Half times the current wholesale price of electricity. It was the emergence of what we're seeing here. In the past, we've had flat electricity growth in the U.S. and Europe. Most of that growth has come from India and China and the emerging markets. That was the future demand for uranium and nuclear power was largely China and India's reactor build programs. But now we're seeing because of this data center, the AI, the hyperscalers, you know, electrification of transport, electrification of industry in the, you know, chasing decarbonization. You've seen now electricity demand kicking up in both the U.S. and Europe for the first time in decades. This is obviously feeding through to the more medium to longer term demand for nuclear power.
Global tech companies, what we've missed in the past, in the 1970s, it was governments building those 54 reactors, taking the construction risk. They got better at them over the decade of the 1970s because again, when you build more than one thing, think of IKEA flat pack furniture. The first one you hate building, by the time you're on the third or the fourth one, you're an absolute expert in IKEA flat pack furniture. The difference now is that we've got this cashed up, motivated end user that's pushing for these, you know, the investment into nuclear capacity. It's not just in the small modular reactors, it's in capacity re-rates for existing reactors, reactor life extensions.
It's for turning on idled reactors, which I never thought we'd see, in the U.S. and Europe's probably to follow as well. It's the completion of uncompleted reactor construction. Then obviously, we've had some massive announcements with, you know, $80 billion in the U.S. to build, you know, up to 10 AP1000 Westinghouse reactors in the United States, which we fully expect for further commitments this year to be coming from that. You know, it's very easy to sit here in the bubble of Australia and our domestic energy policies, which we're not gonna get into, 'cause you'll see steam coming out of my ears.
You know, it's very easy to forget that there's now 38 countries that have pledged to triple nuclear capacity. In fact, another five countries recently added to that pledge. We've seen 14 major banks also pledge that tripling nuclear, and that also includes the World Bank getting rid of a decades-long ban on funding new nuclear energy projects. It's all well and good that you've got these data centers and large energy users also pledging to triple nuclear, but as you said, without the banks to help facilitate those financing of $tens of billions. You know, this is all happening in the background.
You know, again, just this global picture, governments across the world extending, building, investing in small modular and advanced modular reactors, refurbishing existing reactors. It's happening everywhere. It's not going away. Energy security has brought this slide, you know, even more to the forefront of governments' thinking as they look to secure electrons going into the future. Uranium, there's been a lot of money and governments focused on the midstream and the downstream. There's been a lot of talk about conversion and enrichment bottlenecks. Conversion and enrichment is where the yellowcake that you see on your screen goes through a nuclear fuel cycle before coming fabricated fuel rods to be put into a reactor.
That used to be an 18-month process. It's now closer to three years, and that's largely because of legislated bans coming in the end of 2027 in the United States for no more Russian fuel and with similar moves in Europe and other parts of the world. The money has been focused in the last two years to fix that. They were not necessarily bottlenecks on, you know, physical bottlenecks. They were bottlenecks on capital being deployed, and that capital wanted certainty of future business.
They wanted the utilities to sign contracts to say, "When we build this extra conversion and enrichment capacity, you know, there's actually gonna be a market for it," to take away the risk of Russian material coming back somehow, which we see is a very small probability. That's been solved. The CapEx is being delivered and that construction is starting. The real bottleneck is coming from uranium, where global governments have included uranium in the critical minerals lists, but there seems to be an idea that the market is gonna take care of uranium supply. That the market will fund that and finance it, people like me, to get these uranium miners into production. We're seeing so far that we're not at prices that are incentivizing that.
Mainly because there's demand in the fuel cycle now, there's less idled time in which to produce some secondary. That's going down, and it's been inventory depletion. The great thing about inventory is once it's consumed, it doesn't regenerate. You know, we've filled that gap since then, that primary mine supply gap. We're now going into a period where, as I said, we've got 70-odd reactors, which means there's an additional 40-odd million pounds of uranium in a 200-million-pound demand market at the moment being added to that demand equation. When you think about 40 million pounds, by 2030, NexGen should be up and running, and they'll be doing a maximum output in a year of 30 million pounds.
Their average run rate's gonna be less than that. That world-class asset is only gonna be fulfilling the demand for the reactors that are currently being built, you know, not even the future reactors that China's gonna start next year, doesn't include what the U.S. is gonna be doing. You know, we can sit here and we're seeing that China and India are moving already on the uranium. India's just signed massive contracts with both Kazatomprom, the largest producer of uranium out of Kazakhstan, and Cameco, two massive multi-year purchase programs, and that's to secure uranium for reactors they haven't even completed yet, and some that they haven't even started building yet.
Whereas the West is sitting back thinking that there's gonna be this magical supply response, and can I tell you, it's not coming. To get that uranium, you need to start today. You need to be making these investment decisions today to bring that supply in because a lot of these projects, I mean, you know, a 2-5-year build before you're even getting any yellowcake out of the ground. That's the WNA. There's no way the lower scenario is relevant anymore. We're somewhere between the reference and the upper scenario, and we've got the great unknown as to what is small modular demand going to look like from 2030 onwards. I can tell you one thing, we're all gonna get that demand wrong. We're gonna be too light.
We've got some geopolitical risk around supply of uranium, and then you've seen this other slide as well, the nuclear fuel prices. It's not just uranium that's tight. The fuel prices are showing as well that you know that this is a real problem, not just a uranium problem, it's the whole way through the fuel cycle. Oh, wow, I'm actually going really well for time. Who would have thought? Yeah, I just wanna touch on the price and the market at the moment. It's very easy to point to uranium prices. The spot price is $85, somewhere thereabout, $80-$90. The term price, $90-$92. Again, both of these price indicators are irrelevant.
Spot gets moved around on a whim, often without trading. The term price is a backward-looking price. It's basically saying, reporting the lowest possible price that could have transacted a month or two ago. The uranium market ignores the future value of uranium, largely because it doesn't suit the utilities too. When we look forward at $90 term, we're projecting a forward curve out to 2030 of about $115. But the market is not pricing future pounds on that. You're not seeing much incentive to bring those pounds to market because what we're seeing in all mining operations, especially since COVID, is you're seeing cost inflation coming through.
It would be naive to think that we're not gonna continue to see cost inflation in mining projects going forward, especially with the repercussions of the Middle Eastern conflict, and not just for crude oil prices, but for diesel through the refining process, for gas in the electricity provision, but as well is sulfuric acid, which is a very meaningful product in a lot of mining and including uranium mining. It's going to get harder. We've seen some projects come to market last year that were all restart projects. Most of those are through most of their teething issues. Again, the total pounds is nowhere near what's required. Nowhere near what's required.
I might leave it there. I mean, one of the things about our fund is that, as we're saying, it's, we're a global fund. I've been in this space for more than eight years now. As Jane said, probably the only dedicated. Well, we are the only dedicated manager in the Asia-Pacific region, and one of only a handful globally that's got the IP to progress through this. You are gonna hear from some very good and interesting ASX-listed uranium stocks.
We're kind of in the middle of the market cap stack here, anything from, I think, AUD 100 million-AUD 300 million from a producer coming through a restart process now and getting through most of the issues that happen with restarts and ramp up. A really interesting development project in Alligator. I was lucky enough to be out there yesterday with Andrea and the team looking at their field recovery trial, and then a very prospective explorer in DevEx who've got a very good land package up in Northern Territory. I've been up there quite a few times kicking rocks up there with Brendan and the exploration team and another exciting prospect. Hopefully you'll enjoy that, and I haven't gone on too long. Long enough so that you can watch this video on your commute into work.
Guy, I'm very impressed actually. That's probably the first time you've actually stuck to a timeframe, so well done.
Yeah.
I might actually just get you to stop sharing your screen there, and while you're doing that, I encourage webinar attendees just to use the Q&A function, which can be found at the bottom of your Zoom screen, if you do have any questions for Guy or the presenters coming up here today. Guy, I'm gonna jump into it first up. We've spoken about this and you had a slide in your deck, but I guess the single most important demand-side development in nuclear is obviously AI. Just wanna pick your brain a little bit here. Microsoft, you know, the Googles, the Amazons of the world, walk us through exactly why the shift might towards be more nuclear in that case.
You know, probably covering fundamentals first, and then perhaps potentially going a little bit more specific, you know, by walking through how you approach it at Tribeca, as part of your strategy.
AI data centers require firm, reliable baseline electricity, and they're requiring a lot of it, a lot more. I mean, it's been a massive exponential curve on these tech companies talking about 10 MW of electricity demand, and now they're talking GW of electricity demand, and that's been in a really short period of time. They are extraordinarily switched on as to how electrons can be provided to them, electricity can be provided to them. They know electricity grids, transmission sources better than most industry experts and governments because they're investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the data centers, into these machine learning, into hyperscalers, into all of these things, and there's no way that they're going to allow that to become unstuck by being short of electricity.
They, you know, the U.S. has been the most aggressive and visible because most of these tech companies are based there, and the U.S. has got the advantage that they've got a phenomenal natural gas network, phenomenal pipe structure to move that gas around in order to for industry and electricity. However, with that backdrop, they are still aggressively pushing nuclear because they see the 60-80-year reliability of that and have realized that, you know, again, when they can control and lobby governments to protect the whole fuel cycle, then energy security, geopolitics, you know, get canceled out to a large extent.
They've been a really big driver and, again, not only do they have checkbooks, but they have the political ability to lobby both sides of the street, so it doesn't matter who's in charge. You've seen that with deregulation at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. You've seen that in rules getting through on the electricity grids in the United States, which are normally bureaucratic and take months and years of back and forth. You know, you've seen some really big changes happen there. The reality is we can sit here and get a little bit worried about a company's canceling some future CapEx and they're not doing as many data centers and what have you.
Just on the current announced and committed projects from these companies, the electricity sector cannot keep up with what's currently planned. We kind of needed a little bit of a break, if you like, from that, so that we can, you know, build these supply chains and start responding. You know, that didn't worry me. What it gave me was an opportunity because, you know, with this and also the general risk-off because of what's going on in Iran, has provided yet another opportunity to pick up some really good value, not only in just in uranium companies, but also in some of these nuclear technology-related plays as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think I was lucky enough to actually be involved with that presentation that you did with Craig Scroggie, who's obviously the CEO and Managing Director of NEXTDC, that data center, and, you know, it's baffling to sort of see that, you know, we're not really there yet and what's coming for the AI sort of sector is very interesting. Look, I think let's move on from AI and let's look at the sector as a broader sort of thing. What are the key drivers really sort of underpinning that uranium demand from here?
Well, as I said, I mean, what we're seeing as well as a result of all of this, downstream desire for more nuclear capacity, is that we're seeing that the old way of utilities contracting is starting to become old and outdated. They're going to get to a point where they're forced into more aggressive contracting by the end customer, by the Microsofts and the Googles and what have you. You know, the difference this cycle is that at the end of the last cycle, or you know about 2009, 2010, we saw the emergence of China coming in as a big contractor of future uranium. This cycle we're seeing China and now India come in early to that equation.
They're well ahead of the commercial reactors, not only in Europe and Asia, but also in the United States, and they are securing you know, a huge quantity of uranium out a long way, and catching these utilities a little bit off guard. You know, I think Cameco has a brilliant slide out to 2040 where they're talking about 2.4 billion pounds, billion with a B, pounds of uncontracted uranium from the 430-odd reactors in commission at the moment. There is gonna be a moment where again, some people in the industry have alluded to the fact that maybe Microsoft just bypasses the utilities and comes directly into the uranium market themselves. You know, we've seen that happen in other commodities like lithium and what have you.
It wouldn't surprise me if that happens. For them, a $90 price is kind of irrelevant because they need to make sure that you can't thrift uranium, you can't replace it with anything. To run nuclear energy, you need uranium. You know, for them, if they're spending $140/MWh on wholesale electricity contracts out for 20 years when the price is $40, you know, again, they're not gonna quibble over $90 or whatever. They're gonna say, "What is the price to incentivize meaningful supply to come to the market?" We're gonna lock that up.
Well, let's actually do the next question. Let's do a deep dive on that. Again, you've sort of referred to this in your slides in the session. What share of the global electricity generation could nuclear realistically capture by 2040?
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. The current constraint obviously is building gigawatt-scale reactors. You know, the Chinese are doing it in sub-five years and on budget. The Koreans proved by the fourth reactor in the UAE that they can do it around five years and relatively on budget. You know, these are large, very large engineering and construction projects. They require heavy forging. They require long lead items and a big and well-oiled supply chain. The difference that you're gonna find post-2030 is these small modular reactors and advanced designs are going to become commercialized. It is coming. It's coming a lot faster than anybody thinks. The first-of-a-kind are being built right now. Supply chains are being built out.
There's deals being done left, right, and center that the broader market misses because they're not in the weeds. It's all about securing the supply chain for the modularization of these things. That's gonna be the game changer to really boosting that share of nuclear power. I think again, it goes exponential in the you know after 2030, which again, is gonna require investment in uranium to supply that.
Sorry, Bear with me. There's quite a few coming through, and there's quite a few coming through just on the SMR market. You've kind of spoken, this one says, "Can you touch on the SMR market and how you think that affects uranium demand in the future?" But just one even more specifically that's asking, "Is it not possible to adopt the technology used in submarines?
Well, I mean, the technology that small modular reactors and advanced reactors are utilizing is not new technology. It's old science, old physics. We've known about it since the 1950s and through those Cold War decades where not only United States but numerous other countries had test labs exploring molten salt reactors, fast breeder reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. We've always known about the small modular reactors. The pressurized water reactors are just smaller versions of what we're currently building. It was just that there was not a commercial pathway to that. It was more cost-effective to build 2- or 3-GW-scale in one site because it was a large-scale grid power. The submarine technology is exactly the same.
It's just using a much more highly enriched uranium than civilian reactors would use. You know, they've proven that it's possible to do it, and they're very good at doing it. There's a huge amount of expertise, especially in the United States around that. That's all gonna lend to making the small and advanced reactor industry easier. The bottleneck as well has been regulations, and that's dramatically changing.
We've already seen a number of designs in the U.S. with record times to pass through and I'll be in the United States in May and going to see George in the Peninsula project, but I'm also gonna try to get across to the other side of Wyoming and have a look at the Bill Gates backed TerraPower reactor that's being built there in an old coal-fired power plant in Wyoming. I'm gonna see if we can do that. You know, it's already happening and as I said, regulations across the world are fast tracking that to allow this to come to market much more quickly.
Thank you, Guy. Again, there's quite a fair bit of interest here on sort of the SMR market. There's one actually that's just popped up. What's the bear case the market is ignoring? Is there a scenario where grid scale battery costs fall fast enough to close the base load gap before any SMR reaches commercial deployment?
We need grid scale battery technology to be commercial, commercially viable and scalable and even if we do, you know, this is not a nuclear versus renewable plus battery and/or a gas and/or fusion and/or whatever. Everything's required. The sheer, I mean, we've not seen. You know, the compound, the CAGR growth in Western grids for decades, we just haven't seen this. Most Western grids are old and aging and you know, been flat to declining electricity use. Just the sheer pull of what's coming through, not only from tech, but also from, you know, electrification of transport and decarbonization of industry, we need all of that technology and we need all of those supply chains to be built. What's it good for?
It's fantastic for all mining operations of these critical minerals that are gonna be required not only for nuclear, but for batteries and everything else. You know, fantastic space to be in nuclear uranium and broader resources as we are here at Tribeca.
Oh, thank you, Guy. Sorry, we're getting quite a few questions here. Thank God you actually wrapped up your presentation pretty quickly for once. Okay, we've got one here that just asks about your approach at Tribeca in particular. This person asks about what on the ASX is standing out to you, but then also specifically asks whether Tribeca avoids any certain jurisdictions within the energy sector, if you're able to comment on that at all.
When it comes to uranium, it's very hard to avoid jurisdictions because, you know, there's uranium in, obviously Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, but there's also uranium in far-flung African nations as well, and South America. I mean, we even still have exposure in Niger, despite there being a military junta coup a few years ago. I mean, there's just different ways of dealing with those jurisdictions and thinking about them and how we scale our exposure in some of those jurisdictions. There's a few that we won't touch at the moment, but that's not to say that we won't look at them again if things were to change.
Obviously the desire is if you can have exposure in Australia, United States is a fantastic opportunity because there's just so much noise being made from Secretary of Energy Chris Wright over there, as well as the Trump administration around critical minerals and U.S. and allied sort of supply that, eventually those words need to translate into actual action and/or money and/or, you know, some sort of floor pricing or whatever it is they're gonna do to actually secure that. There's some more favorable jurisdictions on that basis, just around politics.
Okay, Guy, I'm mindful of time here, but I've got a couple more I'll just quickly run through because I do know that George has to run to a flight. This one is specific about the technology and processes itself. What's your opinion on fusion? Is this the space that you're looking at?
Yeah, look, I mean, we do have a very small private exposure to a fusion technology in the fund. It's, you know, it's largely a little bit of a placeholder and there was a lot of queries about it. It's a technology that is always been a decade away for a number of decades. You know, there's probably more eyeballs and more capital being deployed in that technology at the moment, but I don't see it skipping the queue necessarily with respect to everything else going on. You know, there's still some quite big challenges that need to be cracked and everyone's saying quantum computing may help that and what have you. But we'll see.
I mean, you know, we're not ruling it out and as I said, it would be a technology that we would welcome if it was able to be commercialized and scaled because it's going to be needed.
Okay, Guy, wrapping up just quickly. You and I have obviously done this for, like, this is our third time now. We're both big fans. Where do you think the market is underestimating the opportunity when it comes to nuclear energy and in particular uranium?
I mean, across the whole spectrum. I mean, there's a reason why we're focusing today on three companies and for full disclosure, the fund owns all three, obviously. While we're focusing here, it's because what I'm looking for at the moment in uranium especially is companies that are doing things, companies that are active. We've had far too long of companies just sitting back and trying to ride the uranium beta from $20- $80 on price, but not necessarily progressing things because I think the next few years, those companies that are providing a solution are going to be the companies that get the bulk of the attention from these utilities when they start getting more aggressive and/or the end customer if they bypass those utilities.
That's where I think the opportunity is. The other great thing about this sector is there's still so many generalists that fly in and out of the sector on macro whims that produces that volatility and while it's not nice to stomach when it goes wrong for you, it does provide you, when you're thinking a bit more medium term, it provides you some fantastic opportunities to top up or reallocate into companies at levels where you kind of thought when everything's running.
Like January, you're kind of thinking, "Wow, am I gonna get a chance to buy these stocks at a good price again?" Maybe not, but then it presents itself and you pin your ears back and that's what we've shown over eight years is that these opportunities have been great times to get into the fund and also a great time for me to continue to flex up some capital.
Absolutely. The fund is performing very well again for the eighth year. Congratulations.
Yeah.
Thank you again for your time. Guy, if we've missed any questions for Guy today, please feel free to reach out either on the Q&A function here or just via email at info@janemorganmanagement.com.au. Guy will still be here for the rest of today's webinar and be able to provide some insights on the companies that are presenting today. Guy, thanks for your time.
Thanks, Jane, and thanks everybody for tuning in.
Wonderful. We'll now move on to some company presentations. First up, we have Peninsula Energy. Peninsula's got a U.S. based production platform, as Guy mentioned, which is becoming increasingly relevant, rather, as we see more focus on domestic supply and security of supply in key markets. George, I'm gonna hand over to you.
Great. Thanks a lot, Jane, and hopefully you can see the presentation on the screen.
Yep, you're all good.
Yeah. Well, firstly, thanks, Guy. That was an amazing overview of the uranium sector and the opportunity ahead of us and, you know, you've really hit a lot of things well, and hopefully people can see the opportunity is enormous. In terms of companies that have been getting on with it, Peninsula's been at this for quite some time. It's been focused on the Lance Project for a couple of decades and has had a few stop-starts over the last 10 years.
A couple of years ago, I think the company, while investors wouldn't agree, probably had the best moment when the toll treating agreement was terminated and the company was left basically half pregnant and they decided that they needed to build the facility to produce their own dried yellowcake on site, and that's a picture of the facility in front. That was a real big turnaround because we can really now control our own destiny. We had the pleasure of producing our first drum of dried yellowcake in September last year, so we are right in the midst of this uranium renaissance that is happening at the moment. Guy mentioned and introduced the three presenters today, you know, a range of producer and explorers and developers, etc.
We've got a few hats on, I think, and sometimes when you get into the production stage, people forget about the upside in the project. You know, at the moment, we host the largest uranium resource in Wyoming, 58 million pounds. We have an additional seven million pounds of the Dagger Project, which is about 12 kms north of the Lance Project, totaling about 65 million. We also have an exploration target calculated under JORC resource of 163 million pounds. The Lance Project has got enormous potential. We currently have a facility that can produce 2 million pounds per annum of dried yellowcake.
We have a license to be able to upgrade that facility to 3 million pounds, and for a very small investment, we can take that facility from 2- 3 by fundamentally adding a dryer, and that'll take us. Look at what our portfolio is. We've got a very long life at the Lance Project, so huge potential. It's fully licensed, and I'll take you through some of those aspects in a moment. We went through a really big reset last year. I joined the company nearly 15 months ago now. The plant was originally targeted to start production in March. I'll use the word delay, but really when you have a look at from concrete pour to production was only 14 months.
Looking forward to Guy seeing the project in a couple of months' time and seeing that that was a tremendous effort to actually build the facility in such a short period of time. Our production guidance is 400,000-500,000 pounds in calendar year 2026 and 500,000-600,000 pounds in calendar year 2027. We're really making sure that we develop a really solid base for production going forward as we move towards filling the central processing plant and then filling the license. We're in an outstanding opportunity at the moment. We have uncontracted near-term production and currently we only have one contract on foot, which I'll go through in a minute.
Market cap, as Guy mentioned, I mean, we've had a significant retrace of price, but it's great to listen to Guy and appreciate that what we're doing is the right thing and the upside is definitely there. We just have to navigate through these interesting times in the marketplace. In the capital raise we did last year, we definitely saw a significant increase in institutional support and people on our register at the moment. I'll just touch on a couple of people. We do have quite considerable experience at site, and I'll highlight two people. Ralph Knode has been in the industry for 50 years. He's worked in ISR for his whole career in North America, Kazakhstan and Australia.
Brian Pile, our VP of Operations and Development, this is the fourth project that he has constructed. We're located in the Powder River Basin in the state of Wyoming. We have a large land package up the top there in the northeastern corner. You can see that if you move that package around, you'll see that that would cover multiple projects in other parts of the basin. We have a significant land holding in the state of Wyoming. We're now focused on production coming from the Ross area, and while it's a small diagram, that small area there is where production has come from and will come from for the next 2 years. We will then move into the Kendrick area, which is the next area.
That is fully licensed and permitted for the next 6-8 years. We have permitting in place for the next part of our journey. Then the larger area being Barber is where there's huge exploration upside and will feed the central processing plant for many decades to come. We also have to the north there the Dagger project which is higher grade. The central processing plant it's a pretty standard flow sheet in relation to the plant. We bring the uranium into the plant. We capture it through IX. We elute we precipitate we then filter press and then dry the yellowcake to less than 1% moisture content. Reasonably straightforward. The plant will be back up and running.
We announced to the market about seven weeks ago that we had failure in the agitators. It was incorrectly installed as part of the construction. Those agitators look like being delivered this weekend, so we're within the timeframe that we told the market when they would be on-site and back up and running. Going through commissioning challenges and getting through most of those matters. We're working through Mine Unit 4. Mine Unit 3 was a disappointment. We have dropped our expectation on Mine Unit 3 in relation to the flow rates. Mine Unit 4 has much better flow rates. That's due to the hydrology. We're bringing on Header House 14 as we speak. 16 will be coming in shortly. 17's ready to go.
We will have all of those in online ahead of schedule, well by the third quarter of this year. As part of the review last year, we also changed the header house pattern designs. We've reduced the distance between our injection and production wells from 80 ft- 60 ft. We've also reduced the number of production wells within a header house, so taking that from 45 - 30. When you combine those and plus better flow rates, mine unit three was expecting to have acidification take nine months. The new header houses will take somewhere between 2 - 3 months to acidify. We've already seen that performance in both header house 14 and 16.
As part of that, we're reviewing our future mine units, and we're likely to start pushing that out from 60 ft- 70 ft, maybe to 75 ft. We're not going back to the old ways. Part of the reason we can successfully support a 70-75 ft spacing is because of the flow rates in future mining units. Last year was all about commissioning. Still going through commissioning at the moment. The ramp-up, 400,000-500,000 pounds for calendar year 2026 as mentioned, and then heading to that full-scale production.
You know, the investment and the money that needs to be invested at Peninsula, outside of exploration, is really about bringing on more mine units at the same time, so that we can ramp up production flow into the central processing plant, which has been built and paid for. This was probably a significant improvement in value. The company had some long-term legacy contracts that were in place that we just simply couldn't fulfill. Our production profile was not able to be matched, and we would have to continue to be in the market to deliver into those contracts, which were lower than the current spot price. Now what we're left with is 600,000-pound contract, which is between 2028 and 2033.
That's for 100,000 pounds per annum. The rest of our production is available for new contracts. The future growth. I'll keep harping on that. We've got enormous potential. There's been limited exploration that has been done on the Lance Project over the last, you know, 5-10 years. Some of the exploration that has been done in the areas of inferred have shown a significant increase in the amount of pounds that have been calculated previously. So we've got a lot of upside with our resource base. We've shown this before. I will highlight the Dagger Project. We're just working with the landowners at the moment.
We should have that locked away, and that is 7 million pounds at over 1,000 parts per million. A lot of exploration's been done on that with scoping studies underway, and that should form part of future supply into the central. Good solid run up to there. You've got power infrastructure that is through the Lance Project. I will highlight that we actually use a very small amount of diesel on-site. You can see the numbers in our sustainability report that we published recently. The impact of the change in diesel price at the moment is very minimal to us. We're off the power grid.
The State of Wyoming produces power from coal, so it's a very low cost of energy to our project. As mentioned before, May last year we had the approvals for the Kendrick production area, so that's now fully permitted. In the U.S. they shifted the responsibility of approvals from a federal level to state, and so now we deal with the State of Wyoming. The State of Wyoming has the lowest population in the U.S., so a project like ours is more relevant in a jurisdiction like Wyoming than other states in the United States. Guy touched on this. I mean, you know, it's the U.S. currently has an enormous fleet of nuclear reactors. It's got SMRs employed in the defense. There's some very strict rules about some.
Where the Defense Department can actually source their uranium from, and it fundamentally is, it has to be produced in the United States. From a utility perspective and a civil perspective, the United States consumes 50 million pounds of uranium per annum. Last year, the United States produced 2 million pounds. There's a significant gap between domestic requirements and domestic production. Then you add that layer on top of that, which is the requirements of defense, and they're now in very deep discussions about how they're gonna start restocking. There is only 5 producers in the United States at the moment that make up those 2 million pounds. The capacity is about 10 million pounds of built central processing plants.
There's a real strain and a real need for future further U.S. production. We couldn't be better placed. That's a highlight there. As Guy mentioned, there's gonna be a lot more pressure on pricing coming forward when you've had a look at the three transactions done in January, February, where you've seen Bannerman and the Chinese, you've seen India with Kazatomprom and Cameco. That accounts for about 70 million pounds over the next 10-12 years. It's a significant amount of pounds that have now been contracted. You know, there's a huge amount of pressure on demand and people are now starting to look at life of mine.
As Guy mentioned, you talk about next gen and the significant amount of production, but there's gonna be other production that will slowly come to their end of life. You know, we need more projects up and running. We don't see a lot of competition in this space 'cause there's a deficit in production. Look, in summary, ASX listed, we're established operator in the United States, significant resource with huge upside. The central processing plant is in place. We are producing yellowcake, and we're hoping to have our first shipment in coming months. We've put a lot of effort into our reset plan. We're actually the only uranium ISR project in the United States. All the others are alkaline leach. ISR accounts for over 55% of uranium produced globally.
We've got an experienced leadership team both at management and board level to take this project going forward. I'll leave it on that note for questions.
Oh, George, I think that's phenomenal. Yeah, obviously from the presentation today, I'll get you to stop sharing your screen and we will jump into some questions now, but you are an established operator, and I think for me it's more the exploration upside is where, you know, what I wanted to hear about, and I'm sure a lot of investors are wanting to hear about as well. Thank you for that. Again, please use the Q&A function, which can be found at the bottom of your screen if you do have questions for George. Let me just jump into the first one here. A deeper dive on the offtake agreements. Again, well done. The question here is, are there other discussions underway, and how long would this type of agreement take to execute?
Look, obviously we've been in the market with contracts for a number of years, if you like, so maintaining relationships with utilities and the like. We're also talking to the U.S. government on a number of angles for offtakes. Look, how long do they take? Firstly, we're not gonna be in a position to really go into offtake discussions until the third quarter. You know, we're changing the way in which we're running Peninsula, and we wanna make sure that we get to a sufficient run rate and confidence in our deliverability of pounds before we start going out and putting in place further take or pays. I mean, we're still suffering from last year's cancellation of contracts. We'll start to put in a thought process and a strategy in the third quarter this year to start looking at that more closely.
Wonderful. Lots of questions coming through, so bear with me. Again, you touched on this in your presentation, and I think it was slide 18 actually, to be honest. You know, obviously strategic advantage of you being a U.S. producer, what do you think the Trump administration might do?
Look, there was an interesting research report come out recently that said, you know, the East is acting and the West is planning. We've seen it in the rare earth space where it's taken a long time for some of the Western governments and that to really deliver solutions, if you like, and you're starting to see some things play out in the U.S. landscape with rare earths, with MP Materials, for example. Government equity, government loans, government floor pricing. You know, they're working through it at the moment. I mean, Guy might have touched on this.
They put a lot of effort into enrichment and downstream, if you like, and I think there's some eyes now coming to having a look at the uranium side of it is, that's gonna be the real critical crisis point going forward, if you like. You know, we've spent a bit of time in D.C. We've got lobbyists. We're working in that space to engage, and I think, you know, it's a government agency. They've got other challenges on at the moment. Department of Energy are working on a lot of fronts, if you like. I think it's just a matter of watch this space. They're looking to do things in the uranium space with the producers.
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think you're already in a, you know, in a quite strategic state at the moment with Wyoming, and your U.S. asset base is, like, located there. How are you seeing that play out in terms of demand and contracting at the current state of play in government?
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, the U.S. government's very interested. The U.S. utilities, I think, see themselves having a problem around 2030 and beyond, if you like. So we haven't seen a lot of RFPs coming out in recent times. One thing I will say is there is a lot of overseas countries that are contacting us because they like the low political risk associated with mining in the U.S. So don't underestimate some of the other countries around the world who are actually engaging with us about our offtake. And, you know, I say to the U.S. government, "I'm not here to solve world peace," but it's crazy to think that other countries will start buying U.S.-produced product when they need it for their own domestic needs.
Interesting. Okay. I know you're running late actually to be picked up, but couple more questions if you don't mind. Okay. How should investors be thinking about Peninsula's position in this current uranium market?
Look, I mean, you know, we'll be able to leverage off the spot market because we don't have contracts in place, so should we see an uptick in the uranium price, we'll be able to get the benefit of that immediately. We're in production. You know, it's you know, we're a player. We're actually producing. You know, we've got an interesting situation at the moment. A lot of people look at our cost curve, where we sit on it.
Sometimes projects can look a lot better on spreadsheets than they do when they're actually in production and you're actually experiencing all the true costs and, you know, there's a real big inflation impact on mining operations all over the world and businesses in general and whether or not feasibility studies keep up to that, whereas we're living that. I mean, we're paying wages. We're paying for sulfuric acid. We're paying for all the inputs on a day-to-day basis. You know, our cost structure is real and we know where it stands.
Perfect. Look, I think, let's talk news flow. What key things should investors be looking out for over the next sort of maybe 6-12 months?
Yeah. Look, it's getting back into production. That announcement will come out in the short few weeks, the Dagger project, and then really delivering into the promises we make. It's all about getting to that 400,000-500,000 production guidance by the end of the year. You know, that's what a lot of people are looking at from Peninsula is to show that they're delivering their promises. We've got an integrity issue that we've suffered from over recent periods, if you like. It's important that people have confidence in this, in the story of Peninsula.
Well, absolutely, George. Thank you so much. I mean, new board, you're established operator, and you've got that exploration upside so, yeah, exciting times ahead.
Oh, absolutely. Guy's got me more excited, so enjoy the rest of the conference and look forward to speaking to you soon.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. If we haven't answered any questions for George today, please feel free to reach out via info@janemorganmanagement.com.au. All right, next up we have Alligator Energy. Alligator has built out, rather, a pretty interesting portfolio across both development and exploration assets in uranium-friendly South Australia. With the Field Recovery Trial currently underway, I actually think Guy was actually on site yesterday, so very interesting times to be around. I'm gonna hand you over to Andrea, who is gonna bring you through a little bit more of the project.
Great. Thank you, Jane. Hello, everyone. Good morning. We're Alligator Energy, a junior explorer cum developer, entering into the development space with our Samphire Uranium Project in South Australia. We'll be talking a lot about this project today. Look, our market cap is around AUD 150 million, mostly retail investors, but similar to what George mentioned in his talk, our last capital raise, which was around September last year, again started to see some institutional investors come in to the portfolio, which was pleasing for us and a signal for us around our ongoing development as a, and growth as a company. We have two main projects, the Samphire Uranium Project in South Australia. It's an in situ recovery project similar to the Peninsula Lance project.
That's about to undertake, or we're undertaking, site trials at the moment, where Guy visited that facility yesterday. We've also got a greenfields exploration play up in the Cooper Basin in the northeast of South Australia. Where we made a discovery of uranium there around August 2024. I'll talk a bit about that project later in the slide deck. As I said, we're in South Australia, which is, probably the ISR capital of, Australia at the moment, because South Australia's such a friendly jurisdiction for uranium mining. We've got five mines in operation already. Four of those are in situ recovery mines.
We're close to a regional town of Whyalla, and it's sort of a unique situation for this project, where it's not remote, so the future mining operation will be not having to pay OPEX for FIFO, and we can source a lot of our staff from the local town in Whyalla, which is only 20 kilometers away. Excellent proximity to infrastructure. We've got power and water already to the site, and also access to engineering services and the like to support the project. The Whyalla town itself is a steel town, and it's actually going through some issues around administration around the steelworks. The local government, the state government, are really supportive of Alligator developing this project. We've been working here for around three years.
We've purchased the project in 2020, where it was discovered. This uranium deposit called the Blackbush deposit was discovered around 2006 by the previous owner of the project, and developed that through around 400-500 drill holes. In that time they owned that asset and of course the uranium price took a dive around, you know, 2016. We purchased it around 2022 and started to develop this going forward. We've been drilling out there for about three years, making sure we've got the right resource to take forward to production. There is two areas of uranium mineralization primarily in this project, which is the Blackbush deposit, which I've just mentioned. That has 18 million pounds already defined under JORC. 78% of that is under, in the indicated category.
Five kilometers to the south is a prospect called the Plumbush prospect, which has previously defined uranium mineralization and we're currently working on a mineral resource estimate, which will be published shortly on that area. We will be the next uranium mine permitted in Australia, that's what we're aiming for, and we've got a good stage pathway to production now, particularly in our de-risking activities that we're undertaking. We did do a scoping study in December 2023, which showed very robust economics, and that was at $75 a pound, and I'll take you through some of those metrics in the next slide. We also started to realize that in order to get to production and targeting that 2030, 2031 timeframe, we needed to start our approvals for a field recovery trial.
We got those approvals in August last year. Concurrent with those, that approval process we were also building a modularized small plant in the background for when we received the government approval, we could get into construction straight away. That construction of the pilot plant ceased around December last year, and from January, February, we've been commissioning this plant, and I'm pleased to say that on Saturday we started to inject reagents into the formation to start releasing uranium. Currently we are seeing uranium come through the pilot plant, which is very encouraging. This step is really a key de-risking step for the project. All indications things are going according to our plans and our forecasts at the moment. We're very pleased where we're sitting in terms of this operating at the moment.
The Field Recovery Trial too is key in terms of developing our bankable feasibility study, which is also currently running in parallel to this Field Recovery Trial. Also running in parallel, we've just kicked off our mining lease application. We've got three key de-risking exercises going on at once, and we're targeting that first production in 2030-2031. We're always working with government to try to bring that forward, and the reason I think we could probably maybe improve on the 2030-2031 production is because we've already gone through this three-year approval process to get our Field Recovery Trial in place, which is really just a mini mine lease application.
We're well aware and well across the issues that we need to address in order to get a full mine in place, and we're going to try to fast-track as much as we can. At the end of the day, the critical path is always how fast governments can approve these things, but we're doing everything at our end to get this underway sooner rather than later. Between finishing the Field Recovery Trial, which is only going to go for about three or four months, we're also now focusing on extending the mineral resource inventory, and particularly the mining inventory.
Over the next year or two, we'll be focusing on that in a very bullish way and we're just working through securing additional rigs to be able to realize the potential of the pounds that are in this system that we have under exploration lease. This is the scoping study undertaken and again in December 2023. Excuse me. The study was done under $75 a pound in long-term uranium price. Like I mentioned, we're now in the 90-92 space, so the metrics would considerably improve here. The CapEx, again, escalation, we're probably looking at a CapEx around $160-$180 million to build a full-scale plant. It's still well in the economic range of developing a mine here.
Anyway, we'll update all of these metrics in our bankable feasibility study, which we're targeting the first half of next year to publish. This is the pilot plant that we've built out there. It's all modularized, light touch. There's no solid footings. We constructed this on time and on budget. The whole investment into this is around AUD 7 million in terms of the build and the CapEx and the equipment. We did want to invest significantly into this facility because it's close to Whyalla, and we're close to communities, we're close to people living nearby.
We wanted to demonstrate that ISR uranium mine in South Australia could really be a benefit to their community and it's not an eyesore with everything blending into the background there, and that we can be a meaningful contributor to the Whyalla community. We're doing this as A-one as we can in terms of also environmental management as well. As I said, we've got uranium coming into the plant now and we're looking forward to some of those key metrics coming through to start inputting into our BFS. In terms of the team and the project itself, like George has just mentioned, also having a considered ramp up is key to ISR projects and we're no different to that.
Our ramp up will include, you know, two years of ramp up similar to what George mentioned, around 200 then 400,000 pounds. The project itself will be around a 1.2 million pounds per year production profile over 12 years at the current 18 million pounds that we have available to us to mine. It's that 18 million pounds that we're going to put under a mining lease right now. We've got 12 years in the bag for our production, but as I said, we're going to work feverishly to try to get that mineral resource estimate up and the mining inventory up to extend the mine life.
We have a team that have over 65 years of in situ recovery operational experience in the company, and I've been working very hard to build that up over the last year or so. My background's in ISR over the last 20 years. I've explored, I've developed, and I've also operated an ISR mine. We understand where the pitfalls are in ISR mining. With this project, we can bring that embodied knowledge into the space and make sure we don't repeat previous lessons learned. Things like drill spacing is critical to us in terms of understanding the deposit in detail. We drill down to around 25 m spacing before we make any decision about where we put production wells or plan production wells for the BFS.
You know, we focus on the wellfield 'cause the wellfield is your money maker. We're highly focused on making sure our geological team understands that so we get the economics right going into the BFS. We're very focused on making sure that 2-3 years of first production is safe and deliverable, and the integrity of that stacks up to make sure we can deliver that into the market. We also have a good pipeline for resource growth, which I'll talk to in a sec, but we'll make sure that our approvals for the future mine can also flex to include new resource and perhaps include an uptick in the production rate. In terms of resource growth, this area here on the right, you see Blackbush there.
That's the 18 million pounds to support our current proposed operation. Plumbush to the south, and it's all hosted within a paleochannel system buried around 80 m at depth. Now, our estimate of the exploration target range here in this paleochannel system is around 15-75 million pounds, and that excludes the Blackbush resource. The upside is Plumbush MRE that we're working on right now. Most of the drilling in this paleochannel has only been focused on 30% of it, so 70% is untouched by any drill holes. You'll see in this picture to the right, there's a couple of historical holes there that intersect the paleochannel that have very good grades and are at mine grade intersections.
We're really keen to get out there and start looking at particularly the strike extension of Blackbush. We're negotiating access with the land holder that has that region ownership. We're just closing out that access agreement. We'll be drilling across the fence there in the months to come. Plumbush also, the mineral resource estimate that we're going to convert from unclassified to an inferred category of JORC. Again, we've got the wider paleochannel system that has a great potential for further discoveries. Just summarizing on the activities, we're right into our Field Recovery Trial operations as we speak. The news flow from that will start coming out next week and beyond as we get results through the plant. Our BFS is underway.
We've selected the contractor that's helping us with that study and they're underway constructing the models for that as we speak. We're also, I think, into the mining lease approvals and engaging the state and federal government on that aspect. I just want to touch on the Big Lake project that I mentioned earlier. It's in a basin called the Lake Eyre Basin, which overlies the Cooper Basin, again, in South Australia. We pegged this ground because it's geologically analogous to some of the larger ISR fields in, say, Kazakhstan associated with an oil and gas basin in Wyoming, Texas. There was no mineral exploration in this area because it's pegged by the oil and gas players. It's the first time mineral exploration has actually been undertaken in this area.
We've spent around two years targeting using all of the historical hydrocarbon wells and all the information that we could pull together, including a lot of seismic information. We targeted our first lot of drilling in this area called Site 10. We were very pleased to see that we discovered good thicknesses of sand, which is what you want for ISR, and also anomalous uranium, very anomalous uranium. That's all, you know, within 108 m of the surface. It's perfect situation for ISR, and we're hoping to get out there later this month. Sorry, it's gonna be around mid-April now, because we've had rain here that's been precluding us from getting out there.
We're targeting mid to late April to have another rig and understand the breadth of this discovery. You know, we hope that it'll unlock another province in South Australia for uranium mineralization. We've got a large land holding there, and there's more than enough work to do out there. We're going to start scratching away out there in late April, mid-April. Just recapping, South Australia is really the key jurisdiction for ISR at the moment in terms of legislation allowing exploration and mining, and also a proven government that has approved in situ recovery mines four times over. We've got the expert team to really take this project forward. We've got all the key skillsets in place now to develop this into a mining operation.
We've also got a great exploration upside and very near-term potential to realize an increase in our mining inventory. I'm really looking forward to delivering that. That'll be delivered over multiple news releases over the coming months and year, particularly with the results from the Field Recovery Trial and our BFS being released. Watch this space for our up-and-coming exploration results and field recovery trial results. Thank you very much for having me today, Jane. Thanks.
No, not a problem. Andrea, great presentation. I'll get you to stop sharing your screen now, and we can jump into some questions. Again, webinar attendees, I encourage you to use the Q&A function, which can be found at the bottom of your screen. Let me firstly jump in. You know, your Heathgate Resources experience, I think you're being very modest here. Was it over a couple of decades or a decade perhaps? I think it was quite, you know, quite substantial, and it's one of Australia's longest-running uranium ISR projects. I want to ask you, how important was that experience there? And what are you sort of bringing? And I know you touched on this in your presentation, but just to reiterate, what experiences and takeaways are you taking from that particular experience in your life?
I think I've spent around 20 years at Heathgate on and off. My last stint was 15 years with the organization and, you know, it's a private organization, so not many people understand or there's no news releases that come out of there.
Mm.
My experience, I was the first exploration geologist for the team. The team was 20 people at that point, given a drill rig to go out and find uranium in the Frome Basin in South Australia. At that point, that was, you know, a very good experience to have and coming from a gold background, and transferring skills. As I moved through the organization, and particularly after discovering Four Mile, which was a game changer for the company, I chose to move into other aspects of an operation such as permitting Four Mile into production, which I did. After it was in production, I moved to operating the mine just to get that operational experience.
I've got the sort of full cycle of experience from exploration to operation here, and I saw the Sandfire project as a good time to apply that knowledge to this project because it was just a, you know, we'd just bought the asset and it was a project that people probably didn't notice much before and I could see its potential. We got to work and here we are today. I think it's a testament to the team and also that embodied knowledge that is bringing forth. A lot of people that used to work for me now work for me here. We've worked together before, we know each other's skill set and, you know, apply that not only to the Field Recovery Trial but also to the building of this future mine that we've got before us.
Oh, absolutely. You're very humble, actually. You should be very proud of what you've achieved. Alligator's very lucky to have you. You touched on this again in your presentation, what do you think really differentiates Alligator in this space at the moment?
Look, I think it's really, I keep saying the team and, you know, I know people often say, "We've got the team, we've got the team," but, I really do believe we've got the team, and that's going to deliver the results going forward. Everyone knows what they're doing. You know, we've got the smartest minds in terms of, you know, I think in Australia, putting their minds to how to discover the next pound. And, you know, we apply integrity to that, and every pound that we release is a real pound. So, you know, that's always been my mantra. So it's that integrity piece, being integrous and making sure that what we say we do, we deliver on, as much as we can in our capacity to control it. So, yeah.
Oh, absolutely. I think you did speak about this a bit, you know, being permitted, good environmentals, mining leases and everything underway. You've got that exploration upside as well, which is phenomenal. Well done. We have run so much over time, but I just want to ask you, okay, got MRE coming up. What else should investors be looking forward to from a news flow perspective in the next six to 12 months?
The game changer really is this Field Recovery Trial.
Mm
You know, it's a major rerating for us, plus increasing our mineral resource estimate on our pounds in even our inferred categories. It's getting us up to the 30 million-pound target, which is a robust project. 80 million pounds is already a robust project, but we do want to really push, and that's the reason why we're engaging extra rigs now to realize that. We really want to get that achieved by the end of the year. There'll be a lot of news flow with the progress of that work.
Oh, very much. We're looking forward to it, and hopefully the rain stays away for you so you can keep getting to work.
Right
Andrea, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it. If we have missed any questions, please feel free to reach out again via info@janemorganmanagement.com.au. Andrea, thanks again. Finally, we have DevEx Resources. The company hosts a very large land package in both Northern Canada and Northern Australia. For investors that are looking at the exploration end of the new nuclear thematic, DevEx offers province-scale leverage with near-term news flow. I'm going to introduce you to Managing Director Marnie Finlayson. Good afternoon, Marnie.
Thank you, Jane. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. Our land holding is just in Australia, not in Canada, but
Oh, sorry.
I'll talk about that shortly. All right, I'm just gonna share my screen. Just confirming that that's working.
Not yet.
Okay. I was sharing the wrong one. Okay. There we go.
There you go. Off you go.
There we go. Excellent. All right. Well, thank you for that and thank you for the kind introduction. As Jane said, my name is Marnie Finlayson. I am the Managing Director of DevEx. I've been in this role for nearly three months, or nearly four months now, after 17 years working with Rio Tinto across operational maintenance, project development, stakeholder engagements, and strategy roles. I joined DevEx for three main reasons. Number one, I really believe in supplying commodities into future markets, and really saw the demand of uranium building, and it was fantastic to hear that introduction from Guy today. I really believe in uranium and a proper uranium bull. The second part of it was to be a part of the Tim Goyder strategy with a really strong track record of building businesses.
If you see most recently, with MI6, the growth of that gold business just over the last 12 months from starting at a AUD 30 million market cap and now sort of well over AUD 1 billion market cap. Finally, I'm gonna talk a lot about this today, the prospectivity of our land holding in the Northern Territory, which I believe is the most prospective exploration ground globally. I'll talk to that as well. The opportunity to sort of really build a business from that platform that will feed into this, the supply gap that Guy covered earlier. I'll let you read that at your leisure. DevEx, who are we? We've been on the ASX for a while, building capability, and also investor backing.
We are positioned for growth and when I started in DevEx, we do have assets outside of uranium, but we have really focused and refocused our strategy on being laser-focused on uranium. It was an interesting conversation with our chair, but he's absolutely on board with this being a uranium vehicle. That is how we're gonna grow. How are we gonna grow? We are here to build our position with pounds in the ground. We're gonna do that through the drill bit, but also through transactions. We are, and I'll cover this in our strategy, but really looking for more advanced assets that we can bring my experience and skill set of developing projects and running operations to bear.
A key differentiator of DevEx, and that I really believe in this day and age and going forward, is being a trusted partner, and that being so important as a foundational piece in order to be able to permit and develop projects in this space. This is our corporate overview. After a recent capital raise and after the acquisitions close, we'll have about AUD 30 million in the bank. We're well-backed. We have a kind of large position in Lachlan Star, which is a gold explorer, which has had a 50% uplift just in the last month, so we're very happy about that investment. Tim, who is our chairman, is also our largest shareholder. He always follows his money and maintains his position in DevEx.
Recently, Matt Yates joined our board, and he's got quite a lot of experience in uranium, the market, and also business development. Why would you invest in DevEx? The first is around the uranium opportunity, and I do not want to reset what Guy talked about in the introduction. One of the things I did wanna note, this is a similar chart to the World Nuclear Association chart that Guy showed, but this is the most recent one, which actually shows a drop-off of supply post-2035. To me, that's really symptomatic of what we're seeing in the world. Firstly, projects aren't being developed, so pounds are sitting in the ground, and for various different reasons, projects aren't progressing. Capital flows and incentivization to actually start to commit to building.
The other part of this is actually permitting and approvals and the time that it takes to bring projects through the project cycle. I really believe that there is a growing need, and that supply, that structural supply deficit that we see post 2030 is actually growing. For me, thinking about DevEx, that is the investment thesis for this company. We are here to explore, find, and develop and be delivering into that large deficit that we see building post 2030. I have included our values here. The reason I have is these are integral to the team, and they are what I see and hear every day, not just from the team ourselves, but also with our partners, around integrity, energy, which is what I bring, and a really strong and deep respect for our partners.
I'll touch on it shortly, but we've just spent the last three days in the Northern Territory with the government and with our traditional owners, and what's really resonated with me during that time is absolutely around integrity and respect. Our strategy is to be the new force in uranium. We have an ambition to be a 10-million-pound uranium producer. People say, "Why 10?" For me, that's three assets, so a multiple asset producer. We're gonna do this through three pillars. The first one is exploring and using that very prospective ground that we have in the Northern Territory to find the next Jabiluka through growing a pipeline of more advanced assets.
That's through inorganic growth activities and finally, as I've talked about before, to be a partner of choice and be someone that government, communities, TOs and other industry peers want to work with in order to develop and play into this market. We have a dynamic and energetic management team, and we have very strong capital market support to deliver on this strategy. To talk about our exploration, this is in the McArthur Basin in Australia, and the thing that excites me about this space is the analogy between what we have in the McArthur and the Athabasca. These are the two regions in the world where the unconformity style uranium deposits exist. I've done some research in the Athabasca. This is actually to scale.
In the Athabasca, within that southern end of the Athabasca Basin, there is actually about 40-50 companies that are exploring, developing or operating. A very busy part of the region. A lot of exploration expenditure has gone into the ground here to find the extensive deposits that exist and more to come. The pivot to the McArthur Basin, I call it our Australia's Athabasca, because this is to scale, and it really shows the large landholding that DevEx now have following the acquisitions, particularly in the Alligator Rivers, which is the northern part of our basin, and also a region where it's a lot cheaper to explore. In the Athabasca, it costs about $1,000 a meter to drill.
In our region, it's about a quarter of that, and it's a region that is relatively unexplored. There's been the ups and downs of the cycles and also public and government sentiment about uranium exploration that has led to this region being quiet compared to the Athabasca and a region that really deserves some exploration dollars to find the next big deposit. The unconformity style deposit. You see the Athabasca here. The one that always jumps out to me is NexGen's Arrow, which has recently been permitted, so large unconformity style deposit. You look at the McArthur. There's about 750 million pounds of U3O8 endowment in this region. Some of it has been mined, so Ranger and Nabarlek have both been mined.
These were easier to find because they were open. There was no sandstone cover over the top, so quite easy to find using geological techniques. Jabiluka and Angularli, however, sit below the cover and are more difficult to find. What our team is working on is how do you vector in on the conditions on which these deposits exist? Looking at, you know, right region, right structure and now what are the host rocks for these amazing deposits and where else do they exist in the basin? The other thing I wanted to touch on here is just about the Northern Territory.
This is a land holding here, but as I mentioned before, we spent three days earlier this week in the Northern Territory meeting with government, and the first thing that we heard was absolutely strong support for uranium and uranium mining. You may have picked up recently in releases that Northern Territory have added uranium to their critical minerals list. We definitely heard that sentiment in the meetings that we held. What it always comes down to in the Northern Territory is your relationships with the landowners. My third week in the job, I went up and spent time with the traditional owners in the region and was really impressed with the work that Brendan Bradley, our technical director, and the on-the-ground team have done with developing relationships that are strong and enduring with our traditional owners.
I had lunch with one of our fabulous ladies on Monday. It was her 72nd birthday. She actually lived in the caves around Nabarlek, which is our lease, our mining lease in the middle of this land holding. She grew up on country, and the absolute biggest wish for this group of traditional owners is to be back on country. They have very fond memories of living in an outpost right next to Nabarlek and working at Nabarlek. That connection to land, but also the opportunity that having an operating uranium mine in their region provides to their families in terms of jobs and being back on country is really strong and a linkage that is really important for us. This is the land holding.
The blue areas here are the DevEx leases that we've had for some time. The cream and the yellow are part of a deal that we did with the Alligator Energy team at Andrea to sort of build a more consolidated land holding in the region. Then the pink area are reopen applications that we also picked up at the same time. The fantastic thing about these acquisitions is we really pieced together a jigsaw puzzle and allow the team to follow the vectoring in that I talked about before around structures and rocks, and do that without constraints of tenure boundaries. In there also to Guy's point earlier, he has been up in this region. I actually think there's an area there that we may have named after him.
Once these acquisitions are complete, this is what the land holding looks like. We're pretty excited about this. In the middle, as I said, is the former Nabarlek mining lease. At that mining lease, there's a 1.6-km all-weather strip, which is fantastic in terms of access in and out of the site, both during the wet season and the dry season. It is very wet up there at the moment. Cyclone Norelle has just been over the top. We've had quite a lot of rain prior to that, so it is a big wet. We are unable to drill during those seasons. We're looking to starting once it dries out enough for us to get rigs in there.
At this point in time, that's probably late May, June, given the amount of weather that's been up there. I want to zoom in on one of the targets we've got for this upcoming drill season. This is the Nabarlek mine lease area. The team have done a lot of near and in-lease exploration previously, and the gray dots show those lease. There are uranium occurrences around this, but nothing that has formed a deposit or a resource. As we follow the Nabarlek fault line down, we have discovered that the right rocks, part of the vectoring in, actually dip away to the south. If you follow this the Nabarlek fault down, you come into an area here called Big Radon. Now, this area has never been drilled.
We've spent the last two years undertaking geological, sorry, ethnographic, ecological surveys here to make sure that we're comfortable and the regulator are also comfortable that we're not going to do any damage into the area. We now have the access to go in there and the approval to drill. It's also subject to Northern Territory Government support for that drill program as well. Why do we like this area that's never been drilled? It's actually using another data set that came from Queensland Mines. It's 25,000 radon cups put in this region. You can see the dots here. The radon cup has got a film on it that picks up the radon gas.
As uranium moves through in its relative half-lives to lead, it expels radon gas. The etching of these cups actually picks up how much radon gas is coming up through the structures. What we have here is a 3-km length of really strong radon anomalies, which we're really interested in understanding what's below that. Whether it's a primary or a secondary occurrence, we will understand after we start drilling it. Because of land access requirements, no one's ever been into this. That will be one of our primary targets for this year. The great thing about the acquisitions that we've just done, if you go further down the Nabarlek Fault, if we find that secondary and actually the primary source of that in the ore body is to the south.
This is a Rio Tinto application, and if you follow that fault line down further, you go into the former Alligator Energy lease areas. That is the reason we did this acquisition was to be able to follow those fault lines across and not be constrained by tenure boundaries. Now, if I zoom out, at the southern end of the basin, the McArthur Basin, down, and then zoom back into the Northern Territory Queensland border is another. This is more brownfield greenfields exploration for us. On the Queensland side of the border, Laramide had their Westmoreland deposit, which is a fantastic deposit. On the Northern Territory side, we have a significant lease area that we have picked up through earn-ins.
We recently announced, it was late last week, some targets here, and they're on the back of. We've mapped out, using radiometric and magnetic surveys, the geology and the structures. They had been defined. What we then did is we took 890 soil geochem samples from across 20 anomalies across that area. We also, with Laramide's permission, took some samples on the top of Junnagunna, which is one of their ore bodies within Westmoreland. Those signatures and the pathfinder geochem has matched up to areas where the structures and the rocks exist, on our side. The areas of B, H, and I, you can see the structures and the rocks coming through there are target areas for this upcoming campaign as well.
This is quite shallow. It'll probably be air core drilling, and something that we're really interested to go down and see what might exist on the Northern Territory side there. That's our exploration program. I then did also talk about the fact we are looking for more advanced assets. We firmly believe we have the most prospective exploration ground. We really are looking for where pounds in the ground are sitting there, maybe in others' portfolios where they have other priorities in terms of projects or ones where we could bring a different skill set and experience and capital backing to be able to start to drive development of these projects and get them into production into that supply deficit period that we see post-2030. Finally about being a partner of choice.
I've talked about that a number of times, but it's absolutely critical for development of any mining projects, whether they be uranium or anything else in this day and age, is having strong and enduring relationships with all your stakeholders prior to asking for something. That was absolutely my experience in Rio Tinto and something that I'm really pleased to say, particularly in the Northern Territory. We've got a strong foundation with our traditional owners, our community, regulators, and government. It's something that we absolutely have to maintain and continue to work on so that when we want to develop something, that we have those firm relationships in place and we have their support to develop. What would you expect to see from DevEx coming up? We are pulling together a three-year exploration strategy.
That will have the detailed build drill program for the upcoming 2026 season. One of those targets will be Big Radon, but there's a variety of others. From 2027 and 2028, what does our funnel of regions and targets look like that are driven by more data analysis, land access? Thanks to Andrew and the team, as part of the acquisition, we got a terabyte drive of data that we're really hoping to feed in to take a regional view of this big land holding we have now to say what else might be sitting out there using data science to understand further targets.
That'll come out at the end of April, and then we'll be releasing monthly exploration updates based on our progress on that exploration plan, but also obviously informing the market if we find anything. The other catalyst will be around our growth, the inorganic growth part of our portfolio, which will be as things progress. Finally, why would you invest in DevEx? Well, we are a safe pair of hands. We have deep uranium and technical development experience. We are a trusted partner, and we've got strong foundations of that in the Northern Territory, and we can build them elsewhere. We're absolutely ready to grow. We've got a very fantastic Chairman who's pushing us hard on growth, and we've got a lot of energy and drive to be the new force in uranium. Thank you.
Oh, Marnie, thank you so much for that. I might get you to stop sharing your screen, and we can jump into some questions here. Again, please use the Q&A function, which can be found at the bottom of your screen. I also need to apologize to you as well. Guy Keller constantly describes your assets as the Northern Territory Athabasca Basin, which you also have as well, and the equivalent of that. I guess for those who don't actually know the Athabasca Basin in Canada, it is the world's premier high-grade uranium district, which produces 20%, I think it is, from last look of global supply. Congratulations, and I apologize again.
No worry.
If you
I'm trying to work out how to stop sharing. Sorry.
Oh, okay. You just, um, just... There should be a red button that pops up.
Okay. I'm trying to work that out, so apologies for the touch of
No, that's okay.
I'm trying to work my way through.
... wiggle your screen a little bit. It should come up with something that says, like a red Stop Share
Not working. Sorry.
It's okay.
Sorry about that.
Ollie, can we do it from the back end? We might just give it a down where the bottom where it does say share screen.
Yeah
there should be something that pops up that says stop sharing maybe.
Here we go. All right, now it's come up now. Perfect. Done.
Different screens.
Sorry. Different screens.
No, I completely understand. You mentioned in the presentation as well that there's an area in the Northern Territory that's named after Guy.
Yeah.
I'm not sure whether he's on the call. I would love to know.
It's called Guy's Bog Hole.
Oh, is it?
We'll just leave it at that.
Okay. Guy Keller, you're still here as well. Feel free to jump in if you'd like and just.
He gets a right of reply.
Tell us, Bill.
I can't wait to see that in corporate presentations, you know, when DevEx has to say, "We're mining Guy's Bog Hole.
Yeah. Correct.
Very prospective area.
Absolutely
I was holding the scintillometer when it was going nuts.
Well, Guy, actually, while we've got you here, did you wanna maybe just give us a little bit of background on why you like DevEx?
Oh, look, I mean as I said before, I think what should be clear today from today's presentations is that we at Tribeca across our global natural resources platform, as well as what we're doing here in the nuclear and uranium space, you know, like we're looking for companies that we wanna know intimately, and that's the people, the culture, the boards, the projects. You know, we wanna get out there and get boots on the ground and pardon the pun, boots on the ground. You know, get out and actually eyeball these projects and work with them and talk strategy as to, you know, what should be the direction, what we think the direction should be, what we're hearing from other parts of the market.
That's, you know, why these three companies were an absolute no-brainer when you were saying, you know, "Who would you like to present?" You know, we've been working closely with all three companies throughout their journey to progress. At the end of the day, I want more companies producing uranium because I want more countries, including Australia, to use nuclear power because it is a proper and long-lasting solution to the world's electricity issues. Yeah, I mean, as I said, they're doing something, they've got some fantastic land packages. Every geologist you speak to that's had a sniff of uranium gets very excited talking about, you know, the McArthur Basin up there as the Athabasca Basin of Australia.
DevEx have done an extraordinary job in securing a land package. I've always been a big advocate that somebody needs to be a consolidator up there, you know, with the relationships with the community and the backing of the government and that seems to be happening.
Yeah. I mean, absolutely, and I think Marnie you touched on that in your presentation. Obviously, those strong relationships are instrumental in being able to sort of get in the ground and actually and do the job, right? I think, and I'm gonna go to you for this question, so many interesting targets you've got across the land holding. What kind of market conditions do you need to see to sort of turbocharge that exploration program?
It's interesting you should ask that because I, you know, I'm a very impatient person.
Yeah.
I would love to. We have the funding now to supercharge it now, but we have to manage. It's a really delicate part of the world. The relationships with our TOs, we can't push too hard. We want to follow process, and we wanna continue to build our trust. We have access to the areas that we believe we will drill this year and really high priority targets. We'll work with the regulators and our TOs to make sure that we're making a respectful process and following all the requirements, but also our own personal requirements of how we want to be as a partner to get access to the future one. It's actually the constraint is not money.
It's actually making sure we follow the right steps, and we maintain relationships along the way. To that point, there's actually something with the TOs around the area we're in now. There's about 32 of them in the group, and 16 of them work for us in some capacity. We've actually got them already as employees on our program, which means they know what we're doing. The transparency around that is really quite unique.
Sorry, I'm just gonna push. Guy, did you have a question there? I wasn't sure. Are you okay? I'm gonna just push into that a little bit further actually, 'cause there was a few questions that did come through on, you know, the communications with the Northern Territory Government.
Mm-hmm
which obviously went very well.
Yeah.
You've just touched on this, you talk about it in your presentation, but just to reiterate, how positive is that for DEV?
It's really positive, and it's a real differentiator, which is why we've put it in our strategy and it's sort of drawn up and is a core pillar. The first thing I got asked by everyone when I started this job, "Can you actually mine in the Northern Territory?" That, you know, so the answer is yes, and we heard that categorically from the government this week, that we're absolutely supportive of uranium mining and the benefits it brings. The work that we want to do collectively is to continue to get the narrative out there, 'cause the issues that happen when you permit don't necessarily happen around the community and where you're working. It happens for people that are far away, so let's say Darwin.
The work that we're really focused on now is actually building those credible and respectful relationships in Darwin, because they're also required in order to support. We already knew and I'd heard about the strength of the relationship, but seeing it in action, and seeing at all levels, from the highest politicians through to the geoscience and the environmental department teams who are, well, the regulators, was really strong. They're really keen for success here. They know the economic benefits that it brings to the Northern Territory. They want more operating mines, they want local employment, and they see what we bring. It was a really positive, you know, we absolutely know there's uranium endowment there.
Whether we find the next Jabiluka this drill season or next season, or the season after, it actually gives me even more confidence to push forward knowing that we've got more holistic support for success, should we find something and to develop.
Oh, 100%. I mean, Guy's term, the Northern Athabasca-
Yeah
Northern Territory, rather, is Athabasca Basin. Yeah.
The government loved that, too. We showed them that slide, and they were saying. You know, and I firmly believe this, I don't just say it to that stakeholder. It's like I firmly believe we have the most prospective exploration ground in the world. So that is. You know, we're 100% focused on that. In terms of further growth, we don't need more exploration ground. We actually would like more advanced assets, but the exploration is 100% focused in the Northern Territory.
Let's actually just dive into that then. Like, let's talk about the scale of the opportunity that you do have.
Yes
... in the Northern Territory across that uranium portfolio. I mean, what could that, you know, sort of-
It could be-
Yeah.
I would love another Nabarlek. That was an amazing mine. That was mined in three months, and then processed over eight years at 3 million pounds per annum. That's an amazing mine. If you think about my 10-million-pound aspiration, you know, 3 Nabarlek's would be fantastic. Or it could be a Jabiluka, that would be fantastic. We know that they exist, we know that scale exists, we know that grade exists. The other things I like about those is the simplicity of the metallurgy. I'm a process engineer background. I know that building designing and doing all the technology development for complicated flow sheets, then building them and the ramp up takes time. That adds a lot of time to your development profile.
Mm-hmm.
Simplicity of metallurgy for me is absolutely key to be able to get into that supply deficit region.
Do you want to talk about that, actually? I mean, we're running sort of out of time. We've definitely run over. Can you talk about the MET process and what you sort of think is gonna be, you know, applicable to these projects up there?
It's standard flowsheets. They're very standard leach and ion extraction processes. A standard process means that you can design and build a plant relatively easier versus trying to build something where there's different elements or deleterious elements that you either have to pull out or to produce a co-product. That is where process design timeframes and, even more importantly, ramp-up timeframes extend. You only have to look at rare earths plant. You know, the penalty curves on those are four years just to get to 60% of capacity. That's a long time. Really sort of trying to compress both the development and the ramp-up profile, so you're delivering pounds into that supply deficit.
Mm, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, very interesting. Lots of newsflow to come for you. I think, just to reiterate to our attendees on the line and who's watching afterwards, key catalysts, let's go.
Thank you.
What key catalysts have you got coming-
Oh
that we should be looking for?
As I said, by the end of April, keep a lookout for our exploration strategy. That'll be the detailed plan for 2026 drill program, but also our plans and our pipeline coming into 2027 and 2028. We're well-funded to support that program. We've got AUD 30 million in the bank. Definitely have a look at and keep an eye out for the drill results once we start drilling.
Amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. It's nice to hear some Aussie grain-grown success stories. Yeah, looking forward to all the newsflow.
Thank you.
All right. That brings us to the end of today's JMM and Tribeca Nuclear Energy Forum for 2026. I want to thank everyone for joining us today and to all of our speakers. Again, Mr. Guy Keller, I think you're still here, from Tribeca Investment Partners.
Still here. Yep.
Still here. Let me put you onto gallery so you can have a little chat with everyone if you need to. If anyone does have any other further questions for Guy, please feel free to reach out again at info@janemorganmanagement.com.au. Guy, do you want to have any closing words?
Yeah. Look, I think, yeah, Jane, I think we've highlighted the fact that this is a real investment thesis, that it's not something that's gonna go away. The bull case scenario, the drivers remain multi-year, multi-decade commitments. You know, the capacity, once it's built, once the life is extended, you know, again, is a multi-decade source of demand for uranium. It runs through economic cycles. You don't necessarily see electricity provision change through economic cycles, especially baseload power like uranium. Sorry, nuclear power. I think as well, you know, while I continue to sit here and say we've got a deficit and there's a lot of work that needs to be done, hopefully you've agreed with me that there's three companies here that have got some really good forward momentum that we here know very well. That's my..
You know, my job is to get into the weeds of this sector and to really understand where the opportunity is, and really try to find that out-performance and those companies that are gonna beat just the beta that you may see in an ETF and be long-term stories in which we can, you know, hitch our name to and commit sums of capital as these companies need them and, you know, return a very good and outsized performance to those investors that invest their money with us. We are open for investments if anybody wants to throw some money our way.
As I said, I think these global uncertainty and geopolitics around what's happening in the Middle East are providing an opportunity to get in at a level that we weren't expecting in January, February. I don't expect it to be long-lasting for this sector because the demand for uranium is only going higher because the demand for nuclear electricity is increasing at a rapid rate of knots.
Absolutely. Nuclear is firmly part of that conversation. Yes. Thank you for your insights today, Guy, and thank you all for joining us. Again, reach out if you've got any questions or if you're interested in investing in Guy's fund as well. Thanks so much for joining.
The Tribeca Global Natural Resources Fund. I mean, we do hold about 25% of the uranium exposure in that fund as well and that obviously gives the exposure to critical minerals, base metals, oil and gas, coal, bad word. But you know, the whole resource spectrum as well. We do have that ability. If you don't want just uranium and nuclear, we also have that fund too.
Yeah, absolutely. Again, thanks everyone for joining us. Reach out if you've got further questions or are interested in either of the funds or any of the Tribeca funds, in fact. Thanks again for your time, Guy. I'll see you again probably next year.
Oh, we should do another one later this year for sure.
Okay. Done.
Thanks, Jane. Thanks everybody for joining in.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.