We'll be making some forward-looking statements today. We caution you to look at our website and our website to read the full disclaimers. Dakota Gold is advancing projects in South Dakota at a time where current U.S. production is down and not meeting the current domestic consumer demand. In fact, production is down by 55% since 2000. We're aiming to produce 150,000 ounces of gold per year at our Richmond Hill Gold Mine. Once this comes on board, South Dakota could go from the eighth-largest gold-producing state up to potentially number four or number three. In addition to traditional uses of gold in investment and jewelry, which most of us are more familiar with, it also has been using or has had increasing uses in technology.
Things such as data centers and all of our cell phones, our laptops, all use gold. This is because it's such an excellent conductor of energy and also it doesn't corrode easily. There's a lot of benefits to it. I think we'll continue to see demand for gold in these industries. Dakota Gold trades on the New York Stock Exchange American. We're excited to be doing this project at a time where gold and silver prices are at record high demands and at prices. The company was founded by Robert Quartermain, who is our Co-Chairman and CEO and actually the largest individual shareholder of the company at about 6% ownership.
We have a good leadership team with operator and mine building experience. We're advancing the Richmond Hill Gold Project, which is one of the largest undeveloped heap leach gold projects in the U.S., to production as soon as 2029. Last year, we published an economic study on the project called an S-K 1300 Initial Assessment with Cash Flow. We are now following up on that by publishing our pre-feasibility study in the second half of this year and then our feasibility study in the first half of next year. We're advancing our Maitland Gold Project. We'll be doing an infill drill program on the Unionville area and producing the maiden resource targeted in Q1 2027. Both of these projects, importantly, are on private land in South Dakota, which is really advantageous to us when it comes to our permitting efforts.
We work with the state of South Dakota and the county to permit. Earlier this year, we were excited to raise $75 million, and that put us at a cash balance of $107 million as of our March 31st financial statements. This allows us the runway all the way to shovel-ready position, giving us years of catalysts without having to dilute the shares any further. Now we'll have a closer look about where our projects are. Some of you might not be familiar with the Homestake District, but it is certainly a legendary mining camp. Dakota Gold is one of the largest landowners in the area, where we have over 48,000 mineral acres surrounding the historic Homestake Mine. The Homestake Mine produced over 40 million ounces of gold over 125 years of continuous operations. You can see that project is on the lower right side.
We also have our two flagship projects, Richmond Hill and Maitland, that are on the private land here. Richmond Hill is in the green. It's the development stage project. Last year in that initial assessment with cash flow, we outlined a life of mine gold production of 2.6 million ounces of gold, and that's over a 17-year mine life. The average gold production would be 153,000 ounces of gold per year. This is part of the measured and indicated mine plan. Just below our project is the current operating gold mine called Wharf, and it's owned by Coeur. This project has been producing for the past 40 years and so far, or I think maybe just a little bit more now, but it has produced over 4 million ounces of gold. On the right-hand side in blue is our Maitland Gold project.
This is our high-grade exploration upside project. We've got two discoveries on it since we commenced drilling on our projects in 2022. At the top, we have the Unionville Zone, which is a shallow tertiary epithermal gold project. The average grade here that we see is 4 g per ton over six meters. Below that, we have the JB Gold Zone, which is more similar to the historical Homestake mine, and we see average grades of 11 g per ton over four meters. This year, we'll be doing the infill program on the Unionville portion of it. We'll look a little bit closer at the details of that initial assessment with cash flow, which supports a simple open-pit heap leach project.
This study used an assumption of doing about 30,000 tons per day of production, and we used a base case gold price of $2,350 an ounce, and we all know that the gold price is well above this, so this offers a lot of upside. The measured and indicated plan was for 17 years, and the measured indicated inferred plan is up to 28 years. The gold production there is between 2.6 million ounces of gold and 3.9 million ounces of gold, respectively. Both of them average about 150,000 ounces of gold per year. We have a really low AISC on the project of $1,050 an ounce. This is because it's a simple heap leach project with a very low strip ratio. The mineralization is very near surface.
Our strip ratio is 0.6, and this allows us to really take advantage of the gold price, and potentially generate a lot of cash on the project. The after-tax net present value at a 5% discount was $1.6 billion for the measured and indicated plan, and $2.1 billion for the measured, indicated, and inferred plan. Once again, if you look at a higher gold price, you could see a net present value around $4 billion. The after-tax IRR or internal rate of return is 55% for the measured and indicated, and 59% for the measured, indicated, and inferred. What this means is how fast we can pay back the debt to construct this project, and this is really encouraging. At a base case gold price of $2,350, we could pay off the project in just over a year.
Once again, with a higher gold price, this could go down to less than a year. The capital cost to construct our project is estimated at $384 million, and this includes a $50 million contingency. Part of this is supported because we're in an area where we have existing infrastructure. There's already a power line, a road. The community is right around us. This project is a 15-minute drive from our headquarters in Lead, South Dakota. Not only can you go home to your family and friends at night, you could also go out for steak, wine, live music. You can order a pizza to our project in 15 minutes. This is all in an area where people are used to mining. They've been around the Wharf mine operating for 40 years, so it's familiar.
There's a lot of miners in the area. We're excited to be advancing this project. I'm now going to turn it over to Bill. He's going to go over the production profile and some of the efforts that we're doing to work on our pre-feasibility study this year. Bill?
Thank you, Carling. As Carling mentioned in the previous slide, our production plan here shows 17 years of mine life, 150,000 ounces of production, 2.6 million ounces of gold. Low cost AISC. It shows a very regular rate over that period of time. We're anticipating operating this plan in a series of phases. Phase 1 and 2 would start in the northeastern part of the project. It's starting up there because of the geology, is at surface, and it has a little bit higher grades than the entire life of mine resource. Also, mineralization is open on the north end of that area. Going into the next phases, we have 3 to 5, which would progressively move southwestward from the initial phases.
The plan here is to do concurrent reclamation and backfill and utilization of previously disturbed areas in order to reduce our disturbances within the project area, therefore making permitting faster and easier. As part of our advancing feasibility work, we did a comprehensive metallurgical drilling campaign this year. The work is in progress at this moment. The drilling is completed, but the work here is to characterize the ore types, the leachability, kinetics, column testing for the different rock types, comminution and crushing studies, process recovery, and environmental issues like deleterious elements and et cetera. This is all important information that's going to be utilized in the PFS as well as the FS. I'm going to skip ahead here. Our 2026 Richmond Hill program was designed to do infill drilling and expansion drilling, infrastructural comminution drilling, and geotech drilling.
In the 10-year mine plan, we began a campaign to infill where we had inferred resources to try and bring them to a measured and indicated category. This drilling was very successful. We found many higher than average gold values. The northern expansion drilling was discovered in 2025, and we continued the exploration in that zone in 2026, and it's still open to the north. The infrastructural combination drilling was important because we had to site our heap leach and infrastructure facilities, the geotechnical work is ongoing right now. Should be completed in June, it's important for pit design and slope wall stability issues. There we go. Back to this slide. This shows some of the upside that we came about on our northeast expansion drilling program.
As you can see on the diagram on the right-hand side, the colored area outlines the shape of the resource model that we were using when we started drilling on this area. On the cross-section to the left, I don't know if you can see the blue line in that slide, but we're hitting mineralization far outside the resource model. This mineralization will be incorporated in the upcoming PFS and feasibility study. Also note the higher grades in this expansion drilling area. For some geologic reason, we're seeing much higher than average grades in this area, so we hope that this area will all convert into mineable ounces. As part of the feasibility study, we'll be doing a bunch of trade-off studies. This, as Carling had mentioned, our production throughput is 30,000 tons for the PFS or for the current cash flow model.
We're going to look at expanding that to 60,000 tons per day in the trade-off work. That will impact everything on the site concerning size of equipment and type of equipment that we use, as well as crushers and space utilization. With this recent drilling, we've come across higher grade near surface mineralization, so our initial sequencing will probably change, and so there'll be trade-off work done on that. Initially we were looking at potentially conveyor stacking, but with the versatility of truck stacking we'll be looking at that because we can do more specific mining using multiple trucks in different areas. Agglomeration and run of mine is also another feasibility trade-off study. Then heap leach pad location and style.
Initially we're looking at dedicated pads for the whole resource production model, but it's possible that we will change that plan using on again, off again pads, which is something that's done over at Wharf very successfully. As Carling mentioned, we're a very favorable location. Our office is in the town of Lead next to the old Homestake Mine, and it's a 15-minute drive to all of our projects in the area. The town is built upon a mining tradition. It's a mining town. There's lots of museums and interest in mining in the community. A lot of people work at the Coeur mine, I think about 600 people capacity at the mine. Within an hour drive of this community, we have about 200,000 residents, many of them skilled construction and equipment operators because of the trucking, oil, and gas industry in Wyoming, et cetera.
The School of Mines is located in Rapid City. This is probably one of the more attractive slides of our project. It shows you where we are right now in 2026. We're in the Pre-Feasibility Study phase and baseline data collection phase and initial engineering. By the mid-2027, we have completed those studies, and we will begin the Notice of Intent to the state and the county and begin the permitting process. That process is prescribed and based on Wharf and other operations. It's probably less than around 18 months, up to 18 months, essentially. We're not expecting any outstanding issues with that. Based on that timeline, we can be in construction and production and have 2029 gold production, which is quite quick for a project in our space. This is going to bore you more. This is geology.
This is our Maitland gold project. It's not our prime focus right now, although it's probably one of the higher upside potential in the district. We essentially have made a discovery of the Homestake deposit north of the old Homestake Mine, about two miles north. It's virtually the same style and character of mineralization of the historical Homestake Mine that produced 40 million ounces. Specifically within the Homestake Mine, there was a zone called the West Ledges, which was different than the main Homestake Mine, the historic Homestake Mine itself, but produced a significantly 6 million ounces of gold during the period of production. The average grade of those ore bodies were 11.67 g with an average width of 6.1. That was based on 6,000 drill holes, most of that drilled underground. Okay. So very close-space drilling.
In our area at JB, we have the same rocks, the same style of mineralization, the same structural controls, but we've only got 47 drill holes into it, because we've drilled everything from surface. In order to really define this deposit, we'll eventually have to get underground and drill a much closer spacing. It's a long-term project. We're hoping to use capital raise from Richmond Hill to actually go in and do this development. This is a geologic model on the left-hand side, kind of shows the complexity of what the Homestake mineralization looks like. On the right-hand side is a graphic showing the scale of the mineral ledges in the West Ledge system at Homestake, down on the lower left-hand side there, the 21 Ledge, which contained 2.5 million ounces. Then this shows a scale of what our pierce points in our drilling looks like.
We believe we have sufficient area size, and we've proven that there's potentially a pretty decent-sized gold system of high grade in the JB Ledge. I'm going to go back up here. At Maitland, we also have a different style of mineralization, much younger in age, like by billions of years, that was superimposed along the same structural control that the Homestake gold mineralization was deposited in. We call this the Unionville Zone. It starts at surface and goes to depth. What we're seeing in this diagram here is the extent of that tertiary mineralization throughout the system, and we're seeing this area where we're going to focus infill drilling to try and bring this to a maiden resource. This also is a plan section of that same area. The reddish marks on the bottom of that section show where the Unionville mineralization projects to the surface.
It also shows the structural corridor with gold on surface, this whole area is unexplored, and we'll be exploring that in the future. Going back to Carling, she's going to explain the rest of this.
Thank you, Bill. After we published our initial assessment with Cashflow on Richmond Hill, one of our analysts, Agentis, was kind enough to benchmark us against other peer developers advancing heap leach projects in the U.S. As you can see here, the size of Richmond Hill is much larger compared to the others, and not only that, we have a very attractive net present value and internal rate of return compared to the others. It's a really exciting project to continue to watch. As we continue to advance through these studies coming up with the PFS, the FS, and then into our permitting, we see a big opportunity for a re-rate. Currently, Dakota Gold has an enterprise value of $85 per ounce in the ground.
If you compare that to some of our peers in the industry, such as Skeena or Perpetua, Skeena is located in British Columbia, Canada, and Perpetua is down in Idaho. Thanks, Bill. They've both completed their feasibility studies and are into their permitting and into construction. You can see that their enterprise value for Skeena is $731 per ounce and Perpetua is $411 per ounce. A lot of upside represented for Dakota Gold. As we do those de-risking studies, they're really important to investors to see that we're getting that much closer to a phase where we are going to be producing as well. Great to see that these re-rates can happen well before you're actually producing your gold. For us, that's three years from now is what we're targeting.
If we look on the right-hand side, you're going to see a list of producers. What's good to see here is how much value those producers are given for 150,000 ounces of annual gold production, which is $2.7 billion in enterprise value at today's prices. We are targeting 150,000 ounces as an average over the life of mine, but we're also looking at, in those trade-off studies, maybe pulling some of the higher grade forward in the earlier years in that 10-year area. Once again, an opportunity to increase that net present value. Dakota Gold has around 130 million shares out, last year we had a number of warrants that were fully exercised, or sorry, that was this year in March. It allows us to bring in an extra $14 million.
We raised $75 million earlier this year. That total cash balance is $107 million. We have a market cap around $750 million. I think the shares are trading around $5.30 today. We've got a really strong list of analyst coverage. BMO, Canaccord, and Agentis were early to follow us. We added three more. Thanks for the note. Three more analysts just this year. H.C. Wainwright out of New York, Scotiabank, and CIBC joined. It's great to see them launch coverage. Once again, our largest shareholder is Robert Quartermain with 6% of the company. We have also other very large and supportive shareholders, such as Orion Mine Finance. We're a responsible miner in the area. We've got a great health and safety track record, zero notice of environmental violations, and we have 90% of our employees all living in this area.
We're really conscious of being responsible and operating as best in practice. We've got a great list of management directors. Many are local South Dakotans. We've brought on board Jack Henris, our President and Chief Operating Officer. He has extensive experience in mine building and operating with Goldcorp, Newmont, and some of the other large developers. Shawn Campbell is our CFO. He previously worked for Goldcorp and others. We brought in Mike Eiselein this year, our Vice President Project Development, with extensive metallurgical experience. This team is working to build this mine as fast as we can. We've got all these exciting catalysts coming up. It's going to be a lot of news coming out over this next year. We encourage you all to follow our story. We're excited to be advancing. Thank you. Is there any questions? I have a question. Yes.
How many people do you think that you'll need to have operating the mine once it's going, and will the community support that? That's a good question. The question was, how many people do we think that we'll need to operate the mine, and will there be support for that in the community? Yes, we have a lot of employees at our current operations whose grandparents and parents were miners in the area, had been working for Homestake for generations, and are really excited to see another project come on board. I think Wharf has maybe 150 direct employees.
Their employee structure is a little bit bigger than that. It's easily 100 to 200 people working at Wharf. That doesn't include the contractors and stuff going in and out.
That's right. During the construction phase, you'll often see a much larger increase in the amount of people. You'll be having a lot of contractors, maybe closer to 600 people, and then that might come down closer to 150 or 200 people, depending on what sort of equipment we're going to be using. Yeah, we do have a very supportive community of mining because this is embedded in the community and something that they're very familiar with. Thank you for your question.
Thank you.
Great. I think that's all. Thanks very much for your time today.