Mr. Larsen: The company has been involved in the gold exploration and development business in Nevada since 1994. We developed a good package of gold properties in the mid 1990s prior to the pullback in the gold price, when gold prices fell severely to around $250 an ounce. We continued to build some good assets at fairly good prices during this period of time. We've actually five projects in Nevada and can be viewed on our Web site at www.royalstandardminerals.com.
Our most advanced property is called GoldWedge. GoldWedge is located in central Nevada, about eight miles south of the Kinross Round Mountain gold mine, which has produced about 10 million ounces of gold. GoldWedge is a fully permitted and bonded underground operation; we have been developing and test-mining this property for the last couple of years. We have produced some gold as part of the test-mining program, and we're in the process of enlarging that operation so that we can increase the throughput. This is needed to improve profitability of the operation as a high-grade underground gold system that we believe will be a very good property going forward as a fully operational project. The upgrades in the plant will include new ball mills, new grinding facilities on a larger scale so that the throughput would be a lot greater. These upgrades should achieve a throughput rate to about 500 tons to 700 tons per day as a target production rate. We're projecting that we could establish an initial 100 ounces a day, moving to 200 ounces per day if conditions permit it.
Our second advanced project is the Pinon-Darkstar on the south Carlin Trend. It's a large property consisting of about 7,000 acres. Pinon has a lot of drilling and is considered to be a future heap leach-type operation, which is pretty conventional on the Carlin Trend in Elko County, Nevada. The permitting is not in place on this property, with our objective to push hard on advancing the permitting process this year. Pinon-Darkstar is an oxide gold/silver system. The gold system outcrops with higher grades at the surface so that the economics of the system would be very good in the early days. And that's what you'd like to see with higher grade and lower cost during early periods of production, improving the overall economics of the project. Pinon's mineral inventory is about 33 million or 34 million tons of roughly 1 gram, with the outcropping about 2.0 grams to 2.5 grams, causing a better grade of material for the first one to three years of production.
Our third advanced project is located in the Stillwater Range in Churchill County, Nevada. Fondaway Canyon has had a lot of drilling, nearly 200,000 feet. This drilling has identified a large gold, structurally controlled system that has been traced by drilling for over two miles. The property has gold from a small open-pit operation operated by Tenneco Minerals. The potential is a high-grade underground gold vein system.
Fondaway Canyon is near our fourth property, called Dixie-Comstock. This property is an epithermal gold system that outcrops on the eastern flank of the Stillwater range in the Dixie Valley. The property has been drilled by major companies as has Fondaway Canyon. Dixie-Comstock has the potential as an open-pit operation, bulk-tonnage deposit. The other projects are in the Manhattan district near the active GoldWedge project. These properties could supply additional material to the GoldWedge Mill.
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