Our opportunity to grow. Where are we? We are north, and a lot of people roll their eyes when you say Nunavut, but I can guarantee that if Baffinland Iron Mines is in the room or B2Gold, they'd absolutely be saying it's one of the best places in Canada to work. We're very far north. We're on the Northwest Passage, so regular shipping. We're on the, I guess, the logistical highway up there. You can see there's some other companies up there. Obviously, Baffinland Iron Mines, you've got MMG, you've got B2Gold, Teck Resources is up there, you've got Baffinland. This is a mining district, very strong historical mining district. We operate in an Arctic desert, so despite our location, we get less than one meter of snow a year. That sounds crazy, but what that means is there's no animals, there's no vegetation, there's no people.
All of the high-risk things to getting things into operation. Our closest community is Resolute. A lot of those locals there actually work on our project and worked at the Polaris and the Nanisivik mines up there. A very strong mining culture. That's the ship. We brought that into Aston Bay last year. That's demonstrated bringing the full logistical chain. We brought things into the project and we sent things out. I've confirmed that this is absolutely, you know, the other thing to consider here. It's all year round mining. Doesn't matter, you know, time of day or climate, whatever. It's seasonal shipping though. You look at Red Dog, you look at Voisey's Bay, you look at Baffinland, all these mines ship during a small period during the year, but mining is 24/7.
This is the initial, as Storm Copper Project's developed, it's gone basically from an exploration project to a development opportunity in a space of two years. With that internally, we want to wrap some numbers around it to see what it's actually presenting today. A lot of people say you need to be, you know, a million tons of copper before you turn things on, but there's lots of examples, particularly in the gold space in Australia, where you don't need a million ounces, you don't need two million ounces. What you have could actually, you know, propel the company forward, making your own cash flow. On a very limited resource to date, it's got some pretty compelling economics. The key one I'd point out here is the capital to get this thing going, which is about $50 million. I'll demonstrate how we achieve that.
As you can see, it's probably one of the lowest capital copper projects on the planet. It's also near term because of the low risk ESG to this project. We began the environmental work two years ago, so we're two years into baseline, including the community liaison and all the other bits and pieces. Permits are currently in with the Nunavut Planning Commission right now for the mine here. That's usually a two to three year process. Baffinland went from discovery to production in five years. There are good examples of mines being very quickly accelerated here. Like I said, this is stage one. What Storm stage two looks like, I'll talk to in a few slides, but this is sort of the numbers behind what we're talking about in terms of the economics. All of the mineralization today is either at surface or very close to surface.
We've got a number of open pits. The grade's obviously very high. The initial resource we put out, which we're doing an upgrade this year, which will hopefully grow, but also the confidence level is going to increase. So we can publish a reserve is around, we've got about 250,000 tons of copper. Like I said, most of that's sticking out of the ground. Half of that will go into the current mine plan, but things that we're doing with the PFS work now is going to make that more efficient. We expect that. Also, the resource work is making that expand as well. We should see some mine life increase in the initial term, hopefully get to the 40 million ton range in a year first mine plan.
Very low strip ratio, we're averaging, looking for that 14,000 to 16,000 tons of copper in a steady state in year three. The exploration work, we expect to expand that. This is the key to how we do things here. This is going to be one of the first copper mines in the world to be solely doing a product based on beneficiation, DMS, and ore sorting. That's the ability of this mineralization. Like I said, chalcocite is essentially twice the density of the dolomite host. It's very coarse grains. When we break it up, it essentially makes a very coarse copper and waste product. We did this test work two years ago. We've done multiple large bulk samples and we've shown that we can take a 1% to 2% copper feed grade and make a 15% to 20% copper product.
That kind of upgrade is world class and not repeatable in a lot of other copper deposits, particularly when they've got bornite and chalcopyrite and some of the lower grade species. That plant is $21 million and all sorting costs $2 million. You can see it's very scalable as well. That plant will do 1.25 million tons per annum. If we want to increase production, even by 50%, it's a very marginal increase in cost and it's all modular, so it can be stacked together very quickly. If you go traditional flotation, obviously you'd have to build a parallel flotation circuit next to the original one. The other thing with this is that there's no tailings, there's no reagents. Operating in an Arctic environment, operating in any environment, you don't have those environmental risks and that certainly helps permitting. A lot of people don't believe in the process.
It's fairly simple. It's used in lithium mines. They take a spodumene concentrate from 1% to 5% and then concentrate it on. It's used in iron ore, it's used in coal, it's used in diamond. There's a diamond mine that does 6 million tons per annum up in Canada, so it can do scale. Kennecott, Bingham Canyon, largest copper mine in the world, is putting all sorting in there as well. Proven technology. The other side of it is DMS. We use jigs. It's essentially gold panning. You've got two different density materials and you're essentially separating through gravity. That's simple. On the basis of that, we've attracted some pretty good partners. Taurus Royalty bought a 0.9% royalty on the copper production for $7.5 million. That's completely non-dilutive. It also shows their belief in the project getting up because if we don't, their royalty goes up in smoke.
We've attracted Ocean Partners, a global metal trading company. They're familiar with all sorting. They're familiar with doing lower grade copper concentrates; they do it every day of the year. They send out a 10% to 15% copper out of Africa every day. They've got a market for this place. They know how to do it. They're experts in moving it. They're the perfect partner. On the back of that, they took a 9% stake in the company. That was the price to come in. They've also provided up to 40%, 80% of the initial capital. That's $40 million. The delta for us as a junior mining company is only that $10 million to get it going. They get 100% of the offtake that's defined under the current PEA. If we find the next big thing, which I'll talk to, then they have to get renegotiated.
It used to be the offtake was done in the later parts of after PFS. The confidence and the belief in this project getting up has brought these guys in at a very early stage. I won't talk to this much other than, look, there's a significant value gap in some of the other Aussie ASX juniors. The thing I definitely suggest people consider when you're looking at these stocks is what's the realistic potential of these guys getting into production. I think we're seriously de-risked from a simplicity in the process, the resource growth potential, and also the jurisdiction. Now, Storm, everything I talked about sits under that one black dot that says Storm Copper. We have over 2,200 square kilometers. Our joint venture owns 100% of a sediment-hosted copper belt. The analogies there, Central African Copperbelt, Zambia, DRC, Kalahari Copper Belt. You're talking about deposits like Mateo.
These are usually clusters, so there's lots of deposits within the same belt. They usually fall in that 250 million ton range in that 1 to 2% copper. We are on the belt curve for grade. We're at 1.2% now and we're sitting at 20-something million tons. A lot of growth potential here. We've got 110 kilometers of strike. We've got copper exposed at both ends of the belt. To the north, about 200 kilometers sits Polaris. That's been confirmed. That's exactly the same mineralization event. This whole belt is mineralized. We've got a zinc deposit seal that sits out on the coast. We've got a distinct zinc and copper horizon, very similar to the Mount Isa in Queensland. Very rarely you see this very near-term copper opportunity and also a district-scale copper potential in the hands of a junior.
We believe that by getting this mine up and going in the near term, that'll fund the exploration for this in the long term. The analogy, I like to use analogies because I think it's good data points. There's a company, a nickel company back in the 2000s in Western Australia called Jubilee Mines. They had probably about 10,000 tons of nickel that stuck pretty much in an open-pit environment. They made the decision to mine it. They poured that money back in the ground and they ended up having 400,000 tons of copper and got bought out for $3 billion. I believe American West Metals could be on the same sort of growth path with the land we have here. I won't talk about this, but you can see some of the amazing intersections we're getting outside the current resource. Last year, we hit 22 meters at 8.5% copper.
That's in next to our big cyclone, low grade, high grade, big flat, kilometer long deposit. We've just done an EM survey this year and there's a lot of anomalies that come out of this. We've got a very long list of target pipeline to test in the coming years. This just illustrates sort of, it's a stacked copper system. That's a big copper system. We've got two horizons that have been identified to date. You can see there, we think the second half of cyclone, which sits at 15 million tons now, sits at depth where we're getting indications of high grade mineralization at depth. If that's the 30 million tonner, that's Mateo in Africa, Sandfire Resources. That's a billion dollar asset. Lots to be found here, lots to do.
I'll just very quickly in the last two minutes talk about Utah because it's very, very unique and it's getting a lot more interest with the new administration, etc. We've got a West Desert Project. It's currently a zinc, copper, indium, scan. Indium is the key point here. It's the only indium deposit in the U.S. and it's one of the largest underdeveloped indium deposits in the world. We've got over 24 million ounces of indium in this. The old resource had 50 million ounces. The U.S.A. is a 100% net importer of indium and most of it comes from China and Bolivia. China has just put a ban on indium. While indium is not the biggest, you know, financial driver here, the zinc, copper, and silver are, it could open a lot of doors to critical metals funding. That's the key here. We want to advance this project.
It is an advanced project. Storm is our flagship at the moment. We can't do both in a junior market, capital constraints. We want to look for joint venture partners on this, potentially put into a new company or get, you know, critical metals funding through the government, you know, non-dilutive funding to progress this. It's a great project. I won't talk about what President Trump has said, but certainly there's been a lot of movement in Utah with fast tracking a few of the mines in the area. The other part of this is the other elements which I'll talk to, which is molybdenum, gallium, and iron ore. This is a porphyry that's the same age as Bingham Canyon. We drilled one intersection from the porphyry to get to the skarn and we hit 490 meters at the same minimum grade as Bingham Canyon.
We get grades up to 4% molybdenum in the base of the zinc mine. We don't understand it yet. If I wrapped a resource around it, we could have 50 to 100 million tons of molybdenum mineralization here tomorrow. There's a lot of work to do there. There's a copper zone that's close to the porphyry. It's got high grade gold with it. It's not what we know here. It's about what we don't know. Only 10% of West Desert is being explored. There's a lot more work to do here. As you can see, to advance assets, seriously undervalued, I believe. Hopefully we can get this thing going in the next couple of years and that'll provide cash flow to fund the company going forward. Thank you.