Thanks very much for that, Con. Good morning everyone. Welcome to this penultimate session of the Noosa Mining Conference. My name's Nick McGlew. I'm an M&A mining partner at KPMG, and I'll be chairing the session this morning. Just quickly before we get into it, I just want to say congratulations to Phil and his team on putting on what is quickly turning into one of the premier mining conferences in Australia. They've done a fantastic job, and we are very proud to continue to be a sponsor of the conference, and we look forward to many more successful years. We'll get straight into it. The focus is on mostly gold, with a little bit of copper as well in this session. The first speaker I'd like to introduce is Patrick Duffy, Managing Director of Sunstone Metals .
Good morning everybody. Thank you for being here. First up on Friday morning, I didn't expect people to be up so early after the big night of the conference last night. Sunstone Metals has two high-quality assets in Ecuador. These are large, long-life, low-cost, highly profitable mining assets that one day will be developed into huge mines, potential to be 400,000 oz per annum each. They'd be both top three gold mines in Australia if they were located here. We have a fantastic team with an exceptional track record of discovery and development. We are fortunate to be in the two key commodities, gold and copper, predominantly gold, with benefiting from copper credits. We're very much focused on value realization, adding value through resource growth, being very deliberate to be able to target opportunities to get into production earlier with smaller scale, lower CapEx mining opportunities at these projects.
Importantly, at the moment, going through a process to identify the best pathway forward to fund our projects, given the scale and given the quality, but to be able to try and avoid just going back to market, as most mining companies do, to raise equity and ultimately dilute shareholder value. I can talk about that a bit later in the presentation. We have two great projects. Bramaderos Gold-Copper Project is in southern Ecuador, close to the Peruvian border, in as ideal a location in South America as you could find. To date, we've got 2.7 million oz of resource at Bramaderos and expectation it will grow to more than 10 million oz. These are very nice at-surface porphyry systems, but also some complementary epithermal high-grade systems.
In the northern part of Ecuador, we have our El Palmar Copper-Gold Project, a huge porphyry system surrounded by these giant deposits on the Toachi Fault system, where all these big elephant projects exist. We have an initial just taster resource, 1.2 million oz, and an expectation it will grow to at least 15 million oz- 45 million oz, based on what we've identified so far, and there's certainly potential to be much larger than that. I mentioned the team, so I joined the company in April last year, previously with Red 5, and successfully developed King of the Hills in Western Australia with Red 5. It's now part of the Gold company and $3 billion company. Prior to that, it was in New Caledonia with Xstrata and Glencore building the Koniambo.
Nickel Smelter was a $10 billion development there, and prior to that in Philippines with Xstrata developing the Tampakan project. It was at Tampakan that I met Malcolm Norris many years ago. Malcolm subsequently went on to discover the Tujuh Bukit copper project in Indonesia, then became CEO of SolGold and discovered Cascabel in Ecuador, and then more recently the two discoveries with Sunstone. He and Bruce, our General Manager of Exploration, have been together over all that period and an incredible team with an incredible track record. Joining me last year was Neil O’Connor as a new NED to Sunstone. Neil was Chief Legal Counsel of Xstrata Copper for 10 years and brings a huge amount of South American expertise. Also, Lucas Bolsch, who I knew at St Barbara, was the CFO of St Barbara, joined us last year as well.
Steve Stroud is at Morgan’s executive, Ray Robinson, who may be here, based in Brisbane, but an exceptional Study Manager, and Rodrigo Izarrieta, based in Ecuador, Ecuadorian, but U.S. trained and a very reliable colleague based in country. Obviously, we are gold, copper, and we’ve been seeing exceptional growth in gold in the last few years. Full expectation that that will continue to increase, realistically $4,000 at the end of this year, but benefiting from all the volatility in the market, all the actions of Trump, and obviously terrible things that are happening in parts of the world. Copper, where it’s just harder and harder to find high-quality copper assets to be able to keep up the supply, and an expectation that that gap will continue to grow over the years ahead, and an amazing opportunity to be in copper in the next decade.
Ecuador is important to understand, so there’s two world-class mines here, both in southern Ecuador near our Bramaderos Gold-Copper Project, Fruta del Norte, is owned by Lundin Gold. That’s a, I think, $15 billion, $20 billion company now, single asset in Ecuador, arguably the best gold mine in the world, and a huge Chinese copper mine called Mirador. It’s been very successful. We had elections in April. The interim president, Daniel Noboa, was re-elected for a four-year term and potential for another four years. He’s very much pro-mining, pro-business, expecting a lot of projects to be built in the next couple of years, and obviously with our projects coming in behind those. Two weeks after the election, we had China Molybdenum acquire Lumina Gold.
Their project is very close to our project, Bramaderos, but paid $600 million for the Lumina Gold assets, which again reflects the confidence in Ecuador to be the next major copper-gold country in the world. I have a commercial background and a key attraction in addition to the geology in Ecuador is the cost base. Energy is half of what we have in Australia, benefiting from over 90% hydro. Labor is not surprisingly a quarter of what it would be here in Australia. If we took King of the Hills that we built in WA with a $2,400, $2,500 Aussie all-in sustaining cost, put that in Ecuador, it would be less than $1,000. That's the incredible cost advantage that we have. It's US dollar currency in Ecuador, so no capital controls protect it from hyperinflation that you see elsewhere in South America.
Lots of reasons to be very bullish about Ecuador right now. At the beginning, I mentioned Bramaderos here in the picture is an ideal location to develop a large-scale mine. You can see this valley where 1,000 m above sea level in the background is these huge Andean mountains, but in the base of the valley are these hills with the porphyries that are full of gold and copper. Very straightforward open pit development here. No protected areas, no indigenous communities. The Pan-American highway that runs from Chile up to Alaska runs through our concession, access to water, access to power, everything you would want for a large-scale development and a very supportive community that's sadly quite a poor community, very isolated, but looking for mining to bring prosperity to this area.
This concession map on the left, you can see these black circles are those hills on the previous slide. These are the porphyry systems. We've done most of the drilling in this Limon deposit, which is reflected in our 2.7 million oz resource. Still a huge amount of growth both at Limon and next door at Melonal. An expectation between those three deposits that will grow to over 10 million oz. A number of other porphyry systems there that we haven't yet drilled or haven't done enough drilling to be able to confidently put an Exploration Target on these, but all over time we'll grow to a huge mining center here in southern Ecuador. Complementing those porphyry systems is some epithermals, higher grade systems that we have at Bramaderos, all at surface and very much complementary to the story. In the top right is Limon.
You can see the yellow outline there, which we'll talk about, has a target of 1 million oz-1 .7 million oz that represents an opportunity to get into a near-term production opportunity, lower CapEx, but a very profitable smaller mining opportunity at Limon. These photos tell a nice story, a bit closer view of the porphyry's Bramaderos, these hills that come through over billions of years ago where the plates moved and the gold come through and eroded away, leaving these hills with gold coming up to surface. Very straightforward open pit mining opportunity, all these contiguous porphyry systems, very low strip ratios, very profitable mining opportunity. You can see only for three months of the year it rains here in southern Ecuador. For nine months of the year, it's very barren, very dry. There's a river run through that we have access to water, but very simple agriculture that exists.
The photo on the bottom is the different style of mineralization, the epithermal systems that sit above a deeper porphyry. These fingers come up, you can see in the background these heavily mineralized areas that nothing can grow, across an area of 1.7 km by 1 km , but a very nice potential starter opportunity here at Bramaderos. Just a cross section there on the right, you can see some of the drilling we have done at Limon. We had a hole that did 185 m at 3 g . Unfortunately, released to a market that was pretty flat, but if you put these results out today, I'm sure you'd almost double your share price overnight. Lots of long holes, 100 m, 200 m, 300 m averaging over a gram. Lots of shorter intervals, 10 g, 20 g that we see here at Limon. A very nice tight open pit mining opportunity.
Again, just emphasize there's an opportunity at Limon to get into production in a shorter timeframe for much lower CapEx, potentially 100,000 oz per annum, to then fund the large porphyry development that would require a 10 million ton, 20 million ton per annum processing facility, but taking the cash flow from Limon to be able to develop that bigger system. We are in discussions with a number of parties, for the bigger players, there's the opportunity to instead just go straight for that big, large porphyry development, but have the higher grade complementary epithermal system from Limon and elsewhere to be able to feed into that early year development. Moving to the north, El Palmar, you can see we're in the tropics. It's just above the equator, very beautiful area. This is agriculture, it's all been cleared.
Where we are at El Palmar, next door is a huge Codelco project that's a billion tons at 1% copper, and further away is Cascabel's project. BHP's here, Hancock's here, Newmont's here, Barrick's here. This is the land of giants, and we're very lucky to have our own very significant porphyry system. November last year, we put out a resource based on a small amount of drilling at El Palmar, but showing that we have an open pit opportunity. There's a 1.2 million oz resource initially, but we would expect that open pit to grow to sort of 6 million oz-8 million oz. In addition, below the surface opportunities, these deeper porphyry fingers that go down to depth. In areas that we have drilled, we've identified a target of somewhere between 15 million oz to 45 million oz. Could be anything, could be substantially bigger than that.
This next slide on the left, you can see a diagram that shows a different view. You can see at the top the pit shown with the contour lines, the drilling that's been focused in that open pit opportunity, going down deeper into those targets at T2 and T3. To the left, there's a further anomaly that we have with the magnetics that have been identified from surface, further mineralization that hasn't yet been drilled that could again significantly expand that 15 million oz to 45 million oz Exploration Target . Then a nice comparison with El Palmar, which is the Cascabel project owned by SolGold. The scale there, you can see what potential we have at El Palmar, but importantly at Cascabel, their high grade starts at 800 m below surface, requires a big investment in Block Cave Technology .
We're able to go straight into an open pit at El Palmar before having to invest in that deeper exploration development at El Palmar. Finally, importantly, we're well funded right now. We raised $4 million back in March. Market cap's sitting around $100 million. We have been getting a lot of extra cash coming in from options that we have in the market that are 100% in the money. I think we've had $1.6 million in addition since March, and that continues to come in. There's another $4 million worth outstanding. We're well funded for the rest of the year. We have been running a process since the start of the year around trying to find the optimal long-term funding solution for these two big projects and looking at opportunities around Joint Ventures, strategic investment at the corporate level, and broader corporate opportunities.
In March, we said that we were in more advanced discussions with two parties. We've had additional parties come in since then. Obviously, ASX's rules constrain what I can say, but in terms of the broader objectives of this program, I'm very confident we're going to get a successful outcome. There's no guarantees until we get the signatures and we can announce something, but we're in great shape. We're well funded. We're still very cheap. We're roughly $20 an ounce EV to resource, which when you look at our peers is still an expectation, should be at least $40, $50 an ounce. You look at some of those West Australian opportunities that are now approaching $100 per ounce. At $20 an ounce, we're still remarkably cheap. I think that's up. I know there's an expectation around what I might be able to say today.
Hopefully, I've given you enough guidance without saying too much. I am here this morning if you'd like to come and have an individual chat. Thank you.