... exciting time with the copper markets doing what they will. Hi, I'm Mike Westerlund, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations. I'm joined by my colleague, Adam Chodos, who's the Head of Corporate Development here at the conference. We appreciate the invitation from the Denver Gold Group to speak. I'm going to talk briefly. I want to talk a little bit about copper because it's quite a story, and then I want to talk about where we are in the process. I'll tell you a little about Pebble, where we are in the process, what we see going forwards, and hopefully leave a little time for questions if there are any. I have a forward-looking statement, which I encourage you to read when you have time. Basically, copper's a very important metal because it's necessary for creating electricity. Electricity is the new way for the economy to operate.
You can't create electricity without copper. You can't transport it efficiently without copper, and you need copper in the end use applications as well. Copper's going to be a key metal going forwards. We have at Pebble, the world's largest undeveloped copper gold project. I'll show you a picture of the land where it is. I'll describe where it is and the fact that it's a world-class resource that is yet to be unlocked. We also have a path forward. It's through the court system, and people ask, "Oh, you're in court. Why are you in court?" On average, I remember seeing a statistic globally to develop a mine from discovery to production is about 17 years. In the U.S., it's about 29 years. The 12-year difference, I put some of that down to litigation. It's quite common in permitting.
The larger the project, the more litigation plays a role. It's not surprising that this being a very large project would encourage some. We have a path forward, and I will go into that in some detail for you. Before I do, I want to talk about copper for a couple of minutes as I find the copper story is a fantastic one. This is a study done reported by RBC, and basically what it shows is the global economy consumes copper, which is the solid blue line, and then the lighter blue lines and the gray lines. These are the additional copper consumption above that from electric cars, from the electrification of the infrastructure and the grid and AI data centers, et c. What they're predicting is by the year 2035, a 10 million ton deficit on a 30 million ton market.
The line that you see that comes down, that's the red line. That is a predicted mine supply. You can see it cresting around now and then starting to decline. That's really alarming because the world needs more copper at a time when the world will be producing less and less. I thought this study was interesting but alarming in that that deficit of 10 million tons is very significant. It was reflected in another study by S&P Global. Excuse me. They predicted a 10 million ton deficit by 2040. So different timing a little bit, but still a serious problem of lack of supply. I thought this table was interesting because it shows that the blue bars are new copper discoveries by millions of tons over the years, and you can see the level of discovery has fallen to almost zero.
Meanwhile, the dotted line is the exploration budgets, which continue to rise. New projects for copper are harder and harder to find at a time when we need more and more. Mining companies are focused on brownfields around their existing deposits because the only way they can show any sort of an increase by looking for brownfields. We do not need more brownfields discoveries in the world. They are all helpful. We need large, new copper deposits developed, and Pebble is the biggest of the lot. I also found this chart was interesting, and this is just talking about global copper mine supply. In the first half of the year, it fell, it declined, copper supply fell. They are saying if this trend continues for the rest of the year, it will be the first time it has fallen, not increased, not held steady, but declined since 2017.
Part of the reason it has declined is that Codelco in Chile had the weakest second quarter apparently they have had in 20 years. They are the largest copper exporter in the world. They had a very weak second quarter. Global copper supply in the first half has fallen. This is the Pebble lands where the Pebble deposit is. It is located approximately 200 mi from Anchorage, Alaska, approximately 150 mi from the ocean, and that is relevant because the criticism of the project relates to a salmon population that lives approximately 150 mi away, and I will talk a little bit about that. You can see on this site, there is not a lot of running water here. You do not see any animals. There are no trees. There are no communities within 20 mi-25 mi. It is very good mining ground.
It gently slopes up from the ocean, and it is flat, and basically the enormous part of this valley would be the copper project. The resources listed there, we talk about large copper projects. Our M&I resource for copper is 53 billion pounds. Our inferred is 23 billion pounds. We got 54 million ounces of gold as a measured and indicated, 28 million ounces of inferred. Then we have got molybdenum, silver, and rhenium. The two key metals on this list, I think for the story is copper, which is a critical metal in the U.S., and rhenium, which is a critical metal in the U.S.
This is the largest undeveloped supply of rhenium in the world. What is rhenium used for? It has got a very high melting point. It is used in military applications, such as the nozzles around rockets. It is used to harden the turbine blades in fighter jet engines. Very large, very critical metals at a time when the metals prices are just going one direction, it appears. This was a study done by BMO. It is a little dated now, but it said basically looking at their universe of clients, and how much the market valued copper at the time, if we were to become a development stage company, we would trade about $8 a share.
Today, we are trading about a $1.40 a share. It is just a guideline, something to consider. There is enormous upside here if we can make that leap. I will talk about the legal case now. We are in court, and why are we in court? Our preference would be that the administration would just remove the veto. What would give us comfort that they would do that? It is the statements they have made. They have said that copper is critical. They have said rhenium is critical. They've said they want more mining. They want to reduce the roadblocks to permitting, of which a veto that is on our project right now would be clearly a very large roadblock.
They want Alaska mining, they want production in the U.S. to protect them from trade wars, etc , because China's one of the big producers of copper. We fill a lot of those buckets for them if they were to approve our project, and they haven't yet. Instead, there was a veto that was dreamed up by the Obama administration and was then withdrawn by Trump one, and then it was reinstated by the Biden administration, made final. Now we're in the Trump two administration. They've chosen to let the court make the decision on the project, I believe.
Basically, the court is reviewing the case under what's called a summary judgment case. That's a standard legal procedure that's very quick compared to many other types of legal procedures. Now all legal procedures are slow. I don't mean to infer this is very fast. Basically, this involves a legal case involving what's in the administrative record now. The largest component of the administrative record is our environmental impact statement. It was written by Ausenco, it was published in the year 2020. It was signed off by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. In it predicts that this project, among many other attributes, will have no visible impact on the population of salmon 150 mi away. They could not conceive of a failure event that would impact the salmon population. We take a lot of comfort from that.
That goes back to one of the core principles of our project, that we can develop this mine in an environmentally sensitive way because our tailings facility is designed not to retain water. It constantly releases the water into a holding pool with a CAD 500 million water treatment plant, which constantly treats the water and releases it. When you find tailings failures around the world, often they're caused by an accumulation of water. It gets heavy, there's more and more atmospheric waterfalls, and they're not able to release the water, and eventually the facility fills and it overwhelms the wall. In our case, the facility cannot fill. Even if there was human error, it cannot fill. As a result, there is no failure mechanism that Ausenco, a world-renowned third-party engineering firm, could come up with. The Army agreed. They signed off.
This is one of the most positive environmental impact statements I've ever read. Subsequently, the Army made a decision not to approve the ROD, and we believe it's a politically motivated decision that makes no sense. We've been working to get that reversed now for a few years. In the meantime, the EPA decided to put a veto on no mining ever, no placing of fill anywhere within 300 square miles that surrounds the Pebble Project, and for reasons that we don't consider to be valid, that we don't believe follows the law. We breached our summary judgment case about a year ago, just up over a year ago. Now we're suing the Environmental Protection Agency because we're saying their veto is illegal. The state of Alaska is suing the Environmental Protection Agency because they're saying their veto is illegal.
The natives that live in the area, they are suing the EPA because they say the veto is illegal. All three cases have basically been combined now in front of Judge Gleason, who is in the federal district court in Alaska. We submitted our initial arguments in the fall last year. The government, through the U.S. Department of Justice, responded in the spring, late winter, early spring. We then responded to their response. We have had what are called the oral arguments in June, which is basically the end of the case where both sets of lawyers get in front of the judge. The judge can ask questions, and they present their cases in a very brief manner. It is just not an introduction of new evidence. It is just a chance for the judge to ask questions and to better understand the law.
That is all completed, but one of the most interesting things about the oral arguments that were presented was at the very end of that case. Everybody is asking me, "When will the judge make a decision?" Everyone asks me. I have got three phone messages when I walk down from the hotel, people asking me, "When is the judge going to make a decision?" We do not know. The judge does not have a specific timeline they have to decide. One of the parting comment from Judge Gleason during the summary judgment case was, "Thank you all for coming in. I will try to have something back on this in the near term." That is a subjective term, near term. What does it mean? It might have different meaning for me, might have a different meaning for you. It might have a different meaning for a judge.
It tells us that the judge is paying attention to the case, that she will work on a solution of the case sooner rather than later. This feels like a decision that will come. We had thought maybe by the end of the summer. Has not come yet, but it is coming any day within the next month or two, probably, maybe by the end of the year, but soon. She recently had a decision on an unrelated case, and it took five and a half months for her to reach that decision. To give you a sense of this is not a one-page decision. Her decision on this unrelated case was, I think it was 89 pages long. It took her months to write. These decisions will be challenged. The groups will challenge them. The judges do not want their decisions to be reversed.
They are a considered, careful consideration of the law, and that will happen in our case as well. Ours is a complex case. There is a lot of material to go through. We have a lot of arguments of why what they have done is illegal. The question is what law specifically will resonate with the judge? We will see when that happens. It may not resonate with the judge. We may lose the case, which would be unfortunate. The arguments are in, we are waiting. Could happen any day, could happen tomorrow, could happen in a month, could happen in two months, but it is soon. When it happens, it is very important because what will happen afterwards, I think, is telling for us. This is a seminal moment for the company if we are successful with this legal challenge.
Because if we get the veto removed, if the judge rules that the veto is illegal for any of the reasons we have pointed out, and there is quite a lot that we have highlighted that we believe it is illegal, then the veto is removed, it is withdrawn as of then. We can then go back to the Army Corps of Engineers, who put their pencils down because they cannot do any work when there is a veto in place. We can go back to them, and we can ask them to pick their pencils back up again, finish the record of decision, finish the permitting. We are something like 80%-90% complete, and we want them to re-engage on the file and finish off. We want to get a positive permit decision. We also will be looking outwards at potential mining partners.
That is always our goal, to get another mining partner or a consortium of companies. Maybe someone who wants a lot of copper in a rising concentrate for generations to come might be interested. I think there may be a lot of interest in a project like this because of its scale, because of its location, because of the million feet we have drilled, the quality of engineering work we have done. I think we spent something north of $200 million on environmental studies, something north of $200 million on engineering studies with our mining partners at the time. A lot is known about this project. The goal will be to get a positive response from the judge to turn our attention to the Army Corps of Engineers, ask them to finish their permitting. The Environmental Protection Agency recently has been really focused on their revising the Clean Water Act.
I mentioned before, it would be really nice if they would just withdraw this, but it took significant effort to do. If they were to choose to withdraw the veto, they would go through the Administrative Procedure Act. It would require them to publish their intention to withdraw it for reasons, here is why it is illegal, and to open for public comments and then respond to the comments and then factor them in. It is a very large project involving a lot of people. They were working on the Clean Water Act, and they opened it up for comments, and they got 220,000 I think it is 220,000 comments in.
I am not saying Pebble would generate 200,000 comments, but it will generate a lot of comments. That would require a big team of dedicated people at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to work on this Clean Water Act and other priorities. It is easier for the administration to let the court make the decision. I do not know if that is their rationale or not, but it is easier because the court is doing the work. The U.S. Department of Justice represent them.
All they had to do was write the briefs, and they have done that. Our goal will be to move forward, to work on attracting a partner, to work on advancing the project. Once we get the positive record of decision, we will be moving into state permitting and then on into construction, hopefully with some names of mining companies that you have heard of behind us, supporting us in that endeavor. Just briefly, we have, as of June 30, we had CAD 53 million in the bank. We are about 70% retail, about 30% institutions and insiders. Those numbers were basically reversed before the permit was denied in 2020.
I would expect if we get positive news and we're heading down the path to become a development stage company, you'll see the institutional ownership ramp back up again because it's a very large project. The background of gold, of copper is very positive and this thing will be worth a lot of money. I'm going to stop there. There's a couple of minutes left. I'm happy to entertain a question if any of you has one.
Great. Any questions in the audience? Hi. Could you just go through the Kopernik royalties structure and your net economic interest in the deposit?
Yes, I will. I'm happy to. It's a royalty agreement with Kopernik at a time when our shares were trading at $0.30 a share. The agreement was in return for several tranches totaling $60 million , they would get the opportunity to buy 10% of the gold production and 30% of the silver production for the life of the mine at a set price. The value of that is approximately 3% of the entire deposit. But what that meant was at a time when our stock was trading at a very low level, and we were able to raise $60 million without issuing equity and this is what you would consider high-risk capital.
But Kopernik is a fund that is very much a gold and silver bug. They believe in the value of gold and silver. I think their impression is the mine has to be built for the copper because the world needs the copper, but they're really interested in the gold and silver. They've been a very supportive partner with us. They've been a shareholder for a long time. They have a good position in us, and now they have a chance to buy the metal, for the life of the mine, if it ever goes into production. You talk about structure, they're also on title for the land.
If, for example, we were unsuccessful in the court and we ended up going down a second legal option, which we have in the background called the takings case, asking for damages, they would have the ability to collect some of the damages based on the amount of metal that they had a right to buy. It's a complicated process. I don't fully understand it myself, but my point is that their position is secured on title, and obviously, if the mine gets built, this royalty will be enormously valuable. Their support has been enormously valuable for us.
Other questions? All right. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you