Our next presentation is from Americas Gold and Silver Corp., and from Americas Gold and Silver is Darren Blasutti, President and CEO.
Thanks, Doug. Happy to be here again this year. I think the biggest change in Americas Gold and Silver from this year to last year is that we're transitioning to a real primary silver producer. We expect by July of next year to be over 80% silver revenue, with about 15% copper and just under 5% lead. And that transition has been a long time coming. As silver prices were not very good, we were more of a polymetallic company trying to produce high-grade zinc and lead. Those were helpful to keep the company and the silver base going as we push forward, but very punishing from a payable perspective to be a zinc producer or a lead producer.
So we're gonna be a silver copper producer, and we're transitioning that through our Cosalá Operations, which has been probably 70%, 70%-75% base metals. That again, next year, with the new EC120 project that we just financed non-dilutively through Trafigura, will come on in commercial production next July. And again, that'll take the company to over 80%. Galena has always been higher silver production than others. But again, we're gonna increase on an annual basis from about a million ounces of silver in Cosalá to about 2.75 million ounces of silver. But more importantly, we're gonna get 90% of that silver back when we send it to the off-taker, as opposed to zinc, where you get 15%, and lead, you get 50%. So it sounds great on the surface, but...
We're excited about that. We've kept this higher-grade silver in reserves for at least five years now, hoping for better days in silver. We're getting them and trying to move quickly. At the Galena Complex, we're ramping up our capital to try and increase production. It's about 1.6 million ounces last year. It'll be a little bit higher this year, but we expect significant ramp-up to around 6 million ounces by the end of 2027 of silver, not silver-equivalent production. If you look at that, that's a 60/40 joint venture. We own 60%. Eric Sprott personally owns 40% of the joint venture. And that puts us just under 200 million ounces on the balance sheet of silver, and we're actually starting to do that. That's permitted silver.
That's silver that's in production. We've got relatively low capital to grow that silver, but I'll show you in a chart here that on a silver - this is silver only, we took out the base metals. You can start to see the growth starting to come, and when you look at Q2 2024 of about 500,000 ounces, we expect that in Q2 2025 to be closer to 1 million ounces a quarter, so we're ramping up that silver production. We're doing that. It's obviously this, our stock trades at about 0.24 x NAV, so we don't want to issue equity. That's been a challenge.
And it's very highly dilutive, so we did this deal with Trafigura, and basically, it's about an 11% coupon, no warrants, no equity, and once we get to commercial production, we pay about $600,000 back a month. But thankfully, at these prices, it generates about $3.5 million of free cash flow a month. So it's a game changer for the company. That will help us reinvest in Galena, as we move forward, and that will grow that production. So we look by 2027, at 60% attributable production from Galena and 100% from Mexico to be around a 6 million-ounce silver producer. That's all, again, from existing resources that are in the ground. We don't have to drill anymore.
We don't have to discover anymore. We don't have to permit anymore. We just need to put the capital really into Galena, 'cause we've got Mexico now fully funded. Here's the growth in silver production I'm talking about. Rather modest over the last couple of years, but it's where it's going in 2025 and then where it will get to in 2027, which again, we believe will be higher than six million ounces of silver from our attributable production. Now, our partner, Eric Sprott, has been great to help us. We'd like to get the other 40% of that piece.
He believes it or not, thinks silver is going to $100, so it's been a very difficult time to look at our valuation and his valuation and find a way to bridge the gap to the 40%. But we continue to do that, continue to try and want to do that, and we've got some ideas in front as we move forward. Just to start with our Cosalá Operations, they're about an hour and a half from Mazatlán in Sinaloa. We have 19,000 contiguous hectares other than a few, about maybe 1,000 within this block that are not ours. It's not been drilled at all. There's been 4 places that's been drilled, and all 4 have become mines.
We expect, with the money that we're gonna generate and from Trafigura, to start testing some of those targets this year, and I'll go through that. But when I say we're bringing a new mine on, as I filter in here to into where we're mining, if you look at the blue and purple, that's the current mine. Produces high-grade zinc, higher grade lead, and about 40 grams silver. What we're looking to do is the gold-looking material is silver copper. It's 180 grams and about 6% copper as our diluted mining grade. So we're basically going from producing a whole lot of base metals with a little bit of silver to about 2.75 million ounces-3 million ounces of silver per annum over the first four to five years.
And what did we give up for that? We gave up the offtake to Trafigura for that, and quite frankly, with the yo-yoing of the lead and zinc TCRCs that go on, copper's at relatively historically low TCRCs, and so we've locked in what we think is a pretty good four-year plan here on the asset. And so you actually get less revenue on the top line, but you get way more cash flow on the bottom line because you're getting 90% recovery in the mill for the silver, and you're getting 90% back from the refiner, as opposed to 15% or 50% back from a lead, on a lead con or a silver con. So this will be a game changer for us.
We expect that we'll be producing about 50% of our silver copper in the second quarter next year, and then by the end of the second quarter, to be 100% silver copper, and that again, will drive a lot of free cash flow and net on the repayments to Trafigura, about just under $3 million at $28 silver. When I say it, you know, it's pretty easy, we're actually using the same mining methods, the same equipment, and we're using the same infrastructure to take it out in the same portal. So it's fully permitted. You can see where we are right now.
We've processed about 50,000 tons of Zone 120, and that has shown the recoveries that are required by Trafigura to be able to make it a sellable product, and it's... We're up into the high 80s% now on recovery as we get towards the final section. So our mill can produce three products: a silver, a copper, a zinc, or a silver con. We expect to be moving that over again to 100% silver copper in next July. So here's the development and into production and stockpiling in Q1, and then Q2, you see we're also into the lower deposit at El Cajón, which is mined over 300,000 tons already out of that deposit previously before we shut it down to build the zinc mine with low silver prices.
So all of these will be in production by the end of the second quarter, driving 100% our production profile and lifting our silver capacity. From an exploration perspective, San Rafael and EC120 represent seven years of reserves for us. We expect to drill the Costilla Norte project. We ran mag and lines and geophysics, and this is a bigger target than San Rafael by about three times the size that we currently have. It's never had one single drill hole put into it. We plan to put 17 hole in the fourth quarter. I've been saying that for a couple years. We haven't had any money, but thankfully, we've got Trafigura's $10 million, so we do have some money. We have $11 million on the balance sheet right now.
La Cabrera de Costilla is a silver copper target. We're actually gonna drill that relatively soon. We're hoping in October. It outcrops at surface, it's about two kilometers long, and the outcroppings are somewhere between 200 grams and 6% copper. So we have, given that we've got the next 4.5 years-5 years of reserves of silver copper, we wanna drill this quicker and get it into production. And it's very interesting. So in Mexico, we have our 19,000 hectares. When we built the San Rafael mine, we permitted for three portals, and we only used one. So we can put two portals anywhere on our property, and so the good news is, if we find something there, we can get into production rather quickly.
And to put in perspective, San Rafael was put into production for about $17 million, and we'll put EC120 in for $9 million 'cause we're sharing the infrastructure and equipment. 60/40 with Eric Sprott. I think the most fascinating slide is here. This is what we did when we sold in 2018, Eric, 40% of the mine for $20 million. What did we do with the $20 million? We drilled it from 50 million ounces to over 200 million ounces, and what we've seen, encouraging drill results as we get deeper. You can see 7,700 grams per ton and 6.3% copper over 2.79 meters or just over nine feet. And so as we get deeper, we see more and more high grade.
Four lots of 4,000 grams, 3,000 grams over that kind of 8 ft-10 ft. So that's what we did with the money and what we've been doing since. We've bought a new equipment fleet, and when you look at the property here, what you see is four shafts. Unfortunately, all the ore's in the center, and so, in the center, the number 3 shaft is now producing all of, or taking all of our mine supplies, equipment, ore, and waste up and down the shaft. We have spent $12 million putting a new hoist in the Galena shaft, and we have about $7 million or $8 million of capital in Galena to finish the shaft repair, and once we do that, we can take the mine... We can more than double the hoisting capacity.
So we basically have a mine that has 200 million ounces in resource, and we're producing 1.6 billion ounces 'cause we're constrained by infrastructure. We have 1,300 tons a day of milling capacity. We're doing five days of 700 tons a day. So we've got lots of milling capacity, and we've got tailings capacity of 2,037, and right now, the mine plan goes to 2,051. We'd like to get a lot more ounces to shorten that mine plan out. The other thing that's important here is that 74% of the costs are fixed, given you've got two mills, four shafts, and 300 people or 250 people working there.
As we so, 74% is fixed as we double and triple production here to get towards that 6 million ounce number. The AISC costs go down below $10. And quite frankly, right now, we are at $20 at the second quarter on AISC. When Mexico comes in next year, one year from now, we'll be under $15 AISC, and then it'll be up to Galena to bring the rest down as we increase production. The challenge for the company has been the balance sheet, and we've had to do everything very slowly. Mexico makes about $1.3 million a month, pays our corporate costs and our interest expense. Galena, about $600,000 a month it makes, and we're putting that back into capital. We'd like to see some capital go quicker, quicker.
So we've got some converts that are due at the end of April. We're looking to refinance that and add a little bit more money on the balance sheet with the refinance of that, which will allow us to bring the Galena Complex production much faster. So that's what we're focused on, driving that production in the company. The good news is it's all there already. We've already found the resources, the capital plan is already in place, but as said, it's just been slow going with a rather difficult market to raise equity, but we'll get there. And the last thing I'll just talk about is that Relief Canyon's been on care and maintenance since 2021.
We've started a study for a CIL plant, where we think we get 92% recovery from this material, and we believe that material plus the heap leach, there could be a solution here. We're not focused on this until after we get the silver assets cash flow positive and up where we want to, but we've got 550,000 ounces in a stripped mine with a gold plant sitting there at $2,500 gold, and we've got to figure out how to extract some value out of it. So with that, I've got 16 seconds left.
Yeah, very good, Darren. Well done. Any questions quickly for Darren? All right. Well, thank you so much, Darren.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Good to see you.
Good to see you.
Yeah. Add a lot of value.
Yeah, it's great. Hi, Lauren. Oh, they're waiting. Sorry. Our next presentation is Reyna Silver Corp., and from Reyna is Lauren Megaw. She's involved in IR and Corporate Development.
Thank you, and thank you so much for having me and being able to present here at Precious Metals on Beaver Creek about what Reyna Silver's been up to. For those who aren't aware, Reyna Silver is a junior exploration company, silver-focused, but one of the beautiful things about silver is it likes to come along with other metals. Our idea is to focus on high-grade district-scale projects. Those are the kind of things that really move the needle, and they're the type of project you wanna explore for. We're gonna be making forward-looking statements. We're a junior. As many of you know, it's important to do your own research on this or any investment. This is also the moment to remind myself to stay cool, calm, and collected, especially when talking about, well, drilling at our Griffin project, which is currently underway in Nevada.
That's our gold, silver, and critical metals, too, and you know, one of the beautiful things about Reyna Silver is that we have four projects that fit through that high-grade, big-scale filter. We have an exploration team that has been serially successful in making major discoveries, and it's not just my father, who happens to be standing right over here, as the technical team advisor lead, but it's also the geologists who are the boots-on-the-ground guys. Those are the ones that were part of those major discoveries as well, so in some ways, you can think about with Reyna Silver, the boys are back together, and it's between that and the work by our CEO, Jorge Ramiro Monroy, that we've been able to put together a balanced investor register, which has allowed us to have access to capital even when our peers haven't.
We have four projects that we are moving forward. We have two in Mexico, Batopilas and Guigui, and two in Nevada, Medicine Springs and Griffin. Batopilas is a special deposit type. The main mineralization there is native silver. The other three projects are carbonate replacement deposits. We're gonna work our way through these as we work our way towards talking about Griffin and why we're excited to be drilling there right now. As I mentioned earlier, we have a strong exploration and technical team, as well as on the corporate side. In terms of our current capital structure, we have almost 200 million shares outstanding. That gives us a market cap of about CAD 21 million.
As of the end of June, and that's with prepayments towards the current drilling program, we had CAD 3.6 million in the war chest, and with an average daily volume of about 500,000 shares. You know, one of the things that we benefit from at Reyna is because of the team, we've had strong support from major shareholders, including Commodity Discovery, Sprott, Waratah, Regal, Ingalls and Snyder. You know, one of the other things that we've been doing this year is looking at: How do we streamline? How do we consolidate? And so what we decided to do is do a merger of acquisition on our sister company, Reyna Gold. This gives us cost efficiency, increased scale, and capital access.
It allows us to have full control of the Griffin project and, you know, the ability to also capitalize on the other projects that Reyna Gold has. You know, this allows us to move forward, seeking out those high-grade, big projects. As they say, "Grade is king." We like to say scale is Reyna; the two go together well. When you're talking about grade, and you're talking about Mexico, you have to start the conversation off with Batopilas. This is the famous native silver district, produced over 300 million ounces of silver with an average grade of 1,500 grams. I just love this photo. That's one month's production in 1906. That's 350,000 ounces of fine silver, and we're not looking to go rehash where we know there's big mineralization.
What we're looking to do is, where's the rest of the system? If you look at the really big deposits in the world, a lot of them are areas that have experienced multiple mineralization events. When we stepped out over a kilometer out of the historic native silver zone at Batopilas, we started finding gold. I want you to remember that combination of mineralizing events later when we get to Griffin, because that is a critical part of the Griffin story. We stepped out, we found gold mineralization, and we said, "We need to rethink how we're approaching this district." We did sampling, we did structural work, we did geophysics.
We put those together, and that led us to a new native silver vein, and on top of that, it also led us to our biggest intercept to date, which was, well, nine meters of over 600 grams silver. The other projects that we have are carbonate replacement deposits. These things are incredible. They're these continuous zoned, multi-phase, polymetallic, but metallurgically docile, so you get to have your cake and eat it, too. They can be very high grade, and I'm gonna take a moment here to translate geologist into English on this. So you have a porphyry, that's that pink section that you see down here at the bottom, and coming off of that's acidic mineralized fluid. That acidic mineralized fluid comes in contact with the carbonate after it goes through structures in the rock, you get an acid-base reaction, and the metals drop out.
So now that I've said enough big words that you think I know what I'm talking about, let's think about these things like they're a public transportation system. So that source porphyry that we were talking about, that's your bus terminal. Your acidic mineralized fluid, that's your bus. Your structures, those are your bus routes, and what happens is, as the bus leaves the terminal, fully loaded with metals, different elements, different metals, are gonna get off in different neighborhoods. So when you're close to the source, you're in the downtown area. Geologists call that the skarn. You're gonna have higher copper, gold, lead, zinc. Your silver grade's gonna be a little bit lower than it is outboard, but that's where everything's voluminous. As you make your way further out into the system, you end up in the suburbs, and we call those the chimney manto massive sulfides.
Your silver grade goes way up, along with your lead and your zinc, and that's historically what we associate with the carbonate replacement deposits, and then at the very end, the elements that fell asleep in the back of the bus get kicked off. That's our alteration halo. That gives us an idea of how big the system could be, and there's a couple of reasons I'm spending some time concentrating on this, and one is that we try to approach this from an ore systems perspective, not just the piece that's sticking out of the ground, so previously, we've largely described deposits based off of what cropped out, so it's a porphyry, or it's a skarn, or it's a chimney manto, but it's actually all part of a continuum, and it's not even a linear continuum.
It ends up looking like this big kind of branching fractal tree. And you start thinking about the deposits that are possible and what happens if we look at that full system, what pieces are undercover? And you have something like our Guigui project, which is at the heart of the Santa Eulalia Mining District. 500 million ounces of silver came out of this from essentially two suburbs. So the downtown area, that source, have yet to be found in a district of this scale, and the premise is we have a lot of detailed work in the historic portion of the district. And if we can identify where the source is, you can work those two ends against each other, find the more voluminous skarn, and even potentially... I mean, how many big cities have you been in that only have one or two suburbs?
And so there's the potential for additional chimney manto mineralization within Guigui itself. And so that's why we're using cutting-edge technology, looking at AI optimization of geophysics as we're honing our way in on that source. Or you have something like our Medicine Springs property in Nevada, where we think we have the whole system. So this is the checklist of the 13 key features that you associate with the big carbonate replacement deposits. You got to have a porphyry. You've got to be in, well, you have to have the magic host rock, the carbonate. We also want to see grade. We don't want to look at something that's gonna be small. The rest of these features tell you that the bus left the terminal many times, fully loaded, and we tested that at Medicine Springs.
We wanted to see whether or not we had enough of that magic host rock. One of the beautiful things at our Griffin project is we get to take advantage of the twenty-three historic core holes there, so we know that we have enough carbonate. We also see at Medicine Springs that we have the grade, and in fact, so far, of the nine structures we've intersected, seven of them have carried high-grade silver mineralization, and this zonation is telling us, along with the geophysics that we're putting together, that we are starting to unravel a large carbonate replacement deposit in Nevada, so you might be wondering, with three projects like that, what are you doing at Griffin, and the reason we are at Griffin is because you get to have all of the favorite features that we like in the other projects in one.
It's a nearly 12,000-hectare project. You get your silver, gold, you get your silver and critical metals. In terms of location, it's probably one of the more famous addresses out there. You're between the Carlin Trend and the Battle Mountain-Eureka Trend. And when you're in a place where you can stand on top of an outcrop that samples run 5 grams gold, and you look across the valley, and you can see Cortez, which is a 50 million-ounce gold camp, you can see why, historically, the focus of exploration here has been on just the gold mineralization, to the point where the blinders are on. And we recognized that there's another portion of these systems in this area, and this is something that's not new, but we're bringing one of the top CRD teams to look at this.
And that is, there is a relationship that was even recognized by Ralph Roberts, who is the guy who found Carlin, which is the association between CRDs and Carlin-type deposits. Whether you're talking Cortez across from us, or Eureka, where more famously, you know, they found this famous high-grade silver, lead, zinc mineralization with a gold kicker. They found a Carlin deposit on top, and now i-80's going back in and re-examining that CRD mineralization and finding even more of it. And at Griffin, we see that same association that's untapped, and we've got the big features that tell you you're a CRD. In fact, we have two historic CRD districts within Griffin proper, that we were able to acquire this last year, along with some additional claim packages, bringing us to that 12,000 hectares.
And this allows us to be the first company to take that CRD mineralization seriously and actually make it a major target. So we're actually currently drilling at Union, where the historic mining focused on mining to the base of oxidation, and then, because that was the processing at the time, but that means that the deeper sulfides were left untouched, and that's one of the first targets that we're looking at here at Griffin. And the other aspect at Griffin is, go back to that public transportation analogy. When we were talking about CRDs being like buses, I want you to think about Carlin-type gold mineralization being like taxi cabs. And I realize that might be a slightly dated example, but they're yellow, and that just works better.
What that means is, if you can understand the bigger thoroughfares, the framework, the infrastructure of the system, you can leverage the two pieces against each other, especially because we see these deep-seated, long-lived structures that have obviously seen multiple mineralizing events going through them. We get to take that considerable amount of good geologic work that's been done and gold-focused and apply it to the system, looking at the CRD portion, because the CRD mineralization, it's more flamboyant, right? It shows up better, it's more structurally controlled. If we can understand the routes, that will also allow us to understand where are the traffic jams, right? Where are the intersections? Where are the interchanges that result in the biggest ore bodies?
When you have a place where you get silver samples that run up to two thousand grams silver, and gold that runs up to twenty-five grams gold, and we have this area where we get copper samples that ran up to almost 12% copper, well, those become your targets, so we'll be going at Union, where we're looking for those deeper sulfides, then we have something called the 007 Zone. I guess you could also call it the James Bond Zone, where we're building upon historically, one of the two drill holes that actually targeted structures and cut 2.9 meters of 5.5 grams gold. We have a reinterpretation of what those structures are like. We're putting those pieces together and testing there.
And then we have Sadler, where we have high copper and silver numbers, up to almost 12% copper, 1,300 grams silver. And the big thing that I would leave you with at Griffin is, it's at least a triple threat. Whether we're correct about the copper or the gold or the silver mineralization, or by taking an ore systems approach, we get to unlock all three. Well, I guess we'll find out with those drill rigs turning. So thank you guys so much, and have a good rest of your evening.
Thank you. Any, any questions? Lauren, before you go, I don't know if there's a question. Actually, I do. I'm curious. Griffin looks so exciting. How, how much drilling are you doing? How many meters or feet are you intending?
We are doing a 3,000-meter drill program, weather permitting. We thought it was important to make sure that we had the district entirely consolidated before we went after these targets. We like them so much. So we could run into snow.
Okay.
But 3,000 is fully funded and planned for.
And so you would drill those in the fall season, and we'd see the re-
We're drilling right now.
Okay, so we'll see those results before Christmas? Or early next year?
Fingers crossed that the assay gods allow that to happen, and if not, we'll see you in the new year with them.
We look forward to the good news. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, and that concludes the silver session at Precious Metals Summit. Thank you very much.