Thanks to the Denver Gold Group for the opportunity to speak here today. Our second year at this event. Last year was more about we were an emerging gold discovery. This year, we're here to talk about, we've had the discovery. We're talking about how we're drilling it out to understand how big this system could be at this stage. It's an early discovery, but we have up to 12 drill rigs on site at the moment. It's quite an aggressive drill program, and we really believe this is going to be quite a significant gold district located in one of Australia's premier gold belts. We're an exploration company. Exploration's a pretty simple business. You put together a good team of people, you have a good discovery, and then you return an above average return to shareholders. Once you get the ingredients right, you move quickly, nimbly.
In this industry, we all know the risk capital is incredibly impatient. When you have these projects and these opportunities, you've got to move rapidly through them, and we've got the right team. We've got a very strong conviction in what we have here. Our location of the project, we have two projects, but what we're going to talk about today is the Spur project located in western New South Wales in Central West. Why we like this project is that when you look at large projects around the world, they're pretty simply characterized, large footprints. You've got multiple discovery opportunities. The geology changes. It's dynamic. You often see high grades, you see low grades coexisting. This system sits open at the moment. What we're doing is we're stepping out along a trend, and by the end of this presentation, I hope that you'll understand that.
We've drilled the first 2 km of it, great success. We've got another 4 km to go. This is a system that we're learning the geology, and we're applying that learning as we move up and around this system. I guess the architecture's really important for what we're talking about here. When we look at these systems, when you look at porphyry copper deposits by nature, they're very large heat cells. They have a lot of metal budget, and they're big systems that generate a lot of gold and a lot of copper. What we're looking at here is a gold system that sits above and in the shoulders of a porphyry complex. By nature, these systems are large. They're quite homogeneous. They have high-grade parts, they have low-grade parts, but they really lend themselves to bulk mining.
When we look at the Cargo complex here, that's the area in pink. Our gold discoveries and our gold is occurring around the edges of it, starting at Spur in the south there, moving up to Consols, up to Ironclad, Golden Clad, Long Gully, and up to Gazzards. At this stage, we've drilled the first one and two. We've had a discovery at three. We're still trying to work out how big it is. This is a 6 km trend of deposits that are linked, and that's really, really important. When we look at the scale of the system, this is how you generate large ore deposits. We're all about exploration, and the drill bit's very, very important for us. I think when you understand this system, you look at the momentum that comes out of this, a lot of intercepts with 100 gram-meter intervals.
That tells you you are in a fertile system. It is a bit of an industry ranking now for gold deposits around the world. If you look at the drill holes drilled in the last 12 months, we have got an incredible strike rate of those really good holes. We are sitting here at the moment, 80 km of drilling almost done for this year, 11 drill rigs active, looking to grow that drill system. You look at some of the drill holes we have been putting out. Last week, 46 m at close to 7.5 grams gold. Broad zones, too. This is a system that we are still understanding, but it is very dynamic, but it has got a lot of the key characteristics you want to see of a world-class discovery. We run a pretty tight register, 388 million shares on issue at the moment.
Board and management on a fully diluted basis have about 10% of that. The share price at AUD 0.62. Market capitalization at AUD 240 million, but the last week or so, that is sitting at close to AUD 0.80 with a market capitalization over AUD 300 million. We are quite well-funded with AUD 57 million cash on bank. Strong register, really important. Some good industry people there that understand the industry. Very institutional and a lot of high net worths. Over the last two years, we have been able to successfully raise money at ever-increasing prices. We have a clear strategy of how we protect that register. We like to keep it in control, and we have always done raises close to or very minimum discounts. I will not dig into it too much, but suffice to say, we have got a team. It is a strong discovery record.
More importantly, globally, we understand what these systems are. We have all worked in them. Several people have done PhDs in these types of systems. We know how to take it through the development pathway and certainly into the studies. We have got a team that has also delivered commercial outcomes to all shareholders in these sorts of explorations, whether they have been hard or difficult. So a good discovery record.
We know the belt we are working in. We know the geology. Two of our directors actually live in Orange, so a very experienced team. But significant commercial capability to take it to the next level. The Macquarie Arc is one of the premier gold and copper belts in Australia. It is home. It is about 80 million ounces discovered in this area in the last two decades. Hosts very large deposits like your Cadia system, your Lake Cowal, and your Northparkes, and these are very large porphyry systems.
Cowal is more your intermediate sulfidation. What I am going to talk about today draws a lot of analogs with Lake Cowal. But this is a fantastic place to work. Several major mining opportunities. Very large projects. Some of the largest projects in Australia. It is a pretty stable area, and it is a community of mine workers, which is really important, too. Access to that human capital. Access to engineering groups and all that is all very close. If we zoom into where we are, the Spur project is located about 40 minutes drive to the west of Orange. It is a major city in central west of New South Wales. We are about 10 km to the west of the large Cadia complex operated by Newmont. You see the blue ground around that is an exploration project at the moment being managed by Gold Fields.
Great area to be, high voltage power, we have state grid, several mining operations, skilled workforce. But an amazing amount of untested opportunity, and that comes when you often have these blocks of ground held for a long time. Cost-effective exploration, no seasonality, all those good things you want to see, drilling around the clock, and certainly advancing the project. We do not have to worry about weather. We do not have to worry about those sorts of things. A little bit about Spur. It sits on 100% owned exploration license. That main exploration license covers certainly the Spur area, which is in the center there. You see that magnetic high with the labels around it from Spur Consols. That is the main area. And that actually sits on a mine in common. That mine in common is a really important piece of the puzzle here.
It is a very strong tenure to have in New South Wales, which means conversion to a mining license is quicker than any other tenure. And then within that, we actually hold several mining licenses too that we have been able to acquire over the last few months. Very strong foundations, good register, strong tenure, sitting in a very good area. You may ask why this deposit sits here today. It has had 160-year history of exploration. And in that year period, about 60,000 m were drilled across the district. We have drilled about 80,000 m in the last year, so we have certainly stepped up that understanding of the system. But before the war, this was a large alluvial field. Had a lot of alluvial gold, 30,000 people living on it. The war happened, people took off, and it kind of got forgotten. 1970s and 1980s, people returned.
Some of your larger copper groups, your BHP, your Anaconda, your Billiton, returned to the area looking for porphyry coppers after what they learned from South America, and also here in North America. Drilled a couple of holes, proved that it was a porphyry system. Very large intervals of 0.2 copper. Ticked that box. Newcrest came along on the back of the Ridgeway discovery in 1986, drilled similar holes. But the curiosity of those holes is what we saw, where there was no gold in them. It was only copper. So we got hold of the project in 2024, and then went about drilling, looking for the gold, because we knew there was something missing in the story. And it was an important step of our understanding. Some of the first drill holes there in the RC drilling, 11 m at 10 g showed us it had grade.
And then last year, we put together a hole 208 m at over a gram that showed it had scale. Since then, the project has been moving rapidly, and we have a clear strategy of where we are taking this project. And more importantly, it is about low discovery costs, right? The more you can throw at this, we just cannot get the holes in the ground quick enough at this stage to move up and around the system. I will show you a little bit about growth. We are pre-mineral resource. We do not have mineral resources yet. But you can sort of see the best way to show the growth of this system since July 2024 is you just keep your eye on those red patches. They will continue to grow to where we are now.
If we step into Consols, which is our discovery we had last year, it's a growing system. It's 300 m by 400 m, 600 m vertical. We believe that there's probably about a kilometer vertical extent of this system. That's how you big build resources. Basically what we're looking at is a series of east-west quartz sulfide sheeted vein arrays. Each one of those systems is 20 or 30 m wide, but then it has a buffer of lower grade copper. You're generating quite a big system here. This is still early days here. Despite finding this a year ago, we still haven't hit the edges of it. We still haven't hit the sides of it, and we still haven't hit the bottom of it. As we advance, we see it moving up and around. What's it look like in cross-section?
We look footwall for the Caluffi fault here. We can see how these high-grade shoots amalgamate. We suspect they're actually coalescing at depth, which is probably suggesting a hidden porphyry down there somewhere. What we're looking at is several high-grade zones. A lot of coarse gold in this. When you look at the rocks there, you see those bottom rocks there, very potassic, altered, pink, reddening. It's exactly what you see at porphyry environments of breccia. It's running 120 grams gold, but very low copper. Not uncommon features you see in some of these porphyry systems, Lachlan Fold Belt with gold sitting in the potassic zones above the porphyry. We look at that section. We intercepted these zones quite deep, but what we're doing is lifting them up the surface. Drill hole 75 we put out this week was another 80-meter step up dip.
That got a great result there with 46 m at close to over 7 grams. That's just showing what the high-grade nature of these systems are. A little bit at Spur. We have two drill rigs on this at the moment, and that's drilling out into a pattern. We're trying to basically pull this together into a resource model, which we're doing at the moment. Covers about a kilometer by 250 m. We've drilled it down to 300 m open pit depth. It remains open at depth. What we are stretching it up to the Essex fault. We cross that Essex fault, we get into Consols, which we previously spoke about. Multi-phase quartz gold stringers here. High grades occur mostly in shallowly plunging zones. If we look at these shallow plunging zones, we can see there's a control with the Tiwi Fault there.
Off that, we often get these intersections of these shallow plunging funds that host high-grade material, anything up to 10, 15, 20 grams over 10 m. At the moment, we're drilling this. We've got it on a 50 to 60-meter drill pattern, and we continue to expand and core drill at the same time. Again, similar theme to mineralization, probably a shallower level in the system than Consols. What it's telling us is that this will progress into a Consols-type system at depth. We talked about the first 2 km. Now we're going to talk about the rest of the another 4 km that wrap up in this system. What we had to do, they're hard to see there, but you can see the Golden Clad and Ironclad. They were mining licenses we had to consolidate.
We achieved that a few months ago, and that gave us the license to step out now. We took an RC rig, stepped out and started going and drilling some of the other gold systems that had historical mining in the northern part. We got some great results there. Alpine, 20 m at close to 2 grams from 50 m, 10 m at 4 from 76. Gazzards, 8 m at 3.5 grams from 120 m. And Ironclad, 35 m at 2. These are the drill holes that we went out with a scout program and drilled selective areas along that trend. What that did was it told us that we saw the same rocks, we saw the same type of alteration, saw the same type of mineralization.
What that told us was that it was a similar theme that we were able to now continue to track up, take the diamond rig, and then continue to drill these systems as they move to the north. The next six months will be interesting because we've already started that program. At the moment, we've got a drill rig at Ironclad, and we're testing some of these areas. We want to make sure that we're not missing some areas that are very high grade, shallow, while we're drilling some of the other projects. Now it's about prioritizing where we need to be as we move towards the maiden resource. The met work's pretty vanilla. At this stage, we've tested both Spur and Consols zones. Very, very good results. Very high recoveries from gravity, which you'd expect with very coarse gold.
And conventional leaching recoveries, the rest of it, that 74%. So you're looking at recoveries that are above 90%. So very good. No arsenic, none of the nasties, none of those sorts of things you need in the type of system. So a very good system. As I said, how you generate big systems is you work in areas with large heat flow. What we're looking at here, and this is our model, we're in an area of porphyries. You've got Cadia less than 10 km away. You've got Northparkes and you've got Lake Cowal. All these are modifications of the same theme. What we're looking at is it's important that you got two real value engines here, the epithermal gold. We believe the upper part of the system will be a multimillion-ounce system, very similar systems you see in South America, around the world.
In some of these porphyries, they generate that. It's great. But deeper down, we believe that there is a copper system here, too. And all indications are that as we drill deeper and getting more gold, it's getting hotter, and we're getting close to that source. This is a district that will have a lot of exploration to go. The company's strategy in the next six to eight months is to focus on getting out that gold resource. And in the background, I believe that that will generate the vectors for the deeper copper systems. So a little bit technical, but I think it's also very important that the systems you work in often lend themselves to the types of mines you have. And these systems, these epithermal systems, particularly ones associated with porphyries, they have vertical extents as a kilometer, as I said.
We are proving that at the moment. They create favorable resource economics. I think that is really important. They are attractive targets for open pit style mining, sometimes underground, bulk underground. Low capital intensity, they are big systems, a lot of gold. I think for us, more importantly, this system is one of the easiest systems I have worked on in drilling. There is a clear geological framework to the way we attack it, and then it is delivering. I think if you look on the side there, you see those pictures, the top two rocks, that is Spur, upper part of the system, very green chlorite, lower temperature. We cross a major fault, we get into Consols. We are getting closer to the porphyry environment. Seeing breccias, a lot of free gold. Temperature increasing, grade increasing. It is all telling us to go deeper.
For us, we have a pretty steady drill program, bouncing between 11 and 12 drill rigs at the moment, which is one of the most aggressive programs on the east coast of Australia. Spur, we have two drill rigs at the moment in number 1 down there. They are plugging away. We like the area between Spur and Consols. We are expanding that. That is a new area. We get into Consols, we have seven or eight drill rigs allowed on that. Now we are starting to drill Ironclad, and hopefully by the end of the year, we will have a couple of diamond holes up in the north, too. That trend there is basically stretching from an alluvial goldfield, which is Gum Flat, all the way up and around over 6 km.
A combination of resource drilling, expansion drilling, exploration, and some deeper drilling going on at the same time. We have a lot of news flow. There will be a constant drumbeat of news flow over the next 12 to 18 months. I think that is really important for a story like this to generate those catalysts you need. Looking at generating an exploration target, probably a maiden MRE, diamond drilling in the north, continued network. I think the opportunity here is this is a rare 10-year opportunity. It is a great place to develop a mine.
I think the company has that investor appeal, that it is a pretty tight register, good shareholders, and we are putting money in the ground aggressively. Only a small fraction of the system has actually been explored to date. We are in that exciting stage of how big can this system actually be? You look at peers around the world, they can be quite big systems. That is us. Thank you.
Fantastic. Thank you, Andrew. Do we have any questions? Yes, just stand up, please, and we will get a mic over to you, mate.
Thank you, Andrew.
Hey, John.
Just wondered if you got any thoughts on how we might actually get into mining eventually. Is it too early? I am just wondering if there is enough decent stuff near the surface for open pit, or obviously they are high grade, lower down, so you might need to go straight to underground. Thanks.
Well, we are still early stages. I think we need to work out what it looks like, and we are doing that at the moment in terms of when you build resources, you build the veins, and you understand what the nature of those systems are and the architecture how they fit together. That is what generates your understanding on how you would mine these systems. So early days, but there is an alluvial goldfield here, too, that I am not allowed to talk about how much gold is in it, but was drilled by Billiton in the 1980s. There is opportunities like that. So you are going to have to take that off the top of this system anyway. But there is a lot going on.
I think at this stage, we need to run a bit harder maybe even, and just see how big the system could be before we look at that.