Well, good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, as the case might be. I know we have a lot of people online today. I'm delighted that you could join us for our annual Capital Markets Day. It's something we've tried to do every year since we formed the company five years ago. This is an auspicious year for a number of reasons. The most obvious is because it is our 5th anniversary, just a few short weeks ago, we celebrated our 5th anniversary on the NYSE American. We actually listed back in March of 2021, were able to get most of our team, actually virtually all of our team, at the NYSE to ring the bell. In fact, the New York Stock Exchange told us we were the only company where all of the employees were actually on the platform.
It speaks to how small and mighty our team is, it also speaks to the scalability of the royalty model. We could run a business multiples of the size that we enjoy right now with the same people. In fact, most of the people that you see in this picture have been with the organization almost from day one, we've had really good retention, a very capable team, as I'll go on a little later on in the presentation, bring quite a pedigree to the organization. I think that's a testament to how we've been able to scale up the business very quickly over the period of the last five years. Just going a little bit over the agenda today. I'll start with some introductory remarks.
I really want to talk about the macro environment, the gold price environment we find ourselves in, the equity environment we find ourselves in, the opportunities that we see in the royalty business from a macro scale, we'll get into a bit more detail with Jackie Przybylowski, our VP of Capital Markets and now Sustainability as well. She'll talk about our growth outlook and some granularity. By all means, don't hesitate to ask questions over the course of the presentation, as they might come up so we can answer them. I know that there's already some detailed questions that some of the people in this room want to get into.
John Griffith, I should add, Jackie joined us two years ago. She was probably the only addition we've really made since the IPO, her addition was timely in that we were in the point of inflecting from investing in our business to actually starting to harvest and generate positive free cash flow. As a result, we felt we were starting to become investable for institutional investors. This was largely a retail-driven story when we IPO'd the company back in 2021, we recognized we needed to diversify our shareholder base, we were in a position to do that simply because we were at that point where we were starting to become self-sustaining as a business. Jackie's done an excellent job in starting to diversify our shareholder base over the last couple of years.
She brings a wealth of experience, as many of you know, in the capital markets, having been on the sell and buy side, but she is also a mineral processor, a metallurgical engineer by training, so she brings a technical depth to the organization to complement what we already have. John Griffith, our President, will provide our corporate development update. John was employee number one when Amir Adnani and I were conceiving of this company privately back in August of 2020. John was the first person I called as a partner, and most recently, was promoted to President. He has been our Chief Development Officer since day one. Well-deserved promotion, given all he has added to this company in terms of tremendous value.
Jerry Baughman is not here in person, but we do have a video explaining the royalty generation model to our shareholders and how that works, because it has been a significant and a very integral pillar of growth among our four pillars of growth that we will talk about a little later on. Jerry has been doing that in Nevada for close to 40 years. He is a geologist by training, a prospector by trade, and he has done a tremendous job of adding basically 75+ royalties into our portfolio through his sweat equity at no cost to our shareholders, with the potential of infinite rates of return as some of those royalties become fruitful. Then after our break and Q&A, Andrew Gubbels, our CFO, will join us and talk about our financial situation, which is excellent right now, frankly.
Just the bottom line for you, we have no debt on the balance sheet. We are generating positive free cash flow. We have pro forma cash of close to $50 million, including our in-the-money warrants. We have a $150 million line of credit that is completely undrawn. We have $200 million of dry powder. For the longest time, we were a severely undercapitalized organization as we were investing and building out our portfolio. That is not the case anymore. We have the ability to grow through the acquisition of near cash flowing royalties, and we are going to be competitive in that regard over the coming years now that we are in that position of generating positive free cash flow, no debt on the balance sheet.
We are also in a position to start to talk about returns of capital to shareholders, and we will get into that in a bit more detail over the course of the presentation. Andrew comes with over 20 years of experience, most recently at Aris Mining, where I serve as lead director, and Andrew and I got to know each other a little bit better. But I knew him back from his UBS days where he led the mining group, so he brings a lot of transactional experience, a lot of mining experience to the table. That really, again, speaks to the pedigree of our team. Jackie will come back with some modeling notes after Andrew, and again, after a break. Then I am really proud to have a number of our operating partners here today.
Lucas Loureiro, his title is actually a little bit out of date. As he told us yesterday, he's become Chief Operating Officer for CoreX for their Americas business. He's responsible for two very significant operating assets in Colombia and Brazil. Brazil, of course, is the one where we have a royalty on the Pedra Branca mine. Lucas will walk you through the prospects and the current state of operations at Pedra Branca today. Then we have Steve Tartaglia, Director of Corporate Development from DPM Metals. DPM only recently took over Vareš, which is a large silver-zinc mine in Bosnia. In fact, it's one of the top 10 silver producers in the world right now.
As a result of the ramp up to full production over the course of the last couple of years, they invested 1.5 billion in acquiring that mine last year and have invested significant capital in accelerating underground development to get it up to a steady state, Steve will walk us through that. Finally, we have Jason Simpson, currently the CEO of Orla Mining. Jason will be becoming the President of Equinox when they complete the merger with Orla a little later this year, I would expect in the coming months. Jason has done a tremendous job of building up the Camino Rojo mine, which we sold to him when I was running Goldcorp a number of years ago.
It was unloved within our portfolio, obviously they've leveraged that into a substantial company, now are merging that with Equinox into what's going to be a very meaningful million-ounce-a-year producer within our sector. That's the lineup today. I think it'll be very interesting and exciting, and particularly excited to have our operating partners here. I'm very, very grateful to them for having taken the time to fly in today and make the presentations as the case may be. As I said, I do want to talk a little bit about the macro environment we find ourselves in.
The question we're quite often getting asked from generalists as we're going out on the road and telling the story is, "Geez, I thought gold would perform in the face of a calamity like the Iran war," or you point at any other financial or political calamity we've experienced over the last 25 years. Why isn't gold performing? Well, gold is insurance. When your house is burning down, you cash in the insurance. It's one of the most liquid commodities available, when it's a risk-off environment, excuse me, as we're experiencing currently, gold gets sold off like many other risk assets. It's liquid, it's a very well-recognized commodity, and it's one where you can take cash, put it on the sidelines, and figure out what you're going to do next when the market finds direction. That's happened time and again.
If you go back to the dot-com bubble, you go back to the great financial crisis, you go back to the COVID crisis, and the first Iran bombing a couple of years ago, gold sold off in every one of those circumstances, but roared back afterwards because the fundamentals are undeniable. This has been a one-way trade for 50 years. If you look back to when we abandoned the gold standard, which is really what this chart shows you, gold started out at around $35/ oz, and most recently peaked out at about $5,600/oz . We've seen the purchasing power of many of our fiat currencies over the same period of time decline by 99%. The relationship is linear and undeniable. Gold's prospects going forward, we think, are tremendous, given the fact that money supply can only go in one direction, which is up.
It's always been the temptation when money supply, fiat money supply, is untethered from anything intrinsic in terms of value like gold, then it can only be expanded. Particularly in this environment where debt to GDP is at historical highs, 350%. Just give you a frame of reference, back in the last big inflation cycle back in the 1970s, it was 100%. When Paul Volcker took over the Federal Reserve, he could raise interest rates to 21% and tame inflation. There's no such latitude for central bankers today. They can do nothing but inflate that away, and that's exactly what they're going to do. Yes, we may have days like yesterday where the rhetoric is somewhat bearish on interest rates, but the reality is interest rates are not going up, they're going down. They're flat on a nominal basis.
When you look where inflation really is, we're in negative territory, so there's no opportunity cost to owning gold right now. Gold is a monetary instrument more than it is a commodity. Monetary instruments trade relative to each other, in short term anyways, based on relative interest rates. Well, if sovereign debt is negative on a real basis, well, gold, which is yielding zero, is going to preserve your capital against the ravages of debasement. That's really what the right side of the graph is trying to show, at least on nominal interest rates. Yes, headline inflation is 2%, 3%, 4%, 4% most recently. The reality is, nobody in this room is experiencing 4% inflation in their daily lives. I think we're all experiencing double-digit inflation. That's the reality.
The headline numbers that are put out by the statistic agencies are really opium for the masses. They're meant to placate us and tell us everything is okay, but the reality is this is not a conspiracy theory because, again, we're all experiencing this inflation. Interest rates are negative on a real basis, and that's what's really been driving capital in the short to medium-term into gold. Money supply, the relationship, again, there is immense. What it suggests now is we've seen a bit of a detachment between M2 money supply, which continues to expand, and the gold price, which has corrected recently. It would suggest that based on historical correlations, that the gold price should be closer to $6,000/oz .
We know that the M2 curve is only going to go up from here, given the state of our government and corporate balance sheets and the reality that they need to debase in order to get rid of the debt. There's no fiscally responsible way for them to repay it. Central banks, recognizing that there is not an opportunity cost to owning gold, recognizing that the sovereign debt instruments, the Treasury bills they own, are getting debased. The purchasing power of those are continuing to buy in increasing volume, and that's what we're seeing in this graph. Now we've seen a new entrant in the space who's become the biggest consumer of physical gold, which is Tether. I think really what Tether has done is tapped into that vein of concern among younger investors about the debasement of their currencies.
It's not something that necessarily was recognized by younger investors a number of years ago. They saw gold as a barbarous relic. We actually saw, until recently, cryptocurrencies as a competitor to physical gold. Now, interestingly, we're seeing a convergence between the two, between owning physical gold and owning the stablecoins, which I think will replace the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that do not have that physical backing. For those of you that don't know Tether, they're a $180 billion stablecoin fund. They are one of the biggest owners of Treasuries in the world. So those stablecoins are backed dollar for dollar by U.S. Treasuries. If you talk to the principals of Tether, they have no confidence in the U.S. dollar.
They're taking the interest from those Treasury bills, and they're diversifying into hard assets as quickly as possible, and the most principal or most significant asset that they're diversifying into is physical gold. They've become the biggest consumer of physical gold in the last year or so, and they've accumulated over $20 billion of physical gold, which they store in a private vault in Switzerland. They have introduced a stablecoin backed by physical gold. There are a number of other competitors in the space offering a similar stablecoin backed by physical gold. That is portending a convergence, as I said, between the crypto world and the physical gold world.
Driven by the same philosophy that there's concern about debasement of fiat currencies, and now a younger class of investors have a way to play this through their smartphones, which is much harder to do with physical gold, but clearly having a stablecoin fund or a crypto wallet within their smartphones has allowed them to participate in the physical gold market in a more significant fashion than they've done historically. If you buy into the thesis that gold is really a one-way trade, and certainly 50 years of history has demonstrated that, the question is, where are you best positioned to get optimum leverage to the gold price? It's not an accident that myself and a number of my board and management who come from an operating mine development background decided that really the royalty model is where you're best positioned to do that.
The dynamics that the operators are facing are twofold. One is declining reserves, which I think is irreversible in the short to medium term. That really goes back to 2012 when the general equity markets largely abandoned natural resources because after the great financial crisis, we had a bit of a party in the mining space. We built and we explored with reckless abandon, and we saw reserves peak out in 2012 because the juniors had unfettered access to capital markets, and we saw a lot of exploration drilling, which is great from a perspective of making new discoveries, but we also saw significant cost escalation undermine the leverage proposition that investors were looking for in the equity markets. They abandoned the natural resources sector in terms of equities. We've seen a steady decline in reserves in the sector.
With those types of headwinds, all the producers can do is cannibalize each other. We've seen that. I was party to one of those significant corporate events when we did, as John was as my advisor at Merrill Lynch at the time, when we did the merger with Newmont back in 2019. That was shortly on the heels of Barrick doing Randgold, and it's just been a steady cannibalization of companies within the space. When you can't grow and when the sector's not growing, all you can do is play Pac-Man. That's really what's happened. It's a shrinking sector. Leverage has shrunk, and if you look at some of the bellwether stocks in our sector, all they've done in the last 30 years is grow the share count, not their production and reserves. That's really undermined the leverage proposition.
That's why some of those bellwether stocks are actually trading at a lower share price today than they were back in the mid-1990s when gold was $250/oz . They just have not added reserves and production, but they've added significantly to their share count. Have undermined the per-share value accretion that investors are looking for. The other dynamic, of course, is cost. Costs are escalating. We had some stability in costs last year. Energy was flat. Labor costs were flat. We saw a significant escalation in the gold price, so we saw margins expand. The producers did very well last year.
The reality is, if you look over a 30-year horizon, as you can see on the left side of the slide, is actually EBITDA margin has been pretty flat at about 30% until that recent surge in the gold price we saw last year. Inevitably what happens is costs catch up, and they catch up for a couple of reasons. We see inflation in the general economy, as we're currently experiencing with oil prices surging. We're also seeing, I think we will see labor costs start to escalate. They've been quite stable, but they tend to have a lagging effect to metal prices. We're seeing across the metals complex, not just in gold, record metal prices across the space. The unions are not oblivious to that. They will start to demand higher settlements.
When you look at costs at the mine site, the majority of costs are labor and energy, and they are escalating. That's going to start to close the gap again back to the historical norm of 30% EBITDA margin. The other factor, of course, is we've seen a perpetual decline in grades across the sector. All the near-surface high-grade deposits have been discovered. Also, when you're mining a deposit and you see low-grade material that makes money at $4,000/oz or $5,000/oz but didn't make money at $2,000/oz , it was waste at that time, you're going to mine that material and it's going to displace the higher-grade mineralization. That's not an indictment on the operators.
That's just economically logical thing to do. If you can make margin on that and extend your mine life and displace some of the higher-grade mineralization to later on in the mine life, you do that. That's inevitably going to result in higher unit costs, that dynamic. Really where you're going to get optimum leverage to the gold price is in the royalty and streaming business, where you have complete inflation protection, but also you get leverage to the exploration and expansion success of the operators. That brings me to the Gold Royalty story, having framed the macro environment for you. As I said, we are at an inflection point. We have been at an inflection point for the last year. The growth that we've been promising really since day one is happening in real time, and that's been reflective of our results most recently.
In Q1, we had 160% revenue growth in the first quarter. When you go through the more granular detail on our growth, as Jackie will do later on in the presentation, that growth is happening today and will be perpetuated over the next five years as peer-leading, industry-leading growth. In fact, where we're looking at about 500% growth or six-fold growth in our GEOs from our existing portfolio. I hasten to add that every one of our royalties are bought and paid for. We have no capital calls. We have no installment payments. All that growth is as a result of the significant investments we've made in our portfolio the last five years.
Now we're very much harvesting that growth to the benefit of our shareholders on a per-share basis with a balance sheet that is absolutely bulletproof now, no debt on the balance sheet, $200 million of dry powder. We're in a position now to start to very systematically and in a disciplined fashion add to the portfolio. Anything we do from this point forward in terms of the acquisitions will be either cash flowing or near cash flowing royalties that will perpetuate the cash flow growth we have in the short to medium term on a, not only on an absolute basis but on a per-share basis. We are very disciplined in our growth. We've only done three royalty acquisitions in two years. It's not for lack of trying, as John will tell you a little later on. We've looked at hundreds of opportunities. We've bid on dozens of them.
We've only actually executed on 10 of them. That's because we have very stringent return criteria. We have stringent geological criteria. We're looking for solid geological models with solid operators in good countries. We're looking for ones that have geological potential beyond the reserves that have been defined when we buy it. We're looking for leverage to not only the gold price, but to the exploration and expansion potential of the deposits we acquire. We'll let the early-stage stuff get generated for free. You'll see a little later on, as I mentioned earlier on in my presentation, Jerry has been systematically adding to the portfolio at the rate of about two to three a quarter at no cost to our shareholders. We don't need to expend precious capital on early-stage opportunities.
We can generate those for free. Those provide us infinite optionality to early-stage opportunities at no cost to our shareholders. I think if you asked how we got from 18 to 256, 257 royalties we have today, it's been the connectivity of our team. As I mentioned, we have a small and mighty team with over 400 years of industry experience collectively. That's a lot of years within a very small, tight team. That connectivity has allowed us to acquire transactions and do deals on an exclusive basis to get the rates of return that we expect and that our shareholders expect on our scarce capital.
Where that's left us today, as I said, 258 royalties. I don't want to leave you with the impression that we're just trying to throw as many of these early-stage royalties against the wall and hope for the best. We have made some really meaningful acquisitions over the course of the last several years through our four distinct pillars of growth. It includes royalties on three of the five biggest producing gold mines in North America, namely Canadian Malartic, Coté, and the underground extension of Goldstrike , REN, which is coming into production later this year and will start to deliver cash flow for us meaningfully in the short term.
We've also seen some of our more meaningful and more mature cash flowing royalties see changes in ownership, which is actually almost always positive because when a new owner comes in, they want to justify the acquisition price of what they've invested in. They want to start to refresh the asset, invest in additional exploration, invest in expansion opportunities. That's certainly the case with Borden, which is part of the Porcupine complex, which Discovery Silver has taken over from Newmont. It's a very mature district. Borden is a relatively mature operation, ironically, one we built when I was running Goldcorp back about eight or nine years ago.
Vareš, which is not a mature operation, it's a maturing operation, a relatively new one. DPM, as I said, has taken over ownership, has intensified the underground development, not only to sustain the current production rate. They have an oversized facility on the surface that they want to fill. They've got a hungry mill, A hungry concentrator, I should say. This will give them an opportunity to look at expansion opportunities, and they've got 18 years of reserve life, which is frankly too long. They're going to ramp up the brownfield exploration and look for expansion opportunities to shorten the mine life, enhance the rate of return on a $1.5 billion investment that they made in the last year.
Finally, CoreX took over Pedra Branca earlier this year. We just had lunch with Lucas yesterday, and he's talked about the opportunities to invest in the asset, both in terms of getting better performance from the fleet and looking at brownfield exploration opportunities and expansion opportunities over time. They want to revitalize what's a mature operation as well. When you look at our portfolio from a 30,000 ft level, very much focused on gold. As the name indicates, Gold Royalty was not a name we chose by accident. Over 90% of our portfolio in the long term is in gold. In the short term, we're getting a lot of growth from copper, and that's coming from Vareš, it's coming from Cozamin, and it's coming from Pedra Branca now that we have a royalty, a 2% royalty on their copper production as well.
In the short term, that's delivering meaningful portions of our growth. It's not to say that we're trying to diversify into copper, but there's certain geological settings where we feel we have a core competency. If you look at our board of management, I came from Agnico back in the day, spent 12 years there as CFO, ran Hudbay for six years. I feel like I have a strong fundamental understanding of gold-bearing VMS deposits because two of the biggest ever discovered were in Agnico Eagle and Hudbay, LaRonde and Lalor respectively. We built the large copper-gold porphyry in Latin America when I was running Hudbay Constancia. Alan Hair is on my board, I should add. Alan built Lalor at Hudbay. He built Constancia, and we have Alastair Still as our Director of Technical Services. Again, a lot of experience in copper-gold porphyries.
In the course of looking at geological settings where we feel we have particular competency, namely precious metal-bearing VMSs, copper-gold porphyries, if we diversify organically through doing that's fine because we understand the geology, we think we can add value, we think we can recognize the potential more readily given our historical jobs in that part of the sector. When you look at our jurisdictional exposure, over 80% of our portfolio is in Nevada, Quebec, and Ontario, with meaningful exposure in Brazil and Eastern Europe. We're very comfortable in Brazil. We were talking to Lucas yesterday, Brazil is a very comfortable environment to conduct mining. I've had a lot of history there. Lucas brings a wealth of experience there, and he feels very comfortable having just integrated that operation into CoreX's portfolio.
Bosnia is an EU-ascent jurisdiction, DPM has been operating in that area for over 20 years. Having the shield of a very capable operator, having operated in that area for a long period of time, I think is an important mitigant to any perceived risk of operating in what's not historically a significant mining jurisdiction. In terms of revenue, you can see, again, low political risk, peer leading. If you want to look at the jurisdictions that are best to operate in from a mineral potential standpoint, from a political risk and regulatory standpoint, all of our jurisdictions are fairly highly rated by the Fraser Institute on those key criteria.
With that, Jackie, do I stop for any questions on the macro? Okay, Jackie's saying I got to get off, so I'll leave it over to Jackie. Thank you.
We will have a break for questions after. Just wanted to talk a little bit about our growth profile. After five years as a public company, Gold Royalty has reached an important milestone. We achieved positive free cash flow for the first time in Q2 2025, and we've been steadily improving our balance sheet ever since. The conversation is no longer about inflection to positive free cash flow. Today, we're a free cash flow growth story, and we're so excited for the next chapter of that growth. If we did no additional acquisitions, and if we spent no additional capital, we would still enjoy peer-leading growth. We've released guidance for 2026 and for 2030 back in March with our Q4 2025 results, and it's broadly consistent with the forecasts that our analysts have right now.
We're estimating production of 7,500 to 9,300 GEOs, gold equivalent ounces, in 2026, and that's roughly 60% growth at the midpoint when compared with 2025. Most of this growth comes from the Pedra Branca acquisition, which we announced in December, and the second royalty on Borborema, which we announced in January. In other words, growth comes from assets that are already in production. They're just new to us. That's meaningful growth, and importantly, it's both low-risk growth and it's fully bought and paid for, as Dave mentioned, in our portfolio. At the spot gold price, which as of last night was about $42.66/oz , the midpoint of our guidance range would translate to over $35 million in revenue in 2026.
I'll note a year-to-date spot price is below the $51.50 gold price that we used in our guidance, which is the middle column in the chart you see here. In our case, a lower gold price is actually helpful for us on a GEO calculation basis because any of the revenues that come from copper or any of the revenues that come from the land agreement proceeds and interest will be converted to a higher GEO at a lower gold price. With today's gold price being about closer to that $41.50 column, around, like I said, $42.66 as of last night, you can see our GEOs would actually be higher than the guidance we set earlier in the year.
At the end of Q1, we'd already achieved 23% of the midpoint of our guidance range for the full year or 26% of the low end of the guidance range. We're very happy with that result. As we had previously mentioned, we expected production to us would be very significantly H2 weighted, about 40% H1, 60% H2. Our Q1 result is well on track versus our expectations. Just to tie this back to the previous slide on sensitivity, the lower gold prices or higher copper price was not the main driving factor for our outperformance in Q1. The average gold price for the first quarter was $48.75/oz , the copper price was about $5.83/lb . Not too far away from our base case commodity price assumptions, as we showed on the previous slide.
Operators that have disclosed that they will be expecting H2 waiting for their production, as you can see there, includes Borden, Coté, County Line, Pedra Branca, and Vareš, as those assets ramp up or are fully optimized. We'll hear from the operator of the last two mines later today. If we achieve the midpoint of our guidance in 2026, we'll see 60% growth year-over-year. That is a very significant growth rate, also compares very favorably against many of our royalty and streaming peers, as you can see on the left-hand side of this slide. We've also released guidance for 2030. We're expecting production of about 28,000 to 34,000 gold equivalent ounces, as David previously mentioned, that's a 500% increase at the midpoint versus our 2025 actual result or 6x our 2025 actual result.
A few of the smaller royalty streaming companies release five-year guidance. Obviously we're comparing ourselves against some of the larger companies, they're coming from a larger base. We wanted to put out guidance for five years out. This is the second year we've done it. There's two reasons that we've decided to do that. Number one, we're very excited about that growth rate. Obviously, it stands out. It looks very compelling, also we're very confident in our growth rate. Over 70% of that growth, 70% of that growth comes from the mature operations or the brownfield expansions or ramp-ups that you can see in the bottom two arrows on this slide. Those are assets that are already fully permitted, built, financed, very low execution risk to us.
Sure, in the brownfield expansions and ramp-ups, we will see some assets that need expansion or optimization, lower risk than many greenfield projects would be. If you include the satellite deposits, that's County Line and REN, 90% of our growth comes from those assets that we view as de-risked. County Line is a heap leach operation in Nevada that's currently having ore placed on the leach pad, will be producing to us within a few months. REN, being operated by Nevada Gold Mines or Barrick doing the construction, should be at first production later this year. Very low risk. We'll hear from Orla, who's operating South Railroad, later today, they'll probably tell you the same thing, that they view that as a low-risk asset as well. Just to emphasize, as David previously mentioned, all of this growth is fully paid for in our portfolio. Doesn't require any capital cost, any contributions, any milestone payments on our part.
How does this translate to revenue growth? We don't give guidance every single year, but you can see here, on the yellow bars, this is the average, the median of the seven analysts who cover us. This is the consensus gold equivalent ounce volume forecast in the yellow bars. We've overlaid our guidance with the little blue beams, so you can see for reference how consensus numbers match against our guidance. Fairly consistent, at least in 2024, and maybe a little bit more conservative in 2030. If you take these gold equivalent ounce volume numbers that our analysts are forecasting and you multiply gold prices on top of that, you could see where the lines go. That translates to revenue. You could see a significant revenue growth over the next few years.
Growing from about $18 million in revenue in 2025. It was about $13 million in revenue in 2024, and growing very significantly over the next few years. Depending on the gold price, of course, could be revenues of $100 million-$150 million per year by the end of the decade. That translates very well to free cash flow. Our G&A costs are expected to stay relatively flat, about $7 million or $8 million per year. Andrew will talk a lot more about that in detail later today. We have no interest payments or costs associated with debt. We're completely debt-free at this point. We have very significant margins. Once we get to that point, our free cash flows will be very exciting.
I'm going to pass over to John to talk about our corporate development strategy next.
Thanks, Jackie. Well, thank you everybody for coming today, and good morning for those in the Eastern time zone, and for those in other parts of the world, good afternoon. As Dave mentioned, I've been part of the Gold Royalty story from day one, and certainly, we want to acknowledge and thank the Gold Royalty team for their contributions to our amazing story. The high-quality assets that we've acquired have transformed this company to positive free cash flow, peer-leading growth, and an enviable low-risk portfolio in just five short years. Just as important are the transactions that we didn't complete. We've stayed disciplined, and we have focused on double-digit returns in good jurisdictions. Often, this means that we're not competitive in broad processes, and so most of our growth has come from bilateral or quasi-bilateral relationship-based transactions.
Gold Royalty was formed in 2020 with 18 royalties on non-producing longer-dated assets, and we completed our IPO in March of 2021. We used a strong currency post-IPO to bring high-quality assets, including Canadian Malartic and REN, revenues, and diversification into the asset base. Our growth slowed after the initial burst of activity in 2021. As our valuation multiple lagged the initial IPO highs, accretive transactions became more challenging for us to complete. We continued to pursue acquisitions, but we've lost in nearly every competitive process. The transactions that we did complete were all completed, as I said, on a bilateral or quasi-bilateral basis, based on the connectivity of our experienced team. During this time, we remained disciplined, completing fewer transactions to ensure that we pursued only accretive transactions.
We're often asked what we're seeing in the market today and if there are still growth opportunities in the current environment. Even though commodity prices have softened this year, let's not forget that we continue to see gold, silver, copper, and other commodity prices extremely high in historical context. Companies which currently operate mines are generally enjoying high margins and strong balance sheets today. It's true that we are seeing mining companies selling fewer royalties and streams for balance sheet repair or capital raising for other purposes. Although it still does happen, particularly when there is a value gap between the operator and royalty streamer that provides a compelling arbitrage opportunity. What we are seeing more of today are opportunities to acquire third-party royalties. This could include corporate or individual royalty holders.
Our team in Nevada is very well-connected and has been active in sourcing third-party royalties held by families, in addition to the generative work that we'll talk about later. For example, we recently announced the acquisition of an additional royalty on REN. We've also recently acquired royalties from larger institutions, namely the Pedra Branca royalty that we acquired from BlackRock World Mining Trust plc, which was announced on December 8th, 2025. The second royalty on Borborema from Dundee Corporation announced January 14th, 2026. Third-party royalty holders may be more willing to monetize existing royalties in the current commodity price environment. Acquiring existing third-party royalties from BlackRock and Dundee Corporation are examples of the different risk-return priorities of different groups in the sector.
While Gold Royalty is prioritizing the acquisition of royalties on assets which are already cash flowing or nearly cash flowing, many other financiers, including private equity, institutional investors, and other corporations, are willing to take on earlier stage risk in the hopes of greater returns. We don't always view these groups as competing with us for royalties, but we often see them as complementary to our own portfolio construction objectives. The January Borborema royalty acquisition added to our royalty on a cash flowing, successful asset. It was also the milestone first transaction completed under the strategic alliance that we have with Taurus Mining Royalty Fund L.P., initially announced on April 24th, 2024.
Gold Royalty and Taurus have the right, but not the obligation, to co-invest at between 25%-50% of any gold or precious metals royalty or stream over $30 million in size, would retain the right to first offer on any co-investment transactions. To date, the relationship has been extremely positive and we have shown one another opportunities on a regular basis, we're certainly thrilled to have completed our first transaction together with hopefully many more to come. Growth through Gold Royalty's five-year history hasn't been a steady flow. There are some periods where we've grown rapidly when market conditions permitted and other periods of slower growth.
Through all parts of the cycle, we have remained importantly disciplined and focused on accretive growth. We will continue to set a high hurdle for ourselves in terms of rates of return, as well as quality of asset, operator, and jurisdiction. We're very comfortable waiting for the next accretive opportunity. At the moment, our growth pipeline is active but is mostly focused on smaller, more bolt-on transactions similar to what you've seen from us recently. That is not to say that we don't have growth. Through all points of the cycle, we continued to add early-stage royalties to our portfolio. We generated 56 royalties since the acquisition of Ely Gold Royalties in 2021. As at our Q1 reporting date, May 6th, 2026, we have 38 properties subject to land agreements and six properties under lease generating land agreement proceeds.
Including the early-stage assets generated by predecessor companies such as Ely Gold Royalties, Gold Royalty has over 200 royalties in the exploration and advanced exploration categories of our portfolio. We see tremendous option value in these royalties. They may be early stage today, but if only a few of them were developed into cash flowing mines, it's a huge win for us. Coming from an essentially zero cost basis, these represent potentially infinite upside. The market doesn't give us credit for most of these options today. In fact, over 200 royalties in the exploration and advanced exploration categories, a NAV is explicitly calculated and assigned to very few. Of the seven analysts who cover Gold Royalty, some have modeled NAV for Tonopah West in the yellow advanced exploration category with a median NAV of $30 million of the analysts who have a reported value.
Whistler, also in the yellow category, with a median value of $20 million NAV of the analysts who have a reported value. Analysts also have a median $260 million NAV classified as "other." Still, this would work out to an average of just over $1 million per exploration and advanced exploration royalty. Far less than these assets will be worth if even a couple of the projects are developed into mines. Investors often ask about the royalty generator model because it's such a unique competitive advantage to Gold Royalty. He wasn't able to join us in person today, but we have a short video to show you where Jerry Baughman, Vice President of the Nevada Select subsidiary, and our colleagues talk through the royalty generator business model.
Hello, my name is Ryan Hass. I'm Director of Finance at Gold Royalty, and I'm here with Jerry Baughman, VP, Nevada Select, wholly owned subsidiary of Gold Royalty based in Reno, Nevada. Jerry, maybe just to start, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm a geologist with Gold Royalty Corp, and was also the Co-Founder of Ely Gold Royalties, and we started the royalty generator model.
For those that don't know, if you could just expand a little bit on what the royalty generator model is.
Well, we generate mining claims and projects throughout Nevada, and once we consolidate those projects with a data package, then we go out and look for people that want to do the exploration and look for ore deposits.
Effectively what you're doing, instead of buying royalties, you're creating them or generating them based on the claims that you stake.
Exactly.
As part of the royalty generator model, you mentioned vending or optioning these claims out to mining companies or exploration companies. If you can just go a little bit more in detail on what exactly that means?
I've been doing this for 40 years, so we have a huge Rolodex of all the people that are working in Nevada. We actually have great contacts with these people. Once we have a project for them, we start showing them all the various projects that are available and the data, and then we try to make the project fit with what they're looking for.
When you vend out or option out these properties, what does the option agreement look like? How is it structured, and what are the terms?
Usually they're four to five years back-end loaded, and once we get our final payment, we get a royalty deed, they get a deed to the property. At that time, we also ask for advanced minimum royalty payments to make sure we can continue with cash flow on the property until production starts.
These option payments are effectively installment payments that the exploration company is paying over a four to five year period, whereby we're retaining a royalty once the final payment is made.
Exactly.
You mentioned advanced minimum royalty payments, which you also collect. If you can just explain to the viewers exactly what that is and how it differs from an option payment.
Well, once we get our royalty deed, we want to continue with the cash flow. The advanced minimum royalties are paid until actual production starts. Any advanced minimum royalty payments that get paid, they can deduct that out, but not any of the option payments. Once they get to the point where they've had some time to explore it, hopefully they've made a discovery, then they'll want to continue with the project. If they don't continue with the projects, then we get the project back 100% and look for a new company to vend it to.
Effectively using the royalty generator model and these option agreements, you're generating royalties at minimal cost, the cost of staking the claims, plus receiving the cash flow from the option payments and the advanced minimum royalties.
Right.
Why would this structure appeal to an exploration company versus having them do the exploration from scratch?
Especially a company that's coming in from Canada or other parts of the world, Australia, and they don't really have a presence in Nevada, but they want to. I've been doing this for 40 years in Nevada, I have huge amounts of experience. A lot of these people actually know me or know of me, they contact me looking for new opportunities. Once they get established, at some point they might want to generate their own projects. Typically, the new people that haven't been here for long, they need a way to get into the industry and to get projects, they typically come to me.
Effectively saves them time and capital by using you as the middleman to effectively vet the claims and the projects.
Exactly.
Maybe if we can go just to the beginning of the royalty generator model, which is really identifying opportunities and staking claims. Maybe just for those that don't know, if you can just briefly explain how to stake claims in Nevada.
There's no limit to how many claims you can stake, but a mining claim is 1,500 ft long by 600 ft wide, and you have to put a location monument somewhere down the center line of the claim, and you can locate as many claims as you want.
Do you need to go into the field to do this, or can you do this at the county recorder's office?
No, you definitely have to go to the field, and you have to put the monuments up, and you have 60 days after location to put your corners up and 90 days to file with both the county and the BLM.
In general, what does it cost to stake claims in Nevada? Is it expensive?
Recording fees all in for both agencies is about $250 per claim. Once a claim is established, it's about $200 per year for the annual fees.
Fairly inexpensive. Again, as part of that royalty generator model, the staking clip fees being minimum and inexpensive, generating a royalty off the back end, it provides optionality to the portfolio. Maybe just going into identifying opportunities. When you're looking at claims or prospecting claims to stake or acquire, what is it about claims that makes you want it? What makes them attractive? What do you look for?
Everything. Our database is massive. We are actually following 833 properties as of this week, and that kind of fluctuates when we come across a new opportunity. We have all the information in there to be able to continue looking at the data, making sure that it's exactly what people are looking for. There's multiple sources of information, and I don't think the only companies that probably have more information on exploration projects is maybe Newmont and Barrick. Other than that, we probably have just as much data. It's just going through that data and spending decades to get to this point to know where all the great projects are. I've already identified 833 projects that we're actually watching to see if those come available, and the minute they come available, we snap them right up.
Effectively using your 40 years of experience in Nevada, leveraging your extensive network and experience that you've had to find the opportunities that others may not. What are some of the challenges in staking claims in Nevada?
Man, I don't have a lot of experience in other parts of the world, but access is amazing basically 12 months out of the year. I don't really think there are any. That's why Nevada has such a high rating on the Fraser Institute, one of the number one jurisdictions in the world. Not only permitting, but access, major gold discoveries here. It's the best, most premier place to be exploring for gold.
What current projects that are highlighted with Gold Royalty that make you proud and put a big smile on your face when you're talking about them?
REN and Goldstrike, the biggest gold mine in North America. Already produced somewhere around, it's hard to even know how many ounces they produced. You'll read between 50 million and 70 million oz. We have a part of that action, so I'm pretty excited about that. Just came back from there, what, two days ago. Huge amount of activity there, big intercepts, who knows what the upside potential is there. I really like Rosebud. Rosebud was a really good project.
It was one that I actually literally got there and somebody was staking claims, but they were there too soon, and called my lawyer, and my lawyer was working for them, so I had to call another lawyer, and I said, "These claims don't come open until noon," and it was 10:00. I started at noon and got the whole deposit.
Just to close, what are you looking at in the next five years? Where are the biggest opportunities in Nevada, where will you be focusing a lot of your work?
Well, the Carlin gold systems are always the biggest and best, I always have a tendency to go down that path. This new big discovery in Beatty by AngloGold is something that I was quite familiar with with the epithermal model, I have a lot of situations where I'm seeing opportunities there. Anglo was actually looking at some of those opportunities presently, it fits that model as Silicon. That's such a huge discovery that I think the opportunities in Nevada are just absolutely amazing.
That's great. No, Jerry, really thank you for your time and sharing your experiences and your knowledge and what you do for Nevada Select and Gold Royalty under the royalty generator model. As always, it's great to come down to the sites as we are this week, we appreciate your time.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Really want to thank Jerry and Ryan and Alex and Sam for putting that together. That was great. We have a few minutes for questions, so if anybody has any questions for Dave or John or myself or if there's anything we can answer on the video, please feel free. If anybody online has questions, you can submit them through the app. Heiko's got a question.
Just conceptually, obviously, it looks like interest rates going to stay higher for longer. What are you seeing with the discount rates that your peers and you are applying to acquisitions, and where do you see that trend going over the next couple of years?
I think the question is really what commodity price to plug into your model. I don't think discount rates have really changed. I think the challenge is with what has been quite a rapid ascent in the gold price of late. If you were running consensus through your models, you are going to be out of the picture from a competitive dynamic. What we end up doing, we'll run a very robust set of sensitivity scenarios around pricing. I think we've hopefully made it very clear to everyone in the room and online our disciplined approach to valuation, our intent to achieve double-digit returns for our investors. Ultimately, we're going to stick to that. That's our philosophy. We've seen transactions done that have implied negative IRRs on some of the assets that have changed hands. We've looked at those assets. We looked at them.
We like them, not at the price at which they changed hands in terms of a value proposition for our stakeholders.
Thanks very much. We're going to take about a 5- 10-minute break. Grab some coffee outside, we'll come back to talk about finance. Thanks.
[Break]
Alright. Just before Andrew Gubbels starts his presentation on the financials, we did have one other question online. Sorry, there's sometimes a bit of a lag on the online questions, so we didn't see it before we broke. The question is, do we have any plans for a Canadian listing? This would make it easier and more cost effective for Canadians to invest in Gold Royalty. At the moment, we do not have plans for a Canadian listing. We do consider that from time to time. Our G&A, we are trying to keep it fairly low to keep our cash flows as high as possible. To avoid additional listing fees and complications, it's something that we haven't pursued at this time.
We're also very proud of the trade liquidity that we have on the NYSE American, we feel like a secondary listing would probably not benefit from that same trade liquidity. As a personal shareholder, I do recognize that it is sometimes a bit of a challenge for Canadian investors, particularly retail investors, to invest in Gold Royalty and I do appreciate those that go through that challenge to invest in us. A lot of our shareholder base, particularly the institutional shareholders, it's less of an issue for, the U.S. retailer or international retail, it's maybe less of an issue for. Appreciate the question. It is something that we continue to consider, we don't have any plans at this time.
Please keep your questions coming. If you have any others, pop them in the chat window we will address them when we see them. I will pass the presentation over to our CFO, Andrew Gubbels, to walk through our financials. Thank you.
Okay. Good morning, everyone. When I sat down to think about the Capital Markets Day, I reflected on what happened and what we've done in the past year and looked at what we presented a year ago, it was amazing how much things have changed. Despite a pullback in mining and royalty equities more recently, our enterprise value for Gold Royalty has nearly doubled from the last Capital Markets Day, so a year ago. This was substantially higher a number of months ago, even doubling is an achievement in terms of growth of our enterprise value. Over that period of time, we completely refinanced our debt, which, at this point last year, we had $67 million of convertible debentures and revolver outstanding. Since then, we raised over $100 million in new capital and equity.
In particular, we added two core cash flowing assets to the portfolio, that being Pedra Branca and another royalty on Borborema. As a result, we find ourselves in a much stronger financial position. In fact, with the upsized credit facility, and Dave mentioned this at the outset as well, which is now $150 million available from Bank of Montreal, National Bank, and World Bank, $14 million of cash and growing every quarter on the balance sheet and approximately $33 million in prospective proceeds from in-the-money exchange traded warrants, we have approximately $200 million of dry powder really to allocate towards capital activities or other allocation initiatives. Gold Royalty has never had such a strong financial position in its history. What's more, we now have a portfolio of cash-generating assets and near-term development assets that'll self-sustain the company for many years to come.
In 2024, so two years ago, we initiated a program to simplify the company's corporate structure and remove redundancies, while also initiating a dedicated FP&A function and a budgeting and authorization protocols. As a result, we've been successful in maintaining relatively steady operating costs over the past eight quarters. That's the yellow line you see over the number of quarters in the graph. This cost discipline was particularly important when our portfolio was less mature, we had fewer quality cash generating assets. Now through a combination of organic and targeted external growth, Gold Royalty has reached a point where it's generating meaningful operating and free cash flow every quarter. In fact, we've recorded record revenue and adjusted EBITDA with growing margins over the past four quarters.
In Q1 of this year, Gold Royalty actually surpassed a number of its peers and became a sector leader in terms of cash operating margins. I think this is an important point. It's taken us a long time to really get to a point where we're generating meaningful cash flows actually those cash flows are hitting the bottom line. This isn't bottom line, this is operating cash flows really, as was mentioned earlier and I'll talk through later on, without any debt on the balance sheet, without any capital commitments, it does fall to the bottom line.
Even though a number of our peers have more gross revenue than Gold Royalty at this stage, but not for long given our growth profile, our comparably lower cost of sales, we've got one stream, it's all royalties for the most part, and low G&A means that we're turning every $1 of revenue into more operating earnings than a number of our competitors. The transformation of Gold Royalty over the last two years is further illustrated by the evolution of our balance sheet. We never spoke about debt being a particular issue in the past.
A year ago, we did however primarily use debt in the form of our revolver as well as convertible debentures, given that they became in the money throughout the period that we had them, arguably debt or equity, but given the fixed charges involved, you can call it debt, to finance the acquisitions of the cash generating assets to really supplement the existing world-class development portfolio and those were Cozamin, Borborema, and Vareš in particular. In 2025, this past year, we were able to equitize those convertible debentures, repay our revolver completely, and also add another top quality royalty in Pedra Branca, while also seeing assets within our portfolio such as Coté ramp up. A number of factors which contributed to this de-leveraging to put us in a very strong position.
Moving forward, we'll principally look to use the cash on our balance sheet and draw on a revolver for corporate development initiatives while repaying any outstanding debt if we do draw down the debt with quarterly free cash flows. This is that self-sustaining flywheel model that the sector's largest peers currently employ. It's taken us a few years to get there, but now we've finally made it and we can enjoy some of the benefits that the larger peers do in the market in terms of financing our growth. Gold Royalty's relative lack of debt outstanding is an advantage, a benchmark to leverage against the junior peers set here. No debt service costs means that we generate more free cash flow for every $1 of revenue than many of our peers who carry debt on their balance sheets.
As I mentioned before, yes, debt will be utilized, revolver will be utilized for corporate development purposes with the view of repaying it in the near term. This debt figure will fluctuate over time, but at this period in time in particular, we have one of the strongest financial positions among the peer universe. We're also relatively better placed to use available leverage to continue to grow the company as compared to our peers right at this period of time. You've heard from Jackie already about growth, but I'll emphasize it again. Gold Royalty does have a market-leading organic growth profile. To show this another way from what Jackie had shown previously, we just simply benchmark the average of broker revenue estimates for the small-cap peer set from 2026 to 2028 and looked at the compound annual growth rate.
Gold Royalty is once again at or near the top, and this is over a three-year period. If there were more reliable estimates five years out, I know it's more tricky to do that, we put out five-year guidance, and you saw that graph that shows how strong our growth is over a five-year period. I'm very confident that Gold Royalty would have an even higher CAGR and would be at the top of the peer set. That's certainly when we start to see assets such as Odyssey coming into the mix and contributing in a more meaningful way.
What this growth means from a financial perspective is the potential for even higher operating margins as operating costs are kept in check, which we've proven to be able to do the past number of quarters, even more cash and leverage available, or said another way, an even better financial performance in the future and an even stronger financial position. Finally, I'll just add another point, a unique advantage of Gold Royalty relative to some of the other peers in the universe, especially on the smaller end of the spectrum, is the strong market presence that we have. With seven research analysts covering Gold Royalty and approximately $10 million of shares traded every day on the New York Stock Exchange, there's a meaningful market for Gold Royalty and its investors.
In fact, it takes fewer days to turn our float than any of the other peers in the sector, and that includes the majors. One of the reasons why we listed on the New York Stock Exchange at IPO was to provide investors with a well-followed liquid royalty opportunity, and that's certainly what you have in Gold Royalty. Just to sum it up from a financial perspective, in Gold Royalty, investors are really getting a leader in many categories. We're a leader in margins, as I showed previously, balance sheet, our financial position is amongst the strongest of our peer set, top-line growth and really bottom-line growth, which most of our organic growth will fall through the bottom line without capital commitments, and trading liquidity.
With that, I'll conclude on the financial section and pass it back to Jackie.
I promise I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but before we wrap up the management portion of this session, I did want to highlight a few modeling notes to the analysts, the associates, and the investors who have joined us today. Just to talk about a few assets, we're going to talk about Borborema, REN, a little bit about Granite Creek, and then Tonopah West. To start with Borborema, operated by Aura Minerals. In our most recent survey of the seven analysts who cover us, we saw a fairly consistent trend. Many of you are forecasting declining production beginning in about 2029 and into 2030. We just wanted to highlight that the operator, Aura Minerals, did announce on February 26th that it has received the full permits to relocate a highway that crosses a portion of the ore body, the Borborema ore body.
Under the S-K 1300 rules, the receipt of that permit did allow Aura to increase the reserves at Borborema by about 82% or 1.5 million oz of gold. Our royalty covers the entire ore body, and that includes the new area unlocked by the highway relocation. The ore body at Borborema remains open along strike and down dip. Concurrent with the highway relocation work, Aura has committed to doubling the capacity of the Borborema plants to 4 million tons per year, and that capacity expansion is expected to approximately offset the step down of a portion of our royalty, which leaves production to us relatively flat between 2028 and that 2029 and 2030 period. Quickly on REN, as John has already mentioned and as we press released on Monday, and I just wanted to reiterate, we've acquired an additional royalty on REN, 0.1875% NSR.
That was $6.25 million , which brings our total royalty coverage to 1.6875% NSR and a 3.5% NPI. REN is the new ore deposit at Goldstrike Underground and is a key expansion project at Carlin, which is part of Nevada Gold Mines, as you all know. As of March 31st, according to Barrick, the project spend was about $193 million , and that includes $26 million spent in Q1 of the total estimated capital cost of $410 million-$470 million on 100% basis. REN will start production later this year, and it will reach its full production run rate sometime in 2027. However, REN does not start to pay us until the initial capital for the project is recovered. It's a low capital intensive project, as I mentioned, $410 million-$470 million. That's thanks to the fact that it's a satellite deposit around existing infrastructure.
Please keep in mind that there will be a delay before Gold Royalty sees revenue from the asset. A lot of the analysts are assuming production to us in 2027. That's probably too soon. 2028, 2029 is more realistic for Gold Royalty. Similarly with Granite Creek, we have a 10% NPI, and the operator, i-80, will recover the initial capital before our NPI royalty is paid. We assume that Granite Creek is a modest contributor to our 2030 guidance, but not significantly before that. In the meantime, i-80 is expected to continue development and optimization of the complex following the extensive recapitalization plan that was completed in Q1 2026. Tonopah West. We talked about Tonopah West a little bit earlier today. It's a great example of the power of our royalty generator model.
Jerry staked this claim in 2021, vended it to Blackrock Silver. Blackrock Silver, as you can see by this Gantt chart, is moving the project through permitting and then construction. It could be in production by about 2029 or 2030. We do assume a modest contribution from Tonopah West in our 2030 guidance. As John mentioned, there's not many of the analysts who have modeled Tonopah West yet, but it is, in our view, upside to those consensus estimates. Finally, one other housekeeping item before we move into the next Q&A session. Historically, Gold Royalty has pre-released the revenue results ahead of earnings by a few weeks normally. As we've grown larger, the timing of the information that we receive from some of our newer royalties and our newer operating partners means that it's now challenging for us to provide that information meaningfully before financial results.
As a result, beginning with the second quarter of this year, we've decided to discontinue the practice of pre-releasing our revenue results, effective in August. Our full financial results will be released Wednesday, August the 5th, after market close, and we'll have a conference call on Thursday, August the 6th. There will not be a revenue pre-release this quarter, and for the future quarters until you hear otherwise from us. Nothing to read into that, except we want to make sure we're providing you with the highest quality information as we have it. Please reach out if you have any questions on that.
With that, we will move to Q&A if there are any questions on Andrew's presentation or anything you've heard so far today. Again, if you have any questions online, please feel free to type them into the text box.
Thanks. Can you talk a little bit about Vareš under DPM? I know that there was a little bit of an operational reset under the new operator, and I'm just wondering if you guys have any insights on the current pace of that.
DPM's going to be presenting after the break. Maybe a question to ask them.
Perfect.
I know we've been really happy with DPM's results so far, and we've seen them consistently over-deliver to what they've guided us. In our view, they've done a terrific job. I don't know if anybody else has anything to add, but definitely they'll address that, I'm sure. Okay. We'll take another quick break. I'm assuming there's nothing online. We'll take another quick break. Maybe we'll come back here around 11:00 A.M. If that works for everybody, 11:00 A.M. Eastern Time. Thank you.
[Break]
We're very, very pleased to have three of our operating partners present today, and I'm going to echo what Dave said earlier. Thank you guys for taking time out of your schedules to come and present at our Investor Day. Our first presenter I think will be very interesting for everyone, Lucas Loureiro. He's now COO at CoreX. CoreX is not a company that's probably as well known to many of you as some of the publicly traded companies. It's a real privilege to have Lucas come and tell us a little bit about CoreX and then, of course, to tell us a little bit about Pedra Branca. Thanks, Lucas.
Thank you, Jackie. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the Gold Royalty team for having us here today in their Investor Day. Congratulations, Dave, and the entire team for celebrating five years. It has been a tremendous journey. I'm sure you guys are going to achieve much more to come. I'm Lucas Loureiro, Chief Operating Officer for the Americas for CoreX Metals & Mining. Shortly after the announcement of our acquisition of the Carajás copper portfolio, Gold Royalty also announced the acquisition of the Pedra Branca Royalty. They happened to close first. Perhaps this is a testament of the efficiency of the royalty model. We do appreciate the vote of confidence that that transaction, the acquisition of the Pedra Branca Royalty shows, both in the asset, in us as the operator, but also of the geological potential of the region.
Over the next few minutes, I will share some insights about who we are, the asset we now run, and our plans to grow it. Thank you. I'll let the notice speak for itself, but one important thing to notice upfront is for investment purpose analysis, you shouldn't rely on information being disclosed by Gold Royalty. We are a private company, and the information being presented here should be taken only directionally. Who is CoreX? As I mentioned, we're a private company, a global industrial group, dual headquarter in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Istanbul, Turkey. We operate in 25 countries. Roughly 10,000 people work very hard to ensure the track record that we have showed, and we boast today over $2 billion in revenue.
What matter most in this room is not only those numbers, is the fact that we are a long-term owner/operator with expertise and access to capital to continue growing. We're not new to this. Our founder, Robert Yildirim, has spent about 35 years building metal supports and chemicals at Yildirim Group, whose roots date back to the 1960s. He has established CoreX in 2024 to carry that platform forward. You can see the pace accelerating in the timeline. In 2024, we did the CMB, a nickel DSO mine acquisition in Ivory Coast, Cerro Matoso, a ferro nickel operation in Colombia, and of course, Carajás in Brazil. Mining is at our core. Our goal is to be a top 100 global miner within five years.
To date, in our platform, there are four key businesses. Yilport is a top 12 global container terminal operator in the world with 22 terminals across 12 countries, mainly Latin America and Europe. We hold a 12% strategic stake in CMA CGM, the world's number three container liner and logistics company. In chemicals, we're number one U.S. chrome chemical producer, and we're building 0.5 million ton soda ash plant in Kazakhstan. The point of all this diversification is simple. It gives us scale, real cash flow, and deep operating know-how to put behind assets like Pedra Branca. In mining, we not only operate, process, develop, we also create value in logistics and trading as well. Let me bring you back to the Americas, where we have most recently put capital to work. What we're good at is running mines and processing plants at scale. We buy undervalued complex assets, often counter-cyclically, and we improve them.
We have a disciplined approach to capital deployment. You can see in our two most recent moves, we acquired Cerro Matoso, which was at one point the largest single-site nickel producer in the world. We integrate the operation at the end of December. It's doing quite well. We have been able to change the metallurgical process to improve the product quality. We have lower cash costs, and we have been able to increase production despite declining grades. In April 2026, we closed the acquisition of Carajás' copper business from BHP, now operating as CoreX Copper Brazil. In each case, the operations, the team, the contracts, licenses, all carry forward without interruption. To the ground itself. Carajás is a highly prospective copper gold province, and if I may say, underdeveloped. In our position there is district scale. We have roughly 35 tenants and more than 65 exploration targets.
The way we run it will keep it low cost and capital efficient. One central plant per hub, processing ore for many deposits. We have Antas Hub operating in the east. Over time, there's potential for a second hub in the west underpinned by Pantera. We sit right next to Vale infrastructure. The rail line to Ponta da Madeira port is nearby. That's a world-class logistics that we don't have to build ourselves. Our royalty is, as you guys know, it was discussed before, Gold Royalty holds a 25% NSR on gold and 2% on copper for both Pedra Branca East and West. Both of those deposits sit at the heart of our investment plans. This table is how we show the resources reserves and how we're going to sequence growth. We are producing today at Pedra Branca East.
We have a high-grade satellite deposit in Santa Lucia that's shovel-ready, fully engineered, ready to start construction in 2027. We have Pedra Branca West in pre-feasibility stage. It's the largest resource in our east hub. Behind them sit Pantera, Grota Rica, Carajás, and dozens more targets. One caveat for the room with analysts. Those contained metal figures are our estimates. They're not JORC or NI 43-101 compliant, and they may differ from previously published disclosures. We're actually going over exploration program to both expand on Pedra Branca, and we may have, for internal uses, an updated MRE by middle 2027. Talking a little bit about the core, the reason why we're here talking is Pedra Branca East and Pedra Branca West. Pedra Branca East is establishing the ground copper-gold mine. First began production in 2020, achieved full production in 2022, and fed existing plant in Antas.
It produced about 9,400 tons of copper in the year prior to June 25, which is under a previous ownership. Our plan here is straightforward, we want to de-bottleneck the producing core this year and grow output next year. We are implementing several initiatives in terms of increasing mine fleet availability, creating strategic stockpiles so we can focus on processing also high-grade ore. The ore body is still open at depth and along the strike, so there is room to extend it via the exploration plan that I just mentioned. Beyond the core, there are three strategic or three clear moves that we will pursue. First, we want to build Santa Lucia, which is a very high-grade deposit with over 2.4% copper, and it is already permitted and engineered. We plan to start construction around 2025 with production in 2028.
Concurrently, we will expand the Antas processing plant from 0.8 million tons of throughput to about 2 million tons a year to take that new feed. Third, we look forward to advance Pedra Branca with potential first production in 2032. The ground your royalty covers is not static. Pedra Branca is the core we intend to grow. Pedra Branca East is the core we intend to grow. Pedra Branca West is the real pipeline project, not just a dot in the map. We are also very focused in our responsibility as an operator, not only in Pará but across the world. This is important because for a royalty such as a long life mine royalty, it is very important that we maintain our social license to operate. In Carajás, we are continuing the practice already established by OZ Minerals and BHP. Around 95% of our tailings water is reutilized.
The depleted Antas pit is being repurposed as an engineered tailings facility. Particularly for Brazil, given some incidents in the past, how to manage the tailings facility is very important. We also have long-running community programs across a host of municipalities in Pará. As a corporate side, all this sits within the group framework. We have a net zero emission target by 2050. We report within the EU's framework of CSRD, and we have a very active Chief ESG Officer that is directly engaged in supporting our operations. Responsible operation is what will ensure us to remain both in Brazil and Colombia and throughout our other operations operating for many years to come. What all that means to you? Three things. One, continuity. The operation and its license, the team, are carrying on day-to-day operations. No disruptions there.
Capital. We have access. We intend to invest and grow as a long-term owner. We are not here just to flip the asset quickly. There is a clear plan on growing production, focus on first de-bottlenecking Pedra Branca East, bringing Santa Lucia into production, and advancing the development of Pedra Branca West. For the ground, I think that adds up to long, durable production of both Pedra Branca East and West.
With that, thank you, and I am happy to take any questions or wait until the Q&A break.
No, we can do questions now for Lucas. All right, thank you very much, Lucas. That was great. Does anybody in the room have questions?
Just given the expansion that you're undergoing here, is there a scenario where maybe this royalty is not paying in an interim period if you decide to focus on the Santa Lucia? Just given that it's higher grade, do you prioritize that ore over Pedra Branca East and there's a gap where the royalty's not paying?
No, the way we're developing the project is, I show in the slide, just from memory, it's about 5.3 million tons of reserves from Santa Lucia. We have to size the mining operation as well, and we're not sizing to produce 2 million tons a year. That is a natural bottleneck, and the way we view, too, is we cannot turn off Pedra Branca for several years and then start producing. Our plan is run both operations concurrently and focus on blending. We expect Pedra Branca East, we will be producing about 800,000 tons. In other words, the existing line will take Pedra Branca East production, and then the additional line will take Santa Lucia ore.
I'm not seeing anything online, I will revert if something comes through.
Sure.
Thank you very much, Lucas.
Thank you.
Our next speaker today, we're going to have Steve Tartaglia. He's the Director of Corporate Development for DPM, Dundee Precious Metals, as it was formerly known. The only stream in our portfolio is the copper stream on Vareš, and we're thrilled to see what DPM's done with Vareš so far and the improvements that DPM's made and, I'm sure Steve will tell you, are continuing to make going forward. Thank you very much, Steve. Welcome.
Okay, great. Thanks very much for having me and giving me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about DPM Metals and our Vareš project specifically in Bosnia. Before we begin here, we may be making some forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on said statements. Perfect. For an overview on DPM Metals, DPM is primarily a European-based precious metals producer. We operate a portfolio of assets in Eastern Europe. Our flagship asset has been the Chelopech Gold Mine in Bulgaria. The Chelopech Mine has produced approximately 200,000 gold equivalent ounces over roughly the last two decades. It's been the backbone of the company for the last two decades, and you would think that an asset that's been producing at that level for so long might be a little bit long in the tooth.
Actually, I believe Chelopech's best days are ahead of it, and I'll get to a little bit more about that in the future. We also operate the Ada Tepe Gold Mine in Bulgaria. This is an open pit mine that's actually nearing the end of its mine life. We'll begin remediation activities on Ada Tepe towards the end of this year. The third producing asset in our portfolio, and probably most of interest, is the Vareš Silver Mine in Bosnia. We closed the acquisition of Vareš in September of 2025. 2026 is very much a transition year for the Vareš Silver Mine, whereby we'll be ramping up to design throughput of 850,000 tons per annum. In addition to our producing assets, we also have a high-quality development pipeline. The kind of jewel in our crown there is the Čoka Rakita Gold project in Serbia.
Čoka Rakita was an organic discovery that we made in 2023. We advanced it through to feasibility stage in 2025, and we're excited to move that forward through to construction in 2027 with first gold poured towards the end of 2028, early 2029. In addition to our development pipeline, we also have a peer-leading exploration portfolio. The team at DPM has made four major discoveries since 2023, all of which are located within close proximity to our existing assets. The first major discovery was Čoka Rakita, which I've already talked about. It's a feasibility stage project with about 1.5 million oz at 6.4 g per ton, so a very high return, high margin project in our portfolio. The next major discovery was made in mid-2025. We call this asset Dumitru Potok . It's located within the Čoka Rakita Gold Camp. We discovered that, as I said, in mid-2025.
We advanced to a maiden mineral resource in December of 2025. That resource was just under 5 million gold equivalent ounces. We're currently undergoing an intensive drill program at Dumitru Potok in the Čoka Rakita Gold Camp throughout this year. We expect this camp to meaningfully grow in terms of the size and scale of the resource. As a company, we see a real potential here within this camp to achieve what I would call a Tier 1 status being, depending on how you define that, but loosely call it 0.5 million gold equivalent ounces over 10 years. We're very excited about what we're finding in the Čoka Rakita Camp. The third major discovery we announced last year, it was a brownfields discovery within our Chelopech Mine concession in Bulgaria. We call this one the Wedge Zone.
There's two aspects of this discovery that are quite exciting to us. One is the proximity of the discovery to the existing workings at the Chelopech Mine. The second is the grades we're seeing. Right now, the grades at the Wedge Zone are approximately 3x the reserve grade at Chelopech. Not only do we see an opportunity to have the Wedge Zone contribute meaningfully to mine life extensions at Chelopech, but we also see the potential for incremental production as that higher-grade material feeds into the mill. The fourth major discovery, and perhaps the most exciting, is what we call the Brevene South Porphyry. This discovery is adjacent to the Chelopech Mine on a license called Brevene. Excuse me.
We announced this discovery in the first week of June, that discovery drill hole was about 713 m at 2.5 g per ton. It is, in fact, still turning in mineralization. Currently, I think we're making about 100 m roughly of progress per week on that drill hole. I've been informed that from visual inspection, not only are we in mineralization, but it's increasingly intensive mineralization, which has myself and the team very excited. I don't think I've seen a drill hole like this in my entire career, and I probably won't be a part of one ever again. In terms of what that means for the company, it's still very early days, but if you plug a drill hole like that into your favorite AI agent and tell me what it says, that's the reason why we're quite excited about it.
Between Čoka Rakita , and our development pipeline and our exploration portfolio, we'll be relying on these to drive the next phase of growth within the company, and we're well-positioned to deliver that growth through organic cash flows from our existing assets, as well as the $575 million that we have on our balance sheet. Turning towards Vareš specifically. The Vareš Mine is an underground mine, with an off-site processing facility and a prospective 4,400-acre land package. It's located about 50 km north of Sarajevo, which is the capital of Bosnia. It achieved first concentrate production in 2024 under the previous owner, and since then has been ramping up to full capacity. It produces two saleable concentrates, a silver-zinc concentrate, as well as a lead-silver-gold concentrate.
The thing that attracted us to Vareš, in terms of why we wanted to acquire that asset, was the logical fit that it made within our existing portfolio. Not only is it an underground mine, it's precious metals dominant, it's located within our region, and it's at a scale and produces final products that are within our line of expertise. It was a natural fit within our portfolio, and we're very excited to have been able to acquire that last year. I mentioned earlier that Vareš is in a bit of a transition period. When we acquired the asset, they were struggling to reach nameplate throughput at design criteria. What we did is we took some time to pause a bit at some of those activities in 2025 to reconfigure the asset to reliably deliver 850,000 tons per annum.
With that, the integration and ramp-up activities at Vareš continue to progress very well. Mine production restarted in January of this year as planned, and we produced approximately 29,000 Gold Equivalent Ounces during the first quarter at an all-in sustaining cost of $890 per Gold Equivalent Ounce sold. Development rates underground have accelerated to plan and are consistently achieving 300 m to 400 m per month. Last week, I believe we actually achieved 450 m per month, everything is progressing as planned. I'm told that we're less than 100 m away from the main decline reaching the bottom of the ore body. The reason why that's significant for us is because it's going to allow us to start opening up secondary stopes. With those secondary stopes, it'll allow us to increase our operational flexibility into the second half of the year.
As I mentioned, with the asset being in a transitionary period in 2026, there's a number of projects progressing on-site. The first I'll mention is the construction of the paste and backfill plant. It's progressing well and expected to be operational in Q4 of this year. The second item I'll mention is the aforementioned Q2 plant shutdown. You may remember on our Q1 call, we talked about a temporary shut at the mill to integrate the second tailings filter press. That activity has been completed, and the filter press has been successfully tied in. The filter press won't actually be operational towards the end of this year, but it will not require any future mill shutdowns. Due to the shutdown in Q2, we're expecting production to be similar or slightly below Q1. Sorry.
Q2 production will be similar or slightly below Q1, but it'll position us very well in H2 as we start to ramp and be able to hit that nameplate throughput of 850,000 tons per annum. Throughout the H2, we'll see a steady ramp from this point forward as we progress up towards 850,000 tons. Okay. One of the reasons why I spent a little extra time talking about our exploration success, even though it's not specific to Vareš, is because of the implications that we think it has for Vareš and that land package. The same team that's been highly successful with four major discoveries since 2023 has had a chance to dig through and digest the historical exploration data at Vareš, and they're very excited about what they see within that land package. In a way, I'll segment that exploration potential as maybe in three main areas.
The first is what I'll call in-mine, there's significant potential to add additional resources towards the periphery of the ore body. Adding additional resources from the peripheries, converting resources into reserves, this isn't going to, I would say, move the needle in terms of scaling up the potential value there in a meaningful way, but it's highly value generative incremental ounces that we can quickly integrate into the mine plan. The second main area is what I'll call near-mine, although if you look at the deposit geometry, it's almost in-mine, and that specifically relates to what we call Rupice Northwest . If you look at the deposit geometry, there's a main area called Rupice Main, then down dip and slightly Northwest towards the Kakanj license boundary is what we call Rupice Northwest. That portion of the deposit is artificially constrained by the license boundary.
What you'll see is the Rupice Northwest portion of the deposit is actually higher grade and with greater widths, but it comes to an abrupt end at the license boundary. The previous owner was not able to obtain permission to extend the drilling there, but we've been very active with our efforts in progressing that. One of the initiatives in order to be able to drill there is obviously to develop over to that portion of the ore body, and we expect that we'll have completed that development in Q3. That would release the final technical constraint on being able to do the drilling. The last bit that is required is permission from Kakanj specifically, and I'll talk a little bit about that when I talk about stakeholder engagement.
The third major area of prospectivity across the Vareš land package has to do with what we're seeing in that 22 km corridor. The Rupice deposit sits within the prospective deformation belt, hosting several barite and massive sulfide occurrences over a 22 km corridor, all of which are in close proximity to Vareš infrastructure and the operating facilities. If you ever looked at a Google Map or top-down view of the map, you can see a number of historic pits where they've really just scratched the surface. Our team is very excited about the prospectivity along the entire 22 km corridor. We've budgeted about $10 million-$11 million for exploration activities at Vareš. We have two to three drill rigs mobilizing, and we expect them to be in a position to start drilling in Q3.
To elaborate a little bit more on the stakeholder engagement front, since taking over Vareš, our focus has very much been on engaging with stakeholders and to build trust and introduce DPM to the local communities. We've built on that strong foundation that was set out by the previous owners, so far our engagement has been well received by the surrounding communities. We've also extended our presence in the surrounding facilities by opening an information center in Kakanj. Just to remind you, Kakanj is that municipality that borders on the Rupice Northwest deposit. We believe this has been very helpful to help facilitate transparent two-way engagement and communication with that community. We're also in a very unique position in that we're able to leverage our proximity to our existing operations.
Due to the proximity of Bozhurishte, our existing operations in Bulgaria, we've been able to host about over 100 members of the surrounding community at Vareš to our Bulgarian operations on a series of site visits to both Chelopech and Ada Tepe, which provided them an opportunity to see firsthand the way DPM operates, the benefits that our operations bring to local communities, and the high environmental standards and performance that DPM maintains. On these visits, not only do they get to see the operations, but they're allowed to speak to mayors, various community officials in Bulgaria, so they can get a firsthand view as to what their experience has been like partnering with DPM and the values we bring to the community. In summary, it's a very active year at Vareš this year.
We're highly confident that we're going to be able to deliver the nameplate throughput of 850,000 tons per annum by Q4, and we're excited about the contribution that Vareš will make to DPM's portfolio going forward. With that, if there's any questions, I'm happy to take them.
Thank you very much. I'm not as familiar with the project, but perhaps you can just provide some context or some insights. When you were looking at this project, what gave you confidence that you'd be able to turn it around or provide value, or surface value?
Yeah, excellent question. When we looked at what was going on at the operation prior to us taking over, there were a number of things that we identified that were inconsistent with our existing operations that we would do differently. I think a lot of those came from the previous owner being capital constrained. They weren't able to invest the capital to achieve an operation that would produce the level of consistency that we wanted. One of those was, they were mining from a top-down approach, which was providing them with a number of issues that would be remedied if they were to go from a bottoms-up approach. Immediately, we slowed operations progressed on developing the decline to the bottom of the deposit so we could switch into a bottoms-up approach.
That was on the mining front, and that was essentially their biggest issue. The other was a number of infrastructure upgrades. We mentioned the pace and backfill plant, so by getting that pace backfill plant into production, it's going to allow us to open up the primary and secondary stopes with a level of consistency that can deliver that throughput without the issues that they've been having in the past. Sorry.
Does that help answer your question?
No, that's perfect. Thank you.
Yeah.
Sorry, I thought you were done. Speaking of the paste backfill plant, how much did it cost? Just to confirm, you said you don't need another plant shutdown, but everything is on-site. There is no issues with getting anything into the country at this point, right?
No, we've had no issues bringing the required infrastructure into the country and equipment. Everything is on-site. I don't have the numbers specifically for the paste and backfill plant, but we did announce an incremental amount of capital for this year. Not only for the paste backfill plant, the water facility, but also advancing a number of the planned capital that was supposed to take place over the life of mine. We're bringing that forward so we can achieve higher production earlier in the mine plan.
Completely different questions. I'm not that familiar with that part of the world and operations there. Can you walk me through your governmental relations and how all that is going? I mean, it seems like community relations are going quite well, but just governmental, please.
Yeah. I haven't been party to a number of the discussions at site, essentially, the way the whole permitting regime works is very similar to surrounding areas. All those areas were part of the former Yugoslavia, all of their mining code descended from that common base. You'll see a lot of similarities with Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina. They're not as modern or as advanced as some of those areas, which we think is an opportunity for us to help influence the way some of the permitting and relations work, by bringing it up to sort of modern standards. Not just what we see in Bulgaria and the region, but also globally.
To do that, we've had a very good dialogue with the surrounding communities and with the government, in terms of what we think should happen, we have an ability to influence that process. That's still an ongoing process. You still need to have good relationships with the surrounding communities. We're making progress on that front. We're very excited about the potential to work with the communities and the government to advance the project in the future.
I'm going to ask you a question, Steve.
Sure.
If you don't mind. Sorry to put you on the spot. I know under the previous owner, Adriatic, there was an expansion plan. Going from 800,000 tons per year to 1.1 million to 1.3 million tons per year. I know DPM is talking about 850,000 tons per year. Can you talk a little bit about how you're maybe seeing expansion? What your view is maybe differing from Adriatic or maybe if you see that opportunity in the future, and I know that would be sort of long-term outside of your guidance, but anything that you see that's opportunity?
Yeah, that's a great question. We looked at those expansion cases as part of our due diligence, as well as evaluating what we could do with the asset, going forward when we took it over. I think our view right now is that our primary goal is to achieve the 850,000 tons per annum and a level of consistency that can deliver that before we would look at any kind of an expansion. Through some of the studies we've done internally, we actually think there is an ability to increase production without necessarily expanding the mill. We would probably see ourselves doing something like that, whether it's with some kind of ore sorting or other ways of optimizing the throughput of the mill before we would undergo any major expansion to 1.1 million or 1.3 million tons per annum.
We see there being a number of opportunities to increase production prior to any kind of major mill expansion. Those are sort of like you said, a little bit more mid-term dated. Great. Thank you so much.
All right, we have one final speaker left in our presentation today before we wrap up. We're very pleased to welcome Jason Simpson. He's the CEO of Orla Mining. As David mentioned earlier, Orla Mining is going through a bit of a transition now. There's a proposed merger with Equinox coming up. I know Jason will talk about that. We are very excited. South Railroad is one of the growth projects that we highlighted earlier. Hopefully, the combined Equinox Orla will continue to see that as a major priority. It certainly is for us, represents some exciting growth over the next five years. Jason, thanks very much for coming. [crosstalk]
Hey, everyone. Start with a thank you, Jackie, for the invitation, and also appreciate all the conversations and guidance you've given to a young aspiring banker, also known as my son. I really appreciate that. David and team, thanks for hosting. Congratulations on five years. To confirm, yes, South Railroad is an important part of the go-forward company, and I'll focus my remarks on that today. Before we get into South Railroad, you'll expect I'm going to be talking about a mine I haven't built yet and talking about a company I haven't merged with yet. Lots of forward-looking statements, so you guys will reference that cautionary language and make sure you're aware of the risks.
I'll just start very quickly about the combination with Equinox, and then I'll drive right into the specifics around South Railroad. The shareholder vote will be on July 22nd. The combined leadership team met this week here in Toronto. We're full steam ahead with the combination. Tremendously excited about the company that we're creating. Out of the gate, 1.1 million oz producer growing towards 2 million oz. Part of that growth is what we're going to talk about today, South Railroad. Importantly also, we are retaining our sort of geographic exposure in four countries, Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and now Nicaragua with the combination with Equinox. The platform, of course, has three producing Canadian mines. As my partner and I like to describe, two of them are ramping up in Valentine and Greenstone, and one that's been sort of rebirthed and recapitalized and is growing in production as well. That's a tremendously strong platform.
Really a lot of our growth is part of what we're going to talk about today in the United States, starting with South Railroad and then progressing to Castle Mountain. A big part of that 800,000 oz that you can see there as the growth pipeline is based in the U.S. I won't spend time on it today, but of course, we have growth opportunities in Mexico and Nicaragua as well. One of the things I will reference about Mexico, I know David spoke to it at the beginning, the similarity between Camino Rojo and South Railroad cannot be mistaken. Another open pit heap leach. Camino Rojo Oxides really was a beachhead for Orla and the genesis of the company, of course, which has led to the ability of us to combine with Equinox.
South Railroad, very similarly, also an open pit heap leach, and also seen as a beachhead into Nevada. Why is Nevada important? We heard some great remarks about some of the royalty work that Gold Royalty is doing with the geneses of the projects that they have there. Clearly, in Nevada with our founding shareholder, Pierre Lassonde's interest in Goldstrike, our Chairman's interest in Glamis back in the day, and the management team's time there, Nevada was seen as a great jurisdiction. That applies to all four nations, but we'll spend most of our time talking about today. In addition to the producing assets, of course, we have tremendous reserves and resources that'll represent opportunities of further growth outside of that 800,000 oz. A pretty compelling company that I'm proud to be a part of going forward.
Let's talk about the growth. It is represented by multiple projects, but you'll notice on the second line there, South Railroad. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to double the production scale in Newfoundland in terms of ton throughput to 5 million tons. From our perspective as well as Equinox's, probably what should have been the first mine built there, but we'll go ahead and expand it now. That'll be the first piece of work. It's underway now. We're going to talk about the second project, which is South Railroad. I won't get into Castle Mountain, but it's another open pit heap leach across the border in California. Well-capitalized to deliver it. We're going to talk about a modest capital sum of just under $400 million with South Railroad at $395 million. This is consensus numbers, by the way.
The consensus numbers show us producing in the timeframe there out to 2030, about $10 billion. $2 billion of those will be in the growth. We're very comfortably capitalized to build certainly South Railroad and things much bigger. Let's focus on South Railroad and our conversation going forward and what we're doing there and how far we've gotten. Similar to Castle Mountain, South Railroad is a covered project on the FAST-41 process. For those of you who don't know what that means, it gives you the benefit of a representative at the Department of the Interior. It gives you oversight from the federal government on the schedule. It gives you transparency via their public website of when the record of decision date is.
Helpful is their influence in the various cooperating agencies required to deliver a permit in the United States and their intensity and vigorous pursuit of holding schedules. That's been tremendously helpful for us. That's important because it enables us to follow our model that we followed at Camino Rojo, which is to begin spending money on the project before we have the permit. We're only willing to put that investment at risk if we're confident that we're going to be able to receive the permit. We did that at Camino Rojo, and that's why we were able to construct it in 14 months, because we did a lot of the work ahead of time. We bought everything ahead of time. Everything was on site before we were on site, effectively. That's what enabled that.
You can only do that if you're confident in the permitting and under a FAST-41 process. We're confident. I've referenced these other projects, which I'm happy to talk about outside of the room. Let's focus on South Railroad. It's ready to go, it won't take long to get to production. These open-pit heap leaches have many benefits, that is certainly one of them. As I mentioned, with the line of sight to permitting expected in the beginning of the second half of this year, we could begin work on execution plans, engineering, and going further into procurement and contract signing. A number of things I'll reference. We've already purchased the energy solution, LNG energy solution. We've already purchased the crushers. We've already signed the major earthworks contracts.
David and team, you can be confident we are building this thing, so that Gold Royalty and other stakeholders can benefit. We have had many site visits with the various contractors, have all of our execution plans in place, are ramping up. What does the project look like? I describe it as a beachhead into Nevada. An oxide heap leach project has tremendous attributes. Mine life is not always one of them. What it does do is produce tremendous cash and enables us to do other things. Camino Rojo enabled us to build Orla, allowed us to acquire this asset in 2022, acquire the land package, which I'm going to talk about further on in the presentation, that gives us the opportunity and that optionality, as Pierre likes to talk about, for discovering more gold.
Of course, we have discovered plenty of gold since the acquisition in 2022. We'll talk about that. The headline numbers, a decade, 130,000 ounces for the first five years at very humble all-in costs that you'd expect from an open-pit heap leach. Greater stripping than Camino Rojo, certainly, but still a very profitable mine. Importantly, what I'll refer to in the second half of the presentation is the expansion possibilities, not only of the heap leach that's on the screen now, but also of course, sulfide and other opportunities on our 30 km land package. Here's where it is. Everybody will recognize those big mines in the North Carlin. We're on the South Carlin on a tremendously large land package. They're a 25,000-hectare land package with the project that we're referring to smack dab in the middle of that land package.
We have discovered gold to the north of the existing construction project to the south of the construction project. No surprise to Pierre, Chuck, and all of us that have spent time in Nevada that there's lots more gold in Nevada. This first project, a beachhead, will give us infrastructure, management team that's focused in on-site, allow us to work off of brownfield site and grow the district. I should go back one here and just talk about the road. Everybody, we'll be based out of Elko. Why is that important? Back in the 1990s when I was in Nevada, most of the stuff was over on the Winnemucca side, tax-paying into those counties. This will be one of the first producing mine that'll contribute to the Elko County.
Important from a stakeholder conversation perspective that will provide tax base for that county as well as in Nevada, one of the challenges you have is human capital. The ability to attract people that can drive home to Elko is certainly going to work in our favor rather than getting on a bus and heading over to the Winnemucca side of the trend. Predictably, open-pit heap leach has very robust project fundamentals at any gold price you'd like to consider. Certainly at the ones that we considered, it generates a lot of cash. The life of mine, I'll show you the standard graph, high production in the first five years, lower in the last five, backfield, of course, by exploration that I'm going to reference, but the life of mine is just over 100,000 oz.
One of the questions that Darren and I often get is about, interesting, we haven't even merged yet, but we're already being asked questions about divestitures, and we have a very clear answer about that, and it relates to this project or any others in Mexico or Nicaragua. We have no interest in divestitures at this point. The combination of all the assets, including this one, is what contributes to our out-of-the-gate +1 million oz production profile, and if we're going to grow to 2 million oz, we need all of these contributions, including this one. Of course, as we conclude the transaction and move into our planning stage, we will continue to be active in the space, and as companies come in and want to offer lots of money, I parrot my partner, Darren.
He says, "We love all of our children, but they're all for sale at the right price." I'm not going to commit to every project in our portfolio remaining. Obviously, the shareholders need to be considered in that conversation, and we certainly will. We're actively building Nevada and intend to grow Nevada. Nevada, like Canada, like Mexico, and like Nicaragua, all represent jurisdictions we want to be in and we want to grow in, not shrink in. We do not subscribe to the model of selling our way to success. Pick a gold price. It's had a bit of a pullback recently, but certainly in between those two numbers, $4,000 gold, very robust economics. These open-pit heap leaches are not a challenge from that front.
Here's the life of mine that I described, and as a mining engineer, I can tell you, our job as now mining executives is to backfill the back end of that. You do that through the drill bit, a very comfortable 130,000 oz a year would have been the second largest operation for Orla. It will be a different part of the portfolio for the combined Equinox, but still an important contributor, and our view is that we can grow the production profile in Nevada. We're sizing equipment to achieve that, and we intend to roll in some of the already discovered gold ounces that aren't part of this project. Why?
When you're within a permitting process, particularly in the U.S., it's unhelpful to re-engineer the operation and the mine halfway through a permitting process, or you just have to reinitiate, which is certainly not what you want to do. Get the mine up and running, this is what I would describe as the phase I mine, then you can start expanding the size and contributors to the mine, and I'll talk about that. Certainly backfilling the back end of the production profile, we already have clear line of sight to that. What are we doing, and where are we on the roadmap? As I mentioned, and visible on the federal website if you're interested, we have an August 8th record of decision, and we're getting prepared for that.
We hired the EPCM in 2024, M3, same company that built Torex for me, same company that built Camino Rojo for me, is going to build this one for me. Interestingly, is also the engineer for Castle. A very familiar crew, so we're working with people we know. They have been busy engineering. We're approaching 50% detailed engineered now, and we have already, as I mentioned, secured the packages for big things like earthworks, crushers, and energy solution, and so on. We're now into the part of the process where we're ramping up the operator team, as well as preparing for construction and takeover. Anticipate that we'll be ending construction at the end of 2027, ideally first gold in the early part of 2028. How are we developing it? I talked a bit about the permitting. The NEPA process is certainly one part of it.
There are other state permits, as you would expect, and different things that we need to feather into the process as well. Like any construction project that I've been through, we'll start on the road this year, or this quarter I should say, and work our way in, and then once we're on site, we'll work where we can and permitted to as we continue to expand. All of the risks, some of the changes between the project we acquired and the project that we just announced, the completely updated feasibility study on Q1 of this year, is large enhancements from an environmental perspective. How we're handling the water, and the pads, and so on, needed to be to our standards, and so we re-engineered all of that and made sure that we got a robust project that's not only environmentally sustainable but also expandable.
Okay. Strong stakeholder support, I already mentioned Elko, and the local communities, but we had almost unanimous positive support in the consultation process as required under the NEPA process. Of course, we have our own ESG framework under Orla, very similar to what is applied at Equinox will be applied here. I mentioned, advance the engineering. Further ahead, I would offer than most construction projects and part of our always model to build things, the procurement I've already mentioned. We've got our complete execution plans finalized now. The project team is on the ground currently, as we start that roadwork into site and working on critical path activities. Here's the interesting part. As I mentioned, a couple of different points. I said beachhead, I just talked about phase I. What are we really after in Nevada? This is what we're after.
This is a zoom-in of that 30 km land package. The projects in red are right in the middle of the graphic here. What we're really interested in is the predictable gold endowment that exists in the Carlin Trend, both north of the project and south of the project. Differentiated between oxides and sulfides, as you need to do. We focus most of our efforts on oxides, with the approach that we can get satellite pits or expansions of the existing pits to further contribute to the infrastructure that we're building right now. We have already discovered, I'll show you a few graphics of the potential to expand the pits. This is regardless of commodity price. Of course, the commodity price gives you a second lever that can also help expand the pits.
Absent commodity price, there's more gold surrounding Dark Star and Pinion, which we've already discovered, but did not change the pit size during the permitting process. We'll get the pits started and then submit for expansion of the existing pits. The second opportunity on the oxide front is satellite pits in places like Dixie, Pony, and other parts of the property that are truckable to the heap leach facility. They'll become a distance that's too far. What we'll do there is we'll set up paths down closer to those pits, bring them to the carbon stage, and get them back up to the processing facility. The second opportunity, more distal in time, would be, of course, sulfides. When we purchased the project in 2022, everybody knows about the North Bullion sulfide opportunity. Certainly there, we've expanded it. It represents a future stage of our Nevada platform.
Here's a zoom in on that package and some of the places that I talked about. Jasperoid Wash would be a representation of one of those satellite pits proximal to the existing project right there in the center. The most interesting and recent one is Firebox, which is visible from the existing infrastructure that we discovered last year and are following up on this year. That sulfide opportunity that I mentioned is in that North Bullion up towards the north. Anybody who knows the area knows the historic mines of Rain and Emigrant are just across our border on the north side. If you look, anybody who's familiar with the geologic pyramid, what this should signify to you is we have plenty of targets and opportunities in Nevada. We'll be there for a very long time.
Look forward to getting started there this year, we'll be there evolving these targets up through that triangle into production. This, I would offer, proves our thesis of acquiring the asset, which is there's a lot more gold around the Dark Star, Pinion area, and all of these targets represent that. We look forward to being in Nevada for a long time, starting with the South Railroad project . We are ready to go. I think even this slide is a bit dated. We're already on the ground, we're kind of already going. We look forward to making announcements throughout the construction phase, as we have on all previous projects. You go through this cycle of questions of when you going to get the permits to how's construction going. We'll go through those conversations.
Once you're completed construction, pour first gold, how's ramp-up going? We look forward to that. The cycle moves into have you found any more and how can you expand. We look forward to all those future questions. I'll pause now and see if anybody has any for me. We don't need that.
You're in an extremely well-known mining district, obviously. What are you seeing with labor costs, labor supply? It sounds like you got some competitive advantages in regards to travel time, there's also a lot of guys demanding a lot of workers out there.
Yeah. Labor costs are high, and it's highly competitive. The easiest answer is we can't pay anybody any less, so we're going to pay the same thing Nevada Gold Mines is paying. The things we're going to need to leverage to our advantage are, I used to say size of company. That's not as true anymore, there's some appetite to work for a smaller company. We would still, of course, be smaller. The Elko advantage and then just the cultural advantage would be the softer things that we can use to attract people. The hard things, like financial, we're going to pay the same thing Nevada Gold Mines is paying, and try and offer a different work experience for folks. The good news about Nevada is you can get the talent, the bad news is there's a lot of competition for talent.
In a place like Mexico, you can get the talent and it's available. That's tremendously helpful. In places like Nevada, you don't get that luxury, you'll either need to import it. For construction, M3 is going to bring in everybody they need, most of them from Arizona and Hermosillo, Mexico. That'll get us through the construction stage, and then it's contractor base, as any project is. That part isn't a problem. The part going forward, we also don't need as many people. We're not running a huge mega pit here. These are two small open pits and modest by any measurement. As we know, the heap leach and processing plant also doesn't take a lot of human capital.
I should know this, how many people are you employing right now?
It grows by the day. I think the last time I checked, not including contractors and EPCM, we're in the 40s. That's just the owner-operator team growing. We'll be several hundred once we turn it over to operations. That doesn't, of course, count anything that we're contracting. For those of you interested, it is seasonal for exploration in this project. We're just launching our exploration in Nevada this quarter. Although we've been able to give updates in Mexico, which is not seasonal, the updates for exploration in Nevada will come later this year because we're just getting started with the drills there now. Our geo and future geo with the combined company, Solange, just came back from site last week.
Thank you very much, Jason.
No problem.
I'm here to wrap things up. I want to thank our operating partners who came here to present today. Our assets are very important, but we're only as good as our operating partners, who are clearly very competent. We have an enviable portfolio of operating partners, all the biggest gold companies in the world, and the emerging biggest gold companies in the world as well. We're delighted that you were able to come and present today. I'd also like to thank all of our team. They all did a brilliant job presenting today, but behind them, there's a small merry band in Vancouver. We have a Toronto chapter here between Jackie and John.
I'm really, really proud of our team and what they've been able to accomplish over a short period of time. I'm really, really happy to have many of our investors here, either online or in person. Thank you for your support. It's been quite a journey over the last five years. We're just getting started. Thank you very much.