Morning, everybody. Thanks for joining this presentation. It's focused largely on the new project acquisition, so to give a bit of an understanding of why that's important and what we hope to achieve with this acquisition. We'll also touch on our other projects, of course. The presentation, which we'll share more widely after this webinar, is called Critical Raw Materials for the Global Energy Transition. That's our disclaimer. Usual disclaimer. Then an overview of Alba. We've always focused on stable jurisdictions, where there's limited sovereign risk. That's always been our focus. Not to say we'd never looked at anything else. Of course, we have. We always look for the best projects, where we can, but we gravitate largely to places where sovereign risk is low, and we can operate in a transparent jurisdiction and know that our investment is largely safe.
That's, obviously, taken us to the U.K. with Clogau and the other Welsh gold projects. It's taken us to Finnsbo in Sweden, which is a high-grade rare earth and gold prospect. Most recently, it's taken us to Motzfeldt, which is in southern Greenland, very close to Amitsoq, which of course many of you will be familiar with, which was also an Alba project for a number of years. We drilled it, and we spun it out into GreenRoc. The move into Finnsbo and now Motzfeldt is really driven by wanting to be in the critical raw materials space, and we'll explain why that's important, and we think it's important for the future of the company, through this presentation. It is flagged on this first slide, because critical raw materials...
In this world that we've lived in for the last three years of very, very poor valuations in the public markets for pre-revenue mining projects and companies, it becomes even more critical to be able to access low-cost or no-cost funding in order to drive projects forward and actually accrete real value for shareholders. That is one of the most important drivers for moving into the critical raw material space because that funding is available there, where it is not available for other minerals or metals, such as gold. That's who we are. Our longstanding executives, myself, Michael Nott, Elizabeth Henson, our two non-executive directors, Mark Austin, our senior geologist and COO, and Sarah Potter, our CFO. If we dive into Motzfeldt first. You see here a map of southern Greenland.
We call it rare earth elephant country because the three largest rare earth projects in Greenland are here. They're Kringlerne, which is now owned by Critical Metals Corp, a Nasdaq company. It was bought last year, or at least. In fact, they only bought, I believe, less than 50% at the time of the project for $211 million. That values the project, obviously, at much more than that. A significant transaction there for Kringlerne, a very big rare earth project. Similar metal, multi-element metal distribution, niobium, tantalum, zirconium, rare earths, as at Motzfeldt. A very big deposit. Then next to it, Kvanefjeld, which has had a bit of a checkered history. Also a very, very large rare earth deposit, but also a uranium deposit.
Because of that, it has sort of fallen into abeyance and fallen foul of the laws against uranium projects, which now are in force in Greenland. Really, we are the third project. When people talk about rare earths in Greenland, and President Trump likes to talk a lot about Greenland and rare earths, really, these are the three projects. We're delighted that Alba now has its foot on a majority stake in one of the three largest rare earth and other critical metal projects in Greenland. It's a significant move. It's a large-scale project. We'll talk about that in more detail obviously.
Just to give you a picture and also a picture of where we are in southern Greenland, not too far from Amitsoq, the graphite mine of course that we know very well, and then Nalunaq, a gold mine that has been the basis on which Amaroq have built a well, quite stupendous market cap for a pre-revenue or mainly pre-revenue company that's now moving into gold production at Nalunaq. We're in that neck of the woods there where really a lot of the major activity is going on in Greenland. If we talk about Motzfeldt, the other thing that tracks, it's not a greenfield site by any means. It's been drilled on several occasions. We take the value of that drilling. We don't have to spend it ourselves.
We've estimated, you know, something in the region of GBP 5 million-GBP 6 million. It could well be more than that. Some of the previous operators haven't disclosed their spend. We've pieced together the spend as best we can, and we're, you know, looking at a conservative estimate of GBP 5 million-GBP 6 million that we haven't had to spend on drilling and other work at Motzfeldt. What it's come up with is a big deposit called Aries with 340 million ton resource made up of zirconium, niobium, tantalum, and rare earth oxides. That deposit, Aries, remains open to the south and east, so there is huge potential for expansion of that deposit. It's already a large deposit, but there is clearly scope for it to be larger. Why are we excited about these particular metals?
We think that also having a multi-element focus project gives you optionality should any particular metal fall out of favor with the markets, or, you know, have other supply issues, or demand issues, then we can move into focusing on one of the others. It provides us with that hedge against metal prices. Niobium, you can see a nice picture there of a Polestar. It's very important as a lightweight resistant superalloy niobium-bearing steel used in many industries, and a little bit of niobium reduces car weight by about 100 kgs, and that's very important in the world of electric vehicles, and just SUVs generally, which are very heavy vehicles. Niobium plays an important role in a number of industries. Tantalum. Most of tantalum is produced in Rwanda and the DRC, so conflict minerals, if you like.
It's very important to find tantalum in non-conflict countries, and Greenland is clearly one of those. It's very strong, it's electrical superconductor, and it's a critical component in capacitors. Those two metals are part of the mix. We move on to zirconium, which is also part of the mix at Motzfeldt. Very strong malleable metal. 90% of it is used in nuclear reactors. You see a picture of one there. It's also got other uses, especially in steel. Most of the production comes out of U.S. and Australia. Finally, but not least, rare earths. We all know how important they are in electronic devices, computers, batteries, phones.
We all know, I'm sure, that the Western countries and that includes EU, U.S.A., U.K., and others have designated rare earths as being critical raw materials that are very important to many things, global energy transition. You see a picture of a wind turbine there. In particular, neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium play a key role in wind turbines, the high-powered magnets that you need for every single wind turbine. So critical and, of course, China effectively controls the downstream market for rare earths, and the Western governments have been alive to that in recent years, increasingly alive to that issue in recent years. Coming late to the party, but seeing the importance of having their own secure supply of rare earths. Greenland and Motzfeldt ideally placed to supply those rare earths for the future.
Skipped a slide there. If I go back to this slide here, mid-tiers moving in. It's important to note that we're not alone in our interest in this area, in this particular area. If we obviously see this map here, it's actually an extract from Amaroq. Thanks Amaroq for your slide. Courtesy of them. You can see there again, Kvanefjeld, the town of Narsaq, the Tanbreez deposits, the Kringlerne deposit also called Tanbreez. You see the Motzfeldt center, and to the right of that, sort of, top right is our main license area. Amaroq have now taken an application over a huge amount of ground around us, looking also for rare earths and other critical metals.
It's, you know, a company that has obviously been very successful, has a very big market cap and a lot of cash behind it, and they're interested in looking in this area, literally within our vicinity now. That, I think is a good sense of validation of what we're doing. We've got the actual deposit and the highest, most advanced prospects outside of the Aries deposit. What they're looking at here is greenfield early stage exploration. Anyway, I think that's a good sign. It's a very large deposit, and I can't stress how much that's important, Motzfeldt. It's one of only five critical raw material projects that's been designated in Greenland, a very large deposit. We've talked about two of the others.
There's also the Malmbjerg project in east Greenland, which is a molybdenum project. It's in very good company and very rare company of being a very large deposit. Scale is something that clearly attracts us to a deposit like this. The grade is, you know, there is definitely stellar grade to be had there. The deposit grades are, you know, middling. What's interesting here is scale, is having a large deposit, and it's in line with Kringlerne and Kvanefjeld in being, you know, having that potential of having a very large scale. It's also been shown to have metals of very high economic importance. This is a slide, a diagram, sorry, taken from the GEUS, the Danish and Greenlandic Geological Survey, and it shows all the arrows are pointing to Motzfeldt.
If I can move from top to down, you can see there the right axis is economic importance and the left axis is supply risk. Highest supply risk are the heavy rare earths, Motzfeldt's in that list. The next one down is niobium, Motzfeldt, and only Motzfeldt and Kringlerne are on that list. The next one down is the light rare earths, Motzfeldt's on that list. The next arrow showing Motzfeldt is tantalum. Again, Kringlerne and Motzfeldt are the only tantalum projects of note in Greenland. And then finally, zirconium, which again is Kringlerne and Motzfeldt. It features very heavily on the metals of very high economic importance in Greenland. I've touched on this before, and it's important to focus on this because this is gonna be a focus for us.
It is about obtaining that low-cost governmental public institutional funding, and it's not pie in the sky, it's real, and these are just some of the projects that have attracted significant funding from whether it's the U.S., different institutions within the U.S., the Department of Defense, the Ex-Im Bank. As you may know, you know, GreenRoc's had a letter of intent from Ex-Im Bank itself, but this is real funding here that's gone into various projects. European Investment Bank, obviously there's a move for the EU to catch up, the strategic project decision. Amitsoq is something that obviously is of interest to us now at Alba in terms of moving Motzfeldt into a position where it can apply also in the future.
The U.K. mustn't be forgotten and, you know, we know full well, having applied and obtained 250,000 GBP of funding from the U.K. to do the anode plant feasibility study on Amitsoq, that funding is also available from the U.K., and we're very keen for the U.K. to support a U.K. PLC, which is moving into this critical raw material space, in our backyard, essentially, which Greenland is. That's very important and it's gonna be a focus for us. Motzfeldt isn't just one project, one deposit, Aries, albeit that's a very large deposit. It's also a variety of other prospects that have been worked on in the past. None of them have been drilled, but there's been a lot of work done in the past, geophysics and sampling exercises.
There is a team right now in Greenland that is working on the Merino prospect, which has with University of St Andrews and the operator Elemental Exploration done a lot of work the last three years on that Merino prospect. It has prospects for very high-grade rare earths, so that is exciting. As yet unproven, but we're hoping to get some more information out of this field program that's underway as we speak about Merino. It's only about a kilometer from Aries. If we can prove that up to a greater extent, you kind of join the dots literally, and you can see that the footprint of the Motzfeldt deposit becomes that much bigger already with Merino twinned with Aries. We'll touch on this. I mean, obviously Alba has a number of strings to its bow.
It's still the largest shareholder by far in GreenRoc Strategic Materials, which owns the Amitsoq project. We have a lot of familiarity, therefore, with Greenland. We've been in Greenland as Alba since 2016. We started working on the Amitsoq project. We earned into it. We found it, we earned into it. We drilled it. We spun it out into GreenRoc. It's a, you know, world-class project in the making. It has very strong economics, and these are things that we will look to do for Motzfeldt, which is to dust off the economics of the project and produce up-to-date PEAs, preliminary economic assessments or scoping studies for the project, so we can see what the economics are moving forward. We also have the Finnsbo rare earth project in Sweden.
A very high grade, 5% TREO, total rare earth oxides and yttrium. That's you know stellar grades, and we would like to drill that soon. We're working on getting drill quotes in for drilling that this year. two-three drill holes to try to prove up the continuity of that high-grade zone that we've encountered at Finnsbo. That's just an indication of where we're looking to drill the three holes. A different prospect there because it's never been drilled, but pretty exciting and low cost prospect to try to prove up initially. Of course, we have been doing a huge amount of work about gold in the North Wales Gold District, called Dolgellau Goldfield. We're the 100% owner of the entire gold belt, essentially, up there in North Wales.
We're at an inflection point with Clogau. Started blasting it some months ago. We are, you know, preparing now for recommencing blasting. There'll be news on that as we ramp up to starting blasting again underground at Clogau. The aim there, of course, is to prove up that target, the Llechfraith target, it can sustain an economic operation for large scale gold extraction. Thus far, we've, you know, been very much involved in test production to test once and for all as a prospect that can go into commercial production, and that remains to be seen with the blasting that we hope to commence soon.
We've obviously sold some products already from Clogau, and we have validated that interest that has always been there for us, why we got into it in the first place, of being a particularly unique market for gold. It's gold like any other, but it fetched a premium price, and we were able to sell those gold coins that we produced, limited edition gold coins for eight and a half times spot price of gold. We've also announced we're moving into producing some limited edition pendants. I hope to have some news on that very shortly. We're just finalizing designs and how those are gonna be fabricated. News on that also very shortly. It does underpin the unique economic potential of this project, even at small scale productions, to be a valuable addition to the economic outlook for the company.
You know, we still need to prove that there is sufficient gold there to make that work. That's the purpose of the next step work program. We've talked about the field program at Motzfeldt. It's ongoing. Looking at the high-grade Merino prospect, we'll be moving into doing a PEA or scoping study. We've got the beauty of this project being an advanced project, it's got a bulk sample of 2.5 tons from Aries that's sitting in the U.K. We're getting quotes now to do some metallurgical test work. A lot of metallurgical test work's done in the past, but we wanna update that. We've talked to the right people, and we know how to do that.
Fairly modest initial cost and, it'll give us a lot of information about how best to process what is a multi-element deposit, and to recover the most economic metals out of the Aries deposit in particular. We'll be doing that the rest of this year. Obviously, as I said, we're applying for government funding. We're looking keenly at the funding rounds that are available now or coming up, and we'll be looking to apply for any of those that we fit within, whether that's in the U.K., E.U., U.S., wherever it may be. Finnsbo, we intend to drill two-three holes there, so we're preparing for that. We're getting quotes in.
Clogau, I talked about the fact that we're gonna go back in and carry on blasting and bulk sampling and selling that next round of exclusive gold products in terms of these pendants that we are designing and will be fabricating shortly. It's a busy work program for the next period of time. I think that that's probably enough for the slides, and I can move on now to the questions that you've kindly all or some of you have sent in.