On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you have joined us for our Australian Rare Earths and Critical Minerals Conference. Our next presentation of the day is from Brazilian Rare Earths. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Bernardo da Veiga, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Brazilian Rare Earths, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol BRELY and on ASX under the symbol BRE. Welcome, Bernardo.
Thanks, Lili, and thanks to everybody who's made the time. I guess we do not have a whole lot of time, so I'm going to try to keep things relatively brief. As Lili mentioned, if anybody wants to follow up on a one-on-one, please feel free to reach out, and I'm happy to make the time. I guess if I had to summarize what makes Brazilian Rare Earths special and why we think we have a great company and project, it's first and foremost because we have discovered what is the highest grade rare earths deposit on the planet, at least based on public filings. Our flagship asset is a deposit called Monte Alto, and to date, we have intersected grades that on average run around 15% TREO, that's Total Rare Earth Oxides.
What is really important is that not only is our overall grade, i.e., the concentration of metal in the ground, very high and significantly higher than the very next best deposits, but also the composition of that grade is very important. For those that follow the rare earth industry, you might have heard of light rare earths and heavy rare earths. The world has quite a bit of light rare earths, and that is NdPr, neodymium and praseodymium, those two elements. The world needs that a lot, but there is a good abundant supply of that, and there is a good supply of that outside of China. However, the heavy rare earths, the DyTb, the dysprosium and the terbium, those are in desperate short supply outside of China and indeed in the world over, including China, but specifically outside of China.
It's in desperate short supply because China controls the vast majority of production and processing of these heavy rare earths. What's really exciting about our project is that unlike many others, we do have a very high amount of dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths, in our overall grade. That's really powerful because it makes our ore quite strategic and quite in demand from various different parties. Something else that's quite exciting is that not only do we have very high grades of rare earths, we also have a series of co-products. These are other elements that we can mine alongside the rare earths that could also prove to be very economic and are highly strategic. These are niobium. We have about 0.5% niobium. We have some quite elevated levels of scandium and tantalum.
Perhaps most importantly, we have very, very high levels of uranium, such that we should be a very significant uranium producer as a co-product. All of this is very important because we are primarily a rare earths focused business, but the fact that we may be able to generate other products that can be sold and those proceeds can help pay for the cost of producing the rare earths, that's very powerful because, of course, it greatly lowers our unit costs when it comes to rare earths or has the potential to greatly lower unit costs when it comes to rare earths. The project itself is unbelievable. It's very, very high quality and very strategically attractive to a number of parties. Secondly, we discovered this asset sometime in 2021. It's a relatively new discovery.
What we found out at the time is that there was a whole province in Brazil. There was a whole area in northeastern Brazil that was completely underexplored, and we felt highly prospective for rare earth discoveries, rare earth and other critical mineral discoveries. We were very fortunate in that early on in our journey, we attracted some very significant and very large investors onto our register. That allowed us to raise a very good amount of money before we IPO'd in 2023 and to use that money to consolidate that province. What started as something like 400 sq km of tenements under our control has now ballooned into over 4,000 sq km of tenements.
In the last three years, I'm very pleased to say we must have made at least 20+ discoveries in that province, all of which have the potential to become very significant deposits. To summarize, the first two major points and highlights for the company is that, A, we have discovered already what appears to be the highest grade, richest deposit on the planet for rare earths. In addition to that, we also consolidated an entire province of prospective tenements that could yield similar deposits to Monte Alto, and we have begun exploration activities over the last few years in those other tenements that have had a lot of success, all of which has been published.
The third point that I think is very important and worth pointing out is that in the world of rare earths, the technical expertise when it comes to rare earth processing is very limited. We've all heard about how China dominates the world of rare earths, and that's because for the last 30 years, the world has been exporting its mineral processing to places like China. The Chinese, being very smart, have gone and perfected those techniques but kept those secrets, closely held secrets. That technical knowledge has been kept closely held. Today, there are laws in China that preclude technical know-how from leaving the country. However, there are other groups that have also historically been very strong in the world of rare earth processing.
It was the French who originally went to China and helped the Chinese and taught the Chinese how to do some of their early rare earth processing. The French have carried on that tradition, Solvay, a major French chemical rare earth separation, very successfully for decades. Some of their guys left Solvay and set up a private company called Carester. That company has been funded by JOGMEC, effectively the Japanese government and the French government. They are building a heavy rare earth separation facility in France. That facility should go online next year. We have recently signed an agreement with Carester, which is very important for us because in exchange for supplying Carester with a small amount of offtake, Carester will then become our technical partners and effectively help us develop our downstream processing in Brazil.
I can't stress enough how powerful it is to have a technical partner that has done it successfully in the past that can help us navigate the various challenges that are associated with rare earth processing, which is not an easy endeavor, highly profitable, but of course, not straightforward. This partnership with Carester should greatly de-risk our pathway to production by partnering us up with a group that has real-world expertise in rare earth separation and recent multiple examples of different plants around the world that they have successfully operated. I can't stress enough how important that partnership has been for us. The third point, fourth point, is that we have a very, very strong balance sheet at the moment. The company has somewhere in the order of AUD 180 million on its balance sheet. We have been very well backed by our shareholders.
Our list of shareholders are the who's who of mining investors globally, including very, very large funds and family offices. From that point of view, it's very pleasing because, of course, one of the critical things for any project is its ability to get funded and to be able to go into construction and operation. We feel very strongly that we have the right backers to do so. All of this is very interesting and all well and good, but I guess the one thing that I think really makes this company stand out is its geographic location. You could have an amazing deposit, but if that deposit is located in the wrong part of the world, deep in a desert somewhere far away from any available infrastructure or in a jurisdiction with very high costs or other things, then that deposit becomes less attractive.
In our case, we have an amazing deposit, as I've pointed out a few times. It has amazing upside potential, but perhaps most importantly, it's located close to the coast in a very mining-friendly jurisdiction, being Brazil. We have an abundance of infrastructure close by. I have a high transmission power line that goes through the middle of the tenements. I have a gas pipeline here shown in green that goes just due east of the tenements. I have a series of highways and roads that crisscross the tenements. I have a number of small little towns close by, which means I'm not having to build mining camps and airports and roads and power stations and all sorts of things that cost significant amounts of capital. Everything is there and readily available for us to use.
We're also in a part of Brazil that's very poor and starving for development. It is a very pro-mining, investment-friendly part of Brazil with all sorts of fiscal incentives that can be made available to incentivize growth. We are very pleased to be here. We've got a number of ports within close proximity. We've got the Port of Ilhéus down here and three major ports around Salvador, which is a major international city with an international airport. Once again, fantastic infrastructure. Perhaps the most relevant thing for us is this green rectangle here on the northeastern corner of the map. That is the Camaçari Petrochemical Complex. The reason why that is a very, very important complex for us is because in the world of rare earth processing, one of our largest costs is going to be acid.
That cost could be as high as 70% of my total OpEx could be acid. Our plan is to put our processing facility inside the petrochemical complex. That has several benefits. First benefit is that our operating costs can be greatly lowered by putting our plant next where acid is produced. Of course, transporting acid is a very expensive endeavor. If you can keep the transportation costs down, that can greatly lower your costs. Second, we may even choose to do our own acid production, which would lower costs again. First point being OpEx should be a lot lower by being located inside the petrochemical complex. The second point is that your capital costs are likewise reduced because there are many things that are already built in a petrochemical complex. For example, there is already a wastewater treatment plant that's part of the complex.
Rather than having to build our own, we would simply pipe wastewater treatment to that complex. That likewise can greatly lower CapEx. The final point, and it's probably the most important, is that by putting your processing facility inside an established industrial area, the permitting time is much quicker because rather than having to consider the impact of that downstream processing on a virgin bit of ground, some inland farming area that's more pristine, more untouched, we're considering the impact of a downstream processing plant inside an existing gigantic petrochemical plant. That makes life a lot easier from a permitting point of view. You're not asking for something new. You're asking to piggyback off of an existing license. That should make life a lot quicker. Our current plan is very clear. We'll keep things very simple at the mine site.
We're just going to mine things, make a concentrate at the mine site. That concentrate only requires water and gravity to be made. You're not talking about leaching. You're not talking about using reagents or anything that could be considered sort of dirty or polluting. You would then take that concentrate. You could either sell it. There are many companies today that will buy it as a product and there's great margin in that. That's a way to achieve near-term cash flow with very low investment. That's an option. You can take it and you can further process it yourselves, which is certainly what we're working through now.
The idea is that we would take that material and we would process it further downstream, but we would do that in the petrochemical complex because for the reasons I mentioned, it should be a lot cheaper and quicker. I'm not going to go through this slide in a lot of detail, but suffice it to say there are a lot more benefits of being located within a petrochemical complex than what I mentioned. Likewise, our deal with Carester, I do encourage folks to go to our filings and read through the announcement we made around that partnership because there's a lot there, and it's really a terrific deal that we made that's going to help the company for years to come. This is what I mentioned earlier about we own a province, not a project.
If you look at the tenements that are sitting there on the map on the right-hand side, that green shaded area on the background, that's what's known as a geophysical anomaly. Basically, we take equipment like sensors that we mount to helicopters or airplanes or drones, and you fly them over this terrain, and that equipment picks up geophysical information. In this case, we're looking for radiation. We're looking for areas where the radiation is higher than background radiation, and you can create a kind of heat map, and the more intense areas are more prospective, the less intense areas are less prospective. Basically, because rare earths are associated with thorium and uranium, we know that where there are rare earths, there quite often is also radioactivity. That heat map gives us a terrific guide as to where to look for things.
As you can see, our tenements, which are the shapes with the blue outline, envelop the majority of the anomaly that we identified. Every one of those dots and triangles that you see along that belt, these are all new discoveries that were made in the last two years, three years. We have a lot of new areas to explore, a lot of things yet to be discovered. It is really pleasing that in a very short amount of time, we have created already a long list of potential targets that we are now drilling sequentially to delineate more deposits. It is all very exciting. This is what our major asset looks like. I am going to skip through it because we are kind of running out of time. The major asset has been drilled extensively. A lot of diamond drilling has gone into it.
We've done it to a very high level of confidence. In the world of mining, there's different levels of confidence. We've done our resource mainly to a measured and indicated level, which are the two highest levels of confidence. We feel quite secure about what we've done. There's one more point that I'll make, and then I'll sort of close things off. When it comes to processing rare earths, it's really important that as you're looking at different companies, you look at what it takes to process their particular ore. Every deposit is different, and every deposit has their benefits and their drawbacks. One major benefit of our ore is that our ore is very reactive to acid.
That means that we put our material into a tank with a leaching agent like acid, and we're able to have very, very, very high extractions, which means that we can actually recover most of the metal into solution. Therefore, that makes the project more economically viable. Now, that is actually not the case for most other companies. Most of the high-grade companies around the world produce very refractory minerals, which means that these are minerals that are not reactive to acid. The first thing you've got to do is you've got to go through this very, very expensive and painful process of cracking your mineral. It basically means you're going to use a lot of force, a lot of energy to break open that crystal structure to then allow the crystal structure to be leached. That process is called cracking.
You might hear this in the literature. As you're reading about other companies, you might talk about, "I'm going to crack the mineral." In our case, we do not need to do that. Our material just happens by luck to be very reactive to acid. We can skip this very expensive step because that step requires equipment, right? It's expensive equipment. It's equipment that's designed to withstand very high temperatures and very high pressures, right? These things are expensive by default. We don't need any of that. We cut down both CapEx and OpEx when compared to that. Those are, I think, the main selling points of the company. It's a terrific asset, very well located, strategically located, close to the right kind of infrastructure that should have many follow-on benefits: lower OpEx, lower CapEx, quicker permitting, things like that.
Very well-capitalized company, AUD 180 million in the bank. We're not looking for capital. We're not about to do a raise tomorrow. Also, we have the sort of shareholders that when we do need to raise, they're able to contribute very material amounts of capital. That's always helpful. Finally, we've made the right partnerships to avoid making a lot of mistakes ourselves and to be able to leverage off other people's know-how and to de-risk our pathway to production that way. In terms of the next steps, let us go through this very quickly. We're now about to issue our first scoping study. I didn't mention this because we don't have much time. In addition to a lot of rare earths in the project, we also have a really big bauxite and gallium deposit, which we inherited from when we bought up all these tenements.
Our interest is in the rare earths, but it so happened that there was a very nice bauxite gallium deposit there that we bought. We are doing a scoping study there, and we will show the market what that could be worth and what the various parameters look like. That is going to come out sometime in the next month or so. We will then figure out what we are doing with that asset, whether we sell it, trade sale it, or IPO that asset. My current preference is to spin it out so that everybody who is a BRE shareholder, who is a Brazilian Rare Earths shareholder, becomes a shareholder in the bauxite as well, and they have exposure to both. We are going to be doing a lot more work around metallurgy and technical improvements to the project, and we will be announcing those.
All of that's going to coalesce into a feasibility study or pre-feasibility study or scoping study for the rare earths. That is sometime in the middle of next year. I am also looking to establish another partnership that would be more of a financial partnership. That would be finding the right partner that wants our offtake and is willing to fund our development in exchange for that offtake, something like that. There are several conversations underway. At some point, we hope to settle on the right party. That kind of brings us to the end. I have got a few questions here, which I will then take and answer if people do not mind. The first question was, with China dominating rare earth separation, what gives you confidence that establishing a separation facility in Brazil will be economically competitive?
What gives me confidence is the studies that we're doing that are showing that given our grades are so outsized, given that Brazil has quite attractive cost structures in terms of low-cost power, ability to produce your own acid, cheap labor, quite beneficial tax advantages, especially in this northern part of Brazil. Where we are in Brazil, in particular, this northeastern area, there's a tax benefit in Brazil, for example, where we're eligible for a 75% reduction in income tax for the first 10 years as a given, and that can be extended. There are a few things there that make us pretty confident. Yeah, that's what we're using. This is really bottom-up work where we're building everything up from the nuts and bolts all the way up and looking at what that means based on today's prices.
We're not the sort of company that expects that needs prices to be much higher in the future. Everything we do internally, we do considering spot prices. If most analysts are correct and prices happen to be much higher in the future, great. That's certainly not how we run our company and not what we bank on. That's one question. Next question. With multiple high-grade discoveries across the province, how are you prioritizing resource definition versus advancing Monte Alto to development? That's a very good question. The answer is that Monte Alto is the priority because it's the most advanced, and we have thrown as much resources as Monte Alto can bear in order to get that sort of drilled out completely so we know exactly how big it is. We've already started things like environmental permits in Monte Alto.
We're deep into engineering work in Monte Alto. Monte Alto's all systems go full steam ahead. That does not take away from our desire and need to do regional exploration. We're very well cashed up. Like I said, we're very careful with our cash, of course, but the cash is there to be spent. I have a dedicated Monte Alto development team that's full-time on that, and I have dedicated sort of exploration teams that are looking at these other deposits. The areas that we're covering are so vast that we already have three separate sort of bases of operations throughout that belt that allows us to attack each one of these targets more efficiently. Next question. Sorry. Your metallurgical results show 86% extraction rates. What are the key technical risks to achieving similar recoveries at commercial scale?
We are building a pilot plant right now, and that pilot plant should be ready by middle of next year. The whole idea is to de-risk that scale-up and to be able to prove that these things can be done at the larger scale as well as the Canada bench scale. My experience is that when it comes to hydrometallurgy in particular, it tends to scale up far better than, say, if you are looking at how well a flotation unit works or how well a magnetic separator works or something like that. These physical methods, they tend to work very well at bench scale and not scale up as well, but with chemical, it tends to scale up better.
However, our partnership with Carester, our building of a pilot plant, our desire to operate the pilot plant for a long time, we're sending our guys to France to work with the Carester guys. We're doing everything we can to build up as much human capital and know-how within the company ahead of us commissioning. I hope that answers that question. Real quick one here. Beyond the Carester heavy rare earth offtake agreement, what discussions are underway for NdPr and light rare earth offtake? Do you have indicative pricing structures? We are talking to a number of parties. There are several conversations underway. I'm using the remaining offtake as the bargaining chip to get offtake financing. That's my preferred option. We're talking to a number of groups in Asia, in the Middle East, North America, and so on.
At the right time, we'll find the best deal for us. We're not far enough along yet to be talking price structures. I mean, the price structure tends to be pretty straightforward. It's either a percentage of, in the case of the Carester deal, it's a percentage of whatever they get for the end metal. We get a percentage of that for our concentrate, and it's a very good percentage. Once it comes to selling NdPr, then I guess there might be conversations around floor prices and things like that. We're not that far ahead yet. Given Brazil's aspiration to become a major rare earth producer and global supply chain restructure, how does BRE differentiate itself from other Brazilian international projects? Find for market relevance.
I'd say the fact that we're the highest grade, we're the ones with the best infrastructure, we're the ones with the strongest balance sheet and the strongest investors, and we're the ones with the best technical results to date goes a long way towards differentiating us. I mean, a lot of the other Brazilian guys, the ones that look somewhat promising, they're ionic clay developers. That's a very different proposition. Ionic clay has its challenges. You're talking about very large volumes with huge environmental impacts to extract very small amounts of metal. We're at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, very high grades for small volumes to have the same impact. I'm just going to burn through the last one here.
With institutional investors expressing robust confidence, what are your projected future financing needs to reach commercial production, and what triggers will determine the timing and amount of capital raises? I guess what we need to finalize is our initial study to work out roughly how much capital we need. Like I said, my preferred path is going to be to finance it through largely offtake financing. If I can do that, great. There might have to be an equity component in there, which means we would do an equity raise. My expectation is that offtake finance will go a long way. I apologize. There was one or two more questions I wanted to get through, but unfortunately, we just ran out of time. If people want to email me, if I have not answered their questions, my email is bdv@brazilianrareearths.com.
Please email me questions, and I'm happy to respond via email.