Dollar Australian market cap as we walk through the value. We have just recently, at the start of this month, announced the sale of our remaining share of Simberi. We announced earlier this year when we closed the first tranche of the sale. We sold that for AUD 389 million, and that put us in a position to be fully funded to move the project forward. Since then, Lingbao, our partner, came forward with another proposal to acquire the asset outright.
We will receive another AUD 453 million in cash, plus a 2.75% royalty on gold and silver produced from the future of the project. If you do an NPV on that at around AUD 4,000, that is about another AUD 200 million of value. As much as we love this asset, Lingbao loves the asset a lot as well. It allows us to simplify our business and focus on the Nova Scotia development assets.
It certainly puts us in a strong position where we are more than fully funded for our future aspirations. So well-funded that we have actually indicated to the market that when we close this deal, we will add another AUD 0.13 per share, fully franked dividend, on top of the AUD 0.05 per share, fully franked cents, fully franked within 12-month period as a project developer, which makes us a little unique. We have still got a strong leadership team running this from Perth. I will not go through everybody. We are not building a team at this stage. We have got the full support across finance, the technical oversight, and the exploration support. I will come back to our Nova Scotia team later. Coming back to that cash position.
I mentioned at the open, AUD 427 million in cash at the end of August, AUD 453 million of cash from the Lingbao transaction for the sale of our remaining half. We are looking at pro forma AUD 880 million and thereabouts, plus the monetization potential value of our royalty. That is more than we are going to need for the Nova Scotia project. As I said, we are looking to reward the shareholders with these dividends. That will make up about AUD 220 million of that AUD 880 we will be returning in fully franked dividends. We have also indicated that given that our pro forma cash position is pretty close to our market capitalization, once we are clear of having announced the updated PFS and update our quarterly for September, we will be in a position to start that buyback program. That leaves us with Nova Scotia.
We are really excited by Nova Scotia and the simplified story we have got. For those not familiar, it comprises the Touquoy restart. We had to shut the Touquoy operation back in 2023. Permitting situation in Nova Scotia has been transformed with the restructure of the regulator and something that took us two and a half years of trying back in 2011, sorry, 2021 to 2023. This year, we have been able to get that approval to restart operations at Touquoy in around about two months. We kept the plant on fairly good care and maintenance, but now we are in a position to refurbish that quickly, and we will be up and running by the end of this calendar year.
But the bigger project and the bigger value concept is the 15-Mile mine, the Old Mitchell Mine and the Old Austen Mine, and I will cover those off as we walk through. So execution team, always important. Lots of developers do not have the execution team in place. But we closed this operation back in 2023, but kept the key people that could rebuild the project. Craig Hudson on the left, he was in charge of the construction of Touquoy back in 2018. And on the right-hand side there, Adam, he was the Plant Manager for the Touquoy operation. So they were the two that both led the construction and then the commissioning. So they are in charge now of the recommissioning and then the relocation that we will do with that Touquoy plant. Andrew Taylor was the General Manager of Operations.
We kept him on during care and maintenance and the rehab program. So he is still in place, so we have the General Manager to continue operations. Not on the screen, we kept the Superintendent of the Mining, we kept the Finance Manager. So we have a team that we could rebuild around, and so we will be up and running by the end of December with that team. So this is the project status. We got the Touquoy restart PFS completed earlier. We got the permit, so that is all up and running. On 15-Mile, just yesterday, we announced the processing hub PFS update, which I will go through. And we also have been explaining our bolstered exploration pipeline. The upcoming milestones. So Touquoy restart, as I said, that will be up and running by the end of December.
We have an opening ceremony planned in November, so that will be embarrassing for me if we are not already started throughput by then. On the 15-Mile project, any day now, we are expecting an advice from the federal government of Canada as to whether they will be requiring a parallel federal impact assessment. We are expecting, given the federal government's policy on one project, one review, that they will be leaving this to the provincial government to permit. Next step for us, we have brought forward and accelerated the processing hub feasibility study. So we are now targeting to finish that in March. And we are expecting the provincial permitting to go from January to as late as possibly June. But we will get the feasibility study done earlier just in case that permitting process runs according to their normal timelines. So on a concept at schedule chart.
Just summarizing those, environmental impact assessment will start on 15-Mile in January. We will have our feasibility study done by March, and we are looking to final investment decision in the June quarter. Obviously, we are fully funded for this project development, so we will not have any stopping and pausing for finance and debt considerations. We will be fully funded as soon as we get that environmental impact assessment.
We are then into detailed engineering. We only think construction is going to be about 12 months because we are simply relocating the Touquoy plant up to 15-Mile. So limited long lead time items or disruptions there. So all going well, by June 2029, we will be in operation at 15-Mile. In the meantime, Touquoy restart will be running for about 12 or 13 months to get through the stockpiles. I will move through. So this one is worthwhile noting in terms of just the reserve increase.
In July, we announced the resource upgrade of about 24%. We have now had the opportunity to translate that and rerun the pre-feasibility study with that new resource model. It has boosted our reserves by 17%, which has bolstered mine life out to 13 years. Importantly, it has also given us increased production in year two and three. That has grown from about 100,000 oz-105,000 oz up now to 120,000 oz-130,000 oz. We have lowered the AISC. Strip ratio has come down with this latest reserve update, so it is now across the deposits average around 2.8: 1. The fundamentals of the project are even improved from what we had before. Post-tax NPV at $300 , we are looking $1.7 billion after tax, and at AUD 4,000 an ounce, it is AUD 2.7 billion after tax.
[Grundel project], which we are now fully funded for, and with the new functional regulatory regime for permitting, we are getting more and more confident with the timeline. Presenting that pictorially, you will see the three different colors of the different ore sources. We have 15-Mile that we start with, then we bring on Old Mitchell and Old Austen Mine as satellite quarry operations feeding the central processing hub. In the interim, you see there that we are expecting to recover about 38,000 oz from our stockpiles. At about current gold price, around $4,000 , we should make around about AUD 120 million-AUD 130 million or Canadian in that interim period. Then we go into finalizing that permitting period into the construction period, where we are relocating that same processing plant from Touquoy up to our 15-Mile processing hub. I have been through, I will just quickly go through these.
In the background, we have been building up our exploration pipeline. The graphic I showed you before was just on proved and probable. We did our PFS only on proved probable, no conversion of resources, no exploration targets. We have a 13-year mine life at over 100,000 oz per annum at $1,100 j ust on proved and probable. You see here the processing hub in the center there, 15-Mile. There is a 25 km, 50 km, and 75-km concentric circles around our processing hub. We have plenty of opportunities in there. We have picked up a lot of ground in the last three years, giving us 46 exploration targets that we have got in the pipeline just within 75-km radius. It is not as easy to haul ore into a processing hub as W.A.
There is a good network of roads that support projects, but that would be perfect for a processing hub business like this, where we can bring those ounces in whenever they become available and add to our feed schedule. I am getting fairly gray-haired, so I like the 1990s exploration pipeline slides. This is converting that same map where we have got all the labels on our various projects across that 75-km radius. These are our projects, exploration, and where they are at in the pipeline. I will show you just a couple, the more advanced end, but we have got a nice stream of projects that are at different stages, and over this 12-month period, we will have five, possibly six targets drilled. As we build up the exploration team, we hope to be able to then handle an even bigger drilling campaign next spring, summer.
I have just highlighted, and we put this announcement out yesterday morning as well. Just to give one example, the Old Austen Mine, which is actually in one of the mines in our development proposal. It is the smaller one, and it is one when we were reconsidering the designs and making this permit friendly, we shrunk this pit down. But we did notice that obviously we left mineralization behind because we were limiting the scale of this open pit. If you look at some of the ore that we have had to leave behind below the ore reserve pit, 4 m at 14.7 g/t, there is some nice ore down there. But as we got through the 1980s drilling database, we can see that there is continuity of this mineralization at depth.
The deepest hole at the moment is around 300 m, but you can see there are intercepts of 5 m and a bit meters at 66 g/t, 5 m at 5.9 g/t, 7 m at 12 g/t. So there is a good consistent 5 m- 7 m zone here that extends that we will now target with additional drilling and also see what the underground potential here is to extend yet another addition to our resource inventory.
You can see on the right-hand side here that we have got, again, going through the historic drilling around Old Austen, we have got a drill campaign done in the early 2000s. It hit 6 m, 5.7 g/t. So rings a bell, that sort of 6-m zone. There was no drilling followed up in that 700-m zone there along strike. That is one, again, we want to get the drill rigs in there next spring, summer.
There are a couple of the more advanced targets. The other others range from conceptual target through. I think I have left five minutes for questions, which I think is my job. All right.
Great. Any questions from the floor? I have got one for you in the interim, Andrew. Obviously, the balance sheet looks pretty amazing at the moment.
Yeah.
You would have obviously some projects and some places to deploy that capital, which you have just spoken to. Can you maybe just outline, I guess, a bit higher level corporate strategy, where you would like to take the business over the medium to longer term, given that balance sheet position?
Thank you. Yeah. It is amazing how quickly the questions go from where are you going to get the capital from to what you are going to do with the capital. The first and foremost, we will obviously receive this money. It will probably only come through around March, April, by the time we have got through the various approvals and conditions precedent. So we have already flagged that we will be looking to do the AUD 0.13 per share dividend and the buyback. So we are looking to buy back up to 100 million shares of our 1.2 billion on issue. So that will be that current share price, that will be another AUD 80 or so million. If necessary, we will not stop there while our share price is cash backed.
But yeah, given that we have got more than enough money to get the 15-Mile initial growth capital done, we will look for further opportunities to distribute capital. But we are not interested in getting distracted. We are focused on the Nova Scotia asset and that exploration pipeline and bringing that into fruition. But yeah, once the money is in the bank, then we will look at opportunities to distribute further.
Right. So yeah, distribution more so than acquisition.
Yep. Everything's too expensive other than us.
Yep. We have a question down here.
Thank you, Andrew. Could you please comment on relations with the Mi'kmaq or any native groups?
Yeah. So, good question. One of the key things, let me find the slide. Our predecessors had an issue that came up with the First Nations relationship where their plan was different to what we've put forward. From the Old Austen Mine, the pit that we just talked about. The Old Austen Mine, they were going to be directing that ore to Touquoy Processing Plant to the south. And co-process that with the low-grade stockpiles that we're looking at now. The problem with that proposal was once you go through how significant the haul road would need to be, and it was going to be going through traditional hunting grounds. There was an unacceptable impost on that local group. I don't think our predecessors realized.
They were thinking they were going to use forestry roads for hauling the ore, but you can't do forestry roads for haulage. Our proposal, which we're bringing forward, is that the Old Austen Mine ore will go to 15-Mile, and it's going to head north, and by going north, we can use public roads. We don't have that same problem of building a haul road through traditional hunting grounds. That's the fundamental improvement. The other improvement at Old Austen was, there was some pushback in terms of the size of the open pit that our predecessors were looking at. We've shrunk that down dramatically, to make it more acceptable. Obviously, with the penalty that we'd lose some ounces at depth. That more than halved the surface disturbance and pulled back the distance from the nearby river substantially.
Those improvements now have been presented and Department of Fisheries and Oceans have had a look at that. That's giving us a lot more support and a lot more confidence that we've resolved those difficulties. The rest of the locations, we're looking for a benefits agreement anyway. There hasn't been the same pushback in the same areas on the previous designs. But that was the one where our predecessors had a glitch that we've now fixed with the project redesign. So benefits agreement. We've paused. There isn't a benefits agreement that's being put forward, and drafts have been exchanged. Obviously, as we're going through a permitting decision at the moment, we've got to hold back on those discussions just from anti-corruption rules. But as soon as we've got this decision from the federal regulator, then we'll be able to progress that benefits agreement.
But we've put forward a benefits agreement that's not tied to support for the project. So it does not a binding where if you sign the benefits agreement, then you have some money. It's a strict, one-way benefits agreement that's if the projects go ahead, that a benefit applies. And, of course, we'll be yet to go through the public review process, which starts in January.