Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Minerals Investor Day 2023 conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Tuesday, May 16th, 2023. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Investor Day. We've got a live event going on with multiple speakers, and we'll try to reference slide numbers as we go to make it easier for those of you on the conference call or logged into the webcast. There will be a couple Q&A breaks, and we'll ask you to hold your questions till the first Q&A break. We'll take questions in the room, and then we'll prompt Michelle for the conference call. For those of you attending virtually, dial into the conference call to ask questions as the webcast is a recording only. The slides for this event are posted to our website and include the Altius slides, plus guest presenters from Lithium Royalty Corporation, Adventus Mining, and Orogen Royalties will speak in that order.
When we finish the Altius presentation, we'll do the Q&A. We'll introduce each speaker as they start. There's a longer than usual forward-looking statement. It's on slide two and applies to everything that we'll say, both in the remarks and in the Q&A. Here in the room, we'll start with Brian Dalton, CEO of Altius, who will do most of the talking. For resources in Q&A, we've got Ben Lewis, CFO. Ben, stand up so I know you're not. Oh, there. Good. I know you're not at the very back. Online, we'll have John Baker, our Chair, and Lawrence Winter, VP Generative and Technical. Okay, what could go wrong? Let's start it up, Brian.
Thank you, Flora, and thank you, everyone. Nice to see many shareholders and friends in the analyst community here. Hopefully, I don't upset too many people today. First off, the top of this slide says celebrating 25 years. Really now we're into our 26th year, so it's probably time to refresh that. After 25 years, we felt we had a little bit of a license to do a look back, I suppose. Then that turned into a forward look, which is probably a great segue into this because there will be a tremendous number of forward-looking statements in this presentation today. Yes, please read this carefully. This started a little strange.
Back in January, somebody came to me with an idea and said, "Hey, you should look at this M&A opportunity." The rationale for it was that you guys trade at a premium to your net asset value and the potential target asset, I won't get more specific than that, trades at a discount. All I heard in that was, you guys trade at a premium to your NAV, and my blood pressure went up pretty strong, pretty quick, and it got me thinking, and I wanted to respond. I said, "Okay, I'll show you how we don't trade at a premium to our NAV." Man, what a rabbit hole that turned into. We've been at this for several months now off and on. Certainly point out that the team has done an amazing job, but I'll also say we've had a lot of fun.
I think in many ways, the spirit of this today should be to look at what we're gonna talk about today in fun. It's about, you know, trying to get a handle on what the potential value of our accumulated royalty portfolio might look like. You know, there's many ways, obviously, to do that. Well, obviously, we pride ourselves, I guess, on being a long-term investor with, you know, very little kind of emphasis or focus on short-term dynamics. Everything we do is about the long term and what might play out. We favor, you know, net asset value, say, over shorter term, EBIT, EBITDA metrics and whatnot in everything we do when we're assessing the value of our business. You know, why does it matter?
Like, why does it matter if we understand or if we have a strong handle on what the value of the business is? I guess it does because it informs so many of the important decisions that we have to make. Everything from, you know, what looks like an attractive price to us if we're active on our buyback, these M&A type proposals, relative value, those types of things. You know, again, we've done all this work. It's actually been a little bit. There's nothing revolutionary here, but it's been fairly illuminating for us internally. We just wanted to share that, I think, with the rest of our fellow shareholders and to see where this takes us. I'm reiterating on the bottom of this slide in bold that, you know, we're not trying...
We're gonna present, you know, some numbers and potential ranges of values around assets that are based on different scenarios. You know, we're not advocating particularly for any certain value. Hopefully, the thought process will be helpful to everyone in thinking about the various assets in our business as we go through. To start with, we'll talk about prices, long-term prices and what prices might look like in the future, and then we'll get more specific and into the different asset groups and try to wrap it up a little bit with some of those potential value ranges that we're talking about. There's this, again, that view that Altius trades at a premium to its net asset value.
Our, I guess our key goal here is to demonstrate that we believe we in fact trade at a very steep discount to net asset value. I'm the CEO, and that's my job to say that, but let me see if we can prove it to you. NPV models out the window. There's a little bit of a debate starting to emerge. Maybe it's always been around, and I'm just listening more carefully for it right now. Just a couple of quotes from recent commentary I've picked up. One from Robert Friedland. "The largest mining companies in the world are throwing these NPV models out the window.
They should be burned, they should be trashed, they should never appear again." I recently tweeted out a chart showing how absurdly small the mining industry is in market cap compared to the technology companies, and it's simply because the mining companies are saddled with these crazy NPV models that don't pay them any value after 10 years. More recently, well-known royalty expert Doug Silver spoke at a mining finance conference, and his comment was, "DCF is flawed, yet it remains the primary technique used for modeling investment decisions. The time value of money model levels off over time and so provide no value for most of a mine's life, such as a 50-year copper mine," which is a really good segue for what we're gonna talk about today. We don't necessarily agree. I think NPV models are fine.
I don't think a dollar tomorrow is worth the same as a dollar today. The way we've looked at this is not the actual fundamental model itself, but we've gone in and thought hard on a look-back basis in a lot of cases at the inputs. I think that's what maybe needs a little bit of a, of a refresh, in our opinion. I think that point is particularly important with respect to royalty-type interest in inflationary environments and whatnot. again, yeah, that's kind of where we'll approach this. First, there's only two real inputs that matter if you're a royalty business. It's price and volume. we'll start out with an overview of historical look at prices and current conventions. current input conventions. prices first.
If you look at most consensus price decks, they're modest up or down over the next few years, generally settling at a lower level, and then that price is meant to hold at that level essentially perpetually thereafter. That's a convention that's used as an input in most long-term net present value models. Generally speaking, you know, volumes are assumed to be at current levels unless there's a specific case where perhaps there's a committed finance or a committed investment amount that's been announced by the mining company that speaks to direct volume growth in the future. These are straightforward conventions that's been around forever, and it's how things are done. In reality, though, at least for the past 20 or so years, most mined commodity prices have been steadily increasing.
They haven't run at long-term flat prices over time. High-quality mines with long resource lives don't run at the same volumes over time. Typically, as incentivization cycles come and go, investments occur, and these mines are continuously expanded. You know, it's always easier and cheaper to do a brownfields expansion than to grow greenfield. That's reality. That's what more typically happens. I get it. I get the conventions, I think it is worthwhile just to think about, well, what's the basis of that and what, and what, you know, what are the differences? In terms of rationalizing those conventions, I get that too. Price trends are ultimately a direct function of industry costs. There's really no debating that. It's basic economics.
If you're modeling a mining interest, I think it's entirely valid to assume that prices will run at a relatively constant rate because you're modeling cash flows. The prices, they may be increasing, but so are the costs. They offset each other, it's fine. The convention is fine. It works. In terms of future volume growth, well, yeah, that's likely to happen here, but it's also gonna be accompanied by a lot of capital expenditure, that's an offset. Again, we don't really have to account for that today if we're coming up with a model. This is not picking on analysts here. This is every investor. This is me up until about a month ago when I'm looking at investments in this space. This is, you know, how we've been doing it.
Again, while these conventions, you know, have rational merits, and I think it's particularly true with respect to sort of average mines with average lifespans, when it comes to royalty interests, those conventions really break down. There's some really big distinguishing features that are important to make here. First off is that as prices increase, if you're a top-line royalty holder, you're a full beneficiary of that price increase, yet you have no offsetting share of the cost component. There isn't that offset. It isn't valid to say that prices simply offset or offset by cost. We fully benefit from the increase in prices. Similarly, I don't think it's fair to assume that as future volumes grow, the offset is in capital costs, 'cause again, we're top-line royalty interests. We're immune to those capital costs.
These are big differentiating factors between, say, how you might try to model a mining interest versus a royalty interest. I think that's the first key point we wanna make here today. We'll start out looking at base and battery metals. We'll go through all of our key commodities here. You know, I'm gonna take a little bit of time on copper just to sort of establish some things, and then we'll zip through some of the rest of it. These are the price decks, consensus price decks that exist today for a variety of base and battery metals. I'm highlighting copper here, and you can see that, well, actually, the spot price would be up another $0.20 or $0.25 today.
You can see that it's gonna hold relatively flat for the next few years, gets all the way up to just over $4, and then it goes to $3.68, and that's where it's gonna hold forever. That's the current convention. If you were building a mine, a model for a copper mine today, and it's a 20 or 30-year mine life, essentially you're assuming $3.68 copper for the vast majority of the years that that mine will operate. Across the board, that's the way it looks. The chart, I think, illustrates that well. If you look at this as a copper chart going back to 1973, you can probably see where the convention maybe originated from. You know, you can go back further if you want.
1960s up until about 2000, copper prices did run in a pretty flat trajectory. You had a cyclicity within that. You know, overall, get the mid-cycle right, and you were gonna be more or less there. Something started to change in the early 2000s, and at that point you see a pretty significant inflection in the trend line for copper prices. As best as I can figure, that early period, that flat period, was a time of great technological change. Big scales of economy started to get brought to the copper industry. All those big mines in South America came online. Basically, increasing inflation of cost was met by gains on the technology and scales of economy. Ultimately, that's the result. You get a, you know, a flat trajectory.
Around 2000 or so something changes, and basically inflation crept into the cost side of the equation, and it couldn't be overcome anymore by scales of economy and whatnot. You had these other features. Mines were just depleting. You can see a blowout on the bottom. This shows the average grade of a porphyry copper deposit over that period of time. You know, the grades are going down, mining cost intensity obviously goes up, the amount of energy, the amount of water, everything. Anyway, the long and short of it is what it is. From about 2000, copper prices have been on a trend line that have averaged 6.5% compound growth rate per year for over 20 years now. Not for two years. This has gone on for over 20 years.
If you look at how many dollars it takes to activate a new pound of copper production, back then it was under $2 in 2000. Today it's over $8, right? It's not hard to see how these prices have escalated. In many ways that's what explains things. Again, this is what it is. We don't really have to get into explaining it. This is the trend line, and that's what we're talking about here today. Dig a little deeper. We try to calculate what we call the incentive price. Lots of people do this for... Copper is a great one 'cause there's lots of data available. All that is you look at what's the average capital intensity to bring a new mine into production.
What's the average operating cost to run a mine today? You put those together, and you try to solve for about a 15% rate of return. That tells you roughly what the copper price needs to be to make people invest in building new copper mines. If the price is above that number, money flows, mines get built. If the price is below that, guess what? Money shuts off, and that's what you get. The orange line here, jumpy one, that's the actual calculated incentive price for all of the years that we've looked back on. The dashed orange line is just the trend line through that. The blue is the actual copper price. You can see that over time, the actual copper price has revolved pretty neatly around that incentive price line, as it should, right?
You get incentivization conditions, supply comes on, oversupply, prices turn over. That goes on for too long, supply goes away and, you know, the price responds. It's behaving as it should. There's a further verification. If you look at the bottom part of this chart, what that is the. It's a combination of things. It's basically the amount of capital spent by the industry in rolling out new production, and it's adjusted for that capital intensity over time. This equates to the new pounds of copper that are incentivized in any one year. Money spent that year, capital intensity that year, how many pounds did you just buy? You can see when you've got incentivization conditions, money flows. When you don't got them, you don't got them.
What's also neat here is to look at the most, you know, the recent history. We've been almost 11 or 12 years now in disincentivization conditions. That's nearly unprecedented. That's a long time in our business for there to be no investment, essentially. Now granted, it follows a strong period of incentivization. But again, it's telling you something. You know, if you talk to most miners in 2000 and said, "20 years from now, the copper price will be $4," they'd be, "Woo-hoo!" Like, "No way!" Like, "Can't wait. What a party!" Well, they're no better off now than when it was $0.60 is the bottom line. It's the same price. It's the same price. We're not in incentivization right now, and guess what? There's no investments happening.
Yes, we'll touch on this in some later slides, you know, there's a pretty strong case to be made that there's a, you know, supply and demand deficit coming in the copper industry that is downright scary. Nobody's investing in building supply and capacity. Scary from one perspective, exciting from another perspective. A couple of points here, and this will take us through some of the rest of the slides. One of the things that was interesting is that incentivization data and price that we have, we don't have that for all the commodities, but I don't even think we need it 'cause the trend line of the incentivization price is the trend line of the copper price, as it should be. These things are, you know, they're working.
I think that's all you have to do, is just look at the trend line of prices and you would then actually know where you're due with incentivization. That's kind of a bit of a grounding point in some of the next slides. The way it works, as I said, is there's a copper price that's picked for the next few years, and then there's that long run price over time. We did a look back, and we've done this for most of the commodities. Went back and said, "Well, what was consensus copper price forecast?" At different points in time and how things played out since then.
If we go back in 2003, I remember this clearly because it was the year we bought our first royalty at Voisey's Bay, I distinctly remember the long-term copper price was $0.90. I think I was trying to sell the deal, copper was $0.75, I had a hell of a time convincing people that $0.90 was actually gonna hold. Anyway, you can see that. What we do is there's a dot that shows the point when the estimate is made. The dash connects it to the point where it's meant to be effective, that continues into the future. 2003, 2008, you can see that the price didn't exactly behave as it was expected to, or as, you know, things have been different.
Punchy statement maybe, but at the bottom here we say long-term consensus price forecasts have proven to represent a poorly labeled trailing indicator with little to no predictive utility for future revenue modeling and valuation estimation purposes. We can prove it. We did a very simple hypothetical case study. Imagine there is a copper mine in 2003, and if somebody owns a royalty on it, and you go about trying to model and say what that royalty is worth based upon your convention today. You know, simple base case. 100 million pounds a year, plug in the forecasted price, and what that would tell you is that this mine will generate royalty revenue for that royalty holder of about $36 million over its 20-year mine life.
You discount that, we just use 5% as an arbitrary number. It's worth $22 million. That's what the royalty was worth. That's what it should transact at. In hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, if you go back and say, "What were copper prices over those remaining 20 years?" It turns out that that royalty generated $115 million, and that the discounted value at that point in time was close to $70 million. A pretty big gap, basically, because, you know, the consensus long-term forecast is flat, and in reality, you had an inflating copper price over that period of time. This was a bit sobering because, I mean, we make decisions on investments that, you know, the first...
We go to the board and say, "We wanna buy this, and we think this is a deal we should do." "Okay, well, what's it worth? What's the basis?" "Well, consensus says it's worth this." Well, imagine 20 years ago, the good investments you could have talked yourself out of. Now, again, I don't know if these trends continue into the future. All I know is that that's what reading history tells us we've got going forward, or That's what we've been doing. We'll zip now a little bit. This is nickel, exactly the same thing, different consensus prices. Basically, you know, again, that 2003 forecast for nickel, in reality, real realized prices over that since then have been 2.5 times what would have been predicted back in 2003.
I think it was three and a half for copper. Lithium. Here we didn't make the same attempt because, quite frankly, it's too nascent. The business is just too nascent to have any kind of sense of the history and the trend lines and whatnot, so. I point this out because later on, we do get into trying to create some scenarios around lithium assets that we own. My point is really just to say that we haven't done the same kind of scenario analysis of projecting forward historical trend lines here. Because, again, three or four years ago, this was a micro market. It's only now becoming a substantial market. you know, there's still a lot of price discovery to be, to be had.
That's just to establish that for some of the later work that we, that we show. What we do know about lithium is that the prices that we had over the last few years, they were definitely hard in incentivization because piles of money went in and mines got built. And it almost stands unique amongst the different commodities out there for that reason alone. That's all I can say about lithium, is that we were above incentivization over the last few years because money went in. Potash, obviously a really important exposure for us. A lot of markets for potash, so it's hard to just throw basic numbers. What we've done is use the Midwest U.S. proxy because, again, there's transport costs. Anyway, it's a noisy market to try to track.
We created a proxy that's based on our Rocanville mine in Saskatchewan, which is one of the biggest mines in the world. Bottom line is the pattern will still hold up. Same kind of overall broad forecast in play. General decline to a lower level that'll hold forever at that lower price. Forever is a long time, and it particularly is a long time if you're valuing all pieces of potash royalties, because we have resources in some cases that will run for more than 1,000 years. That number, that long-term number, it really matters. In potash, we see a 5.8%... I mean, you can take exception to where we draw these lines and what not, but it's math. Generally speaking, it's directionally correct. Same thing, forecasts typically always been below the ultimate trend line.
A bit more confirmation. We do actually calculate a Saskatchewan incentive price. It's dated now because there hasn't been a period of investment in that sector for almost 10 years, so you're going back to old data and trying to bring it forward with inflation rates. Generally speaking, we would say that today, roughly, incentivization for expanding an existing Saskatchewan potash mine would be about CAD 500 a ton is where you would be. That would be the base number that would give you a positive return. To build a brand-new one, over CAD 1,000 a ton, which some might argue and say, "Well, why did BHP just build a new mine? Price was nowhere near incentivization." On a straight investment case, it makes no sense what they've just done there to build that new mine.
It does when you think about potash and Saskatchewan. They're not building a mine, they're building a platform for future expansions. They're just biting the bullets, and they're overspending because they just want in the game, and you get that first capital sunk, and then you've got brownfields economics going forward, which is by far and away the most advantaged, competitively advantaged form of new potash production that the world will see probably for the next 100 years. They want in, they're paying up to get this. I don't think it disproves my point. I think it actually maybe even proves it. And again, historically, you can see how when that capital, it was $11 billion, $10.5 billion in CapEx from 2007 to 2017 that grew out the volumes from most of these Saskatchewan mines.
You can see again, the money went in when prices were above what was incentivization. Same point and comment as we've been making on the other, on the other slides. Iron ore, again, a little tricky because there's a lot of things happening in the iron ore world. There's a benchmark that 62% iron ore, which is quickly not becoming the benchmark anymore. The iron ore market is shifting quickly. It's what we've got, and I think it's still, you know, It holds enough validity still for us to work with here.
Just for purposes of anyone who wants to see where we come to some later numbers, this breaks things down, what the assumptions are, on a consensus basis for some of the varying grades of iron ore, so premiums that might get assigned for better products like a pellet or a higher grade concentrate and whatnot. It's all here on this page. Same pattern. The highest long-term price forecast for iron ore was actually back in 2014, 2015. Since then, it's basically been in a $70, $80, $90 range really steadily. That's the long-term price of iron ore. We've had a ball with trading against this for like seven or eight years and buying Labrador and receiving much higher price realizations than that long-term forecast looks like. Gold. What's Altius doing talking about gold?
It is relevant mainly because we now have an asset that is a royalty on a significant new gold discovery in Nevada. It was also neat because it was probably the most compelling of these charts that shows how consistently long-term forecasts have underestimated the future price of gold, at least over the 20 or so years we've been talking about. Gold's been escalating at about a 6% compound growth rate. This really opened up a line of thought for us. For as long as I've been in this business, you know, we've been lamenting the fact that the gold royalty companies trade at such a big premium to their net asset value, and everyone else doesn't, right? That's, it's fact almost. I mean, it's fact. I don't think it is anymore.
I don't think Franco trades at 2x NAV anymore like I used to. Like, I don't aspire to that anymore because I don't think it exists. The reality is the NAV number was wrong. Not the 2x NAV. It's not that they traded 2x NAV. It's the NAV has been calculated at half of what it would be because, just because the price escalation factoring hasn't been built into the models. Yeah, that's the point, is that instead of there being a multiple to gold royalty companies, there's actually underestimation of the NAV itself. Just to sum up on the price side of the equation. This is going through all the commodities we've talked about. Copper, 6.5% 20-year growth rate. Nickel, 5.5%.
Potash, 5.8%. benchmark iron ore, 62%. Iron ore, 5.5%. Gold, 6.2%. Over that time, US CPI has escalated at 2.5%, and global CPI is about 3.6%. As we get into the next part of the slides, what we're gonna do is we're gonna run some scenarios that look at different price forecast future. We'll talk about what the consensus price is today and what implied value that might assign to one of our royalties. We'll take these growth rates and project them into the future. Actually, we do it at half the current calculated growth rate and then the full current growth rate. You'll see that in a series of valuation matrices as we go forward.
That's kinda all we have on prices. That's probably a good point to ask a few questions or get some eggs thrown at me or whatever people wanna do here. Is there any questions? Is all that thesis clear? Again, another key point here is it's particularly relevant to royalties because that price escalation factor is so lopsided. You get those. There is inflation in commodity prices. There is inflation in commodity prices. It's higher than general inflation. There's industry-specific factors that have been causing these costs, and hence the prices to increase. It's been going on for more than 20 years now. Maybe it inflects and changes, I don't know. That's just the way it is. Yep. Go ahead, Brian.
Do you think you get a bank to buy into this and lend money?
No. In fact, I didn't know if I wanted to talk about this because this, if you're a buyer, is spectacular stuff, right?
Yeah, but if you don't-
It still doesn't take away the fact that there's more weight if you're gonna discount on the front than the back. Again, the longer the duration and, you know, that's what we have. That's what Altius. That's why I think it's important for us to think like this. It will be part of our thinking going forward. Anyone who's out there selling anything, it might not be part of our pricing going forward, but it'll be part of our thinking going forward. Okay, everyone good there? We'll start to get into some of the-
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Okay. Thank you, operator. We'll start with potash, we'll go through each of these kind of in groups. To start out, we're gonna establish some concepts around demand for the different commodity exposures that we have, we'll get into the more specific assets. What drives fertilizer demand, potash fertilizer demand? It's pretty basic stuff. Global population has gone from 3 to 8 billion people since 1960. The amount of arable land, the land that would grow food for that big increase in people, has increased by 20%. The only way you overcome that challenge is higher yields. You need to grow more food from each piece of land. That land is being depleted at heavy rates of the nutrients. Without replenishment, the land won't produce. Basically, that's where things break down.
That kind of drives. That's the underpinning for why there's been strong demand for fertilizers over long periods of time. It's as basic as it gets. This isn't like, oh, you know, do I really need that air conditioner? This is. Without industrial-scale fertilizer use since 1960, there'd be 40% less people on Earth than there is today. This is pretty basic stuff. Like, if you want something to underpin your demand trends, I don't really know what could get better than this. That takes us into what's been happening more specifically in potash. There is a. You know, it's got some noise to it, but on the left-hand bottom side here, this is the global potash demand. We acquired our royalties on the potash mines in Saskatchewan back in 2013, 2014, in that time period.
The global potash demand was around 50 million tons. Today it's roughly, you know, in an undisturbed market, we'll say it's around 70 million tons. By the end of the decade, it's meant to be 90 million tons. These are compound growth rates. You're getting bigger numbers, and you're compounding off of them. There's, you know, there's four or five years ago, when Jansen was first talked about, it was like, oh God, like, the world's over. They're gonna kill the market. This is a non-event now. We've had enough compounding and growth and demand that, like, you know, it's a blip. It won't even be noticed. This is what it is. It's been a 2.7% compound growth rate over time.
You know, on a 10-year basis, the potash market has grown by about 25%. More particular to our assets, I talked earlier about that all that capital investment that went into the mines back a decade or so ago. That's been ramping up ever since. You've got a market that's grown by 25%, and over that time, the operators of the mines that we hold royalties on have grown their global market share from about 17%-25%. Market share growth in a strong growth market. These are pretty powerful dynamics to think about. You know, thinking ahead, like can these growth rates continue, and what are the impediments and limitations? I can guarantee one of them isn't resource. These are huge long life assets, practically unrivaled in the world. It's more than that.
It's more than just the size of the resource, it's the quality. Geologically, these are more stable rocks, that really matters in potash than the big competing areas in other parts of the world, namely Russia and Belarus. They're incredibly capital-intensive, long leads from first investment to when you actually generate cash flow. Cost of capital really matters in the potash game, and hence geopolitics also really matters. Such incredible competitive advantage, it's not hard to see why they've been earning market share. That's in the absence of a war in the competing regions, by the way. This is the, this would be production from our portfolio of mines over time. You can see the blue vertical when we made our acquisition. There's a little green section here.
Those are investments that have been announced and that are underway in further ramping up production from here. The brown is what we'll call signaled growth. This is Nutrien in their investor day last year, talked about relatively low cost investments that they can make utilizing existing major infrastructure to continue to ramp up. They, you know, they're already thinking ahead to this, as well they have to. There's the blue section, and that's just simply us saying that, let's start with an assumption that these potash mines, competitively advantaged, major growth market, will hold their share of global market. No further market share growth. They're just gonna hold into a growing market.
The base case is that if we take the production levels that will be achieved based on what's already being invested and what's already been signaled, that's our base case volume assumption going forward. Then our growth case that we'll talk about, it reflects that compounding of volumes and an assumption that these guys will hold market share over time. We cap that in 2053, which was the earliest number we could find for anybody who says we're gonna peak inflation. It's arbitrary, but you got to do something, right? In fact, in both of our sets of assumptions that you'll see in the next slide, we cap production growth at 2053. These compound growth rates for the price that we talked about earlier, we're capping those there as well. Again, it's arbitrary.
We show this matrix for potential value for potash, not in the others, but for potash. Quote on the basis of an undiscounted after-tax cash flow as well as a discounted 5% cash flow. We do that just because again, it illustrates these super long lives. I referenced Doug Silver earlier. Doug is now advocating not using NAV anymore for valuation purposes. He's talking about using MOIC. We've always thought about, you know, what's the difference between your undiscounted cash flow and your discounted cash flow numbers as a measure of optionality. When you've got a big multiple... Like if your undiscounted number is multiples of your discounted number, you know you've got a high option value asset. That's sort of a little internal thing we've been doing for years.
If it's very close, you're probably dealing with a short life asset, first off. Anyway, so the bottom or the top one on an undiscounted basis, if you're compounding growth at the peak, you know, we've got $16 billion worth of royalty revenue ahead of us from these assets. On a consensus price deck, that's about $2 billion. That's over a very long time. Like again, we get it. Let's look at that bottom number, $15.7 billion. Imagine you had $15.7 billion and you put it in the bank today, and you came back in 30 years and asked yourself, "What's it worth?" Well, you'd find out that it's lost a fair chunk of its buying power. It's diminished in value.
If you actually put potash in the vault, you'll go back and you'll find that it's at least held its value. In fact, it's been inflating at well above, you know, it would have been an appreciating asset. We own these. This is royalties on freehold titles. We actually own the title to the potash. The miners lease the rights from us to go in and extract that potash, and then they have to pay us that entitlement. We do have, at today's prices, you know, CAD 2 billion worth of potash sitting in a vault in Saskatchewan right now. Anyway, that's an aside. Yeah, it gives you the range. Consensus price deck, discounted comes out to about CAD 360, which falls well within the sort of medium of consensus on our assets here, which is CAD 379.
If you use that, max out the growth case or the 2.7 compounding of volume, the 5.8 historical spot price growth. If you put those sensitivities in your model, you put those escalators into your model, you would say that the value of the potash royalties that we hold today is twice the current market cap of the company. We were gonna bring in bingo blotters and give these charts out and see where everyone put them and see if we could come with a number and have a big fun game. Anyway, we didn't do that in the end. Anyway, we're not trying to hang our hats on any one number here, but it's just, it's food for thought. If you're an investor and a broker calls you up and says, "Hey, that Altius is trading above its NAV.
Trade out of that and buy something else." Ask them what their inputs are. Metals. Big picture, again, setting up the sort of demand narrative. I think the right-hand side of this, the top right chart here, is becoming a better-known story. The dark blue line shows how global copper production is set to decline, pretty precipitously, and it's pretty straightforward. Mines deplete, a bunch of them are about to, and it's been a long time since we invested in any new supply. In the absence of investment, we are going into a period of decline of copper supply in the world. The light blue line is basically just a projection of a long-term copper demand growth trend. If...
If we stay on the current trajectory of no investment, the supply will go away, demand will continue, and there is an enormous unprecedented gap coming in supply and demand in copper. Obviously, this can get fixed. It's with price. Price comes, investment will come, and this will all get sorted. That's the big picture. That's the long-term picture. The narrative that's dominating today or the headlines are, you know, oh, there's probably a global recession coming and China's not recovering as fast and, you know, these things. That's what dominates. It changes about a week, like literally. Like it's incredible. We put this chart up. This is 120 years of copper demand. Compounding at 3.3%. There have been 15 recessions in this chart.
Like I challenge you to find them. They don't matter. It doesn't matter. It's noise. That's the big picture set up as to why we think that there's a story to or case to be made here for long-term continuation of demand growth, similar to potash in the copper world. Most of the analysts in this room today have done, you know, have put this work out and I mean, we're all screaming it in the industry. It's just investors just don't care at this point. That's fine. That's fine. You just pay three times as much for it when time comes. That's all. It's easy to fix. Getting more specific on the assets. Chapada is certainly our biggest exposure in the base and battery metal space. We acquired this in 2016.
In the time period since we've acquired it, resources and reserves have been grown by, over, what's that? Over 4 billion pounds or close to 4 billion pounds. It's been great. It's been adding resources much faster than it's been depleting. The big highlight recently was the announcement of a discovery of a brand new deposit. Chapada isn't a mine anymore. Chapada is a district, which I will toot our horn, you can go back to our 2016 presentation, there's a line in there, "We believe Chapada is a district, not a mine." What's neat about Saúva, the new discovery, is that it's much higher grade than the existing resource. That has implications here. Obviously, Lundin has been talking for a while about future expansion at Chapada.
The resource, the amount of resource that's here is not optimized anymore at current production rates. It's a brownfield-expansion opportunity, and those are few and far between, quite frankly. Again, we don't have the details as to what that might look like, but we do think that this resource growth trend is going to continue and that ultimately, Chapada district is starting to look like low-hanging fruit for future supply growth, whenever incentivization comes to the market, which it inevitably will. The scenarios that we'll present in our matrix here are, one, that's current production rates off the current mine plan, and the other is essentially a doubling of production from here whenever expansion plans are announced.
Whether that's from a doubling of the plant capacities or simply because there's a significant component of Saúva ore, which is higher grade at current production rates that drives that, I don't know. The only thing we can hang our hats on, and again, I'm certainly not putting words in Lundin Mining's mouth, the slide on the right is from their recent presentation, clearly marked as being illustrative. What they're graphically showing here is a doubling of production. Again, we're not trying to say that's what's going to happen. Lundin Mining has certainly not said that's what's going to happen. For an indicative, you know, something to build a potential scenario around, that's what we're going with. On a consensus current base case, you know, we come to a valuation of about CAD 111 million.
That compares to 117 for consensus. If we double that, the production is 140. If you start running these compound price numbers across that, and again, I think it's very valid at Chapada just because it is long life, you get to about a tripling of the value of the royalty versus consensus. Food for thought. This would be actually a lot more, except for the fact that the way our stream is structured, is that after a certain number of pounds are received, there's a step down in our stream rate. It's actually a muted response to that kind of compounding. Voisey's Bay, our original royalty, near and dear to our hearts. Current mine, published mine plan has this mine closing down in, I think, 2034.
That's when it's meant to come out of resource. I don't know if I have a pointer. That basically is a mine plan that would see operations end at about the 900 meter level of the mine today. That's what's been drilled out, and that's what the mine plan revolves around. Recently, there's been lots of neat news, not widely publicized, but it's out there that these ore bodies continue and probably for a long way. There was a whole valley drill last year. Think about this if you're following junior mining companies. 90 meters of 2.7 nickel, 1% copper, hundreds of meters beneath the current mine resource at Voisey's Bay. Again, I don't know if that's gonna hold together, if it'll form a resource or if it'll ever be part of a mine.
From a scenario analysis basis, we've gone and said, "Okay, let's assume it's not gonna close in 2034. These resources hold together, and we're just gonna double the mine life at current production rate." Base case is current mine plan. Upside case, growth case is we're gonna say this is actually gonna double. It's a relatively small royalty, so the numbers here is, you know, materiality-wise. Again, showing a point. Base case, CAD 19 million, growth case, CAD 33 on a consensus deck, CAD 32 and CAD 74 if you'd run the historic price growth rate. There's a good example of, you know, where it's a direct royalty. There's no offset in stream rate or whatever. The difference between running the scenario, you know, the running the scenarios is basically 4x. This was a fun one for us as well.
It was a bit of a case study, I suppose, because we've owned this royalty for 20 years. This is like, go back and back-test yourself. When we acquired this royalty, we thought it was gonna produce CAD 1 million or so a year. We ran a CAD 3.20 nickel price, was our assumption. What that would've said is that over the next 20 years, or it's almost 20 years here, it should have generated CAD 46 million in revenue. Sorry, CAD 18 million in revenue. Instead, our revenues received to date are CAD 46 million. Again, just same point we've been making all the way through here, but this case, it's actual real numbers. It'd be, if I had time, it'd be a lot of fun to go back and do a lot of assets like this. Others, everyone. It'd be really neat.
Curipamba, I'm not gonna talk too much on this because Sam is here, and he's gonna talk about it. I'll just point out that the difference between our base and our upside case here is there's a feasibility study that has an open pit mine, and then there's an upside PEA level study that talks about going underground at the end of the open pit. A versus B here is stopping at the open pit. B is actually running the underground. You can see the numbers, very good agreement on consensus with consensus prices with the current numbers that are out there. Sorry Sam, I mean, this is one where I'd actually argue against myself about using the long-term copper. It's a 10-year mine life that's currently known.
This is one where, you know, trying to say that trend line is really can hold together and that it's a valid assumption starts to break down a little bit. On the other hand, maybe you don't want that, because I actually think the next 10 years are gonna be way above trend line in a cyclical fashion, so you'll probably do better than trend line. Who knows? We'll all know in 10 years, right?
Lithium Royalty Corp., Ernie is here with us, again, I'm not gonna belabor this, but, you know, this was a business that we got involved and invested in back in 2017 just before lithium prices crashed out the last time. Ernie and the team have done an incredible job taking advantage of that and deploying capital and buying royalties on a whole bunch of projects that are now either in production or in many cases well underway towards production. Point here, just again from talking about where things might be worth, at least as of the end of the quarter, the shares that we hold in LRC had a market value at the end of the quarter of about CAD 77 million. That's basically a daylighting event that we're pretty happy with. I don't think.
I don't know what the numbers would have been. I, you know, six months ago, I don't think there was very much on the books for what our holding in LRC might have been worth. Also, we have three direct royalty holdings or quasi-direct. There's a limited partnership structure that gave us the right to co-participate. There's three of these projects that we do hold direct interest in, if you will. That's Sigma's, Zijin and Ganfeng's projects in Brazil and Argentina. Very small royalty amounts because they're co-participation interest. Collectively, those mines are. One's in just started production. Two are in late stage construction.
They're meant to produce around 115,000 tons of lithium between them, and there's expansion cases that have been signaled, I suppose, is the right word, that would take that up to about 220,000 tons per year. Again, I'm not gonna try to... Ernie is probably the closest thing there is to a world expert in lithium right now, and you've got him right here, so I'm gonna shut up on this one. That's the base and the grow cases, you know, for anyone who's interested in where we're to. We had a NAV five on consensus price 24 collectively for those three royalties, and 47 if you assume the grow case.
Again, we're running the consensus price deck for lithium because we just don't, at this point ourselves, feel comfortable trying to project anything historic. Renewables, we have a 58% equity interest in Altius Renewable Royalties. We basically founded the business. Soon after we founded it, we formed a joint venture with Apollo. The underlying business is a 50/50 JV with Apollo, and then ARR went public. That's how we get to it. It's sort of a bit of a tongue twister, but we own 50% of a 50% interest in an underlying renewables royalties business. Brand new concept when we got it started, the whole idea of bringing royalty financing to the renewables space made sense to us because renewables actually stood out as a natural resource that didn't have a significant royalty component.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy to say that, you know, in those few years since it started, it now has more than $300 million U.S. that's been deployed acquiring royalty assets. There's almost 2.5 GW of operating projects now subject to royalty. I'll touch on that as we go. This is the portfolio. Let's read through every line in this. You know, the bottom point is the key message. There's a 2.4 GW operating portfolio, and there's about 9.2 GW of development stage assets that have been bought and paid for. These are investments that have already been made. Essentially, as these projects ramp up, again, these are being built by, you know, the Enbridges of the world themselves. I love Kenny Rogers' song.
There's time enough for countin' when the dealin' is done. Let me tell you, they're dealin' right now. Yeah. This is just goes to that when we started this, it was hard. You're knocking on doors, and people are like, "Well, what the blank is a royalty?" And that's where you're starting from. Sector had no real awareness, but, you know, the counterparty list that ARR has built up is pretty incredible. I mean, Comparable in terms of scale, this would look like 3x the who's who of the entire mining industry on this slide right here. For a cold start, not bad. Great tailwinds in the space overall.
It's expected that investment overall in the renewable sector in the U.S. out to 2030 will double to $90 billion a year by the end of the decade. Great backdrop. There's lots of activity, lots of projects getting built. GBR is, you know, starting to win adoption. They're, you know, they're taking market share basically away from competing forms of capital from equity and debt. Similar kind of story, right? Gaining market share in a growth market. Tremendous job that the guys have been doing there. These competing forms of capital, and this is pretty neat as well, have gotten pretty difficult despite those positive tailwinds.
I said it to the team the other day that I last time I felt we're seeing something like this would be mining in 2015, 2016 when, you know, it was ugly. Like, nobody wanted to write a check. It was as ugly as it could get. Major mining companies were reaching out to the royalty companies for money who six months, 12 months previous wouldn't have thought about selling a permanent encumbrance on their core assets. All of a sudden, in a very small window, like, the royalty industry just deployed more capital and bought more assets in a small window, probably. It was, it was the day. It was. If you missed that window, you missed everything. Like, it might be another 20 years before we see it again. I don't know. That was my point to them the other day.
I said, "No matter what, that's the same backdrop, that's what you've got to hit." This is the top left is the TSX Renewable Index, just to give you a sense of where equity capital markets are in the royalty space right now. The peak point on Pretty much right exactly where ARR went public. Equity, that index, TSX Renewables Index is up 55%. Basically, the cost of equity capital has effectively doubled in that period of time. We all know what's happened with lending rates over that period of time. It's a really ripe environment right now to come in with that competing non-dilutive form of capital. It's no surprise, I don't think, that GBR has a very heavy pipeline.
I didn't even think about asking Frank to come up here and present at this because he probably would've. He wouldn't have probably responded well. Anyway, they're busy. They're busy. It's great. Touched on this already. This is. On the left is our. Again, we're not gonna number, put numbers on these, but it's what we're thinking, just some illustrative stuff. The left-hand side shows how megawatts under royalty are going to grow solely on the basis of capital that's already been deployed. No new investment. On the right, we just started to play with some stuff and talk about additional deployment and investment, which we think is very realistic, and how that would ramp up. In fact, if we kept going out with the years, you would still see further ramp-up from the investments we're talking about.
Just lag times from investment to operations. Oops. Slide issue here, but I can talk to it. This is the other key point here. We're talking about optionality long-term, you know, growth, volume growth. What, what could, what could go right, particularly at the royalty level where you don't have any exposure to capital costs? So in terms of volumes and just life extensions, those sorts of things. One of the things that really attracted us to renewables as a, as a royalty target was probably thinking that came from the potash side of things, right? The lives there are so long, they almost feel perpetual. In renewables, they are. Why would one of these renewable projects that ARR has a royalty on stop in 20 years? Right now, there's a...
We buy it on the basis of a 20-year life because that's when the equipment is supposed to wear out, right? It's an engineered life more than it is a resource life. Why? Like, the resource will still be there. We expect, at least for the preponderance of these assets, that what you'll see instead is continued investment. You know, the equipment will be refurbished, so there will be the successive life extensions that will be attached to these assets. Not only that, you know, the equipment down the road will be better than today. It's not just a life extension that you're likely to get. You're probably going to get a volume improvement as well. That site and that equipment will capture more power per area then than it does with today's equipment. This is a site that sits on the landscape.
NIMBYism issues are gonna be more limited. It's connected to grids. Again, the question is why wouldn't they just keep investing in these sites? Our royalties are structured to be essentially as perpetual royalties. Frank had an interesting chat with a guy the other day who is been a long-time investor in the oil and gas space, and this is what blew him away. He said, "Look, I'm invested in the oil and gas royalty space. That's where his preference is." He said, "Half of what we do, or more than that, is basically continuously investing to replace." Right? You got these decline curves, and that's all you're doing. You're investing to replace. He said, "You... This is never going down.
Like this is everything you ever. Everything you buy and invest in is going to be accretive from here. I think that was, you know, when. It was funny that it should have been more intuitive, and we should have thought about it before. I'm sure probably we did without really thinking about it. It was neat that an oil and gas guy was who brought it to our attention. Needless to say, he's looking for blocks if anyone has them. Iron ore. We're not general investors in iron ore. I think we've probably made that pretty clear to our shareholders over time. We're very specific investors in iron ore, particularly on the high purity end.
We buy into the idea that steel, green steel is happening and that something very fundamental is shifting in the iron ore space overall. Really what it is the shift in the steel space. A lot of investment happening in new electric arc furnaces. There's two main ways you make steel. Either as a blast furnace, you add iron ore of varying quality, you mix it with coal, out comes steel. Or you can take scrap and very high purity iron ore, electricity, and you can make steel. That's the electric arc furnace, the latter. Former was the blast furnace route. A lot of investment happening in the world today in the electric arc route, very little in blast furnace. There's a transition underway, and you can see it. Like, it's not a speculation. This is just look at, follow the money.
All of the money is in growth in the electric arc side, nothing on the blast furnace side. It has to be a very scary thought if you're a BHP or a Rio or Vale who produces material that can only go into a blast furnace. Needless to say, this isn't the first slide in their deck when they talk these days. Look, it's not gonna happen overnight. In fact, there may be limits here just in how much high purity iron ore even, you know, can even be sourced to help things make this happen. We believe overall there is an outsized demand for very high purity end of the iron ore world. Very few places in the world that technically that can be achieved from the Labrador Trough being one of those, in particular.
Other places, Ukraine, Russia, or lots of huge logistical challenges like before you even get near the ore body, you've got to spend tens of billions of U.S. dollars in infrastructure. Labrador Trough, pretty unique in that regard, in that it technically can produce this quality material and is relatively unconstrained from a logistics point of view. That is really why we're so focused in our, in our own ore business on the trough. Just more on this high purity DR grade, so basically direct reduction pellets are what can feed an electric arc furnace. current projections, I'm not sure who this was. I think we're stealing it from Champion. You've got a near-term deficit in a what's today a 200 million ton market.
You've got a 100 million ton deficit coming up in a couple of years or towards the end of the decade. That is a couple of years in our world. Yeah, we're focused on this, and we want to be positioned to help support that. I don't think it's a well-known story. Everyone knows that transportation is changing, right? We're going from the adoption curves are underway. We're going to electric vehicles, faster in some places, slower in others, a well-known story. You hear about these hard to abate sectors, cement and steel and whatnot. There's incredible investment happening. The transition in steelmaking is much further along than it gets credit for.
In some ways, like if you go back to the lithium story, right, you could see it coming. You could see it coming the minute all the car makers finally, you know, somebody moved first, then the rest came all very quickly. They said, "We're gonna make these big capital investments, and we're gonna completely convert our industrial complex from that which makes internal combustion engine cars, and now we're gonna switch to EV." It was done at that point. You don't need to see the adoption curves. It was done then, right? When the money went to ground and the industrial complex shifted, there it was. The run-up in lithium prices since then was entirely predicted because they built all this infrastructure with no clue as to where the inputs were gonna come from to feed it.
You get what you get, right? That's exactly what happened. I think it's exactly what's happening here. You can see the money going to ground. The plants are being built. Nobody has a clue where the inputs are gonna come from. It's really exciting. We have three exposures. We have our interest in an indirect royalty interest, I guess, in the IOC mine. That's for our holding in Labrador Iron Ore. We have the Kami project, which Champion hopefully will publish a positive feasibility study on towards the end of this year. For the recording, I didn't say they will publish a positive feasibility. Hopefully, we'll publish a positive feasibility study at the end of the year. They're looking at Kami. It's a project we originated a long time ago.
They're looking at it as a potential source of DR grade pellets that would feed this electric arc furnace market. We're about a 6% shareholder of Labrador. It owns two things, Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation. That's, it owns a 7% royalty, but it also owns a 15% equity interest in IOC. It's got two types of holdings, which causes us a bit of a conundrum when we were getting into how are we gonna form the matrix here, 'cause you just, you know, assume you're gonna run these price growth rates out and whatnot. No, I don't think it works. It works for the royalty, but it doesn't work for the equity. Anyway, I wanted to make that distinction. But yeah, the royalty piece, it's an interest in land, royalty.
The free cash flow at the equity level is, you know, everyone's focused if you own Labrador for the most part, you're owning it because you're looking at the dividend. That's been a little bit light lately, and there's a good reason for it. We're spending a ton of money at this site. CapEx has been heavily competing for free cash flow with the dividend. As a royalty holder, this is exactly what you wanna see. This is, this is perfect. Like, you're seeing your operator get fully committed to the asset. They're putting a pile of money into it. Comment from the CEO last year. It will come to full capacity. I don't want to predict the timing, but they're doing the right thing. You know, IOC close to my heart.
We've probably run a little tight for a number of years. Yeah, no . It needs a little bit of care. Anyway, it's getting it now, right? I don't know. We'll see what happens here. When this was invested in LIORC, it was meant to go to 21 million tons, and like most people here who cover them know, it really hasn't come close. We'll see. There's certainly the right signs are here. The money is being spent. You know, if you're in this for the dividends, you probably should be a little concerned, you know, how much more of this capital is gonna come because your dividends are gonna be constrained. It's the component that comes from free cash flow from the equity, the royalty part that won't be diluted at all.
There will be no impact on your royalties from the cash flow that goes to Labrador that they distribute as dividends from the royalty component. That's I think it's an important distinction, it's an important time to look at that. I actually hope the dividends go to just the royalty everyone freaks out and sells it down to half nothing we'll buy more of it. Anyway, we're a long-term holder focused on the royalty. I wish I didn't have to buy the bloody equity to get at the royalty, quite frankly. I'm probably pretty clear on the record with that. Overall, the royalty is the core, absolutely loving watching Rio Tinto spend a fortune here now. That's big numbers. Look at that over the last few years.
Those are big capital numbers. Valuing. We had to do it a little different. We took the royalty, and we ran the long-term price assumption, compounded it. We didn't do it for the equity. We were going with that kind of convention that if there is a price growth rate to be applied here, it's gonna be offset by the cost side of the equation, right? The marginal exposure at the equity level just won't be there the way it will be for the royalty. It was confusing and difficult to begin with, but in the end, it was like, this actually proves the point for us. This brings it home for us, that these are different. There are distinguishing features here that are really different. We, and again, we've approached it that way.
What we did for the equity portion is that whatever extent, to whatever extent we escalated the price side of the equation, we put in equal escalation. Maybe that's a little unfair, but you know, again, this is illustrative. We put in equal escalation for cost side of the equation. That forms the difference. You can see how there's much more exposure to the growth. There's a much bigger delta in the sensitivities on the royalty side of the equation than on the equity side of the equation. That's your price ranges. Kami, earlier on, I showed a slide on prices, and it had like estimates for the amount of premium, so per percentage of iron, per extra grade point over benchmark, you know, we assign a premium to that.
That's all there to look at, and you can, you can just look back through that when you look at the next slide. The two cases, one is an 8 million ton production scenario, and that is what the current feasibility study, as we understand it, is being modeled at. We just point out that going back a little bit prior to Champion's ownership, and almost, it's almost a matter of course if you're building iron ore mines in the Labrador Trough, there was a case at that point to have this mine expand out to 16 million tons. You build these things in 8 million ton increments. It's plant sizing. You know, again, illustrative purposes, we've done a base case and an expansion case. Base is 8 million tons a year.
Expansion case is that they double line it like, you know, like you do in the Trough. The base case on consensus price deck, 8 million tons, 223, that's top left. Bottom right is expanding out and applying the historic growth rate, and it becomes 1.2-ish billion. That's the kind of sensitivity to both of those escalation factors that you'd see here. Now mind you, they haven't published a feasibility study yet, let alone made a production decision, but this is for illustration purposes. This is what this could be worth to Altius shareholders. Again, more than our market cap. We're getting close here. Project generation business, we don't call it one of our pillars, you know, the way we do on the royalty side, but it is a pillar.
This has been the pillar of the business since the day we started. Most of the royalties we've acquired were based on using the profits from different initiatives that the project generation business has come up with. We generate our own exploration projects, we sell those on to different companies, we retain royalties. That's where the Kami Royalty came from. That's exactly where it came from. Our cost base on Kami is basically, I think it's probably negative, but it's a differentiator, I think between us and the majority of the other royalty companies out there. Often what we'll do is find a project, we'll sell it on to some other group, we'll take back equity and always hold on to a royalty. We manage the portfolios of equities that gets generated from this. Now we augment that.
Sometimes we'll add to that with cash. We've got a portfolio today of about $50 million in junior equities. That's after monetizing about $40 million, and that was all base funded with about $22 million. That's going back to 2016. For anyone who worries, and this is where I guess where we raise this point, we often get asked, "Well, you know, that exploration business you've got, isn't that like a weight on your royalties? Doesn't it like, you know, is it something I should worry about that you're gonna allocate money to that, you know, going forward, and it's gonna diminish really the value of your royalties?" My point is that this isn't a cost center, this is a profit center.
Never mind the fact that, you know, half the royalties we've got, we bought with the profits from this. We've had hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from almost no expenditures over time from this business. Today, in our project generation business, if we look at it, the roots, again, you've got the Kami project. This has been going on for 25 years. There's no mine in our current producing royalty portfolio that's come from a project generation portfolio. I know that sounds kind of depressing, even though it's made lots of money. I mean, it can't be that good, right? Well, the truth is it takes 25 years from an early-stage exploration project. That's, that's what, that's the kind of long-term focus this kind of business you know, really needs to bring to the table.
Today you've got Kami that maybe it'll be the first, or maybe it'll be the next guy to talk about Silicon Project, which is also coming through broadly to our project generation business. Another thing I'll point out here is that we're not as focused on the non-precious metals business in our project generation efforts. We don't just say, "Oh, we can only go look for nickel and copper." Project generation is a very customer-focused business in the way we look at it. We wanna know who wants to buy projects and what type you wanna buy. We're just listening to our customers. It turns out there's big demand for precious, gold and silver, so we've always been active in the precious metal side as well. Let's face it, you're out looking, busting rock.
You're not just gonna look for copper and say, "Well, I'm gonna ignore that gold over there." Anyway, we have almost half of our exposure, excuse me, funny enough, is in precious metals, which is probably surprising for some. I really like this slide. Probably won't mean much to most people, but this tells me everything about our long-term setup. This shows, this tracks drilling meters. This would be, the blue part would be drilling meters that are happening on projects that Altius owns a royalty on today. The green, more to do with pure equity holdings where we don't have an ancillary royalty piece. If we just focus on the blue and on the meters, there's over 300 kilometers of drilling happening on projects that Altius owns a royalty on this year.
That kind of levels of drilling typically means that's not all pure exploration. A lot of times that means you're getting into delineation, so resources are developing and happening. Like it's a fantastic leading indicator, long-term leading indicator of what this business holds way out into the future. It means that the assets that we hold royalties on are seeing heavy investment in seeing those resources grow out and, you know, in trying to make new discoveries. If you've got long horizons, 10, 20 years time, this tells you that, you know, there's some really healthy things happening across our portfolio. Does anyone care about 20 years from now anymore? We do. Silicon, Paddy is here. He'll talk on this as well.
He, Orogen is one of our biggest equity shareholdings, but we also co-hold royalties, they have a separate royalty. We both hold royalties on the Silicon project. Basically, it's discovery of a brand-new gold district in Nevada, which is pretty exciting sentence, you know, pretty exciting mouthful to put out. There's probably no more coveted asset in the global mining complex than a gold royalty in Nevada. Like, you put all those things together, that's about as good as it gets. This is a project that got optioned by AngloGold Ashanti. They've made at least two new discoveries. One, they've published an initial resource on, it's over 4 million ounces. Immediately adjacent to that, there's another discovery that they've talked about called Merlin.
They haven't published a resource on it yet. I couldn't resist adding this little comment from the CEO, recent comment. This other deposit is called Merlin, and he says, "Merlin is the gem in the crown. We will come with more updates this year, and you will be surprised, very pleasantly surprised." A little foreshadowing there. I didn't do it, he did. Anyway, this is a potentially very valuable asset for Altius and the shareholders. I think we've been fairly public in saying that we haven't really decided what we're gonna do with it here yet. We're looking at a whole bunch of strategic options. Is that the canned term used? There's another point we should make here.
On this slide, the blue shows all of the land holdings that AngloGold has consolidated in the district, and it actually covers other known deposits in addition to the Silicon and Merlin deposits that you see in the center part of the slide with the yellow box surrounding them. The yellow box in the original agreement that describes our royalty, the yellow box is the area of interest. It's the area within which any resources that are found are subject to our royalty. There's an add-on clause in that royalty agreement that says that the royalty area can expand with, to the extent that lands expand. We take the view that the current royalty area is the full expanse of the land that has since been consolidated around these discoveries.
Anglo doesn't agree. We have a difference of opinion. Under the agreement, there is a dispute resolution mechanism that basically says you arbitrate under BC, international law, but in BC. We recently, you know, we agreed, we talked about it, and we agreed, 'Look, I don't think there's a middle ground here, like we don't agree.' We just said, 'Well, that's fine. We'll just, let's just get this sorted one way or the other. We both need to know.' That's what we're doing. We're in the preliminary stages right now, selecting arbitrators and all of that. It isn't nasty. There's nothing like it's one way or the other. We'll see how this plays. Anyway, this has just happened.
I think we talked about it in the last quarter, that's where it's due. I don't know what timing is. I'm not trying to prejudge outcomes one way or the other. That's where it stands. For valuation purposes here, we didn't try to get too cute or forensic. There's 4 million ounces published for Silicon. There's another four on the surrounding lands or so that have been talked about and published. Merlin, the gem in the crown. We just come up with a hypothetical that said that, let's assume there's 10 million ounces of resource discovered, scenario A. Scenario B is that there's 15 million ounces discovered. AngloGold Ashanti has talked about more than 300,000 ounces a year of production for more than 30 years, beginning, I think end of 2025. To me, that feels light.
Why would you run at that production rate unless there's some constraint we don't know about? The scenario we would just say, let's say, let's just ballpark 10 million ounces discovered or minable, a 330 ounce per year scenario, a half million ounce a year scenario, and then think about those earlier gold price escalation factors. We just ran it on both scenarios, and you go on the low case, 10 million ounces, 330 production scenario, a $110 million implied NAV 5 for the royalty. On the more aggressive 500,000 ounce a year, you could be up to, like, pushing into the $500 million range in these scenarios. I don't know if it'll be 10 million ounces. I don't know if it'll be 20 million ounces.
None of us do. It's just to help, I guess, you, our shareholders, get a sense of what we're trying to get our heads around and what we're tracking and following and why it could be a pretty material asset for our business. I don't know if we need to really belabor this. This is just for information purposes. It goes to our current capital structure. Still under 50 million shares, 26 years in. Proud of that. Good ramp-up in royalty revenue over time. Even better compound growth rates than the prices and the volumes. Maybe it's a multiplier effect. I don't know. Obviously our commitment to returns of capital continues as the business grows.
Early slide I talked about, you know, this work is meant to inform us in terms of capital allocation and those kinds of things, I guess it does, right? I mean, there's a lot that we're digesting from this. Like, would we wanna issue shares based on the work we've done today, you know, on the current share price? That feels silly. Would we wanna buy shares at the current share price? That kind of feels a little smarter.
Just again, we're not coming out with a serious capital allocation strategy at this point in time, but you're probably getting a sense from the work we're doing here where we're being informed and again, as we make decisions around buyback and dividend rates and all that sort of stuff going forward, all of this is gonna help inform our thinking. Acquisition returns, we've been updating this for several years. It basically just shows the purchase price and then compares it to the revenue that we received to date. It looks at whatever the consensus net asset value. You know, it's not a formal metric per se, but it's indicative.
You can see that over the past year, two neat events, both Chapada and the Potash portfolio have both crossed into the point where we've returned, had more royalties received, royalty revenue received, than we made on the original acquisition. Those were from investments made in 2016 and weighted average in 2017. You know, when you think about the durations about of those assets, they've got decades and decades of centuries to go. That kind of a simple payback, if you will, feels pretty good. It's certainly a lot more than would've been implied at the time of the purchases. We bought Chapada, copper was $2 a pound, and we bought, you know, the average, probably the weighted average price of the buy period on Potash is, you know, was $200.
Making the point a little bit about some of the things we talked about earlier in the presentation. Sustainability alignment. We're not gonna go into a full breakdown of the different ways that Altius has evolved over the years and how it sets itself up and aligns with, you know, principles and concepts that I know are important to a lot of shareholders. I will say that, we recently published our sustainability report, and so all that information is there. It's linked in this presentation for anyone who wants to go there. Full kudos to Flora and the team. I think you will see that, you know, this has been evolving and the way.
I think we're fighting a little outside of our weight class as far as how we've been responding to that type of investor demand, maybe is the right word. Yeah, I think we're for our size, we're definitely leading the pack. We just achieved net zero. What we do is we calculate our own emissions footprint, but we also look at the percentage interest that we have in different assets and the footprints of those, and collectively, we now completely offset that footprint. I won't go through this slide, but it just talks about, you know, less about what our specific water usage or any of those types of measurements are that I think a lot of ESG investors are focused on.
More the bigger picture about the type, the types of things we're invested in and how they matter, right? On the top left, you know, by being involved with electrification metals and being part of that whole supply chain, if you will, at least from a financing point of view, that chart just shows how CO2 emissions are different between an internal combustion versus the electric vehicle. We're helping there. We're enabling there. We're investing there. On the right-hand top side, Potash. This is the, what I talked about earlier. Population goes up, yields need to go up. Well, that happens with Potash. We're invested there. We're enabling there. Bottom right, this is a CO2 footprint for making a ton of steel, whether you use a blast furnace or an electric arc furnace. We're working, we're doing our best.
We're trying to make the AR pellets happen to make this happen. On the left, bottom left, particularly if you look at the blue line, that's CO2 emissions in the U.S. I don't know if this is a well-known fact either. From electricity generation, you can see that they have been really coming up. That's two things. It's not just the fact that a lot of renewables have been coming onto the grid, it's the fact that coal has also been coming off the grid. It's that double impact. Yeah. That's how we feel like we're making a difference. I think that is all that I have before we switch to our guest presenters today. I'll certainly take any questions that anyone has before I hand over the podium. Thank you very much. Yep.
Brian, how are you? Do you understand the issue with the output? That's why I'm down too.
Chicken and egg stuff, isn't it, right? The market is screaming for capital, you're like, "Deploy, deploy." Then you're like, "Oh, we gotta raise money to deploy money," right? That. We're doing what we need to do there. Like, we're not just looking at. If you look at. One thing I'll point out is that everything we've done so far in ARR is equity loaded. Like, there's no leverage whatsoever in anything in that business today. A lot of front-end loading of equity. I'll be honest, debt's on the table now, and we're pretty active there. We don't wanna just sit back and not seize this opportunity. Do we feel very excited about raising new equity? You know, again, it's math. What's the implied return on the investment and what's the implied cost of capital?
Would I say, "No, we won't do it," but it's not a priority at this point. You know, Ben, you know, Ben's heard a lot before, like, find the right deal, buddy, we'll find the money. That's kind of the way That's the message they've got. Yeah, it's again, when the window is best for deploying it's also hard to come by, but we always found a way. We'll find a way. Don't count on equity raises as the default. That would be the wrong base assumption. We won't promise it won't happen, but it's the wrong base assumption. Yep, Mitch.
Hi. Thanks, Brian. You talked a lot about valuing the assets and the inflation and growth rate. I'm just curious if you have a thought about inflation and growth rates on Altius' expense base and, you know, how you think and hope that will fare.
It's a really interesting question because it actually opens up other lines of thought because it goes like, well, what mines would benefit from this kind of, you know, these inflationary factors and which ones wouldn't. It goes to margin, right? If you've got high margins, you know you're gonna have outsized exposure to the revenue that comes from the price inflation and lesser to the cost inflation. I don't see us any real need in Altius' business, for example, to expand on its, you know, you know, headcount or anything like that. I think we've got a pretty neatly running machine right now. Like, you know, for us to fuel growth going forward, really, we're just standing back and helping operators make decisions to put a pile of money into assets and wait to collect checks. Does that.
Like, you got to be careful. When you look at our G&A, like, we pick up a share of costs from ARR, for example, which is in heavy duty growth mode and our writing people. It's non-cash. Just, I guess, just be a little careful there. We're 80 odd % margin. I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but I just intuitively know it doesn't. We should be far outside beneficiaries of price inflation than, you know, anything at the corporate side might do to dilute those benefits going forward. Horst.
Just on ARR, is there any thought at some point to dilute down to below 50%, you know, the whole solid or ticket? Like, are we planning to put a lot of money?
Ben might have more to add on that. He might really have more to say on this than what I'm about to say, but, I wouldn't ever make the decision based on whether or not we're consolidating or not consolidating. It's gonna be more intuitive. We invested in the last round, and held our pro rata share because it was damn cheap. That's kind of as far as the logic really went. I know it might take an easier accounting treatment on both sides of the equation down the road, but, will we dilute below 50? It's not a goal, but it's also not something we'd be afraid of.
Like if that dilution was accompanied by accretive growth, I mean, I used to own 15% or 20% of Altius, and I own 3% or 4% or 5% now, but, you know, it's a different business. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. I don't think there is hard numbers to focus on in that regard.
Just a separate question. On the silicon, when could we anticipate some kind of either development decision by Anglo or like what kind of timeframe is that production?
We could get into a long answer because their initial production is meant to come from North Bullfrog, which is, I guess, in the disputed land areas. They're saying by the end of 2025. See, they bought Corvus to get North Bullfrog. That was partly permitted or it was well on its way. First production, 2025. There's a feasibility study, PFS or feasibility, to come for Silicon Merlin, I think next quarter, but it was a Q3. We'll have a little bit more guide. I'm actually surprised that the information is coming as fast as it is. They're drilling 90 odd thousand meters there now. They're trying to get their hands around or arms around the resource while they're also trying to make mine plans. It's...
They're being aggressive, but I don't know what the practicalities are.
Just maybe one more, if I could. In your roster of copper, you didn't mention Gunnison. Should we just assume that's not working or do you still see value there?
It hasn't been working. We all know that. Obviously, there's technical issues with flow rates and just getting copper recoveries. I don't, you know, there's certainly no sign that they've quit. Like, they're still investing in trying to solve some of those technical problems. I guess we just look at it as something that if it works, it'll work, and we'll start talking about it then. Until then. It was always that kind of a different. It wasn't like an exploration story we'll get financed or whatever. It was always a bit, you know, there was a bit of technical stuff that we didn't even understand ourselves. That came into us as part of the Callinan merger. We ended up with Triple 777.
We thought that, you know, the truth, when we bought Triple 777, we kind of paid a schoolish price for the mine on the hopes that the resource would expand there, and it really didn't. We got better prices. That, that's what that carried the day. Initially we thought that the upside in the investment was that, A, we would. There was the chance that resources would grow, but they didn't. There was a flood of cash in Callanan at the time of the merger, and things were getting really ripe, like copper was just falling, falling. We got a short-term cash flow profile and a bunch of cash, completely cleaned up our balance sheet from having made all the potash acquisition. Without that, we never would've got Chapada.
I know I sound like I'm rationalizing, but Gunnison was part of it as well. Like, okay, well, that's what's, you know, we're gonna get the juice. There was that, but so was Silicon. Interesting investment overall. It'd be an interesting case study, that one for sure, at some point in the future.
Thank you.
Yep. Yep, go ahead, Kerry.
Brian, is this on? Historically, you've been pretty countercyclical with the investing, and now you're, you know, painting a picture of more optimism maybe on prices. How do you square those two things?
No, I think the assets we have will agree with you, bud.
Like, in the terms of the copper price, copper's come off. Is $3.50 a pound investable? You mentioned Chapada, copper was $2. Do you really need to wait for a more depressed market to do stuff or?
Like, if it got ugly, ugly, and we're kinda getting there, things will get exciting again. It doesn't need to be two because again, the trend line is this. We're just looking at that. Like, we're getting deep into disincentivization again. I don't know if it's the same conditions as, say, 2016 when, like, it was. There's one thing to look at that price, that simple incentivization point or not point. You actually gotta look more at what's the mood of competing forms of capital to find out when you're really getting, should be getting excited or not, right? I mean, it was. I mean, the whole mining industry was on credit watch then. Like, I think if you wanted to raise equity, if you're a substantial player today, you can go get it. If you wanna raise debt, you can go get it.
You couldn't then. Like, we were it. Like, that was great.
Are?
That's what the Franks got ahead of them this week, right?
Are you seeing any new opportunities on the mining side, given the market?
There's not much. There's really not much that we're seeing in the hopper that looks. Like, you could make the argument here that, okay, you've got a new view on the copper price going forward. You didn't like that one yesterday, but you were looking at $3.50 copper. Now you think copper is gonna be $6. You plug that in, that's gotta look like a screaming buy. You should buy it. Well, it doesn't matter what the copper price is if you have concerns that the volume is gonna be 0, right? You can put in $1,000 a pound. Like, there aren't any, like, either in existing asset processes, nothing that's really gotten us super excited, you know, which means long-term optionality and long-term resource growth, all that sort of stuff.
It's just not good enough out there for people to be trying to raise capital to do new projects, right? Royalties can't carry the whole day. You need the price, right? You need that equity pricing, it's like Friedland is screaming about these prices make no sense, and I can't do anything with that, and you'll never get any copper at these prices. Glencore is screaming, "You'll never get any copper at these prices." It's in that weird little limbo spot. If things got better, I think good projects would come out, but everyone's like, "I'm not even bringing that forward right here. No way. You're not getting it.
Okay, thanks.
Good. Okay.
There's a question on the call from Jacques. Jenny, you want to open up the line? Yes, Jacques. Please state your question. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thanks very much. Brian, at the risk of sounding a bit thick here, when I look at slide 65, the potash portfolio net asset value consensus number is CAD 223 million. On slide 28, the range that's given for consensus is CAD 296 million-CAD 403 million. I wanted just to know, were those net asset values on slide 65 based on?
Go with the bigger one. Yeah, no, this is a typo on this slide. It's a really good pickup on your part. I'm pretty confident that the median number on the potash slide is the accurate average analyst consensus.
Okay. I'm somewhere in between. I'll take that under consideration. Thank you.
Yeah. Up in the top right of that slide, there is that median, the range and the median number presented. Yep.
Perfect. Thanks, Brian.
We're actually shortchanging ourselves on this slide. Good, good pickup. There's probably lots more errors in this, too. This was a lot of work, and a lot of it came together late and recently. Read the forward-looking statements and add that disclaimer that... Trust me, that won't be the only error we find in this. I'll be cringing every time I look at this again, I'm sure. It's directionally, illustratively, hopefully useful. Okay. Maybe we should switch over to our guest. Ernie, you're starting us off. Ernie Ortiz is the CEO of Lithium Royalty Corporation, and as I said before, he's the closest thing that exists to a global, lithium expert right now.
Oh, thanks, Brian.
Thanks for doing this for us.
Great. Thanks, thanks, Brian, good to see everyone. As Brian mentioned, my name is Ernie Ortiz. I'm the President and CEO of Lithium Royalty Corp. We're now two months and one day since our closing of the initial public offering. We raised CAD 150 million in March 15th, 2023. Yeah, we're off to the races. We have three new acquisitions in just two months, and we're now at 32 royalties. Just, to start, and it's a good segue from what Brian was talking about, but we feel that lithium is truly an enabling technology, and we looked at a whole bunch of different commodities, and we decided on lithium because of all the different positive attributes afforded to lithium.
Lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, and it's an excellent charge carrier, so it's perfectly suited to enable electrification and also storage globally. We feel like we're at the right place at the right time to continue to invest in lithium. Going forward, it's a 33% demand CAGR for the balance of the decade. Last year, the market was 700,000 tons per annum. This year, the forecast is to reach just shy of 1 million tons. The consensus forecast for 2030 is to reach around 3 million tons per year. If you look at Albemarle, which is the largest lithium producer in the world, they're guiding to 3.7 million tons by 2030. On their numbers, that implies a 20% shortage in the market.
Overall, we're still very bullish and a lot of room for growth. A quick anecdote that I like to share is that in order to meet demand, the demand needs for the future, we need at least 10 new lithium plants per year to be up and running on an annual basis. There's a lot of room for growth for LRC. Of course, we're very proud of our track record. We have three assets that entered into production or entering production in 2023. So three out of the 10 kind of needed per year is a good track record, and we have a lot more in that pipeline. Here's a good overview of where we sit today. We're at 32 royalties globally. Globally diversified. We're focused heavily on OECD jurisdictions.
A lot of royalties in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. We do like Australia, one of the benefits of lithium is that it's in pretty favorable mining jurisdictions. Today, Australia produces 55% of the world's lithium production. We do have a big presence there. We do have three producing royalties today. Two of them just entered production in the last three months. Core Lithium, which we have a 2.5% royalty in the Northern Territory of Australia. We just received our first royalty payment yesterday. Also for Sigma Lithium, they just started production last month, which is a Brazilian spodumene project. We're very excited about those new royalties. We also have one royalty in Argentina that's expected to ramp up at the end of the year.
That's with Zijin Mining, which is a $40 billion large copper and gold producer out of China. They have a large asset in Catamarca, Argentina. First phase is 20,000 tons per year. They're guiding to potentially expanding that to 40,000-60,000 tons shortly thereafter. A lot of optionality in our portfolio. Very well diversified, no single asset makes or breaks us. With 32 royalties, we can continue to expand and become much larger. As Brian said, we are kind of an enabling financier. We like to partner with strong partners, strong management teams, and ESG is a strong component of our due diligence process.
All of our spodumene mines are looking to have essentially dry stack tailings, so no tailings dams, so very light on water usage. A lot of them are using solar as opposed to diesel in their operations in the Pilbara and in Western Australia and in the Northern Territories. We think lithium investment is the fact of ESG given its strong point in the electrification cycle. That's where we are today, and that's a good geographical representation of where LRC fits. As I mentioned, big presence in Australia and in Canada. We're a big beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act. I think all of our royalties in the spodumene side, except from except for one, would be Inflation Reduction Act compliance.
That would benefit from all the big subsidies and support from sort of within North America. We're very excited about the pipeline and also just all the catalysts that are coming forward within LRC. As I said, three producing assets. Zijin, which is our 4th asset there, they're expected to start production by the end of the year. We have two more starting in 2024, which is the Ganfeng project, Mariana, which is in Salta, Argentina. They're essentially just waiting for the brine to finish evaporating in Salta, they're going into production starting in 2024. Our only non-lithium royalty, which is Sonova Global in British Columbia. They're aiming to start production next year.
One thing that we're very excited about is that we think there's gonna be at least six new mineral resource announcements in our portfolio in 2023, and we think they could be fairly material. Some of the largest initial maiden resources in the spodumene market history. The ones that we're very well kind of attuned with and looking forward to is Delta Lithium, Winsome's Adina project, and the like. We have a case study on Sigma, but we do wanna highlight our Moblan royalty. That's number 16 on the page. We have a 2.5% royalty on this asset in Québec. It's the second largest deposit in Québec as it stands. It's the second largest single deposit. They just quadrupled the ore body. They announced that last April.
They're now at 50 million tons of measured and indicated, they're doing a 60,000 meter drill campaign in 2023. We think it has the potential to be one of the largest spodumene mine in the Americas. They do have a pre-feasibility study that's forecast to be released this month, which could have much higher production rates. We think that could be fairly accretive to LRC. As I mentioned, we have kind of those catalysts across the board, but we're very excited about the news flow coming for 2023 on top of the acquisitions that we are very active on. We don't have to get too much given the audience here probably knows the Royalty business model very well. Just a few things I like to highlight.
In the lithium space, given the huge CapEx cycle that's needed and a 33% demand CAGR, a lot of the lithium producers are not that cash generative. We think we have a nice differentiating story where by investing in LRC, you can get access to the thematic with 10 times GDP type growth, but also with positive free cash flow growth. We're very fortunate with that respect. We do like to focus on long life assets. We like to focus on assets that either have, or we have the visibility to a 20-year mine life or more. Overall. Our key framework is high grade, low cost.
In the past, we did have opportunities to acquire some cash flow paying royalties, but we felt that their cost of production wasn't conducive to a potential down cycle in the lithium price, and we ended up being right, so we passed on those opportunities. Overall, we have some of the best quality assets in our portfolio with high grade, low cost across the board. Here's another way of looking at our portfolio. As I mentioned, very well diversified. I would like to mention we have a bias towards spodumene. There's different forms of spodumene in lithium production. Spodumene, it has lower CapEx and shorter timeline to production. As we were building out the Royalty business model within lithium, we wanted to prioritize near term cash flows.
That's why we do have a bias towards spodumene, but we aren't afraid to go after brine. We do have two of the longest and best quality brine resources within our portfolio. We're very much about the here and now. Over 50% of our NAV is either in production and in construction. What I like to say is we have at least one new asset entering into production for the balance of the decade. A lot of optionality that's already built in, that even if we didn't do any more acquisitions, we'd still have a lot of growth within LRC. Here's the representation of where our NAV sits today. Our largest NAV contributor right now is Tres Quebradas, which is the asset in Argentina.
As I mentioned, Zijin Mining, one of the largest mining companies in the world, is developing that in Catamarca, Argentina, and they are guiding to start production in 2023. I believe they're guiding to around 18,000 tons of production in 2024, and then ramping that up to potentially 40,000-60,000 tons over time. Here's some, I guess representation on where we think additional value could be created just from the our pipeline in and of itself. As I mentioned, we have around six assets today that we think could have a mineral resource announced in 2023. As those projects de-risk and continue in their life cycle, we think they will naturally be accretive to LRC, not to mention the potential announcements from production expansions and mine life extensions.
The key one that we have on our minds right now is Moblan, given that announcement, they're guiding to in May of this year. We think there's a lot of good news flow that will be a good positive news story for LRC. The one thing that is emblematic of the LRC portfolio is just the optionality we have across our asset base. Sigma is probably the best example, but I could go through a whole bunch of different assets in our mix. When we invested in Sigma Lithium back in 2018, they had a 13 million ton mineral resource. Today, it's around 80 million tons, and they're guiding to adding a potentially 20 million-40 million tons later this year.
It could be one of the largest in the world very shortly. Furthermore, production was 220,000 tons at the time of investment. First phase is 270,000 tons, and they're guiding to producing over 760,000 tons once they have phase three up and running. A lot of optionality and, like, a kind of free carry to the LRC investor. We think this is emblematic across the board. Like I mentioned, Moblan quadrupled their resource last month. Core Lithium, we invested when it had a 10 million ton resource. Now it's a 30 million ton. A lot of these ore bodies just continue to extend. We're proud of the due diligence that work and the optionality that we have within LRC.
We are still very active. As I mentioned, we've done three royalties since acquisition. Just in the last two months, we've done both primary and secondary royalties. Those are kind of two key growth platforms for LRC. What we found is that a lot of issuers and companies wanna partner with LRC. They know that we're a deep, kind of very dedicated lithium investor. There is a brand value that's being associated within LRC. There's a very positive relationship there. In many cases, they ask us to go on the board and help advise on how to develop the mines. Obviously, we can help them advise, but more from a probably secondary standpoint. We don't wanna, I guess, get over-boarded.
That just is a good example of how important they view our relationship and how of a strategic partnership that we hold with different companies. Secondary royalties, we're still very active on that front. Once the IPO news hit, a lot of prospectors and geologists phoned us that they wanted LRC shares, and they'd be happy to vend in their royalties. Obviously, we'll be very diligent on how we can continue to acquire those royalties. There's a lot of good benefits for those prospectors as they can defer taxes if we transact in shares and the like. Overall, we're still seeing a very strong pipeline ahead. We think there's over CAD 150 million of kind of near to medium-term pipeline that we can go after.
We're being very selective in prioritizing what deals we wanna do first. Here's just a representation of kind of just what we've been doing. For the higher risk, higher return projects, those are probably not in construction, but are about to announce a maiden resource or earlier stage. There, we typically target IRRs of 15%-30%, sometimes much more than that. We did acquire some of the royalties that are more moderate risk and moderate return. For example, the Allkem and Ganfeng Lithium projects, which are in construction already, and are pretty much gonna start production fairly soon. There's already been quite a bit of news flow to date. As I mentioned, we've done three transactions since the IPO.
We've closed on five so far. I think we're kind of best in class as far as how many deals we've done per year. I think Franklin also ranks up there of five per year. We know how to transact in up markets, down markets. An important characteristic is that we're not pricing our royalties based on spot. We're using the long-term average consensus price, which today for spodumene is around $1,250 a ton or around 30% of the prevailing market price. We're not factoring any kind of spot economics. If we were, I think our P/NAV value would be around 0.3 times, type of, valuation. We are still being very conservative. We're not pricing in spot, so there's still a lot of good optionality for the, for the LRC investor.
As I mentioned before, we've already had a lot of good news flow as well. Moblan quadrupled their mineral resource. We had a new maiden resource over at Root from Green Technology Metals. Events to come, there's the catalyst that we think will be material drivers for the LRC share price. We do wanna highlight Adina, which is a royalty that we have in Quebec. There are very few projects in the world that have reported over a 100 meter width on a spodumene basis, and Winsome Adina is one of them. We're very excited about the potential mineral resource that could occur there. They're guiding to a 2023 resource announcement to come, and they're aiming for production to start in 2026, 2027.
I think a lot of good news flow, a lot of good assets, we're excited about the potential this year. Here's, again, one of our new slide deck. It's up online. Just, since the IPO, you can see that we're continuing to add value. We've done the James Bay, the Nemus acquisition in Brazil and the Case Lake acquisition, and on top of that, we have had additional resource updates over at Core and at Moblan. Core increased their mineral resource by 60%. A lot of good news flow just in since the IPO and all of this is on consensus pricing.
If you were to use the spot market price or prevailing market conditions, that's the chart on the right of what the implied NAV per share would be. Again, just to finish off, here is a corporate snapshot and maybe just while we're on here, I'll just do a quick recap on what we're seeing in the lithium markets. We are seeing lithium prices starting to bounce. We have seen prices up around 30% to 40% from the lows. The lows occurred roughly mid-April. We are seeing evidence by Albemarle and public commentary that cathode buyers and battery buyers are back in the market and starting to restock as far as lithium production.
We are seeing the Guangzhou Futures Exchange starting to price $40,000 per ton lithium carbonate by the summer. Right now, spot's around $30,000 per ton. There is an expectation that prices could continue to be quite firm going into the second half of the year. That's been predicated on very solid demand. Year to date, EV sales in China are up around 40% year to date, whereas the consensus expectation for 2023 is 30%. There is potential upgrades to come on NEV sales for the balance of the year, but we'll continue to monitor that. Overall, it's looking like a very robust year. We'll still be acquiring transactions and have a lot of good news flow for the balance of the year.
I guess I'll just do quickly on the team. I've been looking at lithium for over 10 years. I wrote the primer back at Credit Suisse back in 2014. I'm also a founding member of the London Metal Exchange's Lithium Advisory Committee. Mark Wellings, who's on our board and is the VP of Technical, he's on the board of Li-Cycle, who is North America's largest recycler. You guys know Blair Legresley as well, well-known investor in the space. We are proud to announce that we added Dominique Barker a few months ago, who joined us from CIBC. She's our CFO and the Head of Sustainability. We are rounding out the team and building the best in class type of management team. Yes, I can stop there and take any questions. Sure.
Brian's comment about the difficulty in analyst estimates, and also given how fast both the supply and demand are growing for lithium and spodumene, do you have any guidance for how to think about incentive pricing? Like, you know, I can't even get my head around. Usually, on a supply curve, you think about the marginal mine needed to come into production. Do you have any suggestions for how to think about long run pricing?
Yeah, good question. I think there's a few ways, I think, to approach that. First, CapEx intensity would be kind of the main one. We've seen CapEx intensity continue to rise. If you look at Lithium Americas Thacker Pass project, CapEx intensity there is around $55,000 per ton, which is more or less where the Korean and Japanese prices are today. You are seeing CapEx intensities rise across the board. Probably five years ago in Argentina, a brine project was $15,000 per ton, and now it's closer to $25,000-$30,000 per ton. Typically integrated product in Europe is also around $30,000-$35,000 per ton, which just so happens to be the spot price right now in China.
You are seeing signals from the market kinda dictate current market dynamics. I would say CapEx intensity is one thing to track. The other thing would be just the marginal cost for some of the higher cost operators. There, the key things to track are Masteel producers in China, which their average head grade is around 0.2% lithium oxide. Just to give you a perspective, our average for our spodumene project is around 1.3%, so we're much higher than kind of that marginal cost producer. Estimates there for $25,000-$30,000 per ton type of operating costs. Actually a lot of them actually shut down in the last month or so because of the spot price in China that actually ticked to those levels.
I would say those are the key kind of benchmarks that we look at. And of course, just operating costs is something that we're continuing to track across the board. Spodumene operating costs have probably doubled in the last 2-3 years, especially if you add in the state royalties. In WA, Western Australia, there's a 5% royalty on spodumene projects, that's already adding several hundred $ per ton to their operating costs. All of those, I think are good key benchmarks to track.
Hopefully, if I could just follow up. The CAD 55,000 a ton sounds like a lot against, you know, what you're saying is the long run analyst consensus, but I don't know the duration of that capital, you know, the required... Do you have a thought about How when you look at what those costs are for new capacity, what greenfield capacities incentive price should be?
Consensus for at least the chemical side is around $22,000-$23,000 per ton. You are right that, there's a lot of backwardation in kind of the implied analyst consensus. Something that we've seen in the lithium space, and I'm sure it's probably for other sector actors as well. You do see delays, and you do see kind of higher for longer type narratives, and that is what we're seeing now within lithium. There's a lot of expectations that lithium was gonna come down much more dramatically and stay there, and it was kind of down for a few months, and now it's already rebounding. Yeah, I think right now you're still seeing some very strong signals.
Li vent, for example, one of the largest lithium producers in the world, mentioned that they could see prices up in 2023, and they feel confident is gonna be up again in 2024. I think that's where you're seeing the market signals that they do wanna underwrite and build these projects because they're required and, you need kind of that high incentive price in order to bring them online.
Thank you.
Okay, next up, we have Sam Leung. Sam is VP corporate development for Adventus. Adventus is a company that Altius is, I guess one of the founders, if I could be that bold to say. Sam, I think the original hire other than with Christian. In fact, I think he told me, "There's one guy, if I'm gonna do this, there's one guy I really need with me." Sam was the guy. Sam has helped us out in other ways too, and he's been on some other boards. He's here to talk about Adventus, probably more broadly with focus, I'm sure on the Curipamba project in Ecuador. The floor is yours, Sam. We're going the wrong way. What?
Thanks, Brian, for the introduction. As you mentioned, I'm here to speak about Adventus Mining, a company that was the original spin-out of Altius back in late 2016. I joined the company in 2017. Typically, Christian, who's the CEO, you guys have probably met Christian in the past. He likes to talk a bit more. He's usually up here. He's actually at site right now with some government officials, which is a good sign for the project in Ecuador. I will be making some forward-looking statements, just as Altius has.
Today I'm gonna give you an overview of what this project is in Ecuador, why we went there, a bit of our history, and maybe just as Brian was sharing, this is a bit of my background, is that I joined Christian and Brian back in early 2017. Spent my entire career, initially as a metallurgist, so always on the metals supply side, so mainly in the copper space, and in various roles. I'm not a very good metallurgist, so I went into corporate development, was with Hatch for many years and then with Lundin Mining, a number of transactions. In 2017, I decided that this was a chance to kind of spread the entrepreneurial spirit a little bit and with the good backing of Brian, and to pursue something in the world with Christian.
We did a search for about 150 different base metals related assets, it was El Domo that ranked the highest and was most actionable in 2017. On the back of that we entered Ecuador and have advanced the project in various ways. Other touch points with Altius are, as Brian mentioned, I'm on the board of a company called AbraSilver with Flora Wood, as well, a small gold explorer in Newfoundland called Canstar. I've put some pictures up there. That was Flora and I up in Salta, Argentina in January. Lawrence and I on the road in Ecuador a few years back. The last photo is my last Altius fishing trip, where I'm probably the worst fisherman that Altius has ever seen.
Why do we go to Ecuador for El Domo? This is it. I mean, this is one of the lowest capital intensity, high grade copper gold projects there is globally outside of basically Central Africa. What we saw the opportunity was an earn-in with a partner that wasn't that capital market savvy, and that we could de-risk and bring in Western engineering and finance. I think that was the big key in that we wanted to spend the money in the ground and bring in the standards and experience that we have as a team. From Christian and I working in our kitchens back in 2017, we negotiated the earn-in, and now the team is about 15 people here in Toronto.
Depending on what's on with drilling and the engineering now is about 200 people, most of the laborers in Ecuador. This is the promise of the project. It's about 5% copper equivalent, about 10 million tons. The $236 million project finance that we've arranged is from Wheaton and Trafigura, that's a lot of intense due diligence over the years in partnership with them. Wheaton desires $180 million or will fund us $180 million for a partial gold stream. Trafigura desires the offtake, the copper and zinc concentrates mainly. That's another over $50 million stake.
This is what we're at, and I think it's gonna be projected to be one of the lowest cost producers, not just in Ecuador or LatAm, but globally. The knock against the project is not huge, but as I'll show you, it is the first deposit in what we hope to be more discoveries. This is an important slide, we put it up front, is that we really wanted to focus on being transparent. We had looked at what Fruta del Norte and Lundin Gold had done with integrating and really being transparent with local communities, and we did that from the get-go. Over time, we really focused and kept tabs on what are the needs and the hopes of the communities in which we work.
Not just kind of greenwashing. I mean, there are some unique advantages in Ecuador here. We, when we did due diligence, there's never been any indigenous groups on our ground. And the communities have been supportive for exploration and in the hopes of a future construction and operation. What I'll highlight on this slide is that Ecuador is about 80%, 90% on hydropower, which people don't really know. It's a huge advantage in some of the carbon work that we've begun doing. Not only do they have that hydropower potential, but you also have the kind of the growth rates of biology, et cetera, as well as mangroves along the coast in a tropical environment. That's gonna be quite advantageous from a long-term standpoint.
This is something that we're of course focused on because the last remaining piece is the ESIA approval for the project with the government. I brought up this slide up, right up front because it's been a tough go. Brian liked to say, "Don't focus on the share price," but I put this up as a demonstration of the battle scars from a junior company and as a developer. It's been a very difficult period of time despite some big wins, like an Investment Protection Agreement with the government of Ecuador late last year. You know, we faced kind of political headlines and social headlines nationwide, not focused on anti-mining or anti El Domo, but those are what, you know, is on the headlines that you guys read.
Despite that, we have stuck to our knitting, our entire team, which is continue de-risk the project, tighten up our belts and where we choose to spend our money, and advance the project. Despite that, you know, Despite the stock chart, we're still going full speed ahead with the mind of further de-risking the project and getting into a construction decision situation. On the background of the backers here, as Brian said, Altius was a founding member and brought on Greenstone. In 2018, we began discussions with Wheaton after they saw that we did the El Domo transaction. They saw it as with a high-grade project with a huge gold and silver kicker.
This is ideal from a streaming standpoint without being too much on future cash costs and production costs. They made an initial equity investment as their first equity investment in a junior company in about 10 years. In 2019, we brought on the Novus Group, and Novus is quite interesting. They are one of the largest private families in Ecuador with a power base in Guayaquil. They are partners with DP World in the first post-Panamax port in Ecuador. They have a huge real estate holdings across hospitality and tourism. This is their first and only investment in metals and mining.
They saw the kind of upside of El Domo as a basis of a new business line, as well as the exploration potential and learning about the metals and mining space as it comes to Ecuador. I put in there as a reminder, Altius owns a 2% NSR on El Domo. This is a slide on for some of the analysts, the technical, TP reserves and the resource. The top table shows the open pit, which is the full feasibility study was completed late 2021. As you can see, it's about 2% copper plus 2.5 grams gold. The underground, which Brian spoke to, it's currently in PA phase, based on kind of reporting obligations.
What we've done from a design standpoint is that all the CapEx includes the tailings, et cetera, and the waste dumps of the underground. For our purposes, it's built into not only the design, but also the ESIA approval process with the government. This is a snapshot of the life of mine NSR value. To Brian's point earlier, here we're using long-term pricing at the time, which was $350 copper and $1,700 gold. You can see the huge kind of cash flows expected. This is what the government is informed of. This is what we've kept track of. We've obviously taken a very conservative view through technical reporting and due diligence. This is the value.
For those curious about the Wheaton Stream, the $180 million upfront for contribution to the CapEx will take about 50% of the gold, and then ratchet down over time. From a timeline standpoint, we are in mid 2023. As mentioned, the big milestone that we had was the Investment Protection Agreement with the government in Ecuador late 2022. We are the third group to sign that agreement following Lundin Gold and the Chinese conglomerate that own Mirador. This is a big step. We've surpassed a number of other higher profile Ecuadorian projects due to the nature of El Domo, the location, and the consultations that we've done transparently. I think that's a big win for the team.
In terms of detailed engineering, that's continued from the funding from last year. We're about 50% done that. The most recent news is the power line contract, which we will give more news on. That locks in a life of mine value of about $0.09 a kilowatt hour in Ecuador for renewable power, which is fantastic. Road upgrade we've announced earlier in Q2. The key number or key action item here is the permits of the ESIA approval. That's the main approval and milestone that we're actively pursuing in Q3 of this year. The control budget is also on the back of the detailed engineering. The original feasibility study CapEx was about $230 million.
There'd been some concerns about escalation, et cetera, as natural course for a development project. Again, the magnitude is $230 million. We're not a billion-dollar project. We're not a two billion dollar project. There will be some escalation. Ecuador has been insulated because it's been on the U.S. dollar for 20 years. We hope to give market guidance on that number, the active number going forward. In terms of timing, the production is expected in the first half of 2025. El Domo, as I mentioned, is about that 9 million-10 million tons of 5% copper equivalent. That's that little pod, that little orange pod there, within 215 sq km.
This is what I think drew Lawrence Winter and the Altius team into Ecuador along with us, is that, okay, this is the first VMS lens. It's extremely high grade, 5x to 6 x higher in gold content than an average VMS deposits. There's likely gonna be more. I guess, a part of the story the last five years has been, well, how do we allocate capital to project development and advancement on something that's got a high probability of being mined versus greenfield exploration beyond that? We've taken some kind of cheap shots at it, I think, over the years and did a amount of geophysics, a lot of geochemistry.
We've hit some targets like in 2021 on additional VMS lenses and other kinda sniffs of it. I think with our strategic investors and our partners in Ecuador and government officials, we went down the tangible route, which is to advance and de-risk El Domo. This means that there'll be exploration here for 10 + years. I should also mention that people concerned about mining in Ecuador is that there's a quarry mine south of our deposit, so just connecting there. There are additional gold sniffs there from historic drilling before us.
When we entered Ecuador in 2017 we also were impressed by just the lack of people operating other than big Australians throwing money in because of kind of the larger scale projects. We saw an angle to work with our partners, the Salazars, to start a portfolio. While we were there, if we had contacts with prospectors and private explorers, a lot of families that are in the exploration business, especially in the south of the country, we start to meet them and we started to be able to connect them with an idea of additional finance or bring them in a public company. That's the concept of the Exploration Alliance.
To date, we have looked at many things, dozens of projects across the country, but two that we are in full control of are Pijilí and Santiago. This is part of our kind of long-term optionality strategy. Again, we've done geophysics here, spent a good amount of money, but not blowing our brains out on poor drilling. With Pijilí we made some discoveries, more academic, but enough for as a project generation for future funding partners, on some interesting copper hits right beside Southern Copper's big copper project. Santiago, which I'll get to next, is probably the most enticing project and interesting target, but we've actually had a quite tough time looking to get to work here. This is Santiago.
To give you a bit of background, this is in the south of the country. It was a former Newmont project in the nineties. At the time were looking for shallow gold, shallow hybrid gold like the Yanacocha, coming from Peru and into Ecuador. They had a limit of drilling about 300 meters, so 1,000 feet at the bottom of an open pit. They hit mineralization, they hit copper, you know, 0.2%, 0.3%, 0.6%-0.9% equivalent. But they stopped because copper was less than $1, and they were looking for high gold. Fast-forward 20, 30 years, we come along, we say, "Look, let's do more sampling. Let's do more geophysics.
Let's see what vision or what visibility we can get below the historical drilling. We know SolGold has drilled down to 2,200 meters in Ecuador. Lo and behold, we see some interesting anomalies and targets for future drilling. The concept here is for us to twin the old Newmont holes and go beyond and see what's really there. What I mentioned the struggle with this is that, you know, there are areas in Ecuador where it's harder to do work than others. This is an area where, you know, we've been very aware from the beginning of some of the community and social concerns. This has taken us years at this point, not months, to really engage with local community members and leadership to get to work.
We're part of the dynamic where a lot of local smaller communities, really wanna get to work and get us drilling, and doing more work. There are other regional forces that are politically battling the government. Stay tuned. This is just a summary slide on what I've talked about, is that El Domo, keep your eye on the news to come with our work with the government and the ESIA approval. You'll see the update of detailed engineering and the capital cost. Everything's on track based on that number. You'll see, continue to see lots of negative headlines from Ecuador. I would suggest that you take them with a grain of salt, and you just have a look at Lundin Gold's share price every so often.
Because those two mining projects are mining operations, and they're contributing and changing the economic outlook of Ecuador behind the scenes beyond the headlines. On Pijilí in Santiago, we continue to have a lot of interest in what those projects can be. That gives us a bit of longer term optionality. From a corporate standpoint, we are actually partnered with South32 in Ireland. I think Brian Dalton had a South32 logo on the screen. They are continuing work in Ireland with us. These were original spin-out assets before we pivoted to Ecuador. They'll be spending a few million EUR in exploration, greenfield exploration with us in Ireland as well this year.
This is a bit of a update of an interesting investment for Altius.
We believe. Okay, next up before we have, we switch over to cocktail, it's a little segue to... I won't keep going. We have Paddy Nicol. Paddy is the CEO of Orogen Royalties. We have a long history with Paddy Nicol. Orogen Royalties is actually a combination of two companies, Evrim Resources Corp. and Renaissance Gold Inc. We were large shareholders of both companies before it all came together. There's connections around the royalty that we each hold on the Silicon project. Even today, we work together in strategic alliance, developing new projects that we feel have Silicon-like characteristics that we're making available for new royalty creation in Nevada. I think we're your largest shareholder. I know we were your largest shareholder, but anyway, all over to you, Paddy Nicol. Orogen Royalties.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, Brian, and thanks to the Altius team for sharing part of their investor day with us. Brian mentioned I'm Paddy Nicol, President and CEO of Orogen. Today we're gonna spend a bit of time talking about the business model. It's a bit of a unique one, I think, within the royalty space. We'll talk about some of our key royalties, and then we'll also cover off the prospect generation business. There's our forward-looking information. There's no graphic. That's okay. When we talk about Orogen to new investors, new shareholders, we like to talk about the predecessor companies that actually formed Orogen. Orogen's been around since 2020, so just about two and a half years under its belt now.
The predecessor companies that formed Orogen were built upon prospect generation, and those companies covered the Western Cordillera of North America. Through their efforts as prospect generators, they both had discoveries. In the case of Mexico, the Ermitaño deposit was discovered in 2016, 2017. It is now in production. In Nevada, the Silicon asset, which is under development, was discovered in 2017. The companies used those assets as a basis for forming Orogen in 2020. We continue to run our prospect generation business today. It is a profitable business unit within Orogen. We receive cash payments, receive shares and share issuances much, very similar to how Brian Dalton described it. In every case, we always retain the royalty on the back end of every deal we do.
That is our primary tool for developing royalties today. We also do royalty acquisition. It's not the primary way that we acquire royalties, but it is a way. Last year was the first year that we have picked up three royalties.
Our focus on royalty acquisition is a fair bit different. We will not be involved in the bidding processes. Our size is simply too small, our cost of capital is too high to be playing in that sort of game. Instead, we use our prospect generation technical skills, business development expertise to look at assets and areas and opportunities that others may not be looking at. It allows us to pick up some interesting royalties, but obviously focusing on strong risk-adjusted returns. Exposure to growth is very important, both from the development of our royalty portfolio. Our royalties are brand new. They're always at the forefront of their potential lives and even our mine life with respect to Ermitaño and Silicon. We also have the leverage in the discovery of any project that we have under option.
We have 14 different ex-exploration partnerships today, along with two alliances. That exposure to that early-stage exploration provides a tremendous amount of leverage going forward. As mentioned, we talk about quality. For assets like Silicon and Ermitaño, these are brand-new royalties. Again, at the forefront of their mine life, you're going to see the full spectrum of value created from these. In addition to that, these are in jurisdictions, I think that are probably some of the best. Nevada, it doesn't get much better than that, and along with a top-tier operator in AngloGold Ashanti. In Mexico, mining is well-known, and we've got a very good operator in First Majestic Silver. We're profitable.
Last year was our first year of royalty revenue. It's provided us to be generate about CAD 800,000 in profit in year one. That stability is massive for a company like Orogen. It allows us to focus on our business of prospect generation and royalty acquisition. Some financial highlights for you. 2022, as I mentioned, first year of revenue. We generated CAD 4.6 million. Of that, CAD 3.7 million came from the Ermitaño royalty. The balance came from our prospect generation business. CAD 800,000 was approximate profit that we generated. Working cap at the end of March is CAD 15 million. Over the course of the past year and to date, the development of our flagship royalties has been significant.
The Ermitaño production profile will grow by about 20%, which will have obviously a knock-on effect for our royalty revenue. We expect that to be CAD 4.5 million coming in over 2023. The announcement of the 4.2 million ounce resource at Silicon is significant. AngloGold has provided a fair bit more information on what that resource looks like. This is, again, this is on an oxide resource and a heap leach operation only. This does not talk about the sulfides or the transitional material that exists below, we'll talk about that as we go along. As I mentioned, our prospect generation portfolio is very busy. 14 active partnerships. We expect upwards of eight drilling programs by our partners this year. We have two alliances. One, as I mentioned, is with Altius.
We generated or created eight new royalties over the course of 2022, and we expect that. Well, to date, we've already brought in three for 2023. The partner funding drill programs are expected to be approximately CAD 10 million. Actually, I think it's gonna be closer to CAD 15 million. There's gonna be a lot of money spent in our projects over the course of this year. Corporate snapshot. I'll draw your attention to the graphic on the right. As Brian mentioned, Altius is the largest shareholder in Orogen. That has come through private placements, the investments that they made into the prospect generators that formed Orogen in the first place. In addition to that, they have been buyers in the open market, that's been a fantastic support for Orogen.
Adrian Day, Global Strategic Management, holds a significant amount, as does the Sprott Asset Management Group. This is a group out of San Diego, Rick Rule's old shop, the Global Resource guys, who are really champions of the prospect generator model. They hold 11%. The balance is sort of a combination of small fund, high net worth individuals, along with a fairly significant component of retail investors. That is starting to transition a bit. As Orogen's grown, we're seeing more and more of the institutional ownership come into play. Market cap is just around CAD 100 million. Our share price is hovering around the CAD 0.55 mark. We're close to our year high of CAD 0.60. There is a number of warrants that have been coming due over the past six months.
Altius actually holds over CAD 7 million of those warrants, which are due next year. The balance actually is expiring today. We're happy to have that lid brought off the company and we'll continue on without those warrants. That's good. Anyways, it's that's where we sit from a corporate snapshot perspective. Zeroing in on the royalty assets. Ermitaño, this is in Sonora, Mexico. If you know where the Laramide Porphyry Belt, there's a smaller area called the Rio Sonora Valley. Within that valley, you've got the Santa Elena Mine, Mercedes Mine, Las Chispas. It's quite a prolific little area. Royalty revenue for us, and as mentioned, was CAD 3.7 million.
The initial mine life for Ermitaño is seven years, that's based on a resource, reserves, which is now sitting at 274,000 ounces gold, 4.6 million ounces silver. There is a significant inferred resource behind that we believe will extend the mine well on into 10-12 years. The guidance for production is up by 20%. Over the medium term, this is the Silicon project. We're moving into Nevada now within the Walker Lane. This is a 1% NSR that we hold, AngloGold as the operator. We talked about the resource already. The future growth beyond just the Central Silicon zone, which is where the resource exists is really in Merlin. There's also a significant sulfide mineralization that sits probably below both areas.
It's a difficult one to figure out. AngloGold has not released one drill hole on this project yet, so we live a little bit vicariously through their public disclosure. What they are saying is very positive. Pre-feasibility is underway, and that's expected to come Q3 2023, and they announced that last Friday, actually. That's encouraging. This is Ermitaño. We're just gonna zero in a little bit. The graphic on the left gives you an idea of our royalty influence. It's 167 square kilometers, so there's lots of room to find more resources. Production here started in Q4 2021, and it's been going very well ever since.
The big story right now on Ermitaño is the new discovery called Luna that was discovered last year, and it provides additional years mine life, we believe, to the operation. First Majestic Silver is planning for the long term for this area. They have put a new LNG plant. They have put in a high-intensity grinding mill. They've put in a dual circuit. These aren't insignificant investments, so they're clearly planning for the long haul. There is also 20,000 meters of drilling planned for this year, which is an infill and expansion program. This next graphic, it's a bit busy, but this was published last week by First Majestic, and gives you an idea of the mine complex at Ermitaño. We're looking north here. The mine area is split up into three areas.
You've got Display Ermitaño, where the current operations are. You can see the, sort of the black lines, that's the underground. Central Ermitaño, and then out towards the east, which was again discovered last year, called Ermitaño Luna. The drilling that's ongoing right now is an effort to bring in some of that inferred resource into an M&I category. The yellow call-outs that you see, this is a graphic taken right out of their presentation, that's some of the new intercepts that they've encountered over the past, well, first few months of this year. Very encouraging to see, and, it's providing a nice level of stability for the company. Well we lost all of our text. That's okay, 'cause I've said this a lot, so I can go off the cuff.
I'll draw your attention to the graphic on the right. This is the Silicon project located about two hours north of Las Vegas, in the Beatty Gold District . The historic mine here was the Bullfrog Mine. These claims that you see here, the dark gold claim is where our royalty influence sits. That's approximately 79 square kilometers. The lands that surround us were once held by Corvus and Coeur Mining. AngloGold has invested over $600 million into acquiring those lands that surround it. It gives you the sense of the intent and scale of what's going on here at Silicon. The initial resource that was announced, 4.2 million ounces of gold, is focused solely on the Central Silicon deposit.
You can see to the south, those little black dots are all drill pads on 200 meter spacings. Merlin was discovered in midway through 2020, and they have been actively drilling that ever since. We, obviously, you've heard Brian talk about some of the captions that the leadership from Anglo is talking about Merlin being the gem of the district. We presume that it's going to be at least big, as big, if not bigger, than the Central Silicon deposit. It's of primary importance, I think, to the company. If you look at sort of the grade differentiation between something like the Central Silicon deposit versus North Bullfrog, it's three times. The average grade at Central Silicon is about, I believe, 0.83 grams per ton.
It's about 0.33 grams per ton in North Bullfrog. This is clearly gonna be the most important piece of this district as time goes on. There is an integrated study coming, as mentioned, coming in Q3 of this year and a pre-feasibility. We're excited to see the outcome of what's going to happen at the Merlin and Central Silicon areas. We suspect that also zones like Seahorse, Lindy Strip will also be included into that integrated look. Beyond that, there is tons of opportunity at areas like Maverick and Frying Pan.
A lot of people ask how big this can be, and, you know, we don't know, except for the fact that AngloGold's already gone on to say it's got sort of about a 10 million ounce look to the area within where our royalty area of influence sits. We'll just have to see how the numbers come along later this year. We're going to zero in on the Central Silicon zone. This is the resource as they've showed it in their mineral resource and reserve statement. It's a fairly rigorous resource. It's a pit-constrained resource. They've applied costs, they've applied metallurgy. So what you see is I think a very solid number. It's based, again, on oxide-only resources.
You can see in the graphic there's a bit of a yellow hatch pattern or yellow blanket that sits over top of the upper part of the resource. That is where the oxide sits, and that's based on a heap leach operation, and that's all the mineralization they're talking about. They are not talking about the mineralization that sits at depth, which is transitional or sulfide through. The charts that AngloGold has published, there's actually 6.4 million ounces in that pit. They've also gone on to disclose that they're going through a number of studies right now to see how they can bring those ounces back in, and it might be through a third or sorry, a secondary or tertiary mining and milling operation.
Beyond that, there is a significant amount of mineralization that is outside the pit. We think that in future years, that gives rise to the opportunity for an underground operation. AngloGold has published photos of drill core that's about 625 meters below surface. Looks very similar to what you see at Ermitaño from an epithermal standpoint. They've also disclosed they have not found the bottom of the mineralized zone yet. They're still chasing that at depth. We see that there's a significant opportunity to grow the resources just at Central Silicon alone. Production, as Brian mentioned, starts on North Bullfrog 2025, with Silicon coming in sometime around 2028. I'm glad the graphics made it. I can at least not worry too much about the text. This is a graphic of Nevada.
I think just wanna talk about the prospect generation business a little bit. We have a fairly deep reach into Nevada. The groups that found Silicon in the first place are still with us, and they continue to provide Silicon-type opportunities. In fact, the alliance that we're in with Altius is doing just that. The projects that we have in Nevada, anything that's labeled in blue is under option today. Anything that's labeled in gold are already created royalties. Anything that's in red is an unoptioned project, and you can see we don't have many left. What we're trying to do now is bring in more projects. We brought in two late last year. We're bringing in two more currently. We're trying to rebuild the pipeline to de-deliver our exploration opportunities.
This is where most of our drilling is going to take place over the course of 2023. Groups like Nevada Gold Mines, Barrick, Pan American Silver. If you follow the Headwater Gold story, who's got an option now or the option's been farmed out to Newcrest, who are drilling the Spring Peak project, which we believe could be sort of the next leg in our stool of royalty assets. K2 is already drilling. There's lots of opportunities lots of news, lots of catalysts, lots of exposure to the upside that will come as a result of these relationships that we have.
It's a very important exploration base for us, and obviously, we've a tremendous amount of partnerships in there and, yeah, we're excited for the news that might come out on this over the next year. This is our final slide, and this is again, speaking to our prospect generation business. It is, I mean, it's one thing to come up with a really nice target. It's another thing to try to convince someone else it's a really nice target and get them to take hold of the dream that you have and carry it even further. I think the team has done a fantastic job in putting this portfolio of active option deals together.
I'm not gonna go through each one, but I think the important column that we should look at in here is the term. Every deal that we have has a cash payment component or has a share payment component. Those cash and share payments make our prospect generation business profitable. We don't put any money into it. It is a self-sustaining entity within Orogen now. Because of that and the efforts that they've made, we're allowed to create royalties on the back end of every deal that we do, and you can see that in the term, effectively like we're creating royalties for free in that sense. I think that's a really unique take on what we've done within the royalty space. That is our presentation.
I apologize for the, for the messed up slides, but happy to take any questions you might have. Yes.
The lands around Silicon, are they privately owned? I'll add a question that somebody mentioned in those areas.
Within our area, where our royalty influence sits, that land was once held in the, I know it sounds a bit ominous, but it was the Nevada test site. Those lands were released by the government, it was public lands. The way that AngloGold would go about permitting that is through the BLM. It's not a Forest Service thing, which is good. One of the reasons why AngloGold purchased Corvus, and Brian alluded to this, was the fact that they were already several years down the road in their permitting process. The other aspect, which I think a lot of people don't know, is that Corvus had private water rights in the area as well.
That's provided a tremendous fast track for AngloGold to get a leg up on what's going on. It's the reason why they're gonna go to produce at North Bullfrog first. In terms of private lands, there's not a lot going on down there. I mean, this is all kind of right near the Nevada test site. It's an area that you just don't see a lot of people. Beatty is certainly there, but that's pretty well the only, I would say, small town within the region.
Will they have to go through the NEPA process? You know.
I'm not sure on that. I'd have to find out for you. Yes.
Is your royalty for district being distributed as well by AngloGold?
No. We understand our royalty rights right now. It's 79 square kilometers. Our royalty agreements are different. The I guess genesis of the royalties that were created when it was Callinan Royalties, a predecessor, did a deal with the Renaissance team. They had a very robust royalty agreement that had some language around expansion and expanding into an AOI. Our royalty agreement that we have with AngloGold is different. It's a quite a definitive type of this is where we know we have land and where we know we don't have land.
The ground that since land has been acquired by AngloGold to the north of where you see the Central Silicon deposit because they're staking ground, they're not acquiring ground, they can actually still go and stake land that is included in our AOI. This graphic is reflected by that. They acknowledge that our royalty influence has grown. Where we won't get royalties for or we won't get an expanding royalty for Orogen is when it's a third party acquired ground. That's where our AOI won't expand. Anything at stake, we will get it. Anything that's or anything that they stake, we will get anything that's third party, we will not get.
Okay. Just to follow up. Your 1% NSR is on top of the one and a half.
Yeah.
Altius has on the Central Silicon.
That's correct.
Two and a half total.
There's two and a half total.
Right. Okay.
Yeah. Both are non-viable. There's no cap on them or anything like that.
Thank you.
Yeah. You're welcome. Any other questions?
No.
Great. Thanks, everyone.
We're going to ask Jenny to see if there's any questions on the call. We'll just pause a moment for that.
Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, please press star one should you wish to ask a question.
We've actually talked through a webcast operator shift change. I've never seen that before. I'm assuming Jenny will interrupt us if there's any other questions. I really want to thank Ernie from LRC, Sam from Adventus, and Paddy and Marco, his colleague who's in the audience from Orogen, for being here. Stick around, we'll close the conference call and webcast in one.