Good morning. Thank you for the introduction and thank you for staying to listen. I am Luke McFadyen, and welcome to Diggers and Dealers, and this is Minerals 260's presentation. Minerals 260 is only about three years old, so we're a relatively new company. We're spun out of Liontown Resources, which is the connection to Tim Goyder, and 12 months ago, we were a AUD 30 million greenfields exploration company. After spending the majority of last year in deal mode, negotiating the acquisition of the asset that you see behind us with Zijin , we announced earlier this year the successful acquisition and then the capital raising later on. We raised AUD 220 million in April. This was 7x our market cap at the time, which we understand is a record for a company of that size.
It was only possible because of the asset, the team, and the strategy that we have in place. A week after we finished that capital raise, we were drilling. We've since gone 50,000 m because of the excellent planning that we had in place before it. We've released three drilling results since, and I'm here to tell you today more about the asset. One of the fantastic outcomes of that capital raise that we had was the amount of shareholders that came in and the quality of those shareholders. Samuel Terry Asset , one of the best-performing funds for the last two decades in Australia. Tim leads from the front in all these companies and remains a substantial shareholder, of course. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and then below that, the top 20 hold 65%. We've got a fantastic team.
As mentioned in the introduction, Tim Goyder leads from the front as the Chairman. He's well known in this part of the world, of course, and it's not a coincidence that he's got several companies presenting here today where he's either the Chairman or the major shareholder. Emma Scotney is in the front row here, leads us through governance, compliance, finance, and strategy work. Dave Richards has been up on this stage too as the MD of Liontown when he discovered Kathleen Valley and led them through the development phase. Stacey is well known in this part of the world too and well known in mining through her gold experience and is fantastic from a finance and strategy perspective too.
Just yesterday as well, we announced the appointment of two former OZ Minerals colleagues who will lead the development operations of that asset in conjunction with the fantastic geology team led by Matt Blake here as well. This is what you see when you go to site today, and we are running a site visit. It was mined in the 1990s by Resolute between 1994 and 1998. Nick Cernotta was the Operations Manager, would you believe, in 1997. When the Bank of England started selling their gold, the gold price crashed to $280 an ounce, U.S. , and this thing went on care and maintenance. Since then, it hasn't moved that much at all. Twenty-six years later, the gold price is 10x higher. Governments are still addicted to their debt and deficits, and we believe it's only going to improve.
For the last 12 years, it was locked up and hidden away from ASX investors by Zijin , until, of course, we came along with our audacious transaction. On the left-hand side is our tenement package, and we acquired 130 km^2 from Zijin in that transaction. Today, we sit on 570 km^2 as we have rapidly moved to acquire or secure further tenements that we, as we see, a substantial opportunity in consolidating the area, which is largely fragmented in its ownership. There's a significant amount of history. Discovered by Western Mining in the 1980s, like a lot of things in this part of the world. There are a lot of people in this room, I'm sure, that have worked there. We've had quite good stories of people coming up and telling us the history of the project.
The major difference in history and now is that gold price. We paid AUD 70 an ounce for 2.3 million ounces, and from the time we signed that deal to now, the gold price has moved AUD 700 an ounce in Aussie terms. The last PFS to be completed by this, by Tony Patrizi and his team at GRES, was done in 2012, and the economic assumptions were $1,400 an ounce and the Aussie exchange rate of AUD 1.10. The difference now is not just that gold price, but it's a company like Minerals 260 led by the team that we've got and will continue to add to, who will invest in the asset to truly understand that geology and unlock its full potential. This is some of the highlights that we looked at as a board when we were looking for a major acquisition. We wanted something of scale.
We wanted something with significant exploration upside. We wanted something in the location that we could operate, and then we came across Bullab ulling. It's in a great part of the world, and Tier 1 jurisdiction is obviously used quite a lot. All I know is that in Western Australia, there's 150 operating mines, 50 of them are gold, and we know how to build gold plants in Australia and Western Australia in particular. In addition to that, this project is 45 minutes drive from here, straight down the Great Eastern Highway. The whole resource sits on a granted mining lease. We have a native title agreement in place and already an excellent relationship with our traditional owners. Environmental surveys have already been completed. All this means is we are in an excellent position to bring Bullab ulling back into production as quickly as possible.
The resource has four deposit names, and that's largely because of its historical mining areas, but it's really one large continuous system sitting on the contact point of granite and an amphibolite unit. Historically, 12,000 holes have been drilled, mostly by Resolute in the 1990s, and that's an important point because they were drilling at a time when the gold price was, as we've talked about. What that means is 60% of the holes of those 12,000 are 50 m or less, and the average RC hole is 60 m. 60% of that resource is in the indicated, supported by 20x 40 spacing. In the southern part of that resource, we see a lot of opportunity both for more ounces and grade. There's just under 9 km of strike in the main resource, and when we add the prospect called Gibraltar, the strike length extends to 14 km.
This is the same image and what we're doing. Matt and his team are running six rigs today. We're adding a seventh one soon. We're going to drill 80,000 m and likely more. That will all support a new resource in December. A little bit like when you buy a house and you renovate it, we're going to upgrade this resource to something much more substantial than what we believe we bought. That new resource will come out in December. To put into context what we've done, we've drilled more meters in the last three months than what has been done in the last 15 years. Our average RC hole to date is 220 m versus that 60 m that I mentioned, and we haven't yet found the bottom of the mineralization.
40% of our holes are infill to support a future mine plan, 40% are depth extensions, and 20% are strike extensions. There's also a 3D animation on our website if anyone wanted to go and have a further look. What have we achieved so far with all that investment? We're 53,000 m past. We've done 53,000 m of that 80,000 m, and drilling to date has met in many ways and in many ways exceeded our expectations. What did we want to do? We wanted to see more gold at depth, particularly in the main resource of Phoenix and Bacchus. We wanted infill results to be consistent with the resource that we acquired, and we wanted to find more mineralization along strike, and that's exactly what we've seen.
Our results have seen gold below the major deposits of Phoenix and Bacchus, and we found gold in between Bacchus and Kraken, and we have some of the thickest intercepts at resource grade in the history of the project. At Phoenix, infill drilling intercepted in our first couple of weeks, 62 m at the resource grade, pushing through the depth of the current modeled pit, and within this intercept was a meter of 23 g. At Bacchus, again, we've seen gold beneath the existing modeled pit, where some of the highlighted infill intercepts have been 7 m at 8.8 g/t and 22 m at just over 3 g/t, and within that, 8 m at 7.5 g/t. Yesterday, we released our third round of drilling results since June, and we'll continue to release results frequently.
Our first results for the Gibraltar prospect were very exciting, where we had 7 m at 2.4 g/t from just 34 m . This Gibraltar prospect is a historical pit, currently not included in our resource. At the same time, we're rapidly developing the project itself. That PFS that was done 12 years ago is a fantastic foundation for us to build upon. We're using all that historical information, as much of that historical information as possible. If we were to replicate both the drilling and the project development work that had been done at Bullab ulling before we acquired it, it would cost us about AUD 70 million. It's a fantastic head start. All areas of the project are now underway and running concurrently, and you'll continue to see updates and de-risking of the project over the next year.
Two areas which I'm going to deep dive into in this presentation is just to give you a flavor of how the historical work is supporting our project going forward. In metallurgy, there's been 20 rounds of metallurgical testing in the last 30 years. The amphibolite rock is the most common Eastern Goldfield rock, so we know it's going to process fine. When the last major round of testing was done, it was 2015, and the price assumption used was $1,400 an ounce. Zijin selected a coarse grind. What we do know is that at the resource grade of 1.2 at 75 µm , the range of recovery is between 89% and 93%. We will do our own testing. We'll do further metallurgical drilling, our own testing, and we'll continue to optimize this recovery for the current price environment.
Water is another good example where we're leveraging the historical information and then building upon it. In the 1990s, Resolute created a bore field, which you see there in the middle, across one of the major paleo channels. Part of the reason for going after further tenure after the acquisition was for access to two other paleo channels within 50 km of the project, both north and south. We not only have a plan A, which is to rehabilitate and recommission the old bore field, but we've got plan B and C for future water as well. The next three years are going to be busy. We're going to continue drilling. That resource is going to come out in December, but we won't stop there. I don't think we're going to have enough drilling done before that.
We will continue to be drilling after that resource comes out as we continue to de-risk that project over the next 12- 15 months, targeting final investment decision at the start of 2027 and then targeting first production in 2028. We can get there because of the history, because of the strategy, and because we're funded all the way through to final investment decision. In summary, we think we've got a fantastic opportunity. It's a fantastic company-making project that's been locked up for the last 12 years. It's 45 minutes drive away from here in the best location in the world, I think, to build a gold mine. Being fully funded is absolutely an advantage, and it gives us optionality to move at pace, and we're targeting that first production in the end of 2028. Thank you very much.