Hi everyone. Thanks again for joining us today on this pretty important and exciting day for the company. For those who haven't met me, I'm Rafael Moreno, CEO of Viridis Mining, and I look forward to getting into a bit more detail on what today's, I guess, announcement really means for the company, not just at the present moment, but more importantly, how these results really set the foundation for our pathway to production. So moving along, I guess, as for the headline numbers in the first few paragraphs, it states, you know, we now have just short of 500 million, and that's right, 500 million tonnes of resource at a pretty healthy grade of 2500 PPM total rare earth oxide, or TREO as I'll call it throughout the call.
But more importantly, an unrivaled 600 and 601 ppm of really the valuable mixed rare earth oxide, or the magnetic rare earth oxide, I should say, and I'll refer to that as MREO, which really puts us in a whole different league compared to other, not just ionic, but clay projects around the world, apart from our neighbor Meteoric, who also has an excellent resource. I guess the common thread here is obviously our location in this phenomenal and amazing alkaline complex in Poços de Caldas.
As per the announcement heading, the real star of the show is our measured and indicated resource, not just because of the, I guess, the geological confidence we get with getting to that category, but standing at 329 million tonnes at 659 ppm MREO has really now set a new benchmark globally for both size, and more importantly, those precious levels of magnetic rare earths.
You're going to hear me reiterate time and time again about MREO because TREO levels, as most of the folks that know me, are not exactly the most important metric. The fact is we're producing a mixed rare earth carbonate products, and the most valuable part of that MREC, for sure, or basket value, is the content of MREOs. If you look at our and review our announcements from last year in September and December respectively, you'll see that with our MREC value at spot prices, we're well above our peers. The key to that is when you've got a flow sheet, and if you've got those magnetic rares actually in the feed ore, that's how you get them into the MREC. Hence why the focus of today and moving forward, it's important that you understand the importance of the MREO and not really the TREO.
Moving down through the actual announcement, the real important part on top of the in terms of measured and indicated resource is this high grade feed. I guess, you know, how do we get to this high grade feed? What does it mean to have a big resource and a high grade really actually mean in layman's terms? I personally like to keep things pretty simple, and it's all about the project economics. We don't really subscribe here to some of these astronomical future forecast prices that I see of a lot of the projects in development these days that, you know, whether it be $100 plus for NdPr in order to be viable.
You know, the board and I, we wouldn't keep plugging this horse if we weren't extremely confident of the project viability at today's lower prices, which from my opinion, or to be honest, the nutshell and the number one value proposition of Colossus is that project viability at today's lower prices. So I guess to answer my own question, you know, what does that big resource and high grade resource allow us to do? It allows us to focus all of our attention, our cash, everything we're doing on developing a mine plan around that ultra high grade ore body. And as per this announcement and what I sort of touched on with this exceptional high grade feed is that, you know, we now have more than 100 million tonnes of over 1000 PPM of magnetic rare earth oxide. That's big.
More importantly, that's very valuable and important foundation for our MREC basket when we start producing. I guess for some context, you know, it seems to be quite a few, I guess, projects coming out. We've sort of nameplated the ROM in terms of run of mine of around 5 million tonnes per annum. If we look to do something similar, which, you know, we probably will, and having over 100 million tonnes of ore, then we've got two decades of processing this ultra high grade ore. If you can understand that from an economics point of view, it's what sets the foundation for where we're confident, as I mentioned earlier, about using today's spot prices for robust economics. To be honest, from my opinion, you know, that 1000 PPM MREO that we're talking about, you know, thereabouts, I believe is like an economic cutoff.
And that's for a true Ionic clay project at today's rare earth prices. And I'm very clear with my wording about the true Ionic clay because high grades aren't enough. Yeah. You know, you still need to take into account the recoveries and couple that with operating costs. And hopefully what you've seen and what we've managed to prove throughout 2024 is with that extensive metallurgical campaign we did with ANSTO, both in our Northern Concessions and our Southern Complex, we've managed to achieve these industry leading MREO recoveries from ore to MREC, you know, up to 78%. And we've all of this with a very simple and linked to that inherently cheap flow sheet. So needless to say, we're pretty busy here finalizing our mine planning and very excited to release the results of the scoping study in the not too distant future.
Moving on through the, I guess, announcement, I think another important part is, so we've kept using BNA Mining Solutions as the consultant. They're quite famous in Brazil, in the Vale, Sigma, Latin, everyone uses these guys. The bit I'd like to highlight, especially in this paragraph, you can see is how stringent we've set our modeling parameters to make sure that, you know, the eventual resource that we come out to the market with, in particular with tonnage as well, is actually economically extractable at today's rare earth prices. You know, we could easily double our resource if we wanted to, if we would apply some future fantasy NdPr price simply with the aim of increasing our resource sums. But hopefully the market, our investors, can understand what we're trying to achieve.
We're all about getting production and making sure we've got a realistic resource, and then we build a realistic mine plan around that, which is what we've done. I'm finishing as we speak. And then you can get some confidence in the scoping study is going to be reflective of actually how we're going to mine. So just with our map, I guess, you know, to touch on here, we essentially have, as part of our resource, we've got five, let's call them prospects, which we've included. We've got to the west, Capão da Onça.
We've got our Ribeirão and Tamoios, which, you know, has turned out to be a phenomenal sort of prospect, not just having the highest grade, both in the accumulation zone, which is what our resource and indicated part includes only, but even in the transition zone to the hard rock, we actually are seeing even higher grades, which is, you know, unheard of. But the key to today's update, and as I mentioned with the measured and indicated, it's basically all coming from our Northern Concessions and our Southern Complex. That's what makes up the development plan. That's what the mine planning is based on. That's what the scoping study and PFS are all based on. From an upside point of view, firstly, if you look in the Southern Complex, you know, we've only done about 75% of the drilling there.
Considering we had over 700 PPM MREO in close to 3000 PPM TREO, you can see why we're excited when we've already got 160 million tonnes in this area, that there's at least another 25% to come. And then if you look at the actual graph, anything which is sort of shaded with that black and white, that's eventual more increase in exploration that we need to do, but hopefully that sort of converts into a resource upgrade when we're ready to do it. And I want to be quite clear that with such a massive resource that we have now, it's not a focus for the business. We're moving very quickly through our PFS and the various development stage gates, and that will be our focus moving forward. As we move forward, we do have our updated resource here and the cutoff that we've applied.
I do want to highlight just and reiterate the importance of, again, the MREO to TREO ratio. It's one of the things that separates us from our peers as well is, again, if you look at our MREC results that we've released and the value of that MREC compared to peers, you'll see that we've got a higher ratio of those magnetic rare earths, you know, praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium in our MREC. And it's not a fluke. The reason why we've got that is because in our feed ore, we've got a higher ratio of those. And just something worthwhile noting that it's great to have the content, but if you've also got a high level of TREO, then it sort of gets diluted and reduces your basket value.
I'll discuss a lot more about that and the importance of that during the release of our scoping study soon, and I'll explain how this impacts the revenue and hence the economics. Obviously, we've got a couple of our tonnage versus grade graphs, so hopefully you appreciate that and you get an understanding that when you apply a 3000 PPM cutoff, the numbers that we're talking with this high ultra grade feed that we're looking at doing for the project. But the next part I think it's worth talking about is just a peer comparison. I guess, you know, for me, as I mentioned before, I'm a pretty simple guy, and using peer comparisons seem to be the norm these days.
I guess with so many aspiring rare earth projects globally, sometimes it's an easier way of doing a quick sense check of sort of who's got the best chance of succeeding because grade and tonnage does point in the direction of who's got the best chance of actually being economically viable. I guess we've got a couple of figures here, figure five and just below figure six. I think they go a long way in pictorially explaining the advantage of having such a large resource with such elevated grades. You know, most of our peers, they've either got one or the other, maybe they've got, you know, good grades or they've got the tonnage, but we've got both.
It's what allows us, I guess, to move diagonally up and have this ultra high grade feed because we've got the capability to compromise on size and move up that vertical sort of grade ladder and then come out with this, you know, fantastic, you know, two decade plus and 4000 PPM TREO, which again, I don't talk too much about, but more importantly, more than 1000 PPM of MREO. I keep talking a lot about the impact of that grade on the MREC or the basket value, but I should explain what it does to CapEx and OpEx. You know, when I look at figure five here on the screen, as a process engineer by trade, my eyes just scream out, you know, higher CapEx and OpEx for the project sitting in this lower quarter of grade.
For the ones sitting up here, lower OpEx and CapEx. What do I mean by this? I started my career sizing equipment, facilities, piping, and you learn very quickly that flow rate or ROM is proportional to costs. This includes the cost of building the projects, CapEx, and the cost of operating projects, OpEx. You know, if you look at the project listed here, this is just a small subset. If you look at the project listed and, you know, if you were to give them the same basis and we all were to produce one molecule of MREC, you know, and we're lucky enough with our feed and this ultra high grade that we can process four or five times less ore or clay than our peers.
It means that the facility, the pumps, the agitators, the tanks, all of it, the piping, it's four to five times less smaller in order to get that one molecule of MREC. Okay, and maybe you can swallow that extra cost of everything being larger and bigger, but the one that's trickier to swallow is the operating cost because, as you can imagine, if everything's bigger because you're having to process four to five times more clay to get that same molecule at the end, is that you need four to five times more reagents. The power load is significantly larger. The amount of people, the amount of space you need, everything becomes larger, and that's really the value proposition that I spoke about earlier when you can get high grade or ultra high grade like we do. I haven't even spoken about recoveries, which magnify that.
If you can have a cheap and sort of benign flow sheet like we do, which reduces the operating cost significantly, that's where you've got a robust project and economics to suit. Obviously you can see me getting pretty excited about what potentially is going to come out with our scoping study now that we've sort of delivered this foundational resource update and what it actually means, as I mentioned earlier, to building the foundation for that sort of production to ore or that pathway to production. I'm mindful of time. For those geological guys out there, happy for you guys to contact me if you've got any questions about any of the work we've done in the resource space, including any of the geology, drilling, techniques, sampling that we've done. That's no problem.
The one thing which I would like to speak about prior to opening up the forum to questions is our future work. I sort of touched on we've completed the block models, obviously as part of this resource update. It's gone straight to our mine planner, our consultant we're using, and they've been very busy going into detail on how we mine and do the mine planning, especially based on the ultra high grade. And they haven't kept it at a high level. We've designed all the pits. We understand all of our access ways, routes, you name it. It's all been designed. So obviously that's an important feed for the engineering contractor to then take and look through their process models so that we understand the production that we're going to get from this facility.
And we'll take that and finalize the scoping study and the economics associated with that. So that's an exciting, I guess, milestone to issue to the market very soon. And then the second part, which I think is just as important, is the critical path to Colossus runs through our environmental approvals. And if you think I've been spending a lot of time on the updated resource estimate engineering, it pales in significance to the work I've been doing with our team on the environmental approvals. So it really is the most important part. And we're looking to issue our EIA very, very soon. So keep an eye out for that because it's imminent.
One of the key parts to that is we actually have environmental approvals. Lucky enough, due to our low uranium and thorium levels, it stays at state level, which is fantastic versus going to federal level, which you can add easily another decade on top of your permitting process. One of the key parts to these very first three approvals that you need is that you need support. It needs to be formal support through a standard certificate you get from your local government. I'm looking forward to showing the support we've got from our local government in that soon-to-be-announced submission. Look, all in all, guys, fantastic update from the company. We've got some other important stuff coming out soon, which is just as important with the environmental approvals and also the scoping study, and excited to get that out to the market.
I'm going to test my skills at the Q&A side of things. I'll open up the, and I can't see any yet. But if anyone's got any questions in the last sort of five, 10 minutes, I'm happy to answer those. Hi, Warren, how are you?
Can you hear me?
Yep, I can hear you now, Warren. It was a bit quiet, that's all.
No, no, no, that's fine. Just in terms of the scoping study, how long do you think that's going to take? I mean, you said imminent, but you know, what do you need to do to get to that point now?
Yeah, so as sort of what's announced, mine planning is basically complete. I work now with the engineering contractor, as you probably know, Warren, to make sure we run that new feed ore composition that we've got and tonnage through the model.
We get our what we call our material balance or our heat material balance. We take that to run the economics, finalize the announcement. You know, when I say imminent, I sort of think in the next few weeks, hopefully we can do something. Yeah, we just need to go through those right protocols, make sure it's all done properly because hopefully you've got a flavor of how serious we take running things robustly. With the impressive numbers we're hoping to show the market, we want to make sure that it's all done and all the i's are dotted and T's are crossed. Yeah, soon, soon, Warren.
Okay. No, I just wondered whether you needed to do a whole lot of bulk sample testing and run that back through ANSTO or what was required, that's all.
Yeah, no, no, it's a good question, Warren.
And if I haven't made that clear, we've actually done that all last year. We've got two very large composite samples. So if you go through to our announcement in September and also December last year, there's a full dedicated announcement for both of those on very large bulk samples that we've done. And we're using those results that go into the engineering.
Okay. So it's not more a matter of because you're going to lift the grade so much. I just wondered whether that required more work. But obviously you can use what you've already done to do that.
Yeah. The good news is that the work we're giving to the engineering contractor, they actually mimic the grades, especially the MREO to TREO ratio. They actually mimic the bulk sample. And that's why I'm confident about it. So it's a really good question you've asked.
And it's another reason why we're trying to make sure everything matches together. Resource, the Met testing, the composite sample, all of them are singing from the same hymn sheet.
Okay. Thanks.
Thanks, Warren. G'day, Patrick.
G'day, Rafael. Congratulations on a great announcement. Just one quick question from me. In your announcement, you mentioned that you've got 106 million tonnes at above 4000 PPM TREO. I just wanted to understand the tonnage distribution across your tenements in relation to that.
Yeah. So I haven't got the. I've come back up to the top if you can see, Patrick. Just hang with me for a second. And I know of the 106, I believe 85% of that sits in the Northern Concessions and the Southern Complex, which is the important part because that's what forms the development plan.
So I dare say we've got close to 100 million tonnes sitting just in the Southern Complex and the Northern Concessions. So hopefully that gives you a breakdown of where it all sits. And it's where we need it to sit considering that's where the development plan sits.
Yep. Understood. And between the Northern Concessions and the Southern Complex, is there an approximate breakdown across those two?
I'd say it's close to slightly more in the Southern Complex. Because if you look at it, and if you can look at the screen, everyone that's following, I guess with the slightly higher grade of the Southern Complex, I dare say you've probably got a 60-40 ratio between the two.
Understood. Fantastic. Thank you.
Thanks, Patrick. All right, guys. I don't see any more questions. But again, hopefully everyone's got my email. Please don't hesitate to contact me today.
We've also got a few, as I mentioned, important announcements coming out in a couple of weeks. So thanks for your support. I look forward to speaking to everyone soon. Thanks everyone.