AJ is a mining engineer with more than 25 years of Australian international mining experience and a proven track record in senior executive leadership. He transitioned from non-executive director to managing director of Wildcat in late 2023. Over to you, AJ.
Thank you, mate. Firstly, can I start off by saying a big thank you to Diggers & Dealers for giving us the opportunity again to present the next lithium mine in Australia. Also, to everyone here in the auditorium and who are listening live, thank you for your presence. Corporate snapshot of Wildcat. About 1.3 billion shares on issue, market cap of about AUD 550 million, with about AUD 37.1 million in the bank. We've got two projects. We've got a gold project in New South Wales with 770,000 oz, and we've got our flagship project at Tabba Tabba, near Port Hedland, which is 74.1 million tonnes, which is the largest undeveloped lithium project in Australia. There's a lot of research coverage there, all available on our website. Our board of directors and management, some serious experience there in mining, construction, and funding.
Our core values are CLAW: commitment, leadership, agility, wealth creation, and most of all, safety. I'd like to take this opportunity to say a very big thank you to our team. We've got a great team. Your drive and commitment gets our progress today. Key highlights for Tabba Tabba. It's on a mining lease. It's close to port. Why is that important? There was a previous mine here for tantalum. We identified that there's lithium there, and you'll see why this will be the next lithium mine in the world, in Australia. Being on a mining lease, there's environmental studies done. There's an existing haul road. There's a pit there. Also, being very close to port, it pushes you down the cost curve. Our operating costs are about $ 541 per tonne. Our C1 operating costs and our all-in sustaining costs are about $ 658 per tonne.
At today's lithium price of AUD 2,000, that's some significant margins to be made. It's a large, high-confidence maiden resource. Why is this important? When we started drilling it out, we identified that at some day this is going to be a mine. Very quickly, we drilled 115,000 m, got it into an indicated status, and then we did a PFS study. DFS study, it's soon to come out, and then we'll have a banking funding model to move forward. 100% of our offtake is unencumbered. None of our offtake has been given away, and it'll be forming part of our last funding model. Exploration upside. We have nearly 2,000 sq km of tenure in the Pilbara. We're going to have Tabba Tabba as the hub. We'll build a plant there.
We've got a number of other pegmatites we've identified, and we're going to explore them as we move forward. We've got some excellent PFS financials, which I'll touch on in a couple of slides' time. Tabba Tabba, it's thick, continuous ore body. Leia is about 100 m-180 m wide. Luke is about 60 m-80 m wide. Chewy is about 40 m-60 m wide. Some really wide, thick pegmatites. In the PFS study, Luke and Leia made the reserve while we were doing more metallurgical test work on Chewy, Han, and Hutt. That test work has come out positive and will form part of the DFS study. Why is that important? That brings cash flow forward as well as reduces our strip ratio. Our entire resource is above 450 m, so there's still exploration potential at depth.
Next is a video that I'll walk you through. It's our vision for Tabba Tabba. It does have some DFS conceptual designs that we're working through. We'll move on to the video now. Where are we? We're in Western Australia, 80 km south of Port Hedland, Port Hedland being the largest bulk port in the world. We're off the Great Northern Highway and the Marble Bar Road, 20-km access road to site. We're also next to two of the largest lithium mines in the world. We've got Pilgangoora 47 km away, and we've got Wodgina nearly 87 km away. We've got over 2,000 sq km of tenure, like I said before, with a hub-and-spoke model. Build Tabba Tabba, we can find more pegmatites. Zooming in on Tabba Tabba itself, it's on granted mining leases. There's miscellaneous licenses around Tabba Tabba we've applied for.
There's a bore field and water license currently in place, existing tantalum pit, and we've got resources at Han, Hutt, Tabba Tabba, Chewy, Leia, and Luke. We've also got an accommodation camp on site that can house up to 80 people. Looking at our conceptual DFS design is a site access road, an all-weather access road that leads to the Tabba Tabba infrastructure. The road itself comes off the Marble Bar Road and gives you access to a 600-person camp, a solar farm, processing plant, and the underground and Leia open-pit access. Zooming in on the site infrastructure, we've got our primary spodumene plant there in yellow, you've got the option of a petalite plant as well as a tantalum plant in the blue and the pink, the non-process infrastructure on your right-hand side there.
Looking at the mining at Tabba Tabba, we have the Tabba Tabba pit, satellite pits at Han and Hutt, the underground at Luke. Luke and Leia will start at the same time, you have an open pit and underground option. We think that gives you great flexibility. You can ramp up the underground or you can ramp up the open pit, it de-risks the project. Moving to the non-process infrastructure. These are our designs. You've got the admin building on your left there. You've got the maintenance and laydown yards that are shared between the open pit and underground. The underground service area there, and maintenance yards. Moving to the spodumene plant. It's a whole-ore flotation plant. It's two-stage crushing and grinding. It's a coarse ore grind, 180 μm.
Mill capacity of 4.5 Mtpa, and spodumene concentrate production of up to 565,000 tonnes in a single year. If we move through the plant itself, you can see the two-stage crushing circuit there. You've got a small ore sorter for the marginal ores, and then you've got your coarse ore stockpile that moves on to your stage 1 and stage 2 ball mills, stage 2 being in the gray. Then zooming in onto your thickeners there and your flotation plants, stage 1 and stage 2 flotation plants. That eventually move on to your concentrate thickener and then to your spodumene sheds via a conveyor. Loaded from the spodumene sheds all the way back through your access road, all the way out to port, and then to your markets in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. We've moved through the gears very quickly here.
Once we had an initial resource, we've had three discoveries in three years. We've had a maiden resource in November 2024. We had a PFS announcement in July 2025, and a native title agreement in December last year. Moving forward, we'll have a DFS study that'll come out in this quarter. Second half of this year, you'll have a Bolt Cutter resource. We'll have our finding and financing solutions, then move on to locking in our long lead items and our road construction, and then finally, our plant construction and FID. This is our second growth engine. It's Bolt Cutter. It's 10 km from Tabba Tabba. It's from organic growth. It's from soils mapping, geophysics, and drilling. The current size is 2.3 km by 800 m. It's a stacked pegmatite system.
We've done some geometallurgical test work that gets recoveries over 75%, and we see a resource come out in the second half of this year, eventually in a mining plan to extend production or mine life. Some of the differences you'll see between the PFS study and the DFS study. The deposits in the PFS study are Luke and Leia. The deposits in the DFS study will be Luke, Leia, Chewy, Han, Hutt, plus Tabba tantalum. Processing capacity in the PFS study was year seven for 565,000 tonnes. We're looking at year three in the DFS study. That's because we'll have Chewy, Han, and Hutt, but we'll also have the underground brought forward. The product produced in the PFS study was just a spodumene product. In the DFS study, it'll be a primary spodumene product, but we'll have the options of a petalite concentrate as well as a tantalum concentrate.
In terms of infrastructure, we've optimized the plant layout and reduced the waste haulage. We've gone from three-stage crushing to two-stage crushing and looking at a single thickener instead of two thickeners. Some of PFS economics. At the PFS, we used AUD 1,384. Today's price is about AUD 2,000. Our NPV at AUD 2,000 is about AUD 2.9 billion post-tax. Free cash flow of about AUD 6.5 billion post-tax and an IRR of 40%. Using a project CapEx of AUD 687 million, that's a payback period of 1.7 years. Some very good PFS economics there. This is a comparison of Tabba Tabba against other Australian spodumene producers. You see Greenbushes, Pilgangoora, Wodgina, and then Tabba Tabba. It's interesting that those were the four projects that Sons of Gwalia had and GAM, the big four coming back together again.
You'll see that a lot of these projects started off small and expanded through the lithium cycles. A key feature compared to any other project is our C1 operating cost. It's $ 541 per tonne. The key reason for that is it's a large open pit, it recovers very well, and it's close to port. Looking at the global supply and demand outlook going forward. The blue line there is the identified supply, which is the existing and potential supply compared to the global demand. Looking at 2027 onwards, that graph expands quite quickly. We see ourselves coming into production in 2028. In a supply-demand gap that we see that's caused by the EVs, battery storage, and AI data centers. Talking about funding, what are our options for funding? We've got the critical government funds. We've got the commercial banks.
We've got prepays with offtake as well as offtake asset-level investment. We've got strategic interest at the project level, finally, equity. We're running a number of these options all the way through so that the board can make a final decision through FID. Our plan for calendar year 2026 is discovery as well as development. In terms of discovery, we're looking at regional exploration. We've got a number of targets that we want to test out this year. We'll go in the second half of this year and test a number of those targets to expand our footprint. In terms of development, we're looking at finishing our DFS study, finalizing our offtake and financing options, completing our approvals. We want to commence our road construction and camp construction, employ good people. Finally, our key value drivers and why you should own Wildcat.
We're in the right location. We're tier 1 Pilbara, 8 km from port, a camp and haul road in place. We're proven discoverers with a great land position. We've had three discoveries in three years. We've got the right asset. Tabba Tabba is impressive in size, scale, and quality. Bolt Cutter is an emerging discovery, and we've got AUD 37.1 million in the bank. We've also got the right team. We certainly have discoverers, but now we've got guys who've got a lot of funding experience and construction experience who have come on board to build Australia's next lithium mine. Really appreciate everyone coming in and giving us your time. We're in the booth. Have a great conference.