My name is Andrew Barker, and I'm the Exploration Manager for Maronan Metals. It's great to be able to tell you about the Maronan Project, the Queensland silver development story, with more. This presentation should be read in conjunction with the notices and disclaimers, which can be found on our company website. Why invest in Maronan Metals? We have two large resources on our single exploration tenement. We have a Broken Hill-type lead-silver resource of 33 million tons at 6% lead and 108 grams per ton silver. This is adjacent to and in places overprinted by an iron sulfide copper-gold resource of 32 million tons at 0.85% copper and 0.63 grams per ton gold. This is a really significant accumulation of metal. For those people more accustomed to thinking about things in terms of gold, this is roughly equivalent to about a 5- million- ounce gold deposit.
We are currently well advanced in completing a scoping study that will come out later this quarter. We have an experienced board and management team who have built and operated high-performing assets in Australia and around the world. We're located in a fantastic jurisdiction, being Queensland. Even better, we're in the home of metal mining in Queensland, the Northwest. We have a market cap of around $47 million, with just over 200 million shares on issue. Our largest shareholder is Red Metal , who hold around 44% of the shares and who vended the project into Maronan in 2022. The Joshua Pitt , Perth Capital, also hold around 8.6% of our shares. We have research coverage by GBA Capital, and we have copies of their research note at our booth if you would like to see it. We are located in the Northwest Minerals Province of Queensland.
Rob Rutherford, our Technical Director, who's also the MD of Red Metal , likes to tell me that the Northwest Minerals Province is the Andes equivalent for lead-zinc-silver deposits. In 2018, Geoscience Australia put out a research note that showed that 38% of the world's economically constrained lead deposits, 30% of the world's economically constrained zinc deposits, and 15% of the world's economically constrained silver deposits are located in Australia. 80% of those deposits are located in the Northwest Minerals Province. We are in a great geological area. We have a field operating base in Cloncurry where I live with my family, and our project is 65 km south of Cloncurry, less than 5 km from a sealed highway. It is also only 40 km to the nearest rail siding. There is significant existing processing capacity within the North Queensland district.
From publicly available reports, we can see that there's potentially a million ton per annum capacity through the Cannington Mill and half a million ton capacity through the Dugald River , currently that is not being utilized. There are also several operating copper-gold plants that could potentially toll treat ore within the area. Zooming in closer, the yellow area is our exploration license, and the blue square is a Mineral Development License application that I'll talk more about later. Our project is located 15 km south of the Eloise Copper Mine. The lead-silver resource has a strike length of about 1 km. It continues to a depth of at least 1,200 meters below surface but remains open. The mineralized widths vary from 4 meters up to 20 meters wide in places.
As we've grown more familiar with this project, we've identified an area here that we call the Starter Zone, which has a strike of around 500 meters and around 600 meters vertical depth. Within that area, we have just over 12 million tons of the lead-silver resource, a third of the total resource. That's the area that we're focusing on for the scoping study that we're currently putting forward. More importantly, over the last 12 months, we've put another 10,000 meters of drilling into it, and we've increased our higher confidence indicated resource to 5.3 million tons. Our copper-gold resource is adjacent to and in places overprints the lead-silver resource. It has a strike length of around 300 meters and continues at least 1,500 meters down plunge to 1,200 meters below surface.
We have an existing EM Plate that is coincident with that, that extends at least 300 meters below our current drilling. As I mentioned earlier this year, we have lodged a Mineral Development License application for a Box Cut and Exploration Decline at the project. This will allow us to go underground to collect bulk samples of both the lead-silver and the copper-gold mineralization, as well as giving us a year-round underground drilling platform where we can complete more drilling for cheaper and drill shorter holes. We expect to lodge the Environmental Authority updates to that later this month. The Exploration Decline project we expect will take around 12 months to complete. It'll get us to a position around 200 meters below surface. That'll expose roughly 100 vertical meters of the deposit. We also intend to put some level development in to collect bulk samples.
As mentioned, it'll give us a year-round drilling platform. Drilling can be challenging during the wet season in this part of Queensland. We've engaged Mine Geotech in Kalgoorlie to provide geotechnical support for building the Box Cut and Exploration Decline , as well as feeding into the scoping study. While we've already completed a significant amount of very good net work, we've also engaged Bianca Newcombe to assist with further refining our metallurgical test work. We currently have more copper-gold and lead-silver mineralization test work in progress. We have good relationships with our stakeholders, particularly the landholders and the native title group, and we've commenced negotiations to update our existing agreements for this advanced exploration work. We're also well advanced in our long lead time environmental approval studies, including flora and fauna, surface and subsurface water. Our scoping study is due out later this quarter.
In the scoping study, we're considering a number of different mining scenarios, most likely some sort of Long Hole Stoping . In places it may be longitudinal, but where the ore body is wider, also considering Transverse Stoping . We're also considering filled versus unfilled mining scenarios and on-site and off-site processing opportunities. As the scoping study is completed, we will be able to provide further guidance on progression to a PFS and a mining license application. As a geologist, I'm itching to get out drilling again. There's still a lot of inferred material we have at relatively shallow parts of this deposit that we can continue converting to indicated and adding to our indicated inventory.
As mentioned earlier, our MDL application is in progress, and we expect that it will be granted later this year, which would potentially enable us to start construction of the Exploration Decline during 2026. I'm highly biased, but I think that this is probably the best opportunity you're going to see at this conference. We have an experienced team and a fantastic deposit. We are very close to putting out our scoping study, and we've commenced a staged permitting process to turn this discovery into a mine. Our booth is located up the back, and if you'd like to find out more about Maronan, we'd love to tell you. Thank you.