Ladies and gentlemen, I will try to be kind of brief and quick. Many of you know our story and what we do, so I'll just take it and move sort of fairly quick, and then have some questions. The view on the screen that you see now is our Samphire Uranium Project, just 24 miles south of Whyalla, with our two drill rigs that we're operating this year. I'll talk about that project as well as our other projects that we've worked on during the year. We have a disclaimer because I do tend to make forward-looking statements, and you can't hold it against me. But, I'm happy to have a good general discussion around a range of things. First of all, just a status of where we're at.
That's our share price as of yesterday, our market capitalization, AUD 220 million. The detail about our board members, and we are, we're very fortunate to still retain the expertise of both Paul and Peter McIntyre on our board, who have been on the board for some time, but continue to add a variety of expertise in both the financial and major projects and evaluations area. And we've been joined this year by Fiona Nicholls, who has a background in environmental and social governance areas, in particular with Rio Tinto, where she helped put in place many of their early policies out of London, with the group there.
But also headed up the ESG side for the energy division of Rio Tinto, and was on the board of the Rössing Uranium Project and Mine, and on the ERA board, as well as an alternate to a range of Rio directors. So some extensive experience, and we're already drawing on her knowledge in terms of how we take our key project forward and how we deal with our communities in other parts of this. And we welcome Callum McIntyre, who's a stand-in for Peter, and attends as an observer when Peter's online, as of now, and if Peter's unavailable, then he has the director part. We have a good. Let me just jump forward.
I just wanted to talk while you see the photos of all of us there, and the top line's looking decidedly older, but we won't go into that. The next slide. Mike Meintjes, who's been our CFO for more than ten years and is, he's got such a breadth of experience in companies like ours, and helps us with keeping us on track in many ways, and is now assisting both with our business growth and opportunities and evaluation as well, which is a very big advantage. Andrea Marsland-Smith, who couldn't be here today because she's in the final stage of recovering from a bout of COVID, unfortunately, but Andrea's online. I thank Andrea for her work.
Andrea, of course, has a long background working with Heathgate Resources on the Beverly and Four Mile uranium projects, and she led the team that discovered Four Mile and brought that into production. She's had every role at Heathgate, including operations manager, right through to management, government, indigenous and markets. So she's got a good breadth, and she's been responsible for recruiting a very experienced team, mostly that you see in the room. Mike Barlow, who joined us in May as exploration manager for our company, brings a good experience base from exploration with BHP, as well as he was head of geophysics for Geoscience Australia for five years before this.
So he's got a very good background to help us with that, let's say, non-invasive methods of exploration that more and more of us are using in our exploration work. So feel free, those present here, to have a chat to our, our staff, and I'll talk about our staff a, a bit later. I want to have a talk, because I, I had a lot of questions when we went out for capital raising in September. And I wanted to just make sure the shareholders understood why. I have explained it in a few different presentations and things since, but look, in the June quarter report, it clearly said we had AUD 81.5 million in cash, and our spend for the quarter up to then was AUD 2.3 million for the quarter. However, we were ramping up.
We were just getting on the ground, or just getting to establish the fabrication and procurement for our pilot plant for the Samphire project. We had just gone on the ground for our Alligator Rivers program for this year. It's the first significant program we've done up there for some time. And in Samphire, as well as the resource infill, we're starting to install other geological wells. And so we were clearly entering a phase of higher spend. And we also were about to do an Indigenous clearance up at Big Lake for the first time ever. So where we ended up in September is our quarterly spending lifted to AUD 4.5 million.
So we knew as a board, going right back to May, June, that, forecasting forward with the work we needed to do on the ground, in particular at Samphire, with the field recovery trial, the pilot plant and that work, that we needed to make sure we were cashed for that purpose. And I'm on record as saying that no longer can we be seen as a junior explorer that's content to have a few million AUD in the bank and make sure we've got programs underway. We need to make sure that we are well-funded for taking the Samphire project forward, because we're being measured now internationally on the progress of that project, as well as our very advanced projects at Alligator Rivers and our greenfield opportunity at Big Lake.
They represent great potential value for shareholders, so we want to be able to work on all of them. So we, we ended up, once we did the share purchase plan and the capital raise, at about AUD 40 million in cash. So it's a, it's a good position for us to have. And if you compare that to other, let's call it similar-stage developers, a company like Bannerman, a company like Deep Yellow, they're all in that game, AUD 40-50 million cash. You need to have that level of cash to be able to advance your projects and, and take them to the next level. Now, you can always talk about timing. Did we go out at the right time? Did we not go out at the right time? Should we have waited?
In the end, where we've ended up, as of a couple of days ago, is we've finished the capital raise. Yes, we issued a discount. It was about a 10% discount to our 10-day volume-weighted average price, but in particular, we know that we're on a trajectory, you really see that happening at the time. However, we've got very close ties to the market, so we knew that a lot of the buying early on in this price period, that this move was traders and financial institutions. And one of the things you ought to remember about traders buying in the market, if they buy uranium, they've always got to sell it again at a profit. They're traders. They don't hold it, they don't use it in a reactor.
They buy it at $72, they've got to sell it at $74 somewhere. So we took a punt that this was going to be a flick up. It might stay there, it might not, but certainly, we, we took a read on the market and said, "This is the right time to raise some cash for our company." We believe that we're going to see the strength in the market continue, because what's occurred since we raised is a lot of utilities, nuclear utilities have come out for long-term contract supply, both publicly tendering, but also behind the scenes, engaged with direct new suppliers. So that's been driving a long-term market, which has lifted from $57 to now $65 per pound on a long-term basis, and the spot price has gone well over $80. So the good thing is we are well cashed up.
We can take our projects right through into 2025, and we are now the beneficiaries on the moving market as well. So we believe it's a good combination, and it's the right timing for us to do what we do. The projects, I will talk about each of them today in a brief sense. The market has been extremely interesting over the last two-three years. Certainly, it's been driven by geopolitics, it's been driven by supply-demand fundamentals like it never has before, and it's been driven by financial institutions. So for the first time, we're seeing exchange-traded funds and financial institutions buying and holding uranium, and some parties always see that as a risk. You've got 60 million pounds of uranium in Sprott's spot fund. What does that mean?
Well, straight away, now they have modified their constitution to say they can sell a little bit, a capped small amount each time to control their net, their net asset value, so that they can continue to raise. So will they eventually be a supplier to the uranium market? Most likely, yes, but they're smart enough to know they're not going to flood. I mean, not only does the spot fund hold this fund, but the general company spot holds a lot of equities in uranium, so they certainly do not want to see any drop in value. So, we see it as a controlled initiative in terms of buy and hold strategy, but nonetheless, it's there. The Ukraine war and the increasing sanctions on Russia have had a big bite.
First of all, 40% of the enriched product for nuclear power in Europe was coming from Russia, 30% from U.S. Now, that, that needed to change and needed to shift, and it's been quite dramatic how fast. The U.S. utilities are gradually weaning off. They've got under the various congressional laws that are coming in 3 years to wean off Russian material. Europe are now out there looking for future sources of supply and conversion enrichment. And those of you who know the industry know you've got uranium conversion enrichment services, leaving the enriched uranium product, which then gets fabricated.
But those conversion enrichment services are where it's tight, because the world put in place a lot of downblending of old nuclear weapons material out of Eastern Europe and out of Russia, bringing that into the market as, as power station grade material from about 1993 onwards, and that was seen as a fantastic thing, and it was. It really did help in the global sense of eliminating a lot of excess nuclear weapons material that could have been a hazard in many ways otherwise. Of course, it kept uranium price flat for all those years of my uranium career, which I wasn't all that happy about, but nonetheless, it was a good thing for the world. But what it did is it led on to then the Russians, even when that finished in 2012, the Russians continued to have conversion enrichment capacity that they used.
They purchased uranium, they graded EUP, sold the EUP back to the market, and in return, when they sell EUP to the U.S. utility, U.S. utility returns uranium to them. So therefore, you get that cycle of EUP production. Now, that's been broken, and even if geopolitics changes suddenly, I don't think it will be picked up very quickly. Everyone in Europe, in particular, is worried about dependence on single source of supply. So, there is now almost a bifurcating of uranium supply. There is the Russian-Kazakh-China block in some ways, although Kazakh is still neutral and still supplying to the West. And the Western utilities in Europe, U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, are all looking for new uranium supply, conversion, enrichment services, and they are actively out there. So we have had 25 meetings, even at our early stage, with nuclear utilities.
We've had some repeat meetings with a few, in particular some U.S., who are keen enough to do early conditional offtake contracts with us, conditional upon approval of the project and financing of the Samphire project. Now, it is a little early for us. We drew a very polite letter saying we're not ready to do this yet, but as you've seen the timeline, later next year, probably time to do a first couple of offtake contracts. So that steps us forward into a different realm as a company and as a development project. I'm happy to talk more about the market. One of the things in particular that I think is important to understand is this long-term contract and quantum.
I haven't got a chart up here of it, but last year, 122 million pounds were under long-term contract. So you now understand the relativity of that? The world burns up around 180 million pounds a year in nuclear power. This year already, there's been 150 million pounds contracted by the end of October, and there is four-five contract discussions still ongoing, so there will be a lot more contracts this year. The graph's a little out of date now, the spot price is well over $80, so- That was only in the last week and a half. Week and a half, that's right. Now, the long-term price, of course, is what we, we look at, and we're looking at what price we should use for our scoping study update.
For example, we used $65 a pound in March when we put that initial scoping study update out, so we're certainly going to lift that this year. But the spot price drives market sentiment. It drives the sentiment to the stage that utilities, if they're testing the market to buy a small portion of spot supply, then they realize they can't get it easily 'cause they're competing with traders, then it, it drives that sentiment in utility buyers' minds. Now, utilities aren't always in panic. I want to make sure we understand this. They always have the next refueling for their reactors, and maybe one after that as well. So, but they do know they have to lock in supply for the future, so they're definitely looking forward.
I'll talk about our Samphire project, 20 kilometers south of Whyalla, and some of you in the room are extremely familiar with this, especially the man who led the discovery of it, Russell Black. It's nice to see you here, Russell, and, thanks very, very much to your team who helped establish this project and, and put it on the map. We're pleased to be continuing your work. We have a JORC resource we put out early this year, a robust scoping study. Now, the reason we put that scoping study out then was to say, "We're about to spend a lot of money.
We're about to spend quite a few AUD million on a pilot plant and a trial, an in situ recovery trial," also resource drilling all year, and then starting an, not only the approval process for the field trial, but then the overall mine approval process, which we've started in the background as well. So before we did that, we wanted to make sure we had a potentially economic project. So with 40% contingency and escalation, a 1 million pound per year project, based on the small resource we had, it looks economic. So we headed into the work, and now we're at the stage where we've got an updated resource estimate about to come out, a scoping study update along with that, and also an exploration target range.
The reason for the target range is we, we talk about what we have in this area, but we've never been able to declare it, so much so. Back in the day, when Uranium SA had the projects, they had a resource over the Plumbush deposit as well as Blackbush. But the, the Plumbush deposit being talked around for it's just too far away now. So we have to put that in a target range, and, and so we'll have that coming out imminently. We were targeting November for that, and we're, we're slipping a little bit, unfortunately, but it'll be in, in November, December. So we want to get on the work subject, on the ground, subject to approvals for our field recovery trial, also coming forward.
Now, with the economic parameters for the scoping study back in March, AUD 130 million CapEx, it could pay back AUD 152 million including post-tax. We're only able to talk post-tax, which is the real cash available for shareholders. A reasonable all-in sustaining cost, $30, even if that creeps up a little bit as we get more detailed, I'm not too worried, that's a good all-in sustaining cost. And this is the portion of the resource. The work we're doing is to lift the indicated, and that's because in any production schedule, you have to use at least 75% of your schedule is indicated resource, and only 25% inferred. So this year's work that Adam Addison, our Principal Geologist here, has led, has been about lifting the indicated resource from inferred out of the inferred level.
We won't be doing much on the total resource. We just didn't have time to drill everything we wanted to this year, and we had a lot of rain. Up in that area, as you remember, Russell said, if it rains, you can't drive anywhere. So it's we achieved a good amount, and you'll see from the results coming out. A few aspects about our project I've talked about before. In Situ Recovery is a low-impact method of mining. You're not digging or mining the rock, therefore, it's a low power draw, it's a low impact on the ground. We've got excellent formation, porosity, and permeability, and the hydrogeological work that Uranium SA has saved many years still stands strongly, and we've been supporting it with all the work that we've been doing.
We're close to Whyalla, so we don't have to build a camp. We don't have to fly to Whyalla. We don't have to build an airstrip. We have a local-based workforce. We've already had between two and four local employees working on the ground there, and one of our geologists is Whyalla-based. And we've already used 30 different companies out of Whyalla to help support the project in terms of suppliers and suppliers and maintenance, and probably spent over AUD 1 million in Whyalla region itself. We've got the opportunity to scale up the plant. We'll talk about the exploration target range shortly.
In any design we do, the evidence is from previous other ISR projects, such as Beverly or, or, Energy Fuels projects in the States, or EnCore projects in the States, you need to allow for growth, because if you start at, say, 1.2 million pound per annum, you're not going to stay there. So we'll make sure in our design work for future plants that we allow for growth. And based on, the, what we're seeing in our resource, we'll be targeting 1.2 million pound production capacity in the updated Scoping Study. Now, oops, let me go back one. Sorry, I clicked this slide. There we are. Now, this year, we did a lot of focus on drilling in the blue, which is the Inferred Resource envelope. This is the Blackbush deposit, sorry, Blackbush East, Blackbush West-...
I do like to relay the story that, that with the Uranium SA days, they had drilled Blackbush East and found it quite consistent, and found some good grades, and some areas of work, and planning to do a trial rig. And they thought, "Well, we better sterilize some areas here in case you want to put the plant site over here." So they drilled Blackbush West and found-
-Even-
even better grades. And this is just a rule of exploration and resource development. Wherever you're going to sterilize, you're going to find more ore, okay? So Russell was just following the rules, so it's fantastic. But we thank you for that, because that's turned out to be a real bonus. We've infill drilled, and this is the work that Adam and his team are doing now with our consultant geologists, to lift the indicated resource, the pinky area, and make it larger. We haven't had time, unfortunately, if you have a look at this diagram with Blackbush East and West, to drill a lot of these other areas that which are key holes that are drilled historically by Uranium SA. All of them are above cut-off grade, all of it, and we just haven't had time to get out here.
But we are going to find more pounds in the ground out this way. We know we're going to see that this way. We've now done a larger indigenous clearance for cultural heritage around this area. So we are ready to get on the ground end of January, start resourceful again, which will be exciting. But I don't wanna... What I want to point out here is we've really been focused on lifting the indicated portion of resource and not increasing the total at this stage. It's really about trying to make this scoping study economics much better. But what we are doing is doing an exploration target range, and an exploration target range under the JORC rules means you can say: what's a conservative estimate of what is likely we could bring into resource?
And that's the bottom end of the range. What is a possible estimate of what we could bring into resource in the future, potentially? And that's the upper end of the range. So Blackbush, East and West, are really about 10% of the channels known at the moment. The ground gravity shows up the channels well, both the drilling work, historical and our drilling now, and we would have done in more than 200 holes, I think, Adam, in the area. It's showing that the good correlation between the ground gravity and the known channels. Now, we know there's a series of channels down here, not all of which are drilled at all. Some, more than 50% of the channels don't have any drill.
But Plumbush, of course, has got some wider-spaced drilling, and so we've got the opportunity to really close that up like Blackbush, and bring that into a more defined resource. Now, the other work that Uranium SA did was some joint venture drilling down in this tenement, which we now own, which also found 400-600, 700 PPM in a few holes. Now, it's wide-spaced drilling, so we'll be doing some ground gravity down here to extend that. So the work that Adam and his team are doing here is twofold. First of all, they are looking at what is a likely extension to resource at Blackbush, based on the arrows you see here and the areas to the east. And the second part is, what is a likely extension to resource around Plumbush and any other location.
So that exploration target range will be out at the same time as our scoping study and resource. Timeline. Timelines are amusement to me, because you put down your best estimate of a timeline, and then something changes, and so the timeline changes. However, we've been in pretty good shape. We've completed our resource drilling. We're imminently going to have out a resource update and the scoping study update, resource update, and the release of the target range, which is great. We've been recruiting a study manager, a lead engineer from study manager, to lead the future feasibility study and to help with the overarching management of the field trial on-site as well. And we're fabricating the pilot plant, we were targeting completion in December.
We've been unfortunately caught up in the DP World container delays, so we've got some of our in-situ pumps stuck in those containers and waiting on them, and our IX columns are due for delivery late next week, so that's a little bit delayed as well. So we'll be around 80% complete at the end of December, ready for wet commissioning here in Adelaide, in January. Commencing a feasibility study, the aim of that is to be on the ground with our field recovery trial, with the four weeks or so of civils and then producing them. As the results come in, we're gearing up the feasibility study to utilize those results and plan the feasibility. Now, we say here, subject to Department of Energy and Mining approvals.
We don't have a defined date anywhere on our schedules for approvals, because regulators, the last thing they want is for a company to tell them when they're going to approve or close it. It is up to them, and it's up to the interactions we have. It's up to the interactions with the community, to the public submissions and the responses and what we have. So we're working through that. We went out for public submissions. We received all them in the last part of September. We've been working through them with the government, but we are still in that last phase of response, documenting back to the government on the approval for the field recovery trial. Now, the advantage of this is most of that work is adding into the full mining lease approval anyway.
It's not wasted work, it's very much valuable work for us in obtaining the mining approval. I mentioned that we're drilling all year in resource. We'll have a further resource update by the end of the year at the latest, if not earlier. I mentioned these offtake contracts. Now, towards the tail end of the feasibility study, when we're starting to know what our economics are, that'll be the time when we can talk to utilities about either a portion of supply, a layered contract, a small one starting, a second one starting. We're not talking about big contracts here, we're talking about initial contracts, which show the market, in particular future financiers, that the nuclear utilities have faith in the fact we can bring this in production and are willing to pay the right price for that production...
The important thing about that is nuclear utilities don't just buy and sign the contract and forget. What they do before they even sign, they have a very big evaluation of the company involved. Who we are, what we can do, what our project's like, what are the risks? Are we gonna continue to produce? What are the issues around our project, both in the sense of environment, people, community, all of that. So the nuclear utilities retain certain skill sets, either within house or they use them externally to evaluate companies. So it does give us, if we sign, successfully sign some contracts with some large utilities in particular, it gives us a bit of a tick that someone's done an external review of what they think of our project. So that's an important aspect of that business.
So the funding we have put in place now carries us right through this time period, and that's the valuable thing of getting that cash in this year. Our pilot plant and fuel recovery trial planning and work is well underway. Zlatko Rudnicki , who's a process engineer, has been working heavily with our external Adelaide Control Engineering group, plus Amjohn, our project controls group. And this is a layout plan of the pilot plant, two 40-foot containers, which are basically the pilot plant itself. A range of tanks for the final effluent project product, plus feeding pipes coming in and out, of course. And it's set up as a full dirty, clean, radioactive site, the same as you would in your own mine site.
So there's a fenced off area around here, which is the dirty site, fence down the middle, clean-dirty, clean change rooms, offices out here, generators, reverse osmosis plant, et cetera. Now, these are the IX columns, which are in one of the containers. Essentially, the process is we have three trial rings out in the field, and you can see, one is in the eastern portion of the Blackbush deposit, one in the south and one in the west. Now, these are different parts of the ore body. The chemistry will be slightly different, so you want to try on different parts. The eastern part is more an average grade of the resource. This one's in a slightly higher grade area, and this one's more average, but slightly different chemistries.
So you, when you run a future well field in production, you have a mixture of liquors coming in from the ground, so you want to be able to work on that mixture as well. And the pilot plant site's quite small, 100 meters by 50 meters. We've put in place an agreement with the pastoralist so we could fence off this area, a rabbit-proof fence to make sure we can both recover it well afterwards. And also, the indigenous group have been out with us and had a good look at what we intend to do there and gone to that with us. So we really are just going through the approval process with the Department of Energy and Mining. So the feeds from the different rings will come into one side of the process.
The reagents on this side get led into the streams as needed, both the feedback to the site and to the rings, but also into the IX columns. The IX columns are full of resin, which has got an attractive force, a valence force that attracts uranium ions. It also attracts salt ions. So one of the things we have to do out in the field here is, with the reverse osmosis plant, we take our inherent groundwater, which is up to 40,000 parts salts, and we run it through an RO plant to reduce the salinity down to about 10. It doesn't have to be clean or pure, but the resins work best at 18,000 salts and below.
So we'll target lifting it down to 10 or 12, and then you circulate within that bubble of fresher water, if you like. Now, Boss Energy are doing this at their project right at the moment for their site. So, while it's a technique that many mines don't have to do, Beverly doesn't have to do it, the Wyomings don't have to do it, because their water quality is better. And it does mean that we have to make that work. We believe it will, and the evidence is from our hydrogeological workings that it will. So that's a key part of the project work. We bring the pre-mixed solution once we dissolve the uranium out of the ground into the first IX column. It goes down, you load the resin.
Once you've loaded enough on, you reverse the flow of the clean effluent that comes out of these tanks back through the same IX column, bring the uranium out as a clean solution into these tanks. Then after that, you recondition it, ready to start again. So we end up with the uranium in solute solution, in a clean effluent, as a product at the end. Now, we don't take it further to produce uranium oxide as the final product, and the simple reason is this: these steps are fairly standard. From an effluent, you dry, you dewater, you dry, you calcine, you pack in the drums, and then you ship. Now, if we go right through to the full final product, you've got to bring in the Australian Nuclear Safeguards Office, you've got to have a different sort of security on your site.
It's all different game. So what we'll be doing is taking samples of this across to ANSTO in New South Wales. They will produce a range of 0.5-kilogram final product samples for us. We then ship them to the converters, which will be the where we ship the uranium on behalf of the utilities, and then they will qualify us as a final product. Now, you can see the well house here. This is where the solutions come in from the field and go out to the field. So a lot of it underway, and as I said, we should have this pilot plant complete around 80%, in December. So a lot happening on Samphire, and I don't know about the rest of the team on the Samphire, but we just seem to be getting busier and busier, but that's okay.
That's exactly where we're meant to be. I wanted to talk about our other projects. The Alligator Rivers project, we have Rob Lightfoot here with us. So Rob's been senior geologist with us for 11 years now on Alligator mainly working on Alligator Rivers, but also been on Samphire in the early days and Big Lake. And Rob and Mike Barlow put a team together to do a full program up at Alligator Rivers this year. Now, I won't talk about it too much in detail, but you might recall this is where the company started. We started to acquire projects here in 2010, 2011, 2012. Some of them were ex-Cameco projects, some were picked up. So we worked on the Beatrice project and the Tin Camp Creek project.
Now, the orange here is the sandstone overlying the area of Arnhem Land, all right? This is just to the east of the Ranger Jabiluka project mines, and east of the East Alligator River. So Arnhem Land is Indigenous land, so we have to have agreements with Indigenous people in this area, which we have. Now, the work over a series of years by the predecessors in the company, to me, that is both Rob and a previous CEO and exploration manager, did some smart technical work, including some work with CSIRO, to look at techniques to looking underneath the sandstone. Where there's exposed areas of basement rocks, you can do direct work.
But we just- we found lots of smoke, not only a small resource, which we expanded a little, but lots of great intersections of uranium, but nothing hang, hung together, but like a Ranger-style deposit as of yet. But we have some good targets here that we want to follow up in the future, and there's different ways we can do that. So we're going to revisit this. Now, Mike Barlow's on board. Mike and Rob are going to do a plan for revisiting some restart work up in this area here, that we really did our last work on in 2018 and 2019. But we also acquired in early 2020, this package of tenements called Nabarlek North, and you can see straight away this is not overlain by the sandstone. So, this area has got a weathered profile on top.
The weathering profile can be deep, it can be shallow, but it's got a lot of features, and some old intersections of uranium, which make it interesting. Just off our boundary, the U40 Prospect, where DevEx have been drilling this year and getting some interesting intersections. Narrow, but, but interesting intersections. We've now done our first drilling during this program, just on the other side of that boundary, and so we're waiting some assays on that drilling, to have that come out. We've also done a larger footprint of drilling with air core and a little bit of auger to look at the geology underlying here, because you've got to look under the weathered profile to see what the geology is like.
Now, the plans being put together for next year will include a broader look at the tenements above, including some geophysics, and linking up the geological knowledge we're finding here with additional knowledge. It's an area where, in particular, the company believes that the work that Mike and Rob are doing, that geophysics is gonna help us a lot more. So, we're gonna have a careful look at that coming forward. Now, the beauty of this area, as you can see, there's smoke everywhere, there's intersections of uranium. We've always known there's a lot of uranium in this area because there's uranium coming down the East Alligator River. There's uranium through the Magilla Creek, north of Ranger. There's uranium in the Saskatchewan country everywhere.
So it's a matter of finding the economic deposits, and, and that's what we'll be looking for. So that work's been progressing well, but it's tough work. It's reasonably expensive exploration, but it's well worthwhile exploration, 'cause it's not pure greenfields. It's not quite brownfields, 'cause we don't have a big resource, but it's close. So it's well worthwhile in there if it's going. Now, the Big Lake uranium prospect up in, top of, South Australia, over the Cooper Basin. You can see the other on this map, the other ISR projects there, Honeymoon, Goulds Dam, Beverley Four Mile, Olympic Dam is the hard rock project, of course, and you can see our projects down here in Samphire. The sediments which host the Beverley Four Mile Honeymoon deposits extend all the way north over this area of the Cooper.
So the top sediments are member formation in the air, and then the Cretaceous. Now, there is evidence of uranium in these areas. The oil and gas wells, which of course go to 2.5 kilometers or more, every now and then, they see these little gamma spikes in their logging up in the sediments. So there's little gamma spikes. And there was a company drilled about 14 years ago, Tri-Star Energy or uncertain , some small holes, which found, you know, bands of uranium at 300 parts per million. Now, what we've been trying to determine over a period of about 14 months now is, using the seismic data that's publicly available and other and an airborne survey we did, is there potential here for uranium out of the granites?
Because the granites are, they're hot granites in that area, they contain a good amount of uranium, the basins are basins, I mean, the Ranger granites at the side, there's granites underneath, there's structures, there's groundwaters, there's all the things that can bring uranium out of the granites in the solution. There is... Are there traps in the sediments? That's what Ben Williams, our senior project leader, has been looking at to see, is there traps in the sediments above? So we've been working on that plan. We've now done, well, it took us 18 months or two years to negotiate an indigenous agreement in the area, but COVID delayed that as well. And that's now in place. We had our first visit with a couple of indigenous people to look at the planning for that work.
We've now done a full clearance, which finished only last week, and we'll wait on that report. But we're essentially ready now to put in a drilling approval supplement to the department and get on the ground essentially around March next year. So, as Paul indicated in his talk, the major in-situ recovery uranium fields in the world are associated with hydrocarbon basins in general, and that's because the hydrocarbon leakage of gas can be reductant. And if you've got uranium solution above, the gas leaks, it reacts with the uranium and drops it out into a solid form of integrated deposit. So we know there's uranium in the system, we know there's hot granites, we know we've got the right sediments. Do we have traps in the sediments? We don't know.
Is there the right relationship whereby you can get an economic formation of uranium? We don't know. So our initial work is going to be stratigraphic, it's going to be drilling to see... Are we seeing the traps? Are we seeing the sediments in the right way that we, so the first drilling was never targeted towards finding a discovery. The first drilling is about understanding the geology from our interpretation. And as Russell tells me, that's always a hard sell to the market, but it's absolutely true. We've got to do geology before we can go forward into really sourcing them. We might be in the wrong part of the basin. We might be up - we need to go up the eastern side, the western side, anywhere, but at the moment, we're looking for the theory, improve the theory. All right.
Our next project in northern Italy, I won't talk too much about. We've had a good look at this, and there's a lot of small prospects in nickel cobalt. It's strange for us to have this, I know, because we picked this up during the golden days of uranium, and in all ordinary circumstances, we might have dropped it. However, the European Union is continuously ramping up its talk about homegrown critical minerals. They've just recently come out this week with a statement. In the near future, they want to see 40% of critical minerals developed and produced in Europe. So we had some interest in this with about four partners that had a look about three years ago. COVID put paid to that a bit. We've done some deeper geophysics work.
We haven't found what we expected, but there is still a very strong nickel, and copper cobalt signature across the area. So what we're doing is we are working, planning to do. We're renewing some tenements, but planning to do a broader spectrum of survey across these tenements while we look for another partner based out of Europe. And the logical person will be, our logical company will be a partner that's already in nickel. That's why nickel prospects say in Norway or Finland, and it's doing a lot of work. They're interested in the area and want to bring it to party in Europe. But, well, we think there's some value for shareholders in this, and we want to get that value out of it for our shareholders. So that's our pipeline of projects so far. We're always on the lookout for others.
We always evaluate, should we be working on this project? Should we not be working on this project, the shareholders' funds? And that's something we are continually doing. I'll finish off just on our ESG practice. So we have a very strong focus on this, and full credit to the early forerunners of the company, Paul and Rob and the people involved in the early days, 'cause we built a relationship with traditional owners in Arnhem Land, which is second to none. We have been used as an example by the NLC as a way for explorers to operate in Arnhem Land, and we'll continue to keep that reputation as valid as we can. And we've carried that forward into how we work with Samphire.
We engaged with the pastoralists initially, even before we completed the acquisition, to make sure we answered their concerns. Where do they want to see improvement in their business? How could we work on that while we worked on our business? And so we have good relationships there. It's not always in agreement. There are pastoralists that don't like the idea of having a future uranium mine next to them, and so we're working with them and having those discussions. So not everyone agrees with what we do, but we make sure we keep talking and keep open about it. We started engaging in the Whyalla region very early on, and we continue to do so. In fact, within two weeks' time or three weeks' time, we've got open days up in Whyalla again with the public and the region.
So we work very strongly with that. And we've got lots of examples. We've had more than 40 Indigenous employees with us in Arnhem Land over the time. We've had a few more this year. We've had our first two Indigenous employees at Samphire and four local employees. We've done a lot of innovative stuff around Samphire, like the rolling of the bush wherever you can, rather than grading, trying to develop ways to have the drillers operate with almost zero impact, if they can. Rotary mud drilling, you've got to have pits or tanks. We're trying to develop a system whereby we can have less impact because we are going to do a lot of drilling up there.
We've won a commendation from the Premier's Awards in Environment and Mining on the work that we've already done, and Matt Daniel, who's our environmental manager, is here, and he's been leading a lot of that charge. Matt's brief is simple: push us well beyond our comfort zone. He does tend to do that, and he tends to push us well beyond our economic comfort zone sometimes, which means, but that's okay. We want that in how we approach our business. The final one is, we might have an opportunity at Samphire. We're engaged under confidentiality with a very large renewable company which has the rights to wind and solar over the areas where we are. There's a lot of other renewable there. ISR mining is a low-power draw method of mining. You're not moving rock.
So even our first project might be only two MW, expanded, might be 5 MW. We will and can do a power line, very only 25 km in the way out, which we'll do. But can we have only renewable? Can we have backup that on-site? And we know an engineering firm which has developed significant-sized diesel generators, which start on diesel and after three minutes, change to waste cooking oil. And there's plenty of waste cooking oil around the regional centers as there is. So there's different ways of cutting it. We're 20 km per hour. Can we use all electric vehicles? We don't need four-wheel drive. We can, we can run two-wheel drive. So can we operate, in a sense, electrically?
And there is trials underway, or about to get underway, I believe, with Carrapateena, Janus Electric trucks, and some tube transport on battery swap inside our prime movers. So could we have logistics being delivered by electric truck, and have two-three containers per month of uranium going by electric truck around to Port Adelaide and shipped out? Now, the important aspect of this is we minimize our greenhouse emissions, then we, as a supplier, become the Scope Three Emissions for a nuclear utility. Now, the nuclear utilities are very interested in this, and particularly the European ones. We've talked with two or three of the majors there, and they said, "If you could say you are a supplier of uranium with almost zero scope three emissions," and that's of great interest.
So, we have already had some discussion, does it translate to a premium? And the answer is possibly. So let's just see where it can take us. So not only would this fit right in with the South Australian government's plans of a hydrogen covenant, things in that area, but it may lead to some good shareholder value as well. Now, we'll run this in parallel with our feasibility to see what is possible, and see where it could work, but the time to consider this is the ground up, so we shall see what we can do. Now, I'm sorry, I always struggle to talk quickly, but I have covered a lot of ground. I'm glad you're able to listen to me, and thank you very much. I'm happy to take any questions that anyone might have.