It's my pleasure to now introduce you to our first speaker, Rowena Smith. She's the Managing Director and CEO of Australian Strategic Materials. Rowena is a 30+ year mining and minerals processing executive who has progressed through senior operational, commercial, strategy, and ESG roles at Rio Tinto, BHP, and South32 before becoming the CEO of Australian Strategic Materials. Please welcome Rowena to the stage.
Thank you very much, Tom. It's a real pleasure for me to be presenting here today, and thank you very much for those in the room for joining us this afternoon. We do appreciate your support. It's been a very big year for rare earths, the last 12 months, and a lot has happened for ASM. Let's get into it. I just want to draw your attention to this disclaimer is longer than even usual, and that is because we are, at the moment, in the middle of a proposed transaction with Energy Fuels, a U.S. and Canadian-listed critical minerals company. What I just want to say up front is what I'm not going to do in this next 15 minutes is give you a comprehensive overview of the transaction. That would take a lot longer than 15 minutes.
What I'm going to do is give you a high-level summary of ASM that will include a summary of Energy Fuels and the proposed transaction, but it will be a high-level summary. I guess what I just want to perhaps encourage investors to be aware of is that we have prepared comprehensive documents that detail the transaction. Those documents have been released to both the ASX and the ASM website. They're available for investors to review. We have got both ASX releases as well as a scheme booklet, as well as a supplementary scheme booklet that we released last week. I really encourage investors to review those materials because they will give a very fulsome overview of the transaction. What I'm going to turn my attention to for today with you is to give you a summary of ASM.
ASM is building a rare earths and critical minerals business to provide those high-tech metals that are needed for the clean energy transition and a number of the emerging advanced technologies. Our strategy has been to go from mine all the way through to metals, and we have two real focus areas, two assets that we've been focused on developing. One is our resource and processing project that we are developing in Dubbo in New South Wales, and the other is our metallization capability. We have built our first metals and alloying facility in South Korea, and we have been progressing planning for replicating that capacity in the United States. That has been our strategy to date, and we've been working hard on the delivery of that. We listed in 2020 on the ASX. In 2021, we committed to building that facility in Korea.
By 2022, we had opened it, and we were already delivering our first high-quality neodymium praseodymium metal to customers from that facility. We went on through 2023 and 2024 building the product mix. We added the alloy, the specialist alloy that is the main constituent for those high-performance magnets that are needed in those advanced technologies. We added that to our product suite. We started working through the process of doing product validations with both metal and magnet customers across multiple jurisdictions. We were focused on that in Korea, but we were also working beyond Asia, establishing those relationships in the U.S. and in Europe. In parallel with that, through those couple of years, we were continuing to progress our project with Dubbo.
In early 2022, we released our Dubbo Project Optimization Study, which really showed what was possible for that polymetallic resource in being able to provide a multitude of products through to final oxide to be able to take to market. As we continued in discussions, looking for partners and getting a better understanding of what was happening in this emerging market, the critical minerals market, that underwent a lot of change through those years from 2020 to 2024. What we recognized is that there was an urgency around being able to bring the rare earth component of that Dubbo resource to market. We started in 2024 doing an assessment of what would be possible in being able to accelerate the development of Dubbo, lower the capital, and be able to bring that to market faster, looking first at the rare earth product suite.
In 2025, we released a scoping study that showed that we had a really exciting opportunity to be able to do just that, and that we had released just before I was at Diggers last year. We've been continuing to work on that since that time. The other exciting development in the last 12 months is that we did see the customer group in the magnet area, our customers from our Korean Metals Plant, really start to activate in this last 12 months period. That gave us confidence to then go to market late last year and get the capital to be able to fund the expansion of that Korean facility beyond the initial phase 1 installation that we'd already completed. All of that work led to the discussion that we now have underway with Energy Fuels and the proposed transaction.
I'll go through the detail of that, but that just gives you a snapshot of where we are today. Let's focus on the Korean Metals Plant first, though. This facility we are very, very proud of. When you look at the rare earth supply chain, it is very concentrated, and whilst it's concentrated across every part of that supply chain, it is particularly concentrated in the mid-processing, and metallization is over 95% concentrated in China. What we have established over this period in Korea with our facility here is a very unique capability. We have got there today established commercial production of the light rare earth metal, the neodymium and praseodymium, as well as those specialist alloys, the NdFeB alloy, that, as I said before, goes to the magnet producers for those high-performance magnets.
The capacity that we have installed today is the equivalent of 1,300 tons per annum of that alloy product. We've also been working on developing our technology for the heavy rare earth metallization. We had our first commercial heavy rare earths go to market in July of last year. We've been continuing to produce those on a small scale from a small pilot facility whilst we have been in parallel through this year developing our scaled-up capability to be able to take that technology through to commercial scale. To date, we have spent about $60 million in that facility. As I said, we went to market late last year, and we got the additional capital to be able to progress with the next phase of expansion of that facility, and that is now fully funded. We have commenced the expansion activities.
When I was here last year, I talked about the fact that we had one strip caster and three furnaces. We are now progressing the work to double that strip casting facility to two, and to take those furnaces to 18. As of today, we have got 12 of those furnaces installed. That photo just up there is a photo of that line, the new line of furnaces that we've installed, which we're super excited about. We always knew that this process would take about 18 months. We started it in the first quarter of this year, so we're progressing really well against that. We estimate that the total CapEx for that expansion will be about a further $8 million.
The production in the meantime, as I said before, we've seen each half on half over the last two years, a steady increase as we have been working through the product validations and building out our customer and product group. We are very focused on building out our customers in the Asia region, but we do also have a focus on growing this to expand it into both Europe and the U.S. I would just draw your attention to the customers that we have there that we are well established with, one of whom is Vacuumschmelze, who I will come back to. What we've also been looking at, as I said earlier, is we've been looking at replicating this capacity in the United States.
We have been in discussions now for some time, and we have well progressed our planning for an American Metals Plant that will have a nameplate capacity of up to 4,000 tons per annum, which again, we're excited about. That is where we're at with Korea. The Dubbo Project is a polymetallic. As I said before, we have got a flow sheet that will allow us to bring a suite of products, the light rare earths, the heavy rare earths, but also zirconium, niobium, and hafnium to market. What we recognized is we needed to really see whether we could get the rare earths to market faster. That's really what we've been focused on in the last 12 months. We released that scoping study last year that showed that we had a very credible pathway to a project that would be significantly less capital.
The capital estimate for the full flow sheet was just under AUD 2 billion. The capital estimate in the scoping study released last year was AUD 740 million for this flow sheet. This takes both the light and the rare earths all the way through to separated oxides. What we have been focusing on this year is taking that through to PFS, continuing to do the metallurgical work on that, but also to look at an option of, instead of taking them through to separated oxides, take it through to a mixed hydroxide is what we are looking at. Our early estimates of that show that that would further reduce the capital by about another AUD 200 million. We are working on the PFS for this at the moment.
Initially, we were just focused on a PFS for the oxides. We thought that would be due about now. Because we have broadened out that scope, we are now doing this with a timeline for later this calendar year. That's what has got Energy Fuels excited about this proposed transaction. Energy Fuels is a U.S. company that traditionally have been a uranium producer. They have many decades, over 40 years, of experience in processing uranium, both mining and processing uranium in the U.S., and in particular, have a very well-established processing facility where the core technology is solvent extraction in Utah at White Mesa. They have been looking to expand their product range and leverage that deep capability they have in solvent extraction to process monazites for rare earths. They have got a very ambitious strategy.
Their strategy is very similar to ASM's in that they want to go from mine all the way through to end processing. Their strategy is actually to take it not just through to metal and alloying, but take it all the way through to magnets. They have proposed in recent months two transactions. There is the transaction that we are progressing with them for the acquisition of ASM to provide them with that established capability in metallizing and alloying. They also have, in recent weeks, announced a further proposed transaction to purchase Vacuumschmelze, that magnet producer, to be able to provide that end point. I do need to emphasize that this transaction, particularly now that Vacuumschmelze has come into it, is a complex transaction. There is a lot of materials. The Vacuumschmelze proposal is why we put out a supplementary scheme booklet last week.
Again, I would just ask investors to please make sure that you do avail yourself of the full materials. There are a lot of risks attached to this as well as a lot of opportunities. The ASM directors have considered all of that material. They have considered the advantages and the disadvantages and are unanimously supporting this proposition for shareholders, subject to no superior offer coming in and that the independent expert continues to believe that this is in the best interest of shareholders. These are what we see as the transaction highlights. We have got a near-term mine, not just to metal and alloy, but if both of these transactions progress, a near-term Western mine all the way through to magnet supply chain with direct access to Energy Fuels' deep competency in solvent extraction and operations in the States.
They have got a much stronger balance sheet and already have got access from the U.S. government for significant funding, including funding for an American Metals Facility. It does give our investors an opportunity to participate in the ongoing growth. Because the offer is a combination of cash and scrip, it does give an opportunity for them to continue to be participating in that growth of what's a significant growth pipeline that Energy Fuels will be building. The share scheme consideration, the implied price, is at a good premium to our pre-announcement share price. That obviously moves from day to day as the Energy Fuels share price moves, but as of this morning, it was a 44% premium. When all of these assets come together, you do get the whole of that supply chain from mine all the way through to metal, and then through to magnet.
It is conditional on those transactions going through. If they do, the combined company, we believe, is going to be in a very unique position in this emerging supply chain. The indicative timeline for us is that we are taking this to shareholders for vote next week, the 12th of August. Pending a successful vote at that scheme meeting and approval from the second court approval date that we have on the 18th of August, then the effective date will be the 19th, and we will be moving toward an implementation date of the 28th. That is ASM. We are delivering that alternative rare earth supply chain. We have worked hard on delivering a unique capability in Korea. We have got a very strong option to be able to bring the rare earths to market faster in Dubbo that can add to that integrated product suite.
We have got a plan that is well-developed to be able to move into the U.S. for metals, and we have got a transformational proposal for our shareholders to consider that we are very excited about with Energy Fuels. Thanks very much for your time.