I would now like to turn the conference over to Ross Bhappu, President and CEO of Energy Fuels. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Justin, and thank you all for joining. I appreciate you taking the time to hear about Energy Fuels and learn a little bit more about our company. My name's Ross Bhappu. I'm President and CEO of the company. Energy Fuels is a U.S.-based company. I live in Denver, Colorado. The Denver, Colorado area, we're based here, but we are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Sorry, the New York American Exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and now with the addition of ASM, we're listed on the ASX, which is fantastic, under the ticker EF2. I've had, over the course of my career, a lot of experience, and spent a lot of time in Australia. It's certainly a tremendous country when it comes to mining.
Early on in my career, I spent time at the Mount Isa smelter, the copper smelter, where I learned about copper smelting. I'm a metallurgist by background. I learned that technology, and then we use that IsaSmelt technology here in the United States. My exposure and time with Australia has gone for many, many years. It's great to be on the phone with all of you. Energy Fuels is a company that is growing. We've grown quite significantly over the last few years. It's a company that started out as a uranium company, and I'm going to walk you through a little bit about how we've advanced from uranium mining and processing through the rare earths and heavy mineral sands. Today we are truly a global, diversified, and vertically integrated critical minerals company.
The first slide, of course, I've always got to go through, sorry, the second slide, is always about the forward-looking statements, and I will be making forward-looking statements, so please be aware of that. If we go to the next slide, Energy Fuels started its life probably some 45 years ago. As we advance through this, the first set of inputs here will show you where we started with uranium. You can see all of these blue boxes represent our uranium assets. We have up here seven different uranium mining assets. We're operating two of them. The key here is the White Mesa Mill, the yellow box in the middle. The White Mesa Mill really is the gem in the crown of Energy Fuels assets. It's the only licensed and permitted operating mill for treating conventional uranium ores in the United States today.
We are currently the largest producer of uranium in the United States. We will produce close to 2 million lbs this year. By global standards, I would say they are not massive. We are not massive in uranium standards, but by U.S. standards, we are the largest and very significant. Probably about six years ago, we started experimenting with other things that we could do with that mill. Recognizing that all rare earth minerals have some level of radioactivity with them, whether it is uranium or thorium, we started working in the laboratory first and experimenting with utilizing our solvent extraction experience to process rare earth ores. That led us to building a pilot plant. Then two years ago, a little over two years ago now, we built a commercial operating facility to treat rare earth minerals, and specifically we treat monazite, and now also MREC materials.
Once we discovered that, we have been purchasing monazite concentrates from Chemours in Florida and Georgia. We also decided pretty early on that we wanted to be in the business of producing our own feedstock. So we added a host of heavy mineral sands operations. The first one would be Let me try to get this. There we go. The first one would be the Bahia project in Brazil. The second one is a joint venture with Astron for the Donald project in Australia. The third one is the Vara Mada project, which is in Madagascar. About two years ago, almost two years exactly, we acquired Base Resources. Base was based out of Perth. Base Resources was operating and just at the tail end of operations of the Kwale project in Kenya.
Interestingly, Base had gone through going from feasibility study, through construction, through operations for some 13-odd years, and now reclamation and closure. So a fantastic experience. We have retained all of that experience, of course, in our Perth office. Today, we are advancing on the Vara Mada project. We have the Donald project joint venture that we are hoping to be in a position to make an FID on as quickly as possible. More recently, probably in January of this year, we made an announcement that we were acquiring ASM, Australian Strategic Materials. ASM has the Dubbo project. With that, we have acquired the Dubbo project, in Australia, of course. Equally importantly, the Korean Metals Plant, which is a metallization facility. It takes oxides, rare earth oxides, and converts them to metals and alloys.
As part of that, ASM and now ourselves have been planning on also replicating that plant in Korea and building a sister facility very similar to it here in the United States. We are referring to it as the American Metals plant. We are still working on the exact location, but on the back of announcing the ASM transaction, again, that goes back in January, we were contacted by all the major rare earth magnet manufacturers about providing and entering into either offtake agreements or joint ventures partnerships. And so, we started exploring opportunity and that led us to a company called Vacuumschmelze. Vacuumschmelze is a German-based company. They have operating assets in Hanau, Germany, so that is just outside of Frankfurt. They have assets in Finland, Slovakia, Malaysia, and China. Importantly, they have just completed construction on a beautiful new state-of-the-art facility in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.
With that facility, we have great capabilities in producing magnets. You can see that column on the left side of the screen; we currently have the capacity to produce 3,500 tons per year of magnet production. Our mill capacity is 10,000 tons per year of monazite, and that equates to about 1,000 tons per year of NdPr. Then we have, as I mentioned earlier, we produce about 2 million lbs of uranium annually. With these assets, and once we build out all of those different facilities, we have the ability to grow the magnet production from 3,500 tons - 13,500 tons. So, expanding it by 10,000 tons per year of magnet capacity. It is really a tremendous capacity increase. With that, we would expand the mill.
That takes us to 60,000 tons per year of monazite, and that equates to about 6,000 tons per year of NdPr. Then we also have the ability, the mill is licensed and permitted to produce up to 6 million lbs per year. It was designed for 6 million lbs per year. We are licensed for 8 million lbs per year. We could likely build about 5 million lbs per year annually of U3O8 of yellowcake. So really provides a tremendously diversified portfolio of assets. I would just mention that, again, Australia has been vitally important over the years. The Vara Mada project is a very important part of our growth plan. ASM is very important, our Donald joint venture.
To put it in perspective, over the last two years, we have invested in and committed over AUD 1 billion into Australia to acquire these assets or to build out projects. So Australia, again, is extremely important to our future. If we jump to the next slide, we really do believe we have this fully integrated rare earth mine to magnet platform, and we are a leading uranium producer. Of course, to get there, we also, because we chose monazite and MREC, we have gotten into heavy mineral sands. So today, when you look at what is Energy Fuels, we are the number one producer of uranium in the U.S. We are this expanding rare earth magnets and advanced materials company. We announced just about three weeks ago that we have started construction of a heavy circuit, so we are building the capability to produce terbium and dysprosium oxides.
With the ASM acquisition, we can produce metals, so neodymium, iron, boron alloys, and metals, as well as samarium cobalt. Then with the addition of all the heavy mineral sands, we are also a major producer, or will be a major producer of titanium and zirconium metals. So really, it is very much a fully integrated platform, and it is quite diversified across a number of critical minerals. I guess the one thing that I would say that everything that we are doing has in common, so when we look at uranium, rare earths, vanadium, titanium, zircon, it is all that these minerals contain radioactive elements, and so they contain uranium, and that really gives us a tremendous competitive advantage when we are processing these minerals.
So just if we look a little bit at the demand side of the equation on the next slide, we feel like when we look at our position, our strategic position, we think we can be, and we are going to be the supplier of choice. We are a leading global player in this space. We have got tremendous scalability. We are going to have industry-leading returns. When you look at the growth that we are seeing in this sector, data centers growing at almost 30% per year. Nuclear energy has been growing at around 4% per year. But when you look at the small modular reactors and the growth in nuclear power restarting things like Three Mile Island and other nuclear facilities, we think it is going to grow at a higher rate than that.
Of course, on the automotive side, with electric vehicles growing at almost 20%, we see a tremendous opportunity on the rare earth side, the uranium side, the titanium side. An area that is really exciting for us is robotics. We are looking at compound annual growth rates of over 50% on robots, and especially humanoid robots, which are massive consumers of rare earth minerals. We have a competitive advantage because of low-cost operations. The Vara Mada project, tied with the White Mesa Mill, will make us one of the lowest cost producers of rare earths in the world, and that includes our Chinese counterparties that we deal with and that would be our competitors. We have tremendous technical capabilities. We have got now this fully vertically integrated platform, Mine to Magnets. We have got very strong government support, and we believe we have got very good sustainable solutions.
As we look at the next slide, the demand outside of China, and I find this really interesting, that the two bar charts on the right-- Sorry, on the left show that between 2025 and 2035, there is going to be a 50% increase outside of China for these magnets, for magnet demand. When we look at where that is going to come from, we need a 2x increase in the mining, we need a 4x increase in refining and separations, and we need to see a 6x increase in magnet production. We think we can be a very important part of building this out and being a part of the solution here. Importantly, we are going to see about $60 billion of investment over the course of the next 10 years to fill that need.
When we look at the next slide at where Energy Fuels is, we feel like we are uniquely-- To be a fully vertically integrated producer. If we start from the left, we have got the mining operations, HMS mining projects, as well as purchasing of MREC. We have got the Donald project that we hope, again, to make an FID on very soon. We have got the Vara Mada project in Madagascar, which is-- We have got a feasibility study that we announced earlier this year, and we are hoping to move that into construction as early as late next year. We have got the Bahia project, which is a little behind both of those, and then we have got our Chemours offtake agreements and then other monazite and MREC offtake agreements. Then, of course, the Dubbo project, which now we have acquired through the ASM acquisition. So that is on the mining side.
When you look at our processing and separations capability at the White Mesa Mill, we do have this capability today, again, about 10,000 tons of monazite capacity, and that allows us to produce oxides of NdPr, Dy, dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium, either separated or individually as oxides. Everything else including yttrium and other minerals and metals. With the addition of ASM, that gives us that metallization and alloying capability. That's the Korean Metals plant, and soon to be the American Metals plant. With our announced acquisition of Vacuumschmelze, that will allow us to produce multiple grades of magnets, including samarium cobalt, and that's the operating facilities in Germany as well as the United States, as well as Finland.
We have operations for all of them, and that gives us that full vertical integration to supply into the automotive industry, the robotics sector, of course data centers and energy demands, and consumer goods. I think people don't really realize that these magnets are prolific. They're used in everything from your iPhone to your earbuds to your electric vehicles, importantly in defense applications with fighter jets, but also just commercial jetliners require a massive amount of these rare earth metals. Again, it gives us a tremendous capability. When we look on the next slide at the advancement where we are today we have the White Mesa Mill with the 10,000 tons per year capacity. We have our existing magnet facilities that we hope to close on later this year with Vacuumschmelze, and that gives us the 3,500 tons of magnet production.
We're hoping to move the Donald project, as I said before, into construction and operations. That'll be the first mine that we develop off the rank in terms of heavy mineral sands and monazite production. We have the ability then to expand, and what we've announced about two or three weeks ago, we announced the expansion of the White Mesa Mill to include heavy separation, which is dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium, and that will be operational by late next year. We hope to have the Donald project up and running by 2028. We have announced earlier this year a feasibility study for this phase two expansion of the White Mesa Mill. That's what I mentioned earlier that would give us the 6,000 tons per year of NdPr capacity.
Around the same time, 2029 or 2030, we're hoping to have the Vara Mada project up and running, supplying monazite feed to the White Mesa Mill. Of course, on the mining side, we have the Bahia project. We have the ability to expand Donald, and we have the ability to expand Vara Mada. You can see that on the mining side; we have a number of projects coming on. On the milling side, at the end of phase two, we'll have complete capacity and facilities to process all of that monazite ore. With the Vacuumschmelze acquisition, the Sumter plant in South Carolina was designed for expansion. It's a beautiful new state-of-the-art facility and can expand in multiples of 4,000 tons per year. So, we can take it up to 12,000 tons per year total.
Quite aggressive, but not reckless as my predecessor, Mark Chalmers, would say, in our growth plans. We are quite excited about the opportunity we have there. On the next slide, I think the question people ask is, well, are you funded for all this? We are in a great position. We have about $1 billion in liquidity today. Most of it sits in T-bills here in the U.S. Our near-term growth CapEx requirements are going to be between $400 million and $450 million . Those are to build out the Donald project, to expand the White Mesa Mill, and to build the American Metals plant, the replication of what we have in Korea.
We have government funding that has been announced of roughly $300 million for those projects, and that comes from EFA, from OSC, which is the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital, and that is via loans and grants. That requires about $100 million - $150 million of additional equity from Energy Fuels. More medium-term, we have needs for, again, the phase two expansion of the White Mesa Mill, which is the one that takes us to 6,000 tons of NdPr, the Vara Mada project, the Bahia project, and then the expansion of Donald, and that would require between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. We again have government funding sources that we are in discussion with for part of that, which is committed, part of that is still yet to come, of between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion. That requires an additional equity requirement of $400 million - $500 million.
Very achievable. In addition to this, we have the closing of Vacuumschmelze, which we hope will occur later this year or early next year. That is a $700 million cash payment as well as some shares being issued. If we just go to the next slide, when we look at sort of the fit, it kind of comes back to why did we choose Vacuumschmelze over any of the other magnet manufacturers. It was because if you look at the left-hand side of this page, between the White Mesa Mill phase one, so where we are today with 10,000 tons of monazite producing 1,000 tons of NdPr, we can produce 15 tons per year of Tb, of terbium, and another 50 tons per year of dysprosium. That fits almost perfectly with where Vacuumschmelze is today with their current capacity of 3,500 tons per year of magnets.
Keeping in mind that a magnet contains about 30% rare earths. The balance of 65% - 70% of a magnet contains iron and boron. The 1,000 tons per year of NdPr equates to about 3,500 tons per year of magnet block. More long-term, when we look at the growth plans and we add the Donald phase two at full capacity, we add the Vara Mada project, and Bahia, that then gets us to 6,000 tons of NdPr, and that again equates very nicely to the Sumter expansion, to the expansion of the VAC facilities, and that gets us to 13,500 tons per year of magnets. From our own supply, that would leave about 2,000 tons per year for either future expansion or sales to third parties. Again, the VAC acquisition was just a great fit.
I might just talk very briefly about VAC on the next slide. It's a tremendous leader in magnets. Vacuumschmelze has been around for over 100 years. They've been producing rare earth permanent magnets for the last 40 years. To give you a sense, they've produced over a billion magnets in the last 10 years. Let me repeat that. They've produced a billion magnets in the last 10 years. So tremendous capability. Today, they have about 1,000 customers. They produce about 2,000 different products, and they are applied across all sorts of uses, again, from iPhone applications to electric vehicles to defense contractors, in jet airplanes, you name it. Pretty much everything that has an electric motor, they would be able to produce, or they are producing materials for. So VAC is a fabulous company and a clear leader in this space.
On the next slide, I want to show just a little bit about how we approach this vertical integration. We chose to do it, number one, by some acquisitions. So on the mining side, we acquired Base Resources. We're partnering up and building the Donald Project with an Astron joint venture. We're going to build the Vara Mada Project, and we have that capability in-house. On the separation side, the White Mesa Mill, we have tremendous capabilities for chemical extraction, for chemical engineering. So we've developed both NdPr and dysprosium and terbium separation, which we've announced publicly, the production of both of those, and we're building out the facility for that. On the metals and alloys side, we looked around, and that's a real pinch point in the industry, and we chose to go into metals and alloys via the acquisition of ASM.
ASM is a tremendously successful company in terms of producing these metals and alloys. The facilities in South Korea, they can do various metals as well as strip casting and producing the alloys. Again, we chose to acquire that technology. Then finally, on the magnet side, both on blocks and finished magnets, again, we chose to grow into that space by acquiring Vacuumschmelze, the leading company in the Western world for producing those magnets outside of Asia. So we chose to do this vertical integration through a combination of internal growth as well as acquisitions. When I look at Lynas took a different approach. They chose to go through separations and then partnered up with [Shenghe Resources] and other companies to produce the metal powders and magnets. That's a perfectly fine strategy, but again, we chose to go a different route.
MP Materials, again, they chose a different route. They're trying to do this organically. They're building out their own metal making and magnet manufacturing facilities. The thing I would say is if you ever had a chance to visit either the Hanau plant outside of Frankfurt that VAC has or the Sumter facility, you'd realize that these are very highly technical projects. To build customer reliance or customer, what do you call it? Where they've approved, basically qualified, sorry, qualified your product. It takes a long time to build that capability, and again, we chose to go a different route. Then finally, [USA Rare Earth], they purchased the old Hitachi facility, and they're trying to grow it themselves. We chose again, to do it a different way, and none of them are right or wrong, but we certainly like the path that we're going.
I might just finish off here by talking about uranium. On the next slide, we just show the supply and demand balances of uranium. Again, we are really excited about the future of uranium. It kind of gets lost in everything we are doing on rare earths, but we are, again, the largest producer of uranium, and uranium will continue to be a very important part of our equation. You can see as we go out to the 2030s and 2040s, the supply-demand imbalance is really incredibly noticeable on that chart, and we very much intend to be a part of that. If you look at the next slide, we have very high-grade mining operations. We are mining in northern Arizona and Utah, but we have operations in New Mexico and Wyoming as well as Colorado.
We are scaling from 2 million lbs per year currently and potentially scaling that up. The White Mesa Mill in the first half of this year produced 1.5 million lbs. The mill is larger than the mines can produce, so we campaign the mill, and we ran it for the first six months of this year. The mill is currently shut down, but we are building stockpiles of ore to feed later in the year. Then we have growing sales and revenue coming from a combination of long-term offtake agreements with major utilities as well as opportunistic spot sales. Again, uranium is a massively important part of our business and will continue to be. In conclusion, on the final slide, I just want to say that we have a well-established business, vertically integrated, to underpin our growth going forward.
We are building a very much a de-risked differentiated critical minerals platform. We are doing it differently than others. We feel like we have a very unique processing and integration capability with the White Mesa Mill and our acquisitions of Base Resources, ASM, and VAC. Then we feel it is very important to be able to capture margin across all aspects across the supply chain, so we are creating value across the entire chain. Then finally, we feel like we are positioned for long-term secular growth in the space that we are operating in. So we really do feel that we are empowering the world's most strategic technologies as a global, diversified, vertically integrated critical minerals company. So that is the conclusion of my presentation, and it is a little awkward to just be on this video without any video of me or of you. So we are happy to take questions.
Justin earlier gave you a phone number to dial into, and I do not know if we have questions, but Justin or Kim, let me know if there are some questions out there.
There are no questions from the phone line at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ross Bhappu, President and CEO of Energy Fuels, for any further remarks.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm going to be in Australia next week. I've got a series of meetings that have been set up on Monday and Tuesday in Sydney and Wednesday in Melbourne. I'm really looking forward to being there. Again, I have a strong affinity and a long history of spending time in Australia. I always enjoy being there, and I look forward to hopefully meeting some of you in person and answering any questions you might have at that time. With that, I'm going to close. I just like to thank you very much for participating.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful rest of your day.