Thank you very much. It's great to be back here on the Sunshine Coast, caught up with a few people that I used to work with here underground at Gympie, would you believe? That was a gold mine back in the day. Speaking to Jason back to who some of you might know, it's amazing. We were reminiscing about it. I figured out, Jesus, that was like 24 years ago. I'm getting old. Great to see a few familiar faces still here. Today, great pleasure to really present on our company making Green Bay Copper-Gold Project in Newfoundland, and really go through the evolution of this opportunity and why we still think there's a lot of room to grow. Two years ago, I was presenting at this conference for Oteco.
We were talking about Pickle Crow, and I had to rush off this stage, run back to the hire car, get back to Brisbane because we were just finalizing the bid for Green Bay. We'd just done all the due diligence, done a couple of secret site visits. Reflecting back on that, less than two years that we've had this, a lot has changed for our company. When I presented here last time, our market cap was $70 million. As of a couple of days ago, we're up to $770 million. It has changed. There's still a lot of room to move in that. Share price has gone from $0.37 to $1.16. We've had a lot of growth in those two years. The drill rigs, there's a lot of work going on there at the moment. We went from zero rigs in October 2023 up to eight rigs now.
We see a direct correlation between value creation and drilling because you don't drill, you don't find. We've got a lot of people working hard on our sites at the moment, generating a lot of core, a lot of information. As we'll go through on this, the results have been spectacular. In the first year of ownership, as a result of that drilling, we've increased the resource by 20 million tons. We are now up to 60 million tons at a grade of 2% copper equivalent. It is getting bigger and it's still open. We're expecting to see a lot more resource growth. The land holding, when we bought this thing, we were on a postage stamp. We only had 56 square kilometers of ground. We've got a lot of conviction about the regional exploration potential in this district. We've increased it up to 346 square kilometers.
We will continue to grow that holding if we see ground that we like. We've locked up the key parts of the belt and VMSs, which is this style of mineralization, volcanogenic massive sulfides. They never occur by themselves. They're never orphans. There's always multiple VMSs around. We are very confident that we're going to find more out there. Just to start off, there's a couple of things that I'd really like you to take away from this. These are not historical assays. These aren't out of some database that someone drilled 50 years ago. These are unmined intersections that we've drilled in the last year and a half. There are some truly world-class intersections there. You can see we've got two styles of mineralization. One is a high-grade massive sulfide copper-gold channels that are on top.
Beneath it, you have this big bulk footwall zone that can be up to a couple of hundred meters wide, a couple of hundred meters vertical. We now know it has a strike of 2.3 kilometers. You can see some of the results there. You're getting super high-grade copper and gold. It is truly a copper-gold ore body. It's not a zinc ore body pretending to be copper hiding behind copper equivalents. It's actually copper and gold. There are no two better metals to be in at the moment. One of the reasons we pivoted into copper is because we really recognize the long-term supply-demand metrics. The reality is there is not enough copper in the world to meet the demands of future requirements, be it EVs, be it data centers, be it all the industrial needs reinvigorating the electrical grid, or the clean energy.
The reality is that there's decreasing grades in copper mines. The average grade of a copper mine is 0.5%. You can see some of those results we're getting. It's way above the average grade. Reduced discovery rates, time and cost of production. Those porphyries in South America can be over 20 years from discovery through to production. We can be in production in between two and three years, which is very quick compared to that. Mining is getting deeper. In a lot of places, social license is becoming more difficult. I'll talk about that a bit later. In Canada, we are not having a problem with that. The opportunity that we also saw here is there's not many opportunities like this from a development point of view in copper on the ASX or the TSX for that matter.
A lot of these sort of deposits that we've got are either owned by majors or mid-caps. There's very few opportunities for people to invest in pure copper gold play development stories. We see that we're in a unique position on the ASX for investors. Corporately, we're in a really good position. We're just in the process of completing a capital raise. We'll come out of that with $145 million Aussie in the bank. The great thing is we have no debts and we have no offtake agreement. That's going to be really important in terms of funding the rebuild of this operation. We're getting a lot of inbound interest from offtake partners, be it cheap debt, be it offers to invest. We're assessing all those things at the moment.
The point is that there are so many people that want this concentrate that we will be able to build this without a problem. We're dual listed on the ASX and the TSX and have a very strong institutional following. Our largest shareholder is BlackRock out of London. Regal Funds out of Sydney are at 5% as well. We have a real good mix of North American, Australian, and obviously with BlackRock, British investment within us. I won't spend too much time on board and management, but just rest assured it's a good team. There's a long track record of creating value for shareholders. We have built mines before. We're all very experienced in our background. I do want to spend a bit more time on the actual asset itself, which is what you guys are interested in.
Just in terms of where we sit, we're in the northern part of Newfoundland, which is an island off the coast of Canada, often referred to as the Tasmania of Canada. It's beautiful, very similar. The climate is a lot milder than a lot of other places in Canada because you are on the coast. It is a true tier one jurisdiction in any sense of the word. We have strong government support, strong community support, really skilled workforce there. A lot of Newfoundlanders actually go to the mainland Canada to work because there weren't many opportunities in the province. They want to come back to work. We've had no problems with the recruitment. We've got abundant hydropower on there. Very cheap, very clean energy available to us. One of the things that's really interesting is there's a lot of misconceptions about Canada, that it's really hard to get permitted.
In some places that's true. It's just like Australia. Every state is different. It's like dealing with a different country. It's easier to get a mine in Western Australia than Victoria, for example. Canada is no different. Newfoundland is an easy place to get permitted. To put that into perspective, to rebuild our mill to a near two- million- ton capacity, we have been released from our environmental assessment, which means we don't have to do any more environmental work. Working in partnership with the government, with the community, and the hard work of our team, that happened in just 45 days. Tell me anywhere in the world where that can happen. We have our environmental clearance to start working, which is just amazing in such a short period of time. Don't worry about Canada. Canada's galvanized against, you know, all the tariffs, all that sort of stuff.
They want to develop their projects. They realize that they want to make their economy strong, independent of the U.S. They are motivated to develop the projects. Under the mine itself, we've already got the real basics of a world-class deposit. The things that we've got here, a world-class resource, we're up to 60 million tons at 2% copper equivalent. That'll underpin large-scale future mining. Surface infrastructure, all up in this operation, there have been $250 million worth of infrastructure already sunk into it. That gives us a big head start in bringing this thing back online. We've got wastewater treatment plants, we've got workshops, we've got all those sort of things already in place. We're near communities. There's already an established underground mine there. It's not like we have to start from scratch. We can already get to 900 meters below surface. The ore body starts at 200 meters.
That gives us a massive head start with the drilling. We've got six rigs underground at the moment. The cost to drill out from underground is significantly cheaper than surface. The processing this was an operation, really small processing plant, like it was 500,000 tons per annum. To put it in perspective, it would take 120 years to process our current resource through that little tiny mill. I'm looking around the room and myself, I'm not going to be here in 120 years. We're a bit impatient. We're going to rebuild a mill on surface. That is what we have the environmental clearance to do at a much larger scale, a much larger capacity. The ore itself, chalcopyrite dominated, very simple metallurgy, simple flotation, no deleterious elements, and historically, really good recoveries. We're just finalizing for a part of our studies, the final network.
We're going to beat these recoveries based on the work that we've done. Really simple metallurgy. The concentrate we have access to a port that's only six kilometers from where we are. Historically, this went to Spain. It can go to Europe. We've been getting inbound from Japan, Korea, you name it. Once it's on the water, it floats a long way. We've got access to a port that's only six kilometers away and really good quality specs on the con. Now, just to show you what we've done in the last year and a half, which is pretty amazing. One of our investment theses is drilling to unlock value. As I said, we've got eight rigs on site, six underground, two on surface. This is what it looked like when we bought it.
It was a bit of a geological leap of faith because there was only one hole in front of the mine workings, and that was 102 meters at 1.7% copper equivalent. There was a fair indication that the ore body would continue. There are a lot of gaps in the historical data. What we've done since we've acquired it is nearly 100,000 meters of drilling. This is all the drilling that our team has done in the last year and a half. You can see we've significantly extended the ore body. That was possible because we did over two kilometers of development to get exploration drives into a position to extend the ore body. You can see the results. We've closed up gaps. We're finding more and more ore higher up in the mine as well. That infield drilling is critical. Now, what it looks like is this.
The deepest holes we have into the system, 25.8 meters at 5.1% copper and 12.4 meters at 6.8% copper equivalent. That's in that high-grade VMS zone. Both styles of mineralization continue. We're drilling the step-out holes at the moment. We've just completed that exploration drift. Now the rigs are up here drilling these extensional holes. Some of the feedback we've had is, oh yeah, the infield drilling. Okay, ho-hum, we've already factored that into the cost. What's really important is that we see there's three ways that this company is going to get re-rated. The first one is continued resource growth, and we're very confident that's going to happen. The second way is through wrapping economics around it and doing our mining studies. Just so people are clear, for the mining studies, we can only use the measured and indicated, the high confidence resource in the feasibility.
Our current resource is only 34% measured and indicated. We had a choice as a company in terms of our drill strategy. Do we go out with a feasibility based on only 34% of our resource and totally undervalue what we've got? I don't think so. Four out of our six rigs are focused on infield drilling. It's not the sexy stuff that gets people excited, but they'll be really excited when they see our feasibility study with a very long mine life based on up to 80% measured and indicated, which is the target that we're aiming for. It is critical to add value. The third way we're going to create value for this deposit is discovery. We've got resource growth, which you've just seen.
We've got the mining studies, which I've just talked about, and they'll be delivered towards the end of this year, early into the new year. The next one is the regional discovery. I mentioned at the start that these things occur in clusters. The Ming Mine, which is the main deposit that we just saw, is one of just eight historical mines on our ground that we've pulled together. The first target that we drilled was another one of these historic mines that was mined up until 1967, called Rambler Main Mine, and only mined at 200 meters below surface. It was another one of these high-grade VMSs, and the first two holes had thick intersections of high-grade gold. The copper-to-gold ratio had flicked around with copper in it, and we know that that's going to continue. Have a look at those orientations and bear that in mind.
You can see that there, right? When you actually put these in long section through that camp, what you're seeing is that's the Ming Mine. What we've got here is the deepest hole that we've drilled. We did downhole electromagnetic surveys. It shows up the ore bodies really well, and we've got a conductor 700 meters in front of our deepest drill hole. It is highly probable that that mineralization will continue. We know that resource growth will come. Have a look at where the drilling stops for this Rambler Main Mine compared to Ming. There is a lot of potential for that to grow. That is just three of the operations that we know. Today on the ASX, we just put out some of our regional geophysics results. What I want to show you is why I'm so excited about that.
What you've got here is that's the known mineralization in that orientation there. You can see that the airborne VTEM has picked it up very clearly. What we've also got is all these clusters in the same orientation that most of them haven't been drilled. The discovery potential here is absolutely huge. We're very confident that that's just not the bedrock giving us false readings because it actually cross-cuts the stratigraphy in the same orientation as Ming, Rambler Main, and East Mine. We're very confident that we're going to find more there. We currently have one of the surface rigs in this area here testing some of those anomalies. We've got one here testing this hill bog trend just to the south of Rambler Main Mine. Those results will be coming out in the next couple of months once we get the assays back and do the work.
Very excited about that. In terms of deliverables, we're looking at a resource update later this year. Like I said before, what you'll see in that resource update is a combination of continued growth in the overall resource. You'll see a big change. You'll see a big upgrade in the measured and indicated category. Our mining studies will be out. Our first one's probably at the PFS level, either late this year or very early in the new year, followed very quickly by a feasibility study. The surface drilling is going to be ongoing. We'll hopefully make more discoveries. Thanks for that. I'll be at the booth for the rest of the day. If anyone has any questions, feel free to come over and ask away. Thank you very much.
Thank you.