Moving on, antimony. Larvotto Resources, Ron Heeks, Managing Director. Ron brings over 40 years of experience in the mining industry and has been Managing Director of Larvotto since the IPO in December 2021. He was previously the Managing Director of Geopacific Resources, which was acquired and developed at 1.6-million-ounce Woodlark Gold Project in PNG. Ron has also held Managing Director positions with Coolgardie Gold, SmartTrans, and was a founding board member of Xanadu. He's worked and lived in numerous countries, working in various commodities. With his focus on the Hillgrove antimony gold mine in New South Wales coming to production, he's passionate about the mining industry and creating value for Australian projects. Ron.
Thank you. Great to be here. I was presenting this time last year. It was pretty interesting because my first slide was actually one that I took at breakfast, which was the South Australian Premier giving AUD 150 million to Trafigura to produce antimony from their smelter at Port Pirie. 12 months later, more than happy to say that we are now currently commissioning the second and largest antimony operation in Australia and one of the largest in the world, arguably the fifth, and we will supply something like 7%+ of antimony in the world. If you include outside of China, considerably more than that. We are a critical minerals company. We are very new, we're one of the new kids on the block. We're looking to aggressively expand and move forward from that. Where are we?
We've got an exploration project in Western Australia on rare earths. We've got 1,000 sq km of ground around Mount Isa, just 40 km from the smelter there. There's going to be some exciting stuff happening up there over the next year or so. Mainly here today to talk about Hillgrove, which is a gold, antimony, and tungsten project. Tungsten is moving up the food queue quite rapidly at the moment. We'll talk a little bit about that. We have a wonderful grade. As we say, we're actually developing this thing now. Commissioning commenced a couple of weeks ago. It's a stage commissioning. The front end of the plant is now operational, and we will be in production by the end of this month.
It's been a great news story. We've done this in about two and a half years from when we acquired the project. We will have very strong cash flows from both the gold and the antimony side. Look out for the tungsten. We haven't included tungsten in anything that we've done so far. The price, as you will see later, has risen quite considerably. We will be putting out a tungsten concentrate in the near future as well. 7.5 g , when everybody talks about grade being king, it definitely is. A 7.5 g Deposit is a seriously good way to start this. We see our future growth from exploration, both in the area and particularly Mount Isa. The Hillgrove area cannot be understated. We'll get into that.
We will have a lot of financial capability to be aggressive as we move forward as well, which will be excellent. We've got a wonderful technical team. We've now got 180 of our staff plus 80 contractors on site, plus 30 in Perth. We are continuing to manage as much of these projects in-house as humanly possible. We've had a few tailwinds along the way. I've never seen so many planets align during the process of what we've done. We acquired the Hillgrove Project in 2023. Since then, all sorts of crazy things have happened to critical minerals, including the term critical minerals, which has actually helped the industry in so many ways it's not funny. Just using that term, it's brought so many new people back into the industry. It's wonderful to see.
We are part of the AUD 1.2 billion Critical Minerals Reserve. We're at sort of the top of the list of that, and that's one of three prioritized minerals. Because of that, we end up talking to all sorts of people, and in my 40+ years of doing this, most unusual. We talk at a high level with multiple governments in U.S., EU, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia. Because of that, we've actually appointed strategic advisors. One of those is the Honorable David Fawcett, who was Assistant Minister for Defence, and Penny Walsh, who was ex-head of BP Government Relations in Australia and previously Shell, based out of The Hague.
The conversations we have with government at that level are so different from how we communicate amongst ourselves that it's been a real learning curve for us to get involved with these people and help them move us, move the project, and the commodity forward. We have a wonderful operations team. The development team are now flat out on the ground. We've, as I say, established relationships around the world with governments at extremely high level, surprisingly high level in some cases. We've got a lot of good financing relationships because it was only a couple of weeks before I was here last week that we financed the project, and we did a bond, and bonds are quite unique, but have since taken off since that time. What a wonderful way to finance a project.
We've got offtake relationships with both Wogen and Glencore for the antimony and the gold, yet to be decided on tungsten. We've proven that we've got an ESG capability as well, having come runner-up to Fortescue in the recent AMEC Environmental Awards. We think for a junior company that hasn't been around long, we've moved along at a fairly rapid rate. The mine itself will generate a lot of cash. We're not going to get into the details of it at the moment, but the technical capability and everything, the financial strength, will allow us to really move forward. We're in a unique location just out of Armidale, and that brings with it all sorts of potentials. As we've said before, it was mentioned previously, sole mill in one area, so are we. There's nothing really within about 600 km of where we are.
The world is our oyster in that part of the world. Where are we? Gold, 40,000 oz a year, antimony, nearly 5,000 tons, and tungsten, about 600 tons. One of those is free, basically, or two of them are free. Tungsten, at current prices, will actually pay to run the whole thing. Antimony ditto, or gold. One of those commodities is free. As you'll see, when we started the project in November 2023, when we acquired it, both antimony, tungsten, gold and copper from the Mount Isa area, has increased significantly. We're pretty happy where we are, that antimony's gone up nearly three times. Tungsten, too crazy to even talk about, and gold up quite nicely as well. We're looking at a very good position. We acquired the asset because the numbers worked at the prices that were there when we bought it.
We think we're looking at something pretty interesting moving forward. Really, let's talk about the upside today, and to me, it's more about the upside now that commissioning, everything's coming on as expected. We will be producing 500,000 or processing 500,000 tons of material to produce the grades that we've got. Let's look at the bigger picture around the area. We've got 250 sq km of ground. You can see Armidale close by. You're on the tenements about 15 minutes after you leave Armidale. If you have a good look at that, we have the mining license down in the bottom right-hand corner. If you have a look at that little yellow dot where the cross is, that's where we're going to go next. That's where everything we're talking about is happening.
You can see the upside potential of the project when you look at the next slide, which is the existing history of the project. The areas in red are our current resources and reserves. The areas in blue are zones that we know are mineralized, but we haven't got to. The green dots are tungsten occurrences, and in the 1960s, we did have Australia's highest grade tungsten mine, which I was underground the other week, and if you've ever seen a blue light on tungsten, when you walk into this and shine a blue light around, it looks like a 1980s nightclub. There's a huge amount of tungsten floating around the place. We look forward to bringing that on. One example of where we're going, and we're currently mining as we speak at the Syndicate Area you'll see there.
If you have a look at that purple zone, that's the Midas Area. That's a new exploration target of about 1 million oz that we've just released. The drilling there has knocked out some exceptional grades. I was underground a couple of weeks ago. We're about 500 m underground, and we were standing 50 m from that zone and nobody knew about it. That's just one of the small areas of potential to expand this field. Let's get into this a little bit more. If we have a look at a schematic across the cross-section, everything's a little bit oblique, so it's a little bit tricky to do this. You can see our current decline there that goes into the Syndicate Area. The Midas Area comes off that, right adjacent to that. The areas in red are where our current reserves sit.
So you'll see that we've got potential to go down and the potential to go up. The interesting thing here that you have a look at is that very like Costerfield and also Costerfield and other projects that we've previously talked about in Victoria, we have high-grade antimony towards the surface and gold grade increases as you get to depth. Where we're mining at the moment is about 50/50 gold and antimony. You go deeper in the field, you tend to get higher-grade gold. Our best hit of 31 m at 2 oz gives you an indication of what happens deeper down in the field. Our exploration targets have only been extended down on zones that have been mined and extended as far as the deepest mine in the field. We haven't really exaggerated too far here and been quite conservative.
So that's below what we currently know, and then if we have a look at the Midas zone, we get this area with some spectacular numbers coming through already directly adjacent to the Syndicate Area that nobody knew about. So that's just one of the areas that we're looking at. We've got four rigs going at the moment drilling this. We'd love to have more, but with commissioning and everything going on, there's only so much we can do at one time. So a huge amount of potential upgrade in the area, and we're still within a kilometer of the mill, let alone the other 255 sq km around the area. So there's a massive amount of upside going on here. The regional advantages of being around Armidale are huge. This is our core yard. It's right next to the airport.
Because we explore for minerals and we mine minerals and we log minerals and we process minerals, this core yard has the best mineral analyzer in Australia sitting in it. There's AUD 2 million worth of laser ablation core scanner in that. We log our core to 50 microns every bit of the hole. So we do mineralogy at a level where most people can't believe. At the moment, we have one of Australia's largest companies, might start with a B and a H, working night shift in our core yard to analyze whether they want to buy one of these things because of the advantages that it provides over other areas. So we understand what we're doing at a very, very high level. Quickly on to Mount Isa. This is an area that we listed the company on. We're just out of town.
The advantages of being right next to a nickel smelter, sorry, a gold-copper smelter, is huge. So we're working up this area. We have just acquired the Blockade Mine. That was a mine that was mined previously by Mount Isa Mines back in the 1960s. We totally surrounded that area. It was an area that we tried to get in the initial float, but for various reasons couldn't lock that away. We've recently done that. We did our DD on it. That's an area that we look forward to bringing on in the very near future, and start mining in that area and start learning how to operate in Mount Isa because it's a very different kettle of fish.
As most people are probably aware, there's a lot of activity going on around Mount Isa, some of which we're involved in, and we've got great interest from several parties. Can't talk too much about that, it's an evolving thing as of this morning. A little bit about the board and management of the company. We've got a wonderful group of people here. There's about 250 years of experience there, which is quite surprising because nobody there admits to being over 37. Huge amount of experience right across the boards. We keep a very small, lean board. Mark, our chairman, widely experienced, both technical and commercial. Myself, mainly technical. Rachelle covers. She's a psychologist, so she covers people, and she's got a master's in environmental science, and every problem we're going to have is either people or the environment.
She looks after all of those areas for us. A wonderful team that keep everybody honest. Great team of people. It's very nimble, it's very quick, and it's allowed us to progress as fast as what we have. Corporate overview, pretty clean. Half a billion shares out there. Performance rights, all of our employees are given shares that vest in two years from when they join as a retention bonus. Every single employee of the company is a shareholder. That has worked incredibly well for us at levels that you would never have imagined, and we didn't even imagine when we did it. Current share price, AUD 1.12. When we acquired the asset, we were AUD 0.07, so we're pretty happy with how that's gone. Lots of cash. Debt from the bond, which is the $105 million bond. An enterprise of about AUD 600 million.
Our board and management own a bit. U.S. Antimony, who tried to take us over last year, have 10%. 1832 our number three, and I'd like to thank Rob down here sitting at the front, as one of our largest shareholders who said some very nice things about us the other day on "Money of Mine," thank you for that. Gage. We've got a good spread around the place, and we're looking at firming that up as we move forward as well. Where are we overall? We acquired the project in December 2023. Was nine months to PFS, nine months to DFS. We did our ITE four weeks after that. We did that in a really unique way. We did the debt piece, we did the equity piece a couple of days after that.
The upgrades started nearly straight away, and here we sit a couple of weeks away from production of 7% of the world's antimony. It's been a wonderful run, and hopefully next year we look forward to telling you how much it's made and what we've acquired and moved on to and expanded from now on. Thank you very much.