Thank you very much, Paul, and thank you to RRS for the opportunity to talk to you. So I'll introduce Alligator Energy to you today and our key project, the Samphire Uranium Project just south of Whyalla here in South Australia. I won't cover some of our exploration ground, but I'm happy to talk. We have a booth here with myself and our principal geologist, so we talk about some of our exploration up in Arnhem Land, where we've been operating for more than 10-12 years and had more than 40 Indigenous employees working with us, and also some new greenfields exploration right over the top of the Cooper Basin here in South Australia, looking in the sediments at the top of the Cooper for uranium, because there were a lot of similarities to other uranium deposits in South Australia. So I'm going to talk about Samphire.
That photo there is a picture of our Samphire project just 20 km south of Whyalla. I have a disclaimer there, but also a map of where our key operations are. We're in the Northern Territory, in Arnhem Land, as I said, a Big Lake Uranium Project in the Cooper Basin in northern South Australia, and our Samphire project near Whyalla. We also have a nickel cobalt exploration project in northern Italy in the Piedmont region there. A snapshot of the company. I won't go through it in detail. I want to point out the experience on our board.
I have a long background in uranium mine management, but also in uranium marketing with nuclear fuels long-term contracts, and I'm not going to add a lot of comment to what both Brendan Bradley and Duncan Craib said this morning about the uranium business, other than to say this is the third time I've been through a uranium boom, if we'll call it that. It's a very solid underlying demand this time, which is wonderful to see, and a change in sentiment in terms of the globe with clean nuclear power. That's driving forward nuclear utilities to really pinpoint their source of supply anywhere from three to eight years out now. So as an early-stage development group, we are getting requests for proposals from major nuclear utilities to propose uranium supply going four to five to six years out. So it's very much on the approach now.
Peter McIntyre is on our board. He was the head of Extract Resources, which found the Husab uranium deposit in Namibia, which was on-sold to the Chinese and is now operating. Fiona Nicholls was the head of ESG for Rio Tinto Energy Division and was on the board of Rössing Uranium and ERA here in South Australia. Sorry, here in Australia. Dr. Andrea Marsland-Smith is our chief operating officer. Andrea has more than 15 years of senior management experience at Heathgate Resources, the Beverley and Four Mile uranium projects here in South Australia, where she's essentially undertaken every management operation to do with in-situ recovery uranium.
And Andrea is the one that's been responsible for building our very strong future production team. So the Samphire Uranium Project, 20 km south of Whyalla, you can see the town of Whyalla in the top right corner. This is pastoral country.
It's on flat-lying ground to the west of Spencer Gulf. A summary there with a JORC resource of nearly GBP 20 million already, most of which is indicated, which allows us to do the scoping study, which we've put out in December last year. We're resource drilling again now. We're extending that resource as we speak, and recently put an announcement out on the areas we're doing that in. We put an exploration target range out in December to try to give the market an idea of the breadth of our potential here, and I'll show you some plans on that going forward. We've gone from a very pessimistic target to a nice optimistic target, and that's only on 42% of our known palaeochannels that host the uranium.
We're in the final stages of approval for a retention lease for a field recovery trial to do the in-situ test of three rings of solution mining. We've done all the bench-scale testing. All of the work so far has been excellent. This is to take it to the final stage of de-risking the project and leading straight into a feasibility. This is the results from our scoping study we put out in December last year. In-situ recovery mining, I'll show you a diagram of it shortly to describe the technique for those who are unfamiliar. It does not mine the ground, does not crush or grind the ground. It is purely and simply identifying where there are compacted sands, where uranium has formed and solidified out of solution, generally coming from the granites underneath in this area where we're talking about.
Therefore, you drill a ring or series of holes. You circulate the known existing groundwater, which is hypersaline in this case. You add in a lixiviant. You dissolve the uranium. You bring it out in solution. Essentially, you're dissolving it like sugar in coffee. You extract it through a process plant on the surface and you keep that circulation going. You don't add water in. You don't remove water. It's a closed-loop system. You're not building big mills. You're not building a lot of concrete in the plant. You've got pumps, tanks, chemistry sets, labs, etc. It's a very efficient way of solution mining existing ground without moving the ground. It's been used in uranium throughout the world. Kazakhstan, all their uranium production is from in-situ recovery mining, and they're about 35% of the world's production.
Here in South Australia, Heathgate Resources have been operating ISR for 25 years. Wyoming and Texas, as Duncan from Boss referred to this morning, have been mining with in-situ recovery uranium for many, many decades. So it's a common technique, and it's efficient. It's quick. It's quite cheap by relative terms. It doesn't get a great extraction. You generally get about 70% of the extraction of the uranium out of the ground, but that's a very effective technique for the very little impact you have.
So our project, a good payback, GBP 260 million, even at the small-scale GBP 1.2 million per annum starter project we've identified over 12 years. So that's a significant after-tax net present value at that point, and at a reasonable cost. GBP 33 all in sustaining cost is comparable to other ISR projects. This is a diagram of the in-situ recovery process.
You've got, generally where uranium forms, flat-lying sediments of some types. At some depth, in our case 60 m-80 m, you have compacted sands, which have been old palaeochannels, and you'll see a plan view shortly of that. Those palaeochannels have been incised into the underlying granites, and the underlying granites are the source of the uranium. So the groundwaters here are 30 million-40 million years old. They're very ancient saline groundwaters, and they've been slowly moving across the surface of the granite, bringing uranium out and into solution, and therefore into deposits. Now, the opportunity for us is, being so close to Whyalla, we're not flying and flying out. We've already got a small local workforce working with us. We have no requirement to do hundreds of kilometers of power and water line. They're about 25 km.
We don't need to build an airstrip, a camp, etc. We've got the opportunity to expand the project, and I'll talk about the resource drilling we're doing now and the potential scope we have. We've also got opportunity to improve the process. We need to do, with a reverse osmosis plant and preconditioning of the groundwater, to bring the hypersaline waters down from about 40,000 salts down to about 12 or so. So you don't need fresh, but you just reduce them. That allows the salt-tolerant IX resins to work more effectively. And so we need to test that process as part of this field trial. That's exactly what Boss are doing and did with their test process. So nothing super new in this, but it is always a unique environment when you're doing almost like remote mining through solution mining.
This is a planned view of the Blackbush Deposit, the primary deposit we've been working on. We've enlarged the deposit but lifted the integrity of it a lot. So the blue is the inferred resource envelope. The pink is the indicated resource envelope. And we lifted this to a level that allowed us to do a scoping study with a schedule of around 12 years, producing GBP 1.2 million per year at the peak rate. And that gives that cash flow, NPV, and payback that you saw on the slide that I pointed out before.
So now that we've really, in 18 months, with a relatively new team, most who have been there only 18 months themselves, we've enhanced that resource and got the integrity we need to go forward with the studies. Now we're expanding that. So to the north, we've already expanded it slightly over last year.
We're doing more drilling to the north, straight up. To the west, to the left on this diagram, we're getting some good intersections and expanding that out. And to the east, too. To the right-hand side, those purple circles there are where we've identified some high-grade hits. Every historical hole, and this area was drilled by the previous company back in the 2000s, every historical hole shown here is above cut-off grade already. But those red ones are high-grade zones where we're trying to find other unique roll fronts of uranium in those areas that have come through the sediments in solution and deposited out in a better grade. So we're doing that work now. We'll have some initial results out from this.
We've got a break in drilling coming up shortly for the pastoralist to do his lambing season for about a month, and then post that we'll have some results come out. Well, this will culminate in an updated resource by the end of the year. Now, to show you the potential we have in this area, on this diagram, the Blackbush West and East projects are what I showed you on that previous diagram. So that's about 10% of the known palaeochannels currently. Now, we are already to the south of Plumbush there. We're already doing ground gravity surveys to depict where the future palaeochannels down there exist.
Because we've got a density contrast between the incised channels filled with sands and sediments and the granite underneath, the ground gravity system works very well. They're also quite shallow, as I said, only up to 80 m deep.
So we already have around 7 km-8 km of channels distance, and we're going to extend that to about 15 km. But as I said, 10% so far of good exploration in the Blackbush and partly the Plumbush area. We know that 32% of the additional of these channels are mineralised. They've got single intersections in them or small intersections. 60%, no drilling. So we really have a good opportunity to expand. And to give an example of how this tends to work, Heathgate started with around GBP 20 million-GBP 25 million in 1998. They started at GBP 1.5 million a year.
They're now GBP 4.5 million a year, and they've still got GBP 50 million- GBP 70 million- GBP 80 million in front of them. The same in Wyoming, key projects like UR Energy, like Peninsula, they all start around that GBP 1 million-GBP 1.2 million-GBP 1.5 million and then move up.
The same in Texas. The same in Kazakhstan. So it's a wonderful technique where you can start with a good-sized economic starter project and expand the work from there. Now, an important part of the process for us is we're waiting on a Retention Lease approval to initiate a Field Recovery Trial. And what this is, is essentially a trial of three rings of holes to circulate fluids, do the solution mining, bring the pregnant liquor solution containing uranium to the surface, put it through a small containerized pilot plant, and produce a clean uranium eluate.
We don't go through to a full uranium concentrate product. We don't need to. Once you've got a clean eluate, the steps of drying, calcining, and product packing are very standard for projects like ours. So the map in the middle shows the three rings.
That small square, the pilot plant, is about 120 m by 40 m wide. The pilot plant depiction is there with the storage tanks for the final product. The process pilot plant, containerized, is being constructed. It's under factory acceptance testing here in Adelaide to be shipped up by late April to Whyalla. We're very close to getting on the ground to do what is a very significant de-risking of the project. The bench-scale testing that we've done through CORES and work with ANSTO has shown good recovery once you get the fluid in contact with solutions.
We want to now see, do we get that contact? Can we get the solutions out? Make sure it gets through the IX plant in a clean manner to get it into a final product. That's about to kick off in the third quarter this year.
Now, I'll finish off just quickly on a recent investment we've made. Along with uranium, we have the brownfields and greenfields exploration in Arnhem Land. We have greenfields at Big Lake and the Cooper. We have the developing project at Samphire. But we are a big believer in other broader opportunities. Because we have a good team with good ISR production experience in our group, we've done an investment into the company EnviroCopper. It's a private group that have been doing detailed analysis work on potential ISR mining of copper projects within South Australia, initially at the Kapunda project and at the Alford West and Northern Yorke Peninsula.
And the key thing about that is they've done a lot of legwork. They've got money from BHP, which is going into the ground for the test work, Kapunda. We've given some funds. We've acquired 8% of the company.
We've got the right to go up to 51% if we wish to do the trials and initiate trials at the Alford West. Now, this is an example of where we believe there's a great opportunity for technique in ISR going forward. Not only are we going to be developing it within our Samphire project and our other projects as we discover them or acquire them, but we think there's some great opportunity in other minerals. Happy to take any more questions at our booth in the coming end of the day today. Thank you very much for your time.