Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and for being here for the later duration of the conference. I'd like to introduce to you, if you don't know us, Alligator Energy, and if you do know us, give you an update on our most advanced project, the Samphire Uranium Project. I have a disclaimer which will correct anything that I say is incorrect, but please do your own research and make sure you look at our projects well. The company is a uranium explorer, originated back in 2010, changed its strategy in 2018 to acquire resource projects before the uranium price and equities prices took off.
We have a lot of shares on issue, we have a lot of liquidity, but we have a well-advanced project and, we've had very, very good support in the market, not only from the investment market, but also more recently from the nuclear utilities market, which I'll talk about. A little bit on the market. John Borshoff did a wonderful job, yesterday when he talked about the broader electric generation industry around the world and globally, and how it can be influenced and supported by nuclear. So I'm not gonna cover that. I'm just going to give you a few recent key facts and points from my travels. I've just been overseas meeting with nuclear utilities in North America and in Europe.
There's a good supply-demand chart here from Cantor Fitzgerald, which, although it has the Rook I project starting up at full production, we all know that's not gonna happen. It will ramp up, but it does show that you're getting new mine production coming on over time. It has the restarts in the light gray, it has the existing production in the dark blue. A few points: the existing production will be extended. Already, mines are looking at mining lower grade, supportive contracts, making sure that they get future production. There will be new mine start-up, but they will be slower. They will take longer and be slower. The evidence is there with our field trial that we're about to undertake at Alligator, in Samphire, and that has taken longer to get approval than we anticipated.
Global nuclear utilities are meeting with everyone. In the past, when I've been marketing uranium and nuclear fuel for ERA and Rio, sometimes we couldn't get meetings with larger European utilities. Now, I've met personally with EDF of France, which is the biggest single buyer in Europe, with the Swedish utilities, with the Swiss utilities. The Swiss utilities haven't done a uranium contract for 30 years. They've been buying enriched uranium product off the Russians and off Orano. Now, they are out there for the first time in 30 years, doing uranium conversion, enrichment, and building up their portfolio from scratch. There's very positive nuclear policy changes. Sweden has recently changed its policy to phase out nuclear plants and now reversed their ban on new nuclear. So they are making plans for new nuclear in Sweden.
They also have a report in front of government right now on lifting the ban for uranium mining and exploration in Sweden, and there are now two municipalities in Norway vying to be selected for the first siting of a small modular reactor in Norway, supporting their hydro and other generation capacity. Utility fuel buyers are running inventories down, but not super down. They still have the coverage for their next two to three fuel loadings. They know how to do this. They are coming to market. They are being cautious in coming to market. There's no panic buying by utilities, trust me. They are very well aware of how they contract and where they need supply. But certainly, the late twenties, early thirties will be a critical time in our industry and supply-demand fundamentals, so there's lots and lots of opportunity.
I was talking to a range of utilities in the States at a conference with our marketing agent, Kevin, over there. We could have sold our production, future production three times over, so there is definitely a strong market out there. Now, our Samphire Uranium Project. This was discovered in 2007 by Uranium SA. They advanced it through exploration, initial resource, and some hydrogeological studies. It went into the doldrums when the uranium price was flat after Fukushima. We acquired it in 2020, and we started to put a team in place in 2021 and get on-the-ground drilling. It's located near Whyalla, just south of Whyalla in South Australia. Whyalla is a regional center of 20,000 people, an iron ore and steel-making center, supporting...
It has a lot of companies based there to support their mines to the north, Olympic Dam and Carrapateena, et cetera. So the Blackbush, Plumbush deposits, well, Blackbush is a deposit, Plumbush is a prospect, are the core projects we're looking at there at the moment, but we have a wide area as well. Key points, 20 kilometers from Whyalla. Infrastructure is good. We don't need a camp, we don't need fly-in, fly-out, don't need to build an airstrip. 25-kilometer power line, water line. It's a great location and a workforce. We already have three or four people employed out of Whyalla directly on our project. We have a yard and an office in the industrial area of Whyalla. Excuse me.
We have an initial starting resource for the project, and most ISR projects in the world will start with something like around a 20-million-pound resource, which is mostly indicated in our case, allows us to get underway with a production asset quite easily in the next 4 years or so. But we're expanding it. We've already done exploration target range of additional 14-75, depending on your optimistic, pessimistic view of what we have in the ground. We did a scoping study we released in December, which shows very good economics. The pilot plant that we're planning to do and run a field trial on site is fully fabricated. We've spent that money and put it there. We do a massive amount of ESG work.
We deal with the community, with Indigenous groups, with the pastoralists we're in the area of, and with the more regional centers around. The project is an in-situ recovery, in-situ leach solution mining method, whichever name you like to give it. I won't go into the detail, but essentially 80 meters deep, there's a series of compacted paleochannel sands, old river channels on top of the granite underneath, which is the source of the uranium. The paleochannel is formed. They were covered in sand, then other limestones and other sediments on top. Then over millions of years, the hypersaline groundwater has leached uranium out of the granites underneath and brought it up into the sands, where it gets reduced, it's reductant, and forms solidified grains of uranium around the sands.
Now, what we do is we reverse that process by circulating the groundwater in a loop of rings, adding 4 liters of acid to every 10,000 liters of saline water, you lower the pH enough so a lixiviant comes in and dissolves the uranium grains like sugar in cold coffee. And I say sugar in cold coffee 'cause it's slow. It takes, depending on the permeability, porosity, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months to get enough recovery out of a ring or a series of rings to get production. So that's a simplified version of ISR. Our study, we released in December, showed a very good return on our initial project of 1.2 million pounds per annum on the resource that we have now, which we're drilling and expanding as we speak. A very low CapEx, as I mentioned, 'cause infrastructure is good.
If we were 300 kilometers further north, we would add AUD 50-70 million on that for infrastructure. A great payback, a good NPV, an all-in sustaining cost in $ per pound, which is realistic. ISR all-in sustaining cost is the right measure to use. You've got to have continuous well field drilling for new wells and rings and well fields coming on, while other ones are being depleted. So if you don't include that regular cost that you're putting in, it's not a real cost. So there's ISR around the world, which is as low as $24-26. There's ISR, which is up towards $39 a pound. So we're roughly in the mid-range, if you like. This is a picture of our existing resource at Blackbush. The pink is indicated, the blue is inferred.
We have put an announcement out recently. We've been drilling since January on the expansion of this resource. We found extensions to the left, to the west. We're now doing a bit to the north. We found some pods to the east. Now, a lot of the historical drilling Uranium SA did was very widely spaced, but they found mineralization. So a lot of the holes here are above cut-off grade, and we've just got to pull it together into the roll fronts that form through the sands. So we're doing that work. We'll have an updated resource out at the end of this year. Now, not only that, but that area of concentrated pink holes up the top is our Blackbush resource.
It's about 8% of the known paleochannels that we've mapped by ground gravity in this region over around 20 km lineal distance, or about 90 km of channel. Now, only 30% of these channels have had any drilling, and only something less than 30% have mineralized intersections. So our exploration target range of an additional 14-75 million pound is only based on those channels that have had evidence of mineralization at the moment. So we've got 70% of these channels undrilled. So it's a big footprint. Down the south, in that red tenement at the bottom, we had historical intersections, but didn't know where they linked in. So we did the ground gravity survey, and lo and behold, they all sit in the paleochannels, and there's a great thickness of sands down there.
So what we did in the last few years, redrill the resource, focus on the ISR resource only, make sure that's real. We wanted to make sure we got a future. So we've already got a satellite project at Plumbush, which we need close space drilling to bring in as a second resource. We've got a main resource. We also wanted to look at the economics. The scoping study told us, "Yes, we've got an economic project," 'cause we're about to spend a lot of money. I do also wanna mention, we put in place a full ISR team. Soon after we acquired the project, we recruited Andrea Marsland-Smith, who's our Chief Operating Officer. Andrea was a senior manager at Heathgate, Beverley Four Mile Complex for many years. She discovered the Four Mile project, and she has operated ISR for many, many years.
She also knows a lot of people in Australia who have ISR experience, so she's now got a full management team of ISR experienced production people under her: principal geologist, senior hydrogeologist, principal chemist, environmental manager, project manager, and engagement manager. So we're set up to go with our field trial. Now, the field trial is the key test for an ISR project. We've done all the bench scale testing, pulled out solid cores with the groundwater, done all the leach tests at ANSTO. We know the basic parameters. We know it leaches, we know the flows and permeabilities are good, but you've got to get a real handle on your reagent usage, lowering the salinity a little bit so the IX plant works better. All of those practices, you've got to lock down. So 3 trial rings to be drilled, a small pilot plant.
The pilot plant is fabricated, it's containerized. We've fabricated this in the first half of this year. It's already delivered to our yard in Whyalla. We're waiting on the final retention lease approval to operate this, and an operating plan approval, which is going to still take... Retention leases, let's call it imminent. We anticipate it in the coming month, and then the operating plan will take 2-3 months to approve. It is slower than we anticipated. South Australia has approved 5 uranium mines, all of which have operated, and they have good regulatory experience. However, every time there's an exploration boom, we all snatch the best people out of the departments, and they recruit young people who haven't got experience, and we go through this same process over and over again. It's happening in WA, in the NT, and South Australia.
So it's taking longer, but we will get there. We'll be on the ground doing the construction of this in the quarter four, operating the trial in first quarter next year. We have exploration. We have explored in Arnhem Land for many, many years. We have a big footprint of projects there. I'm not gonna cover off on the detail. You're going to hear a wonderful talk in about 15 minutes from DevEx, from Brendan Bradley, and he will give a great outlook of what's going on up in Arnhem Land for us. We are exploring the Cooper Basin in South Australia, over the hydrocarbon basin, where there's exactly the same sediments that host the Beverley Four Mile projects extend up. There is evidence of uranium in there. We've done a huge amount of work using public seismic data and going out.
We're just in the throes of our first drilling program, so we'll have some announcements come out of that in the coming month to month and a half. We've made an investment into potential copper ISR. We've done this for the simple reason that we have a very experienced ISR production team, and this group has been doing 5 or 6 years of research work into potential ISR of oxide copper in South Australia. Not only that, BHP is funding their work. So we've put in a bit to help advance one of their other projects and to take a shareholding in the group. So it's opportunistic, but it's a good link-up with our skill set in that state. It does not draw on our technical expertise. It does not delay us, because they are doing the work, we just have some oversight.
We do a massive amount of ESG. We've had more than 40 Indigenous employees in Arnhem Land over a period of 8-10 seasons. We already have a series of Whyalla-based employees, and we've used 30 companies out of the Whyalla region. Not only that, we work very, very hard with the pastoralists we deal with because we wanna make sure that we leave the ground better than we came across it. Most of the bushland in the Samphire country where we are is about half the bush density from when it was native before pastoral activity. We restore it to double the bush density, and we've won a commendation from the Premier's Environmental Awards on that basis.
So at the moment, our tasks in this half are retention lease application approval, the operating plan approved, construct the field trial, results of our Big Lake drilling, commencement of the field trial, end of this year into early next year, update the Blackbush resource, Nabarlek North drilling results, which will be finished around October. And we're starting our first uranium marketing plan. How are we going to market our product in detail? We've already had multiple meetings with utilities, so we're putting that in place. Next year, the results from the field trial feed straight into a feasibility. We'll be doing that work in preparation, and towards the end of the year, first initial offtake contracts to support financing of the project. So a lot of tasks underway. Thank you for your time.