All right, next up, another name that many of our RIU regulars will recognize, and one of the near-term goldies who's looking to go into production in 2026. Let's talk West Wits Mining with the Chairman, Michael Quinert, and hear about the next stage of their project development. Please make him very welcome, everyone.
Thanks, Chrissy, and thanks, everyone. Glad to be at my first RIU Fremantle. What a buzz it is here. Fantastic to be here and see you all. So this slide, I think the cover slide of West Wits, I think says a lot. We're going to work. This is not an exploration project anymore. This is, this is in work now, and it was a significant moment for us to open the mine again and start extracting ore last October from the famous Witwatersrand Goldfields in South Africa. We feel this is a rebirthing of this wonderful ore body, and in fact, this was the first underground gold mine opened in South Africa for 15 years, which drew a lot of media attention and a lot of high-profile attention there last December when we had the opening.
In terms of where we are, why would you invest in West Wits? I think that's one of the key questions we forget to answer sometimes to our investors, and I think taking out of this slide, the key points for me are: well, first of all, we've gone where the gold is. This is a world-class gold field by any measure, the best gold field in the world. Also, I think a big issue for junior companies is to have good projects, can the project be funded? And I can tell you it's a battle, but this project is now fully funded, and we have commenced ore production last October. So, if you want to capture the strong gold thematic at the moment, West Wits is a great vehicle.
We're the newest, just in terms of our snapshot on the company itself, we're the newest underground gold mine in South Africa. We have a very large resource, which I'll touch on later, and we have a second project in the Paterson Province of Western Australia here, which we're putting back into an exploration phase soon. In terms of our structure, it's a strong cash position. We've done a recent capital raise. As I said, we're fully funded. We have $50 million in the bank at the moment. We have a market capitalization moving up now at $350-odd million, and it's been strong support recently from institutions in Australia and elsewhere, and we own 74% of the project, have a very cooperative and constructive Black Economic Empowerment partner.
In terms of the team, I think the key people... I mean, when you're in execution phase, you know, we now need to show that we can execute with discipline and professionalism and efficiency, and the key people here, I think, is, one, Rudi Deysel, my CEO and MD, a mining engineer with over 25 years experience in Africa, including underground mine, mining stopes, very similar to what we're mining here at the Qala project. So in the execution phase, I've got a lot of faith in Rudi. I've worked with him for 5 years, and I've got no doubt he will deliver this project on time and on budget. Tozama Kulati Siwisa is very important, too. She's my Local Director there. She's our community and government liaison person. Very important to have alignment with the communities.
We're operating only 20 km west of the city of Johannesburg, north of Soweto, so we have a lot of communities around us. It's important that we have those all aligned with our interests, and she's been doing a fantastic job. I think she won last year the Rising Star Award from AAMEG here at, in Perth, so she's, she's being recognized on the international stage. So, you know, why, why do I say we got a lot, lot of gold? Well, I'll quote the literature: "The Wits Basin," and people forget this, "is by a landslide, the largest single gold-producing district in world history. It's produced some 22%-25% of all known gold to date." So if you go back 7,000 years since people started looking for gold, this has produced 22% of the gold.
In terms of putting that in some perspective, in modern-day perspective, if we looked at the Kalgoorlie Golden Mile, which is the best, most, you know, densely mineralized gold system in the world in terms of its position, in terms of its size, it's produced 65 million ounces over its 130-year history, moving into the Super Pit. All of the state of Victoria, the whole state of Victoria's gold fields, and Victoria, we seem to think we're built on gold, but it's only produced 80 million ounces since it started in 1851. So that was 65 million ounces for the Kalgoorlie Golden Mile, 80 million ounces for Victorian gold fields. The Wits has produced 1.5 billion ounces.
So if you put Kalgoorlie Super Pit together with all of the state of Victoria, you still have to multiply by a factor of ten to get to what this gold field's produced. Our mining area alone has produced over 31 million ounces, and this is a monster by any standard. So if you wanna... As I said earlier, if you wanna get gold, go to where the gold is. For an aspiring developer, as I said earlier, funding is the key, and West Wits has secured funding through last year, a lot of hard effort. We have a bank facility with two banks in South Africa for $50 million, ready to draw upon in about June this year.
We also have a facility with Nebari Natural Resources Fund in New York, and now Nebari are giving us the optionality. They're putting a proposal to us to replace the bank. So we actually now have a position, which is really weird for a company that's been an explorer going to developer, that we have actually two sources of funding. Importantly, I think, as well as the money itself, is the fact that investors can take comfort from the fact that this project has been through a rigorous six-month due diligence process with those banks. They don't lend money easily. We've had a phalanx of independents look at this project and validate our capacity to execute and the ore body itself. So I think that's also important to note.
We're moving, by the way, to a gold pour next month, so we are also in production. So, this is as I say, we're up and producing, the equipment's moving, we're not reinventing the wheel here. We're using tried and true mining methods of South Africa that have been used for 100 years, but we're combining that with tweaks of modern technology, such as trackless vehicles, and we're using hydropower and various other systems. But basically, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, which is another one of our a key part of our philosophy is to de-risk things, so we're not trying to use a new mining method.
In terms of the DFS itself, which we released last July on this Qala Shallows, which I emphasize again, this is only stage one of the project. It produces a steady state of 70,000 ounces a year. The life of mine is 17 years. All these numbers have been done, by the way, on a gold price. The consensus price the banks used last year was $2,850 an ounce. What a world away that is. So on that rate, we still generate free cash flow of $1 billion, and we have an NPV post-tax of $500 million, with an internal rate of return, post-tax, post-tax of 81%. So you can see now, if you extrapolate that to the current gold price, it's a very strong project.
Strong reserve, the banks make us have a reserve, so we've got 7 years covered in the reserve at a cut-off grade of 1.31. That's for this project showing very strong profile. In terms of the actual gold resource, as I said, the Wits is big. This property was originally run by another company that was listed on the ASX, and in 2001, they had to report under JORC, and they reported a 12.8 billion... sorry, million-ounce resource. So you can see there that while we've rehabilitated 7.2 million ounces of that at 4 grams a ton, there's still more to come here.
What we've done is constrain the resource to 400 meters to not get into the flooded basin, but you can see if we de-water some of those areas, we'll actually be able to put a lot more gold onto the project. In terms of the Qala Shallows Project I went through a minute ago, that only uses 1 million ounces of this 7.2 million ounce resource. The growth, this is showing the growth of the resource base, which was pretty linear through... There's a lot of historical records here. You see, we've had strong growth and why we will validate getting back to that 12, somewhere near that 12 million ounces.
The other thing we have on this project is, you know, we need to walk before we run. So we need to what's ahead, we need to prove that we can actually deliver this, but also we need to focus on ways of monetizing this massive resource. So to do that, we're now funded to look at other initiatives, including a Project 200. Our current project goes to 70,000 ounces. We think we can get it to 200, so we've commissioned a scoping study on that, and we're also looking to open a new project, in terms of a uranium project, I'll get to on the next slide, I think. Yes. So we also have a uranium gold project, which is totally standalone and separate to this.
It has a gold resource, it has a uranium exploration target, but we should be able to take that forward with an exploration project program this year, providing further news flow and upside for the company in terms of this asset. Recent capital raise, we raised AUD 33 million in January this year, showed really strong investor interest in buying from Australian institutions for the first time. That's given us confidence to now accelerate these other projects and continue with the Qala development, which is fully funded. So the pathway forward, there's gonna be a lot of news flow over the next year or so with the development, the continuing development of Qala Shallows, the Project 200 project, and also the Uranium Gold project. And here's just a few pictures to show what we're doing on site at the moment.
I'm running down on time, so I'm trying to finish on time. Also wanted to mention, we have a strong ESG program here with local communities, education projects, and economic development, which is required under our license conditions there. So I've just about reached the end of my time. Thank you for your time.