Very similarly, we've invested, our management and myself have invested a lot in our company, so we also believe in our product here. We're in Alaska. We're an American company. We trade on the New York Stock Exchange. We're part of the Russell 2000, and we're part of the JDX index. We trade a lot of shares, probably between $3 million - $5 million worth of stock trades a day. We have three projects that we're focused on, and one is in production. Manh Choh is in production. Our Lucky Shot project is fully permitted, and we expect to start out producing 30,000 - 40,000 ounces of gold a year in two years, and then grow that to 50,000 - 60,000 ounces. Our third project, Johnson Tract, we need to do some more permitting, but we have a growth profile there of about 100,000 ounces annual production.
We can finance this internally, and that's what I want to talk about. This is our growth profile. It's a five-year plan. I don't think there are many companies that can say they're going to triple production in five years, but that's our objective. We can fund this internally between our production at Manh Choh and the current cash that we have on hand. We have about 15.5 million shares outstanding. I think that's something that really distinguishes us from most companies. We've not blown out our share structure. As I said, management owns about 20% of the company. We're invested alongside shareholders, and we're very protective of our shares. We have a little bit of debt we're paying off. We started at $60 million of debt a little over a year ago, and we've been focused on paying that debt off, and we're almost, it's under $15 million now.
You see our analyst coverage there, and you can see some of our top shareholders, institutional shareholders that support the company. We're in Alaska. The Manh Choh project is located on private land owned by an Alaska Native corporation. There's 150 people in the corporation. They have a 3% royalty, and the mine produces 200,000 ounces of gold a year. Our share is 60,000 ounces. That's our 30% share. You can just imagine that they're making a lot of money on this project, very, very happy. We took a different approach when we found Manh Choh. Rather than trying to say we're going to go build our own mine and permit the infrastructure necessary, we decided to take advantage of existing infrastructure at the Kinross Gold Corporation Fort Knox Mill, located just outside of Fairbanks.
We take one of our mine ore, put it in a truck, haul it up the highway about 400 km, and run it through the Fort Knox Mill. What this did is it saved us a huge amount of time to get into production. We got this project start to finish done in three years, and it obviously saved us a huge amount of capital and dilution to our shareholders. We're looking out for the shareholders because that includes ourselves. We run our mine ore, it's mined. The ore body is located on top of a hill. It's placed into the trucks that haul it up to Fort Knox. There's a stockpile there that feeds into the Fort Knox Mill. It's a campaign process. Once a quarter, in the middle month of each quarter, there's about 250,000 tons of ore. It averages about 6.7 grams per ton.
The feasibility grade was 8 grams per ton, but the feasibility was done at $1,400 gold. As the gold price has gone up, we've taken more of that lower grade ore and blended it in with the high grade ore. It's an open pit, so I think it is the highest grade open pit gold mine in the world today. Through the Q3, we've now produced about 52,000 ounces of gold, and we've received cash distributions from the joint venture of $87 million. We're on track to exceed $100 million of free cash flow this year, and that includes our hedge gold, which I'll talk about in a second. I think this is the most important metric to measure any company on, is how much cash flow are they generating for the business they're in. We're in the business of producing gold.
We're generating over $3 free cash flow per share. That includes the hedges, which I'll talk about in a minute. You can see how we compare to our peer group. Part of that is we have a really high quality deposit, but we also only have 15 million shares outstanding. This is a simple operation, and that's purposely done that way. We can do this. We call it our DSO model, direct shipping ore to existing mills, which means we don't have to permit that. We don't have to raise a bunch of capital. I don't have to tell you I'm going to spend $500 million on building a mill and then have to come back a year later or two years later and tell you it's going to cost $650.
We avoid all that, and we can do that because we have high grades that can afford the transportation cost to an existing already permitted mill that has capacity, such as Fort Knox. We can do that if it's close to infrastructure. In Alaska, we don't have a lot of infrastructure. That means we're close to roads, rail, and the water. We've got a lot of water in Alaska. We have a huge coastline, more than any other, more than the rest of the United States combined. The last thing we look at as criteria is whose land is it? In the United States, if you're on public land, the public gets to have a say in what happens on public land. I haven't worked on federal land in 30 years because it is a pain in the butt to work on public lands, federal lands specifically.
We work on private lands, and unfortunately, in Alaska, there are a fair number of private lands, and a lot of it is owned by Alaska Native corporations and tribes. I grew up in Alaska, so I have long-time personal relationships with a lot of these folks. That's what we focused our business plan on. I'm going to go through our other projects quickly that, again, are part of this five-year plan to grow production from 60,000 ounces - 200,000 ounces, internally financed. Lucky Shot, two-hour drive north of Anchorage. We're 20 mi from the highway that goes between Anchorage and Fairbanks. We're 20 mi from the railroad that goes between Seward and Fairbanks. We can put rocks in a box and send them up to Fort Knox. We're fully permitted. It's a small but very high-grade operation. Our resource grade is 14.5 grams.
We do expect that for mine with mine dilution to get down to between 11 grams and 12 grams per ton, but it's a very simple operation. We already have the underground access permitted there and in place. The inserts tunnel that goes below the historically mined area is in place, and all we need to do is get underground and do all the drilling. We'll start drilling in about three weeks. We've maintained the underground in good condition. We built it over the last couple of years, and we wanted to get the company. The last couple of years have been focused on paying down debt, delivering into the hedges, but now going forward, it's about advancing our other two assets to achieve our ultimate goal of producing a couple hundred thousand ounces of gold a year. Excuse me.
The drilling will take place over the next 12 - 18 months. It's a lot of drilling, but it's short holes underground. They're 20 - 30 meter holes, and that'll outline out a resource of between 400,000 and 500,000 ounces of gold. From that, we can put a mine plan together to produce about 40,000 ounces of gold, then over time ramp it up to 50 or 60. We can do the same thing with our Johnson Tract project. It has good grade. It's 9.4 grams per ton. It's a very thick ore body. It averages about 40 meters thick. From a mining standpoint, very, very favorable mining conditions. I'll talk about the initial assessment results here in a second. Basically, it's the same process as we've just gone through with Lucky Shot.
Build an underground tunnel to access the ore body, do all the definition drilling to a feasibility level, mine plan, and transportation plan, and then develop the ore body. As I said, it's 40 meters wide. We put all of our infrastructure in the hanging wall part of the ore body, so that is unmineralized rock, completely dead. That means it's a little more expensive to do it this way, but it means you don't have any environmental headaches. Water is the biggest concern around most mining operations, and once you touch the water, it's your water. The water that's associated with the ore body is not water we want to deal with. We put a grout curtain there and keep that water on the other side of our infrastructure that we're responsible for. You can see the initial assessment results here. This is a very robust ore body.
You see your all-in sustaining costs are under $1,000, and that's very low cost for an underground mine. Again, it's because of grade and because it's a very thick ore body. You can also see we did the base case here. We used $2,200 gold. That was about six months ago, so it's amazing. I'm not sure what gold price you think we should use, but we managed to convince our QP to include $4,000 gold. Interestingly enough, just the other day from our Manh Choh operations, we sold gold for $4,005 an ounce. I thought that was pretty cool. This is a very robust ore body. I don't think we're getting any value for this in our current share price because for the last two years, we haven't done any work on it except permitting, which brings up another point.
We just actually came back from, or came over here from Washington, D.C., and we were meeting, we're in D.C., meeting with the permitting council, which manages the federal FAST-41 permitting program that President Trump has used to quickly advance critical metal projects. Johnson Tract is producing five critical metals. We're about ready to get put in our application and get listed on what's called the FAST-41 dashboard. The objective of the federal FAST-41 permitting program is to coordinate all the permitting agencies, all federal and state agencies, to get through the permitting process efficiently. That should take a year to 18 months, which is the objective. That would be plenty of time for us to get all the work we need to do. One of the other things we talk about, because people are like, how are you going to transport this ore?
This is the easiest way to transport ore, run-of-mine ore. You put it in a box. The box has a lid on it. It's moved with a big forklift, and it can be moved onto a rail or onto a barge or onto a truck. It makes for very simple logistics. If you're looking for leverage to gold, we focus on high-grade deposits. We're in Alaska. It's a great jurisdiction to work. President Trump loves Alaska. I think his grandfather was one of the people that came up in the gold rush, and he loves to tell that story. We've got a lot of focus on the state right now and a lot of support from the federal government. We think we can execute our strategy here, getting permits in place, and build our gold production profile from 60,000 - 200,000 ounces of gold production.
We can do that internally financed from our cash flow from the Manh Choh project without any significant further dilution to shareholders. If you think about a company that's producing 200,000 ounces of gold at around $1,500 all-in sustaining costs, and you know, pick your gold price. If you use $3,000 gold, you're generating $400 million of free cash flow. This is a rocket ship of a company, and I'd love to answer any questions.
Oh, that's nice. A rocket ship of a company. That's good. Thank you for that. We'll give you a round of applause here. Do we have any questions from the floor? I will start with one then because, given the gold rush, and we could see the price going up, and no one so far has seen any signs of inflation when it comes to wage or equipment and so on. I noticed that you had a slide here saying all-in sustaining cost was $860. That seemed to be low. Do you expect it to maintain on that level?
That's based on our initial assessment. That's for the Johnson Tract project. Our all-in sustaining cost for our producing mine Manh Choh is $1,400. That's a life of mine cost. This year's costs are a little higher because we're doing a bunch of extra pre-stripping. The idea is we do that pre-stripping this year. It costs a little more to do that, but then next year, we can send a bunch of the mining fleet home because it's contract mining. A bunch of the mining fleet can go home, and our cost should come down. The other thing we're spending dollars on that go into the all-in sustaining cost estimate is we're enlarging the trucking fleet. We're doing that mainly because we did the feasibility study at $1,400 gold. Obviously, we're not mining to that exact feasibility study.
We're mining to, I think, $3,200 is the gold price that Kinross is using. They're the manager. There's a lot of low-grade material that in the $1,400 plan wasn't ore, but at $3,200 is ore. We need extra trucks to help move that material. Obviously, we're doing it on the blended basis when we batch process the ore. I think one of the things I'll also point out about, you talk about inflation. One of the biggest factors in a mine is fuel. Particularly in a remote mine, and particularly our projects where you're transporting ore from the mine to the mill, we have not seen any significant inflation in the price of fuel. It's been really steady at $65 a bbl. We use a $100 a bbl estimate in our feasibility study. That's why we, it's one of the reasons we haven't seen any significant inflation in our costs.
I hate to expose my ignorance, but I'll do it anyway here. You talked about DSO, direct shipping ore, and for us uninformed, walk us through the mechanics. Why is that so attractive?
It just eliminates a lot of headaches, specifically two fundamental ones with permitting, because permitting a new mine is a long, arduous process. It can take anywhere from 5+ years to do that. Obviously, when you sort of net present value that, it starts to have significant impact. By directly shipping our ore to an existing permitted facility, we don't have to permit. There's very little to permit to get just to do that process. The other thing it avoids is a huge amount of capital expenditures. There's a lot of companies, and nothing against the companies, but the model, the typical junior explorer model is, I'm going to find 5 million ounces, and Agnico Eagle is going to buy me. If you don't find 5 million ounces that Agnico Eagle wants to purchase, what do you do as a junior company?
You can put that mine into production yourself. Let's say you found 2 million ounces. You can do that, put that mine in production yourself, but you're going to dilute the heck out of your shareholders in doing that. It takes a long time to permit, and you're going to tell the market, I'm going to spend $600 million building my own mill, and then a year later, you're going to have to come back and tell them it's going to be $750 million. That is how our business has performed. That's why we're using the direct shipping ore (DSO) model, because we know we can get things into production quickly, because there's not a lot to permit, and the mill is already built.
OK. So far, you've been very successful. Do we have any more for any more? In that case, yeah.
Some useless knowledge. Frederick Trump , Trump's grandfather, he didn't go to Alaska, but he went to British Columbia, where he had a hotel operation servicing the gold miners there.
Yeah, you know Trump. He'll make mountains out of molehills. Interestingly enough, at the time, nobody knew where any of these borders were between British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. It was just kind of all the Klondike. Yeah, good point.
Right. With that, Rick, thank you so much.
Pleasure. Thank you very much.
You're welcome our next speaker. Thank you, and we'll give him a round of applause.