Alligator Energy. If you jump two slides, please. Alligator Energy is an early-stage developer and explorer in uranium and energy metals. We have a very strong commitment to our stakeholders, our shareholders, and we've been working with indigenous groups for a long time and our pastoralists. Our aim is to both advance our projects and discover new projects going forward. The next slide, please. The strategy of the group is to really advance our Samphire Uranium project, south of Whyalla, which I'll mainly talk about today. We have other exploration projects, and you'll see we're in the South Australian Northern Territory corridor, which is the area where both sides of politics have approved uranium mines, both federally and state. Five uranium mines have been operating in South Australia.
We have nickel cobalt in Northern Italy, which I won't talk about today. Happy to engage separately on that. We're looking at other acquisitions and have been for a while. We have a very strong strategic relationship with a major global trading group, Traxys, which help us with our uranium marketing and other opportunities. If we go forward. The Samphire Uranium project's located 20 kilometers south of Whyalla. This was discovered some 14 years ago. Advanced through initial work, but not developed. We've now pulled together a resource of 80 million pound with about 10.5 million pound indicated. Based on that, we've done now a scoping study with a schedule producing 10 million pound over 12 years in what seems to be a very effective and globally competitive in situ recovery project.
For those who don't know, in situ recovery is solution mining. You're not physically mining the rock in either open pit or underground mine. You're basically doing a series of rings of holes where you put down circulate the groundwater that contains in the sands that contain uranium, and then you add in leachate to dissolve it out. The basic outcomes of this study are very good. We've got a 1 million pound per year production profile. A low capital cost, AUD 130 million. An all-in sustaining cost of around $30 a pound USD. We talk about USD per pound in costs because the uranium price is in USD per pound.
A post-tax NPV of AUD 150 million at this stage with some good opportunity to improve that and a payback period of 3.5 years. Overall, we generate over AUD 900 million cash from this project and get a forecast net cash of AUD 300 million. Just going forward. There's a bit more detail, and I won't go through on the table on the economics here, but a couple of key points. In situ recovery mining is an effective uranium technique and for that reason is one of the cheapest in the world. Up until 2021, 2022, 60% of the world's uranium came from ISR mining operations. Where we are located just south of Whyalla and our particular situation is quite advantageous.
The physical area of the mine and the deposits are quite shallow. They're only 60 to 80 meters deep where the sands, the encapsulated sands are. We've got excellent formation porosity, which you need for the to allow the groundwater containing the lixiviants to move through and extract the uranium. We've got quite high leaching dynamics. Dissolving the uranium in these sands is a bit like sugar in hot coffee. It dissolves and comes out with the fluids. Because of the location, we don't have fly-in, fly-out. We don't have a camp. There's a very experienced mining and services business area around Whyalla and Port Augusta, which services Olympic Dam, as well as the OZ Minerals projects and also the Beverley Uranium, ISR uranium mine to the northeast.
We've got quite a low cost of infrastructure, only 20-30 kilometer power line and water pipelines. We move to the next slide. This shows a diagrammatic view of how what in situ recovery in uranium looks like. 60-80 meters to our sand layers. They're confined layers with clays at the top and the bottom. The uranium's formed over many millions of years, just solidifying around the sand grains. What we're doing is reversing the process. We circulate the saline groundwater, we dose it with a lixiviant. Only 2 liters of lixiviant to every 10,000 liters of groundwater circulated. Dissolves the uranium, brings it through a processing plant where we extract that on the resins and pull the uranium oxide off in a clean manner, ultimately to be calcined and packed as uranium oxide in drums.
The at the moment, the resource we have really is restricting the throughput. We're now drilling again now. We anticipate to increase that resource. If we do, we have the major components of this plant sized to about 1.2 million pounds per annum, which means for very little more capital, we're going to get a lot more throughput. Excuse me. The important thing to understand about ISR mining is you do often start them around this size, 1-1.2 million pounds. Beverley Uranium Mine, which started 25 years ago and has been in continuous operation, started around 1.2 million pounds. The Peninsula ISR operation in Wyoming and the Ur-Energy operation there all started around that size. You can modularize it.
You can expand production as you expand and find new areas of uranium by doubling the capacity in a modular fashion. We move to the next slide. You're seeing a layout of the initial resource that we have now in the Blackbush project area. We have full access and agreements over this area to take the project forward. We've schematically shown the sort of mining sequence through the ground there. The important thing about this is we have expandability to the north and to the west and to the east of these, this area where we are, and I'll show that on another diagram shortly. We move forward, please. We've put out now an estimated five-year schedule to move into production by year four and five. This year 1 is 2023.
We'll be undertaking a field recovery trial. That's the FRT there. That's where we do just two or three trial rings of holes, where we extract uranium out of the central hole, and we allow the lixiviant to fall down on the outside hole. You're basically doing small cylinders of the ore at a time. We'll be doing a trial of that later this year, and our approval documents are being finalized now. We're already drilling again on the site, and we'll be drilling right through. We've expanded the resource from 40 million pounds to 80 million pounds in the last six months. We're intending to expand that again this year. We've been talking to nuclear utilities already, and I'll talk about the uranium market shortly.
We've been talking to them already because there is now a long forward-looking curve that nuclear utilities are looking for replacement contracts. We need to be in the discussions now because potentially by year two, when we're in feasibility, we could put early offtake contracts in place subject to financing, subject to approval. We have the approval process there and then the rest of the key tasks we've got to go forward. This puts Samphire project probably around where Boss Energy was, and many of you will know Boss Energy. They're currently in construction for a similar ISR mine at Honeymoon in South Australia. This puts us about 2020, where they were in 2020. We go forward, please.
There's a number of next steps we're doing this year to let everyone know. A pilot field recovery trial is the most important step. We've done a massive amount of bench scale test work using cores pulled out of the ground from the ore horizons using the entrained saline water, and that's found good recovery options and given us good technical factors for the operation of the plant. There's nothing like trialing an in situ. Nearly every ISR mine in the world does an in situ trial. We need that to feed into a feasibility study. We've got a massive amount of ongoing stakeholder engagement, both in the Whyalla township, the Whyalla region, with our pastoralists, and we have an NTMA agreement with the local indigenous group.
We're continuing some studies on infrastructure and other technical aspects of the project, as well as expanding the resource and of course, looking for resource expansion. You'll see where the Blackbush west and east deposits are that we showed on the previous diagram. We've got expandability around that immediately in these channels nearby. As well as that, there's nine palaeochannels determined by ground gravity to the south and extending to the south that we're now working on getting on the ground to explore with an additional prospect, Plumbush, which has had no work done on it since about 2011. We go to the next slide. One of the key opportunities... Just back one. Thank you.
One of the key opportunities we have is in situ recovery is really just pumps and tanks, and so it's a very low power draw. This project would only draw at this size about 1.2 MW. While we'll size a power line for 4 or 5 MW, it means that we've got the imminent possibility of using renewable power for this project. There is already a number of renewable power projects within the Whyalla region. There's a number of major international players now looking to increase that renewable spread based on the new hydrogen hub that the state government is implementing to the north of Whyalla. We've got that potential because of the low consistent power draw. Distance from Whyalla may allow us to use electric vehicles and light trucks just for servicing with people and logistics.
We're linking into, we tend to link into the work being done with on-highway electric prime movers, which OZ Minerals and Qube are doing with a company called Janus Electric. They're doing a trial of roll in, roll out battery packs in prime movers to transport logistics to the north of the state. We've got an opportunity, if we start early with this, that we could set up a near carbon-free energy project, and we'll be working on that going forward. If we jump another slide, please. This is a diagram of the field recovery trial, which incorporates those red large dots. The 3 trial rings, one expanded up the top there, which will show the trial we're intending to do in the latter part of this year.
The pink monitoring wells around that are there to monitor and make sure that the lixiviant and the material stays within the confines of the rings that we're mining. This is a very controllable thing with ISR mining because you understand the hydrogeology. The groundwater moves exceedingly slowly, and basically after you've mined an area, you just run groundwater through until it dilutes down any remaining lixiviant, which then essentially reacts with the surrounding calcium and basically disappears. We are not allowed to have any long-term impact on the groundwater, saline or not. We go to the next slide. We're doing a significant amount of work on ESG in our company.
We've had more than 40 indigenous employees in our Alligator Rivers area. We're using an indigenous-owned drilling company last year and this year up there. I'm not really talking about our exploration today just due to the time, but we are doing a significant program up there again this year. In Samphire, we're doing a significant amount of work in improving the rehabilitation in sites that we're drilling. We're rehabilitating all the time now with our drill holes. We're doubling the bush density quite successfully, and we've actually won a commendation for the Premier's Awards in Energy and Mining on that work.
We've recently negotiated a full agreement with the indigenous group over the Cooper Basin, which is our Big Lake uranium project, which is pure greenfields looking for new ISR fields. With that, I'd like to thank the viewers and Tim for letting us get a talk going forward about Alligator. In terms of the uranium market, I'm happy to answer some questions around that. We see this project coming on in a 4-5-year timeframe, which really is suiting the time when a lot of Western utilities are ramping down their use of Russian material. We see ourselves coming on at just the right time for the market. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Craig. quite a few questions here. Now the big one is uranium seems to get overlooked when we're talking about kind of renewable energy. Why do you think this is the case?
Well, it's not being overlooked internationally. You'll see that the U.K. announced this week they want to expand their nuclear from 15% to 25% of generation with a big emphasis on small modular reactors. Small modular reactors being constructed now near Toronto and also in the U.S. Many of these small modular reactors are load following. In other words, you link them up to renewable projects so that when renewables are generating a lot of power, the SMRs can be dialed down. When renewables are down at nighttime, for example, the SMRs come up. They actually internationally, nuclear is being related to renewable power in a very, very big way. In Australia, it's not there yet. Let's see.
I think you'll see state governments and federal governments have a serious look at the small modular reactors as they start to be commercially operable by the latter part of this decade.
There's a question here about people, right? It's a good question. Can you kind of give us a brief overview of your kind of experience in the uranium industry? Then what's the market like at the moment in terms of getting good technical people involved?
Yeah. We've been recruiting for. We did a major capital raising in 2021. We were recruiting from that time through. Our Chief Operating Officer, Andrea Marsland-Smith, she was one of my senior managers at the Heathgate Beverley mine for about 15 years. She's got significant in situ recovery experience. I've managed uranium mines in open pit and underground, but not ISR. We've now attracted a team under Andrea to develop this project and take it forward, and we're training new people. We actually have our first graduate, and we'll put more on soon to train people up in this area, and we're about to make another couple of key appointments.
Recruitment takes time in the current market, we are linked through to some specialty engineering and advisory firms in the Wyoming and Colorado region, where they've been operating ISR for many years. That's because there isn't such a big base load of engineering and other expertise in Australia. We're certainly recruiting, and we're certainly training people up.
Traxys. You mentioned Traxys. A few of our online viewers would understand that they also undertake offtake agreements. Are they part of that equation?
No. We've got an agreement with Traxys where they're purely our marketing agent to help us put in contracts between Alligator and the utilities directly. It's not an offtake agreement. It offers other benefits. For example, if we're commissioning a project like Samphire, and we're ramping up, and we need a little bit extra uranium to provide the first deliveries of uranium, then Traxys trade between 10 million-15 million pounds in uranium a year. We can access some of that to feed into our deliveries. We could also do some co-bidding with Traxys whereby if we're producing 1.2 million pound a year, we could bid on 1.5 million pound a year of contracts and deliver a combination of produced and traded uranium.
Not only that, if and when, potentially during early 2024, we put in the first offtake agreements in place, Traxys have committed to work with us to put in up to $15 million into our feasibility and pre-development work. We've got a strong relationship with them in many ways. I've known the key players in Traxys for many years in my previous uranium marketing work. It presents great opportunity for a company like ours.
Looking at the CapEx, it looks pretty low relative to the, to the resource. Is that because of the process, the mining process?
Yes, correct. The... you're really dealing with pumps, tanks, header tanks, IX plant, which is quite small. So the direct capital is quite low. In fact, that capital figure of AUD 130 million includes 40% contingency and escalation factor. That's because it's at a scoping stage, so we quote the major capital items, and then you do percentages of things like pipework, electrics. While it's an early-stage estimate, we've been quite cautious about making sure it's conservative