Next one up on stage is Stuart Gale, Meteoric. Come on up here, sir. Now, we're gonna go to Brazil for this one, to drill into the largest ionic clay resource globally, with a very impressive high-grade maiden ore reserve. I was impressed by that. Let's make him welcome, everyone, Stuart Gale, to tell the Meteoric Resources story.
Thanks, Chrissy, and good morning, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here to speak to you all about Meteoric. It's an amazing resource, and it's an amazing project we have in Brazil. Thanks to RIU for the opportunity. This is a really important conference, I think, for Western Australia and also Australian resources. So, jumping onto Meteoric. For those of you who are not that familiar with Meteoric, I just wanna—t here's a couple of things that I think we need to take away from Meteoric. It's a great resource. It's an amazing resource. It's an ionic clay project, and it has the highest grades of any projects that are out there in the world. With that resource, of course, it's always important that you get recoveries. We have great recoveries.
We've proved those recoveries up through test work that we've done at ANSTO, and we've built a little pilot plant, and we continue to prove those recoveries up. Of course, with resource, grade, scale, that we have, comes cost. This is a low capital intensive project, and it's gonna be a low ongoing operating cost. And we have scale. We've got, you know, we've got a measured and indicated resource, that sits out there that's gonna last us for over 100 years. So, we sit here in a fantastic location. We've got a strong and consistent board, led by explorers. Doctors Tunks, Kitto, and de Carvalho are all doctors of geology. They all have an exploration background, and they're all great guys and have been with the company for a long time. Peter Gundy is also on the board.
Peter Gundy is one of the few people who have had experience on the downstream in the rare earths. So Peter is the founder of Neo Performance Materials. And for those of you that know Neo Performance Materials, you'll know that they oxidize, they make alloys, and they go on to make magnets. That's a pretty rare, rare combination in the current world, in rare earths outside of China. It is very important to the board. And Nomi Prins, who joined the board a couple of years ago now, has great Wall Street banking background and deep connection into Washington.
When I stood here roughly 12 months ago, we were probably trading at about a third of what we're trading at today, and we're continuing to work through and tick all the boxes that we need to tick to bring a great resource into production. There's a couple of things that were key to all of that. First of all, was lodging the PFS, and we got the PFS completed in July, early July last year, and took the opportunity to raise some money off the back of that. And that leaves us with about AUD 33 million worth of cash at the end of December, so well-funded. Really important that we work through all of the environmental licensing and permitting processes.
Meteoric's been at this for about three years now, and we've rapidly gone through a process of delivering on the licenses. We're really pleased to get our preliminary environmental license in December last year. It was a great Christmas present. What it allows us to do is to move on to the next stage of the development of this project, which is to deliver an installation license. A lot of effort and a lot of work have gone in to the delivery of both the PFS and the preliminary license from the team on the ground in Brazil and the few of us that are based here in Perth. We also took the opportunity to build a pilot plant.
Really important to get a solution for the market to be able to see that ionic clays can be easily processed, that we can deliver the information that we get out of the pilot plant into the construct of the DFS, to make some product so that we can send that off to our offtake partners, so that we can use that and consider downstream separation opportunities as well. And that's really developed fantastically well over the course of the last couple of months. We're getting great results out of that, in fact, better than what we were getting at ANSTO. And something that you know, you've gotta have—i t's one thing to have a great resource, it's one thing to be in a great location, but you've gotta have a great team of people.
And we've been able to build up a fantastic team of people in Poços de Caldas. They've got starts at the exploration phase, from a community perspective, dealing with all those ESG-type things to understand and get the licenses out there, and then also to understand the metallurgy of the product. So, so we've built up some fantastic IP, because while we've got some great clays, not all clays are the same, and, and we know and understand how and where those things will recover and where they won't. And of course, all of this has been done in the backdrop of what's been a really interesting 12 months in the rare earth space. It seems like just about every, every, you know, week or so, we're getting headlines around rare earths. It started with Trump, Trump tariffs on China.
China responded with export controls. Rare earth prices went through the, you know, went from $65 a kg to wherever they are now, $120-something a kg. U.S. government stepped in and supported MP Materials, which was great to see U.S. government support of the development of the rare earth supply chain. And of course, from that, we've seen a bit of merger and acquisition-type activity. We saw Energy Fuels acquire ASM not that long ago. We've seen a couple of companies in the US acquire other components to bring that supply chain together. So we're operating in a fantastically interesting space.
There's a bit of geopolitical associated with it, and we're certainly seeing a drive to diversify away from the supply, which at the moment, 90% of magnets are produced in China. So the rest of the world is looking at how they can catch up over the next 30 years. It's a fascinating place, but I'll tell you what they all need, and they need mixed rare earth carbonate. They need to have their foot on the rim, the raw materials in the first instance to be able to achieve that. And why is that? All right, so there's a bit of information on this slide, and this comes from Project Blue, one of the independent experts that are out there that study the markets.
When you look at 2025, and you look over the next 25 years, you're roughly seeing a doubling in demand for neodymium iron boron batteries. It comes across those various areas, but that's the point of it. We have a situation where the world is electrifying, we're moving into robotics, we're moving into AI, we've got EVs. We've got a whole range of different things that all require high-performance permanent magnets. And that's the expectation over the next 25 years, we see a doubling. I just want you to concentrate for a sec on the middle of that slide, which is the robotics piece. It's the dark gray. After this was put out, Morgan Stanley came out with an eight-series robotic almanac, and they look at the demand for robots over the next 25 years.
And their demand for— looks a little bit like this. Their view is that by 2050, they're gonna be producing 1.4 billion robots every year. Right? Stop and think about that for a sec. Billion with a B, every year by 2025. So what that means, even if they're half right, is there's gonna be a significant growth in that overall market. And all of those robots are gonna require neodymium iron boron batteries. So that's the, that's the really important thing to take away from this, is we're sitting in a fantastic place right at the moment to get into production quickly and see if we can capitalize on what these expected demands are gonna look like. And important as well, because, you know, Brazil sits there. It's a great location.
We sit in a fantastic place, but the reality is Brazil's got the second-highest resources of rare earths in the world. That's only gonna grow. It's only gonna grow because, we're gonna continue to explore, and we're gonna continue to develop our project. And within Brazil, we sit out there on that right-hand side in terms of the measured and indicated resource. So our measured and indicated, we've got 666 million tons of the stuff, at some really good grades. But what's more important, and through the work that we've done over the course of the last 12 or so months, that drilling work and that metallurgical work, is to turn that resource into a reserve.
Of course, we published our reserve when we published the PFS in July, but you know, we've got over 100,000,000 tons of reserve at over 4,000 PPM. And just to give you a little bit of an indication, the ionic clays that are produced in the world right at the moment through Southeast Asia and China are probably mining at 1,000 PPM-1,200 PPM as an example. Now, the reason that our grades are so much higher, it comes back to the geology, it comes back to the location. We're located in a volcano and basically that's been the container for the rare earths and the weathering of the rare earths over the last, you know, 100 million years or so. So the takeaway is we've got an enormous resource.
We've got high grades. In addition to that, it's, it's all very well and good to have the grades, it's all very well and good to have the recoveries, but the location that we're operating is fantastic. It's first class. We sit on the edge of Poços de Caldas. It's got 170,000 people that live in there. It's a brownfields mining jurisdiction. Alcoa have been there for 60-odd years. We're going to be using power that's supplied 100% from hydroelectric and solar. There's plenty of water that exists within the Caldeira itself. It's been raining in January. They had 1.3 m of rain during the month of January. So you wonder why there's been a bit of weathering within the Caldeira.
It's a subtropical area, and we have fantastic road access, 250 km by road to the Port of Santos. Easy to get materials in and very easy to get materials out. So, you know, we sit here and we look at this, and I was astounded when I first went there. The resource is amazing, and the infrastructure's almost as good. The ionic clays themselves, though, the mining methodology and the extraction and recovery is simple. So this is a very simple process. It's mineralized from surface. It extends 20 m-30 m to 100 m deep in certain areas, so it's a free dig process. We've got no drill and blast, we've got no crush and screen that we have to worry about. We wash it in ammonium sulfate. The ammonium sulfate releases the rare earths.
We collect the rare earths in solution, mix that with a bit of ammonium bicarbonate, and we have a mixed rare earth carbonate, and that's the product that we're going to be producing. It's much different to the process that folks have got to go through from a hard rock perspective. And when we look at those producers, and we're looking at Lynas and we're looking at MP as the only two producers of rare earths in the world right at the moment, outside of China, of course, Western producers. It's fantastic to have seen their performance as well from a market cap perspective, but they're absolutely the gorillas in the room. But they're hard rock producers. So of course, what this means, grade, recovery, simplicity of process, low cost.
That's low cost, not only from an operating cost perspective, but also from a capital development. I won't dwell too much on this, but our ongoing equivalent NdPr price is in the yellow bars, and it sits at around 20, just under 20, goes just over 20. The current spot price for NdPr is $126 a kg, or $120 a kg, there or thereabouts. We'll get. We won't get that, we'll get about 70% of that. The margins are pretty good, though. Really high-level snapshot. The project is a $443 million CapEx. We'll process 6 million tons of material a year. And the high-level points to think about here is the NdPr production, a bit over 4,000 tons of that a year.
You know, that's representing about 5% of that demand that you saw from Project Blue a few slides ago. More importantly, though, is the DyTb, the heavy magnetic rare earths that we're gonna produce. So that's the stuff that's in really short supply right at the moment. And very pleased. It's only 135 tons, but again, represents around about 5% of the global demand, as we look forward. So really, you know, really, the basket, as they call it in rare earth terms, is a really solid basket from a magnetics perspective. And, you know, all of that low cost delivers a $1.3 billion NPV at roughly current prices. Pilot plant's really important. As I said, you know, we're really pleased with the team that we've been able to put together.
The guys have done a great job in building this pilot plant up over the course of the last three or four months. It's producing a mixed rare earth carbonate. You can see it in the bottom right corner there of the picture. It's coming in the containers, and then the guys are delivering the actual, the cake itself. We're getting that out to suppliers, we're getting that out to magnet makers, and we wanna look at how we can do some separation as well. That's an important part of the process. We've got offtake agreements, non-binding offtake agreements, with Neo Performance Materials, whom I spoke about before. They produce all the way through the supply chain. That goes into Estonia.
Ucore are building a facility in Louisiana, and we've just done a deal with MTM as well, or sort of halfway through the year, in terms of looking at how we could do some separation work with those guys. So, that's going, that's going really well. $443 million of CapEx. We've got great support from the ECAs. EXIM, $250 million letter. EFA, $50 million letter of interest. I will continue to work with BNDES and other ECAs, and that'll form the core of the funding solution for the project. So there we have it. We've got an amazing resource, in a great location, and we're working really hard to be the next producer of rare earths into the marketplace.
The share price has changed dramatically over the last little period of time, and we're gonna keep de-risking this whole process. So thanks for your interest. Enjoy the conference. Thanks.