Next up, we've got Stuart Nicholls from Elixir Energy.
Thank you very much, everybody. Great to see you. Great to be back at NUSA. Back this time, representing Elixir Energy. That's coming off the back of eight years as the CEO and the Managing Director of Strike Energy, where we built a company that is producing 5% of West Australia's domestic energy. Totally Queensland-focused this time. The reason why we are focused here in Queensland is—there we go. We've got some charts. The reason why we've got over here and applying our wares in Queensland and the East Coast of Australia is that there is an ongoing energy crisis. You probably read a lot about that in the news. I think we've gone through almost a dozen Prime Ministers over our energy policies. There has been an absolute absence of energy leadership in this country for over a decade.
That has meant that the sector was heavily underinvested in. That means that the remaining reserves that we have of energy to supply the domestic market are absolutely inadequate. As a result, you can see the decline in the existing set of reserves. What is happening to price? Demand is rising. I fear for the children of the East Coast of Australia. We are growing up in a world that has an incredibly increasing demand of energy per capita. Yet energy prices are rising as a result of reducing supply. The last chart I want to talk about on the far right-hand side is an interesting one here in Queensland. I bet you did not know that 2% of Queenslanders work in the gas industry. They work across the coal seam, services industry, and as well as operating on Curtis Island.
The Queensland government is currently in AUD 150 billion of state debt. The new current government recognizes that they are at a crossroad. That crossroad is, do you lean in, develop your resources, collect your royalties, take the state forward and into a prosperous energy future? Or do you try to curtail things, as our federal government has been doing recently, and try to manage price? If you try to manage price, you will manage jobs. Jobs, payroll tax, you'll reduce investment, lower royalties, state debt rises. We find ourselves in the death spiral here in Queensland. What this government is doing is it's leaning in very hard. I've been operating in Western Australia, what is considered a very pro-resources state for the last decade. I find the attitudes here in Queensland are completely overwhelmingly positive to the development of its natural resources.
That is because sitting on its doorstep, under everyone's nose, has been a large gas resource that has been slowly getting chipped away by Shell. Now, Shell is not a small listed public company. They do not get up on stage at NUSA and talk about all the great things that they are doing. As a result, they have been working away on an area called the Taroom Trough, which is at the southern end of the Bowen Basin. When you look at the Taroom Trough and you look at the scale of the opportunity that is in front of you, this is an opportunity that can not only save the domestic market of the entire eastern seaboard, but it can also allow the export markets of Queensland's LNG industry to continue to prosper and pay those royalties to both the state and the federal government.
There's a bit of activity going on at the moment as we have come out of the back of this low investment world. And we're seeing investment in the Beetaloo Basin. It is remote. It's difficult. It's likely to be producing gas into the Northern Territory as a priority and a little bit offshore Victoria, which is incremental to what we have at the moment. It is not going to supply the size of the problem. However, the Taroom is fantastic because the Taroom is not only large in size, but it sits amongst a huge amount of gas infrastructure. Three or four different pipelines right next door to the Wallumbilla Gas Hub, which is where we trade our gas in the East Coast every day, sitting next door to 25 million tons of liquefaction capacity. So we know that there's going to be a major demand center there.
It's onshore. It's not offshore. Finally, we're bringing over some Northern American technologies. As you have seen, the energy prices in the U.S. are creating an economic boom over there. Finally, it's a lot more mature. That's because Shell's been going at its work. What we have assembled now at Elixir, I started about six months ago, is we've now got a team that has the experience of organically building gas companies. That is experience that is not very readily replicated in Australia. Very few people have taken small gas companies and turned them into bigger ones. Luckily, we have Chairman Richard Cotter, who successfully did that with QGC during the heady days of coal seam gas, and myself and my CFO and my COO, who's here, Kingsley. We were part of all that, the amazing story at Strike.
The company capitalized around AUD 60 million today with about AUD 9 million of cash on hand and an exciting program going on. Let's now talk about the Taroom Trough. This is the Taroom, so the bottom of the Bowen Basin. You've got Roma in the top left-hand corner there for those that know the local area. That's the Wallumbilla Gas Hub. You can see just how amazingly advantaged the location of the Taroom Trough is. Fortunately for the fast and plucky Elixir Energy, we have been able to move at speed to acquire, to win in bid round, and to earn in the largest acreage position in the Taroom Trough. Not only do we have 500,000 net acres in the Taroom Trough, but we also have all of the acreage that surrounds Shell.
You can see the area where there's been quite a few wells drilled and some lateral wells drilled recently. That is where Shell has spent hundreds of millions of dollars progressing these assets to resource and in time reserve classification. This will be the next major source of East Coast gas. We have managed to secure all of the acreage around that. Why is it important to have the acreage around Shell? This is a resource play. It's called a basin-centered gas play. It's an unconventional style of play. It's the application of North American drilling techniques and stimulation techniques in order to pull the gas out. We've had a lot easier or lower-cost gas to produce to date. We are now getting into the good stuff, which the Americans have got very, very good at and have made a lot cheaper.
That is why it is going to start to work in Australia today. We have also, due to the amount of drilling that has gone on in the area, been able to book 2.8 TCF. That is a large amount of gas by any stretch of the imagination. 2.8 TCF of independently certified 2C resources. We benefit from the fact that we sit in what I would consider a major rising tide here in the Taroom Trough. You speak to anybody in the industry and you ask them, "What is the most exciting part of the industry?" They will tell you, "It is the Taroom Trough." Why is that? Because it can move at scale and at speed. Here is the best geological and commercial analogue on the planet for what we are going to try and achieve. This is the Montney Formation in Canada.
The Montney, about 10 to 15 years ago, started production at about 800 million standard cubic feet a day. Within 10 years, that was producing 8 BCF a day. That's eight times the domestic gas requirements of the eastern seaboard. That is producing 8 BCF a day. It gave the owners of that acreage or the upstream tenements the confidence to build Canada's first LNG export terminal, which has just recently been commissioned, LNG Canada. Funnily enough, the people that own all of that acreage, they're producing that gas in Canada. Shell, Conoco, KOGAS, PETRONAS are also the people that have liquefaction capacity in Queensland. Shell owns a lot of the acreage in the Taroom Trough.
You can see that they've got the experience of taking these styles of plays, applying the right technological approach, and then producing significant and meaningful quantities of gas that it can not only underpin domestic markets, but it can also build liquefaction capacity off the back of it. It's a fantastic analogue there. The other thing that people don't quite understand is that this is a basin where AUD 350 billion of market cap is currently exploring, appraising, and operating. There is no other jurisdiction in Australia or any other basin in Australia where people are spending discretionary capital that have that amount of financial backing. It's obviously being led by Shell. They bought a brand new rig in from the United States. They have another appraisal campaign coming up. They're shooting 800 sq km of brand new 3D seismic. They're putting some of their wells back on long-term test.
As you'll hear from my colleague, Omega Oil and Gas, they're very, very busy. They're supported by a couple of fantastic resource investors in Ulwella and Tri Star, very famous investors in Santos is in there. We're in partnership with Santos in a few areas. You've even got Beach Energy, the Ryan Stokes-backed AUD 3 billion upstream oil and gas operator, talking about getting into the Taroom Trough, not actually even being there yet. That's how exciting it is for the industry as people are talking about getting into it before they are even there. When we look at what Shell is, our strategy effectively is sit in the bow wave of Shell and all their slipstream and do some very similar operations to what they do. Anything that Shell does makes me very inquisitive. Luckily, Shell has published some literature.
We know the areas of our permits which are prone to the qualities of reservoirs that we want to look at. You can see that in the dark yellow. We have our landman looking over the fence, taking photos of their results. They all look really fantastic. What we are going to do is we are going to be drilling a well right on the boundary called Lorelle 3. You can see it is 9 km away from the very best penetration in the Taroom Trough that got Shell so excited. We are going to unveil what got Shell so excited. In fact, Shell is so excited about our acreage, they are shooting 3D seismic into our acreage and over our acreage, as you can see in the map on the top left corner. This well is fantastically located.
It's not only less than 10 km from that very best penetration, but it's also about 13 km from the best flow rates that a well has produced in the Taroom Trough. We're fortunate. We're actually even getting to use Shell's rig. Shell's brought this brand new rig in. We're going to get to use it first. We're going to shake it down for them. We're going to drill the Lorelle 3 well, which we'll spud in January. We've also had Mr. Albanese put his hard earned on the table here. We've got an R&D advance finding. That means that we can get 42% of the total cost of the drill, analysis, core, stimulation, and testing of this well returned to us in a tax refund.
Plus the GST, it makes it about 48.5% total costs covered by Ozindustry through the work that we are doing in the analysis of the well. Let's talk about one other thing. Why we think this well is going to be the defining well of the Taroom Trough. Shell has the 3D seismic campaign. It sits over the existing area of drilling that they're doing. Now they want to go and shoot another great big 3D seismic campaign over the entire area. Why do they want to shoot more 3D? It's probably because they can see something in that seismic. We put our propeller hats on, and we start to look at the geophysics with a little bit more detail. You do things like a bit of quantitative interpretation. This is a spectral decomposition here.
What you can see is the reservoir units that are effectively a series of channel formations flying out into the Taroom Trough. You can even start to see areas of what we think is better quality reservoir in the brighter areas. When we map their results against that seismic, we can start to see, and work with me here, if we're looking through the screen, it looks like we're looking at a series of little river systems inside what is labeled as the dunk package. Little river systems that are channels that are going through the screen.
We have got the fortunate position of being able to drill the Lorelle 3 well within 9 km of one of these fantastic results at Dunk 1 that has a big booming reflector at Dunk level on 2023 vintage seismic, where you can see the same sort of reflectivity in the loop that we consider as the Dunk package. It geophysically looks very good. Is this another sweet spot that we have been able to find? We are going to drill that hole in January. We will see. The last one is we have just recently had some success. We drilled a well outside of the Taroom Trough, just on the edge called Diona 1. That well has been successfully drilled, cased, and suspended. We are coming back to stimulate and flow test that well early next year. Fortunately, it sits within 1,000 m of the pipeline above ground tie-in point.
This could be a path to a small and modest but initial production for Elixir Energy. It is very rare that a AUD 60 million company with 2.8 TCF of resources could have a P and an L, not just an L. This could be a defining and differentiated outcome for risk investment in oil and gas. When you ask yourself, what if you're going to walk away and you're going to buy some stock in a Taroom Trough operator? It is Elixir that is the leverage play into the Taroom Trough. We have the largest acreage position. We have got an enormous resource. We're going drilling, and we're going to prove that we have Shell-like quality acreage in January of next year. Thanks very much.