Thanks everyone for coming. We're gonna switch it up, talk about nickel for a little bit. Similar presentation, similar slides. There's a quiz at the end. We have had a transformational shift in the past six weeks for Talon. We ended up purchasing the Eagle Mine, which is the only U.S. domestic nickel mine. It's in the U.P. of Michigan. It matches really well with us because Talon has been focused on exploring for nickel in Minnesota, but we don't have any operating mines. The Eagle Mine is an operating mine, but they didn't have much future because the exploration hadn't really found anything. You put those two together, you have, you know, the exploration upside that Talon brings, you have the operational excellence that Eagle brings.
We can take that operational excellence and help build the Tamarack deposit with that. You know, this group has already built and mined the Eagle Mine for 11 years. We can take that and say, "Hey, you've done it once. Can you do it again? Are there things that you would want to improve on?" Our vision is two nickel mines in the United States with two processing facilities. Tamarack is serviced by the BMPF, which is our North Dakota mill that is funded by Department of Energy. There's a $114 million grant for that. Whereas the Eagle Mine, we have some exploration just outside called Boulderdash that we're working on now. All the while, exploration is ongoing at both Tamarack and in larger Michigan.
Strategic support for us, on the Tamarack side, we do have an offtake agreement with Tesla for 75 kilotons of nickel. Rio Tinto's our JV partner. It was a Rio Tinto project and discovery. I did 15 years with Rio Tinto, and then when Talon took over operational ownership, I jumped over. I really enjoy working for a smaller group and then Lundin just joined as part of the deal. They're up to 19%. Jack Lundin and Juan Andrés Morel have joined the board of Talon, again, signaling the support that we're getting from the Lundins. Lastly, U.S. government funding.
Like I said, $114 million from Department of Energy, but also $20.6 million from Department of Defense, specifically focused on exploration, find more nickel in America, and that's what we've been doing. We want to be producing domestic nickel now, but also building for tomorrow and being a long-term solution. The Eagle Mine, like I said, has been in operation for 11 years. It's a small postage stamp style underground mine. The mill is separate. The mill is about 60 miles away. They truck the ore down to it. If you look at the production that's been produced, it's nearing 200,000 tons of both nickel and copper. It is a nice polymetallic deposit that also has cobalt and some PGEs. It's conventional flotation, just like Tamarack.
Nothing, nothing special, just conventional work. The focus for Eagle was slated to close in about 2028. By Talon taking it over and looking at things a little bit differently, our intention is to extend the Eagle Mine by accessing some of the other mineralization. Eagle has been mined out. Eagle East is currently in production. We have what's called the keel, which is more of a thin layer of massive sulfides with some disseminated sulfides on top. That's kind of the intent, is we wanna use this to bridge into Tamarack and Boulderdash. You have this excellent team that's currently working on all this. We have an opportunity to take that team and turn it into Tamarack. In order to do that, we need to extend Eagle. That's the goal.
A new technical report will be coming out, expected Q2 of 2026. We also have some l ike I said, the Boulderdash prospect was a first hole discovery that we made in 2024. Pretty much at surface, or at least bedrock surface, it was just under 100 meters of 1.6% copper equivalent. It took us a couple more holes before we start to hit the massive sulfide. Very similar story to the discovery of Eagle, where you started with the net-textured mineralization, and then the next year, they hit 85 meters of massive sulfide. We haven't hit 85 meters yet, but that's kind of the goal is continue that. We'll be drilling with at least 2 rigs on this project starting once the snow melts, which is typically about June in the U.P.
Switching over to Tamarack. Tamarack, another high-grade nickel deposit on the other side of the Midcontinent Rift. We have what I always call the holy trinity of infrastructure. For a greenfield site, we have road, rail, and power all within 1 mile of site, which is pretty cool. We are in permitting right now, and like I said, it's a joint venture with Rio Tinto. Right now it's 51/49. By completing a feasibility study, which we aim to do in the first half of this year, we'll bump up to 60/40. One of the things that is fun about Tamarack now is, permitting is actually kind of an exciting story, which I don't think anyone has ever said before. In Minnesota, permitting's broken into three different stages.
You have the EAW, which is where you're scoping the project. You have the EIS, and then you have your Permit to Mine. As part of the EAW process, this is the first time that you can take your project, you hand it over to the state, they distribute it to the other agencies, and they provide you feedback. It's gone back and forth, 4 times now. We've received 1,600 comments, and the comments have been really helpful for how you can shape the project. You need to do this early, because once you get an EIS, it's very difficult to change. One of the comments that we got, early on was with to do with, track out material and stormwater. You have track out material. How do you manage stormwater?
What recurrence interval do you plan for? We said, "Well, we'll plan for the 100-year storm event." I think that makes sense given the mine life. One of the comments we got was, "Why didn't you plan for the 200?" We said, "Oh, this is great. We're getting feedback. This is exactly what we needed." We increased the size of the tanks. We added RO or more RO. We came back and we said, "All right. Here's what we've done." The comment we got back was, "Why didn't you plan for the 500-year?" That was a really good learning for us, because it made us actually pause on permitting, and we said, "We need to take a few minutes.
Instead of trying to guess at a number, why don't we just focus on eliminating the question. That's what we've focused on. We redesigned the plan with the intention of just removing the question to begin with. What we came up with was our decline now. Instead of coming up on the yard, it comes up straight into the building. The ore comes up, the trucks come up, they're enclosed. You have no interaction between the ore and the environment. We can kind of sidestep the having to answer that sort of question and just say it's in a building. The nice thing is that every single access point to this is an engineering control, and this has been a real fundamental change for us on permitting. It's also contextualizing this.
In Minnesota, we have iron mines, iron deposits that have been mined for 100 years. We're not permitting something that size. We're permitting something the size of a big box store. It's the same size as that. It's totally enclosed. This has been really helpful as well as people, you know, they go shop, they go to Walmart or Target, and they say, "Okay, this is about what it's gonna be." Then to the actual exciting stuff, exploration success. We have drilling in-house, so this is something we did at COVID. We hired drillers. We bought our own drill rigs. We've expanded that program. We own five rigs. Right now we're operating three.
This is supported by the Department of Defense with that $20.6 million, our drilling cost per meter gets cut in half by that funding. We also have in-house geophysics, in-house geologists, so we have a fully integrated team that's basically working 24/7. We don't have delays from contractors and things like that, so we can follow up on drill holes. Even before the rods come out of the hole, we know what the next target is because we've done the geophysics ourselves, so we can be very quick on delineation. As, you know, some of the other colleagues have talked about drilling deeper, we sent a hole. A hole was drilled to 650 meters. We extended it by 50 meters, we popped into new mineralization that we didn't know was there.
That mineralization ended up being really high-grade massive sulfides. We ran Borehole EM. We saw an anomaly off to the side, and we drilled that anomaly. It ended up being this beautiful intercept. It was about 35 meters of almost 29% nickel equivalent or 57% copper equivalent. If you look at the actual assets in here, it's about 15% nickel, 15% copper, and 34 grams PGEs. That split, I think, is nine grams gold, 16 grams platinum, and six grams palladium. For the first time in my career, I get to talk about gold, which is kind of fun. It's so extraordinary that it got accepted to the Smithsonian. Six weeks ago, I had the pleasure of going to the Smithsonian and handing it over for display.
As a science nerd, that is like the coolest thing that could have ever happened to me. We're currently sitting on this area with 3 of our drills doing directional drilling and looking to expand each of the hits that we have. Once we get those expanded, the intent is to continue drilling deeper and laterally to see how many more of these pools are there. The thought is that everything's draining down through Tamarack. Nickel sulfides are a primary system, so you have primary, you know, sulfides that were liquid. They can drain from gravity and head on down. We can't lose focus that we have more at Tamarack than just the vault. The vault is a very tiny part of this. If you go 1 mile to the north in the Raptor's Head, there's 9% nickel, 5% copper.
Another mile north, you're at 10% nickel, 6% copper. Both of these have, say, 4 to 6 grams PGEs. Then to the south, there's also massive sulfides. Lots of work to do, lots of exploration to do at Tamarack. Corporate structure, well supported by the Lundin Group. Like I said, Jack Lundin and Juan Andrés Morel are on the board now, pretty strong on that front. I wouldn't be a geologist if I didn't have core in my pocket. If you wanna see the vault zone, you can meet me outside. I'll be at my booth, and you can take a look at what it looks like. Thanks, everyone.