Good morning, everyone. Always good to be back here at the Zurich Gold Show. Definitely a very full conference and full room. Obviously, we're all enjoying these markets, and we've certainly been enjoying our time at Americas Gold and Silver over the last year, so I'll do my best to get through all this. We've got 50 minutes, so direct your attention to the disclosures on the page to read at your own leisure. I'm going to skip the summary slide because we'll go through all this over the course of the presentation, and I'm going to start here with the team. As we all know, one of the most important things when you're investing in mining companies is investing in a team that not only has done it before but can do it again. This team has a strong track record of turning around assets.
We've kind of become known as the turnaround experts, guys that come into struggling assets, bring a strong balance sheet with us, and turn around operations that have been struggling previously. That begins with our Chairman and CEO, Paul Huet. Paul actually began his career—I'll just jump back a couple slides here—running a jackleg underground, just like this gentleman in the photo right here. He spent the first 10 years of his career running a jackleg in a mine and has done every job throughout the mine, which is a pretty unique skill set for a CEO and brings that through to his role today. Mike Doolin is our COO, 35 years, metallurgist, and has had numerous successes with Paul before. Warren and myself, I'm the EVP of Corporate Development, background in mining engineering, capital markets, and helped build and sell our last success in Corora Resources.
When I talk about a track record of success, this page probably captures it pretty well. Some of you may have been investors in our last two endeavors, Klondex Mines, which was a very strong success story during the bear market in gold. Single misunderstood asset, Nevada. We bolted on three mines, two mills, and eventually sold that to Hecla for $700 million in 2018. In 2018, we jumped over to a company called RNC Minerals, which at that point in time had a single misunderstood asset with a huge amount of infrastructure in place called Beta Hunt in Western Australia. It was a nickel mine for 40 years with some weird gold occurrences that people could not really explain.
We then scaled that up to a 200,000-ounce-a-year gold producer, acquired three mines, two mills, and sold that last year to Westgold for $1.3 billion was the value of the sale. Strong track record of turning around mines, doing some smart M&A, and capitalizing on our skill sets. That is exactly the recipe and the strategy that we're rolling out here at Americas Gold and Silver. We've obviously had a strong run, especially in the market that we've enjoyed this last year, but lots of value still not captured in the story that I'll elaborate with you today. Our asset base is in the Americas. Our primary asset is the Galena Complex up there in Idaho in the Silver Valley. We'll spend about 90% of our time today talking about that asset. We also have the operating Cosalá Mine in Mexico with an outstanding team delivering down there.
The Relief Canyon, a past development asset, gold asset, and the San Felipe exploration asset. In terms of how we rolled into this story as our next endeavor after selling Corora Resources, it actually began a year prior to us announcing the deal to take over as the management team of Americas Gold and Silver. Mr. Eric Sprott, who I'm sure everybody in this room is familiar with, owned 40% of the Galena mine at the asset level, but the asset was really struggling. He called Paul to be his technical advisor while we were still at Corora, actually. We had four different groups at the table to buy the company and asked him, simply put, to help him know what was going wrong at the asset level.
A couple weeks into that, Paul circled up with us as a team, and over the course of 2024, we actually conducted our due diligence on this asset as advisors to the company and eventually took over the management team. That culminated in October 2024 when we announced the takeover transaction and the consolidation transaction where we converted Eric's 40% of the asset into 20% ownership of Americas Gold and Silver. He is our largest single shareholder, and we raised $50 million in a bought deal, all with prior Corora shareholders. We raised another $100 million in debt financing in June of this year. Between those two financings, we have everything we need to turn around the Galena asset and execute the strategy I'm going to talk to you about on the next couple slides here.
Last but certainly not least, we also renegotiated a new offtake agreement with Teck Resources where we're going to be paid for all the byproducts the company was previously not being paid for. We'll touch on that at the end as well. Let's talk about the primary asset. Those of you familiar with the Silver Valley will know these mines very, very well. It's the premier silver mining area in the United States. In that page there, you're looking at over 150 years of mining history. Six miles to the east of us, we have Lucky Friday. It's a 5 million-ounce-a-year silver producer, one of their largest mines. To the west of us, we have Sunshine, which is Tom Kaplan's large development project or restart project, and the Bunker Hill Mine. Circled there in blue is the Galena Complex.
Actually, the first workings at Galena were in 1893, so a tremendous amount of mining has occurred there. We're taking a snapshot of the last 25 years of production at Galena here, and I'll draw your attention to the box in 2002. In 2002, this mine produced 5.2 million ounces at over 700 grams per tonne silver and 600 tons per day. Keep those numbers in your mind because I'm going to touch on them a little bit later. That was the record for this mine. Over the last 10-plus years, the mine has produced around 1.5 million ounces. To put our strategy simply on a page, phase one of our strategy is to bring Galena back to that 5 million-ounce-a-year mark, and I'm going to tell you how we're going to do that on this page. This is probably the most important slide in the entire deck.
This is what 100 years of mining at Galena gets you: a tremendous amount of infrastructure. At Galena, we already have four shafts heading underground, two mills on surface, over 100 mi of underground development, and a very large resource that's well over 170 million ounces of silver today. This infrastructure alone would cost over $2 billion to put into place today. The challenges at Galena prior to the team coming in were mining and were hoisting, getting that ore out of the ground and up the shaft and into those mills. That's what we've been focusing on with our turnaround strategy over the course of this year, and that's what we've been deploying the $50 million and the $100 million that we raised into. I'll start with the shafts. The number three shaft shown there in the middle is the primary hoisting shaft.
That shaft, over the last several years, has struggled to do about 350 tons per day. We conducted our due diligence in 2024, and we actually brought a gentleman called Evan Peltier with us. Evan Peltier ran the Macassa Complex for Kirkland Lake Gold, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with. He liked this asset so much that he actually joined as our VP Operations and is our general manager at this mine today. We have already completed phase one of two phases of work to upgrade the number three shaft. We've replaced the hoist motor on surface with a larger motor, which allows us to hoist from deeper depths with more full skips. We will be replacing the braking system and the communication systems early next year, and that triples capacity out of that number three shaft from about 350 tons per day.
We're going up to 900 tons per day. That will allow us to fill the Galena Mill on surface, which for the last 10-plus years has only been fed at about 50% capacity. The next challenge will be to turn around the mining, which is what we've already been working on over the course of this year. At Galena, 100% of mining has been done using the underhand cut and fill method in the center left there for the last 10, 15-plus years. We have now reintroduced long-hole stoping at Galena, and you'll notice on that page there that we have a one-meter width or a three-foot width. We took that stope in July of this year. It was a 7,000-ton stope. It took us 28 days to muck that out. To do that using underhand cut and fill would have taken us one year.
This is part of the turnaround at Galena, and this is what we've done at multiple mines before: changing the mining method, reintroducing modern mining methods, changing personnel, and training up personnel at the site. At Beta Hunt at Corora, we took that mine that was struggling to do 20,000 tons a month. By the time we sold to Westgold, it was doing 120,000 tons a month. This is really our bread and butter as operators. This is what we do. In order to achieve this transformation in the mining method, we obviously needed new equipment. The $50 million that we raised at the end of last year was deployed into new remote mucking scoops as well as long-hole drills, which has been driving that turnaround.
We are successfully debottlenecking both that hoist, which was struggling to do 350 tons per day, and the mining method to feed this mine to fill that mill on surface at Galena. The next stage will be to turn the core mill back on and start to feed that mill as well. That is how we are getting production back to that 5 million ounces per year. I mentioned a very large resource endowment at Galena. I mentioned that there is over 170 million ounces at Galena. You do the math: at 5 million ounces of silver per year, that is a mine life that is way too long. How do we compress that mine life? How do we bring more of those ounces forward? The obvious answer is both tons and additional grade.
Now, we don't need more ounces at Galena, but you can see at the bottom of the page here, those plunging chutes down to the bottom right there and actually updip as well, where it's broadly untested. We're hitting most of the highest grades that we've seen in the mine below our feet, down plunge below that Caladay shaft, which is already in place and ready to be mining again. Another huge asset for this company. Now, Galena is already the third highest-grade silver mine in the world. Our second quarter head grades were about 480 grams per tonne silver, so tremendously high grades being mined already. However, remember I mentioned that 700-gram-per-tonne mark that was hit in 2002. That's what we're trying to get back to, and that's what we're focusing on with our higher-grade tetrahedrite ore that we have at Galena.
Now, when I talk about the future of the mine and the mine life that we have ahead of us, it's already very long, and we're going to try and compress that by increasing beyond 5 million ounces of silver per year. When you look at our neighbors in the Silver Valley, particularly Hecla over to the east there, they're two times the depth of Galena, right? That gives you an indication. We are all mining the exact same system here in the Silver Valley. In fact, you can go underground. You can go all the way from Galena over to the Bunker Hill Mine. They're connected underground. We're mining the same system. The future at Galena is obviously below our feet. This mine will be going for a very significant period of time to come.
When it comes to boosting those grades, we talked about the tons. How do we improve those grades again and get them back up towards that 700-gram-per-ton mark? We've been drilling two areas already inside the mine. I know I'm jumping back and forth between the slides a lot here, but I want to show you the location of these two veins circled here on that long section. You see those two areas that are circled at the bottom of the page there. Keep that in mind. The 34-vein and the 149-vein give you some of the indications of the even higher grades that we have at Galena, two times what we're currently mining. I don't need to read all these intercepts off to you, but that vein is already over 2.5 million ounces and growing immediately adjacent to existing infrastructure.
The 149-vein has some eye-watering grades as headlines, something 24 kilograms silver and 17% copper. You might say, "Oliver K, that's great, but that's a very narrow intercept. It's only 21 centimeters wide." This is why I showed you us mining at one-meter width with long-hole stoping with narrow-vein automated equipment. We can mine very narrow. You dilute that intercept five times. You're still looking at a 5-kilogram-per-ton intercept. That is phenomenal, and we will continue to add those grades to the mine. The other thing that we have going at Galena is it's not just a silver mine. It's a silver mine that has silver lead ore and silver copper antimony ore. We also have some gold products there. For the last 10-plus years, this company has not been paid for anything but silver or lead.
I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation that we renegotiated our offtake agreement. We have a five-year offtake agreement with Teck now, where we get paid for all of those byproducts that we're currently mining, but none of them are more significant financially than antimony. Galena is currently the only large-scale producing antimony mine in the U.S. This mine has been producing antimony since World War II. Every ton of ore that we mine for that higher-grade silver brings with it copper and antimony. It's already coming out of the mine. We're already crushing it. We're already grinding it. We're already concentrating it, and it's already heading up to Teck where we're now going to be paid for it for the first time in a long period of time. Very importantly, we ran two series of test works over the course of this year.
We announced those results in two press releases along with the last 20 years of production history that this company was penalized for. A very important number came out of it. Number one is 99% recovery from concentrate. You can make any product, any antimony product out of this metal. Number two is the ratio of antimony to copper. For any of you trying to figure out the value of the antimony in this mine, just take the copper number, times it by 0.7, which has been confirmed by multiple test works and decades of history, and you'll get how much antimony we have. The revenue potential from antimony and us capitalizing on this over the course of the next year is massive. Step one was the renegotiation of that offtake agreement.
Step two is we have a lot of very interested parties and neighbors in the districts that are looking at building a new antimony circuit, which is not a complex device or a complex plant, rather. It is a series of leach tanks and electrolytic cells that will be built in the district probably over the next 12 to 18 months. We are evaluating that as well. For you as Americas Gold and Silver shareholders, all of this comes for free as we are already mining that ore. I will wrap up on Cosalá, which is our Mexican mining operation, doing about 1.5 million to 2 million ounces of silver per year. It has not seen an exploration drill hole in five years. We are going to be changing that next year. Fantastic team operating it down there and really a cash engine for this business.
There's been four outcrops that have been drilled there over the last 10-plus years. All four of those are mines. We have seven more on the property we want to drill, and we're heading into a new high-grade silver copper area called EC120. To wrap up here, I mentioned already that we're the third highest silver-grade mine in the world. We had 87% silver revenue exposure, so a great way to play the silver metal. Valuation-wise, had a great run, but a lot of what I've just discussed today is not in the stock or in analyst models. This is what you like to see when it comes to ownership. Management and directors as insiders were very aligned. We purchased a lot of these—all of these shares.
What we made in our Corora sale, we rolled right into Americas Gold and Silver, and we got a very strong shareholder base here, which has gone from 7% when we announced this deal a year ago to 63% today. Four new analysts launching coverage. More to come. A lot more fun left to have at Americas Gold and Silver.
Brilliant. We're out of time as well, so we'll leave it there. Oliver, thank you.
Thank you.