Thank you, Duncan. It's great to be here. Always good to be here at Diggers, quite an iconic event. I just want to call out Canaccord for sponsoring the event and making it what it is. What I'd like to do today is give you a bit of an update on the Nolans project. It is the most advanced construction-ready rare earth project in the world that can bypass China. With recent events around rare earths, I think you'll see that we've got the right project at the right time. As I give you that update, I really want to give it in the context of what's happening in the rare earth sector. Please note our standard disclaimer slide. What's happening in the rare earth sector? In the last three months, we have seen electric vehicle production lines shut down across the U.S., Japan, and Europe.
This train crash has been coming for over three decades. To address it structurally is not going to happen overnight. It's a crazy situation because if you think about it, the average price of an electric vehicle is $47,000 U.S. dollars, and we have not been able to manufacture them at full capacity because there wasn't access to $70 worth of rare earths. This is quite similar to the semiconductor chip crisis that we saw coming out of COVID, where you couldn't produce vehicles because you didn't have access to relatively inexpensive chips. The big difference between the semiconductor chip crisis and what we're seeing with rare earth supply is that with semiconductor chips, you can build out capacity for two to three years. With rare earths, mining typically takes 18 years to find the resource and bring it into commercial production.
What we've seen is that up until recently, China has controlled nearly 90% of light rare earths, neodymium and praseodymium, which I'm going to refer to as NDPR, and 98%- 99% of heavy rare earths. Most of the 10% that they didn't control is secured through LINUS for Japan. If you're the U.S., Korea, or Europe, you are very, very dependent on some of your economic growth engines on China's supply. I think we're all aware that rare earths are used to make permanent magnets. That's used in our iPhones every day, electronics, EVs, wind turbines, military applications, and also robotics. The Western world has been moving to address this situation, but it's been turbocharged recently by the U.S. We saw earlier this year with the U.S. introducing tariffs on China that China responded by ceasing the export of permanent magnets, both to the U.S.
and to the rest of the world. China and the U.S. then had a truce, and then China has selectively started exporting rare earths magnets again. However, these agreements are only three to six months. This supply crisis is far from resolved and still has a long way to play out. What we saw in the last two to three weeks, the U.S., through their Department of Defense, underpinned the development of their Mountain Pass rare earth project in the U.S. and furthermore put in a floor pricing of $110 a kilo for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, which is nearly double the price at the time of neodymium-praseodymium oxide. The primary way China has controlled the market has been by suppressing price, and you can see how the U.S. is starting to break that. Furthermore, in just the last week, we've seen Benchmark Minerals Intelligence establish a functioning neodymium-praseodymium oxide index.
This is important because we want the price to reflect the underlying fundamentals of the rare earth sector, and the underlying fundamentals are particularly strong. The Australian government has been very supportive of the rare earth sector through production tax credits, through funding, and you would note that they've spoken about establishing a strategic reserve. We're advocating that any rare earth volumes associated with that strategic reserve should go on a functioning neodymium-praseodymium oxide index, such as the BMI index, as a way of fast tracking the credibility of that index. You would have probably noted in the Australian this morning where the Australian government, through their task force, is considering a floor pricing. Let me talk a little bit about the fundamentals. From a demand perspective, we see demand over doubling over the next 10 years.
Some forecasters will say that they expect it to nearly triple, and that is driven predominantly by electric vehicles. The decade after this one, robots will start to really take hold, and humanoid robots are expected to use the same or more amount of rare earth magnets as electric vehicles. They're expected to drive growth well into three decades from now. We've got very strong demand drivers for at least three decades in the rare earth space. The problem is that the supply pipeline is challenged. This graph shows all of the global rare earth projects with mine supply. You can see most of the projects are in the exploration study phase, with a relatively small number in the funding or pre-construction phase. Importantly, most of the projects here are gray.
What that means is that they're only processing to a concentrate or a carbonate, which means they are largely reliant on processing capability that exists in China. In that whole graph, there's only three that are intending to produce to an oxide, of which we are one. We are the most advanced. We're the only one that can go into construction in a matter of months. We're the only ones that can actually produce and bypass the China supply chain. The other thing I want to point out is you see the two producers, the Mountain Pass and Lynas, and their market cap reflects the rare earth fundamentals. Phase one production at Arafura would be about two-thirds of their current volume. You can see we have significant upside as we push through the funding risk and the project execution risk. Our strategy has been to mine to oxide.
Let me explain why. If you look at the rare earth supply chain, it's actually quite convoluted. You mine the ore, you produce a concentrate, you then process that to a mixed rare earth concentrate, you then separate it into an oxide, you then metallize it, and before turning it into an alloy and a magnet. It's quite a long supply chain. This whole supply chain needs to be built out where it's not so reliant on China. Where do you start? We've said it's important to have mine supply. One, because it takes 18 years on average to get a mine up. If you don't have mine supply locked in, you end up with a stranded asset. The second thing is if you look at rare earths, they're invariably found with radionuclides, whether that's uranium, thorium, actinium, etc .
Those radionuclides largely only come out in the last or in the separation in the oxide step. From the oxide onwards, it's clean from a radiation perspective. What that means is if you're producing a concentrate or a carbonate, you're relying not only on the party to have that capability to process, but be able to receive, process, and dispose of waste that has elevated radiation levels. For this reason, we have gone to the oxide. One, we can bypass China's supply chain, and it's off the back of that we've been able to lock in binding offtakes. We can also say everything that leaves our site is clean from a radiation perspective. We're the only ones that can say that. That can move into construction in a matter of months. A little bit about our project. The Nolans project is 135 km north of Alice Springs.
We can tap into existing infrastructure. We're just next to the Stuart Highway, the railway line that runs to the Darwin Port. We sit on a very large ore body. It's open at depth at 400 meters. The first 200 meters is a 38-year mine life of phase one. Phase one would see us produce 4,400 tonnes of [NDPR] , which supports about 4 million- 4.5 million electric vehicles. Phase two, up to 10,000 tonnes, about 10 million electric vehicles. We want phase two to become a processing hub. Not only does that present us a growth vector, but we think more than anything else it will unlock the rare earth sector in Australia because other rare earth projects only need to go to a concentrate.
If you look at the first one there, the concentrate producer, we can take that product and we can be the bridge between their concentrate product and a non-China market. Importantly, we also produce in phase one 144,000 tonnes of high-grade phosphoric acid. That's important because as a byproduct and the reduction in reagents, it pushes us way down to the bottom of the cost curve. We're fortunate because we've got a phosphate-hosted ore body. We're construction ready. We have all of the approvals. We've done the engineering. We've got the management team. We've got the board. We've spent over $40 million on getting the site ready, 10 km of roadways, 26 km of pipeline. We've got the camp facilities. As we secure the last step, which is the funding, we can move immediately into main construction. In terms of the funding, it's a significant ask.
The challenge that we have had is to go to an oxide. It makes it a capital-intensive project, which you can see we're nearly there. We need to secure $1.5 billion of funding, and we've got just over $1 billion secured. About a year ago, we secured $775 million of debt. Nine lenders, five countries that want to see a diversified supply chain. With the remaining equity, we want to secure 60% of that with cornerstone investors. We are tracking well. With what's been announced today, we've got 50% of that. Once we've got the cornerstone equity investors, we will then raise the rest from the public market. The other thing I want to point out is on the top right-hand corner is completion support. We also have in the debt stack secured $280 million of completion support.
In the equity, we will raise an additional $80 million of cost overrun facility. What's included in the $1 billion that we already have is $17 million of lenders' contingency. If you add that all up, we have nearly $430 million of completion support and contingency above your normal project-wide contingency. We have done that intentionally to lower the risk for both lenders and investors. From an ESG perspective, I would argue nearly 90% of supply today comes from China. They don't share typically our environmental standards. More importantly, a lot of their feedstock comes from Myanmar, which doesn't have our environmental standards nor our human rights standards. Similar to Lynas, we can present to electric vehicle manufacturers a responsible source of rare earths. With our nine lenders, we have quite stringent international requirements around ESG.
There are three things that we're particularly focused on because we can have a disproportionate impact. That's supporting the growth of local businesses in Alice Springs, our local employment including Indigenous employment, and we have a clear pathway to net zero. We're quite fortunate where we're located. As you can imagine, being in the middle of Australia, we've got lots of sun. We've got a lot of wind at night as well. Let me just conclude by summarizing the key points. Firstly, the Nolans project sits on a very large ore body. Just the first 200 meters gives us a mine life of 38 years. It's a scalable ore body. We announced that we would move into phase two once we started construction of phase one. We are construction-ready. We've got all of the approvals we need. We've done the engineering. We've got access to site infrastructure, etc .
We will be in the bottom of the cost curve. We will be below the cost of China production because of the phosphoric acid byproduct credits and because we don't have to neutralize the waste stream since we produce phosphoric acid. We've got the debt secured. Including completion support, over $1 billion of debt has been secured. We have binding offtakes with Hyundai and Kia, Siemens Gamesa, and Traxys. If you look at the market re-rating that has occurred with the two rare earth producers, Mountain Pass and Lynas, we expect to see a re-rating as we push through the funding risk and the project execution risk. Lastly, we see ESG as one of our differentiators so that when car manufacturers use rare earth sourced from us, they know that it's been responsibly sourced. Thank you very much for your time.