I thought after yesterday's horse jokes, we were safe, but you brought them back. Oh, man. All right, let's head to Chile now for a story that's all about scale and copper. Hot Chili is advancing the Costa Fuego copper-gold project, supported by recent drilling success at La Huerta and continued progress towards development. So it's a name that many of us here will be watching very closely, and what we're gonna do is set the scene with a short video, and then we'll welcome up to the stage Managing Director, Christian Easterday. Watch the screens.
The desert isn't supposed to look like this. The most vivid outcome is the silence, wind, stone, and heat. But every so often, when the rain bears its weight here, the wind waits, clouds spill across the sky. Fragile and defined, a reminder that even dry spaces still simply need to live. For those who come here searching for copper, for opportunity, for understanding, it's easy to forget how much it gives. It gives life, it takes it. And in a place like this, where water is rare as mercy, its value can't be measured in barrels or shares. This is Chile's north, where the earth is rich, the air is dry, and the stories are scarce as everything underneath the dust. We come here to see what possibility looks like-
Well, thank you very much, RIU, for inviting Hot Chili to present again and provide an update in what has got to be one of the longest persistent stories in global copper. Born from Australia, now a leading developer within the world. In fact, the ASX's only representative within the top five independent global copper developments. This project is really starting to take on a lot more meaning as we move into a new copper cycle. And timing is everything in this business, so this 17-year journey for myself and 15-year journey for the dedicated team at Hot Chili that has brought us here, now takes on significant meaning.
As most of you know, we've been developing this asset from inception, from discovery at the end of the last copper cycle, and we now sit here today with a project under feasibility, as I mentioned, top five by scale of the independents. This is often one of those moments where you look to those sayings, and there is a saying in this business that often the discoveries of the last cycle become the takeovers or the mines of the next. That is what Hot Chili has been trying to bring to the Australian market, a true Australian-born representative within global copper. We have some very, very exciting developments, and this is coming off the back of a pre-feasibility delivered on a 20-year project, pushing out 120,000 tons of copper equivalent annually, that we put out about nine months ago.
The winds have changed dramatically in that time with the global copper price and with the market sentiment in general, starting to actually feel the fundamentals behind this supply-driven cycle that we're moving into, that has really pushed copper now as the most globally significant or invaluable of the metal markets, coming alongside iron ore at the moment. Hot Chili's stock has quadrupled in the last five or six months. Last week, we put away a AUD 40 million placement institutional across Canada and Australia as we start to build out our beachhead into the North American market and expand our capital pool in preparation for financing this project in the coming couple of years. What we have is a market that is fundamentally changing before everyone's eyes.
This is probably one of the key metals, along with gold and silver, that are seeing significant investment appetite, and we're starting to see that reflected in the enterprise value on each of the peer developers in this copper development space. At the moment, Hot Chili's stock price is rising, but so are our peers', and that differential between valuations in North America and Australian large copper developers has never been more pronounced. We also see it in a growing amount of transactions in this space. P/NAV ratios on asset-level transactions and takeovers are rising, and in the last six months have taken a significant leg up, with activity in this space around M&A and asset-level transactions. So these are all very, very important metrics when Hot Chili is already well underway with its asset-level strategic partnering process in the background to this story.
What we're going to focus on is the three key areas of growth and catalyst for the continuing rewrite of Hot Chili as one of the primary exposures to copper on the ASX. This is now about an exciting new discovery, which we're developing at the right time, adding a lot of weight to our resource base, looking likely to push us to a Tier One asset in the short term, and something that we're going to integrate into that 20-year mine plan and bump that on scale again this year. So outside of the discovery, we're pushing hard on the feasibility of Costa Fuego, not looking to slip on our time frames towards finance and final investment decision, and we're also advancing very well on our strategic asset in water, which the introduction video was no doubt a teaser towards.
So again, a slide that many of you that have been following the Hot Chili story know well. Our advantage at the beginning was all about location, elevation. 12 years of permitting advance has the company positioned to submit our environmental impact assessment on stage one of this project towards the end of this year, and that starts the time clock for the delivery of our definitive feasibility in 2028. And what we have well-positioned is a very, very strategic location. We're at 700 meters. We're not at 4,200 meters. So when we look at projects like the Vicuña Project, which BHP put a lot of news out on yesterday, which was very, very pleasing to Hot Chili and certainly signified a, I guess, a proof of concept of our infrastructure outsourcing plan.
It's lovely when imitation is the best form of flattery in this business, that our Huasco water water supply has just been given a tick by what BHP and Lundin are considering above us. We have a very well-located project that's very well advanced on permitting and ready to go into final approval at the end of this year. But what we do have 30 km down the removed from our billion-tonne resource base that is supporting that 20-year mine life, is a new, fantastic discovery that was about six or seven years in the making. It started to gain momentum last year with an RC drill program from surface, where most of the drill holes were ending in mineralization.
And then with the onset of the Phase 2 Diamond Program, we're starting to see some very, very exciting front-end open pit potential that could dramatically change this project again on scale. So just focusing on La Verde and the fact that we're talking in an explorers conference, it brings me great pleasure for Hot Chili to bring our third bulk tonnage major discovery to the Costa Fuego hub. La Verde is already 1 km long, 700 meters wide, open in all directions. We are locking in on what we've already found first, and that will drive the ability to rapidly integrate this into Costa Fuego this year. But we'll also now be accelerating our drilling.
A second rig will be on the ground and no doubt a third rig to come, as we start to accelerate this towards first resource and then integration into reserves for a restated pre-feasibility at the end of this year. So what we're also now starting to really like is the shallow, higher-grade mineralization that our diamond holes are starting to intersect. So this is bulk mineralization, shallow gravel cover, which can be easily removed and straight into higher-grade mineralization than our front end at Costa Fuego.
So when we're looking at something of the scale that looks likely, at this very early point, to add some five years of production into the front end of Costa Fuego, now we're looking at potentially adding in the first year into Costa Fuego, replacing that front end with material that is some 30%-40% higher in revenue, and that has a dramatic impact on paybacks and financial metrics, obviously. So this is what it looked like with 10,000 meters of RC, and this is what it looks like after eight diamond holes. We've got six diamond holes coming to market and an acceleration of drilling that is going to start looking at this high-grade core, which continues to converge and grow at depth.
Just yesterday, we were able to announce some very exciting results at depth, where we're predicting the high-grade core to continue expanding and starting to see some very exciting higher-grade zones. I guess what's really good about this project is this is the type of high-grade core we found in our second discovery at 400 meters depth. So the type of systems that are found with the ATEX next to us or the Filo Mining above us, but this is from surface. So there is a bigger story here. La Verde sits within a large cluster, three lookalike anomalies, two of them covered by gravels.
We'll be getting our teeth into that in the coming months and starting to see whether this is not only just a mine life push from 20 out towards 30 years with La Verde's discovery footprint, but whether, in fact, that this is a scale-up opportunity, to push ourselves up in terms of global significance of what this is becoming. The resource base is already within the top ten. La Verde will push this likely into tier one category, 5 million ton copper, 5 million ounce gold and above. The pre-feasibility economics were very, very solid at long-term copper prices of $4.30, which are now significantly higher, and certainly $22.80 gold, which is a lot higher on long term. So a very high metal production project, something akin to the scale of production of OZ Minerals before it was taken over, and delivering a bottom quartile capital intensity.
almost a bottom quartile C1 cash costs. But when we take that $1.3 billion mine that can put out twice the metal for the capital of our peers, because of its location down on the coast, we look at the NPVs and the IRRs after tax, and we say, "What can five years of La Verde do to that?" And it can lever that by 50%. So when you add that to the leverage that the metal price is already doing for our key commodities in copper and gold, this is a dramatic transformation of the financials on this project, and this is where scale is king in this business of copper. So leverage for Hot Chili, we were already one of the most leveraged, with almost 95,000 tons of annual copper supply coming.
What La Verde does is it probably puts us to one of the most leveraged out of the significant copper developers in the world that are classed at plus 40,000 tons of annual supply. Our capital intensity relates to elevation. That's always been clear. But also, when you start to look at the meaningful top five copper developers of the world, this is where the cash costs are really meaningful, being at low elevation also. So a very compact development footprint, central processing, primarily a sulfide concentrator scaled at 20 million tons at this moment, as well as a leach operation, drawing ore sources from those two bulk sources. One of them, new, so new that it's not even on this map yet in La Verde, but certainly something that is being prepared for development layout on the EIA.
So I said I would speak about the hidden asset, the strategic asset, the copper that Hot Chili has been developing in the background, and this is about water. We are in the scarcest area of the world for water supply and one of the most stressed regions that's attracted all of the largest industrial water players to invest in building out what will be the solution to water supply for the Atacama. Now, regulations have changed, and you can't take water out of the ground, and that is desalination for the majority of the copper sector. We've studied a pre-feasibility. We've looked to outsource our water infrastructure, something that I said was a growing trend in Chile, and now yesterday, BHP have followed suit. This is infrastructure you can take out of your capital.
Others can finance it, they can secure supply agreements with you, and you pay for it in your operating costs. This reduces capital further. So that approach to what we're doing with seawater supply for the processing of Costa Fuego, I guess, is then complemented by the larger regional water supply opportunity to supply desalination to an entire region, supporting the largest cluster of undeveloped copper projects in the world. And so that opportunity for a regional catchment of water off-takers being coupled with a asset-level strategic partnering process on this water asset is the commencement of Hot Chili's ability to start monetizing this asset to effectively develop our copper project and finance it. So thank you very much for your time. The next few months are going to be very interesting.
A lot of drill results coming out of La Verde, pushing towards a first resource and an integrated and revised pre-feasibility, with some exciting things happening on the corporate front. So thank you very much for your time.