Now I'd like to hand the conference over to Mr. David Boshoff, BCI Minerals Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Welcome, everyone, to the March Quarter presentation from BCI Minerals. I'm really excited to be here with you today. We had an excellent quarter, and I have to say, the moment I received the news that we've got our Groundwater Management Plan approved, I felt like running around the office and high-fiving everyone. It was such a good moment, and so good to be here with you this morning. With me is Steve Fewster, he's our CFO, and we'll be taking you through the presentation now. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge our traditional owners at our project. It's the Mardudhunera people, as well as Robe River Kuruma people. Here in Perth, it's the Whadjuk people from the Nyoongar Nation.
Over this financial year, just this financial year alone, we've spent more than AUD 13.7 million with our traditional owner partners, and we're really proud to be able to continue to strengthen those relationships with them as we continue to build this project. Now, as at the end of this quarter, our market cap is nearly AUD 700 million. Also, our project is fully funded with nearly AUD 900 million available, not only for the capital for the project, but also for that working capital as we commence operations. Our project will be the largest salt operation in Australia. It's the third largest in the world, and we've got some unique features that give us a competitive advantage.
One of those is our port. Our port will enable us to load cape-sized vessels, the only salt operation in Australia being able to do so with short access to customers in our region. As I mentioned just now, our project is fully funded. That allows us to continue to finish the project, as well as those funds we need to be able to commence operations during the ramp-up period. This project affords us three revenue streams, three discrete revenue streams. The first one is our salt operations that we have commenced operations this quarter, full operations this quarter. Also, the other revenue stream is the SOP revenue stream. We're in early piloting work. I'll stick to that in a bit more detail later on.
The third revenue stream, which we haven't discussed in a lot of depth, which Steve will take us a little bit later on, is Cape Preston West Port. That port allows additional revenue stream, low risk for our operations. For the March quarter, we had excellent safety performance. First of all, we completed more than 200 critical control verifications, and our TRIFR is now at 1.8. That's the lowest it's been since the project has commenced. Additionally, I shared with you we received our Groundwater Management Plan. This is both from the state government and the federal government, and that allowed us to commence full operations in the middle of April. Now, from a construction perspective, we have completed more than 60% of our construction portfolio. We've completed the secondary seawater intake during this quarter. Also, pond 69 is now complete.
We've completed the construction of the main haul road that connects the salt wash plant and the port. On the marine package for the Cape Preston West Port facility, that's almost 80% complete. That gives us confidence that we still remain on track for our targeted FSOS date in late December 2026. During the quarter, we also commenced our engineering work, the early engineering work for our pilot plant of our SOP facility that we're planning to construct at the Mardie site.
From a corporate perspective, a big shout-out to our lender group, who have been major supporters. They've backed us in a project that hasn't come to market for many, many years. Across the quarter, we were able to complete two drawdowns. We've been able to draw down AUD 120 million that's been applied to the project, and that's in addition to the bank guarantees that we'd already drawn upon. What that means is we still have around AUD 887 million of funding available to complete the project. Our forecast CapEx to complete is an additional AUD 619 million. You can see there's plenty of funding available there for both the CapEx component of the project as well as the working capital required during ramp-up.
Now, for operations, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we received the full approval for our Groundwater Management Plan. That meant that we can start operations for ponds four and beyond. The picture you can see on the left there is pond four transfer station, where it's pumping into pond four on the bottom right, and the top left, that's actually pond three. So pond three has been full for a little while. Also, we've signed binding offtake agreements. We've mentioned that in previous communication. These are binding offtake agreements that meet our debt funding requirements. They're fully signed, and they are binding commitments from our customers. We've also signed the transshipment agreement. This agreement is with CSL, and that allows us to do transshipping arrangements from our port and also to load cape-sized vessels, which is a key competitive advantage.
One of the elements for the operations, also the performance, has been very satisfactory. We've been able to fill those first three ponds. That required more than 80 gigalitres of water to be pumped from September last year. We also measure on a weekly basis the dissolved salts. That is our salt inventory that is in the water. I am pleased to share with you that our salt inventory is consistent and supports our forecasts of 5.35 million tonnes of production per annum.
One group I'd really like to call out is our projects team. As we stand here today, the project and the construction component is on track and on budget. That's a real testament to the skills and the quality of our team, as well as all the contractors that have been working on the project. Where we sit today, we've spent between spent cost and committed cost, we're about 68% of the way through our budget. This time last quarter, we were around 64%. As each quarter is passing by, we're continuing to de-risk our exposure to both cost and to schedule, which gives us the confidence today to be able to say we remain on track, both schedule and from a cost perspective. In terms of the market outlook, we remain very buoyant about the outlook.
We still see that there's a shortage of supply in the coming years. In this quarter that's just passed by, what we have started to see is the price that has picked up both into the Chinese market and the broader Asian market. It really does give us the confidence as we look at some of these forecasts that our long-run expectations are going to be met.
Now, as far as our SOP is concerned, or SOP, our salt production, or the production of industrial-grade salt, offers us the opportunity to produce by-products. One of these key by-products is SOP, or sulfate of potash. This is a key ingredient to enable agricultural land to become more fertile. That is, of course, specifically for those regions where our populations are growing, and that demand is forecasted to increase into the future. We have completed our FEED study work. A company called Bluestar in China has assisted us with this work. We shipped KTMS salts from our Mardie operations to China, and they completed end-to-end FEED work in a facility at their testing facilities. The next step for us is to design our pilot plant and then construct our pilot plant at Mardie. We have commenced the design work. We signed a contract for the design work to commence.
I'm pleased to share with you that that is well on track. This design work will be an outcomes-based decision or schedule. There are very specific things we're going to be testing, and we want to verify those things before we move to the next step.
One area I'm really excited about that we haven't really explored in a lot of detail is the Cape Preston West Port that we're building. Now, that's an asset that's owned and will be operated by BCI. It has a throughput, an annual throughput of around capacity of around 20 million tonnes per annum. Now, we only need about 5.5 million tonnes of that capacity. So there's around 14.5 million tonnes per annum of capacity that's surplus to our needs. Now, sitting within our region is a number of prospective projects that really have one of the biggest problems they've got to solve for is to be able to get their product through to market. Now, there's Port Hedland to the north of us and then Ashburton to the south of us. Where we're sat is ideally positioned for a number of those projects.
Over the coming months, one area that we'll be really starting to explore is how can we better leverage that asset to support projects in the region and help them get to market and utilize that asset that we will be owning and operating. From a cash flow perspective, look, we're really excited about what salt and SOP can deliver. If all we ever do is the salt component of the project, then what we would have is around $0.066 per share of free cash flow that would be able to be distributed through to our shareholders. Now, based on current share price, that's a pretty healthy yield. If you add on top of that the SOP, which we remain confident of being able to deliver, that lifts that $0.066 per share up to around $0.08 per share.
What we haven't factored into in any of these numbers at this stage is what potential Cape Preston West Port could deliver. In this slide, there's a couple of things I think is worth calling out. In a very short period of time, by around about 2035, we will be debt-free. That's the sort of free cash flow that the business will be able to generate. We'll also start paying taxes to the government and making a contribution to the state from around about 2032. As we move into first revenue late next year, we'll start to be making a significant contribution both to the state and to the federal governments as well.
In conclusion , then, we had an excellent quarter, and it's great that you've been able to join us today. We'll now be switching over to questions.
Thanks so much, David and Steve.
Welcome, everyone.
We've got a few questions to go through. Can you talk us through this innovative pond-filling strategy that you mentioned in the report, where you're filling the ponds from north and south? Can you elaborate on this approach and explain it further?
Yes, absolutely. One of the first objectives of this project is to be able to get water under the sun. That's the machine or the mechanism, if you will, that generates salt. It's all about surface area. What we've worked with the team, particularly the project team and the ops team, is to develop a method where we can fill the ponds as fast as possible to ensure as much surface area as possible is exposed to the sun before the next summer period. In doing so, we've been able to devise a strategy that helps us to fill water from both the northern part of the project, so imagine ponds nine and eight down to the south, at the same time as we're filling ponds four and five from the south.
We will also be filling the crystallizers, and the crystallizers also has a very large surface area to ensure we fill the crystallizers at the same time. All three of those areas are pumping right now as we speak to ensure that surface area is maximized before the next summer season starts.
Thanks, David. Related to that, would it be possible to commence reporting the quantity of contained salt in the ponds going forward? Could this be accounted for as stock on hand and therefore an asset?
Yes, so the way I would describe it, there's three areas of inventory for salt operation. The first one would be a surface, so salt that's already mined or harvested and it's on the surface, so either pre or post-plant stock. The second component, which is further back in the supply chain, would be in-ground stock, so salt that's already crystallized in the crystallizers. If you take it one step further, that's the salt in suspension in your pond system. Absolutely, that could be part of our reporting period going forward, reporting numbers going forward.
Yeah, I might just add, we talk about having the funds available for working capital. What we're talking about there, and it's a great question because what you will start to see on our balance sheet is a capitalization of some of those costs, which then reflects that build up of inventory. Certainly, from an accounting perspective, you will start to see that recognized on that balance sheet. Yeah.
We've been asked whether Cape Preston West Port is obviously a critical piece of infrastructure and provides the potential for incremental revenue streams. Would you define BCI as the natural owner, and how should people think about the value case for this strategic asset?
Yeah, I think we've invested around AUD 350 million in that asset. For us, it's a key component of our logistics and supply chain. We do see having that control over that asset and being able to manage our shipping process as critical to the success of our operations, but also critical to the success of our customers and being able to deliver on our promise to them. Absolutely, I think we are at least the natural operator and the natural owner. In terms of expanding that capacity, I do think we should be looking to leverage that surplus. For too long in the Pilbara, a lot of this infrastructure has been owned by large companies that haven't been willing to share. We're in a unique position where we're not competing with other projects in that area. We're very happy to look at opening up that surplus capacity.
I might also just add the port facilities at current design will have a lot of excess capacity. That excess capacity, of course, for already invested capital, makes a lot of sense to make sure we maximize the return on that invested capital.
Related to that, we've been asked, can you provide an update on the revised port dredging plans? Will these new plans incur additional environmental impacts and also costs?
Yeah, so important for us to clarify that we currently have a fully approved dredging strategy that's fully costless for. That strategy is, of course, to dump on land. However, we think there's a better strategy. We believe there's a better way to do that, and it will be more cost-effective to dump it at an allocated position for sea dumping. This is common practice up and down the Pilbara . Most of the ports being dredged up and down the Pilbara as we speak has got specific sea dumping permits. That process with the federal government and the state government is well advanced. In fact, that will reduce our costs and reduce our footprint. One of the important things to clarify is when we dump on land, there is also an environmental impact. For us to be able to minimize that is important.
One of the key contributors to that is to be able to reduce the haulage costs or transport costs by shortening the distance between the dump site and the harvest site. Of course, make sure that the volume is exactly the volume we need for the final dredging pockets.
David, my understanding to those from when we originally looked at the dredging, with the work that our construction team had done, we've been able to reduce the amount of material that we now need to move.
Yeah, absolutely. Our approvals allow us to dredge up to 800,000 cubes. For the salt-only volume, we reduce that volume now down to 350,000 just for the salt production. Of course, if we need other commodities out of that process, that'll come with its own process at that time.
Can you provide an estimate of the total real GDP contribution to the Australian economy over the life of the project, including all economic multipliers? What is the estimated total net profit per year once the project is in full production?
I'll take the first question. The estimated contribution to GDP to Australia is AUD 4.8 billion over the total period of the project's life. This was estimated independently for the request and request by lenders. Of course, for a project our size, that is significant. The project has got a very long life, and that's one of the factors that plays a key role.
In terms of the earnings outlook, we keep referring to the EBITDA. EBITDA in real terms from salt is around AUD 285 million per annum. That is when we are at nameplate capacity. In addition to that, SOP, the EBITDA is around AUD 100 million per annum, again, when we achieve nameplate capacity. The reason we keep referring to EBITDA and not NPAT is the question asked. By that time, our debt profile will look quite different. Our interest charge will change. Similarly, our tax position will also change. To be able to give people an idea of what that sustaining cash flow looks like, we refer to EBITDA.
The other piece that sits in that free cash flow calculation is also the sustaining capital cost that's associated with the project, which we estimate at between AUD 10 million and AUD 20 million per annum over the life of the project.
Steve, you mentioned before that there was AUD 255 million of free cash flow. Can you explain if this includes the port? Is it real or nominal?
All those cash flows are on a real basis. You would expect over time, with the impact of inflation and some expansion around pricing, that in nominal terms, that number will grow over time. In terms of whether it includes the port, at this stage, those numbers are specifically around salt and SOP. Both of those, or salt, we're currently in construction and development phase, so there's a greater certainty in and around that. David and the team are doing a lot of work around SOP in the pilot plant. We've got firm plans in and around how we'll generate earnings there. On the port side, we really are just starting to kick off the due diligence around what it would take to be able to open that up to further users. At this stage, we haven't included any of the potential earnings that could be attributed to the port.
Related to that, Steve, how long before you will have an idea of interest from potential users of the Cape Preston West Port?
We've already received inbound interest at this stage. We think there's a pretty compelling demand within the region. Port Hedland is at near full capacity. The port of Ashburton to our south is further away from where we are. We do think the projects in the area really would benefit from us opening up that capacity to them.
David, how do you determine the FSOS date, given there's so many natural factors out of your control?
Yeah, I think it's important to stress that our weather assumptions, weather assumptions generally is a very key part to any salt operation. As I mentioned earlier, evaporation and the surface area is a key part of, I guess, manufacturing salt or growing salt. The assumptions we've used is 45-year average weather assumptions for that particular site and that area. That gives us, of course, a level of certainty. The actual weather between now and December next year will determine the result. We are committed to keep the market updated on how those things are progressing. Of course, there's both upside and downside to that. If we get really hot summer, next summer particularly, and the one thereafter, that date can be earlier. Of course, contrary to that, if it's the opposite, that can be slightly later. We'll make sure the market is well informed.
Thank you. Steve, are the contracted salt volumes in the first three years tied to China or ex-China pricing? Our indication is that it is consistent with the pricing in the OFS.
Yeah, in terms of those off-take agreements, all the tons are abiding and committed. Volumes are locked in. The price is not locked in. Price will be determined based on market conditions at the time. About 50% of those committed sales at the moment will go to China. The other half is through the rest of the Asian region. Each year, as we sort of lean into the next calendar year, there will be a price-setting discussion with our customers. That would reflect what is happening in the market at the time.
Excellent. Another question. Are there any other commodities that could be commercially produced at Mardie, for example, bromine?
Yeah, bromine certainly is an element that we have started to think about. It really is just thinking. I spent some time in China late last year and visited some salt projects there where they are extracting salt. They're extracting SOP, but they're also extracting bromine. It's a relatively simple or straightforward process, but there are some complicating factors in the production of bromine. There is quite a lot of chlorine involved in that process. We would need to think through how we would be able to manage the risks around handling that type of chemical. Like I say, it is certainly being done globally, and it's definitely a revenue stream. The other element that is also extracted from salt brine is magnesium. Again, it's an interesting area for us to explore.
In terms of our focus over the next five years, bromine and magnesium and those other products aren't factoring as a current priority.
Thanks so much, David and Steve. That concludes our question time today.