Pleasure to be in front of you today without carrying down the front of my shirt after lunch. I am Luke McFadyen, the Managing Director of Minerals 260. Before I get into the presentation proper, just a short history. Minerals 260 is only three years old. We were spun out of Liontown Resources three years ago. Many of our shareholders are, and still are, Liontown Resources shareholders themselves. We've got Liontown DNA, particularly with Tim Goyder as Chair and David Richards on the board still, and David's in the crowd today. For most of the last year, we were in deal mode. We were negotiating with Zijin Mining Group, the $100 billion Chinese conglomerate, to buy what you see in front of you today, which is the Bullerbyn Gold Project. We announced this deal on the 1st of January.
We went through a full re-compliance process with the ASX because we broke most of the records. We went seven times our market cap when we raised $220 million as a $30 million company. We bought $166 million, and $166 million of that went to Zijin Mining Group for the deal. After we finished that transaction process, one week later, we were drilling. Today we have six rigs on the ground, and we're well and truly into the project itself. One of the really pleasing things about that $220 million capital raise was what we ended up with on our shareholder register. We have some of the best international and domestic funds on our register today, in addition to the high net worth and retail network that comes with a Tim Goyder-led company. Samuel Terry Asset Management is our number one shareholder.
For those that know Samuel Terry Asset Management, for the last two decades, they've been one of the best performing funds in Australia. Tim is our number two shareholder. Tim himself put in $12 million into that capital raise and since has spent $3 million on market. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, two of the best international funds in the world. Below that, we've got a great register with the top 20 holding 65%. Since that re-compliance and listing process, we've then got excellent research from some of the best analysts in town. All those contact details are on our website. I'm sure if you wanted their research, they would email it to you. Tim Goyder is the Chair. He's also the number two shareholder. Tim, I think, has four companies here this week presenting where he's either the Chair, the major shareholder, or both. We are obviously one of those.
Tim's influence is obviously phenomenal in the industry and no doubt in Minerals 260 as well. Like I said, David Richards is here too. Dave's been up on this stage many times when he was the MD of Liontown for a decade, which obviously led to the Kathleen Valley discovery and created what Liontown is today. Emma and Stacey round out the board as fantastic legal and finance experts. We are very balanced from that perspective, and we've got an excellent management team below. I joined Minerals 260 just over two years ago, with the mandate to go and do a transaction like this. I was the Head of Strategy at OZ Minerals, sorry. I just noticed Charlie Sartain is also on the board. Good to see ex-OZ Minerals colleagues as well.
All that history that we have from the other companies, despite only being a three-year-old company, is what we've got in Minerals 260. The project itself, this is what you see today. If you were to fly over, it's a historical site. It was last mined in the 1990s by Resolute Mining when the gold price, would you believe, was $300 an ounce. It closed up when the Central Bank of England started selling their gold in 1999 and crushed the price to $250. Since then, it's changed hands several times and for the last decade sat in Zijin's hands. This is a classic example of a brilliant project in the wrong ownership. It was in their pipeline. It's a $100 billion company. They've got assets all over the world, and this just sat there.
We were very fortunate, and we believe, audacious to be able to go and acquire this asset. We acquired 130 square kilometers from Zijin. That tenement package you see there is 570 square kilometers. Since the transaction, we've continued building out the tenure portfolio for several reasons: more mineralization, of course, water, which I'll get into more details in a moment, and an infrastructure footprint to give us optionality. You'll continue to see us execute that tenure acquisition strategy as we continue through our development. Before I get into the details, I thought I'd just start with the highlights, right? What are the things that we looked at as a board when we thought, why should we go and pursue a $166 million deal when we're a $30 million company?
Some of the facts: it's one of the largest undeveloped gold projects in Australia at 2.3 million ounces, very shallow drilling. It's had 12,000 holes for 500,000 meters through it before we started with our own drilling. We are going to add 80,000 meters to that. We're just over halfway already. The majority of that drilling was done by Resolute when they were mining here. That's an important point because they were drilling when the gold price was $300 to $400 an ounce. What we see is a very shallow drilled resource. 60% of the holes are 50 meters or less. I'll show you where we're drilling at the moment. Our RC hole to date is 220 meters. We are fundamentally drilling completely where nobody has before, and we still haven't found the bottom of the resource.
You throw in the location, and Tier 1 is thrown around everywhere in the world as Tier 1. We are 45 minutes away from Kalgoorlie Airport, which is an hour's flight from Perth. We've got a major highway to the project. The highway, the Great Eastern Highway from Perth to Sydney, runs straight through the project, so we can get there very easily. The whole resource sits on the same granted mining lease that Resolute used when they were operating, and it's still live today. We've got a native title land use agreement, which takes many years to negotiate, and an excellent relationship already with the traditional owners. Environmental surveys, metallurgical testing, engineering is where we start from. It is an excellent project, and now what we believe in the right company ownership. The resource itself, this is what you see.
This is nine kilometers of strike or just under, four main pits, but it's really one mineralized event. Those historical pits are the three that you see there called Phoenix and Bacchus. Today, it's really one large resource. That Kraken area is really interesting for our exploration because that's higher grade than the resource. In the distance, you see that Dervoltologo. That's another satellite area that was previously mined by Resolute, but currently not in our global resource. 60% of the resource is in the indicated category. The majority of that is supported by 20 by 20 drilling. Very densely drilled, well understood. We certainly have a lot of confidence in the resource. If we turn off the classifications and just look at the mineralization, you see exactly what we see as a company. The whole resource is open down dip.
Despite doing over half our 80,000 meters of drilling to date, we still haven't found the bottom of it. We've started holes that are going to go 400 to 500 meters already. Those results will be out relatively soon. Our exploration plan has five pillars. We're drilling down dip at Dixon's and Phoenix. We're drilling infilling at Phoenix and Bacchus. We're drilling along strike at Bacchus and Kraken. There are these regional targets. Dervolt is the primary target, but as you'll see in a moment, there are regional structures that look very similar to both Bullerbyn and Dervolt that have never been drilled. We've got that capital to be able to go and achieve that.
We've drilled more meters in the last three months than what's been on this project in the last 20 years to give you some context of how quickly we've moved and how unloved this project was sitting in a large company's portfolio. 40% of our holes are going to be infill, 40% depth extensions, and 20% along strike. If I'm going to zoom in on that Phoenix and Bacchus area, the Phoenix and Bacchus area is a primary target for us because of the 2.3 million ounces we see today, 1.7 of those million ounces sit in this main pit. Current modeled pit is a cut-off of 0.5, $3,000 pit shell. That's a $3,000 Aussie. The gold price at over $5,000 gives us a lot of headroom from an operational perspective. Those lines you see across the top are the drilling, historical drilling.
There are no aspirational ounces in this part of the resource. It's densely drilled and will be upgraded its classification after we've finished with it. We've drilled down dip, particularly in Phoenix, and we've got some of the thickest intercepts to date in the history of the project. Also, there's a 3D animation of this part of the resource on our website, which goes for too long for me to be able to present today, unfortunately. If you do go on the website, you'll see this. You'll be able to play with it and move it around. It's another way for you to understand the resource itself. What have we done with our drilling? Like I said, we're just over halfway, six rigs, four RC, two diamond. There's no messing about. What we've seen today is exactly as we would want. What did we want to see when we started?
We wanted to see mineralization down dip. We wanted to see it in between the Bacchus and Kraken area, and we wanted to see it along strike. That's exactly what we've seen to date. It's achieved everything we needed to from hitting those targets. We've drilled those red dots out to the extent of the hole, the end of the hole, sorry, below the resource that we've already got. You can see what we're going to do with this resource. Those pits are going to go deeper. The deepest part of the Phoenix pit today is 220 meters in the model itself. There's no doubt there's opportunity for us to go deeper here. When our ounces per vertical meter is between 10,000 and 20,000 ounces, for every 100 meters we go, using the same metric, we get between one and two million ounces.
That's really the opportunity that we're looking at. If we drill into some of these better hits, we see what we saw. We put out this announcement a couple of weeks ago, 62 meters at the resource grade, and then within that, one meter of 23. This is at the bottom of the current modeled pit. This is why we were very interested in acquiring the project and then got drilling straight away. This is one of the examples of what we would have loved to have seen before we started drilling, and now we've seen it. The area between Bacchus and Kraken, like I said, is between strike. You can see that dotted line is the current modeled pit, very, very shallow. It's only 80 meters deep. We've drilled beneath that up to 200 meters, and we're still hitting gold.
Best intercept in this part of the resource is 22 at just over three, so well and truly above the resource grade of 1.2. I need you to change. We go to the regional opportunity. We are absolutely not distracted from the main opportunity being Bullerbyn in those five areas. We see these regional structures that look very similar to what we've got at Bullerbyn and Dervolta. We've got the capital and the strategy to go and explore these areas. That's another part of our exploration strategy. Not to forget the development side. Like I said at the start, there's an extensive amount of development that's gone into this. If we were to reproduce the technical work that's been done on this, we're looking at between $40 million and $50 million that's been put into this already. That's our foundation.
That's why we believe we can get this back into production by the end of 2028. We'll have a new resource by the end of this year. We've got feasibility-level geotechnical data. I'm going to focus in on water and MET in a moment. From an infrastructure perspective, we're in a great position. Every single power option is on the table for us, whether it's grid, off-grid, or hybrid. Permitting in the community is also in a fantastic position, like I talked about. From a MET perspective, we know how this is going to grind. We know how this is going to process, sorry. It's all about the grind size. At 75 microns, we get between 89% and 93%. The last time this was studied was in 2015 when the gold price was $1,400 an ounce.
You can know what we're going to do in today's gold price environment, significantly different. We're going to look at the opportunity from a grind size perspective. This is amphibolite rock, the most common Eastern Goldfields rock. It's very well understood in Australian processing. From a water perspective, some of the ground that we've picked up since the major acquisition was to the south and to the north of the main project. One of the reasons was for water. We've got water rights across the main paleo channel where you can see that squiggly miscellaneous tenement there. That's the old bore field. Forty bores there that we are pump testing and going to rehabilitate. If that doesn't give us all the water, plan B and C are those two other main paleo channels nearby, which we've already got ground rights over. What's ahead?
80,000 meters will be done by the end of September. A new resource by December. We're studying this as quickly as possible using all that historical information. FID at the beginning of 2027. We roll into construction, and by the end of 2028, we are producing. The scale of this will be significant. It will be a major asset. I certainly look forward to updating everyone as we go through time. In summary, why are we worthy of your dollars? We're a huge resource. We're over 2 million ounces. We're open at all parts of the resource still. We've got the capital in the bank to be able to go and explore this. Fully funded all the way to FID, targeting that first production in 2028.
With the board and with the shareholders we've got already, we think we've got a great foundation to be able to move this company forward. Thank you very much.