Good afternoon. My name is Keith Boyle. I'm the CEO of New Found Gold. I'll walk you through quite quickly, actually. We always seem to have lots to say, but we are in Newfoundland, and as I've mentioned over and over to many people, it's one of the best jurisdictions to work in. I met with government officials again last week, and they said, "How can we help you get this thing going?" It really is something. Our Queensway Gold Project is our flagship. We announced a Preliminary Economic Assessment that outlined a phased approach, starting small with a high-grade core and then expanding with that cash flow to get to 172,000 oz a year at less than $1,100 an ounce. Small CapEx and growing. We recently announced and had a positive vote from Maritime, the acquisition of Maritime Resources. We should be closing that by the mid-month.
With that, we basically bought production. They have started production this quarter. Looking at some cash flow that will help us finance our Queensway project. We have a strong treasury, CAD 71 million as at the end of September. We have a brand new team, really, as of December, where the Chairman, Paul Huet, was brought in, brand new board. Everyone on the board is new as of December last year. Brand new management team. I started in January, and everyone except for Melissa. Melissa, the President, was the VP of Exploration, so she found the deposit at Queensway, and she now is the President and still advancing the exploration effort. We have the right team in place now to take it from exploration and becoming a producing company and development company.
Our capital structure, we're sitting currently about 246 after the acquisition, about 340 million shares outstanding. Eric Sprott will be at 18%, Dundee Corporation at 11%, and we've got really good following on the institutional front. Really, that happened with the financing we did in June of $67 million, and then we followed that up with a private placement in August of another $20 million. We released our PEA, as I mentioned, and we've had a number of catalysts since the announcement of the acquisition with the release of some channel sampling at Iceberg and some drill results at Lotto, and more recently, some drill results at Dropkick, which I'll show you where they come from. The combination was quite strategic for us with Maritime. Bought a small mine. It's now starting production. That cash flow will help us fund our project financing.
We've now become a producer, so our—what am I looking at?—multiple should get better. For us, it was de-risking our Phase 1 of Queensway. In Queensway, Phase 1 assumed a toll mill somewhere on the island. We happen to be in the position to buy that mill, and now we're in the position to decide on the milling. We expect a significant re-rate potential. Highly complementary assets. Hammerdown Mine, they did a feasibility study back in 2022 where 272,000 oz at about 4.5 g per ton was the reserve, outlining about 50,000 oz a year of production. Now, we've got our own work to do on that and update that in the coming months, probably in the new year. We're focused on that. They're delivering their ore right now to Pine Cove, processing it at Pine Cove. The Queensway project is advancing.
We'll be submitting for our EA in Q1 of next year, and so permitting through the year and then constructing in 2027 Phase 1. That's 69,000 oz a year at all-in sustaining of about $1,300 for CAD 155 million of capex. Now, we're deciding what to do with the mills. Nugget Pond is a gold circuit that's idle. Pine Cove is a mill that's fully operational, and we'll see what we'll do to process in addition to the Hammerdown, the Queensway material. Queensway PEA summary, CAD 155 million initial capex gets us 69,000 oz a year. That cash flow will then pay for the Phase 2 expansion of a 7,000-ton-a-day plant on site, and that gets us 172,000 oz a year at $1,100 an ounce, all-in sustaining. The NPV at the base case of $2,500 was 743, but a good IRR of 56.
Lots of torque leverage to gold price. We've got for every $100 increase in gold price, we increase by CAD 89 million, and you can see at $3,300 there, we're a billion and a half and 197% IRR. In terms of Queensway, the chart shows the Phase 1 at 69,000 oz a year, 172,000 for Phase 2. We expect that exploration will fill in the back end. The beige bars are the underground. You'll see in a second how that could really deliver more ounces. The payback on the right-hand chart shows how the initial CapEx really unlocks Phase 2. CAD 155 million unlocks 172,000 oz a year. We'd expect a re-rate for that kind of production level. Over 200,000 oz is what we're targeting, combined Queensway and Maritime or Hammerdown.
Those comparables show us that, you know what, we're looking at somewhere between $3 billion-$3.5 billion when we execute on our plan. I'll take you through a few slides. Our property package now is well over 2% of the island of Newfoundland. As Jeff just previously mentioned, we did acquire the Exploits Discovery ground, which you see in pink at the top here, and then Maritime Resources in green. We see we acquired those. We've got other neighbors on the island. We've got a property package now that spans 110 km long, and that's I've worked up in the Abitibi, and that's basically Val-d'Or to Rouyn, so almost 50% of Agnico Eagle's production in that strike length. Lots of exploration upside, lots of ground to explore on. We've only explored a small portion of it.
The resource area there is about 4.5 km of strike along the Appleton Fault Zone, 2 million oz total. Again, as Jeff mentioned a little bit earlier, Bullseye, that piece of Bullseye ground is just sitting right here. Again, right along strike, we're looking at doing exploition further along. When we zero in on the resource, one key aspect of this deposit, you'll see here the block model within the pit shells at a 0.3 cutoff. When we increase the cutoff to 2 g, you can see a very consistent high-grade core. We get about 75% of the ounces and 25% of the tons. With high-grade chutes that are very consistent, and those go right to surface, the depth of that pit in particular is about 230 m. Good high-grade chutes along that main secondary structure.
We're confident about that because in each of these two pits, they were exposed over an area of over 200 m by 100 m, so basically four football fields big. You can see at Iceberg that you can actually walk along the vein itself and see it, see the VG that's right in the vein. They were able to map those areas, connect the dots, and interpret the geology, and that's what informed the resource. Really de-risking the geological and resource risk on this deposit. We recently announced, as I mentioned, some of the grade results of the channel sampling that we did at Iceberg, some spectacular results, but as expected, there was that high-grade core, and we expected good results, and that's what's reflected in the resource.
More recently, this summer, we exposed Lotto, we've done the channel sampling, and those samples are in the lab, so we'll be releasing those again along the high-grade corridor. The mine design, I'll just expand that a little bit. See the white line at the bottom? It's the Trans Canada Highway, and we're less than 20 km from Gander, and we've got two little towns next to us. There's Appleton here and Glenwood, and so within an hour drive of the property, we've got a population of about 40,000 to pull from. Half the planes that fly in and out of Newfoundland are half full, or sorry, the planes that fly in and out of Newfoundland are half full with people that do fly in, fly out, and want to come home.
We just got to show them that we've got a long-term project here for them to come and work. In terms of infrastructure, the red line is the power line that goes right through, actually two power lines go right through our property. We've got to move it to the yellow dotted line, and we've got a highway, we've got an airport, and we've got port not far away. As I mentioned, the underground piece of the production was quite small, only about 270,000 oz of the 1.5 million oz over the life of mine. We see this as a big potential. Little bit of underground, lots of potential. There was drilling done all the way down to 1,000 m, and we saw that it was wide open. We also released at Dome. We recently announced 11 km to the north, Dropkick, some pretty spectacular results.
You can see the grades that we announced earlier this year. We followed that up with more grades that really expanded that area, and we also announced in there an area called Blue Jay. Unfortunately, they did not win the World Series, but we decided to name this one Blue Jay because we really like the potential, but it is a long strike. We are quite excited by this new area that is completely outside the resource. When you look at our property, 110 km, we have looked at maybe 20 km of one of those fault zones. We have got grab samples that were taken as part of regional exploration. The purple is over 10 g a ton, so lots of good smoke in and around the resource area, which is sitting just right here. Then 60 km to the south, again, repeat, more good area to look at.
They've done some drilling, Paul's Pond in particular, some really good results. That, in terms of exploration potential, when you really think of the size that we've got, we just acquired Hammerdown or Maritime, lots of exploration potential there too. We'll update our presentation to show that. We're about to be a producer and a rising gold price. We're fast-tracking Queensway production. We should be in production in the latter half of 2027 at Queensway, so we'll be over 100,000 oz targeting. We're in Newfoundland. We've got the right team. We've got the money in place to do that, and we've got a property package, I think, as second to none. Thank you.
We have time for one quick question. Yes, sir.
Newfoundland is quite challenging, like weather-wise, and had some assets in Alaska and we had a very short season. How does that function over there where you are?
We in Canada operate year-round, except maybe at the two weeks at Christmas to give the drillers. You drill year-round, and I have operated in the High Arctic and Timmins and the Abitibi. You do not stop. I manage the Dome Mine up in Timmins. Same weather as what is in Newfoundland, so nothing untoward for us. Yeah, pretty straightforward, actually.
Keith, I have got a very quick question for you as we wrap up. Wh at is your cost of discovery per ounce right now?
All-in cost, like we have spent all-in about CAD 280 million, and we ended up with just over 2 million oz, so about CAD 143. That is acquisition of property. That is everything. That is from day one.
From day one since Newfoundland?
2016, from the creation of New Found Gold.
Okay. Do you think those numbers are improving since?
They're much improving now that we know what to look for and how to drill. Good example of that is Dropkick. We bought that property. They had drill results, nothing spectacular, but our team knew how to look for it and step out and hit the target. So we're seeing a much more efficient use of money.
Perfect. Thank you so much.
All right. Very good. Thank you.
Thanks.
All right, Mr. Terry Lynch , Power Metallic Mines, trading on the venture with the symbol PNPN.
All right. Thank you, everyone. Good to be here in Zurich. It's always one of my favorite cities to come and visit. We'll give you an update on the progress we're making at Power Metallic and talk to you about our exciting polymetallic discovery at Nisk. I mean, polymetallic just simply means multiple minerals.
We've got copper, precious metals, platinum, palladium, gold, silver, and nickel. We're not going to tell you anything we don't believe is true, but it's junior mining, and any sort of investment is always good to do your own due diligence. I'll give you a little summary at the start. We're fully funded. We're not raising capital right now. We've got over CAD 40 million in the bank as of the last quarter. We've been very fortunate to get some serious sponsorship from some very savvy mining investors on the way through multiple times. Robert Friedland has led the last two rounds. Rob McEwen has been investing in the last three rounds, and Gina Rinehart has been in there as well. Why did they put their money in? I mean, generally, we've made an amazing discovery called the Lion Zone, which we'll talk about in a second.
It's an extremely high-grade copper, precious metals that sits on top of a nickel sulfide, making it into what's called an orthomagmatic body. We're fully funded, as I mentioned. We've got about 100,000 m of drilling that we've embarked on starting this summer. We drilled about 17,000 m in the summer, and we're drilling now. Five rigs are rolling, so we'll probably drill another 20,000 m-25,000 m between now and Christmas. Lots of news coming on the assays, and we're located in Quebec. A little snapshot on the structure of the company, fairly typical for Canadian deals. The one thing that's not typical, I guess, is about half the company is owned by eight investors, and all those eight investors have been investing over the last two years. The people that know the deal the best are continuing to write checks.
The biggest investor has been Robert Friedland over the last two years. Second biggest is myself and my family. I think it's important when people that know the deal the best are continuing to write checks. It shows confidence in the investment. Where are we located in this world? We are located in Quebec, in Canada. I would argue it's the best jurisdiction for critical minerals in the world for three reasons. One is the infrastructure. In mining, if you don't have the infrastructure, you have to build it. It comes out of your mine profit. In our case, we're very lucky. We've got enormous infrastructure support in Quebec. We're located just off of Route North, so you can literally drive to the rig and then just off the road, off a major road, four lanes. It's got power on the site.
We're also across the road from a major Hydro-Quebec substation, so lots of cheap, plentiful green power. We are about 8 km outside the town of Nemaska. Nemaska is a major village in northern Quebec, about two and a half hours north of Chibougamau. It is also the home of the James Bay Cree. It has a fully integrated regional airport, has accommodation and food for our staff. On the First Nation side of things, if you were to choose a First Nation to work with anywhere in the world, you would want the James Bay Cree. They are really sort of business-oriented. They have been very successful. They are all internally managed. They have generated a lot of money with the Hydro-Quebec investments over the years, so they are very well structured. They are very super pro-business, and you will see how they have been helping us.
Quebec's done a really great job of working with the First Nations to make them feel like they're part of the project. The third reason we like Quebec so much is the fiscal terms are the best in the world. When I say we were fully funded, we did a raise in February. End of February, we raised about CAD 50 million. We did the raise at CAD 1.45 a share for the investors. On 80% of that raise, we got CAD 2.83 a share. That's using some tax structuring in Quebec. It's called a charity flow-through buyback, where the Quebec tax-paying individual pays CAD 2.83, sells it the next second to you for CAD 1.45. They get their tax savings. They go from 54% to 40%, but the company gets CAD 2.83 in cash.
It's really good for the primary investor that bought at $1.45. They get to see $2.83 de-risking their investment. It's really a win-win-win. It's a great fiscal structure for exploration in Quebec. It also works on development. If we built this project and say the first phase cost $300 million or $400 million US, half of that would literally come from the governments, 30% from the Feds, 25% from the province. It's really a great fiscal regime. Let's talk about the project itself. Initially, we had a 46 sq km land package. We bought 80% of it from Critical Elements, and it was initially a nickel discovery. We used to be called Power Nickel. We had about 3.1 million tons of 1.5% nickel equivalent, and we grew that to 7.1 on the MRE. It's probably about 8.5 there right now.
As we were growing, on the bottom left, you can see the nickel zone. We call it Nisk Main. The average width or length of the hole was about 400 m. About two years ago, I was raising money. We'd do CAD 2 million raises. I would put up CAD 500,000. My friends and peers would put up CAD 500,000, and we'd do the two-for-one on the exploration. We get CAD 2 million, and we'd work with that. We sort of bootstrapped our development. When we were drilling here, some of the holes ran a little bit longer. We ended up, instead of having 400 m left to drill a hole, we only had 200 m left.
The exploration team said, "Terry, do you want to throw in some more cash?" I said, "I'd rather do it through the market." I said, "What do we have for 200 m that would make some sense, that would answer some questions?" They said, "Well, this thing up on the north, on the top right, it looks like another nickel discovery. Let's drill that." I said, "Okay, let's do it." We did, and we got crazy lucky. We hit the jackpot. There is no way around it. This is the Lion Zone. You can see some of the results on the screen. 21 m of 8% copper equivalent. That is using a $1,000 PGM price. Analysts say there is between 8 million tons-13 million tons of this material at the moment, between 5%-7% copper equivalent. A really prolific zone.
It changed our understanding of the project. When we went out and raised money last February, these two next slides were sort of the clinchers. The first slide basically goes through comparing ourselves to other polymetallic exploration plays on the planet and looking at what they have got in terms of mineral in the ground relative to their valuation. If you look at that and you go through the math, we are probably trading at 20 cents-30 cents on the dollar. That was what we were able to, I think, sort of explain to people. People could see we are not expensive. This next slide talks about the asymmetric upside in the exploration. This triangle that you see before you has nickel on one corner, copper on the other, and PGs on the top.
It speaks to this: this is every orthomagmatic deposit that has ever been discovered on the planet Earth. There are only about 20 of them. They are the world's richest mines. If you are a miner and you had your wish, you would wish you could discover an orthomagmatic deposit because they are the most powerful mines in the world. We have got one. Generally, each one of these has been over 1 million tons of contained metal, some of them more than 10 million tons. The interesting thing is that for every ton of copper you find in these projects, you will find an average of 5 tons of nickel sulfides. We have got right now about 1.5 copper to 1 nickel at Nisk, soon to be 2 copper to 1 nickel. What does that mean?
We're finding a lot more copper, which is good, but we're also likely to find a lot more nickel. And the nickel we find is likely to be a lot richer than the Nisk Main because, generally speaking, you can actually look at all these orthomagmatic discoveries, and the way to sort of envision it in your head is the palm of your hand is the nickel sulfide, and the fingers are the Lion Zone, the high-grade polymetallics. So what you want to do is find the high-grade zones and drill down to the mother lode underneath. We do not think we've found the mother of this enterprise yet. We think that's coming. The cool thing from an investor perspective is that you're not paying for it. It's already built in. The team itself, obviously, in mining, you need people like me to raise money.
You need smart guys like Steve Beresford, who's in the middle. He's the guy who invented that triangle slide previously. He was Chief Geologist at First Quantum and then at MMG and Chief Scientific Officer at IGO. Three successive multi-billion-dollar polymetallic success stories. If he's not the best scientific mind in polymetallics, he's certainly in that conversation. He was a Western Mining-trained guy. Joe Campbell on the left runs GeoVector, one of Canada's largest geological consulting firms. He's also a Western Mining-trained guy. His probably biggest claim to fame is the Melodyne mine that Agnico Eagle has in the Northwest Territories. That was Joe's project, front to back. Very successful, very sharp operating guys. That's enabled us to go from one rig to five, soon to be six. I think everyone's here sort of familiar with the commodity story.
We spent a lot of time at it. I think we all sort of believe the commodities are going to have their day. We certainly think it is coming. This is an example of what has happened since last February on our own particular commodities. Copper is actually up more than 12% now, but you can see our commodities in the ground are up over 30%. I think we were given that $50 million to answer one question: how big is Nisk going to be? You can look at Sakatti. I mean, they have got a recent upgrade to 157 million tons, but the heart of it was about 40 million tons of high-grade. I think we are getting to a Sakatti size. Will we get to Voisey's Bay, 140 million?
The cool thing is you're not paying for it, so don't you hope we get there because that could easily happen. We think this is going to be a district. One of the things we did this summer after we raised the money at the end of February and then, obviously, the tariffs came in and sort of everything softened was we went out and we said, "Hey, in almost every circumstance, these orthomagmatics come in camps." We went out and we acquired 46 sq km to 331. We acquired the land in stages. First, the package would lift at 350% there, and then we acquired the hydro lands and then through staking a little bit more further north. In particular, the hydro lands are really critical sort of to look at.
If you can see on the screen, the red dot was the initial discovery hole of the Lion Zone. We basically have been after this hydro land for some time. We worked with the James Bay Cree, with Hydro-Quebec to actually free it up, and we eventually got it just about a month ago. It was really a big get for us. We believe the second half of Lion is on the hydro lands, and we will be drilling that in just a few weeks. Just to the right, you will see a green star. That was a 1,000 m hole we drilled this summer. It was a research hole drilled not in any known mineral area, parallel to the structure of the Lion Zone, looking back at it using borehole EM. At the bottom of this hole, we had our biggest anomaly ever.
We did not keep on drilling because we did not own the land that was drilling into. Now we do. We are actually in there actively now drilling that area. We are thinking our triple-A targets are really going to be drilled this fall and this winter. Most of our concentration will be around the Lion Zone and on the hydro lands in that lift land up to the right. We identified eight regional targets that basically had the geophysics, the geochemical, and geologic signature of the Lion Zone success. We now own seven of them, and we will be testing those as well. On the met side, we will have a full met study out in January. Our preliminary results we released about six weeks ago show that 93% of the minerals are going to report to the copper concentrate. That is all really good.
We're expecting to have very good news on the met side out in January. Then just ramping up, basically, these projects grow as you grow value in the ground. Value in the ground is going to happen because you're drilling and getting assays out and showing more resource growth, which we're doing. It's going to grow because the commodities are rising, which is happening. The land packages, we've obviously ramped up quite a bit. We're still looking for additional land packages. We're about to move to the New York Stock Exchange. Now that the U.S. government shutdown is over, we expect to hear everything's been filed. We expect that possibly as early as just after American Thanksgiving could happen, certainly by the end of the year. The met study should be out in January.
In terms of a couple of other things, we spun off our copper gold exploration plays in Chile and BC that will be listed in Canada in November. Our feasibility study with CVMR on their nickel powder plant, we expect in H1. Finally, our Saudi project, we finally got control of that in late October. That will be another possible seedling for us to grow. Lots of exciting news happening in Power Metals, and it looks like it is going to be a phenomenal year for us. That is the end.
Thanks, Terry. We have one minute for questions in the back.
How much cash do you have, and who are your bigger shareholders?
We have CAD 40 million in the bank as of last quarter. Our largest shareholders, myself and my family, I put a fresh CAD 5 million in the last two years: Robert Friedland, Rob McEwen, Palace Capital, and BT Global.
Can you, the 52% ownership, you mentioned basically it's your family and then .
Mr. Friedland and.
Mr. Friedland?
Yeah.
How did you break that down between Robert and?
Yeah. So we're about 16% or so. Friedland's around 5% or 6%. Yeah. Palace Capital, about the same, and BT Global, about the same. Sam Stern, about the same. Critical Elements is about 5% as well.
Okay. Wonderful. Thank you.
Anybody else? One more quick one.
How much money will be required over the course of time to put these things into any semblance of production?
Yeah. You can look at there's a few PEAs out there that you can look at sort of in the $300 million-$400 million range to get the first wave of this done. The cool thing about a project like this, it'll probably pay out in a year. The IRR in this is going to be crazy high because it's such a lucrative rock.
Okay. That's it. Thank you, Terry.
Thank you. Cheers.
How are you? Good to see you. Actually, I'm going to try to get some stuff up in here from the chat. All right. Here we go. Next up from Abitibi Metals, we have Mr. Laurent Eustache. Am I pronouncing that right?
Yes.
Okay. All right. They do trade on the CSE with the symbol AMQ. Thank you.
Thank you for attending. It's my pleasure to introduce you to the Abitibi Metals story. I'm Laurent Eustache, the Executive VP of the company. I'm going to certainly do some forward-looking statements in that presentation. Abitibi Metals, at first glance, we have that flagship B26 Project located in Quebec, a great location. We position ourselves as an advanced to early developer stage company. It's an 18.5 million tons combined indicated and inferred resource at 2.2% copper equivalent, or it's also the equivalent of 2 million oz at 3.45 g per ton of a gold deposit. These numbers at $2,000 per ounce, if we were taking it at $3,000 per ounce, we would be at 2.7% copper equivalent. It gives you an idea of the torque of the polymetallic mineralization along these gold and copper markets would ride over the coming months.
We are, in general, a $50 million company. We are well-financed up to 2027 with $13 million at the bank. We see the potential to grow to double or triple the size of the company over the coming months or next year. On the fundamental, the net takeaway I'd like you to remember of that investment opportunity is that we've got an excellent project and location that I'm going to show you there. We've got a team with expertise and a track record and access to capital, which is critical to develop these projects. We've got a clear strategic path toward value creation from a resource-stage project at the moment to an economic mining potential demonstration. We're in the middle of our Phase 3 drill program. We've got 2/3 of our 20,000 m drill program at the moment.
We released half of the result that I'm going to be pleased to share with you today. Great team. Our President, CEO, and founder of the company is John Deluce, the third generation of the Deluce family, which I'm going to give you a little bit of background later on. Myself, a geologist, also worked on the buy-side and joined the company earlier this year. And Louis Gariepy, that joined pretty much at the same time as me as VP Exploration, is a well-recognized senior geologist in the industry, developed a lot of similar stage projects where we are at the moment with O3 Mining, IAMGOLD, and Anglo American. Backing us up as well on the advisory team, we have Shane Williams, Strategic Advisor and President, CEO of West Red Lake.
Eric Callio, Strategic Advisor as well, 40 years of experience, former Executive VP of Exploration of Kirkland Lake and Agnico Eagle. On the capital market, we've got Victor Contore and Chris Levy, senior roles with BlackRock. Just recently, Craig Perry joined the advisory board. Very renowned investor and entrepreneur in the industry behind the success of Skeena Resources, Vizsla Silver, NextGen Energy. Who are the Deluce family? It's a three-generation of entrepreneurs in Quebec and Ontario. They're more known for the airline business. At the moment, they developed Porter Airlines, mostly active in Canada and expanding in the US. They sold over the generation four or five of these airline companies. The one that is also I'd like to bring to your attention is the Air Quebec airline. Basically, they built it and sold it, sold it to the Cree Nation in Quebec.
They have a great network and knowledge of these communities in Quebec, which is fundamental to develop economic projects. They also have a real estate portfolio and mining investment strategy. Abitibi Metals is just the tip of the iceberg of what they're doing in the industry. They're also deeply investing in the development and producers in the industry, along with some well-renowned investors like Pierre Lassonde. On the share structure, it's pretty simple. 154 million shares outstanding. On a fully diluted basis, 158 million shares outstanding. Little hang-on on the warrant. All the financing done with the company was without warrant. On the breakdown of the share ownership, the Deluce family is about 27% ownership, high net worth and strategic shareholders, 16%. SOQUEM, which is the partner to whom we are acquiring the B26 project, 9.9%.
Institution, 25%, with just a limited public float of 21%, 22.1%. Under this coverage, we just have Haywood starting to cover us. We've got some good visits with other mining analysts. We might see additional coverage coming over the coming months. Location-wise, we are in the heart of the Abitibi. I'd say the best location to develop mining projects, close by the former Selbaie Mine, producing about 53 million tons of the same polymetallic that we have at B26. We are on the same east-west of the D2O Gold project. Excellent infrastructures, good access, power line on the project. A little bit on the geology. As you can see, we are close by the Selbaie Mine. The net takeaway of that slide is on the Selbaie camp, there was limited exploration. The Selbaie Mine stopped in 2004.
All the explorations were going forward to South America for perfluorocoppers. So limited exploration was done in that camp. And so that's the government deciding to continue doing exploration. So they invested CAD 25 million within the B26 project, ending up with that discovery. And ended up with 11 million tons of deposit and size of deposit. And the project was just sitting there for a couple of years when the Deluce family recognized the potential to increase it and drilling furthermore. So that's basically where we are today. As you can see as well, there is the Wacosig project up north that the government is also developing. We expect they might have between 10 million tons-15 million tons. Additions of the Wacosig, the Selbaie, and the B26, you already have a world-class polymetallic environment.
When you look at the claim tenures, in brown is the claims that Abitibi Metals control. It is a 40 km long property. What is interesting on that property, we also highlight the Beschefer project. It is a gold project with economic intercept. There is no resource at the moment. That project could bring additional tonnage for the mining development of the area. On the local geology, it is a 1.6 km long mineralized system in one body with 40 zones yet modelized. 80% of the value is within the copper gold stringer zones that you see in reddish color. 20% of the value is lying within the blue zone here, which is the VMS zinc and silver lenses. It is also from surface to 900 m of depth. A large system, a large mineralized system.
One thing interesting to note as well, as you can see the elongated formation of the deposit. This is because it's been crossed by a deformation zone later after the VMS creation, which is a second geological event that's reimposed to the first initial mineralization from the VMS. These accumulation of geological process bring additional concentration of mineralization, bringing high-grade systems and more economic deposit. Here are our results from 2025, our Phase 3 drill program. It's a 20,000 m drill program. We've completed 2/3 of the program, released about half of the results, and we'll be continuing and finalizing the drilling by the end of the year. As you can see, we've been successful, and orange dots are the result of our drilling program for this year.
Two strategies that were initiated with that program, trying to see the continuity within the resource model that we have at the moment and being successful to extend these high-grade systems. I like to take the example of the hole two—I do not know if I have a pointer here. The hole 269 wedge tree, which gave us a 4.46% copper equivalent over 21.1 m in a gap of the drill grid of 200 m, where the nearest hole was providing half of the grade and half of the length intercept. These holes will bring additional tonnage within the deposit already defined. The second strategy is also expansion drilling, which we have been starting to test.
What we have released recently is a 150 m expansion drilling to the west at depth with the hole 373 wedge one, delivering a 3.93% copper equivalent over 11 m that includes an 8.16% copper equivalent over 3.2 m. Pretty much high-grade, excellent continuity. We see a growth path for increasing the resource on the project. This is the remaining Phase 3 plan that we have. As you can see, we will be even more aggressive with over 500 m tape out on the deposit, which is not something you usually see with explorers. We want to really see the extension of that system and grow it the way we have been able to grow it from 11 million tons to 18.5 million tons and eventually go for much larger numbers on the next update of the resource. That is what it looks like on the core.
You have this yellowish color, which is the chalcopyrite, semi-massive to massive mineralization. You also, in the middle of the core, have that deformation zone with the whitish color, which is a quartz veining. That might have been brought by the deformation structure that elongated the deposit, recrystallized the sulfurs, and brought additional gold within the system. What we see consistently is an increase of gold at depth within the deposit. That is one of the reasons lots of gold producers are interested with our story as well. What is our path for the coming year? Our technical team is reviewing the geological model. We will add Phase 2 and Phase 3 drill programs. It is about 30,000 m additional metrics within the next update of the resource. We expect a good progression within the numbers here.
In parallel, we're also advancing the mining evaluation, which is usually you've got the geologist generating great resource and the mining killing all the resources that the geologists are working for. Basically, we want to make sure that what we do by the drill bit creates value from a mining perspective. We already have an internal scope completed. It's really high level, but providing us a lot of intels to make sure that we are doing the right thing to build an economic project toward this development. Lastly, but surely something which is really exciting is the regional potential where limited exploration has been done on the regional. When SOQUEM invested in the area, they put CAD 25 million on the project. 90% of that was on the B26 project.
Limited exploration done in the regional where we think there is a great potential to have new discoveries. This winter, we're going to start doing some drilling here. Some comparables. We are within the gold-rich VMS environment. These VMS environment, when you've got one lenses, you've got a second, you've got a third, you've got a fourth. It's just a question to better understand the alteration, the deformation, and then you get to find another lenses. It's just to be systematic exploration strategy. This is what we are embarking on. Just some example, recent example, foreign mining was sort of the same type of size of company and resource. I'm going to encourage you to see what they've become now. We think we have a business case for the same potential of value creation.
Maybe the best example is the LaRonde deposit. It has been the anchor and the foundation of the creation of the company. Wrapping up quickly, since the beginning, we started on the project, we raised about CAD 28 million on the project, completed three drill programs, about 50,000 m of drilling, increased 63% of the resource in 2024, and we intend to continue doing so by mid-2026. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Laurent. All right. We're going to go right into it. We do not have any time for the questions, but you can be available on the other side of the doors if anybody has anything. Next up, we have Red Pine Exploration, trading on the TSX Venture with the symbol RPX.
Good afternoon. Thank you for attending. I think we have a very exciting story for you that I want to tell you this afternoon.
It's really about the transition from exploration to production. Of course, it's a great time to do it as we can leverage the higher gold price. This is a staged low-risk transition from explorer to production. It's really a way that we can find to generate revenue to drill off and develop a much larger project with a lot of exploration potential. Thereby, we minimize the dilution to shareholders as we advance towards a larger production scenario. The reason that we can do this, as I always say, there's three things you need. You need infrastructure to process your mill, your ore. You need the ability to permit, and you need a deposit that's really amenable to production, whether it's small-scale production that you can fast track or it's a much larger deposit that you develop over time.
I think this project has a number of different options. We're looking at an option that we can fast track into production to generate the revenue that we need for developing a much larger project. They always say in real estate, having the smallest house on the best street in town, you're probably in a good situation. I think that's where we are here. You can see where we're located just outside of the town of Wawa. This is an area that's seen a lot of mining. Really, gold was discovered in Wawa in the 1890s, been off and on production on our property since that time in the 1930s, 1960s, and again in the 1980s. We still benefit from having that previous production in the area as we have some existing permits still in place.
In fact, we still have a closure plan that helps us a lot on the permitting side. It is the large resource that we have at 1.7 million oz that is really what we are taking a portion of to start and to drill off and expand that larger resource estimate that we have. You can see some of our neighbors in the area. We have Wesdome, located about 100 km away with their Eagle River Mine. We have Alamos. We have the newly formed Hemlo Mining Corporation that just bought the Barrick Hemlo Mine. A new player in town, plus we have Vault Minerals out of Australia. We certainly have capacity in the area for a toll milling scenario, but we also have potential in the area for generating partnerships for the future as we continue to develop the project.
This is an area, of course, where we're very close to Wawa and the Trans-Canada Highway. Second thing I said, now that we have access to milling capacity for a toll milling scenario, we need to be able to permit. You can see here in the black outline is the extent of the property outline. It's very big. It's about 6 km by 10 km in size. And in light gray is actually the old leasehold patents that the Canadian government used to give out near the turn of the century. This is an area that we can drill, we can explore, we can build roads. We don't require permits at all. In fact, that's a really big benefit.
It's why we believe we can have this small-scale production permitted before the end of 2026, which seems like a very tight timeline compared to what you see in the papers, how long it takes to get a project going. This is a brownfield site. It has leasehold patents. It has existing permits. What we really need to do is define the mine plan, start small scale, easy to permit, and we believe we can have that done towards the end of next year. We are doing the baseline studies now, and we are advancing on the permitting process. This is what we believe we can achieve in the next year. The third thing, and probably the most important thing, is do you have a deposit that you can mine and access in an easy way? This is a deposit.
Because it's been that smallest house on the best street, that resource still exists. It's only been mined a little bit in the past by previous developers and explorers, and the bulk of the mineralization is still intact. You got a picture of a deposit that is really 5 m or 10 m wide. So picture this room. That's the width of the deposit. And you're mining this at surface for 2.5 km and extending down to depth, which has only been really drilled down to a depth of 300 m. We're only just scratching the surface, but that deposit exists here. There are really high-grade bits that exist within this room. That's what the older miners really tried to get was access that high-grade, because that's what you really needed back then to make money.
Now we can mine the whole deposit, mine that 3 g or 4 g . Let's call that the big meat and potatoes mine that generates a lot of revenue because of the ease to mine this deposit. That is what we'd like to start with. You can see this occurs in a diorite body. This diorite, the most similar example to this would be Côté Lake. It is a 13 million oz deposit down by Sudbury, Ontario, mined by IAMGOLD. This is what we start with. The benefit here is there has been a large deformation or shear zone that has run through the middle. It has concentrated a lot of that gold into the shear zone. That is why we have this higher-grade mineralization of the 3 g-4 g above the 1 g that this type of deposit would normally be. We look at it in cross-section.
You can see in the top right the photograph of the ore. What we have here is those small quartz vein bits that we are trying to follow. In the old days, we would just mine the whole shear zone, that 10 m wide. You can see on the cross-section, the continuity is excellent for that shear zone. If that is what we are going to mine, it is a low-risk deposit. Low mining costs in a diorite, very good rock quality, big open stopes underground. This is what makes this deposit really work. It comes right to surface. Our approach is, and there is going to be lots of flexibility for this. Where it comes to surface, we take some small open pits. We generate revenue every year for a couple of years.
We use that to drill off and develop either a larger underground deposit afterwards or perhaps a larger open pit. We do not have to decide that today. We are doing all the economics internally. We hope to announce all of that in February of next year as part of our PEA. Really, a decision on the larger product does not have to be made for a couple of years down the road. The most important thing is to generate revenue from these small pits. We use that to go forward, to continue drilling and doing our exploration to show how big this deposit could be. We can decide on what is better, a large underground or a large open pit. We do not have our own mill at some stage. We would probably want to do that, but that is part of the internal studies and the PEA.
That's what we would continue to work on throughout next year. Really, where are we on the path? Updating the mineral resource estimate. We just finished a big drilling campaign. We're doing that now. In fact, we have WSP doing it. They have completed the resource. We are heading into the PEA. We've identified the consulting firm that's going to be leading the PEA. We'll be announcing that shortly. We expect it to be completed in Q1 of 2026. From that PEA, we can then turn that into a PFS that we would like to finish by the end of the next year. The reason that's so quick, again, is because it's only the small pit scenario that we're looking at. The bigger underground or bigger pit, we would do that as we go forward into the future.
The speed to get this into production in the small pits, that's really what our focus is at this time. You can see there's a lot of news. There's going to be the PEA coming out in Q1. We're going to need to toll mill it somewhere in this scenario. We're going to be announcing that. We have to make that deal, announce that. That's a big catalyst. If you can see the companies, some of the companies that have done that before us, Radisson, Talisker, Amex, they've all done really great when they've got their PEA out and produced the MOU with a mill. I think that's where we want to be. We expect that to be both out within the next six months. After that, we continue to the PFS, and ideally, the permits coming in towards the end of 2026, early 2027.
Between now and when we go into production, a very short time period, maybe a year, year and a half, a lot of good news coming out, a lot of catalysts and opportunities to bring value into a company that's really valued on the market as an exploration company. It's a lot more than that. We need to get that PEA out, get the MOU out, get the PPs out, and then that value is going to come into the project. People will be able to see what we see as we've been doing all this work in the background. That is really going to be for an investor. That is the timeline for getting more value into this company. This is the concept that we have. This is a long section of the deposits. We're looking at the side, surface at the top.
You can see in those black outlines, those are the small pits near surface. Now, there is a big resource here of 1.7 million oz at 1.5, which is open in all directions. It just needs additional drilling. Really, what we are doing is we are taking something near surface in a higher-grade part of the deposit where the grade is somewhere in the order of 2.5 g . That would be the material that we would send in the range of 150,000 oz-200,000 oz to a toll mill and generate the revenue we need to do the additional drilling to show off the rest of the bigger project. In this scenario, we would convert then after the small open pits or probably during as we are mining those out, we could go into the underground. We know there is an underground mine here.
We also know from our pit optimizations, there is a very big open pit. It is really defining that we need to do more work. Starting with the small open pits and generating the revenue is how we generate the revenue to define what the next big step is for this company. By doing that, showing the value. Just an example of what we have left for this project is potential is you can see that with the exploration drilling we did last year, we had some pretty big step outs just to see that this went down to depth. Like I said, the Paul deposit's only been drilled to 300 m. We drilled a couple of 1 km long deep holes. We ended up getting 20 g over a couple of meters, some other really good hits, unlimited drilling. Most importantly, we found a gabbro at depth.
This is the green line. It's a sill that often concentrates the shearing. As the shear goes through these areas, it breaks the surrounding diorite, which is very brittle. The gold floods into that area, and that's what generates the deposit. We found that at depth. It's too expensive to continue with that drilling, particularly given our share price. We have decided to generate the revenue in the small pits to pay for that. My best target here is because this is a property that over time has been consolidated, we now own 100% ownership. 100% of the claims have now been acquired. The last one was just this past summer. We have consolidated all the data. We drilled into a big fault zone. We know there's a part that's been offset. We drilled a couple of deep holes into it.
We intersected it, found some nice mineralization, some VG, some values around 5 g over 1 m , narrow, but we're just on the edge of the zone. That could be a doubling of the size of the deposit. It's my favorite target. We've done some geophysics. We've proven there is an anomaly down there. It is really just getting back to that. We're going to do that drilling later because I think we never want to forget about how big this project can really be and where the value is. We are an exploration company. The interim step here is doing the small pits to generate that revenue to pay for that drilling that really has to be done. That is the scenario we're following. That is the plan that seems to be quite clear to us now.
That is why we want to get the PEA done so we can put those numbers out to the general public. Really where we are with where we want to get to, and this is the value proposition, is we traded around $20 an ounce. At the end of our last quarter, we had about CAD 8.5 million in the bank. We are well funded to take this through to the PEA. Really, it is about executing, doing good technical work, and starting this transition from a $20 an ounce company as a junior explorer into something much more as we enter into the phase of being a producer. More importantly, we are a small producer at that time, but with a big resource and a project with a lot of exploration potential. That is really where we want to get to.
From there, we can really show how big this project can be, what the next mine on this property is going to look like. This is just the start of a much bigger project. The shareholding is 10% by Alamos. They've certainly been a strong supporter over the years. Merk is another 10%. They've both been pro-rata financings in the last two. We brought in Royal Bank, McKinsey, Gold 2000, a couple of other funds. We have coverage from Research Capital Corp and also Haywood. They've both been very supportive of the company and the direction we're going. I think about a year ago, I went to them with this plan of doing small production. I think it was really pooh-poohed on at the time. Myself, often I didn't really like small producers.
Now there's such a margin, there's such an opportunity for us to be able to generate some revenue, even as a small producer. That is really only the start of the story as we transition into a much larger mining scenario. That is the Red Pine story.
We do have time for one quick question if anybody has something in the background. Back by the door.
If I remember correctly, you had some small problems with some assay news lately, or nine, two years ago maybe. Did you manage to clean that all up?
Yeah, we did. It was certainly an unfortunate break for the company. That happened in the spring of 2024. I joined in July. It was unfortunate that it happened. The good part that came from all of this is that we were able to uncover very quickly what had happened.
Therefore, we were able to quickly assess the damage and to fix that damage. I joined the company knowing that the deposit was still intact because I looked to buy this project a number of years ago as feed for the Wesdome mill. When I worked for Wesdome, I was there for about seven years. I only just left last year. The project is still intact. The main part of the deposit really was not impacted that much because most of the areas where assays were changed were on the extremities of the deposit with the newer drilling. We were able to correct that. Since that time, we were able to bring in a lot of the financing from Alamos, Merk, Royal Bank of Canada, and Gold 2000. They were all comfortable with all of the independent checkwork that was done.
In fact, I suspect we probably have the cleanest database in the mining industry now because of it. I think it's helped us in a lot of ways and certainly put us on a better path going forward with a lot better procedures.
Thank you so much, Mike.
Thank you.
All right. We have actually a short break, 10-minute break, and we will come back at 3:15.