Rio's comments on WINU - Paterson related30 Jul 2020 08:23
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Sergey Donskoy -- Societe Generale -- Analyst
Yes, hello everyone. I have one follow-up first to the questions asked before. On Simandou, if I understand this correctly, you're now getting down to optimization phase to see how you can bring the parameters of the projects to desired levels. How long do you think this will take, this preliminary phase? And if you could provide maybe some milestones for a couple of years ahead for us to understand how you plan to proceed?
And my main question is about Winu, if I may. Now that it has been officially announced basically that you are going ahead, is it possible to provide some guidance as to what capex for this project may be, if it's included in your guidance for next two years? And what is the planned throughput of the mill?
J-S Jacques -- Chief Executive Officer
Why don't we start with Winu? Come on the Steve. Maybe tell me, tell us, are we healthy as a baby here?
Stephen McIntosh -- Group Executive of Growth and Innovation, Health and Safety and Environment
Yes. So as we've said previously, and J-S was very pleased to be able to deliver the maiden resource yesterday. And basically, we'll be on track by the latter part of this year to talk more about timing and schedule and potential costs. We're working through the key elements of the study as we speak. As we said, the aim here is to be very agile and to be very innovative in our approach to bringing Winu forward into the best of our ability. We are targeting a 2023 commencement of production.
Now we're going through the permitting phase, and we're working through the next phase of the metallurgical results, etc. There will be a natural size that will come out of that work, and we're not ready to talk to that at this time. But I think the other part that I'd say is having declared the initial Winu resource, it just needs to remind everyone that the resource remains open at north Southeast to net debt. And within two kilometers, we're now starting to see this very high-grade gold dominated mineralization. A little bit different to Winu itself.
This entire area is covered by shallow sand cover, but it's essentially blind. And so which means we need to just keep drilling. So I think, as J-S has said on a number of occasions, the concept of potentially a hub or a system, a hub-and-spoke or a system here, still remains a very viable thesis. We've explored less than 2% of the landholding. And we're seeing really encouraging results in some holes that we're in the very recent times, we've just completed drilling. So very exciting, I think, moment in time here.
Sergey Donskoy -- Societe Generale -- Analyst
Absolutely I'm sorry.
continued.....
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