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Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for attending and thanks for listening. I may be making some forward-looking statements in this presentation.
Artemis Gold owns 100% of the world-class, tier one Blackwater Mine in central British Columbia, with resources of approximately 12 million ounces of gold and reserves of around 8 million ounces of gold presently. Our expansion study, which I'll touch on shortly, shows the potential to increase production annually to in excess of 500,000 gold equivalent ounces in the first 10 years. So tier one, in whatever way you define it, large scale, low cost, with social credentials, environmental credentials, and a great jurisdiction, not just in Canada, but also in British Columbia, where we have green power, renewable energy, and very low-cost energy and significantly large potential for both resource extension of the existing Blackwater deposit as well as the, the large ground holding that we have. The other unique thing that our business model brings to our sector is the extent to which board and management is aligned with all shareholders, owning approximately 38% of our company. That's where our value appreciation comes from alongside yours as shareholders. And that's not been done by some Howe Street Vancouver trick where we've got magical warrants or other leveraged securities. We've participated alongside institutional and other investors since day one. And since the formation of the company, the initial development cost has secured funding of about 820 million. We're a group of people who've done this, not just once successfully, but more than once in different parts of the world with large-scale gold mines over the last 20 years. Jeremy Langford, our president and chief operating officer, unfortunately, isn't here at the conference but he's where perhaps he should be and that is in the final strokes of construction at Blackwater. As most of, you know, Jeremy has an excellent background in delivering several gold miners into production on behalf of Endeavour Mining when he was CEO, and an array of other people, all of whom have had senior company experience in this industry.
This is a slide that we like to present with all due deference to Monsieur Lassonde. Internally, we call this the Atlantic Gold curve, and it's a curve that we saw generated when we built the Atlantic Gold company and developed the Moose River Complex. It demonstrates share price appreciation during a period starting from the start of construction through to commercial production. In the case of Atlantic, we achieved a 180% share price appreciation through to commercial production during a period when the GDXJ was actually down 1% and that was through to about 2018. The Artemis Gold record so far is that we commenced construction at Blackwater and since then, our share price appreciation is about 173% compared to the GDXJ over the same period to date of around 16%. I guess that is in another way just demonstrating the value that discipline, construction and development of a of a gold mine can bring significant value outside value to shareholders.
For those of you who don't know where we are, we're in central British Columbia, we're not way up in the north. We're like 4.5 hours drive from Vancouver, not far from the regional capital of Prince George, which is a major center, not just for forestry but also becoming more and more so for mining. We benefit from the renewable energy of the BC hydro grid. We are just completing construction as we speak and the final conductor stringing of our power line that goes roughly 140 kilometres south from a location close to Vanderhoof. And with those credentials, our social license, our arrangements with our First Nations partners and some of the environmental initiatives that we've taken, including compliance with the strict regime that exists in Canada and in British Columbia, we think we are best in class in ESG.
I'm not gonna go through any of these line items, but suffice to say, we vigorously defend our track record of checking off key milestones ahead of time and outlining what they are and then achieving them on time. And we continue to subscribe to that and vigorously defend that record, which is the Canadian advantage.
Apart from our our geopolitical risk, of course, we have what's what I call a turbocharging of the gold price via the FX rate that presides in Canada. And as a result, we've seen a 46% plus increase in the gold price since the beginning of 2022, in comparison to other jurisdictions and that provides a nice safety buffer for all sorts of things including cost pressures and other factors.
At the end of June, we were about 87% complete. We're due next month to give our September quarterly update on construction progress. As I said, at the end of June, we were about 87% complete. We have over 800 employees gainfully employed on site in the various key components of the plant. mine prestrip, TSF construction, transmission line, construction, etcetera. We have a moderate climate with year round access, I guess we're in the 90% complete right now. And we remain on target despite various challenges over the summer for first gold pour in Q4 of 2024.
There are a lot of numbers on this slide, but this was the output from an optimization study that we delivered in March of this year, March 2024. And what it focused on is what is the optimal timing of the expansion of the Blackwater mine in phase two and phase three. I want to emphasize the gold equivalent grade in the first five years of 1.36 grams per tonne. The significant annual free cash flow that will be generated each year at the assumed price in this study of $1,800 an ounce gold and $23 for silver. I also want to outline the production profile as that study portrayed it. We expect gold production to ramp up rather quickly in year three to in excess of 500,000 ounces. And a life of mine AISC of approximately $800 and lower in the first five years.
You'll see our capital intensity per ton of throughput in each phase is as competitive as you'll find anywhere at $123 Canadian per tonne of throughput capacity in phase one with about a 750 million capex. Phase two is even lower because it's essentially an expansion of the wet plant. Phase one crushing circuit will more or less do the full 15 million tonnes throughput for phases one and two. And then phase three is a full replication of phase one and phase two to get to around the 25 million tonnes per year throughput. But nevertheless, at Canadian dollars $85 a tonne in capital intensity per ton of throughput capacity is very competitive in comparison to anywhere in the world.
I've touched on most of these things but one of the key differences for our project is the low strip ratio, a valley fill design which generally means that the capital cost is lower. And the risks to capital and the risks to operation are lower, particularly in comparison to a classic sort of paddock style TSF where you've got more than two or three or sometimes four sides to a TSF. We've got the one dam that goes across the valley, and also low diesel consumption because of the topography, with downhill loaded from the deposit down to both the plant and the TSF and waste dumps. An extraordinary amount of drilling was inherited by us from the previous owner, and 97% of our reserves have been drilled off to proven status. And as I mentioned, some fairly moderate weather in our part of British Columbia.
Other aspects of ESG include a gender-diverse board. We've got some 45% of our senior management are women. It's a strong initiative of Artemis Gold, the hydro grid, the renewable energy that I've touched on before and we've got a plan to commission with Caterpillar a zero-emission mining fleet by 2029. And all of that output comes with industry-leading low-quartile carbon emission intensity per ounce of gold.
The exploration upside that I talked about before; this shows a slice through the deposit, and as you can see the pit wall at $1,400 gold shows that the deposit is not closed off to the north and north west and conveniently that is the low wall of the deposit. And then we're seeing some more vertical and higher grade mineralization in the southern area at depth in the south southern pit wall. So we see the future to put some deeper holes in that area to make this pit and this deposit even bigger than we know it today. In another sense, we have already drilled significant upside in terms of reserves. Our reserves were calculated at 8 million ounces, but it was calculated at a $1,400 gold price which is fairly standard even through to the senior levels for reserve calculation today. But I suspect that with a $2,500 or $2,600 gold price, we'll see people gradually dragging that reserve calculation number up closer to $2,000 an ounce level over the next year or two or three. And just as a side note, if we were to recalculate the resource pit shell inside a $2,000 per ounce price, we would add another 3.2 million ounces to our reserve base.
We have issued capital of around 225 million shares and our market capitalization today of just under $3 billion. Cash at June 30 was about $111 million, and we have an outstanding list of large shareholders including the board and management. Interestingly, a number of family offices with very significant positions. I think there's scope for some of the more traditional institutional investors to increase their position. And as we transition and continue to derisk the project through to commissioning and commercial production, we expect some of those large institutional players to continue to increase their position in the company. That brings a close to my formal presentation so I'm happy to take some questions.
Sounds good. Thanks Steven. So there's a question right there.
Steve. I was just wondering who's who's actually constructing the mill and who will be doing the mining? Are you doing that in-house or you got outsiders doing that?
A firm by the name of Sedgman out of Australia, which is a subsidiary of the, the large Australasian conglomerate called Simic in Australia, the mill constructor under under an EPC contract. And we will be doing owner mining and that mining fleet is, is commissioned and has already commenced the pre-strip.
Any other questions from the audience, Steven? Just one quick one for me. Just, again, I've been asking the same question regarding M&A. We've seen several transactions over the last 12 months; we saw Calibre acquiring Marathon, we saw Osisko being acquired by Goldfields. What was the last one? Sabina being acquired by B2? Your project has a lot of large-scale exploration upside. Do you see any sort of potential bid coming your way soon? And secondly, then, or do you prefer you know, running the project, operating the project and realizing value through that?
It seems so far we've been left out of the party, but I guess one of the features that Artemis Gold can bring to the table, as I mentioned earlier, is that we're somewhat in control of our destiny, owning 38% of the company. So we are somewhat in control of the potential for an M&A transaction and in some ways, it's a positive because if we were inclined to enter into a transaction, we can probably deliver the control of the company. which is a big advantage generally. Look, I think every company here who's presented of is probably of the view that they're undervalued. We believe we are, and your colleagues in the analyst community certainly say we are, the investment bankers that do drop by every now and then tell us that if one was to apply and flow through the metrics contained in some of the recent M&A transactions for development or assets that are now in commercial production that we've seen in the last 12 months or so, would suggest a significantly higher price than where we're trading today at around $12 or $13. We don't feel any pressure from our shareholders to do anything. We've still got a lot of work to do. I think we've got some potential that we wanna demonstrate. It's still, you know, what everyone's talking about here at this conference, the disconnect between the commodity price appreciation and the equity prices, reflecting that we're not often in that respect. We're probably not reflecting fair value and we're lagging behind the commodity price, notwithstanding a pretty good performance regardless. So that's a long way of saying I don't think we're ready for an M&A transaction. We want to show you, the investor market and the capital market, what this asset potentially can do, at least in phase one, and get phase two underway. And we have what we need to do that, but at the end of the day, our job as management and as a board is to maximize shareholder value, whether that is achieved in the market or by a transaction.
Excellent. Thanks Steven. Appreciate it. Thank you.