All right, Andrew Barker, Exploration Manager for Maronan Metals. Would you like to come and join me, sir? What happened to the fish guy? What happened to your other, your other half? Did we
Yeah, he, he had a hip replacement and a knee replacement.
Oh, good grief! Did he really?
Yeah.
So this is one of Andrew's colleagues who presented for us in Sydney at RIU last year. He's an absolute scream, and he strategically put this deposit, we think, next to one of his favorite fishing spots. So he's not fishing for a while then, I take it. No? Okay.
No.
Well, would you please make Andrew very welcome. He's going to talk all about Maronan Metals, and there's a lot to get through. He's our penultimate speaker for today, so let's give him a big round of applause, RIU style.
I'd like to thank you guys for sticking around to the end of the day, and I hope that what this will do is give you an advantage on all the other people who've already left and gone out to the bar, because we think we've got one of the best development projects in Australia at the moment. I'm Andrew Barker, the Exploration Manager for Maronan Metals, and it's my pleasure to be here talking at RIU Explorers. It's our first time presenting in Western Australia, and we've got a lot to tell you about with our silver-rich polymetallic deposit located in North West Queensland.
We have the notices and disclaimers. Please read them. They're available on our website. What I want to leave you with today is who we are, what we're doing, and when we're doing it. We have a single exploration tenement located about 65 kilometers south of Cloncurry. On that tenement, we have more than 65 million tons of resources. We have a 33 million ton Broken Hill-style silver lead deposit that's been overprinted by a 32 million ton iron sulphide copper-gold deposit. We have 122 million ounces of silver, 2 million tons of lead, 270,000 tons of copper, and a bit over 0.75 million ounces of gold in our resources.
Last year, we released a scoping study, a preliminary economic assessment, on a small part of that resource that we call the Starter Zone. This study demonstrated an economically compelling 10-year project with a very handy NPV at what now look like quite conservative silver prices. We think there's still significant value to be had growing our indicated resource base and engineering an even better economic outcome for this project. We have around 250 million shares on issue and a market cap of around AUD 120 million. Our substantial shareholders are Red Metal, who spun the project out in the IPO, our IPO in 2022.
We also have Perth Capital and MGX Resources Limited as substantial holders. One of the things I'd like you to take away from this, this is one of the first points: If you look at our market cap, we have AUD 15 million in the bank. Let's call an enterprise value of around AUD 100 million. We have 122 million ounces of silver in our current resources, which means that you're getting silver at less than AUD 1 an ounce in this company, and that doesn't include the significant lead, copper, or gold. We have an experienced board and management team that have discovered, developed, and operated mines in Australia and around the world.
This is the right team for this project at this time. Our project is located in the Mount Isa District, one of the great geological neighborhoods in Australia. Since the last election in Queensland, we now have a very supportive state government who is doing a lot to support and help get new mining projects permitted. This is a great place to be building a mine. We have a bit of a who's who of our neighbors around us. We have South32's Cannington mine, about 90 km to the south; Evolution's Ernest Henry mine, 80 km to the north; MMG's Dugald River; Harmony's Eva project; the amazing Mount Isa deposits, 120 km to the west; and closer to home, AIC Mines' Eloise and Jericho deposits, literally just across the street.
Our silver-lead deposit is really big. It has a strike of about 1 km from north to south, and we've drilled it to 1200 m below surface. If I was doing an ASX report, I'd put some red arrows at the bottom. It's still open. This has been overprinted by an iron sulfide copper-gold deposit. It's got a strike of around 300 m, and we've drilled it down plunge 1500 m, and again, it remains open at depth. If you want to use some exploration terminology, we've found our elephant, but per the African proverb, you can't eat an elephant in one mouthful.
So we've identified an area we call the Starter Zone, that's our first bite at this project. This Starter Zone has been the focus of the work that we've done over the last three years, and we had a resource update out last year where we now have 5.3 million tons of indicated silver-lead resource in this area, and a further 1.7 million tons of indicated copper-gold resource. These resources are fed into the scoping study that we put out in October last year. We considered two development cases, one being building our own standalone plant on-site, and the other, looking to toll treat through some of the underutilized capacity at mills within the district.
Both demonstrate a compelling economic development case. Building our own plant on-site, we think will cost around AUD 270 million, and it'll generate an NPV8 of around AUD 380 million. The payback is 4 years, but that's from the day that you start spending money. It's 2 years from the day you start producing metal. The toll treating option is only about AUD 100 million of capital to get started and generates around AUD 360 million dollars NPV and has an even quicker payback. However, this doesn't have to be an either/or situation. It could be the best approach is a mix of the two. However, I want to reiterate, what the inventory considered in that PEA was less than a quarter of the total resource we have at Maronan.
Even within the Starter Zone, there's a substantial amount of indicated resource that we believe we can convert to indicated. Every 1 million tons of resource we convert to indicated adds a year to the mine life. There are opportunities that will be close to development, shallow and close to development, that we've not drilled yet, and we intend to put some holes into these this year. However, we have a large chunk of resource that we've, outside the Starter Zone, three-quarters of the deposit. Even if we said with our 65 million tons, if we converted two-thirds of it, let's, let's go around, that's about 40 million tons. Putting that through a 1.2 million ton per annum plant, this is a three-decade project, potentially.
However, with the scale of the deposit, we think that there's opportunity to look at higher mining and milling options to help bring forward the value of this project. In June last year, we lodged a Mineral Development Licence application with the Queensland Government. This is an intermediate tenement between an exploration licence and a mining licence, and under that permit, we're seeking permission to develop a box cut and exploration decline. We see these as a really good way to help de-risk the project, and we're expecting that approval to come through imminently. The exploration decline will get us to around 200 meters below surface. It'll de-risk the mining by giving us firsthand experience of the ground conditions and geotechnical conditions.
We'll put some level development in on the ore, so we can see what the deposit actually looks like, not just from drill core, and we'll take metallurgical bulk samples that we can use to potentially produce concentrate marketing concentrate samples. The exploration decline will also be a fantastic underground drilling platform to help us continue converting and building the resources. We are gonna have a very busy couple of years at Maronan Metals. It's getting exciting. With the imminent approval of our Mineral Development License, we wanna start breaking dirt this year, get our box cut and exploration decline well advanced, so that by the time the next wet season comes around, we're well underground. We'll restart surface drilling shortly, which will feed into an updated MRE and PFS.
We'd like to put an ore reserve out by the end of this year, and we're targeting having our feasibility completed by the end of 2027. We'll also shortly start our mining license applications and get them going. We wanna turn this discovery into a mine. We've demonstrated a strong economic development case for this project. We've got multiple attractive development opportunities and the right team at the helm to turn this discovery into a mine. Thank you for your time. Good afternoon.