Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today. Alligator Energy Limited is South Australia and Queensland-based. We have an advancing in-situ recovery, in-situ leach uranium project 20 kilometers south of Whyalla in South Australia, and as Christie so kindly explained, it is a paleochannel hosted system. I'll explain a little bit about that and give you some overview of the project. That's what the project looks like in front of you there. Our company formed in 2010, at the tail end of the last uranium boom. We've been exploring in Arnhem Land and expanded into South Australia in 2018 through to 2020, and are now advancing a key project there called Samphire. We have a market cap of around AUD 250 million. We have around AUD 33 million cash.
We have a resource which is at the stage of a pilot field trial, advancing into feasibility and mine approvals. So that's the status of the project. I won't go into our exploration work today. A little bit about the market, the uranium business. You've seen a few things from players here today, and you'll see a bit more. The uranium spot price is a driver of sentiment. The uranium long-term price is a driver of sales. And having been involved in the uranium contracting business overseas, it's the uranium long-term price that'll make sure production is economic. But nonetheless, investment is important. There's also a very big supply-demand fundamental I won't go into, but a key driver right now is reliability, the backup for renewable power, and the advances, technically, in new nuclear, which has changed the face and the view of how the world's seeing it.
So happy if you come to our booth we can talk more about the market, but I'll talk about our Samphire project now. A summary: 20 kilometers from Whyalla. JORC-compliant resource of a size suitable for an initial start-up operation of 1.2 million pounds per year. A target range of a broader area of 15-20 kilometers, which I'll talk about. A robust scoping study which gives us an NPV of around $250 million at the current price, long-term price of $75 USD a pound. Awaiting approval to jump on site in the third quarter this year to construct a pilot plant. We've already fabricated the plant and drilled monitor wells, ready to run a pilot process through the latter part of this year leading to feasibility.
And we have some strong ESG credentials in the fact that we are looking at how we can minimize the carbon footprint of this project, which I won't have time to go into today, but happy to talk to people about. In-situ recovery, in-situ leach in paleochannels is relatively simple but complex chemically and hydrogeologically. Basically, paleochannels are incised channels, ancient channels into granites or rocks underneath, later filled with sand and with sediments over the top. And then the sands accumulate uranium over time, usually from a source of uranium close by. It deposits out, hits a reductant, and becomes a solid around the sand grains, but with pore spaces in between. You reverse that process in in-situ recovery mining. You circulate the groundwater, the saline water in this case.
You add a small amount of acid or low pH, in this case four liters for every 10,000 liters you circulate. You then put in a lixiviant which dissolves the uranium like sugar in hot coffee, brings it out of solution through an ion exchange plant on the surface, remove the uranium, and recirculate the fluid. So it's a simple solution mining technique. You can see the location there, 20 kilometers south of Whyalla. The Blackbush deposit is the main deposit I'll have a talk about. That location gives us great advantages in terms of existing companies involved in the resource industry based out of Whyalla and exposure to uranium mining expertise to the north of the state. Some metrics from our scoping study we released in December last year. The top line is the metrics we released at $75 a pound. A good return, a good NPV.
US dollar price, which is when we tend to compare. We sell into a market dominated in US dollars. $33 a pound. A little higher, but we've been a bit conservative in some of our estimated costs. And going forward, a fairly cheap capital cost because in in-situ recovery mining you do not move any dirt. You don't mine it. You don't grind it. You don't crush it. And so you're not handling material. You're basically solution mining. Now, I will make a point here that in our team, our Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Andrea Marsland-Smith, is one of the more senior managers from Heathgate Resources, which runs the Beverley Four Mile projects in South Australia. Andrea has developed our team. We have a full production-ready team, including process chemists all the way through hydrogeology, principal geologists, and project managers ready to go.
So both on our board and in our management team, including myself, we have a lot of mine operations experience in uranium, including in marketing and exposure as well. The bottom line here is the same study metrics at $90 a pound. That improves the NPV dramatically. This is a picture of the Blackbush western-east deposit. So that's the small deposit we've found so far, 20 million pounds or just under. Enough for an economic project to kick off. That's what those study metrics were about. But we're expanding. We're drilling resources around or drilling resource potential around that area now. A lot of the holes that were discovered by our predecessor company are above cutoff grade. We just need to put them into these what's called roll fronts, where you get the continuity of mineralization within channels within the sands.
That's what we're doing and expanding now. So that area of resource footprint is around AUD 20 million or just under. Now, this is the area of channels that we have in the district within our tenements. That pink area is the resource we currently have. It's far less than 10% of the total known channels. Only about 30%-35% of those channels are drilled and have some potential mineralization. The rest have not been touched. And this is what happens in in-situ recovery locations. You tend to have a starter project. You expand it from there. You've got cash flow. You move into other areas of channels. You don't need to build a new plant. You then bring the fluids back to that centralized plant. So the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia started in 1998 at AUD 1.2 million a year.
It's now over AUD 4 million a year. The Boss Energy Honeymoon project started 14 years ago at about AUD 1.5 million. It's now restarting at AUD 2.5 million. The same in Wyoming. The same in Texas. This is how you develop in-situ uranium projects. We're about to do a field trial. And this part of the resource, three small rings, 20-meter radius, running solution through for about a month up into a small pilot plant. The pilot plant is a simple containerized IX columns and reagent storage. But you need to run this like a small uranium mine. So we're finalizing the approvals now to get on the ground in third quarter construction, operating it in the fourth quarter. It will only run for three to four months. But give us all the parameters we need leading into the feasibility study. I won't go into our exploration.
We have a lot of exploration in Arnhem Land, where we've been operating for more than 12 or 14 years. We've had 40 Indigenous employees. And we've focused a lot on the large-scale, high grade. And we have greenfields exploration for uranium in the sediments overlying the Cooper Basin, which are a continuity of sediments which come up from the Beverley Four Mile Honeymoon uranium mines. And just to add a little bit of icing on the cake, we've recently invested in a private company which is looking at in-situ recovery copper in South Australia from the oxide copper deposits through South Australia. To finish, a news flow. It's not super pretty, but it just lists what we're trying to do over the next quarters and well into 2025. And with AUD 33 million cash, we're well funded for this program and carrying forward. So thank you very much.
Happy to have a talk with you at the booth with our chairman and our Chief Operating Officer when you have some time. Thank you.