Joining us now is the Executive Chairman of Encounter Resources, Will Robinson. Will is a Senior Resources Industry Executive with over 25 years' experience in Australia and North America. Will is positioned at Encounter as a high-impact Australian explorer focused on niobium, rare earth elements, and copper. The company has defined a high-grade niobium resource at its 100% project in the West Arunta region, Australia's newest critical minerals province. Thank you very much, Will.
Thanks, Christian. There we go. Thank you for the audience who stuck around on this last day of a really long and productive three-day conference. Thanks, and also welcome to all those who are tuning in online today, including our staff back in Perth and also out in the West Arunta via Starlink. Today, I'm going to tell you about what's happening in Central Australia in a major new mineral province that's emerging. It's already a significant, it's already going to be a significant and globally important new source of niobium. I think it's going to be more as we start to unlock, and we really are just at the beginning. Encounter Resources has been dedicated to the exploration of Central Australia for over 15 years. We've been driving this Greenfields Exploration Strategy, which has been driven by two very highly respected geologists in Dr. John Hronsky and Peter Bewick.
They've got a tremendous team who are able to operate in very remote parts of Australia to understand these new mineral systems that are being discovered. We're very quickly unravelling what looks to be something very special in Australia. With the resource announced earlier this year, this time last year, we announced the initial discovery intersections. We put that into resource in May this year. We're now adding additional capability around resource development, project studies, metallurgy, and marketing to enable us to advance this project. We've had a very stable and strong institutional and corporate shareholder base that's enabled us to attack this Greenfields Exploration Strategy that's starting to deliver. We've got a little under $20 million in cash that's enabling us to be very aggressive in our exploration. Let me tell you a little bit about the project portfolio more generally.
We're the, I think, the largest exploration landholder in the Northern Territory. We've got a series of copper-based projects at Sandover. We're trialing some very innovative passive seismic this year in the lead-up to the next drilling that's going to occur at that project. South32 has kicked off some geophysics at the Jessica project, a very large project in the Greater MacArthur Superb asin, looking for IACG and sediment-hosted copper. They've got drilling coming up in October. We've got further drilling at our 100% owned Paterson and Lamil projects, unit projects in the Paterson province coming up in October as well. Today, I'm going to tell you most about what's happening in the West Arunta and why we think this is just the beginning of a major new minerals province for Australia.
It's a very remote location, and I think that's why there wasn't a drill hole into this project until 2020. It's there at the WA -Northern Territory border. What we've seen over the last few years is an incredible conversion rate from target to discovery. High-grade niobium deposits have been found in multiple locations very quickly in this new region. We think that's also going to lead to significant discoveries of rare earths. Most of these carbonatite intrusions that are coming into this belt are also containing significant rare earths. There is zonation within these carbonatite intrusions. You can see the sort of high-grade rare earth near-surface intersections that we're seeing already in the reconnaissance drilling. We both came out here, WA1 and ourselves, looking for IACG copper. I don't think that's gone backwards because of the incredible success that we've had early on in niobium.
The region also has potential for orogenic gold. We're keeping our eye out for all these things because we didn't come out here looking for niobium. We found a lot in a hurry. We think that's just indicative of a highly prospective mineral province with some deep tapping mantle tapping structures that are bringing some really interesting things to surface. Let me just take a step back to 2019. That's our land tenure holding there. It's about, I think it was well over 100 km east-west. Massive land position and really how this region came about. We had a Project Generation Alliance with Newcrest at the time. We brought projects to them that we thought were worthy of further exploration, and they went into joint venture when Newcrest was funding.
We took those two magnetic anomalies in the center of that project to them in 2019-2020 and said, if you fund the exploration, we'll manage it. They said, OK. We really had to put everything else on hold because this was a major undertaking. This was 30 km from a very remote bush track joining two Aboriginal communities in Central Australia. We mobilized the forces of our team. It took us two goes to get the drill rig there. We did get it there. Eventually, we drilled 157 m. Incredibly interesting rock that we drilled into as the first hole into this mineral province. Unfortunately, the rig broke down without testing that magnetic anomaly. We withdrew and got that first 157 m assayed. In that was some up to 0.8% rare earths, 0.1% niobium. There was copper up to 0.1%. There was gold anomalism.
It was a really fascinating start into a new mineral district. That really has set what then subsequently happened, which was WA1 came in and, credit to them, a very small company at the time, dragged an RC rig out there, drilled seven holes. Four of them were mineralized. Three of them were into the Lenne deposit. At that point in time, you had eight holes into a new region, and five of them were mineralized. That was spaced over the best part of 40 km. As I said at the time, I think both of these companies have been incredibly fortunate with their drilling, or there's a hell of a lot of this sort of material to be found out here. Fast forward to today, 2022, and that's what we're seeing. Multiple near-surface high-grade carbonatite discoveries extending on the northern margin, which we call the Elephant Island fold.
One of the things that's really helping us advance the exploration is the investment that we've made over recent years in geophysics. You can see those, that's a magnetics image there. There are those big cracks in the magnetics. That is the plumbing that's bringing these carbonatites to surface. Between Crean and Hurley, that's an eight-kilometer trend where we've got carbonatites mapped and high-grade resources have been added to the inventory at Crean on the western side of that. On the southern trend between Emely, Looney, through Green, that massive mineral system down there is still open on either end. We're still trying to find the edges of it.
Last month, we announced that we'd taken a drill rig to Joyce, 36 km to the east, drilled a drill line and drilled high-grade niobium mineralization to end of hole out there, which is really opening up the project further to the east for further exploration. We sat here last year just after making the initial discovery hole into Crean and then subsequently Emely and Green. We very quickly on the back of that, without really doing any infill drilling, but just the resource drilling that was done on the basis of 200 m drill spacing, up to 400 m drill spacing, the consistency and the cohesive nature of the mineralization, we were able to put a resource out in May this year of 19.2 million tonnes at 1.74.
That's up there with higher grade, significantly higher grade than two of the existing three mines that operate in niobium in the world now. Niobium is a very strategic commodity. It's a large market, over $5 billion a year. There are three mines, two of them are in Brazil. That would be the sort of mineralization we're finding up there, it's up there with the best mines in the world. The RC drilling has been completed through the Green deposit. We're looking forward to updating the market on those results as we drill the infill and extensional drilling to Green and the other discoveries that we've made up in this region. We have been doing mineralogy and work and metallurgy in the background. That is supporting conventional processing, just like the existing three mines and our neighbor WA1.
This was the start of the announcement that we made about three or four weeks ago. You can see the Green resource that we drilled last year. Those drill lines, it's very much still open to the east of that Green resource. We're doing further drilling there as we speak. We stepped over to the Joyce deposit, drilled the Joyce prospect, and drilled nine meters of 2.2 in that first echo program. We've done further drilling there. Our results are going to be back within the next month on that. It's just indicative of just how prospective and how abundant the mineralization is on these major regional cracks that are bringing the carbonatites to surface. Where to from here? Over the last few years, we've flown the region for Falcon gravity. We've done 100-meter space magnetics.
We've just finished a very large airborne EM survey, which we'll have the results of in about three or four weeks. The preliminary images that I've seen from that do look like it's been a very successful survey. What's happening and what's coming up? The exploration upside in this belt with our very large landholding. We think a lot of the exploration upside that occurs from here is going to occur on Encounter's tenure. You can see 15 targets that I've circled there. We're aiming to get drilling into all of them this year. There'll be additional targets that will come out of the airborne EM that we've just flown.
Interestingly, last year, we took a rig 40 km away from any further drilling right out to the eastern part of the project, and we hit a chalcopyrite copper vein in that first drill hole. The GWA has also picked up a surface sample containing cooperite at that eastern part of the project. We do think this is, in the fullness of time, going to become a multi-commodity belt, and Encounter Resources controls a large part of this region. While we are charging ahead with the Aileron project, we are very dedicated to continue our copper exploration work across Western Australia and Northern Territory. We've been doing this for a number of years with a number of partners.
One of the reasons we've been able to minimize dilution through the journey is we've been able to partner with major mining companies, including BHP, Newcrest Mining, South32, IGO, and Antofagasta. They've provided over $30 million of funding to our projects over the last decade, and that's really enabled us to secure and advance the major portfolio that we've got. We're continuing to do that. In the Paterson province near Telfer, we have got a large landholding at Yanina and also at Lamil. We've got an EIS co-funded grant to do some further drilling at Lamil later this year at the Yeneena copper project, which we just got back from a joint venture partner. We made the BM1 near-surface copper oxide discovery back 15 years ago. We've got that back. We're having another look at that.
We think there's a lot of similarities with what we're seeing in the Yeneena to what we've seen in Botswana with sediment-hosted copper success over the last decade. We'll be applying those learnings into this new belt. The first place that we're going to take a drill rig is to BM5. We've identified a significant end of hole gossan in prior drilling, and we're mobilizing a drill rig in October this year to test that out. We put an announcement out about that last week. This is still very much a very prospective region to find high-grade copper and gold in a first-world jurisdiction like Western Australia. While that's going on, we've got a major partnership with South32 in the Northern Territory. At that scale, the area doesn't look too big. That's about 9,000 sq km that we've got under joint venture with South32.
In the drilling that we did last year, we were targeting a magnetic gravity coincident anomaly at the Zeta target. We intersected exactly the sort of rocks we were hoping to with intense red rock hematite alteration and some quartz carbonate veins containing copper. There's a MIMDAS survey that's going on there at the moment. There's an airborne (EM survey that's being flown on the eastern side of the project. South32 is planning to diamond drill there in October this year. October this year, we're going to probably have four drill rigs going. We've got two in the West Arunta. We'll have one in the Paterson province, and South32 will have that rig going in the Northern Territory. We've got major geophysical programs that we've either completed or are about to embark on.
In the space of 12 months from the discovery of the high-grade niobium at Crean, Emely, and Green, we've put in a resource. We're opening those existing discoveries up further with further drilling. We're looking to extend those and then upgrade a resource in early 2026. Why Encounter? We hold a commanding position in what is going to be Australia's next great mineral province. We've defined resources very quickly. We're exploring aggressively with over 40,000 m of drilling planned this year. If you want leverage to this region, we provide fabulous leverage to what is going to be something pretty special, I think, at a significant discount to our neighbor.
In addition to that, you've got a major copper and copper-gold exploration portfolio going on at separate projects and a number of important catalysts that are going to be coming up in the near term, including resource growth, testing new targets in the West Arunta, and testing large-scale copper targets in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Just to finish up, I'd like to acknowledge that when you're doing Greenfields exploration in a place like Australia or a place anywhere, really, pre-competitive data and government data is so important to get us out into these new regions. This region would not have happened if it wasn't for the investment in pre-competitive data by the Geological Survey of Western Australia, which identified the magnetic anomaly, which flew the survey that identified the magnetic anomaly that we first drilled in. That first drill hole was EIS co-funded.
We've had significant support from Geoscience Australia, who are now flying the belt for airborne EM on a regional basis. We've done that at an infill program. We've got a number of studies with various academic institutions and research agencies who are helping us unlock and characterize these carbonatites and why they're important and what else we could find out there and understand the age dates and all the important things that enable us to do so. While Western Australia might have slipped to number 17 globally and Australia slipped generally, it's not the responsibility of a geological survey. We're doing a great job in enabling us to explore these new regions, which are so important for Australia and obviously very important to Encounter shareholders. Thank you very much.