Good morning, everyone. Now presenting Travis Swallow with Idaho Strategic Resources.
Okay. Thank you guys all for being here today. My name's Travis. I work in investor relations, business development with Idaho Strategic Resources. I see some familiar faces in the crowd. My goal with this presentation is really just to give enough background for some of the new faces, but also provide enough new information for some of those of you who are more familiar with our story. Idaho Strategic Resources, we're based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. We operate the Golden Chest Mine in the northern portion of Idaho. The Golden Chest is our only operating asset. It's also the largest gold producer in the state of Idaho. We've got a number of gold exploration properties in northern Idaho as well. Those are consolidated in an area that we call the Murray Gold Belt. I'll talk about that.
In addition to the gold side of our business, we're the U.S.'s largest rare earth elements landholder. That's a side of this industry that we jumped into back in 2020, really right before, I'd say, the U.S. kind of knew it was hitting us with COVID. In addition to rare earth elements, we've got, by effect, the largest thorium resource in the United States. We'll get into that. That's our southernmost rare earth property called Lemhi Pass. It also serves as the United States' largest source of thorium. The quick overview of the company from a corporate perspective, we're listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We uplisted back in March of 2022. We've got just under 14 million shares outstanding. We're a profitable company. We made about $8.8 million in GAAP net income in 2024.
Our CEO is the largest shareholder, sitting at about 9% of the company. Our business plan, we sum it up in three words. It's production-backed exploration. This is a business plan that our CEO has been perfecting probably for the last 30 years, both in his head and in the public markets. It is a business plan that was born out of frustration for how the junior mining companies are typically ran, usually in Canada and Australia, and to a lesser extent in America. How we characterize our 2025 going forward is we're optimized for discovery. Part of this production-backed exploration business plan is to take the cash flow from the operating Golden Chest Mine, plow that back into discovery and exploration, both on the gold side of our company and on the rare earth elements side of our company.
In 2024, we drilled about 10,000 m. In 2025, our geologists have outlined 22,000 m of drilling. There is quite a big jump there. At the Golden Chest Mine proper, our operating project, we have about 15,500 m of drilling planned. In the broader Murray Gold Belt, about 4,500 m of drilling planned. This will be the real, we call, first test of the Murray Gold Belt. At Eastern Star, we are drilling this program as we speak. We have about 2,000 m there as well. On the rare earth elements side of the business, we are going to be doing some soil sampling and radiometrics. We have three projects down there: Mineral Hill, Diamond Creek, and Lemhi Pass. Mineral Hill, we are actually going to be working with a considerably larger company who has land to the north of us focused in rare earth elements.
We're going to be doing some radiometrics and some magnetics flights up there. Lemhi Pass is going to be widespread soil sampling and radiometrics. Also, in 2025, we're making some significant investments in our infrastructure. Those of you who follow our company have likely heard about the construction of paste backfill building. That building is complete. We're putting the equipment in the building as we speak. In the second half of 2025, we plan for paste backfill plant to be commissioned. On an annual basis, once that plant's in operation, we expect it to save $20 per ton of ore we process or mine, excuse me. That comes out to about an annual savings of $800,000 a year. It also makes the mine operate more efficiently. The second stage to this plan is to build what we call the Murray Mill.
Right now, ore from the Golden Chest Mine is trucked to the New Jersey Mill. It's about a 45-minute trucking distance. That costs us $12.50 per ton of ore to ship that from the mine to the mill. Our plan is to utilize paste backfill building, build a new mill within that same building, and wipe out that haulage cost. That's another $500,000 of annual savings at our current production rate. Our approach to ESG as a company, we sum up in three words called We Live Here. All of our employees are locals. We've got about 58 direct employees, another 171 indirect employees that we support through our operation. Our average annual wage is two times that of Shoshone County.
The biggest piece of this We Live Here philosophy is that in our industry, it's very common for miners to spend two-thirds of their life away from their family. Guys that live in the Silver Valley where we operate are being sent to Nevada, being sent to Alaska, where the majority of the mines are, to Arizona, where they spend 20 days on, 10 days off every month. These guys miss a lot of their kids' lives when they're growing up. By giving them an opportunity to work at a mine close to where they live, it's not only great from an environmental perspective, a safety perspective, because they don't want to screw that up, quite honestly.
It is also great for us because we can recruit some really skilled miners that way who are kind of tired of living that life on the road and want to be home with their families. We will look at the Golden Chest Mine. In 2024, we produced just under 12,000 ounces of gold. Average head grade at the mill was 9.67 grams per ton. That puts us in the upper echelon as far as grade is concerned with gold mines in the United States. It is a modern, vertically integrated operation. Like I said, we do control our own processing at the New Jersey Mill. We have plans to build a new mill on site as well. We control everything from the drilling to the development to the mining to the processing, all of it. It is also a modern mine in that it is a ramp mine.
You could basically drive. My dad always says you could drive our F-250 pickup right down to the face where the miners are working. This is uncommon in our area. A lot of the mines in our area are shaft mines. You are getting in an elevator. You are going down 1,000 feet before you could start working. The benefits of having a ramp mine is there is a big safety benefit, but there is also a benefit as you grow to the efficiency and the ability to scale with the ramps a lot easier. Like I said, we are going to drill about 15,000 m at the Golden Chest Mine proper that sits on about 220 acres. When I talk about the Golden Chest, I am talking about just that 220 acres.
We've got 7,300 acres in what we call the broader Murray Gold Belt with a number of exploration projects and occurrences there. Just drilling focused at the Golden Chest Mine has identified a number of new areas in 2024. We've got the Red Star Vein, the Jumbo Area, the Katie-Dora, the Paymaster Vein, and the I-Vein. I've just highlighted a few of the recent drill intercepts from 2024 on the slide. To give you context, we're mining the H-Vein. I didn't even put the H-Vein on the slide. We've got a number of areas just for expansion at the Golden Chest Proper, new veins that we're discovering every year. That's extremely exciting. When we look at the exploration potential of the Murray Gold Belt, I think this is a piece of our story that investors are still just starting to grasp.
We are hoping that in 2025, they can really grasp it fully because we are going to be drilling a lot of these occurrences. You can see in the bottom right-hand side of the slide, you can see the Golden Chest Mine proper. You can really kind of get an idea of the footprint of the mine. If you take that footprint of the mine, you can go and you can put that on the Buckskin Project that is on the page here too, or the King Mine, or the Gold Ridge, or the Big Ledge. Any one of these prospects could turn into a similar-sized Golden Chest Mine.
When we talk about production-backed exploration, this is really what we're looking to do is leverage the cash flow, the profits from the Golden Chest Mine to hopefully one day have three or four more operations in the Murray Gold Belt here. I've highlighted a few of our priority targets for 2025: the Argus, the Buckskin, the King Mine, and the West Argus. Argus is a prospect that we drilled in 2022, had good results. It's very similar so far geologically to the Golden Chest Mine in what we've seen. It's high grade, narrow vein, be an underground mine. That's extremely exciting. Buckskin, similar thing. We haven't drilled the Buckskin yet, but the surface trenching is very similar. The King Mine and the West Argus prospect both have historic workings on them. King Mine has 308 m of historic workings.
It produced about 10,000 ounces back in the late 1800s. They actually had a historic mill. It's gone now on site there processing ore from the King Mine. I think what you'd see if these projects were in another company is each one of these projects really could be a standalone company that some Canadian or Australian or, to a lesser extent, United States firm would go out and promote, raise money, drill. We saw an opportunity to consolidate this entire district that had largely been forgotten, kind of as an accident in history. We did. We consolidated that. Now we're going to systematically advance it as we can out of cash flow.
The second half of our business on the rare earth elements side, one of the things that has become a more recent part of our discussions on rare earth elements is there's been a lot of confusion caused by our U.S. government and the media between the term rare earth elements and critical minerals. Really just what I want to drive home here is rare earth elements and critical minerals are not synonymous terms. Rare earth elements are a subset of critical minerals. Critical minerals refer to 50 minerals broadly. Rare earth elements refer to just 17 of those. Things like lithium, cobalt, graphite, manganese, those are not rare earth elements. Those are critical minerals. Rare earth elements are your neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium. We'll get into that. There's been a lot of confusion.
I think somebody still needs to tell our president that rare earths and critical minerals are not the same thing. These are the industry dynamics of rare earth elements. I think a lot of people understand this now. China's got a monopoly on it. They control about 58% of the mining and 90% of the downstream separation, refining, and magnet production. With this new tariff war, China recently implemented 125% tariffs on U.S. imports of rare earth elements. The only producing rare earth element mine in the United States is Mountain Pass in California. China now charges them a 125% tariff to import that raw rare earth element concentrate to China for processing. Last week, MP Materials actually just announced that they are no longer shipping to China where they had been shipping 80% of their production until last week.
Mountain Pass is now in a situation where they need to rapidly increase their own investment in onshoring their refining and separating capability. On the demand side for rare earth elements, demand's projected to increase 4x from 220,000 tons to 880,000 tons by 2040. This chart here takes into account the growth from humanoid robots and eVTOL, basically drone taxis. When we initially got into this industry, we were looking at the demand for electric vehicles, for wind turbines, renewable energy, things on that side of the rare earth elements industry. What came to pass is a lot of the future demand they project is actually going to come from humanoid robots. That's due to every joint in a humanoid robot relies on rare earth elements to move. This chart takes into account 1 billion humanoid robots on the earth by 2040.
If you ask Elon Musk, he projects 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040. We will see where we will land there. Talking about our projects specifically, our three rare earth element projects that make up the largest rare earth element land package in the country are Mineral Hill in the north, Diamond Creek in the center, and Lemhi Pass in the south. Our Mineral Hill occurrence is characterized by extremely high grades, high total rare earth element grades, I should say. This is a project we have done extensive surface sampling, geologic mapping. These typically exceed 30% total rare earths. These are some of the grades that we have seen a couple occurrences out of Brazil that can get similar grades. To compare this to, say, a Mountain Pass or a Bayan Obo, Mountain Pass is about 8% total rare earth oxides right now. Bayan Obo is about 5%.
It is not necessarily apples to apples to compare a prospect to an operating mine, but starting with 30% and working backwards is a good place to be. Diamond Creek actually has a historic rare earth element resource on it that was outlined by the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1950s and 1960s. We have drilled that project. Actually, our surface sampling has extended the strike length of that resource by about 2x. There is a lot of growth room there at Diamond Creek. Lemhi Pass in the south is the one that has kind of captivated our attention so far. It is our largest project at 11,000 acres. The thing that makes it most unique is the mix of rare earth elements.
Even though, depending on who you ask, there are 14 to 17 rare earth elements, however you want to categorize them, only about seven of them have value. The four that we hone in on at Lemhi Pass are your neodymium, your praseodymium, your dysprosium, and your terbium. That is because those four are used to make the rare earth element permanent magnets that are used in electric vehicles and humanoid robots, F-35 fighter jets. That is really the critical rare earth elements are the critical input to that. Lemhi Pass, I will get into it in the next slide, is unique for this reason for its percentage of critical rare earth elements that it has. One of the recent developments that I think a lot of investors have not paid attention to is there is a large mineral sands company called Iluka Resources
They just got an option on a project just to the north of our Mineral Hill project. Iluka has been a company. They got a $1.6 billion loan from the Australian government to build a rare earth element separation and refining and magnet facility in Australia. This facility that the Australian government loaned them money to build is four times larger than they can support. They have a stockpile of monazite from 10 years of production on mineral sands that they can run through this initially. After that four years is up, the Australian government is requiring them to go around the globe and get offtake agreements for the rest of the rare earth elements they need to keep this plant operational. Iluka has been going around the globe for the past three years.
They've come to our projects once a year for three years, visited with our geologists, visited with us. It was clear that they were interested in the Idaho Rare Earth Element Thorium Belt. In December of 2024, they decided to enter the belt. They've staked claims. They've gotten options on other people's claims. Now we are working with them to advance this belt. That program we have at Mineral Hill is actually in concert with Iluka, doing some radiometrics and magnetics flights. This is what I was talking about with Mineral Hill and Lemhi Pass, and Lemhi Pass specifically. What this slide does is it shows you the ratio of salable products to the total rare earth elements in your sample. At Mineral Hill, you could see the exceedingly high grade of 28.4% total rare earth elements.
Only about 15% of that 28.4% is a salable product. That is your neodymium, your praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium. Below you have samarium, europium, and gadolinium. When you look down at Lemhi Pass, you'll have 5% total rare earths, but 53% of that 5% is a salable product. Your economics on Lemhi Pass is extremely leveraged to these salable products. As that grade increases, that 53% we've seen stay relatively flat. That has been extremely exciting. The common question we get from folks in the industry is, what about the thorium? Thorium, many companies look at thorium as a negative. It's inevitable. When you have rare earth elements, you're going to have some level of thorium. We've kind of taken a creative approach to thorium and expanded our thinking and looked at, okay, what is thorium? How could it be used?
What we found is actually that thorium could be extremely valuable as an alternative nuclear fuel source to uranium. There are a number of countries, India, Denmark, China, already utilizing thorium-based nuclear fuel to power molten salt reactors or other kinds of reactors overseas. The United States once pioneered the development of thorium reactors. Subsequently, we sold all that data to China when we decided to go with uranium-based reactors because we wanted plutonium as a byproduct for nuclear weapons. What we have done recently is we are working with a company called Clean Core Thorium. they are based out of Chicago. It is a father-son team. They have developed and patented a nuclear fuel in concert with Idaho National Laboratory based on thorium mixed with HALEU. This fuel is used, it is developed for use in existing pressurized heavy water reactors.
What we like about Clean Core is that they're not going to, they're not trying to build a new reactor. They're not making a small modular reactor. They're building a new nuclear fuel for existing reactors that has a number of inherent benefits, reduces operating costs, reduces the nuclear waste, improves safety. Those guys have been really good to work with. We've been approached by a number of firms overseas in the thorium space who want to completely rethink how reactors are built today. Ultimately, we believe that's going to be the future. It seems like Clean Core's fuel is a stepping stone to get there. That's what I have for you guys today. I think we have time for some questions. I didn't see where my sign guy was at. We good? Okay. Yeah, I can take a few questions. Yeah. Not necessarily other states.
I'd say national labs within other states have come to us. Oak Ridge was where the first thorium molten salt reactor was built and operated. We've worked with Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory on thorium. As far as other states, haven't had any conversations with states specifically. Absolutely. Yeah. To be honest, we're still getting Idaho to recognize the potential and the value of thorium because this is something that folks have had kind of out of their minds for quite a while. When we talked to Senator Risch's office, Senator Risch has a natural resources manager on his staff. We are educating him on thorium potential uses. Now he's a believer in it. We started from zero with him. I'd assume other states are similar in that regard. Yeah.
Technically, it would be the mineralogy of the deposit that would determine what ratio of neodymium, praseodymium it has to, say, some of the lighter rare earths, the ceriums and the lanthanums. Mountain Pass is a carbonatite, which is the geologic term for the deposit. Typically what you see with a carbonatite, and same with Mineral Hill, is a high percentage of light rare earth, so cerium and lanthanum, and a lower percentage of the middle and heavy rare earths, like neodymium, praseodymium, all the way down to europium, gadolinium, which are typically the higher value ones. As
you move to the south from Mineral Hill to Lemhi Pass and the Idaho rare earth belt, the type of deposit changes and the mineralogy changes. We go from a monazite predominantly in the north down to, say, a monazite with xenotime in the south. That xenotime is what adds that extra kind of level of heavy rare earth mineralization.
Does that change the stock price? Is it more salable now? What percentage of it is salable or is that going to kind of stagnate?
It is stagnant regardless of price. Price helps, obviously, price going up. The percentage salable stays the same because it is based on the mineralogy. That is the toughest job that the corporate office has, capital allocation, because there are so many opportunities. Right now, we look at it like we need to protect our base on the gold side. That's why you see 15,000 m of drilling going into the Golden Chest Mine because we want to grow that base of production, increase that cash flow, which ultimately creates that positive flywheel effect to invest in more exploration down the line. Very debt averse. The only debt we have is equipment debt.
Our management's been in the industry long enough that they've been investors in companies who have levered up at kind of the wrong time. When things go south, the rug gets pulled out from under them. These companies are left and the shareholders are left with nothing. We have been extremely debt averse. We plan to stay that way and continue to reinvest cash flow in exploration.
I don't think you'll see us ever secure any sort of debt with the assets of the company other than equipment we're willing to give back to Caterpillar if we needed to. Yeah. Yeah. This summer, it'll all be completed within a month. I believe the month of June will be when the flights occur. They'll fly LIDAR, magnetics, and radiometrics over just Mineral Hill with Iluka. Iluka is going to do their northern portion of that area too. What that's designed to do is take the areas where we know we have high-grade rare earths, look at the radiometric signatures we get over those areas, and then expand that to our entire claim package and say, okay, this area over here radiometrically looks very similar to where we know we have high-grade rare earths. Let's send our geologists there.
Part of this is that our rare earth projects are so large that to get a geo to walk every inch of it would kind of be insane. We need a way to narrow down those targets. Magnetics and radiometrics are going to be really good at doing that. That would be in preparation for a future drill program. Yes. The guys on the ground at Iluka, we work with very closely. It is very collaborative. The folks on the business development side we have had discussions with. Right now, nothing substantial there. Yeah. Did you say what was the cost? On rare earths, we are not sure.
I guess to expand on that, I would say globally, a cost curve for rare earth elements would be extremely difficult because the largest rare earth element mine in the world in China, they're basically producing rare earths at a zero cost to them because it's an iron mine. It's an iron mine that runs 5% rare earths. This is how we got ourselves in this issue. The iron ore keeps them in operation and they get the rare earths for free. If you want to compare really anything in the U.S. to Bayan Obo in China, cost curve's not going to be there. For us, that's also why a lot of this opportunity existed for us to get these projects in Idaho is because the Rio Tintos of the world, the large mega-cap mining companies, they solely look at economics. We looked at opportunity.
There's going to need to be government help on the rare earth element side of this entire industry, not just for us. MP is facing the same thing. They've been unprofitable for a number of years now. That created this opportunity, but it's also a challenge. I guess to point to, we were investing in the Golden Chest Mine and putting that into production at $1,080 gold. Here we are today at $3,280, I think I saw this morning. We're not afraid to make that investment, not fully knowing the economic outcome of it. We're also going to be calculated in that. We're not just going to rush into something that doesn't make sense. On the gold side, gosh, I don't know what a global cost curve for gold would look like just because there's so many operating mines.
All-in sustaining cost in 2024 was about $1,450 an ounce. It'll bring it down, but also the increased investment in exploration is going to bring it back up. A lot of what I hear folks with the gold price rising is they talk about, okay, whenever the gold price rises, companies' all-in sustaining cost rises right along with it. Margins seem to stay the same. I would say to the extent, for some companies, that's true. For us, I would just look at which of those costs are discretionary costs. us choosing to invest more in exploration is a discretionary cost. We could wipe that out and make our numbers look really good. We're in it for the discovery and the exploration and building this company bigger. That's all the time I have.