The next presentation, DevEx Resources from Todd Ross. Again, uranium, again an excellent jurisdiction in the Northern Territory. You hope to dominate the McArthur Basin. Thank you, Todd!
Yes, just another one?
Good afternoon, everyone, it's a pleasure to be here this afternoon and present to you DevEx 's story and what we're all about, and update you on our exploration plans and why we believe we're uniquely positioned to take advantage of, as Murray was just outlining, the resurging uranium market. Just a little bit about DevEx before I kick off. We've got an exploration portfolio in the Northern Territory. We've been exploring for a number of years up that area. We're one of only a handful of ASX-listed uranium explorers. You've just heard from two. We've got a strong thematic focus on the uranium market.
We believe that with our portfolio of assets, our team, a strong exploration team and uranium expertise within the group, our management, who are all invested in the company, and as I said, our portfolio of assets leaves us uniquely positioned to be able to take advantage of this growing uranium market. We've got a target-rich portfolio, which I'll take you through in a second, and we are one of the dominant explorers in the Northern Territory. Just a little bit of background about DevEx and our capital structure. We've got a small board, again, just three of us on the board. We're led by our Chairman, Tim Goyder, who I'm sure is familiar to many of you in the room. Tim's a big believer in the uranium thematic. He's also our major shareholder, he owns 19.9% of the company.
He's been in DevEx , it was previously called Uranium Equities, for over 20 years. We bought from Queensland Mines the Narwhal Lake Mining Lease, which I can take you through in a minute, many years ago, back in 2010, pre-Fukushima, and we've been exploring in and around that area ever since. Myself, Managing Director, joined the company in September last year. Former banker, having also previously, after stepping out of banking, listed a company that was focused on exploration in Finland, so I've got a bit of a background about Finland and understand what they're up to over there. That was nickel, though, unfortunately, and the market did start to struggle for a little while there. I was asked and approached by Tim to come and join DevEx . Brendan Bradley is our Technical Director.
He's strong uranium expertise, has been involved in the company for about eight years, and has been leading all our exploration programs up in the Northern Territory. We've got about AUD 7.8 million in the bank, so we're well funded. We've got a market cap of just over AUD 36 million, and being led by Tim, he knows what it takes, and that's about putting money in the ground, ensuring companies are well funded to be able to execute their exploration programs and ensure that they've got the capacity to be able to execute the strategy overall. We also have an investment in Lachlan Star, about 30% Lachlan Star, which is currently valued at about AUD 6.3 million. I'm glad no one else really touched too much on the slides other than Murray's lecture at the end. Why are we so bullish on the uranium market?
As Murray outlines, there is a massive shortfall coming. There's already a shortfall coming in the current market. Spot price rallied last year up to over AUD 100 a lb. We've come away from that, and we've started coming back again recently around AUD 73 a lb. It's not the spot price really that the main players are focused on; it's the term price, and that's roughly around AUD 83 a lb at the moment. If you look at the slide on the left, you can see that that chart outlines from the World Nuclear Association the forecast demand for nuclear power, and below that is the supply coming from existing uranium operations and new mines to come on stream.
That supply-demand gap is expected to increase to over 200% by 2040, a big shortfall which is expected to lead to much higher prices, and obviously much higher prices are going to lead to more exploration activity and more projects being developed ultimately. Without that incentive price, which we haven't had for a long time, there hasn't been much money spent at all on exploration. Nuclear is a safe, scalable source of clean energy, and at the moment there's about 60-odd nuclear reactors being built around the world, 440 currently in operation, and China's announced that it's planning to put on another 30 reactors over the next 20 years. There's a huge demand coming for uranium, and it is recognized globally, other than in Australia, as a clean and reliable source of power. Where are we operating? DevEx has assembled a portfolio of clean energy assets.
Our flagship projects are the Narwhal Lake project up in the northern part of the McArthur Basin, and then our Murphy West project to the south. We also have a rare earth project in Queensland called Kennedy. What is our exploration thesis? At a very high level, and Andrea touched on this before, what we're looking for is these very large, monster, high-grade, unconformity-style uranium deposits. They're only found in two places of the world: the Athabasca Basin and the McArthur Basin in the Northern Territory. The Athabasca Basin is dominated by the major players. You've got Cameco and the likes operating there, with some major discoveries like Cluff Lake, and then recently we've seen with NextGen's Arrow discovery, Cigar Lake in operation. The McArthur Basin, on the other hand, has hosted over 730 million lbs of uranium mineralization, but it's had very little exploration undertaken there over many years.
We've assembled a portfolio over the last 20 years of over 16,000 sq km of land tenure in the McArthur Basin, focusing up on the northwest corridor around Narwhal Lake and on the southwest now down near the Murphy West deposit. Just zooming in a little bit on our Narwhal Lake project, you can look on the figure to the right, you can see that we've drawn these lines, the Jabiluka-Narwhal Lake corridor. Essentially, we're sitting to the northeast of the town of Jabiru and northeast of the Jabiluka and the Ranger uranium mines. Our tenements are outlined there in blue, and the red tenement is our historical mining lease.
That was the Narwhal Lake mine, which was Australia's highest-grade uranium mine ever, 24 million lbs at just under 2% uranium, mined back in the late 1980s, discovered by Queensland Mines, and their share price went for a massive run when that happened. That was mined in four months and processed over eight years. Over 3 million lbs per annum was produced out of that site. We've been exploring there, either below and along strike from Narwhal Lake and to the north in an area called U40, which was a Cameco hole that was drilled back at pre-Fukushima as well. Our strategy is hunting for the monsters. We're looking for another Jabiluka or another Ranger deposit in this area. We're outside of the national park. We're in an area where we're fully permitted to explore.
We have a mining lease on the Narwhal Lake mine site in a mining-friendly jurisdiction, uranium mining-friendly jurisdiction in the Northern Territory. In the last 12 months, we've taken a step back away from what we've been focusing on, which was Narwhal Lake and U40, and had a look at where amongst the 6,000 sq km we have, there may be a Jabiluka-style deposit hiding. If you can remember, Narwhal Lake was, as I said, mined in the 1980s. That was at surface. That had been weathered over millions and millions of years, so it was easy to find. The Jabiluka and the Ranger deposits are covered undercover, sitting sort of between 50 - 100 meters of cover. Athabasca, by the way, sits at about 300 - 500 meters of cover.
We've been looking at all the telltale signs to find out where we could find a Jabiluka-style deposit, and that comes down to the right rocks, the right structures, looking for these radon anomalies where you're seeing radon gas being emitted from those areas. Through that, we've identified a number of new targets. These are the targets that we've identified through this review, over 50 years' worth of data that we've gone over in the last six months, and we've come up with new targets called, very creatively named, Big Radon, which was based on a radon cup anomaly where we're seeing radon gas emitting from that area, and KP. We also got a grant from the Northern Territory government, AUD 160,000, to co-fund the drilling for those two targets as well. In addition to that, I'm rushing through because I know I've only got a few minutes left.
To the northwest of our Narwhal Lake area is the Angularli deposit owned by Deep Yellow. We've recently been granted a number of new tenements that sit along the fault below to the southeast of that Angularli deposit as well. Just quickly, down the very southern end of the McArthur Basin is the Murphy West project, where we sit to the west of Laramide's Westmoreland deposit. Laramide's got a resource, the deposit's got a resource of 65 million lbs, and we're in a new belt that's been very underexplored for uranium. We're on the ground today, and we've been looking at following up a bunch of radiometric anomalies that we detected at the end of last year, and we're undertaking a systematic exploration program there as well. We've got a lot of activity underway. It's the end of the wet season, so we're on ground. We're up in Narwhal Lake.
We're now at Murphy West as well. We've got a proven strategy to develop these projects, but beyond that, we're also looking for more advanced assets globally as we focus on a uranium thematic, which we think is only going to get stronger as the years go by. That's it. Thank you.
Thank you, Todd. That was very exciting. I'm glad you used all your time, and I know you have the world-class Chris Torrey on your team, so I'm sure there'll be some more discovery shortly. I'm a former PanCon who found Jabiluka, by the way, so a bit biased.