I'll now hand over to BOA Resources Managing Director, Graeme Purcell. Thanks, Graeme.
Thanks, Nathan. It's good to have everyone listening this morning. It's a great opportunity for us to provide a bit of a background as to what an update to what we've been doing over the past few months, and also to where we think the company, what it looks like in the future for us. Over the last few weeks, it's been a very busy time for the company because just recently we've had a shareholder meeting that got approval to complete the transaction to acquire the Neds Creek copper project and the Thaduna Green Dragon Resources. We completed that about 10 days ago. So we're now 100% owners of this project. One of the key things that we got with this acquisition is the Thaduna and Green Dragon copper deposits, over 5 million tonnes at 2.3% for about 120,000 tonnes of contained copper.
In addition to that, we get almost 1,400 sq km of exploration grounds in this northeastern part of the Yerrida Basin. On completion, it was mostly a scrip deal, and Sandfire Resources is now a substantial shareholder with over 6% of the company. Also, in the last couple of months, as you may be aware, we've been drilling both at our Ricci Lee project, our prospect, and also a number of other prospects within the broader Neds Creek project. We've got some very good results back from those so far, from Ricci Lee, particularly, and also from the Rooneys prospect, and we're still awaiting final results from Ricci Lee and also the results from the other more aircore prospects that we drilled.
So a bit about the company and what's recently happened. What I'd like to do is introduce you to our Non-Executive Director, Mark Tomlinson, who's going to talk you through some of the company and corporate position. Over to you, please, Mark.
Yeah. Thanks very much, Graeme. Morning, everyone. Importantly for the company, following the transaction that Graeme's outlined, last week we completed in what was, I think, easily described as a pretty difficult resources market. We completed a capital raising of circa AUD 9.2 million in a two-tranche placement. AUD 7 million of that will settle in tranche 1 tomorrow, and so the company as of tomorrow and Wednesday will be very well-funded going forward. The structure that you're seeing below there is about 535 million shares will be out post that placement, both tranches of the placement, giving us a market cap of circa AUD 55 million.
We will have certainly over AUD 7 million as of tomorrow, and then another AUD 2.2 million will be added post the second tranche, which will be voted through by shareholders, we hope, of course, at the AGM to be held at the end of November.
You want to go to the next slide? Just very quickly on the board as well. Obviously, Graeme has now stepped up as the Managing Director, with Cath Norman stepping back from an Exec Chair role to be the Non-Executive Chair. With the transaction, we are very fortunate that Adrian Griffin, who was one of the architects of the transaction to bring the Neds Creek project together and then into BOA, has now joined the board. It is a very geological, geophysics-dominated board. I am the only non-geo or geophysicist.
I am a mining engineer by background. Importantly, the Exploration Manager, David Reid, is vastly experienced in this area. He did a lot of the original drilling on Neds Creek, and so we have got a fantastic background of knowledge on the project. Next slide, please. Graeme, I will throw this back to you. This is your area, where we are spending it.
No worries. Thanks very much, Mark. One of the aims with this raise that we are just completing is we need to fund ourselves for the next round of drilling or the next period of drilling that we would like to do on the project, and that is where the bulk of the funds are going. That is what we plan to do with them. With at least 75% of that to be spent on drilling in ground. We obviously still have some other overheads, but that is our main aim, is to put as much as we can into ground because that is where we see the most value or generating value within the project.
You can see on this slide here that we do obviously have some other background costs in heritage and tenement costs, but again, the bulk of the money is going to drilling, and the bulk of that will be at Ricci Lee, where we see immediate resource upside. Also at Thaduna. Now that we have recently acquired that, we can actually start trying to expand the resource there. Also, we will be drilling at the Rooneys prospect, and we will look a bit about at that just in the next few slides. There are also some other targets that may come up that we may want to drill as well. Back to the technical side. Here is our position. It is 100% owned now.
The key with all this acquisition is we now have a resource base from which we can grow, because we're looking at a standalone opportunity here and we have to just grow resources up to economic scale. That's the key thing that we have to do. What we're looking for here is not the VMS style like what Sandfire had at DeGrussa. It's a sediment-hosted style mineralization. It's quite unique in its own way, but it's structurally controlled epigenetic copper. We're using Thaduna as the model, as the example for what we're exploring for at the moment. All that started, the resource growth and resource definition really started in August when we started drilling at Ricci Lee, and also some of the other prospects, which we'll look at in a little bit. This is Thaduna.
This is what we've just bought and what we're using as an example or as the model for exploring the broader Neds Creek project. It's a resource of just over 4 million tons at 2.5% copper. So it's a very high-grade system, but just over 100,000 tons of contained copper. It had some historic workings over the years, but hadn't been really explored since the early '70s. It's a north-trending, steeply dipping ore body. It's hosted in a carbonaceous brittle fault, and it's got some later veining and sulfide mineralization. It's been defined over 600 m vertical depth. It is open at depth. So we can have a look at that in long section to give you a feel for that. You can see on this long section, it's a moderate northerly plunge to around 600 m vertically.
One of the key things of Thaduna is the upper half of it, the top 300 m, is really chalcopyrite dominant, and the lower half is more bornite dominant, and that's where we can see some really high grades up to around that 7%, 8% mark over good thicknesses. That's really where we see a lot of upside in this deposit because the margins of that lower part have been poorly defined. Basically, there's no drilling outside of the margins of the resource. So we're looking to materially grow the resource at Thaduna, targeting that bornite-rich, lower part of the system. Some of the other prospects, using Thaduna as an example, we've identified from the historic data six other targets that fell out of that. Priority of that was Ricci Lee, obviously, and we'll look at that in a bit more detail.
The second priority was Rooneys, and we'll look a little bit about some results that we got from the drilling there, plus some other targets that fell out of there. They're all Thaduna lookalikes and structurally controlled sediment-hosted copper. They're all hosted in Thaduna Formation sediments, so the same host package. All drilling really that we did, both at Ricci Lee and the others, was to try and understand and focus on mineralization controls and also the structural orientation and stratigraphic controls of these prospects. There is also another important prospect to us in Enigma, but that's something that we don't understand very well at this stage. But it remains an opportunity for us in the future. Ricci Lee, this is where we've done the most work.
It's where we started drilling in early August, and we completed 46 holes for over 7,000 m and finished that in around mid-September. The program aimed to test the strike dip and more importantly here, the grade continuity of copper mineralization that had been identified over historic drilling that had 8 RC holes over that 500-m strike and about 180 m vertical. We came in and drilled a more systematic grid-based program over 600 m of strike and down to, in some parts, greater than 220 m vertically. The results of that geologically was we defined the main lode in the Ricci Lee system to over 600 m. One of the things we found in the northern part was there was an additional lode, a hanging wall lode, that was a bit of a surprise to us, a very pleasant surprise.
But one of the good things we found is there is good copper continuity, both along strike and down dip. So far we've had 28 of 34 holes that we've received the results for have come back with significant high-grade copper intersections. These results to date have really improved our understanding of the Ricci Lee system, and we really see it as having very high potential for turning this into a resource. What we'll do for the next couple of slides is give you a look at some cross-sections or the long section initially, and then a couple of cross-sections from the southern and northern part of the deposit. This is a long section. You can see where it sits on the map on the right-hand side. We're 2 km southwest of Thaduna, same structural orientation, same host rocks, and the same mineralization style.
You can see on the long section where we've got some very good high-grade results, where we're looking at plus 30% copper meters, which is what the equivalent, 10.3%. So very high grade and good thicknesses. But so far with the results we have to date, we've defined mineralization, high-grade mineralization over 400 m of strike and more than 200 m vertical. The best one of those is the deepest one at the north where we got some very, very high grades, and we'll look at that section in a moment. But one of the things we are seeing here is an emerging shallow northerly plunge, which has some similarities to Thaduna. But that's really, we have to wait until we get all the remaining assays, and we'll have a look at that and model it up and make some plans from there, especially some future drilling plans.
Just to look at a cross-section, this is one from the south, the southern portion of the system, and it shows a very nice coherent main lode structure. Within that, there's some exceptionally good grades and thicknesses, 15 m over 2% or 10 m at 2.8. There's some very good grades there, and they show good continuity down dip. This is an example of a cross-section from the northern part of the system. Two things here. One, it shows the main lode where we've got, again, some very, very good intersections, but also this is where you start to see the hanging wall lode that we've defined for about 160 m of strike so far. That's also got some very good grades, including 10 m at 1.8.
But the key intersection for us on this section is the deepest one in hole 23, where we got 22 m of 3% copper, including 9 m at 6.8. That high-grade core, that 9-m intersection was mostly bornite mineralization, and that's something that while we get that high grade, and that's something obviously we'd like to chase up at depth. But again, this shows both good continuity down dip, but also now along strike, and gives us a lot more confidence that this can turn into a significant high-grade copper resource. This slide here shows you the other five prospects that we drilled. It includes Rooneys. We drilled a total of 90 holes for over 5,700 m, and all these targets were, again, similar to Thaduna, but just at a much earlier stage.
Our focus was trying to identify mineralization controls, the orientation of the structures, and continuity of mineralization. The results of these, we've received one set of results from Rooneys, and we'll look at that in a moment. The rest of these results will be flowing, either late this week, we hope, or early next week and through into early November. In addition to all the drilling, we've been doing some target generation work using some extensive geophysical and geochemical data sets. That's just an ongoing process to add some targets into our prospect pipeline. Excuse me. This is Rooneys, and this is where we did aircore drilling.
Basically, we did have an RC program planned on the eastern side of the system here, but we took those measures down to Ricci Lee because we thought we could get better results from that for the moment. Plus, we thought we'd learn a bit more from the aircore drilling before we come back and do any planned RC drilling. But the aircore drilling found the Rooney structure did continue out to the west. So we've now got over 350 m worth of strike with high-grade copper oxide, copper mineralization. A further set of holes out west of that, we can now demonstrate over 500 m of strike. So it's a very pleasing result in that we've got the Rooney structure is continuous with good copper mineralization. It's something that we're going to come back and now do a more expanded RC follow-up drill program.
In addition to the main structure, we also identified, at this stage, a smaller secondary structure, north trending, Thaduna-oriented structure that also had copper mineralization. We actually have additional structures to play with there. So it's a very encouraging set of results just from this one prospect and something that we look to put an RC program onto as soon as we can. This is where we are with our prospect pipeline. We now have the Thaduna Green Dragon resources as our platform for growth. Ricci Lee is a prospect we think can get up into resource category quite quickly. Rooneys has just moved up the pipeline into the more advanced stage because the results from the aircore, and we hope to see some of the other prospects move up over the coming weeks. A bit of an idea of the news flow.
You can see we've completed drilling and we're starting to roll out the drill results. We now finally completed the transaction, and we're now in the process of integrating the Thaduna Green Dragon data into our own database and working at fine-tuning what we want to do from there. One thing we are looking at doing is to recommence drilling at Ricci Lee and Rooneys as soon as we can, and we're looking to do that sort of mid to late November if we can secure drill rigs. That's a quick snapshot. That's where I'd like to leave us. We now have copper resources. That's our platform for growth. We've got extensive exploration upside. You can see from Ricci Lee and Rooneys, we've got really, really high potential to develop some additional copper resources and also got an extensive prospect pipeline.
We've got a good team in place that knows how to explore and make discoveries, and we've got good proven capital market execution in the board. We're just now at the process where we want to grow our resources to economic scale. That starts with hopefully drilling again next month at Ricci Lee and Rooneys. I'd like to say thanks. I'll leave it there and just say thanks for your attention. If you've got any questions.
Thanks, Graeme. Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please enter it into the Q&A panel within Zoom. We've had a series of questions come through, so we'll just work through these if that's okay. Your first question, "How soon can we expect the remaining results from Ricci Lee and the aircore drilling?
Oh, that's easy. That should flow through hopefully later this week or next week. We should get some more results from the Ricci Lee RC and also some of the aircore drilling. The aircore drilling will probably flow through to, say, mid-November, but we should have them all out and into the market.
Thank you. Second question, "Will your priority be expanding the existing resources at Thaduna and Green Dragon or infill drilling at Ricci Lee?
We won't be doing any infill at Ricci Lee, but that is definitely a priority. We'll be chasing that more down deep and down plunge. That's the exploration target to try and understand the size and the scope of what we're dealing with there. We are definitely going to drill Thaduna. We think we can materially add resources to that, particularly in the deeper part of the system, and that'll be a focus for us sort of, say, in the first quarter to first half of 2027.
Thank you. Next question. "What gives you confidence Neds Creek could ultimately emerge as a district scale copper system rather than a collection of individual deposits?
Well, that's a good question. We're pretty confident it can do. One, because we've got Thaduna, and we think we can grow that into a more substantial resource. We've got Ricci Lee, which we think can grow into another Thaduna, into a very substantial resource. There's a lot of other prospects that we've identified from historical exploration that has the potential to generate resources. Outside of that, the broader part of the project, at least in the Neds Creek package, really has been underexplored. Our job is to grow resources, but also to look at that ground and really focus on it and try and find additional targets through there and really focus on it. That's where I think the potential lies.
If we stay focused in what we want to do in this project, then we could hopefully turn that into a larger scale opportunity.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, so I will now hand back to Graeme for closing remarks.
Thanks, Nathan, and thanks to all listeners. It has been a pleasure to be able to give you a bit of an update and hopefully a bit of an idea as to where we think we are going in the short and medium term. Thank you very much for your attention.