Hello, everyone again. Thank you for attending the H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference. With you today, Shawn Campbell, the CFO of Dakota Gold Corp. Take it away.
All right. Well, first, thank you to the people in the room here listening to the presentation, as well as investors that I'm sure will watch it later online. Thank you to Wainwright for inviting us to their conference here in New York. We're excited to be here. We had a chance to go down and see the opening bell at the NYSE this morning, and spend some time with our market maker down there. I'm here today to talk about Dakota Gold. We are building the next gold mine in the Homestake District in South Dakota, U.S. During the presentation, I'll be making forward-looking statements. You've seen the full disclaimer here. This is also available for download off of our website, as well as in our press releases. Dakota Gold is a unique investment opportunity.
Right now, we're seeing significant geopolitical risk and uncertainty, and we are a U.S.-listed company with a U.S. asset in the gold sector. This is an opportunity to own gold and exposure to gold while reducing or eliminating that geopolitical risk. We've seen gold and silver at all-time highs in the last 12 months as a result. We've got a leadership team that's ready to execute on what is one of the easier or more simple projects in the mining industry. We have our primary asset in Richmond Hill Gold Project. We put out an economic study last year with some very robust economics that I'll take you through the details on, but we're advancing that rapidly through PFS in the fourth quarter of this year, FS next year, all the way to shovel-ready late 2028 and production in 2029.
In addition to our Richmond Hill opportunity, because we have 50,000 mineral acres in the Homestake District, we have high-grade underground potential as well, and we'll put out a resource for our Maitland/Unionville zone in 2027. Importantly, the project is located entirely on private land in South Dakota, so our permitting goes through the state and county. To point out, we are fully funded until shovel-ready. We have $99 million in the treasury, so even though we're pre-revenue, you're not looking at massive dilutive events when we talk about executing on this project. Here's an overall map of our property position. We were first-mover advantage. When the old mine that had produced 40 million ounces over 125 years shut down, all of that land became available.
We came in, we were able to stake all of that gray land, but we also signed three agreements with Barrick for the option of Richmond Hill, the purchase of Maitland, and then some additional surface rights. We were able to secure this tremendous land package in a district that has produced the same amount of gold as the Timmins Mining District, however, remains relatively unknown compared to some of the other gold camps out there. You can see here the Richmond Hill Gold Project, 3,000 mineral acres, 3.6 million ounces of M&I, another 2.6 million ounces of inferred, so a very large endowment. And within that, we came out with our IEA cash flow. At $2,350 gold, the NPV was still $1.6 billion in our base case. Obviously, at recent metal prices, that grows to over $4 billion.
Some great metrics in terms of quick payback, long mine life, meaningful production, but I will talk about the trade-off studies because we are quite excited about how that is evolving in the PFS. On the right-hand side, talking about our high-grade underground opportunities. We have within two kilometers of our private land in the underground, had some two discoveries, the JB Gold Zone, as well as the Unionville Zone, and we will show you more on those, because once we have our cash flow from Richmond Hill, we have got our next opportunity to invest in. This is beyond that first asset when we are talking 50,000 mineral acres in the Homestake District. This slide shows you a lot of details on the metrics around the mine that we plan for Richmond Hill. Important, again, I mentioned that $2,350 gold price.
Gold price is currently in excess of $4,000, so the economics become tremendously better at current gold prices. But you are looking at about 170 million tons in measured and indicated, 270 in inferred. While we are very happy about the large resource that form part of the measured and indicated, and again, remember that measured and indicated is really the drill density you need to get into a PFS and convert to a reserve. We are excited that we had an additional 100 million tons of inferred that through drilling and conversion could be upside to that case. So a mine life of 17 years in the measured and indicated case with meaningful production over 150,000 ounces a year. Low cost, less than $1,100 an ounce. Again, your margin per ounce, which would have been $1,300 when this study was done, is now sitting at over $3,000 an ounce.
Importantly, manageable CapEx, sub-$400 million, and that results in that NPV in the base case of $1.6 billion. But then we show you the sensitivities, and at + $4,000, this becomes a $4 billion project, and that is what we are moving forward with. On this slide, you can see the production profile over the life of mine. Just really want to highlight, because I will talk about it later, that in the first three-five years, the average grade we envisioned mining was actually less than the life of mine grade. And that is important because when you combine that along with the recent intercepts from drilling, you can see an opportunity we are looking at in the trade-off study to bring grade forward and increase that production early in the mine life.
This is an outline of the property, and I will say a number of times in the presentation, it is simple. We have the outline. We know where we want to draw inside in order to do this project because we intend on staying completely on our private land package. You can see here that the infrastructure, the actual crushing facility and plant, has a very small footprint. This is just a three-stage crushing plant, so you don't have a mill, you don't have a tailings dam. You don't have a lot of the infrastructure and a lot of the cost associated with it. It's simple to execute, simpler to permit, but then operating at low cost as well.
This slide shows you when I talk about the IEA with cash flow, the drilling that went into that was 900 historical drill holes, and then 150 modern-day holes from our drilling. But the cutoff on that was October of 2024. Since that time, we've had all the 2025 drilling and the 2026 drilling, which you can see on this slide, and I'll show you on the next one the kind of intercepts that we've got. But what's important about the PFS is that we get to add 350 holes to that database. So that's 30% more drill holes than what we had in the historic one. So when we talk about the overall resource, which is our starting point of 3.6 million ounces of M&I, we have the opportunity to add 30% more drilling to both increase confidence, but also overall size.
In particular, you can see that our focus when we started the 2026 drilling was to expand to the northeast, and that's primarily where we did drill. Based on some positive metallurgical results in the breccias, and you can see the breccias here in yellow, that material returned an average of over 90% in the columns. So that indicates that we could see higher than average recoveries. So we've now got a drill turning, and we could increase to three in that breccia zone, because if we convert further material in the breccia, and that's higher grade and higher recovery, you can take the opportunity to maybe resequence that at the start of the mine life. This slide shows you a summary of some of the types of intercepts we had over 2025 and 2026.
The average grade in the life of mine of our study was 0.566 grams per ton. Well, you can see here we had intercepts like 11 grams over 26 meters, 5 grams over 25 meters, and so the deposit is quite large. It's 170 million tons that was in that measured and indicated case. So you may not move the overall grade, but with intercepts like this, near surface, the opportunity is to look at sub-phasing and taking small pockets of mineralization and moving it to the front of that mine plan. So where you saw in that production profile, we have below average grade in the first three-five years in the IEA with cash flow, still tremendous economics.
What we're looking in the trade-off studies for the PFS is can we bring forward material that either from a grade or metallurgical performance further improves those early day economics. This is a photo of our team standing in front of the columns, which we put out a press release last week on the results. We're very happy about that with at the half-inch crush, a mean of 80% recovery. When you think of heap leaches globally, mid to low 70s is quite common. We were very positive with these results. On top of having a lot of material that did have that average of 76%, we see the opportunities in the breccias at over 90% and some of the other portions of the deposit that, if phased correctly, could drive early cash flows in the mine plan. It leaches very quickly at 30 to 40 days.
When you think of the other boxes that you need to check to be able to say, "Can this be mined material?" There's no clay, there's very few deleterious elements. There's no preg-robbing, so it can be processed. We have checked a lot of the boxes that you need to be able to convert this to reserves with our upcoming PFS study. Overall, when we look at our PFS study that is expected in the fourth quarter of this year, we've now put out the met results that I think de-risk and give confidence to investors that they're not looking at any surprises from a metallurgical standpoint. The two studies that we're looking at that I think can really move the needle relative to that IEA with cash flow is, one, with regards to stacking rate.
Our IEA with cash flow was 30,000 tons a day or 10 million tons a year. We have a 17-year mine life, or 28 years when you include inferred. That's a lot of material, and that's longer than you would normally see extended a mine life to. Our trade-off study is to look at anywhere between 30 up to 60,000 tons a day. Even the midpoint there is about a 50% increase in throughput. Why would you do that? There is more CapEx associated with building a bigger plant, but the trade-off is that if you mined in the exact same sequence, a 50% increase in throughput is a 50% increase in production. The other trade-off, and I've talked about it, is on sequencing. As we find out more information about this deposit, obviously we've intercepted these higher grade pockets.
Can we bring those forward? We've now got an understanding of the metallurgical performance. Can we target better metallurgically performing and bring that forward? In our IEA with cash flow, because it was early day study, we didn't try to optimize. We essentially started each pit and mined it start to finish, six pits, and we were done. With the PFS, you're going to see us being more targeted, trying to bring that grade forward to come up with an even better answer in the fourth quarter. This slide shows you where we are going to be building this mine. I can say that with the number of projects, the number of remote, hard to access, heavy infrastructure projects that you see in the mining industry, this is where you want to be building a mine.
We have a public access road that comes up to our front gate. It used to be a haul road, so it is already there. We have a power line coming to site. We have all the easements and everything we need to do to have power. We have water rights that come along with our option. We have historic mining. Our offsite infrastructure cost associated with this project is zero. We have 200,000 people that live within an hour drive. We have a labor force, a very skilled, talented labor force that will be able to work at this mine. Compared to some of our other projects out there, other projects in mining, where it is remote, it has got a camp, it has got a diesel gen set. This again, is simple and relatively much easier than some of the other projects you see out there.
The other thing to point out on this map is that less than two kilometers away from our private property is where you see the two high-grade discoveries underground. Conceptually, if you are producing from Richmond Hill in 2029, you have got the cash flow to be able to go underground and get right into the heart of where you have seen those intercepts. To sum up where we are with Richmond Hill and where we are going, you can see this timeline slide. Last year, we put out a resource and an Initial Economic Assessment and put out some economics. In the fourth quarter of this year, we will be putting out our Pre-Feasibility Study. We will be a reserve stage company with an asset in the United States.
We have been in the midst of collecting our baseline data, but I would like to point out that because we operate in a state with state permitting, that baseline data is informed by already having sat down with the regulators. We sat down with a property map and outlined where 25 water wells would go. We agreed to move one and add one, so the baseline data collection that will form part of the Notice of Intent and part of the permit has already been agreed to, so there is no surprises when you come in with the permit. On the back of the Feasibility Study, we are looking at permitting and getting our large-scale mining permit and our Conditional Use Permit through the state and the county. But we have already got enough information about the project to identify what the long lead time items are.
In this industry, as well as AI or any other industry that is in the construction business, your power substation is the number one long lead time item. We have already put our deposit down with GE in order to get our build slot, because that was a two-year lead item, now it is looking upwards of three. If you have got a mining project out there that says they are going to be producing in 18 months and they have not already bought their substation, it is probably not possible. As we advance to the PFS, we know there is going to be crusher components, filter press components, but because we raised that money, we have $99 million in the bank, we are able to secure those long lead items as we need them, but still have enough to get to shovel ready to when we ultimately finance the project.
Construction starting late 2028 with permit in hand, followed by production in late 2029. That is the Richmond Hill Gold Project, which from a consensus perspective, looking at about 90% of the value of the company. What is getting no value is what you see on the screen right here. On the right-hand side, you can see a mine that produced 40 million ounces of gold, the Homestake Mine, over 125 years. The Homestake Mine, towards the end of its life, drifted across onto property that we own the mineral rights, called Maitland. They made a discovery called the North Drift Discovery. We have now drilled 47 intercepts into mineralization on that property, looking just like the old Homestake Mine in the West Ledges. Again, we are getting no value for this. We have hit 47. Over 60% of the time we have drilled, we have hit those intercepts.
As we get the cash flow from Richmond Hill, we are going to reinvest in this and go after mine number two as a high grade underground looking for the next Homestake. When we were putting out intercepts on this, we were putting out intercepts like 5 meters of 20 grams per ton, 4 meters of 25 grams. This is a great asset, a great project, but we want to really manage the capital that we have got. We want to use that to get shovel-ready with Richmond Hill, and at the right time, go back to follow- up on this. We have drilled at the Unionville zone, and again, consistent with the theme of the overall land package, we are not looking for the gold. You can see the underground workings in this slide. We are looking for the halos. We are looking for extensions.
There is known mineralization because there was a mine that produced gold there. We will put out a resource off the back of that drilling in the first half of next year. You have got Richmond Hill, and then essentially no value for these two great underground projects. This is just a slide showing you the size and scale of Richmond Hill compared to some of the other U.S. heap leach projects that have this low technical complexity, with Richmond Hill clearly standing out on the size and scale and return that you are going to get as you move this project forward. Earlier I talked at spot gold having an NPV of $1.6 billion at $2,350. At spot, going up to over $4 billion. Another way to look at it from a valuation perspective is EV per ounce. We are trading at only $55 or $51 an ounce.
In the next two years, entirely under our control, we will put out our PFS. We will get to permitting. Every single month that goes by, we are a month closer to shovel in the ground and a month closer to being in production. All of those factors are going to drive that EV to the left. When we are producing, you can see here that 100,000 ounces of production is worth about $1.5 billion, and that is average. We have a long mine life, a safe jurisdiction, high margin, so certainly warrants a premium compared to the average on that metric. Three different ways to look at this from a valuation perspective to say that there is opportunity for a re-rate as we get closer to production.
Here on the capital structure, you can see we have been fortunate to get to where we are with only 134 million shares outstanding, essentially no dilutive securities. I have been at the company for over five years. It took us almost five years to get the first three analysts to cover the company. Year to date, we have already had four more launch as the company goes from being one of many juniors with a project to being a near-term producer. A lot of new accounts being focused on this, a lot of research. Very excited about that ramp up. Our shareholder registry, blue chip, very proud of that. We have worked very hard with this last financing to put the shares into safe hands and got both mining specialists as well as large institutions in there.
Just to recap, Richmond Hill, primary driver of value for the company, PFS out in the fourth quarter, feasibility study next year, shovel ready in 2028, production in 2029. At the same time, looking at our high-grade underground opportunities in Maitland, currently getting no value despite those great intercepts, despite being right next to the Homestake Mine. Very excited about the rest of this year, but also over the next two-three years with how this company can grow. I think with that, I will end the presentation. I do not know if there were any questions on the back of that. Thank you again, everybody for