It looks like you can unmute me. You'll have to unmute me and turn my camera on. Okay, you are here.
Yep.
Moved. Here.
Do you have any options to increase the volume?
Allow mic. Yep. Then allow video.
Okay.
Come on. Now you'll—
I'm going to share my screen.
I'll share my screen.
I'll share my desktop screen.
Yeah, if you're here, I think you can select. Focus on this speaker.
Speaker?
You can select if you're going to keep rolling to one of these. If you mute your mic, mute your mic.
She's talking about Google for years.
I think it looks like we're on.
I think you're just going to share the presentation.
I think.
Where's your line?
Yeah, that's right. We should be able to switch.
We're usually pretty well.
Yeah, that's what everybody's saying.
Great, good to go.
All good?
Yeah.
Okay. Great.
Good morning. Thanks, Chair. It's my third AGM, and it's really quite pleasing to see some familiar faces in the chairs this morning, so welcome. Also, welcome to those who are streaming online. Sorry for the short disruption there. Between myself and Alasdair, we would like to share with you what we've been working on over the past year and a little bit on what's happening in the copper markets that could be of interest, I'm sure. I think most importantly, what we're striving to achieve in the next 12 months. We have about four or five slides. I promise we won't go on forever to leave plenty of room for Q&A. Just the usual cautionary statement there. If you are after today's presentation, or indeed if you're online and during the presentation contemplating trading, please read this statement first.
There is some forward-looking information that should be taken into consideration. Next, please. I thought I'd just start by a headline that I think encapsulates the last 12 months. In reflecting where we were 12 months ago, where we are today, it has been a year of transition for your company. We have made significant progress in a number of areas despite limited financial capacity in the early part of last year. I'd just like to run through a bit of a snapshot of 12 months ago versus now. Back 12 months ago, the markets were very challenging for juniors. Equity was in short supply, and we as a board made a conscious decision on behalf of all the shareholders to conserve cash and only to focus on the key workstreams for the project that would enable the DFS to commence.
Those workstreams being around metallurgy, around power, around water, and around land.
Sorry, Don understood.
Just trying to get
There we go. All done.
The copper markets a year ago, copper was about $4 a pound. We were seeing for the first time in historical terms TC, or treatment charges, and refining charges by smelters at historic lows. We were just beginning to observe growing capacity in the smelting sector. We as Caravel were forecasting concentrate shortages. Not just us, others were as well, but they were pretty much forecast a year ago. M&A has resolved all that. M&A activity is just starting. Real made some acquisitions, BHP made some acquisitions, etc. We had a bunch of targets. We wanted to finalize those key technical studies before starting the Definitive Feasibility Study. We wanted to progress government approvals in advance of a financial investment decision. We wanted to secure what's known as a lead agency status for the project. That comes from the state government agency.
That actually puts us sort of in the front of the queue in terms of the approvals process. That was something that we were seeking to achieve. We wanted to publish our inaugural sustainability report. Of course, along the whole journey, both then and now, securing a partner and an off-taker for the project. We had set ourselves a pretty lofty goal of completing the Definitive Feasibility Study by the end of this year. That was then. If we shift over to today, it's fair to say market sentiment has well and truly changed. We have sufficient cash now to finish the Definitive Feasibility Study. We did that through a loan agreement that I'll go through a bit later. That importantly didn't dilute shareholders.
The key workstreams that are referred to to be worked on a year ago, the metallurgy is now finalized, which is a big result for the project. The grid access offer has been received from Western Power. Our water demand has gone down substantially through good study work and test work. The licensing is coming to a close. Two of our three land deals needed in order to construct the project are now secured through legal agreements. As you would probably be aware, copper markets have been on a bit of a tear lately. $4.97 a pound versus $4 a year ago. Mine disruptions were not occurring in high frequency a year ago, and they are now. There have been some significant disruptions in mine operations around the world that is causing a really large increase in deficit of supply of concentrate to smelters. That's what's driving that metal price.
It's a short-term supply, short-term being two to three years in our view of supply of concentrate to smelters. TC and RCs, as a result, are still at historic lows. I've been able to confirm that the growing smelting capacity is there. I recently visited a brand new 500,000-ton copper smelter in the Asia-Pacific region and can confirm that it's about a third of the way up its nameplate capacity. It's commissioning to nameplate capacity. It's real. It's not something that you read about when you go and see these things. You see all the workers in there, and you see copper being produced and the equipment operating. Smelters are ramping up. That wasn't the case a year ago. In terms of referencing back to our targets, the technical studies that we mentioned earlier, they're done. The DFS has started.
We're about 30% through the Definitive Feasibility Study now, and I'll go into that a little bit later. The government approvals are progressing, but they do remain on a critical path to production for this project. Like all projects in the state and indeed the country, approvals are typically critical path, and that's still the case for this project. The lead agency application has been submitted. It was submitted a couple of months ago, and we're working with the department now to answer their questions that they may have in order for that lead agency or major project status to be granted to us this year. Pleasingly, the sustainability report is published. You may have read it. That's an important document because that links to our financing strategy through export credit agencies. We'll be working on that this year.
Certainly, discussions are well underway with the strategic partner and offtake partner. We're not ready to disclose that yet, but you can be rest assured that there's plenty of discussion happening in that space. Lastly, the DFS, it won't be completed this year. There is a deferral as a result of conserving cash last year, but also taking our time. We've always said that our approach to this project is to define it well, take our time, do our homework, reduce the risk as a result because it is a large project and it is a large investment, and they do take time to define properly. As a result, we've elected to, the board and I have elected to defer the publication of the DFS until the first half of next year so that we can deliver a quality product to you as shareholders and everyone else.
That's a bit of a, as I say, it's a year of transition with some large achievements there. We're very, very excited about the fact that we now have the funding to take us all the way through the feasibility study. That'll be a major milestone for this project in the early part of next year. I might hand it over to Al for a moment to talk a little bit about what's happening in more detail in the copper markets.
Thanks, Don. As Don mentioned, the copper price has gone up a lot over the last 12 months. We've always been keeping an eye on this period of time that we're coming into now because it's really been driven by a lack of commitment to new supply over the last decade. We're starting to see the impact of that. There's a demand story there as well. There are a lot of things happening that are increasing the demand for copper. The fundamental thing is there's just not enough supply for our demand, and it's causing a fundamental shortage in concentrate. That's why the TC/RC has been so high, and we've seen the price rise. The outlook is very good. We're situated in the part of the world where most of that new demand is coming from.
We're engaging with some of the parties that are most keen to secure new sources of supply. You see the same thing happening. They see an inevitable shortage arising over the next few years. It could be a very long-term shortage. It could last for decades. When you look at the geological side of it, it's getting harder and harder to find new deposits. It's getting harder and harder to develop new projects. All the other pressures around political risk in South America and Africa, rising infrastructure costs in new parts of the world where people are going to build these projects in more remote locations, all say that the price has to rise in order to bring on new projects that are going to be lower grade. Caravel is going to be, I think, one of the first generations of new projects.
The grade's not that much different than some of the projects that are already in production in other parts of the world like Canada, but it's going to become the norm everywhere as these prices rise and force lower-grade projects to be developed. We're in a very good place where we're one of the very few new projects that are ready to come on stream in the next few years as these rising prices start to come into effect.
Yeah.
It's just a forecast, I think. I don't know what they're doing. That's over at BHP. Recent commodity download, I think. The BHP guys are normally pretty conservative. They've had a good track record of picking these kinds of shifts in the market. Copper, as you would see if you look at the news, has been their number one focus for a number of years now. All of their M&A is spent in copper. It's because they've got a very strong fundamental view, which is shared by nearly all the other major forecasters and major companies like Rio and others. Copper's a key part of their desire for where they want to grow their production. The BHP guys are forecasting a 10 million-ton gap. To put that in context, the total market for copper at the moment is in the low 20s, 23, 24 million tons a year.
It's an enormous shift in the demand for copper that we see coming, starting almost now. It was always forecast to happen around 2026. That was even five or six years ago. People said, "We're going to hit this point in about 2026 where demand's going to outpace supply." As Don mentioned, there's been some very substantial curtailments on production by mine failures in places like Indonesia and Grasberg mine. That's hundreds of thousands of tons out. Failures in Kamoa, a new Ivanhoe mine in DRC. Codelco, the world's largest producer, is having a lot of trouble maintaining production. All of those together have brought forward that gap. It's not likely to be a short-term thing. You can see it just grows and grows. There's nothing in the pipeline.
There's no substitution or new ways of finding copper that anyone can forecast at the moment that is going to change that fundamental gap. The only thing that will happen that can fix it is prices go up and then people start taking much lower-grade material. That seems almost inevitable. It's always a risk when you say things like that, when people thought nickel prices were going to stay high and then a different type of nickel came along, but copper doesn't have those types of alternative sources of supply. It seemed a very likely scenario that we're going to be short of copper and the rest of the rail line for better years to come, which is a huge opportunity for projects like Caravel coming into production now where we're highly geared towards that higher price.
Maybe just to add to the comment on the supply, thanks, Al. If you do a search on the mines which have had, as Al said, production curtailments over the last couple of years, there's about a dozen. There's some small ones that are back in operation, but there's a lot of really large mines that have had problems. As Al said, Indonesia, what's interesting I find is that they're in the DRC , Indonesia, and maybe not surprisingly, in the Andes Mountains in Peru and Chile.
In Panama.
Of course, Panama is, for political reasons, as we know, being down for two years now, despite talks that they may be coming back. We'll see. I think it's important to realize that when you look at these large production disruptions of these mines, they're all old mines. They're deep. They're at altitude. They're structurally much more difficult to mine today than when they started. That's why we're seeing some of these failures. It's going to take, because they're deep and they're structurally complex, time for these mines to be coming back into production. There are various forecasts of when that supply is going to come back on the market. I try and pick the middle point. It's not in the next six months. It's probably not for the next couple of years.
I just want to share with you that's kind of the backstory to why we're seeing these big mine disruptions. It's because they're old and deep. Not only is the grade dropping, they're getting more difficult to mine and operate and more expensive.
One final point on that. The BHP's all-in price on the back of that forecast is $5.00 a pound. It's about where we are today.
Yes. Look, just a little bit more detail on this past year. I mentioned that we're financed now through to the end of the feasibility study, and that is as a direct result of a loan agreement that we entered into with Regal Royalty Funds. That was a $15 million loan facility. It has an 18-month term, so it carries us well past the feasibility completion date. It has a 10% interest rate attached to that loan. Importantly, it wasn't diluted, and it's not diluted because we, Caravel, at our election, have the ability to either pay it off at the end of the term or with three months' notice.
If we are in a position where we're not able to pay it off, and certainly that's not our goal, it will convert to a royalty, to a 0.75%, what they call a net smelter royalty of 0.75%, which is actually a very good outcome for us for the future copper production. That has been the catalyst to enable us to now really get moving on the feasibility study. I said we'll aim to finish that early next year. As a result of that funding, we immediately went out to tender to four or five engineering companies. We selected a company that those who are domiciled here in WA may know called Primero. They're owned by another company called NRW Holdings. Why Primero?
Primero is just completing the Finniston project for Northern Star out at Kalgoorlie, and the design of that crushing and screening plant that's expanding that facility is almost a virtual copy of what we're talking about for this project. Instead of bringing in risk, we're actually reducing risk by being able to copy something that is already designed and transfer it across to this project. The other reason we selected Primero is because they themselves as a company are actually a construction company. If you're looking to get an accurate capital cost estimate for a large project such as Caravel, the best data you're going to get will be from the people who actually do it. The accurate costs on steel and in your case, drilling, you can appreciate this, and concrete and everything comes with Primero.
They are actually a boutique company, if I could say it that way, in terms of process plant design and construction. It's a third reason, and they're local. They're just up the road. KCB is the company we've appointed to do the tailings design. As you know, I'll talk about tailings in a moment, but it's a different approach we're taking that's saving us a lot of water. They have particular expertise in this area in Western Canada, which we've brought across to this project. Another smaller company, or not small at all, but a company that's maybe not well known in terms of mining is DBM Vircon. They're just in the CBD here on the terrace.
Their specialty is things like heavy mobile equipment workshops, administration buildings, gatehouses, lube bays, all of the ancillary facilities, what we call the non-processing infrastructure that is needed for a mine to operate and a mill to process the ore. We're just receiving their, as we speak, we're just receiving their first designs in the 3D modeling renderings of what those facilities will look like. Together, those three companies will cover the vast majority of the DFS engineering and cost estimating and scheduling that we require for the DFS. I mentioned earlier the metallurgy is finished. The flow sheet's finalized. We actually produced product, and we've been sending some of those samples to potential future customers. It's a very clean product. I think the main highlight of the metallurgy is that we've been able to greatly simplify the actual plant design from what was there a few years ago.
There was nothing wrong with what was designed back in the PFS days. It's just through, as I said earlier, continued research, testing, benchmarking, and really challenging our thinking as to how can we come up with a flow sheet that is simple but still delivers the product required for our customers. That's what's been achieved in the past year. Water. It's a two-pronged story here, one on the supply side, the other on the licensing side. Maybe I'll just go to the demand side first. Previously in the PFS, you may recall that we were looking at 18 GL of water per year as an annual requirement for water to run the process plant. That required a bore field and an aquifer. The aquifer is known, it's defined, it's been drilled. The bores are located. The pumps are located across that aquifer to deliver 18 GL.
Through test work and through benchmarking and through the adoption of a different tailings methodology, we've reduced that 18 GL per annum demand by at least 40%. We're just about to finalize the numbers and publish those, but it's a significant achievement. Why? Let's just hypothetically say it's between 10 and 12 GL per annum. That means fewer bores. That means less capital cost. Because there's less water, it means the diameter of the pipeline to connect the aquifer to the plant is a smaller diameter, which means less capital cost. Because it's less water that we have to pump, less energy to pump it, it means lower operating cost. This is a major breakthrough for the project over the course of the last 12 months. How did we do it? It's because of the tailings.
Most mills around the world pump the tailings slurry to a containment facility that is exposed to the sunlight. As we know here in Australia, when you do that, there's a lot of evaporation loss because of the intense heat that we have, particularly in the summertime. What we're doing here instead is using a device called a hydrocycloid, like a centrifuge, in the process plant. What that does is it separates the water from the solids in the process plant. The water stays in the process plant. It doesn't even get pumped to the tailings area and be exposed to evaporation. There's a second win. Out of this device comes sand, and that sand is perfect for us to be able to build the walls of the tailings containment facility. We get free construction material. Otherwise, we'd have to import that material.
Not only do we save significant water, we also have free construction material. That has been another breakthrough for us in the last 12 months and as a result of the team doing amazing work in testing and benchmarking and making sure it's actually lowering risk and not adding risk. Power, as I mentioned earlier, we have an access offer from Western Power to be able to connect to the grid. It's called an interconnection works contract. There are not many projects that get those every year. We're very fortunate through the efforts of the team to be able to be granted one of those a few months ago. We are continuing to work with Western Power on that contract. On the land side of things, we have all the land that we need for the initial mining area.
There's still one more contract that we wish to enter into to secure all of our land, but two out of the three important land agreements, and mutually beneficial agreements, I might add, have been entered into, and we're progressing towards that final agreement in the very near term. Approvals. I mentioned it's critical path. It is critical path. The environmental review documents, this is the 3,000-page document that gets submitted to the government. For their internal experts, subject matter experts to review and say, "Okay, the impact of this project is low enough that we are going to recommend that it goes to the public, to all of us, and others for review." That's the stage we're at right now. We've submitted the third version of that.
There's always a back and forth Q&A, and we're just finalizing that third version before it gets released to the public for review. That's a five-week prescribed period. We're anticipating that will happen in the middle of the year. Once that happens, it goes back to the Environmental Protection Agency. As Richard said, Part Four of the EPA Act is under the remit of that agency, and they make their recommendation to the minister. The minister says, "Here's your permit to go and build the project." That's the journey we're on. We're about 60% of the way through the journey if you want to think about it in those terms. There are very few projects that are as advanced as we are.
If you compare it to another project that is a polymetallic project a little bit closer to Perth relative to us, they haven't even submitted the ERD document yet. It's a long process. That's why we started early. That's why we're in quite a favorable position at the moment. In the last few months, we've brought on the Study Manager. His name is Mr. Greg McDonald. He's basically working very, very hard managing the Primero Group Ltd, KCB, and DBM Vircon engineering firms. This is the end of the very first week for our new Mining Manager, Andrew Dowd, who's sitting here in the room, who's going to take custody of all of the line design going forward, but also the operating cost of the whole project. Let's not forget, it's not just capital that we have to be concerned about.
It's also maintaining that low operating cost, which is what really drives the financials of this project. 30 million-ton large-scale production, low cost creates a 50% margin and creates enormous value over 20 years of production. It's great to have Andy on the team, and he'll be taking that forward. As I said earlier, under our Corporate Affairs Manager, who's again here in the room, we've released the inaugural sustainability report. That ties directly to export credit agency financing. We're building this project in the most renewable way we can or most sustainable way we can. As a result, we need to adhere to what are known as the IFC. Funding guidelines and Equator Principles, which we are. The very first step of that is to issue a sustainability report.
The export credit agencies, whether they be in the United States or Canada or Japan or Finland, they all ask for that as the starting point to look at your project and say, "We are going to be interested in providing you a preliminary offer of credit to support your funding program as you go forward to the financial investment decision phase." It's pretty exciting that that's out there as well. Those discussions with the ECAs have started. That's sort of the draft for 2025. We've done a lot. For next year, basically from this point moving forward to when I hopefully sit in front of you again next year, we want to finish that third land agreement. We obviously want to continue the approvals process, which is that public environmental review and then the granting of the Part Four.
We want to obtain that lead agency designation from the state government. That will, as I said earlier, put us in a pole position as a priority project as we go through all the approvals. The second and third bullet points are very much linked to one another. Al and I have started to spend an awful lot more time on the strategic partner and offtake side of things. We were in Melbourne and Sydney last week, and there's plans for future engagements going forward. We'll be spending a lot of our time from this time forward worrying about funding and how we're going to get this project funded. Last but not least, and probably the biggest milestone of all over the last few years, is getting to a point where we've actually got the definitive, and I mean that to use that word intentionally, Definitive Feasibility Study.
I think, do you want to play that little video or? Yeah. We put a little, it's a little bit outdated, but I'll try and talk you through and give you sort of an appreciation in a visual sense what the project may look like when it comes to construction and operations. This is available on the website, by the way, on Google. If you just Google Caravel Copper Project video, it's a Vimeo, and you can go and see it at your leisure. By the way, this presentation is also available on our website. I'm going to share, make sure I share the right thing with. Play. Oh, thank you. DBM Vircon produced this, by the way, just one of our engineering companies. There we are in Western Australia. You can see we're down near Perth. The Pilbara is up north there. We all know where that is.
We're in the Wheatbelt. Importantly, we're only a couple of hours' drive by sealed road from Caravel to Perth. About a four-hour drive to Bunbury and same up to Geraldton, which are our two natural ports for shipping our concentrate. Regan's terminal is a new line, 330 kV line that state governments announced they're going to build. That goes over to Moora and then connects into an existing 132 kV line that connects power to our project. You just saw there a second ago the water line. Those are the deposits, Ninin, Bindi, Dasher, and Opee. We're mining Bindi and Dasher in the first 25 years of production. That gives you a bit of a visual of the development envelope in green. That yellow line is the Klingri-Wongan Road, which we'll build an overpass to in year five and onwards.
There's a little bit of the Bindi mine and Dasher pit and waste rock location tailings. We've spent a lot of work on the site plan to integrate things and get things as close as possible. Up in the right-hand corner is what the village could look like. We're working on that. It's capacity for several hundred rooms. Very typical operations village. We zoom into the Bindi pit itself. It'll stage through the years of production from year one to five on tailings and the ore. You see the waste rock landform developing, the pits getting deeper, the tailings is growing. You see a little small area of the process plant in between everything. It gives you an idea of the scale. It's a large mine. It goes for 20-odd years. It's no surprise that it's large. You fly over to the satellite mine called Dasher.
That comes in around year five, and it'll operate for five or six years. It's the same story. It sequences down to the pit bottom. We have waste rock landforms. What's different here, though, is that we're going to truck the ore along this road in the haul trucks. The trucks come straight out of the pit along this road, which has got, as you can see, vegetation. We're planting all along the road and in and around the plant. We'll build up and over the Klingri-Wongan Hills Road so it's not to interfere with the public road too much. It won't be those trucks. It'll be a typical mine haul truck. That takes us over to what's known as the ROM plaid and into the primary crusher. Trucks dump into the crusher.
It takes us from about half a meter size down to 300 millimeters, comes out of the crusher onto a conveyor belt. What you see in the upper left-hand side, that's not there anymore. We've designed out the need for secondary crushing, so big capital savings there. That comes up into what's known as a coarse ore stockpile. This is just a surge pile between the crushing plant and the downstream wet processing plant. We come out of that coarse ore stockpile into two lines, each 15 million tons per annum. They'll probably be brought a little bit closer together again to save some cost and reduce impact. It goes into a thing called a semi-autonomous grinding mill and a ball mill that takes from 300 millimeter down to 200 micron. That's where the magic happens in the flotation circuit. That's where we float the copper.
We add a reagent called xanthane, and it floats the copper, goes into a settling tank, a small one next to the building that you see. That tailings thickener, by the way, is no longer there either. We've managed to design that out as a result of our tailings methodology. The copper then comes out of that copper settling tank into that building. Water is recovered. The concentrate goes into the trucks, and the trucks are driven to Bunbury or Geraldton. If you can build it that fast, that'd be great. That just gives you a visualization. We'll update this as the detailed designs start unfolding over the course of the next few months. We'll update this video and publish it to the website for everybody to see how it's evolving. That's the project. I'll pass it back to the Chair at that point if there's any questions.
Thank you, Don. Are there any questions from the shar eholders today? Please.
One. Knowing that location and where it might go and all that, what's the studies of that being done about the affected lake need and that sort of thing there?
Yeah. We've been part of the broader environmental studies that have been completed. I can answer. Probably closer to it, but through heritage, environmental, all of the normal, form part of our presentation and report to the government that they are considering for our environmental review.
Maybe just to add to that, as I mentioned earlier, that environmental review document is the key document that pulls all the study work together into a single bible, if you will, as to what the impacts may or may not be on the environment. That requires, at the very beginning, a lot of field studies to establish a baseline.
What vegetation and what fauna do we actually have? Those studies have been ongoing for years now. They're all complete. What they have earmarked is that there are some tree areas where there are trees known as threatened ecological communities, HECs. We're not touching those. In fact, we're not touching anything that has come up in the environmental studies that says you should stay away from that. We've designed around it, all of it. It's probably no surprise that the potential impact is low, given that it's been farmed for years, for decades. In a way, it's good, but also it means that, unfortunately, through a lot of the deforestation that occurred for farming, we know that there's a rising water table that's causing salinity at surface.
One of the greatest things from an environmental sense about this project is that by building a bore field, we're able to draw that water table back down again. We'll be able to flush those salts back down into the soil profile and start reversing some of the vegetation degradation that we're seeing at surface that has happened over the last number of decades. There are not many projects where you get an environmental win and a mining win all at the same time. We're pretty excited about that. That's a key pillar, if you will, of our ESG strategy. Going forward, it's about monitoring. Now that we've done all the baseline studies, it's about continuing every year to monitor. It's through the seasonal impacts. Do we really understand what's happening season to season? We keep monitoring.
Another key part of our ESG, and I'm kind of stealing Chantel's thunder here that she leads this, so please talk to Chantel after if you wish, is seed collection. We want to revegetate a lot of areas. We've just started a seed collection program. They've been out in the field over the last month collecting seeds, which are then being processed, which will ultimately then go into creating seedlings, grow the seedlings, and revegetate. Continual land rehabilitation is embedded in the way in which we're going to build and operate this mine. We're not going to wait till the end and then some closure disappointment. It'll be continually rehabilitated where we can and as we go.
Thank you.
Anything further? Please, Mark. Okay, go.
Questions. I can't really get my head around all of them because there's so much.
One of the things I get today is enthusiasm, and we just need to get over this line with a few of these things, which are always going to be problematic for mines. I look on the copper a lot, which is not the best of size, but there is a lot of negativity. There is about this. How is your PR going to change to reflect that? Or should it even take into account a few posters? They're still reading my copy. Where's all the paperwork?
It's a good point. I mean, it's not the first time we've been asked the questions. Why aren't you out there talking about this fantastic project? The honest and simple answer is that we've been putting in place the building blocks of the project to be able to then tell the story.
It's taken us the better part of the last year and a half to all the things that I spoke about today: finalizing the flowsheet, the mine plan, the video, all of that. We're in a position now where we actually can start to tell the story. It's not just tell the story, but tell it convincingly so that people can see and appreciate that the actual work is done that backs up what you're saying. That's to convince me. Yeah. That's to convince people on the product. I'll never trip, but as Alasdair said, we won't bother with that. As I said earlier, that's what Alasdair and I are going to be spending a lot of our time in the next year doing, getting out and telling the story to investors and so on.
The other way is looking at it is that I think you're never going to be able to convince people who basically don't necessarily understand what goes into it for the deployment. You can spend a lot of time trying to do that, and you still won't get there. The guys that do understand it, the more sophisticated, bigger institutions and funds, we've got to put our effort in there. Groups like Regal have a lot of due diligence on this project before they made that commitment to providing that funding. As we build more and more associations like that, the next step being a strategic partner, then I think it's a lot easier for everyone else to look at that and see, well, these guys understand all the nuances of a big project like this, and they can rely on that capability. Yeah. Are there any other questions?
Yeah, we're still on track for peeling the dirt back about October next year. Define peeling the dirt back. That's the first pocket load of dirt getting moved to start construction. Yeah. As we've said, it takes a methodical and disciplined approach to defining these projects well, cost estimating, and indeed planning them. At the moment, our target has been to reach a financial investment decision towards the back end of next year or early 2027. We're not giving up on that target. It's still there. See how it goes this year. If the project is defined convincingly and a partner comes in, that will be the key, because then we'll have a balance sheet, and then we'll have the funding in order to really start seeing that, yes, a financial investment decision in the time frame I just mentioned is actually achievable.
That's a common question I get asked by the locals up there. I just say, "Oh, end of 2026." Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's still the outstretched out, is it?
No, as I said, it's the end of 2026. Maybe it's early 2027, but it's within months of that time frame. This is not. We should always contrast Caravel with a small high-grade project that is short life. They tend to be put into production much faster, but they only operate for a few years. Maybe six, five, six, seven, maybe ten years. This is a 20-plus-year business we're creating. As a result, we're taking our time to do it properly and define it when we get there. Yeah. Copper's getting more valuable every year we leave there anyway. Yeah. As one of our colleagues often reminds us, the copper's still in the ground up there. It's not going anywhere.
It's a good opportunity. I think one of the most, just from a personal point of view, one of the most attractive features I think about on this project is, first of all, its location. Being only a couple of hours outside of Perth. The fact that we don't have to build all this non-process infrastructure like other projects in the Pilgrim, for example, are required to do. For me, as a constructor, I like building things, so we don't have to build as much. I love the fact that this project is in the right metal and it's got a long lifespan. The business case is shaping up to the prices that we're seeing gradually rising in the bellwether metal called copper. Prices are gradually rising to support the business case. You heard the story about the absence of supply of concentrate. The demand's not going away.
It's just a question of taking our time, doing it right, and it will come.
One of the advantages, if you like, of not getting things done as planned, probably in 2023, would be probably digging by middle of next year, is the technology is changing. Poor spotting in particular is fine. I didn't notice it in there, and it's always been an iffy one. It costs, but it does.
It's a good point you raise because there are a basketful of future opportunities for us. We're starting as one, get our head grade up, and obviously, you get free capacity that way.
Equally, it'll probably assist as the pit gets deeper and what we practice in a few places around the world where, just like here in the TransPerth network, where the pantographs raise up the top of the haul truck and they connect to an overhead electrical grid to give them an energy boost to exit the pit. That's emerging. That's out there. Of course, battery electric vehicles is out there. Haul trucks is coming. Lots happening in that space. The one opportunity that is not built into the base case for our project yet, which our new mining engineer is going to have a good close look at, is autonomous haulage. Driverless trucks. Do we do it from day one, or do we do it in year three? Do we do it in year 10? That's a question that is still there.
If we do it day one, that obviously, there's two huge benefits from that. One is safety, and safety and productivity kind of go hand in hand. The other one is that it'll drive our labor costs down. There's a bit of a strategic decision still required in the next few months to make that determination. There'll be other future opportunities for this project. In 20 years, I can't even dream up what they are today, but they're coming. Artificial intelligence is here. What does that mean for this project? We don't know yet. You're currently looking at 60,000 tons of copper or concentrate, 65,000 tons of your copper in concentrate at a grade of about 23%. It means it translates to about 300,000 tons of concentrate that we have to truck to Bunbury and Geraldton.
If you want to expand, if you only built a water pipeline this big, you're going to have to do something to get to that. That's right. There's a few places throughout the plant or throughout the project where you want to make sure that you don't constrain yourself, and as you've just quite rightly pointed out, the water pipeline is one. If we only need somewhere between 10 and 12 GL per annum on average. You're actually going to need more in the summer month of January because it's really hot and you have a peak. You design the pipeline for the peak, and maybe even a little bit extra. There's about two or three places like that in the project.
It's not about the pipeline; it's the pedals and the pipe.
Spot on.
Digging the hole, putting it in, more expensive than the actual thing.
We're aware of that.
One last one from there. There's lots more of it. The $15 million. Paying interest on it now?
Yes.
You've drawn some down?
Yes. We drew it down in July, and so the clock has just started ticking. We've had, I guess, two months of interest payments now. Two, maybe three months.
Is it on all $15 million or just what you draw down?
We've drawn the whole amount down, and it's on the hand. In fact, to be pretty transparent here, a good chunk of that we've now reinvested as well in term deposits to make a little bit of money back. The interest is paid on the declining balance, of course. Okay.
And it's capitalized.
And it's capitalized, yes. I have a problem with some.
Yeah, sure. By all means.
Anything further from anyone, or shall we close this part of the meeting?
We're happy to have a one-on-one conversation if you have further questions. That being the case, thank you very much for your attendance today. Thanks very much. Thank you for coming.