There we are. That's the picture I wanted. That is the Qala Shallows project in Johannesburg, 15 km from the center of Johannesburg that we've set up there. You can see that we have a decline established, and we have the whole mine infrastructure in place, including potable water, fuel, generators, and so forth. That is now, I'm proud to say, in operation. That project is now operating. Started at the beginning of September. We call it Qala Shallows because it's a new beginning, and I hope to explain to you what we're trying to do on the Witwatersrand Basin here and start a new beginning. There's the disclaimer. To keep you interested, I've put a photo in there for you to look at of one of our LHDs, which is good, so you can be a test on the disclaimer later.
Okay, so let's cut to the chase. Why do you want to invest in this company? I have to show you why you would invest in this company. I've tried to just distill it here into a few high points that we'll sort of drill into later. The first one is that we're in gold. As Paul and the other speakers have said, gold's the hot item at the moment. If any time you want to be in gold, it's now. We're in gold, and we're producing gold. We have a large resource and lots to go. In terms of our economics, you want to have a project that's viable, where we've done our DFS, our bankable study was updated and released again in July, and showed very strong fundamental economic returns. That's another good reason to focus on us.
The other thing is you need to be funded. I mean, I think as the last speaker said, great, you've got to be funded. We are fully funded now through to sustainable production, which we'll get into how we did that funding, but we are funded. We are in one of the best, if you're going to be in a gold project, you want to be in the best place in the world to do it. I'm going to, I think, convince you that Witwatersrand Basin is the best place to be still. In terms of, you also have the team to execute the plan, and I'll take you through who we've got to do that. We have a really strong social licence program in place as well. That's, again, just to give you a snapshot of what we're doing.
We are West Wits Mining. We own 74% of the South African project under the BEE requirements there. We have a 5 million ounce resource. We're starting the first underground gold mine in South Africa in 15 years. It's actually quite interesting. It's getting a lot of play over there in the press and in the parliament. We're on track at the moment to do our first gold pour in March next year. We're going to stockpile for a while, but we will be pouring gold in March. We also have an asset in Western Australia in the Paterson Province, which is an interesting project where we've got some interesting results. It's in a farming at the moment with Rio Tinto, but there'll be more news on that at the end of the year or early next year on what we're doing with that.
The corporate snapshot, we're a pretty clean structure now. We have a good ratio of shares to options. We've had a really strong market run in the last sort of six or eight months. We've come from a market capitalisation of about $70 million at the start of the year to about $200 million at the moment. I think we're at $200 million today. As I said, we're funded. We've done two pivotal capital raises this year. So we've got over $12 million in the bank, and we have a JORC resource of 5 million ounces. But you can see on the graph down the bottom there, you can see what sort of share price appreciation we've had recently. This is the team, and I really want to concentrate on the key people that are implementing it. I was the leader of this company for a long time.
I am still the leader, the Chairman, but I'm not the key guy. The key guy is the guy in the middle, Rudi Deysel. I've had 40 years as a commercial lawyer. You don't want a lawyer running a gold mine. You now have a mining engineer and a geologist running the gold mine. He's had 25 years' experience in African mining, all sorts of mining, but in particular narrow vein, narrow reef type mining like this, underground. We also have, I want to talk about Tizama Kulate at the bottom there. Tizama is our key corporate and community relations person. She's done a fantastic job. It's very important where we are to have good relations with our communities. We are building a mine that's going to employ 1,000 people in an area that needs employment.
She's done a great job of connecting that sort of good news story with the local communities. In terms of where we are, I mentioned the Wits Basin, and I think a lot of people in this part of the world have forgotten about the Wits. Maybe people that are older haven't, but it's a wonderful goldfield. It is, by a landslide, the biggest goldfield in the world, in the world's history. It has, even today, when it hasn't been producing at its peak for some time, it still accounts for 22%-25% of the world's gold. All the gold mined in 6,700 years of known gold mining, 22% of it has come out of this field. I think that's important for people to recognize that. That's one, to put the numbers on it, but the numbers are a bit meaningless without context. It's 1.5 billion ounces.
These leases we're sitting on have produced 35 million ounces. These are big numbers. Just again, to put it in perspective, I come from Victoria, which once had a very proud and large gold mining industry. It has some gold mining still. The total production of Victoria since 1850 to now is about 77 million ounces. Compared to here, you can see this is 20x-25x bigger. I think if you're going to mine gold, go to where the gold is. I mentioned funding. We are funded. We're funded by a variety of three sources of funds for our mine. One is equity. We've raised the equity. We've met the equity requirement with the banks. We have two separate loan facilities in place, fully executed, and one is about to be drawn down, the Nedbank loan facility for $12.5 million.
The other one is a more conventional banking facility backed by Absa Bank and the IDC in South Africa for up to $50 million. I'm probably going to tell you we're not going to use all that debt funding because the third source of our funding comes from production ore during development, which we're now producing gold. And all of our numbers were done using a $2,850 gold price. So this production ore we're now going to be making over the next 12 or 18 months is going to be reducing our reliance on debt quite substantially if you look at those numbers. In terms of where we've been, it's important to look at the track record of the company. We have delivered the DFS. We've delivered all the mining rights and approvals.
We've secured the project funding early this year, and we've signed off on all the definitive legal documents now. We've started first production. We started in September with production, which is on time. We're delivering ore to the plant where we're toll treating. Our first gold pour is due, as I said, in March. There will be further ongoing ramping up of production. We've literally got equipment arriving every second day on the site. It is really ramping up. The goal, and this is, again, as I said, the earlier speaker said, this is only stage one, the Qala Shallows project. The Qala Shallows project will ramp up to 70,000 ounces for a period of 12 years steady state, but a 17-year life of mine in total. It's great to see some pictures of the machinery working underground. That's a very recent picture. We've commenced.
All of the infrastructure's in place and operating. We're using some new modern methods such as hydropower in the mine. We're in the process of building that stockpile as we speak. The economics, I think, as I said earlier, in the feasibility side of things, the economics are everything. I just want to take you through this one a bit slower so we can see the economics here in the DFS. By the way, this DFS, as I said, was released in July, but it included a lot of the costs in it were actually contracted costs we're now let the contracts are using. They're not guesses. These are based on numbers that are real.
It's showing huge revenue, free cash flow of almost $1 billion over the 17 years, an NPV post-tax of $500 million, an internal rate of return at 81%. That's all done at a gold price of $2,850. If you actually factor into the process and you look at some of our sensitivity analysis in the DFS release, at the current gold prices, some of those numbers, like the NPV, will go to almost $900 million at the moment. I think you can see that it's got very strong credentials. I think we've put the point in there that even at $1,850 gold price, it's delivering a 35% internal rate of return. There's a long way for the gold price to drop before this project becomes unprofitable. That's the reason we're backed by a strong inventory.
This Qala Shallows uses about a million ounces of a 5 million ounce resource. We're only deploying 20% of our known resources at the moment. A lot of that's in measured and indicated. We have an ore reserve that takes us seven years out. That's important because it covers the bank loans, and the banks wanted to see plenty of coverage and buffer for the repayment of their loans. That's why we had to put all that into reserve. I think the other thing about the banks just to mention is we've been through a very detailed and robust due diligence period of six months with these banks. It's not just the company telling you these numbers are validated. The banks are telling you. The banks, believe me, they have a phalanx of advisors on these things.
We've been through not only our own process of validating the project, we've been validated by the banks, which is unusual for a junior company, I think you'll agree. The overall gold resources are much larger. There's over 5 million ounces in JORC declared there now with 65% in measured and indicated. I think it'll go a lot further. The historic resource on this property, which was reported in JORC at around 2000 from the previous owner, was 12.8 million ounces. We've only scratched the surface. This 5 million ounces, most of it's constrained to a 400 m depth. In Qala Shallows, we go deeper because we have a water pillar. There's water in the basin below 400 m that we could pump and plug. At these gold prices, it's looking like it might be worth doing that.
At the moment, the resource statement is fairly modest in terms of what we know is under our feet there. There is plenty of scope for upside in this whole project based on the resource side of things. That is the buildup of our resource thus far from 2016. You can see how we have built the resource and the reserves. There will be more growth. As I mentioned, there was a large historic resource that is still there. It is a matter of deciding whether under current JORC we bring it onto the books or not and how we bring it onto the books. There is plenty of upside here for further enhancement of that resource base. Looking at our current tenement, it is in the teal or blue area. We also have the yellow area, which is in a prospecting right, which enables us to extend Qala Shallows.
All of our resource statements, or certainly our feasibility studies, are based on that Qala Shallows area mark one. There's another four targets that we've put into scoping studies. We know the gold's there. We know it can be done. We just haven't put it into a feasibility yet because, to be honest with you, I didn't have the money. Qala Deeps is just the extension of Qala Shallows, so that will be a relatively straightforward extension of that project. We have the Bird Reef, which is a whole different reef system in the middle of the property that's carrying 2-3 g of gold and is untouched. We've got remnants of the main reef left, which is running at very high grades.
On the left of the picture, we've got what we call Bird Reef Central, which is a discreet project where we have two reefs running alongside each other. One is heavy in gold and one is heavy in uranium. What we plan to do with that is put that into a feasibility study to show that it can be mined together. We think we already have an exploration target there of 12-16 million of uranium. We've just got to drill that out and put that together with the gold. We've never looked at them together because we never had a situation where gold was good and uranium was good. That is a very exciting upside for the company, which we'll be getting onto in the next 6-12 months. Key milestones we've been through. We've produced our first ore.
I think you've got to judge a company in terms of assessing its future going forward. You've got to judge it on its record. We have delivered. It's a hard job, I can tell you, bringing a gold mine into production. Many people here would know that, but it is a hard job. Maybe I wouldn't have started if I knew how hard it was. We are here now and we're producing. We've done that. We've got all the approvals. We've got our first gold pour due next year, and we'll be building up to steady state. There's going to be a lot of action happening in the next couple of years. I think we can verify that by pointing to our history of deliverance on these matters. We just can't help putting pictures in to show that it's real.
There are some current pictures from last week of what is going on at the mine. I am going over there in a few weeks. We are having a big opening with the High Commissioner of Australia and the Mining Minister and so forth. We are getting the whole site prepared for that. As I said, in South Africa, they are quite strong, as they should be, on their ESG. We have very strong social labor plans with our local communities. We are tapping 1,000 people to work at the mine from the local area. We do not have to put up accommodation or anything. People just walk to work. We are on mains power. We are going to put some solar in, but we are actually on mains power at the moment. I think I have gone over time. That is it. Thank you very much.