Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Taylor Combaluzier, a mining analyst here at Red Cloud Securities. Today's webinar features U.S. Gold Corp., which is a U.S.-focused gold exploration and development company, advancing its portfolio of projects in Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho. The company is focused on its flagship CK Gold project in Wyoming, where a positive PFS was released last December that outlined a 10-year mine life with average annual gold equivalent production of just under 109,000 ounces of gold per year, for a post-tax NPV of $266 million and an IRR of about 34%. Today, I have with me on the webinar, Luke Norman, who's the Chairman and Co-founder, as well as George Bee, who's the President and CEO at U.S. Gold Corp. The format of today's webinar will be comprised of two parts.
In the first part, Luke and George will provide an introduction to U.S. Gold. In the second part, we'll take your questions live. Please send in any questions you have using the chat function, and we'll get to as many as we can. I'll note that you can send them in at any point throughout the presentation. To start, we'll handle the disclosures and then get into it. For U.S. Gold, there may be some forward-looking statements made on this call. I would direct listeners to the cautionary note on page two of the U.S. Gold corporate presentation located on the company's website. For Red Cloud Securities Inc, I would highlight that this webinar is for information purposes only and should not be considered a solicitation to purchase or sell securities or a recommendation to buy or sell securities.
We note that this call does not take into account the particular situation or needs of individual investors. Participants should rely on their own investigations and seek their own professional advice before investment. Please see our most recent research located on our website for U.S. Gold-specific disclosures. With that out of the way, I'll turn it over to Luke and George to update you on U.S. Gold and what you have to look forward to with the company.
Well, thank you, Taylor, thank you for everyone who's joining us today. That was a good introduction, Taylor. As Taylor has mentioned, U.S. Gold Corp, we are listed on Nasdaq. Very unique, kind of a listing place for this style of company, clearly. I will get into our capital structure et cetera, shortly, in essence, a $40 million market cap company with this advanced stage, bucket-ready, gold, copper asset in Wyoming, just about 20 miles out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. We are looking to advance that, as well as a very high-profile portfolio of exploration assets in Nevada. Now, originally, U.S. Gold Corp, as Taylor mentioned, I am a co-founder of the company. Originally, U.S. Gold Corp was put together as an exploration-focused, Nevada-focused gold company.
We, we were fortunate enough to pick up along the way, the CK Gold project, which previously was called Copper King. This current market environment, maybe we should go back to calling it Copper King. Copper being a bit of a market darling right now. Copper King was in the portfolio, and our real focus was in Nevada. We have two projects, both Keystone and Maggie Creek in Nevada. Keystone sits near the Barrick Gold Mine's Cortez Complex, which is obviously a very big producer for them. It has very similar stratigraphy and, and quality of rock, so we were exploring that. Up until around. We went public in 2017, June of 2017, which we ran into a bit of a headwind. The exploration space was not really well regarded at the time.
People were not too excited about Nevada anymore. Newmont and Barrick had joined forces, competitive tension had been diminished in Nevada, so we were having trouble raising capital. I looked at Copper King and thought that maybe it would be a good idea for us to consider divesting Copper King for cash. I did not want to throw potentially the baby out with the bathwater, so I handed over what technical data we had on Copper King to George and asked him to take a closer look, do a deep dive, and sort of give me his, his thoughts and perspectives on whom might be a good candidate to sell the asset to. He came back to me several weeks later. He had conducted a full scoping study on the project, just an independent one.
He said we were crazy. "We should not get rid of Copper King. We should advance and develop Copper King," and that he would gladly get involved in that process. I'm not sure if any of you or many of you are familiar with George, but George has a very formidable background in terms of building mines for Barrick Gold Mines throughout the world, Nevada and South America, predominantly. When George gave me that advice, we took it seriously. We consolidated the stock back. We brought in an acquisition, which also purchased our Idaho projects. George came to the helm.
The reason he liked Copper King so much, and what I had missed, is that the concern with Copper King or the CK Gold project, had always been a question around grade being a bit low and its vicinity to a state park within Wyoming. Those are two concerns that we will definitely address up front today, because those both have turned out to be somewhat benefits. I mean, low grade is never a benefit, the fact that the grade sits right at surface, and as I mentioned, bucket ready, is a huge advantage to this project. Also, I'll just touch on our cap structure right now because I think it's, it's prudent to do so. You know, I'm gonna use the word unique quite a bit through this presentation because it is a very unique company.
You'll see right here in our share structure, 8.4 million shares out. That's no one's used to that in this junior mining space. Usually, there's 80+ million shares. When people see a $4 or $5 ticker right now, they think, "It's probably already priced in. This is already an expensive stock." You can see by our chart, we've followed the trajectory of all the junior mining companies, and unfortunately, it's brought us down to a valuation point where we are below any of the cost-based stock that is out there on this company. It's a really good value proposition right now. We've done all this advancement at Copper King, which we will get into, both George and I. We have raised a fair amount of capital.
We have close to $9 million in treasury, and an enterprise value of somewhere around $30 million right now. You know, very, very good opportunity or a good time to consider an investment into U.S. Gold Corp. Our key work that we've been—o r the key thing we've been working on since George joined the company in 2020, was, again, turning the company around from an explorer and turning ourselves into a pre-development company. That included additional drilling to go and shore up our resource and bring it up to what we have now, P1, P2 standard reserve of just under 1.5 million ounces gold equivalent.
George and team, through a pre-feasibility study that we put out in December of last year, have built up a base case scenario for this project to produce about an average of about just under 110,000 ounces of gold equivalents per annum. The reason we're using gold equivalents is it just, it simplifies it, I think, for everyone. Even the analysts out there like to have a little more simplification to this. The economics are largely driven by gold right now, at least based off our pre-feasibility with $1,625 gold, $3.25 copper. We're running at about a 70% gold to 30% copper economics, we are heavily leveraged to both.
Running those numbers in that range, great, we're running an AISC of about $800, and we'll get to that very shortly. Look, as I said, good listing, good, good position in cash. The other item I will bring up, and the reason why we've just started working with Red Cloud closely, is we are looking to dual list our company now over onto the Toronto Stock Exchange later this year. Our trigger point was being able to produce the pre-feasibility, which is deemed to be NI 43-101 compliant, we are going to dual list in Toronto. I think that will really help us in our orphaned situation that we're in right now. That being, you know, being listed on a more tech-oriented exchange in the U.S., clearly we're not getting seen by the street in Toronto.
We're excited, looking forward to having Toronto become a part of our, our outreach. You can see here a list of comps that, that's been drawn up, you know, and the, and the mean, how they generally trade, market cap to, you know, ounces in the ground or, or what percentage of NAV they're running. You know, price to NAV, most companies are running around 0.35% of NAV. We're running around 0.1 right now. There's a lot of leverage there, and as we get through our bankable feasibility and file for permits later this year, later this year, in the next 6 or 8 weeks, we're gonna move further up that scale.
A big disparity between where we sit right now, in terms of valuation and where we probably should be compared to our peer group. I won't get into the ESG slide too much right now because there's a heck of a lot more to this project than just it being a copper gold mine. Obviously, we do have to talk to this and, and will at a later date. Right now, the big thing with this Copper King or the CK Gold Project, is its potential to be a very carbon neutral, carbon friendly, gold and copper mine. A rather brash statement, how do I come up with such a thought?
Well, as I mentioned, when we first started looking back at this project and trying to evaluate whether we should do some advancement on it, concerns around this project previously, and I think it's sort of history amongst people who have known it in the past, was its proximity to the state park. You can see, obviously, Cheyenne on this slide, 20 mi away, you know, a very well-maintained road, rolls in, very short entry point into the project. It's located on state ground, but we do have to cross some private land. We have all the tenures and agreements in place with this private landholder. You can see outside of the property boundary here, and I'll try to draw. There's our property boundary, obviously, here, and it's superimposed here. You'll see this water body.
That is known as, Well, that is Crystal Lake, and to the south of it is Granite Lake. Sorry, other way around. I think actually, no, yeah, that's right. Crystal Lake and then Granite Lake. They are water reservoirs or a reservoir network for the township of Cheyenne. They are also located within the state park known as, Curt Gowdy State Park. We sit right on the edge of these two pristine lakes that feed water into the township. Okay, that to me, was gonna be an endpoint for this project. Fast-forward to today. The Bureau of Public Utilities in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is desperate for additional water capacity. They do not have enough water capacity to feed the future of, of the townships surrounding us.
Their plan of attack is to increase the dam heights within the two man-made lakes within the state park, and in doing so, flood out all the local recreation areas and roads and support, like bathroom facilities, et cetera, within the park. Our plan to build an open-pit mine within a mile and a half of the state park will, in fact, leave them with a hole in the ground in the very same granite that hosts these water containment facilities, and by proxy, save the park. That's one exciting factor around this project that no one was aware of. The other thing that George will get into here in a moment is the grade. Now, people were concerned about the low-grade nature of this deposit historically.
With the drilling work that we have done, that George had done, that we've done through block modeling, et cetera, we have a very high-grade center to this project that sits right out, cropping its surface. It's a shovel-ready project with very mineable grade, and again, a project that's gonna service the community in the future. Lastly, which we also don't value into this pre-feasibility, is if indeed this is going to proceed to become a pit lake, as you can see that pit outline here in this lower right side portion of the slide. Our waste rock is also the very same waste rock that is being harvested here in the very bottom center of the slide by Martin Marietta, just off the I-80 highway to our south.
That rock is selling for about $16-$18 a ton, and it'll be sitting on surface next to our copper-gold mine for, by essence, for free to us at U.S. Gold Corp. What I'll do is I'll let George get into this pre-feasibility study with you all, and then we'll come back and continue sort of a more, interactive view of this presentation later on.
Great. All right, well, thank you, Luke Norman. You know, we are on a state section here. We will be paying a royalty to the State of Wyoming. The royalty payments are earmarked for K-12 education, and in Wyoming at the moment, there is a deficit with respect to the education budget. You know, we, we, we anticipate that we're gonna get a lot of support as we, as we look to putting several tens of millions of dollars into the state coffers for education. That's beyond the tax revenue and the jobs. We have an independent study by the University of Wyoming Center of Business, essentially outlining, that's in one of our press releases. You know, just before I go into the pre-feasibility study.
Look, all ounces aren't created equal. This is fairly low grade, but goodness, you know, we are outcropping on surface. We don't have a big pre-strip. We're in an area where mining activity, just 3 miles, is, you know, an acceptable practice. The other thing is that being on a state section and being surrounded by private land, we are not under the jurisdiction of any federal authority. We had a declaration from the or a determination that we were non-jurisdictional last year, February, from the Army Corps of Engineers. We are on private and state land, and that means that really, we follow the regulations in the State of Wyoming. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and the State Lands Office will be dictating our activities.
We're well advanced on the permit. We should, as Luke said, we should be able to put that permit in play, application in, in the next few weeks. You know, we started right from the get-go with environmental monitoring, so we've got well over 18 months of data collected. We don't have any cultural artifacts on the site. There is no indigenous claim. Generally, you know, we're not seeing any endangered species, fauna or flora. We anticipate things are going to run relatively smoothly. Look, the PFS that we put out, again, 1.44 million gold equivalent ounces. What we decided to do was essentially put a value proposition around what we know that we have.
You know, we've, we've got extensive drilling, which defined the 100 of a million ounces of gold, 240 million pounds of copper. We put that into a mine plan, 10 years in duration, 20,000 tons per day, splitting off, as Luke said, just under 110,000 ounces per year over those 10 years, at, at an AISC of $800. Now, the mine plan is actually front-end loaded, and the first 3 years are 135,000 ounces of gold equivalent production, just because some of our better grade is situated at surface. You probably can't see it too well, but I'm holding up a piece of core here. This isn't all low grade.
This is a piece of our core, which has got just shy of 12 grams per tonne and just shy of 8% copper in it. This is an old mining district. The old boys were there, mining it in the '20s, shut down. Unfortunately, that's not the tenor of the entire deposit, but we do have some very good grade right up front in the project. The mining cost is low because the strip ratio is less than 1 to 1. The process, what we what we need to do, is we need to extract the rock, put it into a concentrator, and put a, a, develop a concentrate for shipping off-site into the market.
This initial capital here reflects the cost of putting a, a contractor, a concentrator in place, and that's a big bite for a small company. You know, we were, when we put the PFS out, about $75 million. We're currently about $40 million market cap. How do we crack this nut? We think that we're gonna crack this nut with equipment manufacturer and perhaps State of Wyoming loans, so that we would have probably covered two-thirds of this capital cost estimate on debt, on an 8-year note on very favorable terms. You know, as Luke points out, when we put the PFS out, we were essentially looking at a $1,625 gold price and $3.25 per pound copper price.
That gave us a 2.2-year payback. Obviously, you're all aware of where gold and copper is going. As, as Luke mentioned, 70% of the revenue is from the gold, but copper is well above where we're looking at that today. If we do debt financing, AISC is at, you know, based on an equity raise. Well, if we put the 2/3 of the of the capital cost in favorable terms on debt financing, maybe this number goes up to $950 per ounce, but it's still a very good margin from where we are. I've already mentioned our million ounces of P1, P2 reserves, 248 million pounds of copper.
I'll move on to, to just mention that the, the project, you know, it's not typical for a, a, you know, a gold mining project. We, we, we have to essentially mine the rock, put it into, you know, a crusher, grind it up, and then go into a flotation circuit, regrind, scavenger cleaner flotation. We then reclaim all the water that we can and recycle that into the plant with filter presses, so we have a dry stack tailings dam, so there's no conventional tailings concerns. You know, essentially, we're just using flotation reagents, which are fairly benign, on-site. The, the, the concentrate gets shipped off-site to a smelter. We're looking at anywheres from 20%-26% copper, 2-3 ounces of gold per tonne.
It's a very clean concentrate, so that is a concentrate which we are looking at, and it looks to have a good market. This is just briefly some of the drilling. You know, when Luke talks about our PFS, because I saw the opportunity of putting this in, this project into operation quickly and making it shovel-ready quickly, we've done a heck of a lot of work as part of the pre-feasibility study. What you're seeing here is just some of the holes that we have put in place for exploration, just to have a look a little bit at the continuation of the ore body at depth.
Really hydrology, to make sure that we are covering off the hydrological characteristics and the geochemical characteristics of what the pit will look like when it's done. That plays into the notion that the pit can be used as a water storage facility. Geotechnical holes, and then condensation holes, for where we want to build the plant site. Just quickly here, you can see the pit, In colors, up on the top left-hand corner, the higher grade outcropping at surface. We haven't tapped the depths of the deposit yet, we've got additional resources at depth.
As I say, the, the idea was to put the value proposition around what we definitely knew we had, and we've got additional resources at depth and to our south. Really what you can expect in the next little while is, you know, we will be talking a little bit about some of the additional resources that we anticipate at depth. The feasibility study will be coming out soon. We, we've got a minority-owned company out of Denver, Samuel Engineering, concluding the work on the engineering for the feasibility study. We've already established that the rock, which doesn't contain copper and gold, is really good rock for aggregate and ballast. We'll be looking at adding on at least at a preliminary, preliminary economic assessment level, the opportunity associated with the rock.
You know, as mentioned by Luke, we, we've probably got 30 million tons of rock sitting on surface, which has been paid for as part of extracting the gold and copper. If we can get a fraction of what Martin Marietta is selling, that is extra revenue for the project. Again, attractive financing options. We are looking at the pit lake potential to be able to tie into the system that feeds the city of Cheyenne, their water supply. We're advanced on the permitting. The application should be going in. We would anticipate around a year.
The, you know, mid to late 2023, we then move from a project which is, which people originally thought you wouldn't be able to get permitted. We believe that we can and will, and in the short term. Really, as you look around at projects in safe jurisdictions, you know, Canada, United States, where you know the rules of the game, having a shovel-ready project is quite unique. That's where we anticipate being next year. And we'll move on to construction and production, 2024-2025. With that, I'll hand over to Luke.
Yep. Thanks, George. I will go back and just do a sort of a summary on Copper King, before we wrap this up, of course. We should absolutely touch on our exploration portfolio. I think it's, it's key. We're receiving little to no value for this portfolio of assets right now. They are the highest pedigree, Nevada, especially, exploration projects you can find in the junior space right now. In fact, this slide, you can see in the background here, this is a view taken from our Keystone project, which is a full district scale, standalone domal district, sitting across the valley from the Cortez Complex. As I mentioned, Barrick's big dog these days in Nevada. They continue to make new discoveries there.
Cortez Hills is rounding around 25 million ounces of gold. Then they've got about four or five additional new discoveries that have added into that. Keystone sits, you know, right in the heart of this big elephant, elephant country that we know in north-central Nevada. We have, like I said, this domal uplift that has given us access to the same lower plate rock formations that are in existence up in the Cortez trend. We have a, a multi-intrusional, multi-pulse system that, that fed into those rocks. We ran a couple of scout programs back around three years ago, and that's when we discovered exactly that, that we had the same, same, very same sort of backdrop and surrounding that, our neighbors to the north, Barrick, have at Cortez Hills.
There's a sort of a layout of our stratigraphy, with our mapping crew that we work with, whom had was led by Tom Chapin, who had previously worked at Cortez Hills. We have the, like I said, very, very similar to almost identical rock package, we were hitting alteration in the extent of, you know, 2,000 feet plus of, of heavily altered, multi-stacked, limestone packages right close to surface, the right brecciation. We were seeing all the exciting ingredients you'd hope to see in Nevada for these big mineral systems, the orpiment and realgars and others. Unfortunately, it just really, it hit deaf ears at the time. The marketplace just was not paying for early-stage exploration, Keystone looks like it could be a monster.
My previous company that I co-founded, Gold Standard Ventures, we have a very similar story to this. You know, again, a standalone domal district that, in that case, on the Carlin Trend. We managed to build that market capitalization up to close to $1 billion with getting into this discovery mode and discovery phase. I think that Keystone represents a very, very similar situation to that. You know, that you've got this multi-deposit, multi- very structurally complex, you know, stacked stratigraphy-type opportunity where we could find a number of deposits.
I think as we move ahead with Copper King, and we start to create that value, and especially if we start to see a turnaround in the sector, we would definitely like to deploy some capital into Keystone. Our other, I'd say, equally as exciting project in Nevada is Maggie Creek. Maggie Creek sits right in the heart of the North Carlin Trend, in amongst some of the biggest gold mines on the Carlin Trend. The very mines that created Newmont and Barrick as we know them today. You can see Gold Quarry just to our south here, and Gold Quarry is a very gold-rich project, obviously. Newmont have a symptomatic outcropping oxide deposit just flanking our land package there.
When we went in last year, we drilled 1.5 scout holes, if you can fathom that. But long story, low treasury at the time. We went in and discovered. We knew actually from previous geophysics, excuse me, just trying to find the right slide here. From previous geophysics, that there was a sort of a west-northwest trending structural corridor through here. We placed 2 holes just to go and test for structure, just to see if the alteration was there, if the right rock packages were there. Lo and behold, on the very first hole, we drove right into the package that you want to see on the North Carlin Trend, and that's called Popovich. That was very heavily altered with all the right ingredients we wanted to see.
Some of the ingredients that are seen in some of the most unique deposits on the North Carlin Trend, that being nickel with crystalline barite within that hole. We'd be really intrigued to get in there and take a deeper dive at Maggie Creek at some juncture. I think that's a huge value proposition for all shareholders. Barrick were quite surprised that we got into that heavily altered Popovich at such a relatively shallow depth. Everything's relative, of course. It's, it was around 1,300 feet when we hit Popovich, I believe, maybe a bit deeper. Seeing that heavily altered Popovich completely changed Barrick's perspective on what our Maggie Creek claims represent. They thought that, that, that, that package was dipping off steeply to the south, and that we also were not into the right alteration.
Once they saw that we were, they've, they've shown a little bit of interest in it. I think collectively, we would all love to get into there. Challis, I won't get into at all really today, other than to mention that, you know, it came with 300,000 ounces of historic resource. There's a lot of other companies exploring in and around us now, so we do hope to maybe team up with one or two of those at some juncture and, and give it some light of day. We have a very impressive portfolio, but Copper King is our prime driver right now. Unique, here's that word again. You know, for the 48 contiguous states, Wyoming is the only state that handles its own permitting.
We are dealing with filing permits in the next 6-8 weeks and dealing directly with the Township of Cheyenne. There is no federal involvement whatsoever, no U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We've received clearance, as George mentioned. No Bureau of Land Management or Forestry. Cheyenne is, you know, the township nearby, is also the home to the state government. We have Governor of Cheyenne there. The previous governor, Governor Freudenthal, is actually a consultant of ours. He and the past attorney general for the State of Wyoming are helping us navigate the permit process that they had helped build and bring together. They're helping us with the different forms of government that we need to go through this permit process.
We're in very, very good hands for that in that regard. It is a bucket-ready project, as George mentioned. You know, with, with grade at surface, as we see, it's very low strip, a sub one-to-one strip ratio. There's no nefarious agents that we need to use to extract the mineralization. There's no containment ponds, no smoke stacks. It's just dry stack tailings. Environmentally, it's a very clean project. Ultimately, where we think we're going to get a lot of credit, and we're going to start building that credit, and hopefully, obviously, that will reflect back to us some additional value, is that carbon footprint is brought down dramatically if we are selling off our waste rock as aggregate and handing over the open pit to, by proxy, save the local state park from flooding.
We are going to be taking ourselves, or dual listing ourselves, excuse me, on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We think that that's going to give us a lot more visibility. I think we will attract a lot more attention from the analysts on Bay Street, with a listing there. Yeah, look, ultimately, we've got everything lined up for this project, from proven mine builder with George and his team, all the way through to a lot of local support. A project that employs a lot of local people, and we're an hour-and-a-half drive from Denver International Airport, very well located. I will wrap this portion of the presentation up in terms of going through the PowerPoint. Maybe Taylor can come back in, and we can navigate through a few questions.
Perfect. Thanks a lot, Luke and George. So yeah, we'll, we'll turn over to the Q&A portion of the webinar now. Just a reminder to everybody on the line that you can type in your questions at any time. Having said that, we do already have a ton that have come in, so I'll just kick it off here with the, the first one. So do you think part of the issue with the undervaluation versus peers is the fact that it's difficult for funds, to take a meaningful position, with just 8 million shares outstanding, and the realistic float of probably just 4 million shares or so?
Look, we're actually a quite a liquid stock relative to that, to that float. We trade quite, quite well. I think the biggest impediment we've had in terms of bringing in funds is the fact that when we went through our, our realignment, we consolidated back the stock in 2020, right when, you know, there was that blip of excitement into the gold sector, and that was driven, unfortunately, due to COVID. Everyone sensed that there was gonna be some inflationary forces with that, with the printing of money that was going to go on. Gold had its moment in the sun from, I'd say, sort of March through till the end of July, which is exactly when we were forming the company or reforming the company and bringing in George.
By the time we were ready to go and speak to the institutions, they were already. It was September, and they were going into a redemption phase, and, you know, flows were flowing out of the gold space, not into it. We have one well-established gold fund in the company who's a big supporter of ours. That's the Phoenix Gold Fund, David Crichton-Watt, who's the principal there. I don't think that our current float or market capitalization is the impediment for investment into our company. I think it's just been a lack of knowledge about the positives around this project and capital flows going the wrong way.
Okay, great. Turning over to the project side, here, just one question. I think the, the viewer missed what the current mine life is, for CK once it's in production.
10, 10 years based on the P1, P2 reserves that we have at the moment. You know, one of the things that we're looking at is maybe accelerating the mining, using a stockpile strategy and then processing for the last 2 years. At the moment, based on our current resource, it's 10 years. There is upside, and we can look to extending to depth and to the south.
Great. Okay. I know you did mention this in the presentation, just, you were wondering about the bankable feasibility study and whether that'll give value to the aggregate or not.
Look, I think as you, as you climb the... climb past the various milestones in a project's life, and you start taking risk off, we will see those valuation metrics get recognized. You know, you know, I, I, I will say that there's inflation at the moment, but that I think is gonna be more of an offset by the higher metal prices. We're also doing a lot of work to to make the footprint of the plant more conservative, eliminate some of the equipment. Yeah, I think, as you look at, as you look at achieving milestones, permit, feasibility study, permit approval, the valuation increases.
Great. Okay. In terms of financing here, we have a few questions. Just wondering if you've begun discussing with the state about financing and kind of the, where the current cash on hand, gets you with the project.
Yeah, look, I think one of the again, I think one of the more concerned, you know, viewpoints of our company right now is clearly our market cap versus the, the CapEx that's required to build this. Pre-feasibility makes the assumption that the $220 million of build is financed through equity, right? In reality, the State of Wyoming, for one, has precedence for putting up state bonding to fund up to 50% of CapEx, and we're very much pursuing that right now. We're in discussions with the state, or we're about to commence discussions with the state, excuse me. We've done our homework, but there is a possibility that the state would, through a municipal bond, put up the equivalent of half of the funding.
Vendor funding through the build-out of the mine would be about up to 60% or 70% of the balance of that. You'd be looking at a, you know, sort of a, a need for $30 million or $40 million worth of equity dilution in a scenario like that to build this project out. As George mentioned, that would bring your AISC up. It would send your IRR through the roof. Again, the project's highly leveraged in the price of gold and the price of copper. If we do see increase in the price of gold and copper, or even if they just stay stationary where they are right now, you know, you see with all the big mining companies, their cash flows are way up with these higher metals prices.
Funding this project would not be a pure equity proposition at all. I also believe that with the simplicity, and I say simplicity, permitting is not a simple process, but relative to just dealing with the State of Wyoming and that's it, the simplicity of this permit process means that from filing to an answer and commence, well, sorry, a final answer back on the permits is a 12-month process. Hypothetically, in 12 months or less, we could have a fully permitted, bucket-ready project that spits out over 100,000 ounces a year equivalence. As George mentioned, the front 3 years, 130,000 ounces per year. That's gonna be really attractive to other mining companies.
If they can bring in, if we can bring in the reduced carbon footprint and green credits that would be associated with this, that would be a very valuable proposition to other companies. I think it's gonna excite a lot of M&A activity. As we go through this process in the next 12 months, will be exciting from that perspective. Obviously, institutionally, I think the funds will really much like the fact that we will have such a really good ESG component to this project. All the value is about to be untapped right now, I believe.
Okay. Then, kind of on, kind of with that theme, I guess, do you think buyers will start bidding on CK once the permits are in place, or do you fully intend to take the project over the finish line and into production?
I think that they're going to see a, a number of variables being met along or a, a number of benchmarks being met through this 12-month period. it's not now sit on your hands and wait 12 months for permits. they're gonna see a, a lot of news generated by us as we tick boxes off through that permit process. Each one of them is a huge value add to the project. No, I think that's gonna be reflected back into the company very soon, and I think that, you know, what I call an arbitrage, but, you know, that gap between our, our valuation relative to our peer group, you know, 0.1 versus 0.4 of NAV.
You know, you take $320 million NAV, if we're trading at 0.4 of that, we should have a $120+ million market cap right now. With permits, that can go anywhere from 0.6 to 1 to 1 on NAV. Again, that's using those diminished metals prices, you know, the $1,600 gold or $1,625, sorry, $3.25 copper. A lot of variables in play that are gonna add value to us, and we are, again, on the very cheap side of the curve relative to our peer group. Look, one other thing I wanna touch on is, just to our south, the exact same mining operation is in place, and that being Martin Marietta, but it's just purely an aggregates pit.
It's the same operation, just digging out this exact type of rock, crushing it and selling it. That's what we're doing with the copper-gold component. We're crushing it, washing it, and making a concentrate, a dry con. These things are permitted, they're in place, and they're spitting distance to our project.
Mm-hmm. You... those are, that's a, a good example of an aggregate operation. I guess, some viewers aren't overly familiar with Wyoming as a jurisdiction, even up here. You know, it's not one that we hear about too much. Are there other examples of mining operations you can point to? I know the, the state does have some, and the oil and gas industry is quite prevalent there as well.
Coal. George, please. Yep.
Yeah, you know, the, the, the State of Wyoming has got a very large portion of its income and revenue from the resource sector. Of late, you know, you've started to see a little bit of a decline in the tonnage of coal that has been mined. Concerns about, you know, carbon, power stations closing. It doesn't appear that people are willing to put money into new coal-fired power stations. As a consequence, there's been a fairly dramatic decrease in the coal produced.
You know, that, when you start looking at, the loss of revenue from coal recovered, the opportunity to diversify, the take from natural resources within the state, becomes quite attractive.
Perfect. Okay. you know, we have a question here, just wondering, you know, given kind of the... as you touched on in the presentation, the, the grade of the deposit, the, the low-grade nature of that and the, you know, the, the attractive, all-in sustaining costs that you're able to achieve, could you just kind of maybe, discuss that a little bit and how that's, how that worked out?
How that works? Okay. Look, you know, on slide five, where we show the metrics of the deposit, you can actually see one of the shafts that was on. This was part of the Silver Crown mining district. You know, the little piece of core that I've shown you with the, you know, with the chalcopyrite sitting in here. You know, the old boys in the 1920s didn't go underground for the kind of average grade that we see. Obviously, when you're mining the larger disseminated body, which has been shot through primarily granodiorite rock, we see very consistent, but lower-grade material across the resource.
There is a concentration, of, very good grade right at the, top of the deposit, which actually outcrops on surface. You know, why do the numbers work? Well, the numbers work because we, you know, we're in a, we're in a, low, strip ratio scenario. We don't have to, to move too much, waste to get at the, at the rock. We've got lots of mining capacity around us. The, you know, with, with, with the, with the industry coming off coal mining, there's lots of contractors available, competitive market for, for mining. Our, this, this material, once it's, crushed and, and ground up to the appropriate sizes, it floats really well.
we're down to starvation levels of reagents, so we're, we're looking at a couple of bucks a ton for mining, $7 a ton for the processing. We, you know, we, we really don't have to move a lot of waste to get at that. Additionally, you know, unlike a lot of the projects I've been involved in, throughout South America and the world, you know, we don't have to build a whole bunch of infrastructure. You know, people can go home to Cheyenne or Laramie at night.
You know, all our service functions can be conducted out of town from in Cheyenne, where we'll be creating a bunch of jobs, good paying jobs, which is a, you know, at a time when that economic activity is needed. You know, things like the fact that we're an hour and a half from Denver, four hours from Gillette, six hours from Salt Lake City, we don't have to carry a lot of inventory of parts and equipment. By the time we're ready for to replace a motor, the old motor is out, the new ones, you know, has arrived on site for replacement. It is a very, very nice project.
You know, if folks wanna come and visit, you, you hop on a plane to Denver and 1.5 hours later, you're on site. Logistically, it is an excellent place to be.
Perfect. That was a great answer. Just kind of a follow-on on one of those things. We have a question, just wondering what the ramp up to full capacity is once the mining starts.
Well, look, like any, like any mine, you know, this isn't rocket science. You know, a simple mining truck shovel operation. You know, we're just doing all the testing around the blasting and blast vibrations at the moment, but it's dead simple mining. You know, 100 ton, 130 ton trucks, nothing untoward there. The concentrator, this material floats really well. We, you know, we would anticipate, you know, a normal startup condition wherein, you know, over the course of the probably the first four months of operation, you would improving up, getting the bugs out of the plant and getting up to full production at 20,000 tons per day.
Great. Okay. We have one question here, just going back to the corporate side of things. We have a question, wondering if insiders have been buying at these low price levels.
Luke, you're the, you're the biggest investor that. I mean, the last time I bought was at $7 a share, and, you know, I would be, I'm certainly looking, and can't believe the valuation at the moment. You know, managers and insiders, we've got about, 20% of the company.
I've just become an insider, so I actually held off buying any until I filed my Form 3, which was just late last week. Now I'm gonna buy some. I just wanted to be on print to buy it-
Yes.
-for what considered. Doing so anonymously for so long. Yes, I'm a buyer of the stock. I will absolutely continue to be a buyer of the stock. You know, just, just to point out again, this current, at even $5, we're trading about $1 below any cost base and stock that, that I know of. You know, it's. Our cheapest financing ever done was down around the $6 mark.
You know, we had Armistice come in, who's a very big fund. They were brought in recently by EGP in the U.S. That was publicly announced, so I can speak to that now through Armistice's own filing. You know, they came in at over $8 a share, so we were trading at almost 50% discount to that a week or two ago. Look, there is no rhyme nor reason for us to be trading down here. I think we just haven't had the love and support in the sector, and the algorithms are in there picking at people's heels and making people think that there's something wrong. I get so many calls from people wondering, you know, there must be something wrong on a project level that they don't know of. There may be something wrong.
One of the questions that hasn't been asked in this group, by the way, which is: Where do we see the biggest inherent risk? What do we see as the biggest failure point to this project, you know, hypothetically? I'll let George answer that because he's far more conservative than I. To me, I don't see one. There is no kind of breaking point. Sure, we could not get permitted.
You know, the biggest, the biggest risk, Luke, is that we attract too much attention before we've got the value of the stock up, and...
Agreed. Somebody jumps in there.
Yeah.
Yep.
Perfect. Okay. With that, I think we have gone through pretty much all the questions. You know, maybe I'll give you guys the last word, maybe just, you know, the final pitch and final thought you wanna leave with potential investors, and then we'll sign off.
Well, look, just I'll go first and just from my side. Look, we, we, we're keeping our eyes on the ball. We want to get the feasibilities and the permitting done around our copper gold project. It's a great project. It's got great numbers. There's upside. There's upside beyond. You know, we, we, we're not spending money at the moment doing additional exploration to increase the size of the resource. You know, we, you know, we're not focusing on the aggregates at the moment because, you know, that's a, that's a little bit of a different story. It's, it's something that we're going to look at.
You know, if you've got 30 million tons of rock sitting out there, gosh, if we could get $10 a ton, that's $300 million of additional revenue for the project. You know, we're not getting distracted. We're keeping our eyes on the ball. We'll permit that copper-gold project. You know, it just. You know, I used to drive past the Carlin projects every day. I worked for Barrick for 16 years over 3 different occasions and, you know, started out when Goldstrike was a hill. You know, just to Luke's point, you know, we're in some of the best real estate in Nevada, and that, you know, we're just getting zero value for that at the moment.
You know, I, I, I shake my head sometimes, but, we're not getting distracted. We're gonna get this CK Gold project focused, resolved, and move through to putting this into operation. Luke?
Yep. I think you summed it up perfectly, George. Exactly that, you know, the, the value proposition, which is already way out of kilter right now, which is just our simple, very simple, copper-gold mining story, is not taking into consideration all that value in aggregates. The, the value that we bring to the community in terms of saving their park, that, that, that almost, I think, green-friendly mining scenario that, that I speak to, that we're gonna kind of work towards with, with consultants and such, to come with a really positive, report around that. These are all things that are just gonna add value to the CK Project. As George mentioned, you know, down here, it's more of a concern if we get some M&A interest right now than it is, a positive.
We just need to get through this and make sure that the investment community realizes that the CK Gold project is the next North American mine to be built. We're not gonna spend 5-10 years in permitting purgatory or permitting hell, frankly, when it comes to federal agencies. It's a very meaningful size mine, and it would tie in very nicely to any mid-tier producer. You know, who knows what kind of green credits they could get out of this, too. That's, that's my summary.
Perfect. With that, I would like to thank Luke and George from U.S. Gold Corp. for taking the time to host the webinar today with Red Cloud Securities. Thank you to everybody on the line for tuning in with us.
Thank you, Taylor.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye-bye.