Fantastic to be here. The atmosphere in the air is pretty damn exciting to be involved in gold exploration. I guess a slightly different model to the royalties. We're thrilling to build. I'm very lucky to be part of a team that has done it before in Côte d'Ivoire, taking a project from pegging through to exploration, through to delivery of first gold, which is extremely exciting when you see that first gold bar come out. Ultimately that project was taken out. That was Tierro Abidjar. I think it was just under $800 million Aussie. I guess we're just too young to retire. It didn't quite make enough, but I think there's just so much value and excitement to be able to do it again. With Aurum, I've got the MD, Kagan, here as well. We've essentially got the team back together to do it again.
There definitely are some forward-looking statements. I definitely would hope that you like what you hear. I guess one of the key, and we talk to people, we're not that well known in North America, but we've got some pretty big investors that have come on board for the journey. I guess one of the keys for us is that we, I think when you look at us compared to other exploration companies, you know, ground is, there's lots of good management teams out there, but one of the big things that we do, instead of taking prices from drillers, we run our own drill team. That allows us, it's an incredible competitive advantage. We can probably drill for about 65% of a comparable contract cost. It means you can take risks, you can go out and you can drill a lot harder.
For example, everything we do is diamond, which is pretty unusual for an Australian company. We can go straight underneath, say, a soil anomaly or an artisanal pit and just stick some drill holes in there. It means we move very, very quickly. That's what you'll get from this presentation, that we're not hanging around. We're out here to create value because obviously we're shareholders as well. We want to make sure that everyone gets a big uplift. 3.28 million ounces. When we talked, we were actually last year, last year we had zero ounces on the books. That's what we've been able to do coming from two projects. One organic at Bundiali, which we'll talk about. The other one was through an acquisition of a company where they'd lost the love of the market, but it presented a fantastic opportunity and we're able to pick that up for script.
Obviously, aggressive exploration for a junior, we're looking at 130,000 meters of drilling, which is quite rare in this space. The reason we can do it is because we run around drill rigs and we save, we save money. Cost-effective and development pathway. I mean, we are very clear. Drill to build, our strategy is get on the ground, prove up the resources, and ultimately we want to execute and build a project as well because we think owning a gold mine is also an incredible source of value. Côte d'Ivoire is a very favorable jurisdiction where you can get stuff done. I guess this is us in a nutshell. It's a drill strategy there.
We talked about the organic growth coming from Bundiali, and you can just see from no resources to December 2024, our first maiden resource from Bundiali, delivering another, and I guess that next lift was the acquisition, completing a takeover of Mako Gold, so adding another 870,000 ounces. We'll talk about that. That's come with a treasure trove full of data as well. Now another resource update. Sitting two projects, 3.28 million ounces, running 10, we'll have 12 drill rigs running shortly. Another aspect of that is the small environmental footprint. Most other companies are spending about 25% of their drilling cost in West Africa on bulldozers and so forth. We just save all that. These little rigs can punch. We've drilled a 747 meter hole. They've got a big reach and high productivity. I guess that's where we are.
We think there's a, I mean, all gold companies say we're undervalued, but we think there is some incredible value here. We also are very proud that we've attracted some great investors with the Lundin family coming on board in May and also Montage. There's a strategic aspect here. Also Xiao Jin, who we'd worked with before at Tierro. I guess outside of myself and Kagan, Yao and Yaya were all part of the Tierro story. We certainly are incentivized, holding just over 11% of the company. You can see the value uplift. That Mako takeover was initially, I guess, a market digesting it. Since then, I think all the loose hands have been shaken out and we're all about long-term holders. That's where we are. I think you get a bit of a feel for the strategicness of where we're sitting.
We've got Saoema, we've got Coney down to the south with 6 million ounces, and then there's Tongon as well. A great part of the country to find, you know, multi-million ounce discoveries, which is what we're about. We've done it before. We're in the process of doing it again. We've also got the Mako aspect, which is probably a little bit too far away to be a trucking option. We are looking here at two projects being developed, one ahead of the other. We currently see these as two standalone operations. Importantly, you've got great government support. You've got jurisdiction. In the timeframe, we can get this from start to having first gold bars in most other countries just still running through those environmental processes, which means you can miss the cycle. Definitely a strategic land package.
We started in around July 2023 with Plusor, Kagan, myself, and another eight investors started pegging some ground. At that time, it had to be lithium, but we were believers in gold, thinking about an IPO, but we backdoored into Aurum, which had kind of ran out of some love. The guys that had held onto it, it was a shell. They were happy to do a deal. From one tenement, we've grown Bundiali to seven. We've taken what was very fragmented to be a mine camp-scale. It's got the potential there. The neurology is pretty fantastic. I think you can see by the rate we've been able to move, it's got the potential. Just zooming in on the project, previous explorers, I've got to credit them. This is ground that we knew from soils, a limited amount of drilling. It had the potential.
We had Randgold Barrick on the, where that 75K sign is. The other side was Paul Roberts, who discovered Bandcan. He was here. On the wrong side of the cycle, had to give away a lot. He saw multi-million ounce potential. He did enough work for us to be able to see. Unfortunately, he moved off. Fortunately for him, he moved off to Guinea. Fortunately for us, this ground just ended up inside, ultimately with Taraco and Taraco having a land dispute with one of the owners. We've been able to clean all that up. We've also brought in other joint venture partners. Our ownership stakes are between 80% currently and 100% down on BST. In a mining scenario, we have the potential to move from 80% to 85% up to 88%, assuming the government, you know, the government has a 10% take.
We've got a 225 kV grid power line just running right across that as well. Gravity looks pretty good. We've done the preliminary met, and our strategy is really running both processes at the same time. We've already running on the ground, looking at environmental approval. We've got probably an 80% idea on where everything's going to be. There's going to be a few alignments and realignments. It's important that by the time you finish your DFS, you've got your mining license, you've got your environmental approval. Otherwise, you don't tend to get these things funded. Three deposits just on a million, $1.1 million ounces. Bundiali itself is hosted in a sandstone, but what it tends to be is big, thick zones of grades of somewhere between 1 to 1.2. We have seen some higher grades there as well, but open pittable.
I think the key from that slide there is there's still many targets still to be tested. That's a 13-kilometer corridor and we've only really just begun. Some of the slides there just showing the thicker sections from BDT1. We've had some recent success putting some holes into BDT3 with our first resource. Some quite, a little bit narrow, but some quite high grades there. That's the key. There's going to be multiple pits with that ability to work with engineers to develop and deliver higher grades to the mill. BMT3 has grown very nicely. Again, nearly a million ounces from we've drilled to date about 130,000 meters of diamond totally. This area just really had soils and some great mapping and some good aeromag. Everything here is all our own discovery. Again, we've still got lots and lots of targets to go after.
Everything's in growth mode and our drill rigs are running 24/7. Some examples there of cross sections, high-grade structures. This will tend to be probably a higher strip, but higher grade. It all balances out in the end. BST at the time was, before when we just acquired it, it was probably the most advanced. Had some cracking numbers there, 20 meters at 10 shallow drilling from surface. We've just recently got back drilling there and looking to try and grow the resources. The current resource is very shallow, only about 120 meters. We look at putting the diamond holes in there, giving ourselves about 250, 300 meters vertical. Very important that you can recover. We've done preliminary network. We're running through a PFS right now. The signs from this work look, they were released in December last year, look pretty positive.
Potential for, you know, good gravity gold, which is the cheapest form of recovery. You've also got some quite coarse grind size. The signs are promising. We've got more core coming to Australia for confirmatory work, and that'll all flow into a PFS that's due to be delivered at the end of the year or possibly just early in January. This is Napié. This is an opportunistic acquisition, a company, Mako Gold, that had some great success in Burkina. They saw multi-million ounce potential as we do, but they missed the cycle and the market had fallen out of love with them. We were able to pick this up for a pretty good value. Incredible amount of work that had been gone on there. There's over 100,000 meters of drilling in that 870,000 ounces. The key is they were capital constrained. They just didn't drill deep enough or drill enough.
We've currently got our first lot of diamond rigs working away on there. There's some news that'll be coming out imminently with the first lot of holes. From that resource, most of it, 93% is less than 150 meters deep. We're just looking at drilling some between 400 to 500 meter holes underneath and just seeing how far this could go and what kind of grades could be down there because it looks very, very promising. I think that just really captures it where the drilling was very shallow and some deeper drilling at depth. This is the capital constraint and this is what we've done to take control. The one thing we can do is run around diamond drill rigs and change that cost of exploration because in the end, if we don't drill the holes, we don't grow those resources.
Côte d'Ivoire, look, we think it is one of the best jurisdictions. Kagan's been there since 2012. I've been there since 2017. It's a place you can get, you can get things done. Mining is only about 2% of GDP. They'd like to take it to 4%. Obviously, you've got some majors like Endeavour. Barrick, I believe, are exiting. You've got the Montage guys that have grown up to $2 billion and knocking on the door, becoming a multi-million ounce. That's what we want to do with Aurum. It's a very simple strategy. What to look forward to? We certainly don't hang around. We've got another resource update coming at the end of the year. We've got a PFS to start putting some dollars and cents. What is this thing worth to our shareholders? On the other side, we're working at Napié to provide the first resource update there.
In the meantime, all that drilling continues through into next year. The goal is to have a DFS and start thinking about getting this funded and getting Bundiali built, following up with Napié. Thank you very much for your time, and I really appreciate it.
Good. Thank you very much. Anybody have a compelling last question for that afternoon?
I can see everyone wants to go.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody, for attending.