Thanks very much, John, and a pleasure to provide an update or introduce Waratah Minerals. We're a gold copper explorer. We're...
John's working. It's not going to work out of the tech. As some highlights for you, we're very focused on our Spur Project opportunity where we believe there's an important world-class discovery evolving there. We purchased the project 18 months ago, so it's fairly fresh still, but we've been having success after success. Part of the world that I know well, having been based there for 18 years, working on, fortunate to work on some great stories and having a peek at Cadia Valley as well. High caliber team, the Board you'll see, very technical bias, having worked in the area and part of big discoveries globally as well. Good story, attracting good technical people. We're building a real world-class technical team of geologists here. As you'll see, we're running at this very quickly now as we get more confident on it.
Strategic position, a lot of investment coming in from majors into this part of the world, both buying mines and big farming investments from the majors backing some of the juniors. The beautiful thing about this, we had a very clear question that we wanted to test in this area. 18 months ago, we had a concept that we know in this part of the world, mineralization sort of sits off the shoulders of major intrusive complexes. It's a beautiful example that's evolving here. That change in idea, change in the exploration strategy is delivering. We're up to three RCs now. We're putting the foot down on multiple levels here, building the team quickly, opening up multiple exploration fronts. As you'll notice, very, very much focused on the edges of what looks to be a fertile and intrusive complex. Well- funded, the story is starting to get noticed.
Last raise we did in May attracted the North American instos. Stuart Tonkin's our top holder. Starting to build real strength on the register. Coverage out of Blue Ocean. You can see the story there reflected on the share price. The acquisition didn't get the market's attention, but quickly we did a strategic placement, $0.5 million, to get the ball rolling and start testing things in late 2024. That got the market's attention because of a couple of people we brought in, high-profile investors, Stuart Tonkin, as I mentioned. All seven, mid-last year, also got the market's attention. It's reflecting the gold endowment. This system's 57 m at 2.5 g gold. In May, a shallow copper coffee intercept there again. You can see, we're just starting to reflect. We've now got three rigs on this.
You start, we would expect this to level, this to some of the volatility that you can see there to level out. We're just seeing a typical discovery emerging as we're starting to put our foot down. Very technical-driven Board. Naomi's there as well, who's been with the company for a period as our Legal Advisor, bringing great M&A support as well. Andy, who's here at the conference with me, and Darryl Clark , part of some major porphyry discoveries around the world. That's the part of the world we're in. We're 5 km to the West of Cadia Valley, now of course in the hands of Newmont. You've seen the likes of Evolution investing heavily in New South Wales as well. Eight or nine years ago, they purchased Cowal , and they took that from 3 million to 14 million ounce plus system now.
Serious epithermal gold system with lots of similarities to what we're seeing at Spur. Recent acquisition to Northparkes . Major investments in mines and also exploration stories in this part of the world. Zooming in a bit closer, we're surrounded by Gold Fields funded exploration deal there. About a year ago, they farmed in on that area in blue, and you can see Cadia Valley. A strategic part of the world, a really good place to find a major world-class gold system, one of the largest mills in the country, Cadia Valley at 38 million tons per annum. Very large in a global sense as well. Zooming in into the data, and you know this is where the value gets driven from with these discovery stories. You've got to have a different way of thinking about it.
There's been a lot of explorers here, a lot of really good people, GOs look at this before. We're now at the point where we've got great technical momentum. We've de-risked the proof of concept. We've now got the funding to be able to do this properly. You can see from some of the gold hits there, basically multiple hundred gram-meter hits in the gold epithermal portion of the system. We're very focused on that main mag high area there and that Dalcoath Spur Essex area. Zoom in there. As I said, you've got to be able to explain to people. I get this question a lot. As Andrew mentioned before, you know, how is this still there? Why hasn't this been found? It's a great question, but there's all sorts of reasons why these things don't get found. Corporately, not having the focus. The team, commodity price fluctuations.
Here it's also a case of the big discoveries that were made at Cadia. We're in the 1990s, you know, mid-late 1990s. GOs in the region were, you know, looking for something, looking for something in this case that hadn't actually been found yet. Anaconda Copper, the [Yanks] were very interested in this part of the world back in the 1970s for copper porphyries. Of course, Cowal hadn't been discovered during that time either. He didn't realize that these rocks could also host, you know, + 14 million ounces of epithermal gold. All this sort of leads into, you know, what are we going to do differently? We put our foot down, as I keep saying. We've drilled about 25,000 m of mostly RC, but becoming more and more core-based drilling now. We've relogged a lot of the old holes in the area. We've assayed some of those as well.
We're applying, you know, state-of-the-art techniques, geochemistry in particular, because we're also building geometallurgical models from these very 3D geometric models from these big geochem datasets now that we're able to use, justify the cost of collecting. You look at these images now from that district, and it seems very, very obvious now that most of the metal is on the edge of that big magnetic high. That wasn't always obvious. This was the proof of concept that I referred to. A lot of the early work was drilling into the guts of the mag high there, into that early stage intrusive complex. This is a very, very common pattern in all the Lachlan systems that I've worked on over 18 years. You're close if you're drilling into the big mag highs, but you're not close enough. You've got to be off the shoulder.
It's actually that later stage of magmatism and intrusive activity, which is driving the mineralization. We've got it now by the tail. There's that big corridor there. It looks to stretch over 2 km . We're still testing the extents of it. It looks to be growing. You can argue that that's a 2 km long system now. You're seeing multiple hundred gram-meter gold hits there. Shallow discovery emerging. As you can see, we've only tested a small portion of that, and that's a small portion of the project area. Mineralization shows a lot of similarities with Cowal, in particular GRE46 , where they're underground mining at Cowal at the moment and printing about $70 million of free cash flow a quarter, I noticed. These things are ultimately very, very minable. We don't see any red flags in the metallurgy.
We're starting to ramp up our geometallurgical and gold deportment work at the moment. Some of the drilling is arguably resource definition work now. Some more detailed images there. The top right, you get a bit of a sense for, you know, a lot of the zones there within the overall Spur gold corridor. We haven't really drilled too deep into those yet. We're seeing that that starts happening. We've got a focus in the Consols area in the North and Northeastern part of the corridor there at the moment. Let's say three rigs operating, so it's busy times. Get a sense for some high-grade zones here within that particular. Zooming in on a long section from the Spur zone itself within the broader Spur gold corridor, you can see, you know, we're mapping out this steep Sutherland Plunge control to some of the high grades.
Very, very substantial intercepts there. As I say, anything +100 g . We're building the gold endowment very, very quickly. We can see evidence for the porphyry alteration. We'll keep moving here. We're seeing portions of the system carrying copper, some nice copper hits recently in this hydrothermal breccia. We start to look for analogs in these rocks elsewhere in the belt. The most obvious one for the Spur gold corridor is GRE 46 at Cowal, which is a 3 million ounce system of about 3 g. You can start to infer, you know, how much gold this thing could have potential to build into. Of course, Cadia, all the other big porphyries, and you'll notice the detail there of the position of the Cowal epithermal mineralization. It's off the shoulders of the early intrusions. Don't drill the big magnetic highs, drill the shoulders of them.
That's what explorers are starting to do, and that's what's driving here. Very, very busy time. Thanks for your.