Good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. Certainly a lot of time zones on today's call, so I do appreciate you joining us. I'm on today with Contango ORE, to talk about the recent publishing of a technical report summary on the Johnson Tract Project, with some pretty attractive economics. So I've got on today CEO Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse and CFO Mike Clark. Gentlemen, how are you today?
Doing well. Romeo, I'm in Cornwall, England, on a geo-field trip. And the hotel has terrible internet, so we have our Starlink out front. If the internet goes haywire, we can blame Elon Musk.
That was my plan, so that's perfect. Awesome. Here's how today's going to work, just for the folks in the room. After my brief housekeeping here at the beginning, I'm going to throw it to Rick and Mike for a brief presentation. Then I've got some questions for them. After that, this is totally an interactive event, so please use the chat in the bottom right of the screen. If we don't get to your question today, for whatever reason, running out of time, et cetera, I'll make sure the Contango team gets them, and they'll get back to you as soon as possible. We'll hope to get to as many as we can today. I'll say this event is also being recorded, should be available right in your inbox by the end of the day, Eastern Time.
From there, you can share it out as much as you'd like. It will also be available on 6ix's YouTube channel and 6ix.com. Without further ado, I will throw it to Rick and Mike for a presentation.
Yeah, thanks, Romeo. We've got a few slides to go through here, just really focusing today on the Johnson Tract Project. Hopefully, you saw the press release announcing the Initial Assessment, which is American for Canadian PEA. It's the same thing. If you go ahead, we're obviously making forward-looking statements here. I think the next slide is on Manh Choh, of course, in production. We are on track to produce about 60,000 ounces of gold this year. I think next week, we'll have a press release out on our Q1 results. Mike, we'll probably have another event like this to talk about those results. Today, we're here to talk about Johnson Tract and on the Initial Assessment that was released just yesterday, I guess. The next slide is focusing in on Johnson Tract, of course, located in Lower Cook Inlet, down right, not too far from the coast.
That's one of the things that's attractive about this project. As you know, Contango is focused on our Direct Shipping Ore model, which means we'd like to focus on projects that are close to existing infrastructure. In Alaska, that means road, rail, and water. Like our Manh Choh project, which is next to the highway, the Alaska Highway, that means we can direct ship our high-grade ore running between 7 grams to 8 grams to the mill at Fort Knox. Our Johnson Tract Project is located about 20 mi from the water. It's a good fit. As you can see, it's very good grade. As the study has shown, it's got a very attractive, very robust project with a $225 million NPV and 30% IRR. Let's dive into it a bit more.
The land, one of the other criteria we've talked about for our DSO model to work and to work quickly, get mining projects into production quickly, is the land ownership. The land here is owned by Cook Inlet Regional, Inc., also known as CIRI, one of the more successful of the Alaska Native Corporations. They had the right to select lands. They allowed the Lake Clark National Park to exist because that was their traditional land. They allowed the settlement with the federal government was to allow the park to exist, but to allow the Johnson Tract Project area and the land to be deeded to CIRI for mineral rights, along with easements to the coast and a port site or a barge loading site. The next slide shows the easements. The purple outlines are the two tracts of land that are patented land owned by CIRI.
The white dashed lines are the access easements that have been issued. In the darker outlines there, it shows the potential port sites. We are doing more studies this year to determine the exact road alignment and also the exact location of the port site there on Tuxedni Channel. Next slide, just to get you oriented here, our camp in the foreground there. The Johnson Tract deposit is located between those two mountains. You can see they are very steep mountains. In between the camp and the portal site there with the white triangle is access road to connect the camp and the portal site. This is, again, all in this recent Initial Study that we have Initial Assessment Study that we have just published.
The road there has been permitted, and we're now in the process of permitting the proposed tunnel portal site at the portal site there. The deposit, Johnson Tract, is located between the two big mountains there. Again, very steep. The way to, certainly the way to develop this project is to put a tunnel in and get underneath it. First step, next step is really to get underneath and drill this out to a feasibility level. The next slide shows this in a sort of a 3D projection here. The multicolor blocks, those are the resource model, the block model for the resource. Based on the existing drilling from surface, and as I said, it is difficult to drill from surface. You see where the proposed tunnel comes in right at the base of what is the known deposit. It's open at depth. It's open along strike.
It's just that we can't drill very easily from the surface based on the geometry of the steep mountains and the geometry and dip of the ore body. On the right there, you can see where the proposed tunnel is. It's basically about a kilometer and a half long tunnel, which is a similar length to our Lucky Shot tunnel. This is, we're not trying to build a huge long 10 km tunnel like that. This is pretty basic stuff. As you can see, the plan then would be to get the tunnel built and do the infill drilling to outline the ore body.
That really is the next main step from an exploration standpoint to get the ore body drilled to a drill density that will allow us to complete a feasibility study, which is effectively just a mine plan, because, again, we do not plan to build a mill or a tailings facility or a large fixed power plant to run all that. We'll have to have a mobile power plant and basically be a very small footprint underground mine only, with the ore loaded in metal boxes that carry about 25 tons of ore per box. That would be transported by road down to the barge loading site. The ore will be loaded on a barge and then sent to a milling facility. Next slide, if you will, Romeo, shows the ore body and the overall general mine plan.
I'll point out, you can see where the ore body is there on the left. The red is our footwall fault, and it separates ore from waste material. You can see we refer to this as the Day-side fault. It's in the hanging wall of the ore body, but the footwall to our workings. We've taken this approach to develop the mine by putting all the workings, all the development workings, in the hanging wall to the Day-side fault. The reason for that is that's an unmineralized post-mineral intrusion. It has no sulfides in it. It's not going to generate acid. It's not going to result in any metal leaching because you're not generating any acid. It's a smart development plan. Basically, the way you're going to mine this is starting at the bottom and then mining upwards.
If the ore body continues, obviously, we'd have to ramp down. All of our development rock and development work will be in that post-mineral Day-side that is, again, has no sulfides and, therefore, no potential for acid rock drainage and/or metal leaching. You can see the economics here. They're very robust. This is mostly a gold and silver mine with a significant amount of copper and zinc as byproduct. We tend to focus on the post-tax NPV5 numbers, $225 million NPV with about a 30% IRR over a seven-year mine life. On average, you're producing about a little over 100,000 ounces of gold equivalent ounces at an average gold equivalent grade of 7.58 grams per ton. Now, that's a diluted mine grade, so that takes into account your slope development and dilution. As you'll notice, the resource grade is 9.4, but your mine grade is 7.58.
You're basically diluting the ore as a result of the mining method that you're using. Obviously, more infill drilling as we get underground and when we do slope development, we may obviously be able to improve that. Right now, with an indicated and inferred model, the resulting mine plan results in that roughly 2-gram dilution to the resource grade. You can see the initial capital costs here are about $214 million. That's, I'll take some broad numbers here. It's roughly $50 million to put the infrastructure in place, which is the tunnel, get the feasibility level drilling in place. It would also include the access road up to the portal site. In the initial costs, initial capital costs include about $36 million of contingency. I think that's about 25%.
Your sustaining costs, which is continuing the development of your different ramp levels as you mine from the bottom upwards towards the crown pillar at the top there, which is $61 million. That includes a $12 million contingency. Our all-in sustaining costs are a really healthy $860 per gold equivalent ounce. Obviously, you're taking your credit then for the copper, the zinc, and the silver that you're producing as co-products in the overall mine plan. What I really love about this project and the approach is the payback period is not much over a year. Very, very significant economic metric in terms of putting in the $200 million of capital, you're getting paid back in just a little over a year. That's the quality of a high-quality project or a consequence of a high-quality project. You can see the gold price sensitivity.
We've chosen $2,200 as the base case. That's about where consensus is. Obviously, the gold price has been moving up pretty dramatically in the last year. Consensus also has been moving up, but obviously, it lags a bit to the spot price by about $1,000. We wanted to make sure that investors understood what the leverage to gold is here with regards to an NPV calculus. They can see the NPV at $3,000 gold is $400 million, and at $4,000 gold is $600 million. It's a very robust project. Of course, what you always want to protect for is what's the downside look like. You can go all the way down to $1,800, and this still has, I think, about a $140 million NPV.
It's a solid project, a modest amount of initial capital to develop, a modest amount of sustaining capital because you're letting gravity do most of the work here. You're mining, starting at the bottom and mining up, which also will obviously result in pretty good operating costs. I think the next slide gets into that with a couple of views of the ore body. You can see the kilometer and a half access tunnel there. And then basically, you're using a series of spiral ramps starting at the bottom and then mining up as you mine the ore body from the bottom to the top. The level plan layout there on the right side shows the internal spiral ramp, and then your development access over to the fault, which is the Day-side fault, is shown in purple there.
Then your mine sequencing, you're using for the most part, and shown in green, is longhole stopes. These are, as an underground mining method, a pretty cheap way to mine underground. These are long stopes that you're mining. Right up next to the fault in orange is the cut and fill. That's obviously more expensive mining than the longhole. I don't remember the exact percentages, but more than about 90% plus of the ore body is mined using longhole methods. Clearly, the ore body, as was shown in the previous slide or a couple of slides back, the ore body is open at depth. Once we get in, and Romeo, maybe just back the slides up to that block model, you can see the ore body has been drilled to a depth there. That's obviously where we put the tunnel in.
We've done that purposely, and we want to be able to drill further down along the plunge of the ore body. We really can't test the width of the ore body from the surface either just because of the geometry. We'll be able to see if it extends along strike as well. Let's go ahead and go up a couple of slides then. Is that the last slide? I think that is the last slide. I'll stop there. I mean, there's a lot of statistics to talk about, and we're really pleased with the study. I think it's a realistic plan. I think we're discounting this project over a five-year period. We're going to try to work hard to see if we can get it done a little sooner than that. I think that's a realistic time frame.
Certainly, from an independent study, we're pleased with discounting the net present value over a five-year period. I'll stop there, Romeo, and we'll open up for questions. I'm sure there will be quite a few.
Awesome. Yeah, there's a good number in the chat already, but I've got my own first. I appreciate your patience, folks in the chat. I won't be long. Just wanted to get through a couple myself. I will ask, I don't usually see a payback period this short of 1.1 years undiscounted. I'm curious, how in your experience and perspective, how does Johnson Tract compare to other mining projects in the sector? What do you think contributed most to achieving those numbers?
Yeah, and maybe, I mean, basically it gets down to grade and the long hole, being able to use longhole stoping as the principal mining method for an underground mine. It's obviously fairly selective because it is an underground mine, but you get sort of more of a bulk approach to mining. There are some parts of the ore body that we may even look at sublevel caving, which is an even more less expensive mining method and/or room and pillar. So those are other things. You need more geotechnical information to really make those kind of those level of decisions. So we've kind of, in the Initial Assessment here, we've just done what you would typically use for your typical underground mine where you have thick mining widths. Remember, the average width of this mine is 40 of this mineralized body is 40 meters.
That makes for good longhole stopes. Now, its grade is the most important thing. Then next is the thickness of the ore body. I will point out just a couple of things on that one-year payback. I want to make sure investors understand how this is sort of derived, that it's based on when you start production. Now, because it's an underground mine, you actually start mining almost two years ahead of that. We call it year minus two, you're starting your underground development work. Then year minus one, you're doing your test mining and you're ramping up mining ore and delivering it to site. Year minus one, we're actually producing ore.
If we can move, assuming that the rest of the infrastructure is in place in terms of the road, access road down to the barge site facility, then you can transport the ore to a mill. That is it. I just want to make sure we are spending money well before we start actually mining ore. That is just how that works for an underground mine. It is a little different than an open pit.
I think that's helpful context for folks in the room. Now, I know gold is going to contribute approximately 70% of this project's revenue. I know I saw the slide. The project's got really strong sensitivity to gold prices. I'm curious, you're using $2,200 as the base case. What price range do you believe is realistic over the next three to five years? How is this impacting your development timeline?
Gold's been on a complete tear here. I mean, there's all sorts of $4,000 or $5,000 predictions. I think Goldman Sachs has a $4,000 target. I think it's by the end of the year, or maybe it was a one-year target, something like that. We did not want to publish an Initial Assessment that was out of date the day it was written. I'll tell you, it's a bit difficult. We convinced our QPs to go up to $4,000 just because gold's already between $3,000 and $3,500. Obviously, we'll make a lot more money if gold prices are higher, but it's also the other metals that contribute as well. I think we've chosen what I would call conservative long-term pricing that's based on consensus.
The consensus numbers are a whole bunch of different banks that say, "Here's what we think the metal prices are going to be." It is just an average. I think CIBC is the one who sort of has done that traditionally over the years, and it has kind of become the guidebook, if you will. At higher gold price, do things happen faster? No. You still have to do all the work, and there is a fair bit of work to do. Just to kind of go through it, the next steps we are doing is to permit the underground tunnel. That is a mine operating permit. It is a mine. Technically, we have to meet all the criteria of a mining operation. The permitting is the next step. Once it is permitted, we build the tunnel access, and then we just drill the heck out of this thing.
It takes a lot of drilling to define an underground resource. It's probably somewhere between 10,000 meters and 15,000 meters of drilling. Those two things cost, rough numbers, about $50 million. That is included in the capital costs that are in there. The $214 million of capital, roughly $50 million of that, is getting the underground built. At that point, it's just you're doing exploration. Mike's going to tell me I have to write that off because it's exploration. The tunnel is going to be used for the main access point to remove the ore when we're ready to mine and develop the project. In rough numbers, that's going to be $50 million off of the initial capital because it's basically already a sunk cost at that point. I don't know if Mike, do you want to say anything else about the counting?
No, no. I think you said most of it there. I do not think I have anything to add.
Awesome. I got one. I know at that base case of $2,200 gold, with that $224.5 million, 30.2% IRR, it's obviously compelling. I'm curious. This reflects a question that's in the chat. Can you share just capital allocation strategy between Johnson Tract and other exploration assets in your portfolio? How does it compete, basically?
Yeah. I mean, geez, if we had all the money in the world, we'd be doing more, but we don't. I will say what continues to be our main focus is paying down the debt and delivering into the hedges. Once we get rid of the hedges, we're generating somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million of free cash flow a year with Manh Choh. That has got to be the first order of business, frankly. Now, what do we need to do? We need to permit Johnson Tract. Permitting is not expensive. I mean, I do not want to downplay how much, but in terms of $200 million capital to build a project, spending $3 million or so on permitting is money well spent. You cannot do the rest of the work until you do the permitting. That is the next step at Johnson Tract.
We'd love to get a drill program going at Lucky Shot this year, and we're making an assessment of whether we feel comfortable doing that, but we haven't made that decision yet. I'd say from a capital allocation standpoint, we're going to pay down debt and deliver into hedges and continue to permit the Johnson Tract project. We'd love the gold price to go up and the copper price to go up. That's all good stuff, but it doesn't make things happen faster.
No, fair enough.
I'd like to add to that, Romeo. Our debt is now, as of today, down to $30 million with ING and Macquarie, and our hedge balance is just below 75,000 ounces from 124,600 at July of last year. So we're making progress, and we're targeting trying to get all that kind of paid off by the end of next year.
Awesome. Actually, Mike, I got another one for you. The AISC listed on the deck, strike is very low at $860 per ounce. Just for me and everybody in the room, if you could remind us how that's calculated and kind of what's included.
It's basically all your OpEx and your sustaining CapEx. The OpEx is your mining, and then you're trucking down to the barge site, and then you're barging down to the mill site, and then trucking from the barge to the new mill, and then the milling costs, and then the G&A. Those costs are all in there. Those are roughly split to about 50% for mining, 25% of that is for milling, and then the other 25% is G&A, and then the transportation. In addition to that, you have your sustaining capital. You have those amounts in there. Now, the number here that they have, everyone does their AISC a little bit differently, but the AISC they have here, we have $860. The way we typically account for Manh Choh is we would also include royalties and mining production taxes.
If we actually added those in, that might add about another $100 to it, but yeah, it's still well below $1,000. That's how we would account for it in our financials going forward.
Appreciate that. Helpful context for sure. One question I had is, how long is that ramp-up period expected to take? I know you kind of got into this already, Rick, but I think it is worthwhile to reiterate. Before declaring commercial production, is there pre-production that period? Does that include that $213 million? Just give us a bit of reiteration there.
Yeah. So basically, we take the five-year discounting window. The first three years are explorations, and then year minus, and I'm counting backwards, so 5, 4, 3. Year minus two, you're putting your development work in. So again, you're mining, but you're not producing any ore. You're just putting all your development work in, again, in the unmineralized Day-side. Then year minus one, you're actually producing some ore, and it's not a full year. That's why, I mean, that's why we have a seven-year mine life because you're producing gold in year minus one, year zero being the start of production, commercial, the declaration of commercial production. But year minus one, you're actually producing ore. Year minus two, you're actually mining. You're just not making any money. You're spending money.
Once you start commercial production, and it's a bit of a thumbs-up from here, so it's an estimated time, but that first year of mining, stop mining is what I would call your ramp-up year. Then you're saying, "Okay, I'm going to do six months of ramp-up, and now I'm going to declare commercial production." That basically is an accounting decision. Mike can maybe give us more detail on that.
Yeah. The one comment I'd add to that is that's when the AISC calculation comes into play. It's once you make that production decision. It's not the sunken capital before that.
Rick, one thing I know you went over it already, so don't need a long answer here, but why is that average grade changed to 7.6 grams per ton from that 9.4 grams per ton in the resource?
Yeah. So it's a good question. When you do a resource block model, you're kind of a tight frame around where the drilling will allow you to predict grade or estimate grade. When you go to a mining block, and the longhole stoping is a cheaper method of mining, but it's less selective. You get more dilution than, say, compared to, say, cut and fill. If we went to sublevel caving as an example, you'd have even more dilution, but your mining costs are going to go down significantly. It's a trade-off between tons and grade. Obviously, it's an economic decision as to whether you do cut and fill, whether you do longhole, whether you do something like a sublevel caving.
I think once we get more geotechnical work and we get underground and really see how the rock behaves from a mining sense, we'll make some decisions of whether we stick with longhole or whether we look at something like sublevel caving. It may not apply to the whole ore body. It may only apply to parts of it. Those are kind of details that you need to get with getting underground and really looking at the rock face to face, so to speak. All of this work, of course, is based on drilling to date, which is pretty typical of how you approach these projects. Once we get underground, we'll be in the ore body once we've drift over to it. We will have a really good feel for that. That is basically the answer. It's basically just mine dilution.
That makes sense. One thing I want to talk about is a bizarre bear case for gold. Because I know you said the project still has a $140 million NPV at $1,800 gold. I do not think we are ever going to see that number again. I am curious, if we do have a period of sustained lower commodity prices, what operational adjustments could you implement at Johnson Tract?
Yeah. So I mean, actually, if you go to the recommendation sections, one of the things in the recommendations is to look at ore sorting. I think actually, regardless of whether we wouldn't necessarily wait until the gold price went down to look at that, but we're going to look at ore sorting because ore sorting basically is a modern method that used to do by hand, which is these are rocks I like, and these are rocks I do not like, and you literally used to hand sort them. We can do that with ore sorters now at an incredibly fast speed. It is something we will take a look at. What the ore sorting is basically separating out based on a whole, there is a whole variety of sensors that you can use to sort ore.
Depending on the character of the ore, you can decide if you want more sulfide or less sulfide. If that's what's carrying the gold, then you can sort pretty effectively. What that does is it gives you sort of two pluses if you make ore sorting work for you. One, you're reducing the amount of material that needs to be transported, so you're saving dollars on your transportation costs. Obviously, if you're upgrading your ore through ore sorting, the head grade at the mill you're processing is going to be higher, so your cost per ton at the mill will be lower. It is something we're definitely going to look at. Again, as you point out, it's a robust project all the way down to $1,800 gold, and this thing will generate a lot of cash flow.
I appreciate that. One thing, and this reflects a question that is in the chat. Jan Van Moorsel congratulates you on your PA. He asked, how are you going to fund the CapEx? What I would add is, are we looking at equity, debt, and are you planning to hedge this time around?
I'll let Mike talk about hedges. It'll probably be a combination of equity and debt. I'm going to be precise about equity again. If we go through the timeline here, the next two to three years, we'll be permitting and be setting ourselves up to go underground. When we go underground, that's when we start spending the big dollars. At that time, we'll be unhedged at Manh Choh, and we'll have paid back all the debt. We'll be generating $100 million of free cash flow a year. We don't want to spend all our money at Johnson Tract, so we might also look at entering into a debt facility to finance, just to throw out a number here, half of it. We'll self-finance half of it and debt finance a portion of it.
Now, the difference to address the hedging question, and I'll let Mike weigh in on this as well. When we started Manh Choh, we were a junior company, junior explorer that had no background, no lending history, and not making any money. What bank would loan to you? The only banks that loan to you are banks that will want to make sure that they're going to get their money back when they make a hedge. That is why the hedges are in place. Now, we're a money-making operation. Once we pay the hedges, deliver into the hedges and pay the debt off, we're generating a substantial amount of cash flow that the banks can look at and go, "Okay, well, we'll loan you $100 million because you're making $100 million a year." Mike?
Yeah. Hedge is kind of a five-letter word I'm not a big fan of these days. I'll never say never. I guess you could always do a better hedging program and use collars or something if you needed to. I guess I wouldn't want to be forced into it by lenders. If the price was right and came up with a good program, then yeah, nothing's off the table, but not something we're actively exploring now. It's kind of early days.
Appreciate it. One thing I know you talked about during the presentation is the underground exploration at Johnson Tract. I'm curious what you think the upside could be there. I'm going to throw out kind of a crazy number, but is a doubling of the resource possible? Is that something you see as potential?
Yeah. I do not know if Romeo can go back to the slide deck and just show that block model again. I will just speak while you are doing that. Yeah, I mean, the bottom and the along strike portion of this ore body is completely open because we just physically cannot drill it from the surface. It is up along the fault, the Day-side fault there, but the bottom is open and the sides are open. In fact, there are a few other lenses that have been intersected adjacent to the main, what is the main JT Johnson Tract ore body there. Yeah, there is lots of upside. You can see the other thing I will point out is on this slide, the yellow blocks are 3 grams, which is roughly the cutoff grade. The pink and purple blocks, they are up 15 grams per ton, 25 grams per ton.
That is close to an ounce per ton rock. It is completely open at depth. We just need to get underground and drill all this fan shot of holes that we have represented here to really understand how much more ore there is going to be and how deep it is going to go. The next thing I will say is the style of mineralization here is it is a breccia. It is a polymetallic breccia. It is copper, zinc, gold, and silver. This type of mineralization is related to a porphyry system. It is not above us. It is below us. We know that from the alteration pattern at the surface that we are very high level here in this porphyry system. Once we get underground, then we get that silly mountain out of the way. We can drill deep holes from the underground and see what else is down there.
It is a very exciting exploration target. It is difficult to drill because of the terrain. Once we get underground, I think we're going to be, I think we'll have an easy shot at increasing the size of the ore body. Obviously, we may find something substantially larger if we can tap into the porphyry source here.
Great. A couple of questions we already covered, which is great. One thing, and I just want this reiterated, why did the expected mine life go from 10 years to 7 years?
Yeah. Good question too. I'm going to speculate a bit here that we've said we have a million-ounce gold deposit, and we would expect to process this at 100,000 ounces a year. 100,000 divided by a million equals 10. A couple of things here. I mentioned earlier that we're actually mining ore in year minus one. It's really eight or seven and a half. The other reason is you don't mine the entire ore body here. You're only mining the parts of the ore that are better drilled and that you can substantiate where the grade is. That's where the upside is. Once we get underground, we're going to do all those drill holes that you saw on the previous slide there. I'm pretty confident we're going to get back to that million ounces.
I think we'll probably easily exceed that.
There you go. We've already gone through ore sorting, but I will ask the transportation logistics for Johnson Tract. They involve barging and trucking to that off-site processing facility. Curious if you could run us through the tolling cost assumptions that you make?
Yeah. So the assumption is a 25% premium on the milling cost. And we talked with SRK about this, and this is a bit of an industry standard. I will not disclose specifically what we are paying with regards to Manh Choh and the Kinross Fort Knox mill because that is really under confidentiality. But I can say that this is a more conservative assumption than that. So I think it is a reasonable assumption for an Initial Assessment level assessment or study. Obviously, one of the other things we are looking at is, okay, where are we going to process this ore? I would say we are looking at five different opportunities. They range from we have had some discussions of groups that say, "Well, we will just send this stuff over to Asia and put it on a seagoing barge and send it to Asia." That is not something that we actually came up with.
It was something that we were approached with. I'm not sure I want to, depending on where that is in Asia, I'm not sure. I definitely want Contango to be in the middle of that. If there's an international metal trading company that likes that idea, we might just sell it to them and let them deal with it. The more traditional thing is to look at existing mills. As I said, there are four other options for us to take a look at. We're having discussions with four other groups. Once you're on the water, you have a fair bit of mobility. Barge costs are relatively inexpensive compared to, say, trucking. In the case of Manh Choh, we know what those metrics are pretty well because of all the trucking we're doing with that project. We know that barging is simpler.
Maybe just to cover it off, you'll notice in the study that we're placing the ore into metal boxes. These contain about 25 tons of ore. That would be trucked to the barge site, loaded on the barge, and you just load these. The reason we like this approach is you just load these boxes with a forklift. It's a big forklift, but it's only 25 tons. It does make for fairly easy logistics. The same when you're unloading it. When you get to the mill, you're just basically rotating, the forklift rotates, and it just dumps it into a hopper. Fairly simple from a logistics standpoint. It's not like you're doing stockpiles and things. We do not like the stockpile because you run into losing material and then dust control and lots of other things. People worry about contaminants.
Putting it in the sealed boxes just kind of eliminates all that concern.
That makes sense. One thing, and just for folks who do not know, there was a 25% contingency applied to capital costs. I am curious from your perspective, what areas of the project do you think have the greatest potential for optimizing as you kind of progress towards production?
Yeah. I mean, that's a tough one. Transportation will obviously really be dependent on fuel costs. Yeah, that's a big one just to keep an eye on. I think underground mining costs are mostly related to employment and to wages. A significant amount of the capital is mine development. I think it's about half, right? It's close to half of the overall initial capital. It's almost all of the sustaining capital. Yeah, labor costs are probably the other real one to kind of keep an eye on.
Great. I appreciate that. One quick question. I just have to ask as a Canadian, and I think other Canadians might be curious. Why was this framed as an Independent Assessment, not a PEA?
It was actually news to me that there was a new term called Initial Assessment. I learned something doing this because I always called them Preliminary Economic Assessments. I am trying to beat it into my brain to remember to call it an Initial Assessment. They are the same thing. S-K 1300 is not exactly as it expects things between the United States and Canada. It is not exactly a carbon copy, but it is pretty close. There are a few differences. One of the differences is in under 43-101, you have 45 days to file your document, I will just call it. Under S-K 1300, you only have, what? Was it four or five days, Mike?
Four business days from.
Yeah. So we're getting after it.
I appreciate that. There is one question, last one of mine, but it mirrors one in the chat. We will take this as me going to the chat formally. That is, with that environmental considerations and closure costs of $30 million, how are you approaching permitting and community engagement generally, just to ensure that this goes off timely?
Yeah. Community engagement, first of all, it's sort of early and often is the philosophy we like to use. One of the reasons, or I shouldn't say one of the reasons, but now we have an Initial Assessment document that kind of shows, "Here's what the plan is." We want to be able to talk with the communities. I sort of break them into largely two communities. Our partner is Cook Inlet Regional, Inc., CIRI. It's an Alaska Native Corporation. They own the land. They have the rights to mine the land. They're our business partner in this. It's an Alaska Native Corporation, and their shareholders are Alaska Native. They're sort of a special class of stakeholder. For community engagement, we work through CIRI with our community engagement with CIRI shareholders. There's a number of villages around Cook Inlet.
Obviously, a lot of CIRI shareholders live in Anchorage, but the fact I was just in their office the other day, and they showed me a map of where the CIRI shareholders live, and they live all over the United States. A lot of them obviously live in Alaska too. We have a lot of engagement through CIRI and in partnership with CIRI with the shareholders of CIRI. Secondly, and not just separately, I guess I should say, engagement with the other communities all around Cook Inlet. Homer, Nikiski, Kenai, Soldotna, those are communities that are adjacent on the other side of Cook Inlet, if you will. There are a few more traditional villages, CIRI shareholder villages on the west side. As I said, we will be engaging with them through CIRI.
Now that we have a study and plans that we can show people and say, "This is the plan. We've got more work to do, and here's the work that we plan to do," we'll be doing a lot of community engagement with both Alaska Native CIRI shareholders and other stakeholders in the region.
Great. B. Midex from the chat asked, "What's the plan on the tunnel? Will it be mine-sized or will future enlargement be required? And what are the relative costs of the full-scale approach versus smaller?
Yeah. It's a good question. You're best to, especially when you know you've got an ore body, if we were a little more suspect on whether we have an ore body, we might just do a smaller exploration tunnel. This will be a full-size tunnel. I think it's 4 meters by 5 meters, if I remember correctly.
Thank you. Dan from the chat asked, "I know we already touched on it, but always worth reiterating. Has an existing mill for the ore been identified somewhere near Tidewater?
Yes. Yeah. Can't say because I'm under CA.
Succo. Sorry, folks in the chat. We've been through ore sorting. We've been through some ESG. J. Murray asks, "How thick is the fault? What's the competency of the Day-side fault?
Yeah. Good technical question. It varies. It varies from very thin to less than 1 meter to up to, I think, 5 meters is how wide it is. And it's an aquiclude. That's an important thing from a water management side. An aquiclude is a barrier to water. It's just another reason why we put our infrastructure, our development work on the Day-side, unmineralized Day-side in the hanging walls of the fault because you do not have to worry about any of that water being contaminated because the fault itself is an aquiclude. Obviously, that's something we'll be taking a hard look at when we do the feasibility study, mine plan, is how we're going to mine this and keep the water separate.
That definitely will be, I'm sure there'll be a lot of hydrology work being done on that just so we can manage that. We know the water quality of the ore body is going to have, it's mineralized, so it's going to have, and it does. You can go on the surface and see it's oxidizing. Obviously, Mother Nature is metal leaching now. That's how we find these things. They're anomalous metals on the surface. That'll be an important part of managing the project. It'll definitely be a focus of further studies.
Great. Somebody in the chat asked if the silver and copper byproducts were large enough to attract the interest of streaming financing?
I'd say yes, but I'm not a fan. Just like Mike's not a fan of hedging, I'm not a fan of streaming.
I'm not a fan of either.
Mike's going on both sides.
I've been on the wrong side of this twice.
There you go.
I'd just say I also don't think there'll be any necessity. I mean, the streaming companies have been very successful at financing because the equity markets have been very tough. Again, now that we're generating cash flow, it puts us in a little bit different league. And as Mike said, never say never. As we see the world right now and the gold price where it is, I think traditional debt financing would be the way we would go here.
I guess I will caveat. The streaming deals are a lot better than the original ones that were out there. There are better terms, and they are not necessarily life of mine. I guess I will say never. I will not say never, but.
I can tell by the frowns what you're interested in. Wesley from the chat talking about company strategy. He notes, "Contango looks like it's going to use Manh Choh to pay for the development of Johnson and Lucky." He says both of them are shorter lived mines based on current reserve size. He is curious what the strategic plan is for long-term value at Contango. Basically, what's the deep future plan?
It really is exploration. We are doing exploration at Manh Choh. I will be very surprised if we just mine to the feasibility plan at Manh Choh. I think we will at least get a few more years out of it. Lucky Shot, we only have a 100,000-ounce resource, 110,000-ounce resource there. We know we have a lot of drilling to do. That is a permitted mine site. We just need to do the drilling. As I mentioned earlier, we would love to do the drilling this year. We just want to make sure that we have the financial horsepower to pay the debt off and deliver in the hedges before we make that commitment. We were just talking about the exploration upside at Johnson Tract, which I think is just excellent.
I mean, it's just some of the deeper drill holes that we've drilled there, deeper meaning at the bottom of that mineralization that we've identified to date, are in some of the best grade material that's been drilled. Now that we're going to put a tunnel right in the guts of that, I'll be very surprised if it just ends magically right there. It is about exploration. I'd also say we're looking at other opportunities. We like the idea of not being a single asset producing mine. Obviously, why wouldn't we have our development plan? Looking at other opportunities where we can continue to expand, in particular opportunities that might lend themselves to the DSO model and/or an existing operation that would lend itself to being the hub of a DSO model.
A hub-and-spoke approach, which is pretty frequently used in Australia, but not as prevalent here in North America. Maybe something that we look at more specifically and look and see if that hub-and-spoke, we can make that hub-and-spoke work for Contango as we grow the company.
Great. One question was right at the top of the hour that I wanted to save for after the Johnson Tract specific content. They asked if there's any plans to monetize or explore the other assets acquired from HighGold?
We didn't acquire any other assets from HighGold. It was just they had already spun off the Ontario assets in Onyx. Yeah, there were no other assets that came with the HighGold acquisition.
We do own a chunk of Onyx, though. So that is going well for us.
Yeah. It looks like a pretty good project from an exploration standpoint.
There you go.
I'm a happy shareholder.
There's one question from Jan, and I only bring up the bridge once per webinar these days. He asked, when will the Manh Choh bridge killer be finally behind us?
Again, the Biden administration did not approve the Alaska Department of Transportation plan and budget. That is what precipitated the reductions in the bridge weight restrictions. The Trump administration approved the plan. Now there is a plan to fix the bridge that was causing the issues for us next year. It is not something we see as a fix from the bridge weight restriction standpoint this year, but next year.
Awesome. Thank you. Now, I know it is getting into evening in England, so I won't keep you too much longer, but I will leave it to you.
Skin is.
Yeah. You need to skin us a clock. I didn't want to throw at you for what you're most excited about coming up next at Contango.
I mean, next week, I think Mike's going to release our Q1 results. I'm excited to get those out. I think we're, as you saw in our first campaign of this year, we produced 30% more gold. It will be exciting for us to tell everybody how much we spent producing that gold. I think the week after, we start the next campaign for the May campaign. It is nice when we see an operation that's just doing well and really kind of ahead of schedule by producing more gold in Q1. That is exciting. Making money is exciting. Paying off the debt is exciting. Delivering into the hedges is exciting. Look, this Initial Assessment on Johnson Tract demonstrates that this is a really viable project. I think in a year's time, we've added a lot of value for Contango shareholders.
Hopefully, the HighGold shareholders who stuck with the project and stuck with Contango are rewarded by the fact that we're starting to demonstrate the value of this high-quality asset. I am really excited about that. I would also like to get the drills turning at Lucky Shot. I think we're in a good spot. Gold prices, I think, are going to keep marching forward. I do not know if people saw the Fed announcement, not the song and dance that Jerome Powell did for yesterday, I guess it was, and keeping holding rates steady. Behind the scenes, they started quantitative easing again. Was it $25 billion of bonds that they had to buy because the rest of the market was not buying them? When QE comes back, gold price does well.
If we keep doing QE, it doesn't matter what the interest rates are. You're printing money again, and that's inflationary. Gold price will respond accordingly.
That makes sense. I certainly see the money printers getting geared up. You can hear their humming just starting. Rick, Mike, thank you guys so much. This was a great presentation. Thanks for going through the drilling with the questions. Folks in the chat, oh, sorry, go for it, Mike.
One comment. Our annual meeting is on June 10. Proxy materials went out last week. I just want to remind people to vote their shares, please.
Vote your shares.
Thank you.
Good note to end on. Folks in the chat, thanks so much. Another million questions. I think I got through all of them. I will send the whole transcript to the Contango team just in case we missed one. Thank you, everyone, so much. I hope everybody has a great afternoon.
Thank you.
Cheers, folks.