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

Today, we have U.S. Gold's Executive Chairman, Luke Norman. Luke is a Co-founder of U.S. Gold as well as Gold Standard Ventures, which was recently acquired by Pierre Lassonde back mid-tier mining company. We'll start with the presentation from Luke followed by Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them using the function at the bottom of your screen. Before I pass it off to Luke, we'll start with a brief disclosure slide. Luke, please take it away.

Thank you, Jake, and welcome anyone who is here to join us on this lovely September day. Right, so as Jake mentioned, I am Luke Norman, I'm the Co-Founder and Chairman of U.S. Gold Corp. U.S. Gold Corp, we trade on NASDAQ, USAU, very tight share structure, which I'll introduce you to momentarily. And yes, we're -- also on the line with me is George Bee, our President and CEO, if we have time, of course, we'll hear from George today as well. And U.S. Gold Corp, we are in the process, the final stages of permitting top of gold mine just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming or about 1.5 hours north of Denver International Airport. We have our own silly disclaimers here, but I will recommend that anyone who wants to read through them, go to our website. That's usgoldcorp.gold, you'll find our presentation material and a lot more on the company there. Right. So what we'll be talking about today, as you're aware, Jake, is our value proposition within U.S. Gold Corp right now. We're in a very unique position given that we are permitting a copper, gold mine in Wyoming. And by dealing with -- by being in Wyoming on state ground, we're dealing purely with state official. So we don't have to deal with any federal agency whatsoever. So there's no Bureau of Land Management, Army Corps of Engineers and our project, we've got a very good handle on that. Thanks to George, who came in and joined the team in August of 2020. George's background is building very big gold mines for Barrick Gold Corp. So comes with esteemed pedigree in building gold mines and dealing with your local situations. So being in Wyoming, close to his home in Utah. We went ahead and took a resource that we had purchased many years ago and established a reserve. So we now have a just shy of 1.5 million ounce reserve that breaks down to around 100 -- sorry, 1 million ounces of gold and 250 million pounds of copper. That will deliver us greater than 100,000 ounces, close to about 110,000 gold equivalent ounces on a per annum from production and there's a lot more upside to that deposit, and we'll see that in the upcoming slide as well. We completed a pre-feasibility study in December of 2021, and we're very comfortable with that. I feel it's well engineered, a really good understanding of the deposit and the metallurgy. And that forecast about an $800 all-in sustaining cost using metal prices of $1,625 gold, $3.25 copper. So yes, it's a robust, very good economic footprint. And that's due to the fact that we have a low strip ratio within the deposit. The first couple of years, there's 0 strip. And as we move through, we -- life of mine ended up about 0.88:1 strip. So both strip and another new value proposition that we have recently learned about is our waste rock is pretty much identical to a large materials company next door, who are actually mining just this particular granite to sell it for $20 a tonne into the aggregates market. So additional economic upside to this deposit is being worked on beyond just the copper gold portion. But ultimately, we are in the final stages of permitting in Wyoming, and that's what's got us excited and clearly, what's got us on the phone with Jake today. Rather unique, you hear that word a lot out of me, unfortunately, with this project, but it is a very unique story, also a unique share structure, 8.4 million shares outstanding. It's not your traditional junior mining company by any stretch from that structural standpoint. You can see our longer chart, we're at pretty much all-time lows. It does not make a lot of sense for us to be trading there all-time lows, given the amount of value propositions that we have added over the last couple of years, derisking events in particular. But we've been treated like our peer group right now. And I think the peer group has been -- precious metals has not been an exciting space for quite some time, since the beginning of the COVID outbreak, I think. But more importantly, I think the market and correctly just packages us in with our peers that permits are impossible to get and funding mining projects is difficult. So we're going to show you our pathway to permit and our pathway to funding today in this presentation. And you can obviously see that we've got 3 analysts covering us. Jake has a rather conservative $18 target we can talk to later. Right, so just quickly on ESG because this is going to be a really important component to our company moving forward. Not only are we developing a copper gold mine, I think traditionally or not traditionally, but how the U.S. and Canada are evolving is mining has become a very dirty word, people want to see mines offshore. They don't want to have it in good old U.S.A. or in the mountains of British Columbia. Hoping that all this production happens out of sight, out of mind in Asia and elsewhere. So when you're advancing and trying to develop a mine in North America, you want to be very mindful about how you go about things. This is a project where we won't be doing any of our gold extraction on site. We actually just extract a dry concentrate. So there's no leaching agents or anything like that, that is being used and no need for leaching pad, et cetera. It's literally just a crush, grind, float and using a -- shipping a dry concentrate from site. So already, that carbon footprint is very low, no stack emissions, et cetera. But where this project starts to differentiate itself from any other mining opportunity that I've ever been familiar with in North America, is again, our waste rock is a salable commodity. So now that's sitting on surface with a zero carbon footprint. Meanwhile, again, a large materials company next door to us is expanding all sorts of machinery, diesel usage, power, et cetera, just to extract that rock to feed it into a very strong marketplace in both Colorado and Wyoming. Other benefits to it is we may very well be able to utilize our exhausted pit as a water reservoir to tie in to the local reservoir network to aid the township of Cheyenne as they run into shortages and through growth. So this ESG slide standby, there's going to be a lot more update to it. We are focusing on the CK Gold Project, we will try and keep a better tempo here. We're at advanced stage predevelopment company and project. We're in a very mining-friendly location, the Silver Crown mining district just out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. We're not in the mountains of Jackson. We are very close to the Colorado border, we've managed to put together a prefeasibility study and technical reports that were all independently verified by Gustavson, which gives us a reserve of 1 million ounces and 248 million pounds of copper. So that will give us about -- we used $1,625 gold, Jake, and $3.25 copper on the pre-feasibility. That would grant us about a $323 million NPV 5%, right now. So in a more normalized market, I guess we would be trading either at a sort of 0.4 to 0.6 ratio of our NPV or a more common one is also ounces in the ground. So if you take 1.5 million ounces of gold equivalent. I think in our previous market, these valuations are around $100 plus an ounce in the ground. So we feel we're at about a $36 million market cap today that we're very undervalued relative to normalized markets. And I'll show you a snapshot of that. But we're just about advancing our final engineering in lieu of our permits, which we believe should be awarded at the beginning of next year. Okay. So one location. I'm used to building a projects in high Mountains in Nevada. This is sitting pretty much in the plans of Wyoming. You take -- you land in Denver international airports, you drive 1.5 hours north to Cheyenne and 20 miles to the west is our project site, CK or Copper King deposit. It sits just north of the I-80 hotel. I'm hoping people can see my cursor. We sit just about 2.3 miles north of the I-80 Highway -- excuse me, I think I said hotel, I-80 highway. And that black dot there is the Martin Marietta branded Canyon Quarry. And again, they are open pit supplying granite, which they're crushing, grinding and selling into Colorado Basin and the surrounds of Cheyenne as aggregates. And that comes in many forms from aggregates into concrete to rail ballast. There is an insatiable demand for aggregates in this area. And you can see in the pop out, Jake, up to the top left, that's a schematic of what our exhausted pit finalized pit might look like. Well, back down in the main map area, you'll notice these 2 dark areas to our Northwest. They are 2 man-made lakes. They're 2 granite Lakes. So granite hosted Lakes, one is called Granite Lake and one is called Crystal Lake. There were water empowerment that are being built by dam to feed the township of Cheyenne nearby. Now that being deemed under capacity by the Bureau of Public Utilities and they're looking for a resolution to fix that going into 2040. Well, right now, there are -- best case option is to increase the dam heights at these water empowerment and basically flooding the area out. And just that happens that, that area is State Park. So our exhausted pit could tie in very nicely to become a reservoir. So there's a lot of additional little benefits to this prime location and this deposit being hosted the way it is. So I mentioned the pre-feasibility study. Just a quick look at this. So 1.44 million ounces of proven and probable reserve. That's, again, gold equivalents. Just for as lay people, I'm not a geology of store engineer either, the economics of this deposit work out to be about 70% gold, 30% copper. We wanted to take a snapshot in time with this feasibility study -- pre-feasibility study. So we needed a minimum 10-year mine life, and we wanted to be up over 100,000 ounces of gold. We achieved both of those but there is, again, a lot of resource upside beyond what's in this prefeasibility. So that has derived around a 20,000 tonne per day plant, crush, grind, float, as you can see on our sensitivities table. We ran the numbers at $1,625 gold, $3.25 copper, and it left us $800 all-in sustaining cost, which, again, Jake, I'm sure you can appreciate relative to our peer group, that's a remarkable number and a great job done by George and his team to manage that. And we feel that, that's a very fair representation. You can see again on this sensitivities chart, we haven't even taken gold to the prices where it trades today and has such an impact $1,825 gold, $3.65 copper making an IRR of almost 55%. And again, none of this takes into consideration the upside, the benefit to us having $35 million or potentially $35 million worth of waste rock that's worth $20 a tonne. So that would have a massive impact on this slide, obviously. So the deposit, I do refer to the pre-feasibility has been a snapshot in time. The reason I use that language is we had to take a certain portion of this deposit and define it as a reserve and then get our permit to file up and running. Sorry, a permit to mine, file our permit to mine, get it up and running. The reason being is we could have spent another several tens of millions of dollars just increasing the size of this reserve but to what end. If we can show Mr. Market, we can't show the world that we can actually develop this deposit, then it's kind of all meaningless. So permit this pit shell, but clearly, a lot of mineralization continues to dip. We see probably another 1 million ounces under that hypothesized pit shell and then we have ongoing to the Southeast natural extension to that ore body as well. So this thing could produce well in -- like most mines, Jake, they have a mine life, but they never seem to end. So it's wide open, very clean neurology, low sulfide content. There's very little asset generation out of the rock. So it's very good deposit from that point of view. I won't talk to this slide, I think it's a little bit long for today's presentation. But it is, again, a simple, very simple method of mining, we simply go in, blast, bring the rock to surface, separate the ore, obviously, from the waste. The ore gets crushed ground, run through a flotation circuit where we get the heavy metals, they're separated, the dried -- and the dry concentrate is trucked off-site to a smelter anywhere in North America or as far as Asia, there is definitely interest in this. It's a rich, high-quality concentrate. The tailings, that's left, it's known to various agents in them, they don't leach any sulfate or put into a topographical low, buttress by some of our waste rock and ultimately, soil -- top soil and return to pasture land post production. So very, very clean form of mining. But again, that leaves us with close to 35 million tonnes of valuable rock sitting on surface that we're doing extensive studies on right now as to how to market and sell that $700 million worth of free rock. Just to take you through the achievements. I think this is important because people are kind of sitting around saying, oh well, we'll have to wait. There's not going to be any action until you get your permit to mine and that's quite the opposite, quite the contrary. How this is working is we're ticking boxes all the way along and each one of those boxes is a derisker. At some point, the marketplace is going to recognize this, that we're floating down at a $36 million market cap, and we're going to be the next copper gold Mine in North America, a robust reserve, a lot of upside, very mining friendly state and very strong economics. So yes, we've just continued to anywhere from moving that resource model into reserve completing all that field work. That's another important factor that I don't think is spoken enough around this company. The hard dollars are being spent to get us to this point. we've raised in excess of $25 million of Copper King to get us to this point in time. So the vast amount of capital and dilution from an equity standpoint to get us here has been expanded, yet we are trading at near all-time lows. I didn't mention either on our capital slide earlier, but we still have about $5.5 million in cash, and we have 0 debt. So we're in a great shape here to move all the way through 2024, if need be, with permits in hand. The big question mark, of course, which we're going to touch on here next is great, but how do you build a $225 million mine? Well, I'll just pop back to that slide. So I think that's one of the areas where people have been questioning us a bit lately is this CapEx, $222 million build. Simply put, you've seen our share structure, 8.4 million shares out with the last thing we're going to do is get into heavy dilution at the equity side of things when there is OEM equipment manufacturers that offer debt components, they are traditional mining lenders, that offer debt components. We now have a copper component, so there is access to federal and nonfederal brands for obviously that copper component. And ultimately, what equity we do require, if we go back to the slide here, another unique aspect to this deposit is the richest, highest grade mineralization in the deposit as it exposed at surface and in year 1. So year 1, we produced around 130,000 ounces of pure gold, not gold equivalents but pure gold and about 22 million pounds of copper. So there's nothing stopping us from doing a forward sale on some of that gold or some of that copper production to offset that CapEx burden at the front end of this project. So yes, I just implore that people don't look at that $225 million or $222 million ticket. It will be higher, by the way, because we're in an inflationary environment. We think it's probably going to be closer to $250 million. but that's not going to be a burden on equity shareholders. There will be a little bit of equity somewhere along the line, certainly, but not the balance of that. I'll wrap up here, but we have an amazing outreach network program in Wyoming. George and his team, extensive team in Cheyenne, they work diligently with all of the locals, whether it be top right there, the Bureau of Public -- sorry, that's the Park's board or even just the business alliance below, the local ranchers, et cetera. We really implore on them to understand the style of mining. We don't want them to be scared off thinking that we're building cyanide leach pads, et cetera, so we've done a really good job, and that's resulted in very little pushback locally. We've had no real opposition yet to this project. And in evidence, we were awarded just about 5, 6 weeks ago, our industrial sidings permit by the same group, the partner of environmental qualities who will be ultimately awarding our permit to mine. So that's just all further encouragement that this thing is going to be, like I said, North America is next copper gold mine. I did already talk to this briefly, but our pit has a very real possibility to save the state, town, a lot of money, a lot of stress by having to flood their state park to increase their water empowerment. We've done a lot of metallurgical work, et cetera. Our pit will satisfy their needs. It's just a matter of finalizing those discussions with them. All right. So yes, we're in the final stages of expecting to be awarded a permit to mine. We've done all the advanced engineering, as I spoke to. We've spent the money. We spent the hard dollars establishing this reserve, doing all the groundwork so that we can put that bankable feasibility study post permit. We are conducting an aggregate market study. We have 2 aggregate pros working for the company now and are very, very attuned with that marketplace. So like I said, outside of any of the economics of that copper gold deposit, we have $700 million potentially of aggregate sitting on surface for free. We've got lots of options in terms of future financing options. I know I just touched on that, but get components from a number of different sources available to us. And the end goal or the end game, I think, is ultimately to try and work with the state, with the park and with the Bureau of Public Utilities to leave a legacy to leave a legacy. To leave a legacy by way of this water storage facility, which can tie in nicely to their park, the third lake and what a great ending to a productive project. And ultimately, we're staring down the barrel of construction and production. So that's exciting times for us. Again, we've got a proven mine builder and George and his team -- sorry, I was looking for our team side. So look, I'll hand it back over to you, Jake. Please, any questions.

Thanks for that, Luke. So I want to start off with copper, which you were just mentioning. It was recently declared a critical metal for the first time in the United States. It's been on other countries, critical materials list for quite some time. Can you touch on how copper being added to the list might benefit the CK project going forward?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, look, domestic copper, well, again, I think we're going to be the next copper gold mine permanent and ready to go into production in the U.S. As I mentioned, our ESG component is going to be built on dramatically over the next sort of 6 months, call it. That's going to open up access to us to nontraditional sources of capital, obviously, positive ESG, very clean footprint, combined with a critical metal. It's just going to open the world up to us. It also helps with marketing story. Look, the original name of CK Gold Project was the Copper King project. So if we have to bring the copper forward and talk a lot about the copper component of this deposit, so be it, but I think it's going to -- yes, it's going to be really impactful to anyone who can produce copper in the U.S.

And I mean do you think there's opportunity for potentially an offtake for the copper down the road for somebody that's looking for a significant source of U.S. base copper?

Absolutely. And look, back to that, even without it in the critical status, it was, the Biden administration have made it very clear that they want to electrify the automotive industry. That doesn't just mean electric cars as we've witnessed in California and Florida and some emergencies there. It also means transmission. You've got to get that power out into the grid and out to the vehicles or those vehicles are useless. And there's been a couple of instances where there's been emergencies, they've asked people not to charge their cars. So the need for copper is very real. It's going to get, I don't know, it's exponential in that marketplace. I'm shock that copper is down. I think copper has been subdued a little bit by growth in China. People are seeing some real issues in China right now, potentially opening up and copper has been driven ahead by their growth. I think that's just going to be spun on its head, and I think the growth in the U.S. is going to really drive this market forward.

Yes, I agree. Switching over to permitting. You received the ISP permit in the second quarter of this year, and it was a fairly short process relative to traditional permitting time lines in the mining space. Do you think the market should take this as a sign of support locally and at the state level for the project? And then building off that, can you just touch on some other permits that are outstanding to get to a construction-ready status?

Absolutely. I think it's indicative of the support, both on the state level and locally. Through the process of the ISP, just for anyone who's listening, ISP is the Industrial Siting Permit and what that does is that allows the state to actually deploy capital towards infrastructure surrounding our project. It just frees them up should they want to put in fire hydrants or different things. I don't want to get into the list of it. But during that process, it wasn't a short process, it actually elongated or delayed the permit-to-mine application whilst we put in the application there by about 3 or 4 months. It -- sorry, during that process, we had to have open town hall meetings in both Laramie and Cheyenne. And again, the objection was minimal. There was -- they has a written of concern about it, but I think it was not really understanding that the style of mining that we're using, again, just to reiterate it, we're not leaching gold on-site. We don't have a smelter on site any of that. So there's no smoke stack emissions or any of that sort of things that people associate with gold mining and dirty mining. It's really essentially the same as what they have nearby at Martin Marietta's Granite Quarry, so minimal pushback. I forgot the second part of your question, Jake, you might have to refresh me.

Looking at just the remaining permits that are outstanding, just you guys are getting towards the finish line of the processor.

Really, the main permit outstanding clearly is the permit to mine. There are facets of giving ourselves through to that. Obviously, power offtakes, water usage agreements, all of those boxes have been ticked. We're really just down to final question-and-answer periods with the Department of Environmental Qualities lands, division who are handling our permit to mine and there are small line items that obviously need to be addressed through a process like this and questions may come back again to us. But heck, we're dealing with people who are 20 minutes away in Cheyenne Wyoming not sitting back waiting for a federal agency to come back to us 3 years later with just a stack of return it later. It's a really encouraging interactive process with state officials who are stone throw away from our project. That's really good.

Okay. Switching over to the economic study was completed in 2021. And obviously, we all know the world has changed quite a bit since then. Can you just touch on your plans to move forward with the feasibility study or a costing update from a capital standpoint as we head into a stages of permanent?

Certainly. And the second point here on our sort of catalyst. So pretty much all that advanced engineering has been completed. We're sitting on what we need to submit a feasibility study. But combined, the company sat there and thought, well, look we were in a real inflationary flux through COVID. I think that started to settle down, a lot of those constraints within marketplaces that were leading to all sorts of lead times on equipment seems to be repairing themselves. So we are -- we have all the engineering we need to finalize our bankable feasibility study, but why bother drafting that or finalizing that until we have the permit in hand because we don't know the exact fixed costs on the OEM equipment on some of the other pieces of mining equipment that we're going to acquire, compile it and go to work financing the project. So we just don't want to stale-dated feasibility study. And that's why when I talk about our prefeasibility from December of 2021, we talked about that as being a snapshot in time. In 2021, based on the cost to build this mine, cost of fuel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we came out with this $800 AISC. Well, now we're looking at gold up in the $1,900, $1,950 range, that has a huge effect on us. But some of the inflationary aspects of energy and materials have gone up as well. But we think that it will still be around that sort of $0.50 on the dollar, the all-in sustaining costs at the project level. So we just want to make sure we have a fresh document when we go to market for capital versus walking around with the stale one, so that's simple.

Yes, that's fair. And I think in that vein, too, I mean, at least from my point of view, Wyoming has historically been supportive of the extraction industry as a whole. Do you think there are any state level financing or funding opportunities that may be a lower cost of capital than you could otherwise get in the open market.

Yes. And I kind of brushed over that when I talked about how many different forms of capital there are. But yes, the state of Wyoming have precedents that they can award municipal bonds towards a project like this. So we would be paying very low interest rates through a loan from the state. We are exploring that with the state, so I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves and jinx it. But yes, that is another opportunity or access point to capital for us. So like I said, a lot of -- as you'll see, our middle point here, attractive future potential financing options. They are certainly one of those targeted forms of capital.

Okay. And do you think you start evaluating that sometime next year as you get closer to construction decision in...

We're talking to off-takers. We're talking to people who are interested in streams on this project. We entertain conversation with anyone. But at the end of the day, until we have a permit to mine a lot of that, smooth, so we are -- with permit to mine in hand, we will absolutely step up our conversations to finance this. Now keep in mind, if missed the market is not there, Jacob, our market cap continues to language like this, and we're sitting there in precious metals, haven't triggered anyone. Hypothetically copper hasn't triggered the marketplace. We're not forced to also then rush out and immediately attack raising capital in a challenging market. Let's say interest rates continue to hit higher et cetera, et cetera, we might just want to -- okay, let's focus on the ESG positives of this project. Let's go and secure conversations with the state about using the exhausted pit as a water storage facility, bank credits, et cetera. So we're not forced, we're not going to the head-type scenario where we're going to have to rush out and finance this project either. So that's what really excites me about this is we can take it on, we can come out with bankable feasibility study as soon as we get our permit to mine or we can read the market and maybe delay it a little longer. It will all be positive for us as shareholders.

Yes. That probably makes sense. Outside of CK, it's -- I don't think you touched on it yet. The other assets in the portfolio, you monetized Maggie Creek recently. And I want to touch on Keystone a bit because I think that's something that kind of gets lost behind the CK project. What are the plans there? I mean, do you have plans to maybe initiate an exploration program yourself? Are you looking for a partner there? I mean, obviously, the upside opportunity there is huge. I'm just curious how you plan to attack it?

Yes. Great question. It's the monster in the portfolio. This photo kind of does and doesn't give it justice, this photo was taken from Keystone looking due north that's Cortez Hills up here. That's the Cortez Hills deposit and a string of deposits they've discovered along this hill side now, total endowment of around, I think, 56 million ounces of gold, okay? I mean this is just massive. I think it's now taken on as Barrick's flagship, this complex to Cortez projects. And we have a very similar -- so you remember the Gold Standard story, I'm sure, but like Gold Standard, this is a stand-alone domal district, and it's sitting right across. We think it's -- we don't just think it's on trend with Cortez Hills. The reason why we're so adamant that this is a Cortez Hills analog is, well, heck, we've done some drilling here. Just bear with me, I'm getting backwards and forwards, but we did a bunch of scout drilling, when we first had the project -- when we first acquired the project, excuse me. And we saw all the same stratigraphy as Nextdoor, Cortez very, very similar off-the-chart alteration, augment realgar, the kind of things that you look for in monster deposits in sort of Carlin type settings or in this particular point, Cortez. And the reason we know that is one of the people that was working with us closely. Tom Chapin, he do lot of mapping work and early work at Cortez Hills when it was owned by a Placer Dome. So we've seen their rocks and what we see in this schematic up top is Cortez hill, that's all important win band and when people were excited about exploration about 3, 4, 5 years ago, companies were putting out press releases just that they've discovered win band on their project, and it would spark the stock up. Well, we have a massive swath of win band rolling through our project just like Nextdoor, it's a multi intrusive, multi pulse system, up trust, lower plate rocks. It has an arsenic anomaly at surface that is second to none in Nevada. This is going to host some monster gold deposits, but it takes money to drill them, and it takes a marketplace that actually cares and wants to finance you into drilling those type of scenarios. So we are sitting on the project right now. We've just put together an amazing exploration program for it that it's -- we would like to do in the future. but we won't be -- don't worry shareholders, we won't be diluting it down right now to go and tackle Keystone. What I do hope is we actually advance develop Copper King or CK. And maybe we spin this out as an ultimate exploration offset for our shareholders in the future. So definitely keep an eye on this.

Got it. So it really comes down to capital allocation in market is the plans here?

Yes.

Perfect. I'll stop here for a second and pull some questions from the audience. Again, if anyone has a question, please just submit them using the function at the bottom of your screen. The first one reads, how much more capital is required to reach a production decision?

We have enough in treasury to reach that production decision Again, we're paid -- I mentioned earlier, we paid all the real hard dollars needed to get us through all that engineering, pre-feasibility and engineering to feasibility study. So now we are -- we can eat through to the end of 2024 with the treasury we have right now, but we'd like to be a little more aggressive. Like I said, we'd like to bring a little bit more of that ESG component in maybe get a sort of a green credit study done. So we may take a little more dilution in the future, but our lowest ever financing is $5.85, most of the capital that's been raised into this company has been significantly higher prices than that. So we're not in a rush to run out and dilute ourselves at sub-$4 by any stretch.

The next one is on CapEx. And it says inflation is high right now. Where do you expect CapEx to move to?

Yes. And George is -- I won't say best guesstimate because they are working diligently on those numbers. But again, we're not going to finalize and submit bankable until with permit in hand. Our estimates right now are closer to $250 million. But again, that's with the metal price moving accordingly, it's offset.

Got it. And the last one is, are you still exploring at CK, can you make the mine life longer? That's an interesting one, right, because it is open, but I guess it's going to be market dependent, right, on the...

Yes. Well, actually, yes, I did touch on that. I'll reiterate this, is we had to draw a line in the sand with ourselves because every drill hole ended a mineralization but we need to take an economic snapshot in time so that we could go and advance and get a file for permit. So we could just keep drilling reserve until the cows came home. But then you're spending money to what end, okay? So we get it up to 2.5 million, 3 million-ounce endowment probably would have spent another $20 million doing so. Now we've got far more dilution, and we still haven't filed to permit. So for my impairment. So we really still believe -- actually, are adamant that the better choice was to go ahead and get the permit to mine because we can show you ongoing mineralization, again, South East and to date. So mine life on this project will weigh -- we'll weight outstrip that 10 years, just down to how we approach it, maybe just dig faster.

Yes. Well, you're right. And it begs the question, would the market reward you for a 15-year mine life versus 10 in the capital market, right?

Yes. Probably, but I think they're going to reward us with a permit to mine more.

I tend to agree. Okay. I think we'll stop and leave it there. I want to thank everybody for stopping in today, and I'll pass it off to you, Luke, for any closing remarks.

Yes. Look, thank you, again, anyone who did join us today or anyone who catches this later on recording. Great opportunity here in U.S. Gold Corp right now, and I just can't reiterate that enough, you can see our -- actually our share structure is we've got -- we're in a strong cash position. All the hard yards have been done for you. We've spent, like I said, upwards a $25 million getting this thing all through engineering, reserves, permits filed, working with local community, et cetera. And here we are on the cusp of getting permitted, and we're at near all-time lows. So we're at great buying opportunity. That's what I'll say.

Great. Thanks again, Luke.

Thank you. Cheers.