Next up on the stage is Darren Cooke, CEO at FireFly Metals. Darren has been with FireFly since the company's transformational acquisition of the Green Bay Copper-Gold Project in 2023. The company is now regarded as a leading high-grade North American copper developer. By way of background, Darren is a geologist with significant experience in the gold and base metals industry in Australia and North America, spanning regional and near mine exploration, operational geology, engineering planning, and corporate development. Darren has a strong track record of discovery and delivering resource growth during his time working at numerous world-class deposits. Prior to joining FireFly, Darren spent six years as part of the BD team at Northern Star that completed significant M&A transactions that saw the company transform into a globally significant gold business. Over to you, Darren. Thank you.
Thanks, Christian. As someone who spent 10 years living in Kalgoorlie, it's an absolute privilege to be back here to present the FireFly story because it is a very compelling story. This company has transformed into something fairly special through the acquisition of our Green Bay Copper-Gold Project. The Green Bay Copper-Gold Project is without doubt a company-making asset. It's high-grade copper in a Tier 1 jurisdiction, and we got it for a song. During my time with Northern Star and back into the Barrick days when we sold the Kalgoorlie assets to Northern Star, Bill used to talk about generational opportunity to buy assets that were distressed, and he's built a multi-billion dollar company out of it. This is one of those opportunities, and it is a generational opportunity that we never thought we'd see again. I don't think we will in the copper space.
In terms of BD and transformative acquisitions, this has to rank up there, and during this presentation, I'll explain very clearly why we're so bullish. Why the transition into copper? We're very bullish on the macro landscape in terms of copper supply demand, and I know at this particular conference there's been a lot of talk about net zero and whether that can be achieved or not. The key mineral to achieving net zero is copper, because you can have all the batteries you want, but without copper to move the energy, it's just a chemistry set, and there is not enough copper in the world to go around. Even without fully achieving net zero, we're going to need a lot more copper in the world for data centers, for transmission of electricity, to replace aging infrastructure.
We see a huge amount of demand in the copper world, and the reality of copper is that the discoveries are declining. We're not seeing the same scale of discoveries as we have in the past. The grades of those discoveries are getting lower, and the existing mines, there's been more issues with social licensing in some of the historical key producers of copper, such as Panama. We are very bullish on copper moving forward. One of the questions I always get asked is, okay, you're in Canada, what impact is the U.S. tariffs going to have on you? My response to that would be none, because we are not going to be sending this product to the U.S. We have numerous people from Europe, Asia, and Canada looking to get our concentrate, so we're not seeing any impact from U.S. tariffs at this point in time.
We still see the demand for copper being very strong in coming years. To talk through some of the transformation of the company in that short period of time, we acquired the Green Bay Copper-Gold Project in October 2023. When we did the transaction, which was $65 million, our market cap was $70 million, and at the end of July, we were up to $720 million. In less than two years, we've gone from $70 million to $720 million, and I can assure our investors there's still a long way to go in that share price with what we've got. Share price went from $0.37 at the time of the transaction up to $1.09 towards the end of July. Drilling, you know, our key mantra is, you know, you don't drill, you don't find, and the way we generate value is through the drill bit.
We've gone from no drill rigs, 202,000 m of historic drilling, to eight drill rigs on site now. There's a direct correlation between creating value and the number of drill rigs, and we've done 100,000 m of drilling in that period of time since ownership. That is producing huge results for us, and that's driven the growth of the company and will continue to do so. The resource on the back of that drilling has grown by about 20 million tons while still maintaining the grade, and that resource is still open and will continue to grow. The land holding, and that's really interesting. When we bought this asset, it was a postage stamp.
We only had 56 square kilometers of ground, and we truly believe in exploration potential regionally. These VMS deposits, volcanogenic massive sulfide mineralization for those non-geologists out there, they rarely occur as often as they always occur in clusters. One of the first things we've done is expand the footprint of our ground, and we're up to 346 sq km. As I take you through this presentation, you'll understand that that will be a major part of our growth strategy moving forward. Just into some of the corporate stuff, as we've seen with some of the other juniors, they have struggled to get institutional investment, and we have got a very, very strong following. Over 60% institutional backing headlined by BlackRock and Regal Funds Management out of Sydney. To have that sort of register at our stage is very good.
We are dual-listed on the TSX as well, so we have a foot in both camps. The key thing with us is no debt, no streams, no offtake agreement, which is going to be critical in terms of building this project. We're very well funded to execute with about $145 million worth of cash and liquid investments available to do this work. We're fully funded right through beyond final investment decision. On the board and management front, I won't spend too much time on this, but it is a team that's very experienced, has a long track record of creating value for shareholders. I won't spend much time because I know a lot of people in the room are familiar with this group of people. One thing I really did want to highlight to people is our management team on the ground.
We really have established a world-class team with lots of experience from big companies, Northern Star through Goldfields, through Asenco. We've got some of the leading experts in permitting, which has been critical in us achieving our timelines, and a lot of good local people on the ground in Newfoundland. The key thing that I believe in is that this is the team that's going to see us through to construction. Too many times in my career, I've seen a study team roll in, produce numbers, disappear, and leave it for someone else to achieve what's being rolled out. This is the team we're building to take this project forward. Just to introduce the geology, there's two styles of mineralization here. We have a high-grade upper zone of massive sulfide, and you can see some of those results there.
This just reaffirms my thoughts that this is a company-making asset. These are not drill holes from some historical database that were drilled 20 years ago. These are our drill holes that were drilled in the last year and a half. I must say, I haven't seen numbers in that upper VMS zone since the discovery of the Grueser. We see this as a platform for us to really grow this company into something pretty special. With the Grueser, they never found more than what they had. They never found a big bulk zone. What we've got underlying that massive sulfide are these big broad stringer zones that are amenable to bulk mining. That's going to form the baseload of what we produce moving forward, supplemented by the high-grade upper copper gold-rich VMS.
When we screen the various deposits around the world through the various S&P data sets, this is a very rare investment opportunity. You know, when you look at how many are out there, copper and gold, this is not a zinc ore body pretending to be a copper ore body. This is genuinely copper and gold. There's very few of them in Tier 1 jurisdictions. Moving further down the page, you're further reduced with companies that are public and companies or assets that have had over $100 million invested in it. One of the reasons we're going to make this a low-cost startup and also a very quick startup is because we can leverage the existing infrastructure that's there. We've had $250 million spent on this project already, and that will really fast-track the development for us. You can see we're down to 57.
When you look at copper projects with copper grades above 1.5% and then owned by developers and not producers, there's only three in the world that we can come across that meet all that criteria. One's New World, and we've just seen a bidding war erupt for that. You've got Trilogy, and then you've got us at Green Bay. This is a very rare project. When you look at copper production in 2024, this is ASX-listed assets. There are very few opportunities for investors to get into the copper production landscape into a junior on the ASX. I can repeat this slide on the TSX. We think we're a unique investment opportunity for people out there. There's not many deposits of this grade and this scale available for investors to put their money into.
Into the asset itself, we're in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which is an island off the East Coast of Canada. I quite often refer to it as the Tasmania of Canada. It's got a lot of similarities in many ways. The great thing for us is that we have very, very strong government support. The infrastructure is fantastic. We have low-cost hydropower through our project, available on the door, which really gives us an advantage in terms of what we're moving forward to with the productivity. I think how good this province is has recently been recognized in the latest Fraser Institute results. For government policy, Newfoundland is ranked sixth in the world out of 82. As much as it hates me to say it, it's a better place to do business than Western Australia right now.
The ratings for Western Australia have dropped to 17 in that same period of time. Hopefully, our politicians really do rectify that and understand that we are losing pace with the rest of the world in terms of the government support, the permitting, and business is getting harder in Australia. It's something that we haven't had to deal with in Newfoundland. We've had 100% community and government support. We already have the key ingredients of a major copper mine in place, and it is the rare combination of scale and grade. The current resource sits at about 60 million tons at about 3% copper equivalent. It's still open. It will still grow. We've got many drill rigs on site now testing the extensions of this deposit. That's going to underpin a very long mine life and very significant copper production on the world scale.
We've inherited a lot of surface infrastructure. The way I see that is it's dollars we do not have to spend in the ground. We've already got wastewater treatment plants, workshops, all the core logging facilities, offices, camps. It is already there. That will really speed up our development. We've already got access to underground. We've got a decline and a shaft there already. We can drive our trucks down 900 m below surface, even though the ore body already starts at 200 m. That underground infrastructure gives us the opportunity to drill from underground and demonstrate a very long mine life. The processing and concentrate, very simple in terms of its metallurgy, extremely simple, just a simple float. It's a clean ore. There's no deleterious elements. We just put out some met test work results, and we can get our copper recoveries up to 98%.
What's important with the current work that we've done on the metallurgy is we can get the gold recovery up to 85%. Historically, through the small scale 500,000 ton per annum plant, they're only getting 66% recovery in the gold. We've got 550,000 ounces of gold in our current resources of byproduct. That will have a massive impact on the economics of our project moving forward. To wrap it all up, I was talking before about what a great jurisdiction Newfoundland is. We got our environmental approvals or released from our further environmental studies to build our startup plant of 1.8 million tons per annum in just 45 days. When we went into Canada, people were telling us, oh, that's a hard place to get permitted.
It's not when you have a willing government, you do the right things, you engage with the communities, and you show that you're corporately responsible. That has been an amazing process. I really like to thank the people in the communities that we work in for their support and also the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Our plan is to start off at 1.8. As we're discovering more and more copper, we will expand that eventually and upscale the project with further approvals. Back to the theme of creating value through the drill bit, this is what we bought in October 2023. You can see there was 202,000 m of drilling. It was a geological leap of faith because we only had one drill hole in front of us, but that was 102 m at 1.7% copper.
What we have done, this is the drilling that FireFly Metals has done in the last year and a half. You can see we've focused on significantly expanding that resource down plunge and growing the ore body and also infilling the upper parts of the mine. We've got ore that starts up 200 m below surface. We've infilled this area where we're getting a lot of ore, and we're significantly growing there. The way we did that was by investing in mining development. That's one thing we did really well at Northern Star was putting in exploration development because getting the drills in position to expand the ore bodies is critical to building a mine plan. All up, we've done over 2,000 m of development. We've mined that exploration drive. Currently, we are drilling further out in front of that resource.
We have an EM plate out there that extends it for a further 700 m beyond that last drill hole. You can see that still had 12.4 m in that upper VMS at 6.8% copper. We know that the ore body will continue. We will see continued resource growth. Part of the reason we've been doing a lot of this infill drilling is so we can incorporate that into our mining studies and really significantly increase the amount of measured and indicated. As those people know, when you do feasibility studies, you can only use M&I in reserves. You cannot use the inferred material. By dedicating four of our six underground rigs to infill drilling, we're creating significant value by getting reserves up and then showing the mine plan and the pathway to really low cost and long life production of copper.
That deposit there is what we call Ming, and that's an old historical mine. They started mining that in the 1970s, and obviously, the ore body is still open and growing. One of the things that really gets us excited is the exploration potential. As I mentioned before, these deposits rarely occur as orphans. They are always happening in clusters. You get a camp of VMS deposits, not just one or two, because those conditions are very common geologically in the same spot. You can see here some of our surface map of the geology. Keep an eye on this northeast orientation.
Our Ming deposit has a strike of over 3 km, which, by the way, is very extensive for a VMS system, and it strikes to the northeast. There are two other historic mines there that were mined in the 1960s and 1970s, and they didn't stop because they ran out of ore. They stopped because the commodity prices at the day, and they discovered copper, and some of those were a bit more gold-rich, and they decided to go and chase the copper instead of the gold. We've already put a couple of drill holes down in front of the Rambler Main Mine, and we've got some pretty impressive results. You can see there 10 m at 5.7 g per ton gold, 1.3% copper, and also 12.9 m at 4.2 g per ton gold and 0.5% copper.
When you plot that on the same sort of scale as Ming, you can see the main deposit that we got there, the upper VMS, the broad footwall zone that's amenable for bulk scale mining, how far our EM anomaly extends, where our deepest holes are in Ming. They haven't drilled below that where we put our holes in, so we don't know what that's going to develop in. It's still open. We have one surface rig up there drilling it out at the moment. On the regional package during the introduction, I said we've expanded our land holding from 56 sq km up to 346 sq km, and most of this ground was ground that we've acquired. One of the key tools to making discoveries in this district is geophysics. They show up very well. These ore bodies show up very well using geophysics.
We've flown the whole lease using an electrical method called VTEM. We've done the magnetic surveys again, and we have really changed the geological map in this area. What you can see on this map is the magnetics as a base, and each one of those dots is a geophysical anomaly, a conductive anomaly that has rocks in it that conduct a lot more electricity than what you see in the background rocks. You can see the existing deposits there. We've got the Ming mine there where we've got our 60 million ton resource, that Rambler Main mine where we've got those big hits that are still open. Then you've got another mine called East Mine, and they all trend in that northeast orientation.
When we look at our geophysical results undercover without drill holes, we have a plethora of other results there that look exactly the same as the known mineralization. We currently have one of our surface rigs down at the very south testing that out, and those results will be in in coming months. We know that because of that orientation, it's not just rock type that it's there. It's got to be some sort of sulfide that's producing that reaction. We're really hopeful that in some of those cases, it's going to be copper and we'll make another big discovery regionally. The other part of our growth strategy is also demonstrating the pathway production, and we're very, very advanced in our study work that's going on in the moment. You'll see the first studies coming out early in the new year.
We've engaged some of the leading consultants in the industry to get us through this study work. All I can say is watch this space for those results because I think people will be really surprised by the sort of level of NPVs that this project can potentially generate. That study work will be coming out early in the new year following a resource update that we're planning in October, November. The timeline, as I said, really does emphasize the amount of work that our team's done on the ground. It's been a brilliant execution of the strategy, and that will continue. The key things for us coming up is our resource update, continuing with the drilling, six rigs underground, two rigs on surface, even potential there for a third surface drill rig based on the results that we're seeing. The discovery work will continue.
We're still looking at the resource update towards the end of this year, studies coming out, and we're looking at investment decision by the middle of 2026. We're being inundated with offtakers and partners wanting to get involved in this project, and that will all be happening in the background in the next few months. I'd just like to thank everyone for their attendance and thank the organizers of Diggers & Dealers. Great conference as usual. For further information, please look at the presentation on our website. Thank you very much.
Thanks, thanks Darren.