Thanks, Anthony. For those who do not know me, my name is Stuart Crow. I am not David Dickson, who is the Chief Executive. I am a founding shareholder and chairman of Lake, and it is a real honor, and I am quite excited to be here today. I think the last time I was here talking, I think the share price was somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 in slightly better times for the lithium market. As we all know, lithium has been interesting, but investment is about timing and opportunity. It is a great time to make my comeback. We have had a good week this week. We have been on the road for a week, and the stock is getting some interest, but there is a lot going on away from Lake Resources. I am going to break this down into a couple of bits. That was quick. That is not my timer.
All right, so I'm going to start off, and I do apologize for David, but as we'll see, there's a lot of activity starting to percolate in the lithium market, and we've been running a process for two years, and things are getting busy. David's been unable to come out and present and be a part of this roadshow just due to business and requirements needing him back in the States. I've been tasked with this presentation, which is, as I said, very exciting for me because I've been watching this market. I've been working with this company for eight years, and there's a big future coming, and the lithium space is getting very interesting. As you'd know, the lithium market is very, very small.
It's about one and a half million tonnes per annum, and the demand is growing exponentially, and people finally are starting to work that out. We've seen just fortuitously, in the last week, we've seen things happen like the POSCO deal with MinRes, where the valuation ascribed to that was, I read somewhere, in excess of 100% of Macquarie Bank's valuation of those assets. You start thinking, well, why is POSCO paying such a premium? POSCO, in this industry, they know the value of these assets, and they set the price to a level that they're happy to pay. I think it's reflective across the whole sector. Like it was probably overshot in terms of valuation back in 2002, I think it's fair to say the market has been undershot over the last sort of 18 months or so.
The other thing that's happened, we have seen Barronjoey increase their pricing forecast for next year and the future years. They've also brought forward their prediction of a lithium deficit in the market to 2026 from 2028 to 2029. That's significant, and Barronjoey carry a lot of weight amongst the institutional investment market. The other thing that we've seen recently is just talking to people who've entered our data room, and that data room, as I said, has been open for just coming on two years.
Just in the last month, we probably added another three to five new names into that room, and the people in there already were seeing increasing action and interest, and certainly a lot more work being done as the price sort of slowly just drifts higher because we're at a point now where from here to $20,000 a tonne of the lithium market, things are going to get pretty exciting. POSCO's the first sort of major public deal in the lithium space we've seen for two years, and I think you're going to see a flurry of activity because particularly if we're going into a deficit, you would expect to see the price move fairly quickly. Now, I'll just move over here. This is a bit of where am I shooting this? Handy work from our legal team.
I am going to be making forward-looking statements, so focus on that because I enjoy talking about this space, and I enjoy talking about this stock. As I said, the lithium market is about 1.5 million tonnes a year. In discussions that we've had recently, we've found people that I've never heard of who are talking about building a factory in Texas who want to build batteries for trucks. They say, "Oh, that's great. Fantastic. Never heard of you. How do you know how to do that? What do you need?" I say, "Oh, we're looking for 400,000 tonnes." Then someone else walks in from a continent that's not readily known for its electric vehicles or its battery storage, and the representatives of that country say, "We're looking for somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 tonnes." It's like, "Oh, great.
How do we think we're going to get there? The existing producers cannot deliver the expected demand that's due in 2030. There has to be incentive pricing to get new production online so that this demand can be met. What's really interesting, as all forecasters and anyone who's an economist or people who look into the future, most people making these forecasts are quite happy to admit more often than not they get it wrong. At LME recently, there was a presentation by a very clever and highly respected forecaster that at the end of their presentation said, "And of course, we could very easily be wrong here, and it could be twice this." This market is at a point where it makes the lithium sector very, very attractive for investment.
Like I could have organised it, or I couldn't have organised it much better, this morning, Argentina announced with the U.S. an opening of a framework agreement on trade, which for all companies invested and operating in Argentina is a fantastic piece of news for us that will allow us, with the removal of barriers to entry of bringing our product into the U.S., now open. It's pretty scanned on details, but I expect that will be filled out over the coming weeks. The fact that that's there is remarkable and will open up significant offtake opportunities and funding opportunities for us coming out of the U.S. That's the sort of thing that can change the trajectory of a small company like this.
The other thing about Argentina, with the new president, President Milei, who's been in power and just recently, in a midterm election, increased their majority and had a sweeping result, fantastic result. The U.S. had already supporting there. As well as that, when we first started Lake, when we were travelling around trying to raise initial money and get this thing going, we'd walk to private equity businesses and they'd say, "Look, it's a great project. We love your technology partner, but Argentina's a no-go zone." Just in recent times, you've seen the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto, Lundin out of Canada. Only last week, the sovereign wealth fund of the UAE and Eni, an Italian company, announced a $50 billion investment into a new gas field there, Glencore's there.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, recently said there's $100 billion sitting in the U.S. waiting to get access to Argentina. This trade agreement announced this morning is the start of that. Lake and all other lithium companies and other exploration companies in Argentina are going to be beneficiaries of this. Now that's the background. That's the opportunity. We're going to look at the company. Where Lake Resources is now, we've never been as far advanced as this. We are just in the final stages of permitting. We've got an asset that is a significant asset in scale, 11 million tonnes of LCE. That resource goes down to sort of 400 m, maybe 500 m on average. The basin's probably twice as deep as that. Our DFS, over 25 years, at 25,000 tonnes, we use less than 8% of the contained lithium in that project.
We've got the ability here to scale. From our point of view, this is the largest small company independently owned asset in Argentina. All the others are owned by Rio Tinto, Eramet, big companies, Chinese. We are here on the cusp trying to bring this project to production. We expect permitting; we were hoping to have it done by the end of this year. Probably unlikely now, given that we're at the middle of November. Either way, I think it'll be here. We could be lucky to get it here by the end of this year. More than likely, that'll come in the early part of next year. It doesn't appear to be any red flags. It's just a process that we're going through.
This will be the first project that's been permitted with direct lithium extraction, which is the process that we're using, using our technology that's supplied by our partner, Lilac Solutions. You may have heard of them. They use a thing called ion exchange, which is like a big desalination plant that filters the lithium out of the water. We then re-inject the water back into the salar. It is a very sustainable and efficient method of harvesting the lithium out of the brine. We also get a very high purity product. We have run an extensive pilot plant on site and had that product qualified by a battery maker in Asia, and it came up very well. That is underway. We upgraded our DFS recently because Lilac optimised their process. Subsequent to that, they have optimised again.
Just to give you an idea of some of the things that have happened there, the cycles that they used to say and get excited about for using their beads, which pick the lithium up out of the brine, they used to think was great if they do 700-1,000 cycles. We're now doing in excess of 10,000 cycles. It is progressing very well. Every time they optimise it, obviously impacts our OpEx and CapEx numbers positively. The other thing that has happened over the life of this project, we've increased the grade of the brine because we've drilled in different parts and a little bit deeper in some places. The project's sort of getting ready to go, and we're in the process of now trying to finalise our offtake and funding partners. Just some numbers here. It's $1.1 billion worth of CapEx.
Everyone says, "Oh, wow, that's a big number." The reality is we've got 70% of that coming through a debt facility with Export Finance Australia out of export finance funding. And so we need to find $400 million. We'll get that from our partners and prepayment, some form of funding from offtakers and partners. The OpEx there is currently $6,000. We're looking to optimise and bring that down even further, but that still puts us down in the bottom quartile. Net present value, $1.5 billion. This project at FID probably should, in textbook corporate finance, probably should be trading at one and a, sorry, at 50% of that NPV number, which is about $800 million, which is a long way from where we're currently trading at five cents. It's a great project. It stacks up really well. Everyone says it's a billion dollars.
That's a lot of money. If you look at the money that they've spent and potentially wasted in Western Australia trying to do hard rock conversion at $2 billion plus and still not getting great results, $1.1 billion for a high purity product is pretty spectacular in my book. As I said, Lilac continually optimised. That really helps us with our financial numbers keep getting better. Permitting's underway. The Argentinian situation just gets better by the day. I think with the U.S. coming in there as strong as they have, this company has the potential to go a long way from where it is currently at $0.05. We are very, very close. I think if you look at comparators in the market, one I like is Standard Lithium, operated and created by a mate of mine, Rob Mintek. They are funded.
They do have a partner, and they are in the U.S., but they have a similar size project to ours, probably a slightly higher OpEx, currently trading at $1 billion. That is a long way from where we are, and that is the sort of stuff, they are the sort of guys we are trying to chase in terms of valuation. With that said, I would like to thank you all for your attention. We do have a booth here. Very happy to chat about anything lithium, anything Lake, because I am, as I said, very excited to be a part of this and very keen to take this project forward.