Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Abby, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Americas Gold and Silver Crescent Silver Acquisition Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Americas Gold and Silver website later today. Our speakers for today will be Americas Gold and Silver CEO and Chairman, Paul Huet, and EVP of Corporate Development, Oliver Turner. Without further ado, I will hand the call over to Paul.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Obviously, what an exciting day. We've been working on this for several months now. We've been here in Idaho with Americas Gold and Silver for 11 months already. It's been a whirlwind, exciting opportunity. Today, the company changes forever, and we're extremely excited for this opportunity. We won't find more accretive opportunities to fill our mill with the exact same ore. For us, we can't be more excited to get this deal across the finish line. If I'm a little tired, I apologize. We've been up all night trying to get this to our shareholders, and we finally got it across the line. Very excited to talk about it. We've got a deck here in front of us. We're going to walk through those slides and explain exactly what we saw.
I do want to say, I personally was able to get underground there more than 15 times with a very elite team of underground operators and narrow-vein miners to review this asset. We spent hours and hours on this DD with external people. The summary is, we're going to walk through it here right now. It's 9 miles away from our existing mill. Again, we won't find anything more accretive. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Oliver and Maxim to start going through the slides, and I'll be right here.
Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Obviously, a very exciting time for Americas Gold and Silver shareholders, and we're happy to have everyone on this call listening in. Hopefully, by the end of this presentation, you're as excited as we are about this very accretive acquisition, which provides immediate mill feed to our Galena mill right out of the gate the kind of transaction we like to do as a management team. We will guide your attention to the forward-looking statements to read at your own discretion whenever you have time, and we will jump right into the highlights of the transaction. As Paul mentioned, this is a highly strategic acquisition of a key asset in Idaho Silver Valley. The Crescent Mine is located just nine miles away from the Galena complex.
We also have in this mine a very high-grade silver-copper resource: about 23 million ounces, grading 655 grams per tonne. I'll run through some synergies a bit later on the call, particularly regarding the spare mill capacity we will be utilizing with this acquisition. Very importantly, this is on private land, fully permitted, and can be restarted quickly. We expect tons from this operation as soon as mid-2026. With all our acquisitions, we're not buying it for what's on paper today but for what we can expand the asset into. We see significant potential for expanding the resource base at Crescent. Starting off with the financials, we're reviewing the purchase this morning.
There's a press release this morning summarizing the key points of the deal. The purchase price is approximately $65 million US. The consideration to the vendor is $20 million US in cash and 11.1 million common shares of Americas Gold and Silver, which, as of the close yesterday, is about $45 million. We expect to close the transaction very quickly, which is great for everyone involved. In early December—targeting on or about December 3rd—we expect to close the deal and the financing concurrently. Looking at Crescent on a page here, I mentioned some of these numbers previously: a 23 million ounce resource, a very high-grade resource at 655 grams per tonne, located just nine miles away from us.
Most importantly, this asset will be amenable to the mining methods we've been rolling out at Galena, particularly long-hole stoping, which is helping turn around the Galena asset and scale us up to the 5 million ounce-per-year level we’ve been targeting. We’re excited to get Crescent into the mill to contribute to that growth profile. In terms of location, here’s a plan map on slide seven for those following along. Slide seven shows a plan map of the Silver Valley, with the Galena complex circled in the blue dashed line. The Crescent Mine is located just nine miles by road from the Galena complex, situated between the Sunshine and Bunker Hill mines. Very strategically located a short trucking distance to feed our mill.
Very importantly, part of that entire belt through the Silver Valley, where we’re all mining various parts of the same system. We’re really happy to be tucking this in it’s right in our neighborhood. We’ll be able to capitalize on a lot of the same workforce. Our excellent operating team at Galena, as well as the workforce in the Silver Valley, will be leveraged. Equipment purchasing and vendor strengths will also be maximized. We’re excited to take advantage of these synergies with an asset so close to our current operations. On slide eight, I mentioned the magnitude of the resource grade at Crescent: 655 grams per tonne. Globally, it’s hard to find a higher-grade silver deposit.
You see it’s right up there on the left-hand side with the best of them: 655 grams per tonne. This is hosted in tetrahedrite ore. To keep things simple, tetrahedrite ore is a silver-copper-antimony ore the same type of ore we currently mine at Galena, which also contains silver, copper, and antimony. This type of ore will mix perfectly with our Galena feed into the Galena mill and behave similarly from a metallurgical perspective, which is fantastic. We’ll also benefit from higher grades compared to the blended grade at Galena (466 grams per tonne), which is the blended grade of the two ore types.
We have two types of ore just On slide eight, we have two types of ore at Galena: silver-copper ore grading around 200 grams per tonne, and silver-lead ore grading around 200 grams per tonne silver. The silver-copper ore grades north of 600 grams per tonne that’s where the blended grade comes from. Adding more high-grade feed of the same ore type to the mill is important. We’ve been vocal about our ambitions in the antimony space. The Crescent Mine will contribute to our antimony byproduct credits and growth plan, as discussed with investors and in the media. We aim to scale antimony concurrently with silver it’s all in the same rock at Galena, and the same applies to Crescent. Mine will contribute to our antimony byproduct credits and growth plan that we've been out there talking about with investors and in media as well. We have ambitions to scale antimony concurrently with silver. Remember, it's all in the same rock at Galena. The same will happen with Crescent.
We're looking forward to contributing this antimony feed to help satisfy the U.S. domestic mine supply shortage that we're all very aware of. It puts us in a neighbor-stronger position and aligns very well with the strategy that we have at Galena already. Slide nine, in terms of the synergies we're looking at, I mentioned several of these earlier when we were talking about the workforce. We're talking about equipment, obviously G&A synergies and vendor contracts. I draw everyone's attention to the bottom right-hand part of this slide deck, where we have the milling capacity that is currently available and underutilized at our Galena complex. The total capacity you see on the left-hand side there is around 1,500 short tons per day.
That's comprised of the 750 ton per day mill at Galena, which has another old mill that allows that to be expanded north of 1,000 tons per day in the future. We also have the 500 ton per day core mill. That's where you get that combination of 1,500 short tons per day from. Shifting over to the bar chart on the right-hand side, you see in the dark blue there our current utilization is about just under 410 short tons per day of milling capacity. That's the actual number from the third quarter that we just reported earlier this week. That accounts for the 10-day shutdown, planned shutdown that we had for upgrading the number three shaft as part of our expansion plans at Galena. 408 tons, that's up from about 300 tons per day over the last several years. We are expanding at Galena.
Of course, the mine is going to be catching up to the hoisting and the mill over the next several years. We have all of this spare capacity, just over 1,000 tons per day of spare capacity and potential there that we want to be filling with ore as soon as we can. That is what Crescent provides us. We are able to tuck feed from as early as halfway through 2026. We will get some development ore into the Galena mill. Obviously, as we set up our mining at Crescent, we will get more and more of that feed coming over. It is just a tremendous way for us to capitalize on mill capacity that we are not currently using. I mentioned earlier on slide 10, I mentioned earlier that it is all part of the same belt that we have in the Silver Valley here.
This is a very historic mining area, well over 130 years of mining history in this district. The first workings happened at Galena actually before the year 1900. A long history of mining and this long section here certainly shows the tremendous amount of development that's already in place across the Silver Valley with just huge resources in all of these mines that will continue to be mined for many decades to come. We're excited to tuck in a second portion of this belt in the Crescent Mine on the left-hand side of the page there. You can see the scale of the Galena complex on the right-hand side there. We own the core, Galena and Palade all together. One thing that is worth mentioning at the Crescent Mine, of course, is that this is not a new mine. This is another restart.
Definitely the expertise of this management team is turning around existing operations and scaling up past producing operations. This mine has already produced over 25 million ounces at over 900 grams per tonne silver. Again, a history of high-grade production, continued high-grade production with that strong resource that we mentioned earlier at 655 grams per tonne. All of that will head over to the Galena complex and complement our current operations there. Just a great nearby synergistic acquisition that we're very, very pleased about. Slide 11 shows an isometric view of the underground workings that are already and currently in place at the Crescent Mine. You've got three adits accessing the Crescent Mine. On the top, you've got the Countess, you've got the Big Creek, and we've also got the Hooper level on the bottom there. You see the two primary veins shown in green and in red.
Those are the South vein and the Alhambra vein. Those two veins are the primary host for that 23 million ounces at 650 grams that I talked about. There is significant potential via the drill bit to expand these veins in several different directions, and we're extremely excited to do it. I'll talk a little bit more about that on the next page. Lastly, on this paper, what I do want to mention is part of our investment into Crescent in the first portion of this year is going to be putting drop raises in between these levels.
We need secondary egress to commence mining activities, but we also want to put in drop raises so we're able to get ore from the upper adit access and upper levels of the mine down to that Hooper level, trucking it out nine miles down the road to Galena and be able to use gravity as our friend. As I mentioned, we are going to be implementing long-hole stoping at this mine, which we've had tremendous success with this year. That is the future of Galena's transition to more and more long-hole stoping. Same mining method, same approach, same team, and same strategy here at Galena. We're excited to get those tons to the mill as soon as we can. Lastly, on the exploration upside, I mentioned that there is the potential to expand these two veins.
On slide 12, you see a planned view of those two veins, the Alhambra vein and the South vein in the turquoise area that is the Crescent Mine property. We've also got some additional claims outlined in yellow on slide 12 that show the potential for extending these two veins beyond that turquoise area. To the left there, on the left-hand side, you see some dotted lines. There is over 2,100 feet of untested potential there. We think there's strong potential for those veins to be extended along strike. The same mining depth is what's currently set up at Crescent, as well as that depth. Over to the right, of course, this is the potential that these are extensions from veins that are already on the Sunshine property. All of this is part of the same system.
We're going to be applying the same exploration approach that's driven some pretty phenomenal exploration success at Galena this year, particularly with the discovery of the 34 and the 149 veins, where we're hitting multi-kilogram silver hits. We look forward to drilling out this system and seeing if we can extend it and potentially increase grades there. With that, the rest of the deck is summarizing resources. There's also a summary of the 2015 Tetra Tech report that I would advise investors to read at their own leisure. You've got a production profile there that was projected to be over 1 million ounces of silver per year. In fact, about 1.4-1.5 million ounces of silver per year. Of course, as we did with Galena, this team is going to take away the work. We're going to devise our own mine plan and get mining right away.
We'll be updating the market next year on what we think Crescent can contribute over the course of this year. With that, I think I'll turn the call back over to Paul for some comments. I believe we have a bit of time here for a few questions on the line. Yeah. Good job, Oliver. Thank you for the summary. Look, as I mentioned early on, our team has been working aggressively at getting Galena uptake into a pattern where we get back to that 5 million ounces per year. What this does is it allows us to fill the mills quicker, much sooner alongside us as we continue that growth at Galena.
When you start looking at three adits, I think of some of the things we've done in the past in our own lives, we could be mining 500 tons from each of these adits. To think, what could it be? Could this be 2 million ounces a year sustaining? Absolutely, it can be. We're working on the heels of the former PEA. We did engage, obviously, some consultants to put together some mine plans. We're excited to get in there and drill and then reopen this mine early in 2026, right after this thing closes. Very exciting time for Americas Gold and Silver shareholders. The company's not standing still for the last 10-11 months we've been here. We're quite excited to take this thing over. We will take over a couple of questions and turn it over to the operator. Thank you.
We'll now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one a second time. If you're called upon to ask your question and are listening via speakerphone on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Again, it is star one if you would like to join the queue. Our first question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle with HC Wainwright. Your line is open. Hey there. The background noise. I'm traveling. Obviously, you didn't know this was coming today. With the financing, there's a decent amount of excess funds.
I mean, can you provide a little bit of color on what exactly on dollar amounts we expect to spend? How is the equipment at site and any color on the value of its condition facing? Yeah. Heiko, look, at the moment, there is not a whole lot of equipment on site. We will be bringing in a contractor early on. There are two scoops and two jumbos and one truck. The reality is part of the plan that we have will be bringing in a contractor. A lot of the dollars are going to be specifically for reopening the mine. There is not a lot of rehab to do. It will be about drilling immediately and then doing those raises that Oliver talked about, putting in the secondary egress to allow us to be in full production.
Because at the moment, without secondary egresses in the U.S., you can't be in full production. You can be under exploration, which is what we will be doing. Putting in those raises, we need a couple of Alimak raises to connect the Countess to the Big Creek and then the Big Creek to the Hooper. Then we can truck right out of the rail. There is not a whole lot of equipment, but we are going to be using a contractor out of the gate. I gave you a summary of where we're going to be spending the dollar trailer, Heiko. You wouldn't be willing to quantify any of this, correct? Thank you. Yeah. Look, we're not going to get into those details here on this call, Heiko. It's a little too granular for this call. Fair enough. I'll get back to you.
Thank you again. Sorry for the noise. Yeah. No worries, Heiko. Travel safe. Our next question comes from the line of Justin Chan with SCP Resource Finance. Your line is open. Hi, guys. Congrats. Definitely exciting to see you guys expand your footprint. Yeah. Just a couple of questions. One, in the long term, can you give us a sense of how you see the bottlenecks at Crescent? Is it moving material? Is it mining methods? Just maybe talk us through what you see the long-term potential as being there. I see you mentioned 250 tons a day. Just maybe, is that a medium-term goal, or is that the long-term potential? Without doubt, it is connecting all these three adits. When you just think about some of the things we've done in our past, let's just talk about Klondike. We had the Midas portal.
We had the Hollister portal. We had the Fire Creek portal. This is a very similar situation we have here, Justin. We've got the Countess portal. We've got the Big Creek portal. We have the Hooper portal. All separated right now. They were all mined at different points in time in history. All of them are connected to the same vein, but they're not connected to each other. We put in Alimak raises connecting these all together, which will take us a bit of time, not much. We could start mining immediately on the ore, but we can't go into production and stoping. Our immediate stuff is going to be putting in infrastructure so that we can mine these things for the next 20 years.
Because we know with a high level of confidence and conviction from our geology team, as soon as we start drilling, there is going to be a lot of additions here. There is so much. There's only 5% of our private land that's been drilled. You got to think about that. 5%. We've got over 23 million ounces at this grade. There is plenty more to come from. We really need to put in rehab the mine in some areas, get in the contractor, put the raises in so we can drop ore from the top of the Countess, from Big Creek all the way down to Hooper, where we have rail already. There's complete track, and we're going to do a site visit here in the new year. We're going to be excited to take people. People are going to be quite excited.
It's different than Galena, where we had the shaft bottleneck. We have a decline here. Most of us, most people are used to having a decline where we can have 20, 30-ton trucks in two. We can have them in all of those adits. Very exciting for us. That's about the best summary I can give you on that, Justin. For sure. Is it a long-term plan to use the rail, or will you haul and muck using vehicles? Is ventilation a long-term constraint, or do the three adits mean that's not really something you need to worry about too much? Yeah. Again, ventilation will not be a constraint. There will be trucks in the top two portals. There will be rail in the bottom portal. This is, again, what this does for us. The synergies and the optionality this provides, we could not have designed it better.
There's three adits into a mine. Somebody spent, look, the NAV, I think the current NAV they have is over $300 million. We got this at a very good price. I'm very happy we were able to negotiate this. The ventilation is not a constraint. The bottom Countess will remain tracked. It's got 80-pound rail already. We'll have nice ore cars. We'll have a chute, and we'll drop everything down to that bottom level and just have trucks from there directly on the flat ground to our mill. Gotcha. The press release, instead of the PEA envisaged 250 tons a day 10 years ago, are you happy to give a number on what you think this could be in the medium-long term? Yeah. Look, you just look at any of the other portals we've been part of in any of our history.
Look, I'm not uncomfortable saying we should be able to get 500 tons out of each of those, the top two portals dropping down to the bottom quite easily. We just need a bit of time here. We're not doing it in 2026, but we're starting in 2026. We will get ounces in 2026. We're buying ounces today that we will be mining as soon as the first half of 2026. That's fast. This isn't where people are saying, "Hey, it's going to be two, three, four years." We're going to be adding ounces to our feed next year. This is as quick as it can be here. Okay. Perfect. Thanks. And just one last one.
With that much tetrahedrite ore, do you need to put in changes to the plant, which has currently been processing a lot of Galena, or how do you want to do it where the recovery would be? Yeah. As you know, we have been squarely laser-like focused at restoring Galena for the first 11 months and our Mexican asset getting into EC120, which we're doing very good on both fronts. We have not been spending a lot of time on the tetrahedrite yet and the antimony. However, in the last 36 weeks, just before the government shutdown, we've actually been very active at working, speaking to our neighbors, speaking to the government. In fact, it's no secret. I'm going in to see the government next week, even into the White House, which I've never been able to do that before.
The tetrahedrite and the antimony are certainly something that are extremely important to us that will start showing up very, very quickly in 2026. As you know, we have already secured our off-take agreement that allows us to finally get paid beginning of January. The more tetrahedrite we have, the more we can get paid. Our opportunity is to make sure we can get paid the most for that tetrahedrite so we can see ASIC down to single digits here. Okay. Awesome. Thanks so much, Paul and team. I will stay up the mic. Ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the conference back over to Paul Huet for closing remarks. Listen, all I want to do is just take a moment and thank everyone. Again, if I was a little tired, I apologize.
We've been up 26 hours trying to get this to you guys. I want to just take 30 seconds and thank the team, all of the group who have worked tirelessly to get this across the finish line. We're in one of the greatest silver markets we're ever going to see in our lives, coupled with the copper, antimony, gold, and lead that we're producing. Hold on to your socks. Americas Gold and Silver is a very different company. It's changing today. We've got a lot of room for growth from this point in time. This is a trajectory where we've done quite a bit for 11 months. From this point, we're scaling up quite, quite faster than we ever had anticipated. Thank you for being on the call. We appreciate all of you. We appreciate everyone and all our shareholders. Have a great day.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.