It's time to welcome our next guest, Omai Gold Mines Corporation. It's a Canadian company focused on exploration and development of the Omai Gold Project. Is that the way to pronounce it?
Yes.
It is in Guyana, South America. Here to tell us more is Elaine Ellingham, please.
Thank you.
The floor is yours.
Great. Good afternoon. I think we're skipping a big piece of the land of the planet and going down to South America now, basically down in Guyana, which is on the north coast of South America. I'm Elaine Ellingham. I'm the President and CEO of Omai . I am an exploration geologist, and that's my first and foremost. The opportunity to work on something like Omai, which was a past-producing mine and a large past-producing mine, has been absolutely spectacular. About a month ago, three or four weeks ago, we hit a major milestone for the company, which was actually our fourth mineral resource estimate. We did kind of hit it out of the park. The deposit now has 6.5 million ounces in resources, putting it in the category of one of the large undeveloped projects in the world. We'll just jump in there. You are looking.
We have actually two deposits. They're only 450 m apart, and we'll talk about the two of them. Making some forward-looking statements, so the cautionary words around that. The project itself, as I mentioned, was a past producer. It produced 300,000 ounces a year between 1993 and 2005. For some of you who are enjoying the gold price now at $4,000, back then, actually, when it was in production, the gold price hit $250 an ounce. They were still profitable. That speaks to it. It ceased operation during that time, but also because the company was building another mine in Suriname, about 200 miles away, and decided to relocate the mill over there. From my perspective, it shut down for all the right reasons for us, which was low gold price, other priorities for the company that was building another mine. In we went.
We have 100% ownership in the project. It has a very simple ownership structure. We acquired it directly from the government. It's a basic permit that's good for three to five years, and we have renewed that once. Lots of advantages when you have a brownfield project. For this one, there is some infrastructure. There's road access, and we'll talk a bit about that. You know what the metallurgy was. It was conventional milling. It was a carbon in pulp, 92% recovery, and over 30% from the gravity circuit. We already know certain things like that that de-risk a project. We'll also talk about the government there, because the government of Guyana is very, very enthusiastic about seeing the reopening of this mine, because it employed 1,000 people. They are looking for that again. It's always nice to have a tailwind behind you.
We are well-positioned on the cash front. We just completed a financing last week that takes our balance up to just under CAD 60 million , which is $40 million. I can't convert that instantly to crowns, but there you go. We'll just take a quick look at the deposit. As I mentioned, there are two different deposits. What you're looking at is—I'll try the pointer here. Sorry. Not sure how the pointer works there. Anyway, the one on the left is the shear-hosted deposit, and the one to the right is an intrusion-hosted deposit. The original mine was built for the one on the right. In the upper part, it produced 2.4 million ounces of gold. There was a dike underneath it, which is after the mineralization that they knew about. That's where they stopped mining that. The other deposit is a shear-hosted deposit.
These are both orogenic gold deposits, very similar to what we see in Ontario and Quebec in Canada. I've spent most of my life on those types of deposits. They tend to have very deep roots and keep going to depths. In fact, with our work, we are proving just that. The one on the left is where we focus most of our work. It did produce 1.4 million ounces, but the company that was mining there, it was kind of an afterthought. What you're looking at is actually 2.5 Km long. Initially, we drilled very shallow, because everyone was saying, you're just drilling under an old pit, so it's going to be deep. In fact, it was not deep, and I'll explain why.
In this past year, we drilled deeper, and we took it down to about 400- 450 m and found, lo and behold, that the grades get better at depths and the width. I'll also talk about, you'll see, there's one drill hole down there. I'm not sure how that—anyway, there is one drill hole you can see. We're actually drilling across the one deposit, and because the other deposit's only 400 m away, we kept the drill hole going. We're testing a full 700 m below that deposit to see if it still goes at depth. You might ask, why are we doing that? Basically, with the two deposits that we've identified, we're probably looking at about a 20-year mine life. If that continues down, it's just indicative. It's a proof of concept that maybe this is a generational mine.
Something like that is really important for a country like Guyana. You don't want to be employing people for 10 or 20 years, and then they have to finish their career and find a new job. For this, this is a big win for the country. Location-wise, we're in the Guyana Shield. You can see Guyana there. To the east is a country called Suriname, and to the west is Venezuela. There's a main corridor road. Most of the country is covered by rainforest, so there's really only one artery, one road that goes to the south. It goes from Georgetown, the capital, through Linden, down to the Brazilian border. That road is being upgraded currently, and we're only 10 miles off that road. Guyana, I hadn't been there before this, but it's a very welcoming country. It's very small.
The population is less than 800,000 people, so you actually get to know people, especially in the government, very quickly. As I said, this was a very famous asset in the country. You would be hard-pressed to find a Guyanese person who doesn't know the Omai mine. It was definitely—it used to be the poorest country in South America, except for when this Omai project was in production. Except in 2015, they discovered offshore oil. I would imagine some of you have heard about it, because it's just incredible. In fact, they're projecting that by 2027 alone, the average GDP of a Guyanese is going to be the highest in the world, greater than the UAE. It has absolutely projected them through the economic spectrum very quickly. They're investing in a lot of infrastructure incredibly efficiently. They just built a 1.1-kilometer bridge in 30 months.
You sort of say, is mining still important to them? Very much so, because the offshore oil is not employing a lot of Guyanese directly. Also, the mines, they know that in the hinterland, those populations, the jobs in the mining are really important for developing the interior. The President was just reelected on September 1st. I know there's a lot of talk about politics here. In Guyana, they really want to see the development. The President in particular, I've met with him about five times. He always asks, " How soon are you going to be in production? " It's a different kind of environment there. He was just reelected. He not just got the majority there by a surprise victory that was more than they expected, but they also won parliament. He has five years to really realize his dreams.
This is great, because I think we're part of one of them. You'll see the road access there. The other key thing, you see Georgetown, the capital city, Linden there, and then our Omai property. Linden is actually interesting, because it's been an open-pit bauxite mine since 1916. As you can imagine, that's a population that has a lot of open-pit mining skills. When Omai was in production, that's where most of them lived. We get CVs every day of the week. How soon are you going to be opening the mines? The other good news is with the infrastructure bill, the first thing they're doing, the road was always paved to Linden for a long time. Now they're paving it below that. Other things, you can see me standing on the road there in the middle. It's a very nice road. It speeds up the trip to the property.
We also have an airstrip there left over from the old days, which is a convenient way to get in, about 40 minutes from the capital. Top right, you can see the site is still cleared. You're in the rainforest there, but it never regrew. It's just grasses and open land. Very easy to work there. The bottom right is important. We'll talk about that. That's the tailings that were built for the previous mine. We've been looking at those, and those are in great shape for refurbishing and reusing. Just looking at the deposit, the top left is a plan map looking from above. You can see all those red lines. That's basically all of the gold zones of the Wenot gold deposit. That's the shear-hosted. What you're looking at there goes a whole 2.5-kilometer strike length.
A lot of gold deposits of this type, you'd get one or two zones. You can see there's almost 12 sub-parallel vertical zones. Just 450, 500 m to the north, the pink is the intrusive zone body. You can think of it as a cylindrical intrusive rock. Basically, you saw the deformation along that Wenot shear. At some point, that just torqued that intrusion, broke it sideways. As you know, for the gold fluids, you need the open structures and fractures. Both of those were mineralized by the same fluids at the same time. What you're looking at here is, again, as you know, when you're mining, you want to be shallow, especially for open-pit mining. The top right is only 75 m below surface. This is our Wenot gold deposit.
You're looking at a 2.5-kilometer strike there, and you're looking at all the block model that made up our resource. Important to note is that the purple is actually over 5 gm. The average grade of the Wenot gold deposit sits at about 1.5 gm per ton in the indicated and 1.82 in the inferred. That's because the inferred is where you have less drill density, and that's at the deeper part of our deposits. In fact, we're seeing the grade increase with depth. The other thing to point out, in the middle there, you'll see the extent of the old pit. It was fairly small, so even down 75 m, that was fairly insignificant. That's because the gold price was low, and they were very selectively mining it. After we did that, in the past year, it was kind of, does it continue at depth?
The bottom right, you're looking at down at 375 m, because we would see a pit can probably, especially for this large, go down to 350, 400, maybe even a little deeper. Lo and behold, you can see the grades there, much improved grades. These are vertical zones, so you should see the same footprint at a lower level, which you do. No previous mining there, obviously. We started to hit last fall grades like 4.5 gm over 57 m and 3.1 gm over 68 m. I've been in the business for 40 years, and it doesn't matter what kind of deposits you're working on, those are spectacular. What we did, we were going to do a PEA earlier this year, and we went, no, let's just find out how big this is. In the last one year of drilling, we actually added 2.2 million ounces to that deposit.
That delayed our PEA, but no regrets. Just quickly looking at this, the left is a cross-section of the deposit. It's a little different from some gold deposits, because each one of those is a different gold zone. There are multiple gold zones across actually 350 or 400 m. When you drill through it, we just drill, drill, drill, and you go through multiple, multiple zones at different levels. It is quite a unique deposit there. On the longitudinal sections, the takeaway on those longitudinal sections is each one of those, you're looking across the deposit, and you can see that 2.5-kilometer strike. Basically, a lot of deposits, you would get one or two of those 50-meter sections, long sections. This one, you're catching each one of those different zones. It gives you an idea of the magnitude.
Also, what you see is you can see our PEA pit there and how much mineralization we've added below. It gives you an idea of what that next one's going to look like. Again, here, just looking, this is the long section again. Really, you can see how much better the grades and widths get at depth. That's a great thing, because at some point, you probably want to cut off the pit. With those grades, you can go underground. It's really an economic optimization. The bottom left, the takeaway there is we've broken down the resource by 100-meter slice. You can see in the areas where we've drilled the most, between about 150 and 350, each one of the—it's almost a million and a half ounces per 100 meters, right? Just spectacular.
You can also see there that the grades are getting better, the average grade with depth, just what you want to see. Just to keep life exciting, we did a couple of drill holes into the intrusion-hosted deposit. It was already well drilled. It has 46 holes, 27,000 meters, and a 1.8 million ounce resource. We wanted to get samples for metallurgy and rock mechanics. We did one hole at the end of last year. We had a second hole planned. What we did was we did drill across that. You can see on the left, we decided to keep it going and to drill under the Wenot gold deposit, because it's not that far away. Yesterday, the drillers, we hit 2,000 meters on that hole. The good news is we did hit the shear. We hit the same lithologies in the shear. Geology did not fail us.
At the end of the day, it's in for assay. We don't know the results. The shear was there, which is good news. This is the other deposit. This would be an underground, not that deep. The top's down about 275 m. We've started doing some of the studies to bring this into the PEA as well. The new PEA, we did one last year. That was to get us on the permitting path. That's being quite accelerated. In the next PEA, which is underway and is going, we're aiming for a Q1 finish on that. We're doing, again, the Wenot pit. It's much bigger now that we've identified the additional ounces. We're bringing in the underground at about 2,500 tons per day. Basically, we've hit the target we wanted to, which is about a 20-year mine life with production of 250,000- 300,000 ounces a year.
We have four drills turning. Each one of them has a very specific task to drive us through to the PEA. We are quite optimistic that it's going to take us to something that's going to be a more realistic path forward for the project. Because we were a past-producing project here, we can accelerate certain components of the PEA. At the top right, you can see that we've started the underground mine planning and the ramp down there. It's about a 5.6-kilometer ramp. The bottom right, the tailings, actually, we have the original design plans. We've had some experts in there, and it can handle two 10-meter raises. In other words, we can use one of the old pits for tailings plus this tailings facility, and that is ample for the 20-year mine life.
We've done rock mechanics, lots of water studies, because it actually rains over 2 m a year in Guyana. That was a big issue. We've tested all the water, and on that basis, we actually got an environmental permit. We're green-lighted to actually dewater the Wenot pit. Yeah, our stock has been flying, as with the gold price. Let's see. Got some analyst coverage. It's good.
Thank you for that. Do we have any questions on the floor here? Please raise your hand. I have a question. If I'm not mistaken, you raised a significant amount in February.
Yeah, actually, last week.
Was it difficult considering the amount? To what level are you funded?
No, actually, combined, we have about CAD 60 million . In this gold price environment and with a very large project like this, road access, government that wants a mine, it was we were oversubscribed.
OK. With your experience in the sector, you feel that it's much easier now to go to the investors than it was a year ago. Would you agree?
Absolutely.
Will you produce when you have all the ducks in a row, invite a partner, or sell straight out, as you are exploration and development?
With all projects, it's the same. You just want to advance them towards production and basically de-risk every aspect of it. Whether we change the management team and develop it or go for an acquisition, it's either way. We're not looking for strategic partners at this point.
You mentioned the next news from you would be the PEA.
We have four drills going. I think the results of the deep hole, that's been kind of exciting for us. Geologically, it's exciting. Ongoing drill results from expansion of the Wenot gold deposit on the east and west, and we also have some exploration targets. We've focused on Wenot, but we've always done a couple of holes here and there on some of the targets. Now we can do that.
There might be a positive surprise, because you have a focus on where you will deliver, and then all of a sudden, something else will pop up.
Right. When you're in good geology, you're in good geology.
Oh, that's interesting. Watch the space, as they would say. Elaine, a pleasure.
Thank you.
We'll give Elaine a warm thank you for that.