Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm just gonna really focus mostly on what we're going to do over the next six months, particularly with the Sybella rare earth deposit, this giant discovery that we've made in Queensland. Really just show you where the opportunities and the buying of... what might make our share price move in the next little while. So we'll get into it. As you... You're probably aware of Red Metal. We've been around a while, 23 years we've been listed. We only got 383 million shares on issue, with no consolidations or any changes.
AUD 57 million market cap, AUD 4.9 million in cash, but more importantly, we've got about AUD 44 million in investment in our Maronan Metals spinoff, which is a project we'll just touch on briefly. So you're really getting a lot of what I'm about to show you here for free. So where's the news flow gonna come out of in the next six months? The rare earth discovery at Sybella, which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail shortly. We're doing the definitive column leach tests. They're in progress at the moment. We should have those results by about towards the end of April.
These are, really are the acid tests that'll really make everyone start to sit up and take notice of this project, 'cause it- for us, it's, it's the definitive tests. As I said before, we've got 88.5 million shares in Maronan, and that's about 35% of the in the company. It was a spinoff we did in 2022. Andrew and Dean are in Booth 18. They're doing a... They're the guys with tons of mining experience, who are pulling this project through to development. They're very im- The MDL application is imminent on that project. It's...
They've done an economic assessment last year, this year, and they're about to get the Mining Development License, and that'll enable the project to fast-track towards a mining lease, get down to the ore body very easily, and then start bringing those reserves from resources to reserves, and allow it to get to a mining lease very quickly. If you compare it to its peers, a lot of its peers are trading around the AUD 400 million market cap, the silver companies. It's about AUD 120 million, so there's still some plenty of upside, and it's probably one of the few silver projects in amongst its peers that actually can turn into a mine very quickly. So go have a closer look at those guys.
We love it, and, we've got 88 million shares in, in, in them, and I do have a conflict of interest there. But that said, we've also got, we've made a recently, in last, just the last quarter of the last year, we made a discovery of a, a very unusual, intriguing, unconformity gold, anomaly, just along strike from Hemi. It's about three kilometers long. I'd say come and have a look at it in the booth. It's probably not something I'm gonna talk about too much here. I, I don't think I'll have the time, but it's, it's for the pure explorers out there. That's the kind of stuff that's in our DNA and that we love.
We have multiple drill-ready, big copper plays, and coming into a copper boom, we've got plenty of exposure to that commodity, as we've always have. That's where, where we really... That is where we do it. That's our bread and butter. We operate in Olympic Dam Terrane, Mount Isa, Paterson, Coober Pedy. These are the big copper provinces, and we plan to drill a really significant, big, gravity mag feature just south of Carrapateena in, probably in the first half of this year, we'll be getting on to drill that. So, like I said, I think you're getting a lot of this stuff for free, 'cause we've got AUD 44 million worth of Maronan Metals stock backing us up. But let's talk about rare earths. The rare earth demand's exponential.
The supply is constrained both geopolitically and also from the number of non-Chinese mines out there. I think you're all aware of what's driving it. AI and quantum computing are driving drone and, and robotics technology, and EVs are, are part of the mix, and it's really starting to show through in the price for rare earths, which has really gone up more recently. Like I said, it's not. I think it's a commodity that's one for the future, with supply constrained, a bit like copper. So if you're really investing in the future, you really want to invest in copper and probably rare earths. If you want to know anything about rare earths, you've really got to understand the mineralogy. If you want to separate these projects, you have to understand what ore mineral you're talking about.
There's probably three different types emerging now. There's these complex high-temperature ones, which are based on monazite and apatite. They create a mineral concentrate. They heat it to 800 degrees celsius to crack the mineral, and then they have a lot of, they have to purify that liquor from thorium, which is a highly radiogenic element. These are found in carbonatites and heavy mineral sands deposits like Iluka and Lynas. They are really high-cost, high CapEx projects. They have a lot of waste, radiogenic waste to manage, but they also probably have a high replacement capital, 'cause they're dealing around with high temperatures. There's a simple ambient temperature leachable systems. They've come out of the recent, price hike in rare earths. There's the clay-hosted ionic ones, which Meteoric's a good example of that in Brazil.
And then there's this, this new deposit type that we've discovered, these granite-hosted one. Here, the ore mineral is a soluble bastnäsite, a fluorocarbonate mineral. The clay-hosted deposits, they have a soft ore. They put it in a vat or a tank, they swirl it around, leach it with ammonium sulfate, and, then they use a filter press to separate the pregnant liquor from the clay. These are sort of low to moderate CapEx projects, and they sort of are probably pretty low OpEx, and they're probably the future of some of the rare earth processing. The Sybella ones, similarly, we have a soluble ore mineral in a friable, crushable granite.... We stack it into heaps, then we leach it using weak sulfuric acid.
Then we tap that rare earth liquor, that pregnant leach liquor from the base of the heap, and this is really potentially a, that's one of the lowest cost processing, lowest cost, operating cost, types of processing in the world, and we're going to do that with rare earths. They do this in the copper industry, Morenci in the US, Escondida in, in Chile, soluble copper in a non-reactive granite host, and we're doing the same thing with rare earths. So this will be potentially a bulk, bulk heap leach play. So now you know how to adjudge the rare earth projects out there. Like I said, Red Metal's got a market cap of about AUD 55 billion. We've got 44 of that's from the Maronan shares, no doubt, and we're working this project towards a PFS. Meteoric are at a PFS-level study.
They're making great progress. They're over $500 million market cap, and Lynas obviously selling rare earth oxides, they're over $15 billion. So you can see the value proposition we're trying to capture by bringing this rare earth- this new rare earth deposit, this low-temperature leachable deposit to your minds, but also to the market's minds, as we work it up in the next six months to a year. So a little bit more detail about the project. It's a world first. There really hasn't been anything pop out in the exploration space globally that's identical to it.
It's 12, it's a granite-hosted thing, just 20 km out of Mount Isa, so we have the best infrastructure you could imagine: an acid plant, a gas plant, a power station, water, a population, an airstrip, a rail to bring acid in. It's 12 km long, 3 km wide, granite intrusion. It's potentially amenable to bulk mining, heap leach, and, it, which is obviously a low-cost, low CapEx processing. Now, why do I say low cost, low CapEx, sort of processing? It's because the bulk of the rare earths occur in this soluble fluorocarbonate mineral, and that's amenable to weak acid leaching at an ambient temperature. The granite host rock is, and this is the most important point, the granite host rock doesn't consume the acid.
It's low acid-consuming, and it occurs in a fresh and weathered granite that's coarse-grained and very easy to crush, and it's very friable. So there's no crushing in it, crushing problems. The grade is evenly distributed throughout the whole granite, and there's vast tonnages that start at surface. So all these factors come together to tell us we've got a very simple bulk mining heap leach processing proposition. We've got the plenty of tons, as have a lot of projects in the rare earth space, but it's really about the mineralogy and how easy it is to get and how cheap it is to get it into solution that's important. We've often quoted...
We've got about 4.8 billion tons outlined, and that, but more importantly, it includes about a weathered resource of about 780 million tons, and that's the easy-to-mine, softer, friable stuff. It starts at surface, pretty much zero strip. We've also got, more recently, the yttrium price has gone up to probably the same price as neodymium, so we've never really rated yttrium that much, but it's now starting to add some value to our resource as well. There's two zones of higher grade zones called, we call the Carey Zone on the east and the Templeton Zone.
We're focusing a lot of our feasibility work or advanced metallurgical work on the Carey Zone on the east because it's just got a little less acid consumption, so that's where our first 30 years of probably mining will probably start. So we've done a series of bottle rolls, leach tests, and this is really just to optimize what's the best acid strength to leach this rare earth out of the rock? And that's been very useful 'cause it's, we're using that stuff for the column leaches that we're doing at the moment.
We were able to show that we could get strong rare earth extractions, 70%-80% of the neodymium, praseodymium, 40%-50% of the dysprosium, terbium, and the yttrium, using acids around the sort of 2-2.5 pH. Bearing in mind that lemon juice has a pH of 2-3, so what we're really saying here is that we can crush the rock to 20 mm size, sprinkle lemon juice over it, and capture the rare earths out of the bottom of the heap. It's a zesty idea.
We're using only about 15-25 kg per ton of sulfuric acid in the bottle rolls, and we also discovered some interesting ways to optimize that, either using upfront acid agglomeration, but also adjusting the acid strength of the life of the mine and a few other neat little tricks about removing the iron in the heap by recycling it through a second time. All that knowledge that we gained from those bottle roll chips, we've been using to inform us how to do the column leaches, which are in progress at the moment. We also took that pregnant liquor that we got from the base of these from these columns, and we did some interesting ion exchange test work recently, and that was quite a breakthrough.
We were able to separate a large proportion of the impurities of aluminum and iron from the pregnant liquor, and it delivered a strip liquor from that, which is nine times richer than we had before, with very low impurities. What we're doing here is basically running this. This is just a very basic water purification unit. We ran our pregnant liquor through that and stripped the iron and aluminum out of it. That's a significant breakthrough 'cause it really offers really huge cost advantages, but also improved our rare earth recovery. So it's a simple step, but it was quite a breakthrough 'cause no one else is doing this sort of stuff.
Currently, we drilled about nine diamond holes during the year, last year, and we've done a whole bunch of high logging and spectral logging on them to break the ore into its mineralogical types. And now we're taking those different ore types and doing individual column leaches on them. The column leaches, as I've indicated, are really the definitive acid test for this project because they best simulate what a heap leach, they simulate the heap leach setting. We've got about 11 columns of the different ore types and using 10 and 20 million, 20 and 20 mil size fractions. So that's kinda the, the rock's about the size of your thumbnail. We're getting those results.
We hope to have them by the end of 2026, and that's the point that we think will, that this project could have for a real significant re-rate as we sort of start to march towards Meteoric's market capitalization. Once we—if this is successful, we'll accelerate the infill drilling and step-out drilling on the Carey Zone, so we can get that up to indicated, so we can publish the scoping results. And we'll start all the flow sheet design and engineering on the costs and initiate some of the baseline work. All the while, working towards delivering on a scoping study or even if it possibly a PFS towards the end of this year.
It's hopeful that this, if these results are positive from this leach work, but also the, the PFS shows that we can really make a difference in terms of price, of getting this stuff out of the ground super cheap. Then the governments and some offtake partners will start to take a fairly strong interest in the, in the project. Discussions we've had with them in the, to date have really indicated they, they really want to see a little bit more of a scoping level study before they'll really start initiating conversations with offtake and stuff. So we're confident that once we get to that point, we'll start to see a lot of potential other funding other than through the market.
So if you want to get amongst the, the, the skin and fur and, and the fluff that's going on with the hype at the moment in the rare earth space, then, you know, come on board with Red Metal. We've only, like I said, we've got about a market cap of AUD 55 million. We're on our way to maybe something like Meteoric if this thing comes through, but we're backed up with about AUD 44 million in value from our stock and investments in Maronan. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff also going on in our gold space and copper-gold space, which, we're also, yeah, we'll do over the next six months, which could offer a good sugar hit. Please come and see us in Booth 41, or just come and see the Maronan guys in Booth 18 here. Thank you very much.