We're gonna move from gold now. We're gonna go into silver, and silver itself, no longer gold's little cousin, it's been gaining a lot of momentum, and investors, I think, are really starting to look for where the opportunities are in this particular commodity, where they might lie. The big question is, Mr. Wallace, is it with you? Is it with Investigator Silver? Would you please make Lachlan Wallace very welcome. He's the MD for the company.
Yeah, thanks, Chrissy. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Very simple value proposition here today. The Paris Silver Project in South Australia is the only pure silver development asset with a near-term pathway to silver production. Unlike other silver developers, we are not seeking to sell a complicated basket of silver equivalents or silver by-products. It's basically the production of a silver doré bar, which is then sold to the local Perth Mint, to ABC Bullion over in Sydney, providing 100% leverage to the silver price. Just before I jump into part of the Paris discussion, there has been a lot of volatility in the silver market of late. It has risen from about $30 an ounce about four months ago, peaked at $120 a few weeks ago, and then it's back around sort of $75-$80 as we speak at the moment.
But the fundamental supply-demand imbalance has not changed. Effectively, from a demand point of view, silver has dual utility. It is used as an industrial metal. It is the most conductive metal known in the elemental suite, and as a result, as the world continues to decarbonize through electrification, that demand continues to grow. From a monetary point of view, we have increasing money printing, rising debt, credit downgrades, and that's just driving, I guess, a lack of confidence in fiat currencies all over the world and seeking, I guess, investors to look for refuge as a hedge against inflation in hard assets, including, you know, gold as well as silver. On the supply side, though, only about 27-28% of silver is actually coming from primary silver miners.
So the vast majority is mined as a by-product of gold, copper, lead, zinc mining. And these gold and copper miners, they are not changing their production profile just because the change of price occurs, and that means that the supply response is basically priced inelastic. And where that silver is coming from is, I guess, geopolitically challenging. Most silver is getting mined through Russia, China, Latin America, and these are not the poster children, I guess, for geopolitical and operational stability. They are plagued with supply disruptions. There is very little silver that's coming from, I guess, true Tier One jurisdictions like Australia.
I guess, putting all this together, I guess the driving demand as well as the tight supply means that we have had, over the last five years, supply deficits, and that is, you know, putting an upward pressure on price. This is the macro that we're building the Paris Project into. So I guess setting the scene for Paris, it is a high-grade primary silver project. We are rapidly advancing both the definitive feasibility study, which will be due out very shortly, as well as permitting, and we have a clear pathway through to near-term silver production. We are operating, or we are planning to build a very simple open-pit operation. So the ore body, we're intersecting ore about 10 meters down, so it's a large, flat, tabular ore body, really amenable for large-scale bulk open-pit mining at a low cost.
From a processing point of view, very conventional whole-of-ore cyanide leach with just a Merrill-Crowe zinc precipitation to recover the silver. And that's obviously a low-cost way of working forward to produce that silver doré bar over what will initially be around a 10 or 11-year mine life. We are operating in South Australia, so a really mining-friendly jurisdiction. We're close to large mining hubs in Whyalla and Port Augusta. These areas are well-stocked with both skilled workforce as well as equipment and support services, and they are all within a couple of hours of the planned site location. And importantly, the Paris Silver Project is just the beginning.
We are located within a 15- kilometer long mineralized silver district that we are actively exploring to be able to expand beyond that initial 10 or 11-year mine life. In 2021, there was a pre-feasibility study done. This is the latest, I guess, financials that are out in market at the moment until we can get the DFS out there. But I guess what that study showed was a project that returns some strong economics, about $500 million of free cash over what was about a five-year mine life at the time. But here's the thing, t his was done at $22 US silver. We're now currently around $75-$80. If we put the current price deck through the old model without changing any other inputs, we add another $2 billion worth of free cash.
If we put the price that was there a couple of weeks ago at $120, it's $4 billion of extra cash, and that just highlights, I guess, the leverage that a pure silver play in Australia has to that rising price environment. So the following slides I'll go through just, I guess, highlight some of the main changes that, I guess, you'd expect in the DFS when it does come out. Obviously, price has been a massive driver. That's enabled us to increase the size of the pit, increase the amount of ounces that are gonna come into the mine plan, and feed into that higher price environment. So the pink pit there is what was in the PFS. The gray, obviously expanding now, is closer to what we will have coming out in the definitive feasibility study .
As well as the size of the pit, also the margin has improved, and what that has enabled us to do is to reduce the cut-off grade, ensuring that there were ounces that were previously sub-economic to be making margin. They now do make margin and can be sold into that price environment. So we're seeing, I guess, that silver increase through both size of pit as well as cut-off grade. In 2023, we found a large body of water about 10 km away, and that's enabled us to rethink the way that tails was going to be managed. Originally, it was a dry stack tails facility. Now we've moved to a much cheaper, from a capital and operating point of view, wet tails facility.
That's enabled us to take out things like expensive filtration and downsize the detox, so they're the red boxes, I guess, on that stylized flow sheet you see there, as well as reduce the operating costs. So in blue there is rehandle of, I guess, dry tails. That is now just replaced with a simple pump and pipeline to be able to push it out to the wet tails facility. So when we put all of this together, what we're going to have is, I guess, a larger pit, more ounces coming out through the lower cut-off grade, and a much simpler flow sheet with regards to the wet tailings facility, as well as some value engineering that stripped out concrete, steel, and obviously install hours.
And that study will be out very shortly, and yeah, looking forward to be able to talk about that in some more detail. We're actively working through a permitting process, and I'll spend a bit of time on this slide because it's important. This is where a lot of otherwise good projects can fall over and see delays. But if you take a look at the picture there, it's a flat, dry, sparsely vegetated area. The water, that we have, the groundwater there, is too saline for livestock. There is no competing land use issues that we have on the site here. As I said at the top, South Australia is a mining, friendly state. About 1 in 15 dollars of the state domestic product is coming from the resource industry.
So what we have here is a government that's very supportive of, of mining and are actively assisting us to be able to fast-track, the approvals process. So, been meeting with government basically on a weekly basis to refine, condense, and ensure that we adequately scope the permitting, process. We will lodge the mine lease application about the middle of 2026, and we're seeing that we'll be able to turn that around by about the middle of 2027, and that'll be FID, and off we go into development. It does help. I have gone through this permitting process once before. The last mine that was built in South Australia is one that I led, which is the Hillgrove Underground Copper Mine. Took that from basically early exploration through the feasibility, through permitting, through funding, development, and into first cash generation there.
That's important, that track record, because what it means is that as regulators are considering putting together resources to be able to allocate towards permitting, what they see here is a proponent that is able to go from that permitting into execution and bring that economic activity into the state. So as a result, they have been very accommodating in terms of their response times and their pragmatism towards the permitting pathway. From a Traditional Owners' point of view, we have an excellent relationship built over about 13 years of respectful negotiations with regards to the drilling areas. We've conducted around five formal Native Title surveys. They've identified a number of areas of cultural significance.
We've agreed, exclusion areas around those and just ensured that all of the, pit, as well as obviously the supporting infrastructure, is outside of all of those areas. And I guess being able to do this in consultation with our Traditional Owners from the outset has not only reducing, I guess, the risk of costly and time-consuming rework, but obviously achieves much better outcomes for, for all parties involved. So as we get to, the DFS being, you know, ready over the course of the next, few weeks, we are now starting to turn our mind towards building. So really starting to prioritize, speed and certainty and starting to move from a study into a build. So as we do that, the first items are going into detailed, construction work packs.
So we're already involved in that detailed engineering, starting to engage early contractor engagement and considering some long lead items, such that when we hit FID, we are not waiting around for long, a long sort of supply timeline. So getting all of that in place already now. We're also getting finance ready. So obviously, data room set up, ready to go from a finance point of view. But the other thing we are going to do this year is a very detailed drill out, so down to basically operational grade control level spacing, if you like. We already have 25-meter spacing across the majority of the deposit, so, and the ore body is honoring the drilling very, very well.
But the reality is, a lender is going to be concentrating on that head grade over that initial sort of 2-3 years through that debt repayment window. And so what I would like to do is to get the drill data up there to reduce, I guess, any lender concern around that. So we'll be undertaking, you know, north of about 150 holes, bring that down to about 12-12.5 meter spacing. And what we'd expect that that will improve lender confidence around head grade over that repayment window, and that will lead to shorter due diligence as well as better debt terms.
So that work is ongoing, as well as some additional drilling in and around the pit, looking at expansion opportunities, both the north, south, as well as to the eastern side as well of the existing pit. But the Paris opportunity is really just the start of the journey. It is sitting, as I said, within about a 15-kilometer silver district, that we have a number of targets that we're currently following up on. So, you know, to the north, about five kilometers, we have Apollo. That was, you know, returning eight meters, 1,200 grams a ton silver. All the way down to the south, about 10 km away, is Athena, 20 meters, 160 grams a ton, including five at almost 500 grams a ton.
So these are opportunities, obviously, that we need to follow up on all the way through, and I guess anything within approximate trucking distance to the Paris Plant when built, as well as the tails facility, has a much lower economic and permitting hurdle to be able to get into operations. So we are currently drilling out there and expanding that resource base with the intent to expand the mine life well beyond that initial 10-11-year period. About 80 km to the east, we have a collection of tenements we call Uno Morgans. This has basically been acquired as part of a hub-and-spoke opportunity to be able to truck back to the Paris area.
There's been a limited drilling program over there, which returned, you know, really high strike rate, over 80% success rate, in terms of anomalous silver or zinc through those areas. Some of the highlights there, 12 meters at 240 grams per ton. What we have done, though, late last year, is sort of taken a step back, done a detailed gravity survey over the area, as well as a geochemical survey, and now we're starting to rank those targets and establish a planned drilling program through that area to see whether we can have a, I guess, a broader hub-and-spoke opportunity nearby to the planned Paris Plant location. Further to the east, so we're close now to Broken Hill, but on the South Australian side of the border, we have an asset we call Curnamona.
It is actually across the road from the White Dam Gold Mine that Portia Gold is up and running at the moment, and in close proximity to the Havilah asset, so Kalkaroo, Mutooroo, large copper deposits that Sandfire has recently earned into. So we have an area there which has historical mining, gold and copper mining from the 1800s on it, but it's an area that's never been drilled in the past, despite there being now three targets, where we have coincident IP, mags, gravity, and soil anomalies. So we started drilling that area in December. We'll complete that program around March, and looking forward to getting those results out, targeting a larger sort of scale, IOCG or porphyry-type model out in that area, obviously, copper, gold. From a corporate point of view, we are very well-funded.
We have AUD 13 million cash at hand, plus another AUD 19 million of in-the-money options. So war chest of about AUD 30 million to advance us, I guess, all the way through the permitting to FID, as well as, undertaking that execution readiness planning, so the detailed engineering, ensuring that we're ready to go at FID, as well as, continuing to expand the growth portfolio through exploration. So to sum up, the silver market just remains strong and structurally supported. We are advancing the Paris opportunity towards, I guess, finance-ready and, permit-ready outcome, and we're getting really ready to build. We continue to undertake exploration to grow that pipeline, and our, balance sheet has never been stronger. So if you are considering silver, we're over at booth number 53. Encourage you to come and have a chat, but think Investigator.