Hello, welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets Group, we are very pleased you've joined us for our two-day Precious Metals & Critical Minerals Virtual Investor Conference. The next presentation is from Omai Gold Mines Corp. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter at any time. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "book a meeting." At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Elaine Ellingham, President, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Chairman of Omai Gold Mines Corp., which trades on the OTCQB under the symbol OMGF, and on TSXV under the symbol OMG. Welcome, Elaine.
Thank you. We're going to talk today about Omai Gold Mines Corp. We are a junior exploration company that has had tremendous success. Our project is in Guyana, which is actually in South America. There's a little map there you can see. Not Ghana in West Africa, but Guyana. It's the former British Guyana. A small country, it has tremendous wealth in offshore oil now, and a long history in gold mining. We're going to talk about the Omai project, it was a past producing mine. It was, when it was in production, the largest primary gold producer in South America. We've been working on this for the last four and a half years, we have discovered substantial gold resources. You're looking there at the two deposits we have, we'll talk a little bit about those.
Obviously making some forward-looking statements, you should read the cautionary language caution. Just looking at our deposits here, we have two gold deposits. They're actually adjacent to one another. You can see them there in the cartoon. They're about 450 m apart. The Wenot deposit is where we've done most of our work. To combine, we are looking at about 8 million oz. We've put out our NI 43-101 resource statements. You see up at the top, we have about 2.5 million oz in the Indicated category, another 5.5 million oz in the Inferred category. Both at pretty robust grades, especially for the Wenot deposit, which would be an open pit deposit. You can see there, the one on the right is an intrusion-hosted deposit. It's like a cylindrical body. The upper part of that historically produced 2.4 million oz.
They hit a barren dike that was just after the mineralization came through the rocks. They drilled below, we've drilled below, there's another 2.5 million oz down below. The Wenot deposit has been our main focus. Historically, it produced about 1.4 million oz, we have now drilled and drilled 2.5 km Long. That's a big deposit. It's down to 500 m, at about 400 m across. There's multiple vertical zones. Historically, the Wenot pit was an average of 1.5 g per ton. What we've discovered down below is about 3.2, 3.3 g per ton, a very compact deposit. That's a nice grade there. In the Wenot, an average grade of about 1.5, 1.6 g per ton. Again, very good for an open pit mine. There's lots around the world that are sub one gram.
That is pretty robust grades. Sorry, I keep hitting the wrong button here. There we go, so Omai Gold Mines is a bit unique because it was a past producer. It is now a very large scale, 8 million oz, that is a large deposit. It has the opportunity to be a very long-life mine. The other thing that is interesting, you think South America, and you think you are probably somewhere in the rainforest or the jungle. In fact, we have a paved highway to within 8 km of the property. Guyana also has a strong reputation for being a very mining-friendly jurisdiction.
And partly it is because of the old production from Omai Gold Mines. Because Omai Gold Mines, in fact, when the country was in production, it was about 35% of the GDP. It employed 1,000 people, and this is a small country. It has only 800,000 people.
You can imagine that this was a well-known asset, created a lot of very good quality jobs. They are anxious to see it come back into production. We have been able to move this forward fairly quickly because it was in production before. We have a lot of the old data. And we also have been doing very aggressive drilling. And in fact, we decided to drill much deeper, and we will talk a bit about that. And in fact, we found out that that Wenot deposit, we even identified it at 1,200 m below surface. Benefits of a past producer. We actually know what the metallurgical recoveries are. Very good. They are about 92% historically. And our new metallurgical test work, which we have done quite a bit of, shows it 93%-95% recovery.
We also have some existing tailings facilities already that can be refurbished, and that is a big plus. Going forward, basically, the ownership of the property is super simple, 100% owned. It is a very simple land tenure. It was granted to us directly from the government. And also in Guyana, there is a very clear path through to environmental permitting, and we are already on that path. Some of the things that are attractive about this is, we know that all the major gold companies around the world, they have been generating tremendous profits. Operating margins are high. Gold price has been spectacular. Even it has fallen back a bit, but for producers, there is still a high positive margin, operating margin. They are cashed up. They need to look at where do they expand production.
The big companies, they want large companies, long life mines, and in jurisdictions where they can get permitted quickly. We basically have all of those things. We are just looking track record. We have expanded the deposit very quickly. For example, last year we drilled probably 11 out of the 12 months. This year, we started drilling mid-January. We will be drilling right through to the end of the year, stopping mid-December. 11 months drilling. There is no seasonality down there. You are only five degrees north of the equator, so weather is pretty constant year-round, so we can drill all year round. We have five drills that have been on the property for the last year, and a lot of drill results obviously coming. But the big item for us is that we are publishing a preliminary economic assessment.
This is sort of the culmination of all of our work over the last five years. It was just April that we put out our most recent resource estimate. You can see there, 5.5 million oz in the inferred, 2.5 million oz in the indicated. This is going to be a big mine plan. This new mine plan is going to include the open pit from that Wenot deposit, the underground from Gilt Creek. Stay tuned for that. That's probably early in August. Where do we stand? Just to show you, we are large. The Guyana Shield is a very attractive geological environment. It's actually a greenstone belt similar to what you would see in Canada, in Quebec and Ontario that host a lot of the large Canadian mines.
These orogenic deposits tend to go deep, be long-life mines. Omai is no exception to that. You can see there that in the Guyana shield, we're actually the second largest in total gold resources right now, second only to the Merian Mine in Suriname. Suriname's the country to the east of Guyana. That's actually an operating mine operated by Newmont. Our access is something fairly unique, even if you're working in Canada. You're looking at the capital city of Georgetown at the coast. Basically, when you think Guyana, think more Caribbean. Although it's in South America, it's English speaking. It's much more Caribbean. It's part of the CARICOM, which is the Caribbean Economic Association. Georgetown is on the coast, capital city. This is a paved road down to our junction.
This road actually continues all the way down to northern Brazil. The government of Guyana has a vision to create that as a major trade corridor because it would provide a shortcut to the Panama Canal for northern Brazil. That puts us right in the middle of things. This is the junction. That road just recently completed the paving to the junction. They're still going further. For us, it makes a big difference because you have the international airport. We're now about a three-and-a-half-hour drive on a nice highway, 8 km into the property. Linden is the second largest town in Guyana. Just to give you an idea of the size of the country, second largest town, 42,000 people. The good thing is it's got a long, rich history in mining.
In fact, there is an open-pit bauxite mine in there in Linden that's been in production since 1916, obviously a lot of mining skills. When Omai was in production, also that's where most of the workforce lived. With respect to energy, with some of the development that's going on very aggressively in Guyana because of some discoveries of offshore oil, they're becoming a very rich country very fast. New power sources are coming. We do believe that in the future that there is a green energy solution that would be tremendous for operating a large mine that we expect Omai to be. Just going forward here. These are just a few pictures. You can see on the right, we have an airstrip right on site, another luxury item left over from the old days. Great having a previous mining site.
You get certain benefits that are great. Bottom left, you see me standing on that road. It's not just a paved road, it's really like a paved highway. It's nice and flat, very direct. A great advantage when you're developing a mine. The top right, you can just see that's our site. It's still clear. It didn't really revegetate from the old days, and we live in some of these old warehouses. We actually have big core logging facilities and all the core stored inside. On the bottom right, you can see we do have a tailings facility that can be refurbished. These are great benefits. This is just a picture of the project. You saw the two deposits. This was the Wenot. You're looking at them from above. Just 450 m away is this intrusion-hosted deposit. Very convenient having them together.
You can see these are all our drill holes here. We've drilled it quite extensively and are still drilling. That's just a picture. Lots of visible gold in these deposits. This I'm just showing you again, multiple zones. These are again from the top, subvertical zones, and each one quite robust with gold mineralization. You can see it when you see our drill results. On the far right, you can see each drill hole will go through multiple different zones, and some of them quite impressive. You can see these, hole 102 there, 28 g over 9.3 m, 8.9 over 5 m, 3.36 over 12.5, 4.5. Multiple zones, and these are really robust because remember, the economic cutoff for the Wenot open pit is 0.3 g. That's what we're going to be taking to the mill. Obviously these grades are far exceeding that.
I mentioned we've got five drills turning. We drill about 6,000 m a month. Obviously a lot of results coming through the system. I can skip over this, but the only message here is sometimes people say, if you're drilling an old mine or you're just drilling deep, you're looking again from the top, you're only 75 m down. I show this because the color bars, those are all of our zones. You can see multiple zones and across almost 400, 450 m across. Look at the old pit. You're only down 75 m. The old pit was quite small even by that depth, and that's why a lot of our zones, they're not that deep. When we went deeper, of course, we ended up getting much higher grades, which was again, pretty exciting for us, drilling things like 4.5 g over 57 m.
We'll keep flipping, but in a longitudinal section, remember this is 2.5 km Across, 500 m deep. This is a big deposit and the purple are all greater than 5 g . Then look down here if you follow this arrow, there's one hole down here and I mentioned to you we did one deep hole, which we'll look at just briefly. These are what I call the no guts, no glory holes. In fact, we were just looking to see if we could hit that Wenot shear structure. In fact, we hit it exactly where it should be. We hit seven gold zones. Pretty exciting for us. Yeah.
This is just looking at it from the side again, the two deposits we mentioned, and this is what the PEA or the preliminary economic assessment that we're coming out with is going to basically do a mine plan that includes the open pit over this Wenot and the underground at Gilt Creek. Gilt Creek is not all that deep. The top of this is 275 m. We would be doing a dual ramp down into this. Actually, what we would do is do a spiral ramp along the south side, because what you can do is this is only 450, 500 m across. Even though you're developing these, you can run an exploration drift and start exploring down here, because remember we put one hole, we know it's down there.
In other words, a long life mine with these two that you see that we expect to be in the order of 16-20 year mine life. You can see there's potential for even more. That's important to the people of Guyana because this mine, last time around, it was producing during a CAD 400 gold price environment. Gold price hit CAD 250 when they were mining, and they were still making money, but it ended up being a 10-12 year mine life. For the people of Guyana, a very long mine life is much more stability and jobs through your career. It's really important. Just on the work we're doing, I won't dwell on it, but we're advancing fairly quickly. We have our application in, we're in the EIA, environmental impact assessment process. We do expect that we're a brownfields project.
It's highly disturbed site. It already looks like a mine site, it should be accelerated. We've done quite a bit of metallurgical test work, very happy with that. We're just trying to advance things like the tailings design, which you wouldn't be able to do on a pure greenfields project, it's quite beneficial. Lots of community interaction for us. Significantly, these are really the milestones. It's very important. We did the resource estimate. That was a big one in April. A lot of the metallurgical test work, that was important as well, very positive. The PEA is the next milestone. I mentioned to you we're still drilling with five drills, and we will be right through to the end of the year. Lots of drill results.
Working on the environmental permitting, we should have a milestone that we'll be able to announce. We've had a lot of incoming saying that we meet the criteria probably for the GDXJ. That is one of those indexes that would greatly assist the liquidity, although our stock is fairly liquid as we speak. After that, because of all that drilling, we're going to be doing an updated resource estimate, probably in Q4 of this year, closer to the year-end. We're starting our work towards a feasibility study because we believe that would be our next step. We have a cash position of about CAD 33 million, we're actually well-financed to do a lot of this work. Our stock has been a big performer.
We have less than two million warrants outstanding and about 8% options, not a lot of dilutables. We have about 670 million shares outstanding today. Our market cap sits around $1.2 billion U.S. Our share price is about a CAD 1.75. We've come up, you can see our stock chart. We've had a good run as we've been able to develop those and discover those resources. We have an impressive list of investors, a lot of the main institutions. We have no major shareholders. The largest shareholder is probably the Mackenzie Funds, with about 6% or 7% right now. We're well-represented in U.S. and European funds as well. Just with respect to a lot of people judge companies by the price to the net asset value, or the value that you can see on the bottom there.
The analyst consensus is about 0.2 to 0.3 price to NAV. I would say that this is based on sort of our old resources, and as that new PEA comes out, essentially our PNAV would go down much lower. In other words, there'd be strong price pressure to go up. There's been some recent acquisitions in the mining space at a very healthy 0.5, 0.7 price to NAV ratios. We still believe that we are, especially as we start de-risking the project, that it's going to move you further and further to these higher levels. We do believe there's a lot of upside on our stock right now. That's our story. If you want any more information, hope you can reach out. Our contact information is there.
Visit our website and stay tuned because we have a lot of press releases, a lot of things coming up, most importantly being our preliminary economic assessment. Thank you. I think there are a few questions. I can look at them. One here, Guyana's emerging as a major gold jurisdiction. What are you hearing from larger producers about the strategic value of a large de-risked project there? As I said very briefly, we all know that the major producing companies, and even the minor producing companies, are generating a lot of cash flow. Their cash balances are increasing. They are now getting pressure from investors to expand.
Absolutely they're looking at projects like Omai, mainly because, as I said, past producers like this and also governments that want to see, and communities that want to see these projects developed, and probably a very much an accelerated timeline for permitting. You still have to go through all the processes for sure. At the same time, I think there's also a high familiarity with Omai. Sorry, I think I got quite a few questions here. I'll try and flip through them. We've got a few minutes here. What's the biggest catalyst investors should watch next as the updated MRE and PEA progress? Those are in fact the highest catalysts. I think the PEA, we have been doing a lot of drilling.
A lot of people are concerned that as you get deeper and you do a deeper deposit, that your strip ratio is going to go up, your strip ratio being the ratio of how much waste you have to move versus, or material you're going to put through your mill, because obviously it costs money to move waste. I think one of the things is we've done a lot of drilling of the secondary zones, particularly on the south side, and those went from basically not being drilled to being one gram. Not as high as our zones on the north side, but I think a lot of people think that our strip ratio is going to go much higher because we're getting deeper. In fact, because we've been able to drill those other zones, that's not the case.
I think that's going to be a bit of a. We're still working on it, so we're not sure where it's going to land, but I think most people are overestimating what the strip ratio might come out at. Sorry. I think a lot of questions are where we are, what the stage we're at in the PEA. I would just say that we're probably two to three weeks out. Obviously, it's vacation time, so things slow down a little bit there. This is a very important milestone for the company because, remember, it's a large open pit and the adjacent underground, so it's almost like designing two mines. How do you optimize those two? There's a lot of optimization and there's a lot of flexibility as to how you develop that and what size.
The other issue is when we started this process, even, I would say six or eight months ago, we were thinking that the processing plant was going to be 15,000, 18,000 tons per day. Given the size of the deposit and the new resource in April, it's clearly going to be larger than that. We have mentioned in one of our press releases that it's looking at 20,000-25,000 tons per day. That is partly because that is a very large pit. You can operate at a very high tons per day when you're looking at that kind of a pit. The underground would be probably a couple of years later. It takes longer to develop the underground. There is some optimization as to when does that underground kick in. The good thing about when the underground kicks in, it's higher grade.
What you do is the lower grade that you're mining from the open pit in the early years gets displaced by higher grade material coming from your underground. As I said, lots of moving parts on that, but we're quite sure that's going to be out by the second week of August, I believe. Sorry. A question, how should investors think about the step change potential from the updated mineral resource work at Wenot and Gilt? The step change in the fall, as I said, the drilling we're doing will result in an updated resource estimate late in the year. The main objective, we're drilling pretty much within the same volume of the pit that we're looking at now. It would add more ounces to the existing volume.
Again, that has the effect from a mining perspective of bringing the cost down, bringing the strip ratio down. I guess the other thing I say is, when you're sitting at 8 million oz, that's a big deposit. You should be moving forward to developing that. There will be ounce increases because as you drill in there, I think as you saw with the number of zones at Wenot, I think it's a fairly safe statement to say it is impossible to drill through the Wenot deposit without hitting gold mineralization because there are so many zones. We will still see expansions and growth in the resource. Okay. Sorry. Where do you see the next easiest ounces coming from? At Wenot depths, Wenot east, or satellite targets along the 7-km shear. Good question.
I am an exploration geologist, and Jason Brewster, our VP, Operations, both of us, our passion is for exploration, but you have to be practical as well. Wenot was definitely the low-hanging fruit, as was Gilt. We have focused our attentions at growing those resources because it's pretty clear that's a pretty nice deposit. I would say east Wenot is probably where we'll step out a bit. It continues on. Unlike Wenot that clearly has 12 or 14 zones, the east Wenot seems to scrunch down into maybe two or three. Now, some of those zones are things that a lot of companies would be delighted to see alone, but, compared with Wenot, they're two or three zones. We did do a drill hole out to the east of Wenot last year, that hit 11.04 g over 14.7 m, and that was down about 200, 220 m.
Obviously that needs following up on. We think that the zones, they're always very vertical, but we think out to the east it starts to dip to the south. We probably have to rethink, or we have been rethinking about what's the best approach to drilling those. That's probably easy pickings. Then we have some surface high-grade zones that, again, we need to quantify. I think that question came up a couple of times. One question, sorry. The company has been trading at roughly 0.2, 0.3 x NAV, PNAV, while peer developers have transacted closer to 0.6. What needs to happen to close that valuation gap? I think the PEA, a lot of the analysts need to wait until they see where this PEA lands, and I think that's going to change things.
Also, you move up the PNAV as you de-risk the project, and we think that's what we have been doing. Certainly, anything on the permitting side, the environmental permitting side, and the metallurgical and things like that. I think the PEA is going to incorporate a lot of things, strip ratio, for example, that will de-risk the project and therefore move the PNAV up. I think we've got through most of the questions. Oh, sorry. One person asked, "Is the old mill still intact?" Quick answer, no. In fact, that was one of the reasons that the mine shut down. It was 2005, 2006, and the company that was operating this mine had acquired the Rosebel project. The Rosebel project is about 200 miles to the east in Suriname.
It was a new project that they were trying to build. The Omai mine was actually a 20,000 tons per day mill. It was running at 24,000 tons per day. Even by 2003, the company had decided that they were going to move that mill over to Rosebel. They were in a bit of a credit crunch. Remember, the gold price was low, financing mines wasn't so easy. They just decided that they were going to relocate that. That, the old Omai mill, is still the mill operating at the Rosebel mine in Suriname today. Oh, sorry. Some of these sort of flipped. Please feel free to reach out to me. I think we only have a little bit of time left, and I have quite a few questions here, which is great. Sorry.
With 50,000 m of drill program underway and five rigs turning, what kind of news cadence should investors expect through to the rest of 2026? You're going to expect a lot of drill results. Interestingly, there's been a bit of a slowdown at the assay labs in Guyana. They were having issues getting flux because of some of the shipping challenges the world is facing. We are now through that, there should be a lot of drill results coming and hopefully no slowdowns through to the end of the year. Yeah. As I said, that's a priority because as you move to a feasibility study, you need a tighter density of drill holes, that's really what we're doing. As we drill, because there's so many different zones, some will get upgraded from the Inferred Indicated category.
At the same time, some new zones would still be encountered, and that's why I say that the resource will still continue to expand. Sorry, I think we're just at the end there. I think we're wrapping it up. Please reach out. I think our emails are on the PowerPoint presentation, feel free to send us your questions. Thank you.