U.S. Gold Corp. (USAU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. This is Campbell Mccrary from Amvest Capital in New York City. Welcome to the U.S. Gold Corp. live webinar. Today is Thursday, July 27. U.S. Gold trades on NASDAQ as USAU. Hope you'll enjoy today's program. An on-demand replay will be available following this live webcast. The link that you originally used to register, in a few hours after the event, it will be the same link that you can share. And you can also just access, and it will take you to the recording. And you can actually, in watching the replay, ask questions as well, and we can give you answers. The important bit of the format is sending in questions. [Operator Instructions]. Only we see the questions, and they're always anonymous. So anything that's on your mind, please do send in. I have with us today Luke Norman, Chairman of U.S. Gold; and [ Gary Lindsay ], who heads up Investor Relations at the company. When we log out, please share your feedback. That's important. We're going to do it during the show once at the end or in a follow-up e-mail. Very important, this call is most definitely for informational purposes only and is no way a solicitation to buy or sell this or any security for that matter. So read that carefully. Of course, Amvest is the New York-based specialist investment management and corporate finance firm based on natural resource sector. So welcome to the program Luke, Gary. Take us through 15, 20 minutes, whatever you need, to say your piece. And then we'll circle back to Q&A. Thanks.

Yes. Thank you, Campbell. And I apologize to anyone, I'm on a WiFi network somewhere in Northwest U.S. So if it's a bit scratchy, apologies again. So U.S. Gold Corp. We started this company in 2017. I'm a co-founder of the company. I have a backdrop -- or background in precious metals space. My previous company was a company called Gold Standard Ventures. We enjoyed some great success there with exploration -- pure exploration in Nevada. So that was us -- U.S. Gold was kind of my approach to a spillover event or a new attempt at exploring gold in Nevada. And that's -- on this opening slide, that's exactly what you're seeing, Keystone, drilling. Fast forward to today, and we're now a predevelopment/developer in the state of Wyoming, and I'll explain to you how we got to that point. Our CEO, which -- coming up on the slide here, gents, excuse me, and ladies. First of all, of course, our forward-looking statements. We'll -- I'll leave those to your own discretion and allow you to look through them on our website. So what we've managed to achieve in relatively short order is we have just shy of 1.5 million ounces of gold equivalents as a form of reserve -- not a resource, a reserve -- which gives us about 100,000 ounces of annualized production forecast. A lot of upside to that project, but ultimately, we're placing these off an economic standpoint or case around that 1.5 million ounces right now and a mine that's going to produce gold at about $800 all-in sustaining cost, extremely low strip, just exposed at surface. And it turns out our waste rock is being sold by Martin Marietta next door for about $20 a tonne. So that's not built in the economic case for this project, and I will discuss it at points during this presentation today. But ultimately, we're going to talk about a copper/gold deposit today. And as we end up with some additional value, so be it. Right. So first and foremost, as Campbell pointed out, we're NASDAQ-listed. Okay, that's a bit of a surprise to most people, including, I imagine, many people who are on this Zoom or this webinar today. It was a choice that was made because with U.S. -- with Gold Standard Ventures, we ended up with primarily a U.S. shareholder base. So I thought very closely, discussed it with the team, and ultimately, we listed primarily in the U.S. because we have U.S. assets, U.S. management and, again, a previous iteration of this company having a very strong U.S. shareholder base. So it's a unique structure, 9.2 million shares outstanding. In Canada and Australia or wherever else these precious metals companies tend to list, that is a bit of a rarity, so a tight share structure and by design. I think that can be reflected very nicely to our investors moving forward because when the value comes, when the events occur, that I'm going to take you through today that create the value around this company, you're going to see a real pop in the stock, I think. Mindful, of course, to all the other variables that occur around stocks working. But you can see there an old edit. The project, CK Gold Project, as we call it, very rich in copper also. So ESG, which used to be a slide that we try and slip towards the end of the presentation, is going to become key around this company. I mentioned to you that our waste rock looks like it's going to be a highly salable commodity within not just the state of Wyoming, but into the Colorado Front Range. But we also feel that this project has got a lot of potential to be impactful on the positive side with the environment. And one point is we are located very close to a state park in Wyoming. That would usually be a trigger for a negative response towards a gold mine. In this matter, potentially a hole in the ground or an open pit -- as I mentioned, low strip ratio open pit project, and we'll get into the methodology of extraction in a moment, but our open pit looks like it could end up being a water reservoir tied into the state park and ultimately a big benefit to the local community and beyond. Right. So I mentioned we have an economic viewpoint or a reserve that we've built this viewpoint around, and we'll get into it in greater detail in a moment. But ultimately, we've got an NPV on this thing at around $1,600 gold and at $3.25 copper range, about $323 million. And in a more normalized market, we traditionally trade somewhere around 0.6 to 0.8 of that value in the stage where we are right now. If you look at the Lassonde Curve, for example, that's where we should be trading hypothetically. But we have about a $40 million market cap if you reversed up to that previous slide. So CK Gold Project. We renamed it the CK Gold Project, and I will continue to call it that, but its historic name is Copper King, sits on state-owned ground in the state of Wyoming. Wyoming, a great place to do business. Our project is about 20 miles out, as you'll see on our next slide, about 20 miles outside of Cheyenne. Cheyenne is the forefront, the bearer, of all the approaches -- I'm sorry, the permitting aspects of this project. So everyone we deal with, we're not dealing with federal agencies, we're dealing with local community people, people who are driven around the positives of trying to get the state moving forward, not people who are federally involved -- sorry, federals not being involved. A prime example of this is our ground. As you'll see, the pop out in the top left corner, that's state ground. And our royalty within the project is set up to benefit the schools in the local district and the community through the state of Wyoming. So we deal with the Department of Environmental Quality in the state. And just to our south, just to prove that they're not afraid of a good, old open pit type approach to production, is Martin Marietta. You'll see the I-80 running through the center there of this corridor. Martin Marietta are currently producing just pure aggregates. So they're mining basically a similar granite to what our ore bodies hosted in, and selling it as a $20 a tonne rock in the form of aggregates. So it's a mining-friendly state, we will say. And we're just about 1.5 hour south -- or north, excuse me, of Denver International Airport. Right. So I mentioned we have a 1.5 million ounce reserve. That's encapsulated in what you see in the top left-hand corner of the slide, which is ultimately a pit shell. So the deposits exposed at surface. You'll see some red towards the top of that pit shell. That's our highest grade material. That's the top left corner of the slide, excuse me. But the mineralization extends well below the pit and we see continuation, in a lateral sense, of ongoing upside to this deposit. So we need -- again, I've used the terminology snapshot. We needed an economic snapshot at the time because we want to advance this as a copper/gold mine, and that's what we've presented to the state and continued. That's exactly what we're going to do. But there is upside beyond it potentially for the future. A further breakdown on our PFS, but that was a pre-feasibility study that we put out in December of 2021. The world is in a bit of flux right now and things are changing around us constantly, so a bit of an inflationary environment. So we're still comfortable with that snapshot because that reserve has not changed. The reserve is set in stone, quite literally. Cost of production are coming up slightly with some of the prices of gold and copper, so at least reflective to this deposit. I mentioned there's a very simple form or method of extraction, and that's the truer statement I can think of. It is crush, grind, float and sending a dry concentrate off-site, so no cyanide or any other nefarious agents involved in the mineral extraction, but ultimately, some of our waste rock and our tailings just get put into top of graphical lows, top soil goes back on top post-production and we turn it back into pasture land for the state of Wyoming. So we've done a lot of metallurgical work. And we don't see -- it's a sulfide deposit, but we're not seeing any -- well, there will not be any bad agents coming out of this rock. It just sits there, and ultimately, we'll have top soil on top it post production; the crush, grind, float. So far, we've had a great alliance with the state of Wyoming. In this particular slide, that's George Bee, our President and CEO, whom I'll get into a conversation on in a moment. That's him talking amongst some of the community leaders about the postproduction aspects of the project, the potential for it to be a part of their water reservoir network, et cetera. We've had a really great response locally. And it's exciting. I've actually just left Wyoming. And I apologize, everyone, we got caught in a weather cell yesterday and ended up in Spokane somehow through this travel and not quite enough sleep, but yes, we just spent the last 3 days in Wyoming meeting more interesting and, well, just business-oriented people there. So I keep harboring on this conversation about our proximity to a park. And ultimately, we're looking at this thing as being potentially an add-on to this reservoir network that is located within Curt Gowdy State Park. So what you see here are 2 man-made lakes that neighbor us in a very similar granite house to what were going to be open pit mining. And their plan is to increase that capacity within that reservoir network. In doing so, it's going to have a really big effect on the usability of that park as they have to flood out the lake, and they're going to lose a lot of access points and different things with these 2 man-made lakes. So to make work project, to help solve a water storage issue, well, we're going to have a very big open hole in the ground in granite that could be used to supplement and offset all the costs that are staring down right now to add to that reservoir network. Here's a perfect snapshot of this PFS, this pre-feasibility study that we had put out, 1.4 million -- or 1.44 million ounces of gold equivalents. So our economics run around 70% on the gold side and 30% on the copper side. There's 300 million pounds of copper tied up within that resource, no consideration for the aggregates whatsoever. A 10-year life of mine is how we've kind of approached it, 108,000 ounces and a CapEx of $222 million. Now again, that was December of 2021. We are in a somewhat inflationary environment. So we expect that CapEx has come up a little, probably pushing up towards $250 million, for argument's sake. But if you want to compare us to any of the peer group, larger producers, it's still a very manageable amount. But okay, how does a $40 million company go about building a $250 million mine? It's a very common question for us. This is designed around building a kind of a Cadillac production facility. But when you go and buy a new -- just like going to a car dealership tomorrow, Ford or Chev or Toyota, they'll give you debt. Well, the same thing happens with the OEM producers of mining equipment. They'll supply a form of capital, there's access to capital through state funding. And ultimately, year 1 of production, I showed you in the previous slide, our highest grade is at surface, so there's potential for us to forward sell some of the gold as well. So we're not afraid of that $250 million raise, but ultimately, it's kind of a show-me situation. We're going to show you that, first and foremost, we're going to get permitted. I'll just get the reserve estimate here. Right, so these are the catalysts of the company. There's permit. So permitting, within the state of Wyoming, we're dealing with zero federal involvement. There's no impact on the waterways of America. There is no impact or no involvement whatsoever with forestry or Bureau Land Management. We deal with the good people of Cheyenne, Wyoming who are 20 miles away from us. So we're working closely with state regulators and continue to and have had very little pushback so far. In fact, we've been fortunate enough to be -- a press release last week announced our industrial siting permit. So we feel that we should be getting close to or hoping to see an approval for our permits in the early stages of next year. The engineering. A good man, George Bee, that's the CEO of the company. George has built some of the biggest gold mines on the planet. He was the -- hit a production for Barrick. He moved into South America in his latter part of his tenure with Barrick. And that whole El Indio, Veladero Belt, he's worked on extensively. So he knows how to build really big holes in the ground and produce gold. So extremely fortunate to have him. When I say the slide point is advanced engineering, I'd like to quip or joke that it's overengineered. He would, of course, argue otherwise. But yes, the right man to build a gold mine, for sure. I make it to point number three. Waste rock is a salable commodity within the marketplace. We're right on the border of Colorado pretty much. That Front Range is just a huge industry going on around us, right down to the fact that they're rebuilding 150 nuclear silos in the state of Wyoming and into Montana. So our waste rock is valuable. And the financing options to get us mine up and built, point number four, I mentioned between OEM, contractors, state of Wyoming, other federal grants or opportunities and just standard debt financing, forward sales of gold. We feel like we're not going to have to blow apart this capital structure that we currently have. And yes, there's a potential for it to be a bit late. And ultimately, we're heading towards what we feel will be construction and production. And that decision will be made early next year, but it's looking good. Now we're not just a stand-alone predevelopment/developer. This company was originally built around this opportunity we have in Nevada, which is called Keystone, sits just across the valley from the whole Barrick, Cortez complex. It's a big district scale opportunity. I won't get into too much detail on it, but Nevada is definitely somewhere you want to find gold. Our project, like I said, district scale, sits just across the valley from Cortez Hills. Cortez Hills, that complex is somewhere around 15 million ounces of gold and growing. And we feel like we've got an analogue to that -- or an analogy to that. The reason why we have that, we'll make such a brash statement or assumption, is we've drilled it, and we've got the same rocks. Alteration, very similar, same kind of backdrop and system. You can see Cortez Hills there hosted in that wind band up at the top portion of the slide. The bottom portion of the slide, that's our wind band and access to it. So we're just going to find the right plumbing and we -- yes, we'll be in the picture. Stratigraphically, the deposit looks very, very similar to the Cortez, same with its alteration. So Challis in Idaho, I won't mention any more other than the fact that it's got about 300,000 ounces of historical resource. We think it's a big game changer as well. But right now, we're focused on developing the future mine in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Just a final slide here just to wrap things up, but a really well accomplished team, from our executive team down to our Board of Directors. But George, as I said, has built some of the biggest gold mines on the planet. It's the reason why we all came together with -- turning this from a pure explorer in Nevada into a development company. And again, I don't think you'll find a much better gold miner on the planet. So back to you, Campbell, and thank you for this.

Thank you very much. Thank you for sending in questions, audience. [Operator Instructions] Here's a macro question. Seems like the market may be overlooking the strategic importance of copper production in the United States. Can you touch on the anticipated revenue split between copper and gold at CK and the opportunities that might arise should copper be placed on the strategic minerals list?

Right. So right now, the economics stand -- a very, very good question, by the way, because our economics stand around 70-30 split, so 70% in gold, 30% in copper. But we also all know that both sides of the federal government in the U.S. have large aspirations for electrifying the automotive industry. I don't know how copper is somehow being left out of that critical mineral list. I know that there's a lot of smarter minds and I working very feverishly in the background trying to rectify that. But in the short term, copper is one of the hottest commodities on the planet and will continue to be so for a very long time and not just as electrification but everything that occurs around it. So I think, I feel -- I think collectively as a team, we think and feel that copper is going to be a real driver behind this project moving forward. And we did keenly adjust the name of the project from Copper King to the CK Gold Project a couple of years back. But it's a quiver that we wouldn't -- sorry, an arrow we wouldn't shy away from pulling back out of the quiver.

Yes, for sure. Can you -- jumping around, can you discuss a little bit the indigenous Native American Indian situation in Wyoming? Every state is different. And how do they handle their treaties? And whose land are you on, sort of on? And how does all that fit in ESG?

We are on state ground. Again, the K through grade 12 school board will be the beneficiaries of our royalty system, a royalty system that we've worked closely with the state to construct. We'll be the first hard rock mine in 100 years in Wyoming because traditionally, it's been coal and oil production. So we -- I was about say, unfortunately and truly almost unfortunately, that we don't have to deal with any of -- anyone outside of the state. We're on state ground. And it previously has been leased out as pasture land. So there's been a farmer who we work very closely with as well. We have some state and some private ground. That's all held and owned by local farmers.

Okay. How many other companies are pursuing hard rock mining in any stage in Wyoming? Are you the only one in the state?

No, there's 2 or 3 now. We were fortunate to have a very well recognized porphyry expert come to the project a year or so ago. And in doing so, he mentioned that, "Hey, look, you found this wonderful porphyry deposit, exposed a surface, but there's going to be a lot more." These things don't tend to hang out on their own. They tend to hang out in clusters. So that's 3.0. It's like I call U.S. Gold Corp. 2.0 from the Gold Standard Ventures. That will be 3.0. But all jokes aside, Campbell, it's probably strewn with porphyries around this part of Wyoming. But we are the only ones we know that are filing for permits to produce right now.

Your industrial siting permit, or ISP, issued in just a few quarters, is this time line typical in Wyoming? Should we take this as a sign of strong support for the project and the remainder of the permitting process? And then I'll add to that, how you've looked -- in many jurisdictions, what feeling are you getting about Wyoming time line-wise?

We were fortunate enough -- on Tuesday, George and I and team, we're at the governor's lunch, which is part of this Frontier Days that they're going on right now. It's a massive rodeo. We deal with the state. And the state, again, are the people who awarded us the ISP. We're very, very confident. I mean, it's a professionally well-run state. They recognize the fact that there are potential issues around the mine. Once everyone recognizes that we're not using cyanide -- well, as we go through the process, we're not using cyanide or any other -- I use the word nefarious agents, I think that's fair enough, a fair statement. We just crush, grind, float and selling a highly concentrated sand out of the project. And 3 miles to our south, Martin Marietta, a $20-plus billion market cap company, doing exactly that form of mining just to sell the rock, not a copper/gold porphyry but just literally selling that rock as aggregate and rail ballast and a line of items. Yes, we're really confident that they're a fast-moving state, but they've been mindful and making sure that we're going to do our operation properly and look out for the environment as we go.

Just randomly googling the CK mine. From the interstate, how far are you -- I don't actually...

The I-80? The CK mine is about 3 miles away from the I-80, approximately.

Is there a road from 210?

Well, we have -- right now, our access is Happy Jack Road. So there is a road that goes between Cheyenne -- sorry -- yes, between Cheyenne and the reservoir network. It's a well-maintained gravel road. And then we just come up, and through some ranch land agreement that's already in hand with one of the local branches, that's our access point. So Campbell, you've known me for a very long time. Our projects in Nevada, for example, I'd fly people into Salt Lake City. We would drive 3 hours to Elko, spend the night in a hotel and then drive another 3 hours to our project. It would take about, I think, 2.5 hours to get up to where we got to our exploration portions of the project. This is 1.5 hours north of Denver International Airport. You can drive it in a car, not a pickup truck. It's pasture land that our deposits hosted upon. So you're really just going into a field but looks like a farm field.

You're so close to Denver and Fort Collins and Cheyenne, you're just 30 minutes to 2.5 hours. You could get the big mining hub, Denver, for skilled talent and money.

That's what makes this project so sensible. We've had people question grade, for example. It's certainly not one we'd consider a high-grade deposit. But people are going to go home at night. We don't have to build man camps. People -- employees, up to 200 at the peak of our development, will be coming and going by bus. As I told you, it's a dry concentrate. We'll be sending out 6 or 7 trucks a day of dry concentrate. All that aggregates is getting stockpiled by way of the plan of operation anyway, our plan of how we're going to develop this mine. So that stuff is all sitting on surface for free. I mean the legacy of money creation from this project will, unfortunately, far outlive us all as a management.

To that note, yes, you have -- your plan, 10-year life of mine, what, you think you can double that?

I love those kind of questions. But ultimately, yes, but it's a management of also resource and time. So we could continue -- we've seen the resources well below that pit shell shape that we put an economic value to. But at some juncture, I think if we can work our way through at the state and recognize that this is going to, by proxy, being not just a reservoir but essentially save the park from having to be flooded, we will, at some point, cap the production. Where that point is, who knows? But right now, at 1.44 million ounce reserve, it has great economic impact to us as a company.

Okay.

Campbell, let me just jump in. Yes, this is Gary. I started with U.S. Gold about a month ago, so I'm relatively new, and I have that great perspective of what I've seen so far from the management team. Fantastic. Every week, in their management meetings, things are moving forward even though it's July and everyone is very engaged, very skilled and very, very impressed with who they are. And Luke's talked a little bit about George Bee and how amazing he is. He is. But Luke is also very amazing and has brought a lot of mines financially into production and has spent and knows a lot of the industry. If there were -- as an investor, if there's something that I would want to know, it's probably along the lines of what the 3 analysts have written. And the 3 analysts are from Alliance Global Partners, Red Cloud and H.C. Wainwright. They have valued the properties from $12 an ounce to up to $25 per -- not per ounce per share. And so when you look at those valuations, it's 3 to 8x what our valuation is. This morning, we were at $4.31 when I looked; big, big opportunity for growth here.

U.S. Gold Corp., the equity has been around a long time, many years. How is the company different, had different focus? What's been -- what was -- say, let's go back to the last 10 years.

Yes, we consolidated back the company in, I believe -- and excuse me if I'm wrong -- I think it was 2020 is when we did our rollback. And no one likes to consolidate a stock, especially when you're the founder of the company and not probably the largest personal or private investor in the company from a dollar perspective. But look, I think a tight share structure on NASDAQ is key. And we brought in a whole new approach. Just a background story, I touched on it briefly at the beginning of the presentation, but as primarily an explorer, primarily, I've always enjoyed Nevada as a place of exploration. So this company was built around Keystone, which is our Nevada asset. But George, I brought in. He and I went down looking at another opportunity in South Africa. But I asked them to take a look at the CK Gold project where, at the time, it was called Copper King, asked them to take a look because I thought maybe we'll monetize that for -- saving us any further dilution and using it as exploration dollars. That's when George turned around after an in-depth look into the full scoping study on it, brought in some of those direct cohorts to do so. He said, "We'd be crazy to sell this project. We should develop it. It's a little cash cow." So that evolution, I felt, was reflective of a major shift within our company, so worthy of that consolidation that we went through. And today, we're 9.2 million shares out.

All right. Strip ratio?

Just around 0.9 to 1. So less than 1:1 on the strip ratio and our highest grade ore exposed at surface. So at year 1 production, we'll be 130,000 ounces of gold.

In-situ grades of gold and copper?

So a combination of that comes in around 0.72 or 3 grams a tonne. It might actually be higher than that because there's silver as a byproduct as well. But keep in mind, that's higher grade than what we had at Railroad and Gold Standard, and that was sitting at 130 feet below surface. This is exposed at surface. So grade is certainly not any kind of marginality to this project. You'll see, on a much previous slide, an all-in sustaining cost of around $800 an ounce. So yes, that's going to shift upwards because we're an inflationary spike right now. But with that goes to the price of the metal. So we're comfortable.

Looks like you've monetized some assets like Maggie Creek, but you've got 3 others that look good. Do you think -- I guess, what did you get for Maggie Creek? Do you plan to monetize some of the other assets?

Maggie Creek was such an interesting project. Campbell, I know you've heard my rhetoric back in the Gold Standard days. We had Railroad, which was a third window on the Carlin Trend. Well, Maggie Creek [ set a button ] to one of the most historic famous mines in the entire Carlin Trend, Gold Quarry. And originally, when we stepped into that acquisition, the plan was -- we had a papered-up agreement. We were going to deal with a local rancher and add thousands of acres of exploration ground to it. Ultimately, we ended up with just Maggie Creek, which was 3 square miles of [ tenure ] attached at the hip to Barrick's Gold Quarry, and Barrick didn't seem very interested in it. And it turned out their model had assumed that the mineralization just quite literally fell off a cliff at Maggie. So we drilled a hole and a half, not cheap drilling down that part of Nevada, by the way. We drilled a hole and a half, and lo and behold, we found Popovich, which is the formation that holds the biggest gold mines on the planet, or at least Nevada-wise; well altered, all the right key signatures of a deposit there. And so Barrick came to us and said, "Look, we're the only people who are going to be able to develop this." So they gave us back more than what we paid for it. So we've monetized it and held on to it at net smelter royalty. So we broke their model, I think, is the terminology George likes to use. And keep in mind, George managed Goldstrike previous -- in his younger years. He was one of the first big mine managers in Nevada. So he knows what the right rocks look like and so do Barrick.

You talked a little bit about ownership of U.S. Gold, percent in institutional. Who are some of the names we might recognize? And when did they get in?

Ironically, not too many big institutional shareholders, but standby on that front. Our landscape has changed remarkably in the last 6 months. I can't talk to some of the people who are chatting with us that feel that they should become shareholders. But we were a little bit open with the decision to list on NASDAQ, and I'm sure you can appreciate that, Campbell. Traditionally, a company like this will be listed in Canada, earn its stripes, and then maybe dual-list in the U.S., NYSE marketplace or a similar exchange. I got a little bit -- sorry, we, the company, we got a little bit, I guess, ahead of ourselves, over our skis a little bit, in terms of just purely listing on NASDAQ. But lo and behold, every company I've had that's operated in the States ends up being predominantly a U.S. shareholder bound. So NASDAQ was...

My friend, with Dakota Gold, did the same thing.

Yes, Mr. [ Horton ]. Yes, my very good friend and business partner from Gold Standard Ventures, exactly. So I think what's happened is we're starting to see now a recognition for what we've done and what we're achieving. So we have a $40 million approximate market cap right now. I would argue it's probably somewhere around 1/4 or 1/5 of where it should be right now. These arbitrage opportunities don't last forever. The marketplace -- as I said, there are people out there already starting to recognize the inherent value in this company. We won't look at gross metal values or any of that kind of crazier, I guess, aspect of looking at these deposits of these projects. There's a lot of upside to this company. When you're stockpiling waste rock that's worth $20 a tonne, and you've already paid for it coming out of the ground, for example, $700 million worth of waste rock sitting on the sidelines. Yes, the story is going to get the exposure it earns.

Let me jump in here too, Campbell, and weigh in on this. Management owns, what, about 20%. Is that right, Luke?

Sorry. Thank you. Yes. The root of the question, I apologize. I wasn't trying to be a politician there on you, Campbell, I just got lost.

And the other important thing is the company has put a big focus right now on doing a big push marketing-wise right now. We are close enough to getting the mining permit, and our expectation is that this will be the next gold and copper mine in the U.S. or in Canada. And so because of that, the valuation will go up. It should go up significantly. But we're doing a pretty big marketing push on. And we're just at the very beginning of this, so our expectation is things will move up very nicely.

You use phrases like near-term production potential or emerging near-term producer. What kind of time line does that mean?

How long is the piece of rope? Again, dealing with a state as opposed to dealing with a federal bureaucracy is night and day, what a shift. Like, we meet these people eye -- again, I just left Cheyenne, Wyoming yesterday. We're in lunch meetings with the governor. We're meeting everyone that's involved in the steps in the process to permit this mine firsthand, not send off a file and wait 3 years and see what the Bureau of Land Management come back with. These people understand that this is an economic boom for them and, likewise, for us as a company. So it is an expectation of us as a company that we will have permit to mine in the first quarter of next year. Expectation is a bit of grandiose word. I would say that's what we kind of designed and built our expectations around would be, Q1 of next year. And then it's crush, grind, float. We don't have any kind of real specialty equipment that doesn't already exist, probably sitting on a shelf somewhere. So it is a pretty quick build. We could be in production as soon as the end of next year, but certainly into 2025.

Great. Very good. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in for your great questions. I'll pass it back to Luke and Gary, maybe take us through in summary, upcoming catalysts.

Well, catalyst #1, of course, would be that permit to mine. I think that's the big value-add. What our marketplace did not pick up on was our industrial siting permit. It's the same as the DEQ, the Department of Environmental Quality, out of Cheyenne, Wyoming that issues that permit. The very same group who are working on our permit to mine. We're not using any cyanides or any of the leaching processes to extract older copper. We're selling a copper concentrate, a dry sand. And there's an operating, this rock quarry to our south doing the exact same form of mining. So we're confident that we will make it through this process. And that is our biggest catalyst because if you're on federal ground anywhere in Canada or the U.S., good luck to you getting permits right now. We've built this company around a team of guys who have built gold mines. That's what they do. George is not a market person. He's not been out there as a reinvented broker in things such as myself. He builds gold mines. And well, the Copper King, or the CK Gold Project, that just represents a whole bunch of value. I mean it's just sitting there at surface, the richest gold part of it sitting at surface. Day 1, you're into ore, very hard to find a project like that that's not being developed. And what we offer is obviously great leverage, not just within the copper -- sorry, that gold cycle, which I think gold is going to get very, very inflated in the future and will continue to be successful as it hovers around $2,000 an ounce, I think, lookout in the aspect of gold. But we have a very safe hedge with a big copper component associated with this deposit. And then finally, Cortez Hills -- well, sorry, excuse me, Keystone, which is located near Cortez Hills will probably be the biggest game changer for all of us as investors in this company in the future.

If I just add 2 little things, one is the all-in sustaining cost of $800 an ounce of gold equivalent is pretty fantastic in terms of gold companies. And so the simplicity of the mine is a very big factor in getting this up and running very quickly and eliminating a lot of the risk. And last, if anybody is interested in the analyst reports, reach out to me or to Campbell, and he can reach out to me, and I'll be happy to send them to you. So thanks for joining.

All right. Thank you, everyone.

Yes. Thank you.