503A of the Corporations Act have been received. As previously noted, Bryan Ting of RSM is present at today's meeting and, in accordance with the Corporations Act, is available through the Chair to answer questions relevant to the conduct of that audit and the preparation and consent of the auditor's report. I ask shareholders if there are any questions or comments regarding the financial statements and reports, including any questions as to the audit and the auditor's report.
There's nothing coming up online at this stage.
Okay. We'll now proceed to the resolutions set out in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. Resolution 1 is a non-binding advisory resolution which relates to adoption of the remuneration report as detailed on the screen. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are visible on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution?
None.
Okay. I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. Now, Resolution 2. Resolution 2 relates to myself, so I will hand over the Chair to Christian at this point.
Thank you, Stuart. Resolution 2 is an ordinary resolution which relates to the election of Non-Executive Director Mr. Stuart Mathews, as detailed on the screen. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are outlined. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution?
Nothing online.
Thank you very much, Carol. I confirm that all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll conducted at the end of this meeting. Thank you. I will now move back to Resolution 3 and hand back to Stuart.
Thanks, Christian. Resolution 3 is an ordinary resolution which relates to the election of non-executive director Mrs. Fiona Van Maanen, as detailed on the screen. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are visible on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favour of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. Resolution 4 is an ordinary resolution which relates to the re-election of director Christian Easterday, as detailed on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favour of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. We'll move to Resolution 5.
Also, an ordinary resolution. This relates to the re-election of Director Roberto de Andraca Adriasola , as detailed on the screen. Proxies received in relation to this resolution are visible on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. Voting on the resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. Resolution 6 is an ordinary resolution. This relates to the re-election of Director Mark Jamieson , as detailed on the screen. Proxies have been received in relation to this resolution and are visible. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all detailed proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. The resolution will be by poll conducted at the end of the meeting. Thank you.
Resolution 7 is an ordinary resolution which relates to the re-election of the company's auditor, as detailed on the screen. The proxies have been received in relation to this resolution and are visible. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all directed proxies will be cast in favour of this motion. Voting will be by poll and conducted at the end of the meeting. Thank you. We will move to Resolution 8. This relates to myself, so again, I will hand over the Chair to Christian.
Thank you, Stuart. Resolution 8, again, is an ordinary resolution which relates to the issue of 200,000 shares to Mr. Stuart Mathews or his nominee, as detailed on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution?
Nothing online.
Thank you, Carol. I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. I'll now hand back to—oh, no, I won't. I'll now move on to Resolution 9. Grant of service rights to Mrs. Fiona Van Maanen, Non-Executive Director under the Employee Incentive Plan. Resolution 9, again, is an ordinary resolution which relates to the issue of 33,482 service rights to Mrs. Fiona Van Maanen or her nominee, as detailed on the screen. Proxies received in relation to this resolution are outlined. Are there any questions or comments in regard to this resolution?
Nothing.
Thank you, Carol. I confirm once again all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As mentioned, also, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of this meeting. Thank you. We will now move to Resolution 10. Once again, grant of service rights to Mr. Stuart Mathews, a Non-Executive Chair under the Employee Incentive Plan. Again, Resolution 10 is an ordinary resolution. It relates to the issue of 66,665 service rights to Mr. Stuart Mathews or his nominee, as detailed on the screen. Proxies received in relation to this resolution are outlined. Are there any comments or questions in regard to this resolution? Thank you, Carol. Again, I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As mentioned, voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of this meeting.
Thank you. I'll now hand back to our Chair, Stuart Mathews, as we move on to our Resolution 11.
Thanks, Christian. Resolution 11 is an ordinary resolution that relates to the issue of 311,106 short-term incentive performance rights and 452,518 long-term incentive performance rights to Mr. Christian Easterday or his nominee, as detailed on the screen. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. Voting on this resolution will be by poll to be conducted at the end of the meeting. We will now move to Resolution 12. The ordinary resolution relates to the approval of the company's updated Employee Incentive Plan and for the issue of up to 8.8 million equity securities under the plan. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are detailed on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution?
I confirm all detailed proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. We'll now move to Resolution 13, which is the final resolution of today's meeting. It's a special resolution that relates to the approval of the company having an additional 10% placement capacity, as detailed on the screen. A special resolution requires at least 75% of the votes cast for approval. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are on the screen. Are there any comments or questions about this resolution? I confirm all undirected proxies will be cast in favor of this motion. As noted earlier, we're conducting a poll on all resolutions. Please complete the voting paper now by marking a box beside each motion for either for, against, or abstain, and then signing the paper. Once completed, please hand all cards to Ross Anderson. Thank you.
Has everyone that intended to vote submitted their cards? Yes. Thank you. There being nothing further, I declare the poll closed. Ross will now process the poll, and the results will be announced to the ASX once they are available. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the formal part of the meeting, and I declare the meeting closed. I take this opportunity to again thank everyone for their attendance, both in person and online, and for your continued support of Hot Chili. I will now hand over to Christian for a brief overview on current activities. We are at an exciting phase in Hot Chili at the moment, which I think will be reinforced by Christian.
Thank you very much, Stuart. It is great to have our two newest additions to our board joining us at this Annual General Meeting. We welcome Fiona Van Maanen and Stuart, bringing a wealth of experience for this phase of the development of the company. A timeline that has certainly kept in line with the very ambitious goal of the company, which is to transition Hot Chili into what is effectively Australia's largest copper producer in the coming years, born from Australia and tied into a 17-year partnership with all of our key stakeholders in Chile to bring this ambition to a reality.
We're now moving past our pre-feasibility, which was delivered earlier this year, and we're moving into really the pointy-ended development, which requires quite a lot of augmentation of our skill base from the very top at our board right through our executive management and senior ranks of our company as we move our capability towards transitioning towards building this very, very large coastal copper project in Chile. We are very pleased to have Stuart Mathews join as our Chairman, bringing a wealth of experience, mine-build experience across the world. I believe five major mines that Stuart has brought to fruition from inception through to production and operation. His time with Gold Fields guiding that strategy globally will be invaluable in this next part of Hot Chili's phase of development.
I have a presentation, which I've just presented recently at a conference to a number of very interested potential investors, which outlines broadly the company's key areas of value focus around our copper project and our water assets, which we're transitioning to these final investment decisions. Mickey, if you'd like to just move forward into the presentation, we can skip some of the corporate overview and probably move to just this as a broad overview. As most shareholders are aware, we've been developing a large consolidated coastal copper production hub about 600 km to the north of Santiago. Most importantly, this is located as the gateway, the coastal gateway to one of the largest clusters of undeveloped copper projects in the world.
This is at a time of extreme supply stress for the copper sector, both on the physical supply side with the concentrate market and pushing into where prices are now elevating to and where the future lies for this very, very critical commodity in copper, which is at the forefront of the world's push to electrify everything. What we see here is that Hot Chili, after 15 years on market, after having achieved a great deal with this project, building a one billion ton resource base between our two major discoveries, Productora and Cortadera, we are now at a very exciting phase where all of our advanced permitting work for over a decade positions us for this moment to be moving into feasibility and to be preparing for the submission of our final environmental impact assessment next year.
What that does is lay a pathway towards our final investment decision and moving this company into that execution and construction phase upon finance investment decision. What was always very different about Hot Chili was the location, was this low elevation advantage, which you can see there on the bottom right, and this competitive advantage over our peer space, which meant that what Hot Chili was in the business of doing was growth, building that critical scale which we required to ensure that we could have extremely competitive, low-cost operational numbers and low capital intensity. That is very much what our pre-feasibility has delivered this year, ushering in a 20-year mine life as very much a springboard from where we can grow over this final phase.
A very advanced situation now, a very large resource base which is about to get larger with further announcements just released this morning on our new discovery, La Verde, about 35 km down the road, where a significant amount of patience on dealmaking in this area has again unlocked another major coastal porphyry cluster, which the company is now getting its teeth into. We have seen the arrival of our third major bulk tonnage coastal discovery in La Verde. I'll talk about that announcement towards the end of this presentation in more detail. Moving forward in the presentation and just quickly on La Verde, obviously, this is a discovery that was made at the end of last year, a very stunning drilling intersection from our second hole in an area that took six to seven years to consolidate.
Our Executive Vice President, Jose Ignacio, was absolutely critical once again in this long relationship build with a key landholder that had effectively checkmated a mid-tier company in Hudbay with the surrounding landholding. After six or seven years, we were able to secure the Hudbay ground, and we were able to do a deal which a mid-tier could not achieve in that time. This is a very familiar story. This is the same story of patience, of dealmaking capability that led us to consolidate Cortadera before this and originally Productora. Patience and true determination and grit has got the company to this point to unlock these opportunities, and we choose well.
The drilling results that have come out of La Verde in the first phase of drilling and now the commencing of the second phase are a testament to that selection and to that patience in being able to do deals that others cannot in this part of Chile. Moving forward, I will not touch too much on the La Verde discovery. This presentation outlined the before phase one drilling about 10,000 meters of RC, which has rapidly defined a 1 kilometer by 750 meter mineralized footprint with multiple high-grade near-surface centers that were identified in that first drilling. Now we are transitioning that original RC phase where over half of our drill holes ended in significant mineralization.
We're starting to focus on really what we're looking for here: the ability to bring an early higher-grade open pit feed into our mine plan to significantly de-risk that mine plan by pushing back capital expenditure decisions, but more importantly, leveraging the value we've just delivered in the pre-feasibility with additional mine life growth as we build this 20-year mine life out towards 30. We'll skip over these La Verde slides and move to our resource table. Firstly, the impact of what La Verde is likely to do. If we move to the next slide, we see here where Costa Fuego is positioned globally amongst the largest undeveloped resources in the world outside of the majors. This is a list of the independents in the world. The color of those metal bars relates to how young each of these resources have been established.
You can see that Costa Fuego is one of the new entrants in the world in this table. We're well within the top 10. La Verde now looks extremely material to our resource-based growth, likely to push this project in towards a top four or top five positioning globally, not just still holding the tag as the largest undeveloped resource on the ASX. Our grade is very competitive. It is very, very much representative of where the global head grade of copper production is in the world at this point in time and actually where all of the average grade of new supply for about 75% of new supply coming into the world for the next mines to be built.
We have a very large gold and copper resource base that is about to get a lot larger with the addition and integration of La Verde next year with our maiden resource, which our resource development team here, headed by Kirsty Sheeran and our principal geologist, Chris Mackay, are busily working on with our extremely dedicated field team run by Andrea Araya over in Chile. Moving forward to some of the numbers that we put out in that pre-feasibility. This was a huge undertaking by the company. This is many, many years in the making. Shareholders that do not see any major milestones delivered look no further than an extremely important de-risking and value point in the company's progression towards achieving our goal of transitioning this company towards a producer. This is very much a base for us. It sets accuracy on our numbers at 25%, not 50%.
We've now moved into a very important space that allows this project to be taken very seriously by large strategic funding partners, which we're also advancing in the background with the strategic funding process. It's a $1.3 billion mine to build. Produces about the same on profit after tax. Most importantly, this is a project that has delivered time and time again pointers towards one of the lowest quartile capital intensity projects in the sector. Only five of these exist outside of the majors that can produce close to 120,000 tons of copper equivalent on supply side. A very large payload of copper. This is 85% exposed towards copper metal, one of the highest exposed projects in our peer space, and putting out a very, very impressive 50,000 ounces of gold over that primary production period. What we see are very competitive operating costs driven by low altitude.
Again, having this project at 700 meters on the coastline and not at 4,000 meters, this is impacting our numbers from capital intensity right through to operating costs, which you can see there sitting just outside of the first quartile. Most importantly, this is a project that was always going to deliver a lot of metal for the capital outlaid. Again, very important about being meaningful. This is a top quartile production capacity global project in the copper space that is coming near term. We look at leverage in two ways. We look at leverage to value on those numbers with copper price, but most importantly, our opportunity, which is presenting right now, leverage to mine life extension. What that does is very, very similar to what copper price or grade does to a deposit's economics. Here we're looking at the impact of copper price.
For every $0.10 a pound, how much does our post-tax net present value increase? That is just under $110 million US for every $0.10 above our long-term price assumption of $4.30. At the moment, that is the fourth most leveraged copper project in the development space outside of the majors. The bubble sizes there represent the size and scale of that measured and indicated resource base. You can see, again, reflecting back to that table you saw earlier where we are one of the top 10. The color is about how advanced your project is. We are one of the blue colors; we are outlined in red just to focus where we are in that leverage factor. The blue projects are the ones that are 25% accuracy or better. They are pre-feasibility or more.
The light blue projects need to spend a lot more money and a lot more time to be able to get to where these leading developers are in terms of de-risking and advancement. What that means is we are a project and a company that is extremely tied to the future price of the metal that we've invested in for 17 years now, copper. We're very, very pleased to have that second bite at leverage, which is an exciting material growth addition coming in at the moment on La Verde. Moving to the next slide, this is just reiterating the competitive advantage of being down at low elevation. These large copper projects in the world, they principally reside, about 65% of them reside in the Americas along the Andean Belt.
Most of these porphyry deposits, where the majority of the world's copper supply come from, are above 3,500 meters. They are above the snow line in the Andes. High elevation, for any of those who have not walked around at 4,000 meters, after about 20 meters of walking, you probably want to sit down. That impacts operational cost. That impacts development timelines. The high Andean projects take twice as long, around four years to execute and build. More importantly, they have skewed the entire industry towards high capital intensity projects that are only getting higher and probably headlined by even investment decisions by the largest mining company in the world, BHP, to commit $12 billion about nine months ago into Chile on brownfield developments at twice the capital intensity of Hot Chili's greenfield development in Costa Fuego.
Moving forward in this presentation, again, I'll just finish on the doability of this project. I believe that our Chairman will probably speak about this following his recent trip with Fiona to look at these projects firsthand at site. It strikes you what we're dealing with here. The company's invested in a field notes video, which will be coming out very shortly, to give all of our shareholders really this firsthand impression of what we are building here. It's something that you can drive off the double-lane Pan American Highway. They're projects that are hidden just behind hills. It's 17 kilometers out of a major township and the Wasco Valley and is 50 kilometers from port, sitting next to major power infrastructure in the central grid right next to this project. This is a production hub approach.
It is about centralized processing and drawing our scale from these successive major discoveries sitting within tracking distance of that central processing location, which has seen over 10 years of permitting advance. It is a large project. We have the opportunity to envisage scale-up opportunity through this feasibility stage. Primarily, it is around 400,000 tons of annual concentrate, one of the cleanest concentrate coming to market in the next five years with virtually no arsenic. It is also complemented by a significant copper cathode operation, which will take advantage of our extensive oxide resource base being developed and producing around about 12,000 tons of annual copper in cathode. Moving forward on this presentation, and I will just touch very, very briefly on Huasco Water.
Look, this is our secret weapon on financing for all of those who are questioning how a junior can move through the La Son Trof and being ambitious and not realizing that we have to have a very, very strong strategy on how we develop this asset to protect our shareholders from dilution. That has been at the forefront of our thinking for many, many years. Vallenar Water is the outcome of vision from our Executive Vice President, José Ignacio. This was born out of metallurgy results, which arrived on our first discovery over 13 years ago at Productora that indicated we could receive better copper recoveries using seawater processing. That was the first insight into low capital intensity the company received after that major discovery.
It was something that allowed us to make a very simple decision: apply for a maritime water extraction license to provide seawater for our future operation, which at that time certainly was not guaranteed. Productora was a very exciting exploration phase and something that gave us the confidence to commit to such activities. What that has now led to is not just an opportunity to supply—if we move forward to the next slide, Micky, after this one—to supply water to our operation in the future at Costa Fuego. Now, after that very long lead time of 10 years to secure our first maritime concession, including two years from the Chilean Navy to secure our coastal rights for surface rights on the coast to establish our water extraction activities, we look around now, and regulations have dramatically changed in Chile.
Now you are no longer able to take water out of the ground. Continental water extraction for the mining industry in the Atacama Desert, the most stressed water area in the world, has meant that all existing mines in Chile are transitioning to 100% desalination water supply. All future developments will require desalination supply for those projects that require freshwater processing. We're very lucky being down on the coast. Our metallurgy is different because our alteration assemblages in the older deposits are different. About 25% of Chilean production are from projects that can produce copper with seawater supply. We're firstly in that basket, a very low-risk basket of developers, not many of us, and certainly no other peers in our space at that elevation with those characteristics that have our scale.
Secondly, when we look around at the largest cluster of undeveloped projects in the copper space globally in one region, and we find out that we have the only maritime concession to extract seawater and that the timelines for permitting on water supply in Chile have not changed, and there are currently no plans before Parliament for them to be changed. We have a tier-one jurisdiction where government and rule of law is principal to having that blue ribbon, I guess, stamp on Chilean investment in the mining sector being a top three investment jurisdiction. What we have is an impediment to these neighboring major deposits being developed inside of the next 10 years because of those timelines to approve maritime rights in Chile. That represents a huge opportunity for the company.
If we move forward to the next slide, the Vallenar Water business for us is an opportunity to perhaps have a strategic asset that can be monetized for the company to provide a large component, if not all, of the equity side required to build our copper project, thus shielding our shareholders from large dilution where a junior company every once in a while pops its head up and says, "I want to be ambitious." We do not believe in this industry that mining companies were immaculately conceived.
Every once in a while, there is a particular type of psychopath like myself, and there is a particular type of visionary like José Ignacio that allows a pathway for a company to be this ambitious and to also put in place a strategy to protect our shareholders from that dilution, which has skewed our industry towards companies that now can quote the La Son curve like the back of their hand, has ensured that the culture in the North American market is all about finding something and selling it, never having the ambition to tackle this very, very scary thing called the La Son Trof or the Valley of Death. Every once in a while, the Australians, which we're a little bit hard of learning, we always try to make a project real.
Most companies stumble through this huge challenge in front of them to avoid that issue. Huasco Water is our solution to funding. At the moment, our immediate near-term solution to funding is pegging this valuation discrepancy between asset value transactions in the market at five- to six-times multiple above our company's market capitalization. Therefore, our funding solution to avoid dilution now is all about completing that strategic partnering process, which we have engaged the largest investment bank in the world, BMO, to manage and guide the company through. We have been very patient in that endeavor, and we hope to bring an outcome to our shareholders once we have fully assessed what is a very, very active and white-hot market for assets in this class that are this near-term and meaningful.
I'll now just finish with a very well-timed announcement, which was just delivered to market this morning following a very long period of patience for our assay returns from our current phase two diamond drilling. Micky, if you'd like to bring up our announcement and particularly figure two, I think we can stop and look at that. We commenced our drilling in late September. I believe our first assays were sent off to a laboratory around about the 9th or 10th, first batches coming out of our diamond drilling. We've had to sit patiently like the entire Chilean industry. Might I add, when we got impatient a few weeks ago, we even called our friends in Australia and wondered whether we could send our prepared samples over to Australia to get perhaps a week or two ahead of timelines.
We found out that the Australian turnaround here in Western Australia is actually a couple of weeks longer than our friends in Chile. We knocked on a few doors and found out that we had to continue being patient. We would have loved to have delivered these a number of weeks ago for our shareholders. We were very, very positive about what we've been seeing in the diamond drilling. Diamond drilling is a bit different to RC drilling. We can see everything we want to see in core.
We can perform all of the work that is going to lay the foundations for building a robust resource using the same approaches that were outlined and employed at our large copper porphyry discovery to the north in Cortadera, utilizing our global experts in porphyry exploration in Steve Darwin and bringing our team, which is a world-winning approach and world-class team, which last year or the year before, excuse me, won the coveted Parker Challenge by Rio Tinto on using this technique with Oyu Tolgoi, their flagship large copper project in Mongolia. That same team, that same approach, and that same systematic pathway towards developing a robust resource, being able to focus on high-grade centers and our approach to being able to bring forward the definition of a higher-grade component of La Verde is now playing out. This morning, we released a first diamond hole from this program.
This was a twin hole to our discovery hole. It was very important for us to ensure that we had good repeatability on our RC drill results, that we could see what that near-surface high-grade related to, but more importantly, that we could extend that, that we could start to look at the opportunity to see whether our high-grade centers would coalesce or converge at depth. What you're looking at on the screen here is what 10,000 meters of RC drilling gave us: one kilometer long, being capped out at the depth of RC capacity with over half of our drill holes ending in mineralization, three higher-grade centers which we're focusing on to put in trucks and send north and impact our mine life additions for Costa Fuego and leverage that value that we looked at on the financial metrics and to integrate that rapidly.
What we showed this morning is the impact of that first diamond hole if you want to move down to what the picture looks like with just one diamond hole. You can see here another diamond hole. Once again, because of mechanical issues, a diamond hole that has again finished in over 0.5% copper and over 0.2 grams per ton gold. This entire hole is mineralized from top to bottom with a gold credit twice the grade of our resources to the north. This is extremely important because less than 0.1 grams per ton gold covers our transport distance. What we have here is the early signs of high-grade centers that are converging into one large high-grade center.
If we look back to what we learned at Cortadera, the high-grade core at Quebrada III that gave us so much, what we see is that there is now a high-grade center from surface that is larger than Quebrada III's footprint of the high-grade core. That is what is exciting the company now. This looks like rapid copper and gold metal additions coming onto a base which is already one billion tons strong. You can see here in the addition of the black drill holes, which are outstanding with assays to come now, and now we should start to see our regular assay flow now that we've caught that initial distance of processing. We'll start to see these additional diamond drill holes hit the market into Christmas and into the new year.
You can see some of those white extensions on previous RC drill holes, which will start to fill out the near surface and start to laterally expand the extents of this high-grade system, which already is telling the company that even the scenarios we're playing with, how many years of additional feed we might be looking at here, are starting to become things of yesterday. We're resetting our expectations on this as the announcement title suggested. These results far exceeded what we expected to see. We are seeing a very gold-rich porphyry system with a major footprint that is looking like it is going to be very material. I commented to some of my team this morning that we have not seen drill results like this since the company was delivering world-class intersections when we discovered the high-grade core at Cortadera.
We have not seen gold like this since that discovery in the coastal range of Chile. If we go back to 2020 to what my comment was there, having an extensive knowledge of every deposit in Chile, its history of discovery, and how it impacted the world's largest producing copper nation, we have not seen these kind of gold credits on a coastal porphyry since Candelaria was discovered by Phelps Dodge and changed exploration in the Chilean coastal Cordillera forever. This is a very exciting moment for the company. What's even more exciting is this is the first of four clustered porphyry footprints, and why José and myself spent six to seven years trying to get our hands on this opportunity for the company.
This represents our pathway towards a tier-one asset and to allow the company to dream bigger and allow the company to position this project at definitive feasibility with much stronger financial metrics and put the company in a position to negotiate on our shareholders' behalf the best deal we can to bring in a tier-one strategic partner on both our copper and our water assets. Hopefully that gives you a good overview. Thank you very much for everyone joining online, also all shareholders and our key stakeholders, advisors, and friends of Hot Chili that have turned up today to support us. We very much appreciate the voting support for each of the resolutions that have been read out today. I now want to pass over to Stuart and then perhaps ask Fiona for some kind words. Pass over to Stuart.
Look, Stuart, I just want to mention a little bit of our history. I didn't know Stuart very well from a technical perspective, but from a reputational perspective, for many, many years in this industry, I think I first met Stuart in the first year I'd floated Hot Chili in the market. And Stuart was a shareholder early, which was good timing, Stuart, because the beginning of the company saw great returns for our shareholders with the discovery of Productora. Not so much the downturn of the cycle, which wiped out most of our competitors, but we're still here, unlike many of our peers.
We have been able to build this project stronger and bigger to where it is positioned today that I could be in a position to finally get a phone call from Fiona, who had mentioned that her friend Stuart Mathews had just retired very quietly, and most of the industry did not know that he had left Gold Fields as their Executive Vice President, that had presided over a very, very strong period of growth for that gold major in the world. From that conversation, there were several conversations to try and bring that mine build and that stewardship partner pun to the company's capability so that we could transition through this very important investment phase before final investment decision.
Just a bit of an introduction, Stuart, I'm sure that you'd probably give a better background on yourself, but also hopefully just on some of the reasons why you did join Hot Chili.
Yeah, thanks, Christian. Look, I think because I'm new and I'm a new face to shareholders, I think it's probably worthwhile a little bit of my background. I did know Christian and Hot Chili people early, like when they first formed. We formed a probably informal relationship and social relationship at conferences. We knew how to get along and have some fun those days. I did have minor sort of shares in Hot Chili early for a period. Very happy to be involved now. I've come from a geology background out of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. I'm not an explorationist. I'll give you that. I'm more a production operational geologist background.
I've moved through all the ranks of mine geology, then went to general operations management, general manager of mine sites, then get dragged into building mines. Built five. Been involved from day one right through to full production. It's exciting. It could be wild and challenging. The reward at the end is pretty amazing. Now, Hot Chili have just delivered a pretty stonking PFS into the market for Costa Fuego. I think that made people sort of eyes wide open all of a sudden. Because once we've done that as a company, you've made a great discovery. You've got a PFS out there which puts some metrics around what the scale of this project looks like. They know you're on them. The market knows you're on your way to a DFS, definitive feasibility, and finding a way to develop this project and get it into production.
Now that we have the new discovery that we've just been hearing about, La Verde, that's another piece, which actually we have two prongs now. We have to find a way to develop this project, get it to DFS, and now we've got the growth path as well, which says anyone looking to strategically partner with Hot Chili is looking pretty promising because you've got a project ready to be developed and advanced rapidly, as well as some great gains on having the water locked down, the power secured, the port facilities. The location, which I didn't appreciate till I actually touched the ground in person a few months back, is like you could not ask for a better location. It sells itself when you go there. It looks development-ready and a great part of Chile, which I'm quite familiar with. We're in a good space here.
I'd like to thank all the shareholders here for supporting Hot Chili to this point. Stay with us because there's more to come. We've got a development story, a project ready, and we've got a growth story to add to that as well, which looks pretty stonking as well. That word stonking was actually in the market. I remember reading it. Someone said that Hot Chili's just released a stonking PFS. I saw it.
I used to come to that.
There was someone that was on a YouTube video. Stonking PFS from Hot Chili. I had this opportunity to join. I'm happy to be involved. I think that's fine.
Thank you. Now we have an opportunity to share some scones and a bit of coffee a little bit. Maybe like to say a few words, Fiona?
If you want me to. Yeah. No.
My background is basically operational accounting. I spent my first 10 years working flying flat or residential on mine sites. I actually met Christian when he was a young boy as a young GO in Mount Magnet working for Hill 50. I had not seen him for many, many years. Then a recruitment agent called up and said, "We're looking for a non-executive director. Are you interested?" I remember Christian when he was such a young chap. From my operational experience, I have moved up through the finance ranks through CFO and company secretarial. Corporate governance and finance and accounting is my background. It is very exciting to be working with Hot Chili when we had the opportunity to go to Chile and actually meet the team over there. They have got a great team.
They've got long-term employees and are very loyal to Christian and Christian to his employees. It is a great asset. I feel very privileged to be able to be along the journey. Thank you.
Thank you. Can you ask some questions?
Yes, certainly.
If questions are going slow,
let us know. We will start with questions from the audience here.
The question I have is, I might turn and finish out for a while because I've talked at different times. I'm interested in the partnering process that you're talking about and have been talking about for a while. You talked about BHP committing all those funds in a more complex environment. It's interesting that somebody like that wouldn't have talked to you and looked at the comparison. Why did they ignore the comparison?
Well, Jen, that's a very good question, Mark.
Obviously, I need to just state at the outset, we're under NDA with many parties. I probably would say that in relation to BHP, which I think they're happy for us to let people know that we are under NDA, maybe they haven't ignored us. We're in discussions with multiple parties that have varying levels of interest, whether it's our copper project as their primary focus or water. In the case of BHP, I'm sure that you could probably tell that maybe it's both. In particular, given their large investment in Bocuna, obviously having an alternate water solution to what perhaps the Lundin Group were originally anticipating for desalination supply from the Pacific across the border, they have a journey in front of them to develop Jose Maria and Phillow, something they've invested $3.2 billion into.
Their numbers that just came out last week look like a staged $14 billion US commitment on the Argentinian side of the border. At the moment, they have a number of things to solve, and water would be high on their agenda. We have a great dialogue with the joint venture for the Bocuna there, along with many, many other parties. I have Will in the room, and he's ensuring that that's probably where the conversation finishes. I wondered why.
Can I ask another question? I'm just interested in the venture or the placement. I mean, are you keeping control of the company? What are you considering? What are the alternatives that you're considering? Keeping control of the company and joint venturing, which means that they might be earning their interest by contributing capital, but you're still keeping your company separate. Or would it be a share position?
Those are the sorts of things. Are you considering all those alternatives?
Yes, we are.
What are the alternatives that might be most favorable to you in your head?
Look, we are, for governance reasons, have established a special committee of the board of non-conflicted directors. We have a very well-thought-through governance process as to how the board will assess what is, at this stage, multiple non-binding indicative offers that are incomplete, and that process is ongoing. While we move through that systematic process in a blind process that is being run independently by BMO as our financial advisors to the potential transaction—did I get that right?
Yeah, that's good. That's good.
We're assessing a wide range of structure.
Some of the things that you talked about from minority through to joint ventures that might consider control on the partnering side to 100% proposals at company, at asset level, we have all structures that we are open to discussing. What the company has gone out looking for primarily is something that we viewed was the way that a company would build a project like this is very much in line with how nearly every copper project in Chile has been built. That is embedded with a minority partner at the asset level so that the transaction is priced at an asset level. That asset-level market is five to six times higher than the company's market capitalization today. If we were to bring in a 20% partner, I think that shareholders would be all very, very happy with that.
That would be very much in line with how nearly every copper project in Chile has been built. In the case of existing mines in Chile, that has typically been with a Japanese partner with associated off-take rights for the equity that they own in the project. We are in a very, very stressed concentrate market where projects in the Codelco portfolio, for instance, to take one example, one of their operations used to pay the refineries about $130 million-$120 million a year to refine that concentrate. Now, Codelco for that mine is being paid $120 million-$130 million to supply that concentrate. This is a very, very unique part of the cycle that I do not think I have ever seen before.
What that means is that the decision that Hot Chili took to retain 40% of its off-take rights in the first eight years and therefore afterwards uncommitted outside of a very strong partner that we already have for 60% of our off-take in the first eight years in Glencore at benchmark terms has left that opportunity open and therefore left that room for a minority partner. Hot Chili went forward with this process with that in mind. However, when you engage the world's largest investment bank in a process such as this, it means that we have, for shareholders, gone out and gone to all of the available parties that would be interested in this type of asset. That means that we have a number of non-binding indicatives that span a range of proposals on structure. We've not discounted any of those structures.
Therefore, the special committee is carefully considering that process. In parallel, we're also completing technical due diligence, legal due diligence. We're not completed in that process. We've seen that a number of our peers in our space have made announcements based on non-binding indicative offers. We are not the company that would do that lightly. We will be hopefully in a position to announce something once due diligence is complete and once a proposal has been considered acceptable by that special committee to bring to shareholders in a binding form. At that point, I imagine there is a very dramatic key catalyst on value for our shareholders. We're working very hard behind the scenes. Most of my management group is invested in a long process of Q&A, technical due diligence, site visits.
We have more parties that will be at site before Christmas, parties that were there just last night. We're very active on that front. We're running a process on our copper, and we're running a process on our water assets. Some parties have interest in both. We won't presuppose that there will be any outcome out of this process. We're financially secure at the moment. We're being very careful with our expenditure. We have a drilling program that is only 3,000 meters. We're nearly finished with that. It's producing some very exciting news flow. I know that there are many shareholders that would love to see four or five drill rigs on this and to really be capturing that growth and alpha news flow into a very buoyant market.
The board at the moment has decided to very carefully and prudently manage our expenditure so we can see if we can get to an outcome which will deliver significant value for our shareholders in the near term from that process. Stuart, is there anything further to add?
No, I think you've covered it pretty well.
What time period are we looking at here? Are we looking at six months? Are we looking at two years? Are we looking at three months or whatever?
The answer is as soon as possible, but ensuring that.
You come back to me.
Certainly. Look, look. Time's running out in some areas. Yeah. Look, we started this nine months ago.
We would have been in a strong position coming into the end of the year to consider with our legal counsel and the special committee those final candidates in stage two of the process that are advancing through final stages of non-technical due diligence that have passed their technical due diligence. However, about seven weeks ago now, I think, the world changed in the asset market. We were approached by no less than 12 new parties, some of them very, very large that have now interest in joining the process, that have subsequently joined the process and executed NDAs. Several of those parties were not interested in this project nine months ago. What has changed? The copper price. The gold price. Copper price. That's quite easy. The concentrate market going into effectively heart attack mode. It's changed everything.
For the benefit of our shareholders, we believe it's prudent for us to assess those new entrants and to at least assess what their indicative value view of our projects may be. Until such time as we've assessed that field, we won't be locking into any previous leading potential proposal that we may have been considering towards the end of this year. How long? I think that it's as soon as possible for our shareholders is my answer without giving you an answer because I can't.
Quick question. The water rights you've got, is there an expiry date? I mean, do you have to take water before a certain date or just?
No expiry date. What we're doing is advancing those assets, showing the government that we are advancing this concept.
Those licenses are unlimited, only limited by the level of environmental rigor and applications that support extraction levels. Effectively, it's the ocean, and we can drink from a virtually limitless source. The last time I looked in terms of not just saltwater processing for our project, but to supply desalinated water, you firstly need to take the water from the ocean. It's a hell of an opportunity that our shareholders have embedded that I think I've spoken with some shareholders today that we recognize has no value in our market cap. Our copper project is one-fifth of the value that assets are being transacted in the market today. Stop. Sea level's rising, so you'll be helping. We'll also be managing our water consumption very sustainably, looking at as much recirculation, evaporation limitations that we can. Okay. Is there any further questions?
I'm happy to see the scans.
Over to you, Stuart.
Do you want to close the meeting?
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for attending today and for your continued interest in Hot Chili going forward. Also to all the people online who have taken the time to listen to Christian's presentation and contribute to the resolution's passing. Thank you.
That's a really good—I'd like to say something after being here 15 years. I think there should be some form of recognition for the job that you've done and the management team because so many companies fall by the wayside. To kind of put up with the amount of pressure that you have, personally have, that I know have for the last 15 years, I don't know many guys that could have achieved what you and the management team have achieved. Thank you for that, mate.
Thank you. Recognizing that through the resolutions that were voted today, the new STI LTI performance rights, we are basically getting the remuneration structure better and remunerating everything.
Yeah. Good. It should be a recognition of it.
Yes. Absolutely.
Yeah. I think that's great to have that support of those resolutions. Good.
Thank you. Stuart?
Yeah. We will close the meeting, I think. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, everyone. That's about you. I think we're all happy.