Joined the meeting as an attendee and will be muted throughout the meeting.
U.S. Gold Executive Chairman, Luke Norman. Luke is the co-founder of U.S. Gold, as well as Gold Standard Ventures, which was recently acquired by the Orla Mining backed Mid-Tier Mining Company. We'll start with a presentation from Luke, followed by Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them using the function at the bottom of your screen. Before I pass it off to Luke, we'll start with a brief disclosure slide. Luke, please take it away.
Thank you, Jake, and welcome anyone who's here to join us on this lovely September day. Right. As Jake mentioned, I am Luke Norman. I'm the co-founder and chairman of U.S. Gold Corp. U.S. Gold Corp, we trade on the Nasdaq USAU, very tight share structure, which I'll introduce you to momentarily. Yeah. Also, on the line with me is George Bee, our President, CEO. If we have time, of course, we'll hear from George today as well. U.S. Gold Corp, we are in the process, the final stages of permitting Copper King Gold Mine just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, or about an hour and a half north of Denver International Airport.
We have our own set of disclaimers here, but I will recommend that anyone who wants to read through them go to our website. That's usgoldcorp.com. You'll find our presentation material and a lot more on the company there. Right. What we'll be talking about today, as you're aware, Jake, is our value proposition within U.S. Gold Corp right now. We're in a very unique position, given that we are permitting a copper gold mine in Wyoming. By dealing with, by being in Wyoming on state ground, we're dealing purely with state officials. We don't have to deal with any federal agency whatsoever. There's no Bureau of Land Management, Army Corps of Engineers. Our project, we've got a very good handle on that. Thanks to George, who came in and joined the team in August of 2020.
George's background is building very big gold mines for Barrick Gold Corp, so comes with a esteemed pedigree in building gold mines and, and dealing with, your local situation. So being in Wyoming, close to his home in Utah, we went ahead and took a resource that we had purchased many years ago and established a reserve. So we now have a just, just shy of 1.5 million ounce reserve, that breaks down to around 100... sorry, 1 million ounces of gold and 250 million pounds of copper. That'll deliver us greater than 100,000 ounces, close to about 110,000 gold equivalent ounces on a per annum, from production.
There's a lot more upside to that deposit, and we'll see that in the upcoming slide as well. We completed a pre-feasibility study in December of 2021, and we're very comfortable with that. Feel it's well engineered, a really good understanding of the deposit and the metallurgy. That forecasts about an $800 all-in sustaining cost with a. Using metal prices of $1,625 gold, $3.25 copper. It's robust, got very good economic footprint, and that's due to the fact that we have a low strip ratio within the deposit. First couple of years, there's zero strip, and as we move through, we life of mine end up at about a 0.88 to 1 strip. Low strip.
Another, a new value proposition that we've recently learned about is our waste rock is pretty much identical to a large materials company next door, who are actually mining just this particular granite to sell it for $20 a ton into the aggregates market. Additional economic upside to this deposit is being worked on beyond just the copper gold portion. Ultimately, we are in the final stages of permitting in Wyoming, and that's what's got us excited and clearly what's got us on the phone with Jake today. Rather, unique. You hear that word a lot out of me, unfortunately, with this project, but it is a very unique story, also a unique share structure. 8.4 million shares outstanding. It's not your traditional junior mining company by any stretch from that structure standpoint.
You can see our longer chart. We're at pretty much all-time lows. It does not make a lot of sense for us to be trading near all-time lows, given the amount of value propositions that we've added over the last couple of years, de-risking events in particular. We're being treated like the, like our peer group right now, and I think the peer group's been, precious metals has not been an exciting space for quite some time, since the beginning of the, the COVID outbreak, I think. More importantly, I think the market incorrectly just packages us in with our peers, that permits are impossible to get, and funding, mining projects is difficult. We're gonna show you our pathway to permit and our pathway to funding today in this presentation.
You can obviously see that we've got, you know, three analysts covering us. Jake has a rather conservative $18 target we can talk to later. Right. Just quickly on ESG, because this is gonna be a really important component to our company moving forward. Not only are we developing a copper-gold mine, I think traditionally or not traditionally, but how the U.S. and Canada are evolving is mining has become a very dirty word. People want to see mines offshore. They don't want to have it, you know, in good old USA or in the mountains of British Columbia. They're hoping that all this production happens out of sight, out of mind, in Asia and elsewhere.
When you're advancing and, and trying to develop a, a mine in North America, you want to be very mindful about how you go about things. This is a project where we won't be doing any of our gold extraction on-site. We actually just extract a dry concentrate, so there's no leaching agents or anything like that, that is being used. No need for leaching ponds, et cetera. It's literally just a crush, grind, float, and using a dry concentrate, shipping a dry concentrate from site. Already that carbon footprint is very low, no stack emissions, et cetera. Where this project starts to differentiate itself from any other mining opportunity that I've ever been familiar with in North America is, again, our waste rock is a salable commodity. Now that's sitting on surface with a zero carbon footprint.
You know, meanwhile, again, a large materials company next door to us is, is expanding all sorts of machinery, diesel usage, power, et cetera, just to extract that rock, to feed it into a very strong marketplace in both Colorado and Wyoming. Other benefits to it is we may very well be able to utilize our exhausted pit as a water reservoir to tie into the local reservoir network to help aid the township of Cheyenne as they run into shortages and through growth. This ESG slide, standby, there's gonna be a lot more update to it. Right, we are focusing on the CK Gold Project. I'll try and keep a bit of tempo here. We're an advanced stage pre-development company and project.
We're in a very mining-friendly location, the Silver Crown mining district, just out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. We're not in the mountains of Jackson. We're very close to the Colorado border. We've managed to put together a pre-feasibility study and technical reports that were, you know, were all independently verified by Gustafson's, which give us a reserve of 1 million ounces and 248 million pounds of copper. That will give us about, we use $1,625 gold, Jake, and $3.25 copper on that pre-feasibility. That would grant us about a $323 million NPV5 right now.
You know, in a more normalized market, I guess we would be trading either at a sort of a 0.4-0.6 ratio of our NPV or a, a, a more, you know, a, a common one is also ounces in the ground. If you take 1.5 million ounces gold equivalent, I think, in, in a, in a previous market, these valuations were around $100+ an ounce in the ground. We feel we're, we're at about a $36 million market cap today, that we're very undervalued relative to normalized markets. I'll show you a snapshot of that, but we're just advancing our final engineering in lieu of our permits, which we believe should be awarded the beginning of next year. Okay, what a location.
I'm used to dealing with projects in, in high mountains in Nevada. This is sitting pretty much in the plains of Wyoming. You take, you land in Denver International Airport, you drive an hour and a half north to Cheyenne. 20 mi to the west is our project site, CK or Copper King Deposit. It sits just north of the I-80 hotel. I'm hoping people can see my cursor. We sit just about 2.3 mi north of the I-80 Highway. Excuse me. I think I said hotel. I-80 Highway. That black dot there is the Martin Marietta Granite Canyon Quarry. Again, they are open pit, supplying granite, which they're crushing, grinding, and selling into Colorado Basin and the surrounds of Cheyenne as aggregates.
That comes in many forms, from aggregates into concrete to rail ballast. There is an insatiable demand for aggregates in this area. You can see in the pop-out, Jake, up to the top left, that's, that's a schematic of what our exhausted pit, a finalized pit might look like. Well, back down in the main map area, you'll notice these two dark areas, the to our northwest. They are two man-made lakes. They're two granite lakes, or granite-hosted lakes. One is called Granite Lake, and one is called Crystal Lake. They're embayments, they were water impoundments that have been built by dam to feed the township of Cheyenne nearby. Now, they've been deemed under capacity by the Bureau of Public Utilities, and they're looking for a resolution to fix that going into 2040.
Right now, there are best-case option is to increase the dam heights at these water impoundments and basically flooding the area out. Just so happens that that area is a state park. Our exhausted pit could tie in very nicely to become a reservoir. There's a lot of additional little benefits to this prime location and this deposit being hosted the way it is. I mentioned the pre-feasibility study. Just a quick look at this. 1.44 million ounces of proven and probable reserve, that's again, gold equivalents. Just for us laypeople, I'm not a geologist or engineer either. The economics of this deposit work out to be about 70% gold, 30% copper.
We wanted to take a snapshot in time with this feasibility study, pre-feasibility study. We needed minimum 10-year mine life, and we wanted to be up over 100,000 ounces of gold. We achieved both of those, but there is, again, a lot of resource upside beyond what's in this pre-feasibility. That's derived around a 20,000 ton per day plant, crush, grind, float. As you can see on our sensitivities table, we ran the numbers at $1,625 gold, $3.25 copper, and it left us $800 all-in sustaining cost, which again, Jake, I'm sure you can appreciate relative to our peer group. That's a remarkable number and a great job done by George and his team to manage that. We feel that that's a very fair representation.
You can see again on this, sensitivities chart, we haven't even taken gold to the prices where it trades today and has such an impact. $1,825 gold, $3.65 copper, you've got an IRR of almost 55%. Again, none of this takes into consideration the upside, the benefit to, us having $35 million or potentially $35 million worth of waste rock that's worth $20 a ton. That would have a massive impact on this slide, obviously. Right, so the deposit, you know, I, I do refer to the pre-feasibility as being a snapshot in time. The reason I use that language is we had to take a certain portion of this deposit and define it as a reserve, and then get our permit to file up and running. Sorry, our permit to mine.
File our permit to mine, get it up and running. The reason being, is we could have spent another $several tens of millions of dollars just increasing the size of this reserve, but to what end? If we can't show this to market, we can't show the world that we can actually develop this deposit, then it's kind of all meaningless. Permit this pit shell, but clearly a lot of mineralization continues to dip. You see probably another 1 million ounces under that hypothesized pit shell, and then we have ongoing to the southeast, lateral extension to that ore body as well. You know, this thing could produce, you know, well, and like most mines, Jake, you know, they have a mine life, but they never seem to end.
It's, yeah, wide open, very clean mineralogy, low sulfide content. There's very little acid generation out of the rock, so it's, it's a very good deposit from that point of view. I won't talk to this slide. I think it's a little bit long for today's presentation, but it is, again, a simple, very simple method of mining. We simply go in, blast, bring the rock to surface, separate the ore, obviously, from the waste. The ore gets crushed, ground, run through a flotation circuit, where we get the heavy metals. They're separated, they're turned into. They're dried, and the dry concentrate is trucked off-site to a smelter anywhere in North America or as, as far as Asia. There is definitely interest in this. It's a, it's a rich, high-quality concentrate. The tailings that are left, there's no nefarious agents in them.
They don't leach any sulfides or anything. They're put into a topographical low, buttressed by some of our waste rock, and ultimately, soil, topsoiled and returned to pastureland post-production. Very, very clean form of mining. Again, that leaves us with close to 35 million tons of valuable rock sitting on surface that we're, we're doing extensive studies on right now as to how to market and sell that $700 million worth of free rock. Just to take you through the achievements, I think this is important because people are kind of sitting around saying, "Oh, well, we'll have to wait. There's not gonna be any action until you get your permit to mine." That's, that's quite the opposite. Quite the contrary.
How this is working is we're ticking boxes all the way along, and each one of those boxes is a de-risker. At some point, the marketplace is gonna recognize this, that we're floating down at a $36 million market cap, and we're gonna be the next copper gold miner in North America. A robust reserve, a lot of upside, a very mining-friendly state and, and, very strong economics. Yeah, we've just continued to Anywhere from moving that resource model into reserve, completing all that field work. That's another important factor that, that I don't think is spoken enough around this company. The hard dollars are being spent to get us to this point. We've raised in excess of $25 million at Copper King to get us to this point in time.
The vast, you know, amount of capital and dilution from an equity standpoint to get us here has been expanded, yet we are trading at near all-time lows. I didn't mention either on our capital slide earlier, but we still have about $5.5 million in cash, and we have zero debt. We're in a great shape here to move all the way through 2024 if need be, with permits in hand. The big question mark, of course, which we're going to touch on here next, is great, but how do you build a $225 million mine? Well, I'll just pop back to that slide. I think that's one of the areas where people have been questioning us a bit lately, is this, this CapEx, $222 million build.
Simply put, you've seen our share structure, 8.4 million shares out. With the last thing we're going to do is get into heavy dilution at the equity side of things. When there is OEM equipment manufacturers that offer debt components, there are the traditional mining lenders that offer debt components. We now have a copper component, there is access to federal and non-federal grants for obviously that, that copper component. Ultimately, what equity we do require, if we go back to this slide here. Another unique aspect to this deposit is the richest, highest grade mineralization in the deposit is exposed at surface and in year one. Year one, we produce around 130,000 ounces of pure gold. You know, not gold equivalents, but pure gold and about 22 million pounds of copper.
There is nothing stopping us from doing a forward sale on some of that gold or some of that copper production to offset that CapEx burden at the front end of this project. Yeah, I, I, I just implore that people don't look at that $225 million or $222 million ticket. It will be higher, by the way, because we're in an inflationary environment. We think it's probably gonna be closer to $250 million. But that's not going to be a burden on equity shareholders. There'll be a little bit of equity somewhere along the line, certainly, but not the balance of that. Look, just I'll, I'll wrap up here, but we have an amazing outreach network program in Wyoming.
George and his team, extensive team in Cheyenne, they work diligently with all of the locals, whether it be top right there, the Bureau of Public... sorry, that's the Parks Board or even just the business alliance below, the local ranchers, et cetera. We really implore on them to understand the style of mining. We don't want them to be scared off, thinking that we're building cyanide, leach pads, et cetera. We've done a, a really good job, and, and that's resulted in very little pushback locally. We've had no real opposition yet to this project, and, and in evidence, we were awarded just about five, six weeks ago, our Industrial Sitings Permit by the same group, the Department of Environmental Quality, who will be ultimately awarding our permit to mine.
That's just all in further encouragement that this thing is going to be, like I said, North America's next copper gold mine. I did already talk to this briefly, our pit has a very real possibility to save the state, the town, a lot of money and a lot of stress by having to flood their state park to increase their water impoundment. Our. We've done a lot of metallurgical work, et cetera. Our pit will satisfy their needs. It's just a matter of, of finalizing those discussions with them. Yes, we're in the final stages of expecting to be awarded a permit to mine. We've done all the advanced engineering, as I spoke to.
We've spent the money, we've spent the hard dollars establishing this reserve, doing all the groundwork so that we can put that bankable feasibility study post-permit. We are conducting an aggregate market study. We have two aggregate pros working for the company now, are very, very attuned with that marketplace. Like I said, outside of any of the economics of that copper gold deposit, we have $700 million, potentially of aggregate sitting on surface for free. We've got lots of options in terms of future financing options. I know I just touched on that, get components from a, a number of different sources available to us.
The end goal or the end game, I think, is ultimately to try and work with the state, with the park, and with the Bureau of Public Utilities to leave a legacy. To leave a legacy by way of this water storage facility, which could tie in nicely to their park, be a third lake, and what a, what a great ending to a, to a productive project. Ultimately, we're staring down the barrel of construction and production. That's exciting times for us. You know, again, we've got a proven mine builder in George and his team. Sorry, I was looking for our team slide. Look, I'll hand it back over to you, Jake, and please, any questions?
Thanks for that, Luke. I, I wanna start off with copper, which, you know, you were just mentioning. You know, it was recently declared a critical mineral for the first time in the United States. It's been on other countries' critical materials list for quite some time. Can you touch on, you know, how copper being added to the list might benefit the CK Project going forward?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, domestic copper, well, again, I think we're gonna be the next copper gold mine, permitted and ready to go into production in the U.S. Really, As I mentioned, our ESG component is gonna be built on dramatically over the next sort of six months, call it. That's gonna open up access to us to, to nontraditional sources of capital, obviously. Positive ESG, you know, very clean footprint, combined with a critical mineral, it's just gonna open the world up to us. It also helps with marketing the story. Look, the original name of CK Gold Project was the Copper King Project. If we have to bring the copper forward and talk a lot about the copper component of this deposit, so be it.
I think yeah, it's gonna be really impactful to anyone who can produce copper in, in the U.S.
Do, I mean, do you think there's opportunity for, you know, potentially an offtake for the copper down the road for, you know, somebody that's looking for a significant source of, of U.S.-based-
Absolutely.
... copper?
Absolutely. Look, you know, back to that, even without it in the critical status, it was... You know, the Biden administration have made it very clear that they want to electrify the automotive industry. That doesn't just mean electric cars, as we've witnessed in California and Florida, and some emergencies there. It also means transmission. You've got to get that power out into the grid and out to the vehicles or those vehicles are useless. There's been two instances where there's been emergencies, and they've asked people not to charge their cars. The need for copper is very real. It's gonna get, I don't know, it's exponential that marketplace. I'm sure the copper is down. I think copper has been subdued a little bit by growth in China.
People are seeing some real issues in China right now, potentially, you know, opening up, and copper has been driven ahead by their growth. I think that's just gonna be spun on its head, and I think the growth in the U.S. is gonna really drive this market forward.
Yeah, I, I agree. Switching over to permitting. You received the ISP permit in the second quarter of this year, and it was a fairly short process relative to traditional permitting timelines in the mining space. Do you think the market should take this as a sign of support locally and at the state level for the project? Then building off that, you know, can you just touch on some other permits that are outstanding, you know, to get to a construction-ready status?
Oh, absolutely. I think it's indicative of the support, both on the state level and locally. Through the process of the ISP, just for anyone who's listening, ISP is the Industrial Sitings Permit. What that does is that allows the state to actually deploy capital towards infrastructure surrounding our project. It, it just frees them up, should they want to put in fire hydrants or different things. I, I won't get into the list of it. During that process, which it, it wasn't a short process, it actually elongated or delayed the permit to mine application whilst we put in that application there by about three or four months. During that process, we had to have open town hall meetings in both Laramie and Cheyenne, and again, the, you know, objection was, was minimal.
There was a letter written of concern about it, but I think it was not really understanding that the style of mining that we're using, again, just to reiterate it, you know, we're not leaching gold on site. We don't have a smelter on site, any of that. There's no smokestack emissions or any of that sort of things that people associate with gold mining and dirty mining. It's really essentially the same as what they have near nearby at Martin Marietta's Granite Quarry, so minimum pushback. I forgot the second part of your question, too, Jack, so you might have to refresh me.
Looking at the remaining permits that are outstanding, you know.
Oh, right.
You guys are getting toward the finish line of the process here.
Really, the main permit outstanding, clearly, is the permit to mine. There are facets of getting ourselves through to that. Obviously, power offtakes, water usage agreements, all of those boxes are being ticked. We're, we're really just down to final question and answer periods with the Department of Environmental Quality's Lands Division, who are handling our permit to mine. You know, there are small line items that obviously need to be addressed through a process like this, and questions may come back again to us. Heck, we're dealing with people who are 20 minutes away in Cheyenne, Wyoming, not sitting back, waiting for a federal agency to come back to us three years later with just a stack of return it later.
It's a really encouraging interactive process with state officials who are, you know, a stone's throw away from our project. It's really good.
Okay. switching over to... The economic study was completed in 2021, and obviously, we all know the world has changed quite a bit since then. Can you just touch on your plans to move forward with a feasibility study or, or a costing update from a capital standpoint?
Yeah.
As we head into final stages of permitting?
Certainly, it, you know, the second point here on our sort of catalyst. Pretty much all that advanced engineering has been completed. We're sitting on what we need to submit a feasibility study, but combined, you know, the company sat there and thought, well, look, we were in a real inflationary, inflationary flux through COVID. I think that started to settle down. You know, a lot of those constraints within marketplaces that were leading to all sorts of lead times on equipment seem to be repairing themselves. We have all the engineering we need to finalize our bankable feasibility study, but why bother, you know, drafting that or finalizing that until we have the permit in hand?
We want to know the exact fixed costs on the OEM equipment, on some of the other pieces of mining equipment that we're going to acquire, compile it, and go to work financing the project. We just don't want a stale, dated, feasibility study. That's why, you know, when I talk about our pre-feasibility from December of 2021, you know, we talk about that as being a snapshot in time. In 2021, based on the cost to build this mine, cost of fuel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we came out with this $800 asset. Now we're looking at gold, you know, up in the $1,900-$1,950 range. That has a huge effect on us. Some of the inflationary aspects of energy and materials have gone up as well.
We think that it'll still be around that sort of $0.50 on the dollar, the, the all-in sustaining costs at the project level. We just wanna make sure we have a fresh document when we go to market for capital versus, you know, walking around with a stale one. It's that simple.
Yeah, that's fair. I, I, I think in that vein, too, I mean, at least from my point of view, Wyoming has historically been supportive of, of the extraction industry, as, as a whole. Do you think there are any state-level financing or, or funding opportunities, that may be a lower cost of capital than, than you'd otherwise get, in the open market?
Yes, I kind of brushed over that when I talked about how many different forms of capital there are. Yes, the state of Wyoming have precedents that they can award municipal bonds towards a project like this. You know, we would be paying very low interest rates for a loan from the state. We are exploring that with the state, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves and jinx it. Yeah, that is another opportunity or access point to capital for us. Like I said, a lot of... As you'll see our middle point here, attractive future potential financing options. They are certainly one of those, you know, targeted forms of capital.
Okay. Do you think you, you start evaluating that, you know, sometime next year as you get closer to a construction decision in, in-?
We, we are talking to, we're talking to offtakers, we're talking to people who are interested in streams on this project. You know, we're entertaining conversation with anyone, but at the end of the day, till we have our permit to mine, a lot of it's moot. We are, with permit to mine in hand, we will absolutely step up our conversations to, to finance this. Keep in mind, if, if Mr. Market's not there, Jake, if our market cap continues to languish like this, and we're sitting there and, and precious metals haven't triggered anyone, hypothetically, copper hasn't triggered the marketplace, you know, we're not forced to also then rush out and immediately attack raising capital in a, in a challenging market. Let's say interest rates continue to head higher, et cetera, et cetera. We might just wanna...
Okay, let's focus on the ESG positives of this project. Let's go and secure conversations with the state about using the, the exhausted pit as a water storage facility, paying credits, et cetera. We're not gun to the head type scenario, where we're gonna have to rush out and finance this project either. That's what really excites me about this, is we can, we can take it on, we can come out with a bankable feasibility study as soon as we get our permit to mine, or we can read the market and, and maybe delay it a little longer. It'll all be positive for us as shareholders.
Yeah, that, that totally makes sense. And outside of CK, I don't think you touched on it yet. You know, the other assets in the portfolio, you know, you monetized Maggie Creek recently. I wanna touch on Keystone a bit, because I think that's something that kind of gets, gets lost behind the CK project.
Yes.
What are the plans there? I mean, do you have plans to maybe initiate an exploration program yourself, or are you looking for a partner there? I mean, obviously, the upside opportunity there is huge. I'm just curious how you plan to attack it.
Yeah, great question. It is the, it's the monster in the portfolio. This photo kind of does and doesn't give it justice. This photo is taken from Keystone, looking due north. That's Cortez Hills up here. That's the Cortez Hills deposit, and a string of deposits that they've discovered along this hillside. Now, a total endowment of around, I think, 56 million ounces of gold. Okay? I mean, this is just massive. I think it's now taken on as Barrick's flagship, this, this complex of Cortez projects. We have a very similar... You know, so you remember the Gold Standard story, I'm sure, but, like Gold Standard, this is a standalone domal district, and it's sitting right across. We think it's, we don't just think. It's on trend with Cortez Hills.
The reason why we're so adamant that this is a Cortez Hills analog is, well, heck, we've done some drilling here. Just bear with me, I'm getting backwards and forwards. We did a bunch of, scout drilling when we first had the project, when we first acquired the project, excuse me. We saw all the same stratigraphy as is next door at Cortez, or, like, very, very similar, off-the-charts alteration, you know, orpiment, realgar, the kind of things that you look for in monster deposits in, in sort of Carlin-type settings, or in this, in this particular point, Cortez. The reason we know that is one of the people that was working with us closely, Tom Chapin, he did a lot of the mapping work and early work at Cortez Hills when it was owned by Placer Dome.
We've seen their rocks, and what we see, you know, in this schematic, up top is Cortez Hills. That's all important wind band. When people were excited about exploration about three, four, five years ago, companies were putting out press releases just that they discovered wind band on their project, and it would, it would spark the stock up. Well, we have a massive swath of, of wind band rolling through our project, just like next door. It's a multi-intrusive, multi-pole system, upthrust, lower plate rocks. It has an arsenic anomaly at surface that, that is second to none in Nevada. This is gonna host some monster gold deposits, but takes money to drill them, and it takes a marketplace that actually cares and wants to finance you into drilling those type scenarios. We are sitting on the project right now.
We've just put together an amazing exploration program for it that it's we would like to do in the future, but we won't be. Don't worry, shareholders, we won't be diluting you down right now to go and tackle Keystone. What I do hope is we actually advance, develop, Copper King or CK, and maybe we spin this out as an alternate exploration offset for our shareholders in the future. Definitely keep an eye on this.
Got it. It really comes down to, you know, capital allocation.
Absolutely.
Where the market is-
Yeah.
... for plans there.
Yeah.
Perfect. I'll stop here for a second and pull some questions from the audience. Again, if anyone has a question, please just submit them using the function at the bottom of your screen. The first one reads: How much more capital is required to reach a production decision?
We have enough in treasury to reach that production decision. You know, again, we've paid, I, I mentioned earlier, we've paid all the real hard dollars needed to get us through all that engineering, pre-feasibility and engineering to feasibility study. Now we are... You know, we can eke through to the end of 2024 with the treasury we have right now, but, you know, we'd like to be a little more aggressive. Like I said, we'd like to bring a little bit more of that ESG component in, maybe get a, a sort of a green credit study done. You know, we may take a little more dilution in the future, but our lowest level financing is $5.85. You know, most of the capital that's been raised into this company has been at significantly higher prices than that.
We're not in a rush to run out and dilute ourselves at sub $4 by any stretch.
The next one's on CapEx, and it says, "Inflation is high right now. Where do you expect CapEx to move to?
Yeah, George's, I won't say best guesstimate, because they are working diligently on those numbers, but again, we're not gonna finalize and submit bankable until with permit in hand. You know, our estimates right now are closer to $250 million, but again, that's with the metal price moving accordingly, it's offset.
All right. The last one says: Are you still exploring at CK? Can you make the mine life longer? That's an interesting one, right? Because, you know, it is open, but I, I guess it's, it's gonna be market dependent, right? On, on if-
Yeah. Well, actually, again, I did touch on that. I'll reiterate this, is we had to draw a line in the sand with ourselves because every drill hole ended in mineralization. you know, but we need to take an economic snapshot in time so that we could go in advance and get the file for permit. We could have just kept drilling reserve until the cows came home, but then you're spending money to what end? We get it up to a 2.5 million-3 million ounce endowment. Probably would've spent another $20 million doing so. Now we've got far more dilution, and we still haven't filed the permit. you know, for, for a mine permit.
We really still believe, actually, are adamant, that the better choice was to go ahead and get the permit to mine, because we can show you ongoing mineralization, again, southeast and to depth. The mine life on this project will, will way out, or will way outstrip that 10 years, just down to how we approach it. Maybe just dig faster.
Yeah, well, you're right, and then, and then it begs the question, would the market reward you for a 15-year mine life versus a 10 in, in this current market, right?
Yeah.
Got it.
Probably, but, probably, but I think they're gonna reward us with a permit to mine more.
I tend to agree. Okay, I think we'll stop and leave it there. I wanna thank everybody for stopping in today, and I'll pass it off to you, Luke, for any closing remarks.
Yeah, look, thank you again, anyone who did join us today or anyone who catches this later on recording. Great opportunity here in U.S. Gold Corp. right now, and I, I just can't reiterate that enough. You can see how tight our share structure is. We're in a strong cash position. All the hard yards have been done for you. We've spent, like I said, upwards of $25 million getting this thing all through engineering, reserves, permits filed, working with local community, et cetera. Here we are on the cusp of getting permitted, and we're at near all-time lows. What a great buying opportunity. That's what I'll say.