Thanks very much. I might just wait for everyone to leave the room after Luke's presentation, then I'll kick off. I will start just by acknowledging Luke and Minerals 260. It's extraordinary what that company's achieved in the last 12 months, particularly the deal with Franco-Nevada. I think, for the rest of the development pack, Ballard included, it has it all looking at the conventional ways of funding projects, as opposed to debt and equity. We've got a debt advisor appointed, and we're certainly open to a number of other options. For all those funds and shareholders sitting out there waiting for the big equity raise to build it, I assure you that that may not actually eventuate. Last presentation before morning tea, I've seen this sort of feature in a couple of slide decks this morning.
It's the concept of no more than a handful of ideas, and I think this is best represented by Tony Abbott back in 2010. From what I could tell, Abbott's election mandate was three things: stop the boats, repeal the tax, and stop the big new tax on everything. Regardless of your political persuasion, it's always sort of stuck with me that no more than a handful. That's Ballard's top three. We are funded to a financial excuse me, a final investment decision. We have AUD 62 million in the bank. We are fully permitted. That's fully permitted, full stop. Not refer footnote one. We have everything we need to do to build a mine tomorrow. We're taking a long-term patient view, and we're building the resource to genuine standalone scale. I'll just start with the structure.
For those not familiar with the story, Ballard listed just over a year ago, July last year. Ballard was spun out of Delta Lithium. The history there being Delta had looked at a number of ways of monetizing the gold at Mount Ida. On a process of elimination, the most obvious thing became to do was just to set Ballard free, do an IPO, and Ballard to fund its own pathway. By virtue of that demerger, Delta is there with 34% of the register. A couple of Delta's major shareholders, MinRes, Hancock, Idemitsu, by way of the in specie distribution, have all come on to Ballard's register in their own right. MinRes is sitting there with just under 5% of the register. They're not substantial. Whereas Hancock, as I say, just under 6%. September last year, we did a strategic placement to our neighbor, Aurenne.
They've just got just under 10% of the register. I'll talk a bit more to Aurenne in a moment. Just in terms of the board and management team, myself and Tim Manners, we're the two Exec Directors for the company. Tim was CFO for Ramelius for seven years during a very formative period of growth for that company. I'm a mining engineer. I've followed a well-trodden pathway through the operations. I wear a number of scars, and we're trying to apply those learnings to what we're currently doing, ably led by our Chairman, Simon Lill. Simon was Chair of De Grey for 12 years for that entire journey up until the takeover by Northern Star. James Crowe was a Delta rep, and Stu Mathews. Stu, until he retired a couple of years ago, was Executive Vice President of Gold Fields Australasia.
He's used to looking at big camp scale project, big exploration budgets, and he brings a different lens to a company our size. Just rounding out the management team, Todd Hibberd, our Geology Manager, and Lauren Faulkner is our Co-Sec. As I said, AUD 62 million in the bank, categorically, that will get us through to an FID. Our location, we're a couple of hours North of Kalgoorlie. We've got bitumen roads within 20 km of the mine gate. We're surrounded by some well-known ASX producer, Vault and Genesis. They're 100 km to the East of us. 100 km to the South of us is Ora Banda. One of their underground operations, Davyhurst, is 80 km to the South of us. Same greenstone belt, same geology, same predominant underground mining method that we're contemplating. As I said, we've got Aurenne.
Aurenne are 6 km to the South of us. They are a privately owned gold mine, owned by one guy. They're a steady state operation. They've got a 2.5 million tonne per annum plant. They're producing circa 70,000 oz per annum. The strategic placement we did to them last year was a demonstration of intent from both parties that there's willingness to consider a merger. There is nothing in paper other than a CA. Those conversations are ongoing. There's no probability of success of a merger as opposed to anything else in that landscape. What we talk about, all that we can control is plan A. Plan A is building the resource to genuine standalone scale.
If anything else comes along that betters that, whether it's a merger with Aurenne or indeed any other sensible M&A within that region, there's obviously a lot of latent processing capacity within 100 km, then that has to be plan A. We're putting 220,000 m into the ground this calendar year. That's an AUD 50 million exploration budget. I think Ora Banda is the only company, including Genesis and Vault, who are putting more money into the ground than us. For a company of our size, a junior explorer developer, we are pinning our ears back and having a crack. That's the resource with just Geology 101. The greenstone gold, the greenstone that hosts the gold was there first. You've had a subsequent granite intrusion.
As the granite has cooled, that's when the pegmatites have come out through the gold, and that's why you have both lithium, which Delta was looking to exploit, and gold occurring. There's no interaction between the gold and the lithium. The gold is vertical to subvertical. The pegs which host the lithium are flat, so you get some minor interaction when you're mining the open pits. Certainly from an underground perspective, there's no interaction. Of our 1.2 million ounce resource, we've got 1 million ounces at 3.5 at Baldock. Baldock does all the heavy lifting for the project. We came out of the IPO starting blocks last year, the first thing we did was embark on an 86,000 m infill drilling program at Baldock. That's converted 670,000 oz at 3.7 of indicated material at Baldock. That will support an ore reserve and the basis for an FS.
From all the other regional projects you see on the screen, we're busy drilling those now. Our expectation is we have sort of two thirds to three quarters of our production profile provided by Baldock and then another third coming from the incremental stocking fillers, the satellite regional open pits. This is Baldock. As I said, 86,000 m infill drilling program. We only drilled that down to 350 m vertical. There's 1 million ounces in that top 350 m. We're busy now. We've got three diamond drill rigs sitting on top of Baldock, doing extensional drilling. We put out some drill results a couple of weeks ago, those two results shown on the screen to the South of Baldock.
You can sort of squint, close one eye and imagine the dotted line on the screen is the existing resource outline of Baldock. We certainly expect that though, that drilling, we've still got additional assays coming through from the lab, that'll add a significant proportion of inferred resource, I should add, to the current resource at Baldock. Just an isometric view of Baldock looking to the South. That's Aurenne's operation, 5 km to the South of us. As I said before, we're on the same greenstone belt as Ora Banda and Agnew, we're confident with those two analogs and the success that both Ora Banda and Agnew have had at depth. We know these orogenic gold deposits plumb deep, we're confident by putting the meters into the ground, by doing the drilling that will translate to resource growth.
Just jumping to the other side of the granite. This is what we call the Ballard Fault. We've put out a number of results with respects to the prospects on the Ballard Fault. As I said, we're deliberately targeting these regional satellites as open pit material stocking fillers to top up the baseload feed out of Baldock. Importantly, they provide oxide transitional material to blend with the underground fresh rock from Baldock. Just our overall timeline. We have guided to a 1.5 million ounce resource update in September. The other way to think about that is we won't put out a mineral resource update until it is 1.5 million ounces. That's important to us because that will support an initial eight-year mine life, which will then roll through to feasibility finance FID, which we've also guided to FID by the middle of next year.
We have the money to do that. As soon as we've achieved that 1.5 million ounce resource, we'll then pivot to a combination of infill drilling and continuing the growth drilling. Assuming that we proceed down the standalone option, it's an 18-month build time. The idea being by the time we've actually built the plant and starting to commission it for first gold, we've grown the resource to 2 million ounces. For us, that translates to a 10-year mine life. They're our sort of key milestone, eight years or 1.5 million ounces to bank it and having 2 million ounces or a 10-year mine life by the time it's built. Every single Ballard employee is incentivized with those 1.5 million ounces and 2 million ounce targets. We recognized very early on they were key milestones, we incentivized our workforce appropriately. Permitting.
I think this is one of the Not I think. This is the key differentiator between us and the rest of the development pack. I think Luke's left the room now, so I can say this. Minerals 260 are talking about airlifting production bores. We're putting them in the ground. One of the scars that I wear from previous roles is water. Not only do we have a 3.6 gig water abstraction license, which will support a 3.7 million tonne per annum processing plant. We're further de-risking that by putting the production bores into the ground. We have a works approval to build a 2 million tonne per annum processing plant. Every permit we need is in place. The maturity of our board, the top-down goals. We're being patient. We're not going to be distracted by toll treating. We looked at toll treating options under Delta.
We felt it really destroys value. If you want to truck ore for us 100 km down the road to Paddington will charge you AUD 100 a tonne to treat it. It's another AUD 20 a tonne to haul it. It's an AUD 120 a tonne processing solution. Whereas if you build your own processing plant and you're afforded an AUD 30, AUD 40 a tonne processing cost, it's an AUD 80 a tonne differential. You can do the math. It's an 18-month payback period. Of course, with your own processing plant, you're completely in charge of your own destiny. With the exception of time, obviously that's what we miss out on. I guess we're still all reasonably bullish on the gold price. Even if gold does fall back and settle at AUD 4,000 an ounce, that's an exceptionally good gold price. That's the story.
We're here for the rest of today. We've got to head down to Brisbane first thing tomorrow morning, but feel free to stop by the booth for a chat. We've got some merch. We use InvestorHub for all our communication, so feel free, excuse me, to reach out via InvestorHub. I've had a number of calls with shareholders and potential shareholders that have come via InvestorHub. More than happy to set anything up. Thanks very much for your time. Good day