Good morning, everyone. Great to be back at this fantastic conference in Noosa. Presenting on Chalice Mining and the developments we're making with our Nickel, Copper, and Palladium project in WA. Chalice Mining is a fantastic investment opportunity, and the reason there is we've got the best, basically, Palladium deposit anywhere on the planet. It's located in WA, and we've got a fantastically strong balance sheet. We're on the way to developing that asset. It's going to be a very profitable asset to mine and operate. It's the largest resource of its kind in the world, 17 million oz of contained PGMs. Most of that Palladium, 960,000 tons of Nickel, 540,000 tons of Copper, and 96,000 tons of cobalt in an open pit deposit. Quite extraordinary in terms of scale. It's got a development pathway now.
This time last year, we were scrambling to sort of redesign the processing pathway for this project. We've made some huge leaps forward in the last 12 months, really simplifying the flow sheet and adapting the project to a low commodity price environment, albeit at the moment for those watching PGMs, the price environment is certainly improving. Huge amount of upside as well in our portfolio across the West Yilgarn. All that orange on the map there, that's all our projects. We're very active, exploring in the West Yilgarn for more deposits like Gonville and others like Boddington, other lots of gold and Copper potential in that part of the world. Fantastic strong balance sheet, AUD 83 million in cash and listed investments, a stable institutional share register, and a proven team. We've got a dedicated invested team, insiders own about 2.5% of the company.
All of that combined makes it a fantastic investment opportunity. You are buying effectively metal in the ground for AUD 24 an oz at the current prices, ignoring all the value of the base metals. Palladium's now trading in closer to $1,300 an oz and on the way up, which is fantastic to see. Fantastically strong register. It's a Tim Goyder company, as many of those in this room will know. Tim's a fantastic entrepreneur and mine creator, company creator. On the right-hand side there, you can see in the last couple of months or the last three months, we've been one of the best performing stocks on the ASX in the mining space, up about 90% in that time, to a market cap today of about AUD 700 million, share price of about AUD 1.90 a share. Why Palladium?
For those who don't know, Palladium, the spot price, whilst it has risen about 30% off the lows, is still deep in the cost curve. It's below the marginal cost of supply. The marginal supplier at the moment needs about $1,450 to break even. The price today, like I said, is about $1,300. The price is going to continue to go up. We've seen two mines already curtailed in this part of the cycle, and it's a very unstable supply chain. Russia and South Africa produce about 85% of the world's metal, and they're very aging, deep mining complexes, so very underinvested. We've seen a supply deficit in Palladium for 10 out of the last 11 years.
I think what's most curious about Palladium is that there's an expectation that the world is going to electrify transport, and we're all going to be buying battery electric vehicles, and that's going to destroy demand for Palladium. What we've actually seen is that there's a push now away from battery electric vehicles and back towards hybrid and ICE vehicles, and those obviously contain Palladium in the catalytic converter. There's a catch-up happening at the moment where speculators have been sort of speculating that the story is over, and we think it is anywhere from over. If you had a look at the left-hand side there, the growth on battery electric vehicles has basically plateaued in the last 12-18 months. We're not seeing any of the demand destruction for Palladium that was forecast. We're actually seeing slower BEV adoption, and we're seeing stricter emissions standards being put on hybrids.
Hybrids are this fantastic sort of interim transition technology. They also have higher Palladium content in their catalytic converter as well because they have to deal with stop-start conditions. In simple terms here, hybrids have massively outperformed, and that's kept Palladium demand very strong, and that's causing the market to be exceptionally tight at the moment. This is the last 7 years of the Palladium price in US dollars. As you can see, back in 2018, it was sort of around these levels, about $1,000 an oz. It then really went into a tight period when people started to pivot away from diesel engines, and we had the Dieselgate scandal with Volkswagen. We had COVID, we had the Ukraine invasion, obviously Russia producing almost half of the world's metal. It sent Palladium up to extreme heights, over $3,000 an oz.
Then we had a big dumping and a big destocking cycle. What was encouraging, I guess, in the last 18 months, whilst that's been very tough for our shareholders, we have seen the price sort of bottom out at about $1,000 an oz. You can see just in the last 3 months there, the price is starting to recover. That's probably one of the most attractive-looking price charts if you follow sort of cyclical investments in commodities. I'd say strap in for a big amount of upside here with Palladium going forward. Really, Chalice is the only way to play Palladium, to get an exposure of scale in a safe and reliable jurisdiction. Our share price, up about 100%, like I said, since that start of the price rebound, it's performed, outperformed the PGM producers there in the gray. It's also outperformed all the other developers.
We've already seen two mines being curtailed. There are limited ways to play this. A position in Chalice, like, gives you, I guess, the premier position, the premier sort of exposure to this price rebound, which is happening at the moment. Our project, we're in the middle of a PFS. We're about three quarters of the way through that study. The project has a very unique revenue stream, like I said, mostly Palladium, quite a lot of exposure to Nickel and Copper as well. Fantastic to see Nickel turning a corner at the moment as well. It's a shallow, open pitable resource. We've purchased all the farmland where the resource lies. We have all our infrastructure catered for in terms of being on our farmland. We've simplified the flow sheet, and that's one of the major developments I'll talk to in a minute.
Having the high grade, recall when we found this deposit early on, about 5 years ago, we hit a substantial amount of high-grade material. Having that near surface allows us to really deploy capital in a very efficient manner. We can start relatively small and then stage this project up over time. That's why we think it will be one of the most competitive and the lowest cost producer of PGMs in the Western world. I'm honestly one of the few producers of PGMs in the Western world. We've made an investment in this project of AUD 225 million to date. Over that 5 years, we have been actively working up this project. We've drilled out the resource. We've acquired the farmland. We've got a COO in place who's here today. Actually, it'd be great for people to meet him, Dan Brearley. He joined us from Evolution Mining.
We've got really the execution team now in place in the company, and we've got the flow sheet bedded down. We've done so much metallurgical test work, about a AUD 15 million investment to solve all those challenges we had in metallurgy for a couple of years there. The infrastructure piece is really coming together as well. We've got now our wet water and power solutions defined. Our tailings storage concept is complete, and the cost estimates for the PFS, like I said, are really in the finalization stage now. Next year, we'll move into offtake. Obviously, we'll be making our major environmental approvals submissions as well, and then moving into financing and targeting an FID on this project in late 2027.
I appreciate it is still a little while away from making cash flow, but it is a very, very large mining development project, one of the largest development projects happening in Australia at the moment. We are aiming for about a 10-year turnaround between discovery and first production, which is actually sort of one of the quicker turnarounds you'll see in the industry. For those who were here last year listening to me, you probably saw we had to do, in our previous flow sheet, some unconventional processing on the Nickel side of the flow sheet to get a saleable product. We've now stripped that out, and we've worked out through test work in this new configuration with flotation that we can produce simple Copper and Nickel concentrates using flotation only. We'll be producing an iron byproduct as well with magnetic separation.
Then we'll produce additional Palladium through leaching of the flotation tails on the right-hand side there. We've basically got almost the same recoveries that we thought we needed, that we had with the more complex flow sheet. We've got close to that with a very, very simple flow sheet, and a huge amount of the cost and the complexity has come out of this project by doing that. We've got much lower CapEx and OpEx relative to the scoping study in 2023, and we've got the additional contribution from the iron byproduct, the magnetite, as well. We've proven we can do this and use this flow sheet across the entirety of the grade profile. As those who know the resource, there's quite a lot of high grade, but there's an extreme amount of low-grade material. This flow sheet is going to work across that full grade spectrum.
What are we up to till late 2027? As you can see there, the PFS will be completed in November of this year. We're about halfway through all the permitting work in terms of modeling and getting our submissions ready to the regulators. Those submissions are going to happen in the middle of next year. As you can see, we referred the project to regulators at the beginning of last year. We're anticipating that around the end of 2027, we'll be with our major approvals in hand. Concurrently to that, obviously, we'll do a feasibility study following this PFS. We'll be doing offtake negotiations as well, particularly on that Nickel concentrate. Now that's a key product. The Copper concentrate in the market is extremely tight at the moment, so we're not anticipating really much effort being required there.
On the Nickel side, we will be negotiating hard with the Nickel off-takers out there. We move into construction late 2027 and ahead of first production around the end of the decade. For those who follow the company, the first time I came here to Nusa was prior to the Gonville discovery. It was a completely different company back then. In our DNA, exploration remains key. The western part of the Yilgarn Craton remains our focus. It has been for the last 5 years since the Gonville discovery. What we like about that is it's not only hosting large-scale magmatic sulfide deposits like Gonville, it hosts extraordinary gold deposits like Boddington, which have a little bit of Copper in them as well. The western side of WA is very, very poorly explored relative to the gold fields of WA or the Pilbara.
I guess this higher metamorphic sort of terrain in the western part of WA is now really a lot of the focus in the gold industry is coming to this side of WA. We've been exploring there since 2021, and we've got over 40 targets that we need to go and stick a drill hole into. We've got 3 lined up for the next few months at our Kings and Barrabarra project, which I'll show you now. The first, I guess the one that's probably got us most excited is called Hardtack. It's a 7-kilometer long gold in soil anomaly. It's along strike from some historical gold workings at the end of the 19th century. It gives us a lot of encouragement that there's some gold here in this major structure. There's a kink in this major structure as it sort of trends from the south up to the northwest.
We actually drilled some holes into it aiming for Nickel plates, and we hit gold, which is a nice surprise, often in exploration. We've got already a meter at 6.6 into some sort of randomly positioned diamond holes. There's now a systematic program of air core to do to really refine in on where is the gold, and here in the bedrock that's causing this anomaly. An exciting one to watch in the coming months. Up a bit further north, the Barrabarra project, this is about 3,500 sq km. This is sort of part of the gold fields that's been forgotten about. This is all mapped as granite and gneissic terrain, 5 years ago before the Gonville discovery. Really now, since we've gone in there and actually done some exploration, we've found these huge swathes of greenstone. This is really virgin terrain, undrilled, essentially part of the gold fields.
It's just on the western side of WA. We've got a very comparable setting here to Boddington. There was less than 500 basically drill holes in that entire 3,500 sq km, which is quite unbelievable when you think about how well explored WA is. We've already got an intersection there, 8m at 1.2 from 20m at the Warspite target in the southeast there. We've got that research west trend sort of going through the middle of the page there, which is 15 km long, and it's just this real standout gold anomaly striking over a huge strike length. There's a hell of a lot of drilling there to do to open up what we hope is a series of gold deposits through this area. A very exciting but early-stage project here.
Another, I guess, string to our bow in Chalice as to, you know, and we continue, like I said, to have a strong geological team, and we continue to spend in the order of AUD 5- 10 million a year on this type of exploration, and it's quite frontier stuff. We do think that's where the big discoveries do typically come from, away from sort of existing areas or known areas. That remains our focus, and obviously in the early stages, it's a little harder to conceptualize, but we think that's a fantastic place to explore. I'd encourage you to keep an eye on the Palladium price. Obviously, Chalice's share price is very much intrinsically linked to that, and it's trending very, very nicely for us at the moment.
The PFS underway, our approvals well and truly underway, and obviously a huge amount of upside in the West Yilgarn for us to exploit. A fantastic time to invest in Chalice, and please come and have a chat to us in the booth if you'd like to hear more.