Thank you, Ashley, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Arafura's investment briefing, and thank you for dialing in. My name is Darryl Cuzzubbo, your Managing Director and CEO, and with me today I have Peter Sherrington, our CFO, and Stuart McNaughton, our Chief Operating Officer. Today is a very significant day as we announce securing the debt and completion support for the Nolans Project. As always, I just draw your attention to the disclaimer and note that this presentation will be available on our website. Today we can announce that we have secured more than $1 billion in debt and completion support. This is a key milestone, particularly given that we've been pursuing a debt-led funding strategy.
We've pursued a debt-led funding strategy so that as we engage with investors, they know that after many months of detailed due diligence that has been conducted by no less than 9 domestic and international lenders across 5 countries, they can be confident that, one, we have a robust set of economics that can withstand the cycle. Two, that we are ready from a technical capability and an ESG perspective. And thirdly, that we carry significant geostrategic importance, noting that as it stands today, if you're an electric vehicle or wind turbine manufacturer in Europe, Korea, or the US, you are almost completely dependent upon NdPr supply from China. We believe that we're the only greenfield project that can meaningfully reduce such dependency in the next 5-10 years. Today we'll also show you where CRU are sitting on the cost benchmarking curve.
Peter will provide you with an updated set of project economics, including what they look like under a likely incentive pricing scenario, and Stuart will brief you on the outcomes of our preliminary study for phase two, including the ability of becoming a third-party hub processing. But before we get into the update, let's recap on why Nolans is the right project at the right time. I believe 5 years from now, our timing will be seen as quite fortuitous. We know that the energy transition will approximately double the demand for NdPr over the next 10 years. We know that the development pipeline of NdPr oxide projects is challenged and that it typically takes about 18 years to go from exploration all the way through to commercial production. The NdPr supply chain is fragile; almost 90% of NdPr supply is reliant on China.
It is in this context that we will be constructing Nolans and bringing much-needed NdPr into the market at a critical time while diversifying the supply chain. The volume from Nolans phase one will support over 4 million electric vehicles, with phase two expected to potentially more than double this impact. But let me be clear that we only intend to progress phase two into construction when phase one has delivered commercial production, which we think is the most prudent approach. Importantly, we will also be producing 144,000 tonnes of near-battery-grade phosphoric acid, which is a key input for lithium iron phosphate EV batteries, which continue to grow in market share and increasingly dominate the supply of EV batteries globally. Similar to NdPr, battery-grade phosphoric acid supply is controlled by China. And as you know, the Nolans project is fully permitted.
We are construction-ready, sitting on a very large high-grade ore body that hasn't yet been fully drilled out, and all of this in a tier one location. As for any resource project that has a mine life measured in decades, the position on the cost curve is critically important to make sure that we can withstand the inevitable cycles. As shown by this chart, the CRU's benchmarking based on a predicted 2030 timeline. We are comfortably sitting in the first quartile for unit costs, where we would be robustly cash flow positive even at multi-year low prices. This is because of the substantial byproduct credit that we get from phosphoric acid, which has increased in price by about 25% since we last ran our project economics.
This graph highlights China's dominance in the market, essentially making up almost all of the second and third quartile and about half of the fourth quartile. It also highlights that at current spot prices, most producers are either marginal or losing cash, which again reinforces that the current prices are just not sustainable. Let me now hand over to Peter, our CFO, who with his team has done an exceptional job in getting us to today where we can announce the closure of debt. Thanks, Peter.
Thanks, Darryl. Firstly, I'll talk about the debt structure. Just at the outset, I'll just sort of make the point that obtaining the credit approvals validates our FID as deliberate and quite unique debt-led funding strategy, which has also been enabled through targeting offtake into jurisdictions with supportive ECAs. We'll explain that in a little bit more detail as we go through the slide. There have been very few mining projects funded by or resource projects funded by multiple ECAs over recent years. Complexity of the debt structure creates unique challenges for lenders and for Arafura in bringing this together. The final funding structure is extremely robust, and conditional approval of these facilities has been a significant milestone, which has required some fairly significant work by Arafura, its advisors, and the lenders themselves.
This has really been achieved by leveraging the strategic nature of the NdPr, and as I mentioned at the outset, successfully negotiating bankable take-or-pay agreements with quality offtake partners with links into jurisdictions where there is strong recognition of the need to facilitate supply chain diversification. The AUD 775 million of senior debt facilities consists of AUD 590 million of direct lines with four ECAs and ECA-covered tranches of AUD 185 million, which is covered by two ECAs and then a number of commercial lenders sitting underneath that covered tranche. The commercial lender conditional approval commitments have been made by German bank KfW, KEXIM Global (Singapore), Commonwealth Bank here in Australia, ING, and EFA under its commercial account. Probably the commercial lender approvals are significant.
The participation of these groups in the ECA-covered tranche and also the cost overrun facility and the contingent instrument facilities demonstrates appropriate risk sharing with the ECAs in the debt structure and provides Arafura with a full suite of banking services from the commercial lenders. These include Aussie dollar and US dollar denominated project accounts, forward FX swaps, interest rate hedges, and other facilities that will support Nolans through its construction phase and into its operations. The commercial lender participation has been assisted by the facilities being made under a green loan framework, recognizing the project's strong linkages with energy transition and NdPr product being aligned with EV and wind turbine applications. Through the support of EFA and NAIF as the first lenders to provide their approvals and then the other ECAs, Arafura has been able to achieve a weighted average tenor of greater than 12 years.
This is required to support the long-life, capital-intensive nature of the project. Mining projects generally attract tenors in the range of five to seven years. The longer tenor has been instrumental in achieving the debt sizing of $775 million. It's a credit to Arafura, and to some extent, it's been opportunistic that it's been able to align its strategic objectives with emerging global enablers, including the critical mineral sector, clean energy transition, supply chain diversification, downstream mineral processing, and regional development. These have been critical to being able to execute the facilities that we have with the high-quality lenders that have engaged with Arafura. Advancement of the debt funding to credit approval phases has enabled us to provide a reasonable base to share with the market the proposed sources and uses of funds and set out the equity that's required to fully fund the project.
The project funding requirement, as you can see on the graph, incorporates $1.2 billion of pre-production capital costs. This includes contingency and escalation. It also includes $66 million of working capital to fund the project post-construction phase and through to ramp up. And then financing costs of $168 million. This includes financing fees, capitalized interest, and capital raising costs on equity. Through the debt process, significant due diligence has been undertaken by the lenders and their independent experts, and there is a need for Arafura to fully fund the lenders' base case, as shown in the sources and use of funds. Incorporating the lenders' base case assumptions necessitated an additional capital of $67 million. Key inclusions here were additional contingency and working capital to sustain a three-year ramp up versus the equity case of a two-year ramp up and other operating costs and assumptions.
The total new equity requirement is for $713 million plus $80 million for the equity portion of the cost overrun account for a total of $793 million. It's slightly less than a 50/50 debt equity split after some costs have been considered or taken into account. Importantly, the total funding incorporates significant completion support that is not drawn in the lenders' base case. This includes the COF or the cost overrun facility, which is a debt facility of $80 million, the cost overrun account for the equity amount of $80 million, and the subordinated standby liquidity facility of $200 million provided by EFA. There's considerable completion support within the funding structure that provides for comfort around completion support, provides significant benefits to the lenders and the equity investors and even offtakers to demonstrate that the project can be executed.
In this presentation, we've also taken the opportunity to update the project economics. I'll just run through some of the key assumptions and then the outputs from the analysis. The project economics have been updated using the capital costs update that was released in November 2022 and also incorporates the update, which was based on a trend analysis in the October 2023 release. Subsequent trend analysis has continued and been incorporated into this latest estimate. It indicates the capital costs have not moved materially during this period. We have, however, allowed for capital costs to be escalated by 2.5% from the estimate date through to the delivery schedule as the costs are incurred through the project execution. Revenue is a significant driver of value within the discounted cash flow analysis.
With the NdPr, we've sought new independent market data and have based the NdPr forecast on four independent market forecasts using an average of CRU, Project Blue, Argus, and Adamas. Average NdPr pricing during the offtake period is $104 and takes into account discounting of the Chinese VAT and buyer's discount for contracted offtake volumes in some circumstances. Phosphoric acid revenue has also been updated based on a revised CRU forecast. Generally, OPEX values have not materially changed, but we have reviewed some key ones. Sulfur, for example, has been updated based on the latest CRU forecast, and gas prices have been adjusted in line with our proposed contracted values. We've also adjusted royalties upwards to reflect the recent NT Mineral Royalty Act changes.
As I've mentioned before, a review of the other material operating costs or significant operating costs indicated these did not materially change the values that were presented in November 2022. Key outputs from the analysis. The discounted cash flow analysis shows post-tax NPV of $1.7 billion and an internal rate of return of 17.2%. Significantly, the other key performance indicator, the higher phosphoric acid price, has assisted in reducing the net operating cost. We show our net operating cost on an NdPr basis. We net off the phosphoric acid revenue on an NdPr basis to show a comparative number against our peers. It's showing the net operating cost of less than $30 a kilogram, which supports Nolans' position in the first quartile of the cost curve. The table we have here also shows a scenario for the Argus incentive NdPr price.
The Argus analysis assumes NdPr rises to a level that's required to incentivize diversification of NdPr production, predominantly ex-China production. Pricing assumption is likely to be supported through tariffs that are emerging for EVs in Europe and EVs and magnets in the US as well. Under this scenario, when NdPr increases to $2.5 billion and the IRR to 20.6%, it probably does demonstrate the sensitivity of the business model to where NdPr price sits. Importantly, with debt funding now conditionally approved, as we've always done, we've focused on the equity funding required to execute the project. This will happen now with greater intensity as we divert all our resources, or predominantly all of our resources, into this particular activity. Development of an ore-to-oxide rare earths processing plant is capital intensive.
So, as with the debt process, the equity funding relies on us leveraging the strategic nature of the NdPr product in order to secure the equity. Current weakness in the NdPr price increases the importance of the participation of key strategics in the capital raising. This will provide leadership and demonstrate the strategic imperative for new and diversified NdPr supply and will send a significant message to the market as we work through the process. We've outlined here roughly a broad overview of our equity strategy, which consists of four pools of funding, which will be engaged on a staged or cascading approach with the objective of building momentum for the funding through the establishment of a cornerstone group using pools one and two. The first pool is the customer cornerstone and other strategics. This consists of substantial holders and offtakers.
These groups have already commenced this engagement and have been ongoing with a number of groups. There was already significant activity here around due diligence and engagement on the opportunity. The second pool, which will form part of the cornerstone group, are the industry cornerstone groups. Again, engagement on this phase has already commenced, but the debt funding milestone is a catalyst for expanding this engagement to a much larger group. Groups engaged here are targeted because they include family offices, corporate offices, state-backed funds, specifically targeting funds that are aligned with critical material supply chain diversification, resource-focused PE groups, large institutional investors, and industry-backed super funds with mandates that are aligned with the Nolans Project.
As I mentioned, there has been some engagement here, but the debt milestone will enable us to go out to a much larger group with certainty around the funding requirement and with the debt being very, very advanced in the approvals being secured and also long-form documentation also being well advanced. Pools one and two will demonstrate momentum. The cornerstone group will be the nucleus of the funding before going to groups three and four. Group three will be institutional investors, resource-focused energy transition groups, high-conviction funds, and generalist funds. And, of course, existing shareholders are an important source of funding as they've been significant supporters of the project for an extended period of time.
We look forward in providing you with updates on the execution of the funding strategy, but I'll now hand over to our Chief Operating Officer, Stuart McNaughton, who will cover the Phase 2 preliminary study and the timeline for Nolans.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning. An internal Arafura team has completed a preliminary study to examine the potential expansion of the size of the Nolans processing facility. The case studies examined included a 100% expansion, so doubling capacity, as well as a 150% expansion to achieve a total of 2.5 times the Phase 1 capacity. We also looked at using the expanded capacity to process third-party feedstocks such as monazite concentrates. This opens up the possibility for Nolans to become a downstream rare earth processing hub. The positive results of the study support the decision taken to undertake a pre-feasibility study post-FID.
The PFS will consider the options of building a discrete second processing plant or an integrated expansion of the existing processing facility. In parallel with the pre-feasibility study, Arafura will commence the process of obtaining the required regulatory approvals for phase two. The timing of the pre-feasibility study aligns with the expected demand growth for rare earths driven by the energy transition. I'll now hand you back to Darryl.
Thank you, Stuart. Peter took you through the incentive price scenario where, based on Argus's assessment, we would see an NdPr pricing of $163 per kilo over the life of the mine. The incentive price is, as Peter mentioned, the price that is required to induce other non-China rare earths projects to come into the market to fulfill the expected supply deficit.
There are three triggers that would cause a supply deficit, noting that it only takes one of these triggers in order to switch the NdPr pricing dynamics from one that is reflective of an oversupplied dominated market, as we see today when even the Chinese producers are overall losing money, to one where NdPr pricing is sufficient to motivate developing higher-cost NdPr projects to get more supply into the market. At our last investor update, we noted that the average price of an electric vehicle is $53,000 and that at today's pricing, it only takes about $50 worth of NdPr to get another electric vehicle out the door. So the question that we posed was, if you had to quadruple the price you pay for NdPr, i.e., pay an extra $150 per car, would you do that to get another $53,000 vehicle out the door? And, of course, you would.
The reason why I point this out is this supports Argus's incentive pricing where it looks reasonable. It also looks reasonable given that we've already seen in the recent past NdPr pricing higher than this point when we saw a brief imbalance in early 2022. The three plausible triggers for NdPr entering into a supply deficit are, firstly, one where China can't increase production sufficiently to meet the demand that's expected to double over the next 10 years. This is actually CRU's view where they see China's output growing marginally until 2028 and even less so post that point. There may be signs of this already happening given that China's increased production in the last 12 months hasn't come from their mines but has actually come from importing rare earths, in particular from Myanmar.
The second potential trigger comes from EV buyer expectations who presumably choose to purchase an EV in order to play a role in responsibly transitioning to a lower carbon future. An extension of this is that EV buyers will, in time, expect EV manufacturers to use rare earths supplied from responsible sources. China-source material cannot be guaranteed from an environmental or a human rights standpoint, particularly given that over 40% of rare earths inputs are coming from Myanmar. The third trigger, and perhaps the most concrete, as explained by the graph on the right-hand side, is the impact of international policies that have already been announced. This graph maps the non-China-sourced NdPr against demand that, through these policies, cannot come from China. It reflects the European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act, which states that from 2030, no more than 65% of NdPr can come from one country.
It also takes into account the U.S. tariffs of up to 25%. If we assume that the U.S. are content to allow 65% of China supply, similar to Europe, you see a forecast supply gap open up of 11,000 tons in 2028, which is when Nolans is expected to be coming into production. This is equivalent to about three additional Nolans projects and reflects the supply of 11 million EVs. And if you put that in revenue terms, that's about $600 billion per annum. I make this point just to show how much is at stake here. It is this plausible and I would argue likely scenario why we have announced next steps in looking at a future phase two expansion, which will include the ability to process third-party feedstocks to bring NdPr into the market when it is needed most.
As an industry, what we can do to facilitate and accelerate this change is support the creation of a seaborne NdPr price index that is not dominated by China's domestic pricing and production policies, and hence one that is a functioning price index reflective of global market fundamentals. Let me finish on why we're all here today, and that is to create enterprise value and hence delivering value for our shareholders in a sustainable way. You would have seen this chart before. Our resource is similar in size to Lynas's world-beating Mt Weld resource, noting that our resource still hasn't been fully drilled out. It is open at 400 meters. We do not know how deep our ore body goes. The size of the bubbles here reflect the NdPr grade.
So when you take into account the size and grade of our resource, the first quartile cost position we will enjoy, and the opportunity to process other rare earths feed, you can see that we're working towards an enterprise value that is many multiples of where we are today. It should also be noted that these enterprise values are at a time when we are seeing NdPr pricing at multi-year lows, which we've already presented; we think a very different pricing environment is likely to emerge over the next few years. So to recap on today's key points, we're very pleased to announce the securing of our debt financing and completion package. This allows us to turn our complete focus to raising the necessary investment. We have a robust strategy in place supported by tier one committed investment banks, UBS, Canaccord, and Barrenjoey.
It is upon achieving this that we will announce a Final Investment Decision and immediately release main construction contracts. We also announced today our plans for the next steps in looking at phase two with the provision for a processing hub that accounts for the scalability of our resource, combined with making the most of being the first company to develop an ore-to-oxide processing facility in Australia. We've updated our economics, which will be robust throughout the cycles, and we believe that an incentive pricing scenario is likely when the U.S. and Europe apply the policies that they've already announced. This, combined with having first quartile cost position, underlines just how robust our investment case is. I'll now pause and open the floor to any questions. Over to you, Ashley.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question via the phones, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type your question into the ask a question box. We will now pause momentarily to allow time for questions to be registered. Once again, if you wish to ask a question via the phones, please press star one on your telephone. There are no phone questions at this time. I'll now hand over to Shaan Beccarelli to address any webcast questions.
Thanks, Ashley. We don't have any web questions at this time. I'll hand back to you, Darryl.
Okay, no worries. Thanks, Shaan. Thanks, Ashley. Look, let me just again thank you for attending today's call. If you've got any questions, follow-up questions, please send them through.
I think we ran through a lot of information. Today is a very significant day as we move the organization forward. You can see that there's a lot happening as we make this organization its value many times more than what we are today. So thanks again for your time, and thanks again for your continued support. Thank you.