Good morning, everyone. Thanks. Firstly, thanks to Nick and Sharon and Paul and the rest of the team at Resource Rising Stars for inviting us back. We've got a bit of a gap in the gold stories to fit a nickel story in. Thanks, Sean, for the intro. We are the only nickel story here today, so I'm pretty confident in saying this is the best nickel story you're going to hear at the conference over the next few days. If you want to come and visit us at the booth, we're out there in what I call Nicholas's naughty nickel corner, front left, just near the coffee. We've had at least one or two people come up, so it's been a pretty good start. I'm going to talk to you about the Jaguar Nickel Sulfide Project. Nickel's unloved.
The price is down, but as Sean said, this is the opportunity for those smart, contrarian, anticyclical investors, and especially the strategic investors, to identify the best projects in the unloved space and get them at value. There's a disclaimer. Please read that at your leisure on the ASX website. We purchased the Jaguar Nickel Sulfide Project off Vale back in 2020. We've since drilled about 180 kilometers of drilling, and we delivered a resource in 2024 of 138 million tonnes at around 0.9% nickel, and that's 1.2 million tonnes of contained nickel metal. In the nickel sulfide world, that is a world-class deposit. We've continually de-risked the project, delivering a study in May of this year that showed there's at least a 15-year open pit mine at a very low all-in sustaining cost of $4.40 a pound.
Now, just remember, today's nickel price is around $7 a pound, so there's a very healthy margin at even today's nickel price. This thing is shovel-ready. We have both environmental licenses we need. We are waiting on a mining lease license from the government, but it has been technically approved, so it's just a rubber stamp process. We're running a strategic partnering process and looking at offtake partners in conjunction with our debt funding, and that's the big piece that really will see the re-rate of this project and this company, and we expect that to be resolved by the first half of next year. If I have time, I'll just touch on a really exciting copper gold discovery that we made during this year. If I don't have time and you're interested, please see us in the naughty nickel corner. What are the strategics looking for?
They're looking for projects that are ready to go. They're looking for projects that are tier one. This thing's going to deliver 22,000 tons of nickel in concentrate over the first seven years of the open pit. To put that in perspective, that would be a top five or six nickel sulfide producer in the world today. They're looking at competitive costs, and that's very important. In the recent study in May, we demonstrated this throws off really strong economics. There's more than a $1 billion net present value, and we can pay down the capital investment in less than two years. Crucially, because of the nature of our ore body and the location in Brazil, this thing has the ESG credentials that the Indonesian H-Pel laterite projects do not. Here's a quick corporate snapshot.
We recently raised $25 million, so we've got plenty of cash in the bank to see us through to that final investment decision. We have a market cap of around $200 million, a very strong board that has experience in both delivering projects in Australia and Brazil, and our top 20 has been very consistent over the last four years in supporting us well. Jaguar is the only project at Resource Rising Stars that's talking about nickel. It really comes down to that green line there. That's the all-in sustaining cost to produce one pound of nickel, and it's sitting at $4.40. Over the last 20 years, there's only a few moments in time where the nickel price has dipped below that. What does that mean? That means this thing's making money at today's prices and will make money, obviously, over that last 20 years. Costs up.
On the demand side, today's nickel market sits at around three, three and a half million tons of nickel required per annum. By 2030, it's expected to touch five million tons. You've got to find another 1.5 million tons of nickel in those five years. That's like bringing 80 Jaguars online. It's just not going to happen. Jaguar will be ready to go, and we'll certainly be one of the desired projects once the nickel price turns. Why is that so? It just comes back to that first quartile operating cost. The reason we're in that first quartile, all the sulfide projects in green are off in the first quartile to the left. All the laterite projects in gray are off to the right, and they're higher costs.
That's driven by the nature of our ore body being near surface in a very conventional flotation plant process, and also by the cheap Brazilian renewable power. Brazil is a great place to have a nickel asset. We've been there operating for 20 years. We understand the environmental and mining framework to deliver the licenses. We have those licenses in hand, as I mentioned before. We're on a list of strategic mineral projects that the government has made and will basically help us to push this project into production. When we do get in production in the region where we operate, we are in what they call the Sudene. In the Sudene, you pay a 15% tax rate for the first 10 years. That's almost half the tax you would pay for a similar project in Australia. The royalties are interesting.
There's a 2% royalty on nickel, and more than half of that, 65% of that, goes back to the local community. The community sees the money go back into the schools and the hospitals around town. They get right behind the project. It's that $0.03 to $0.05 per kilowatt-hour price for power that really drives the low all-in sustaining cost of this project. We're located in the west of the Carajás. For those people who don't know the Carajás or have followed it very closely, it's in the north of Brazil. Geologically, it's like rolling the Pilbara and its iron ore assets into the copper assets of Mount Isa. You've got the world's biggest iron ore mine, which is about 100 kilometers to the east of us in S11D. You've got the world's second biggest IOCG copper-gold mine in Salobo to the north of us.
Vale has been operating here for the last 40 years. They've invested billions of dollars in infrastructure, so rail, road, airports, and power. The map on the left shows our location in respect to the Onça Puma ferronickel plant. That's being serviced by two towns to the south, about 30 kilometers, of Tucumã and Ourilândia do Norte. Those towns have a population of around 70,000 people. Onça Puma has been operating since the early 2000s. You've got second and third generation miners at the ready to work for you. You've got skilled labor, and you have service providers in those towns. We're drive-in, drive-out. There's no need for fly-in, fly-out. They drive 30 kilometers up the road. They're on site. This is a layout. We own probably 75% of the land already. Most of the layout is sitting on top of farmland, so no need to remove anyone.
In yellow, you can see the pits. That's the ore body. I think eventually they will coalesce, and that means you get about a strike length of about three kilometers and one and a half to two kilometers wide. It's going to be the size of Kalgoorlie Super Pit. It really is a large project, and that's underpinned by this amazing resource. It's a world-class resource of 1.2 million tons of contained nickel metal. If you can see the graph on the left there, Jaguar, there's eight deposits or camps in the world that plot with a higher grade and a higher total tons of nickel above Jaguar. Of those eight, only one other is undeveloped. If you're strategic looking for unincumbent nickel tons, then Jaguar is certainly the project for you. Since 2020, we managed to double the resource through our efforts of drilling.
Importantly, this deposit remains totally open at depth. We finished drilling at the end of 2024 because we had enough nickel already, and we were conserving funds. If you want to make this thing bigger, you certainly can. Before we get into the reserve, I'll just point out there's a pit there with red, which shows nickel above 1%. Sitting underneath the reserve pit is 20 million tons at about 1.5% nickel. To put that in perspective, when IGO bought Sirius Resources about 10 years ago, they paid $2 billion for the Nova-Bollinger deposit, and that had about 14 million tons at 2.3% nickel. We've got 20 million tons at 1.4% sitting underneath our open pit. We've got a Nova-Bollinger sitting there ready to go once this thing's up in operations.
You might be able to see there 50 million tons comes out in the reserve at a strip ratio of about five to one. We mine that with local contractors. There's plenty of contractors in the region. They mine for Vale and other mining companies. Once we mine the ore, we process it through this plant, $380 million build. We think that's a good number. Ero Copper, which is a TSX-listed Canadian company, built a 4 million ton copper plant down the road for around $320 million. We will be able to produce a very high-quality nickel concentrate. That's driven by the nickel sulfide species in our ore, which is millerite. At 30%, that's almost double the nickel in concentrate that we'll be shipping around the world. We think the buyers are going to be very interested in our product.
You can see there over the first seven years, we're touching almost 1% of feed to the plant, and recoveries are well above 70%. That means we can get to 22,000 tons of nickel per annum, which would put us today in the top five or six nickel sulfide producers globally. As it drops off, that's the perfect place for us to bring in that underground feed source. Just quickly running through the cost, you can see there they're a bit below $4. Remember, today's nickel price is at around $7 a pound. In the first few years, it's around $3.80. Then it goes up and flatlines around $4. That means it's making a good margin even at today's depressed nickel price. In this feasibility study, we used a $9 a pound nickel price, and this threw off $170 million U.S. in free cash flow per annum.
If we use today's nickel price, it throws off about $100 million per annum. The guys in Brazil have been doing a wonderful job in licensing. As I said, this is shovel-ready, waiting just on the mining lease, which is a rubber stamping process. We have the ground, and we're working with the local community to get them trained up and ready to go for construction. Just as important as the cost of making the nickel is the cost of the environment. Given the ore body, the nature of the ore body, and that cheap Brazilian renewable power, we can produce at a very low carbon dioxide per ton of nickel. I'm going to have 20 seconds. Sorry, we are running a process for the strategic partner and the debt.
That completed by the first half of next year, along with that mining license, the board will be able to press go on a final investment decision, and it'll take us two years to build. By 2028, we're starting commissioning with commercial production in 2029, which is the perfect time for that nickel price to come back. Very quickly, please see me in the booth about the copper exploration story. There's some really interesting hits there. We're very close to some existing concentrators, so we don't need a massive discovery. We think we have something very interesting. I'd be more than happy to run you through it. In summary, what are the countercyclical contrarian investors looking at, and what are the people that we're talking about to come in and fund this project looking at? They want four things. They want scale, which is tier one.
They want lowest quartile cash costs, and we're in the first quartile. They want ESG, ticking the ESG box, and we certainly do that. They want it shovel-ready. Jaguar ticks all those boxes as in, and is certainly the nickel project of choice. If you would like to know more about Jaguar and Centaurus, please come and see us in Nicholas's naughty nickel corner out in the back corner. Thank you very much.