We're going to stay with copper, and we've got Arizona Sonoran Copper Company next.
Thank you.
George, great to see you again.
It's great to see you. Thank you.
George Ogilvie, President and CEO, will take us through this. Thank you, George. Over to you.
Thank you for the opportunity to present here today. It's Arizona Sonoran Copper Company, and it's a copper cathode for U.S. industry. We do make some forward-looking statements, so I'll draw your attention to the cautionary language. This presentation is on our website, so please feel free to review that at your own discretion. I'm sure everybody's very well aware that the asset is in Arizona. It's a former producing mine, so it's a Tier 1 jurisdiction. When it was in production, they were producing a copper concentrate through a flotation mill. We envisage going back to a heap leach operation and will be producing a copper cathode for U.S. industry. Last year, we put out a PEA with an after-tax NPV of $2 billion and an IRR of 24% after-tax, and we believe that with a PFS imminent, we can duplicate those numbers.
You have an experienced management team here with a proven track record of creating exceptional results for the shareholders of the companies and other companies that they work with, and we're very well advanced with the permitting given that we're on private land and there's no federal nexus here. There's a PFS coming out imminently, and that will lead into a bankable feasibility study in 2026. We're located 45 miles south of Phoenix. When you leave Sky Harbor Airport within one hour, you can be at the mine site. We're just off of Interstate 10. We have the Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway on our southern border, including the Union Pacific Southern Rail Line, and the town or city of Casa Grande is five miles to the southeast with a population of 68,000 people. The project came with water rights to the year 2070.
We also have a natural aquifer in the ground that we can draw water from at a rate of 3,800 acre-feet per year, and I think if you Google one acre-foot, there's like 320,000 gallons of water in one acre-foot. When we did the PEA, we used about 2,100 acre-feet per year, so about 55% of our actual water rights. Interestingly, that aquifer in the ground is only permitted for industrial use because it contains naturally certain elements like selenium, chromium, and zinc. Farmers and ranchers in the area are not able to drill into that aquifer and use it because they don't want that going into the supply or food chain as far as livestock and farming is concerned. There is a power line that runs through the property from the Palo Verde nuclear reactor, and we're located in the industrial park of Casa Grande.
The current resource that we have is in excess of 11 billion pounds of copper. We're looking at a simple heap leach here with two open pits. There'd be a large new open pit at Park Salyer and the Cactus West, which is a former Sacaton mine. We would be doing a layback of that existing pit. Our main focus this year in the drilling has been to move as much of the inferred material into the indicated category. We've got 3 billion pounds of copper, which is actually located here in the inferred category, and given that this is going to be mined in the first five years, we really want to bring this up into the indicated category.
I think when the mineral resource comes out, likely next week, we're likely to see numbers in the M&I category well in excess of 10 billion pounds of copper, and the global resource will have grown to slightly above 12 billion pounds. We've been on quite a journey here since acquiring this asset in early 2021. From a land perspective, we've almost doubled the land from 4,000 acres to almost 8,000 acres, and we'll touch on that in a future slide. We've grown the resource some 350% from only 220 million pounds of copper in a historical surface stockpile to today, as I said, in totality, in excess of 11 billion pounds of copper.
With the land acquisition, we now have more than enough land to take us out to 30 years of mining, and you'll likely see in the pre-feasibility study with minable reserves a mine plan that will be in the range of 22 years of initial mine life, only focusing in on the leachable oxides with no primary sulfide considered at this juncture in time. With respect to the land, about four months ago, as we were working through the PFS, we came to the realization that beyond year 15, we did not have enough land to accommodate some of the leach pad space out here to the west, nor could we accommodate some of the waste that's going to be stored here in the southeast.
We started conversations with various private landowners in the area, and over a period of four months, we were able to pick up that 2,100 acres of land. Of course, they wanted a big cash payment right up front of approximately $100 million, which obviously we couldn't afford, but we came to a very sensible agreement. I think that upon taking title last week, we gave the landowners $5 million of value, which was $2 million of cash, $3 million of shares. On each anniversary over the next three years, they get the same payment, and then in 2029, late August, there's a balloon payment of $80 million U.S. dollars.
We did it that way because when we execute on our plan, as I'll show you shortly, by the end of next year, the project financing will be in place, and obviously at that juncture in time, we'll be able to actually pay off the land, which we can do without any penalty or any recourse. With being on private land, the way the permitting works here is with no federal nexus. Once we apply for an amendment to the permit, once the application is administratively accepted, and that can take anywhere from two weeks to two months, but once it is, the regulators must give us a response to our permits within six months.
The longest we've had to wait for any permit to date was an amendment to the aquifer protection permit in 2023, which essentially took five months from when it was administratively accepted to when we physically received the permit in our office. We've obviously got a community right next door to us, and over the course of the last four years, we've conducted three perception surveys. The last one was done in October of last year, some three months after the PEA came out. We wanted that news to be able to disseminate into the market and get the reaction of the community. We used the same consultancy firm, the same set of questions, 500 respondents, and we found that the favorable rating to see the mine come back into production increased from an already high 83%- 87%, which is quite incredible.
We've got a very, very, very strong social license here. One of the drivers for that is that the city of Casa Grande is there today because of the initial discovery hole here back in the 1960s. Although mining hasn't occurred for some 40 years at this property, there's a culture and there's a heritage of mining within the community. With the PFS coming out imminently, we would then immediately go into a bankable feasibility study, which is going to take about 9 to 12 months to complete. Sometime this next time next year, we'll have the bankable feasibility study out. In conjunction with that, there's two very critical work streams, obviously the permits.
Once the PFS comes out, we know between PFS and DFS, the process flow sheet is not going to change, where we put the leach pad is not going to change, the general plan arrangement won't change, the production profile is not going to change. It allows us to start that application process. If we assume that early next year, the applications all have been administratively accepted and the clock is starting to tick, you can see that by next June or July, we will then be in possession of all the final permits required to actually build and construct the mine. The mine is fully permitted today, but that is as per a PEA, which we put out in 2021 as part of a qualifying document for the IPO. That is only an 18-year mine life with 28,000 tons of cathode a year.
It only deals with the surface stockpile and the layback of the historical open pit. It does not include Park Salier. The permits have to be amended. The other key component, as we started the project financing, we've engaged Hannan & Partners out of London several months ago. We've got 15 potential financiers under NDA about to come into the data room. By Christmas, we'll have narrowed that group down to some five or six, which will be the core syndication, let's say, for the project financing. In early 2026, we bring in the independent engineer, and as we move through permitting, the environmental studies, and then into the bankable feasibility study, we would hope to conclude the project financing sometime in the third quarter next year. With all of that coming together, then in the fourth quarter, we're now at a FID decision to greenlight the project.
Right now, we're showing about a 24-month construction and development period. If we can deliver on that, we can see first copper cathode here at some juncture in 2029. When this mine goes into production, based on the PEA, we saw that we had 100,000 plus tons of copper cathode production over the first 20 years of the mine life. If we can replicate that with the PFS in the first 15 years, when this mine goes into production, it will be the fifth largest copper mine in the U.S. today, based on the other producers. Obviously, you can see there that all the other producers are controlled by the majors, particularly Freeport-McMoRan, given this is in their backyard. Delighted with the performance of the share price in the last seven to eight months, the stock is up over 70%.
I certainly think that bringing in Hudbay as a strategic investor was a big change for us. They approached us last August after the PEA went public. They conducted four months of due diligence and then approached us in December for a strategic investment. We thought it was a good idea. We brought them in, and subsequently, since then, they've followed their money under their preemptive rights. They came in initially at $1.68, and on the bought deal, when they followed on, it was at $2. Yesterday, we closed at $2.54. Despite that, today, we still only have a market cap in U.S. dollars of only $350 million. If we can deliver a PFS very shortly that has an after-tax NPV around $2 billion U.S. dollars, on a price-to-NAV basis, we would be trading at under 0.2x price per NAV.
We get asked consistently why that is, and we scratch our heads on that, but the one reason we think that the share price is not where it should be at this juncture in time is that if you follow the genesis of the project, it started out very small. As we've added more land and more resources, the project has grown in size and scale, but it's continuously changing. We brought Newton in with Rio Tinto, and we'd added in a complexity with a new technology, which now is no longer in the plan.
We think the market is now paying attention to this, and if we can come out with a PFS that in the first 20 years mirrors exactly what we had in the PEA, with no primary, no Newton, just simple oxide leaching on a heap leach with SXEW processing, we think there's a big re-rate coming in this stock before the end of the year. The analysts have us trading at 0.3x. Their valuation of the company at the moment is between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, hence the 0.3x valuation. You can see that most of our peers trade today between 0.3x- 0.8x price to NAV.
Of course, I'm biased, but I would argue that an asset in Arizona with copper cathodes that's on private land, that's substantially permitted, has access to water, strong social license, low capital intensity, I think an asset and company like that should demand a premium. If that's the case, and we just went to 0.4x or 0.5x , you can see easily there's potentially a doubling of the stock here in the next six to nine months. Very tight share capital structure, 179 million shares issued, no warrants, fully diluted 189 million shares. We're currently sitting with just under $50 million U.S. Dollars in the bank, and we're fully funded through to FID in Q4 of 2026. The bought deal that we did recently and then Tembo Capital doing a secondary has brought in a lot more quality institutions into the stock.
As you can see, over 50% of our shareholder base is institutional, and Tembo Capital are now below 9.9%, which has removed an overhang on the stock. We've seen that in the last month that the liquidity is up substantially, and typically now we're trading well over $1 million Canadian dollars in value every day. Just to recap, this is a high-value proposition. It's a Tier 1 jurisdiction. It's a known entity, big copper porphyry. We're in a great jurisdiction, significant infrastructure, which helps minimize the CapEx. Remember, we don't have to build roads. We don't have to bring in water, build a desalination plant. We're essentially at sea level. We're in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. There's no endangered species or wildlife or fauna. There's huge exploration upside here. We know there are other areas on the property that are sarco-drilled that need to be followed up on.
One of those would have been the northeast extension. Many years ago, they drilled there. They got 35 meters of 3.5% copper that needs to be followed up on. Of course, it's a brownfield site. It's open pit. It doesn't get more simple than that when it comes to mining. 90% of all the copper mined in Arizona is mined via open pit, strong social license, and the permitting is substantially completed. That concludes the presentation. I'd like to thank everybody for your time today. Thank you.