Right, welcome back to the last session of this Resources Rising Stars Conference. Thanks very much for joining us. I'm Paul Armstrong from Reed Corporate. Thanks very much for your great courtesy today and your attention. We've got some great stories to finish off with today. Before we move into those presentations, a little reminder about our prize that we're giving away at the end of this session: a trip for two and accommodation to Adelaide, to the Rising Stars Investor Conference for the Gather Round, AFL Gather Round. It coincides with the football, so you can put your investing in football together. Might even speak to your accountant about the tax deductibility of that little adventure. But we'd love to have you along. Two great days, so April 9 and 10. But this trip today for two people and the accommodation to attend that conference in Adelaide.
So please, if you're not in the draw that Kate has a bowl at the back of the room, please put the name out of your little lanyard into there, and we'll draw that at the end of the session. Also, at the end of this session, we have a great panel discussion being chaired by Kristie Batten, known to many of you in her role as a journalist around the resources industry. She will chair the panel discussion, and it will have four very well-known and well-experienced players in the resources finance game. So a bit of fun and a bit to be gained out of picking their brains. So Kristie will host that session later on. Let's get on with the show. Our first presentation today this afternoon is from DevEx Resources. Three key words, if you like, with DevEx.
Tim Goyder is the biggest shareholder with 17%, and they're looking for uranium, and they're doing it in Australia. So there's the trifecta. Todd Ross is the Managing Director, and he's here to update us about where they're at. Please welcome Todd.
Thank you very much, Paul, and thanks to Reed Corporate for putting on another fantastic event. Great to see so many people here after the last session of the day. Hopefully, you had your coffee. You're not here just for the drinks. I'm going to update you on DevEx, and I've got 15 minutes or so to convince you about why we believe we're well and truly positioned for growth. As the demand for clean energy continues, we believe that with our portfolio of assets, existing uranium assets, our growth strategy, and our funding position, we're very well placed to be able to take advantage of the resurging uranium market. Our important disclaimer for your information to read at your leisure. Who is DevEx? DevEx is one of only a few ASX-listed pure uranium exploration companies on the ASX.
We have a strong alignment to the resurgence of the uranium sector. DevEx has been exploring for uranium for over the last 10 years, had a pause after Fukushima, and is back with a vengeance in the last three years, exploring up around the Northern Territory, which I'll get into in a second. We're focused on delivering strong returns to our investors. We're a team committed. I recently joined the company only two months ago. We're focused on acquiring, exploring, and developing projects in the uranium space. As Paul mentioned, our board is led by Tim Goyder, the chairman. He's also a major shareholder, 17% of the company. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Tim. He knows what it takes, and that's really about making sure companies are appropriately funded, and we put money in the ground, and we take action.
I've been brought on to take that action and get things moving with us, so we've got a real plan, and I'm going to take you through that now. Myself, former banker, 25 years in resource finance, was leading the Minerals and Mining Team for Western Australia for BNP Paribas for 10 years, so I've been in the game for 25 years. Also run listed junior exploration companies. Brendan Bradley, he's our technical director. He's been exploring up in the Northern Territory for over seven years for uranium, but has deep over 25 years geological experience as well with a great team behind him. Stacy's been our commercial manager and was previously on the board, invaluable resource for the team, so overall, we have AUD 11.2 million cash in the bank. So we're well funded. We've got 441 million shares on issue.
We've also got investment in Lachlan Star, around 30% of Lachlan Star, which is worth today around AUD 7 million, and then investment in a private company called EntX, which was a spin-out from DevEx as well. Both Lachlan Star and EntX were spin-outs from DevEx. So what do we already have in our portfolio? Well, our portfolio is really built on clean energy. So we have our flagship projects in the Northern Territory, and I'll get into those in a bit more detail, but the Nabarlek project up near Jabiluka and Ranger, the Northern Territory, and then the Murphy West project to the southern end of the McArthur Basin. We also have a portfolio of nickel-copper PGE projects, as well as a rare earth project called Kennedy over in Queensland.
The Kennedy project itself is a great example of the technical capabilities within our team who identified, drilled out, and discovered this project and put a resource on it around 18 months. So why are we so bullish on the uranium market? Well, as you probably heard this morning, if you were listening to Grady's presentation, the outlook for uranium is very strong at the moment, and you can see on this chart on the left-hand side here that the World Nuclear Association is forecasting incredibly strong growth for the outlook for our demand for uranium, driven a lot by the clean energy transition well and truly underway. Below that, you can see the bars that represent existing mines and restarts of old mines. There's a huge gap coming overall, around 200% of a gap to increase by 2040. That's expected to lead to, obviously, higher uranium prices going forward.
But it's not just driven by clean energy and the need for clean energy. It's really been driven by increased demand for power globally, which is driven by data centers and the AI revolution. Overall, we have 415 nuclear reactors globally. At COP28 last year, we had 22 companies pledge to triple their output of nuclear power. On the data center side, last year we had, in the last 12 months, $58 billion invested in data centers, and that's just beginning. Overall, we're expecting that with the AI revolution, we're expecting around 10% of global energy consumption to come from the nuclear power, sorry, from AI sector. If you look at a Google search, a Google search compared to, for example, a ChatGPT search, a ChatGPT search uses about 10 times the amount of energy than a Google search does, and that's only just beginning. It's growing exponentially.
You've got some of the major tech companies already investing massively in securing clean energy through nuclear power: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, to name a few, looking at restarts of nuclear power generation, or also what's called SMRs or small modular reactors. They're putting a lot of money on that. What's our exploration strategy? Well, we're focused on finding very large, high-grade uranium deposits, what's called unconformity-style uranium deposits, I should say, and they're only found really in two places of the world. The Athabasca Basin in Canada and the McArthur Basin in Northern Territory. In the Athabasca Basin, it's very much dominated by the majors. Very difficult to get land access. There's been some major discoveries there, Cigar Lake, for example.
These unconformity-style deposits typically are structurally hosted, so you'll see the grades accumulating around the contact between the sandstone and the basement rocks, but where the projects get bigger and bigger is when they're hosted in the structure and continued to depth. That's what we're looking for in the McArthur Basin. So if you look at this side here on the left, it's showing you those two figures at the same scale. DevEx has 14,500 sq km across a belt-scale area of the Northern Territory in the McArthur Basin. Just our Murphy West area to the south alone is already significantly in size compared to the Athabasca Basin. So just zooming in a little bit on the Nabarlek project. Nabarlek is in the Alligator Rivers Uranium Province, in the McArthur Basin.
It is surrounded by deposits that have been discovered or mined, obviously the Jabiluka or the Ranger uranium deposits, but Nabarlek was an existing mine. Back in the late 1980s, AUD 28 million was mined at a grade of 1.84%. One of the highest-grade, what was the highest-grade uranium mine in Australia. It was mined in four months and processed for the remaining eight years. The project itself sits to the northeast of the town of Jabiru, outside of the National Park. The Nabarlek mine is still an existing mining lease, and we've been exploring around the shadow of the head frame around the Nabarlek mine, but also to the north at an area called U40, which I'll get on to. What we've been focused on are these uranium-bearing fault zones. As I mentioned, structure is key.
The red outline here on the center of the page is the existing mining lease, and we were initially drilling to the north of that, and then, as I mentioned, the U40 fault zone to the northeast. The U40 area was drilled in a joint venture with Cameco and DevEx before Fukushima, and then everything was parked up, so when they drilled that, they were getting grades of up to 7.6% uranium, so incredible grades that now we've been following up this year. We're looking at the continuations of that deposit at depth and looking to try and find that structure that's hosting the large grades, getting on to the south as we move down the McArthur Basin, so obviously, the Alligator Rivers Province to the north, it then goes undercover, deep undercover in the middle of the basin, then pops out back again towards the Queensland border.
That's where the Murphy West project is. Murphy West, overall, we've got 10,000 square kilometers across three earning agreements. And to the west of us, sorry, to the east of us is Laramide's Westmoreland deposits, so AUD 51 million that was discovered by them several years ago. We have a very large package, which we're now undertaking systematic exploration activity across the Murphy West project. We flew a radiometric survey across that area a couple of months ago and a radiometric and magnetic survey, which we're now using to follow up on some of these trends. What we're looking for, again, is the radiometric anomalies where they correspond with the magnetic fault zones that we've detected. We've uncovered, I'll just get on to that side, a number of really interesting magnetic anomalies that we—sorry, radiometric anomalies that we're going to go back and follow up on.
The team are out there at the moment, and we're just undertaking a systematic exploration approach across that whole land package. The Kennedy Rare Earths Project, as I mentioned, significant discovery. It's 150 million tonnes, 1,000 ppm TREO. So it's a very good ionic clay, a true ionic clay rare earth project. Heavy rare earths. It's shallow. It's close to existing infrastructure. Easy dig. The MET test work was very compelling, demonstrates that easy recovery. That project itself, we're looking to continue to advance that, and it sits very firmly within our portfolio. The ESG focus of DevEx is an incredibly strong story for us. It's important to continue to have the social license to operate. We've been rehabilitating the Nabarlek mine since we acquired it. We've got a good reputation with the traditional owners up in the NT. Continue to work with them very closely.
We employ a lot of the families as well. Very important for us to be able to continue to have that social license to operate. So why DevEx? Well, as I said from the beginning, we're here to deliver value to shareholders. We're looking at tapping into this resurging uranium market. We're very much focused on growing the business. We have an extensive land package of uranium exploration opportunities, but we're not going to stop there. So we're going to be looking to expand the company through the drill bit, but also through potential acquisitions. And we're really focused on delivering shareholder value. Thank you.
Thanks, Todd. Our next presentation is Sun Silver. Sun Silver made a stunning debut on the ASX earlier this year. It's a relative newcomer, but it's made its mark already on the back of some great results from the Maverick project in the U.S.A..
Matt Hayes was a key driving force and advisor to the company, and a key driving force in the IPO and right up to what they're doing today. He's about to tell us what's made this so successful and where it goes to from here. Please welcome Matt.
Can I get a dongle? Sorry, I'm stuck there. There should be a dongle to plug in. Oh, okay. All right. That should be coming up soon. Okay, there we go. So Sun Silver, ASX code SS1. So investment highlights. We are the largest silver asset on the ASX in pre-production. We're getting larger. We've been drilling the last couple of months, and where we're drilling up in the northwest of the Maverick Springs deposit is getting higher grade and wider. And the silver supply is rapidly depleting.
The Silver Institute released a forecast recently that for 2024, the silver is going to be, the silver market is going to be in a deficit of 282 million ounces this year. What does that mean? That's about a 30% supply deficit. And it's been in a supply deficit for the past four years, on average about 20% year-on-year. So supply is running out, and it's getting shorter. So a breakdown of our mineral resource estimate. There's 423 million ounces of silver equivalent at a grade of 67.25 grams a tonne. That's made up of 253 million ounces of pure silver at 40.25 grams a tonne, with a gold credit of 2 million ounces, a big credit, at 0.32 grams a tonne.
Now, we're in Nevada, and all our neighbours are producing at those grades or lower for all-in sustaining costs of around $1,000-$1,400 an ounce. So that is good grade for the area we're in. A bit of a comparison to our ASX peers, pure silver plays in pre-production. No one really comes close except for the Bowdens asset, which is held by Silver Mines. They've got 189 million ounces of pure silver at 29 grams a tonne, and we sit over 60 million ounces higher at 253 million ounces at 40 grams a tonne. So 30% higher grade. And we're in carbonate host rock, which is a metamorphosed limestone. It's really soft, really easy to mine, really low-cost bulk tonnage projects. Corporate summary. We've got 144 million shares on issue.
The market cap, as of two days ago when we did the presentation over in Sydney, was 73 cents. Today, I think it closed at 83 cents. Have to keep rewriting these prezos because the share price keeps going up. So that puts us at a market cap of about AUD 120 million as of today. We only IPO'd six months ago at 20 cents. So we've returned over four times to our shareholders in that time. And we have cash at bank as of the 30th of September, AUD 13.5 million. That's in part due to a capital raise that we did one month ago. In that raise, I'd like to talk about Nokomis, who's a U.S. long fund who came in and has taken 9.5% of our register. A lot of investors in Australia aren't familiar with Nokomis, but they're very famous over in the U.S.
They have an average hold time of seven years. They're a value fund, and they look for large resource assets of their class and at an early stage, and they hold. One of those was Agnico Eagle. They invested in them seven years ago when they were a couple hundred million dollars. They're $40 billion today. Last year, the fund returned 85%. Past performance is not supposed to be a future indicator, but over in the U.S., they like to look at past performance, and they're certainly performing well. They actually paid a premium of AUD 0.80 when we did the raise. We closed at around AUD 0.70. I guess they paid a premium because they thought we looked like good value. Going on to the team, board and management. Our Executive Director, Gerard O'Donovan, was the ex-MD of Battery Age Minerals.
Prior to that, he worked with Pilbara Minerals, where he led the development, commissioning, and ramp-up of their Pilgangoora mine and also led the integration of their Altura asset. Dean Ercegovic, our Non-Executive Chair, is the founding director of the Primero Group and their chief operating officer. Primero Group is a really highly regarded engineering, construction, and procurement company. They were bought out by NRW about two years ago. Nathan Ma, Non-Executive Director, qualified metallurgist over 20 years, has delivered over 10 projects, two of those being large silver mines, one in PNG, one in Argentina. Our on-the-ground exploration manager, Robbie Anderson, he has worked in Nevada for 17 years as an exploration geologist, five years at Newmont, and the last two years he was with Rochester on their KUA development, which is the largest silver producer now in America and in Nevada.
Going into Nevada, where we are located, they call Nevada the Silver State. And up here in the northwest, they produce around 75% of the U.S.'s gold and silver. The Carlin Trend where we are is soft carbonate host rock. So it's a compressed limestone. And what you tend to find with the ore bodies up here is a lot of them tend to be quite low grade, but they're very consistent, tabular, and predictable. And pretty much every drill hole that we inherited has intercepted mineralization consistently. Nevada's been ranked the number one mining jurisdiction in the world by the Fraser Institute in 2022. And in the last 10 years, it's been voted top three every year. No other region in the world has had that.
A lot of people in Australia think Western Australia is the best mining jurisdiction in the world, but it's only ranked in the top three in the Fraser Institute six times out of the last 10 years. It's been dropping back recently. We're 85 kilometers from Elko. It's a fully-serviced mining town. It's like Calgary on steroids. There's a Cat dealership there with equipment. As far as the eye can see, we drove along past it for a kilometer and a half. Everything you could dream of, every engineering company, 12 drill contractors. We're an hour's drive from Elko, pretty much fully sealed roads all the way. Just a quick overview of M&A in the area. There's been a lot recently. Jerritt Canyon was purchased by First Majestic for $500 million recently. Some other ones here that you can see as well.
But what I want to draw your attention to is our neighbour 20 kilometres to the south, the Bald Mountain asset. That's producing at, I think it's 0.38 or 0.39 grams a tonne, head grade gold, very similar to our head grade, at an all-in sustaining cost of $900 an ounce. That was purchased by Kinross nearly 10 years ago for $610 million USD when the gold price was half. Now, I want to bring this up and draw your attention to it because when they purchased it, it had 5 million ounces of gold at a grade of 0.5 grams a tonne. There's less than two years' reserve left. Our gold equivalent and the same type of material is 5 million ounces. It's just shy of a gram a tonne. So I wonder what they'd pay for us now.
Here's a map of other operating assets within the area around a 150-kilometer radius around us. There's 18 all up. You can see it's a highly active area. Zooming in on the map to some of the neighbors in the area. Here's the Rochester mine that I mentioned earlier. There we go. This one here, I want to draw your attention to this. This is where Robbie Anderson, our exploration manager, worked. That's operating profitably at $23.90 an ounce, all-in sustaining cost, at 12 grams a tonne. We're six times that grade. In the expansion projects they just did, they're now forecasting that they'll be operating at $14 an ounce. They're printing cash. Over here, people would consider that slow grade. Over there, that's making money.
And then here's the Bald Mountain asset that's just to the south of us, directly connected by a road 20 kilometers away. So going into the asset, this is the tenement land package. The guys are up there drilling up in the northwest. There's a water well up there as well that we use that we have full permitting for. There's access roads all throughout the site. We inherited 60,000 meters of historical drilling. This is what the resource ore body looks like. Big tabular ore body. Every single one of these drill intercepts that you're looking at, they've pretty much drilled them all vertical. The reason they've done that is it's quite soft ground and tricky to drill, and the rods sometimes get stuck. But what it does show is nearly every single drill hole has intercepted mineralization, and it's actually open in all directions.
We've had more hits than Mike Tyson's career. When we were looking at the data that we inherited, you can see here the consistent intercepts all the way through. We found that there were some really great grades up in the northwest section. 142 meters at 71 grams a ton and over 100 meters at over 100 grams a ton. We focused in on this region here and found this hotspot of a really high grade, wider intercept zone that hadn't been followed up. That's where we're focusing on now. There's some brecciated silicified outcrops up to 1.2 kilometers away from the existing resource. The existing resource is this section here in yellow. We're drilling in this section here now to see how far out it extends. The guys are finding that it's actually getting higher grade and wider.
We've had some stunning intercepts happening up there. But also, while we've been drilling up there, we've also found that there's antimony consistently throughout all the drill cores, which has been in the news recently for China banning it. And there being only one resource in the U.S., it's their most critical mineral. They're looking for it. Our resource was never historically assayed for anything other than silver and gold. The XRF, we've taken into the core shed and gone over it. And there's antimony consistently throughout the resource on the XRF. We're looking at following up and assaying and seeing how much antimony is actually in the deposit. Of the drill program, there's been about 10 assays received, all of them intercepting higher grade, wider intercepts. There's about 10 more to come. What does that mean for the asset and the resource?
This green section you're looking at here is the extended resource where we've been drilling at the moment. And because of the scale and the size of the resource being so massive, 423 million ounces, what you're looking at, this section here, which is the historic, the average is about 20 meter intercepts. When we get out to here, where we've been drilling at the moment, it's getting up to five times as wide and up to three or four times the grade. So there's a theory developing, because it's still open, that the actual largest part of the resource is up to the northwest. It's getting larger and higher grade. So a few days ago, we tested a theory that the structures that are running north to south along the deposit, where it's actually hosting high grade.
I mentioned earlier that all of the drill holes have just been drilled vertically for issues with the soft ground. It was the first time we tested this theory that drilling along those structures on an angled hole would actually yield high-grade intercepts. We had nearly a 17-meter intercept at about 490 grams per ton silver equivalent with a component of 1,249 grams per ton silver. That's our highest grade intercept to date throughout the 67,000 meters of drilling. So it's not inconclusive, but it's one from one on that theory. We had to end the hole in mineralization because the hole collapsed, trapping the rod. It was an RC drill rig. We're going to follow that up with diamond core and see if we can actually get higher grade along those structures. We also had 1% antimony assayed in that hole as well. So what's next in the field?
We're going to continue drilling, extensional drilling, to see how big the deposit actually gets. And we're also going to do some infill drilling, primarily starting on the south section of the property where, under the historic foreign resource estimate, NI 43-101, 30% of the resource was actually indicated already. But because it was done pre-2012, it's not JORC compliant. We can very simply twin some of those holes and get that portion up to being indicated. So in summary, we are the biggest on the ASX, silver asset in pre-production by a long shot. We're getting larger. We're going to be bringing up the resource classification next year with infill drilling and exploring the antimony throughout the deposit and doing further met test work. Thank you very much.
Right. Thanks, Matt. Well, it is the season for antlers, isn't it?
Our next presenter has a very special one of its own. New World Resources owns the Antler Copper Project in Arizona. Nick Wariner is the managing director. He's about to tell us about this project and the grade and where it's going to. Please welcome Nick.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks again, Nick, for the opportunity to present here and in Sydney earlier in the week to talk about New World Resources at the Summer Series, which is a terrific event. Very pleased to be presenting to you all here today. New World is in a very exciting stage of its development as we transition to be a project developer and get our high-grade Antler Copper Project in northwestern Arizona into production. It's a great time to be building a mine in the U.S. with political support at all levels of government, and also securing critical mineral supply chains in the U.S. is more important than ever. As a company, New World has two primary corporate objectives. The first one, as I mentioned, is to get Antler back into production as quickly as possible.
And the second, to continue to expand our company's high-grade resource base through ongoing exploration. Since we acquired Antler in March 2020, the company has drilled extensively at Antler and outlined a mineral resource that's in the top 4% globally, at 4.1% copper equivalent. We've proven with our PFS released in July this year that we have one of the best standalone copper development stories in the world, and therefore we're rapidly advancing it into development. Notwithstanding that, New World has significant resource endowment across both of its project areas at Antler and nearby Javelin, and will continue to explore these areas over the coming 24 months. As a company, we have a very strong board featuring a diverse skill set across geology, mining, project finance, and importantly, strong project development experience in Australia and in the U.S..
We're very lucky to have Resource Capital Funds and Cbus Super on our register, and we have extensive high-quality research coverage from a variety of parties, all of which have price targets on multiples higher than where we are today. We have just over AUD 11 million in the bank at the end of September. And with all this in mind, and given our leverage to the upswing in copper price predicted over the second half of this decade, we are significantly undervalued. From a mine development perspective, New World's tenements are in prime real estate. We're in very sparsely populated northwest Arizona. We're about an hour and a half south of the city of Las Vegas and near the major regional center of Kingman, Arizona.
Arizona is a state that has more than 70,000 people working in the mining industry and is home to some 70% of the U.S.'s copper output. We're close to established infrastructure. We have access to water. We have access to renewable power, and we have direct access to export and domestic copper smelting markets on interstate highways and transcontinental railway. Our Javelin tenements are located 75 kilometers away, and any ore that we do find at these projects can ultimately be processed through the Antler processing facility. We have a very low-risk permitting regime with nearby precedent from mines permitted on federal land from start to finish in 18 months. There's significant government and community support for mining and general project development in the area, and in my view, there's no better place to be building a copper project.
New World released our PFS in July this year for Antler, as I mentioned, showing it's a high-margin, very high-grade copper project with low capital intensity. Antler's timing to development, being construction in 2026 and production in 2027, is coincident with a looming global copper supply shortage. As a summary, the PFS outlined the development of a 1.2 million-tonne-a-year underground mine and processing operation, producing an average of 30,000 tonnes of copper equivalent in three separate concentrates per annum. We have a 12.5-year mine life and modest capital costs of about $300 million for a life of mine revenue of $3.2 billion and NPV of $630 million U.S. dollars, or, to put it another way, about 16 times our current market cap.
We've outlined a project that is best practice across all regards, using low-impact underground mining, using paste backfill and dry stack tailings, and also using 30% renewable power by the time this mine is into production. We've been drilling extensively at the project since March 2020 and since that time completed about 70,000 meters of drilling. The drilling was used to define the Antler resource, which at a 1% cutoff grade is 11.4 million tonnes at 4.1% copper equivalent, of which 79% is indicated. This formed the basis of the PFS released in July. There's a very high-grade and very continuous ore body that's open at depth.
In fact, the deepest hole drilled in the ore body, which you won't be able to see, but is up there at 10.7 meters at 14% copper equivalent, is outside our current resource, and there remains compelling exploration upside at depth and to the south, which we'll drill once we're underground. Given we've outlined a 12-plus year mine life already, with our PFS, we're rapidly proceeding to development. Almost all of our infrastructure is located on private land, which is a significant advantage when building a mine in the U.S. This mine was also a past producer, producing up until the 1970s and produced a modest 70,000 tons of copper in concentrate at a grade of 5% copper. Given it is a disturbed site with existing disturbance, this will also be a significant advantage as we try and permit our project over the course of next year.
We're building an underground-only mine with 45% of our tailings going back underground as paste fill, and the remainder stored in a dry stack tailings storage facility. Current mine life's 12 years and our ROM head grade is 3%, which is pretty high by global standards. Importantly, we have strong certainty in our mine plan with 83% of our mining inventory classified as probable reserves. We've undertaken extensive met test work since acquiring the project with three separate test work programs, culminating in our PFS test work program in July, utilizing locked cycle testing across representative samples from across the entire deposit. It's a conventional polymetallic crush grind float circuit to produce three clean concentrates with no penalty elements. We've undertaken market soundings with all of the large copper and zinc offtakers globally as part of the PFS.
However, importantly, no offtake agreements are in place at this time. Antler has direct access to export markets for the Port of Guaymas in Mexico, which is a significant concentrate export facility, and also the Port of Long Beach in California. In addition, and importantly, there's direct access and ability to sell concentrate to two domestic copper smelters, which we have direct access to via transcontinental railway. Both of these smelters are short copper concentrate at the moment. And at a time where critical mineral supply chains in the U.S. are of the utmost importance, this is a significant advantage for Antler as we go into production. We have a lot of flexibility in terms of our offtake and ongoing discussions and terms in place. However, we're in no rush to do a deal on our offtake until we need to finance this project later next year.
Total pre-production capital is about $300 million, which includes $30 million of contingency and forecast direct OpEx of $77 a tonne. Our C1 costs are around $0.12 a pound when you consider our co-product credits or an all-in sustaining cost of about $0.50. All in all, this is a high-margin project that will generate significant cash flow over its initial mine life and beyond. At our PFS price assumptions, we generate very, very strong returns for our shareholders, including free cash flow per annum of about $115 million a year, or multiples of our current market cap. These cash flows will allow us to have a significant debt component to our capital structure, about $200 million.
Importantly, given we are producing about 8% of our revenue as precious metals, we have options in how to refund the remainder of our capital requirement through precious metal streaming and the like. This will allow us to explore non-equity diluted structures to finance this project over the course of 2025. Developing a project on patented mining claims and on private land in the U.S. is a significant advantage. Coupled with the fact that we're taking a best practice approach across all aspects of our project development, our permitting process is fairly straightforward. In addition to our mine plan of operations being our key federal permit submitted in January 2024, we've submitted and have completeness determinations on all of our key long lead time state permits that are required to commence operations.
It's anticipated that all of these permits will be in place by the end of next year and will allow us to construct the project in 2026 and be producing in 2027. There's exceptionally strong support locally at the state level and federally for new mining projects in the U.S. at the moment, particularly for projects like Antler that will be securing domestic critical mineral supply chains, as I mentioned before. We've had recent site visits from key local and federal politicians, including our representative in the U.S. Federal Congress, Representative Paul Gosar, who visited us during election week recently and has expressed his support numerous times publicly for our project. This is a chap who's on the House Natural Resources Committee and a very influential figure in the new Republican government. Antler has significant support at all levels of government.
Turning now to regional exploration, across our tenement portfolio, New World has significant untested exploration potential, including eight past-producing VMS deposits, of which two are nearby to Antler and six are located at our Javelin project 75 kilometers away, where we have a 5,000-acre land package. All of these past producers are of relatively modest size, as Antler was. However, all have exceptional grades of greater than 5% copper equivalent, and given the propensity of VMSs to occur in clusters, the likelihood of finding more high-grade mineralization is high. We're currently in the middle of a detailed exploration review and fieldwork programs following our 2024 drilling programs, and we've appointed one of the world's leading VMS experts out of the University of Colorado to assist with this process, which is starting to pay some serious dividends.
We'll be looking to recommence drilling at the end of quarter one 2025 to target some of these new targets outlined through this process. At Antler, we have multiple geochemical and geophysical targets along strike that we'll be drilling early next year. There's significant exploration potential within the shadows of the Antler head frame and we'll be undertaking targeted exploration following our review of these areas in 2025. This includes three-kilometer-long copper and zinc in soil anomalies and also significant coincident IP anomalies nearby to Antler. The Pinafore deposit is part of our Javelin land package 75 kilometers away from Antler, which is a past-producing VMS with a historic mineral resource of 630,000 tons at 3.4% copper and 7.1% zinc. Again, very high-grade mineralization within trucking distance of Antler.
This project is located also on privately owned land and there's significant alteration over 1,200 meters of strike where this past resource is outlined. Recently, we've announced some exciting drill results at Javelin and we'll be following these up next year. Over the course of 2025, we have a lot to do at New World. We've got significant project development progress, exploration success anticipated, and consequently significant news flow. Our permits will be granted over the course of next year, as well as resource model updates and the company sourcing funding solutions for the project over the course of the first half of 2025. Once our definitive feasibility study is completed at the end of next year, the project will be construction ready and our U.S.-based project development team will be ready to execute. All the while, we're continuing with exploration in an area rich in VMS endowment.
In summary, Antler has all the hallmarks of the ASX's next significant copper producer. We have outstanding projects, both from development and exploration. We have very robust economics at Antler with a standalone high-margin, low-capital-intensity development plan. And importantly, we have exceptional timing. We have near-term production coincident with the emerging copper supercycle and significant news flow related to development and exploration. Many thanks for your attendance and happy to have a conversation next door if time allows. Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Nick. Brownfields Exploration has been the source of so much wealth in the market over recent years, particularly in the gold space. I think Northern Star and Bill Beament made an art form of it in the early days there.
Countless others have followed suit since Spartan Resources, who you heard from earlier today, was a great example of what Brownfields Exploration can deliver in terms of shareholder value. Our next presenter is Javelin Minerals. Javelin is playing exactly the same game in Kalgoorlie, two projects, 50 kilometers either side of Kalgoorlie. Brett Mitchell is the Executive Chairman. He is about to tell us what they are doing at those projects and how they want to follow some of those successful companies that have been before them in Western Australia. Please welcome Brett.
Thanks a lot, Paul. And thanks, Paul, Nick, Sharon, for having us here again and to be able to present at Resources Rising Stars. Yeah, my name is Brett Mitchell. I am the Executive Chairman of Javelin. And Paul did a pretty good job of outlining the business plan for the company. So thanks for that, Paul.
But yeah, we're very excited about the opportunity that we've got ahead of us now from what's been a transformational year for us in 2024. We started the year as a lithium and future battery metals exploration company. We had no cash in the bank. We had a disenfranchised shareholder base. And we finished the year owning two historic brownfield exploration assets with near-term development potential in the heart of the eastern goldfields of Kalgoorlie. Both of these projects have wide open resource systems. They've been underexplored for the last four to 10 years. And they both hold over 100,000 ounces of resource currently as a starting position before we've even done any further drilling. So we're in a very, very good position as a launchpad to go forward into 2025 with money in the bank.
We've got a very active news flow pipeline from drilling and exploration of both these projects. We're underway at Coogee right now and we'll be drilling again at Coogee and Eureka in late January, early February next year. I was the shareholder of Javelin for about three and a half, four years when I was asked to join the board and lead a review and restructure of the company, which started at the start of this year. As I said, we started with, fortunately, we had the Coogee Gold project, which was mined by Ramelius back in 2013, where they mined about 20,000 ounces over four and a half grams, and then left the project. It was then subsequently acquired by a predecessor company to Javelin, but it hadn't been looked at by the Javelin management team for over four years. I led a review of the company.
We've relaunched the company and recapitalised it off the back of the Coogee asset earlier this year. And it's led to returns to those investors of three to four times already, and we're only just getting started. Following that, we were fortunate enough to just recently acquire the Eureka Gold project, which sits 50 kilometers north of Kalgoorlie and is part of that additional AUD 3 million capital raising with Shaw and Partners. So now we're adequately funded as a junior. We've got a AUD 20 million market cap. We've got a clear strategy to create shareholder value through exploration and through the drill bit and follow the Spartan Resources lead on that. And the interesting thing for both of these projects is that over that period of the past four to eight years, they haven't been exposed to any systematic modern drilling campaigns, which we're about to get after.
Also, at the Eureka project, there's some historic drill intercepts there that have never been followed up, and I'll run through that shortly with you, but four meters at 134 grams a ton, three meters at 48, and four meters at 32 grams that have never been followed up north of the existing pit is some pretty exciting opportunity. Corporately, I mentioned that we have recently completed the acquisition of the Eureka project. We bought that off Delta Lithium. We paid a very, very attractive price for Javelin and its shareholders of AUD 3 million to buy that 100% of the Eureka project. We paid AUD 1.5 million in scrip, which is escrow for 12 months, and AUD 1.5 million in cash. Also, Delta Lithium will be appointing a representative to join our board as a fourth board member as a commitment to the company and the future.
You can see there we end up post the transaction, post the capital raising, and with no liabilities. We'll have just under AUD 3 million in the bank and about six billion shares on issue, which leaves us at a market cap of approximately AUD 21 million. Sorry. In terms of board management, yeah, so my background's corporate finance and capital markets. I've been involved in and around the resources industry for 20-odd years now, as well as some other industries outside of that. But I've always had a love of the resources industry and a company that we took from just a vehicle through to a large lithium explorer and developer. Delta Lithium is a company that I was heavily involved with. Andrew Rich recently just joined the board only four months ago, and he joined as a result of doing a review on the Coogee project.
He liked the project so much he was willing to join the board, which is a testament to the quality of the project, and that was before Eureka was on the horizon for us. But Andrew's background is he's a mining engineer. He's a very well-known and well-respected operator of underground gold mines in WA. He's worked for Ramelius, Westgold, and most recently the CEO of Linden Gold that was recently acquired by Brightstar. So he knows how to make these resources work and commercialize them into production and cash flow for the company. Our third director, Pedro Kastellorizos, is a very well-known and respected geologist to complement the team. In addition to the team, we also do have OMNI GeoX, which is led by Peter Langworthy. They're our independent consultants who are helping design our drilling programs on both projects and running those projects.
Peter's one of the best known and widely respected gold exploration geologists in WA. We also have Topdrill doing our exploration drilling program for us. They're doing it on a drill for equity program where we can elect to issue them for up to 50% of each monthly invoice in equity, which helps manage our cash position when we've got so limited funds at this point in time. Onto Eureka. This was just a bit of back history here, and this will explain why those follow-up drill intercepts were never followed up by Red Dirt and Delta. It was originally acquired by Red Dirt Metals, which is now Delta Lithium in 2020. It then undertook an exploration program outside the north of the Eureka pit in 2021. Just after those results were announced, Delta went and acquired Mount Ida for the gold project.
But then found through completion of that transaction, there was a lot of spodumene on that project, and overnight they turned into a lithium exploration company. So therefore, the Eureka project never got any attention inside of Delta from that time forward. And as I was an ex-director of Red Dirt Metals, I was aware of it, inquired about it recently for Javelin, and we were able to acquire the project. So it was very much our fortune that we've been able to acquire this. And we've got some of these 300 and 600 meters north of the pit, these high-grade intercepts that have never been followed up that sit between 50 and 100 meters vertical depth. One of the key advantages of both of the projects we own is that they're on granted mining leases.
As you'd be aware from listening to the presenters here and knowledge of the resources industry in Australia today, having granted MLs is hugely beneficial for the commercialization of any project because the path to production is so much shorter. We also are located only 20 kilometers north of the Paddington Mill, and our project is only about one and a half kilometers off the bitumen. So in terms of ability to get a project like this back into production and actually throughput and generating revenues, we've got all the core ingredients there. There's an existing resource of over 112,000 ounces, with over 32,000 ounces produced historically, with very high grades of recovery through both transition zones and the fresh rock. There's an overhead shot of the Eureka pit. You can see it's in very good condition.
From the pit optimizations that we've run as part of our due diligence and acquisition process, this photo is looking to the southeast. That's the way that the ore body dips. With a simple pit cutback, we believe that there could be 20-30,000 ounces, which is readily minable through a simple pit cutback, which at $4,000 gold price is a lot of money for the company based on the 20 million market cap we are today. Here's a long section, which just to show you where there's the pit there. There's significant mineralized zones open at depth and along strike. The two other zones of mineralization and loads that we will be exploring sitting 250 and then sort of 500, 600 meters north of the pit.
But there's also to the south of the Eureka pit, we have four and a half kilometers of untested strike, which will be a core focus of the exploration program in 2025. Initially, we're going to be drilling around the pit to try to increase the existing resource there and also drill test those lodes 250 and 500 meters to the north to see if we can define some high-grade potential ore bodies there. We've just completed a gravity sorry, just geochemistry, geochem analysis and magnetics review of the structures at Eureka. Through that, as I said, there's been no modern exploration activities here since 2021. Our core focus when we get back to drilling in early 2025 will be to follow up these high-grade intercepts to the north of the pit, which you can see there.
Most of these intercepts are sort of from about 50-100 meters in depth. Both of our projects have had a lot of shallow drilling done on them to date. We are planning to drill test to a lot deeper depths, as is justifiable at the current gold price. The Eureka program, we've completed our environmental studies. We're in the process of doing heritage and cultural surveys. We're planning to commence our first drilling program there in, as I said, at the end of January, early February next year. Getting onto the Kuji project, yeah, Kuji was mined by Ramelius back in 2013. There's a photo of the pit there taken a few months ago. It's currently got a resource of over 125,000 ounces. We've commenced the drilling program there only a week ago, and we'll be finished by next week.
We'll drill about the first 3,000 meters, starting at the south of the pit and drilling around to the western edge of the pit to look to hopefully increase the existing resource, and then we're going to move to where we're currently drilling about 300 meters north of the pit on some step-out drill targets. This is only the first phase of our drilling. Most drilling companies shut down in mid-December. It's getting pretty hot out there, and then we'll recommence in mid to late January, so this is just a toe in the water now. The great thing is that from an investor perspective, now we've got money in the bank. We've actually commenced our first drilling campaign. We're going to then have constant news flow in terms of assay results from Kuji and then more drilling and results from Kuji and Eureka constantly over the next six months.
Here's a diagram of the Jaguar resource. You can see the pit shell outline in the middle of the resource there, and it shows you the lodes both to the south, which we've drill tested as part of this current drilling campaign, and also quite an extensive lode to the north of the pit that we're currently drilling right now, and that lode to the north also contains some inferred copper resource, which we're really excited about exploring the potential of that during the current and future drilling campaigns starting in January next year, but the gold mineralization extends for over a kilometer with an average width of about 350 meters and extends vertically sort of deeper than over 200 meters. It's a table just showing the Jaguar resource estimate.
In terms of the current drilling program, this shows the magnetic features on the mining license to the left-hand side of the diagram. That's actually the adjacent exploration license. That magnetic feature will be drilling in the program next year. The drilling right now that we're undertaking is only on the mining license itself, as I've outlined. And we're also going to be drilling, or we are drilling currently, a couple of these, oops, sorry. These mag features up here. So that's what we're currently drilling right now. And we're really excited about the potential of those because they've only been drilled to about 25 meters, very shallow drilling historically. And the top of that mag feature sits at about 300 meters. On the adjacent exploration license, we see a couple of trends here again that have never been properly drill tested. We'll be drilling this in the new year.
But a couple of these features here are nearly three kilometers and one and a half kilometers in length with only shallow drilling historically. So from an exploration perspective, we're very excited about the potential opportunities that they could present for us moving forward. We have some non-core projects in the company. I'll just touch on these because we're just now not spending a single dollar on those. The money we have in the bank, and there's not a lot of it, but we want to put it all into Eureka and all into Kuji. These projects are in the process of either being sold or disposed of, and we'll have no cost for the company moving forward.
So, just to wrap up, in terms of the investment proposition for Javelin or what Javelin is for investors and shareholders, we've already seen the company with its strategy very clearly focused on being a brownfields explorer and potential near-term developer in the eastern goldfields, particularly on two projects that are on granted mining licenses for the benefits that they deliver to the company with existing resources. We've got near-term production potential on both of these. The fact that they haven't been subject to modern exploration activities over the last four to ten years gives us a great opportunity. And the fact that our share price from where we started at the start of the year has gone up three to four times before we've even put a drill hole in the ground gives credence to the strategy and what we're focused on doing.
So we're only capped at AUD 20 million. We therefore have some serious leverage to success on that drill bit. So we'll follow the Spartan lead on that and drill aggressively for the next 12 months and lots of news flow to come out of that. So thank you for your time. And thanks again.
Ripper. Thanks, Brett. Centaurus Metals is developing the world's next big significant nickel sulfide mine, known as the Jaguar Project in Brazil. Darren Gordon is the Managing Director, and he's here to give us an update on it. Please welcome Darren.
Afternoon, everyone. You're nearly there. It's not too far to go, and you'll be able to crack the beers. So I hopefully won't keep you too long, but a great opportunity really to come back and present the Centaurus story.
What we've been doing in Brazil over the last 12 months has been enormous, and we think that we're delivering a lot of value there, albeit against the backdrop of a nickel price which is not really doing us too many favors right now. That will change. We're very confident on that. And I think the other side of that is we're very, very confident on our own project being able to compete in a market which is now being dominated by the Indonesian nickel supply. So we'll talk to that in a little bit more detail as we go through the presentation. Centaurus has been in Brazil for 15 years, and that 15 years has given us an enormous advantage in country. We've been able to build a really good asset base there.
That time in country has also enabled us to pick up the Jaguar Nickel Sulphide Project off Vale a few years back. We've now been able to do all of the work there, drill it out, get through the feasibility study. During the course of this year, and I think it was in early July, we released the economics on the project. That really highlighted a long-life project with a low carbon footprint that's going to deliver enormous value over a long period of time. The key aspect of that has been our low operating cost. It had been extremely important for us to be able to demonstrate that we are not the same as all of the nickel producers that are operating in Australia. We needed to show that we could compete with the Indonesian market.
And what they're doing from a supply point of view is obviously keeping nickel prices depressed at this point. At $3.60 a pound or just under, we're going to have lowest quartile operating costs, which means that we will be able to compete in the market at all points in the cycle once we're operational. So when you combine that with the fact that we've got a feasibility that's delivering near on a billion dollars of post-tax NPV on an 18-year project, we feel like we're in very good shape. So there's a lot of work that we're still doing now. We're getting through a funding process to bring this project to fruition. We've got to finish the approvals process, but we're well on track in relation to that. We're also building out a pipeline of projects.
So in that regard, we're working a copper-gold project in the same region where the nickel project is in the Carajás Mineral Province of northern Brazil called Boi Novo. We've had some early drill success there, albeit it's a greenfields project. And we'll talk to that in some respects. And we have a legacy asset in that Jambreiro iron ore project. And there's some interesting things that are going on in the market as the majors are looking for higher-grade, low-impurity iron ore that's allowing that project to come back and actually have another look at getting up and running. So on that backdrop, you can sort of see that we've got a very good project, but our market cap is obviously diminished at the present point in time because of what's happening in the nickel sector. The sentiment is down. We can't hide from that.
But we know that we've probably got one of the best undeveloped nickel sulfide projects globally. We've got the team of people. We've got the board of people to be able to bring this project to fruition. We've got great coverage. We've got a great shareholder base. So all of the pieces are there. And we see that there's enormous value add that can come from the development of Jaguar. Looking at Brazil, obviously a long way away from Melbourne, but for us, it's a fantastic place to operate. It's got a very sound tenement system. It's got a very good tax system for us in that we are in a region of Brazil where we have some tax incentives there that will deliver us a 15% tax rate for the life of the project.
We have a royalty system that encourages community participation in the projects, creation of jobs in the regions. And that's getting us good support, very good social license to operate where we are. But I think that probably the biggest thing there, which is not the reason we went to Brazil, but having a grid power system based off hydro sources not only delivers you very low cost power, but also very low emission power. So the combination of those two things are hugely advantageous for us as we're looking to bring this project upstream. And I will hype on that a little bit as we go through this because it does have such a big bearing on what we're doing. So just touching more specifically on Jaguar, we're located in the Carajás mineral province of northern Brazil. It is one of the more prolific mineral belts globally.
Some of these projects you may have heard of. Some of them you may not. But top of screen there is the Salobo copper-gold mine that Vale owns. It's about 36 million tonnes a year of throughput. It's the biggest copper mine in Brazil, probably the second biggest IOCG deposit behind Olympic Dam in South Australia. In the middle of screen, there's S11D. It's the largest highest-grade single deposit of iron ore that's being mined globally, 66% iron ore, the premium product that Vale produce. On the left-hand portion of that map is their Onça Puma nickel operations, only 15 kilometers away from where we're looking to build our project. But Vale have already spent $3 billion on that asset and more recently have been putting in a second rotary kiln there to lift that production rate.
That's probably added another AUD 500 million of investment into that area. Right on the bottom left of screen is a project called Tucumã or Boa Esperança project, just being built by a Canadian-listed company called Ero Copper. It's a four million-tonne per annum copper float plant about 40 kilometers from where we are. And we're looking to do a three and a half million-tonne nickel float plant. It's very similar. It's basically trying to take a cookie-cutter approach and adopt exactly what they've done where they've been able to deliver a good project for relatively low cost on time within sort of 21, 22 months. It's a great place to be doing a resource project, particularly the ones that we're looking at with Jaguar. You can see from the topo that we're really dealing in farmland.
It's really cattle-grazing country, so we're not really impacting on any local communities. I've touched on a fair bit of this, but just to highlight, on the bottom right there is Ero Copper's copper float plant. I was there in January. They've now got that operational. So that's very close to where we are, and that's exactly what we want to do. Vila do Conde Port, the hydro dams that are in Brazil, all of that infrastructure really plays into what we're trying to do with our project. And it is hugely advantageous looking to get a project up and running in Brazil. From a feasibility study perspective, a few key points to pull out of this. Very large resource, very low operating cost in the first quartile. Capital cost is very, very manageable for a company of our size. And those overall returns are really strong.
As I said previously, just under a billion dollars post-tax NPV, over $3 billion of post-tax cash flow over the 18-year mine life. So it works out to be about $180 million a year free cash flow. So if we can get that up and running, that's obviously a very good project for a company that's got a market cap of only $200 million. So this is the resource. This is how it's grown over time. We picked up this project late 2019. We've drilled about 200,000 meters of diamond core drilling ourselves. We combine that with the 50,000 meters of diamond core drilling that was in this project at the point in time when we acquired it. And it's a very well-defined deposit now. And we've been able to lift that resource to over 1.2 million tonnes of contained nickel metal.
The yellow bar there is showing the component that is in the measured and indicated category. So we've got very high confidence in the resource. From an operating cost point of view, I said $3.60 a pound. That's a very, very good operating margin even at today's nickel prices. So we were running this out at about $19,000 per tonne. Even today at around $16,000 a tonne, we're probably making around $4,000 a tonne margin on this project. And that's really driven by the low power cost. At 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour, based off the hydro that's feeding the national grid in Brazil, you just don't get better power costs anywhere in the globe. So feel very fortunate to have access to that. It obviously enables projects like this to be able to stay low cost over a long period of time.
That's putting us in the bottom quartile of cost. When you look at all nickel projects across the globe, the grey bars are all the lateritic projects. The green bars are all the sulfide projects. As you can see, there's not many sulfide projects around the globe. And Jaguar does stand out as one of the best undeveloped nickel sulfides globally. Capital cost is, say, very manageable at about $370 million USD. We've got to go through the funding process for that. We're working with Standard Chartered Bank now to bring partners into that project. We think that there's some very good appetite for the nickel product that we're producing. And we'll look to bring this through over the next couple of years. From an emissions point of view, as I said, that power, while being low cost, is also low emission.
While that's probably not the most topical aspect of projects these days as compared to maybe two years ago, it is still an important attribute when you're talking to off-takers about where you're going to sit with your carbon footprint. So I think everyone focuses on the economics first, and rightly so, but this carbon footprint is also a very important part of the process. Some of the resource that we have is very high grade. And so with that now, while we're going through this partnering process, we're doing a little bit of value engineering. And that's going to have potential changes to the mine plan, which will allow us to maybe bring forward lower strip ratio material at the front end of the project, potentially allow us to lift the production rate in the early parts of the project life.
You can sort of see there's over 8 million tons there, sort of sitting at 1.5% in the top 100 meters. So if we can access some of that material early on in the project life, then we're going to give ourselves a very good kickstart and hopefully get that payback period right down. Some of the other things we're doing are looking at the underground. This feasibility study that we completed was just in relation to open pits. That gave us a reserve of 460,000 tons of nickel out of that 1.2 million. There's another large portion of that overall resource that's sitting underneath the pit that we think we'll be able to get to at some point in time. We don't need to obviously drill it out right now, but it still has a lot of opportunity.
We're also doing some things on the process flow sheet to maybe increase the grade of the nickel concentrate to try to look to reduce the freight cost associated with moving the concentrate. And that could have some significant benefits to us from an operating cost perspective. So we'll get through all of those things over the next few months, hopefully make an investment decision by the middle of next year, get into construction in the second half of next year, and then have approximately a two-year build to be able to bring the project on stream. So that's Jaguar. Quickly touch on Boi Novo. Again, just the map to reorientate yourself. Still the Carajás mineral province. We're now looking to the right of screen there. That project's about 35 kilometers outside of the city of Parauapebas. Parauapebas is the hub of the Carajás. It's about 250,000 people.
All of the mining service providers are based there. Importantly, BHP has a small copper float plant about 20 kilometers from this project. So with us drilling this out, while it's early days, we are seeing some nice mineralization. The project doesn't need to be massive to be economic because of having that processing plant so close. So we're doing the work on that basis. There's some breccia-hosted mineralization that we've hit, including this nine meters at 1.5% copper. We've also hit wide zones of disseminated sulfides, 80-meter-wide zones, which we don't have the assays back for as yet, but which should come through over the next three or four weeks.
That's really exciting for us to be able to find early-stage projects like this, put our exploration team to work, and continue to build the pipeline of assets that sit behind Jaguar inside the portfolio that Centaurus has in Brazil. Finally, just looking at Jambreiro, it was the project that we first went to Brazil on. We did everything to get this project up and running sort of back in 2012, 2013. It sat idle for quite a while. Now there's a really strong push by the majors to look at us producing direct reduction pellet feed material, which can then be fed into electric arc furnaces. While we were looking at a different product previously, the fact that we can produce a direct reduction pellet feed material has, I guess, a few people excited.
And we're looking at how do we extract value out of that. So we're doing a little bit of work now. We've done some test work to show that we can produce DR pellet feed material. It's got a reserve on it already back from when we looked at it before. And we're going through a license renewal process now. So it's a little bit of watch this space. When we last studied it, it had an NPV of about $150 million at a $75 a tonne iron ore price. Iron ore price today is $100 a tonne. You'd get a premium for your direct reduction pellet feed material. So we think that the economics on that could improve quite significantly. And it is a little bit of a sleeper. Make no mistake, for us, the focus is on the Jaguar nickel project.
But we do have a pipeline of assets there in Brazil. And we're able to leverage off our knowledge in country to be able to bring these things through to fruition. So there's a long-term focus there. I guess I just keep harping back to the value of that project as it stood out of the feasibility study. It's just shy of AUD 1 billion post-tax NPV against a market cap of maybe AUD 200 million. We feel like there's huge upside associated with that as we get the project funded and we complete and deliver further news flow. The next three or four months, there's a bunch of things happening from an approvals point of view, the value engineering work we're doing, the partnering work that we're looking to have. So we think it could be a fairly interesting time for the company as we do all of that.
So thanks for your time today. Do appreciate it. Enjoy your afternoon.
Thanks, Darren, Antimony, antimony. One thing you can't call it anymore is anti-money, can you? It is one of the hot words or the buzzwords of the current time, along with germanium and gallium, other little heard-of elements of the periodic table until recent times. Of course, those who caught up with the news in the past 24 hours or so would have seen that the Chinese have said they're going to very quickly ban all exports of those critical minerals, and antimony being one of them. Thunderbird has just got its hands on an antimony project right next door to the biggest one in Australia, owned by Larvotto, if that's how you pronounce it. George Bauk is the Executive Chairman. He is going to tell us what he is going to do with his antimony. Please welcome George.
Thanks, Paul. Thanks, everyone, for coming and staying for the best session of the program, the lucky last one before the panel. So as mentioned, Thunderbird Resources. And I'll take you through our portfolio of projects, which includes our uranium in Canada. We just finished a drilling program there. And as part of the northern hemisphere weather season, we really needed to pivot and have a look at other opportunities. We looked at uranium in the southern part of the world. And really, an opportunity came across our desk in relation to antimony. I've spent the last 20 years with particular reference to rare earths, so have a pretty good knowledge and understanding of critical minerals and understand how it all works from a geopolitical perspective.
And really took a deep dive into antimony in the last three months to have a look at what the real key supply and demand is, where it sits in the world, and to see what's happened in China in recent months just highlights the great opportunity that we have here. So in terms of location, you can see right bang in the middle of the land area is Larvotto's Hillgrove project. And I think today they announced the AUD 30 million capital raise. If you have a look at the economics of that project, they're simply outstanding. They've historically produced antimony over time and gold. So it's a well-known project. It's ranked eighth in the world. And I think if you take out the geopolitical projects in that top eight, it's fair to say this is probably number one in the world in relation to safe geopolitical areas.
I have spoken many times on podiums for a number of companies, and I can actually put my hand on my heart and say that from an infrastructure point of view, this is the best I've been associated with in relation to being close to Armidale in New South Wales. The road infrastructure and everything's there to really make for a great project, so we surround Larvotto. These were assets that were picked up three years ago by a gentleman who was working in North America and working on copper, and during COVID, he thought he may never get to the U.S. again, so he needs to find a project to work on in Australia, so as he went around Australia having a look at what's available, he actually picked up that land package three years ago.
And fair to say that over the last few months, when China first announced they were going to ban antimony, this was a time he thought was worthwhile to put into a listed company. So over the last couple of months, we had the opportunity to have a look at the asset and actually acquire the property area. 488 square kilometers. There's only a small amount of us in the area. So you've got Trigg Minerals and Lode Resources are the two other major explorers in the area and Thunderbird Resources. So when it comes to our property area, as I said, we actually surround the Hillgrove, the Larvotto Hillgrove project. We've got an enormous amount of outcropping and historical results on our project. As I said, we've only had it from start to today has been about two months. So we're going through the historical data.
This is an area that has not had a lot of modern exploration outside of that Hillgrove area. So there's very little drilling. There's historical workings, historical production of gold from about 100 years ago. So we're taking our time working through that historical information to make sure that we get it up to a standard that we can report it. But as I said before, you can see numbers up there. Little Britain, Union Jack and the like, we've got 18% antimony. There's early-stage exploration and geology that suggests that there's a northwest-southeast trend from the Hillgrove project that goes into our property. They've just had results recently from drilling, which is only two kilometers from our property. So it's a super exciting area. We've got a lot of work to do and follow up the historical work, get airborne surveys happening as soon as possible.
Further north is Kookabookra. To our east is Trigg Minerals. They've got a small resource of antimony there. So they're working through that at the moment. And again, we've got outstanding gold prospectivity. There's been a little bit of drilling done here in recent times. But again, so much rich historical data to go through. And we've got to get boots on the ground as soon as possible. So again, antimony and gold in that particular property area. So in terms of the acquisition, it was AUD 150,000 cash, 30 million shares, and then a heap of milestones later on in relation to certain NPVs and resource size. That's a picture of the area in relation to what we'll be dealing with. So in terms of planned work programs, we'll be looking, compiling the data.
We'll then be getting land access agreements in place, get on the ground, do rock chip, soil sampling, drone magnetics, and then we start drilling, so we expect to be able to drill there in a very short period of time. As mentioned before, antimony hit the news waves in the last 48 hours with China saying they're going to ban antimony exports. You look at what its applications are for and obviously the criticalities associated with defense applications. It's used in hardening of lead, goes into bullets, missiles, and many other products. It's also an additive to solar farms where it can improve the efficiency of a solar farm by 9% and many others, including fire retardant, so it's got a lot of applications, not just for defense.
But there's no question that that's got a real interest with the U.S. with concerns about having such a dominant player in China in relation to the supply chain. If you look there, where does antimony come from at the moment? It's China, it's Russia, it's Tajikistan, Burma, Bolivia are the five sort of key sites that it comes from around the world. And it doesn't matter which critical mineral. We have to have a diversity of supply chains. You don't want to have anyone have a monopoly of a supply chain. And in particular, certain countries make it even more concerning, if you like. We really need to build out the critical minerals to have a more transparent pricing. China will manipulate price. And we're seeing really strong price for antimony at the moment, sitting at about $37,000 a tonne.
We will see that go up and down over time. I mean, that's been seen in so many other commodities. One of the great things about Larvotto's project and the project we're looking at surrounding it is that it's not only got antimony, but it's got gold. You've got the ability to have multiple revenue streams. It's not just reliant on antimony. That is so important when you've got one opaque revenue stream that is going to be influenced heavily by a country like China. Just quickly touching on our uranium properties in the Athabasca Basin. As I said, we haven't thrown these out at all. We're still big bulls in uranium. We just recently finished drilling our Hidden Bay project. We have four key properties: Hook Lake, Hidden Bay, Cluff Lake, and Surprise Creek. We picked these up in 2020.
When these were picked up, the basin had a lot of area to look and pick up properties. It's now been all taken up. You've really got to negotiate with an existing holder to be able to get a position in the Athabasca Basin. It's world-class. It's the highest-grade uranium deposits in the world. You've got Cameco with the famous Rabbit Lake. Sorry, Rabbit Lake. They've got McArthur River and Cigar Lake. We've got Rabbit Lake just up the road from us. It's world-class. It's a fantastic place to do business in terms of Saskatchewan. Uranium, it's been flat-lying, $80 a pound. People are waiting to see it pop. I think the great news of recent times has been the IT groups that have been coming in and actually investing in uranium as an energy source to feed the data centers and in particular AI.
We've seen Amazon, Microsoft all start to interact with uranium with the Three Mile Island and also the small modular reactors. We're going to see a positive sign in 2025 with uranium. This is our number one project, Hidden Bay. We just completed 1,800 meters of drilling. It's got some great geological features there. We drilled four key prospects. We hit alteration. We hit uranium in small quantities on the contact. We've got a former Cameco geophysicist that works with us who's worked on many projects in the basin. He's super excited about this. Unfortunately, to excite the market, you've got to hit multiple % intersections. With uranium, you can be so close with really subtle signatures.
So we are super excited about this and really hope to see a strengthening of our market cap and hopefully get back onto this property at some stage in the future. That's just another graph, another chart. Cluff Lake. This is our second priority project. It's located right near the historical Cluff Lake mine, which is about seven kilometers from our border. Cluff Lake produced 62 million pounds of 0.92%, which is about 25 grams of gold if you do a gold equivalent. And just to the south of us or southwest, you've got Shea Creek, which is owned by UEC in Orano. That's over 100 million pounds at 1.3%. The challenge with that deposit, it's 800 meters deep. We've flown airborne geophysics. And what the geophysicists have done is realized that the potential of our project sits at around 200 meters below surface.
The exciting thing for us is the area is fertile. But having a closer-to-surface target is a lot better because drilling 800-meter holes is not for the faint-hearted. Just quickly, Surprise Creek. This is a project we actually pegged in 2021-2022 around the old Uranium City. The last hole drilled in the area was actually before I was born in 1968, 2.1 meters at 4.3%. We've just flown airborne in about June, July this year. We've just got the data. We're processing it now. We hope to have some information out to the market on this particular project. Just finally, with our copper exposure, when we put the uranium assets in in 2020, we had a Peruvian asset. We worked on that. We got it to a point where it was drill-ready. It took us two years to get permitting.
We transacted that with Firetail Resources, so we retained 30%. Simon, the director of Firetail at the back with his arms up, loves Peru. We've got 16.5 million shares, so just under 5% of the company. We still own 30% of the project. We got cash and shares, so we've actually returned money to the company from the investment we've made into this project, and I think it's got an exciting future. Firetail has also got a project that they've recently acquired in Canada, so we've got a great exposure to copper and to Firetail through our ownership of shares in that company, and also on the Surprise Creek project, we've also got some really interesting copper numbers from historical drilling done by Phelps Dodge. It's fair to say in the Athabasca Basin, there has been such limited work done for any commodity outside of uranium.
It's very rare to see historical work done in the basin for the likes of copper. This was Phelps Dodge that was up there a very long time ago. So with this geophysics, we've just flown. We hope to be able to get information to provide a model that can highlight what are we looking for, what could this be like in terms of a copper target. So look, in summary, in terms of our proposition, we've had a pivotal acquisition in relation to antimony project in Rockvale, which is right next door to Larvotto. We're hoping to get a slight fee if we keep promoting them. But it's an outstanding project and very proud to be right next door to them. We've got 488 square kilometers. So we've got a great land holding.
We just can't wait to get on the ground there and start working it, going through the historical data and drilling as soon as possible. We've been developing our uranium project. We've drilled it, both Hidden Bay and Hook Lake, in the last few years. We're looking to work out how to monetize some of those properties. We can't do everything. And then we've got a great copper exposure through Firetail Resources and the free carried interest in Surprise Creek. Our share price is over 2 cents at the moment. We've got 324 million shares on issue. So market cap about $6 million, a couple of million dollars net cash. There are major shareholders there. We are a serious leverage when you consider. I was at a function Friday in Perth. And Ron accepted the award for best share last year or this year.
So hopefully, I'll get that award next year. In terms of board of directors, myself, Gary Billingsley, been around a long time, Canadian base, knows uranium really well. Robin Wilson, he discovered the Browns Range project for Northern Minerals from a greenfield discovery. So he's got exploration success in his CV. And Joe Graziano, our company secretary. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you, George. Okay, you've all worked very hard. So we're going to have a liquidity event. The drinks are about to come into the room as we have our panel. So please, as the drinks come in, they'll be on trays at a couple of places. So please feel free to get up and help yourselves. While you're doing that, you might want to make sure that you've put your name badge into the bowl that Louise will have at the back of the room to be eligible for the trip for two to Adelaide in April. All right, let's get on with the show. First of all, our panel chair, better call her our panel chairman. Our panel chair, please welcome Kristie Batten.
From Seneca Financial Solutions, Luke Laretive. A man known to plenty in the room, Rob Curtis from EMR Capital. And from Bell Potter Securities, Stuart Howe. And of course, from Bell Direct, please welcome Grady Wulff. I'll leave you in the hands of these people to have a good chat. And then at the end, we'll please have a drink and we'll draw the prize for two. Upon the conclusion of today, you're all invited. In fact, you're not invited. You're instructed to join us in Sophie's Bar next door. We have plenty of drink and food. And we'd love to have you all there. Over to you, Kristie.
Thank you. Oh, yep. Are we on?
We're on.
Okay, cool. All right. We've only got half an hour. So let's get straight into it. Grady.
All right.
As 2024 is wrapping up, what do you see as being the key themes for this year?
Themes have been a lot of key themes this year. Obviously, we have China, very sluggish post-pandemic, really weighing on a lot of the commodity prices out there, iron ore specifically. Iron ore has been resilient, but it has had the challenges this year. Steel as well. Steel mills in China put on hold because the price was so low domestically. Trump, we can't go anywhere without talking about Trump at the moment. That's obviously impacted the markets and commodities and the outlook for commodities, especially with the tariffs he's set to bring in. We've obviously had the USD weakening before Trump, so that's really driven the gold price up and a lot of drivers for the gold price at the moment, which is sitting at all-record highs, $2,700 announced the other week, so that's really strong. We have the AI movement continuing to move forward.
That's really putting pressure on the water supply, energy supply. Uranium, as I spoke in my keynote this morning about the drive for uranium on that front with the AI driving nuclear power and a lot of big investment and big thoughts from Microsoft and all the big names out there. I think as well the green energy transition is still underpinning the market. But at the same time, we have seen a bit of a pullback in that. I think the EV revolution is still happening, but it's a mixed pace right now. A lot has happened as the drinks come onto the stage. But a lot has been going on at the moment. But it's really exciting.
I think heading into next year, I'd like to see more stability because there was just so much impact in commodity prices that was really difficult to predict. I don't think last year I would have thought the gold price had come as far as it was going. At the start of last year, gold was definitely not on my radar to be the commodity of the minute. It's now my commodity of next year too. Yeah, a lot going on right now.
Thank you for that. You almost missed out on a drink. I don't know if I have one. Stuart, hello. Obviously, you talk to a lot of institutional investors. What are their focuses at the moment? And where are their heads at for the coming year?
Yeah, I think the last six months has really seen gold and copper sort of come to the front. I think that's probably no surprise to anyone in this room, and that's been a huge change since sort of 12 or 18 months ago. I think marketing trips I did back then, it was all about uranium and lithium, and that's sort of transitioned. I think there's still quite an interest in lithium and quite an interest in uranium. Uranium, I think everyone was going through a learning curve and trying to get their head around that commodity. I think now they're probably waiting on the sidelines, and lithium has obviously struggled as well recently with oversupply. Gold and copper, I mean, gold, the story is obviously the macro drivers, but also we've had in both those commodities, we've had a couple of major producers get acquired recently.
So OZ Minerals by BHP and obviously Newcrest as well. So it's forced investors to have a look down the, I guess, market cap chain to some of the names in that space. But yeah, the last couple of months, it's really just been gold and copper. And probably to add to that, some of the more interesting and, I guess, critical minerals, we cover a couple of companies like Alpha HPA, which is in the high purity alumina space, and IperionX, which is in titanium. And they're more processing technology companies. And there's been a lot of interest in trying to understand how those technologies work. And so there's been a fair bit of interest across the board from those as well.
Rob, you're probably one of the best traveled people in the resources space. What feeling do you get when you're overseas from global investors?
I'd love you to define best. Certainly well travelled. Eating a lot of Qantas plane food is not a competition you want to win. But in terms of, I mean, I think Aussies, so for those that don't get out of the ASX market, I think you'd be surprised just how dead globally resource markets are. So some connectivity to London, I guess, and that is fairly dead. The TSX, it's amazing how things change. 10, 15 years ago, it was always the Aussie dream to have a dual listing on the TSX. Canada is dead. And the life has been sucked out of that market some years ago. I think we need a few wins over there to get people back interested. But they're very influenced by U.S. markets and so tech stocks, et cetera.
Both at retail and institutional level, the TSX is a shadow of what it was. I know there's a whole bunch of people sitting here that would be surprised to hear this. I mean, the ASX is a boom market in comparison. There is just such little availability of capital for mining and resource stocks in Canada. Now, from our perspective, running a private equity fund, that is fantastic. That's the reason spend so much time over there because that presents opportunity in terms of the lack of availability of capital to fund projects. Here, it is so much stronger. That's because we have such a strong mining is still an important sector to the Australian landscape. There's strong retail and INSTO support.
Even so, at the junior level, but those projects that advance and require capital to go the next step, as the project advances and the company grows in size, there are institutions willing to step in and support stocks. So it really is. It's amazing. Toronto used to be the capital, the mining capital on the planet. It's no longer the case. I think the stats probably in the last five or six years are. It's a bit of a skewed stat. But in terms of dual listings, I think the number of TSX companies coming to Australia for a listing is three to one as opposed to ASX companies going that way. I know personally. There's been a number of Canadian listed companies who I've helped just put in touch with groups down here.
And they've come here with a view to potentially listing on the ASX, but certainly come hunting capital. So I know Aussie, I can see one in the front. He's going okay. But there's a whole bunch of other groups who would just think I have said to them, go to Precious Metals and Denver Gold and so on. If you think things on the ASX are tough, either just pick up the phone and talk to a Canadian or go to one of those conferences because you'll quickly recalibrate.
Luke, Seneca recently introduced a new small cap strategy. Does that indicate it's now buy time for small cap resources?
Look, I think, yeah, we've been going 14 months now. And definitely small cap resources have played a pretty big part in our sort of 38% return so far. So we think it's a happy hunting ground. We think that you've got to do things a little bit countercyclically sometimes and go places where other people aren't looking just yet. Certainly, I think in the smaller end of the mining market here on the ASX, whether they're explorers or developers, there's opportunity. And I mean, even most recently, you're seeing, I mean, De Grey has been trading at AUD 1.40 or a buck 30, buck 50 for ages. You can be there. And it's probably the best undeveloped gold asset in Australia. And no wonder someone wants to come and grab it. And probably someone will end up paying more than the current takeover price, in my opinion.
So I think there's plenty of places to go look for value at the moment. There's no shortage of opportunities on the ASX. I think that often people just don't want to do the work, don't want to get out there and meet the people, press the feet to the ground and do the hard yakker, because that's what it takes.
What do you look for when you're investing in a small cap stock?
We have a pretty simple kind of seven-step process. It's on every piece of content we've ever written about resource investing. But we're looking for assets of significant scale, global significance, good people, good share register, and I suppose alignment with management and the owners. Aside from that, just a commodity with some momentum, I suppose, is always helpful, particularly in junior land, and enough cash to achieve some meaningful milestones so that we can realize some value.
Is that sort of similar for you, Rob? That's the same sort of criteria?
Yeah, I guess we've got a thing called the rule of nine that we have in every investment committee paper, and they are those sort of same criteria, I guess, slightly different to some people, but we're a private equity fund, so our funds are closed in 10-year time frame, so invest, do your magic work, and then sell within a 10-year time frame, we tend to look at taking assets, unloved assets from majors and mid-tiers, but we certainly have invested in sort of junior companies where a couple of people might be familiar with Highfield Resources, Potash and Spain, et cetera, so there's a couple where we have. Really, for us, one of the keys is commodity. We're very tight on commodity, and it's base metals, but copper, gold, metal, potash, and that really goes to knowing what the value of that commodity is at any given point.
I'm not saying that guys in antimony and all that sort of stuff are wrong. I'm just saying you don't want to get trapped in an investment in a 10-year fund where suddenly antimony is not the favorite commodity. It's great if you're in that today. But if you need to, we ultimately need to exit that investment. And so if you have a good copper investment, gold investment, metal, it is an exitable investment. So we really stick with LME traded commodities or whether it's deep liquid markets that you can exit.
Grady, obviously gold and silver have been very positive this year. Where do you see them going from here?
Yeah, I do see the tailwinds are still there. There's a lot of, I know, as I said before, weakening U.S. dollar obviously boosted the gold price. But before that, then we had the Trump election that really impacted the gold price, pulled back a bit but the fundamentals are still there to get the prices of those going. There's undersupply on the silver side and the high-grade silver. So obviously Sun Silver has done really well this year, debuting on the market in a really tough time to debut on the market. So congratulations, team. But when we look forward, we look at all of the drivers behind the gold rally at the moment and as I said, People's Bank of China buying up more bullion than ever before and also more than any other central bank in the world.
So that just says that they're trying to de-risk themselves and kind of diversify their portfolio away from the USD. And we've also got undersupply as well of high-grade gold around the world. We've got, there's not enough near-term producers as well. We've got a lot of investors. What I've seen in the markets themselves is investors when they're not sure, because everyone's, as I said in my keynote this morning, with the markets sitting at record highs, where do you go? And everyone just thinks immediately gold and gold assets, gold ETFs, gold bullion, anything to do with gold, because it's the historical store of value. And so everyone goes, I would get guaranteed returns by investing in some form of gold. And so that's really driving investment opportunities as well. So I definitely see that there's strong tailwinds for gold and silver moving forward.
But I do see they're not, well, silver was always the kind of stepsister of gold, wasn't it? The ugly stepsister, like a Cinderella story. But I definitely see silver is running its own race as well. And it's kind of the forgotten commodity. So there's definitely a need for that as well.
Luke, you were a silver bull early on. What do you like so much about silver?
It's not really a silver bull, I suppose. I mean, I think we thought Sun Silver was a good risk-reward opportunity for us at IPO. And I think we look for the same sort of thing in any commodity that we're investing in. I think the unique and the nice thing with silver at the moment is it's gone from being an ugly stepsister store of value, if you want to use that sort of terminology. But it's now got an industrial application. And I think for me, sort of being an old-school nerd supply-demand model type person, I like to see things that actually have an industrial use and application. And I can see a demand supply curve being attractive and supportive of investment in that sector. So I think that's good tailwinds for business.
I think investors can get a little bit caught up on narratives and stories around these commodities. And I think at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the actual investments you make. We can all talk about a lot of rubbish about commodity this, commodity that. But at the end of the day, it's the companies you buy where you get the leverage. So I think it comes down to still finding good share register structure, incentivized aligned management teams, really good quality resources, tier one jurisdiction, blah, blah, blah. Go read my stuff. But the point is that you can, it is more about that and less about silver. It's great that silver is doing well. And I'm stoked about it, don't get me wrong. But I do think that the nitty-gritty work still is what matters.
One commodity that isn't doing so well is obviously lithium. Stuart, I think you cover lithium.
I do. I'm the guy with that responsibility at Bell Potter.
Lucky you.
It's not the ugly sister. It's the half cousin or something at the moment. I think that, look, lithium is going through growing pains at the moment. It's obviously a very new market, not so much a new market, but it's growing very quickly. We have seen a cycle and then a lot of supply come online. That's impacted prices more recently. I do think, though, that the underlying supply demand down the track is strong. If you take a view on EV ramp up, and I know the issues at the moment are really around the OEMs not really ponying up and taking part of that growth just yet. I think they will get there.
If you take that view, and I think that's fairly consistent, this is a market that will more than double in the next five years in terms of demand. While we've got an oversupplied market at the moment, we're going to need a lot more supply into the future. I think that's been recognised by some in the market at the moment. You'll see Rio, obviously, and their bid for Arcadium. They were looking at that for a long time. I think it was very opportunistic, but also, I guess, a good get out of jail for Arcadium. We did some work recently on the supply cuts that have come out of the market.
Just those Australian assets which have announced pullbacks or the closure of Bald Hill, which is one of MinRes's assets, that has the impact of pulling forward the first deficit year we see in that market by about 12 months, so around that sort of 2026, 2027. While I think prices are low at the moment, there's good cost support, not only the Chinese producers, but the Australians, which are pretty much at the top end of the cost curve at the moment at sort of, I don't know, around up to $800 a tonne delivered spodumene into Asia. And that's about 30% or 40% of the market. I think as we look into next year, am I expecting a quick recovery in prices? No, probably not. We will see wild swings in this market. I think the next swing is up.
But we just need to wait for that sort of demand-led recovery.
Are you game enough to call the bottom of the lithium market?
Look, I don't think we can go much lower than where we're going without significant supply coming out of the market, and I think that there are enough strategic interests to ensure that the operations like Liontown's Kathleen Valley will continue in this current market, so is it the bottom? I think we must be pretty close to it.
Just being recorded.
Yeah, it's live streamed right now and recorded. What about uranium? Because obviously we started 2024. It was very exciting to people. It hit $100. It's really pulled right back, down 20% or more. Where do you see that sort of going from here? Anyone who wants to take that?
Just ask.
Todd?
I think for me, there's probably a really good story around uranium as a commodity. I think if I was a hedge fund investor or a commodities investor, I can see why you'd want to own a spot trust or whatever. From a stocks perspective, this on the ASX, we have a pretty firm rule that we don't hold stocks during production ramp up. It's just a risk. If you've ever worked in mining, it's just a risky period for any mine anywhere on the planet. So I think Paladin has got issues there. Boss is really expensive in my view. I think there's a lot of, there's not a lot of value from a stocks perspective.
So while, again, we can talk about a good narrative around the commodity, and maybe that's how investors want to play it and play the hedge fund game, well, that's not what I do, unfortunately. I just buy companies. So yeah, I think there's a good story there. And there's plenty of good supply-demand dynamics. But it's probably a hard thing to get good exposure to on the ASX as a fund manager.
Yeah, I think with Microsoft buying up that nuclear power plant to power all of their AI for 20 years, that just kind of indicates the demand is going to be there. So I do see potential upside for sure.
I think the market itself, I mean, there are emerging deficits. But the main supply-demand imbalance is not really until 2030 when Cigar Lake really scales back. So yeah, it's a super interesting commodity. The supply side, or at least the restarts, have had mixed success recently. I think that there's been a lot of educational re-education back into the uranium market, as I mentioned earlier. And it's certainly one to keep an eye on. But it's also at risk that one piece of bad news that I've seen before in that market can really pull the wind out of the sails. And that's something that everyone should keep their eye on.
It probably isn't the one exception to my little speech about the TSX before, because they are quite sophisticated investors in uranium, given the quality projects we've seen NexGen come down here recently. As much as anything, I'm fascinated to see politically how educated people are on this subject next year. Leave it there.
Next question. Everyone's gold price prediction for the end of 2025, Luke?
I'm not in the business of forecasting gold prices, but I leave that to brighter minds. Look, I think there's continued support and momentum for the gold price at the moment. I wouldn't have to, my best guess would be it would be here or there where it is now. I think that's the only sort of logical thing I could say. Do I? Sorry about my mic. Yeah, that's probably, I don't have a lot to add, to be honest.
Rob?
So, just to be clear, this is Rob Curtis speaking, not EMR Capital. So, I would say a little bit. I don't have that crystal ball either. But more than what it is now, I would say I'll have a three in front of it. U.S..
Stuart, any thoughts on a direct over gold?
I'll give you the Bell Potter view and what Stuart has for you. The Bell Potter, what's going through our models is about $2,700 a ton. Sorry, an ounce. That's not a ton.
Ton.
That's out of consensus, mate. You're pretty[ {fucking] right.
That's the official Bell Potter view. My view is that there's more upside risk than down, and yeah, in the low threes.
I'd say threes for sure. Looking, I was actually talking to some CEOs when I was interviewing them on the Gold Coast. And they're getting offers for above $4,500 an ounce in hedging in forward contracts. So it kind of says the market's saying there's upside potential. And I'd say definitely a three in it. I'd be bullish to say $3.5. But I want to say $3.5. And I know there's a lot out there. No, he says $3.5. I'll be optimistic. $3.5.
What about the best, I guess the first energy kind of critical mineral sort of commodity to recover in terms of, is it graphite, lithium, rare earths? What do you think?
Yeah, I think lithium for me. I just got back from a Pilbara Minerals trip, and I was just up there doing a site visit. For me, the incentive pricing in lithium right now just supports high prices. I mean, as sort of Stuart pointed out, there's 20%-30% of the market that's going out of business essentially if things stay where they are. The square doesn't quite circle there for me. Yeah, I'm happy to call the bottom of the lithium market at the moment. I think you're seeing phenomenal value. From my perspective, the best part of the market is the brines. The brines are lower in the cost curve, easy to bring online, whether that's DLE stuff or just traditional EVAP.
I think, yeah, without a doubt, lithium brines is the best sort of critical mineral to invest in at the moment.
Rob?
I see Darren. I would love to say nickel. Sorry, dude. That's a slower burn, but I think we'll come back. I wholeheartedly agree. I think the DLE technology on lithium brines will be cracked fairly soon at a commercial scale, and I think there is no shortage of lithium, but I think that will change things quite significantly.
Stuart?
Copper.
Yeah. It's probably the most boring critical mineral. But it's pretty critical. And grades have been declining year after year. Supply, we're not finding new copper discoveries at the rate we once were. And demand going through the roof for all the infrastructure we're building around new power grids, storage, AI, all those themes playing to copper. So copper.
What's Bell's view, price estimate, forecast, sorry, for copper in 2025?
You got me on the spot there. No, it's certainly higher than where it is now. I think we're about AUD 4.50.
Does it have a 10 in front of it or?
I'll go dollars per pound and $4.50, yeah.
Okay.
It's got my metric chart.
I know your stuff.
It's got my metric chart this time.
I'd say combination of copper and lithium for sure. Lithium probably $27. But copper for sure.
2025.
Okay, well, I'm talking $27. But $25, yeah, copper because of the energy transition, how much is needed, how little there is, and also the copper mines take a lot longer to get online than most of the other commodities, so with supply side shortened and not enough coming online and the demand only increasing, that equilibrium's definitely out. All right. Stock picks, Luke.
I knew you were going to come to me first. I didn't prep one.
Hey, you can have multiple. It doesn't have to just be one.
Look, I think in the, I suppose, the smaller end of the miners, like I said, I think the short-term easy win is the De Grey. I think it's going to get another bid, if not two more bids. I think that goes for AUD 2.30, AUD 2.40, and you're at kind of AUD 2 now, Northern Star. So sorry if you're a Northern Star shareholder, you might miss out on that one. I would say, like I said, the brines, we still really like Vulcan Energy Resources. We still think that's cheap here, and lots of catalysts in the very near term. Outside of lithium, we like copper. We're an AIC Mines shareholder. So that's a pretty good way to play things if you've got Stu's view. I think there's lots of nice, interesting stories. We just met with Genesis. They're doing a great job.
I think there's plenty of good companies to invest in resources on the ASX. There's no doubt about that.
Rob?
So do we have to pay respect to Nicholas and choose one from the basket of companies today?
No. I mean, maybe one from the basket and.
You can't pick an exclusivity for free. So if we do, I'll pick Sun Silver because I'm a big shareholder.
Yes, it's a good pick.
If I had to pick a completely obscure one, there is a bit of science. There is a fair bit of me being buried in this PA as well. There's a company you've heard from, I think, Firetail and AIC and Silver. There's another one in that stable called Alicanto.
Why?
Because I own some of it.
Okay. Stuart?
Alpha HPA, A4N is the stock code. Technically not a mining company, but certainly a commodity and a high-value critical mineral, high-purity alumina. They have a funded project up in Gladstone, which is under construction or in development now. They play in a market that basically supplies semiconductor manufacturing, LED lighting, lithium-ion battery coatings on the cathodes of batteries, which substantially improve the safety case, so everyone freaking out about their car, their Tesla burning. This is a technology that has the potential to alleviate that. Backed by, they're just debt funded, so NAIF and EFA have supplied up to AUD 400 million in debt for that. Oracle is a major partner and a 5% shareholder. I think it's the one that at the moment has most legs in my view.
Grady?
From my personal point of view, obviously Spartan.
I knew you were going to say that.
Yeah. It's not because of Simon himself.
It's actually because he's right there.
Not because he's giving me eyes in the front row. No. It was the first mine site tour I did. The fundamentals are there for what I look for in a gold stock. There's a lot of metrics behind looking at gold stocks. I think it's the most exciting journey, an exciting story. Now, obviously, the money in the bank, well done, adds a lot of really good upside potential with making and turning the mine back on, turning the mill back on, and getting the gold out of the ground. Yeah, definitely Spartan from the bunch here. Yeah, I think from the fundamentals, the uranium market's looking pretty exciting over the next year. Everything to do with AI, even water at the moment. Like I was talking to a few different water producers in Australia and CEOs.
There's simply not enough. Yeah, the listed water stocks are.
So we'll just drink champagne instead.
Yeah, happily. I'll just drink all the champagne. We need the water for AI, everyone.
We've only got two minutes left. So I think we've got the most important question that we haven't covered. I want everyone's tip for AFL and NRL Premierships in 2025. Luke.
Look, I'm a West Coast Eagles supporter. So it's dark, dark, it's dark days at the moment. It's very dark days. So yeah, I'll keep the footy turned off at the moment. But the NRL, look, I don't really follow it. But we'll go to Storm because that's where I live.
Rob?
If the North Melbourne Sox weren't enough to give it away, and men's footy is dead to me anyway. It's all about the AFLW. Rugby, I only know one team. Storm, isn't it?
Yeah, that's a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
Stuart?
Yep. Long-suffering Carlton supporter. 30 years next year. 30 years next year since our last flag. We've got a dual Brownlow medalist. If we don't win in the next couple of years, then we've got bigger problems. So let's go Carlton. With my deep Melburnian understanding of the NRL, I will say Storm.
I'm just going to change it up here.
Grady, you live in Sydney. So maybe we might get a different view here.
Oh, I'm not going to say Swans because that's embarrassing. Absolutely embarrassing. Sorry. I'm really good friends with Robby and we're going to his wedding soon. It's an embarrassment to be a Swan supporter at the moment. There's something seriously wrong there. I'm a Dockers supporter. So please pray for us. Don't laugh at me, Simon. Please pray for us. I'm going to pray for us. And I think we've got the good fundamentals there. We've never won a flag. So 30 years, never won one. But yeah, I'm definitely optimistic on the Dockers. I'm an underdog fan. And I'm going to go with Panthers because obviously Sydney. But I don't follow the NRL at all.
All right. Well, we've actually got 13 seconds left. So let's wrap it up there. Please thank our panelists.
Thank you.
Please thank Kristie Batten too.
Yeah, thank you.
Cheers to that.
Right, we are going to draw the prize for tickets for tour and accommodation to the travel and accommodation to the Resources Rising Stars Gather Round Conference in April. Just before we do that, I'd like to invite everyone here to that conference. It's a fantastic couple of days. We had the first event last year. It was a raging success. And there'll be 40 or so companies there to see, to hear from, to talk to personally. And mix in your investing with your football. It's great fun. And it can be very productive. So we'd love to have you along. If you'd like to register, please go to our website and register. We'd love to have you. And there's a couple more people to put their name tags in there.
Everyone, you've got to be in it to win it.
It's really good. It's all these companies as well. So I'll put you in touch.
Are we all?
It was fun last year.
It was like a song.
It was actually amazing. This year was amazing. Oh, yeah, this year. God.
There's no advantage to leaving your run late. I like the strategy. Okay.
Brian Pashley. Yeah.
No way. Not in these shoes.
There we go. Now, before we go off for a drink, I just wanted, as well as inviting you to the Rising Stars Gather Round Conference in April, I also just want to quickly, given that we're in the festive mood here, a quick little story tell you about these Englishmen, Scotsman, Irishman who used to drink together. And they died just before Christmas. And they all went upstairs. And they got to the pearly gates. And St. Peter says to them, "Well, it is Christmas." He says, "You can't come in till you show us something that reminds you of Christmas." So the Englishman comes up with a goose with lovely holly decorated around it. And St. Peter says, "Yeah, I can see why that would remind an Englishman of Christmas. That's terrific.
In you come." He says, "The Scotsman, what have you got?" And the Scotsman comes out with this black pudding with tinsel wrapped around it. And St. Peter says, "Yeah, I can see why that would remind you of Christmas." He says, "The Irishman, what have you got?" The Irishman pulls out this little pair of G-strings. St. Peter looks a bit perplexed at him. He says, "Why would that remind you of Christmas?" The Irishman says, "It's obvious. They're carols." Right. So on that note, thank you very much for coming and joining us today and for being so courteous and tender. We love it. And please, please come and have a drink with us and something to eat next door. Thank you.