Our next speaker is Will Robinson, Executive Chairman of Encounter Resources. Will is a highly credentialed resource executive with over 30 years experience across Australia and Canada, featuring a decade-long presidency at AMEC, strategic advisory for the Australian Government, and the founding of ASX listed resources companies Encounter and Hamelin. Thanks, Will.
Thank you, Courtney, and thank you for the organizers at Diggers for giving us the opportunity to tell the Encounter Resources story again this year. In April 2026, this year, we ticked over 20 years as an ASX listed company. Through that time, we've been absolutely committed to opening up new frontiers in Central Australia. That's led to us having very large exploration programs and land positions in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. It's led to the discovery of resources in copper, niobium, and rare earths. Through that time, we've been able to work with some terrific teams from major mining companies, including BHP, South32, Newcrest, and Antofagasta to advance these projects while minimizing the cash strain on our shareholders.
The two main projects I'll be talking about today is the Aileron niobium rare earth discovery in the West Arunta, which has just ticked over 100 million tons in resource and the project studies are kicking off. I'll finish up telling you about our copper portfolio, which is what we've been attempting to do for a very long time, which is to find a major new copper position in Central Australia. There's a lot of work going on in parallel. Let me tell you about Aileron. We are advancing this project through development studies. We're doing all the baseline work that we need to do, while at the same time exploring what is one of Australia's most unique new exploration opportunities. That land position there, a project position that's over 100 kilometers east-west. There was not a drill hole into that until 2020.
We drilled that hole in October 2020, the first hole into the district, which is just on the edge of the Crane carbonatite discovery. Since that time, there's been multiple large discoveries of niobium-rich carbonatites in this region. We think this is just the start of something more significant. We've been investing very heavily in recent years in regional geophysics, one of the things that's enabled us to do that has been the work from Geoscience Australia and the Geological Survey of Western Australia that has done broader surveys that's enabled us to infill, that's given us a fabulous roadmap to do our exploration is leading to ongoing discoveries. Why niobium now? Niobium is a pretty special commodity. It's an AUD 5 billion-AUD 6 billion a year market. Supply is very concentrated out of Brazil.
The West Arunta may have arrived at a really special time in that industry, as it's growing very strongly in high-strength steel. It's a critical mineral for the U.S.A., Europe, Japan, Australia, because of its applications in defense and aerospace. The developments in battery technology using niobium in the anodes in particular, is happening very fast at the moment into industrial uses. I'll touch on a little bit about that. Why Aileron? Aileron, this year, we upgraded the resource to 120 million tons at about 0.8% niobium in the whole global resource, but that's got a high-grade core of 26 million tons at over 1.7%. That is almost double the grade of two of the existing operating mines around the world. It's shallow.
It's strike extensive, We're continuing to find more of this material. I think we really are at the start of a pretty important new mineral province for Australia for niobium, We think it's going to be more than that because they're seeing significant rare earths associated with this niobium, particularly on the margins of these intrusive complexes. This is the resource at Green. The Aileron resource is made up of three resources, one at Emily, one at Crane, and one at Green. Green's the largest. That's over 100 million tons. It's still very broadly drilled. Some of those drill sections are 400 m apart into 200 m apart. We're currently doing the infill into the high-grade starter pit areas within this resource.
As I said, it's shallow and still open at depth, We're seeing some pretty spectacular primary mineralization underneath the enriched material sitting on top of it, We're also seeing some interesting rare earths in the primary mineralization as well. We're working towards expanding that resource and upgrading the classifications and detailed drilling through those high-grade parts of the Green resource and other resources this calendar year. Really, what's important about the resources in the West Arunta is the growth trajectory. We increased the resource from one year of drilling by 54% last year across the project, We've got a 70,000 m drill program that's underway, We have confidence that these resources are going to continue to grow.
The metallurgy, while the resources are growing, we're doing a lot of the work in parallel as we progress into studies, the metallurgy is following the conventional processes that are used at the three existing mines Predominantly pyroxene with some columbite in these carbonatites. That's all going to happen in parallel with the exploration as we drill this thing out, increase the confidence, and grow the resource. This is the site layout. Another key milestone this year, we applied for a mining lease. That's the tenure position there. You can see those resources with Green, which I've shown you earlier. Emily, today we put out an announcement, some of the infill drilling. The first line of infill drilling from Emily came back a consistent drill line over about a kilometer full of high-grade niobium through to end of hole.
We'll be going back there shortly to test the depth extent of what we've found there. We have confidence that Emily is going to continue to grow, just like we saw Green last year. You can see up on a separate major structure to the north about 10 or 15 kilometers away, very sparsely drilled on that major structure, and that carbonatite complex is still open both east and west and we think is going to continue to grow as well. This little random hole out here out about 6 km east of Green, that's Joyce. We've been doing a lot more drilling there this year, and we'll be looking forward to reporting the results of that. We've been working on where's the best spot to put infrastructure and plant out here, with the engineers having very positive engagement with the traditional owners.
We're at the start of that process of finding where's the best spot to build what we think is going to be a long-term mining operation in Western Australia. A lot going on on the drilling front. There's a lot going on the metallurgy front. We're doing environmental baseline surveys, all the things that we're going to need to do that are going to be time-critical, happening in parallel with the exploration. Interestingly, also a lot of engagement with the market, because that is going to be crucial here. We know that the niobium market is not a huge market, and we need to be working on offtake early on in the piece. To that point, earlier this year, we signed an MOU with Echion and Switch Technologies. They're trialing a niobium anode battery in a hybrid truck in Western Australia at the moment.
One of the things that's held back niobium use in batteries has been concentration of supply. The West Arunta has a chance to change that, and one of the other things is finding a place where you can try and commercialize these batteries, and the Western Australian mining industry might be the spot that that happens. If that does occur, then the flow-on impacts into energy storage and other applications could be huge. It's a really interesting inflection time for niobium-based batteries. We're seeing that not just in Western Australia in the mining industry, but also with some of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world. That's just from earlier, about two weeks ago, one of the leading battery manufacturers in the world committing to a new cell for AI data centers using niobium. Who knows where this thing goes?
I generally am pretty agnostic about battery technologies because it changes pretty quickly, but there's a lot going on in the niobium space at the moment. This is where I get really excited anyway. This is an explorationist dream. You come out to a new area, there's no drill holes, there's extensive new data sets that have been gathered in geophysics. You get a really good look at where the structures are in multiple data sets. You find a lot of mineralization in a hurry. It's a world-class niobium province. We have confidence that we're going to find zones of rare earths. We're also seeing interesting copper and gold occurring along these key structures. There's 15 targets that we'll be testing this year. We test this with an air core rig. It's 10 to 20 m worth of cover. Drilling with a low-cost air core rig. It's flat.
It's in one of the world's best mining jurisdictions. There's not too many ticks that this doesn't have in the boxes that it doesn't tick as far as an exploration opportunity in Australia. The fact that there wasn't a drill hole here until five years ago is pretty remarkable. We're 30,000 m into a 70,000 m drill program this year. 50,000 m of it's going to be on regional, 20,000 m on the existing resources to enhance and grow those. There's some very busy geologists out there at the moment. Moving on to copper. Copper's been the one thing missing from Central Australia. There's lots of indications that there's potential for great deposits out there, but not a lot of success. We've been working towards this for a lot of years. We've got a series of 100%-owned projects in a pipeline, and we're working with South32.
The area that we're most excited and where we're operating at the moment, we've got a drill rig at Yeneena, drilling an eight-kilometer-long copper system that we found back in 2010. The project's been with joint venture partners for the last 12 years or thereabouts. We got it back last year, and I'll tell you about that, and we've also been drilling at Lamil. This is the first copper resource we put on the books. That's at Turee. It's a high-grade near-surface copper oxide resource. After we made that discovery, Antofagasta came on board, the Chilean copper major, and they drilled a series of these traverses. It gets a bit lost on that plan, but most of those drill traverses are 400 m apart, and this system has got half percent copper hits over eight kilometers in broad-based drilling.
It's already got a resource up at the northern part. We're seeing spectacular grades and indications that this system can produce grade, where you've got five meters at 2.5% copper, and it's got a splash of 10% copper in there in that drilling. We see this as one of the very rare copper opportunities globally in Western Australia. We're drilling there at the moment, and we'll have some first results back from that later in August from the pre-collars that we put down for the diamond drilling that's currently going on. We just finished a program at Lamil. It's 25 km to the northwest of Telfer. It's just off a major road. We just finished a program at the Elsa prospect.
Got some real focus around a couple of drill holes at the south there, which is 18 m, about half percent copper and 6 m at 1.7 g gold next to each other inside what looks like a really interesting breccia complex in this region that hosts some major mineral discoveries. We'll be going back there with some more drilling later this year, and we're also looking to test that deeper than what we've done to date. In parallel, we've got South32 about to kick off a drill program in the Northern Territory. They've got a 6,000 m drill program planned for the remainder of this year. We'll have a drill rig in the Northern Territory.
We're planning to have three drill rigs going in the West Arunta, and we've got a drill rig going in the Paterson Province all at the same time between now and the end of the year. The corporate snapshot. We're well cashed up. We've got AUD 27 million in the bank to pursue this program. We've got a fabulous board with Jon Hronsky and Peter Bewick leading the exploration team. We added Simon Hay this year. He's a project builder. He's a project operator, metallurgist. We're looking at transitioning the board as the Aileron project advances. We've got a terrific team who work incredibly hard, and they're probably dialed in via Starlink in the Paterson and things. Hello to them and thank you for all the hard work that you do because you're part of something special that's happening here. Research coverage. Argonaut and Euroz both cover us.
[Chiefley Securities John Bishop's done some fabulous work on what we're doing out there, so acknowledge to him and apologies for not putting him on the slide. Just to finish up. The deposit's already got scale, it's got grade, and it's growing, and it looks like it's going to be amenable to conventional treatment. The district is going to continue to throw up new discoveries, we believe, and we're at the forefront of that and we're not waiting around for that. We're investing what's going to be the best part of 70,000 m of drilling this year. We're doing all the project work in parallel, and I like to think to get that Aileron up and going. Then there's what I call a copper kicker.
I don't think there's any value for the copper being placed in our share price at the moment and I think there's no way you could put together the sort of copper portfolio that we've got that we're advancing in parallel with the work that we're doing in the West Arunta. Thank you very much for our time. The booth number's 32. If you want to learn anything more about our copper, we've got some great, some core from that and also from the West Arunta. Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks, Will