tremendous news to discuss the project economics upgrade at Rhyolite Ridge. I'm going to hand it over to Bernard. We'll have time for a few questions at the end. Over to you.
Yeah, thanks, Peter, and welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining this call. Please read the disclaimer before making any investment decisions, and then we'll jump into it. So yesterday, Ioneer announced a very material upgrade, improvement to the economics of the Rhyolite Ridge Project. Rhyolite Ridge is a unique lithium and boron deposit. It's of strategic importance to the United States. It'll be a very large and long-life producer of both lithium and boron into that market. And this is really exciting news with these updated and upgraded economics. The NPV, just to put that into perspective, the NPV of the project has risen by 38% to just under $1.9 billion. That's roughly equivalent to about AUD 1 per Ioneer share in NPV. So it's a very significant and material upgrade. And I'm going to talk later in this presentation about how we got there.
But at the end of the day, we're producing more lithium and boron, and that's going straight to the bottom line economics with no changes in capital costs required to do that in the upfront CapEx. The ore reserve is 260 million tonnes, and it comprises three ore streams. Those three ore streams, we blend them together. That gives us an 82-year mine life at a production rate of around 3 million to 3.2 million tonnes per annum. That number is up from around 2.4 million to 2.6 million under the previous. So we're mining at a faster rate. We're producing more lithium and boron. The all-in sustaining cash cost is right down at the bottom of the bottom quartile at $5,626 per tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent produced. That includes the credit for the boric acid, which is why this project is so economically attractive.
That boron really drives the cost down per unit of lithium carbonate. It's fully permitted. It's shovel ready. The engineering's done. The offtakes are in place. We have a $1 billion, just under $1 billion loan that's closed with the U.S. government. That's a low cost, long life, 20-year term loan. So the project is very much de-risked l arge, long life resource as well. The 260 million tonne reserve is just one part of the deposit. The resource is over 540 million tonnes. So there's lots of potential to expand in the future and lots of optionality about how we expand in terms of lithium and boron production. And you can see that these hundreds of millions of tonnes, when we're mining at a rate of around 3 million a year, you can soon see why there is that optionality and opportunity for future expansion. It's construction ready.
We're in the partnering process right now to bring an equity partner in. And once that partnering process is finished and a final investment decision is made by both companies, both parties, then we will be ready to move into construction. So I'm not going to run through all these numbers. There's a lot of numbers here. So I'm only going to touch on some of the highlights. But what I also want to explain is we present the information in years 1 - 25 and then life of mine. Now, the reason we do that is the life of mine is an unusually long period of time, 82 years. And so rather than trying to express all of the economics over an 82, 83 year period, we pull out the first 25 years. And that just happens to coincide with the loan period of 20 years, plus a bit.
It also coincides with some changes in the mining schedule as well because we're bringing forward as much of the Stream 1 high boron ore in the early years. Just some highlights. I'm only going to touch on the years one to 25 for the average annual figures. We've got a 17% increase in the average annual revenue. We've got a 17% increase in the tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent. We produce lithium carbonate initially, and then we convert over to lithium hydroxide. That's why we quote both numbers. Really, it's only one to three years of carbonate, and then the rest of it is hydroxide. There is a tonnage increase when you go to hydroxide. The 20% increase in hydroxide is up from 21,300 tonnes to 25,500 tonnes. There's a big jump there.
The boric acid doesn't jump as much percentage-wise, and I'll explain that later. But there's an obvious reason for it. But I'll come back to that. The revenue, the average annual EBITDA increases by 22% from $406 million to $497 million. And the last two numbers on the top right I'll also point to is that for the life of mine, we do use the life of mine for calculating the NPV as is appropriate. The unlevered NPV is $1.88 billion. And the levered, taking into account the loan from the Department of Energy, the unlevered NPV is $1.998 billion. So just under $2 billion , that's a 33% increase. So a tremendous increase in these numbers. And I will come back and explain how we actually got there. But let's just jump through a few other slides.
The ore reserve, because we put out a new mine plan, new mine plan results in a new ore reserve. It's not vastly different than the one that we announced three or four months ago. But I do want to point out a couple of things. Again, there are three streams here. It's only Stream 1 that's high in boron. Streams 2 and 3 are low in boron. The difference between Stream 2 and Stream 3 is that Stream 2 is not clay bearing. So it's a rock that's similar to Stream 1 . It just doesn't have the boron mineral in it. And instead, it has another mineral, which is quite refractory in acid. It doesn't get dissolved by the acid. Stream 3 is clay rich. And you can see that the lithium grades and the boron grades vary across these three different streams.
Stream 1 is very high in lithium and high in boron. Stream 2 is very low in boron and it's got a moderate amount of lithium. Stream 3 is very high in lithium, the clay, but it's really low in boron. Now, grade is not king in these deposits. It's important, yes, but it's not the only economic or major economic driver. Acid consumption, how much acid you consume, is also very much an economic driver and so we use this term acid yield, which is the amount of lithium that's produced from a unit of acid, so from a tonne of acid.
Now, it happens that Stream 1 is great because it's got this high boron revenue to go with the lithium but its actual acid yield is higher than Stream 2, so while Stream 2 is lower in grade of lithium and boron, it has excellent acid yield properties. So we get a lot of lithium for the same amount of acid. And so that's an important economic driver. And then Stream 3 , the positive thing about Stream 3 is that it also has a decent acid yield, but it's got very high lithium grades.
So these are all things that need to be taken into account when we're doing our mine planning. And we do blend these ores together to feed into the process plant. Do we have to do that? No. We've got enough of each of them to process only that type of ore on its own. But that's not the intention. The intention is to focus on Streams 1 and 2 . And Stream 3 with the clay, there's just a small amount in there, less than 10%. And that's because as we mine, we mine against the boundaries of the Stream 3 clay rich material.
And we take a little bit of it so that we don't have to worry too much about where those exact mining boundaries are. And all of our test work has been done on that basis. But blending a small amount of the clay in does not cause a problem. So again, it's just important to note that there are these three different streams, and they have their own different properties of acid consumption and metal content. And we have to take that into account. And the big win in this acid leaching work that we've done recently is that the Stream 2 really does respond extremely well to this shortened leach period. What does all this mean for OpEx, all-in sustaining OpEx? Well, we're already down in the bottom quartile, but this puts us even lower in the bottom quartile.
A large part of that is because of that boron credit. No other lithium deposit in the world has a boron credit like Rhyolite Ridge. We're producing more than 100, on average, over 100,000 tonnes of boric acid, boric acid's around the $1,000 per tonne mark, so $100 million for every 100,000 tonnes, so it's really a major economic contributor. You can see over on the left, I won't go into the detail, but this project, the operating costs are largely relating to the processing facility, chemical processing facility, not the mining operation, and of those processing facility costs, then half of them relate to reagents, either buying of those reagents or the transportation, so if you want to, if you want to improve economics, you're going to focus on improving the efficiencies of your use of your reagents, and that's exactly what we've done and announced yesterday.
The project is substantially de-risked. It's fully permitted. There are three major permits. We have them all. Shovel ready, the engineering's over 70%, way beyond what most mining projects are when they start construction. Offtakes are in place and the debt I've already mentioned. It's also expandable. And so we have the number I showed you before, the 260 million. That was the reserve. So this is the resource, which is inclusive of reserves. But again, you can see Stream 1 , 2, and 3. The big difference here now is that you see that Stream 3 , there's 60 million tonnes. So there's a lot more of the Stream 3 material. It's just that we only put a little bit of it into the reserves because, as I mentioned, we really focus on mining and processing Streams 1 and 2 .
And another thing I want to point out is as we mine this material, quite a lot of it gets stockpiled. And so it's easy for us to then add additional tonnes into the processing because we're not having to actually mine more. We've already mined it and we've stockpiled it. So there are future expansion opportunities because we have that very large resource base. There's various ways to do that. And there'll be more information on this coming out in the short to medium term as well. But suffice to say that this project could easily do 2x, 3x, 4x the volumes of the materials that we're doing in stage one. Partnering status. We have Goldman Sachs working alongside us. We've done one of these partnering processes before. And so obviously, we know very much what we're doing and we're very well prepared.
That process has got underway early in Q3, and there are multiple parties in the data room. They are reviewing. We're engaging with them. It's going well. We're happy with how things are progressing, but we do have given guidance that that process takes at least four months, and so we'll keep the market updated at appropriate times. But suffice to say, we're pleased and it's progressing well, so I want to now talk a little bit just in the next few minutes about these savings that we've been able to achieve and how we've been able to improve those, enhance those economics as we have outlined, and really, it comes down to improving the use of our reagents, particularly our sulfuric acid, so we mentioned before, roughly half of our costs relate to reagents, so that's the area to target.
And we realized that there were some benefits to be had by looking at improving the acid yield by reducing the leach time. So we had in our process design a three-day leach with the acid. And we looked at taking that down to two and even less than two. But the numbers you see today are a reduction down to two days of leach. Now, what that does is it produces about 20% more of hydroxide and 9% more boric acid. So it's a no-brainer if you like, which is why we're putting it out now. Have we finished optimizing this? No, we haven't. And there'll be further optimizations to come. I will just explain in practical terms how we get to do this, improving the acid leach and reducing the acid leach time without making any changes. So we have shown on this diagram seven vats.
The seven vats have each of them under the original design had a 24-hour cycle time, so that means that on any particular 24-hour period, a vat was performing a certain task, so that was either it was being loaded, it was being leached, it was being washed, or it was being unloaded, and every 24 hours, the sort of clock ticked over and any particular vat then went to the next phase, well, by reducing the so because we had a three-day leach then, that meant that three of those vats were being used for leaching, obviously. By reducing it down to two-day leach, we only need two vats, so that gave us a spare vat. Now, fortunately, the unloading, the washing, and the loading, and in fact, the crushing as well were all underutilized.
So by pulling the leach time down to two days, we had a spare vat. We had spare capacity to crush, load, wash, and remove additional ore. And that's exactly what we've done. And we have the surplus acid as well because not all of the acid was being used now that we'd gone from three down to two. So we had spare acid. We had a spare vat. And one vat represents about 18,000, sorry, 1,800 tonnes per day. So we were able to go from 7,000 tonnes per day up to about 8,800 tonnes per day on average, okay? So that's how we're processing 25% more ore each day. And of course, that gets us to those increases of circa 20% lithium and 9%-10% boric acid. It's all in that vat leach.
The rest of the processing plant, the evaporators and the crystallizers, they were able to handle that because they'd been designed to work at a higher capacity. This work has been ongoing for quite some time. In fact, even back as early as early last year when we put out the first resource with Streams 1, 2, and 3. There are hundreds and hundreds, over 400 leach tests across those three different ore types. Not just individually, but also blended together. You can see some photos here of the pilot plant, of the column testing at KCA. We've done small columns. We've done very large columns to simulate the full heights of the vats. You can also see these really nice pictures of what this all looks like before you leach it, pre-leach, and after. This is the unique thing about Rhyolite Ridge.
The physical properties of these rocks are very different than any other lithium deposit that we know of anywhere in the world, and it allows us to do this leaching and to maintain high recoveries even when we reduce the leach time by 1/3 from three days down to two. It's a truly amazing deposit, and there isn't another one like it anywhere in the world. Next steps: secure the equity financing to sit alongside the government debt. That's the strategic partnering process. Obviously, that's our number one priority. Once that's in place, final investment decision from our Board and the Board of the incoming partner or partners, and that'll allow us then to move into construction phase. Roughly 36 months, including about six months of long lead items, so 30 months of actual construction time. First production, obviously, then would be 36 months from that FID decision.
And look, we're already thinking and looking at ways and pathways to future growth for this deposit and project because it certainly can easily justify it. And obviously, we see the future for both lithium and boron, particularly domestic supply into the U.S., as being something that's really a priority for us and also the U.S. government and U.S. customers. Key takeaways, unique deposit, dual revenue, nothing else like it in the world, in the lithium world. That boron, $100+ million a year sort of average just makes a huge difference to our costs. It's shovel ready. The economics are incredibly robust. You can see that from what we've just updated. And as I say, there's further optimization to come. We have not left every stone unturned yet. And it's expandable. So take some questions.
Thanks, Bern. We have some questions coming through here too today. Thanks for that presentation. There's some really good key takeaways there summarized nicely in that last slide. Let's see. Has Ioneer tried to grow them in spent rock after processing?
We have grown it in rock collected from the surface, not in leached ore, okay? But we have grown it in material taken from the surface out of Rhyolite Ridge that would be simulating our overburden dumps. So we have done that. It grows extremely well in it. So yes is the answer to that question for non-ore material, i.e., waste rock dump type material. Yes, and it works well. It grows in every kind of soil that's reasonable.
And Bern, I think the picture of that friable rock you've got there, which differentiates Rhyolite Ridge quite distinctly from many other projects, which are hard rock. It's a simple waste to rehabilitate too, by the looks of things. It's not a rock that's requiring a lot of crushing and grinding.
That's correct. These pictures here are exactly as you'll see it eventually in the operation, 20-mm crush size. And that makes these incredibly unusual properties because 20 mm, 1 in or 3/4 of an inch, these are reasonable fragments of rock. And yet we can get very high recoveries in only two days. And so the rock is actually very competent because of the searlesite, or in the case of Stream 2 , another mineral called adularia, which is a feldspar. The rocks are competent. When you crush them and leach them, they stay competent.
And that means that you can leach, and they're very porous. So they leach very fast, but they're very competent rocks. And that means that you don't have to have a tailings dam. That means that unloading and loading those vats that I mentioned, which is done with a clamshell crane, it's all doable. And you don't need the tailings dam. You can dry stack this material. And it's a very easy material to work with. And I often say this is the equivalent of an oxide copper deposit heap leachable. That's what Rhyolite Ridge is in the lithium world compared to a copper deposit.
It's quite unique in the world of lithium and boron, the lithium projects. Bern, the strategy for securing offtake for the additional production or discussion around the offtake as a general topic?
Yeah, good question, actually.
And this announcement yesterday, and we flagged this back in May that we were working on this, not only that we were working on it, that we had very positive indications from the work on it. But it is very timely because of the discussions that we've got going on with the potential strategic partners because, of course, there are a number of them that are in there because of the future access to our lithium. And so having spare or uncommitted capacity is an attraction to them. It's 7,500 tonnes. So it's a fairly material amount of uncommitted lithium that we now have available because of this. The parties that are in the data room knew the work we were doing and had indications that this is the direction it was going. So it's been very timely. And they know that there's also room to further increase that.
Of course, there's also a lot of room in terms of the long life of the mine that our offtake agreements for the first three to four or five years will actually be extended well into the future with the long life of the mine.
Sorry, I was talking away to myself there. There's a question here, Bern, about Rio's decision to put its borate business under strategic review. Do you have some comments or thoughts on that?
I've seen the announcements from Rio and as I'm sure the person asking the question has, so it's under strategic review. I think that there's no doubt that boron, California and Rhyolite Ridge are both very strategic assets in terms of global boron production because they're the only two large long-life projects at the stage that they're at.
I mean, there are other projects that have some boron in them for sure, but advanced, long-life, low-cost, using standard processing, then these are two of the best, and so I think that there will be and there is a lot of interest in both of these deposits because of the fact that it's a material that is used by the military, and it's also used in many other applications: magnets, glass, fiberglass insulation, agriculture, and so it's used in many, many different applications, and the United States is a big consumer, and 73% of the world's reserves are in Turkey, so that makes both of these assets very strategic, so yeah, we're very interested to see how that plays out, the strategic review that Rio Tinto is doing.
Bern, given the new economics, and I'm sure there's plenty of conversations underway with the strategic partners to come alongside the US government debt, can you comment on how those are progressing and just your outlook?
I can't say a lot more than what I've already said, that we're in the middle of the process, okay? We really only started it early in Q3. So it's a couple of months in. It's progressing well. We've got multiple parties in there. We're having very good interaction with them. And it's moving forward. And we're hopeful that that guidance that we gave, that we can stick as close to that as possible. But we're also not going to rush things. We've got a fantastic project. We want the right partner. And we're going through detailed due diligence.
We've done these due diligences many times before, both in the previous partnering process and to get the DOE loan. We did due diligence over a two-year time period. So I would say we're very, very well prepared, very well organized, and everything's going very smoothly. And we're pleased with the progress. And we will continue to focus on that as our number one priority.
The question here about the processing of an option to sell the raw ore to a processor to gain better cash position while construction is in process. Is that an option?
Sorry, could you just ask that again, Peter? I missed the first part of the question.
Why not sell the raw ore to a processor to gain a better cash position while construction is in process? Is that an option?
No, it's not an option because there's no one set up to be able. I mean, you'd be talking about a leach operation that could take Rhyolite Ridge ore. There isn't one that's in existence. So you can't take this down to a local copper mine and do a heap leach because what would you do then with it? You could leach the ore, but then you end up with the pregnant leach solution that's got the lithium and boron in it, and you need the chemical plant to process it. So no, it's not a practical option for us. The chemical plant is very much tailored to the three types of ore that we have. We don't expect that would change. We need to focus on putting this material through our processing plant, which has been designed and will be built to take this material.
And I think we'll complete the questions with a broad one. Given the lithium price outlook has improved significantly over the last few months, there's a lot of interest back on producers and the supply chain. The U.S. government's been talking about their focus on critical minerals and self-sustainability. Can you just perhaps give a little bit of color to conversations with the Department of Energy and the U.S. government on Rhyolite Ridge?
Sure. We continue to work very closely with the government, both the federal government and the state government. The state government's also very supportive of what we're doing. And in particular, they're singing from the same song sheet, the state and the federal government. They want these critical minerals projects built, these mines, okay? But they also want the downstream processing and refining of the chemicals. And so Rhyolite Ridge is perfect for that.
It's a mine, but really it's a large chemical processing plant, and it can produce refined high-purity chemicals that can be sold into the United States market and elsewhere as well, of course. So strong support is ongoing. I think the fact that we have the closed loan is very strong evidence of the support that we have from the government. And the fact that we had a greenfield project permitted in six years. And so I think there's ongoing regular conversations with people in the government, various agencies. But we found them to be very supportive: Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, who are the permitting body, Department of Defense, given the defense applications of both the lithium and the boron. And I think the final thing I would say there is that when you look at the messaging that's coming out of Washington, it's very, very clear.
They're focused on materials and processing of those materials and refining of those materials that can go into three applications as their priority: magnets, so boron is in magnets; batteries, so lithium and, in fact, boron are also in batteries; and chips, semiconductors. So two out of the three of those key focus areas for these complete supply chains we have at Rhyolite Ridge. And of course, given the very advanced nature of this project, it's a clear priority for us and for the government to see this project in production because there's very, very few others that you could say the same things about that the engineering's been done and it's ready. It's been piloted. There's been $200 million invested in it already. There's been ample engineering work done. The offtakes are in place. They're with parties that have committed to use the materials in the United States.
And the debt's in place. So it's been very much de-risked, and it's very much in the focus of the administration, the Trump administration, to see this project into development as quickly as possible.
Thanks. Bern, a very strategic project, right place, right time, as they say, and a significant amount of work, which has been shown successfully today in your economics. So congratulations to you and the team on all of that. Thank you for your presentation today and to everybody who signed in. There are a broad range of questions here. So if any were unanswered, please send them in to peter@nwrcommunications.com.au. We'll make sure the team gets to respond to those. And we'll have this recorded as well. Thank you very much, Bern.
Thanks, Peter. And thanks to everyone for listening in.