Welcome back, everyone. At this time, I would like to introduce Fred Earnest, President and CEO of Vista Gold Corp. Fred introduced Vista Gold to our viewers in September of this year, and he is here today to share some exciting updates about the company. Vista Gold trades on the New York Stock Exchange American and TSX under the symbol VGZ. Welcome back to the conference, Fred. What's your update today?
Thank you, Anna. You know, we're coming to the end of a very exciting year. You know, you got a few slides to share with everybody just to help them understand, you know, what's happened. For those who may be new to the story, we, you know, as you indicated, we trade on the NYSE American and the TSX exchanges under the symbol VGZ. At the end of the third quarter, we had $19 million in cash and no debt. And as a corporation, we're building value based on the strengths of our Mount Todd Gold project, where we've demonstrated financial strength and technical viability through a feasibility study on a very large-scale development project that was completed and updated earlier this year. During the year, we've completed a 7,000-meter drilling program. Last meters were drilled last night our time.
We are evaluating a project targeting a reserve grade of a gram per ton with an initial CapEx of less than $400 million. That's about a 60% decrease, with only about a 50% decrease in gold production. So we're excited about that and hope to be able to make an announcement here shortly. I'll talk about that in a minute. But overall, we're positioning Mount Todd as a leading development opportunity and at the same time exercising the discipline necessary to realize the best value at the right time for our shareholders. So just kind of talking, you know, just to orient people. For those who may be new, the project's located in the northern part of the Northern Territory of Australia, about 250 km southeast of Darwin. It's a brownfield project. It's large-scale. It's permitted. It's ready to build.
The picture on the left kind of gives people an idea of what the project area looks like. This is a site that we could construct at the start of the year if that were our intent. So as far as an update goes, this drilling program that we just completed divided into two phases, what we call phase I. It was at Batman North. That's the area with the drill holes located here at the north end of the existing pit shell. We drilled 11 holes, about almost 3,000 meters. It defined mineralized boundaries and updated mineralogical information, and the outcome of that, now that we've got all that data and taken a look, we think that that's going to result in a very modest increase in resources for the project, particularly in the north end of the project.
Phase II has been drilling on what we call the Southern Cross Lobe, where we've drilled 23 drill holes. A little over 4,000 meters have been drilled. We targeted shallow mineralization, and what we've encountered is two distinct mineralization styles. And if I just go to the next slide here, I can talk about those in a little bit more detail. The near-surface mineralization, anything shallower than 75 meters, exists in sheeted veins. This is a very similar mineralization to what we see in the Batman Deposit. We're seeing similar widths of individual veins. Vein densities have been similar. And the grades in the downhole have been similar to what we see drilling in the Batman Deposit, for example, what we saw in phase I. We typically, in this upper part, see coarser grain sediments. They're less solidified, and there's a lower degree of alteration.
That's probably a function of greater distance from the Yenberrie intrusive. However, and what's really exciting for us is the deeper mineralization, the mineralization that we've encountered deeper than 100 meters below the surface, where we've encountered a different type of vein. They're wider veins. They're more distinct. There's not as much other vein material around them. And these more distinct and wider veins and mineralized assemblages, we're seeing better grades over wider distances. For example, in the first part of the drilling program, results that we've announced to date, we've reported in one hole half a meter at 50 grams per ton. That gives us a grade thickness of 25 grams per ton meter. Another hole had one meter of 12.57 grams. Another one had 2.3 meters of 7.93. And then we had another hole about halfway through the program that had a meter at 25.89 grams per ton.
You know, this is really exciting. This is a different style of mineralization than what we see in the Batman Deposit. We're trying to figure out the geometry of these high-grade intercepts and establish connections, but we now believe that with additional drilling, that these deeper intercepts and thicker intercepts and higher-grade intercepts represent an opportunity for potential higher-grade underground mining in the future, so this has been very exciting to see something different than what we typically see at Mount Todd and what we've drilled predominantly in the previous 70,000 meters at the Batman Deposit. The other thing that I alluded to is the start of this new feasibility study. You know, Mount Todd is a large, high-quality gold deposit and one of the most attractive mining jurisdictions in the world, and we've designed a project that's very large, 50,000 tons a day, with a CapEx of $1 billion.
But we are on the cusp of starting a feasibility study in which we're going to be targeting a significant increase in our reserve grade. We're targeting a gram per ton. We plan to accomplish that by raising our cutoff grade. As I indicated previously, the initial Capex that we're targeting is about a 60% reduction. That results from having a project that, throughput-wise, is about a third the size. Production that we think we can achieve on that size of a plant is in the range of 150,000 ounces to 200,000 ounces of gold per year. We'll continue to incorporate things that reduce our development risk, like mining, contract mining, and third-party power generation, while maintaining the opportunity and the optionality for expansion.
In summary, what we're really trying to do is develop and demonstrate that Mount Todd is an especially attractive, ready-to-build development project with all of the permits already in place. And as such, we're positioning Mount Todd for value creation while we exercise a disciplined strategy to realize the best value. In other words, to complete a transaction that rewards our shareholders. So that's, you know, in just a nutshell, that's the update. And I'm happy to take any questions that people might have.
Great. Yes, a few questions for you. If you could comment on the timeline for production taking into account the smaller-sized project.
Absolutely. You know, we're anticipating that we'll have this feasibility study for this 150,000 ounces to 200,000 ounces per year project completed by mid-year next year. Let's operate on the premise that we're going to complete a transaction by the end of the year. And we're completely open to what that transaction might look like. I think that a decision could be made to build Mount Todd by the middle of 2026, and that we're looking at an 18-month construction period. So that's the timeline.
Devon asks if you can speak to your company's current burn rate and how much runway you have with your existing capital.
Yeah, like I said, we've got $19 million in cash. Our fixed costs for maintaining, you know, Mount Todd between corporate and our costs in Australia are about $7 million a year. We're winding up the drill program. There'll be a few, a couple of hundred thousand dollars or so that hit the books from that in the first quarter of next year, and then the cost of the feasibility study, which we're guessing will be a little bit more than $2 million.
Esther mentions, Esther might have missed this statement, but do you own the water rights? Can you clarify that?
We have, at Mount Todd, we're water harvesters. We have a dry season and wet season. During the wet season, we receive about 1.3 meters of rain. We have the permits and authorizations in place to capture and store the water that we will need for the operation. So that would be our water use permit.
And with Mount Todd, your strategy is to find a partner to help build that. Is that still your strategy, and would you be willing to sell the project and/or the company?
We're looking for a transaction, Anna, and whether that's a corporate-level, a project-level transaction, or whether it's the formation of a joint venture to develop the project, what we want at the end of the day is to create value for shareholders. We are open to consider any option that leads down the path of value creation.
If you move forward with a feasibility study for an alternative scale project, how long might it take to complete, and when would you expect to announce the results?
Yeah, we anticipate that we'll have this study completed by the middle of next year. We'll leverage off of the immense amount of work that's already been completed for the previous feasibility study. And we anticipate that we'll be able to announce results in the first part of the third quarter.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for this update. And we look forward to following you along in the new year. And happy New Year to you, Fred.
Happy New Year to you. Thanks.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back. Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from Interstellar Communication Holdings, which provides an affordable personal satellite service named ic Mercury for stargazers, utilizing PocketQube technology and a customized user platform. Now, with this service, users can access their personal satellite and unlock the potential of the universe. We're going to start with Seda Hewitt, the space ambassador of ic Mercury. Welcome back, Seda.
Thank you very much, Anna. It's always wonderful to see you, and we really like to be part of your meetings, as always. So, Anna, why we are here? Because we have wonderful developments. Me and my friends, we will be trying to, you know, tell you all of them one by one. But let me just start by.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. So let me just start by giving you a little bit of information. I think you already know this, but I would like to introduce you to Devang Bhatt . He is one of the founders of the Gallerie Fund, and Devang is one of the newest and the wonderful additions in our team. We are producing, we are actually doing a space art gala together, and he also has a very nice, interesting story. So Devang dove into art during his military career, and when he is deployed to the Middle East, he found himself doing the sketches, and he is drawn to art forms more than ever. And after that, he found himself that the hobby became the real passion of his life, so he switched the career to the total arts, and right now, he is together with us to combine art and space together.
So Devang, would you like to continue after that?
Of course. Thank you, Seda. Thank you for that introduction. Hi, everybody. My name is Devang Bhatt . And I'm the founder and CEO of Gallerie. As Seda mentioned, I started my career in the military and most recently got my MBA from NYU Stern. Post-MBA, I worked in media and tech consulting and as a technical product manager for Amazon Games. I founded Gallerie in 2023. We are the first AI-driven platform to discover value and create investment-grade artwork from across the globe. Now, a little bit about art. Art is an extremely underserved asset class with a total market cap of $1.7 trillion. That's more than a few countries' GDPs combined. Yet 90% of that value is inaccessible due to systemic market problems. Art outperforms the S&P 500 for the last 30+ years, year- after- year.
Yet very few people are able to invest in it despite the ever-growing demand. We at Gallerie are innovating and standardizing art valuation methods and making art as liquid and data-driven as stocks, so in a sense, we're the first movers in this vast blue ocean opportunity. Along our journey, we were very, very fortunate and lucky to cross paths with ic Mercury, with the wonderful team that you see here, and we have since decided to host the space art gala, which we're hosting in the Down Town Association Club in New York City on Monday, well, art, like space, captures the very essence and brilliance of human imagination, so we definitely see a lot of overlap here, and in some ways, art and space are both infinite and mystical, so for this gala, we had invited artists from all over the world to participate and showcase their talent.
Because of help, like, you know, getting some help from this particular event, the Gallerie was able to expand in about 30 countries. We have a 20,000 user base. For this event alone, about 2,000+ artists participated. We have about 8,000 submissions from this. From those 8,000, we've selected the top 10 who we're going to be presenting at the space art gala. We really hope to see you and welcome you to witness our journey.
Thank you very much, Devang. Hi, I'm Lij ie. I'm the captain of ic Mercury. And also, at this very special space art gala, we are going to have our partner, Ben, from LifeShip, to introduce you to the program called Art to the Moon. And we are all teaming up together and trying to send the artwork through LifeShip. And their art will be captured in a small tile and going fly to the moon. This is so exciting. And we're going to introduce the process and how to do it in detail at the gala. So everybody is welcoming. And we hope to see you at the Down Town Association Club. Next, we will have Harry, our lifeguard, to tell you the progress of the ic Mercury satellite development.
Thank you, Lij ie. I'm excited to confirm the satellite launch on February 25, 2024. It will carry an experiment by SmartIR Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, GEIC, University of Manchester, U.K., consisting of a very low-power active radiator to be tested on space condition and software payload game developed by ic Mercury. On December 2, 2024, Interstellar Communication Holdings announced a partnership with Olympia Point Ventures LLC, a certified master agent of Starlink service. This agreement effective November 22, 2024, enables Interstellar Communication to act as an authorized agent for Olympia's technology solution, including Starlink satellite internet service. Thank you, Lij ie, to continue.
To get this far, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all our partners. They all serve a very important part in our journey. With their help, we are able to make this possible and to showcase that you can send your own satellite as well. We invite stargazers and space enthusiasts to do what we do and try to explore new things in the space industry and keep looking up. This is a very exciting journey. That concludes our update. We'll be very happy to take questions from the audience. That's all.
Wonderful. Yes, thank you so much. A question about your gala. Nicholas wants to know, given it being a perfect gala, what would the end results be for it?
Actually, there are 500 applicants from 15 countries who have submitted their artwork. There are only 10 winners in this competition. They got the opportunity to send their artwork to the moon. That's the end result. The artists are very excited to be part of this experiment. They are very happy to send their artwork to the moon. I hope aliens like them, too.
I'm sure they will, depending on what type of art they like.
R ight.
So we have a question or a couple of questions from Dawn. When it comes to the personal satellite model, he wants to understand what is the benefit to invest in it.
So at ic Mercury, we provide you a portal. Without having this portal, you may not know what the other space companies are doing in this commercialization process. But with the portal, with the introduction, we are trying to bring you a lot of the excitement we see along the journey. So the benefit, one part is you got the opportunity to play with the hardware and understand the amateur radio network, how it works in the communication world. And also, the software, you will get a lot of interesting applications that you have never imagined before. And plus, you know, we have experienced the space people here to coach you, help you, and make the universe closer to you to explore. So those are the benefits for owning a personal satellite.
What is the revenue model?
So from the three parts of what we provide, the hardware, software, and the service, so far, we had great teamwork with existing space companies and even, you know, existing very mature business models. We got the opportunity to work with them to have this revenue-sharing business model. Like Starlink, a very mature company, industry leader, we are very, very fortunate to be able to carry their product and make it accessible to more people in the world.
Wonderful. Well, we are out of time, but we have more questions for you. We'll send them to you so you can answer on your own. Do you have any closing remarks for our viewers today?
The teamwork makes the dream work.
Absolutely. Well, I wish you a wonderful time at your gala and a very happy New Year. And we'll see you in 2025.
Thank you very much, Anna.
Thank you, Anna. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you so much.