Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us here for our first Deterra Investor Briefing Day. I feel like I'm talking to an aeroplane fuselage in here. Firstly, I just want to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians, and acknowledge the elders past and present. Thanks very much for coming along today. I think there's an issue with the train, so we might have a few people coming in later. You may have seen already that we've lodged an updated corporate presentation on the ASX this morning. Today's format is going to follow that presentation, and we'll talk to each session, and we'll take Q&A at the end of each session. There'll be a mic, so if you've got a question, just please grab the mic and state your name, where you're from, and ask the question.
The proceedings will be recorded, and we will be uploading only the audio to our website after this event. With that, I'll hand straight over to Deterra CEO, Julian Andrews.
Thanks, Jason. Again, thank you, everybody, for coming down this morning. As Jason said, we put a slide pack up on the ASX platform this morning. We appreciate you are unlikely to have had a lot of time to go through it. We will be stepping through that today and obviously happy to take questions as we go. As Jason said, we will try to keep those to the end of each segment, and then we will have a bit more time at the end to come back to any particular issues that you want to cover off. Okay. There we go. Quick rundown of the agenda. I will speak a little bit.
I'll give a bit of an overview of the strategy and the approach, just a refresher really on the business model, what it is, you know, we're looking to execute on and how we're going about doing that. Then we're very, very pleased to be able to have Jonathan Evans and Luke Colton from Lithium Americas, who will be coming in over, remotely, and they'll give a short presentation around the Thacker Pass project. Obviously a project over which we recently acquired a royalty. We're very pleased to have them join us. We'll then talk a bit more about some of our key assets and some of the catalysts around those. We'll have a break and then cover off on capital management. As I said, at the end, we'll circle back and obviously happy to take any further questions at that point.
With me today, as well as Jason, who's just introduced me, introduced himself, I have Tyron Reese, who's our Chief Operating Officer, based with us in Perth. He came across as part of the Trident acquisition. We also have online, somewhere up in, in the, from Denver, we have Adam Davidson, who is our, leads up our, heads up our American operations, who also came across as part of the Trident operation. Look, I know you're all very familiar with the business, but just a quick overview for those of you who may not be. You know, we're a diversified resources royalty company. We've been listed on ASX since late 2020 when we were spun out from Aluka Resources, who remains our major shareholder with a 20% holding in the business.
and, you know, with a market capitalization of around, you know, AUD 1.9 billion, we're part of the ASX 200. As I said, I'm sure most of you are very familiar with the business model. it's a very simple one with a compelling investment thesis, and there's really three key elements to that. The first one is that we give our investors top-line exposure to mining activity, which comes with very limited exposure to, to operating margins or operating costs or capital blowouts, as well as the ability to participate in expansions or extensions to the underlying operations at no cost to ourselves. We have a mix of high-quality cash-generating assets and development assets, that support strong shareholder returns. And we have a consistent and disciplined, strategy and approach to creating additional value through investment in new assets.
I'll cover each of these points in turn. First, in terms of the business model, as I said, it provides a way to invest in mining with some key structural advantages. In particular, you know, we're exposed to commodity pricing and to volumes, but because it's a top-line exposure, we don't have that exposure to other elements further down the P&L. Particularly operating costs, so we don't get caught in margin squeezes when operating costs go up. We're not exposed to increases in capital costs, whether that's, you know, it's sustaining capital or investment capital. At the same time, the other critical component of the model is that we do have that free carry into extension or expansion. We get the benefit of the miner's capital investment in that extension or expansion without having to contribute to it.
In many ways, it's effectively a free carry into that expansion or extension. Clearly, this is a qualitatively different exposure to mining and comes with a lower risk profile than your typical mining equity investment. The model's very well established in other parts of the world, particularly in North America. It's been around for many decades, but it's really taken off in the last 15 or 20 years. We now see in terms of the major listed organizations, the sector has a combined market capitalization in excess of $80 billion US. Despite this growth in some of those other jurisdictions, you know, we remain the only listed ASX royalty company of any kind of scale. We offer, you know, we're unique in our ability to give ASX investors exposure to that model.
To dig a bit further into it, you know, what drives performance and, you know, how, how do royalty assets generate superior value? We believe there are really two key factors that drive value in royalty companies. The first one is quality. And by quality, we mean the ability to continue producing and generating revenue over time. Mine life is a really critical component of that, and also to attract capital for further investment or in extensions or expansions. That's not enough in its own right. It's a key driver of sort of the base value, if you like, but the alpha is really about that extension and the expansion. To have that extension or expansion, assets need to have optionality. That is the likelihood of having extension or expansion. How do we measure that?
What do we mean by that? What does that actually mean in practice? When we look at investment opportunities or we look at royalty assets and say, you know, how are these likely, are these likely to drive superior value? You know, we look at a number of factors. First one is really mine life. And mine life's critical, as I said, because long life mines tend to, you know, they will experience multiple commodity cycles. Timing is less critical. They will, you know, go through the ups and downs. Particularly given that price risk in commodities is often asymmetric, longer mine life assets have the ability to participate in the occasional, you know, commodity price fly up that, you know, is a feature of commodity markets.
There are also some valuation elements that are important when we think about mine life. Cost position, obviously critical. Again, it's a slightly different consideration than when you're looking at an equity investment in a mine. Obviously a well-positioned mine in Q1 or Q2 is critical. It's a binary risk, if you like, when you're a royalty. You're less concerned about what's going to happen to your margins over time. You're more concerned about what's happening to the top line. You know, price is obviously a factor that's an external, but volume of production is critical. The binary risk is, is it producing or not? Ideally, you want to make sure you've got a mine that is sufficiently well positioned on the cost curve, that it's going to continue to produce through very, you know, fluctuations in pricing cycles.
is also that it's sufficiently profitable that it is going to be worth investing either in sustaining CapEx to keep it operating effectively or expansion CapEx if there are those kind of opportunities. As I said, sort of the Q1, Q2 assets obviously are important. Scale's important. That's really, you know, for a number of reasons, but probably the most important of which is that large scale assets typically are better positioned for brownfield extensions or expansions, particularly if you've got a very large deposit that gives you much greater scope to expand production down the road or extend production from an original mine plan. As I said, it's that expansion or extension that really drives the additional value.
The quality of the operator, and that's really about ensuring, you know, the fact that well capitalized and well-run operators are better able to continue to invest in sustaining capital or to fund future expansions, as well as obviously a well-run operation is more likely to continue operating. Finally, location. Where it's located is pretty important, yeah, for a number of reasons. You know, one is the jurisdictional risk, and we've seen examples recently of operations in higher jurisdictional risk locations having issues with that. We typically focus on lower risk jurisdictions, but also the location in terms of access to infrastructure, because that again really drives the ability to continue operation and the ability to actually attract funds to invest in further expansion or extension. That, that's the business model.
I'll talk a little bit about that, how that then reflects in both our current portfolio and our future thinking about further investment. The second part of the business, the second element of the investment thesis is about, you know, our existing portfolio and the fact that we have a mix of high-quality, cash-generating assets as well as some development assets in the portfolio that will support shareholder returns over time. Maybe just to run through, and you know, we talk about this quite a bit, but I think that's because it does bear repeating. You know, we were founded really around, you know, a world-class asset in the Mining Area C Royalty. You know, if it's not the highest quality royalty in public ownership out there, it's certainly one of the top three or four.
If we think about it in terms of those criteria that I just went through, around what really drives quality, you know, it's large. It's the largest iron ore operation in the world. It represents about 9% of global seaborne iron ore trade. It's just recently been through an expansion to take it from 65 million tons a year nameplate capacity to 145. It's reached that on a nameplate basis in the middle of last year. It has further significant optionality. There are a number of deposits that, you know, you'll see a map a little bit later that just outlines where some of the other deposits that have been identified by BHP as falling within that royalty area. It's low cost. So at, you know, $18 or $19 a ton, that's obviously a very low cost operator.
Clearly, you know, best quality operator you could ask for in BHP operating. It is a joint ownership with Itochu Mitsui. Well located right in the heart of one of the premier, iron ore, provinces in the world. In terms of, you know, we talk about the royalty term is life of mine. You know, it is a long life mine. BHP's talked about operations going certainly out to the late 2040s, early 2050s with the potential to go, you know, decades beyond that, as I said. Really high quality core asset in the portfolio generates a lot of cash for us. You know, I think it is worth perhaps lining that up, and you know, that is what we have done on the slide here against the Thacker Pass royalty, which is a royalty that came in as part of our acquisition of the Trident portfolio last year.
Still in development, as I said, you know, Jonathan and Luke will be talking to that further. Just to quickly sort of line that up, you know, again, a very large asset. The recent 43101 technical report that Lithium Americas put out had it, you know, significant increase in the reserves, making it again a world scale project. Long life, the target development plan is potentially as long as 85 years. A lot of optionality in terms of stage developments, taking it up to, you know, as high as 160,000 tons a year. It's low cost based on the guidance LAC's put out. Again, you know, great operator support through Lithium Americas. It's got General Motors there having both, you know, having a project level interest as well as offtake. You know, strong support from the US government funding.
Again, in a tier one mining jurisdiction in Nevada and the USA, another very high quality asset that we're adding to the portfolio. Still a little bit out from production, but, you know, we see real potential in that. This is a new slide that we've put in. I thought it was just worth adding this in just to talk a little bit more about optionality, and particularly how that can drive long-term value. Mining Area C royalty is, as I said, a textbook illustration of how royalties can work. Just a bit of history. Mining Area C royalty was really a holdover from an interest that Consolidated Goldfields had in the original Mount Goldsworthy mining joint venture dating back to the mid-1960s.
Over time that interest sort of morphed into, sort of a carried interest in Mining Area C that was converted to a royalty in the mid-1990s. You know, turn of the century, you know, no production had been announced. There were no announced plans to develop, and the valuation on that was very low. I think in the merger, sorry, the merger booklets between RGC and Australian Sands was something like $10 million to $14 million. So some option value, but no, no real cash value. In 2002, BHP announced it was going to start, it was going to develop the North Flank on the royalty area. The original plans were to put in a mine that would have 15 million tons a year of capacity by 2011, and it would cost $213 million. In actuality, production actually got up to 55 million tons a year by 2011.
That production exceeded the original plan. There was continued investment in further capacity. The really key point on here is that, you know, the royalty holder contribution, it was Aluka at the time, was $0. In fact, under the nature of the royalty, there were some capacity payments coming back, which are not shown in this chart. More recently, we saw a very similar dynamic, with the announcement of the South Flank development in 2018 when BHP and Mitsui and Itochu announced that they were going to be developing a second mine on the royalty area in South Flank. That would add another 80 million tons a year of production. Capital cost much higher this time at $3.6 billion US.
and, you know, that expansion was, essentially was begun in 2021 and completed in, completed on a run rate basis by 2024. Again, no contribution from, in this case, Deterra. We benefit from capacity payments that come back to us. I guess more importantly, we could benefit from the increase in volume productions that come out. What's interesting about this chart is it shows that, you know, and they have chosen this timeframe to sort of illustrate the point that, you know, between 2015 and 2020, broadly flat production volumes between the sort of the completion of the north flank development and the beginning of the south flank development. Clearly at that point when your volumes are relatively steady, revenues, you know, the royalty gross revenue royalties are going to be driven by pricing. You can see that on the chart.
We then go through a period, through 2021 through 2024 where we see that increase in production volumes, which, yeah, as I said, you get the benefit of both price and volume. Effectively what that does is that resets the pricing fluctuation at a higher level off a higher base because of the increased production. In that way, you're getting short-term variation from pricing. Longer term, that's typically driven by volume. Again, the real power of getting that free carry into the extension or the expansion. You know, there's been, you know, billions of dollars invested by BHP and its partners in the Mining Area C operation. We generate, we get the benefit of that.
In terms of the portfolio itself, again, this is a chart that we put out before, but it just shows that, you know, we have within the portfolio now, we've got a broader exposure both geographically across a range of jurisdictions, commodity-wise, and stage of development. Notwithstanding that, as we currently stand, we're still very much exposed to Mining Area C just given the size of it. So from a revenue perspective and from a valuation perspective, they're still heavily weighted towards Mining Area C. We'll talk, and to be clear, we'll talk a little bit more about some of the assets in the portfolio a little bit later. The third element of the investment thesis is about the consistent strategy to add value through the addition of new assets.
Just to talk about this in a little more detail, clearly within the existing portfolio, we have some important drivers of future optionality. You know, we still have a little bit more growth to come from Mining Area C to the extent that it achieves nameplate capacity on a sustained basis. Spoken a bit about Thacker Pass and, you know, that's in development at the moment. There are some other assets like La Preciosa and Mingomba that also have longer term optionality. So we have a degree of optionality within the portfolio that balances the cash flow that's coming out of Mining Area C and the gold offtake contracts, which again, we'll talk to a little bit further in a moment.
But we also, you know, the other leg of the strategy is to also continue to add assets to the portfolio that add quality, add optionality, and in so doing bring value growth and, you know, earnings, additional earnings, sources of earnings into the portfolio. To be clear, our appetite hasn't changed. This I think is consistent with how we've been speaking about investment for quite some time. In that regard, you know, we have been selective, we have been disciplined. You know, we've been around for four years, we've made one major investment. I'll talk a little bit more about our processes in that regard. To be clear, when we look at this, our investment activity, we look at each individual opportunity in its own right, and each one has to be value accretive in its own right.
We're not being driven by any kind of desire to get a certain degree of commodity exposure within the portfolio by a particular point in time. We're not looking to add, we're not looking to deploy a certain amount of capital over time. If we're able to do that successfully, then we believe that, you know, we'll be, we, you know, some portfolio benefits may accrue to us over time. That's around the increased optionality that that brings, scale benefits and diversification benefits. Given the size of the portfolio, we're quite leveraged to those portfolio effects. To be absolutely clear, that is not the objective. That is an outcome of our activity. Each, you know, we are focused on value addition in each opportunity. I'll talk in a moment about what that means to us. Look, I won't linger on this slide.
It's been in our pack in one form or another for a few years now. Just a reminder about the consistency of the strategy and where we're looking for opportunities. You know, we do focus on areas where we think we bring something that's a little bit different. You know, the vast majority of our sector is focused either exclusively or primarily on precious metals. We're not. You know, there's a large group of capital chasing a relatively still large, but relatively smaller proportion of opportunities. We are in that orange zone where there's a smaller number of people chasing what is a relatively larger pool of opportunities. Within that non-precious sector, you know, we are a substantial player. Again, I won't linger on this. This has been around for quite a while, this slide.
No change in our appetite, no change in our focus. Yeah, in terms of size, commodities, geography and stage are all pretty consistent. We're looking for, you know, opportunities, bulk-based battery and electrification. We're looking in developed mining jurisdictions and we're looking for assets that are either in production or, you know, where we can see a line of sight to production. In terms of where those opportunities are really coming from, we're looking at opportunities to write new instruments, that is to act as a source of capital for people looking to fund development. Alternatively, it may be that we can acquire existing royalties from third parties. And then, you know, there is a third source, you know, portfolio or M&A. To be clear, that would be opportunistic. I think, again, needs to be very much a value driven.
Our focus is primarily on, on new instruments and existing opportunities. Just to cover through this, I've put out a little bit more detail about how we, how we think about investments and the process we go through to screen. As you can see on the left there, we've just tried to illustrate the way that the pipeline narrows. To be clear, we see a lot of opportunities. About half of them we can cut out pretty quickly, through just an initial screening exercise. That's generally on the basis of commodity. They're in a commodity we're not focused on or jurisdiction. They're in a jurisdiction we're not comfortable investing in at this point of time. We can generally sort of screen out about half of those opportunities pretty quickly.
We then go through a process of, a more detailed, but desktop review, one that uses our internal resources, where we'll look at it in public information or there may be some preliminary information provided by the counterparty. We'll go through and we'll actually do a bit of work to understand a bit better the risk return trade-off. Again, that's quite a tight screen and typically a lot of those can be screened out at that point. Once opportunities still look prospective, that's when we'll go into a detailed diligence exercise. You know, what that approach really allows us to do is to really make sure that we're able to maintain a low fixed cost overhead. You know, we maintain enough expertise in-house to be able to do probably those first couple of steps internally.
But then once we get to that detailed exercise, we're able to leverage external expertise. We get the right expertise for the right opportunity at the right time. That's how we sort of approach our diligence exercise. From a valuation perspective, you know, there's no sort of magic in it. You know, we will look at, yeah, typically we'll start by looking at projected production profiles. We give our investors exposure to commodity price. So typically, you know, we'll be looking at a consensus outlook on pricing. You know, we will look at discount rates that or cost of capitals, if you like, that really reflect the unique nature of that project.
You know, we look at the operator, the commodity, the jurisdiction, stage of development, all those sorts of things, take a view on what the right cost of capital for that project is, and then look to generate a return something above that. That gives us a good sense of the base value, if you like, of the base case of the project. As I said, a key component of value from royalties is that optionality. That is where we also focus a lot of effort. That is really driven by technical analysis of the deposit, you know, what is in the ground, 'cause ultimately that is gonna drive what that optionality is. There is obviously a bit more subjectivity around that, but it is really driven by that technical due diligence.
In terms of the metrics we look at, you know, very, you know, as I said, we'll, you know, when we look at the cost, you know, we have a unique cost of capital for each project. We look at, clearly, we, you know, we're looking to price in a way that generates an IRR in excess of that cost of capital. Typically what that would mean, again, depending on the nature of the individual opportunity, somewhere in the high single digits or low double digits. We tend to focus on net asset value as a key metric, as given the nature of some of our investments, you know, they may be in development, or the optionality out is an important part of it. You know, immediate cash flow and immediate EPS metrics do not always capture that.
We tend to focus on net asset value as a key metric. I'm aware that we're running a little short on time, so I'll just wrap up quickly by giving a quick update on Trident acquisition. As I said, we announced that deal in June and closed in September. It was an on-strategy countercyclical investment. It was very much value driven. We saw an opportunity to acquire a portfolio of assets with some assets that we really liked, at a price that we felt was below what they were worth. It was a value driven investment. Even though it was a public market transaction, we still saw that as driving value. It delivered us some good quality development, near-term development options.
It delivered us immediate cash flow from the Gold Offtake s, and it also brought some longer dated optionality around some of the assets. You know, since acquisition, it's continued to perform very well. In fact, it's outperformed certainly our expectations over the period. It's still early days, but it's certainly heading in the right direction at the moment. John and Luke will talk in a moment about where the Thacker Pass project is, but clearly we've seen that significantly de-risk, certainly from a funding perspective over the last few months. We have seen also an increase in the reserve size in that recent technical report I mentioned in January. Gold Offtakes are performing beyond expectations in terms of volumes delivered. Clearly it's a great time to be in gold as a commodity over that period. Those have performed very well.
As we say there, you know, there is the optionality to divest if the value is compelling. And to be clear, I think we've said from the beginning those assets are non-core. If we see an opportunity to divest those at what we think is an appropriate price, we would certainly take that. And we're sort of all exploring all options in that regard too, but you know, we're not looking to sell them at any price. Look, I'm conscious that we've got John and Luke on the line. I ran a little bit over, so we haven't got time to take any questions immediately on that. As I said, we'll have plenty of time a little bit later to take any questions you may have on this element.
With that, I'll hand over to, I think we've, have we, do we have Luke and Jonathan on the line? To introduce, as I said, I'll just hand over to Jonathan Evans, who's the President and Chief Executive Officer of Lithium Americas, and Luke Colton, who's the Chief Financial Officer of Lithium Americas, whose, you know, flagship development project is the Thacker Pass Lithium project in Northern Nevada. With that, I'll pass over to Jonathan and Luke. Thank you.
Thanks a lot. I'll introduce myse``lf and let Luke do the same. I'm Jonathan Evans. I'm the CEO and President of Lithium Americas. I've been with the company for seven years. If I include my board time, I was an independent board director before coming into management in 2018 in the fall. I'm a chemicals executive.
I spent my formative years with General Electric and their materials businesses, advanced materials and thermoplastics. I've been in pharmaceuticals. I ran FMC's lithium division as the president for five years when lithium was a tenth of the size that it is today. If you wanna speak about DLE, I've run the only DLE project in the world, which is in Argentina. I was in private equity for six years in the chemicals and industrial space, working for both Primera, Audax, and the Jordan Company. Bulge bracket and mid-cap private equity. Of course, I joined Lithium Americas. Engineer by training, and to the core I'm an operations person. I'll just turn over to Luke.
Hi everyone. I'm Luke. I am the CFO of Lithium Americas. I started about a month ago, so I'm fairly new.
Career wise, I got my master's in accounting in the US and worked for Ernst and Young for four or five years. I then joined Rio Tinto and I had a variety of roles with Rio over a nearly 20 year period. I won't bore you with all of them, but the two that I might just briefly mention, I had about six months in Melbourne helping to negotiate a very large JV agreement between Rio and BHP. We did complete the negotiations, but it didn't make it through regulatory approvals, unfortunately. I did have six months in the lovely city of Melbourne. I also spent three years in Perth, Australia, working for Rio Tinto Iron Ore. It was during a period of time where there were major capital projects going on in the Pilbara.
Rio was updating its rail, its port, it was building new mines. It was a very dynamic time to be working for Rio Tinto Iron Ore and really enjoyed my time in Perth. I still miss Cottesloe sunsets, one of the best places I've ever lived for sure. Happy to be with Lithium Americas now and excited for the adventure that will be Thacker Pass and excited to be speaking with all of you today. Thanks, John.
Yep. All right. I'll start. I hope you all see the slides. I think these are probably available to take away from Deterra, or we can send them to you so you can see some. A lot of activity here that I don't think the pictures really do it justice.
We've been busy on site here since March of 2023, and have really started to accelerate, starting last fall and we're in full construction at this point. Just to sort of a snapshot of who we are and what this project is about. This project is in Northern Nevada. From a permitting and regulatory standpoint, the best place in, we think, in North America, Nevada's a, as you all know, and you're familiar with the gold space, is a very large producer of gold, not that far away from us in Battle Mountain and the Elko area, but also to the east of us as well. We have a lot of skilled workforce, and a state that knows how to permit and also welcomes us, you know, given what we do. We are the largest measured and indicated lithium resource in the world.
We, per 43101 or SK 1300 in the US or the Australian rules, based on our drill results, and it's over 1,000 drill holes, all in this small area here, this project area, which looks like a peanut in the southern area of the Caldera. Our reserve is over 14 million tons and our resource is approaching, measured and indicated, over 45 million tons. I've had folks ask, is this a larger the out of comma? What they've measured, it's larger, and it's larger than anything else that's being either explored right now or is being in production. We are fully funded. We are closing our last financing up with Orion, who we, I know quite well, and I think Deterra probably does as well.
They are very well versed in this space, actually even working with the US government and the Defense Finance Corp, as the US has made critical minerals front and center for this administration strategy. Frankly, it's been strategy maybe quieter, but in the last administration and certainly in the first Trump administration as well. The main element of the funding stack is the Department of Energy ATBM loan, which is closed at this point. We have no CPs except for to commit and spend the capital in the JV between us and GM before we draw on the loan in the fall of this year.
We work even now weekly with the Department of Energy and it is right in the sites and on the focus of what this administration wants to move forward with, the all-of-the-above approach around critical minerals, oil and gas, and nuclear. It is a low-cost project. Even in today's pricing environment, we would be cash flow positive. Our OPEX is around $6,200 a ton. This is a fully integrated project. We mine and process all on site. When it leaves the site, it is in a super sack and that material is bound for a cathode facility in the Midwest, whether that be Ultium facilities with General Motors that are run by LG and Samsung, or it could be Pasco in Canada, or, given their agreement now with Hyundai, it could be folks like SK Innovation or EcoPro.
We're already doing qualification now at this point. We're qualifying with seven different vendors at this point early on. Again, the largest and the only fully permitted asset that's actually fully funded and actually in full construction in North America. We have a long-term offtake agreement. GM is a joint venture partner and I'll talk about it a little bit more. They are 38% owner of the JV along with us. They're invested at the top of the company as well. All told, between cash and cash equivalents, they've invested in the project almost $1 billion. This is a key part of their strategy for supply chain that they have oversight onto. Now as a joint venture exposure from an accounting standpoint at cost, even though they'll be buying the product through the JV.
Our board and management team, our management team's composed of folks that are engineers, and experienced folks from large companies that came here to build a project and actually operate it. We have a very experienced owners team led by folks from Fluor and Bechtel and Wood and everybody else managing Bechtel themselves. We've built this pro, this company to actually build and operate. This isn't a resource company that, we're out shopping around to try to have somebody, you know, buy the company out. This is a serious company that's actually gonna have this thing built and in production by the end of 2027. We've de-risked the project greatly. At this point, we've kept the final engineering going at this point. It's approaching 60%. For this audience is well versed. When you typically take FID on a project, you're at around a third of the engineering done.
We're at well over a half. By the end of the year, we'll have, you know, almost all the engineering done at anywhere from 92%-95%, which has been super helpful, in that we have a high degree of confidence now as costs are coming in and around schedule and around planning, that the stream of work was key to keep fully funded and, at full pace, even as we were starting off construction fairly slow. This is backed by our technical development center, which is in Reno. We have the process, basically the entire process circuit is under one roof. The upfront part of this process, the beneficiation, which is where most questions are, is tested at scale. That equipment now has all been moved in our three-story high bay.
We've run several hundred tons of ore on the front end at scale. The rest of the circuit actually, the chemistry is actually quite simple, especially when you get to sulfate. It's exactly like you would do for spodumene conversion, and the end of it actually, they all look the same in terms of polishing and other process steps that you would put in there to get battery grade material at the other end. Our schedule here, it's been a long journey. This resource was discovered by Chevron, actually as empty materials, that project was as well. You can see the milestones over the last several years, whether they'd be permitting, work with communities, with community benefits agreements, GM's initial investment, and then conversion for their second part of the investment to a joint venture type structure.
Our loan closed back in early October of last year. After that, shortly after, the JV closed because the government had to memorialize that and actually it was very credit enhancing from a government risk standpoint. Our reserve and resource assessment, which came out in January of this year. Finally, the last announcement was the final financing with Orion sponsoring it, to ensure the project is fully funded through construction. Good partners here. I spend a lot of time in Washington, DC. I was there for almost the bulk of last week. Well known by leaders in both houses. I was at the White House last week. The Department of Interior, Department of Energy, were a project that was permanent during the Trump administration and that was purposeful. I can say that now publicly.
We were defended and helped by the Biden administration as well as the strategy around reshoring and domestic minerals, which was also important to the Biden administration. Now with the new administration coming in, critical minerals is associated and equal with oil and gas. We are in a very friendly environment for us to continue to move forward. As I mentioned, GM, the only OEM that I know that has put this kind of money and support into a project directly, they spent a lot of time de-risking their supply chain well beyond lithium and nickel. They have two investments in graphite, both synthetic and naturally occurring, in semiconductors with Global Foundries. They have worked with magnets and with rare earths with MP Materials.
Amongst the OEMs, they put their money where their mouth is, as they know this is a long journey to set up success, to have the supply chains, to be able to grow in an industry that's gonna continue to evolve over the next 10 years in an environment now, which is very unstable and becoming very political, between one part of the world and the other. Finally, Orion, we had several investors that were interested in us. The process itself was lengthy in that we had to finish certain things before we could actually close off on this, mainly the JV, the loan close and the JV close. We pivoted to the final financing. Orion was by far the best partner. I think they're quite familiar in this space. They knew what they were looking at.
They actually also work with the US government, and we're excited to be partners with them and they're excited to be partners with us. As I mentioned before, a lot of de-risking done. Our workforce hub is going up right now. That's of course the housing for the workforce. Now we're not in the Pilbara and we're not in Northwest Argentina in the Andes Mountains, but still, we'll be employing up to 1,800 people at peak here. We will provide housing, meals, and busing to site. It's located right off I-80 in Winnemucca and it's about a 40-minute bus ride to site. It's actually well suited, with good infrastructure around it. Our excavation is essentially complete. Blasting's been done. Our batch plant's on site. We'll be starting to pour concrete in May. All of our long lead time equipment has been ordered.
We've committed at this point several hundred million dollars between long lead time equipment and equipment in general in terms of commitments and money spent, to ensure our timeline is kept to schedule. Plus also we de-risked on pricing in some cases. As I mentioned, detailed engineering, that number continues to tick up quickly, and we'll be having that about essentially complete by the end of the year this year too, which is the way you want to do a project that's not, you don't move engineering and construction at the same time. About 25% of the project will be done and we'll have 100% of the engineering done. So there's no more questions or risks at that point. Just some pictures to give you some idea of what's been done. It's hard to capture this.
You can see these things from space now in terms of the amount of excavation that's been done, what's been set up at site, all utilities, water, fencing, all the plant pads are set, media piles. The mine has started the excavation and, in the, you can see the bottom right, the workforce hub, the piers. We have all the housing units on site where those are being placed actually now. I'll actually be next week with the governor of Nevada along with our congressman at this, at an event next week 'cause they wanna come out and actually see it. Also, of course, as a press out for them, just given critical minerals is so important to government policy at this point. Our process, 'cause we get lots of questions on this. Yeah, it's the first clay process.
This is something, the first thing I'll say is I don't think there's been any company that's been due diligence more than us. I think that is clear in that in given OEM that's made a direct investment, who's a pretty conservative company. You name me a battery company and they've been out. I think we're out of engineering companies that we can use actually to come in. There hasn't been no red flags that have been raised. Frankly, look, I have a lot of experience in this sector, both in Brian and I know Hard Rock pretty well. Every project is different. Every flow sheet is somewhat different. What we have here is essentially steps two through five are practiced every single day. Actually, step one is practiced every single day in the phosphate industry.
Nothing that we're putting in here is different or off the shelf. There's no equipment that's sized here that isn't in operation around the world in multiple quantities. What we do on the chemical process side, which is where most of the CapEx is, is practiced every single day, whether it's done in Chile, whether it's done in Argentina, whether it's done in China, or even in the US to some degree for lithium hydroxide for both Albemarle and I guess Rio Tinto lithium. There's nothing new here. The ore body is different, but that's why the cost is lower. Unlike spodumene, I don't need to blast, I don't need to crush, I don't need to flotate, flotation. And I also don't need to calcine.
We essentially put it into a slurry and the ore is, is loose and friable in your hands. It's basically particle size separation. We have lithium up to 1% by weight in some cases. It's a very rich deposit. Our mining CapEx is extremely low. It's about $60 million for a project that's close to $3 billion. It's actually a fairly simple process. I would point to, again, lots of folks, well, this hasn't been done before. The nickel industry said that as well about Indonesia for the laterite deposit, which has killed the nickel industry. They figured it out, and there's been several mines shut down now because they figured that out. It's a little lower grade deposit, but the mining's extremely easy. The processing, they figured it out. China doesn't have the, doesn't have the world on this stuff.
If you put the right engineers together, we spent several years putting this together and spent about $10 million putting together a pilot plan for this as well. We have been through everybody, Tesla, you name it. They have been through this site. GM was the fastest and the first. We are happy to have them as a partner because they share the same long-term vision that we have, which is that there are domestic resources available in North America. Just like any other project, Australia and the US are very much alike, and Canada. The upfront CapEx costs here compared to the past for this industry are higher than people think. The size of these projects is much larger than in the past. I mean, my history, 10,000-20,000 tons was a lot for a plant. Now anything less than 40,000 tons is considered small.
Your CapEx for these types of projects runs anywhere from $2 billion-$4 billion at the end of the day, and that's actually the cost for something like this. Australia is the same. Even Argentina, when you look at companies like POSCO, you know, came out and they wanna put up to 100,000 tons in Argentina and they said they think it's gonna cost them at least $4 billion. That's the real cost. I've seen lots of feasibility studies, $500 million, $600 million run because that's not the real number, and the guy who ends up buying it and ends up building it at the end of the day is gonna find that out. OpEx wise and cost curve wise, you can see where we sit. What we've done here is put the full potential with our feasibility study.
We have the ability here to make up to 160,000 tons a year with five phases. The first phase, of course, is 40,000 tons. On a C3 basis, you can see both life of mine, and also years one, one through 25. I mean, we could high grade for the first 25 years easily. We can actually do it longer than that given the deposit's so, so high quality. Where we are today from a pricing environment, we'd still be cash flow positive. I don't think price is gonna stay there. We can talk about why, but I know the industry pretty well and I know what CATL has done. It's had the same impact on Australia and, and, even Argentina, whereas, a lot of people are shutting down and shelving and this thing will end up popping. Don't believe it'll go back to $80,000 a ton.
Doesn't need to. And $20,000-$30,000 a ton offers a good enough IRR for folks to get back into the, into the business again and actually start putting good projects in place. What this typically tends to do now is the projects that aren't economic, especially in this pricing environment, aren't gonna get funded 'cause no one's gonna talk about $80,000 a ton now. Now they're gonna talk about what happened the last three years when they look at projects and economics. Our reagents is the largest part of our costs. Those are all domestically sourced. Work can be sourced from Canada easily. The lowest-cost naturally occurring soda ash deposit runs by rail right by our transloading facility in Winnemucca on its way to South America. We make limestone on our own with our own quarry.
Liquid sulfur comes from the Gulf Coast, Midwest, and can come from Western Canada as an alternative as well. Management team here, Yvette, Luke, myself, you know, a couple of other people to highlight, on our board. Kelvin Jashinsky, well known in the space, you know, former president of Barrick. He ran Anglo Gold as well, World Gold Council member. He knows this business. Also, Kelvin's known very well in the government communities as well, but a very skilled executive, long time in the natural resource sector. Phil Montgomery, who is a Director and Chair of our Technical Committee, Phil is the past head of BHP's capital projects and Bill Jansen and several other projects. Some real knowledge on our board, and oversight to couple with Richard Gerspacher. Richard, we recruited from Fluor.
I think he was actually in Australia at the time, as one engineering company was kicked out and Fluor was brought in on a major lithium project to get it back on track again. Intentionally hired somebody from the other side of the table who's done this and built mega projects around the world. Richard actually helped get our Argentina project done. He speaks fluent Spanish, spent several years in Chile. He's been in Indonesia, has been in Asia, Australia, and has built power projects in the US and has built an excellent owners team with folks that have qualifications like him to manage our partner Bechtel, who's the EPCM of the project. This here, so, this is key for us. It's probably key for everybody, but this is a slide that's, that's relatively new.
This is something that we think is very important and the importance of the U.S. of national and economic security. You know, our, our, I'm an American, I'm in the U.S., obviously. The Department of Defense spends a lot of money on this, not only for radios and communications, but for submarines, drones, jets, tactical gear. There is a whole variety of different things. It is the reason why it is a critical mineral in the U.S. and why it has gotten so much focus in addition to copper, nickel, cobalt, rare earths and others. This is something that resonates, and there is a lot of development that is going on in the U.S. around batteries, in general. I think, privately, if you speak to U.S. legislators, which I do, they view batteries as very strategic. You know, EVs gets confounded or, or, in, the election that happened.
At the end of the day, there's a real agreement around the board here that we need to have the ability to make our own batteries in this country too. Not 100%, but we need to have the raw materials and the know-how is already here. For us now, it's gonna be moving forward, to draw in September. At that point, moving forward at pace. This year we'll spend about $1 billion in capital. We'll be completing the project mechanical handover, commissioning by unit, and starting the plant up by the end of 2027. We have a one-year ramp up to full production, and then we'll be basically in full production and probably thinking about phase two, depending upon how market conditions are.
Excited that this, it's been a long process in an industry that's challenged, I think, with a difficult environment and especially now getting private capital off the sidelines. It's been a tough journey, but we feel proud to do it. I think as we're in the middle of construction, the industry is gonna turn around and we'll have the benefit of that. You gotta build through the cycle in these industries. Otherwise, you cause problems like we had a few years ago where pricing spiked up to ridiculous levels. A lot of folks that had no business being in this industry all hung their shingle out and there was a lot of capital that was wasted. That's all I've got.
Thank you very much, John and Luke. We've got a few minutes for questions if we've got any questions in the room.
John, you touched on it. One of the questions we feel a lot here is just where the Trump 2.0 administration is at with the loans that have been either closed in your instance or, in fact, you know, there's a lot of letters of intent that we see here in the Australian market. Perhaps you could just give us a bit of color. You, you know, you touched on the fact that the LAC loan is closed and ready to draw, but just some of the conversations you've had around that and the confidence that you have in that funding.
I mean, look, there are actually not that many loans that have been closed. There's a real distinction. I think closed without major conditions. We were given no quarter with the government. Our closing process took seven months.
It was not something that was pulled across the line between the election and the inauguration. The loan close itself, it is an obligation. It is actually a legal obligation the government has, throughout this whole process. There is no politics involved in drawing. It is all very mechanical. We speak every week to the DOE. We have to give them monthly reports on spend, on safety, and all the other things that any lienholder would have. We are already doing a dry run, this point to draw with them. Essentially what it is is once they certify that we have spent and committed the capital, an order goes to the federal credit bank to move the funds to Citibank and we draw. There is no politics involved. I do not go back to ONB or Treasury. Look, I spend a lot of time in Washington, probably too much.
It's been helpful with both sides of the aisle, but our project and what we do is a center focus of this administration. I mean, critical minerals, it comes up almost every single day. There's rumors about another executive order. I mean, some of it, I'm not quite sure is real or not about building stuff on military reservations. For sure, the environment from us, from a regulatory and from a government support standpoint, is very overt and open. I mean, I was at a conference last week with three very senior senators that have permit reform very high on their lists from Utah and from Alaska. Also, the moderator was Senator Scott from Florida. Very powerful guys. I was the only industrial representative in their whole panel and actually the only industrial guy that whole day.
It was really around how important it is that we support not only what we do, but permit reform in general in the US, is around pipelines, it's around building plants and so forth. We have no worry. In fact, the EOs are very clear in that what we do as opposed to, say, charging stations and other things is right what the government wants us to do. I actually, in some respects, think it's made it a little bit easier for us than it was in the past where, like, there's no questions in here that you're gonna ask me. No, nobody asked me any questions around scope one, scope two emissions, IRMA, tribal relations, any of those types of things. 'Cause at the end of the day, you're all investors.
You are not gonna invest in a project where you do not get a good economic return. The government's view very overtly actually is that, or directly now as opposed to some of the other stuff which has been removed, and it was a barrier in some cases for projects where NGOs got involved and wanted to slow folks down, which, look, lots of Australian companies operating in the US, which get stuck in that, and in Canada as well. I think a lot of those barriers have been basically flattened by the current administration. Actually, I feel bullish, to be honest with you.
Luke and John, thank you very much for your time, much appreciated. Great to see the progress at Thacker Pass and congratulations on the progress to date. We wish you well for the future.
All right. Thank you all. Take care. Bye-bye.
Thanks very much.
Grab the, oh, there it is. Okay. The next section we are going to talk about our key assets and it's going to be a team effort. I'll talk a bit about MAC and then Adam Davidson's gonna talk a little bit more about Thacker Pass and its ownership through Trident and Deterra. And Ty's going to talk about some of our other development assets and I'll touch on off takes as well. Everybody's very familiar with MAC. What I'll do is I'll just touch on the new material that we have in the presentation. It's coming. One minute, I'm told. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. Okay. Everybody's familiar with MAC. What we've done on this slide is just lay out some of our future revenue opportunities from the Mining Area C royalty.
Firstly, in terms of capacity payments, you can see at the bottom left there, the blue bars represent the capacity payments that have come from Mining Area C. And just, for those who, perhaps aren't as familiar, a bit of a refresh. Deterra receives a one-off payment of $1 million every time Mining Area C has production of 1 million dry metric tons per annum that is over and above the previous 12-month high watermark. In 2023, Mining Area C produced 118 million dry metric tons, at 145 million wet metric tons, which is the capacity of the plant. When you take out the moisture, that represents about another $17 million worth of one-off payments that we would receive as they move through to full production capacity.
In terms of the timing of those receipts, whether or not BHP hit that production this year or over the coming years, we'll see in due course. In terms of the ongoing gross revenue royalty of 1.232%, we've put a table there that just gives you some sensitivities. The pricing that we've used is not the 62% index price. It is the BHP realized price. For reference, in one half 2025, BHP's realized price was $81 US per wet ton. That, that's dry tons there just to make the calculation a little bit easier. For reference, the gross royalty revenue that Deterra received from MAC in one half 2025 was $104 million. You can see and choose your, choose your pricing and your FX view, and you can see what that would represent in terms of an annual revenue to Deterra.
Finally, I get asked a lot about Deterra's share price. Just to give one lens to that is that the consensus NAV for MAC on a standalone basis is $2.6 billion. You can do the math yourself. That ends up as a sort of NAV per share on a MAC standalone basis in the high fours. Again, just reinforces what Julian was saying about the power of MAC and, you know, where we really see some of the value in that asset. With that, I'll hand over to Adam to talk about Thacker Pass. Yep.
There we go. Hopefully everybody can hear me. I see. Obviously John covered off Thacker Pass in some detail.
I won't speak to the asset, but I think it's worth touching on the royalty instrument itself, and kind of what the economics and outlook is for Deterra specifically. The quick headline on the Thacker Pass royalty, it's an 8% gross revenue royalty. 60% of that is attributable to Deterra. You'll note there that there's a partial buyback that LAC can execute. All their previous studies have assumed that they would do so just prior to first production. Otherwise, 8% is a pretty egregious royalty rate. Upon execution of that partial buyback, we'd see the royalty step down to a 1.05% gross revenue royalty attributable to Deterra and $13.2 million come back to Deterra as part of that buyback.
and important to note that that royalty is, untapped life of mine, has an area of interest around the project such that if the project area grows, the royalty grows naturally with it. It's a really high quality instrument in that regard. Actually the most important thing I think on this slide is, is the milestones. It kind of goes back to what Julian was speaking about earlier with regards to the royalty model, and that these are effectively derivative style instruments. Any growth in the underlying asset at no incremental cost to us as the royalty holder, we get to benefit from that growth. I think Thacker Pass royalty is, is a sort of perfect poster child for that kind of growth. In 2021, the royalty was acquired by Trident.
At that time it was a, a stage one, stage two project of 30,000 and then ultimately 60,000 tons per year. You know, within that same year it had increased by 33%, which again goes sort of straight to our bottom line, increase to the 40,000 and 80,000 ton a year that you see today. And then there were quite a few sort of qualitative benefits along the way. We saw General Motors equity investment, up to $650 million. The first tranche of that was released. And then the record of decision was upheld. That was sort of the final key federal permitting hurdle. Early last year, obviously John mentioned the Department of Energy loan, $2.26 billion. That has carried on even, even post acquisition of Trident. Trident was acquired in September last year. In October, we saw that DOE loan closed, which locked in that funding.
Then we saw the restructure of the DMJV, which will ultimately lead to them putting in $945 million. I think that's the largest investment by an automaker into a mining project directly. With Orion stepping in on the final bit of funding, it's got about as good a blue chip backing as you can get from a project perspective. I think actually the most exciting milestone was probably in January of this year when LAC updated its 43101. As John mentioned, it's now the largest global lithium resource and reserve. They doubled the planned mine life from 40 years to 85 years, and also increased the production profile such that the project through various stages grows up to 160,000 tons of annual production.
I think the exciting thing is obviously this is a world-class project both with regards to scale of resource, scale of production, but it's also very tangible. I think in their most recent release, they flagged first concrete being poured next quarter. Plant commissioning is gonna be Q2 2026 and then first production in 2027. From there, the asset's gonna operate for the better part of a century and has plenty of scope six and beyond that. Just flipping to the next slide. Just in the interest of time, I won't linger on this too long other than to just flag the economics of the royalty itself. You can see that table there. Pick your poison with regards to lithium price. I think a couple things to flag. One is this is the anticipated royalty revenue at stage one only.
You can quadruple that as additional stages come online. The other thing to note, and John touched on it briefly in his presentation, is lithium is obviously a growing sector as everybody's aware. I think rough demand last year was about 1 million tons. Anticipated consensus demand by the end of the decade, which does not feel that far away, is about 3 million tons. It is anticipated to continue to grow from there. When you get sort of these growth commodities, there is a lot of volatility. We have all witnessed that, a lot of peaks and quite a few troughs. We are sitting at a trough at the moment. You know, do not anticipate it going back to 80,000 tons and staying there sustainably. With the royalty being a very derivative style instrument, we are best positioned to capitalize off those peaks.
If it does get back up to 40-50 before coming off again, with Thacker Pass rolling into production within the next couple of years, and that style of exposure, you're sort of perfectly positioned over its 85-year life to capitalize on some of those for a heavy market. It is a high quality tier one asset such that in the trough, as John said, from an ASIC perspective, it's well positioned to weather those sorts of periods of time. I think that's why we're so excited about this asset. It really does stack up well. It'll take some time to develop, but it stacks up well relative to Mining Area C. I think we'll complement it nicely as it continues to be appreciated by the market and the asset advances further. With that, Jason, I'll hand it back to you.
Thanks, Adam.
Julian mentioned that the Gold Offtake s are non-core and, potentially divestible for the right price. They are important to us though. I just wanna spend some time giving you a little bit more detail around those offtakes. In terms of, since they have been under Deterra's ownership, we have a book value, when they came onto our books of AUD 86 million. In the first four months of our ownership, they have generated $7 million. They are certainly generating more than we expected that they would. We are very pleased with them. You can see on the right-hand side that in calendar year 2024, 306,000 ounces were delivered under the offtakes. In calendar year 2025, we are expecting 293,000 ounces to come through.
Now that drop is predominantly related to Victoria Gold Eagle mine in Canada, which in 2024 had a fairly catastrophic, catastrophic heap leach pad failure. That mine is in suspension at the moment. We are not anticipating getting any ounces from that operation. On this slide, we have laid out a lot more detail around the offtakes, the caps under each offtake, the ounces that have been delivered through the life of that offtake through to December 2024, and then the ounces that were delivered in the 12 months through to December 2024. I will leave you to work through the level of detail that you want to in terms of each offtake.
Important to know, if you look at the right-hand side of that slide, when we look at the Equinox and the i80 assets, they have about 1.2 million ounces to be delivered under those offtakes. They will actually, at the current run rate, take through towards the end of this decade for those to actually deliver into those offtakes. Bonikro delivered 46-odd thousand ounces in calendar 2024. Now, there is actually no cap and no time limit. The current mine plan has that mine ceasing in 2029. However, Allied are actually contemplating extending that mine life as well. That is something that we will continue to watch. Blivor is obviously a very significant offtake for us. They have not delivered material ounces into that offtake yet.
Really the key catalyst for them is completing a SPAC capital raise and listing in the U.S. that they're currently undertaking. They're seeking at least $50 million, and they need that capital to then undertake an extension and expansion of that Blivor operation in South Africa. Even when that happens, we would expect to start to see more material deliveries under that offtake. Stepping out of the operating mines, I touched on Eagle and we see option value there. That could come back online at some stage. Obviously, Volt's Sugar Zone deposit, which a lot of people here are familiar with, again, probably a little bit more than option value. They're making some progress with their planning around that, but as and when they come online, that's when we would anticipate deliveries to start occurring under that offtake.
Now I'll pass you over to Ty, who's gonna take you through some of the other assets in the portfolio.
Thank you, Jason. The Mining Area C has obviously been touched on, in a fairly high level of detail already. I won't rehash that other than just to, you know, read out the potential impact of the capacity payments there, as well as obviously just the impact of the higher royalty volumes, expected as BHP maintains their steady state, production at the 145 million wet ton per year. Thacker Pass, John and Adam have obviously gone through that in a good level of detail. Again, just to reiterate that, that contingent payment, which is effectively a buyback and, you know, in all scenarios will be exercised. I think we take a very high, level of confidence that will be exercised.
Frankly, if it doesn't, it's an 8% gross revenue royalty. We'll take that as well. You know, that will be bought back. Stepping down to perhaps some of the smaller assets in the portfolio that probably don't get quite as much attention, but do drive a reasonable amount of value in the sort of short to medium term. I think our Preciosa Silver Royalty, Preciosa is operated by Avino. It's a relatively high grade, underground mine in Mexico. That's basically just signed the last of its required landholder permits that's needed for development. Avino just last quarter has come out and said that they're expecting development works to kick off immediately with those landholder agreements signed off and expecting first production from that asset in the second half of this calendar year.
From our perspective, the materiality of that largely relates to the $8.75 million payment that's due within 12 months of first silver from Preciosa. You know, we would expect that somehow in calendar year next year. That also then triggers a small payment on our half to the original vendors of the royalty, which is Coal Mining. Net, a $7.75 million inflow to us. I think more generally as well, you know, what we sort of end up with there is a nice, nice silver royalty over a producing mine. Preciosa is effectively a large satellite deposit to what is an existing processing plant that's been operated by Avino for a long period of time. You know, at that point we've got a nice, material silver royalty that's just sitting there plugging away.
As many in this room will know, precious metals royalties obviously have a, you know, a high value attached to them in the market. To be able to sit on a nice silver royalty like that is, is quite attractive to us. Antler's an interesting one that is being operated by ASX's sister New World. Just recently went out and raised another $14 million, just over the last few days. It's a copper zinc project, polymetallic project in Arizona that's moving through the state and federal permitting process at the moment. State permits are expected to be granted over the rest of this year and into Q1 of next year. Federal process is running in parallel, and that's expected to lead to an FRD decision into Q1 of next year. From our perspective, there's a couple of interesting aspects to that one.
There is the buyback as part of that royalty. There is the opportunity for them to buy that down, which would result in an AUD 9 million payment on the sort of the core royalty. There is also a broader area of interest royalty that contains a separate buyback provision. If all of the buybacks are exercised independently, that is AUD 13 million that would come back to us in total. More broadly, I think, you know, we have heard a bit today from John about, you know, the importance of US domestic production and the focus on that. I think that is a really nice example of a project that is starting to get quite a lot of traction.
We've seen, you know, in Arizona and that part of the world, another sort of project that's a little bit further advanced, but has recently attracted a reasonably big investment from Royal Gold in terms of Royal buying a bigger royalty that was sitting over that project, paying $55 million in cash to get exposure to that asset. We've also seen Hudbay come onto the register of that business as well. That is Arizona Sonoran, TSX listed. We're starting to see a lot of that North American flavor coming into that market. We think Antler's well positioned to benefit from that, as it moves forward within the current Trump administration, focus on domestic supply, et cetera. We think that's a nice looking project.
Our instrument there allows us to have quite a lot of involvement in, in that process as it moves forward. We've got various rights of first refusals, rights of first offers, matching rights, et cetera, to essentially anything that they do, with royalties, streams, prepays, offtakes going forward. It just gives us a nice amount of flexibility and optionality just to watch as that develops. If there's a, an opportune time there to sort of get involved in a more material way, then, you know, we, we have the ability to do that. In the same vein as, you know, Antler, you know, copper. Minbull, there is in Zambia, it's been producing, you know, for probably four years now. We first invested in that, back in 2021 as Trident. I think it was our second investment.
It was really funding working capital as they were ramping up towards 10,000 ton a year. As you can see now, they're moving up towards 56,000 ton as part of a phase two expansion, which is going quite well. I think it's taken a little bit longer than they'd have liked just as they went through COVID, et cetera. You know, the management team there is quite strong, very good ability to raise capital, even as a private business. That's developing nicely, you know, and you'll see there that that's a five X expansion on when we first invested, as Trident. She's just really starting to hit her straps now, and there's still potential further expansions there as well.
You know, I think just to sort of summarize and just to be clear, this is just a small sort of subset of a number of the assets within the Deterra portfolio that came across with Trident. Obviously, Mining Area C and to a certain extent, Thacker Pass will be the sort of material drivers in the short term. Just to highlight that within the rest of the portfolio, there is a significant amount of optionality. I think, you know, the way we think about these things is within the development pipeline, as things move from left to right, closer to production, that's where you get a lot of the genuine sort of value growth throughout these royalties. You know, very few royalties are bought as producing royalties and generate substantial value on day one.
We see a lot of value as these assets move from left to right. Over time, I think we'll see that they will become more material in the pipeline and they will provide a bit of that diversification, et cetera. As Julian says, you know, we see that more as an outcome of what's within the existing portfolio, as much as anything as opposed to an input, or a target. With that, I think we're ready for Q & A, but I'll throw that to Jason.
Yeah, thanks Ty. You might want to stay standing up. I think we have to stand up to be heard.
Any questions on the assets that we've just covered or in fact Julian's introduction? You're a very compliant crew. Oh no, we've got one down the back. We'll just get a microphone for you.
Thank you very much.
I think it was an excellent initiative to get LAC to speak to us all. Thank you very much for that. We all learned a lot. Julian spoke about cost of capital several times. Can you, and I ask always royalty companies, what is their cost of capital? And I'll ask you the same.
You might wanna answer that, Julian, but I think you need to stand up to be.
Yeah. I do talk about cost of capital in the context of when we look at further investment opportunities. You know, in that regard, I just wanna be very clear that we take a ground up approach. We will look at each opportunity and say, you know, what's the nature of that investment? Where's it located? What's the commodity?
All of those sort of factors and say, what's an approach, what's the cost of capital to invest in that? And then we look to price to drive a margin. The reason why I emphasize that is because, you know, we are very conscious that in, you know, with the Mining Area C asset and the cash flows that it generates, we do have a, you know, we have a, you know, very bankable asset, if you like. Our cost of capital is relatively low and we're not looking to be clear, we don't use that cost of capital to subsidize investments. We're not using that as a threshold to assess investments.
You know, we look at them on a, on a unique basis in terms of our, our cost of capital that we drive off primarily off the back of Mining Area C. Certainly in terms of the debt facilities that we have in place, we have a series of revolvers that have an average margin of 1.35%. Yep. Over BBSY. Yeah. 1.35%, 135 basis points over BBSY. That is about, I think at the moment, what is that, about 5%? Yeah. It will come in about sort of 5.6%, something like that. Yep. Yep.
I just want to ask about that portion of the work, the technical work that you sub out to others, right?
And if you're looking at a new project, is that about sort of, you know, sending in a bunch of engineers to understand the technical risks about whether this mining operation is gonna deliver, et cetera? What, I'm sorry, I just really wanted to say what that work is and what, and how detailed it is to give you confidence about your potential investment.
Yeah. Again, it's a little bit different with each project, just depending on where it is in its development stage. But, you know, as I said, we tend to focus towards the sort of the right hand half of the development spectrum. Typically when we're looking at opportunities, they have mine plans, they have studies in place. The starting point for us always is the mine plan that's in the study.
Our diligence is very much focused on testing that mine plan and, you know, digging into it and saying, you know, to what extent, you know, what are the risks in that mine plan? Is it gonna produce? When's it gonna start up? What is a ramp up profile likely to look like? That's all at the front end. I guess, you know, the other element of it is at the back end of that development plan, you know, what's the capacity for this deposit to support more than that, you know, with the economics warranted at the time? It is a detailed review. It's, you know, as I said, depending on the stage of our review, it might be a red flags type review. What are the issues associated with this?
Once we get to the point where we're looking to actually commit, you know, to put in something, some form of commit, you know, binding bid, you know, clearly we'll have done a lot of work at a, quite a degree of detail, you know, we'll have people visit, visit sites to take a look. We'll obviously spend quite a bit of time interacting with the technical advisors that the, the, the developer has as well or their internal resources. It is about really testing that, that development plan. As I said, thinking about the deposit, what else could it support, with the, the economics warranted?
Can I, can I ask specifically with Thacker Pass? Because it is, a different technology. And so many of us have been around for a while.
We're all scarred by clay based projects because separation can be difficult with slimes, et cetera. You know, what was done, and maybe it's a question for Ty, is how did you get comfortable about the technical risks about trying to deal with a clay based separation or a clay based deposit? I mean,
yeah. Ty, you might wanna start and I can add any further thoughts from our perspective.
Yeah, sure. I can talk to it from the, I think, the Trident perspective, at least when we made the initial acquisition. Look, I think we recognized that that was a risk.
I think, you know, we did the site visits, we got the technical consultants and, you know, as John said, you can, you know, you can exhaust every engineer out there and nobody has a, you know, specific red flag that they can point to. I think I'm a metallurgist by background, so I fully appreciate the, the sort of the clay, commentary and context. But, you know, we went through the process, we, you know, got in-house people, we, for that particular one, we were able to talk to the company directly as well, which isn't always the case for secondary royalty acquisitions. Quite often you don't actually have access to the people directly. So we were able to do that through, again, external consultants, some internal know-how.
I think alongside the technical, I think the way we sort of try to think about things is a bit more holistically as well as, you know, we can see that it was a significant project of scale in the US that was probably going to enjoy some government backing as well as good support from others. Whilst we need to make sure that technically the thing will work within reason, I think we also put quite a lot of value on the potential access to capital to support a ramp up if things do go a bit sideways. Because from a pure royalty perspective, you know, on an 85 year asset, if it's delayed by a quarter or two, frankly, it does not matter that much to the NAV. Obviously there are short term impacts, but from a pure IRR NAV perspective, it does not matter that much.
We put quite a lot of weight in LAC's ability to raise capital, you know, the day after the record of decision came out. I think they went out and raised $500 million, $400 million US almost immediately. Yeah. We were able to look at that and say, look, we've got good access to capital. The science, to the extent that we can, seems to stack up, you know, then we're piloting, I think for two years or something at that point, and then now up to three or four years of sort of consistent piloting where they've piloted the entire flow sheet through from beneficiation, which, as you say, is definitely one of the risk areas, right through the technical, sort of chemical backend, which is a bit more, a bit more widely produced, I think, versus some of the upfront beneficiation of clays.
Yeah, I think it's a bit of a mosaic approach. You know, we get as much technical as we comfort as we can internally, externally overlay that with the qualitative sort of financial aspects. Do we think they can survive a downturn? Do they have a register that's strong enough to back them? Do they have the support from government, autos, et cetera, to be able to push through? Because there will be delays. It's just inevitable. These things will always be delayed. It will be slower to come in than every, than Lithium Americas think. Again, we sort of step back and look at that sort of objectively from a qualitative royalty perspective and just see that they should have the capacity to be able to weather any sort of, any unexpected delays.
I think that's where, you know, the value of having GM in at the asset level, the DOE funding, et cetera, gives us a lot of confidence that even if the technical doesn't end up being quite as, you know, straightforward as they hope, there's easily enough sort of liquidity there to manage that through. You know, from a royalty perspective, that's all we really care about.
I think, you know, just to add to that, you know, I think as John said, you know, they've been diligenced. I think that project's been diligenced a lot by a lot of different parties, and they have been running the test facility in Reno for several years now.
I had a chance to go there in December and they took me through that as well as through the site. You know, Ty's point is an excellent one around the nature of our interest really insulates us from any capital cost overruns. It insulates us from operating margin pressures. As long as it gets built and it is producing, we are gonna generate revenue. To the extent that the ramp up profile and, you know, in our diligence, obviously we look at a lot of different ramp up profiles. At the time we were looking at a 40 year project plan. They are now talking about potentially twice that. Yeah.
As Ty said, you know, if we're, if things are a little bit rocky to start with, you know, that's unfortunate, but it doesn't really affect the fundamental economics of the investment.
Okay. Time for a quick cup of tea and then we'll come back in here and talk about capital management. Thanks.
Okay, welcome back everybody. Now for the session that you've really all been waiting for, capital management. This is the slide that we put up at the first half 2025 results. Just to recap, as you're aware, we declared a fully franked dividend of AUD 0.09 per share. That represented a payout ratio of 75% of NPAT. We also said that going forward, that while we have debt outstanding, one-off receipts would be used to pay down that debt and exclude it from NPAT when considering the dividend.
Those one-offs, for example, include obviously the MAT capacity payments, the potential buyback from Thacker Pass, and some of those other contingent receipts that Ty mentioned. Now, just an accounting point on contingent receipts, and I have put a footnote on the following slide that when we receive a contingent receipt in our profit and loss account, there will be an equivalent, a roughly equivalent amount of depreciation that goes against that as well. The reason for that is that as we have brought the Trident assets onto our books and booked an accounting value for those assets, part of that accounting value actually represents that contingent receipt as well. When we recognize the revenue, the asset component of that revenue will also move out into the P&L. There will not be a material NPAT impact from those contingent receipts when we actually receive them.
Happy to take people through that in more detail, you know, after this session. Moving on to the next page, I just want to spend some time talking through our capital management levers. The first point to note is that at the top left of that slide, we have about $300 million worth of drawn debt. Now, importantly, all of that drawn debt is from our revolving credit facilities. The nature of those revolvers is that there is no fixed amortization schedule to repay that debt. It is at our discretion when we actually pay that. To the extent that we pay them down from the one-off receipts that you can see over on the right, or from the NPAT that we do not pay out as dividends, we can pay that down at our discretion.
Alternatively, it's open to us to hold that debt and roll it at maturity as long as, obviously, we're within our banking covenants, which, you know, as I said at the first half, and you'll see on the next slide, we're very comfortably within our banking covenants and we retain a very strong balance sheet. We don't have a fixed timeframe to pay off our debt. We've got a strong balance sheet. As Julian's noted, the debt cost is BBSY plus about 135 basis points. It's really well priced. Earnings from the Gold Offtakes, as I've mentioned before, covered the servicing costs of the debt in the first half. The key message there is that we're under no pressure and there's no immediate urgency to be rapidly paying down that debt if we choose not to.
That said, clearly our capital management framework supports our business model and also our investment strategy. It needs to maintain that flexibility to provide funding even when we find a compelling investment opportunity. Just a point to note here and to reinforce what Julian said before, our risk appetite has not changed since the Trident acquisition. That was the first investment that we made within four years as a listed business. To be clear, that is not guidance that we will wait necessarily for another four years to make an investment. It is simply to emphasize we are patient. We will wait for that right opportunity and we will be ready to execute even when a compelling opportunity actually presents.
If we were to see a compelling investment opportunity, then in terms of our ability to fund that, obviously we've got an additional circa AUD 200 million headroom in the revolving credit facilities that we have. Clearly if we drew that today, we'd push through our target leverage ratio of 0-15%. Now, we've always said that it is an option for the right investment that we would go past that 15%, but we've also been clear that if we were to do that, we would look to bring our debt levels down to within that 15% ratio fairly promptly after that. Equity is obviously also another capital management lever. Clearly we chose not to use equity when we did the Trident transaction. You know, a couple of the reasons for that was that the quantum was well within our debt facilities.
It was a cross-border transaction, so using our equity was going to increase the cost and the complexity of that transaction. That was at a time where our share price was in the mid four dollars as well. To be clear, I do not want people to conclude or take away that we would only issue equity at a certain price. The key messages from the capital management framework are that, you know, firstly, we have got a really strong balance sheet and we have got no need to raise equity to further strengthen that. Secondly, for the right investment, for really exceptional opportunities, we have got a range of options that will allow us to optimize our capital management structure just depending on what the nature of that investment is and what the circumstances and the environment of that time might be.
All of those are factored into the decisions at the time as to which levers of that capital management framework we would look to use at that particular point in time. The final slide here is one that we saw at the first half and again just emphasizes the strength of the balance sheet. Obviously, we have a maturity there coming in second half 2026. As I mentioned, the nature of the revolvers is that, you know, we either pay that down or we roll and extend that when we come to that timeframe. You can see that we are well within our covenants, as I mentioned. That is all I wanted to talk about on capital management, but really an opportunity to throw it open to the room for questions for either myself or Julian to talk to.
Thanks, Chen.
We'll just get you a microphone. Chen down the front.
Morning. Thanks, Jason. Chen from Bank of America. Just a question for your Gold Offtake. You mentioned a couple of times it's non-core and looking to divest in due course. However, you get immediate cash flow, right, from your Gold Offtake, which you can use to pay either interest payment or return to shareholders as dividends. What's the thinking behind that? You know, you are not going to keep the Gold Offtake agreement because it's still good cash flow. As I mentioned, your balance sheet looks okay. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Chen. We get asked a lot about the Gold Offtakes and the simple answer is they're for sale, but not at any price.
As you can see, and the reason I keep reinforcing the cash flow that we get out of there is that they're providing a meaningful contribution to our book and to our shareholders and to our balance sheet at the moment. We're under no pressure to sell them. You know, we're in a market where their instruments that are perhaps a little different to what people commonly see. We treat them internally very, very much as a short-term instrument and we look to minimize our risk from holding those. There could be other trading officers, for example, that take a different view and more actively trade them or hold them and are happier to take a longer view and greater risk on those and therefore might see more value in them.
That's really the message that it's available for sale, but it's not for sale at any price because they are valuable to us.
Just a follow-up. Yeah. Thanks for that. Just a follow-up on your answer. It's non-core because the risk or the nature of the Gold Offtake agreement of sitting under your portfolio, is that right? Because it's basically a trading activity that you need to take the risk of the gold price and the volatility.
Yeah, it's non-core because if you go back to Julian's slides about where our focus is, our commodity focus is Base, Bulk, and Battery and Electrification Commodities as well. You know, we were happy to acquire the gold portfolio as part of the Trident portfolio. We wouldn't have prospected that individually. You know, we think we got it at a good multiple as part of that portfolio as well.
That is why it is non-core.
Perhaps just to add to that, I think the key point is that we, you know, to the extent we are looking to divest them, it would be because we think they would be worth more in somebody else's ownership than ours. That obviously is where we come down back to the comment about, you know, they are not for sale at any price. The other point to make perhaps from a capital management perspective is Jason made the point that in terms of sort of one-off receipts, typically we would be using those to manage our debt position. To the extent we sell them, you would expect we would use that to reduce our debt position.
Happy for any non-capital management questions. Okay, good. Thanks very much for attending, everybody.
If you've got anything that you want to follow up, you've got my number. Please feel free to give us a call, very much appreciate your attendance today and happy to be able to let you go on time.