FireFly Metals has been one of the undisputed share market success stories of the past year, with the stock soaring on the back of its highly successful acquisition of the Green Bay Copper-Gold Project in Canada. Successful drilling has already delivered a 42% increase in the resource, with much more growth on the horizon. To tell us about FireFly's exciting growth strategy, please welcome Executive Director Mike Naylor.
Thanks, Nick. I'll be right back. Back later. Yep.
Thanks a lot for that, Nick, and thanks, everyone, for joining me to hear a bit more about FireFly Metals. I'll go straight into the presentation. The disclaimer and cautionary statements are available on the website. We released this presentation yesterday, so please go and read the disclaimers. Our flagship project, the Green Bay Copper-Gold Project, is in Newfoundland in Canada. It has a large resource of 59 million tonnes for 1.2 million tonnes of contained copper at a very high grade of 2% copper equivalent. We also have over AUD 250 million of infrastructure, which includes a processing plant, a decline, port, power, camp, and surface infrastructure. And we have a significant and immediate drilling campaign of 130,000 meters, of which we have drilled 40,000 meters already and increased the resource by 42%.
We often get asked - we've done this a couple of times before - what we look in a project.
We look at size and scale, which this project definitely has. Grade, 2% copper equivalent, is fantastic. And infrastructure. Like I said, we could turn this back on tomorrow, not that we would, but we have an abundance of infrastructure that sits on this mine site. We also have the Pickle Crow Gold Project, which has 2.8 million ounces at 7.2 grams per tonne. Spectacular grade there as well. We have announced to the market that we are doing a strategic review on Pickle Crow, and that could be anywhere between a sale, a joint venture, divestment, or even a spin-out or an IPO. But when we bought the Green Bay Copper Project over 18 months ago, we had a market cap of AUD 80 million based on the Pickle Crow Project alone.
Our expectation is we're going to get something significantly higher than that, given the gold price and the outlook for gold, as Grady stated. We have a proven track record. Our management team here, led by Steve Parsons, we've done this before, we have a great history of driving shareholder value and shareholder wealth. Our latest success was Bellevue Gold. We were there from the inception. Market cap was sort of AUD 3 million-4 million. Now it sits at over sort of AUD 1.5 billion-1.6 billion. And that was led by Steve Parsons and the team there. And this is our next venture. And we're really excited. We were not going to do another project again, but this project was too good for us to knock back and not get involved with. And I think, importantly for us, we've just completed a capital raising.
We have AUD 88 million in the bank.
We're absolutely well funded to Christmas next year, and we'll be able to deliver on that 90,000-meter drill program. I always think it's important for where we've come from for the past 18 months and where our location is, and then I'll show what exciting times we've got in the future. When we acquired this project, we had over AUD 100 million in debt. We have zero debt at the moment. I think, importantly, there's no streams. There's limited royalties to the local landholders. Very importantly, there's no offtake, which becomes exceptionally important when financing a project. Obviously, we had zero dollars in the bank when we acquired the project. Now we've got AUD 88 million to deliver on what is going to be a very aggressive exploration strategy. We had a market cap, as I said, was AUD 70 million.
We've almost 10x'd that at the moment, sitting at AUD 610 million market cap. Resource there of 39 million tonnes at a 2.1% grade or copper equivalent, and we've increased that by 42%, as stated in the past 12 months, which is an exceptional result for a copper project. When we purchased this project in Newfoundland, it had 58 sq km. We've acquired a number of regional exploration targets there that have old historic mines on there, which are truly exciting, and so now we've got sort of 328 sq km of ground. A little bit on the capital structure. We've got 563 million shares on issue. Board of Management holds 11%.
When we acquired this project, the board of management, we put in over AUD 5 million here to make sure we're backing the project and what we're going to achieve in the next sort of 24 to 36 months.
We are heavily institutionalized for an AUD 610 million market cap. We've got 58% institutionalized, which is fantastic, and that's led by BlackRock at 13% there. BlackRock followed us very early into Bellevue, and they've been great supporters of us through our FireFly journey as well. Importantly as well, we've got a number of research papers, and this is all public information that you can go have a look for yourself, but there's research out by Canaccord, Moelis, Euroz, Argonaut, Barrenjoey. Barrenjoey has a price target of AUD 1.60 on us, and RBC, a large global institutional bank, just covered us a few weeks ago with a price target of AUD 1.55, so certainly a lot of growth expectations from those large international banks. Just a bit about the team. Kevin Tomlinson and Jessie Liu-Ernsting there.
They're both Canadian-based. Kevin is also the Chair of Bellevue Gold.
So Steve, myself, and Kevin are still involved with Bellevue in a non-exec director perspective, but we see this as our next success. This team's led by Steve Parsons, who I introduced earlier, founder of Bellevue Gold, founder of Gryphon Minerals, but certainly knows how to spot a project and grow them really well. We recently had Renee Roberts join our board. She is the Chief Risk Officer at Judo Bank and also Director of Collingwood Football Club. And she's very, very talented on the risk. As we move into development, she's going to play a vital role in keeping us management honest. And then we've got Darren Cooke, who's just been implementing the strategy on ground and on the growth and the resource to exceptional perfectly. While we got involved in a copper company, we just saw there was a real lack of quality copper projects on the ASX.
They were either really small or high cost, or then so what we decided to do is have a good look at the copper project. The Ming Mine, which we bought, was only doing circa sort of 7 - 10,000 tonnes of contained copper per annum, and I think that's why a lot of the BD groups missed this opportunity that we picked up 18 months ago, but we see through our drilling program that there's a genuine opportunity for us to get sort of a 3 million - 3.5 million tonne type processing facility and come to market and be a very genuine sort of mid-scale copper producer, and with 59 million tonnes of copper already at 2% and a growth profile, which we are going to deliver and grow on substantially over the next 12 months, you'll see us move into these ranks really quickly.
So hopefully this video works now, but I think it's always good to show exactly where the project is, and it just gives you a good insight of the project. I was hoping that the music wasn't going to work, but here we are with the music. We think copper is an exciting place to be. I've just spent the past, I don't know, six months talking to offtake partners, and the hunger for copper and the copper coming is extraordinary. Here we are in Ming here in Maritime. This is a drive-in, drive-out workforce here and a very skilled labor force. Most of these people come from Ming's Bight here. And as you can see, there's a hydro power that runs right through the center of our property. Just to put hydro into perspective here, we're getting hydro power for about CAD 0.06 per kilowatt hour.
When you look at WA, they're getting close to three to four times that. We've got access to a port only five kilometers away. Our mine site's literally five kilometers over that hill there. That port access is super important because previously they were shipping over 130 kilometers away to get the product out. So that was one of the things we did to de-risk it. We have a fully operational mine going on here. We've advanced 750 meters of lateral development, and that's allowed us, and as I'll show in the slides later, how we've been able to grow that resource because we've been able to drill that out by getting drill cuddies in and doing 40,000 meters of drilling. So it's fully operational, fully permitted from that perspective.
You'll see from what I'm going to show, we're continuing to develop that decline at the moment and to drill it out. Here's the ore body. We've got two very distinct mineralisations sitting here. We've got a very high-grade VMS system that sits above a base load system that sits below it. This is probably average width, sort of 100-200 meters in width, so very long and broad. This was the previous boundary of the resource that we had here. This is where the sort of 39 million tonnes at 2.1% came from, or we do have a satellite deposit for 10 million tonnes outside this. We drilled 40,000 meters to increase the resource by 42%. All we did was this exploration drive. As I said, this is a fully functional mine.
We've got jumbos and diggers in there, and we drilled out here and added 42%, and we did that for only AUD 79 a tonne, so that's extraordinarily cheap. Just want to quickly go on this slide. Between this resource and last resource, we didn't change the cut-off grade. We wanted to compare apples with apples, but a one-gram cut-off to get close to 1.2 million tonnes of contained copper, and I think very importantly on this slide, over 40% of this resource is Measured and Indicated, so it is at a higher confidence category from a resource perspective, and 40% is a great start for us, and now to put that resource into perspective, just a few comps here that I think are really important to show how big our mine is or how big it's going to get as well.
We've got contained metal here of close to a million tons of contained copper. Foran, which probably a lot of you haven't heard of, is a TSX-listed company with a market cap of CAD 1.7 billion, and they've got contained copper of 516,000 tons there. And then you look into some of the Australian operations. Metals Acquisition Corp has 977,000 tons of contained copper. So we actually have more contained copper. They've got a market cap of AUD 1.7 billion, and it was acquired for AUD 1.5 billion. So you can see the value growth in what we're trying to achieve here as well. And then you're getting into the very large one from Evolution, Ernest Henry. Once again, they've got 1.3 million tons of contained copper.
And I think from what I'll show you in the next couple of slides, that's definitely a target that we'd like to get to.
They bought that for close to $2 billion as well. There's a lot of growth left in what we're going to do over the next 12-18 months. Just another, I guess, long section here. I just wanted to show here is the high-grade VMS section that sits at the top here. That is 6 million tons at 4.3% copper, an extraordinary grade there. What you'll see coming in the next sort of six months is a lot more drilling going into that VMS system. You're going to see a lot of those high-grade hits come out of our ASX announcements. Then obviously they will also drill into this lower footwall zone too, which you'll see some great results come out of. I think this is quite a powerful slide as well.
That's the drilling, the 40,000 meters that we just did to increase the resource by close to 42%. All we're doing is pushing this exploration drive out, and it is a 5.5 by 5.5 meter exploration drive, so it's not wasted money. We'll be using that for development and ore haulage eventually, and all we're doing is fan drilling out to test the 700 meters of strike extensions that sit here, so we extended this 750 meters. We're just drilling this another 700-750 meters, noting that the last intercept that sits at the bottom of this hole is about 61 meters at close to 1.8% copper. What also gives us great confidence that this ore body continues is the geophysics that we did down hole shows that the mineralization opens or extends for another 500 meters, so it's certainly not blind drilling.
It's not cut off, and geophysics are saying that it continues completely. I just want to show you the imagery here in 3D just quickly as well. Just on FireFly, hopefully this works, which is great. Here we are. As you can see, here's the Ming Mine and the 360 square kilometers that we've got here. We're one of the major tenement holders in the region now. Here's a Nugget Pond processing facility. That's a 500,000 tonne per annum processing plant that was producing the circa 10,000 tonnes per annum copper per annum previously. Here's the port that we got. That blue line is very important there. That's the hydro power that runs through CAD 0.06 per kilowatt hour, which is exceptionally cheap power. We have an abundance of surface infrastructure there from workshops, admin rooms, training rooms, etc. that sit here.
So here's the previous resource before we grow it, 1.2 kilometers in length. You can see there. There's the VMS that sits there in the gold at the top and the lower footwall zone that sits in the red. It's a very broad system that sits there. So we've added 750 meters to the strike. So we have added 750, and this is only in a 12-month period, remember, which is made up of the 59 million tonnes at 2% copper. So amazing that we've been able to get that so quickly. And I would expect rapid results to come in and two resource updates for next year. I think very importantly, we do have amazing infrastructure here through the decline. Majority of it is 5.5 by 5.5, so we can get ore up very simply, keep our CapEx down, and that the mineralization starts from 250 meters.
That's super important. Here's the high-grade VMS system that sits on top of the lower footwall zone. These are some of the most spectacular intercepts you'll see. There's 23 meters at 12% copper, 41% at 7.1% copper equivalent, 74 meters at 10.7% copper equivalent. They are truly just amazing intercepts that sit there. Here's the lower footwall zone. Once again, very broad, still very good grade intercepts that sit there, 18.2 at 2.2%, 41.1 at 2.3%. Oh, no, I lost it. It's okay. But I think very importantly, what I wanted to finish on that slide was with is that we're going to extend that mineralization by another 700 meters and fan drilling. The lowest intercept in that high-grade portion was 71 meters at 1.8% copper in that broad lower footwall zone. You'll see that that mineralization is continuing, and this is really a simple step-out drilling.
As much as the Steve and Gio's love to say that it's all them, I think an accountant could drill this one out quite simply, and you'll see that in the next 12 months. What excites us about the land holding that we've got as well? We actually have acquired all the land around Ming Mine here. There is like five or six historic mines that sit here, high-grade VMS systems. You look at just Rambler Mine in isolation, 25 meters at 4.7. It's got 6.9 at 14.2. These are only down to 100 meters. This is a genuine game changer. We've actually conducted geophysics over this area at the moment. We're just doing the interpretation. I'd expect some results to come out on that very shortly. A great land holding.
So this is just what we're going to come up with in the next 12 months. You're going to see results come out from the drill bit. We love driving value through the drill bit. We're going to be drilling and releasing results every sort of four to six weeks. And you can see from our ASX announcements that we stick to that. You're going to see two resource updates come out next year. You're going to see some geophysics and some exploration on some of those regional targets because we are going to dedicate a rig to that as well. So with four drill rigs turning, news flow, there's certainly going to be a lot of catalyst-rich announcements that come out next year. So just in conclusion, we do have a game-changing, catalyst-rich, high-grade quality copper project on the ASX. It's a fully operational mine.
It's got grade, it's got infrastructure, and it's got scale. And what you're going to see over the next 12 months is this grow very rapidly. And as far as Pickle Crow goes, stand by for an announcement on that on Q1. Thank you.