Let's go over to New South Wales, to the Macquarie Arc region, which is responsible for some of Australia's most significant gold discoveries, and today we're hearing from the Big Fella Executive Chair, Andrew Stewart. We're listening to Waratah. You've had some really impressive drill results, which have been catching investors' eyes. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it, and you've got seven drill rigs continuing to expand, so there's lots to hear about. Please make Andrew very welcome.
Thank you, and thank you to the RIU for the opportunity to speak here today. Waratah, we're a pre-mineral resource exploration company. We're focused on our project, Spur. It's located about 30 km to the west of Orange. It's an aggressive exploration program. I love this picture here. This picture really shows what we're about. This is our new Consols discovery, where we have five drill rigs operating at the moment. A really aggressive drill program focused on this, and, you know, delivering a real drumbeat of exploration results as we continue to progress this project. Exploration's a really wonderful business, and when executed well, it's a real value-add exploration. We're right at the front of the Lassonde Curve here.
And to be successful at this business, you've got to have a good team, you've got to have a good project, and you've got to have the fortitude to drill and drill aggressively. We all know that exploration is driven by money, that risk capital is incredibly impatient, so we all have a little bit of time to get these projects to a stage where you need to get them. And that's really what we're going to talk about today. We've had the discovery, we're progressing our geological model, we're continuing to step out and grow that. So we have a clear strategy, a very strong team, and a project that continues to deliver. To get all those things, it's good, it's important, but it's also very important to have investor appeal.
We have quite a strong register that's made up of Australian and global institutions, also some very, very important investors, Gladstone, 1832, Farj oy. 300 million shares out there. Share price of AUD 0.62. We've got a market capitalization just under about AUD 200 million. So we spoke here last year, we probably had a market cap in the AUD 20 million range, so we've grown quite quickly over the last 12 months, and AUD 30 million of cash on hand. Very strong board here, a board that's been involved with greenfields discoveries globally. Not only had those discoveries, progressed them through to resources, and been able to get liquidity events for those resources, so either through the sale, through joint ventures, and through various methods. So, we have a clear focus.
We're here about delivering value, and it's about finding, and then delivering the value to shareholders. A little about where we are. We're in Australia's premier copper and gold belt. It's the Macquarie Arc. It's located west of Sydney, and it stretches, you know, an area basically from Orange into the north. This is an area that hosts some very large deposits already. You know, we've got large projects like Northparkes, Cadia, and also Cowal. So several large mining companies, a lot of focus here, enormous amount of exploration money going into this area at the moment. And it's importantly, it's a mining jurisdiction. You drive into Orange, you can feel it. There's, y ou know, you see the hi-vis, you see the trucks. It's all about the community.
We have a community of mining-related workers here. It's a good place to work. It not only gives you access to infrastructure, it's great. All our employees come locally, and that's a real advantage here that we have. If we zoom in a little bit, our Spur Project is located about 30 km to the west of Orange. We're about 7-8 km from the Cadia Valley project, and you can see there, we're completely surrounded in majors. The blue area is Gold Fields. We go into Newmont with a large open pit there, which is Cadia, which was one of Australia's largest gold mines up until recently, and then we move to the west. A very tightly held area.
It's an area that's seen a lot of exploration, but we have a little bit of a different tinge to the way we're exploring it here. And I think we'll step through that and you'll see. You know, often the question I get is, you know, "How does a project that we're drilling at the moment exist very close to, you know, these sorts of mines in an area that's had many decades of exploration?" But as you'll see from our strategy and what we're doing, you can see the, the, I guess, the different, the different tangent we're taking with this project and how we're growing it. So we're luckily in a brownfields environment, as I said, infrastructure, we don't have to worry about those things, and it's fantastic work to work.
Well, the Spur Gold Project, 100% ownership, very important. Multiple exploration opportunities here. We're focused on the Cargo, which is the middle area, and the Spur intrusion. It's a unique tenure. I think this is a great opportunity because we sit on a mining common, and, you know, that's crown land, no native title, no freehold. So it's a very unique opportunity here. This was something that was assigned in the early 1800s or the late 1800s, let's say. And we believe that the conversion of this mine development from exploration to mine development will be faster than any other projects, given this unique tenure we have at Spur. A little about the history. This was the first copper and gold porphyry. It was found in New South Wales. It was found before Cadia.
A lot of the larger American companies, Anaconda, Cypru s, all worked here in the 1970s and the 1980s. Had a protracted exploration, start, stop, start, stop, and that's really the opportunity it's given us. We came in here, we looked at it, we actually liked the copper potential, but we. Walking the ground and walking across these areas of old workings, we quickly realized there's an opportunity here for the gold, and we set about drilling that, and got really immediate success here. So if we look at this project, you know, it's a big area. We've now got a trend which is over 6 km. It wraps around the Cargo intrusive complex, and we start at the south there, Spur. It's the first area we were drilling last year.
Amazing results, and we've been able to slowly step out in Consols. We announced the acquisition of Ironclad earlier this week, an important sort of pearl on that necklace around the intrusion complex, and we're continuing to step up. Last week, I was up at Alpine. Walking along that, we see the same things. It looks exactly like Consols. You walk across this area, there's old workings, there's old adits, there's some drill holes. You hit rocks, it's got gold in them, so it's a fantastic place to be. So rapidly growing that scale, and we'll have a look at Spur, we'll have a look at Consols, and we'll have a look at those individually. So the Spur Zone, the picture at the top there was this time last year.
The picture down the bottom here, January, it's where we are today. So you can see how we've not only grown Spur, it's now of an area 1 km by 250 m, large, large zone of good mineralization at surface. It's got high-grade shoots, multiple high-grade shoots, and those sorts of 10 m at 10 g type material. But, you know, really you can see Consols growing there, and that was really good exploration from our team, stepping across the Essex Fault there, and going: "Well, okay, we see the same thing at Spur, it should be at Consols." And, you know, again, it's a systematic, aggressive drilling that's growing the system into quite an impressive, impressive gold system now, and we're about moving it quite quickly. Often I look at drilling results globally.
It's all about, you know, strike rate, drill holes. You know, our 100 g, our 100 gm intervals, you know, we're sort of getting a 10% of those return on every drill hole we drill. So it's a fantastic strike rate here. Seven drill rigs active at the moment. Probably one of the bigger drill programs in New South Wales at the moment. We'd like to expand that actually. We've got 80,000 m of drilling that's underway at the moment. So, the board has a fortitude to understand this system and drill it, and the best way to do that was diamond drilling and piecing the system together. Long section of Spur, it's all about the understanding.
Now we understand the high-grade shoots, with now, you know, looking at those high-grade shoots, you can see those sub-parallel lines, shallow dipping, high-grade shoots, multiple zones. We're seeing 1 m over 100 g , 24 m at 7 g. They're the sort of results we're demonstrating now as we understand the system and bring it through. What do the rocks look like? It's a classic intermediate sulfidation vein, you know, related to a porphyry somewhere in the district. You know, coarse gold, and I think that's a real win for us, is, you know, when you get the diamond core, you can see the gold, and it allows you to understand the deformation where the gold sits in the system and then continue to target it.
So really nice grades, 2 m at 8 g, 1 m at 150 g, and these sit in broad halos of 1 g. So, you know, I think in the past, previous explorers probably focused on the high-grade zones and missed the fact that the wall rock is actually mineralized, and we see broad zones of good material in the wall rock that's, you know, economic grades at these depths. Cross-section, starting to fill these out. Again, broad zones, 200 m, sort of zones of, you know, 1, 1.5 g gold, but discrete high-grade shoots within there, and those high-grade shoots have really good grades in them. On to Consols, new discovery, aggressively drilling this.
Drill hole 62 last year really put us on the map with over 200 m at 1 g, 38 at 3, and 89 at 2. So this was a new discovery. Fantastic! We hit it a bit deep, now we're stepping it up. So we're actually sort of, I guess, doing it reverse. We hit it sort of about 400 or 500 m, now we're chasing it to surface, and we can see it surface where those outcrops are, where there's old workings. Again, very limited drilling. Same theme, quartz veins, visible gold, very coarse gold, very high grades, and earlier last week, we announced some really good drill holes, 15. You know, a nice 12 m at close to 10 g, getting closer to surface, and we're lifting that system up. This is really unlocking the project.
We believe this is gonna add a lot of ounces to this system, and, you know, drilling it quite aggressively. Great metallurgy, amazing recoveries, as you would expect. I'm not a metallurgist, but you look at the free gold in this system, you know it's gonna be a good gravity recovery, and then our test work's showing that very coarse gold. Exploration. So we started Spur, we've moved on to Consols at a discovery. We recently acquired Ironclad. We'll be drilling there in six weeks, and it's about stepping out and continuing to drill around this intrusion. So, a lot of news flow, real constant drumbeat this year, we like to say. So, you know, unique opportunity, good tenure, very good area, aggressive drilling, and a team that's done it many times before. So, that's the pretty simple story.
As I said, you know, we're not doing anything that's, it's out there to, it's all about the exploration, about the drill bit delivering. Thank you.