Next up we have Rowena Smith. Rowena is the Managing Director and CEO of Australian Strategic Materials. She's been in the resources sector for 30 years in operational, commercial, and strategy roles with the likes of BHP and South32. This is Rowena's third time taking to the stage at Diggers & Dealers. A fun fact about Rowena is her first business venture was in her late teens making cakes for cafes, and her specialty was making the croquembouch for people's weddings. If you think that's pretty challenging, running ASM must be, I'm going to say it, it's going to be a piece of cake. Please welcome Rowena to the stage, everyone. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Paul. I can say that I did learn early the difficulty of starting a business without having properly thought through labor rates and profit margins. That lesson was well learnt. Thank you very much for having me here today, and particularly thanks for the opportunity for us to tell the ASM story. We are in exciting times at the moment in the rare earths industry, and that's what we do here at ASM. We're building a global rare earths and critical minerals business to meet the needs of those downstream markets that are emerging in the Western world. It has been a very eventful year. The geopolitical uncertainty, which we've been hearing a lot about, has definitely created opportunity for those of us in rare earths.
The vulnerability of this supply chain and how dominated it is by Chinese production, over 90% of the midstream processing, the refining, the metallization, the alloying, and the magnet production, over 90% of that is controlled in China. That vulnerability has been known for some time, but it hasn't really been felt. What we saw with the Liberation Day and with the tariff sort of events that have been happening in recent months is we saw that shift to an urgency around establishing these alternative supply chains. In particular, the first response that China had when they received notification of the increased tariffs from the U.S.
was they put export restrictions on all of the heavy rare earth materials that were coming out of China, which is pretty much 100% of the world's production at the moment, as well as the specialist alloys, the NdFeB alloys that are the major constituent for the magnets, as well as the magnets. What that then has set in train is a chain of events where not just the U.S. is very focused on how they're going to establish continuity for these supply chains so that their emerging magnet producers, and importantly, the users of those magnets, the car manufacturers, the robotics, the defense industries, you know, how are they going to ensure that they're going to have security of supply?
They've certainly been active, but so has the EUs, so has Koreas, so has Japan, and where we had seen a lot of talk in recent times in the last few months, we've really seen it drive to action. This is ideally positioned for ASM strategy. We have a strategy to go from mine all the way through to metal, and our strategy anticipated this shift in the world dynamic some time ago. We've been working on it for a while, and it's nice that we are ready now to be able to fully take advantage of this shift in that global dynamic. We have an advanced project in New South Wales.
I don't agree with Ken that New South Wales isn't a great jurisdiction, even though I am a Perth girl, so there's no doubt I love W.A., but we feel very, very pleased to be working there in New South Wales with our Dubbo mine , where we will refine and separate those materials to be able to be taking them through to one of our metals plants. The first metals plant we already have in production in Korea has been producing since 2022, but we've also got very advanced plans to be able to replicate that capacity in the U.S. These are the product lines, as I said before, that are going into all those advanced manufacturing industries that are so dependent. What we have been celebrating in recent times is real progress on a number of fronts.
The Korean metals plant, particularly in recent months since those restrictions that we saw imposed by China, has had a huge influx of inquiries, so we're busy ramping up our facility there. We have been broadening our product range and just had success with our first heavy rare earth metallization there, which I will talk to, as well as, as I said before, well progressed on our expansion plans into the U.S. We've also recently had a really good look at how we could accelerate the rare earth production for Dubbo and bring that online faster, but also really lower that initial capital hurdle, which I think has been a constraint for us in getting Dubbo into production to date.
We've just been to market with the support of Canaccord and just had great, great support from our established investors, shareholders, as well as some really exciting new participants in our register. Just under AUD 25 million, which adds to the AUD 19 million that we had at year end, means we've got a really good cash position to be able to focus this year on getting in and delivering. This is the plant in Korea that I said we established. It's been in production since 2022. We built this through the COVID period. We're very proud of this facility. It's been producing light rare earth NdPr metal since 2022, and then since 2023, we have been making that NdFeB alloy, that specialist alloy that goes to the magnet facilities.
We built this plant ahead of the rest of the ecosystem in Western countries being there, so the ramp-up of this facility has really been constrained by the magnet producers establishing themselves outside of China. That's why the dynamic just recently has been so exciting for us, because we've gone through the product validation processes on both our metals and alloys with numerous producers in Korea, in Japan, in North America, and in Europe. What we've seen in recent weeks is those orders starting to come in. Novion Magnetics, that's an emerging U.S. producer in Texas. We've got a 100-ton agreement in place with them. First deliveries, first 15 ton, has just started to go out last month. Vacuumschmelze, a German-established magnet producer, who also has got funding from the U.S. government to replicate a facility in the States in South Carolina.
We've got first orders from them commenced last month across an array of these alloy products. USA Rare Earths, they just listed earlier this year and are in a very strong capital position now to be able to progress their plan, their commissioning, their magnet facility at the moment in Oklahoma. We've got a five-year supply agreement for them to supply 60% of their raw material needs, and indeed we've just sent them samples to support them on this early part of their commissioning, but they'll be ramping up through next year. Very excited to have announced just in recent weeks the MOU with Neo Materials’ Magnequench , which is their magnet division. They have operations in China, in Thailand, and they're just, in fact, doing a grand opening of their new facility in Estonia next month.
We've been delivering them the light rare earth metal, but one of the reasons they're particularly interested in broadening out the relationship into something that is a longer-term and more collaborative arrangement is because of our capability to metallize heavy rare earths. I only know of one other producer who is able to provide that technology outside of China commercially at the moment, and for those who've got access to heavy rare earth oxides and they need the metals to be able to make their magnets, we are a very unique capability partner. Excited about the conversations with NEO. Some of those customers have got their own oxides that we will toll-treat for them. Others need us to purchase it. We've got arrangements in place with providers from Australia, as well as the U.S. and Europe, for Western-sourced oxides to be able to support growth here in this facility.
The facility has currently got installed capacity of 600 t of metal and 1,300 t of alloy. We've spent about $60 million there at the moment, and we have got a pathway design capacity to take that up to 3,600 t. Importantly, we are working on that additional product capability to be able to do the terbium and the dysprosium and got really good economics here for when it is at full capacity, which we're anticipating could be in 2027. Expanding this into the U.S. is one of the exciting stories that we've got, and this we are well progressed on at the moment. We've been talking to the DOD about funding support. We have just had actually a due diligence trip to the States. We've been looking at six different states, but we're narrowing that down to the top two states over the next few months.
What we're seeing in the U.S. is that the policy is extremely supportive of putting this facility into that jurisdiction, and we are seeing that not just at the federal, but actually at the state level, very strong competition to having this facility put into their own jurisdiction. Again, we're thinking that the economics of this will look similar to what we have seen in Korea. I think actually we'll see it'll be a lower cost operation than what we've got in Korea. We're going through that process of finalizing state selection and talking with the DOD about funding. We've got a formal submission in with them that we're hoping that we'll hear back this side of Christmas on, and all going well, we will then progress with making a commitment decision on that next year, and it's commencing construction in 2027.
Dubbo, our resource in New South Wales, is a very important part of the story as well, because these metals plants need feed. Whilst there are a number of light rare earth projects that are starting to develop outside of China, there are very few that are rich in heavy rare earths, and you need those heavy rare earths to be able to make these specialist alloys for these magnets. Dubbo is a polymetallic. It has the light rare earth neodymium, praseodymium, but it also has the terbium and the dysprosium and zirconia, niobium, and hafnia. All the study work that we've done to date, and we've been working on this for 20 years, and I'm sure many of you have heard the story before, all was working on a full flow sheet that brought all of those products to market simultaneously. It had a lot of advantages.
It's a very big resource. It's a 75 million-ton resource. It's in a tier one jurisdiction. It is regional rather than remote. It is fully approved to be able to proceed. We have done many, many, many years of work on the technologies to be able to do the separation and refining with ANSTO, as well as working with Bechtel on the final engineering. We feel very strongly about the quality of this project, but the AUD 1.7 billion starting price has been tough, particularly for a company of our market cap. What we challenged ourselves last year is could we find a lower cost pathway to accelerate the rare earth production? We got some federal funding to support us on that, and we just released the scoping study on that a couple of weeks ago. We're really excited about this.
We've identified that the heat leach option does give us a simplified flow sheet with substantially reduced upfront capital. It's less than 50% of what the original capital was, low operating costs, and robust financials. When you look at it specifically, one of the things that we're particularly excited about is that this brings us those three products that the market really needs at the moment, the light rare earths, but also a high volume of the terbium and the dysprosium for less than three quarters of AUD 1 billion in capital. The costs for all three of those products sit well within the first quartile of costs for Western suppliers for these materials. Across a range of pricing forecasts, we're seeing robust internal rate of returns. The funding position has been a focus for us for some time.
While we were seeing the AUD 1.7 billion initial outlay for capital being challenging, we were nonetheless getting very strong support from governments across the Western countries to be able to provide us with debt support. We've got over AUD 1.5 billion worth of conditional export credit agency support for this project. What we've been doing as we've been going through doing this heat leach scoping study is continuing to talk with them about being able to resize that to be able to support the heat leach first phase. They're very supportive of this approach. They like the de-risking that this provides, that we can get those first three products up into production early, and then we can use the revenue from that to be able to go on and do further development and access the rest of the materials in the ore body as a second phase.
We also are seeing that it's simplified the offtake discussion. At the same time that the market is really actively looking now to secure light rare earths and heavy rare earths all the way from mine, we have got the opportunity to be able to provide a project that, you know, is a much simpler proposition and lower cost proposition for them to invest in. We are able to offer them a solution that takes it all the way from mine all the way through to alloy for them and solve those parts of the supply chain that are challenging for them as well. We're working now on completing the column leach testing and refining the CapEx and OpEx estimates to complete the PFS study by Q1 of next year. That keeps us on track for being able to commence construction there in Dubbo in 2027. That is ASM.
We are the only ASX-listed company that will give you exposure to rare earths all the way from mine to metal. We are the only ones who are producing light rare earth metals and alloys today, and we've got lots coming up in the next year to watch out for. Thanks very much for your time today.