Our next presenter is Darren Cooke, Chief Executive Officer of FireFly Metals. Darren is a geologist with over 26 years experience and has previously held senior positions in global majors including Barrick, Newmont, and Northern Star Resources. Darren has had extensive gold industry experience in Australia and North America, spanning regional and near mine exploration, operational geology, long-term planning, and corporate development. He has a strong record of discovery and delivering resource growth during his time working at a series of world-class deposits.
All right. Thank you very much, and it's a privilege to be back here at home in Kalgoorlie to present the FireFly story, which has been absolutely sensational in terms of the rate at which it's developed and will continue to develop. Just as an introduction, a few of the investment highlights. This is a world-class high-grade copper gold VMS asset in Canada. It's in the province of Newfoundland, which is off the East Coast. It's an island very similar to Tasmania. It's a beautiful part of the world. Our resource is up to 80 million tons, but what sets this apart is the grade, which is more than 2% copper equivalent. Unlike a lot of other copper deposits, we have a pathway to very rapid near-term copper production. We have great exploration potential in the district, and we'll talk through a bit about that later in the presentation.
It is truly a Tier 1 jurisdiction in every sense of the word. We hear the term Tier 1 jurisdiction bandied around quite a bit, but this is genuinely a great place to operate, great team, and we have a very, very strong financial position and a healthy balance sheet. It's a great time to have a copper development asset and to be close to being a copper producer. There's a real scarcity of high-grade, new production copper assets globally in the world. What we're seeing is jurisdictional risk increasing, particularly in South America. We're seeing the exploration shortfall, as you can see from this chart. Projected copper demand is far higher than the rate at which we're discovering and bringing new mines online. The new mines that are being brought online and the expansions that are being undertaken at the moment are low grade.
They're low-grade porphyries. They are very capitally intensive and take a long time to bring online. When I say a long time to bring online, it can be more than 20 years from discovery to producing copper. One of the advantages we really have at Green Bay is that we will be producing copper likely within the next three years. It's a fantastic opportunity to move into the realm of copper production. What you'll see from this presentation is that we believe this is a company-making asset. Now, I know everyone's going to hear a lot of presentations over the next few days, and they're all going to start to blur into each other, but there's just three key takeaways that I want you to remember from this presentation and what makes FireFly really stand out. The first thing is the scale. All right?
When you take out all the byproducts, we genuinely have a copper and gold ore body. Our resource is 1.4 million tons of contained copper with 1.1 million ounces of gold as a byproduct. If you want copper exposure, what this chart shows is our resource and just the copper component of it. What people really have failed to recognize is that we actually have more copper in our resource than Ernest Henry. We have more copper in our resource than MAC, in Metals Acquisition, and Cobar. All right? We have a lot more copper in there than a company called Foran, who may not be as well known in Australia, but certainly is in Canadian. It was the poster child of base metal development stories.
We've got more than twice the amount of copper in our resource than what they do at Foran, and they've just been taken out for over AUD 3 billion. We have scale, all right, compared to a lot of other very, very well-known copper deposits. The second point I'd like you to remember is that we have world-class intersections and very, very high grades, and that's probably one of the most distinguishing features of the deposit that we've got. I'll just take you through a couple of the mineralization styles. Firstly, we have an upper massive sulfide, and you can see those results there, 10.7 m at 12.2% copper equivalent, 26 m at 8.2%, for example. We routinely get grades in this zone over 10% copper equivalent.
I've said this in a number of presentations that I've given, but I don't think there's been intersections like this in the copper space anywhere on the ASX since DeGrussa was discovered by Sandfire. We know that was a company making asset for those guys. We feel similarly that this is going to be a company making asset for FireFly. We have the massive sulfide up on top, and beneath that, we have a broad footwall stringer zone. Instead of being massive sulfides, we have individual veinlets of copper that bulk out into incredible thicknesses and an incredible volume of rock that bulk out to anywhere between one and a half , and we've seen this zone up to 5% copper. You can see there some of the results, very different mineralization style and therefore, most likely a very different mining method.
This is more amenable to bulk scale mining and can support a very large mine life moving forward. One of the things that we've discovered, particularly in the last year, is as we move down plunge in this deposit, those two zones are actually converging. I'll show you a long section shortly. Where they converge, you're going straight from that massive sulfide into the copper stringer zone, and you're getting some incredible intersections there, such as 43 m true thickness at 7.6% copper equivalent. There's not many deposits in the world with intersections like that. One of the other things that I'd point out, it's the deepest hole that's ever been drilled into this system that we put out last year, 49 m at 6.1% copper equivalent. We know that this has a combination of scale and grade.
Today, this morning, we put out some more drill results to further highlight that. This is infill drilling results, the reason that's important is because we're currently working on our first mining studies, and we want to put these mining studies out with over 70% Measured and Indicated in them. It was really interesting. You can see how good these results are. I read in one of the mining tabloids that they've pulled the old, our hits are so good that we're delaying our study line. It is actually genuinely true when you look at these results. Some of the highlights here, over 60 m at 4% copper, 13 m at 11.1% copper equivalent. Grades of up to 13% copper equivalent. We want to get that into Measured and Indicated for the study.
These are the final results that will form the basis of a new resource update that will underpin that mining study. We have committed to the market that that will be out during August, and the team is working extremely hard to get that done. These results are fantastic, and there's more to come. We have six rigs underground at the moment and three on surface. The final point I want you to remember about this project and our company is that it's very rare. All right? When you look at all the TSX copper producers, you look at all the ASX copper producers, and you look at that spot between 25,000 tons and greater than 75,000 tons of copper production per annum, there's just no assets in this group that are owned by junior companies. We're a very unique investment opportunity.
This is a very exclusive list. You can see how it can compare. What our studies will show, that'll come out this month, is a pathway to be at the upper end of this graph, and we're very excited about how those numbers are looking. If you want copper exposure in the junior end of the world, there is just nothing out there, and this is a very unique investment opportunity. What I'd like to do now is to show people what it's like. A lot of people don't understand Newfoundland or what it's like. I want you to hear from some of our people and have a look at the site.
This is already a mine. It's brownfields. We can get 900 m below surface. Give you a feel for some of our team that we have working on site. The great thing about operating in a province like Newfoundland is that all the ingredients are there to make this a really clean and sustainable operation. We're trying to be part of the community and really build up the prosperity for the entire district.
This is a significantly higher grade than other projects out there. We've already grown it to be such a large ore body already, and we expect it to grow much bigger than that. The next couple of years are really exciting for us. It's not only about growth, but we're looking to take the project through development and being a VMS mineralized system. These deposits normally come in clusters, so we'll be expecting to find more of that.
The Green Bay project is not a remote site. There are lots of small communities around here in the peninsula, well-connected to infrastructure. You can literally drive through a paved road to the car park of the mine.
Geologically, it had been under-tested, and we're going to be making it a lot bigger. It's copper. We've got the people. We've got all the professionals in exploration through development into production in our company already.
We do go out and do aquatic studies, but we also do vegetation, air quality. We also spend a lot of time with communities trying to understand land and resource use from their perspective.
If you look at the historic copper production, we actually have eight past-producing mines on our land package. Even though there was historic mining in the area, modern tools and techniques, systematic exploration hasn't been conducted on many of these areas.
We have all the drills turning now and to be able to work around a lot of these historic mines. The fact that there's the ground that could sustain this for generations again, I think definitely makes it very exciting. In the mine, we're adding resource through diamond drilling underground, and here on surface, we're looking for the next resource that will feed our project in the future. We have the support from the board and the shareholders to really hit the ground hard and find the next main mine.
That gives you a bit of a feel for where we operate and what a great place it is. Look, just on board and management, this is a really highly experienced team with experience across many different operations, many jurisdictions, and a team of experienced mine builders. We have our chairman, Kevin Tomlinson, here today, who you saw in the video who's built mines in Africa, built mines all over the world. Steve Parsons, Mike Naylor, that are very well known to people through Bellevue and other enterprises previously. Leanne Heywood, who's one of our directors, used to really be heavily involved in the marketing of the copper in the Rio Tinto business and was on the board of Metals Acquisition previously, prior to the takeout.
Rene, who's got a very strong financial background, and myself with Northern Star, Newmont and Barrick experience and a lot of experience here in Kalgoorlie. The key takeaway from this is we've got an experienced team that knows how to build mines and fund mines. One of the things I really wanted to highlight today was the management team, they're working incredibly hard on those studies at the moment. It's one of the best teams I've worked with, and I've worked with some really good ones in the past at Northern Star and Barrick and Newmont. This is the team that will take it through to construction. It's a safe pair of hands for our shareholders. I'd just like to thank them for all the effort that's going into the mining studies at the moment. We're looking forward to demonstrating that pathway to large-scale production.
Just in terms of the jurisdiction, for those that aren't aware, Newfoundland is a fantastic jurisdiction. We have government support. We have community support. You can see that through the latest Fraser Institute rankings, where on policy perception, we outrank every state and province in Australia. Canada is doing a great job in looking to unlock their mineral potential, particularly around critical minerals, and they really understand how important the mining industry is. I hope to see Australia follow suit very shortly. We have great infrastructure. We have hydropower running through the property. We're only one and a half hours from a regional airport that has multiple flights daily from outside of the province. Being a brownfield site, we can get to 900 m below surface already.
There's been AUD 250 million previously invested into this project, and we can recycle a lot of that capital. It's been an amazing journey for FireFly. Three years ago, we had a AUD 70 million market cap. We were exploring for gold in Ontario. With this acquisition, we have absolutely transformed the company. Our current market cap's AUD 1.4 billion, the growth story for FireFly has only just begun. The strategy that we adopted was very similar to what we did building Northern Star in the early days. One was to focus on the resource growth and demonstrate the potential to significantly have a world-class resource. The second is to rebuild the mine at a much larger scale, which will be demonstrated in the studies that come out. The third pillar that we've really been working towards has been the district scale discovery.
As Steve mentioned in the video, these VMS deposits always occur in clusters. This is just one of the long sections through the deposit. You can see in the yellow color, the upper VMS. The red is that bulk footwall zone that's amenable to transverse long-hole mining. You can see down the bottom where they converge. The scale of this ore body's incredible for a VMS. It's over 3 km in strike, it is still open. We still have conductive anomalies beyond that. How we've unlocked this value, how we've more than doubled the resource, is we've done 200,000 m of drilling from underground in the last two and a half years. It's been an incredible investment.
We've done over 2 km of exploration development from underground with our owner/operator mining crews and see that as practice for when we get into full-scale production, they've really adopted Australian mining techniques very well. When we bought this, when we did the due diligence on it just over three years ago, there was one hole in front of the existing mine that was 102 m at 1.7% copper. You can see on this screen all the drilling that we've done. It was a bit of a geological leap of faith. One of the things that we've learned through all the projects that we've been involved in is that there's no geological reason that things get cut off. A lot of the times they won't be.
Now our deepest hole into the system, which is over 1 km down plunge, is 49 m at 6.1% CuEq. All of that drilling has paid off, we've built a world-class inventory. One of the other things that really stands out about this is a subset of our 80 million tons at 2.2% Copper Equivalent is what we're calling the core zone. That is a super high-grade zone that currently stands at about 20 million tons at an incredible grade of nearly 4%. That on its own is almost a DeGrussa without the other 60 million tons that never really got found there. We see that as the high-grade cherry.
With a lot of our study work, what we've been working on is bringing that to the forefront of the mine plan to generate upfront cash flow, increase grade, and reduce our payback period. That's coming together very well. One of the other things that we'll point out is it's a very high-quality resource. We're over 70% Measured and Indicated at the moment. This isn't just all based on inferred. There are some real bones to the study that's coming out. That's the high-grade zone. Just on the mining studies, as I said, they'll be out this month. We appreciate the patience that people have had, we want to really maximize what we put out because there are so many ways to really attack this ore body. It's so big.
You think about it, I can't say too much exactly what the mine life will be, what we're looking at is various scales, anywhere between 1.8 million tons per annum. We're even assessing options up to 3 million-4 million tons per annum. With an 80-million-ton resource, you can do the math in your head. It's a very long mine life operation. We also have a lot of grade that we can bring forward into the mine plan. This ore body has great recoveries. The copper recoveries from our MET test work are over 98%. The gold recovery is over 86% and is metallurgically simple. Nothing complicated about the processing. We have a port that's only 5 km away from the mine, it's really easy access to market. I think people forget how far east Newfoundland is.
To put that into perspective, I can fly from the capital, St. John's, to London in four and a half hours, which is quicker than I can fly from Perth to Sydney. We are very close to European markets, and we're also close to smelting capacity in Canada as well. One of the questions that we often get is, okay, you guys, you've got a market capital, AUD 1.4 billion. How are you going to fund this? The first thing I'd point out is we have a really healthy balance sheet, and we have a really supportive register that's mostly institutional. You can see there our biggest shareholders, BlackRock, Regal Funds, and a number of other really reputable institutions really support us. They really do back us. They've backed the team through various projects that they've been involved in.
We're both dual-listed on the ASX and the TSX. There is quite extensive research out there at the moment, the average target price is well below where our current stock price is. You consider the future of where we're heading with our study work that coming out that, I think, will really surprise people with the potential scale of the deposit. Combine that with the brilliant copper price at the moment, that's over AUD 6.50 a pound, which is pretty amazing. I think when you translate that into Australian dollars, it's over AUD 20,000 a ton for copper. We're in a very good position from that point of view. The key takeaway from this is that we are well and truly able to fund this.
The great thing about this being copper and not just gold is there's a lot of non-dilutive ways to fund it as well because, as you can imagine, there's offtake groups that are falling over themselves to get such a high-quality, high-grade concentrate that's so close to port. We're investigating all sorts of funding options from traditional debt, equity, offtakes, strategic partnerships. There's a lot of different options that we're looking at, and that'll really ramp up after our study comes out. The final pillar that we've been looking at is our regional exploration. When we acquired this project, we only had 50 sq km of ground, so it was really literally a postage stamp. What we've been accumulating over the last three years is other pieces of ground, and we've built the package out to about 350 sq km now.
We really believe in the potential of this. We're through the first phase of exploration, which is really the generative phase. We've been doing a lot of geophysics using modern techniques, found a lot of anomalies, and we're currently out there drill testing. There will be strong news flow on the regional exploration once the study comes out. We're very excited about making a discovery in this district. Just to wrap this up. It's going to be a catalyst-rich 2026, 2027 for us. Like I said, it's amazing how far we've come in the last less than three years. The future's going to be just as rapid, and there's a lot of good things to come out.
We'll have our economic study out. We will be moving very rapidly to feasibility. We're hoping to have the feasibility out either later this year or in the first quarter of next year and get constructing next year. We have a very rapid timeframe towards production. We have a lot of permitting support. The permits are already in place for quite a bit of the construction work. We're starting early works. We're pre-ordering long lead time items later this year. We know this is going to be a mine. We know we're going to move it forward.
World-class asset, great infrastructure, platform to fund this operation, the upside from the district, regional exploration, proven team. We think it's a great time for copper. The copper market will get stronger, it will get better, and it's a great time for us to be operating. Look, thank you very much. Myself and the team will be around Diggers this week, so please feel free to come over and speak to the team. Thank you.
Thanks, Darren