Next speaker is Greg Hall, who's the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Alligator Energy. Alligator Energy is a uranium developer bringing a new ISR project called Samphire in South Australia into production. Greg's a long-term veteran of the uranium industry, worked at Western Mining in Olympic Dam operations. He spent time with Rio Tinto, and he was actually the founding CEO of Toro, who we'll be presenting later on today as well. Greg, thank you for joining us. Over to you, and look forward to the update on Alligator Energy.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Thanks for your time, and look forward to speaking to you about our group and our company. I'll just share the screen and try to give you some insights into what we're doing. Is that visible?
That is visible.
Perfect. Okay. Look, thanks very much. Just to introduce your team and your viewers to Alligator Energy, we're a uranium group that's been around since 2010, mainly on the exploration side up until 2018, and we've now been expanding our portfolio to a developing project as well as some more advanced exploration. The company itself is established with a strong board, myself with the background of uranium you mentioned, Peter McIntyre, who was the CEO of Husab and found that deposit prior to its sale. Fiona Nicholls recently joined us about a year ago. Fiona has a long background with both ERA and with Rössing on the boards, and with ESG in particular within Rio Tinto and the energy division.
I particularly want to mention our Chief Operating Officer, Andrea Marsland-Smith, who was one of the more senior managers at Heathgate Resources for well over 15 years and has been instrumental in running those operations at Beverley and Four Mile. In particular, she has led the discovery team for Four Mile. So, Andrea has now recruited a full ISR team at the stage we need to at the moment, ready for field recovery trials for our project. The Samphire project itself is located in the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, just south of Whyalla, about 20 kilometres. A summary is provided there: a JORC resource of just under 20 million pounds so far. We've expanded that, in particular the indicated portion, during last year. An updated scoping study showing 1.2 million per annum production over 12 years.
We're now drilling extensively around that initial Blackbush deposit to expand that resource, and we've put out an exploration target range that I'll mention shortly around that. That target range is only based on around 42% of the known channels so far. The main aim this year is to get the field recovery trial underway, and I'll give an update on the status of that. We're anticipating running that through the third quarter. This is some key facts from our scoping study, the updated one we put out in December. Being ISR with very little ground impact, the capital cost is quite low, even with a 35% contingency and escalation factor. AUD 130 million, a quick payback at $75 at about a 42% IRR and after-tax AUD 250-260 million NPV. All in sustaining costs around the $33 mark.
It's not the cheapest, not the most expensive, and I'll give some reasons for that coming forward. But certainly, we want to expand the resource base, potentially lift this production rate, and certainly extend the life. So, we see lots of ways forward to helping this performance. Some of the reasons for the status of this scoping study and the good costs we have is we have a very shallow deposit. We're only drilling between 75-80 meter holes in general, sometimes a bit shallower. And we have excellent formation porosity from all the work that's done by our predecessor company and ourselves, and good leaching dynamics. Now, of course, we've got to test that during the field recovery trial in situ coming up during this year. The location near Whyalla offers a wonderful example of locally based workforce. We can have people driving in and out of Whyalla.
We have no fly-in, fly-out, no camp construction, only 25-30 kilometers for key infrastructure. So, the location offers that good economics as well for us. So, the scoping study update I mentioned, we're now drilling to expand that. Like any of these projects, with ISR in particular, you can modularize the plant, so it's easier to move from 1.2-2 million or even higher per year. So, we're intending to do that. We've got further exploration underway now around the Blackbush deposit. I'll talk about to do that. And we've got some efficiencies we need to establish. Because we've got hypersaline water, we're doing an RO plant and creating that fresher plume. It's not fresh, but it's just lower salinity in the area of the leaching. We don't need that for the leaching itself.
We can leach easily in the high salinity water, but you do need that during the IX process to make sure you get an efficiency in the IX plant. And I'll talk about that coming up. So, this is the Blackbush deposit. You can see the inferred in blue and the indicated in pink and the holes we've drilled through there. And so, this is the scope of the resource at the moment. We've started now drilling both to the left-hand side and the north, and in particular these purple circles out to the east, which we haven't had a chance to touch at all yet, where there's been some higher-grade intersections that we want to follow up and try to see if we've got these extensions to this resource. Now, every one of the holes you see here are above cutoff grade. The red are the higher-grade ones.
So, we are now targeting towards the east in these purple circles as well as extension to the west, north, and south of the existing project. So, that drilling commenced at the end of January. We'll have an update on the progress of that coming up shortly, but in particular by the middle of the year. The other good thing about this area, and this was found initially by the previous company and we've since expanded the footprint, is the known channels that potentially host uranium are easy to find. You've got a hard granite underneath, such as density contrast between the softer sediments and hard granite, that ground gravity works magnificently here. So, we're just about to start some ground gravity to in fact, we have started some ground gravity to the south of this channel area, and so that's going to extend that area further to the south.
So, we've really got 10-15 kilometers of distance with these channels that are involved. In particular, we've identified about 64 kilometers of known paleochannel. 10% are well explored. That's mostly Blackbush with a little bit of the Plumbush deposit. 32% are mineralised, and we've only taken our exploration target range from that initial 42% of known mineralised channels. We've been quite conservative on the low-end side with some optimism on the high-end side. So, you can see that already we've got some potential to grow this around the Blackbush deposit from the previous diagram, and we're now starting to look broader in the broader channel going forward. So, our aim here is to emulate other ISR projects around the world. Beverley started at GBP 1.2 million per year. That grew. It found Four Mile. That grew, now running at GBP 4.5 million a year.
You know that URE are restarting up at around GBP 1 million a year. They're already planning to expand beyond that. Boss Energy is a classic example that once you find a field, you find expansions to that field, and so they're now going to be restarting at about 2.5. So, we believe that we've got an economic and cash flow positive project now running through at even the long-term pricing of $75, and we'll be able to take this further forward. The field recovery trial, the pilot plant for this is a containerized, two major containers pilot plant with some other mobile facilities. That pilot plant's currently in wet commissioning in Adelaide, and so that'll be up on site in preparation for the field recovery trial to start. We have already purchased all the resin we need.
We've purchased a lot of the consumables we need, which are up at our yard in Whyalla. We're awaiting the retention lease approval on that. We're drafting the PEPR, which will be required to be lodged, and we're hopeful that we'll be constructing this around mid-year going forward into the third quarter. Now, this is an important part of the process because it will give the final proof to the significant bench-scale testing we've done that the recovery is there, that the process we need to use for the reverse osmosis and then the IX will work, and that we can get a clean eluate out at the end of this process.
The good thing about this is the pilot plant will be available to us to do field trials at other satellite deposits as we find them through this field, through this broader field, and that'll be of high value use for us going forward. Just to finish off, we've made a recent investment into Enviro Copper Ltd, which is a privately owned copper ISR company based in South Australia. It has access through its portfolio over the Kapunda Copper Fields and the Alford West Copper Project in Northern Yorke Peninsula. They are advancing the trials. They've done a lot of research into fractured rock aquifers in copper, a lot of modeling. They've engaged with both University of Adelaide and the CSIRO to do work. They've developed some different eluate, some different lixiviants, rather, to be able to extract the copper cleanly.
They're now doing their first field trial at Kapunda. Now, this has been funded by initially OZ Minerals, and now BHP have taken that over, and they're continuing to fund that Kapunda trial. They're not shareholders in the company, but they are after IP access. So, we have put in place an investment proposal to go forward to take up to 50.1% in a stepwise manner based on how the performance goes for this. And in particular, the funds we're putting in are to help advance the Alford West project, which is the one that's untouched. And that's what we're very interested in. Kapunda, of course, has old mining areas around it. It's great for a good trial, and it could be a potentially economic project. We think that Alford West will be the real test. But yeah, they're working well.
They've done their first push-pull test and now drilling the first ring for the circulation trial at Kapunda going forward. So, we're very excited about this. South Australia has massive oxide copper reserves. It's not known how many of them could be amenable to ISR, but certainly between ECL and others, they've started to do that work. So, we're excited about our investment here. It broadens us out into the energy mineral space along with the nickel cobalt we have in another project, which augments our uranium. And also, our team has uranium ISR experience in production, and Leon's team from Enviro Copper have the development and exploration experience. So, it's good augmentation of our combined experience. So, that's just a brief presentation, Andrew, to give your listeners a heads-up about what we're doing.
We have exploration both in Arnhem Land and greenfields in the Cooper Basin in sediments, which have the same uranium sediments as Beverley and Honeymoon. But I won't go into those in detail except if you've got a question or so.
Thank you. Thank you, Greg. Thank you for the overview. Greg, look, given your background and expertise, a question that would be fascinating, I think, for the audience to get your insights on is around the cost structures of these in-situ leach operations. And what is it that drives the different all-in-sustaining costs of different operations? I mean, you see numbers ranging, I think, from sort of the low numbers down, perhaps in the high 20s, up to numbers in the mid-40s for an all-in-sustaining cost for an in-situ leach uranium operation. What are the key drivers behind those differences?
Well, look, depth of drilling is a key one because, as even in our area, the ongoing capital every year you put in for the drilling is quite significant. So, depth of drilling has a bearing there, and that's important. The cost of consumables, acid and resin, are big drivers. Lixiviants to a certain extent as well. So, you can have that variation around the areas. If you have a high capital cost for infrastructure, for example, if you've got to do 300-kilometer power lines or more, then that puts a legacy cost issue on the project as well. So, they're the sort of key drivers. Generally, the labor cost is not super high. It can be managed. But those are the sort of key drivers to these sort of projects.
Now, I will temper this with the fact that I'm experienced in underground and open-pit uranium mining, and Andrew is very experienced in ISR mining. So, that's what I've learned over the time working with her so far.
Yeah, OK. And I'd imagine the grade of the deposit is the key determinant, then, of the amount of acid that gets consumed. So, you know, higher-grade deposits, perhaps lower consumables. Is that right?
In fact, the consumption of acid can depend a lot on what are the other deleterious and other elements that are in either your groundwater or in the sands. So, uranium leaches quite effectively even in a not a very low acidic environment. It'll leach in an alkaline environment as well. So, uranium can leach quite readily.
But your acid consumption, if you've got pyrite, if you've got some carbonates, if you've got some carbons, if you've got lignites, they can be a big consumer of acid. So, to keep that low pH that you need for the lixiviant to work properly, if you've got other elements in there that consume the acid, that can be a drama. In general, higher grade is great because you don't need to start new wellfields so frequently. So, the number of holes you drill can be impacted by the grade of the material.
Yeah. Back to the Samphire project. So, you've obviously got a fair bit of exploration upside around the ground there, which you're drilling out now. How big do you need the resource to get there, do you think, before you've got something which is then a commercial scale?
The current resource we have is commercial scale.
So, when Beverley started, they started on around a 25 million pound resource, roughly. When Boss first started to put their plans in place, they were about 30 or 35. So, we're at about 20. We can increase that a little, but we've got an economic project already. We know that the cash flow will be there to be established. We're certainly getting the nuclear utility interest. We've met with many of them already. Many are very keen to, let's say, do some even early-stage conditional contracts. We're establishing a marketing plan this year. Myself and Kevin Smith, our marketing agent, went on in a rush to get into that, but nonetheless, we are getting prepared. So, the current-size resource, which is 1.2 million pounds over 12 years, will give us significant cash flow. And while we're heading towards that, we're expanding the resource.
Certainly, we'll be moving straight into a feasibility post the field recovery trial. By the time we get well into that, we would have had at least a year and a half or so of drilling and expanding resource. Certainly, the existing resource will be satisfactory, but we know we're going to expand it.
Yeah, great. The field recovery trial, the pilot plant you're building, how long does that run for, and what are the sort of results you're looking for from that?
Yeah. Well, it's about a 3- to 4-month duration. We've got three rings we're drilling, and we've made the rings quite tight, so a maximum 10-meter radius. The reason there is you don't need full-size production rings to do this test. We know the permeability, the porosity. We've done those tests separately anyway.
This is about the chemistry in the ground and creating the right conditions to extract cleanly through the plant. So, first of all, we want to be able to make sure that the leaching we've seen in our bench scale, which is up to 96%. Once you've got the lixiviant in contact with the uranium, we've been getting 96% leaching. You don't always get the lixiviant in contact because you have preferential flow paths in a ring. So, let's get a test of, OK, what's the good leaching dynamics we're getting out of that? The second is, can we effectively create this plume? I mean, just in the modeling of our hydrogeology, we believe we certainly can because it's very slow-moving groundwater. Can we create this plume circulating that and therefore get a lower salinity into the IX plant?
The issue here is that the sites on the resins can be taken by salt instead of uranium. So, you get a less efficient—you don't get zero throughput. You get a less efficient throughput at higher salinities. So, we want to make sure that RO process works, and we can get the eluate out cleanly at the end with the washing of the uranium out of the IX plant. A clean eluate is the third critical factor. So, they're the three main ones I'd mentioned.
Yeah, great. I think that issue about the salts is something that those listeners who are familiar with Boss Energy and the Honeymoon project, it was one of the things that caused them issues in their previous iteration, which I believe they're now preconditioning and sorting that issue out. Any insights you've got on?
Well, they had a different plant in the past. It was solvent extraction, and the solvent extraction type plant is much more difficult in those conditions. And now they've moved forward to an IX plant, which is exactly what we have. So, the resins, the more salt-tolerant resins work in saline water. And for example, you know if our salts are sort of like 40,000-45,000 parts per million, we don't need to bring them down to fresh. We can bring them to well under 18,000, say down to 15,000 salts, and that'll effectively operate the resins will operate in that level.
Yeah, OK. Greg, look, that's been terrific. Thank you so much for your time this morning and giving us the update on Alligator Energy and the Samphire project. And good luck with the drilling that's going on at the moment and the pilot plant trial.
We'll certainly all be watching with a lot of interest.
Thank you very much, Andrew, and all the best. Cheers.
Cheers, Greg.