I've got BCI Minerals CFO, Steve Fewster. Thanks, Steve.
Thank you very much and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is super exciting. Super exciting point for our company. We were here last year, the amount of progress over the last 12 months has been phenomenal. Just a few headlines. In terms of our construction, we're 85% complete. Nine of our evaporation ponds, all of our evaporation ponds are at operational height. We have salt crystallizing, we're product forming, and we expect to be operationally ready to start delivering salt in the first quarter of calendar year 2027. Most importantly, we're not here with our hands out. We remain fully funded.
As I say, BCI is almost finished constructing Australia's largest and the world's third-largest salt operations, and it's sitting there right in the premier salt growing region of the world. A region where industrial-grade salt has been grown for over 60 years. It's well known and highly respected in our market. It also has a ubiquitous use. Almost every day, something you're touching relies on a sodium molecule or a chlorine molecule. It's an attractive market for us. It's a stable market. It's a mature market. Our shareholders that have initially invested have the belief that it will generate strong and reliable returns and dividends in years to come. We think the demand is about to flip, I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through.
Firstly, we've built world-class infrastructure that's capable of delivering much more than just salt. Again, we'll touch on that a little bit further, we'll be producing SOP and we own our own port, that creates its own set of opportunities. Firstly, how do we produce salt? It's a fairly simple process, probably hasn't changed in thousands and thousands and thousands of years, huge barriers to entry. It is relatively simple. Seawater comes in here from the left, makes its way through a series of nine ponds. That's a really important process because as that water progresses through over an 18-month period, slowly, the elements that we don't want in that brine will fall away, so that when we get to our ninth pond, we've got exactly the right elements in that brine.
At that point, it comes through to the salt crystallizers at the right density, salt will start to crystallize and fall to the bottom of the crystallizer cell. From there, the remaining brine gets pushed down into these KTMS crystallizers. I'll talk a little bit more about those. From there, once it's at the right height, around 300 mil of salt in each cell, we'll start to harvest. It goes through the salt wash plant. Very simple process. We wash it with a bit of seawater, away it goes out to our customers through a port that we own. As I was saying before, the KTMS crystallizers will take that brine through, that leftover brine, into those crystallizers. That will then form a different type of salt, that salt will be used for the preparation and production of SOP.
Coming back to where we are in terms of completion, seawater intake's done. Ponds are done. Salt wash plant is almost complete. We're progressively lining those crystallizers. The jetty is complete. We're doing some dredging. You can see from that diagram, we are very, very close. In terms of why salt, we love salt. As I said before, it's a very, very stable, very mature, very predictable market. Boring to some, exciting for us. As I said, almost every day. The threads in my suit have plastics to make it nice and stretchy, particularly around my waist. They're all coming from salt. The carpet here, the aluminum. Salt is an incredibly important mineral. Where we're really excited in particular, and I think you'll hear from a lot of people today and tomorrow in the critical minerals space, are the Chinese.
The Chinese in particular in the Asian region have recognized that the processing of critical minerals is about to explode. What they're doing is well ahead of that push through of all this processing. They're constructing numerous chlor-alkali plants that then will produce the caustic soda that will be used to process those minerals. To produce caustic soda, you need salt. It is the single most important ingredient in the production of caustic soda. What's driving a lot of businesses that you'll hear today will also similarly drive our business. As I said, the market is looking very, very good, and we think in the next two years, we're going to see a shortfall of supply. We've been to Asia. We've walked across the construction sites. We've talked to procurement teams. We can see there's an increasing push to secure agreements with the reliable suppliers.
We can identify, we've walked around these sites, and those sites represent about 20 million tons of new demand that will come on between about December this year and about December next year. They're sitting in China, they're sitting in Indonesia, and they're sitting in India. That demand is about to grow. On the supply side, there's only 10 million tons, and we account for 5.35 million tons of that. India is going through a massive shift. It's a country that's been a net importer of a lot of the chemicals needed for their country. As Modi is trying to drive living standards up in that country, so too is the growth of the chemical industry. India is the largest exporter of industrial-grade salt, lower grade than ours, but they are the largest exporter of industrial-grade salt.
What we expect to see is that's going to pivot. They're going to start to redirect that domestic production to their domestic chemical industry, and already we're starting to see the exports out of India fall away. In the next three to four months, there's about 2.5 million tons of new domestic demand for three chlor-alkali plants that are about to come online within India. We think the market tailwinds are particularly strong for BCI and the product that we're making. As I said, we're very, very close. Construction is only months away. Last year we were talking about it being finished about October this year. We continue to say it's going to be complete around October this year. It's four years. Four years it's taken us to get to this point.
Four years we've been promising October in this quarter coming up that we'd be complete, and we've stuck to that promise. Not only have we not slipped on schedule, we haven't slipped on cost. We have stuck to the budget, and I expect ideally we'll come in slightly under budget. For a project of four-year duration, of the scale that we've done, to stay on schedule and on budget over that period is an absolute testament to our project team and the values and the people within our business. Sorry, that's slightly out of sequence. In terms of salt, as I said, we're producing salt. Come and visit us, come and touch some. We've got a bunch of crystals there. Salt is crystallizing. We released our quarterly report on Monday this week, and we talked about 49,000 tons sitting in our crystallizers.
Roll forward 22 days and we're sitting at 86,000 tons. This is during winter, with only eight cells out of 28 cells lined and operational. We'll progressively build out and line those additional cells and more brine will be moving in. Temperatures will start to increase and we'll start to see that salt rapidly crystallizing, and we'll be rapidly moving towards a position where we'll be able to start harvesting and sending that salt off to our customers. Just to come back to our port. Mardie Port is a strategically significant asset, not just for us, but for the Pilbara itself. There is an absolute shortage of export capacity in the Pilbara, and we've built infrastructure that's capable of exporting at least 20 million tons per annum.
We only need five and a half of that, so there's 14.5 million tons of capacity that can be used by Pilbara producers in that western region that need to get that port access and get their product to market. Pleasingly, I think we spoke about this last year, pleasingly, there's a lot of attention starting to be placed on that port. There's significant chalk resources within trucking distance of our port, estimated to be in excess of 1 billion tons. You can see there's a real opportunity for our business to grow beyond not just salt, not just SOP, but we've got this incredible asset here. I'd say at AUD 0.42, which I think our share price was as I was walking up here, there is absolutely zero recognition of the value that that can deliver to shareholders.
As I was just saying, SOP. SOP is a product that we've been talking for quite some time about. We've been methodical and been very deliberate in the steps that we've taken to make sure that when we make that final investment decision and commit our shareholders' capital to a large-scale commercial plant, that we've done the research, that we understand the process flows and we're not risking our shareholders' capital. Over the last 12 months, we've done a lot of work on the process flows, and we've had those process flows reviewed by two engineering companies, one in Australia, one in China, to independently validate that we can produce SOP. We've had universities examine our bittern, all of those results show that we've got commercial quantities of SOP and the process flow will work.
Before we go and commit that capital, we will build a pilot plant. We've spoken about this repeatedly. We will build a pilot plant. We've awarded a FEED study to Bluestar Lehigh Engineering Institute, a highly specialized engineering company in China who produce SOP plants. Our next step in the coming month is likely to be we'll award the construction of that pilot plant. We'll get that pilot plant up and running, and we'll run it for 12 months. We want to see how that chemistry works through all four seasons. We want to see how it operates in very high temperatures. We want to see how it operates in low temperatures, and how that chemical performance will be across that range. That is a very important part about our decision-making. Financially, we're in a strong position.
With AUD 258 million left to spend in capital, we've got AUD 435 million of available liquidity. We are very well-placed with AUD 177 million to fund our operational team and our working capital requirements. That, on a current run rate basis, would fund us for at least another eight quarters. We are very, very well-positioned. In FY 2027, in, sorry, in September 2027, we expect the business to become operating cash flow positive. In the next 12 months, we'll be at a point where revenue is exceeding cost, which will be a lovely position for a CFO to be in. The following year, in FY 2029, we expect to be free cash flow, generating positive free cash flow with a business that has very low sustaining CapEx. That positions us strongly to be able to deliver annuity-style dividends to our shareholders very soon.
With only months to go to complete construction, with salt crystallizing and revenue imminent, with some of the most outstanding infrastructure capable of providing diverse earning streams, we believe BCI presents a very compelling investment opportunity. Again, thank you, and come and visit us if you'd like to know more. Thank you very much.