Good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to be back at Beaver Creek and appreciate those of you who are here in the room to listen to our discussion of what we're doing at the Mount Todd Gold Project. Every once in a while, a set of circumstances arises that allows astute individuals, management teams, companies to make some very strategic shifts that can result in the creation of significant value. I'd like to tell you about such a shift and what we're doing about it. I will be making some forward-looking statements. I encourage you to become familiar with that. Just really quickly, the Mount Todd Gold Project that we're going to talk about is located in the northern part of the Northern Territory, about 250 km south-southeast of Darwin, about 10 km off of the Stuart Highway.
The things that I would like you to take away from our 15 minutes together this afternoon are as follows: one, that we have just recently completed a feasibility study that demonstrates a very achievable path to near-term production at Mount Todd. Second, Mount Todd is Australia's second largest undeveloped gold project, and it's the largest undeveloped gold project not held by a producer. The 15,000 tonne per day project that we've designed and announced results of the feasibility study in July incorporates what the Australians call fit-for-purpose design principles, and at the same time preserves the opportunity for expansion. We've prioritized grade over tonnes, and we've prioritized significantly reducing the initial CapEx. Last of all, the project demonstrates very strong project economics, which we believe support near-term development and production.
Digressing for just a moment, Vista Gold trades on the NYSE American and the TSX stock exchanges under the symbol VGZ. We have 125 million shares issued and outstanding, $13.2 million in cash at the present time. Our market cap has been a good week for us. We're approaching a market cap of $190 million, and we have no debt. We enjoy the strong support of a very core group of institutional investors. I'm pleased to indicate that the Vista's board and management's holdings have been gradually increasing. So this new path to value realization, let me just explain for a moment where we were and where we are today. Up through 2024, we had designed the Mount Todd Gold Project as a 50,000 tonne per day operation with an initial CapEx of a little over a billion dollars.
We were using a 0.35 gram per tonne cutoff grade, which is a little bit above break-even, and that would produce on average over the life of the mine 395,000 ounces of gold per year. This strategy was dependent on being able to attract a senior producer to join us as a partner in the development of Mount Todd. Well, the last several years have indicated that, first of all, the major producers are a little averse to taking on development stage projects, and second of all, recently they've been much more inclined to take on mergers with other producers to increase their production profiles. And so approximately a year ago, we started looking at, or 18 months ago, we started looking at what would a smaller scale project at Mount Todd look like.
In December of this past year, our board authorized us to undertake a feasibility study at a 15,000 tonne per day throughput rate or 5.3 million tonnes per annum. As I said, we targeted the significant reduction in initial capital, and we achieved a 59% reduction. We prioritized grade over tonnes. We did that by, first of all, raising the cutoff grade to 0.5 g per tonne. I know that goes against the logic of a lot of people, but we felt that higher grade pays more than lots of tonnes at low grade. We've adopted contract mining, a very common Australian mining practice, as something that we avoided for years. We've also continued to include third-party power generation using the existing natural gas pipeline.
This has allowed us to achieve a very constant annual gold production rate over the extended life of the mine: 153,000 ounces of gold over the first 15 years of a 30-year mine life and 146,000 ounces per year on average over the 30-year mine life. We've adopted these fit-for-purpose design principles. We visited Western Australia gold operations. We looked to see how mines are built in Australia, and rather than trying to design a North American operation that would be plopped down into the Northern Territory, we've adopted the same principles and practices that we saw in practice.
Last of all, adapting to the times, we've adopted the idea that a significant part of our workforce will work on a fly-in, fly-out basis, and we've included a full-service camp with all the amenities and our capital costs, with the goal that over time that we'll be able to increase the amount of local employment as the Northern Territory Government would like to see us do. So what are the results of this feasibility study? Our CapEx has dropped from over $1 billion to $425 million. As I mentioned, average gold production over the first 15 years, 153,000 ounces of gold per year coming from ore that's delivered at an average grade of 1.04 g per tonne. That's a significant increase from where we were at in the previous studies and our previous thinking, where we had an average deposit grade of 0.77 g per tonne.
The reserve has gone down a little bit, or 5.2 million ounces instead of 7 million ounces, but the grade has gone up. Not all of that material is lost. The 0.35-0.5 gram per tonne material is going to be stockpiled or segregated in the waste rock dump, and it will be able to be processed at some future time. The resource has grown. We've conducted drilling programs in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024. The results of those studies have been incorporated into the new resource assessment. The economics, we used a $2,500 gold price for base project economics, and at that gold price, the after-tax NPV at a 5% discount rate is $1.1 billion US, with a 27.8% after-tax IRR. If we raise that gold price to $3,300 an ounce, the NPV goes to $2.2 billion, and the IRR gets very close to 45%.
Our all-in sustaining cost over the life of the project is estimated to be just shy of $1,500 an ounce U.S. For the first 15 years, it's just shy of $1,450. Compared to all of the universe of Australian gold producers, this is just a little below the median. It's a very solid number. I feel very comfortable in it. Sure, we'd love to have the lowest quartile all-in sustaining costs, but I believe these numbers are realistic. And so I'm very happy with the results of the study. Now, as I indicated, we raised the cutoff grade. That resulted in an increase in the reserve grade of 23%. I'm not going to go into the details. You can all read the numbers on the slide here, but basically we've seen an increase in resources, and we've seen a significant increase in grade of the proven and probable reserves.
From a mining and processing side, this is going to be a very standard, very conventional Australian gold operation. Everybody thinks that Mount Todd is difficult for some reason, and I'm here to tell you that on the mining side, this is going to be a conventional truck and actually excavator operation, drilling and blasting on 12 m benches, mining on six-meter benches. Our pit slopes have been reevaluated, and we think there's perhaps an opportunity for a little bit of improvement there. I mentioned that we're going to stockpile this intermediate or this marginal grade material. It actually amounts to about 900, almost a million ounces that we're going to put in the corner of the waste rock dump and not process at the present time. The stripping ratio for the pit will be four to one.
On the processing side, we're going to use stockpiling to deliver higher and consistent grades to the process plant. Those of you who know the project will remember that in years past, at a larger scale, we had a very significant drop in our production profile in years 6, 7, 8, and 9, and then it came back up. Very happy to report that we've stabilized that with the new mine plans and this throughput rate. We've been able to achieve a nearly constant 153,000 ounce per year production rate over the first half of the mine life. The process flow sheet itself is very simple. Three stages of crushing: a gyratory crusher, secondary cones, and third stage HPGR crushers. We dropped one stage of sorting, and we may even ultimately drop sorting altogether.
Two stages of grinding to produce a final product of 80% passing 40 microns, which allows us to achieve an 88.5% average gold recovery with a carbon-in-leach recovery circuit. So what are the next steps? Well, right now, having just released these results in July, we're on a mission to broadly increase the awareness of the value of the Mount Todd Gold Project. I've seen a lot of resistance to this project based on its past history and the fact that it was so big that many people thought that it would not get built. I believe that at 15,000 tonnes, which is a very common size and the gold production rate at 150,000 ounces a year, more or less, that we fit into a very common band, and it becomes much more achievable when we look at what can be built in Australia.
This is leading to this increasing awareness is leading to our interest to advance interest in a strategic transaction, and I'll talk about the three pathways that we see forward in just a moment. But at the same time, we've already begun some activities that will benefit and add value to the project. With this smaller scale, there are some minor modifications that need to be made to our existing permits for the project. We hold the permits for the development of a 50,000 tonnes per day operation. The west side of the pit has gone outside of the limits of that permit just a little bit, and we're right now pursuing the modifications that we need to be able to undertake the project as designed.
There's also some testing and evaluation that's been identified as a result of the feasibility study, which will lead to the start of detailed engineering. So why should you be interested in Mount Todd and Vista Gold in particular? Well, simply stated, there's a very significant rerating that happens when companies transition from developers to producers. We have a premier asset in a tier one mining jurisdiction. With this new study, we've demonstrated very strong project economics, and we believe we've demonstrated a very achievable path to near-term production. We've preserved opportunities for future expansion, and the strategic paths that are now open to us include a joint venture to develop the project with either an operating or a strategic partner. Realizing that some potential partners may not want to have a partner, we're open to a corporate or other asset-level transaction if it appropriately awards our shareholders.
We're not going to do a deal at a 35% premium to our market cap. We can advance and build Mount Todd on our own, and that's a huge change. That opportunity has really not been available to us in the past. When it was a billion-dollar project, it was just out of reach. So what happens when you become a producer? The chart on the right shows our reserve and project valuation or company valuation compared to junior gold producers in Australia, and what you see is that we have the largest reserve and probably the smallest market cap. As we transition to being a producer via one of these strategic paths, we see the opportunity for a tremendous rerate. At the minimum, we think that we can achieve a valuation like Catalyst or Bellevue, and aspirationally, we seek to have a valuation much like Capricorn.
Went the wrong way. In conclusion, these are the things I'd like you to take away from our 15 minutes together this afternoon. Vista has laid the groundwork for a new path to project and value realization at Mount Todd. We've designed it as an Australian project for near-term production. I believe it's right-sized. We think we have an attractive development option. The grade is certainly more attractive at a gram than it was at 0.77 g per tonne. The huge reduction in capital costs is to our favor. Steady gold production means that it's more easy to finance. We have maintained the leverage to gold price. It's one of the things that we've always enjoyed at Mount Todd. And with this new feasibility study and smaller scale, the economics that I've demonstrated at $2,500 and $3,300 an ounce demonstrate the leverage that we enjoy.
We've preserved the opportunity to expand. We know that a 30-year mine life isn't optimal, but we believe that once it's built, that an expansion will happen and the market will determine when, where, how big. We've reduced development and operating risk through the use of firms with outstanding reputations like GR Engineering Services or simply GRES and the contract miner that we've selected. We've opted for reduced risk with the workforce through using a fly-in, fly-out workforce, and we've opened the doors to a variety of development options. I know I'm out of time. Thank you very much for your interest. I'll be outside in the hallway. If anybody has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them there. Thank you.