We started as a greenfield project in 2008 and have worked all the way from, essentially, discovering the deposit to developing the geological dataset, to going through feasibility and environmental studies over the years. We garnered local support with the natives, municipalities and the province, and we worked and reworked various studies to make sure that the project would meet the ESG requirements that we set out as an organization.
We travelled the world to sell the project in terms of finding investors, because there aren't a lot of them in this space and it requires speciality expertise to understand some of the details of projects like this. It's not as simple as maybe a gold project or a copper project. There are many steps to it.
We reworked the business plan a number of times to make sure that the economic returns to those investors were sufficient, and we worked with government in terms of related infrastructure. We have power that goes by our project, about 25 kilometres away, but it has to be brought to site. There are other things that have to be done. We had to build a management team that was capable of managing the construction and then doing the ramp up in operations.
It's a long journey. We've invested over $150 million to date in this project, and we expect to see its fruition in the next couple of years.