Afternoon, everyone, thanks very much to the organizers and sponsors for enabling us to present again this year. In the last year or two, a lot's changed with MGX, what I want to talk to you about is our change from iron ore to gold. There's a picture here, just keep it in your mind for the minute, of the Central Tanami Project, which is a joint venture into which we bought a half interest in the Northern Territory, just over the West Australian border up towards the Kimberley region. Where are we? We've been operating as an iron ore producer out of Western Australia for nigh on 20 years. Small team, capable core management group, we built up plus 400 million in cash and reserves.
Our last iron ore operation, which is Koolan Island, which you can see in the map there is off the Kimberley coast, actually shipped its last shipment today. This morning it went out. We've been running a program to clean up the island and basically monetize stockpiles. It's been very successful, better than many people thought we would do, it's helped fund, effectively, our rehabilitation works. I'll touch on that at the end of this presentation as to how we're exiting from there. Our real focus now is on the 50% interest in the Central Tanami Project or the CTP, where we are a joint venture partner with Tanami Gold, another ASX-listed company. Both Tanami and ourselves have a common major shareholder. It's APAC Resources from Hong Kong.
We bought this interest in the Central Tanami Project from Northern Star, announced it last year, it's fairly new. We just settled it in February this year and are now looking to accelerate that work. Corporately, just to touch on where we are, the first thing that will jump out when you look at our cash and our market cap is there's no value being attributed to the gold project at this point in time. That's something we're now just getting out on the market and talking about. We've settled the CTP acquisition. We're now into development activities. I'm going to talk you through the two key gold deposits there, which are substantial, we are now educating and informing people about our news flow that will be upcoming in the next 6 - 12 months. Corporately, 38% is held by APAC.
We have an institutional presence that is lifting. Was sitting around 12%, that's now sitting at 17%, we're seeking to grow that. We also have, you can see it in the red area down the bottom left of that pie chart, one of our former iron ore customers has a stake in the business, they are very stable. At some point in time, that might help come out and come free for liquidity purposes. At this point in time, that's all working well. The board has remained stable, you can see the names on the right-hand side.
The opportunity really is for us to concentrate on the Central Tanami Project, divest, as we've announced, the Koolan Island operation, which is our iron ore operation, which has been successful for us, also challenging for us for many years, then get on with the Central Tanami Project JV development activities. We have a substantial cash reserve, plus AUD 400 million. We won't need all of that for the Central Tanami Project, and it does present us with opportunities for a range of other things. If you haven't been to the Tanami region, and not many people have, it looks like this. It's a desert, very remote, can be accessed from Alice Springs, it can be accessed from Halls Creek in Western Australia, and also from the north, from Darwin via various connecting roads. The project at Central Tanami was mined in the 1990s.
Those who've been around perhaps longer than me even, might remember Otter Gold and Zapopan NL and companies like that. They did the initial mining. Then Newmont in the early 2000s discovered and operated a deposit called Groundrush as an open pit, and that deposit very much is still there and has been drilled extensively and is the core underground mine that we're proposing to develop here. In the map at the right-hand side, if you imagine the left-hand side of this map is the WA NT border. The black line, if you can see it, that's bisecting the tenements towards the bottom of this map is the Tanami Road. The Tanami Road is gravel from the WA side and from Alice Springs, which is about 600 km off the bottom right-hand part of this chart, is sealed to within about 200 km of the Central Tanami site.
About 100 km south of this site is the Newmont Tanami operation, so Granites and Callie. Substantial operation. Other owners in the area have exploration tenure. It's a big regional field, been very successful for the discoveries there. Different types of mineralization. What we have are the green tenements shown within the joint venture. They're the 50/50 owned ones. The blue tenements that we also acquired as part of our agreement from Northern Star are wholly owned by MGX exploration leases. That's more of a regional program. We're doing some work on those, but the focus right now for the next two - three years is on putting the Central Tanami Project into production. If you look down at the bottom towards the green areas, you see the black dot. That's the plant site. There is an old processing plant there.
We don't think it'll be suitable for what we want going forward. We're working with GR Engineering and others on looking at the designs for a new plant on that disturbed site. There is capacity and real estate for us to do that. To the north, 40 km north, is the Groundrush deposit. That's the black circle at the top of the green tenement package. I'll take you to some pictures on that shortly. To the south, about 25 km away, is one of many deposits that have been mined, open pitable in that area, and that's called Jims. I'll show you a little bit about that deposit as well. The main point to take away from this is that the project has been worked on really as an exploration project for a number of years.
Our joint venture partner, Tanami, was in joint venture with Northern Star, and they had slightly differing views about how to go about this. Effectually, at the end of the day, we were able to acquire Northern Star's stake because as a project for its business, it's less meaningful nowadays than it was when they first got involved 10 years ago. Just to concentrate on Groundrush, just the images you see here first. The picture on the right-hand side is the northern extent of the Groundrush open pit that was mined by Newmont between 2001 and 2006. Out of that pit, they took 600,000 ounces at an average grade of four grams per tonne, and the metallurgical recovery was in the mid to high 90s. Seen various historic statistics, it was attractive.
What we've done, and when I say we, recently and prior to our involvement, there's been extensive drilling of the deposit underneath that pit, and that now sits as the core component of the total resource base of the joint venture. The total resource base is 31 million tonnes at 2.8 grams per tonne gold, which is a good grade per Australian standards, and that's for a total of 2.8 million ounces of contained gold. That's 100%. I'm giving you statistics of the total project, recognizing that MGX is a 50% JV partner. The core deposit at Groundrush is 11 million tonnes at 3.3 grams per tonne. It's a key component, and that's 1.2 million ounces.
Previous scoping work by the joint venture and our current partner have indicated the potential for this project is something like maybe 1.5 million tonnes throughput per annum, producing somewhere around 100,000-120,000 ounces per annum. That's really indicative stuff, and that's a 10-year mine life. We've got work ahead of ourselves to further do the drilling, to update the resources, confirm the metallurgy, and do the process plant engineering design. What we see at the moment is this looks like a really attractive Australian gold project. We're keen to give it a really aggressive shot in the next two years. In that long section on the right-hand side, the brown color is the existing open pit, and the drilling that's underneath that has then informed the geological wireframes, the modeling that's been done of the deposit.
The green shapes are the stope optimizations of that geology and the intercepts and the way that resource model's been built, and that's what's produced that 1.2 million ounce resource. We know that it's open at depth and open down plunge to the south, which is the bottom right side of that picture. What we're trying to concentrate on right now is to make sure we've got the feasibility assessment correct, and very shortly we will be starting to undertake an exploration decline. Permitted here from the center of the existing open pit, just in the left wall of that picture you're seeing on the bottom right, we're about to start an exploration decline, which will be about 3.5 km long. Here's another long section showing you the same thing, just in a bit more detail. The brown color is the existing pit.
The gray colors underneath, being the stoping areas and the development headings, do not exist currently. They are our mine plan. The colored development heading you can see that comes out of the central part of the pit, spirals down, and then heads down to the right-hand side is what we want to start within the next few months. That will take about 14 months as an exploration decline, and from that drill, particularly you can see the fans of the drilling on the right-hand side, into what is a +400,000 ounce inferred component currently sitting in that part of the deposit. Turn that into indicated. We will also test for some extensions. The benefit here is drilling from underground is obviously cheaper than drilling from surface.
We could drill from surface, the fact to get this authorized and approved earlier means we can get underway with a development program of that decline for a mine that will ultimately be a lot bigger. Triple decline development currently proposed, as you can see in the spirals in the north, central, and south. This becomes the core for delivery of our future production. We're concentrating here for the moment. We go down to the southern part of the tenement. We go to Jims. Jims is one of about 20 known gold deposits, some of which have been mined previously, way back when, 20, 30 years ago.
There were two open pits at Jims, shallow, the drilling that the joint venture has done has delineated a resource that is shown there in the bullet point above, 2.6 million tonnes at 2.7 grams per tonne for 220,000 ounces. Our objective and our strategy with this project is to have Groundrush underground producing the core, supplemented by open pits, Jims being our priority one for the moment. There are another half a dozen where we could do drilling if we had the time. At the moment, in that picture on the right-hand side, the blue color are the geological model wireframes, and then that's been optimized and it's produced a pit cutback shown in gray. That, I think, will increase in scale. Our resources have been done at AUD 3,500 per ounce. It's currently sitting closer to five-plus.
The green colors are the underground stoping components optimized of the resource estimate. The two together comprise that 220,000 ounces. The picture on the bottom right is drilling we're doing right now. That started in June and over this dry season. Dry season typically lasts from April, May through to November, December. We're really trying to accelerate this. We will also be doing diamond core drilling there as well. In relation to news flow and infrastructure and other things on the site, we're working with Tanami closely, and we've actually taken people from our operation at Koolan Island and put them into the joint venture, and we're building up and trying to modernize some of the aging infrastructure that's there. The top two pictures are the camp. There's a 1.4-km gravel airstrip.
Ultimately, we'll probably look to do a new airstrip a few kilometers away from here, but for the moment, that will suffice. The existing plant site is shown in the picture on the bottom right. That will be partly scrapped. It won't be sufficient for what we need, but it will work for us in terms of real estate and disturbed area for building a new plant. The key news flow items you can read in those bullet points. They relate to all the things, the engineering studies, the drilling results, the start of the exploration decline, the upgrade of the infrastructure on the site. Approvals. Traditional owner support is very strong. They've been anticipating and wanting production for a long time, and now's the opportunity. Finally then, to just jump from that into a final picture on Koolan Island.
For those who've been there, you know it's a fantastic site or you've been past it. Effectively, we're done with iron ore. We've made our money and our company from this operation primarily and some of the Midwest ones we've had. We have rehabilitated the site largely, and what's left we've sold to an infrastructure group, a U.K./U.S. group. They are going to take this site subject to FIRB approval, which they, I don't think will have an issue with. They've already had FIRB approval on another island next door to us. Later this year or before March next year, we will transact and pass on this operation for a new life as a logistics base for oil and gas offshore, for fuel distribution and tourism, things that we're very happy to leave the traditional owners with.
We get AUD 20 million-AUD 25 million from it, and about AUD 30 million of rehabilitation obligations associated with those key assets passes on to someone else. Righty-o. To finish, there we are. It's a relatively simple story, transitioning from iron ore to gold. We've got a half interest in what we think is a terrific new gold project in the Northern Territory. It's been around for a long time, but there's now two parties of the same momentum and the same ambition to put this in production as soon as we can. We sit with a valuation that doesn't really reflect any of that at this point, so we're keen to get going. Thanks very much