Thank you for all staying right till the end. I think you've been through 76 presentations if you've been here for the whole conference. As a treat for you guys sticking around to the end, you got to stay alert. I have two silver coins. I'll be asking some questions at the end, and if you can be the first one with the correct answer, you can walk away with a 1 ounce silver coin. Maronan Metals, we have a large silver-lead copper gold project up in Northwest Queensland. For those of you who don't know the story, I'll go into a bit more detail as we go through this presentation. For those who heard us present last year, what's changed since we were here 12 months ago? Last year, we came here and said, "We're going to put out a scoping study," and we did.
The scoping study was on a small part of the resource that we call the Starter Zone. Less than 25% of the global resource that we have. The economics on that Starter Zone scoping study look really attractive. They've given us the confidence to progress to a pre-feas study. We also said we're going to go and permit an exploration decline, and the Queensland Government is open for business. We got that approved in under 12 months. Over the last 12 months, we've also strengthened our corporate structure. Red Metals, who have been great supporters of the project, previously holding around 36% of the company, completed an in specie distribution of the majority of their shares to their shareholders. They still hold shares, but are no longer a substantial holder. We also managed to bring Kinterra Capital in as a cornerstone investor.
Kinterra are a Toronto mining-focused PE company. They put AUD 22 million into the company in May this year. Where we're going, we're on our way to getting a pre-feas study out. We're nearly a quarter of the way into a 40,000-m infill drilling program. We have the associated studies in geotech, metallurgy, and engineering ongoing. We're progressing the environmental studies we need to lodge a mining lease with the Queensland Government by the end of this year. It's an exciting time to be a part of Maronan Metals. We have a current market cap of around AUD 125 million, with around 315 million shares on issue. As mentioned, Kinterra Capital is now our largest shareholder, holding 19.9%, and Perth Capital remains a strong supporter with around 8.2%.
We have research coverage available on our website from GBA Capital, Rawson Lewis, and Morgans. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, some other people also. We're really excited to have Kinterra on the register. Kinterra have AUD 1.5 billion in capital under management and a 20-year history investing in the mining and resources space. It's institutional validation of not just the project, but the team that have got it to where it is. For those of you who haven't heard of Kinterra, they've invested in or acquired a couple of companies on the ASX, including Cannon Resources and New World Resources. The AUD 22 million investment that they've put in is specifically to accelerate the drilling program, get this 40,000 m done so that we can build our Indicated Resource and complete a pre-feasibility study. We're located in Northwest Queensland.
We're actually in the McKinlay Shire, the project, but our closest town is Cloncurry. If you talk to Greg Campbell, the mayor of Cloncurry, he'll say it's God's country, and he's right. We're surrounded by giant ore deposits. We have Mount Isa about 100 km to the west of us. We have South32's Cannington mine, Evolution's Ernest Henry, MMG's Dugald River, Harmony's Eva project, all within about 150 km of our project, and we're just across the road from Eloise mine that AIC Mines own. We look forward to making Maronan another one of these giant ore deposits in Northwest Queensland. This image here superimposes the Maronan deposit over Brisbane. We're not in Brisbane, we're in Noosa. After this presentation, when you're strolling down the street to Hastings Street, you'll get to Hastings Street and you might walk all the way to the other end.
Hastings Street is 1 km long. That's the strike length of our deposit. A deposit has been drilled to 1.2 km below surface. In the great tradition of Australian exploring and mining companies, I can put a red arrow, we remain open at depth. We talk about the scoping study or preliminary economic assessment that we put out for Maronan. That was on this part of the resource that we call the Starter Zone. The scoping study gave us a 10-year mine life at a 1.2 million tonne per annum processing rate. It's around AUD 260 million in CapEx, and that gives us an NPV of AUD 377 million NPV8. That was back when the silver price was AUD 36 an ounce. Every $1 increase in silver price adds AUD 20 million to our NPV.
At current spot silver prices, the NPV for the project is around AUD 750 million. That's not a project to be sneezed at. On the basis of those positive economic outcomes, the board have committed to completing a pre-feasibility study. We've put together a team that we think can build and operate this mine. We're doing some things ourselves with our own team, but we're also engaging skilled consultants to help us do this correctly, the right way, to make sure that it works. Chris Hiller is an experienced mine engineer. He's done a lot of work with Alkane Resources on their Tomingley deposit in New South Wales. MineGeoTech, based out of Kalgoorlie, are fantastic geotechnical engineers and will help make sure this mine withstands what we want to do, getting the ore out.
The team at Resource Strategies helped us get the exploration decline permit in under 12 months, and we're well advanced on progressing towards getting our full mining lease application in. Bianca Newcombe, our metallurgist, or the froth doctor, as we call her, has been doing a great job improving on the met test work that we've done to date. We're also engaging with GR Engineering. They are the best in the business building process plants, and they've helped us with the designs that we've done to date, and we really enjoy working with them. The scoping study that we put out was really constrained by the amount of Indicated Resource that we have in the project. We've started and are nearly a quarter of the way through a 40,000-m infill drilling program targeting. We had about 7 million tonnes of Indicated Resource at our last estimate.
We'd like to double, if not further improve that. We have two drill rigs on site at the moment, and we expect to add a third to the program in August. That work will feed into a resource update that we'd like to have completed before the end of this financial year. It's a busy time for Maronan Metals. We're getting a lot of things done. The key point there, I'm going to show it again, this is the starter zone. The area that we're looking at for the pre-feas study, we actually double the strike length. We're looking at the full kilometer strike that we've got and the top 600 m. Some of the early results we've had from that project outside the Starter Zone are really encouraging.
We've had some drilling results in the northern part of the resource where we're seeing 10% lead, 120 silver, 6% lead, 97 silver, 11% lead, 89% silver. These are high-grade results outside the starter zone that we're very excited about. There's plenty more drilling to come, but it's a really nice way to start the program. Of course, it's all good to get it in drill core, but the real question is: Can we get it out and turn it into a saleable product? We think that's one area where Maronan excels. The metallurgy to date, we think is exceptional. We are generating a really high-value lead concentrate. We're getting lead recoveries well above 90%, silver recoveries above 90%. We're getting that into a lead concentrate that's going more than 70% lead and with at least 1,500 g per tonne silver, sometimes quite a bit more.
This is the type of concentrate that we expect smelters to be fighting over us for. On the copper side of things, test work that we put out earlier this year showed improved recoveries for the copper compared to what we included in the scoping study. We'll generate around a 25% copper concentrate with 10 g - 15 g gold, which again, is a highly saleable product, especially when you consider the tightness in the copper concentrate market currently. In parallel with the technical work, we're doing the permitting work to get this turned into a mine. As I mentioned, the Queensland Government is open for business at the moment. We had our exploration decline permitted in under 12 months. We've been engaging with the Queensland Government on potentially getting coordinated project status. We have the Deputy Coordinator-General, Kerry Smeltzer, coming out to site next week for a visit.
In the background, Resource Strategies is continuing to progress so that we think we'll be in a position to lodge a full mining lease, including a process plan, including a tailings dam, by the end of this year. We've started our surface drilling program. We're nearly 10,000 m into that 40,000-m program. There's going to be steady news flow from assay results over the next couple of months as that progresses. Our technical studies are progressing in parallel with that. The key things that we see that we think will be catalysts are the update to the resource, completion of the pre-feasibility study, which we expect will allow us to declare our first ore reserves around the middle of next year. With the funding that we've got, we had around AUD 33 million in the bank at the end of the June quarter.
We're funded to complete all this work shown in orange. We think there's still some opportunity to create value at Maronan. We have the exploration decline that is fully permitted. We're not quite funded to develop that yet, but certainly if we find that funding, there's the opportunity to bring that forward a year and get that started next year. We think there's some opportunity also, pending the permitting, to bring forward construction of the process plant. We haven't talked too much about toll milling in this, but we don't think that that's the right solution for this deposit. It's a big deposit, 65 million tonnes. We don't want to be trucking that much rock around Northwest Queensland, but there may be an opportunity early in the mine life to do that and bring forward some cash flow.
We've been saying it for four years now, we're really making progress turning this discovery into a mine. We're in God's country. This is a giant deposit. It's a resource that's built for decades. The scoping study, preliminary economic assessment we put out, it puts a value on the project, but we think that's a base. That's why we're accelerating this surface drilling project so that we can communicate more of what this could be. The scoping study is proof the model works, not the limit of what it's worth. We're aggressively drilling 40,000 m of drilling, two rigs, looking for a third, for an update to the mineral resource estimate and a pre-feas in the middle of next year. No bull. Real silver, real lead, real copper, real gold, real scale. Thank you. I have some questions for you if you'd like a silver coin.
First question was, we're located in Cloncurry, which is God's country. God stands for? You're the first winner. The second question, Maronan Metals has a lot of silver in the deposit. How much silver do we have in our resources? Oh, 122 million ounces. Two winners. Well done, fellas. If you want to come up the front and thank you.
Andrew, well done.