Thank you for hosting us. We really appreciate it. It's a busy time, and we continue to do super well, and we're in a privileged position, to be honest. I'm on my way to Morocco tomorrow, so I've had to cut this conference short, but the interest to get to site is there, and it's a function of, you know, execution. People want to see what we're doing in Morocco, which happens to be a great place to visit. As you'll learn from this presentation, we're the only pure-play silver company on the planet. No byproduct carry, nothing like that, no lead, no zinc, and incredible intercepts that is capturing the market. So with that, I'll go into forward-looking statements and right into the team. I think a lot of you will be familiar with Benoit La Salle.
Benoit La Salle was the founding shareholder of SEMAFO, which actually got a lot of airtime here in Sweden, and certainly he took that company to about $3.5 billion of market cap. I think this company is going to be much bigger, for the simple reason that Morocco is on an exotic belt and an eclectic belt that is a copper belt that presents a ton of opportunity. We are the only real player on the belt outside of Managem, which is controlled by the king. So you know, it's basically bringing the band back together. The other person that I should really mention is Mustapha El Ouafi.
He's to my left here, and he was the number two at OCP, which is the largest phosphate producer on the planet by reserves, and certainly one of the largest in Africa for sure, but he basically was the number two at OCP, and as we consolidate land packages and advance everything we are doing in Morocco, he's a key component to that. The board is equally very interesting. With the board and management, we control about 47% of the float. It's a very tight float, 136 million shares outstanding, again, 50% of which is controlled by the team. So we trade on average about CAD 10 million- CAD 15 million of notional value on the TSX exchange every day. Just a quick snapshot. We took over the company in 2020 at the start of COVID. It was in complete disarray.
A lot of people would say, "Oh, it's, it's done. The easy money's been made." While that might be true, when we took over the company, it was basically bankrupt. It was; our auditors quit. It was bare; it was on resuscitation. It was barely surviving. We instantly put set in motion a bunch of things that took the company to 500 million, 1 billion, 1.5 billion. Honestly, if I'm, if I'm looking ahead, notwithstanding the silver price at $30, it was $32 yesterday, and we're big believers of $40-$50 silver. I think without silver moving, we're still a $25 stock over the next few years. I already spoke to the cap structure. We have about $100 million of project finance debt. It's low cost; call it 8% debt with the European Development Bank.
Again, this is very unusual because usually you're getting funding at 15% +, and it's very soft. It's also an ESG loan for people who are aware of ESG and governance, and certainly the CSR programs that are important. We're going to be zero Scope 2 emissions, as we ramp up at Zgounder. But again, 47% of the float is controlled by management. And the other interesting component here is, I would say that we're just starting to get to capture the imagination of the larger investors that everybody's aware of, the Fidelity's, the Wellington's, the BlackRock's of the world. A lot of these players are now kicking tires and trying to understand what we're doing.
I think it won't be long before we're starting, we're going to start seeing the bigger players, the generalist funds really capture what we're, get involved and take this to a price that's much higher. This chart's very important because it speaks to the significance or the scarcity of silver and us in particular. We are the only pure-play silver company on the planet that's publicly traded. And what's also important is we're growing ounces at a huge rate. So I'll take you through a slide in a second, but it's like owning an ETF, a silver ETF, and we're adding ounces every year, you know, at 25%, 30%, 50% increases every year. And that's a function of the belt just being not walked on or looked at, ever. There's no, there's never been technology brought to bear.
We're the number one driller in Morocco at 75% of the drilling capacity. This is just a snapshot of Morocco. For those that have not been there, it's fantastic. I take my family there all the time now. I'm there twice a month. If anybody ever wants to go, you know, you can be in Casablanca and very quickly or Marrakesh. Our mines are about three hours, paved road, 5G networks, no problem. Very easy to get around. The other interesting component is when you think about mining in Morocco, it's about 2% of GDP. It's not very significant. They do cars, obviously, food, vegetables, tourism. When you look at OCP, the phosphate producer, it jumps to a, you know, 8% or 10% of GDP, but mining itself is not significant. So it's not a concern. It's a very forward-looking country, forward-looking state.
So very easy to travel. Tourism's a big deal. You know, it's really hidden. It's like the Switzerland of the Middle East. In terms of royalty structures and everything else, we're looking at 3% of sales, a 32% tax rate. That includes the COVID tax they never took off. You're looking at the mining permits that are renewable every 10 years. Listen, when I talk about all our mines here, they all have mining permits. And so that's a huge advantage. When you think about thematics around the world in mining, they can't get permitted. It's very tough. Even with policy changes and governments changing, Morocco. It's measured by weeks and months, not by years. Sometimes five years to permit a mine. We can do stuff very quickly here.
Now, this is the interesting part of the presentation because you can see the belt on the far right. The blue line that goes across is about 1,500 kilometers from side to side. It's a fault. It's mineralized with all kinds of different stuff along there. It's a copper belt, and you can see our flagship asset, Zgounder to the south, Boumadine. The next asset that I would draw your attention to, to the right, the far right, that could be 10x the size of Zgounder. Zgounder, that's a nice asset. It's 100 million ounces of silver. We'll probably find more. It's going to throw out about 8 million, 5 million-8 million ounces of silver per year of production starting next year. We're fully ramped up by the end of this year. So it's basically an ATM.
We're going to produce anywhere between 100 million and 140 million of EBITDA per year starting next year. So again, that's assuming $30 silver. But the real excitement, however, is the rest of the belt, and we're spending a ton of time consolidating the belt. You're not going to see us do an M&A outside of the belt because the returns are just not, and the, they're just not what they, what we see here. So Boumadine, like I said, that's polymetallic, probably 75% base, precious metals, and that's going to be roughly 10x the size of Zgounder. We announced a resource to start. After 12 months of drilling, I think we announced 4.1 million ounces of gold equivalent at 5 gm at with 95,000 m of drilling over 12 months. That's nothing. People spend years doing that.
So the objective here is to double, triple, quadruple that in the coming months and years. We announced something very special the other day, last week. We're spinning out an asset, that's going to include our Mauritanian asset, which was a non-core. We're also going to throw in another asset called Amizmiz, which is in Morocco. It's a partnership with Rick Clark and Adam Spencer. Rick Clark, for those who remember, did Red Back. He was at Montage. Aya is going to invest alongside of this. It's going to be a sister vehicle, no free stock. Everybody's buying in. Some big names are getting involved because of Morocco and because of Rick Clark's and our status. But we're seeing so many opportunities that we just can't handle the funnel. And a lot of them are just too small for us.
By too small, I'm saying 1 to 2, 3, 4 million ounces of 4 gm gold. So that's going to go into these guys and see what, see if there's something to do. So again, a ton of interest in this. I think at last count, we were raising CAD 10 million. It was probably 6x covered at a very, very reasonable valuation. I'll skip over this. We've had a great year. We continue to hit all our KPIs. This is a very important slide because it speaks to the resource growth that I keep talking about. So when we took over the company on a per share basis, you know, it was 0.5, and now we're at 3.5, almost 3.5 ounces per share.
And that's going to continue going right and way up as we announce additional resources at, at Zgounder, Zgounder Regional, certainly, and, and Boumadine. But you can see we've grown the resource 7x since we took over the company. That's going to double again. And so we see no shortage of that at all. I think I talked about the intercepts. They continue at Zgounder, some of the highest grade intercepts on the planet. They're, and without any byproduct carry. So there's not a week that goes by that we don't see results. We announce them on a regular basis that you're getting, you know, 21 meters of 4 kg. That's crazy. We see that all the time. This was the first maiden resource that we announced or the resource statement that we announced probably about two years ago for our Zgounder project. It's about 100 million ounces.
The objective here is to grow that, with more drilling. And again, it takes time. One of the things that we've encountered is when you talk about silver, it doesn't respond well to geophysics. So it just takes basic walking the ground, drilling deep, and we're getting lots of sniffs, lots of smoke right now. And it's taken probably two years to get to this point. But now we're seeing it. We're seeing it, lots of smoke, like I said. So stand by for more results as we sort of announce them over the coming months. This is just more operational updates. It's going really well. As you can see, when we took over the company, it was operating at 45%. Today we're at 85%-90%. This is a snapshot of the feasibility for Zgounder.
We're looking at basically 5-8 million ounces per year for annual production. It'll be built for 10-12 million ounces as we find more ounces. That puts us into the top five in the world in silver. Again, pure silver. So again, we're looking at the cost of building this was about $150 million. If you did the same project anywhere in North America, $400 million. I forgot to mention this, but it's an important core competency. When you think about Morocco, it's about a third of the cost anywhere else on the planet. So drilling is $150 per meter. It's not $400 or $500 like in Nevada. Building a plant like this is $150 million. It's not $500 million, $400 million like it is in North America.
This is an aerial view of what it is. It's 2,000 meters above sea level. It's like you're being on the moon. 30% of the output will come from an open pit. It just, it's de-bottlenecks it. It's easier to truck stuff. And like I said, we're at full ramp up by the end of this year. Some more information just on what we're tracking on budget. We're running about eight weeks delay, but not a big deal at all when we think about mining. So, a month and a half behind. But, we're well on our way. I did mention that we're going to zero Scope 2 emissions, which is critical for all the ESG funds out there.
We often get called by some of the largest ESG funds around asking us to help them cater to their, or actually formulate some of their presentations because it's a big component for people now. Now, going to the exploration, this is why people own the company. We announced about 160,000 meters of drilling. That's a significant amount of drilling. I think we have 16 drills turning right now. When you think of the rest of the world and companies of our size, it's a $20 million-$30 million budget on exploration. It's massive. And the drill results are consistently coming in. I wouldn't say at 90%-100%, but close to 90%, which is unheard of. This is a snapshot of Zgounder, and you can see the yellow is in our current resources of 100 million ounces.
And we're drilling right to the granite contact to the base there. And this is the fault here that I've spoke to you about. We're trying to find the dislocation to the west. We see a lot of smoke at where this was pushed over. We don't, we're seeing potential. We're quite excited with what's going on. But again, this is all going to be filled out in yellow as we drill this out. Huge concentrations of silver at the, at the granite, at the granite contact. That system, that little X there , is Zgounder. We've accumulated all this land around the granite contact. So everything in, in pink is the granite, and we're trying to amass as much land around it as possible because it's a host rock. So, again, that little X is Zgounder. We also recently did a little transaction here at past-producing copper-silver asset.
That's along another granite contact. This is the—this is going to be the holy grail for us. This is Boumadine. Boumadine is going to be one of the biggest discoveries in the past decade. Like I said, we announced about four million ounces of gold equivalent. That's 350 million silver equivalent ounces at close to 400 gm silver. The objective here is it's open in every direction. We actually think we've been drilling in the wrong place, which is pretty astonishing. The objective here is to double, triple, quadruple this resource in the coming months. This is just a small snapshot of the resource we presented at PDAC last year. Again, just more image, more imaging of what we see.
So what's really interesting here is you can see the main pit over here, but what you don't see in this, this goes down south, this goes up north, this goes out west, and to the east. On the geophysics that we ran to the west, we see a huge anomaly, and it's actually very pronounced. And so we're mobilizing now, and you're going to see we call them potatoes. So you see the at surface results here that have delivered almost 5 million ounces of gold, but there's huge potatoes underneath where we believe there's a stock that works into something much bigger, whether it's a porphyry or not, we don't know. Time will tell, but this is through the entire area. We ran geophysics through the entire area. We spent about $5 million on it, just on geophysics. Here again, you can see that anomaly.
It sticks out. Again, the resource that we announced is just on the right-hand side. We're getting incredible showings over here at surface. I'm going there this week with some investors to take a look. You can see these outcrops from surface, and it's massive sulfide. And we're really excited. So again, we have drills turning. We're going to have some deep holes. 50% of the 120,000 meters of drilling will be for step-outs . The other portion will be for infill, just to increase the reliability of it all. Here you can see the potatoes we talked about. On the right-hand side, it's very hard to see on this picture because I can't expand it, but we drilled above the potato and you can see below it, we didn't even hit it.
That was 5 million ounces or 4-5 million ounces at 5 gm gold equivalent. We're going to get into the potato. On the west side, the same thing. We didn't even drill it. Time will tell what it is, but there's a ton of smoke. We're really super excited by it. Just briefly on health and safety, it's a key component to what we do. I told you our loan is ESG-focused . Obviously , governance is a big part of what we do too. With that, I'll take questions.
I'd like to underline one thing here. I think that the key word, for my well, question or reflection is that when you said that Morocco was the Switzerland of the Middle East, because as I understand and you pointed out, it's a very stable jurisdiction. But what does that mean in your cooperation between yourself and the local authorities? And who do you talk to? Do you talk to the government or is the local or do you talk to everyone?
We have Mustapha El Ouafi, our number two, who I said was very key to our success on our management team. He's on the mining committee and decides policy with the government. And so, you know, we have a huge say in what's going on. We're very influential. I would say that it's a cooperative with ONHYM, which is the government mining agency and the government itself. And so they have one objective: get money into the country, get mining, get more bodies, create jobs. And so we're at the tip of the spear for that.
Mustapha is our representative. He's an operator, but he happens to be a guy that understands policy too. So, we're lucky to have him. He's been offered fine, some of the biggest jobs in government, and he decides this is a legacy. I mean, the key point here is that obviously with the board that you have, you have the experience, but you also have the stability, which I think is important. It's huge. The stability, I can't emphasize it enough, is tremendous in country. I mean, what other countries do you hear of giving grants on projects? We get 20% grant, 10% depending on where you are, the job creation. You know, if we have a $1 billion ticket on a CapEx for the next project, I'm just throwing numbers out there.
I don't know what it's going to be. If they were to give us 20% of that, name me another government that does that. Doesn't exist. Name me another government that says, oh, we're going to build a power line or the water infrastructure with you to do it. So it's just a very cooperative environment for us, and in terms of the turnaround on permitting, I can't emphasize this enough. I mean, it's just a very cooperative, open discussions with government and the highest policy officials every day. You can't do it overnight. Like , we have the people in place to do that. I think that's what the biggest companies on the planet are looking at us now. You know, they're trying to understand Morocco and how do they get involved, and unless you have boots on the ground, it's like any other country.
You need boots on the ground to really understand the people. So the Barricks of the world, the Newmonts of the world, you know, it's hard. They're going to weird places like, I want to, I want to name them, but Morocco is for sure going to be the top of the heap when they start understanding how to get involved. But listen, we're the only vehicle right now that makes sense for anybody.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
And we'll see you later, actually. Absolutely.