This is Neometals, and this is Chris Reed, and he will explain why. Please make him welcome.
Thank you very much, Chrissy. Thanks to RIU, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The first thing I'd like to say is, the greatest asset at Neometals is its people, and today I'd like to shout out to our technical team on the gold, Darren Townsend and Clay Gordon. I stood up here last year, we had an exploration target. Since then, we've had our first resource, we'll shortly have our second resource and mining studies out, and in the next couple of weeks, have a production joint venture to put this asset into production, and hopefully next year, this time, we'll be turning out gold bars. And so I think that's a good testament. You know, we shouldn't...
Yeah, there's a lot of jurisdictions, but still in Australia, you know, we can go from a greenfield site through to a mine within two years. Admittedly, we're not building a plant, but it can be done. Here's the speed reading test. It basically just says, "If you feel like buying stock, speak to your licensed investment advisor." So developing gold and lithium assets is in our DNA. You know, we've done the high-grade underground Sand Queen, we did Macarthur, we did Mount Marion. We've built a battery recycling plant for Mercedes-Benz. We're commercializing our lithium technology with Rio Tinto. We're in the financing stage of probably the world's most advanced lithium, sorry, vanadium project up in Finland, trading on stockpiles.
Then in September 2024, we announced that we were gonna refocus on gold and get into production and rebuild the balance sheet, while unfortunately, we watched the critical metals prices slide. So hence, we started looking at Barrambie. I'll get the fly-through going. This will help you to sort of put it into perspective. So we'd had Barrambie since about 2003, and we predominantly looked at it for vanadium, titanium. It contains the world's second highest grade titanium, vanadium deposit. But then, when we looked at gold, it was an old historic gold producer back at the turn of last century. It's fantastically located in the Murchison. You know, we've got a big tenure holding there.
We have about 500 square kilometers of tenements, about 300 square kilometers of granted mining tenements over the Barrambie Greenstone Belt, which sits on the Youanmi Shear, and it's got 40 strike kilometers of the contact. So you know, that's almost Kalgoorlie to Kambalda, so you can fit a lot of stuff in between. We'd spent about AUD 40 million developing up Barrambie, taking that through its you know, mining proposals and ministerial approval to develop. But it was the gold that you know, it not been that well-loved. We turned out a very large exploration target on that in late 2024. They first discovered gold out there when they were putting the Rabbit-Proof Fence. They went over the ironstone, found gold, stopped making the fence.
The guys that were coming down from the north thought, "Why haven't you finished the fence?" The guy said, "Well, because we're mining gold, and what we do is we trap the rabbits." So if you wanna blame anyone for rabbits being in WA, it was the boys putting the Rabbit-Proof Fence up. So you know, we've got a very, very good understanding of geology. We did quite a lot of drilling and all of that has enabled us to have a great start. Initially, Barrambie ranges the underground there, so what we're looking at is about a mile of contact. The old guys produced about 20,000 ounces of gold at just under an ounce, sort of a 6-foot shear. They took out a foot quartz load, a footwall quartz load that went just about an ounce.
So you know, that's one of the places that we've started. We drilled that this year. You see the old headframe there. The old guys mined it down to about 100 vertical meters. Sorry, yeah, about 100 vertical meters over three levels. So what we've done is we've drilled that over about a mile, proved the stratigraphy is still there. You know, down deeper, we've got some good intercepts, but for us, the focus has been more up at the north end. This is a really, really good target for us in the future. It's an underground target. Unfortunately, it's not an open-pit target. What we're finding a bit further north is there is some open-pit targets, some Magnum Bonum, Silver Linings.
They are a couple of our advanced projects that we're gonna have a look at, once we get Ironclad, that you can see up at the north end. Ironclad is what we're looking to put into production about, about 8 Ks away. It's interesting, you know, we've got gold on the sediments and the gabbro contact. We've got it on the gabbro and the basalts. We've got it on the basalts and the granite. So, you know, 40 strike kilometers, but, you know, in every unit, we are getting gold. So we put out our first resource, pretty modest. That's okay. It enabled us to get down the mining lease and into the Native Title process. We've since followed that up. We found 61 old RC holes.
You can find, you know, you, you've got 20- to 30-meter intercepts there at, you know, at 3- to 4 grams. A lot of broader ones that are a little bit lower, all centered around high-grade old workings. You're looking at about a kilometer from north to south there, and we did a few holes at Mystery. You know, it's this is just like walking up to old mines in the 1980s. So, you know, we're truly blessed. We don't have to go and find gold. The old guys left the gold. What we've really got to do is look at those structural controls. So, you know, it's a camp scale opportunity. You know, you've got history of high-grade old gold mining, you know, near-term production.
We had to be in production by this time next year and a massive resource base to work with. So if I just go back a sec, sorry. What we're gonna look at now is a little mining lease just at the top there where Ironclad. So, you know, it covers about just 5.5% of our strike. What we can tell is the gold's traveling up the north-south fault. Every time we get a cross-cutting fault, we are getting high-grade underground workings. But generally, the mineralization's in a wide quartz stockwork on that contact. You know, you can see some of the grades there, 26 at 2.5, you know, 26 at 4 from the surface. You know, they don't get much better than that.
You can see the plan on the left there. We've drilled that over about 320 meters of strike. Sits in a, it sits on the contact, we're not sure that it's that visually discernible, but, you know, we'll mine it and have detailed grade control. And then you've got the long section there. We've got our original sort of pit outline at about $5,100, I think we used as a gold price when we looked at the resource in June. And you don't find too many commodities that go up by 40% in six or seven months, but we're very, very happy with that. What we're even more happy with is that the widths and the grades are increasing at depth, and we've drilled it only down to about 120 vertical meters.
So we are very, very keen to make that bigger. But to start off with that, our strategy has just been to get it into production, to self-fund exploration, to rebuild the balance sheet, which will give us optionality. And so late last year, we signed a letter of intent with some mining contractors that we know well. We've used their geological company on and off for sort of 20 years. And so we're looking at a production joint venture, where they'll fund the working capital, they'll operate it. They've got toll milling capacity at Wiluna. We'll essentially dig it up, put it onto trucks. We've got a main road, the Sandstone-Meekatharra Road runs past the deposit about 250 meters. And it'll be at no upfront capital cost to us.
And, you know, they're really driven to making a success. So on the right-hand side, you can see sort of the project layout. We put our native vegetation clearing permit in the last week. We'll put the mine development and closure plan in early next quarter, and we expect to turn that into a full production joint venture agreement in March. In terms of our indicative plan there, we're very, very well advanced. You know, the ore, we've done the metallurgical test work. It's free milling. It's pretty soft 'cause it starts from the surface, and I mean, you know, I think the pit probably goes down 60 or 70 meters. So low work indexes, low reagent consumption, and recovery is up to 98% in the work done to date.
So it'll go through the mill pretty well, high recoveries, and for us, you know, the next step is starting the grade control drilling, next quarter. And then really, you know, you move Ironclad into production, and then we've got to start to backfill, to extend the mine life with some of our advanced projects. So, you know, we are very, very fortunate that we have historical explorers in the 1980s who've left us with some fantastic advanced prospects. You know, we've got 20, you know, 30-meter intercepts at sort of 1-2 grams for a lot of them, shallow. So we think, you know, get into production and then start to push these all up, up the curve. So our main priority will be extending Ironclad to the north. That's the sort of easiest win.
Like I said, it's getting deeper. As it gets deeper, it's getting higher grade and wider, so that's good. And then, you know, I mean, it's an exceptionally mineralized belt, so you've got gold, high-grade gold, open pit gold, stockworks, different, you know, lodes. You've got vanadium, titanium, and then we discovered that we've got copper. So the guys, I'd like to thank the guys at Solstice up in the northern boundary of our northern boundary, for drawing attention to this belt there at the northern end of the greenstone belt. I've got the southern 40 strike kilometers, and we've got an old mine there called Rinaldi, sitting down the bottom end. Sort of last mined in 1960, 1961, where they did an open pit.
I'm just trying to picture, you know, between Sandstone and Meekatharra, it's pretty dry now and pretty lonely. I'm just trying to think what it looked like in 1960, 1961 with a 5-ton truck taking ore down to CSBP at Kwinana. But they took out about 1,400 tons at just under 10% copper. So we're very, very pleased to find that. Had a look, there's a couple of shafts north and south of it, so we took some samples, you know, the grade's pretty good. We got up to sort of 24% copper, and there's additional shafts and a mine to the south, too. So we don't know how big it is. We think it's a, it's a fold, it's sort of... But, you know, always good to start with gold....
So we think it's a fantastic base to build a gold business. You know, you, you have got the most underexplored greenstone belt in the Murchison. I know, because we got it in 2003, and we hadn't done any gold exploration until last year. It is a camp-scale opportunity. There's multiple processing options, fantastic transport infrastructure, and essentially, you know, the team's just been drilling, defining the resources, running it through the studies, doing all the work. We want to develop it and then repeat that on the next deposits. I don't think gold's going anywhere for the short term. I mean, it, you know, the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times," but, you know, I'm not sure they ever contemplated living these days. It's, it's pretty wild.
So, I can't see anything changing, so I can't see the gold price retreating too far. In terms of corporate dashboard, you know, we've got about AUD 6 million still in the bank, market cap AUD 46 million. I think, you know, it's been tough. We're turning it around. Over the last decade, you know, we have returned AUD 82 million back to the shareholders in dividends, capital returns, and buybacks when we were profitable, and we're trying to get back there as soon as is humanly possible. So we've got a strong team and culture. As I said, the people that we've got at Neometals, you know, when we see the things that we've done, we've retained a core base, and we're looking at, you know, giving our...
Preserving and delivering value to our shareholders from gold and critical metals, right? We're giving them multiple shots on gold. So we do have commodity diversification, but, you know, we are focused on generating cash flow from gold as a firm base to build the business. As I said, we've got some fantastic lithium and vanadium prospects. You know, near-term cash flows, we're looking to develop royalties from some of the technologies, and we're looking to re-enter the upstream lithium world, looking at a lithium brine project in Utah. We are very ESG aligned, and I think we've got a proven record and delivering it back to the shareholders when we can. So thank you very much.