Investigator Silver are developing Australia's only pure play silver development in Australia. I say pure play quite deliberately because unlike other Australian silver development projects, this isn't a lead and zinc con with silver as a byproduct. We're producing a silver doré, so a silver bar that's sold directly to the bullion dealers that provides that 100% uplift in the or exposure to the silver price. Why silver? Look, really quickly, silver is a unique metal in that it both has a monetary value in terms of stored wealth, just like gold, but it also has an important industrial demand that's been spoken about a little bit already this morning. Really important in solar, EV, AI, data centers, semiconductors, all manner of green energy technology.
As the world continues to decarbonize through electrification, that demand for silver, which is the most conductive metal known, continues to increase. It's the supply side that's quite interesting because only about a quarter of silver is actually coming from primary silver miners. These are the guys actually looking for the stuff. The vast majority is coming as a byproduct of gold, copper, lead, and zinc miners. These gold and copper miners are not changing their production profile, just going to get a bit more silver because the silver price has gone up. It means that the supply response is basically priced inelastic. Where that silver comes from is quite interesting as well because it's about 70%+ that's coming from Latin America, China, and Russia. This is hardly the poster children for geopolitical stability and investment attraction.
There is very little that's actually coming from true Tier- 1 investment-grade jurisdictions. What we have here is this increasingly tight supply, but a growing demand, and it's led to a number of years of deficits that's pushed the price earlier this year to record levels. As the world continues to work towards a decarbonized future, that demand and deficit is forced us to continue. It's into this backdrop that we are building Australia's only pure play silver project. Where is it? It's in South Australia. It's about 60 km north of township of Kimba, but it's about two hours just west of Whyalla and Port Augusta. Major mining hubs that have great access to skilled labor, mining equipment, and support services. You can see the picture here. It's located in an area that is dry, it's sparsely vegetated.
It has highly saline groundwater, can't support livestock. It basically has no competing land use. We've been working with our traditional owner partners for about 14 years now. We've identified all the areas of cultural significance. The mine was actually designed in consultation with them to ensure that the footprint didn't interact with those areas. We've just recently completed all of our heritage surveys over about the 5,000 hectare mining lease, and that is now working through that native title agreement process. Importantly, being in South Australia, it is a true Tier- 1 investment grade jurisdiction. One in AUD 15 of the state economy is coming from the mining. They've developed frameworks to basically encourage, in a very pragmatic way, to be able to move from development into production. That's been recently recognized by the Fraser Institute.
Not only does it put South Australia as the number one location from a mineral potential point of view anywhere in the world, but it's number four globally and number one in Australia from investment attractiveness. It also helps that we've built mines in South Australia before. I actually led the Kanmantoo underground development. Those guys are speaking in the next session. Encourage you to check it out. By building that and taking that through from permitting all the way through the exploration, the permitting, the financing into build, it's given a track record that the government are quite happy to then support because they're also spending a lot of time and energy putting these permits in place. They want to make sure that as they award mining leases, that that proponent will put those operations into production and provide that increased economic activity.
We have that track record and that permitting process is working really quite well. We've been engaging now with government on all of the studies. Been through the hydrogeology, ecology, tails, fauna, the whole works, and working through that process with government and expect that we'll have the permitting all wrapped up by about this time next year. In terms of the project itself, simple would be the best way to describe it. It's basically an open pit operation. The ore body sits only 10 m below surface. It's 2 km long, up to 600 m wide. This is a really simple project that's really amenable for obviously low-cost bulk open pit mining. In terms of the large amount of ore that we're sitting on, it enables us to build stockpiles very quickly. This does two things.
It means that we can actually start to bring forward high-grade material and ensure that we're getting some nice grades early on in the mine plan. The first few years running about 4.5 million-5 million ounces a year before it then tails away for the rest of the sort of 10-year, 11-year mine life and about 3.5 million-4 million ounces per annum. In terms of spice, if you're a mining engineer in the crowd or geotechnical engineer, this is not going to be a project that's going to provide a lot of challenge. Maybe not the one for you. The same sort of goes from a metallurgical point of view. If you're a metallurgist, this is going to be a relatively simple, boring sort of project.
The reality is here that we have a conventional flow sheet that's used in all primary silver mines around the world. Basically, 3-stage crush, 1.5 million tons per annum through a cyanide leach, Merrill-Crowe process. Exactly the same process that's used for everyone that's producing a silver bar around the world. Not a lot of Well, no novel technology and no real things for a metallurgist to get stuck into. Not a lot of challenge here. Simple, reliable process is what we're looking for. Bit the same on the production side. Oh, sorry. We are producing a silver doré. What we actually see here is that we don't have those concentrate handling complex logistics. We don't have any opaque offtake agreements. We're not arguing with smelters at this point. Even the commercial guys on this project don't have a heap to do.
This is a really simple, dare I say, sort of boring project. What happens when you've got an exciting, I guess, silver market with a relatively straightforward boring project is that you actually get project economics that are anything but boring. We had a DFS that came out in February this year. These are the current prices we're seeing at the moment, around $60 silver, and we're throwing off about $1 billion in free cash over about an initial 11-year process. The mine life, the repayment period is about 13 months. Initial capital build of about $260 million is repaid during that period. We have a relatively low All-in sustaining cost that enables margins in the order of about 50% or above.
Importantly, because it is a silver doré, so a silver bar that we're taking direct to ABC Bullion or Perth Mint or like direct to the bullion dealers, we are fully leveraged to the silver price. Every $1 translates to about an extra $42 million in free cash generation, an extra $27 million of NPV. Completely leveraged to that silver price. What we're concentrating on now since the DFS is really getting ready for construction. There's three main work streams. There's permitting, there's the execution readiness, there's the detailed engineering, and the financing.
On permitting, as I've said, working through the mining lease, and we're well on track to having all of that all put together by about the end of the year, or sorry, the middle of next year, in terms of fully permitting, heritage surveys done, and working through that native title mining agreement process. In terms of the detailed engineering, we are basically going from what was, I guess, ±25%, 30% at DFS level, getting it to issue for construction work plan. That basically when we hit FID, we are ready to then walk forward, and immediately get into construction. On financing front, we've already engaged independent technical experts, so the type of work that lenders are going to want to see.
In addition to that, we are just starting off now a detailed infill drilling program right in the heart of the ore body. After building your last couple of mines, lenders really will focus on the area of the ore body that's going to repay the debt. For us, it's this stage 1 pit area. It's already actually drilled to 25-m spacing. We're actually going to bring that down to 12.5-m spacing. For every hole we've currently got in there, we actually add another three holes. What this high data sort of density drilling will do is actually get lenders to a quite a comfortable point that their debt, in fact, will be repaid, and we expect that that will translate into faster DD and a lower cost of capital.
They are the major work streams that we're putting together over the course of the next 12 months. In terms of the team, we've been building out that capability. On the slide here, basically, the only person that was here this time last year was Jason Murray in the top right-hand corner. He's been with the project now for 13, 14 years and effectively stewarded this process through from early stage discovery to now 57 million ounces of silver and continuing to grow. Everyone else on this slide has been brought in more recently, really to construct this project. Everybody here has basically permitted, financed, and built and operated mining operations. Joe and myself, last project we did was in South Australia, the Kanmantoo build. We took that through from early stage exploration, through the feasibility, through the permitting into development and into operations.
Milan, he's been working on the Peak Iron assets to the north of the state, basically involved in the infrastructure builds of all of those assets up in the Gawler Craton. Geoff largely led the Carrapateena, the block cave, their AUD 1 billion-dollar expansion, block cave expansion for OZ Minerals at the time. These guys have all recently joined, and just a couple of weeks ago, we put on Byron Gordon. Byron basically has about 25 years of history of financing projects in exactly the stage we're in now, from development through to operations. These are people who have all built mines before, and now our mission is basically to permit, to finance, and to build this operation. We've got the team to be able to do it.
In terms of what we look like over the course of the next 12- 18 months as we work towards construction and then into first silver production is obviously permitting completing by this time next year. As we do that, we're building out that engineering, taking it through to those issue for construction work plans, ensuring that we're ready to build at FID, and we undertake that detailed drill out just to get the lenders to a comfortable position to assist in that financing process. We have about AUD 60 million cash in bank, we're well-funded to also consider long lead items. These are things like MCC, switchgear, ball mill, things that can really bring forward that project and the first silver delivery, as well as the enabling works. Things like camp, power, road construction. We're well-funded to be able to consider those.
Effectively, a two-year build process and silver production in 2029. That's really just, I guess, the baseline project we're currently working on. This was a pit that was used in the DFS that came out in February. The red here, or the red and blue here is the geological model. Red being indicated, blue being lower geological confidence in inferred. We deliberately restricted the size of the pit to not include that inferred material. In fact, the Whittle shell at a much lower price than where we are today actually wanted to push into these areas highlighted by the blue boxes. Effectively, it was way pushed to the north, the east, and the south. We deliberately restricted it because I did not want to have a feasibility plan that had a high degree of inferred.
We're out here drilling these areas now, I fully suspect as we get more drilling in there, these areas go from blue to red, so a high geological confidence. They get into the mine plan, that mine plan grows, Additional value comes into that process. In addition to that, we actually used a cut-off grade based at $ 48. We're currently trading about AUD 60 at the moment. There's fully 6 million ounces within that pit design that doesn't make margin at AUD 48, but it makes it at AUD 60. That additional 6 million ounces with price as it is now comes into a future mine plan. We've been making sure that as we go through the permitting process, that we're geared up for this.
The tails dam not only houses all of the planned 30 million ounces of production over that period, but also accommodates an additional four years' worth of mining on top of that, which would see all of this life within it. In addition to that, really, Paris is sitting within about a 15 long km corridor. You can sort of see it there sort of towards the top of the pit area there. To the north, we have some excellent hits. Around 5 km away, we have Apollo, about 8 m, 1,260 g / ton, only a handful of holes drilled in that area. All the way, 10 km to out south, we have some Athena, which was actually drilled as an iron ore project about 12 years ago. Never initially assayed for silver.
It was only after the discovery of Paris that someone went back and actually assayed that for silver and found holes actually terminating within silver, including 20 m, 160 g/ ton, 5 at almost 500 g/ ton. The area's been underexplored. A case in point of that, something like Perseus in the middle there, around 2 km from the pit. That was the location for our explosive magazine. We drilled four holes in there for sterilization, four drill hole hits of silver. We need to go back there and check that out. We really see, I guess Paris might be an 11-year mining project as we face market, but we see it really from an internal point of view, just being the start of what is a district scale opportunity.
What we have now basically is we are in a Tier- 1 jurisdiction, a very, very simple project, robust economics with a backdrop of a positive silver market. We're AUD 60 million of cash at hand. Effectively, we have an EV of only about AUD 60 million against a project NPV at current prices of over AUD 600 million. Look, this really puts us with an EV to project ratio of about 10% of the project value, which is extremely low when we consider that against our peers and industry standards. As we continue to de-risk through the permitting, through the detailed engineering, and securing that finance, we would fully expect that we'd trade in line with our peers' multiples, which would then see a huge increase on our current position that we are in today and obviously provides a good investment opportunity.
I guess just to bring all this together, Tier- 1 jurisdiction, rising silver market, well-funded with an execution team that can deliver, and robust economics and plenty of upside. We are now fully focused on execution and this mine, it will be permitted, will be financed, and it will be built. If you want to learn any more, we're just out the front. Thank you