Thank you, thanks for the introduction. Most people know me as Joe. Normally when I get called Jonathan I was in trouble, so I appreciate that. What's really pleasing at the outset here is that we're presenting as part of a silver session. Excuse me. For years there's not really been a silver sector in Australia. I kind of understand why. I've always sort of pitched silver as, in Australia, there's only really ever been two successful silver developments. One was Broken Hill and the other is Cannington. Everything else has been either too small or significantly financially challenged. It's very pleasing that silver is now starting to get a bit of a profile in Australia. I'll leave the disclaimers later. We're very different from the previous stories that have just been presenting, in that we're Australian-based and we're New South Wales.
As most people would be aware, New South Wales, we've had our challenges with respect to permitting. Not through anything we've done wrong. We lost the consent to a judicial review because it was deemed by the appeal judge that the New South Wales government had made an error, a very minor technical error in the report. It's taken us 2 years to get where we are now. We've now submitted all of the information to the government that's been requested. We're starting to get initial feedback on it. It sounds fairly reasonable. We believe that before the end of this year, you know, we'll be in a position where we'll be able to communicate to the market that, you know, we're back on track with respect to the permitting process.
Interestingly, you know, from the permitting, we're waiting for that development consent from the New South Wales government. After that, we need the mining license, which the application is in. That's pretty much sat with the department already. Once the consent's back, that'll be signed off. Yeah, we then need the environmental, the federal environmental piece. The good thing about New South Wales, and now Western Australia as well, is that the feds and the state governments are, they have a bipartisan agreement on environmental studies. Whatever you do in the state gets accepted by the feds. Again, we don't envisage any issues on the permitting side. I guess, importantly, whilst we've been going through this permitting road bump, it's given us the opportunity to really get the studies up to scratch. We released the DFS for this project on Tuesday.
It is a very, very compelling development opportunity. We tend not to talk about resources because we have the luxury of having reserves. We've just declared a reserve of 94, just under 94 million ounces of silver, which is substantial by anybody's metric. It supports a mine life of 26 years. We've been very conservative in everything we've done here on this study. The study has been done by Lycopodium, which a lot of Australian mining companies get a bit scared by Lycopodium because they tend to have very robust engineering designs. CAPEX is quite expensive. We're happy with that because it gives a lot of comfort to the debt funders and the off-takers. The NPV and margins are very, very strong. What's really important for us is, despite this being a polymetallic deposit, we've really optimized this project on the silver.
Life of Mine, our revenue is 91% silver, and there's some small credits from lead and zinc. Everything we've done here has been about maximizing the leverage to investors from a silver perspective. Again, the metrics are very pleasing, and our view is that these are relatively conservative. Our base case, we use AUD 45 silver. That gives us a lot of comfort. The spot numbers are even more impressive. What I would want to impress on people is that that level of conservatism goes down to the mine design, in that we use AUD 35 an ounce for the Whittle shells in our mine design. I guarantee you, when you're out there looking for debt funding, whatever price you've used, the debt funders will ask you to run a 20% sensitivity downside stress test.
By using AUD 45 an ounce in our economics, but AUD 35 in the design, we've already demonstrated that this thing is very robust. What's really important to stress is, in terms of the leverage that we provide to investors, if we'd have put in AUD 50 silver price into our shell, that mining inventory in the Whittle shell increased to about 130 million ounces. That would have been 40-year mine life. The beauty of this ore body is that it's shaped in a way that whenever you put a higher silver price in, the open pit just drives down pretty much at the same strip ratio. Our resource-to-reserve conversion ratio at the moment, I think, is still relatively conservative.
If you're looking at silver prices in 16 years at the end of our stage 1 development, I have no idea what the price of silver is going to be in 6 weeks, let alone in 16 years. I think it's going to be probably north of AUD 50 an ounce. This mine life is going to last for a very long time. A couple of the guys I've spoken to this week from sort of debt discussions, the commentary has been around this. There were very few, in the last 10 years, there have been very few studies put out into the Australian market for projects where mine life is beyond 10-15 years. We feel pretty comfortable that once we get the consent back, that this is a pretty good story.
There's been a few of these charts today. I won't dwell on this too long. We all want to be compared to the best. We think we can do that from a reserve position and a mine life position. Everyone's always a little bit selective about what companies they choose when they're doing the comparatives. We've been selective in that. Our view internally and publicly is that really, if you want to be a silver producer, you've got to be able to demonstrate you've got more than 50% of your revenue from silver. We do that. We exclude anybody here that is really a polymetallic with silver byproduct credits. We think that's just playing a bit of a game. We sit now on the reserve side on the development front. There are probably two projects ahead of us globally.
One is Vizsla in Mexico, the other is Diablillos, which is our silver in Argentina. I think both those assets are absolutely terrific. I think the Diablillos is twice the project that we've got, but they've got six times the market cap. There's a bit of a gap to fill there. Panuco, which is the Vizsla silver, look, yes, we've hit a road bump with respect to permitting. I'd rather be dealing with that than having to phone families of our company and telling them they've had, you know, we've had 10 people kidnapped and hacked to pieces by the Sinaloa Cartel. Yeah, there are benefits to New South Wales. Everyone knows where this is. I mean, this project has been around for a long time. It was discovered by CRA in 1989.
They very quickly determined that it was a silver project, not a copper gold porphyry, which is what they were searching for. They sold it and went through a couple of hands and ended up, this was the foundation asset for Silver Standard. Rick Rule and Rob McEwen, who are very famous investors in North American mining, this was their foundation asset. They had no intention of developing anything. They were sort of horse trading and just trying to build resources. They sold this to Kingsgate in 2010 for AUD 75 million. Kingsgate spent another AUD 25 on it. When they lost Chatree, they had some debt outstanding, so we swooped in and bought this for AUD 25 million. We've subsequently spent AUD 100 million on this.
I would just flag that for people that, you know, when you are taking projects from inferred resources through to a reserve, you need a lot of money. Money, you know, you have to have that money. Just bear that in mind. I mean, of that AUD 100 million, we've now bought about AUD 50 million worth of property. We own 3,900 hectares of farmland around the mine, you know, for water rights, infrastructure. It's been very important and a very sort of deliberate strategy. We also run a farm. We have Bowden's Agriculture as a subsidiary company. For those of you that know much about farming, it's a great tax loss, I can guarantee. Just to give a sense of the opportunity here, this is the mine life and the production schedule.
I actually ran this slide originally just with silver, but one of our shareholders actually asked me to put the lead and zinc in there as silver equivalents. It's a very strong first five and first 10 years. We've designed this project with expansions in mind. The process plant has been designed with the ability to put in a second flotation stream and an awes water down the track. That engineering was not a problem. I mean, for those of you who know the project, we made a significant change to the process about 18 months or 2 years ago. Originally we were going to be doing two concentrated streams, a lead silver and a zinc silver. For the wrong reasons, the project was effectively being optimized for lead, to get the lead concentrate to a sellable quality.
I got the guys to look at it from a bulk concentrate perspective. The bulk concentrate picked up recoveries massively, and once you clean the concentrate, you end up with a far, far superior product. Within that design, we always had room for two float streams, one for lead, one for zinc. We've kept that in there in the design. We're not building the second stream, but we've kept it in the design so that down the track it's very easy to expand this project. I look at this and, you know, you start to see the production sort of dip in year seven. Is that going to happen? Probably not, you know. We might be at 3 million tons, 2.5, 3 million tons by that point.
Yeah, we've got a lot of levers to pull here, on top of that leverage to the actual silver price. Slide. Just to give a sense as to, you know, the design, this is simple. I don't want to be flippant because there's no such thing as a simple mining project. However, the design we've done here, we've tried to keep it as simple as possible. This mine plan, it's 2 million tons per annum. It's a strip ratio of 1.5 to 1. It's 5 million tons of material movements a year. It's seven trucks and one excavator, and it's day-shift mining only. We're keeping it simple. By going to the bulk flotation, it's simplified the processing as well. We've removed cyanide from the process. You know, everything we've done here has been to simplify this project.
You know, the intention here is to make funding this as easy as possible whilst providing significant opportunity. In terms of next steps, look, obviously, it's the first thing I ever mentioned, permitting. You know, this all hinges on the permitting. A number of people said to me, "Oh, it's a coin toss." Look, it is not a coin toss. Yes, it's a binary outcome, but it is not a coin toss. We have done the work. This project has been studied to death. We have provided the government with sufficient information for them to be able to make an informed assessment of this project.
At no point in the last seven or eight years has any department from the New South Wales government come out and said, "This development is a problem," or, "There are issues with the," you know, there's a group of activists out there, it's about 100 people, and they talk about the lead. We've got 0.29% lead, and they're claiming that we're going to be the next Broken Hill, we're going to poison all the children. We have very strict measures in place to make sure that, you know, real-time lead dust monitoring, all those things that should be in place. We'll be doing this very responsibly, and we've given the government every bit of information they need to make that decision. Key takeaways, look, I mean, it is what it is. It's a very simple story. It's New South Wales.
When I took this role, for those that know me, I used to be in broking, I know quite a few of the fund managers, particularly in London. I told a few of them what I was going to do, and they said, "Great, love the asset, don't own it," because, you know, get the permits, we'll be there. They said, "Just promise us one thing, that when you get this into production, don't go and use the money to go and buy assets in Latin America." Their view was that they can make that allocation themselves. If they want silver without that geopolitical risk, Australia is a very safe place. Once we get the consents back and we get this into production, we can demonstrate 25 to 40-year mine life producing 4+ million ounces of silver a year with very, very strong economics.
My parting gift to everybody really is that, you know, our share price halved on the day we lost the consent, which is what I said to the board would happen. I said, "It'll be down 50%." We're down half. Subsequent to that point, the silver price has more than doubled, we've now put out a DFS, a very, very robust DFS, with almost 100 million ounces of silver, which makes us probably the second largest development play in the global silver space. That's a very appealing asset. We do have some exploration in North America, but I'll leave that for another time. If you want to come and have a chat, more than happy to have a chat, but I'll leave it there.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, thanks for the introduction. Most people know me as Joe. Normally when I get called Jonathan I was in trouble, so I appreciate that. What's really pleasing at the outset here is that we're presenting as part of a silver session. Excuse me. For years there's not really been a silver sector in Australia. I kind of understand why. I've always sort of pitched silver as, in Australia, there's only really ever been two successful silver developments. One was Broken Hill and the other is Cannington. Everything else has been either too small or significantly financially challenged. It's very pleasing that silver is now starting to get a bit of a profile in Australia. I'll leave the disclaimers later. We're very different from the previous stories that have just been presenting, in that we're Australian-based and we're New South Wales.
As most people would be aware, New South Wales, we've had our challenges with respect to permitting. Not through anything we've done wrong. We lost the consent to a judicial review because it was deemed by the appeal judge that the New South Wales government had made an error, a very minor technical error in the report. It's taken us 2 years to get where we are now. We've now submitted all of the information to the government that's been requested. We're starting to get initial feedback on it. It sounds fairly reasonable. We believe that before the end of this year, you know, we'll be in a position where we'll be able to communicate to the market that, you know, we're back on track with respect to the permitting process.
Interestingly, you know, from the permitting, we're waiting for that development consent from the New South Wales government. After that, we need the mining license, which the application is in. That's pretty much sat with the department already. Once the consent's back, that'll be signed off. Yeah, we then need the environmental, the federal environmental piece. The good thing about New South Wales, and now Western Australia as well, is that the feds and the state governments are, they have a bipartisan agreement on environmental studies. Whatever you do in the state gets accepted by the feds. Again, we don't envisage any issues on the permitting side. I guess, importantly, whilst we've been going through this permitting road bump, it's given us the opportunity to really get the studies up to scratch. We released the DFS for this project on Tuesday.
It is a very, very compelling development opportunity. We tend not to talk about resources because we have the luxury of having reserves. We've just declared a reserve of 94, just under 94 million ounces of silver, which is substantial by anybody's metric. It supports a mine life of 26 years. We've been very conservative in everything we've done here on this study. The study has been done by Lycopodium, which a lot of Australian mining companies get a bit scared by Lycopodium because they tend to have very robust engineering designs. CAPEX is quite expensive. We're happy with that because it gives a lot of comfort to the debt funders and the off-takers. The NPV and margins are very, very strong. What's really important for us is, despite this being a polymetallic deposit, we've really optimized this project on the silver.
Life of Mine, our revenue is 91% silver, and there's some small credits from lead and zinc. Everything we've done here has been about maximizing the leverage to investors from a silver perspective. Again, the metrics are very pleasing, and our view is that these are relatively conservative. Our base case, we use AUD 45 silver. That gives us a lot of comfort. The spot numbers are even more impressive. What I would want to impress on people is that that level of conservatism goes down to the mine design, in that we use AUD 35 an ounce for the Whittle shells in our mine design. I guarantee you, when you're out there looking for debt funding, whatever price you've used, the debt funders will ask you to run a 20% sensitivity downside stress test.
By using AUD 45 an ounce in our economics, but AUD 35 in the design, we've already demonstrated that this thing is very robust. What's really important to stress is, in terms of the leverage that we provide to investors, if we'd have put in AUD 50 silver price into our shell, that mining inventory in the Whittle shell increased to about 130 million ounces. That would have been 40-year mine life. The beauty of this ore body is that it's shaped in a way that whenever you put a higher silver price in, the open pit just drives down pretty much at the same strip ratio. Our resource-to-reserve conversion ratio at the moment, I think, is still relatively conservative.
If you're looking at silver prices in 16 years at the end of our stage 1 development, I have no idea what the price of silver is going to be in 6 weeks, let alone in 16 years. I think it's going to be probably north of AUD 50 an ounce. This mine life is going to last for a very long time. A couple of the guys I've spoken to this week from sort of debt discussions, the commentary has been around this. There were very few, in the last 10 years, there have been very few studies put out into the Australian market for projects where mine life is beyond 10-15 years. We feel pretty comfortable that once we get the consent back, that this is a pretty good story.
There's been a few of these charts today. I won't dwell on this too long. We all want to be compared to the best. We think we can do that from a reserve position and a mine life position. Everyone's always a little bit selective about what companies they choose when they're doing the comparatives. We've been selective in that. Our view internally and publicly is that really, if you want to be a silver producer, you've got to be able to demonstrate you've got more than 50% of your revenue from silver. We do that. We exclude anybody here that is really a polymetallic with silver byproduct credits. We think that's just playing a bit of a game. We sit now on the reserve side on the development front. There are probably two projects ahead of us globally.
One is Vizsla in Mexico, the other is Diablillos, which is our silver in Argentina. I think both those assets are absolutely terrific. I think the Diablillos is twice the project that we've got, but they've got six times the market cap. There's a bit of a gap to fill there. Panuco, which is the Vizsla silver, look, yes, we've hit a road bump with respect to permitting. I'd rather be dealing with that than having to phone families of our company and telling them they've had, you know, we've had 10 people kidnapped and hacked to pieces by the Sinaloa Cartel. Yeah, there are benefits to New South Wales. Everyone knows where this is. I mean, this project has been around for a long time. It was discovered by CRA in 1989.
They very quickly determined that it was a silver project, not a copper gold porphyry, which is what they were searching for. They sold it and went through a couple of hands and ended up, this was the foundation asset for Silver Standard. Rick Rule and Rob McEwen, who are very famous investors in North American mining, this was their foundation asset. They had no intention of developing anything. They were sort of horse trading and just trying to build resources. They sold this to Kingsgate in 2010 for AUD 75 million. Kingsgate spent another AUD 25 on it. When they lost Chatree, they had some debt outstanding, so we swooped in and bought this for AUD 25 million. We've subsequently spent AUD 100 million on this.
I would just flag that for people that, you know, when you are taking projects from inferred resources through to a reserve, you need a lot of money. Money, you know, you have to have that money. Just bear that in mind. I mean, of that AUD 100 million, we've now bought about AUD 50 million worth of property. We own 3,900 hectares of farmland around the mine, you know, for water rights, infrastructure. It's been very important and a very sort of deliberate strategy. We also run a farm. We have Bowden's Agriculture as a subsidiary company. For those of you that know much about farming, it's a great tax loss, I can guarantee. Just to give a sense of the opportunity here, this is the mine life and the production schedule.
I actually ran this slide originally just with silver, but one of our shareholders actually asked me to put the lead and zinc in there as silver equivalents. It's a very strong first five and first 10 years. We've designed this project with expansions in mind. The process plant has been designed with the ability to put in a second flotation stream and an awes water down the track. That engineering was not a problem. I mean, for those of you who know the project, we made a significant change to the process about 18 months or 2 years ago. Originally we were going to be doing two concentrated streams, a lead silver and a zinc silver. For the wrong reasons, the project was effectively being optimized for lead, to get the lead concentrate to a sellable quality.
I got the guys to look at it from a bulk concentrate perspective. The bulk concentrate picked up recoveries massively, and once you clean the concentrate, you end up with a far, far superior product. Within that design, we always had room for two float streams, one for lead, one for zinc. We've kept that in there in the design. We're not building the second stream, but we've kept it in the design so that down the track it's very easy to expand this project. I look at this and, you know, you start to see the production sort of dip in year seven. Is that going to happen? Probably not, you know. We might be at 3 million tons, 2.5, 3 million tons by that point.
Yeah, we've got a lot of levers to pull here, on top of that leverage to the actual silver price. Slide. Just to give a sense as to, you know, the design, this is simple. I don't want to be flippant because there's no such thing as a simple mining project. However, the design we've done here, we've tried to keep it as simple as possible. This mine plan, it's 2 million tons per annum. It's a strip ratio of 1.5 to 1. It's 5 million tons of material movements a year. It's seven trucks and one excavator, and it's day-shift mining only. We're keeping it simple. By going to the bulk flotation, it's simplified the processing as well. We've removed cyanide from the process. You know, everything we've done here has been to simplify this project.
You know, the intention here is to make funding this as easy as possible whilst providing significant opportunity. In terms of next steps, look, obviously, it's the first thing I ever mentioned, permitting. You know, this all hinges on the permitting. A number of people said to me, "Oh, it's a coin toss." Look, it is not a coin toss. Yes, it's a binary outcome, but it is not a coin toss. We have done the work. This project has been studied to death. We have provided the government with sufficient information for them to be able to make an informed assessment of this project.
At no point in the last seven or eight years has any department from the New South Wales government come out and said, "This development is a problem," or, "There are issues with the," you know, there's a group of activists out there, it's about 100 people, and they talk about the lead. We've got 0.29% lead, and they're claiming that we're going to be the next Broken Hill, we're going to poison all the children. We have very strict measures in place to make sure that, you know, real-time lead dust monitoring, all those things that should be in place. We'll be doing this very responsibly, and we've given the government every bit of information they need to make that decision. Key takeaways, look, I mean, it is what it is. It's a very simple story. It's New South Wales.
When I took this role, for those that know me, I used to be in broking, I know quite a few of the fund managers, particularly in London. I told a few of them what I was going to do, and they said, "Great, love the asset, don't own it," because, you know, get the permits, we'll be there. They said, "Just promise us one thing, that when you get this into production, don't go and use the money to go and buy assets in Latin America." Their view was that they can make that allocation themselves. If they want silver without that geopolitical risk, Australia is a very safe place. Once we get the consents back and we get this into production, we can demonstrate 25 to 40-year mine life producing 4+ million ounces of silver a year with very, very strong economics.
My parting gift to everybody really is that, you know, our share price halved on the day we lost the consent, which is what I said to the board would happen. I said, "It'll be down 50%." We're down half. Subsequent to that point, the silver price has more than doubled, we've now put out a DFS, a very, very robust DFS, with almost 100 million ounces of silver, which makes us probably the second largest development play in the global silver space. That's a very appealing asset. We do have some exploration in North America, but I'll leave that for another time. If you want to come and have a chat, more than happy to have a chat, but I'll leave it there.
Great. Thank you.