Thank you very much, and a pleasure to be here as usual at the Read Corporate events. Thanks for the introduction, Nick. I almost don't need to do the presentation now because he summarized it in a nutshell. Look, it's a pleasure to be here sharing the FireFly story. Look, three key things to get across here. What we have here is a rare combination of scale and grade. Just recently, a couple of weeks ago, we put out our resource update. We've got the resource now up to 84 million tonnes at 2.5% copper equivalent. It's one of the highest grade resources out there, and it has large scale to it. What's impressive about that is it's got a really high-grade core. I've said this many times before. It's very much DeGrussa-like.
We've increased that high-grade core to 25 million tonnes at 4.3% copper equivalent. It's huge. One of the other things about this particular resource is it's very high confidence. 72% of the resource is now in the measured and indicated category. So, it is really rare. There's nothing else like that out there in terms of the investment opportunities available. We put out our first studies a couple of weeks ago, and what that really showed is the pathway to a huge long-life copper asset, copper and gold producer. The NPVs show a pathway to over AUD 3 billion, and that's at very conservative economic prices for copper at strong discount rates. AUD 3 billion, okay? Remember, we only picked this thing up three years ago for AUD 65 million.
I think this will go down in hindsight as probably one of the best M&A moves in the last decade. What it will produce at the upscaled case is up to 100,000 tonnes of copper equivalent production a year, and that does put you on the global scale. It's got quick payback, generates a lot of cash flow, and it is low cost to get it into production. The key thing about that is we can be producing copper before the end of 2029, which is very near term in terms of how long it takes to develop copper mines. The third thing to take away from this is that the growth story has only just begun. You've probably all heard of the Lassonde curve and things get a bit monotonous when companies get into development.
We're going to beat that, and we're going to beat that Lassonde curve by continuing to grow. We've got nine drill rigs on site at the moment, six underground, three on surface, and the results are looking very encouraging. So we will continue to grow. As I've written here, the growth story has just begun for FireFly. I'm not going to spend too much time on the macro side of things. You've heard it from Alex. You've heard it in the opening remarks this morning. Needless to say, it's a great time to be a near-term copper producer. Jurisdictional concentration, it's getting harder to mine copper in a lot of the key areas such as South America. The grades of the copper ore are declining. The average grade of a copper mine now is only half a percent, and here we are with 2.5% resource.
It is getting harder and harder to find high-grade quality assets. The development timelines are blowing out because a lot of these copper deposits that are there take a long time and a lot of effort to bring online. Whereas for relatively modest CapEx, we are going to be in production by the end of 2029. So very well-positioned for that.
For those that do not know where the project is, it is in a place called Newfoundland. I would lovingly describe that as the Tasmania of Canada. It is an island off the East Coast. It is very pro-development, pro support of this mine, both from a community and government point of view. We already have our environmental permits in place to start early works and to start aspects of the construction. You can see there how it rates against some of the Australian jurisdictions in terms of the Fraser Institute ranking.
It is a great place to do business. That is the key takeaway from this particular slide. Just as on the balance sheet, our current market cap is about AUD 1.6 billion. Very strong institutional support. One of the key things here is, though, we have about AUD 373 million in cash in the bank at the moment. What that means is you can take out all the questions on how we are going to fund this build. We have got the money now that will enable us to build this project. So there is no question that between this, the debt that we have been offered, and the prepayments from offtake groups, we can build this project successfully. We have got very strong institutional support. We have got quality board and management, and everything is set up to build this mine.
Just to reflect on the ore body itself, because I am a geologist by background, and without the ore body, you do not have a project. This is truly a world-class volcanogenic massive sulfide system. We have an upper zone that has copper and gold in it, and that is massive sulfides. You can see some of those grades there are truly spectacular. Sitting underneath that, we have these broad zones of copper stringers, and that can be over 200 m wide, 200 m vertical, and really amenable to bulk scale mining, as you can see there. But what we have really found in the last few months, and the last year in particular, is that those zones actually converge as we drill down plunge. We have been getting some massive intersections, as you can see there.
The deepest hole that we have drilled into this system is 49 m at 6.1% copper equivalent. So the ore body is still open. 49 m at 6.1%. That is huge. There are not many hits like that out there. We have a downhole conductor that shows that the ore body still keeps going. As I mentioned before, we have just updated our resource. You can see here some of the drilling that we have been doing. It is still open. We intend to keep drilling.
As I said, we have got six rigs underground, and we will be drilling some extension holes. But what we have also been doing is adding a lot of grade laterally. We have been finding more of this high-grade VMS. Why that is important is because we will add that to the mine plan, and it will bring forward early cash flow, as we will see from coming slides.
It is rapidly heading towards a resource that will be in the order of at least 100 million tonnes, in my view. It is a truly world-class scale and grade. Just to put that into perspective of where it sits, what you see here is the resources of some pretty well-known deposits, such as Ernest Henry, Arctic, CSA, Marimaca, and a few of the other projects around. This is stripping out all the byproducts, because what you find is there is a lot of copper mines that are really mixed with other metals, and they are not quite pure copper. This is just stripping it back to the copper. What you can see here is we have 1.6 million tonnes of copper. We have more copper in our resource than Ernest Henry, more than CSA. This is a big deposit.
There are not many development opportunities out there like this at the sort of grades that we are dealing with. Just to summarize the PEA study that we have put out. The key point from this slide is that we have used some world-class consultants on this, Entech, Ausenco, and so on and so forth. This is not just numbers that we have made up. This has had contributions from some world-class mining consultants. These numbers in this PEA are very robust, more robust than a normal study. As I mentioned before, 72% of the resource is in the measured and indicated, so we are very confident on these numbers and the mining methods and techniques that we have proposed. What we have done is we have looked at two different scenarios to develop this. One is starting out at about 1.8 million tonnes per annum.
What that does for us is generate some impressive numbers on its own as a start-up case. So a AUD 2.2 billion NPV. That is using a AUD 5 copper price, and copper is currently sitting at about AUD 6.60 a pound, so very conservative economics. Discounted that at 7%. That averages about 50,000 tonnes of copper equivalent production over a 14-year period. There is a long mine life there, 32 years overall. Strong rate of return at 41%.
But one of the key things is there, the amount of cash flow that this thing spits out, AUD 5.4 billion. That is post-tax as well. Pretty low cost as well at AUD 2.33 a pound. As I said before, copper is currently sitting at about AUD 6.60. Very rapid payback, less than two years. An initial capital of AUD 513 million. So you think about it, we have got AUD 373 million in the bank at the moment.
We also have a lot of funding offers from debt providers and offtake groups. We do have the funds to build this project. What we did is, "Okay, what happens if we redline this? What if we really push this to what we believe the limits of the ore body are?" We can get it up to 12,500 tonnes per day or 4.6 million tonnes per annum. That increases the NPV to AUD 3 billion. At spot price, that NPV goes up to over AUD 5.5 billion. We get up to a peak production rate of about 100,000 tonnes of copper equivalent production over a six-year period. We have the potential to continue that peak production on for longer through extending the ore body down plunge. Still got really healthy IRRs.
We've still got very good mine life at over 22 years, so multi-decade mine life. Over AUD 6.5 billion post-tax cash flow and AUD 550 million average cash flow for the first 11 years. Pretty compelling. That expansion capital will require an extra AUD 476 million. Very fundable by us and pay back under four years for that particular case. How we're going to do it, we've got some very simple mining techniques. It's just quite common industry standard. We've got very good mining in terms of the just traditional longhole open stoping, transverse longhole mining. Haulage for trucks for the base case, but we will be putting in a shaft for the upscaled case. We have sufficient ventilation. The metallurgy and processing is very simple. Good recoveries. We've got over 98% recovery on copper, well over 80% on gold and 85% on silver.
We have a port that's only 5 km away, and it's very close to European markets in particular. Some of the infrastructure in Newfoundland, we have huge advantage in terms of the power cost to run this project. We have hydropower, and it's only AUD 0.065 a kilowatt hour. We're blessed in terms of the infrastructure that we have. What I thought I'd show here is just a quick video of what we're doing and what the mine looks like, and this is the upscaled case. You can see what we're doing here is we'll be putting in a new bypass decline to enable the 63 tonne trucks to haul, and then putting in the shaft. The way we achieve those production rates is really by pushing development and getting multiple mining fronts up and going at once.
We can get up to the 4.6 million tonnes per annum. You can see there the colors, the grade. The upper VMS obviously has super high grades in it. Some of those stopes are well over 5% copper equivalent. That bulk footwall zone that lies underneath in the blue, still very high margins. A lot of that continues on from the VMS mineralization there. You can get a feel for what we're doing. We've done a very detailed mine design on this. We've done very detailed scheduling, and we know that the numbers and the economics stack up. This is what the production profile looks like. The base case will produce just over 1.1 million tonnes of copper equivalent metal. The upscale case, about 1.3 million tonnes. But the key point here is that it is still open.
Where that production profile drops off is artificial. That is where our drilling stops, and we're very confident that that high grade VMS continues. As I said before, the deepest hole is 49 m at 6.1% copper, and we've still got a very strong geophysical anomaly that shows the ore body goes on. It's only a matter of time before we keep pushing that high grade production out further. You see here, this puts it in another point of view. What we're doing is we're trying to bring forward cash flow by putting in that high grade VMS first, and where the production and the grade tails off is where that VMS runs out in the current mine plan. But as I said, that's an artificial barrier, and we will be drilling that in the next year and showing that that still continues further down plunge.
What does it look like if we can pull this off? This is the amazing aspect of it. Now, with our base case, we are in the top 11 producers in both Canada and Australia. If we can get up to that 4.6 million ton per annum case, it puts us in the top five copper producers in Australia and Canada. Which is just amazing when you think about it. We are up there more than Sudbury, more than Carrapateena, more than Ernest Henry in terms of copper production. It does put us on the world stage in terms of copper production. That is where we are aiming. There is a very real incredible pathway to get there. The team over in Canada is working very hard to make this happen.
As I mentioned before, I will not spend too much time because part of this presentation was really just to familiarize people with the mining study. We are very much committed to growth, and we still continue to grow the resource, both underground and what we are aiming to do by the first quarter of next year is put out our first resource from one of the regional exploration targets called Ming Mine. The drilling there has been going quite nicely, and we are expecting a maiden resource regionally. What we are also looking at is the regional exploration, and I can promise our shareholders, I get a lot of questions on this. We will be putting out a release on the regional exploration within the next month. What that will show is there is massive potential for discovery of more deposits in this district.
Very happy with how the drilling is going, and Crispin and the team are doing a great job. We will put some color around that in the next month. Look, just in terms of the timing, it is going to be a really busy few months for us. We are going to rapidly advance this towards feasibility. We are going to have a feasibility out in the first quarter of next year, and accompanying that will be the FID.
As you heard from Alex in the previous presentation, that is when a lot of companies get re-rated, and we think that FireFly is absolutely primed to be re-rated. In the coming months, there will be ample news flow, regional exploration, the infill drilling, and in-mine extensions as well. Look, please come and see me at the booth. Be here to answer any questions. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the conference.