We have new rail and port opening up this part of the central part of Africa to the Angolan coast. This is the fastest production of copper for the lowest amount of money in the history of the copper mining industry. We invested $1.3 million for the phase one mine, and we recovered the money in 10 months. It was over 100% IRR, and then we took that cash flow and did it again and again, building three concentrators with 17 million tons a year capacity. Then we refurbished an existing hydroelectric dam. I am going to show you a picture of that. Now we have built the largest solar field in the world at a mine, and it is going to get much bigger. We built a smelter, all with internally generated cash flow.
We kicked the ball with $1.3 billion, and roughly $7 billion has gone into what we are going to show you, all with internally generated cash after the initial investment. This hydroelectric dam was built by the World Bank in the 1970s. Just to refurbish that rotor, because the Congo River is coming through that rotor, there is about 95 tons of copper in that rotor. You need copper to make electrical energy. This is 178 MW of hydroelectric power. Why we love the Congo, why the Congo is the best place to mine copper in the world. It is so obvious. It is so simple. I can explain this to you, and nobody can argue. First of all, there is no ice or snow, and secondly, it is flat. We are not up in the mountains somewhere in vertical real estate. It is warm year-round, but not too hot.
We do not even look at copper less than a 2% cutoff grade. In 50 or 100 years from now, we will look at all the lower grade stuff. We have hydroelectricity, and we have sunshine. This is our phase one solar field. It delivers 60 MW of power 24 hours a day because we have batteries. The problem with solar is the damn sun does not shine all the time, but we are near the equator here, so we get a good six hours of really strong sun, and we are going to double this now to 120 MW, and then 180 MW.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed, and only God knows how long the Strait of Hormuz will be closed. She might change her mind, but we do not know how long the Strait of Hormuz will be closed. Diesel prices are going up, up, up, up, up, up, up. You have to burn some diesel in the mining industry unless you go 100% electric. The idea here is we can generate this solar power in the middle of nowhere and get it down to about $0.12, $0.13 a kilowatt hour. If we have to bring diesel fuel into the central part of the Congo, probably about $0.40 a kilowatt hour.
This solar is cheaper than the diesel, and this is just backup power for the hydroelectricity. Going back to first principles, no ice, no snow, flat ground, hydroelectric power, high grade, international airport to the market. Nothing can compete for a copper metal on planet Earth with this, unless you have enough gold with your copper to recover all your costs.
Because with the magic of U.S. GAAP or our accounting principles, you can report negative copper production costs if you have enough gold. I would wish that we had gold here, but we don't. Those are just the batteries. You can see the solar field in the background. This is an extremely green mine. The amount of global warming gas generated per unit of electrical energy is lower than any copper mine on planet Earth. As the pendulum swings and people get interested in the fact that last year was the warmest year ever recorded on this planet in 132 years, we think clean copper will attract a higher price. We think dirty copper, where you're burning coal to make the copper, will probably attract a lower price.
Now, when we're looking at what we need, I've listed all these critical materials on the left and all the junk we keep on buying. If you're interested in renewables or electric mobility or any form of the generation of energy, the conductance of electricity or the use of that, or of course, IT, there's everything. Everything requires these metals. If you can go to Africa and mine copper, and you have the best-in-class people who know how to do that, then you can mine all this other stuff because it doesn't really make a big difference whether you're mining copper or gold. The skill set is the value of the people. What our industry is lacking is enough young people in mining. Now that we have women coming in mining, we potentially double the labor force.
Unfortunately, all the kids went into internet and broadband and viral technologies. We only graduated about 80 mining engineers in the United States last year, China, about 3,200. If you want to build all this stuff in the middle, somebody's going to have to go out here and mine all that stuff on the left. This fact is becoming weaponized as we balkanize the world economy. This is a good example. Is there a soundtrack with this?
The real advantage is sending robots where people face the greatest risk.
Louder.
That's why we are building an army of robots. Just imagine, robotic systems control the battlefield 24/7. Sensors detect movement, sound, and the smallest changes in the environment. Different types of robots respond to threats before they reach people. Robots intercept the enemy, defend against attacks, destroy targets. Move on to enemy positions first. People control the systems from a safe distance and enter the cleared position only when it is safe. Yeah, it sounds like the war of the future, but we are already there, and we are starting to build the army of robots today. For a long time, strength belonged to those with more people. Today, strength belongs to those who know how to save lives.
Those dogs are particularly frightening because if we had Terminator, it was a humanoid robot. But those dogs can really, really move fast. They have a low center of gravity. You put a thermal detector on that dog, and that camera can identify my old friend Terry, for example, and go after him. You put a machine gun on that dog, it's terrifying. All of the actuators to make that robotic dog or to make Arnold Schwarzenegger coming as a humanoid robot, all of those actuators require critical raw materials to mimic muscle. If we don't have the materials to make those actuators, then somebody else is going to make 20 billion robots a year, and we're not going to have any. Yes, they could walk all the way to Colorado. This is terribly real.
Warfare as we knew it has completely, utterly, and totally changed. In the Ukraine conflict, nobody's using tanks anymore because a $12 drone just sees the heat signature and kills it. That means that AI, artificial intelligence, is purely, first and foremost, a military technology. It's extremely important you understand what I just said. Elon's low Earth orbiting satellites, Starlink, have 27 millionth of a second latency for the signal to go up and come down. If my drone, directed by AI coming after my friend Terry, is 1 millionth of a second faster than my opponent's drone, he dies, I don't. In the financial world, a lot of people put trading computers right next to the COMEX or the NYMEX so that they could trade commodities a billionth of a second faster in the financial world.
Why are we still running net present value models on mining, when if you don't have the metals to defend yourself, you are dead? You die. We have to take these NPV models and just throw them out the window. They're ridiculous because of the current situation. I've been trying to explain to people of the example of one critical metal on that list I had on the left, because most of these metals you guys have never heard of. Most bankers and analysts, they haven't got a clue about these metals, but I'm picking scandium because it's the only metal that was named after Scandinavia. There's another one called germanium that was named after Germany. There's another one called indium. India finally got an element. But it's these elements you've never heard of that are going to be much more valuable than gold.
They used to call this the Gold Show here in Colorado. How stupid is that? We used to put gold in our teeth. Who the hell puts gold in their teeth? You look like a Russian mafia with gold in your tooth. We do not need gold for that purpose, and there is no fundamental disruptive technological requirement for gold. Scandium, this little puppy, is up 50x in share price in the last two years, and up 5x in share price in the last year. This is the best-performing mining equity in the world. Now, the question becomes why? What should this conference focus on to attract intelligent people to stimulate their hand-to-wallet reflex? The problem is that we have only so much electromagnetic spectrum. I want everybody in this room to pay attention, because I flew a long way here to teach you something you might not know.
Originally, we had 1G wireless, 2G wireless, 3G wireless, 4G wireless. When you had your original Nokia hand phone, that was 1G. When Steve came up with the first Apple One phone, we are at about 2G. The problem is that as we get more and more information on a given amount of electromagnetic spectrum, it is like real estate, we have to cut it into finer and finer pieces. Right now, Apple computer, if you have an iPhone, is running on 5.5G, otherwise known as 5G+. It is a spectrum allocation midway between 5G and 6G. There is at least 50 little pieces of semiconductor in your Apple phone that needs scandium. Without scandium, you are not able to call your girlfriends, do a WhatsApp, do a tweet. It just does not happen, guys.
We are now moving to 6G, and what the scandium does is it allows us to discriminate ever narrower slices of spectrum, and all military equipment is going to 6G. When that drone is coming after my friend Terry to put him out of business, it is going to run on 6G wireless. All military equipment is going to run on 6G. You can see it there, aluminum scandium nitride, down there in the lower right-hand corner. It is right here. Aluminum scandium nitride. Now, Jensen Huang is running on gallium nitride. If you want an AI chip from NVIDIA, you need gallium. So, gallium, super important. Scandium, super important.
Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America, just was in meetings with his Chinese counterparts last week. They have this amazing poker game going on between America and China about these critical raw materials. I was quoted in the media telling this anecdote. I cannot say where I learned it, but the Chinese, in a previous encounter, came on pretty hot and heavy and started bitching and saying, "You have not sold us the General Electric aircraft engines that you promised us for our Boeing aircraft fleet. You are bad people. You did not sell us those aircraft engines. We need those spare engines. We bought a lot of Boeings."
The Americans said, "Yes, but you have not sold us the metals we need to make those aircraft engines." That is where we are right now. You are all Chinese over there, and you are all Americans over there. We've just divided you nicely. The Chinese people are not the natural enemy of the American people. If somebody's trying to sell you the story that because somebody's Chinese, they're your enemy, that's bullshit. That's not true. We're all human beings. But the Communist Party of China may very well be your enemy.
There's a big distinction here because AI for China will serve the Communist Party of China. I'm not sure what AI will do for the average American, but I can assure you AI is moving forward because it's a military technology. As the President of the United States said, if we don't develop this technology, we're caught in this conundrum that the other party will. All of this is driven by these rare, thinly traded, must-have metals that you've never heard of.
Scandium is used, for example, General Atomics, you know that Raptor drone, the one where there's a guy sitting in Nevada running a drone blasting people in Afghanistan. They want to make that out of scandium aluminum alloy. This is a 3D-printed piece of scandium aluminum alloy. I can't give it to all of you, but it's as light as cardboard. It's five times as strong as steel, and you only have to add 0.25% of 1% scandium, which enables you to 3D print the aluminum. The lightweighting of everything is a critical theme in everything. Lighter cars, lighter drones. Elon is printing 3D rocket pieces, and you can 3D aluminum by adding scandium. Everybody sees this simplification, generator one, two, three of the Raptor engine.
Actually, that Raptor is just as complicated as the first one, but a lot of the complication is hidden inside in the 3D printing of the rocket engine itself. The combination of accretive manufacturing and the ability to use 3D printing with scandium revolutionizes aluminum. Of course, that cruise missile goes further if it's lighter and stronger. That ship goes further and lighter if it's stronger. If you want to 3D print this very important metal, you can't do it without the scandium, guys. Then you can make an incredible set of golf clubs, an unbelievable tennis racket. You can make a Porsche out of this alloy, and this stuff is really valuable. The Department of Defense bought 5 tons of scandium from Rio Tinto for $6,250,000 a ton. $6,250,000 a ton. Copper's about $14,000 a ton.
That means a long wide-bed pickup filled with scandium metal is worth about $30 million-$35 million. You just have to give you a feeling for what one of these critical materials is worth. In quantum computing, it turns out that aluminum scandium nitride represents one of the most effective materials to control light. With light control, if we get quantum, I hope and pray all of you blow out your bitcoins today. Get rid of them. Because when they show you a bitcoin, they're showing you a coin with a B on it, looks like it's made out of metal. But all a bitcoin really is a little bit of electromagnetic energy. It's invisible. If we have quantum computing, they're just going to tear those things apart. They're not even going to exist anymore. They're all going to be stolen.
They're going to be gone. If we have electromagnetic warfare where a satellite or a rocket comes over your city and just a little burst of electromagnetic energy, an EMP weapon comes down, everything electrical is gone. There's no internet, there's no broadband, there's no wireless. Your little bit of electromagnetic energy is gone. You're not going to trade it to anybody for anything. At least gold, if you can remember what tree you buried it under, you could dig up that gold when the Russians get to Colorado and trade it for a loaf of bread if they don't kill you for it. There actually is no safety in this. It's all bullshit. We need to prevent war.
If we have an adversary that has all these metals and we don't, we get into a situation of imbalance where it looks like our society is in danger of losing its sovereignty. In this discussion that happened with President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump last week, we only got a 60-day extension on a period of time where China's threatening to cut off all those metals I showed you on that left side. If you bought this stock a year ago, you're up 500%. I guess that's better than leaving your money in the bank, and up about 50-fold in the last two years. To quote Crocodile Dundee, "That's not a mining share, mate. That's a mining share." That's the best performing mining share in the world.
I didn't have to go around doing dog and pony shows or going up in elevators talking to hedge funds named after Greek gods, or go to conferences. It did that on its own for a very real reason. That scandium metal is orders of magnitude more important than gold. Do you understand what I just said? Is there anything I just said that you can't understand? We've been in this mining industry for 45 years. What has China done? China has said they're now restricting the sale of gallium, germanium, antimony, scandium, tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, molybdenum, and many others. Under the current rule, if you want to buy scandium from China, or you want to buy tellurium from China, you have to give your plans, your blueprints, to the Chinese Military Commission.
Then they look at your plans, and they can deny you the sale of those metals for any reason or no reason. The number of sales that have occurred are just falling off a cliff to our society. I hope you understand what I just said. Who is going to give their plans for their next product from this country to the Chinese Military Commission? Would anybody raise their hand and volunteer to do that? When we look at our dependency, 100% of our arsenic, cesium, fluorspar, gallium, graphite, indium, manganese, niobium, rubidium, scandium, tantalum, titanium, bismuth, that's 100% dependence on China, but it's pretty bad when you're at 85%. The ones in red are the rarest of the rare, the most important of the important, and the vast unwashed masses out there have no idea what I'm talking about to you, yet.
This is very early. Very, very early. We are in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the Himalayas. This issue is not going away anytime soon because we lost our sovereignty. We haven't been mining in this country for 30 or 40 years. I had to go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo or to Mongolia or somewhere in Russia, or all over the place. The hardest place to mine was right here because we had too many lawyers. You all know that 50,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea is a good start. Mining was a cardinal sin. But now people are going to start looking at this a little bit differently. In my portfolio, I happen to be working on those. Now, we can't do everything, but we're solving 100% of the scandium problem.
We're working on platinum and palladium and nickel and zinc and germanium and gallium. We're prepared to do others, but no one mining company or group can solve this issue at the scale of the American economy. The problem is solving this at the massive scale of the economy. Now, we went to Microsoft and just looked at a little baby server rack in Chicago. This is a 50 MW little baby data center. This is a toy. To build that data center, we needed, in every server now, every server rack, copper, barium, antimony, titanium, indium, silver, tungsten, gold, gallium, tantalum, rare earths, which are not rare and not earths, niobium, and palladium. Did you know that you can't make a server without palladium, or gold, or tungsten, or gallium? Nobody's telling you this.
It's not just the copper to generate the electrical energy and transmit it and put it in the data center, but that if you have an AI girlfriend or a boyfriend, very attractive, that girlfriend or boyfriend is made out of those metals. If you have a beautiful female or male robot, anthropomorphic, to make love with, that robot is made out of these metals. This is what wars are going to be fought on, and this is what wars are being fought on today. So I want to show you Ivanhoe Mines because we have the largest precious metals mine in the world, and it's started. It only took us 34 years, guys. I'm going to share a little film about what it actually takes to build a tier one mine. Hopefully, there's a film. Yeah. Turn it up enough to hear it, but not too much.
Turn it up a little bit. Let's hear it. This is about 160 million ounces of precious metal, and we just got tired of drilling because if we mine 1 million ounces a year, that's 160 years. So we've only drilled 10% of this system. There's no shortage of metal. The world's largest platinum mine is just north of us, but this mine has a lot of nickel and copper in it, as well as gold and rhodium. Gold's okay, but rhodium is more than twice as valuable as gold. So we started with nothing here. We went back to 1998. This is 2026. 28 years of this evolution for this one mine. So it's about as thick as an eight-story building. It's flat, and it's about 7 mi long, and we just stopped drilling it at 170 million ounces.
That's a picture of me when I was a lot younger in 2011, when the Japanese government invested almost $300 million to buy 10%. We didn't even have a mining license. South Africa's coming back in style now. Their GDP's been doing quite well. Their bonds are trading up. Here we are. You can see our number one headframe in the background. We're mining under all these people. We sold 26% of the mine to about 150,000 people, 20 host communities. We lent them the money to buy the interest. After we drilled a 500,000 m, we had already drilled out 59 million ounces, and we were wondering how far should we keep going. Then we had to start sinking a shaft. Our main working level is at 750 m, so that's about two Eiffel Towers deep, just to get a scale.
The ore body would be six times, eight times thicker than the ceiling of this room. Then we got down there, and then we signed agreements with the local government. We started training people, schools, hospitals, free wireless, childhood education, agricultural development, because if you don't do this around a mine, you don't have a social license to mine. This is the software. Finally, Shaft # 2 and 3 and 4. Feasibility study says next year we start producing a 500,000 oz a year, but lots of nickel and copper as byproduct. So the precious metal production cost is the lowest in the platinum palladium industry. There's Marna, our CEO. That's where we started Shaft # 2, and here goes Shaft # 2, the largest shaft on the African continent. It's a big one.
It has some of the world's largest electrical motors, and here comes the baby concentrator. The baby concentrator is running today. We call this, it's a phase one baby. She's been built. Here comes Phase 3 and # 2 coming. When we've got all three running, it's 1 million ounces a year of platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold, and the nickel and copper to pay for those precious metals. The lowest cost, largest precious metals mine in the world. I can assure you, if you buy Ivanhoe Mines today at the current price, you're getting this for free. It only took us 35 years to get here. Who in their right mind goes out and works for 30 or 35 years for a project like this? You have to be completely crazy to do this kind of thing. So there's Cyril Ramaphosa. There we are with Cyril.
He's the President opening the country. We got the ribbon. There's my son, and we're going to completely revolutionize the industry. We have an all-electrical mining fleet. We have women driving the equipment, and we're developing new technologies to train these kids. We know how to mine in Africa. If we can't mine in Africa, we're screwed because I can't mine in Russia, I can't mine in China, I can't mine in Iran. Where the hell do you think the metal is on this planet? It's Africa. That's where the metal is. 25% of the miners are women. That's amazing. We're trying to get it to 50%, and the women are better miners than the men. That's a long story, but at least they don't drink, and they have children. They're much more responsible. We have great relations with our host community. They're protecting us.
This is the safest place I've ever seen to mine. Please raise your hand if you've been to Platreef. It's pretty good. There's about 20 people here. Please come and take a look because this is the largest precious metals development in the world. Because it's flat, if we go to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, they give us the money, we could build 10 more shafts. We could do 5 million ounces a year. There's no resource limitation here. But it took 34 years of my life, and if I look back at that to the beginning and I thought about it, I probably never would have done it, guys, because if you're smart, you just write an app. You write an app and sell it to Mark Zuckerberg for $4 billion. This is a stupid and difficult way to make a few bucks.
Now, when we look at the basket price of all these metals, we're right here. When you add up the gold, the platinum, palladium, the nickel, we're near the all-time high for the value of these metals. But when we started 25 or 30 years ago, we had no idea what the metal price was going to be, and that's the problem with the mining industry. You have to commit to 5, 10, 15, 20 years of misery, and you have no idea what the price is going to be after all that effort. But fortunately, this is by far the lowest cost producer in the world of these metals, the bottom of tier one. So this is a thinking person's precious metal equity, Ivanhoe Mines. We're not just a copper mining company in the Congo.
We have the largest, richest, biggest, best precious metals mine in the world, reaching full production about a year and two months from now. We've been getting a lot of help from Uncle Sam. Sunrise, the scandium company I told you, has a $400 million conditional loan from the United States Department of War because that scandium is what's going to keep you alive. And EXIM Bank has offered $1.1 billion of long-term debt financing for a copper mine that we're building on private land in Arizona. And the CHIPS Act, which was passed both by Democrats and Republicans during the Biden administration, is investing $250 million in award for us to develop new semiconductors to completely change the way we explore for metals, crush and grind the rock to get the metals out.
We're going to completely change the mining industry because without that last one, we're going to fail. We've been spending a lot of time with the United States government. We had a roundtable. There's Donald Trump, and there's Secretary Rubio and Howard Lutnick and myself, and this was the first time the President of the United States talked to the world about mining since the days of President Polk. It was around 1908 to 1910, about 120 years ago. This was the first president to talk publicly about mining in 120 years in the United States. And he mentioned our copper mine in Arizona because we're on private land. As you know, Resolution has had a problem with the San Juan Apache Nation, and they've been trying to get a permit for 35 years. But we're on private land. We don't need a smelter.
We're going to produce LME Grade A cathode. If there's any equity that is the next Sunrise Metals, it's Ivanhoe Electric. That's because we're running massive exploration programs with the best exploration team in the world and the best technology we've ever had for exploration. We're working in the United States. We have a partnership with BHP. BHP is still the largest non-Chinese mining company. They used to be the biggest mining company in the world until Zijin came along and passed them in market cap. In our case, BHP puts up all of the money, we allow our technology to be used, and we're 50/50. We have no risk.
We own the technology, and we're exploring in Arizona, in Utah, in Nevada, in Montana, and we're doing the same thing in Saudi Arabia in a 50/50 partnership with the Saudi government, and we're doing it again in Chile with the largest landowner in Chile, Soquimich, which is the world's largest lithium producer. If you can keep on going to casino and it's a 50/50 bet, heads I win, tails I don't lose, you eventually become the world's biggest mining company.
Nobody has a joint venture with BHP or the Saudi government or the Chileans where the risk is taken by the partner and we keep half. I hope you understand what I just said. I don't understand why the analysts haven't explained this to you, that mineral exploration is a risky business and you want to overcome the odds. This is the best exploration team in the world with the world's best exploration technology. Let's look at this and turn it up and I'll catch my breath.
In a 50/50 joint venture—
This is Saudi Arabia.
—with the Saudi Arabian Mining Company.
Turn it up.
Together, we are leveraging our world-class technology platform in Saudi Arabia to explore for electric metals, including copper, gold, and silver across nearly—
More.
—50,000 sq km of the Saudi Arabian Shield. We are active across a diverse set of geological environments. These include volcanic-hosted massive sulfide systems at Wadi Bidah, iron oxide copper gold systems at Mesayna'a, porphyries at Dhran, epithermal gold and base metal systems near Mahd Ad Dhahab, and sediment-hosted copper in the platform. Opportunities for the joint venture are constantly being evaluated with a wide variety of deposit styles present on one of the world's most active frontiers for mineral exploration, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this opportunity alongside Ma'aden.
Why do we love Saudi Arabia? There's no ice or snow, and the diesel fuel is super cheap, and there's great infrastructure, and we have a 10-year tax holiday on any mine we find, and the government will provide 90% of the financing. That's a great place to go mining. We pick our spots. Now, when we go to China, I've asked you to buy Ivanhoe Electric. I made it pretty clear, didn't I? There's a lot of discoveries coming in Ivanhoe Electric in its work. It's got the best exploration team in the world and the best technology in the world. I rarely ask a friend to buy an equity. I'm too old for this. But don't say I didn't warn you about Ivanhoe Electric this year. It's on the New York Stock Exchange. Now, when we look at China, this is the power generation in China.
It's just going straight up. Look at U.S.A. and Europe. We don't have the power for AI. China has the power for AI. People are getting cranky in the United States about these data centers because they're pushing up electricity prices. Three days ago, Oracle declared force majeure on a data center being built in New Mexico. They lost about $100 billion in market cap a few days. We need a lot more electricity if we're going to have AI, and I remind you, this is a military technology. My main concern now is I-Pulse. That's a picture of the Z machine at Sandia National Labs. That's the world's most powerful machine. In the history of our species, that's the most powerful machine ever built by human beings. That machine radiates 80 TW of power.
You see that green bar that's horizontal, and this is the power in all the world's power plants combined. Today we're about here. The world is producing about 8 TW of power. That's all the nuclear power plants, all the solar, wind, coal. This machine is incredible. It's been used for strategic weaponry purposes. It mimics the conditions at the center of the sun. It creates an atmosphere of up to 100 million atmospheres and 12,000 degrees centigrade - 13,000 degrees centigrade, which is what initiates a fusion reaction in the center of the sun.
The American government built that, and our Chief Scientist, Rick Spielman, was the Chief Scientist who built that machine. We're taking that level of science and technology to completely change the mining industry. We have BHP as a shareholder, Rio Tinto, Newmont Mining, Anglo Teck Corporation, Ivanhoe Mines, and Codelco. Those of you that are not on that list, I will give you a crying towel. You are toast. You will not be able to do this the old-fashioned way. Here is a little film explaining it, short version.
I-Pulse has developed game-changing technology, and game-changing meaning hugely disruptive to a whole range of industries.
We are talking here about pulsed electrical power, a greener, more efficient, more powerful way to use electrical energy. If you are one of the lucky ones we invite to our labs, it is better than going to Disneyland.
Pulsed power is not a new idea. The applications are new. To discharge energy quickly in somewhere between 50 billionths of a second to 50 millionths of a second, and you get peak powers from megawatts to terawatts. That is pulsed power. We can crack, fracture, drill, and mine with that energy.
You can directly experience the difference between power and energy. We just take that energy from your iPhone battery, and we liberate that amount of energy for a few millionths of a second into a metric ton of water, 2,200 lbs of water in a steel tank that weighs about 700 lbs, which creates a vacuum as the bubble collapses, and it lifts that whole tank. It can be a shocking amount of work. We just want people to feel how much power is liberated from that tiny amount of electrical energy.
Simply put, I-ROX breaks rock. What you are seeing behind me is ore from the Escondida mine in Chile, and as that falls through the column, we use our proprietary pulsed power technology to burst the rock from the inside. Conventionally, we break rock by crushing it from the outside. When you burst it from the inside using a tensile force, you can use up to 80% less energy than conventional grinding technologies. We are able to take these large pieces of rock down to a very fine powder, but we do so very efficiently.
You have a chain of events, the primary crusher, the SAG mill, the ball mill. What we want to do is take away that SAG mill and that ball mill, bye-bye. It is a huge savings in electricity and a much lower carbon footprint.
By breaking rock along mineralogical boundaries, we are able to unlock more of the valuable metals that are trapped inside. We are seeing this translate into up to 5% higher metal recoveries, which is incredibly valuable, both in terms of the companies that are involved as well as the new metals that are needed for the energy transition.
I-Pulse, I-ROX, I-Mine, these are all examples of breakthrough technologies. They have the potential to radically transform the way that we go about the act of mining and processing. It's going to reduce CO2 emissions, and it's going to make the cost of mining lower, which means that we'll be able to mine these lower-grade ores more economically and with less environmental impact than would otherwise be the case.
I think this is going to be a tremendous impact and change in the mining industry. Safety benefits, the decarb benefits, obviously the increased production and the bottom line benefits. It's a quadruple win on all dimensions.
It is technology that I think will be an important part of the change in our industry in terms of how we break through with some techniques that we've used for 100, 150 years.
For whatever reasons, we have some difficulties as an industry to innovate. Here, I think we have a good example that innovation is possible.
This is almost like the holy grail that the mining industry has been searching for for decades. The technologies that I-Pulse brings will help the mining industry become part of the solution rather than being part of the problem.
There is hope. There is hope if we use the best of our innovative technology, and of course, our ultimate dream is to provide power for these data centers of the mining industry with a new way to do geothermal power. Right now, if you want to buy a natural gas-powered turbine for a data center, the wait is five to seven years for these hyperscalers. But the contracts do not guarantee delivery.
They just say, "Best efforts," because the critical materials to make the turbines come from China, and China is threatening to cut off those materials on the 10th of January, 2027. We need to increase America's power output by 25% by tomorrow morning in 2030. So it is a really weird situation we find ourselves in. When we look at the map of the United States, all that heat, America has more geothermal potential than any nation on Earth.
Just that little pink spot in Virginia is enough to generate 20 GW of power. But we need disruptive technology to do this. We need to have closed loops like you see on the right, and we think we know how to do this very quickly. We have been funded by the Japanese government, the French government, and now we have received mother's milk from Uncle Sam. The core technology we need to crush and grind rock and drill is the same technology we need to go geothermal. So in the future, we are just going to go down here under our feet, tap the heat that Mother Earth gave us, because the center of the Earth is a naturally occurring nuclear power plant.
There is enough uranium in the core of the Earth and enough pressure that we get a naturally occurring fission reaction, and that is where the heat is from under the Earth. In the days of the Old Testament, when they talked about Satan down there in a red suit with those horns, everybody knew it was hot down there. The Jews agreed, Muslims agreed, Christians agreed. It is hot down there. So all we have to do is revolutionize geothermal power, and we will have enough electricity for everybody on this planet with no global warming effects. We are doing this now. We have a tool that is drilling through rock about three times faster than anybody has ever drilled through rock. The life of the drill bit is about— and replace the drill bit.
If we can drill cheaply enough, we can also drill through hot rock and liberate endless electrical power for the human race. It's a dirty job. Somebody has to do it. It's easier than putting a man on the moon. You know, when we put a man on the moon, some people think we didn't really do it, but we did it with slide rules. This is much easier than putting a man on the moon. It's right underneath your feet. You can follow me on X because I'm tweeting a lot, @robert_ivanhoe. You can find all of these companies. If there's anybody in this audience that wants to help us change the world and make it better, the miners are now the community that needs to find a way to sustainably mine this metal, and think a little bit broader than gold to protect your pocketbook, please.
Think about other metals, because you can mine gold, you can mine other things, and we don't mine gold with our copper. We love it with our copper. We're not against gold. What we want to do now is try to find a way to talk to our Chinese friends and their Russian allies and their Iranian ally and their North Korean fat boy ally in a way that we sort of don't have a hold on each other, that we haven't lost our sovereignty. That way we can play rugby by a set of rules where we break each other's collarbones, but we don't kill our kids.
Do you understand what I'm trying to say? It's amazing that the world got to this point that it's completely reliant about American ingenuity and technology and the miners to solve this problem. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you this shit when I'm 76 years old. Please help us out. God bless America, and let's try to help our country to innovate its way out of the hole we've dug ourselves into. Thank you. Was that great? Thank you.