Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Q3 Conference Call for Green Minerals. My name is Ståle Monstad. I'm the CEO of the company, and with me today is also Ståle Rodahl, the Executive Chairman of Green Minerals.
As usual, we'll start with the financial highlights. Not much different from last quarter. The underlying EBITDA was NOK 2.3 million , and we have a yearly burn rate of a little under NOK 10 million , which is as it has been for the last couple of years, and also in line with the previous guiding. If we look at the highlights for the quarter, we had a directed equity issue to Oil States Industries as a follow-up of the concept study we did with the consortium, and OSI is now a 4% owner of Green Minerals, and the shares were issued at NOK 15 per share.
In September, we also started discussions with SMD, Soil Machine Dynamics, about a cooperation and collaboration around the core sampling unit, and we signed an MOU with them just a week ago. We have also revised down the exploration capex with 25%, meaning that the capex until first ore is going to be lower than previously guided. We hear from the authorities that the progress towards license is going as planned. We believe there will be an announcement for the first licensing round this year, towards the end of this year, and we believe the award will happen in the Q2 of 2025. And also, quite excitingly for us, is that there were made a new discovery along the Mohns Ridge in Norway this summer. We'll come back to that a bit later. So first, the introduction of OSI as a shareholder in Green Minerals.
That was the agreement after the concept study, which delivered a very robust system for production of deep-sea minerals in a harsh environment, which is what we have in Norway. The consortium that did the work covers all the competence needed to engineer and produce this system, and as I just said, OSI is now a 4% shareholder in Green Minerals, and that is also highlighting the interest from relevant industry partners and players in the space. And I would like to show you an animation of this production system. It's a short video of two minutes, and it's starting now, I hope. As mentioned under the highlights, we have recently signed also an MOU with SMD, Soil Machine Dynamics, for a collaboration for a core sampling unit and also exploration technologies.
SMD is a company with more than 50 years of history, and they are specialized in design and manufacturing and development of autonomous power and remotely operated control systems. So we're really, really happy to have signed this agreement with SMD. They were also a key partner in the consortium responsible for the production system concept that we just saw in the animation. In addition to the core sampling capabilities, we aim to equip this vehicle with also unmanned geophysics and environmental survey sensors and monitors, and we believe we will be ready by Q2 in 2026 with the commercialization and produced vehicle. There has been quite a lot of talk and discussion about the EU being opposed to deep-sea mining. So I want to just point to this report that was recently released by the EU.
It was a report on the future of European competitiveness, and the work was led by former Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Draghi. There's a quote here that I want to read: "The EU should also carefully explore the potential of environmentally sustainable deep-sea mining." Further, that estimate suggests that the seabed holds large multiples of known land-based reserves, for example, of copper, titanium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, which is an important statement from the EU on deep-sea mining. In Norway, during the Arendal Week this summer, our Minister of Energy, Terje Aasland, was part of several debates and panel discussions, and he kept his word straight all the way through: "This is happening. We are following the plan, and there are several reasons for that.
There is a need for more minerals for the green shift, and it's also a very challenging supply chain risk with the geopolitical situation in the world at the moment." It's not only talk. Also in the proposed national budget for 2025, the government suggests an increase from NOK 30 million - 150 million for 2025 to learn more about mineral resources and the environmental conditions in the deep sea of Norway. The public hearing on the announced or suggestion for announcement for the first licensing round had a deadline in September, 26th of September. Green Minerals, of course, responded to the public hearing, and we are positive to the proposed area. It includes all our highest ranked areas along the Mohnsryggen Sør, and Mohnsryggen Nord.
We also highlighted that the latest results from the research cruises give further indication of significant copper resources on the Norwegian mid-ocean ridge. We stress that the active hydrothermal vents will not be harmed at all from mining activities. I just want to give a brief recap of what happened out there this summer. Last summer, the University of Bergen discovered the deposit and have released some data from that cruise indicating very interesting copper grades, up to 13% in some samples, and one of the zones that were called had an average of 5.2% copper. The size of that discovery is quite big. It's believed to contain between 10 and 15 million tons of ore. This summer, they went back to that area, and only two kilometers away, they made another discovery called Grøntua .
The results from that, the analysis of the samples have not been released yet, but the preliminary results also show very interesting minerals like Atacamite, which is indicative of copper further down. That's very encouraging, and again, it confirms this cluster theory that when you have one discovery, there's likely to be more quite close to it. Copper is critical. We did a piece, an article that is published on our LinkedIn page. You can see the link here in the presentation. Also, I've included a couple of diagrams from BHP showing that on this lower left side, you see that the discovered copper resources are deeper and deeper buried. You have to go further and further into the crust in order to get them out, which means more waste and more work and more energy spent.
Also, they have a copper demand projection that is showing a steady growth all the way up to 2050. And finally, we know that the copper grade, as you see in the lower right side, is steadily decreasing in the terrestrial copper mines, and the mines are getting older and older. So copper is critical today and will continue to be critical for the years to come in order to achieve sort of the net zero by 2050. And with that, I hand over to Ståle Monstad.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Just want to take you through our numbers. We are going to show you some new numbers as well that you haven't seen before, but just as a background and status on the company.
When we started out four years ago, more than four years ago, our clearly stated ambition was to become a license holder, one of the world's most attractive copper resources with the lowest use of capital possible, and with the lowest use of capital, we don't just mean gross capital per se, but also in terms of share count, meaning having the highest possible leverage per share for our shareholders, subsequently to deliver one and a half million tons of world-class quality ore for off-take. The strategy to get there in a non-revenue-generating industry so far is through a partnership, extensive use of a partnership model and an asset-light approach, and indeed, we are super happy now that we are on the verge of delivering on our stated ambition to our shareholders.
The status on the project is such that Norway opened for deep-sea mining, the full deep-sea mining, as the first country in the world on 9 January, 2024. Cook Islands led this by 12 months, but that is only for exploration. The company, as the only one in Norway, has a production concept in place for harsh environment deep-sea mining. We have proven as a world-first joint processing capabilities for the deep-sea ore with terrestrial ore, adding great industrial value to not only the company, but indeed the entire industry. And Green Minerals was nominated or was invited to nominate areas for licensing, and we are very pleased to see that the authorities indeed are coming up with, in the first license round, our three top priority areas, which bodes well for our exploration.
The company is en route to deliver, as I said, license holdership during the first half of 2025 sometime, and we expect first ore from pilot production in 2029. Further, the company shows unmatched capital efficiency versus traditional onshore mining, which I will get back to, and finally, just when it comes to the license and the data that we hold, the public-private partnership model in Norway has allowed Green Minerals to get access to more than $50 million worth of exploration data, and this is, of course, a major advantage starting up this industry in Norway compared to anywhere else. We expect to have the license papers in hand during the current quarter, and we will file our application as soon as possible thereafter, so we believe the company is well positioned for a license win in 2025.
We are indeed in pole position for such a win as a pioneer in the industry, and we're ready to execute on any awarded acreage. When it comes to the metrics I touched upon, we have said previously that in a financial sense, the key metrics are such that they are disrupting to the economics of traditional copper mining. And I think indeed we will look at some resource numbers later, but I think indeed for any terrestrial miner to, or call it any of the large current miners to overlook deep-sea mining is something that, well, is done at their own peril. If you look at deep-sea mining, one major advantage is that no infrastructure investments are needed.
As you all know, to open a new greenfield mine onshore, significant infrastructure investment are needed, and in some cases, we are talking about into the billions of dollars just in infrastructure to get to where you want to open a new mine. In deep-sea mining, we don't have that. We have a transport distance of about two days from shore. We bring the equipment on a boat, and we drop the equipment where we have identified the best production location, and we start producing. No further investment needed. The CapEx per ton just on the investment per se is also at a major advantage to terrestrial mining at $17,000 per ton versus $30,000 per ton on average onshore. When done producing at one deposit, we simply pick up the equipment and leave for the next site. There is zero sunk cost in the mine. This has several advantages.
One is the obvious cost advantage, but also it has a major advantage in terms of being able to optimize the ore grade that we produce at any given point of time. If you look at terrestrial mines, given the huge investments done in the mines themselves, they often end up producing more rock, actually, than actual minerals. And there are examples of mines just to the east of us, actually, producing now at a grade of 0.17% for copper. We have a major advantage in terms of being able to optimize and always stay at very high average ore grades produced. We will introduce an offshore oil and gas business model into the mining industry, which has significant advantages when it comes to capital efficiency and our goal of reaching this production on an asset-light basis.
Here, for those who are not familiar with offshore oil and gas, the rental model is often used both when it comes to renting vessels and when it comes to renting drilling rigs. And we will engage or are engaging with the same type of players, and it's natural to start from that type of model. And the day rates we're able to offer with the profitability in this system are attractive indeed. On the environmental side, we're not going to use much time of it, but I think internally we feel that over the last couple of years, the noise around the environmental footprint of deep-sea mining has been reduced, actually. And the reason for this is a number of studies having shown that the risk to the environment and biodiversity is indeed much lower than feared.
Looking at Green Minerals, we will introduce a semi-closed loop harsh environment deep-sea mining system that Monstad just showed you, where indeed the effect on the environment around us is very small. And the seawater is being pumped back to where it came from. There is no midwater plume. There are no pumps creating noise along the rising system, and we will see sharply reduced overburden, and with a sharply reduced overburden, we will see less waste and less tailings compared to terrestrial mining. So a study by two American scientists that came out in 2020 indicates a 90% reduction in environmental footprint deep-sea mining versus terrestrial mining. And again, studies since then indeed confirms that. When it comes to the cash flow profile of Green Minerals, as Monstad mentioned, we have reduced our CapEx estimate with around 25%.
The max drawdown on cash is now at around $35 million in 2028 before we start getting significant cash flow then from our production. On current copper prices and assumption of 1.5 million tons of ore per annum, which should be a cautious estimate, the cash flow profile looks as you see here with steady state EBITDA of up to $200 million per year. I should add, this is on a company level. This is on Green Minerals level and not on a project level. On a project level, you will see a far higher EBITDA. We're talking more than twice of what we indicate on the company level. This, of course, is interesting given a market cap of $10 million currently and a peer mining group multiple of six to nine times.
There, I can say with the capital efficiency we expect to show, and with the superior environmental footprint as well, we expect the multiples for deep-sea mining to at least not undershoot what you see terrestrially to be modest. Now, we continue to receive questions about the Capex need for the company going forward. It is hard to engage in much detail one-on-one in such discussions. Therefore, we'll take the opportunity here today on a conference call where the information is being received simultaneously by the market to say a few words about this and to show what we have done previously when it comes to Capex and funding. The obvious link here or the questions that are being asked indicates an obvious link between the Capex need for exploration and for our production system and the Green Minerals funding need.
I would just like to say right away that there is no such obvious link between a license win and funding need on the company level. And let me show you why. We have talked about an extensive use of a partnership model and an asset-light strategy since we started. And indeed, we have been able to deliver on that so far. And we see, frankly, no reason that we shouldn't be able to deliver on it going forward. Again, looking at this table, remember that the backdrop for the existing, call it incumbent, terrestrial miners is the following. New greenfield copper resources are hard to come by. And then I'm talking about commercial copper resources with a sufficient ore grade to give attractive economics in these projects. These projects are hard to come by.
It takes 10-15 years to get the new greenfield copper mine up and running. We are approaching peak copper on the supply side, and indeed, more copper is needed. So for any incumbent copper miner to overlook the extremely attractive resources, which are 10-20 times higher than what you find terrestrially in terms of ore grade, I would say to overlook that is at any incumbent miner's own peril. And especially now that a well-respected resource nation like Norway, after extensive research and extensive exploration, has taken the decision to open up for this. So just to go through our history, major Capex items, number one, has been the production concept. I'm sorry. Capex for this is significant. Again, funding need to have this concept done exclusively for us has been zero. Green Minerals has participated in two research cruises on the Mohns Ridge.
The CapEx to perform these cruises, obviously, is significant. We're talking in the millions of dollars. The funding need for Green Minerals has been very low indeed, almost negligible. We have engaged in a world-first blendability project together with the Geological Survey of Finland. The CapEx for this project has been low. The funding need for Green Minerals has been negligible, and the data and the results that we're getting out of this are super important for any miner with a full value chain approach like ourselves. When we started, more or less right from the outset, we engaged in deep-sea mining. As a Green Minerals Initiative project, the CapEx for this is low. The funding need for Green Minerals, zero. We have two CapEx items ahead of us.
One is exploration CapEx, which of course is significant, just as the two research cruises we have already participated in. And then the question is, what is the Green Minerals funding need? Well, our approach, as we have said all along, is through our partnership model to keep the funding need for Green Minerals as low as possible to the benefit of our shareholders. Our aim is therefore that the funding need for Green Minerals will be zero also on this item. Whether this will succeed or not is still an open question. Nothing has been signed. So therefore, we have put a pending on this.
But I think it is fair to say, and it's something that should be that we feel a need to communicate given the questions we're getting, that the CapEx need, even for the exploration program, may be or the funding need for Green Minerals, even for the exploration program, may turn out to be zero. And when it comes to a production system, the CapEx there is large. Obviously, we have previously indicated around $1 billion to get the production system out there. The funding need for Green Minerals to get this production system up and running is expected to be zero. Nothing has been signed there also. So this is also pending. But our clear ambition is for CapEx or for the funding need for the company to end up as zero.
So, I just want to show you this, not only that our ambition for the two remaining CapEx items are like this, but also show you that we have indeed, over the four years we have been operating, been able to deliver on our ambition to keep CapEx and to keep CapEx and assets on our own balance sheet at a minimum. And I think I'll leave it with that. But obviously, we are currently in discussions with, we say, more than two potential partners when it comes to these CapEx issues that are in front of us. So in summary, we are delivering on strategy. We're ready for the next step. Just going through the major de-risking that happened on the 9th of January this year. For us, this is really the main de-risking. I think the rest of it is lots of work to be done.
On the production system, for example, we see TRL9 across the entire production system. We are now actually more engaged in developing further to the right in that value chain, i.e., how to take care of the ore when we get it to shore. We believe the company has prime position for a license win. We talked about the production concepts, globally leading partners throughout the concept. We are really happy with the way this has worked out. The processing study adds significant industrial value to the project, as we've shown you before. Those who want to look at this in more detail, we'd like to guide you to our Capital Markets Day webcast that is out on our website. This is from May this year. The mining infrastructure in the Nordics is well developed. Off-take agreements are expected closer to first ore.
Discussions with several potential partners have been initiated. We will, of course, inform you when there are firm results from these discussions. Further on, deep-sea mining metrics are superior to traditional terrestrial mining. We introduced a new type of business model to the mining industry, as I have explained, through the oil service type of rental model. Economics are outstanding. As I just went through, there is no automatic link between the license win and further funding need for the company. The key here is the partnership model. On the environment, we've come far. In terms of proving deep-sea mining as an environmentally friendly way to extract more minerals from Mother Earth, the investment case is unusually strong financially. It's fair to say.
We are approaching current copper prices around $200 million in annual EBITDA from one harsh environment deep-sea mining system on a company level. And then on the project level, we are more than twice that number. So very attractive economics. And I think very attractive for any partner in our value chain to be a part of. Pretax cash return on investment above 300% per annum. And the pretax cash payback time, as soon as we have the system up and running, is no more than four months. And just for reference, the market cap on this company is $10 million. And before I leave it there, I just want to remind you that Green Minerals is primarily a copper play.
This is the reason, or this is one of the main reasons, that our view on copper is one of the main reasons that we are focusing on seafloor massive sulfides in Norway. Also, we have an MOU on a really big license in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone that gives the company exposure and upside to other key battery metals. This license is truly big. We have previously indicated the size equal to 180 North Sea blocks in oil and gas, or five times Aker BP, for that matter, with over 200 million tons of wet nodules being indicated after our partners having spent $40 million in exploration on that license. So this is indeed interesting, but again, copper is our main focus.
Norway seems to be the most attractive nation to start from and the first nation to be of the starting blocks when it comes to starting deep-sea mining. With that, we open up for questions. It is possible to ask this in the Q&A section of the webcast. All right. Do we see any questions that have come in so far? Let us see. There are a few. What is the status for the license in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone? The status there is that we have a memorandum of understanding. This memorandum was signed now close to two years ago. The memorandum was extended earlier this year. We're still working under the memorandum for the transfer of rights in the license from the existing owners of the license to Green Minerals.
I think what's important to note on the license is that true to our ambition then and focus on keeping CapEx low, there will be no payments done from Green Minerals to the existing owners until production starts, so we are working from the perspective of a royalty-based agreement. Let me see. The cash position is decreasing. Do you plan to raise equity? I think I've gone through that in great detail now, so the company, when it comes to the main CapEx items, there is, as I said, it would be let me put it this way. It would be incorrect to assume an automatic link between the CapEx need for the project and the funding need for Green Minerals. That link is not there. What the company does need, of course, is to finance ongoing SG&A, which is at a very low level.
As Monstad took you through, it's currently running at around $220,000 on a quarterly basis. We expect to receive the license within the next couple of quarters. It's natural to look at or to engage in discussions with current shareholders and also the potential partners for the large CapEx items when it comes to adjusting, which is we really talk about the need for SG&A, which is running low indeed. Regarding the directed equity issue to Oil States, did Green Minerals receive NOK 15 per share from Oil States? Or was this compensation for work done by OSI? The issue there is, and as you will see when we announced the partnership with Oil States Industries, the part of the agreement was that Oil States would take an equity interest in Green Minerals.
And indeed, when having finished the concept study, all deliverables have been made, that deal has also come to fruition. And the shares have been issued to Oil States Industries at 15 per share. So I think that would be it. There is one more question that's coming in through mail. And that is, what is the risk that Green Minerals will not receive a license in the upcoming first licensing round on the Norwegian Continental Shelf?
And maybe I can take that one. I think the risk is very low for us signing up without a license. We are one of the two, three companies that are in the forefront at the moment in Norway. And it's most active. And also is in a pole position. So I think the risk of not receiving a license in the application is extremely low.
All right. Okay. Give it a few more seconds. Let's see if there are any other questions. Seems to be pretty clear, so with that, I think we'll just close the call, and just leave it by saying that we are really pleased with what we're seeing from the Norwegian authorities when it comes to the opening process in Norway. The timeline so far has been really impressive, and I guess it's now around five years since the Seabed Minerals Act was voted through in the parliament, and we are already in place. It took four years between the Seabed Minerals Act and to vote in for opening of deep-sea minerals, and one year later, we are about to receive the license papers, so we are really, really pleased with that, and it's a major part of the reasoning along with the copper resource.
To put it in perspective, I think we should call it a world-class copper resource. You haven't seen anything like this terrestrially for the last at least 100 years. But the work done by the Norwegian authorities along with this resource is the major reason why Green Minerals puts Norway first and focuses on getting our first production system up and running in Norway. So we'll leave it with that. Thank you. And see you again in three months.