Our penultimate presenter for this session is Centaurus Metals Managing Director Darren Gordon. Darren is a Chartered Accountant with over 27 years' experience as a Senior Resources Executive, including extensive involvement in financing resource projects from both a debt and equity perspective. Darren has over 16 years' experience operating in Brazil and has a deep understanding of the regulatory framework and general operating environment needed to advance resource projects through development to production. Looking forward to you running us through the story. Thanks, Darren.
Thanks, [Gonya]. Thanks to Diggers for inviting Centaurus back to present. We really do appreciate that, and we look forward to talking you through the significant progress that we've made in respect to the Jaguar Nickel Sulphide Project over the last 12 months and where we see the movements over the next 12 months. Centaurus is really well placed to deliver the world's next major nickel sulphide mine. A lot of work has been done around feasibility study work that has demonstrated the project is highly economic, and we're now working our way through to an investment decision, hopefully by the end of the first quarter next year. Just touching upon some of those specifics, Jaguar now sits at 138 million tons of nickel for about 1.2 million tons of contained nickel metal.
With that, we've focused on the open-pit mineralization, which has enabled us to deliver reserves of around 400,000 tons of contained nickel metal, sitting in about 52 million tons of ore. That's going to give us a 15-year project life as it currently stands just from the open pit. Most importantly, we've been able to demonstrate that that's going to come at very low operating costs. It has been one of the key factors that we've been focused on for a long time now. We know that we are going to be needing to fund this project, probably with a minority project partner, and for them, that is absolutely critical to demonstrating that we will be able to stay in the game at all points in the nickel cycle. What I can say is that at that cost, we will be making money at today's nickel price.
We know that the nickel price is depressed. The sentiment is low because of Indonesia. I can comfortably sit here or stand here and tell you that we will compete with Indonesia day in, day out, and hopefully through the course of this presentation, you'll get a very good reflection of that. We are advancing the strategic partnering process. We're having a lot of good conversations in respect to that. The data room is open, and we're talking to a number of groups that are looking to secure long-term offtake, and we really do see quite a significant disconnect between the way that strategics are still thinking about their need for nickel supply and the way that equity markets are treating that.
We've got to be able to close that gap with that funding coming from a project partner, looking more at the project value as opposed to where our market capitalization currently sits. From an environmental approval point of view, we've basically taken all the risk out of the project. We now have all of the environmental licenses that will enable us to build the project. That involved getting our environmental impact assessment approved. That then gave us a preliminary license in Brazil, which was stage one, which we got in 2024. We've now, early on this year, got the installation license, and that installation license gives us the right to be able to get on and actually build the project, obviously subject to funding.
It is a low- carbon footprint jurisdiction, and again, whilst equity markets have probably moved a little bit away from that as an importance for the project, it's still very, very important from the partners that are looking at it, particularly those that are looking for supply of nickel away from Indonesia. Centaurus is extremely well- placed in respect to that, with a lot of the, I guess, the carbon footprint or the very low carbon footprint from the project being generated out of the grid in Brazil coming from hydro sources. We do have a little copper project. I won't spend any time on that today. If you want to come and talk to us at the booth on that, we're having some nice exploration drill success, but really there's a lot to talk about in relation to Jaguar, so I'll focus on that in today's presentation.
The production profile that we've rolled out in the feasibility study work is going to demonstrate that we can be about 22,500 tons of nickel over the first seven years, pulling back to about sort of 16,000 tons, 17,000 tons of nickel for the back half of the project. We do think that there's an opportunity to keep that production profile pushed out above 20,000 tons with underground sources, but they haven't been factored in yet into our feasibility study work. What that's been able to show is that we've got a project with an NPV over a $1 billion, an IRR sort of above 30%. That makes it a very nice project with very quick payback, and that's extremely attractive for the groups that we are talking to as far as coming into the project because they really want to see those very strong economics.
When I talk to those economics, I really would like to just draw that back to where we sit from a market cap point of view. The cash flows that this project will generate once we are actually operational and once we've closed that funding gap are exceptional, and this market cap will be dwarfed when we've actually finished all of that work. Jaguar would work today. If it was funded, it would be producing. It would be making a very strong margin. Hopefully it's an investment proposition that makes sense for you when you hear the rest of the story. Just on those costs, $4.43 a pound, this is where the nickel price has been over the last 20 years. We are obviously at a point where the market is feeling the pressure, but where that green line on there is our all-in sustaining cost for Jaguar.
You can see there's very few times in the market cycle where the price has been below that. Combine that with the fact now that we're sitting in the bottom end of the cost curve, sitting underneath all of the or a lot of the laterite projects that are in Indonesia, including those that are integrated supply with groups out of China. As I touched upon earlier, that is one of the most critical aspects for us, and I'll continue to reiterate that all day that to be low cost is very, very important for us to be able to go and get the project funded and to be able to demonstrate that we will be in the market at all points in the cycle. Brazil's doing a lot in relation to critical minerals. There's a big push from the Brazil National Development Bank.
You've heard from stories that have today, even with Pilbara going into Brazil. I think you know you could ask Dale about it in more detail, but the cost structure in Brazil is certainly attractive. The government system for funding into critical mineral projects has been enhanced dramatically over the last sort of 12 months- 18 months, and we are really at the forefront of that with a very good dialogue going on with the development bank in relation to debt funding. The tax rate where we are located in the Carajás mineral province of northern Brazil will allow us to a 15% tax rate, and the power cost, which is obviously reflected through into the low all-in sustaining cost, is driven by the fact that 80% of Brazil's power is coming from renewable sources.
That's fantastic from a cost point of view, but it's also fantastic from an emissions perspective. Just looking at the Carajás mineral province in more detail, it really is one of the world's most prolific mineral belts. There's a number of very large deposits on there, principally owned by Vale. Vale had been there for about 40 years. They've spent an enormous amount of money, but I think recently, about three months ago, they rolled out what they call their Nova Carajás, their new Carajás program, where they're going to spend another $12 billion on this region, enhancing infrastructure, adding to what is already a well-established network. We've got airstrips, we've got high-voltage power lines, we've got rail lines, we've got sealed roads, we've got everything that we need in this region.
Where we're located on the western portion of the Carajás, we're quite close to Vale's Onça Puma Ferron ickel operation, where they're spending another $500 million there at the moment, putting in a second rotary kiln. We're about 40 km from where Ero Copper has just finished building a 4 million-ton per annum copper float plant. We know that the size of the operation at 3.5 million tons for ourselves in a nickel float plant is very achievable given what others have done in that region in the very recent term. You'll see on the map close to in the middle of there, our Boi Novo project, as I said, not really touching on the detail of that, but we have been drilling there. We've had some copper exploration success.
If you want to come and talk to us a little bit more about that, please feel free to do so. When we just look at the layout, there's nothing overly complicated about it. What I would draw your attention to is those pits there for Jaguar stretch over about three kilometers of strike. We are dealing with a very large mineralized system. The overall footprint there is probably over about 6 km, 7km . We see that we're dealing principally with farmland. It's been historically cattle- grazing country, so nothing where we've got to move a lot of people, no people, in fact. We've got the land where we're actually operating. Inside those pits is about 1.2 million tons of contained nickel metal in the mineral resource. Importantly, about a million tons of that is in the measured and indicated category. We've done an enormous amount of drilling here.
We've got a lot of confidence in the ore body. The geological team has done a great job of pulling that together. With that resource, we've been able to pull together our reserve base. Sitting inside those three kilometers of strike at Jaguar, you're looking in the green there is above 0.4% cutoff. Underneath the pits at Jaguar South and at Onça Preta, sort of that little pod to the top of screen, we do see opportunity for underground mineralization in the future. As I said, those are not in the economics at this point in time, but we do see that there's another couple of hundred thousand tons of the mineral resource sitting at around 1.5% nickel grade that might at some point in time come into the production profile. It's a very conventional open pit mining scenario. We use what I call the mosquito fleet out of Brazil.
It's very rare to see a mining operation of this size using big yellow gear. It's a lot cheaper to use the local trucks, local drivers, and pretty much every operation is doing that when they're using a mining contractor in Brazil. We work through all of that and we end up with a very good profile from a mining perspective, about 4 million tons a year, probably between 3.5 million tons and 4 million tons a year being mined. That strip ratio life of mine of about five to one, a little bit more movement early on, but obviously also looking at optimizing the grade profile that we mine early on in the schedule. Some of the more recent work that we've done has been optimizing the process flow sheet. That's now enabling us to produce a 30% nickel concentrate, and that doesn't really exist in the globe at the moment.
The reason we are able to do that is that the nickel sulphide species that we are dealing with is a millerite rather than what most nickel producers have as a pentlandite. A millerite is a very high tenor nickel sulphide. Once we suppress all of the other sulphides, including the pyrite, we're left with a very high-grade nickel concentrate. The last time that sort of concentrate we believe was produced was with Mount Keith, producing using millerite ore sources probably 20 years ago. With that, we have a very low volume of concentrate, which is obviously able to reduce our trucking costs and make sure that we're very cost-competitive from a logistics point of view. We process all of that through the plant. We're running at about 3.5 million tons a year.
As I said, they're starting grade, so somewhere around 0.8%- 0.9% nickel, which is very high grade for an open pitable ore source, delivering us around about that 22,500 tons of nickel. As I said, you can sort of see in the middle of the bottom chart there, sort of the profile pulls away a little bit down to about 16,000 tons or 17,000 tons. For us, we feel like that production profile is exceptional and not really being done by anyone else in sulphide nickel. That delivers cash flows that have those costs sitting around $4.43 a pound on a payable basis, all-in sustaining, very consistent over the life of mine and generating very strong cash flows. These were run at $9 a pound, which is our long-term price assumption for the project.
That first seven or eight years looks like it's about an average of about $170 million free cash a year. At current spot prices, that would be around about $100 million free cash a year. Whichever way you look at it, Jaguar is in a very good position relative to where its market cap sits right now. The approvals, as I touched upon earlier, we've got the environmental approvals in place for both the project and the power line route. That obviously gives us a lot of confidence going into the project. Brazil's been renowned for being slow at approvals. I would challenge anyone that that's not the case. Brazil really, we can work through these approval processes very comfortably, and we're doing a lot in the region to support the local community.
The emissions is, as I said, not been something that the equity markets have focused too much on, but it is something that we still see as very important relative to the strategic partnering conversations that we're going on. When we talk to these strategic partners, they are looking for long life. We've got 15 years, production profile above 20,000 tons of nickel, a new source of nickel sulphide source, low-cost operation, and a low-emission operation. Jaguar really does deliver on all of those things, and it's putting us in a very good position when we're having these offtake and partnering type discussions now. We're also concurrently running the debt process with Aramco. Some of you guys will know them, and that process is coming along well. Timeline-wise, we look to make an investment decision March or April next year. It's all driven by the funding process now.
There's a bit of work that we want to do in the interim period to keep everything moving with the project. We would see a two-year build with production towards the end of 2028. It really is one of the next nickel sulphide projects to get off the ground. Not going to be many of them. This will be one of them. I'll leave you with these thoughts. We really are dealing with a tier-one scale asset. It's in a great mineral province in Brazil where there are many projects up and running. We have the approvals in place. The cash flow generation is going to be enormous once we've actually got the project funded, and that will really unlock the market cap, and we expect to see a very significant re-rate once we get that funding piece out of the way.
If you want any more questions, we'll be at the booth. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Darren.