Next up, we have Darren Gordon, Managing Director of Centaurus Metals. Darren is a chartered accountant with over 28 years experience as a senior resource executive, including extensive involvement in financing resource projects from both a debt and equity perspective. He has over 17 years experience operating in Brazil and has a deep understanding of the regulatory framework and general operating environment needed to advance resource projects through development to production. Thank you.
Thanks, Courtney. It's a great pleasure to be back here at Diggers & Dealers Mining Forum to provide a very timely update for how Centaurus is going and where the development of the world's next nickel sulphide mine is going to come from. There's been an enormous amount of work that's been completed over the last 12 months. We'll look at some of that today. It is really exciting times right now, in that we're really putting together the final pieces.
Big part of that is funding. Hopefully what you see on screen here is going to start coming out of the ground over the next couple of years. Just sort of a broad snapshot of Centaurus, where it sits right now. It is a Tier One asset in that it is one of the few nickel sulphide assets that will be developed globally. We are able to do that because we sit at the bottom end of the nickel cost curve, but we've established a project that's got a very long mine life, coming from a very large resource. That doesn't happen too often these days.
Nickel has been a commodity that's been on its knees over the last two or three years as Indonesia has put its mark on the world. I feel like there's a few things changing that are really enabling nickel to turn, and that's going to be exceptionally important for Centaurus. Just with the project that we've seen to date, a 15-year project life. As I said, bottom end of the cost curve. We've got through all the approvals processes. We've had our mining lease granted. We've got our environmental approvals in place. We've recently had the power line connection approved by the national operator.
Overlaid on that, it's really about getting through the financing. We've signed a five-year offtake agreement with Glencore. That's led into the debt funding process, which is running right now. With that, we're looking to bring to fruition over the next couple of months and enable us to make a final investment decision. We do have some serious project credentials coming from the fact that we are based in Brazil. It's great to see groups like MIC getting involved in Brazil. There's definitely been a lot more companies going to Brazil in the last three or four years.
That's only going to be good for people here in Australia on the ASX that sees this market as something that's in the distance. There's more and more operators that are going there, and they are going to have success. It is an underexplored part of the world. I think Jaguar really hits that home when you start to see the size and scale of the resource here. Putting all that together, we're looking to make investment decisions towards the end of the third quarter.
There's a lot of things that obviously we need to pull together on the funding in the next little while. There's a lot of work going on in the background to do that. I think it's a little bit about watch this space. Just going back over where we've been over the last 12 months. We raised a little bit of money just around this time at Diggers last year. Nickel market wasn't overly strong at that point in time, but it's enabled us to do all of the work that we needed to.
It led through getting the mining lease granted at the back end of 2025, then really set us up for a very busy period through the first half of 2026. As I touched upon earlier, there's an initial offtake agreement signed with Glencore. We were able to get some good traction with the Brazil National Development Bank on funding, which then led into very strong support and, I guess, term sheets seen from commercial lenders, and that's what we're working with right now.
We've had an incentive program from the state of Pará, which is the northern state where the Carajás Mineral Province is located, where Jaguar is, and I'll show you that on a map in a sec. All of those things are just helping us get this project off the ground. There's been a lot of activity that's gone on, really putting us in a position where we can make that investment decision then launch into the construction phase. Brazil does have great support from a critical mineral perspective. The government there is doing an enormous amount.
I think you could talk to any new operator that's gone to Brazil, and they will tell you part of the reason is that there is strong support being seen, whether it's rare earth, whether it's niobium, whether it's copper, whether it's nickel. You really are seeing that support come through with government. It is a well-established mining culture. Vale's been there a long time. In the south, in Minas Gerais, where MIC and Oceana are, there's 60 years of mining history there, just in the iron ore areas, just in and around that city of Belo Horizonte.
As you move into the north, into the Carajás where we're located, Vale's celebrating 40 years in that area. You've got multi-generational families that operate there. That really does stimulate the culture that's enabling these projects to be successful. Tax incentives. I talked to the Pará state incentives that came our way. We are also going to avail ourselves of a federal tax incentive once we become operational, where we will see a 15% tax rate for our project. I think the one big thing that really hits home and why Brazil, I think, is highly successful on a global stage is that 80% of the power on the national grid comes from renewable sources, principally hydro. That's great.
It's got a fantastic carbon footprint associated with that, but it really does come with low cost, it enables Brazil projects, if you've got size and scale, that you will generally be at the bottom end of the cost curve. I think that that's important for anyone who's trying to look to get a project up and running there. If you can get your scale right, you'll generally have a low-cost operation. The Carajás. It really is a prolific part of the world from a mineral endowment perspective. Those names on that page may not be that familiar to everyone, but I can tell you top of page, Salobo, largest copper mine in Brazil.
Vale is operating there at about 36 million tons a year of throughput, produces about 250,000 tons of copper and about 400,000 oz of gold. S11D in the middle of the page, highest grade iron ore mine in Brazil, probably globally at the moment, running around 66% iron ore, producing about 90 million tons a year. When you look at their iron ore coming out of there for Vale, it's about 150 million tons in total. Copper, they're looking to push up towards 700,000 tons of copper coming out of this region by 2032. That investment that Vale's making in this region is sitting at around about AUD 12 billion.
It's what they call the Nova Carajás. You are in a part of the world which might be considered a little bit remote, being 800 km from the coast, but it's like an industrial center. You've got roads, you've got rail, you've got airport, you've got a main township there in Parauapebas, which is sitting at about 250,000 people. You do have all the mining service providers there. There's universities in the region. You've got second, third, fourth-generation mining families living and operating and wanting to have jobs there.
When you look at our project over onto the left, you see most of that area is farmland. Everyone's looking for a leg up. Everyone's looking for a new opportunity, and these mining projects that are operating in this region are providing that. That we feel like we're doing an enormous amount of work with the community to get our project supported, and that really comes from the generation of incomes, new jobs, and we're really seeing that come through all the time. In that bottom left corner, there's a couple of projects there. Onça Puma is Vale's ferronickel operation.
They've just expanded that, spent about AUD 500 million pushing it out to about 40,000 tons of ferronickel. Right down that bottom left corner is a project built by Ero Copper, Boa Esperança, now called the Tucumã Project, which is a 4 million ton per annum copper flotation plant. Why I just point that one out is that the project director that we appointed in April was the guy that actually built that project. He built that for about $340 million, did that in 22 months. We're saying to him, "Come in, basically do the same thing again."
We're looking at a 3.5 million ton nickel flotation plant. It's a bit of a rinse and repeat. Just anything he didn't quite get right last time, just fix it up this time. He's super excited about being with us and is really, I guess, giving us the momentum that we need to bring this project to fruition. That guy's name is Thiago Costa, center of page. Thiago's there. He's building out the team. We've also got great support coming from our board. It's a Board that's been together for some time, huge depth of experience in the mining sector, and really is enabling our project to come together.
We've got good broker support. I think everyone's looking at, okay, where is that? What is that investment opportunity? I look at that at the market cap that we are, and we compare that to the overall economics of the project that we put out, and we say that there's still an enormous opportunity there. Why we are probably trading at those levels is because we're coming in through this funding phase. I expect that once we're through that funding phase, the project cash flows that I'll show to you will be valued in a very different way. As I said, large resource, 1.2 million tons.
You can read the numbers at your leisure, but I think importantly, you can sort of see that it's really got the size and scale about it that most operators really want to have when they're looking to build a project, and particularly a new project in nickel. The resource, 138 million tons at around 0.87% nickel, 1.2 million tons contained. Of that, we've then run our reserve estimate of that. That's come in at around 400,000 tons. That provides us with a 15-year project life just from the open pit.
All the work we're doing with debt finances now, they've looked through this, as you would expect. There's ITEs that are crawling all over the place, helping the lenders to do their work. When they go and look at that resource, they really do not find too many holes. The drilling that we've done has provided us a lot of confidence. The gold bar there really demonstrating that most of our resource is sitting in the measured and indicated category at around about 1 million tons contained. As I said, the resource, sorry, converts to a reserve of around 400,000 tons of contained nickel metal.
It's really going to be a very simple open-pit operation. Nothing overly complex about it. Nothing overly complex about the float plant that we're putting together. Having Thiago on board to deliver the project on something that he's pretty much already built only 30 km or 40 km down the road from where we will be located gives us huge amount of confidence on our ability to deliver this. The production profile there, you can sort of see 3.5 million tons a year all the way through, grade through the early part. Probably sitting at around 20,000 tons-22,500 tons of nickel for the first seven or eight years.
Little bit of a drop-off at the moment in year eight, but we would expect that that's going to get filled from underground operations as we look at that part of the project. I'll come back to 1.2 million tons contained on the resource, 400,000 tons in the reserve from the open pits, then we'll start to have a look at the underground where we've got a resource of about 300,000 tons. Of that, about 230,000 tons is sitting in the measured and indicated.
There's more work to be done. We've done some internal looking at it. It looks like there's a very good opportunity that we would expect that we can fill out the production profile, I really think that you could see 20,000+ tons of nickel here for 25, 30-odd years. This really just sort of sets out the cash flows that we're expecting to generate once we have the project up and running. Sitting at around $170 million per year at that 22,500 tons of nickel over those first seven years.
All-in sustaining costs at around AUD 4.43 a pound on a payable basis. That is at the bottom end of the cost curve. We compete with Indonesia very comfortably. That has really been the dominant force in the market over the last two or three years. It has kept the lid on nickel prices, we are now starting to see those lift. At AUD 4.43 a pound, that's where we sit relative to where the nickel price has been over the last 20-odd years. You can see that little tick-up at the beginning of the calendar year. I think it's probably worth just spending a little bit of time understanding that. Indonesia.
There'd been an enormous amount of supply coming through the market. That has been tightened up through new mining quotas that the Indonesian government has put in place. They've put in a new regime around royalties, which have pushed the costs up. They do want to get more of a royalty take coming out of the mining of their nickel ores. Then overlaid on that, you've had what's happening with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, is that the sulfur price has gone up, forcing sulfuric acid to go up, and you're starting to see HPAL operations in Indonesia become a lot more expensive.
Probably running at around about AUD 17,000 a ton cost. Projects like ours, we don't have that issue of needing to have sulfur. We have sulfur in the sulfide con. It is actually a very valuable part of the concentrate when we're talking to off-takers. They do like the fact that they can get some sulfur units coming out of the sulfide con that we are looking to produce. The arrangement that we had with Glencore is for about 1/3 of our annual production for the first five years, 20,000 tons of concentrate.
We are producing a very high-grade concentrate of around about 30% nickel. We do that because we have a millerite nickel sulfide species. It's not pentlandite. It is something that is a little bit different, little bit higher tenor, which makes it attractive for us in keeping logistics costs down. We don't need to produce anywhere near as much concentrate to deliver 20,000-odd tons of nickel per year. We are doing further work on off-take. We're working through the financing process with the banks right now. The ITEs have nearly finished their work. We would expect to be getting credit-approved term sheets from the financiers towards the end of September.
That leads into an investment decision. We'll look to be tying in the equity with that. The offtake that we're talking about for the balance is a bit of a work in progress. Hopefully, we can have some comments out around that over the next six to eight weeks. There's a little bit of activity going on now. Basic engineering's been completed. We're going in through that detailed design phase. The infrastructure work, we've started some, I guess, initial activities, widening the roads into site. Site establishment work around construction offices and those sort of things coming together, as you can see by the background photo.
The power connection has now been approved, so we can continue to advance the power line work that needs to be done. Thiago being appointed as the Project Director, I guess I reiterate this over and over because I don't think it can be underestimated how important it is to have someone of his experience, a Brazilian national, lives locally, knows the culture, and actually has done these sort of projects before. For us, that's a huge coup.
The financing is running its course. If I say it quickly, it sounds easy. It's not easy, but it's something that will bring our project to life, and there's a lot of work going on with the community. The schedule will see us have a two-year build once we've made investment decision. There, as I said, there's some work going on now at the early stage, it's really about getting through the build and have a huge amount of confidence in our team to be able to deliver that.
Just in closing, just to sort of bring that back to the value proposition. We do have a Tier One scale asset. There is no other nickel sulphide company on the ASX. There is very few of them operationally on a global basis. We will have strong cash flows once we're up and running. We've got our first offtake in place. That is supporting the financing process. We'll have further offtakes to announce before we get started.
Once we've got all of that funding in place, the cash flows that we can generate will be looked at very differently in the market. I do think that it's an opportunity for people that can follow a commodity that hasn't been that loved over the last two or three years. Find the right opportunity. We think Centaurus is it, and hopefully you can make that call yourself. If you'd like any other information, we're over at, I think it's booth 67. Come and see us. Thank you.