It has our copper equivalent. I think you would agree it is a very rare combination of scale and grade. We see a lot of projects that have more tons, but 0.5% copper. Now we are rapidly progressing towards 100 million tons, sorry, at 2.5% copper equivalent. What makes this one unique is there is a high-grade core opportunity there as well. We have a high-grade zone within the deposit, 25.1 million tons at an incredible grade of 4.3% copper equivalent. It is a robust resource, 72% in the measured and indicated category. What we have done recently is we have put out a PEA study. The second plank of our strategy was once we have developed the resource, once we have shown the scale and the grade, let us wrap the economics around it and show there is a viable project.
There are two scenarios that we presented in our PEA, both of them show multi-decade mine life with near-term production. I think that is one of the key. You see a lot of copper assets out there and they can be 10 years, 15 years away from production, extremely high CapEx. We are blessed because we can be in production before the end of 2029. There is the opportunity to get up to 100,000 tons of copper equivalent production, which puts us in pretty rare company, particularly with assets owned by juniors in Tier 1 mining jurisdictions.
We have a low cost, rapid payback, and it generates huge levels of free cash flow. Then finally, the growth story has just begun. We have only scraped the surface of the regional exploration story. There will be results coming out shortly. What we will demonstrate is the potential for multiple mines in this district. It is genuinely a camp. It is not just a single deposit.
Within the mine itself, the resource is still open. 49.1 meters at 6.1% copper equivalent is the deepest hole that has ever been drilled into this system. We know it is going to continue. Look, I am not going to spend too much time on this, but it is a pretty constant theme in this conference that we have seen is it is great time to be in copper. Not only is there a scarcity of copper assets that can be bought into production quickly, but we expect to see the copper price go from strength to strength, given there is an emerging supply gap. With the AI revolution that is occurring, data centers, electrification, there are just not enough new copper mines in the world coming online.
The ones that are there, low grade, high capital, and we are uniquely positioned to be into production before the end of 2029 so we can produce within this copper cycle. As I mentioned before, we presented two cases in our PEA, and one of the key things I want you to take away from this is this is a serious mine and it is a serious copper producer. When you strip out all the by-product metals, because I get a bit sick of seeing projects call themselves copper mines when they are just hiding behind metal equivalents. When you look at copper exposure and what we will be producing in terms of pure copper, the base case puts us in the top 12 mines in Australia and Canada.
But the upscale case where we do achieve those 90,000 tons of copper equivalent production over 11 years, that puts us in rare company. That puts us up in the top five mines in either Canada or Australia, so this is a big project. You can see from the names on this list, it is really the only one in the hands of juniors. In terms of the capital structure, we are really well-funded.
We have AUD 373 million in cash in the bank. We have just done an equity raise, and one of the reasons we raised now was because we have just taken out the question as to whether we can fund this. So combined with project finance, combined with all the off take offers we are getting for PEA payments, so on and so forth, we can build this mine and it does not have to be dilutionary.
We do not have to raise equity to build this mine. We have got no debt, no streams, very minimal royalties, and a really supportive shareholder base of institutional investors. So we are in a very good position moving forward. Solid market cap. And look, share price is pretty cheap at the moment. And I would say to people, I would like to think we are not going to get much lower than this. It is a great project. A lot of value in there. And once you have a look at the economics of the study, you will see that we are pretty undervalued at this point in time. The Green Bay Copper- Gold Project, which is the core project, is located in Newfoundland. And, for those that are not familiar, that is an eastern province of Canada.
Great jurisdiction, extremely supportive government, and a massive amount of infrastructure there, both provincially that we can leverage, such as the hydropower, the airports, the road infrastructure. But even locally at our mine site, there has been AUD 250 million previously invested, and that enables us to really leverage that and get into production at a low capital intensity and for relatively little cost. There is a big brownfields advantage.
L ook, when you look at the Fraser Institute index, for those that are not familiar with the province, it is globally well-regarded in terms of being one of the premier mining districts. So not only do you have a combination of scale and grade and large scale mine, but you are truly in one of the Tier 1 mining jurisdictions of the planet. The mineralization, and this is what really sets this deposit apart, as I said before, it is not low grade. It is very high grade, and we have multiple styles of mineralization.
One is the upper volcanogenic massive sulfide. And you can see the grades in those intersections. They are not out of a historic database. They are actually holes we have drilled in the last few years, and they are truly world-class hits. Getting hits up to 12.2% copper equivalent. And it is genuinely copper and gold. It is not anything else. It is not zinc, it is not lead, it is nothing else. It is copper and gold, two of the hottest commodities right now. And beneath that, you have a broad zone, a copper stringer zone, where you get really thick intersections of not massive sulfide, but little stringers of chalcopyrite, and they bulk out to average around the 2% mark. And you can see some of those incredible thicknesses there, 117 meters true thickness at 2.1% copper equivalent. Pretty outstanding.
One of the things we have discovered since we have had the asset is as we drill down plunge, those two zones converge. Higher up in the mine, there is a gap of about 150 meters of barren rock between the massive sulfides on the sea floor, given this is a VMS. The stringer zone beneath it, which are the fluids moving up to actually deposit that on the sea floor. They actually converge, and you are getting some spectacular results, like 43.6 meters at 7.6%. The deepest hole we have ever drilled into this system, as I mentioned before, 49 meters at 6.1% copper equivalent. We are very confident that we will continue to grow, and these grades will continue to increase as we go down plunge.
The mineral resource has grown significantly since we have acquired the project, and as I mentioned before, we have done 210,000 meters of underground drilling. We now have the resource to total about 84 million tons at 2.5% copper equivalent. The great thing about that, 60 million tons in the measured and indicated category. It is pretty rare to have over 70% of your inventory in measured and indicated in an underground mine, because you are usually limited by development.
W e have invested in that development, we have done that 2 km of development that has enabled us to extend this resource significantly. Now, when you look at the in-situ metal content, this deposit has 1.6 million tons of contained copper. It has 1.3 million ounces of contained gold and 12.1 million ounces of contained silver. So it is a very high grade, and very well-endowed copper gold VMS. It is very unusual to see these sort of VMSs anywhere.
What people are starting to appreciate now is just the scale of this resource and how it compares to some very well-known deposits. Once again, stripped out the by-product metals. This doesn't include our gold, it is just pure copper exposure, which is what the investment community can't seem to get enough of at the moment. You can see our resources are far bigger than some very significant deposits, such as Ernest Henry, Marimaca. Surprisingly, we have got more than double the amount of copper that McIlvenna Bay had before they were taken out by Eldorado Gold. So, this competes very well on the world scale, and there are very few of these quality assets in Tier 1 mining jurisdictions in the hands of junior developers. Just under the PEA study highlights, as I mentioned before, we have done a hell of a lot of work on this.
This is not your average Canadian-style PEA. This is actually a lot more robust. It is based on a resource that is well over 70% M&I. The costing and design work we have done, and what that base case, the 4,800 tons per day, shows is that it has got a very healthy NPV discount at 7% of AUD 2.2 billion and an annual steady state production of about 50,000 tons of copper equivalent. Very strong IRR at 41%. The cash flow is impressive. This is based on $5 a lbs copper price and $3,500 an ounce gold, $44 an ounce silver. So the metrics look far better at spot price, but even at that discounted rate, still $5.4 billion LOM, a post-tax cash flow, very rapid payback, and relatively modest capital to build it.
What we are doing on site is we are building a new mill on the site suited to this deposit, changing the mining method to a more bulk scale. For this particular case, we are only using truck haulage. What we considered was, okay, what if we decided to expand this? What could this deposit do? We have considered a case of 12,500 tons per day or 4.6 million tons per annum. The key difference between those two is it is going to require a shaft, and we have already done the design work on the shaft. We have had it fully costed. What we know about Canada is that some of the best shaft-sinking companies in the world cut their teeth in Canada. It is a common thing to get shafts in operations in Canada. Not so common in Australia, but it is very common in Canada.
What that does is it takes us up to a large-scale production of 90,000 tons of copper equivalent over 11 years. There is a six-year period where it peaks at over 100,000 tons of copper equivalent production, which is really significant. That is what really defines a world-class project. Still get very high IRRs, 22-year mine life. The cash flow goes up to AUD 6.5 billion or AUD 550 million a year. One of the things that really stands out is the costs. The C3 costs are only $2.16 for the metal. When you apply the gold credit to that, it comes down to $1.43 per lbs for copper production, which is one of the leading cost curve producers of copper out there.
The other thing I would point out with the expansion capital, which is basically increasing the processing capacity and about AUD 300 million on the shaft, is that can be self-funding out of cash flow if you stage the operation starting at 1.8 and then expand it down the track if we choose to do so. This demonstrates the free cash flow after tax for the base case, and you can see that at 15 years at AUD 290 million, but at spot price, that goes up to AUD 434 million per annum average over that 15-year period. Where that tails off, that is an artificial boundary. That is exploration driven. As I mentioned before, the deepest hole in that system, 49 meters at 6.1%, we expect that tail to push further to the right because the ore body won't stop.
The other thing is, any regional discoveries will fill that gap as well and enable us to think about further expansions. When we look at the upscale case, so the 4.6 million tons per annum, we have got a number of ways we can do this, and we are assessing all our options at the moment. But it can be self-funding, as you can see here. If we start off at 1.8 million tons per annum, the cash flow generated there can pay for the majority of the shaft and the majority of building the actual capacity into the processing circuit. You see there, the cash flow is pretty amazing. 11 years at AUD 550 million average using a $5 a lbs copper price. At current spot price, that goes up to $820 million a year. You think about it, that is post-tax free cash flow.
Our current market cap is about AUD 1.4 billion. If we end up spitting out AUD 820 million a year, that is pretty significant, and this is a major project, and we are very much undervalued at the moment. This current dip in the market, I view this as a great buying opportunity that may not be around forever. You can see here, once again, the LOM production. This is actually recovered metal. You can see with that upscaled case, it is just over 1.1 million tons of contained copper produced, 860,000 ounces of gold, and 8 million ounces of silver as a byproduct for the upscale case. As I said, this is a snapshot in time. This is drilling constrained, and we know that this is only going to get better with time.
We have six rigs underground still drilling this deposit, and we have three rigs on surface doing the regional exploration. We will grow this deposit. That is how we are going to beat the Lassonde Curve eventually. We are going to keep growing. The growth story here is not over by any stretch of the imagination. The way we are doing it from an operational point of view, very standard. The mining methods are standard, conventional long-hole stoping, a combination of transverse and longitudinal haulage trucks for the base case, shaft for the upscale case. The metallurgical test work is fantastic. We get 98% recovery on the copper. We found a way to get the gold recovery up to 82% and the silver recovery up to 85%. You couldn't ask for a better polymetallic ore body. Communition-wise and flotation-wise, just standard process, just a rougher flotation, a cleaner flotation.
We are floating a pyrite tail and leaching it to recover additional gold. We will be producing not only a copper and gold and silver-rich concentrate, but also some doré on-site as well. On the concentrate side of things, this concentrate is extremely clean. It is extremely sought after with no deleterious elements. We do not have the offtake agreements in place yet, and there is a lot of competition to try and get their hands on this. Our port is only 5 km away from the mine, and it is a deepwater port, year-round access, easy access to the European markets. I think people don't realize how close to Europe Newfoundland is. Our project is actually closer to Munich than it is to Vancouver. We are a long, long way east, so easy access to European markets. We are blessed with the infrastructure, with the power corridor.
The power line runs through our property. We do not have to build miles and miles of power infrastructure. It is already there. The final thing is the exploration. We really believe that this is a camp. We really believe that this is going to become a hub-and-spoke opportunity where you have got a central mill that is fed by multiple mines. I think when we put out our most recent amount of exploration results, which is coming within the next month, people will start to appreciate the opportunity that is in front of us to build a hub-and-spoke operation with multiple feed sources. We are currently spending AUD 16.7 million on regional exploration this year. Three rigs, 346 sq km of ground, and that will grow. But we have done extensive geophysics. We are getting some exceptional results, and they will all be coming out in due course.
One of the areas that we're drilling our maiden drill campaign on is the Tilt Cove area. That's got amazing VMS potential. The areas around the Ming Mine, the main mine, we're anticipating putting out a maiden regional resource on that in the first quarter of next year. To wrap it up, really busy times for us. We don't do things by halves. There's no question about that. We're looking at getting out our feasibility study in the first quarter of next year. Currently assessing all the financing options.
What's really clear is all that we've got to decide now was the split of equity, the split of the project financing, and the offtake prepayments. There is a way where we don't have to raise money to build this. Then, FID construction mid-2027, first production end of 2029. Big time for us, and thank you. We're floating around the conference. Any questions, come and ask. Just like to thank the team for all the work they've done on it as well. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you.