My name's Jason Beckton from Baker Young. Our first presenter, the recently promoted Andrea , will talk about Alligator Resources. Thank you.
Jason, thank you. Today, I'd like to take you through the Alligator story. We're just on the precipice of de-risking a project near Whyalla, through some pilot trials. We're talking uranium, and we're talking in situ recovery, which is solution mining, similar to oil and gas extraction, using a series of wells to extract the uranium out of the ground. We'll walk through that as we go through this presentation. In particular, our flagship project is the Samphire U ranium project. It's located in South Australia. Our other project that's key to us is the Big Lake Uranium project, which is a greenfield uranium discovery late last year. We think there's probably a new province there to be widely explored in terms of sedimentary uranium, and similarly, another ISR province. We'll just focus on the Samphire U ranium project in the next couple of slides.
We have been in the previous sort of 10 years working in the Alligator Rivers region, particularly looking for high-grade uranium, similar to the Canadian deposits. We're now focusing on Samphire in terms of this is potentially going to be the next uranium mine in South Australia that will be permitted. We've just recently had a successful capital raise, around AUD 17 million, and now we have cash in the bank, around AUD 30 million. That gives us a good runway to do all of the studies that we need to do in the forthcoming 6 to 12 months. The Samphire p roject is near a town called Whyalla, which is in South Australia. It's about 20 kilometers south of Whyalla. Whyalla is a steel town and services a lot of the iron ore mining operations there and has a lot of services that we can tap into there.
We're not considering that the mining of this deposit in the future will be a FIFO operation. It's certainly going to be something that's of benefit to the local community of Whyalla. The Plumbush Prospect is a small prospect that will be our satellite deposit to Blackbush Deposit. Blackbush is what we've been focusing on in the last three years. As I said earlier, it's in situ recovery project. It's similar to the projects that you may have heard of, Boss Resources' Honeymoon Project, Heathgate Resources, Beverley Four Mile and Beverley North ISR projects. It's all part of the same host rock system, and Samphire is the next one off the rank. Just focusing on the Blackbush Deposit, we have now 18 million pounds of resource that has been delineated over the last three years.
That's enough to support a 12-year mine life at about 1.2 million pounds per annum production. Beverley Uranium Deposit started off that way at around 20 million pounds, 16 million pounds produced over 12 years. These types of ISR projects, it's a typical startup project. At today's long-term uranium prices, it's economic today, so we could get financing for that as it is right now in terms of the metrics. We've been working on the integrity of the deposit such that we can start planning future well fields in terms of feeding that into definitive feasibility study. You'll see the picture on the right. You'll see some purple-green areas, and that shows the Paleo-channels , which are old riverbeds where the uranium sits. The uranium sits around sand grains. We put wells into that and extract the uranium from the sand, and the sand doesn't move.
Those channels that you see are our host rock, and we have defined those over the last three years quite well, as you can see by geophysical methods. Blackbush is the deposit to the north, and we have Plumbush to the south. Blackbush has been drilled between 50 m and 25 m centers and has come up with 18 million pounds. Plumbush drilled 200 m to 400 m centers is probably around 2 million to 3 million pounds at the moment. Once we start pulling in those drilling centers, this type of deposit usually starts then to produce or define more pounds because the sedimentary uranium is in what's called Roll Fronts, which are probably between about 10 m to 25 m wide. It's hard to get them, but that's why we need to get the drill spacing down to define the next resource in Plumbush.
There's five kilometers between Blackbush and Plumbush also, and there's no drilling in between those areas. The historical drilling there at Plumbush too, there's some really good mine-grade intersections there. We know there's good potential in Plumbush and to the south. I mentioned the scoping study, that this project's financials are robust as it is right now, the long-term prices. We're currently sitting around AUD 78 a pound in the long-term price for uranium. If we consider looking at maybe lifting the production rate to about 1.5, if we can realize some more resource south of Blackbush, then we add about another AUD 150 million, probably AUD 100 million to the NPV if we look at about a 1.5 million pound production rate with the full mine.
Just stepping back, the area wider, we've got a great tenement package that actually encapsulates all of the potential host rocks in the region to host uranium. Not only have we got the Blackbush Deposit, we've got the Plumbush Deposit, and to the south of that, we've got an additional tranche of paleo-channel system that's barely been drilled. We've done a study around what we think the potential pound range is in this system. We think it's between around 15 million to 75 million pounds of uranium in the total system, and only 30% of this system has been drill-tested so far. We've got at least 70% of this system to test over the next 5 to 10 years, and we're going to start that exercise early in the new year, pending just our normal approval processes for access.
I mentioned that we are de-risking the project in terms of doing a field trial. A Field Recovery T rial is a very prudent step to do in these types of projects. They're done all around the world. Projects that don't take this step sideways to do this work often end up in trouble when they go to full mining because ISR is solution mining. You can't see the rocks. You can't do the grade control as well. You really have to rely on the chemistry coming out and react to that as you're mining. It's a very reactive mining way of mining. A Field Recovery Trial is something that we do to make sure that we can de-risk and understand what's going on as we go into a full mine. This trial will be conducted in Q4 to Q1 next year.
We've already fabricated the plant off-site, and we're just waiting for the last lot of approvals so that we can construct on-site in a couple of months. The trial's only going to go to three to four months. We want to test fast and understand fast so we can get through to mining lease approvals and interfeasibility study. We've got a good ISR team. A lot of them have come from the projects that I showed earlier. We've got a good experienced hydrogeological and process team that will run this plant. I myself, 25 years in in situ recovery in particular. This is just a picture of the plant. We've modularized it, and it's all ready to go. We're looking forward to pulling it together once we get final approvals. This is our Big Lake project. I mentioned before we've had a new discovery late last year.
We picked up these tenements thinking that this area is actually analogous to other in situ recovery projects that are in Kazakhstan, Wyoming, and Texas, where you have an association of uranium in sediments above hydrocarbon basins. In South Australia, we have a big hydrocarbon basin called the Moomba Basin, and we've got a large tenement holding there, working for the last two years to try to understand where to actually drill. Our first drilling program in August last year hit some very good intersections of thick widths of uranium and nothing that I've ever seen in my career before when you go to a new province and drill sedimentary uranium. This is definitely a drill result of note.
We went out earlier this year to try to follow up with a follow-up program, but the Central Australian floods thwarted our efforts there, and we've had to retreat, wait for the waters to subside, and then we'll be out there again in October or November this year, pending the flood waters. Nonetheless, we'll also be out there next year working at this project and seeing how large the system is and continuing exploration in this region. Just to summarize, having trouble with my slides here. The next couple of quarters is busy. We've got our Field Recovery Trial approvals just coming to an end. We'll be constructing the Field Recovery Trial plant on-site in the next month or two, then into operations. All of the extractive work, the recovery work from the ground, the processing parameters will all go into a feasibility study, which is about to commence.
As soon as we're through this approval with the Field Recovery Trial, we'll be into our mining lease approvals, which for a uranium mine takes around four to five years. We've put ourselves in good stead because we've just gone through a three-year approval to get this pilot plant in tow. We've worked through a lot of the bottlenecks for the state government. We think we're in a good pathway to have a more speedy mine lease approval. A lot of the technical information has been worked through, and we're in a good place to have a good springboard for a successful mining lease approval. I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks, Jason.
Thank you, Andrea. My personal account, you always like to see a company worth 10% of Boss Energy. People know exactly what they're doing in an energy-friendly state and South.