All right, thank you very much, and it's great to be here back in Colorado to tell the FireFly Metals story, and it's been quite an amazing journey over the last couple of years. Three pages of disclaimers, which obviously means that we're TSX and ASX listed, more compliance than you could poke a stick at, but basically, our key asset that we have here is the Green Bay Copper-Gold Project in Newfoundland. It's a large-scale, high-grade copper and gold VMS-style deposit, and Pickle Crow was our primary focus historically, and we've been pretty clear on that, that it is a value creation opportunity for our current shareholders.
We're running a process, and that is nearing its conclusion, and you can expect to see some news on that in the next month or two, but things are going very well with that process, and we do expect to generate quite a bit of value for our shareholders. So one of the reasons that we pivoted from the gold into the copper was because we really strongly believe in the macroeconomic thematics of copper, and I think that's validated quite a bit by the fact that a lot of the gold companies that are here are actually looking to add copper to their portfolio. So we actually see a large demand coming up, and the reality is in the copper space, these deposits are finding harder, or it's getting harder and harder to find these deposits.
You're seeing decreasing grades, reduced discovery rates, increased capital intensity, and the mining's getting a lot deeper, and social license is becoming a big issue as well. So this deposit that we have in Newfoundland is one of the rare things that we can get into production very quickly for very low capital, and it's very high grade. It's more than five times the average grade of a porphyry deposit being a VMS, and this is genuinely a copper and gold deposit. It's not a zinc deposit hiding behind metal equivalents pretending to be copper; it's actually copper and gold. So look, the journey from the company's been huge. We've gone from a market cap of AUD 70 million to AUD 820 million in less than two years.
Share prices performed well, obviously, over that period of time, but one of the things that we really believe in is creating value with the drill bit, and we've currently got eight rigs on site drilling at the moment. We have six underground and two on surface, and that's one of the most intense drill campaigns that's probably happening in North America at the moment. The resource, in the first year of owning this asset, we've added 20 million tonnes to the resource while still maintaining the grade at around that 2% Copper Equivalent mark, so that's been going very well. We are doing another resource update at the moment, and that'll come out most likely in early November, and then the land holding, one of the key swing factors for our company is the regional exploration potential.
So we started out with a postage stamp of about 56 sq km and made a really conscious effort to tie up the key parts of the stratigraphy since we arrived before people understood what we were onto. So we've increased it up to nearly 350 sq km of ground, and we'll go through some of that. Just very quickly, corporately, we're very well funded. We've just completed a capital raise, AUD 145 million in the bank, and the great thing is there's no offtake on this, so that provides a non-dilutive funding option potentially to rebuild this. There's no streams and no debt within the company, and very strong institutional support, 67% institutional support ownership, and headlined by BlackRock out of London at 13%.
Board and Management, I won't spend too much time on this, but it's a pretty well-known group in Australia, and we've generated a lot of value for a lot of our shareholders over previous iterations of things that we've worked on, be it Bellevue, Gryphon, Northern Star. There's a lot of experience of building mines in this group, but the key takeaway is there's behind the board and senior management, there's a large team of mine builders that have had a lot of experience with some of the best companies that can take this project forward to construction and operation. So look, I just thought I'd introduce the geology of the deposit by showing you some of the assay results, and these aren't assay results that are out of some historical database. This is stuff that we've drilled in the last two years, and it's a VMS system.
You've got two main styles of mineralization. On the surface, you've got a, or in the upper part of the deposit, you've got multiple channels of sulfide, dominantly chalcopyrite and pyrite, and very, very high-grade copper and gold, and you can see some of those results there are quite spectacular, where you're getting, in some cases, over 12% copper equivalent, and it is, like I said, very high-grade copper, very high-grade gold as well. Beneath that, you have a broad stringer zone or a stockwork zone that would have formed just below the seafloor that is really amenable to bulk mining. This thing's a couple of hundred meters wide, a couple of hundred meters vertically, and then we now know that that's got a strike of over 2.6 km.
These are wispy copper veinlets, and they bulk out to being averaging around the 2% copper mark, so really amenable to bulk mining. We're looking at something like transverse longhole open stoping to extract a lot of tons out of this deposit. I won't spend too much time on this because it's a pretty short presentation, but look, key takeaway is what people in this room know: there is a real lack of quality copper projects out there, particularly when you look at stuff that's in the hands of juniors and not in the hands of majors already producing developed companies. To meet this criteria, where there's already been hundreds of millions of dollars invested over 1.5% grade held by public companies and in Tier 1 jurisdictions, we're pretty much the last man standing by that criteria.
You can see here some of the production of the assets on the ASX and the TSX, and there really is a lack of that mid-tier sort of copper producers, so the 50,000 tonnes and above, and that's the niche that we're aiming to fill as the scale of this deposit becomes evident. For those that don't know, Newfoundland, it's a brilliant part of the world. The government has been incredibly supportive, the community's been incredibly supportive, and that's really demonstrated in the latest Fraser Institute rankings. Newfoundland for policy is in top six globally, and unfortunately, my home state of Western Australia has dropped back to 17, and I could understand why, because it has been very easy to operate in Newfoundland to the point where I just saw on the previous presentation that the EA timeline's 4.6 years, two years.
We've done our initial assessment in the provincial system, and we've had our EA released in 45 days, and that is unheard of in Canada. It shows the level of support from the community and the government. The thing I want to make clear to people is this is already a mine, so it's not a greenfields target. It's not going to require as much capital to restart this operation. It's underpinned by a really large-scale resource, but currently it's 60 million tonnes at the 2% copper equivalent mark, and that will grow in the resource update that will be coming out. That will increase, so it's pretty rare to see VMS-style mineralization with that scale of resource. It is an elephant. It's not a normal VMS system. It's far more extensive.
We've inherited surface and underground infrastructure, so the way I see that, money we don't have to spend to get it going again. There's already wastewater treatment plants, workshops, offices on the surface, heaters, all that stuff is there ready to go, and there is an operational underground mine there. We can drive down to 950 m below surface already, so you think of the time and the cost of getting down to 950 m below surface gives us a massive head start. The ore that comes out of this deposit is very clean.
There's been a track record of production that we can go back to to demonstrate that, and some metallurgical test works that we put out in August that show we can now get recoveries up to 98% on the copper and 85% on the gold, so it produces a high-quality concentrate, and it is certainly in demand globally given the scarcity of good quality copper concentrates at the moment. And then, as I mentioned before, we've already been released from our environmental assessment in just 45 days, so we'll be in a position to start early works before the end of this year, which is amazing when you think about a project of the scale that we're looking at. Just to demonstrate the amount of work that's gone on, this is the cross-section or long-section of the ore body when we bought it in October 2023, total of 200,000 m.
You can see the white is the development, the yellow is the existing shaft, the gold is the upper really high-grade massive sulfides, and the lower red part are that bulk stockwork zone of copper. And we took a bit of a leap of faith because there was only one drill hole apparent and a wedge off that 460 m down plunge of the development, but that had 102 m at 1.7% copper in it, so given the geological continuity, we were very confident that it was going to continue. And rather than restarting production, we decided to halt production, really put in exploration development, and position the drill rigs to expand this deposit out.
We've drilled 115,000 m in the first two years from underground, and you can see we've done over 2 km of development to position those drill rigs to extend the ore body, and so far we've extended the ore body by more than 600 m down plunge, and the ore body's continuing to get better as we go down. We're seeing the grades increase, and we have a down-hole EM anomaly from that deepest hole that is in this particular picture that extends more than 700 m down plunge of that deep drill hole, so we know the ore body is likely to continue. You can see there that the intersections in the deepest hole are pretty spectacular. That's the massive sulfide style mineralization. We are also getting that broad footwall zone continuing on, so it's been absolutely fantastic for us.
In terms of what we're doing to really revitalize the project, we're resetting the cost base. We're building a new mill on site, changing the mining methods. That reduces the haulage cost, that reduces the mining cost and the milling cost, and we've got access to a port that's only 6 km away from the mine. Historically, they were trucking at 140 km by road, and that was adding AUD 34 a tonne to the cost, so the conclusion we came to when we did due diligence on this is this is a world-class ore body. There was a mismatch between the scale of the existing infrastructure and what the ore body can do, so we're resetting the base by building the new infrastructure, changing mining methods. But as we all know, for those geologists in the room, these things rarely occur as orphans. They're never alone.
There's always clusters of these VMS-style deposits, and on that package of ground that we've assembled, there's eight historical mines, VMS mines that have been mined, and within 2 km of the Ming Mine, which is where the 60 million tonne resource mostly sits, is Rambler Main Mine and the East Mine, and we drilled a hole down plunge of the Rambler Main Mine. That was only mined to 200 m below surface, and we've already got economically mineralized zones there, 12.9 m at 4 g gold and 0.5% copper, and another spectacular hole of true thickness, 10 m at nearly 6 g gold and 1.3% copper. So that's 2 km away. We know that ore body continues.
You look at the long section to put it into perspective. This is far larger than a typical VMS, and you can see the Ming Mine goes down now over 3 km . There's no drilling beneath our current drill holes, so we just don't know how far it's going to go down. We don't know whether we're going to find another one of these bulk footwall zones, and we've got a rig on surface testing that particular deposit as we speak. Now, being a VMS-style deposit and chalcopyrite dominated, geophysics works really well.
This is the first time that this land package has actually been consolidated by one owner, and I think the best work that had been done there previously was back in the 1980s and 1990s, and companies like Noranda were kicking around in the district, and you think back to how much your electronic devices have changed since the 1980s and 1990s, geophysics is no different, and the technology's come a long way. So this is the first modern geophysical program that's been done over the district, and what you're seeing here is the basemap, the magnetics, and all of those dots are conductive anomalies. We used a method called VTEM to check it out and see what was beneath the surface.
Those white boxes are the known mineralization, and you can see that trend towards the northeast picks up the mineralization really well, but what we're finding really exciting is that there's all these other conductive trends in the same orientation that have not been drill tested, and they cross-cut the stratigraphy, and therefore it's unlikely to be from a bedrock. It's likely to be sulfide. They're likely to be VMS horizons. It's just a question now of what style of sulfide is going to be in them, so we have another one of our surface rigs out there systematically testing those anomalies, and we'll see results coming in for that fairly quickly. The other thing that our investors can expect is our mining studies.
There's a hell of a lot of work going on in the background at the moment on them, and we've got some really world-class consultants leading the charge on that. We will see what we're terming a PEA Plus coming out in the first quarter of next year, and that will include quite a bit of measured and indicated in it, so it'll be a very, very robust study coming out. So look, key catalysts for us, just to wrap it up, there's going to be more drill results coming out. We're not going to put out drill results every week or two because the market will get bored, but as things come back, we will put the drill results out. Resource update later this year, and then the mining studies will start rolling out from the first quarter of the year, so any questions, please chase us around.
We're going to be here all the way through the conference, and thank you for your time.
Thank you, Darren.