Good morning. I'm pleased to be back here in Noosa. I am, after three years, hired just three years. It's good to see Queensland for what it is. I thank you for being here today. I have exciting news to disclose and share. Sorry. Is that off? Yeah, sorry. It's me here. We have a great project at the Andes, 4,000 meters next door to Rio Tinto, next door to POSCO. What is not to like about POSCO. You saw the news this week with MinRes. You saw the POSCO news with our other neighbors to the north, the Lithium South Development, a transaction for $65 million. The transaction of POSCO, just for the back of the envelope, two things implies with MinRes. The Lithium price, Carbonate price, needs to be above $15,000 a ton.
If we do the valuation for Galan, as a starting point, it's just $800 million . What's not to like about what's happening this week? It's no surprise that the Lithium Market is coming back, and it's coming back on the strong driving force from Electric Vehicles and, secondly, by the Stationary Batteries. Why is that relevant? Everyone's seen Solar Farms, Wind Farms. You might ask, why do we need so much energy? It's not just replacing all energy for Green Energy. The demand of energy is going through the roof, and that is driven by AI. A reminder, we are one quarter into the 21st century. The 21st century is Power hungry. AI is Power hungry. Computers are Power hungry. Energy needs to be taken from many different sources, but computers like Stable Current.
If you remember, all computers that used to have desktop with a battery to maintain your Power or Service, what we've seen today is no different to that. We have massive servers requiring Stable Energy. That energy stabilization comes from batteries, and that comes from Lithium. Therefore, the demand for Lithium is going up. It's no coincidence that the Lithium price now is coming up. If you ask most of the people around the room, they will tell you that the Lithium Market is coming back strongly because supply is not catching up with demand, and demand's going stronger as never before. Back to Galan. We are an ASX-listed Company. We have a market cap of around $ 220 million.
For reference, three years ago, we were around $750 million, and we have a quarter of the resource size, no permits for phase one, no 80% construction advance that we got today, no permits for expansion phase II, no RIGI Permit. Excuse me. No RIGI Permits for Physical Stability in Argentina that gives us a few things that I'll explain in more detail, but it puts us in a clear pathway risk-wise, similar to what an Australian Mining Project would be. Therefore, the Milei Administration has done tremendously by applying this New Legislation. There's another Mining Company before us that got the RIGI. A joke around says, it's another junior company, and that's Rio Tinto. They got that for the Rincon project in Argentina. We are the second mining company to get it.
We got it ahead of POSCO, ahead of Ganfeng, ahead of Glencore, ahead of everyone else. That shows something that we're doing right in Argentina. Do not brush us off because we are small. Look at what we have achieved. Look at those permits. Look at those relationships that we have in Argentina to get these permits to be able to execute a project that has got massive scalability. We are just starting. This is the beginning of things. I mentioned many times, we want to crawl before we walk, before we run. This is our first stage, 4,000 tons, and this is where we're going to go. Now, in the board, we have Richard Huntsley, mining lawyer experienced in Argentina. Daniel Jimenez is ex-Vice President of Commercial of SQM. We have Lithium credentials. We have Terry Gardner standing here with us.
Thank you, Terry, for joining us and promoting Galan every time that you can. We have also Claudia Paul, based in Chile, with ex-SQM experience. I myself am a mining mineral economist with close to 25 years' experience, and I can do things in Argentina. I can deliver. Also, I'd like to thank today, we have a new appointed Director from Clean Elements that are now our largest Shareholder. You can see that with 18%. Also, I'd like to thank SIEspaña, that has come from the ISP Bank, Swiss Bank. Just to highlight that today, we have the funding, we have the backup, we have the muscle behind Galan to be executed step by step, but we have something that we did not have before, and that is the Financial Support that we needed. Now, more into Galan. Why do you want to choose Galan?
Why do you want to be investing in Galan as an Investment Proposal? We are a Brine Asset, and Brine Assets are, on average, the lowest Operating Cost in the industry. No matter what's happening in Australia, people will be whinging that the price is too low. You don't hear that from the other side of the world. People, like companies, make money. The only one that has been there all along is Greenbushes. Greenbushes is an exception to hard rock mining, and that's owned by Albemarle, Tianqi, and I mean, that's it. No one else. Everyone else is trying to increase production to defend themselves with scale. We have low operating costs simply because hard rock needs to be processed, and that's energy intensive. We have the Lithium in Brine, and that's solution.
All we need to do is Evaporate, Filtrate, continue Evaporation, and that's our Product. We use nature to our advantage. We use what we have. With that thesis, I just want to show that our number one purpose here is to sink our CapEx, start production. We know that these are cycles. When the cycles come back, we're going to be able to defend ourselves a lot better than what we have so far. The Lithium Chloride is our starting point. We are replicating the success of the likes of Pilbara Minerals, producing Lithium Concentrate. The difference is that ours in solution will more than double the grade. If our product was converted to the equivalence of Lithium Oxide that you're familiar with, the benchmark is 6%. Our Lithium Chloride Concentrate, so Lithium Spodumene Concentrate, would be 12.9%. Now, there's nothing in spodumene doing that.
The highest one, and again, it's Greenbushes, they can do 7%. Most of the rest of the players in the Pilbara is below 6%. 5.5% is sort of the average. We have a competitive commercial advantage in our product to start producing, to get cash flow, and start growing. We are not saying that we are going to be producing Lithium chloride our whole life, but this is our walk before you run, before you crawl, before you walk, before you run. We are doing things step by step. Importantly, the size. I mentioned this. The scalability is massive. We are starting with 4,000 tons. We want to get all the way to 60,000 tons. We know that is going to take time, but that is our aim.
Let us do this first step, and we're going to be informing the market as we progress the next step, and it won't be long before we start doing expansion if the market comes along on the right as we believe that we've seen today. We are fully permitted. Explained that part. And we have now, because it's Lithium chloride, it's a simple product that needs to be filtered and evaporated, and that's it. We don't have to add much more into that. Simple product, low cost to operation and to get to the market. I mentioned earlier on our strategic location. It's in the Ombra Morton Salt Flat, next to POSCO, next to Rio Tinto. This is our journey. We started in 2019 with our discovery. Our exploration campaigns have been highly successful.
Just to let you know, of every drill hole that we've done in our tenements, there's one drill hole that didn't show Lithium. Everything else that we've done has been a good drill hole. To 2026, that's a year for us to come into production. We expect to be in production next year, mid next year. We are putting a nano filtration plant that Otium is delivering. Otium has the technologies and patent for nano filtration. It's very simple. We are removing impurities instead of chemically, as we were doing with liming. We're doing this mechanically. What does it bring? It brings lower operating costs, more competitiveness. We have a product that we can sell with lower pH and potentially a higher price of selling. Once again, where are we located? This is the Ombra Morton Salt Flat. Everything in blue is Galan.
Not everything in blue is the salt flat for clarity. Why do we pick more ground than we needed? It is because we are always thinking ahead as being a miner. We are going to be using more ground for ponds. That is the reason why we have our tenements beyond where we have. We have done two DFS. We have enough wells to grow beyond the 4,000 tons. We can grow to 10,000 tons. We are well ready. We are positioning ourselves in a ground that we want to go and deliver. Size matters. This presentation is online for all of you. You can download it from our website. Ombra Morto is number nine resource in developed in the world. Keep that in mind. Why is that relevant? Because this is where we sit. It sits on the first quartile of the Cost Curve.
This is very relevant to see where the brines are compared to hard rock, and that's why the thesis from us as explaining where do we want to go and why I blindly so believe in this and have been doing the last eight years. It's been difficult. We may miss a gallon along the way. We fix them. And now we are in a prime position to be, as far as I know, the next year will be the only ASX-listed company that will come online, a Lithium company into production. Everyone ran away from Lithium. We didn't. As a result, we'll be in a prime position in the market to start production when no one else is, to my understanding, no one else is coming as a new developer. This is our scalability, our growth path.
This is where we want to be all the way to 60,000 tons. Lastly, Argentina permits has been, the evidence is with the permits. Milei has been doing a good job, and we believe that we can go into all the way to become a producer because we got the provincial support, and we got the community support, and we have the support from the federal government. The battery chemistry is important. Lithium is being used a lot for Lithium LFP batteries, and that's a lot of technicality in there. I want to bring you back to Galan once again. In our view, Brine is best because of cost. We are a near-term producer. We're coming up next year, mid-year. Cash flow is coming up. Size is important. Scalability is there, and we can deliver in time.
Our neighbors are showing that transactions are relevant, and Rio Tinto and POSCO are there for a reason. We are just doing our job. We need to demonstrate that we can, and we are doing this. We got the financial support. We got the team support, community support, government support. Next year is a great year for us. Thank you very much.