Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have Galantas Gold Corp. Trades on the TSXV under the ticker GAL, the OTCQX GALKF, and the AIM GAL. Focused on the acquisition, development, advancement of gold and copper assets in stable mining jurisdictions. Is currently advancing the development of the Indiana project and the Andacollo project in Chile. Happy to welcome CEO and Director, Mario Stifano. Welcome, Mario. We very much look forward to hearing your presentation.
Thanks, Ana, and thanks for having me here. Thanks everyone for attending this presentation. Galantas, for those that have a history or involvement with Galantas in the past, we were focused on a project in Northern Ireland, but we decided to change focus into Chile. As Ana mentioned, Chile is a tier 1 jurisdiction for mining, whether it's gold or copper. We basically acquired two core assets for Galantas, the first one being Andacollo Gold, which I'll get into a little bit more detail with you shortly, and the second being Indiana, which we believe has high potential for a district-play, IOCG-type deposit. In terms of our capital structure, when you're looking at a company and companies you want to invest in, who's involved with the company and who are the investors are key.
The most critical criteria, obviously, in our industry is the assets themselves, and we think we've got tier 1 assets, but we also have tier 1 investors. Eric Sprott is our largest single investor. Ocean Partners is our second largest investor. They are commodity traders, similar to a Glencore, Trafigura, so very large in the trading space and obviously very strong supporters of Galantas Gold. Alpayana is another key investor. For those of you who don't know who they are, they're a private Peruvian family. They have mining assets in Peru. They have mining assets in Mexico, obviously know the industry quite well, and they're a core investor of Galantas, and we're extraordinarily happy to have them on board. Franklin Templeton, who led our last round of financing when we raised CAD 100 million to advance our Andacollo project.
We're obviously happy to have all our shareholders involved in the company. In terms of where we are and what makes Galantas quite special, I think compared to a lot of the other gold and gold and copper assets out there, is we are a near-term producer. We have the Andacollo Gold Project. It's a historical mine. It was operated by a U.S. company, actually, called Dayton Mining, and then they sold it to an Australian company in 2010 called Lachlan Star. This was operated in a very, very low gold price environment. If anyone was paying attention to gold in the late 1990s, early 2000, you're in that $200-$300 per ounce range. Then right around the financial crisis, gold started to increase, and then 2011-2012, it declined again to that $1,000-$1,200 per ounce range.
This asset has never really been operated in a strong gold price environment like we are today. We acquired this asset, we announced the acquisition in January. We closed it at the end of June, just a few months ago. A lot of people don't really know what we have here at Andacollo, but it's 6 million ounces of resources, 1.5 million ounces approximately indicated and 4.5 million ounces inferred. It's significant. It's a proven producer. It produced over 1 million ounces by Dayton Mining and Lachlan Star. It produced at the peak over 130,000 ounces of gold. Our view is this is going to be a long life, significant producer for Galantas Gold.
What's really important about Andacollo is to get it back into production, we think it'll cost around that $60 million, $70 million range, and we're financed to do that. That really makes it exciting because anyone looking to invest in Galantas, not only do you get a robust, large, world-class asset resource, but you don't need to spend $1.5 billion-$2 billion to get this asset into production because the infrastructure is all in place, and you can see that here in this image. This is the Andacollo project. You can see that dotted line, and I'll get into a little bit more detail afterwards, but in that dotted line on the other side is Teck. Teck is operating the Carmen de Andacollo mine. It's a large copper porphyry system producing 45,000 tons per annum of copper. On the other side of the dotted line is our project, Andacollo.
You can see the heap leach pads there. You can see the ADR plant. You can see all the prior pits. This has only been mined to the deepest level, 100 meters, which is extraordinarily shallow. This thing should go a lot deeper than that. The resource is down to about 250-meter level. Teck has drilled down to 600-meter level, so that 6 million ounces that we have, we're very confident that's going to continue to grow as we drill. We're pretty excited about this. The only piece of infrastructure that is missing here is the crushing plant, and we have a solution for the crushing plant, and that is the lead gating item to get us back into production. You can sort of see here all the infrastructure. This is the ADR plant, the ponds. We're in the process now of refurbishing the ADR plant.
We've already fixed and refurbished the ponds, and really what we were doing there, because this has been shut down effectively since 2016, 2017, again, because of a very low gold price environment. From our perspective now, our focus is getting this completely ready to go for production next year, and I'll get into a little bit more detail on that as well. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, the gating item was the key here for the crushing plant. What happened, this asset was actually in bankruptcy, and there was an individual, Luis Cottrell, who acquired it out of bankruptcy in 2019, and then we acquired it from Luis Cottrell. As I mentioned, we closed that at the end of June. But the administrator sold the original crushing plant to help fund the administration process in Chile.
But we've been lucky enough to find a replacement crushing plant out of Mexico. It's from the Dolores plant. It's a very similar 20,000 ton per day crushing plant. Our goal now is to disassemble this in Mexico and ship it out to Chile, and that significantly reduces the lead time to build a new crushing plant. It could take 12-18 months to build a new crushing plant. So when you look at Galantas and you're thinking about how do we invest in gold, obviously gold is doing quite well, but Galantas is unique. We'll be in production, but we have a large resource, and I think that's really critical here. For those of you that are technical, this is just our ADR plant, and the reason why I'm showing this is all the infrastructure is in place.
This has got a proven metallurgical recovery, so we're not starting from ground zero to try to prove up a deposit here in the metallurgy. As I mentioned, this has mined over 1 million ounces to date, and from our perspective, we think as we get this up and running, we'll be able to continue and recover gold in that 70%-75% range, which is fantastic for a heap leach. Maybe there's opportunity to increase that as well. There's some ideas there, but we know we should be able to recover 70%-75%. Just to point out as well, on those historical heap leach pads, there's 300,000-400,000 ounces of gold that was defined by Lachlan Star, and they were really mining this all the way up until 2015, and then they stopped stacking the pads.
What you're seeing there in that 10,000 ounces of recovery was just really continuing to circulate the cyanide on the heap leach pads and recovering gold, and then they officially shut it down at the end of 2017 and went into the administration process here. But you can see the process there, and the recoveries and production. In the early part of 2000, Dayton Mining was mining this very low gold price environment in the early part of 2000, stopped stacking the pads. Then they started up production again, and then in 2010, they officially sold it to Lachlan Star. But again, we're always mining a very low gold price environment here.
So no one's actually had this asset like we do in a $4,000 to, hopefully, we'll see $5,000 before the end of the year, and hopefully much higher than that as we move forward when it comes to gold. But we're in a very high margin environment now when it comes to these kind of projects, and Galantas is highly leveraged to a rising gold price because we have this 6 million ounce deposit here. I mentioned a little bit earlier that we're right next door to Carmen de Andacollo's project, which has been operating since, I guess, late 2000. They were originally operating an SXEW plant, which is oxide copper. Now they're in the sulfide copper. They're doing 40 to. Well, they're going around 45,000 tons per annum of copper. That's quite significant.
At today's copper price, just reviewing their financial annual report, at today's copper price, if they produce 45,000 tons of copper, their EBITDA is probably going to be $650 million. The question I get asked all the time is why did Teck not buy this asset out of bankruptcy? That is a fantastic question. There are multiple reasons for that. I believe the first one is when it was in bankruptcy and it was in a very low gold price environment, it probably didn't make economic sense. At $1,200 gold, this is going to be a marginal asset at best. But today, at $4,000 gold plus, this is a fantastic asset.
At the time, it probably just didn't meet the criteria for Teck to acquire it out of bankruptcy, but that doesn't necessarily fully answer the question, because I probably, if I were the CEO or the general manager of Carmen de Andacollo, I probably still would have bought that asset. The other reason we believe why it was never acquired by Teck is when Teck transitioned from an SXEW oxide copper to flotation circuit sulfide copper, they entered into a streaming deal with Royal Gold. The total package was $600 million. Then they added additional $400 million, I believe, in cash, to build and expand the Carmen de Andacollo mine. As part of that deal, Royal Gold basically had an area of interest on 100% of the gold production from Teck.
If Teck were to have acquired this asset, basically all the gold that gets produced on our asset would have gone to Royal Gold anyways until 900,000 ounces are delivered. From Teck's perspective, it was just never economic. They never would have made money. They never would have put the asset in production because all the gold goes to Royal Gold. But obviously, we're not hampered with those kind of issues. But there is a unique opportunity we do think between ourselves and Teck's asset. The reason is this is actually one big geological system. Hopefully, you can sort of see the image here, a little bit of a close-up there. Those are our two pits. Teck has been mining down to 250 meters.
Our pit, Tres Perlas, has been mined to about 100-meter depth, and you can see there's an area in between those two pits that has not been mined, and that's really because that's our property boundary. Neither one of us can mine beyond each other's property boundary, even though there's a significant amount of gold and copper sitting between those two pits. I think there's an opportunity to really look at trying to put these assets together, and I'd like to be the one that acquires Carmen de Andacollo. We don't know if it's for sale, but we think in the combined Anglo-Teck merger, this is a small asset in the big scheme of things.
Even though it does create a significant amount of EBITDA for the combined asset or combined company rather, we do think this is a non-core asset, or will be a non-core asset for Anglo-Teck. When that merger gets approved, hopefully by the end of March from what we are hearing on the street, we want to put our hands up and sit down with Anglo-Teck and see if there is an opportunity for us to work together. Because combined, you have got a world-class asset, and what I mean by a world-class asset, I am not kidding, and people use that word very loosely. In our case, combined, this is a billion-ton project. This is all one big porphyry-related system. Teck has got the copper-rich side, we got the gold-rich side, but this is all one intrusive related system.
Never before has this been under one umbrella, whether it was under Teck or Dayton or Lachlan Star. If you can really start looking at this as one big asset, I think you have got a significant opportunity here to generate a world-class asset. Obviously, we are a great asset on our own. Teck is a great asset on their own. But combined, this is your true scenario, one plus one equals five in my mind. I think you have got significantly more ounces and copper pounds that you can mine combined that you couldn't do on our own individually. As part of our exploration program at Nicol, we are drilling now close to the border. We are trying to expand some of the high-grade hits that Lachlan Star was drilling in 2012. They identified some fantastic holes. You can see there some wide zones of high-grade mineralization.
What we think is happening is there is real potential for that high-grade zone to expand. Now, we got 6 million ounces, close to 0.5 grams per ton heap leach. It is not going to make a big difference here, everybody, in degrees for that at 6 million ounces, but it makes a really big difference in the early mine life of a project if you can mine higher grade material and put that through your crushing plant and onto the heap leach pad. That is really why we are focused on some of those high-grade zones that Lachlan Star started to identify with their drilling. They also identified, by the way, and this shouldn't surprise anyone because we are right next to a copper mine, they start to identify as well some oxide copper, close to the border with Teck.
You can see there, 37 meters of 1.8 grams, 30 meters of 0.5% copper, 30 meters of 0.5% copper, and that is very similar to the resource grade that Teck has. It is close to 450 million tons, I believe, at around 0.35% copper and 0.1 grams per ton gold. So a significant deposit. Combined a billion tons, there are not a lot of billion ton porphyry systems in production in the world today. This will be a very interesting project if we are able to combine these two assets. In terms of production and our timeline, we want to get the ADR, so we want to get the crushing plant to site early part of next year, get it commissioned so we can start stacking the pads during Q2, and start producing gold.
It takes about up to 120 days for gold to be circulated with the cyanide and to start producing gold. We are pretty confident we will be producing gold in the second half and potentially obviously Q1 or Q2 as well of next year. From there, we look to expand over time our plans at Nicol. We are permitted, and that is one thing I want to emphasize to everyone here. We are fully permitted to go back into production. If I had everything in place today, I can turn on the switch tomorrow and start producing gold. We also need the crushing plant before we can start crushing additional ore and sending it on to the heap leach pads. We are a fully permitted project here with 6 million ounces, and we believe that 6 million ounces, as I said, will be a lot larger.
This will be the kind of project that not only the majors will want, but hopefully if we are going to acquire Teck's asset, we will become that mid-tier project that can generate significant cash flow and really grow Galantas. We got big visions here, big goals, but I think we have got all the pieces in place to get ourselves into production and get ourselves into that mid-tier production scenario, particularly if we can buy Teck's asset.
I think there is really no other company out there like Galantas today. For those of you that like gold, like copper, like the opportunity to really grow an asset and really get a world-class asset in production, Galantas is the story. We are the only one out there. Very briefly as well, I want to talk about Indiana. Indiana is another exciting project for us. This was the first project we acquired.
It is an IOCG. You can see we are right in the middle of IOCG country. To the north of us is Capstone. To the south of us is Candelaria. This is an asset that has not been aggressively explored. It was drilled really up till 2014, and again, keep in mind, very low gold or copper price environment back then, so not aggressively drilled. On the other side of the mountain is a big iron ore mine. We are right in the right country for IOCG. Historically here, what has been drilled is two key veins, Bondadosa and Flor de Espino. There is a resource there of about 5 million tons. It is about 330,000 ounces of gold let's call it 2.25 grams gold, and about 65,000 tons of copper at 1.3% copper. So significant resource, wide open to depth and on strike.
What is very intriguing to Galantas here is these additional veins that we have been working hard to map and identify and trench, and we think there is a very interesting structure here that is occurring, these North-South kind of structures. If you look at Mantoverde, which is Capstone's project to the North of us, theirs are basically North-South kind of structures as well. We think in time we have real potential here to identify a large, hopefully bulk mineable kind of resource, and we are seeing hints of that. We are seeing some disseminated style mineralization that was not seen before, and based on that, we want to take our time here and see if we can drill out a much larger resource here before we go full out into production here at Indiana.
Obviously, our core asset is Andacollo, and we want to focus on Andacollo, but I don't want anyone to forget about Indiana. This was a key asset for us and maybe in time, this could be the much larger asset. Because of that, we're going to aggressively drill this, particularly these North-South structures, and see what else we can find here. We're right in the heart of IOCG country, so it's worthy of a much more aggressive drill program than we were originally envisioning here based on what we're seeing on the ground. You can sort of see the ore that was shipped to ENAMI, which is a state-owned processor. You can see the high-grade copper there at the top. That's oxide copper. You can see some of the high-grade gold that was shipped as well.
We know there's quite a bit of mineralization here and there's good grades, but we want to see if there is potential here for more of a bulk mineable resource before we go full out, as I said, as an underground, more of a narrow vein kind of structure. I'm going to go now to our resource, I'm going back to Andacollo because I think this is really important as well. I mentioned we had 6 million ounces in our resource. In addition to that, I want to point out that we also have, and I technically can't call it a resource because it didn't make the constrained pit, but I mentioned that we share a property line with Teck.
Because we could only mine up to the property line and you're mining away from the property line on, let's call it a 45-degree angle, there's quite a bit of gold that's been identified, but it did not make a resource because we can't put it in a constrained pit. If you look an NI 43-101, there's basically another 90 million tons or 1.2 million ounces of gold that has been drilled, but we cannot mine it unless we remove that property line between Galantas and Teck's asset. Teck, I think, has got the exact same issue. They probably got quite a bit of gold and copper on their side that they cannot mine because they need our property. That's where I'm getting back to that concept of putting these assets together.
That's going to be one of my key goals as CEO, to see if we can pull this off, because then I think you create a world-class asset. Regardless of whether we can do something with Teck or not, we have 6 million ounces, and you can see here the strip ratio at almost all gold prices is around 1: 1. This is a very low strip ratio asset with significant upside with the drill bit and significant production potential here starting next year. This has got enough life for 20, 30 years plus . That's Galantas. I think I've taken up most of the time. I'll leave it for any questions.
Okay, Mario, thank you so much. Let's jump into some questions with the time remaining. With the existing crushed material on the heap leach pads, is Galantas still expecting to recover gold before the new crushing plant is commissioned, and what are the remaining operational milestones?
Great question. We are not planning to recover gold from the heap leach pads. That's really pure upside. We're working hard to be in a position to start circulating cyanide towards the end of this year, and then obviously we would hope to recover some gold, but that's really not in our base plans. That is pure upside for investors, for Galantas. But I am hopeful we'll be able to recover gold out of those heap leach pads because there is quite a bit, and a lot of work was done by Lachlan Star to identify a remaining resource in there. If you go back to that chart that I mentioned before, and I'll bring it back up again. Right there. The gold just didn't stop in 2017, it's because they stopped circulating the cyanide. A lot of work needs to be done, obviously.
We've got a large team on site now. I think we're up to 50 employees, working to get this mine ready for a restart. In terms of our key operational milestones, really the biggest one is the crushing plant. We're refurbishing the ADR plant. We should have that done by the end of November, middle part of December. Then really we're waiting for that crushing plant to get to site and get that commissioned. We got a team again in Mexico working on getting that disassembled and then packed and shipped to Chile, and we'll be able to provide some updates on the crushing plant and the timing for that hopefully in the coming weeks, so the market gets an idea of where we plan to get that to the port in Mexico and off to overseas to Chile.
For us, it's really the crushing plant is the biggest, I don't want to call it bottleneck, but it's the biggest gating item. Hopefully by end of March, we'll be ready to go.
Talk a little bit more about the crushing plant in Mexico, including dismantling, transport, permitting, installation. What is the critical path to commissioning, and where do you see the greatest risk of delay?
Great question. This crushing plant is basically a replica of what was previously there. It is a three-stage crusher, crushes down to 3/8 of 1 inch. This is a fully permitted crushing plant for our project. We do not need any additional permits from the Chilean government, Sernageomin, or anyone else to get this asset up and running. I want to make that very, very clear. We are fully permitted. Really, the gating item is getting this disassembled in Mexico and shipped over to Chile. Potential delays could be customs. This is a big crushing plant. It is 20,000 tons per day, so it is not small. We have already digitized all the components. We have this all mapped out on how to disassemble it.
We are now working with a group on transportation, and we are working and trying to finalize the group now to dismantle this and get it ready to be shipped to Chile.
Now, with two substantial projects progressing simultaneously, how confident are you that existing funds, together with the anticipated Andacollo cash flow, will be sufficient to deliver the next milestones?
Great question again. I want to clarify, if anyone did not read our last news release on Indiana, we basically indicated to the market we are going to refocus on exploration there. Minimal amount of underground development at Indiana. So the cash burn at Indiana will be minimal now going forward. It is really going to be exploration and underground exploration. We are not focused on getting Indiana up and running quickly. We want to focus almost all our efforts on Andacollo. This is the big prize. Let's not kid ourselves here. It is a 6 million ounce deposit, so we want to focus as much as we possibly can on Andacollo. I would say right now our focus would be 90% Andacollo, 10% Indiana.
Perfect. I want to give you a few moments to end your presentation with some final thoughts, closing remarks for our viewers today.
Oh, Thanks, Ana. Well, look, as I said, I think Galantas is one of those rare companies out there that is a near-term producer, and we are talking near term as 2027. We are months away, not years away, from production. We have got a world-class resource, 6 million ounces. We are extraordinary confident it is going to grow. I mentioned earlier that it has only been drilled down to 250 meters.
There is no reason why this does not go 500 meters, 600 meters depth. Teck at their Carmen de Andacollo is drilled down to 650 meters, and this is all one porphyry-related system. So these systems go very deep. We have got, combined between ourselves and Teck, a world-class asset. On our own, we are probably a world-class asset. There is no reason why, and I am not a geologist, I am a finance person. I just look at patterns.
I just know you drill this down to 400-meter depth, you're probably at a 10-million-ounce kind of deposit here. This is a rare gem of an asset, and for this to be held in a junior company like Galantas, that the market yet does not appreciate what we were able to acquire at Andacollo, this is one of those rare opportunities for someone to go in and start building a position in Galantas. That's my view. We've got significant ownership by management, board members, significant shareholders, in anticipation of Galantas going into production, really demonstrating the value of this asset, because we think it's there. It's got a proven history here. So we're not starting from ground zero. We're just looking to restart an existing asset.
Perfect. Well, thank you, Mario. We really appreciate your time on our conference.
Thank you.
We would love to follow along with all of this progress in the new year.
Great. Thank you ever so much. Appreciate it.