i-80 Gold Corp. (IAU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

There we go. Sorry about that, not off to a great start. Thank you for joining us today for the i-80 Investor Day. Last fall, we announced our development plan, we talked about delivering feasibility studies for our 5 gold projects by the end of March. We're on track to do that. Preceding that, we issued 5 press releases now with the last one going out this morning for the Granite Creek open pit. And what you can see when you look at those press releases and studies is that there's been a lot of work done. We believe that these are reasonable and achievable. And we hope that as we move to the feasibility studies, we'll be able to do better. At $2,175 gold, the NAV of those 5 gold projects is $1.6 billion. At $2,900 gold, it's $4.5 billion. And again, this is just a portion of our portfolio, and I think Matt will talk a little bit later on about some of the projects we have within the portfolio that aren't included. So it is a very valuable asset base in Nevada. And I can tell you, having recently worked on Ontario and then going back to Nevada, where I worked in Nevada for Barrick Gold with Goldstrike when they were building that, operating in Nevada is easy. It's a great environment to work in. You can get things done quickly and economically, and the team will walk you through that today. The host will be Matt Gili, our President and CEO. And I hope that by the time we finish, you have a good sense for the people behind the numbers and doing the work and the confidence that they can do what they say they can do. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Matt. We're going to keep this at 10 minutes per asset in terms of presentation and then a 5-minute Q&A. Thanks. Over to you, Matt.

All right. Thank you very much, Richard. Yes, as Richard mentioned, my name is Matt Gili, I'm the President and CEO of i-80 Gold. I've been here with Ryan Snow, the CFO since the inception in April of 2021. This is -- what you're seeing today is the culmination of 4 years of really hard work to bring all of our projects to a point of a publishable technical report, where we can start talking about them openly. I'm very excited to be here today. This is a big moment for me and the team. And so let's get started. So the first thing I'm going to do, I'm not going to read this disclaimer. But I'm going to say one thing. The information contained in this presentation reflects our assumptions opinions, estimates, plans, beliefs and expectations as of March 6, 2025, and is subject to change without notice. All right. So the next 2 slides, we're going to talk about the team. And I'm not going to read through each of these bios. I'm not going to detail each one. What I'm going to show you today is a team, I couldn't be more proud to be part of that has got a tremendous amount of international experience, but more importantly, for what we're doing right now is a Nevada-based team, which has specific experience in operating in Northern Nevada, understands the environment, understands the players, knows how to get things done and is incredibly skillful in their job. You are going to have a chance to hear from each one of these people today. So without me going through them specifically, know that you're going to get to meet each of these people. Today's agenda, as Richard pointed out, I'm going to do a little introduction. I'm going to show you the -- let's call it the big picture, let's call it why are we here? Then we're going to go through each of the sites. And different parts of the team are going to show you each one of the sites, the 5 projects that we advanced to PEA right now. Inside of each of those project presentations, there's going to be 1 slide on permitting, which Mark Miller is going to take you through, and there's going to be 1 slide on exploration, which Tyler Hill is going to take you through. At the end of each section, each mine, we're going to open it up to questions and answers for that property. That's the agenda for today. All right, here's the pillars. This is why we're here. This is why all of this matters. We are a proven Nevada mining experience company. We understand what we're doing. We understand the environment, and we're based in Nevada. This team, the people you're going to hear from today, we all work and live together in the Northern Nevada area, some of us in Reno. Back to all of the people you're going to talk to today are in Reno. We also have another operations hub that is at Lone Tree which is outside of Battle Mountain where the safety teams and a lot of the engineering groups did. So we are a Nevada-based team based in Nevada where the mines are. We have a very high-grade growth pipeline. You can see that from each of the PEAs. And what we also have is resource expansion potential at each of our sites. So what we're going to show you today is the start of i-80. It's a 22-year start, but it's the start of i-80, but is by no means the end of i-80 and we will just continue to grow upon that. We use the strategic hub-and-spoke mine model. And you see this in the Pilbara in Western Australia. You see this at NGM and the former Newmont and Barrick operations. It's the concept that if you look at the 3 underground mines for i-80, they're all brilliant deposits. None of them is large enough of scale to support its own processing facility. When you take the 3 and you combine them, that's when you demonstrate the scale necessary to be running a refractory processing plant in Northern Nevada. So that's really the model. The model is we have the autoclave capacity. That's our core. That's our hub. And these spokes feed into that hub. It's a very efficient way to use capital. You see that from the capital estimates, the capital costs for each of our projects are very modest because they're not each one trying to build their own processing plant. You do see -- you'll see a processing plant open pit at the Granite Creek open pit, but we're sticking with the hub-and-spoke model right now. So the first 3 underground projects all feed into the hub-and-spoke, and then we're going to show you 2 very substantial open pit deposits today as well, one at Granite Creek and one in Ruby Hill. These are large in scale. They're oxide, they are traditional Nevada oxide gold deposits, and they're just the next step of growth for i-80 Gold. And then lastly, we're going to talk about -- we have a great pipeline of growth. We have projects that are currently in operations, some are in construction, some we're going to construct. There's a lot of moving parts here. And CFO, Mr. Ryan Snow, is going to take us through and say, "Okay, so how are we going to recapitalize this? What is our strategic plan for structuring the balance sheet." All right. Here's my first slide. And look, I've prepared some notes just because I'm very excited about what we're doing here. So first, Nevada. We are talking about brownfield sites, the hub-and-spoke model and the efficiency that comes from having all these properties together. And I really can't overstate, relatively speaking, how easy it is to operate a hub-and-spoke model out of Northern Nevada. Anyone from any of our sites or from the Reno office can be at any one of our other sites within a 4-hour drive. So we can share resources. We share laboratory facilities. We share core processing facilities. We share technical staff, and we interact meaningfully every single day. The communications are there. The interaction is there, and we function as a team. We have 3 underground mines feeding into the centralized autoclave facility. Again, as I mentioned before, each of these properties by themselves doesn't have the scale to build an autoclave together. With the Lone Tree autoclave, they all comes together into one very tidy package and that allows us to get the value out of 3 modest-sized deposits, big for us, modest sized buzz, refractory in nature. That's our strategic advantage. We are the entity that can process those 1 million to 2 million-ounce high-grade refractory deposits in Northern Nevada. Added to this is the 2 open pit deposits. I touched on briefly, we'll touch on them in more detail. But those are -- historically, if you're looking back at our last 4 years, we didn't talk a lot about the open pit deposits. We had them. We knew that they were there. Exciting to us, it's really -- look, it's a change in the gold price environment. This really brought out the value that's contained in these 2 open pit deposits. They're both very large in scale, and they are high-grade in nature. So this is really what you're going to see today as we go through the presentation. What this brings in all together, when you look at all the different parts, is you look at a company that has over 13 million ounces of gold resource in Northern Nevada and almost 200 million ounces of silver assets -- silver resource here in Northern Nevada. And again, talk about exploration upside. Tyler is going to touch on the exploration upside for each of our properties as we go through the presentations. All right. So this is the slide that's exciting to me. This is what we've been working for 4 years. And this is the first time that we've been able to show in a public forum a production growth profile supported by technical reports. This is what all of these deposits together represent. And this is a big deal for all of us. It shows us in 2031, we are now a steady, reliable 400-ounce a year producer. We peak as we bring on mineral point, we peak very high and then we come back down. Tyler is going to go through how we're going to maintain that level as we go forward over the next 2 decades. This is a fundamental pivotal moment for i-80 Gold, and you will not have seen this before. We would have alluded to parts of it, and you kind of had to piece together the math and figure out how all the parts fit together. This demonstrates how that all fits together. So great production profile, lots of moving parts. The common question we get is, how are you possibly going to build all of these projects. And this is how you do it. It's sequential. We're going through and systematically executing on each of these projects. As we advance each project, we learn from the previous project. As we advance each of the permits, we learn from the previous permitting process. And so while it looks like a lot of moving parts. When you look at it in this context, you can see this is a very executable construction schedule. This is a very executable ramp up for a mining company. And this is the heart of what we're doing. As you see, you not see a PEA on all of our projects, and that is fundamental moment for i-80. But that's certainly not the end. Through the course of the rest of this year, we're going to advance feasibility study on the Granite Creek open pit -- underground permit, the Granite Creek underground. We're going to advance the feasibility study on the Cove underground. We're going to finalize the Class 3 engineering estimate for recommissioning of the autoclave. And we're going to advance the technical reports for the Granite Creek open pit. One thing you're going to touch on as we go there as we were looking now at a CIL plant as the processing facility for the open pit. That's a fundamental change. It's very valid. It's great work. We're going to spend some time this year confirming that and really fine-tuning those estimates. So I just really can't overstate how exciting time this is. I hope my excitement -- is my excitement palpable, Ryan? We have worked really hard on this. I'd say my team more than I to get to this stage, and we are very proud to be able to show you what we've been working on and the value represented by these assets. So it's time for me to pass on to the team. And the first project that we're going to go through in detail today is the Granite Creek underground. I'm going to pass over to Mr. Tim George, and he's going to take us through Granite Creek underground.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and welcome, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. It's just amazing to be able to get up here and talk about our deposits in this open forum, and have it all out for everyone to see. So my name is Tim George. I'm the Vice President of Operations for i-80 Gold. I'll be walking you through Granite Creek underground. This is i-80's currently producing mine. This is a very typical Nevada underground operation. What do I mean by that? This is portal access. We have 2 portals accessing this mine from a historic open pit from the CX pit. This is underhand cut and fill, 100% underhand cut and fill, we produce backfill on site. We have a quarry produced backfill, mixed that with cements, very typical for underhand cut and fill here in Nevada. It does make for a very busy open pits. There's a lot going on in that picture, as you can see. We've got a lot of infrastructure there right at the portals and a very congested, busy place to be. Now we're talking about the PEA today. So what does this show us? Shows us that we've got approximately 60,000 ounces per year, underground mine with approximately an 8-year mine life. The reality of this is that we are 10 kilometers away from Nevada Gold Mines, Turquoise Ridge mine, which is a very large deposit, a long trend, there is multiple historic operations there, Getchell mine and others, this is essentially the same geologic setting. And I don't want to get too carried away, Tyler is going to walk us through more on the exploration side. But suffice it to say that we believe in the potential of Granite Creek. This is a really good mine and it has a lot going for it, and there's a lot more down there. So with that, we have PEA out. We are going to be completing a feasibility study in the fourth quarter this year. We have little over 20,000 meters of drilling that did not make the cutoff for the PEA, and we're planning on another 15,000 meters of drilling throughout the rest of this year to go into that feasibility study. So great amount of information that's going to go into that feasibility study, very much looking forward to it. So where are we at today? We are developed down to a little bit past the 4,100-foot elevation. That gives us about 700 vertical feet of mineralized exposure on that body. And ultimately, we're going to get down another roughly 900 feet to the 3,200-foot elevation of what we know now, right? As many of you may know, we've encountered a fair amount of ground water in the mine. This was not unexpected, but it has had a larger impact on our development than we had initially planned for. Accordingly, we have really ramped up dewatering and hydrology studies on all aspects. So first has really been about our knowledge of the aquifer. This is not -- we don't just get a slow seepage through the mine. This is very much structurally controlled. We can go hundreds of feet without hitting water and then hit a structure where we encounter really big inflow. That's different. We're learning about it. We've done quite a bit of geologic mapping and actually mapping when we hit those water flows, mapping that out into structures that carry that water and learning how we're going to deal with that water. We've also found quite a bit of historic data on air lifting from holes. This is helping us plan new dewatering wells and better target our dewatering resources. We've also started a very successful grouting program underground. The good thing with this is that when we do find the water, we can grout a specific area, and it's not a prevalent issue throughout the entire mine. We've -- since taking over this project, we started with 2 operating dewatering wells. We quickly got a third one into production that was already existing. We then drilled another dewatering well. And then most recently, we've deepened one of those wells, well 5. We've deepened that with some of the geologic knowledge we've gained and really been able to increase the production on that well, and we've increased overall dewatering pumping there at site. With those wells, water quality has been an issue in some of those, and we've also permitted and constructed a water treatment plant that is currently operating. And most recently, we've been able to take permit, clean up the water that's underground and obtain the permits for putting that through the treatment plant and discharging that out to our infiltration basins as well. So quite a bit of work that's gone on this past year and before that, even. So we've greatly increased that system. And going forward, we have another well planned for this year as well as increasing that treatment capacity and continue to dewater this mine. Large part of that as well has been installing piezometers. Every time we turn on a new well, it's a new pump test for us, and we're learning more about this aquifer. And as of February, we have a predictive groundwater model and all that work -- all that knowledge gain is going to be rolling into that feasibility study later this year as well. So we've got mine there at Granite Creek, what are we doing with the ore right now? We have processing contracts with third parties. So we have in-place contract for oxide material. And then we are in the final stages. We've essentially agreed to commercial terms on a new refractory processing agreement and will be -- we're in the final stages of finalizing that agreement. With those third-party contracts, essentially, when it all boils down to it, what we see is a 58% to 62% payable on the material that we send to third parties, which is a hard pill to swallow. We don't have a processing cost on top of that. But you can see that once we get that autoclave up and running, we're looking at 92%. That recovery is coming from acid autoclaving, which Tyler is going to carry us through a little bit more later. And that's going to be a huge impact to us, which you'll see in the coming slides with the economic impact. So as we ramp up, we will -- let me find my notes here. All right. So we're looking at the -- where are we? So as we continue to ramp up, there is a -- the cash flow shows that for the next 3 years, 2025 at current prices, at $21.75, we lose about $20 million. At current prices, that's actually cash positive. Why is it so much spend in 2025. And the main reason there is that we're looking at this exploration drift and quite a bit of drilling this year to complete that feasibility study. It's basically modest cash flow for the next 3 years. And then once the autoclave commissions in 2028, we see very cash positive for Granite Creek. You can see this quite well in the chart there. As we bring that production up, our overall cash costs come down, and it's very positive for Granite Creek. It's very key that we get that autoclave going in 2028. So with that, I will invite Tyler to walk us through the exploration of Granite Creek.

Let me turn this on here. All right. I'd like to direct your attention to the image on the screen. This is a section looking west through the Granite Creek underground. The image shows a snapshot of what things looked like in 2021 when the property was acquired. Note the underground workings in black at the top and the red shape showing what would later become the South Pacific zone that contain only a few historic holes at the time. Now you'll see the image displays a current snapshot of the underground workings and additional drilling since 2021. I apologize if you're viewing online. I've been told you won't be able to see the transition to the new image, but for those of you in the room, you can see how far we've come with development in mining as well as drilling of the South Pacific zones and Ogee zone. We still see a significant exploration potential at depth and to the north as well as elsewhere across the property. Also note, the planned drilling from underground this year shown in the black traces from the exploration drift. The recently published PEA includes only drilling through 2022, leaving 21,000 meters of drilling not in the current resource. Additionally, we will conduct 15,000 meters of drilling this year for infill and step out of the South Pacific zone. This new drilling will be included in a feasibility study planned for the end of the year.

Thank you, Tyler. With that, Matt is going to trade places with me again and open it up for some questions and answers.

All right. So what are we talking about with Granite Creek? We have a producing mine with very positive reconciliation. One thing we haven't touched on yet today with regards to Granite Creek is we've had over 2 years of operating experience within Granite Creek. We've had approximately 12 different levels that we've mined out and have been able to do a reconciliation on to those levels compared to the resource model, and they're all reconciling quite positively. And so that -- what that does for us, we're not using that and trying to say that's going -- that we're putting some sort of factor into our mine plans. We're just saying, look, our resource model is very comfortable. It's very -- it's conservative. It functions well. That's the base of our mine. Very pleased with what we have there. As Tyler laid out, Granite Creek is the property with the most implied resource expansion ability -- the resource expansion ability that we can see out there as we go down trend on the South Pacific. It's not -- it's odds obvious to us that we are neighbors to a mine that's much larger, and we have very anomalous style structures with what they have there to the north of us. And groundwater. So that's the story that you've been hearing for the last years on the groundwater, how are we managing with the groundwater. As Tim pointed out, we've gone through extensive program to first understand the hydrology model and now have a predictive hydrology model that tells us what's going to happen in the future, allows us to plan better for our dewatering wells. We have upgraded. We've installed 1 additional well. We've upgraded another well, and we will upgrade another well during the course of this year. A company that we put in a water treatment plant so that we can treat for arsenic in the water and discharge that out into the aquifer, the basin on the other side of the highway.

So with that in mind, I'd like to open up to questions regarding the Granite Creek underground. Justin?

Maybe could you talk through like where the ramp is, what the mine plan is in the next year to have? Where the ramp is? What levels have you developed? And then also just on the exploration drift for Granite Creek to drill up the South Pacific zone. What's your expectation there on timing? And where is it like currently?

100%. All right. So Justin's question was, where are we now with the decline, what levels are we looking at? And how are we progressing with the exploration decline, Tim?

Yes. So I'll tackle the exploration decline. We got a very good start to it last year. Got slowed down once again, got slowed down by water, but we're incorporating that grouting program and with the exploration decline and beginning to move that along now. So we do expect to be on time with that exploration decline.

Right. So I guess when our -- when do you think just start drilling [indiscernible]?

So, I recall Tyler, we're looking at 2 months out.

Yes, the drift is approximately halfway complete where we're at now. So probably a few more months just...

And so Tim, touching on the concept of how many levels do we have? That concept of levels, how many levels do we have in production right now, how is the decline advancing? What's the plan for this year? What do we -- how many levels do we ramp up to?

Yes. And the levels are changing on a day-to-day basis. So I apologize that I don't have an exact number for you, but essentially, the ramp is progressing a little ahead of schedule. We're right about where we expected to be on that ramp for 2025. It is supposed to accelerate towards the end of this year as we get ahead of the water more and more, essentially on what we planned for this year, and we're sitting -- I don't recall the exact elevation of hands. But if you want to talk later, we can look at exact levels there.

So what we're doing, Justin, there is that the plan for this year has got a phased up approach to the way that we're thinking the decline. So each quarter, we have a different target rate for the advancement of the decline, culminating in just over 11 feet a day for the second half of the year. And so as Tim pointed out, if you're following Granite Creek, it's all a function of how many levels you have active. And so right now, we have between 5 and 6 levels that are active at any one moment. And the advancement of that decline is really what allows you to continue to ramp that up. For the first quarter of 2025, the target advancement rate on that decline is very modest. Then it steps up to ultimately 11, as I mentioned before. The plan for this year would then be to kind of finish the year between 7 and 8 active levels. The South Pacific zone has come into the mine plan. It has been a major contributor to the ounces for production in 2025, it is absolutely a major contributor to the ounces that we're getting right now. South Pacific is really turning into a very notable ore zone, and we're very pleased to have it in the picture. It's about -- the South Pacific contributed about 25% of our ounces in 2024. Justin, did I give you justice there?

Yes, I know that helps a lot. Are you getting to the level where you have more horizontal extent than...

Again, the -- in the Ogee Zone, the main zone, we've kind of reached the steady state there. The -- as we go deeper, the levels aren't necessarily getting larger. They shrink and swell as we go down. The South Pacific -- the upper levels we've touched have been modest. And as we can see, and certainly, our resource model shows that as we go down, those will get longer in extent. We haven't got there yet, Justin, but that's the whole development plan for 2025.

I'm curious on the dewatering -- curious on the groundwater and the PEA, how the -- what the current assumptions are with respect to groundwater that went into the PEA. And then also more broadly, does the groundwater -- is it more of a schedule risk or a cost risk?

Okay. Great questions. First off, I'll address the first question with regards to the PEA. The PEA was based on work we had done in early 2024. And you're right. It doesn't include the today impacts of the groundwater. All the work that we did in 2024 to mitigate the groundwater risk. It has been built into our internal plan. And I will say that in the second half of this year, at that sinking rate of over 11 feet per day, that is more than the sinking rate that's implied in the PEA. So we have a 6-month -- there's about 6 months where we're a little bit out of sync. That's fair. I hope we disclosed that transparently in the press release. That's the time frame we're looking at, is that 6-month window for us to get over the hump of the water. We have significantly increased our ability to dewater the mine both through the well system as well as the contact water system. The predictive hydrology model shows us that as we continue with this program, we are going to be able to see that water level really drop. I will say we're advancing the decline again. So at the end of last year, the message was we haven't advanced the decline for several months because we've been -- that hedging has been underwater. We've got all the pumping systems in. The main decline is sinking again, the exploration drift is started up again. We're using routing as a way to advance in areas where we do hit pockets of water. So that's the model for this year. That's the plan for this year, and that's where you get to that guidance of 20,000 to 30,000 ounces produced that's in the press release.

Okay. And then on the groundwater more broadly. Is it -- if you encounter more surprises, is this going to cost you more money? Or is it in a slow you down...

I'm sorry, I didn't -- it is -- because we built into the PEA and the internal model, the budget on capital for -- we've allocated a capital cost per year of extending our dewatering program, primarily wells. I mean the idea is always to have wells as you're dewatering versus better systems of capturing water underground. So each year, we have allocated approximately $3 million for another well as we advance. And the water treatment plan is functioning brilliantly. We're going to do an expansion to that water treatment plant to allow it to handle even more water. So other than the capital cost of dewatering, which I'm not -- we're just building that in. We're just going to assume from now on, and it's prudent that we're going to be spending $3 million a year on dewatering infrastructure. It's really scheduled risk, right? What happens -- it's not a lot of water. In the context of Nevada to have -- we're discharging right now 1,200 gallons a minute from the underground. That's not a lot of water, right? But it's a lot of water if it's in your decline, and it's all H1 at the bottom of the mine. So that's the issue. It has been completely a function of schedule risk versus the extra cost of dewatering other than the capital infrastructure. Did I -- am I giving you just...

We have one question online that just wanted a bit more clarity on the drilling schedule going forward. Granite Creek underground.

100%. Look, I'll let -- Tyler and Tim, you alluded to that, where we're sitting with the exploration drift. Most importantly, how are we going to finish those meters of drilling for this year and how are we going to get that feasibility study out at the end of the year?

Yes. So there has been a bit of delay due to the water, but we are back progressing on the exploration drift now, and we hope within the next few months, we'll be able to begin drilling.

Yes, we're certainly the plan, the schedule, the budget is to complete that drilling this year and have it incorporated into the feasibility study that comes out in the end of the fourth quarter.

I think it's important to chime in there. On the feasibility study, really what we're waiting for is the drilling to upgrade that resource. The rest we got a handle on.

All right. Any further questions, Katerina? Okay. Thank you very much. Let's go to the next one. Now we're going to talk about the Granite Creek Open Pit. Todd?

All right. My name is Todd Esplin, VP of Technical Services. Really happy to be here today. I'm a Nevada minor, been working my whole career in Nevada. I had a few opportunities to leave, but always stuck it out in Nevada with Barrick and Kinross. And i-80 has been a great fit for me with the different sites all around Nevada where I worked my whole life. So one thing I want to say about Granite Creek underground water real quick, and then I'll get into the open pit. We just finished a predictive groundwater model. We can now take a dewatering well and say we want to place it here and they can predict what the flow -- the level that will pull in years, pull the mine down to and also how much contact water we have. That's very new to Granite Creek, and that model goes clear out to Twin Creeks, goes miles and miles every direction with a lot of inputs and it's calibrated. So we have those at some of our other mines, but Granite Creek is a little later. So I just want to say that, and then I'll get into the open pit. So Granite Creek Open Pit, it's something we hadn't been looking at, and then we decided to look at it again with gold prices going up and pretty enlightening. I'm going to go over some of the changes. And one thing I won't do today, I'm not going to go over every number you guys have the press releases. I'm really trying today to show you something, maybe I have some inside knowledge on and can go over and give you a little context on it. So you can see up there, it's really nice mine. It's about 130,000, 127,000 ounces a year, 10-year mine life, pretty nice grades, stripping ratios a little higher, but it's not that big a pit. And if we go to the next slide, you could see the pit up there -- what's changed here? When you look at our 2021 PEA, what's changed? The biggest change that when you pull this pit at $21.75, it goes a little wider and it goes a lot deeper just because of that gold price. And then the other big change we made with GRE's help is before this asset was heap leach and CIL. Because of the increased gold price, we were able to make it all CIL and you're wondering why is that important. That's important because the recovery now is 86.6%, where a lot of the recovery in the heap leach was around 60%. So it brings a lot more ounces that can be recovered. And it's just a really neat story that we just finished up in the last few days. If you look at the time line down there, you can see that we do have permitting. There is a -- not a -- the Mag Pit has some water in. It's not a lot of water, but that has to be dewatered. We can do that really easy in about a year, and we're looking at putting that into the tailings dam that we built. You can see we have permitting. Mark will talk about that, and then we have about 1.5 years of construction then we're into production. All right. So some of the interesting things here. This is -- one thing about this open pit, I've run open pits before is, I used to run the Round Mountain open pit. That pit is deep, and your truck hauls are very long. This pit, if we go back one, you can see it's not that -- it's an existing brownfield's pits, 2 pits, and we're just going to do laybacks on it and go deeper. So the hauls aren't that long and they're not that far. We're also going to incorporate backfill into that. And then let's -- we'll get into it more, but I'll talk about a little here. So the CIL plant, we looked at it a different how fast should we mine. We looked at 3,000, 7,000, 10,000 tonnes per day in the mill and the CIL circuit ended up with going with 10,000, just made more sense to get it mine quicker and get that through the plant. When you get a plant like that, economy of scale makes seems a little cheaper. So that's what we went with. In the capital, we can talk about a little bit. You look at the capital cost, they might seem a little low, but this is a very simple. I've been in processing a long time in my life, a very simple crusher. It will be a SAG mill and then a ball mill, and then we'll go right into a CIL circuit. And this ore is really amenable to a CIL circuit, especially in the Mag Pit side. The Mag Pit side has a little organic, it's not a lot. But if you know anything about organic, when you get them in competition with coconut carbon in a CIL circuit, you can have better recovery. We did that a lot of gold strike on the autoclave side, is you get a lot better recovery when you get -- if you have organic, you get something in competition, the coconut carbon will always win, not always, but most of the time. Some of the other capital items, the -- included in that capital is the initial tails dam, is included in there. And then in sustaining capital is building that tails dam up. And you always want to build the tails dam up when you build it up, when you're in production because it's just way cheaper. You have waste coming out of the pit. This tails dam, if you go to Granite Creek, it's very flat, very simple. We have a lot of land. We bought some more land from MGM a few years ago, and we have lots of places for the tails dam. It's easy to pipe tails out to wherever it makes the most sense to get economic tails dam. So very simple tails dam. Here's the unit cost for operating costs. I'm not going to go into every one of them, but you can see all-in sustaining there at $1,225, pretty nice typical open pit. One thing you don't see in Nevada too much anymore because everything has been mined out, everything is somewhat gone refractory. So it's nice when you have oxide in the underground too, but it's nice when you get an oxide deposit like this that's fairly simple and really tried and true processing. All right. We'll turn it over to Tyler to go over some of the...

All right. Thanks, Todd. So first, I'll direct your attention to the image in the bottom left, which displays the conceptual open pit at Granite Creek, which consists of laybacks on 4 historic pits, the A, B, CX and Mag Pits. The section at the top of the image is a long section through the B, A and CX pits. Note the current topography shown in black and the conceptual ultimate pit outline in white underneath. You'll see the drill hole traces and gold shown on the trace. Almost all of this drilling is historic drilling from the 1970s and '80s when the pit was first mined. The lower image is a section through the Mag Pit. Again, same features there with the black being the current topography and the white being the conceptual ultimate pit. You'll see most of the pushback there is on the southern end, where there's a significant amount of mineralization that remains. So overall, approximately 85% of the material from the Granite Creek open pit will come from the CX and Mag Pits. We do see potential to expand mineralization at depth and along strike of the known deposits. Again, these really haven't seen any drilling since the 1970s and '80s. It's important to note that there's also 2 additional historic pits on the property that are not included in the current resource that offer further upside, and we'll look to include these in a future feasibility study.

Thanks, Tyler. And now Mark Miller, our VP of Environmental, will go over permitting.

Good morning. Just to follow up on Tim's presentation on the underground, at present, we have all needed permits to continue advancing the underground there. But however, as we move into the open pit expansion, we do foresee additional federal and state permitting actions needed. At the federal level, it will require a National Environmental Policy Act requirement, which will eventually lead to an environmental impact statement, we believe, through the Bureau of Land Management. Over the next 2 years, the key focus will be on completing required technical studies and baseline surveys. At the state level, Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, we have a water push control permit and a reclamation permit that will be -- need modification. And then also our Class 2 air quality permit will be -- receive a revision. Currently, with the -- what we know today from a permitting perspective, we expect this process to take an approximate 3-year time frame. And for details related to that time line and associated class, you can refer to the PEA. Thank you.

Thanks, Mark. And I was looking down on my notes, one thing I failed to mention is this also is, we're looking at contracting this open pit. And it's a very small fleet of 10 trucks, 110 tons -- 10 to 12 trucks and 4 loaders. It won't be rope shovels or hydraulic shovels. The benches are pretty small, how they did it before, and it's a pretty small fleet needed for mining this, I wouldn't call it a small open pit, kind of a medium open pit. So anyway, we'll turn it over to Matt.

All right. So let's talk about questions regarding the -- pardon me, I went too far. Let's talk about questions regarding the open pit. Huge change in the way that we look about -- at the open pit at Granite Creek, and that just the appreciation of what is there. You've heard us talk about it before. We mentioned it. Now you're seeing a real effort and an appreciation for the value that's there. We have begun the permitting process. We have a 3-year time line towards that permitting. The -- that -- as Todd alluded to, making sure you understand that trade-off between heap leach and CIL, that is -- it's how much does recovery pay. And when gold price is $21.75, recovery pays and it pays enough that it does make economic sense and value creation to put in that CIO and process that material. It's 1.4 gram feet that goes into that plant and to go from 60-ish percent recovery into the 80s, that makes a lot of value for i-80 and for our shareholders. So that's really what you're seeing there. You're seeing a rethink of the open pit and reappreciation for it. So I'm pretty excited about this. It's all very fresh. You would have just barely seen it, but I'm looking for questions regarding the Granite Creek open pit. Yes?

[indiscernible].

So Justin. Okay. So you're asking some very specific questions. I'll tackle the easy one first. Yes. When you look at the plan we have here for Granite Creek Open Pit, which is different than the Mineral Point plan, but we'll touch on that later. The Granite Creek Open Pit concept is very much contractor-driven. This is a very normal size contractor job for Nevada. It's 110-ton trucks, it's loaders. This is what the open pit mining contractor group in Nevada is set up to do. So that's the basis for what we've done here. You will see, we put in $10 million -- approximately $10 million in the capital estimate for us to build the facilities like the truck wash and the truck shops and those infrastructure that's required in order to be able to bring a contractor on the site, but the rolling stock and the operators and the supervisors of those operators and the maintenance for that equipment is going to come from the contract. So I answered that one. When you -- regarding the power cost, the power cost for NV Energy right now are in $0.09. Yes. So we're in the $0.09 to $0.10 kilowatt hour range with Nevada Energy. The Granite Creek is hooked up to the Nevada Energy line, okay? So the power is there. I mean we're online with Turquoise Region Twin Creeks complex. We're running right now at approximately $0.09 a kilowatt hour for electricity. So we answered that. And what else did you have Justin?

Grind size -- is standard grind size...

Yes, grind size.

If my memory serves me right, it's like a [indiscernible] kind of typical CIL. There's no fine grind you have to do for this deposit. I do remember that for sure. It's pretty typical CIL grind.

Relating to permitting. Is it just keeping the pit dewatered or -- and just getting the permit...

I'll let Mark answer the permitting. The pit is really easy to dewater and actually GRE came up with a good plan where we'll just take it to the tails dam when we build it and evaporate it. It's 150 million gallons. So it's not that big. Permitting, I'll let Mark talk about because it's a little more complex.

Yes. On the federal side, as we look ahead, I mentioned that the [indiscernible] will require us to more than likely complete an EIS. With that, I mean, the big focus is really on your big resources such as your biological, your cultural, your hydrological, those types of activities that get the attention of the agency as well as the external folks outside of our company. So there's a robust analysis that goes on. And certainly, we will not be issued a permit to proceed with that open pit expansion until those have all been satisfied to all external parties.

Could I -- Mark, can I summarize it by saying to answer Justin's question, the dewatering of the Mag Pit is inconsequential part of the permitting. I mean we're already -- by what we're doing with dewatering the underground, we're already pretty much dewatering the area. So dewatering in itself is not going to be the primary driver for the permit. And in fact, if you look at Granite Creek property as a whole, it's a brownfield site. It's been being disturbed for 30 years. There's no cultural. There's no sites of cultural significance and certainly no endangered species there. So it's really a very bog-standard permit, but we are going to have a tailings dam. So that's just going to require the amount of diligence that a permitting agency is going to expect from a company that wants to build a tailings dam anywhere in the world. So yes, so I hope I answered that, Justin. There is no specific smoking gun issue at Granite Creek permitting. Is that fair to say, Mark?

Yes. That's pretty standard Northern Nevada permitting action, tails dams are part of how we operate. And -- but like Matt said, there's been a renewed focus on how those tails dams are managed moving forward. So part of that permitting will involve a robust engineering design to ensure that we've got adequate capacity as well as stability to move forward.

Kent.

This is a question about permitting. Already, there is a long time to get permitted. Now with the Department of Efficiency, I believe, headed by Elon Musk and Trump. Already, we have -- we don't have enough staff on these agencies to process permits applications. And there's too many projects and too less staff. So with the Department of Efficiency initiatives, are they going to reduce some more stuff and then it's going to get delayed? Or are you going to take any proactive actions contacting the ministers or state governors to increase their staff and not to cut down the BLM staff. That's one question, and I have a comment after than.

Okay. So I'll answer the -- I'll go for the first question, Kent. And I am going to be very incredibly cautious in my answer to this question. Over the course of the last 3 weeks, maybe 4 now, there have been some significant impacts upon federal employees in the country of the United States. And when we -- when Mark refers to an EPA permit, he is referring to interaction with an employee from the Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the Department of the Interior for the United States. So on one hand, we have concerns about that. We have concerns about the -- there are -- well, one, they are friends and neighbors and we don't like to see our friends and neighbors being impacted negatively. And two, we rely on them to get our permits expedited. So we're monitoring the situation closely. And there have been some administrative people that have been let go from some of the Nevada BOMs, that's not helpful. On the other hand, then there is certainly a lot of discussion about how the incoming administration wants to make the permitting process more efficient. So I'm leaving a narrow political path here. On 1 hand, we're concerned about the impacts on employees for the federal government. On the other hand, we're optimistic that there is a real drive to make the permitting process more efficient. We don't believe in any model that permitting is just going to get easier and you don't have to be as environmentally conscious. We're going to be environmentally conscious. But we just believe that there's going to be a process by which permitting itself is just a more efficient process. We hope that -- we believe today that those 2 things will balance each other out, and we're still very much committed to this 3-year permitting time line.

It's going to be music to Ryan's ears. When you say after-tax cash flow, this is an academic calculation, but in reality, are you in a taxable situation where you actually have to pay tax. So the actual cash flow could be more than the after-tax cash flow that is indicated, I believe. So that may be a positive situation for -- at least for the -- until you become taxable.

In the PEA's, we've taken into account the tax situation that we see for our company with our existing loss pools, et cetera. That's been reflected in the after-tax cash flows that are published in the PEAs.

I see it's already done.

Yes.

There are some more questions on open pit. We have a question that takes us back to Granite Creek underground from online. And they ask is approximately 7 mining levels enough for the throughput that you need. Also, what is the average width of the currently delineated veins? And how are you looking to manage dilution. Any optimizations on mining methods being implemented?

Okay. That's a great question. Okay. So you went through so many questions there Katerina. Give me the first one.

So approximately 7 mining levels, is that enough for the throughput that you need.

Okay. So Tim, do you mind if I feel this one real quick? Okay, just because you and I talk about this almost every day. Right now, if you look at the PEA calculation, the PEA calculation is approximately 700 tonnes per day of ore production. And if you look at what we plan for ore production per level, that's -- it's 100 tonnes per day per level. And that's all of our levels. So through the whole cycle through the mining cycle, the backfill cycle and through the reaccess cycle. So right now, we're exactly in sync. And that's -- and the PEA is kind of built that way, right? So there is an in sync there. The way to get more production at Granite Creek is to get more levels in production, not to try to get more tons per day per level, okay? That's my belief, and we've kind of demonstrated that as we've gone. So that was the first question. So we are on path, the number of levels we have currently in production is in sync at 7, is in sync with the PEA. We've actually done -- look, we've done better than that for the last 2 months. But let's just say from the standpoint of the PEA, we're in sync. And your second part of that question?

What is the average width of the currently delineated veins? And how are you looking to manage dilution/optimization of mining methods?

Okay. I'm going to start on that, and then I'm going to hand over to Tyler. And what I'm going to say is, when we -- when you look at the ore body at Granite Creek, you shouldn't be thinking of it as a vein? The Ogee zone is an undulating deposit, okay? And so you have -- so we're not mining down the vein. We're not taking a single pass down to vein. We're coming into a polygon. And then we are cutting across the polygon and then retreating our way out with panels. So that is the Granite Creek methodology, particularly for the Ogee. In the South Pacific zone, there -- it's not a vein, but it does resemble a vein somewhat in its geometry. Tyler, do you want to expand on that?

Yes. So everything at Granite Creek is very structurally controlled. So rather than veins, they are the mineralizations in fault zones. So the Ogee is on a fault zone, the South Pacific is on a separate fault zone or a set of fault zones. But they do, like Matt said, active veins in places where you very quickly go from high-grade mineralization to rock that is far below cutoff. The width varies anywhere kind of in that 2 to 3-meter range, we've seen intercepts true widths of kind of in the 13 to 15-meter range in drilling. Maybe Tim can comment on what size some of the mining is now?

Yes, and that very much matches up with the mining where a typical 1 cut is like 4.5 meters. And then there are places where we widen that out to 3 or 4 cuts at that width.

Yes. So if we were talking about the whole program by which we minimize dilution at Granite Creek. It all starts with -- first, we have the resource model, but we don't just come in on to a level and say, Oh, the resource model says, this is where the ore is and just go in there. What's the first thing that we do when we get to a new production level? Tim?

So we're doing cover drilling on every level that we do, and we do that through a combination of a core rig that we have on site, essentially full time. We have one core rig doing cover drilling as well as a Cubex rig or an underground RC rig that we use at times as well.

So as Tim points out, when we come on to a level, we do essentially ore control drilling, just like you would do vertically in a pit. We come in -- so we come in, we have an idea of where the ore should be from the resource model. We come in on to a level. We cover drill that level. And then we use that detail to fine-tune where the stope layouts are going to be. But that's not where it ends. Every round that we mine is logged by the ore control geology crew. It is then brought out of the mine as a separate entity late into a win row in the yard and then it's sampled. And based on that sample is how we direct that round, that approximately 170 tonnes of material to which pile? Is that ore? Is it refractory ore? Is it oxide ore? Is it waste? And so each round is separately categorized based on its assays to where it is located. So those are the processes we use in order -- the ore control processes that we use to minimize dilution. We have an overbreak system that we monitor overbreak in every one of our headings. All of our headings are cavity surveyed. And so we are able to calculate in detail the overbreak on every one of our headings. We have a monthly meeting to reconcile that overbreak with the contractor and work out ways to improve our mining methods. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm looking -- it's you, Katerina. What's the third -- was there a third part?

Just comments on optimization of mining methods.

Okay, optimization of mining methods, that's really a very important topic. You're going to see that when you get to the undergrounds at Cove and at Ruby Hill. Right now, the mining method at Granite Creek is very much underhand cut and fill. However, we are starting to see spots where we can do some more bulk style mining. What that does, if you go back to my previous conversation, it was that 100 tonnes a day per level. That is what you can do to change that 100 tonnes a day number. So if you have a more bulk amenable mining method, you can schedule more than 100 tonnes a day. And so we're seeing that a little bit in Granite Creek right now, and we've done 2 experiments on areas, and they've been successful on how we can improve our bulk lining method. We see a lot of potential for South Pacific that is not yet built into the PEA, but we see potential where we can see a vertical overlay on the South Pacific that will allow for benching. But when we get to Cove, you're going to see that 20% of the mine tonnes in the Cove PEA are assumed to be bench tonnes. And when you get to the Ruby, you're going to see that 80% of the tonnes in the mining model are assumed to be benching. And we're seeing -- like if you look at a comparison, it's about $20 less per tonne mining when you go into the bench methodology. Tim, did I do that justice? Okay. Katerina, anything else? Okay. Progressing along. We are now going to go and we're going to talk about the Archimedes Underground. Tim is going to take you through that. Do not be shy in going into detail about benching that we're going to be doing. Why is Ruby Hill Underground -- Archimedes, pardon me, Underground different than Granite Creek and the pros and cons?

All right. Thank you. So going through Archimedes Underground as we're calling the underground there at Ruby Hill. So once again, we're looking at a very typical Nevada mine. We are planning this as a contractor mine. We didn't go into detail there, but we are contract mining there at Granite Creek right now, small mine development at Battle Mountain is our contractor. There are many good contractors in Nevada and in the region. And where we're at now, it makes sense to have that ready to roll fleet come in and do the mining from a contract standpoint. Archimedes Underground, once again, another very typical Nevada mine. This is all portal access. We are planning 2 portals out of the Archimedes pit. We are putting those on the west side of the pit, if you will. Historically, there's been some ground issues there at the Archimedes pit. We're staying well away from those, so those don't impact our mining underground and just going to make that a non-issue. This is primarily going to be a long-hole stoping. Matt calls it benching, it's the same thing. It's a type of long-hole stoping that we use in Nevada, and that makes up the majority of the mining here with some cut and fill making up the remainder. So you can see here where the Archimedes Underground is going to fit in with the mineral point, open pit. They are separate deposits. Geographically, we get to them separately. The portals are not going to get taken out by the open pit. They will remain separate and distinct throughout the mine life there. I'll give you a little construction update. As you can see on the schedule since 2025 construction, we actually started construction in late 2024. So we've got a slope stabilization contractor in right now. There's a large section of high wall that we're putting a fence across the top bench draping that high wall so that we've got protection there at the portals and that, that's all ready to roll for the underground. Currently, we're permitted to do all the surface construction for this underground. We are not permitted to go underground yet. Mark is going to cover that here in a few slides. I'll leave that up to him to talk through. So we've got stope stabilization contractor there, and we also have a construction contractor. And so what is the construction contractor doing. We are building a shop there right by the portals. We're going to have office trailer there down by the portals. We're bringing in power so that we've got power at the portals on day 1 as well as water. We're going to have a fuel island oiling facilities, everything there at the portals ready to roll for underground contractor. We've also gone out to bid for underground contractors. We have multiple bids that we're analyzing right now that are very good from a very strong selection of underground contractors there. So the metrics here on Archimedes Underground. We're looking at roughly 100,000 ounces per year for a 10-year mine life. It's a very good mine. Average recovery there is sitting at 90%. The vast majority of that is planned to go through the autoclave. There's a little bit of oxide that will go on the existing heap leach and a little bit of third-party contractor, but the vast majority of that is going to be autoclaved there at Lone Tree. You'll see there one of the things. This is of the 3 underground mines, Archimedes and Granite Creek and Cove. This is the lowest grade, but the geometry of this body is it has the most potential for higher tonnage rate, bulk mining, easier mining and less costly mining. All right. Looking at the cash flow there, it has a relatively modest spend there for the next 3 years. You can see there in 2028, we get the autoclave online and really start producing out of that underground. Essentially, all of the capital expenditure here is in mine development. We've got an existing mine. We've got power there. We've got water. We've got dewatering facilities. It's already there. We're just going underground. There's roughly $4 million in dewatering. I'll talk about that a little bit as it's a large issue at some of the other mines. Archimedes pit has been dewatered for decades now. There's a whole series of wells around that pit that are pumping and dewatering. It's a very confined fault block, if you will, where the water exists, and we can pump out the area around the mine without impacting a much larger area. We do have a little bit of capital there to essentially deepen those wells so that we can push that water table down deeper. But where we're sitting for the next few years, this is a dry mine and has been so for some time. As you'll see, we talked about operating costs there. These are much better costs than what we're sitting out at Granite Creek. Like I mentioned, we are bulk mining here with primarily long-hole stoping. With the overall mining costs per tonne milled is $164 per tonne, very much -- you can see the cash flow there. On the permitting side that we're going to get into here shortly. Essentially, we're looking at a Phase II of permitting. We split this at the 5,100 elevation level, and Mark will explain that. But essentially, we're looking at the Phase II of permitting kicking in, in June of 2027. And so you can see where that fits in our overall production schedule there. So with that, Mark will chime in here and talk us through the permit.

Thanks, Tim. As Tim mentioned, we received our permits to begin the surface infrastructure work for the underground. That involved approvals from both the BLM and the State of Nevada. Now our current focus is on getting the permits that we need to tap that underground. And that's -- we've decided to take a phased approach to that primarily because we needed to be able to get into that underground in a faster way versus permitting the entire underground. So if you look at the graphics on the right, you'll see how we broke that up. Phase 1 is what we're currently permitting. And Tim mentioned the 5,100 foot level, what's the significance of that? Well, previous permitting actions at Ruby Hill that were tied to the East Archimedes open pit involved technical studies that were approved. And so we used that particular truncated elevation as a springboard to get our permitting going for that phase. And that -- once again, like I said, it allows us to get into that underground quicker while we then can turn focus to the lower Archimedes Underground for Phase II. At present, from the Federal side, an environmental assessment was required to tap that underground. And from the state side, it was a major water pollution control permit. Those actions are close to completion, and we expect approval in the early Q2 time frame. And once that happens, that allows us to get into that underground mine through about mid-2027. As soon as these permits are approved, we will then turn our attention to the Phase II permitting. At present, the big focus from both agencies was they needed more characterization primarily from a hydrology standpoint and from a geochemical standpoint. So we have begun looking at those on how we can get more robust data sets put together through additional drilling that Tyler has done. So we're working with his information and of course, several consultants that we're using that focus on these particular aspects. So with that in mind, that's going to take us to about a projected time frame of the end of '27 at the latest to get those permits. The key thing is we don't want to run out of underground real estate before we receive that second tier of permitting actions. So it's very sequential and Matt had mentioned that very early on about how we're approaching this. But it's -- we feel good about it, and we've had many conversations with both the state and Federal folks at the BLM to really provide them with the approach that we wanted to take to expedite this permitting action.

Thank you, Mark. And Tyler, on exploration.

All right. Thanks, Tim. So Archimedes Underground, we have several exploration targets to follow up in the coming years. On the image here on the slide, this is a section looking west. So you see the 426 zone shown in orange there at the top and the Ruby deeps in red at the bottom. You'll note a drill hole on the left there, 50 meters of 6.9 grams. That is south and outside of the current resource. So we need some follow-up drilling around that hole and potentially to expand the Ruby deeps to the south. Additionally, there are multiple high-grade intercepts beneath the Archimedes pit that provide further exploration potential, and you can kind of see those on the bottom left there. One is the historic Homestake hole, and then we drilled a whole about 30 meters offset of that one a couple of years ago now, and that's the only 2 holes in that entire area. We do have a 50,000-meter program planned from underground in 2027, and that's to upgrade the inferred resources to indicate it ahead of a feasibility study.

Thank you, Tyler. All right. Matt will walk us through.

Thank you Tim. So what is -- takeaways from Tim's presentation on the Archimedes Underground. First, we're in construction right now. The -- as he said, we've draped the high wall, getting ready for the portals. We brought the utilities down. We're building the shop structures and the office structures down into -- in the pit so that we can expedite that. So that's where we're sitting right now with Ruby. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because Ruby, while it has a lower rate, it's the lowest grade of the 3 underground deposits. It's the most minable of the 3 deposits and is able to produce about 102,000 ounces a year, as Tim laid out for a 10-year life. That first age of permitting allows us to get -- to continue on the PEA plan through June of 2027. So that's the time frame that we have to work towards to get that next permit. The permits are sitting on the desk. As Ken pointed out, there's been a change in administration in the United States. And so there's a little hesitation now to be the tall poppy and sign something, but the documents on their desk and ready to go, and they're comfortable with it. So we'll continue with that, but we expect to get that imminently as far as a permit to begin the mining through 2027. You got a modest NPV of $148 million. Look, the great parts about Ruby are its location. It's right next to a town. It's fully infrastructured. It's a really easy place to operate. Downside, it's farthest away from the processing facilities and it has lowest rate. So if you look at what's the potential, what do we need to do to increase value at Ruby Hill -- or Archimedes Underground, pardon me, is to be able to do some sort of pre-classification, some presorting so that we're not having to truck the entire ore stream to the processing facility. That's the next step in our value creation path. So with that in mind, I'm open to questions about Archimedes Underground.

On the permit. So can you push the ramp to Phase II or you can [indiscernible]?

So what we'll do is we will actually drive the development. We get the first permit here in the next month or so. We drive -- we drive the decline. We drive the decline all the way down to 5,100, but we have to stop at the 5,100. And the way -- and when you look at the mine plan and the PEA, that shows that if you can get -- as long as you have the permit to allow you to continue to decline down June of 2027 -- June 30th of 2027, then the mine plan functions without a hitch. There's actually -- we have a few months of contingency built in there, but just let's use the June 30th date.

And I guess -- just so we can help keep track of progress. I guess how much progress do you need to ramp? Have you kind of assumed to that Phase I? How many levels do you need to kind of hit your schedules?

So that one is very different. I mean the Ruby Hill orebody is completely different in structure in shape than Granite Creek. So the 100 tonnes a level doesn't hold together. The peak production coming out of Ruby Hill is just over 1,500 tonnes a day. And that is very much, you should think of Ruby Hill as panel benching. So you're coming into a level and the vertical -- the tonnes per vertical foot calculation for Ruby is completely different than it is at Granite Creek. It's really -- holistically when you have all the undergrounds in production, what you're going to see is you are mining Granite Creek as hard as you can. You're mining Cove as hard as you can. And you're actually doing ore calls to Ruby Hill to be able to say, "Okay, look, this month, I got Ruby -- I got Granite Creek and Cove going really smooth. I'm going to -- I need 800 tonnes a day this month from Ruby", and so it will be more of a pull than a push from Ruby Hill. So I didn't give you a specific answer there, but it's not the same -- you can't use that same -- that level calculation that I've been using for Granite Creek and Ruby Hill.

Yes, it's both mining, yes, got it. Is it a longitudinal sequence and your backfill is it paste or CRF.

No backfill is CRF. So we have no tails. So we don't have any place that we're using paste. It is the sequence there. Each of our mines has a different -- it's cemented rock fill at all of our mines. And for cost about $42 per metric tonne is the cost of producing a tonne of backfill. But the ratio is different at each of our mines. At Granite Creek, the backfill replacement ratio is 1 tonne of backfill per tonne of ore. At Cove, the replacement ratio is approximately -- there's a little bit of a specific gravity, but approximately 75%. So 0.75 tonnes of backfill per tonne of ore. And at Ruby, that ratio is 60%. So it's approximately 60% -- 0.6 of a ton of backfill for every ton of ore.

[indiscernible] or transverse?

It's transverse. So yes, I'm using -- you're coming -- the way that benching method works is you kind of have -- you have a long dimension and a short dimension to the level. You're coming down the long dimension on both sides. I mean you're cutting across the top, drilling out and then in mucking, lashing, whatever verb you're using for removing or across the bottom.

Just one question. I was looking at, I think it relates toll processing. Because I noticed you got a few comments there on acid versus alkaline. And I assume you're going to -- the Lone Tree Autoclave is going to be acid. You're not going to run it as an alkaline. Is that -- how should we should be thinking about that? And how does it pertain to the overall picture?

Okay. There's been a lot of -- Todd is going to go -- the last presentation is on Lone Tree Autoclave that Todd is going to take us through. But I'm going to lead into it because this is a very exciting topic. Our original projections for all the different ore types coming in, and you'll see this very clearly that we have carbonate rich ore that comes from all of our deposits, it's just the amount of carbonate. And if you're following autoclaving, you know that for every tonne of carbonate you have, you have to have a tonne of sulfuric acid, William, I think my math is correct, to neutralize that, okay? So we've always been looking at the -- and so we have -- with the carbonate that we have, that's a lot of sulfuric acid. We have always been looking at the standpoint of alkaline operations for Lone Tree, and that's the way the original scope was designed. So you get to the fundamental question. It's a trade-off, operating costs versus recovery. More sulfuric acid, you get better recovery. And that equation fundamentally changes with gold price. So as gold price goes up, the amount of benefit you get from recovery gets bigger. And if sulfuric acid prices don't go up proportionately to gold, that completely changes your equation. So what we are looking at now is an autoclave. The -- we know this. I mean, the entitle -- I don't want to -- I'm hoping not stealing your thunder here because he's got a presentation coming up. But we -- the Goldstrike Autoclaves, which Todd and team ran for decades, those switch between alkaline and acidic. And we are now building in with our QP partners, which we're very, very fortunate to have, we are building in the optionality to be able to run that alkaline or acidic. And so there's -- we are very much building in the concept now of batching so that we are going to be -- we're going to be running in an alkaline environment for a period of months, and then we're going to swap over into an acidic environment for a period of months and being able to manage that, that it's all a function of recovery now. The gold price has just made recovery so much more value creating than the cost of sulfuric acid.

I think one other comment, Matt, just everybody understands. Switching from alkaline to acid long you have acidulation tanks, which we're going to, is very easy. I mean it's just a fact of turning on the acid to acidulate the carbonate and turning down the boilers a little bit. So you can switch back and forth so we'll be able to campaign one or the other. And like Archimedes Underground, especially in the lower levels, acid autoclaving is much better.

And out of curiosity, how long would that take to make a switch and...

Make the switch?

Yes.

Very quick. I mean...

Like a day, like a week or a month. What...

No, I mean, it's very quick. You got to think about an autoclave is running, right? You got a continual stream coming in and the pressure and temperature aren't going to change. The only thing that's going to change is now you switch over and start acidulating the carbonate in tanks, and that's just taking sulfuric acid and putting it into a tank and getting rid of the carbonate. So I say 10 minutes, I mean a little flip, but it's very fast, right? You can change it. It's just adding that acid. And then when you do alkaline, you have to have more boiler steam to increase the heat to help oxidize the ore. So you just turn the boiler down. But it is very fast.

Yes. We're being -- and I appreciate the comment. We're not being flipped. They've been training [indiscernible]. They've been training me on this. This is a big part of i-80 is this autoclave. So they've been training me on it. So I'm going to rehearse the speeds that I've been trained on. So you have a vessel, you feed ore into it. If you're running in the alkaline with our ore stream, it's going to naturally want to go alkaline. So if you're feeding in alkaline and you're running in the alkaline environment, you're all fine. You're feeding in your ore, you're processing it, you're pressurizing it, you're heating it up. You know that when you're in the alkaline environment, you're not going to be getting a lot of heat from the oxidation. So you're going to have to have the boiler capacity. So you're going to be -- you have to the boilers. So you know that. So now, okay, I'm running along. Now I'm going to swap over to acetic. What I am going to do now is I'm going to start adding acid into the feed side of the autoclave. That is going to acidify -- it's going to neutralize the carbonate. That's going to start bringing the heat up. I'm going to turn down the boilers and that oxidation is going to continue to happen through the autoclave. Now I come out the back end of the autoclave. All I have to do on the back end of the autoclave is -- if I'm running a -- if I'm running alkaline, I'm fine. I just need to make sure my pH is above 8 when I come out the back end of the autoclave. If I'm running acidic, I've got to then add back in some lime product to bring the pH back up above 8. That's all part of the cyanide reaction.

And at Goldstrike, we ran 3 autoclaves, alkaline and 3 acid, right? And then we co-mingled the tails out of the autoclave into a CIL. So...

That's the fundamental change that you're seeing in our approach to the autoclave and the alkaline versus acidic is the metal price and recoveries right now just make that a compelling argument. Do you have any questions for us, Katerina?

[indiscernible]

They do.

[indiscernible]

Okay. So I'll go through all those questions. I'm very -- that would be another thing I spend a lot of time on is the toll milling agreements. So the oxide ore purchase agreement is a very simple structure, and that is when we get to oxidized material, we sell it to our third-party partner, and they just buy -- they buy it -- we weigh the trucks, we sample the material, we compare our notes and they write us a check for a percentage of the gold contained, and that's the agreement. So it's a revenue agreement. On -- and all they care about on that side from the oxide is that we don't have too much sulfur because then it wouldn't be oxide, okay? So that's -- the limitation there is making sure we stay under the sulfide levels, and we've never approached the sulfide levels for the oxide. On the toll milling agreement, that is very much about the autoclave. There is a limitation. The limitation is 1,000 tonnes a day. That is how many tonnes a day that we can process at their facility. They do care about the material. And the way they demonstrate their care is that when we go into any new mine, and I mean not a new level, not a new zone, but when we go into a new mine, we send them a bulk test parcel. It's either 5,000 or 10,000 tonnes depending on the mine. And then they have the chance then to run that material through their plant, analyze the results, make sure it's not interfering with their material and accept it. They've accepted Granite Creek years ago, and we run Granite Creek material through -- we were running Granite Creek material through the autoclave through the toll milling agreement for -- all the way through October of last year. And so that's fine. And we have the ability to add other mines into that agreement, but the 1,000 tonne a day level still remains, okay? So that's where we were sitting through October. You know that the previous toll milling agreement expired in October. We are now in the final stages of another 3-year extension agreement with our partner, and then we will start -- we've built a nice tidy stockpile of material over the last 4 months, and we'll start doing that process again. Did I answer your questions?

[indiscernible]

Oh, sorry. There's a limit on the roads. We're not even close to it. For example, Cortez right now is shipping 1.8 million tonnes a year on the roads to the Goldstrike complex. We're -- our limit is 365,000. So we're not -- there's a limit, but we're not even kind of close to that limit. It would be cool if we were. But that's another -- that's -- when we finish our production ramp-up, maybe we'll be there. Katerina, do you have any online questions?

We've answered all the online questions.

Okay. All right. On to Mineral Point Open Pit.

All right. Talk about Mineral Point. I'm not sure 10 minutes is going to work for this one, but we'll make it work. We'll get in there. There's a lot of Mineral Points, pretty neat deposit. When I first came to i-80 in '22, I started working on this a little bit, and it just really interests me because I have a history of running a large open pit. And it just interests me, but gold prices weren't quite there. It didn't look too bad, but it was interesting. And then recently, over the last year, we've done a lot more work. You can see that interesting at $21.75 down there at the bottom, where it says $2 billion, it's really interesting at $2,900. So yes, a nice open pit. If you compare this open pit to other things in Nevada, Kinross Round Mountain, I ran that pit. Really similar to that pit, about 100 million tonnes a year. You process about 23 million tonnes on a heap leach -- large heap leach and you know it's a large fleet. You have 2 rope shovels, 2 hydraulic shovels, 24 haul trucks, large haul tux, 320-tonne haul trucks to keep the -- you want big haul trucks, so you can keep the manpower down, keep the cost down on the labor. And this will be one of i-80 Gold's largest producing mines from an ounce standpoint. And the other very interesting thing, there is silver in Nevada, it's a silver state, but not that many mines produce a lot of silver. Cove used to produce a lot of silver in the day. Core Rochester produces the most silver in the state right now. And then Mineral Point produces a lot of silver out of that 280,000 equivalent ounces a year, 80,000 of that is silver, and you're going to produce a lot of metal 4.5 million to 5 million ounces of silver. So nice silver mine. We'll get into the processing a little bit, but it will be Merrill Crowe, which if anybody knows Merrill Crowe is what you want to use on silver, zinc precip. You don't want to use the CIL because you just overwhelm the carbon with silver. So you use zinc precip to pick up the gold and silver. Yes, simple technology, pretty common news around the world, the Merrill Crowe. This bullet here -- they told me not to move, and I'm the guy that moves all around the stage because we're getting a film. So it's hard for me, not to want to walk around. But the Barrick did a lot of work on this. I remember Barrick working on it. It used to be called [ Bull Wacker ], and now it's Mineral Point, but it -- Barrick, as I dig into the reports, has done a lot of metallurgy work on this. It's an advanced stage. And we started working on the hydrology recently, and there's just lots of hydrology work done. It should be about 6,000 GPM is what the reports say right now on dewatering. Mark will talk about some of the -- some challenges there on the dewatering in the area. And then yes, just a very interesting project. And it is, you know, Ruby Hill is a brownfield site. There's infrastructure there. We even looked at Mineral Point. We're going to use part of the truck shop that's there to save costs and then add on to that truck shop for their larger equipment. All right. Some of the metrics, like I said, one of the largest open pits. Cortez would be another pit you'd compare it to that kind of has that tonnage. Gold Strike in the day was quite a bit higher than that. Nowadays, they run a little lower than that and in a similar range. I talked about the trucks and shovel and then you have all the support equipment, dozers, graders, RTDs, everything to manage that. Stripping ratio is pretty low, 2.9:1. And then one thing we've done here that I worked a lot with 4K Dynamics that did this report, the way we sequence this pit makes a lot of difference. The first sequencing we did, you didn't get any ounces until a couple of years or 2.5 years. So we sequenced the pit to optimize how we get ounces out. And we also optimize the ramps to get more ounces. That was even hurting the ounces, just the ramps in the pit. So there's a lot of work being done on Mineral Point. Anything I want to go over on the metrics, I think everybody can see them, but I think I talked about it already, 100 million tonnes, 280,000 equivalent ounces and about a 16.5-year mine life. Yes, I talked about quite a bit this already. Oh, there's one I want to talk about. This is -- I got some recovery graphs that are coming up. This ore, if you do run of mine, doesn't recover great and especially on the silver. But if you crush it, it's a very steep recovery curve. And so what we have in the PEA right now is a 2-stage crush, primary and secondary with cone crushers. And we're going to be looking at a tertiary crush just to look at the economics on that. If we could get the recovery right now at 78% for the gold, 41% for the silver, if we could get that silver up in the 45%, 50% range, it makes a lot of difference in the economics and maybe the gold would go up, too. We got to do work on that. So typical to Nevada, silver is more locked up and has to be crushed finer. That's what core Rochester does with HPGR crushers. So we'll be looking at that as we go into the technical work and doing that metallurgical test work to balance how fine you crush. You got to be careful when you crush, you get too fine on a heap leach, you'll have porosity issues. So you got to balance that with what you could leach. The initial test work didn't have any porosity is used at a 0.5 inch. So we'll be looking at that. This is another interesting one. This runs through -- if you look over there at the slide, you'll see the Archimedes pit, and you'll see a heap leach over there, if you can see it on kind of in the middle of the page. We actually have to take out the heat that's there, and we're running that heap right now. So in year 7 and 14, there are some tonnes that will come out of that heap. We'll take those -- we'll take that heap. We'll put it on the new heap. We didn't put any ounces in for doing that, but you'll get some ounces flipping that pad over and leaching it again. So that will be one thing that has to happen as we mine through that heap leach. All right. Here's the recovery curves I'm talking about. You can see on the gold side and don't look so much at the yellow and red one. Those were 1.5-inch column test. But you can see on the blue and the green up there, those are typical column tests at a 0.5 inch size recovery curve. You get a really fast up to 75%, 80% in a matter of days and then it kind of -- like any heap leach, it kind of keeps going up. These were done at 90 days. We need to do some more test work at a longer period of time because it's likely as you stack a heap, you probably can leach it even more as long as you have cyanide and it would go up even higher. But you can see how that works. On the other side, that is silver. You can see how the silver -- silver is kind of in that 41% range. Those are 90-day tests also. And that's where I think there's some -- you're never going to get it from the mineralogy and stuff I've done. This is never going to go to [ 90% ] or anything, but there's a potential to get 5% to 8% recovery to get that higher, and it does make a lot of difference in the economics. All right. On the capital, there's -- on the $708 million of the initial capital, $299 is equipment. That's all the equipment, all the rolling stock, all the shovels, everything. And then the other part of that capital is for the processing facility. You got crushers, you got stackers, primary, secondary crushers. You've got a truck shop. You got a -- like Tim was talking about, you got a wash bay, all that equipment will be in there. And they did a nice job of, I would say it's not lean at all is what's in this capital buildup. And then the sustaining capital mostly resides in -- you don't want to build that heap all the way at start. So most of the sustaining capital is in building the heap out. As you're going along, you want to put new expansions on the heap and then build that out as you go. That's what I've done at most mines. And then there's some sustaining capital and you've got a 16.5-year mine life. You're going to have to replace some equipment and do major rebuilds that you do on shovels and different things that are capitalized. All right. Here's the unit costs. And you can see the ASIC over there. We do plan on doing this as owner operator. I think at this point in i-80's time, we do this owner operator. This mine is so big that economies of scale, you can get your mining costs, processing costs down fairly low, do an owner-operator and it's easily done. And so this mine site will be owner-operator. I want to go back. I don't easily go back. I think somebody told me I'm not supposed to, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm known for getting in trouble occasionally. All right. I kind of missed the time line I was noticing down there. And I wanted to talk about it. Tyler and I are planning on doing some drilling at Mineral Point this year and then we'd get fresh metallurgical samples to do that on the north side of the pit. There's a lot of M&I on the south side, but on the north side, it needs more drilling to get fresh metallurgical samples for column tests and to do that work on the crushing. And then you can see the permitting time line and technical report is pretty long. And the reason for that is, as Mark talked about, we got to get the Archimedes Underground lower level below [indiscernible] per minute. And then we can move on to Mineral Point. You can't do 2 NEPA actions at the same time. So that's why that time line is out there, and it will give us time to build capital for this project. It's pretty capital-intensive. But you can see the time line there. I just want to make sure, but saw that, start construction in 2030, give us plenty of time to do the permitting and get the technical work done and get a feasibility study done on this project, which isn't going to be that hard with the amount of work that Barrick has done before. All right. Turn it over to you, Mark.

All right, Todd. As Todd mentioned, the permitting of the open pit cannot officially commence until we have received approvals on the lower Archimedes Underground. In the interim though, we do intend to focus over the next few years on some of those key technical studies in baseline surveys that need to be completed that require a long lead time analysis. And 2 examples of that is a regional groundwater model, which we are kicking off and that is definitely part of a NEPO defensible activity as well as the geochemical characterization, which Todd touched on a bit. So we'll definitely be working with Tyler's team to make sure that we have good drill data that can be used for this particular type of work, which really amounts in some cases, like humidity cell testing as an example, and some of the other tests that Todd talked about. Based on the disturbance footprint associated with this project as well as dewatering efforts, we anticipate this will be a NEPA action that will result in the need to produce an environmental impact statement. And so that, once again, drives us into that roughly 3-year plus window for approval of that permitting action. On the state side, the same types of permits, water pollution control permit, reclamation permit, air quality permit will all need revisions to the current permitting actions. Primarily, I think we're all aware of how important water is across the globe. Here in Eureka and the Ruby Hill mine area, it's an area known as Diamond Valley. Water rights are very important. They're over appropriated in that valley, and there's heavy agricultural users primarily around alfalfa and so on and so forth. So as a result of that, for many years, there's been a decline in the ground water elevations in the valley. As such, the area has implemented what's called the Diamond Valley Groundwater Management Plan to help mitigate those long-term effects. And as such, all users over the next 30 years, there's a recipe in terms of reduction in usage to try and get that water -- groundwater table to replenish itself. So a lot of work around that. And as a result, we get a fair number of inquiries about how we're going to manage our water on site from a pumping perspective as well as post mining from a pit lake. And so those are big things that we need to continue to work with Eureka County and other key stakeholders on because, like I say, it's a big attention getter. And I think that's it Todd.

Thanks, Mark. All right, Tyler?

All right. Thanks, Todd. So we'll talk a bit about exploration on mineral point. So on this slide, I note the image in the bottom right. This is a long section through Mineral Point within East. So you'll see that most of the drilling that has been done is in the southern portion of the deposit, and that's where the resource is mostly drilled to indicated. The top image shows a cross-section through the northern portion of the deposit where we see very good potential to add additional ounces. Many of the historicals ended in mineralization and many holes are on the margin of the conceptual pit. So you can see a few holes there in the center of this section that obviously should go a bit deeper and then a few on the sides there, the conceptual pit, where there's some pretty good mineralization and you definitely need a few step out holes to make this thing a little bigger. So we have 6,000 meters of drilling scheduled this year that will be core drilling from surface, and that's to collect additional material for metallurgical and geotechnical purposes. And in the coming years, the deposit will need 50,000 meters of drilling for infill ahead of a feasibility study planned for 2029. But we do see good potential to further grow the resource here at mineral point by the time we get to feasibility.

Thanks, Tyler. All right, Matt?

All right. So let's recap on Mineral point. We got a -- over $600 million NPV, over $280,000 equivalent ounces per year of production. It's the real deal. It's a big mine. $900 million of capital. That's basically 3 buckets of equal proportion: one being pre-strip, one being the mining equipment and 3 being the processing facilities that you're going to need for mine that size. Talking about a mine, the size of Round Mountain, size of Cortez, big money. This is extremely exciting for us, right? I mean many people carry this in the models as the dollars per ounce -- dollars per resource ounce. This is the first time that we've been able to show you as the investing public the real potential for mineral point to give you some parameters by which you can start modeling it. You can start seeing what its potential really is. You can also see where the value drivers come out of Mineral Point and the first thing that you're going to pick up on, at least that I pick up on is, you got a 41% silver recovery. Whatever you can do to increase silver recovery is going to be incredibly beneficial to the deposit. It's still there because it does have that relatively large upfront strip. And at our previous gold prices, we were using $1,650 for a long time. This is interesting at $1,650. At $21.75, it's extremely compelling, and that's where we're at right now. And as Richard pointed out, you start talking about current pricing and you're in the $2 billion mark. So it's a very exciting project. It is the real deal. It's going to take a lot of time. It is the last of the 5 projects that were in our development cycle. It's -- we are planning on being able to make a construction decision on that at the very end of 2029. That's where we're sitting right now, and I'm looking for questions on Mineral Point.

I guess when you wrap it up [indiscernible], so you're planning to go operate from day 1.

We will. I mean, the -- at least in the Nevada context, when you're talking about 2 hydraulic levels and 2 rope shovels and 24 320-tonne trucks, this really isn't -- the contractor isn't set up for that. So this is really compelling owner-operator.

Do you need to acquire the land for your heaps, your waste dumps, et cetera.

No. So that's all part of -- the land package is all part -- we'll have to permit it, of course. But the land -- everything that we have laid out is sitting firmly in the i-80 land package.

Can you remind us what the power situation is here?

Because the power at Eureka comes from -- it comes off the grid, but it's a different supplier. It's Mount Wheeler. Ryan, do you know the -- the electrical price for Nevada Energy is $0.09 per kilowatt hour. I believe Mount Wheeler is approximately the same, isn't it? Yes. So Mount Wheeler does -- it's the American system of rural co-ops. They don't make their own power. They buy it from Nevada Energy. So it's $0.09 a kilowatt hour. And yes, like -- remember, this was a producing mine for Homestake and then Barrick for a decade. So as far as the grid is concerned, that's all functioning and in place. We're going to have to do some upgrades to the transformers and stuff just to deal with the electric shovels and the crushers, but these are all built into the PEA.

Yes, Matt, I'll chime in there real quick. We've got a 25,000 volt line that comes straight to site right now. Basically, the main line comes right into there. So...

Yes, Kent?

[indiscernible] Archimedes Underground.

So June 30, 2027, Ken. So between now and June 30, 2027, we are going to absolutely be advancing the permitting, but we won't be submitting the draft plan of operations to the federal government. We'll have it ready. And then July 1, 2027, we will deliver that.

[indiscernible]

Pardon me.

[indiscernible]

Yes, mid July 4, day after. The office will be shut down on July 4. So that is absolutely the sequence. And we're not waiting on anything. So we have plenty of -- this project has been there stewing. Now -- so now we're launching. So we've got -- Mark's got 1.5 years of work to pull together baseline studies and to pull together the necessary reports, particularly with regard to hydrology and waste rock characterization that you're going to be required to do to get the permit. I was hoping for more questions because I'm very excited about -- yes, okay.

I'm just curious, given your comments around the sensitivity potentially to silver recovery.

Yes.

What's the distribution of silver with respect to gold in the deposit? Is it uniform? Are there higher or lower zones? And how does that affect the cash flow?

Okay. So the first thing I'll -- Tyler, give us -- because we do -- there is a little difference there.

Yes. So there is a difference. It's not completely uniform throughout the deposit. You do get areas of higher silver in places. Yes.

Yes. And so the second...

Can you tell me it's early in the mine life or later in the mine life?

It's later. So the -- I know that from the -- and you can see that when you go through the work that Lilly has done to pull together all that long. You're going to see these bumps in the later years of big silver jumps. That's coming from specific areas that are deeper in the mine. Tyler, did I say that right?

Okay. Good.

The other thing -- the next part is where is the silver in the ore itself. This is -- this seems to be completely a function of silica encapsulation. So what we do -- so we're using a very conservative -- and 41 is not a guess. This is coming from the column test. And so we're going to continue to rationalize that, look at opportunities that, does finer crushing, get you higher silver recovery without going to the point where you're starting to make sand. So that's going to be a big part of the work that we advanced to the feasibility study.

Okay. So now you made be ask a different question. So you mentioned silicon encapsulation with -- is that with respect to silver specifically? Or does it occur with the gold as well?

It's not occurring with gold. It's come from column test. It's not from hopes and dreams. The column tests aren't showing that at all. and we're getting really, really solid -- the crushing helps a lot because the one thing you see at Ruby Hill, you see that the underground too. It's good rock. It's good solid competent rock. The crushing really improves the kinetics for the heap leach. It's certainly -- the Archimedes pit, that certainly improved it. It was about a 10% increase in recovery that came from the crushing. We're seeing that -- seeing the similar numbers here. The goal is -- and maybe Todd and Tyler have more insight into specifically why the gold is functioning different than the silver, but gold doesn't seem to have any realistic issues, real issues whereas the silver does.

So you're saying that the gold recovery is actually not especially crush sensitive? Is that correct?

Oh no, the gold -- I'm saying -- I misspoke. The gold recovery is specific, is sensitive to crushing. We're going to crush.

Yes, I saw it on the graph.

Yes, that's right. We're crushing. And all -- every number you saw there and the $300 million -- part of the $300 million for facilities is built on the concept of crushing. It is just if you crush even more, can you get more silver. And we'll keep working on that. But I don't want to be too optimistic, but I want to be -- I don't want to let the opportunity slide.

Yes. I think the typical with a lot of deposits, sometimes to run a mine is just time. You need more time to get it there, right? Because the solution breaks it down and stuff. This does seem sensitive to crushing on the gold. So there's a mechanism there where you crush and it's a lot faster, plus you got to do it for the silver. As far as silver encapsulation, a little careful with that term. I mean there's always some gold that's still encapsulated 3%, 4%. That's why you don't see 100% recoveries, right, in any deposit, but silver is just usually -- Tyler can talk more to it a lot finer and gets trapped. Silicon encapsulated usually. And so you just have to grind it finer. With the CIL, you could grind it really fine. But this grade isn't there for a CIL.

So I mean those are very respectable silver recovery numbers for Nevada.

For Nevada. You are correct.

All right. We didn't -- I mean I'm just so excited about my point, I just want to keep going a little bit. And what we didn't touch on Tyler, one, let's talk where we're starting. We're starting with a resource now that's sitting at 5.5 million ounces of gold and almost 195 million ounces of silver, and that's where we're sitting at now. Tyler, do you want to touch on the expansion ability. I mean you were you talked very optimistically.

Yes, I touched on it some there in the slide, right? There's a lot of those holes that ended in mineralization. There's a lot of holes on the margin of the pit that are mineralized. So I think as we do additional drilling, there's really good potential to add more ounces here. And you can add a lot of ounces with not a whole lot of drilling in a lot of these places to the north there, and I think that's pretty exciting. So yes, 1 million to 2 million plus who knows, but I think there's really good potential for another $1 million to $2 million at least.

Katerina, do you have any questions online? No? All right. Well, I think that concludes our presentation on Mineral Point. I hope we've done it justice because it is a very exciting property. And when anytime you're looking at $2 billion of NAV at spot price, that's exciting to me, at least. So with that in mind, we are to -- I'm getting the lunch signal from Katerina. We are now to the break where we take some time for lunch. Katerina, how long is our lunch break? Our lunch break is 15 minutes. Thank you for your participation. I hope you stay for the second half of today's presentation. We are going to talk about Cove. I'm very excited about Cove. I'm going to talk about Cove. I'm going to give my team a little break, and I'm going to take you through Cove. Cove is the oldest property within i-80. It was the one that -- when I came and joined the organization, it was the one that we've developed and I'm very excited about it, and I'm going to lead you through that after lunch. Thank you very much. [Break]

Right. I think we're ready to start again. We're going to start on Cove. Before we start on Cove, I just need to finish out one piece of business. If you recall, we were talking about the Ruby Hill, our committees underground. We were talking about permitting. While we were talking, we received the record of decision from the BLM regarding the permit for mining underground, at our committees and there was a finding of no significant impact. So that is the Federal permit for mining underground at our committees is received. We still need to finish out the state permit. State permits are generally much easier. Well, it's easier to manage the state than is the Federal Government. So that's a good point to start us off. On the second half of our discussions. So in the second half, what we're going to do is we're going to finish -- we're going to fish on Cove as far as the mines go. Todd is going to take us through a quick discussion on the autoclave at Lone Tree, and then I'm going to pass over to the CFO, who's going to take us through the restructuring strategy. All right. I want to start on Cove. Cove is very exciting to me. It's the first mine that we started developing as the new i-80. Granite Creek was already in production. So we took this over. It's been sitting idle for about 5 years, waiting for something to change, something that would make it compelling to develop. The compellingness came from the Lone Tree autoclave and having a processing solution. It's near and dear to my heart. It's the first one we started building at i-80. It's 1.4 million ounces of mineralization and resource with an 8-year mine life. 100,000 ounces a year is the steady-state production, $271 million NPV at $21.75 gold and 5% interest rate. So regarding the project itself and pardon me for my glasses but I can't quite see everything there. So we got a high-grade brownfield development. Gold deposit, it's open for expansion and down-dip. It's immediately south of NGM's Phoenix mine. So just giving you a proximity to where we sit in the world. It has -- we have very well advanced on exploration and permitting. We're going to talk a lot about that. But you can see that in the diagram there, those drill hole traces that are coming off of our exploration platform into the Helen and the Gap zones. We have now finished that drilling about 1.5 weeks ago and demobilize the rig. So that process by which we now take those drill results and move those into the feasibility study is progressing now with the feasibility study for Cove being scheduled again for the end of this year similar to the underground for Granite Creek. The -- what you do see there is, you see the time line, okay? And you see a long permitting time line and you see 1.5 years of construction and then we go into production. And so very valid questions are going to be, what are you doing for 3 years of permitting at Cove? And why is it -- why -- you're already underground, what's the 1.5 years? This is all about water. That's going to be the theme of Cove. One, great ore body, very good grades, very minable ore body with expansion potential but you have water. You can see the water in the pit there, in the pit in the lower right-hand corner. So the permitting is related to dewatering. And 1.5 years of construction and over 60% of the capital costs for construction are related to the development of the dewatering field and how we remove the water from that system. That exploration decline you see there, the elevation of that is about 20 feet above where the current water table is. I'm going to go into some kind of specifics there. We've got 2 deposits. We got the Helen and we got the Gap. And the Helen in the lower right is represented by the green and the Gap is reversed by the blue. They're adjacent to each other. They are separated and distinct. Typically, the Helen, the green side is more amenable to a roaster and the blue side, the Gap side is more amenable to an autoclave. We have a 10-year roaster agreement with a third party to allow us to process -- to allow us to -- I think we have -- is that a fire alarm? Okay. I am just going to pause. Okay, so what matters most is everyone's personal safety. And so I am going to look for direction from my hosts on what we do now. So would you recommend that we continue? It's going to be hard with the alarm going off. You can't really -- it will be a little distracting. So I'm going to ask everybody to remain in place and calm while we figure out what's going to happen. Yes, there's food outside, in case you didn't know.

Yes, we were told the alarm will be off in about 5 to 10 minutes. So if we want to just take a quick break for the noise to die down. Okay, for a few more minutes. So good opportunity to just grab a quick coffee or bio break.

Okay. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back as soon as this alarm is complete. Thank you very much. And that's the end of the Cove presentation. No? [Break]

All right. We'll let everybody reassemble. For those of you that aren't familiar with mining underground, when you have a fire alarm underground, to communicate it, what you do is you dump stench into the ventilation system. And it is the -- it's the smell they add to liquid gas and propane. It's -- but you don't just -- it's not a subtle -- you dump it into the system. It's nauseating. And it encourages you to quickly evacuate the underground operations. Get out of here, the message is, just get out of here. Don't get your stuff, don't get your lunch box. Get out of the mine. All right. I'm going to start back again. Thanks, everybody, for that -- and apologies for that slight interruption but we're back on track. We're talking about Cove. We're talking about a property that's very exciting to me. I'm just getting myself all situated here and back on track. Okay. So the current mine plan includes Helen and Gap. We were touching on that. Helen's green, Gap's blue. Helen is more amenable to a roaster, Gap is more amenable to the autoclave. This is all based on PEA-level metallurgical testing. And the big focus for us in 2025 is a renewed amount of metallurgical testing from those brand new drill holes we just finished 2 weeks ago to allow us to really fine-tune that mix, verify that's roaster versus autoclave feed. We do have a roaster agreement with a third party for a 10-year term that allows us to process 750 tonnes per day of material in their roaster for a toll milling agreement. Now I need to recombobulate myself. We're talking about the capital structure at Cove. You're going to see a relatively high -- relatively high for us, $157 million of capital. Over 60% of that capital is associated with the dewatering. From the standpoint of the rest of the capital, what you need to start in mind, we've already portaled down. We've already established the exploration drift down to the water table and that's about 5,400 feet of development we've completed so far. So the surface facilities are largely in place and largely functioning. What we really need to do is the next step as -- complete that dewatering. That's what the 3 years of permitting is for and that's what 1.5 years of construction is for, is for installing those 15 wells and the associated well fields for recharge. Just to put us in context, we -- so we understand what does dewatering mean in the Nevada context, when you pump out the water, it's not your water. Somebody else owns that. So what you do is you pump the water out of your immediate vicinity and then you pipe it away from yourself and you reinfiltrate it into the aquifer over there. This is the same system we use at Cortez. This is the same system that we use at Gold -- I think we, in a previous life, this is the same -- in a previous life, it's the same system that we used at Cortez and at Goldstrike and in all the other mines in Nevada that require dewatering. So we're not consuming that water. We are just moving it temporarily so we can proceed with our mining operations. So then you see -- again, you see the ramp-up curve, predevelopment, construction and production when -- again, when this mine comes into full production in approximately 2032, 2033, you're looking at 102,000 ounces of gold production per year over a 10-year life. Cove is partially amenable to bulk mining, 20% of the tonnes that are in the mine plan and the PEA mine plan, are mined through bulk method. I'm using bulk method to describe long-haul and/or benching, however you want to describe that. The rest are conventional drift and fill. The ground quality here is very good. People are asking, what is the ground quality in Nevada. And the -- for virtually all of the underground mines across Northern Nevada, the RQD is between 30 and 45, which puts you right center in the middle of poor. You're not in very poor but you're in poor. So what this just means since we have that consistent ground quality across Northern Nevada, we feed back to that Nevada experience, we mine in Nevada fashion. And so that's what we're experienced with. And Nevada fashion is that we use welded wire, we use swellex, bolting with swellex, which is a style of ground support with welded wire mesh. And on our primary development drives, we then top that with a shot of -- coat of shotcrete and a shotcrete is mixed on at the portal. That's the Nevada style, that's what we're used to and that's what's built into all of our PEAs. So from an operating cost standpoint, that shows up as the mining cost at $152 a tonne, which is a very reasonable mining cost for Nevada. You do see -- these numbers are all very consistent. You've got a really nice AISC, $1,300 is a really good AISC for us and for Northern Nevada. The number that stands out there is going to be the electrical costs and that is a function of the dewatering. So the dewatering does consume a lot of electricity. That electricity, just as we talked about the other sites, that's [ line grid ], Nevada Energy, Berkshire Hathaway, $0.09 a kilowatt hour. We're going to touch now -- I'm going to hand over to Mark here in a second to discuss permitting but this shows you the layout of the wells across the north and west side of the pit. That's -- this is coming from a very detailed hydrological study led by Todd and his team, consisting of drilling wells, doing 40-day pump tests to really fine-tune that model. The Cove dewatering model is very high quality. It's the basis for the feasibility study in the path going forward for Cove. And without further ado, I'll pass it over to Mark.

Thanks, Matt. So as Matt indicated, obviously, this project is very much about the management of dewatering from both pit lake and underground mine [ perspectives ] .So initial projections have that initial pumping rate at being approximately 50,000 gallons a minute, which is pretty significant. This would currently put it at the largest dewatering project in Nevada. With that, Matt mentioned the studies are going on. A big part of that has been preparation of a NEPA defensible groundwater model, which -- where we've taken many of these inputs and looked at how we're going to optimize those pumping rates and looking at different sequencing to make sure that we achieve our desired outcome. On the federal permitting side, we fully expect this to be an EIS when the official decision comes from the BLM and that, once again, significant new disturbance and a major dewatering effort. We have, over the last 2 years, been working on the required baseline studies as well as the technical reports. Those are all in the hands of the BLM as we speak and we are waiting on their review of such. At the state level -- just one additional thing, at the BLM, we've also submitted the initial plan of operations amendment to the BLM, they have provided us some comments. And once we get their feedback on these baseline studies and other reports, we will then do another iteration of that plan and submit it to the agency. On the state side, we've got 3 water pollution control permits out there. Every one of them is going to be affected by this permitting action. So in the first half of this year, the focus is going to be on getting those modification applications into the state of Nevada. Other than that, with all of those moving parts, we are still targeting a permitted project by the end of '27.

All right. Thank you, Mark. And then we'll turn over to exploration.

All right. Thanks, Matt. Cove is a project that's very near and dear to my heart. I started working here in 2016 and was part of the small team that advanced it to the first PEA. So I really enjoy Cove. At Cove, over the last couple of years, we've been busy with the infill drill program of both the Helen and Gap deposits. We've drilled over 45,000 meters and you can see the black traces on the image here, that's all the drilling we've done over the last couple of years. We see further expansion of these zones likely concurrent with underground mining. And it's important to note that both the CSD and the 2201 zones are not included in the PEA. Those are the other 2 deposits you see shown in red on the image. So off on the right just under the pit, that's the CSD zone and then a little deeper down, that would be the 2201 zone. The 2201 zone has an average grade of 26.7 grams gold and it hasn't been drilled since 2015. Definitely a lot of upside there. This year, we'll incorporate the new drilling into an updated resource model with a planned feasibility study by the end of the year.

All right. Thanks, Tyler. Okay. So let's recap what we talked about with Cove. We're talking about a deposit of 100,000 ounces per year. It's got 8-year mine life. It's got NPV of $271 million at a 5% interest rate and [ $2,175 ] gold. It is -- it requires dewatering and that is known and understood and advancing well as far as our studies and planning for when that comes. Just from our context, it's a big dewatering but it was dewatered before. Echo Bay dewatered that pit when they were mining it and water treatment is not required for us to discharge that back into the aquifer. So those are all positives. And that's where we start talking about questions.

So I guess how long for dewatering that [indiscernible]

Okay. So the way it's built right now, Justin, as soon as we start -- as the wells are drilled and come online, they start dropping the water table and we're at the water table. So we're basically following the water down. It is approximately a 12-month from the first well until we get down to the top of the Helen, Helen being that deposit that's the farthest away and the highest elevation and then we start touching ore. And that's -- so the dewatering plan and the [indiscernible] depression and the modeling of that drop in the aquifer is synchronized with the mine plan. And so those are built together and those are demonstrated very detailed in Leily's models. So you can deduce that from the model, Justin, because those are synchronized together. Does that answer your question?

Yes. So it's essentially just the gap between processing and your mining schedule. Permitting in your mining schedule.

Yes, permitting in your mining schedule.

Yes. Is there a reason you haven't -- I guess, for Helen and Gap, do you think they continue at depth? And could you drill deeper now, or?

No, I don't think Helen and Gap continue at depth. So they're hosted in the Favret limestone and then below there, you get into a dolomite and a conglomerate and that's just not -- it's not a good host for the Carlin-type mineralization. But that is what hosts the 2201 zone. But I don't think that style of mineralization probably continues under the Gap and Helen. We do have some deeper drill holes that were previously drilled into that unit that don't show the same style of mineralization.

You have like lateral extension potential?

Yes, there's definitely lateral extension potential. And I think you really see that once you get underground and you're able to follow some of those high-angle structures that we know exist and follow those out laterally.

Do you have any online questions, Katerina? Okay. Well, either I have very eloquently described the full potential for Cove or not. But anyway, I am very excited about Cove and that concludes the 5 of the mining projects that we're going to discuss today. We're now going to move over to Todd. He's going to take us through a recap of the Lone Tree Autoclave itself and then move on to the CFO.

All right. Let's talk about Lone Tree and the autoclave that's at Lone Tree. There's a single autoclave at Lone Tree. And in comparison to other facilities around Nevada, there's only 3 facilities that have autoclaves. Barrick Goldstrike has a facility -- 1 autoclave facility, 6 autoclaves that are there. They use 5 of them, one of them quite old and they don't use it. And then at Twin Creeks, now they call it Turquoise Ridge, with MGM combining there's 2 large autoclaves there. So in all of Nevada, there's only 3 autoclave complexes. Now those complexes run quite a bit more tonnage than we run at Lone Tree and we'll get into that a little bit. But it's become very apparent to us that we don't want to do -- keep doing toll processing. We want to have our own processing facility. And when you have single refractory ore, you have to have an autoclave. So want to go over a little bit of the history of Lone Tree. It's -- started out Santa Fe. They put in a heap leach with some crush material and then they did a autoclave POX -- as autoclave expansion in 1994. Newmont took over the property in 1998. They did put in a flotation plant and what that flotation plant bid -- and it's still there, we don't have any plans for it yet. There's a floated material out of the open pit at Lone Tree and then ran that through the autoclave to recover the gold and it's fuel. You get sulfides in a [ con ]. It gives you temperature for the autoclaves in order to run the boilers as much and you can oxidize things really nice. And then it went in care and maintenance in 2006 and then i-80 got it down there in 2000 -- I should know the date but 2020. And through that whole time, there's a heap leach that runs at Lone Tree. We still run that heap leach to get around 15, 20 ounces a day off that heap leach. It's in operation. That heap leach ran the entire time, still pulling ounces off of it. Down to the bottom there, there's a proposed construction schedule. So we're doing technical work with Hatch. This year, we continue to work with Hatch on a Class III engineering study. And what we're doing this year, we did the acid alkaline trade-off last year and into this year. And then what we're doing now is optimization. In other words, we did the full engineering, now we want to make sure that we really need that item. If we have a duty standby, do we need to? Or can we take the downtime? What's the trade-off? So we're working on that. And that will continue this year and then construction in 2026. Plan is to finish that Class III study in Q3 2025 and then we can get a proper number out to everybody on what the autoclave, what costs to get back in operation. Yes, I talked about this. It's just hub-and-spoke model we always talk about. But if you really think about it, this -- it is 3 mines feeding into this. But if you think about it from a tonnage standpoint, the Goldstrike autoclaves run around 14,000 tonnes a day. This autoclave is 2,500 tonnes. It is from 3 mines but it's a single autoclave. It's not that big. It's pretty easy to run. So you don't have the complexity of having 6 of them with downtime and rebuilds and everything like that. All right. Let's get into some of the numbers here. Like I said, it's 2,500 tonnes per day. The design for this autoclave is 389 degrees fahrenheit at 297 PSIG. And like I said, we've recently determined we can run asset autoclaving and we went into that earlier, so I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of context on that. But it really gives us flexibility for ores that are more amenable to acid autoclaving. There's definitely some of them out there. When you do alkaline, you just -- it's always lower recovery. Alkaline is always lower. Sometimes it's 3%, sometimes it's 30%. So it just depends on the ore and how it goes through there. So having the ability to run an asset is quite the advantage for us. And then the availability is 85%. And then I want to go into a little bit, we'll make it pretty quick. We have done a lot of work on the autoclave where we come out and did nondestructive testing on tanks and pipes, pumps and looked at what -- just a massive amount of work, what's going to take to get this facility going again because it has been sitting. Things are in pretty good shape. The buildings are in good shape, the mill circuit, ball mill, SAG mill, really good shape, not a lot of work to do. The buildings are in good shape, just needs some work on the roofs. It's more -- some things need updated and then some -- there's some new things that I'll go into just because things have changed on the permitting side. I like this picture. It was in a Hatch calendar and I had it hanging on my wall for a long time but I asked them, they sent me the original. But if you -- I'm not supposed to move here, I'd go over and point at stuff. But if we just talk about a few things here and what we're doing. We talked about a boiler. When you run alkaline autoclaving, you need a bigger boiler. So we had to put a bigger boiler in. That's in that location. Mercury scrubber, in 2006, you didn't have to have a mercury scrubber on the off cast on an autoclave. In 2010, I think Goldstrike did the first one on their alkaline autoclaves to capture mercury and they used sulfur-impregnated carbon to do that and that's the industry standard now. To get this autoclave going again, we have to put a large scrubber on to capture mercury, which is a good thing. And that's where that system is down there. And then the carbon and leach is an interesting area. This picture actually shows all the tanks being rebuilt. And that was our thought at one time. Now what we're looking at is some of those tanks, they're all in somewhat poor condition as far as they need new carbon screens on them and pumps but the tanks themselves, some of them are in better shape than others. So our thought is now is use the ones we can and then rebuild those tanks as sustaining capital as we operate this plant. This is totally normal when you run a plant. I worked at lots of plants. We take 1 tank down over about 6 months to rebuild it or recoat it with rubber and then you get it going again because there's enough capacity in the other tanks to get the residence time that you need. And then, another big one we had to do, this facility has a tailings dam, a TSF and that's what Lone Tree used. That tailings facility from our analysis and what the state wants really isn't recommended to use again. And so what we've done at Lone Tree, with a lot of trade-off studies, has decided to do a filter tails or dry stack. And so that's what that building is out there. And we also have to put in our RO plant to do that. Now the plan is, we still have the tailings dam we need to close out. So we're going to take the dry stack material, put it up on the tailings dam and that will help close off that tailings dam. That gives us about 2.5 to 3 years of capacity out of the autoclave and then we'll build in that time a sustaining capital about 2 years in, 2.5 years, we'll build a dry stack tailings facility for the remaining other 16 years of autoclave capacity. So that's something new. You don't see a lot of dry stacks in Nevada, pretty common elsewhere in the world but it is something that -- when you look at trade-off studies to closure costs versus dry stack, dry stack is always more upfront on operating and capital. But sometimes there's less costs downstream when you're closing off the tailings facility. The oxygen plant, that's been a fun one. It's -- right now, we're looking at, can we use the oxygen plant that's there. That's one scenario we have. The other scenario is, there's some new technology and auction plants where it might be just cheaper just to build a new one. So that's one of the trade-off studies we're doing with Hatch. There's just some pictures of the off-gas system I talked about that uses -- there's some cooling there but also mostly use of sulfur-impregnated carbon, same carbon you use in like a CIL circuit but this has sulfur in it. So it complexes with the mercury and then you change it out once in a while when it gets full of mercury and disposal of it properly. And then at the bottom there, you can see the dry stack tailings facility and the RO plant. These are -- these are -- I want to show new things that are getting built, why there's some costs there associated with the autoclave. And this is just a picture of -- a little closer picture of the oxygen plant. And we are going to put -- one thing that's super common when you have an oxygen plant, if you put oxygen into the CIL circuit, we're looking at this at other places too, you get better recovery a lot of time. Since we have excess oxygen, we'll be looking at that, too, to see if the recovery can increase when we do feasibility studies. All right. Turn it back over to Matt.

Thank you, Todd. Awesome. All right. This is when we talk about the autoclave. Todd has gone through, he has been very succinct and clear. We have a facility that has -- I believe it stopped operation in 2006, run by Newmont. They kept it on a level of care and maintenance through all that time. There was a period in 2012 where they looked at restarting that autoclave and brought in a third-party consultant to help them analyze that. We piggybacked off that and used the same group. I can say it because it's written on the slide, it's Hatch. And we use them to progress the PFS that we published 2 years ago and to progress on the feasibility study, which we're doing together, it's still in draft form. We spent a lot of money on this. So I mean -- and could -- we'll spend money. But what I'm saying here is this is -- it wasn't us just looking at a plant and kind of guessing what we thought we needed to do in order to recommission this. All of the pipes, all of the pumps, all of the mills have been gone through and nondestructive tested and analyzed and what do we really need to do to restart this plant? What are the real costs associated with restarting this plant? I'm very proud of the work that the team has done here to give us a true and accurate estimate of what needs to be done, including a tailings solution on the back end that Todd touched on that is very robust and sound and really improves the -- our custodialship of that site and getting -- closing out that -- the existing tailings dam, which has never been loved and it's not a particularly great tailings dam. So the very holistic solution here. We're looking at rebuilding that plant with a 20-year mine life, operating at a nameplate of 2,500 tonnes per day that will meet our needs for the immediate future and then allow us for -- to expand the refractory underground or surface tonnes as they become available. Any questions? Peter?

I'm just curious, and this is part of my ignorance about the autoclave. The nameplate, the 2,500 tonnes, what's the limiting factor in how that works?

Okay? Again, should I try? Okay. So here's what it is. So you do the analysis in the alkaline environment, which is -- was our base case. In the alkaline environment, you get the required oxidation at the operating conditions that Todd laid out, which is approximately 300 psi, 300 degrees, 43 minutes is your residence time through that autoclave vessel. So that becomes your determining factor. It's the volume of the vessel and the resonance time you need for each particle as it moves through that vessel. 43 minutes, you do all that math, you come out at 2,500 tonnes a day, which is less than Lone Tree ran it at. They ran it at 2,800 tonnes a day. Again, you have to adjust that residence time for the material that you're running through there and whether you're doing it in an acid or alkaline environment.

And I think any processing plant I've worked on, we always run them higher than nameplate. It's just common but you got to -- I think under alkaline, that would be tough on this one. But acid you might be able to but you just got to play around with that when you get running.

Yes. I mean that's kind of the basis of my question because normally, you have the ability to run it a bit faster but obviously, this is a slightly different beast than like a CIL mill or something.

But in all our technical studies, everything, we're saying '25 because we don't want to get ahead of ourselves but that's something you work on later, optimizing.

Pretty short time.

Short term. That's probably the only slide in the whole presentation that's in short term.

Very good point, Leily. Yes. We are transitioning to international and there's -- we have some rough spots.

I don't know if you're going to tell us the capital cost that's coming in the feasibility study. But I can look at what it was 2 years ago. What has changed over the last 2 years? Can you guide us to what that number probably is going to be?

Okay. If you take -- if you look at the last -- the number we published 2 years ago, which is approximately [ 248 ], I believe, here's what you're going to see has changed. One, we've added on the tailings solution that we were very clear. I hope we were very clear in -- when we laid that out, that the previous work did not include what we were going to do with the tails. We have subsequently enlisted [indiscernible] to help guide us through the tailings trade-off analysis. There was all kinds of -- do we make a new tailings facility? Do we just rewet the existing facility and raise it? Or do we go to some other option? And we -- through the analysis, it was pretty compelling to move over to dry stack tails. One is that the Newmont -- I wouldn't say that. I don't want to bring anyone else into this conversation. The tailings facility that was there had a issue that in today's environment, you wouldn't really want to live with. So there's not -- the state regulators are not particularly interested in us rewetting that and we're not interested in those sort of issues either. So taking the dry stack tails and using that for the first 2.5, 3 years to cap the existing tailings facility and then create that -- you want to create that shed of water off the top. That's a really compelling argument to close out. And if we own that, that our tailings -- that's our TSF now, right? We own the property. We own the good and we own the bad. So to close that off is really compelling for us and then to switch over and to allow us to stay within our private land, we can then build a dry stack just immediately to the north of the autoclave and then that reduces your closure expense. It does have ramifications on -- you have to spend that capital upfront to put in the filter presses. And that's your trade-off there. So if you took the previous number and you added in a number for tails, which you probably want and then you did an escalation for 2 years, that's the number that you would get.

Matt, you can be a little bit more specific than that.

Okay. How specific -- just tell me -- because just tell me the number then.

So sorry, okay. So we've done that. We've added those items. The new number came in somewhere approximately around $380 million. What the team has done is looked at -- the internal team, has done is looked at some value engineering of where they think they can cut some costs out of that estimate. And they have identified approximately $75 million or so that they think they can cut from that number. That is the work that we're talking about executing in 2025, is taking that back to the third party and saying, do you agree and what's the number going to come in at? So I think if we look at those numbers and we say where do we sit today? We could talk about $320 million-ish today. Before we take into account the impacts of the potential tariffs that we're talking about and what that might look like on that capital 2.5 years from now, we don't know yet but we haven't analyzed that in those numbers yet.

Yes. So that's more detail than I would have done. But he's the boss. And so that's the number. Now that number has to go through -- so I'm always hesitant because that number has to go through the normal engineering [ QP ] controls. They're going to want to do some escalation. They're going to want to analyze our ideas and make sure they're sound. And they're going to want to do some further engineering on -- several ideas require more engineering and that's going to need to be done as well.

One last one on that then queue -- and this might be jumping ahead to the recapitalization. But like do you look at this capital for the autoclave as something different than what you're looking at just to run the business? Like is there a way to fund this without going to traditional sources, I guess?

So that's going to be a bit of the strategic shift that we talk about when I come up and speak here shortly. But yes, we are exploring some options to fund the autoclave that would be outside of the traditional funding mechanisms. Yes. Kent?

Just curious how much did you pay for the Cove and how much did the [indiscernible]

Kent, Do you mean Cove or do you -- so Kent is asking how much did we pay for the asset? And what are the care and maintenance costs? Kent, do you mean Cove or do you mean Lone Tree?

Lone Tree.

Lone Tree. Okay. So for Lone Tree, what -- the transaction that we did for Lone Tree was a swap with the 40% ownership of the South Arturo asset that we had for -- when we formed the company, we had a 40% minority ownership of the South Arturo deposit with Barrick at the time and we did a swap for those. What was the book value of that transaction?

Yes. I'm going from memory but I believe it's around $180 million that we valued the transaction, Matt, when we did the swap.

Yes. And so holding cost is a really important question because Lone Tree by the nature of having an autoclave facility and having a pit lake there that's less awesome than some of our other pit lakes, there is a holding cost associated with that. That holding cost is offset by the 15 ounces a day that we are producing off of that heap leach facility. So -- and from a holding cost standpoint, I think we can -- pure holding.

Yes. It's approximately $9 million or so. In 2025, we anticipate that the revenue generated from the leaching at the Lone Tree will offset all of the holding costs and produce some positive cash flow from Lone Tree.

And that's a little different than you would have heard last year. The few things that have happened there is that cyanide prices have come up a little bit but they're not too much, whereas gold has changed dramatically. So we analyze that equation every month to make sure we're still doing the right thing by continuing to add cyanide. Right now, it's totally the right thing but you just have to keep doing that math to make sure you're making the right prudent decision. Yes, sir.

Yes. So for alkaline versus acid, it's essentially just -- you're looking at acid consumers in the ore and just doing the trade-off on acid and..

Acid and -- in acid offset by propane. So the -- when you add acid, you got -- of course, you got to pay for that. But then the -- by adding the acid, you're adding fuel into the autoclave, which then is partially offset by lower propane consumption. The net increase is $35 a short ton. That's the net increase in operating costs. So then that -- of course, that -- then with that knowledge, you then offset that by your increased recovery. And so for some of our deposits, notably, the lower portions of Ruby Hill -- or Archimedes, I am sorry, Archimedes, that trade-off and recovery increase versus operating cost is very strong and that's what compels you to start looking hard at acidic environment.

Increased wear or corrosion on the facility or not materially?

Todd, do you see a change in that aspect of the autoclaves?

I mean there is differences. Sometimes in alkaline, you can get more scale but you take an autoclave down to rebrick it at a certain interval and that's when you would clean those things. There is some differences but not major.

Okay. Maybe just one last one. On, I guess, acid availability, is that, in current conditions, is that not really a major consideration?

Todd did a whole lot of work on this in the last 3 months. So I'll let Todd answer that question.

Yes. I reached out to a broker. They used to use at Barrick and got current cost of acid and kind of the supply. Obviously, like any commodity, it can change but it seems pretty stable right now. Different things, tariffs definitely could affect it a little bit. Sometimes if the copper market goes higher, they use sulfuric. But sometimes they produce sulfuric. So yes, it's about $175 a tonne right now. Well, it's $150 -- it could escalate to $175. That's kind of what we used in the economic study was $175.

Yes. In the context of the North Western United States, the kind of sulfuric acid quantities we're talking about are large but certainly not. They're no different than the amount of sulfuric acid that's going to some of the other processing facilities. Now our processing facility is a little smaller than the others. But in the context of Northern Nevada, this is not a strange amount of sulfuric acid.

No, we used to get a little more than this at Goldstrike. And we do have a rail siding, so we can bring it in. The broker told me most of it, right -- if we did it right now, in probably 2 years, we would get it from Kennecott in Salt Lake, which is where we used to get it. They produce a lot of acid from the smelter there in Salt Lake City.

Yes. That's a good -- a really good point on the rail siding. That does change the equation tremendously. For those of you that don't follow us in great detail, we own a property called Argenta, that is an old Baker Hughes barite processing facility. We bought that not to mine barite. We bought that because it has rail siding that's adjacent to Battle Mountain and it came with water rights that we could use at Cove. Any questions from the audience?

We do. We have a question online for Lone Tree. Says, can you speak to any added complexity to the autoclaving process by running ore from multiple deposits?

Okay. Yes. Go ahead, Doug.

I can answer. It's super common when you have feeding a roaster or an autoclave, you have to hit certain targets on sulfides and carbonate. And so what you do is you never feed direct, you feed with a loader. I used to work in places where you get half a bucket of this, 1 bucket of that and 4 buckets of that. And you do that to meet the blend going into the autoclave. So the ore would come in from all the sites. We'd have 1 person, metallurgist manage how you feed that into the autoclave. And it's really important for acid or autoclave to hit those targets, otherwise, it makes it hard to run the autoclave. But it's just simple math, making sure you feed it correctly and making sure the loader operator feeds the crusher properly. So that's how it will work. Stockpile and then feed appropriately to hit the right targets.

That's the secret. This is the life that I -- that we used to previously live between Cortez and Goldstrike. The secret there is you need to have sufficient stockpiles. You can't just feed in as the mine produces. You need to have the ability to have stockpiles so that you can always be maintaining that blend and managing that -- those stockpiles is the key to keeping the autoclave running consistently.

But it's not an issue. It's just...

It's a manage -- how about this, it's a manageable issue. Anything else, Katerina? All right. So that ends kind of, let's call it, the ops and technical section of what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to hand over to Mr. Ryan Snow.

Thanks, Matt. All right. So we're going to do an update on the recapitalization plan and talk through a couple of items today. First, I mean, as you can see from the presentation today so far, the team has been extremely busy publishing the PEAs over the last month. So I want to thank the team for that hard work, both here in the room and either in Reno or in Toronto. Those PEAs are critical to the next step in our recapitalization plan. They've given us the ability to put together the production slide that Matt showed you earlier today and really show what the cost is going to be to execute the plan that we've laid out that we can take to a finance partner in a defendable form. The NPV on the property is as robust as we've walked through today. So just a quick second to go through the table you see here. Again, at [ $2,175 ] gold, the NPV of the project is $1.6 billion. If we use spot price today, NPV is $4.5 billion. There is a lot of asset value here to be unlocked. So really, what we're talking about is near-term balance sheet and how do we unlock the value that we see in this table. The capital requirements for the hub-and-spoke model are relatively modest. We're talking about $250 million approximately that will get us 250,000 ounces or so of annual production. Additionally, for about $244 million more, we can get 130,000 ounces of annual production from the Granite Creek open pit. And then when we talk about Mineral Point, it is a larger CapEx, approximately that $990 million number that we talked about earlier. But it does get you 280,000 ounces of gold equivalent production on an annual basis for 17 years. This is the story that we needed to have compiled to go to our financing partners and execute the plan. So with these updated PEAs, our next step is to update our internal life of mine model. The last PEA was just published this morning, hot off the presses. For those of you that haven't had a chance to go through again, we apologize for making you sit through this today. I know you're going to go back and write your letters later but I appreciate it. So what we're going to do with that is take these updated PEAs, update our life of mine models, play with some flexibility that we have around timing and look at what is the best path forward for the company to execute the refinancing plan and unlock the value. So I mean the PEAs -- the updated PEAs have demonstrated the value of refurbishing the Lone Tree Autoclave. We just walked through the Lone Tree piece. You've seen it kind of throughout the presentations today that there's tremendous value in us refurbishing the autoclave in our portfolio and unlocking that value. If you remember the Granite Creek presentation, we talked about this 30% increase in payability factors that come when in 2028, we have our autoclave up and running. This fact, in addition to the negotiations we've had with our toll milling partner over the last couple of weeks have led us to really realize the importance and made us commit to updating the autoclave -- refurbishing the autoclaves ourselves in a more accelerated time line. So in our November plan that we put out, we had a slightly different view of what we're going to do with the autoclave on a short or midterm basis. But that has changed over the course of developing the PEAs and negotiating the new toll milling agreement with our partner. This is leading us down a path that we'll see a slight strategic shift to the recapitalization time line that we spoke about in November, likely pushing us towards doing the full recapitalization sometime in the fourth quarter, along with the feasibility studies on the Granite Creek property, the Cove Underground and the autoclave itself that we've been discussing throughout the day. We have seen -- or we're currently pursuing, excuse me, a variety of financing options in parallel that will allow us to execute this recapitalization plan on the time line we just discussed. It will allow us to recapitalize the balance sheet, provide the necessary capital to advance the plans we've walked through today and minimize solution to our existing shareholders. That is our goal. The path that we're looking at are varied. We're looking at a potential term out of the existing gold prepay and silver purchase and sale agreement with either our existing partner or new partners. We're looking at rolling the existing converts or debentures potentially into a new piece of paper with maturities that align with the updated cash flows that we've presented to you today. We're exploring new debt instruments that would allow us to do the same. We are looking at a potential stream or royalty on our high-value mineral resources that we've walked through today, specifically Mineral Point. And we are also exploring the potential to put a royalty on the throughput capacity at the Lone Tree Autoclave that would allow us to fund that -- the plans that we've laid out today. We are exploring noncore asset sales. However, as you've seen today, the properties that we've discussed in the presentation are all core to us. The one property we have that we have not discussed at length today is the FAD property that sits adjacent to Ruby Hill. That is the property that we are looking at for potential monetization. Finally, we would have equity offerings. But again, I want to stress that we're diligently working to form an efficient capital structure that would see us execute these plans and minimize dilution to our existing shareholders. The company currently has just over $200 million in debt. That is across the gold prepay, silver purchase and sale, the convertible loan and convertible debenture instruments that are due through February of 2024 -- sorry, 2027, excuse me. In the first quarter of 2025, we've completed the private placement that saw the company raise approximately $17 million. And we have been active in the ATM instrument that raised approximately $4 million under that instrument over that period of time. With the release of this press release today, we will be able to trade again in the market under the ATM and we envision doing so next week to raise additional capital. We are also evaluating our capital allocation in 2025. And we are looking at plans to determine what has the largest return to our NAV of -- of about 4 main work streams. First is permitting our future gold mines. As Mark has walked through today, there's permitting actions at all of these properties. And we view advancing the permitting will significantly derisk the projects, as the future time line for permitting can be difficult to manage and is largely outside of the control of the company. We anticipate allocating approximately $10 million to permitting activities in 2025. Next, we've allocated approximately $3 million to completing the autoclave refurbishment study that we just discussed previous to this section. That will help us remove the uncertainty related to our existing toll milling agreement. And as we've shown, it improves the life of mine economics as seen in the updated PEAs. Third is the completion of the feasibility studies for Granite Creek and Cove Underground, to which we've allocated $15 million in 2025, which includes approximately $9 million for the infill drill programs that Tyler has walked us through. Finally, is the development of the Archimedes Underground project, which would advance the next producing mine for the company to which we plan to allocate $25 million in 2025. To summarize, we completed all 5 updated PEAs. And for the first time, we've been able to show the full value of the company. This is critical in advancing our discussions with our financing partners and will allow us to advance -- sorry, with our financing partners and will allow for us to advance the work streams we've outlined throughout the presentation today. I'd now like to open the floor to questions.

I'm a bit surprised nobody else asked the question. So I am just -- so is it possible for you to come up with a schedule where 2025, 2026, how much was -- what was the scope of the work that you plan to do? And how much is the budget? And how are you going to get the funds for it?

Yes, it's possible for us to do that. And that's the next step in the plan that I discussed. So now that we have all of the PEAs updated, we'll be updating our internal life of mine plan for exactly that reason. And we've bolstered our team in the finance department at i-80 to allow us to do that. We've got new resources here in Toronto that will be doing that work with us. And what we will plan on doing is taking that updated life of mine plan and presenting exactly what you're talking about.

Okay. For this year, you mentioned there is $10 million allocated to permitting, $3 million for autoclave studies, $15 million for Granite Creek. And there's another one $25 million, I forgot what...

For the advancement of the Ruby Hill Underground.

And you have got the funds for it or do you have to raise the fund for all of these projects?

Yes, we are going to raise funds for all of those projects.

You discussed a lot of different options for potential recapitalization and financing. Do you think you could just list a rough order of your preference for those different options? And if you could, maybe even like a percentage breakdown of how much you're going to rely on each option for potential funding for all of these projects?

I think it's a bit early to give you a percentage breakdown but I'll definitely give you my preference. And so I think first would be the sale of the noncore asset, selling that FAD property, hopefully monetizing that would be first. Second would be the stream of royalty on Mineral point, is where I would go to next. And in addition to that, the potential throughput royalty that we could see on the autoclave at Lone Tree. The rolling out of the existing gold prepay and SOFR instrument are probably 1 and 2; a, I mean those need to happen concurrently with the other 2 that I just mentioned. And then rolling of the existing converts and debentures into a new instrument that aligns with our cash flow profile that will come out of that updated life of mine plan would be next.

[indiscernible] with cash available you have right now. How much cash -- how much time do you have to get some of these things in line?

Yes. So we've got a little bit of time. We will have to do something early in the second quarter to raise capital, to execute on the plans that we've walked through today. In addition to that, we'll need to be having conversations with our existing gold prepay and silver purchase and sale agreement holders to do something to defer repayments that are coming in March of this year, at the end of the month.

We have some questions online and somebody wants to know what is your timing and your cash raising objectives regarding the ATM sales?

Yes. So our ATM is an interesting one. We have access to the ATM until we file our annual results for 2024, which is happening in March -- March 27, in a couple of weeks. We have access to it until then because we've lost our foreign private issuer status with the SEC and we've become a domestic filer. And when we do that, we're going to need to put a new shelf prospectus in place with the SEC. So the ATM is valid through the 27th. With our existing blackout windows, we will have approximately 3 days next week that we will be trading under the ATM and we plan on maximizing those 3 trading days next week. We go into blackout on our standard schedule 2 weeks before the release of our results. So as of March 13, we will be blacked out from using the ATM.

How much is available under the ATM?

The ATM was put in at $50 million. We've raised approximately $30 million of that. So there's a lot of headroom left. We definitely won't use the full $50 million in those 3 trading days.

Another online question. Remind us what we paid for FAD and what it might be worth today?

Yes. The payment price for FAD was roughly $80 million. We've invested capital into FAD since then with the drill program that we were required to complete. I think all-in investments in FAD is probably somewhere between USD 90 million and USD 100 million. We are going through the process right now of trying to evaluate what we think we can get for FAD on the open market but our goal is to recoup that investment.

One more question online that goes back to the autoclave. Is there any plan to run ore through the autoclave for third parties as a way to generate additional revenue?

That's definitely on the table. I would say that in the near term, for the autoclave, as we've shown you today, we have plenty of capacity to fill it ourselves. So that opportunity really comes at the back end, in my mind and Matt, you might feel differently but comes in the back end after we've processed the material from our own properties. With that being said, as Todd outlined, it's only the third -- it is the third autoclave facility in Nevada. The other 2 being under control of 1 entity, where you're the only other entity that can process refractory material in Nevada. And at some point, there will be value in owning that processing capacity that we can sell to a third party.

Just wondering, I mean, given the size and the profile of Mineral point, it really kind of looks a lot like some assets that some of your peers in the U.S. [indiscernible] have. Would you consider a partner for it?

I mean, yes, I would say that would be on the table. But really, Mineral Point is going to be a whole another funding exercise to fund that capital. And at that point in time, we'll be exploring all the options to fund Mineral Point. Any more online questions, Katerina? All right. So just to close out with the same slide that we began the presentation with today. These are the 4 value drivers for i-80 Gold. And again, we've got the proven Nevada mining expertise. And hopefully, that's shown through today in the discussions with the technical team that we've presented to you. I do want to point out what you haven't had the opportunity to do today is meet the team below this team. They all have a very qualified and experienced people working for them as well with a depth of Nevada experience. We have the high-grade organic growth pipeline and we have the resource expansion potential on the brownfield sites in Nevada. As Tyler has mentioned, almost all of the resources that we have are open for expansion and there is an opportunity to gain value through that as well. We have the strategic hub-and-spoke mining and processing model for the cost efficiencies that we walked through today, as Matt mentioned, to start the slide. We're not -- we don't need to build a processing facility at each of the undergrounds. We can process it through the centralized autoclave facility and gain efficiencies that way. And finally, we've got the restructuring and recapitalization plan for future growth that we just walked through. So I want to thank everybody for coming today. And we'll be around for a little bit after to take any questions you have that you didn't ask in the public forum. Thank you all.