Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's great to be back again to give you a bit of a summary of where we've got to with our Cangallo deposit, which is a new porphyry discovery, probably the first greenfields discovery certainly in Peru, maybe in South America for the last 20 years. For those of you who haven't been to Peru, I'd recommend you do so. Peru is a great place to visit. It's got great history, great restaurants. Their food's fantastic. I'd use Chilean wines instead of Peruvian, but apart from that, it's a great place to be and a great place to work. I'd put it on your bucket list as some place to visit. What you can see on the screen is a photo shot of our Cangallo prospect. There's a lot in this photo in many ways.
You can see the extensive cover that we have in the pampa, which is most of the area you can see. There's a few small outcrops poking through, and they all have copper in them. From our early work and from our early sampling, we knew that we were potentially onto something. The dark blue in the background is the Pacific Ocean. We're very close to the ocean. That's an important point and I'll label location as I go on because we think that's a major factor in the cost structure that we have or that we could have at this particular deposit. So a great location and lots of work to go. There's a drill rig in there. We are actually working. Usual disclaimer, which I'll let you go through. You could ask, why Peru? What's that got to offer?
Peru is elephant country for copper, and copper's been in the news lately. It's sitting at, some people say, record-high prices, which it is, but I think they're justifiable high prices given the electrification that's going on around the world and the amount of copper that's going to go into these new data centers, etc. Copper's a great commodity to be in and just read up on BHP's latest annual, and they'll be saying the same things. In our area, we have a lot of major mines owned by a lot of the major companies. They're looking at this country as being acceptable in terms of sovereign risk. And at this stage, there is none. Mining in Peru is a major component of their income. It's going to last there for a long time.
Of particular note here may be Tia Maria, which is close to the coast, although it's probably 20, 30 km in, whereas where we're sitting, we're within 5- 10 km, which is much closer. Tia Maria is currently being developed by Southern Copper, and it has some similar analogies to what we have. They're looking at oxidized copper and heap leaching to keep their costs down, which is sort of what we're looking at in the top 250- 300 m of our section. The areas in green are the areas that we're focused on, Cangallo being up on the top left-hand side. As I said, I keep banging on about location. It is actually important. Many of the large deposits that have been found in South America are fairly remote. They're up in the Andes and they're at high altitudes.
All that does is bring with it lots of costs. While I cannot quantify what that means in terms of grade, it could be anywhere from 0.2%-0.3% copper grade difference from where they are compared to where we are. What you can see on this slide is you can see the Too far away. You can see the round circle, which is where the prospect is. It is like a plateau. They call it a pampa. We are 8 km from the coast. If we had a processing plant there, it would probably be 5 km from the coast down at the base of the hill. We only pump the water up maybe 500 m. The prospect itself is sitting at about 12 km, but the pit would be something like 300-400 m deep.
Importantly, we are close to the logistics freeway, the Pan-American Highway, which is where you have got access to good infrastructure and it is one of the highways that is one of the few in the country that you can use for bringing in supplies, etc. We have power lines crossing the area, which hopefully is a plus for us. We have not negotiated or gone in to talk to them yet, but we think that is absolutely doable. Another important aspect is it is desert country, so you cannot see any competing land uses, which is a critical component when you get up into the Andes and the communities. There is no community there. So a great location for giving us advantages in development and optionality for processing with the bulk of the seawater. The prospect itself continues to grow every time we drill. So every program we complete, we are finding more and more.
We have been restricted a little bit in what we can do through the permitting process in Peru, but that is coming close to an end. We are expecting this month to get access to a number of other drill pads, those white squares you can see down the bottom, which will allow us to test the southern third or half of this resource. The typical intersections are large.
They are low grades, but when you start talking about heap leaching and cheap processing, we think the grades we have got are good enough to be economic. So on that, the yellow traces on that are the copper histograms on the drill holes and the dark blue are diamond holes. We have drilled five diamond holes in this area, which stretches over a couple of kilometers at least. So we are really only just starting to test beneath what we have found near the surface.
That is only just beginning. I will show you a couple of cross-sections, a north-south and an east-west cross-section, if you like, on the next slide, so you can get an idea of what the scale of it looks like. All the colors in red, the lighter red is above 0.2 km and the darker red is above 0.3 km. So, they will average higher than that grade, but that is like a grade contour. But the drill spacing is still 250-300 m, so it is something that we cannot actually put resources around yet. We can gather internally what we think, but in terms of what we need from a JORC compliance point of view, there is still a fair way to go. All the holes, you can see the copper starts from near surface, within 20 m usually of the surface, sometimes at surface.
In terms of an open pit operation, that almost goes without saying. Most of the holes end in mineralization. We have only drilled. The RC drilling was down to 350 m, 450 m, in that range, and they basically, not all, but the bulk of them where it is mineralized, are ending in mineralization. We just started to drill beneath those, looking for some higher grades, if you like, in the fresh rock, and that program has really only just started. That is the north-south section. It runs over 1.5 km. The southern area and the northern area are both limited by our drilling. We are expecting those things to continue once we have approval for the pads. From an east-west point of view, we have got a northern cross-section and a southern cross-section.
The southern one is limited by the amount of drilling we have been able to do, and we expect that to grow as we can start drilling in that particular area. We are looking at multi-element, pathfinder elements, trying to understand the shape, if you like, of what the mineralization is like a bit depth. Because that is a very important aspect to know if you are to plan your deeper diamond drill program. That is all in the infancy at the moment, but we are heavily working on it. As well as the broad lower grade intersections, we are starting to see higher grade intersections coming in the more we drill. A lot of numbers. We have put a 10-m limit on the small side. Some of those 10-m intercepts contain a couple of meters of even up to a percent copper.
The interesting thing, apart from the copper in the supergene zone, which is shallow, the deeper intersects are actually in structures that must be coming from a source porphyry. If we are getting higher grades in structures coming from a source porphyry, if we can find where that is or maybe higher density veining, we are expecting to see higher grades as we continue with our drill program. The core shots you see on the right are typical of porphyries. You will see stockwork veining. There is breccia in the bottom one. The chalcopyrite occurs in the veins, and they are all penetrating into the host volcanics. The volcanics at times can be mineralized, but the bulk of the mineralization is within the veins. If you can increase the density of those, which we find in places, you get your high-grade stuff.
We are thinking there is a good chance in this broader system that we should have one, two, or who knows how many centers that we will end up finding. The drill core, it gives you the same sort of. It demonstrates the upside, if you like. The grades here, 0.8 copper, 0.7 over a couple of meters. We need to find that over tens of meters, if not hundreds. But we think the chance of that is very good.
You will also note we have got some reasonable gold numbers there, 0.1, 0.16, 1.2. They will add. People quote copper equivalences. You can basically add the two numbers together, and you get an approximation to what the equivalent grade is. The 0.82 and 0.16 will nearly get to a percent copper equivalent. We do have the grade in these areas. We are just starting the process of finding where that increases in size.
In terms of the district, we have a large landholding position that's 100% owned by AusQuest. It's nice and clean. There's no dags in there at all. It's ours. We have a number of prospects apart from Cangallo that we have some drilling in, very limited. There's a lot more work to be done, but we think we could be onto a cluster. Porphyries are gregarious features. They don't like being by themselves, so there's often multiple porphyry centers when you can find one. Our focus at the moment is purely on Cangallo because that's the money prospect at the moment. We have drilled a few holes in some of the other areas, and they've given us interesting results, but not compelling at the moment. But they require a lot more work. It's also nice to see a few of the majors coming in.
Those tenements weren't there when we started this program, or we started exploring in the area, I should say. It's nice to see others are starting to think about this coastal belt of Peru, which we've always thought is prospective. It has great advantages from an infrastructure point of view, and I think that's starting to be realized by some of the majors who are talking to us. In terms of community and government, our team in Peru from day one has been engaged with the community. Today we have Mick Sherrington here, who's our COO for Peru. He'll be at the booth if you want to come and have a chat with him. But we regard this as not only important for future development and access issues, but we think it's the right thing to do. It's part of our DNA.
If you want to come and have a chat with Mick, please do so. You can see on the left, there's a community meeting. They're always well-attended. People are interested in what we're doing. On the bottom right is a photo of the Puerto Viejo School, of which we've helped with some of the repairs and provided some additional infrastructure to help with the kids, which is greatly appreciated. In terms of moving forward, this is a bit of an old slide. I've had it out before. But between now and the end of the year, the main thing is these stage four permits, which will provide us with additional drill pads. From a drill pad, you can drill one, two. We've got the odd pad with seven holes on it. You can do lots of drilling.
The pads themselves are sort of 250 m apart, so still wide space because the scale and size of what we're looking for is so large, and we haven't hit the extremities yet. We don't know where the northern, eastern, or southern limits are. We think we've got a reasonable idea on the western side, but the rest is still very much unknown. We're also doing some metallurgical test work. There's been no red flags to date come out of that, and we're looking at heap leaching. Heap leaching is a cheap option to get copper out, and you can mine much lower grades if you have a heap leach-type operation as opposed to a flotation metallurgical process. Our top 250-odd meters is really amenable, we think, to heap leaching. That's a real positive, and that should be remembered rather than looking purely at the grade numbers.
News flow to come out between now and the end of the year will depend on our drilling assay results that are coming in and possibly some metallurgy. We have just a corporate slide. We have a small board. We have 1.766 billion shares out. We have a AUD 70 million- AUD 80 million market cap at the moment, or EV. We still had over AUD 6 million in the bank.
That was the last official figure at the end of June. You can see what has happened when we made the discovery, and it has been fairly steady since then. We are looking to try and change that and push that price up higher. To recap, just before I finish, this is the new copper growth story, really, in a tier one environment, which is in Peru. It has large lateral and vertical extent. It is open in all directions still.
We consistently get 0.3% and up to 0.5%, 0.8% copper numbers. It is oxidized, so potentially amenable to heap leaching in the top 200 m, 300 m, so low cost. The location, favorable logistics, and potential for lower OpEx and CapEx. We are diamond drilling at the present time to understand the copper, how it is distributed, and maybe locate one or more of the porphyry centers. At that, I think I have said enough, and thank you again for listening. If you would like to come and see us at the booth, please do so. Thank you.