Thank you very much. And again, I'm Scott Melbye. I'm CEO of Uranium Royalty, and I'm a co-founder. I had the privilege yesterday to speak to you about Uranium Energy Corp, which is one of the fastest-growing uranium miners and developers in the world today, focused in North America. This is a little bit of a different way to invest in the uranium and nuclear thesis. The company itself was founded by Amir Adnani and myself, who are involved in UEC, a couple of companies like UEC and Mega Uranium vending in assets in 2017 to launch the company in 2019 on the TSX and then subsequent listing on NASDAQ a couple of years later. But long story short, before we get into kind of the macro, we've created the first and only pure royalty and streaming company in the uranium space.
So we basically saw the enormous success of Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, Sandstorm, Royal Gold. We love that the investors love that kind of diversified exposure to commodities through royalties and streams. We also see how it's become a very important source of mine development capital for new mine development and for an industry that had gone through, like uranium, through such a deep and dark bear market over 11 years. There wasn't a lot of mine investment coming in. We were basically shutting mines in, taking it out of production. And that was at the end of that period, the time at which we decided to launch, which you might say is counterintuitive.
But we were able to make some of our initial portfolio investments at that sort of late stages of the bear market and acquire assets for under 0.3x to NAV to get a start and kick us off with the IPO in December of 2019. But listen, we're in the uranium space. I spoke yesterday about this enormous growth it's undertaking. 64 reactors under construction around the world. 70 more have been connected in the last 10 years.
We're only beginning to get to the first stage of the small modular advanced reactors that tech leaders like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman are so keen on and see it as not only a way to deliver electricity more broadly to the economy, but as a way for them to keep their AI ambitions on track and be able to produce the enormous amount of electricity that data centers are going to require. Maybe as much as nine, 10% of U.S. electricity demand will be consumed by data centers. We're in the right market at the right time, the right commodity. This is the supply and demand balance. This is our business case. I mean, we look at the demand for uranium and the production. We're in a structural deficit today of about 40-50 million pounds.
We've been in a deficit for some time, but we've had huge inventories that were kind of increased around the Fukushima area where production was slow to cut back. Demand was impacted. Now, 2024, demand is on a pace to double nuclear generation by the next 15 years, and the aspirational goal at COP28 of tripling nuclear power doesn't seem so extreme now in light of that we're on track to double, so we're the capital provider for the mines that are going to fill that gap between existing primary supply and growing demand. We are the first mover in the space. That gives us enormous advantage in the royalty and streaming space, and base and precious metals has become very competitive to acquire assets that come available on the market or companies that hold royalties.
I don't think we'll be alone for long, and we're beginning to see companies that are very eager to join us. We welcome the competition, but we have decades of experience in uranium. We understand the risk-return proposition that is uranium, and it's quite unique. And so that gives us, I think, a leg up over other competitors that may come in. Liquid assets of CAD 304 million. Most of this is in physical uranium, and I'll come back to that. But we decided that to not only have a war chest to go out and acquire new royalties and streams, but for the early investors, the early shareholders, we wanted to expose them to uranium off the bottom of the market. And we've already seen very significant appreciation in our physical uranium holdings. Our portfolio is quite large for a new company that launched in 2019.
We have 22 interests on 19 projects today. This is a global focus. So we're looking at uranium jurisdictions all around the world. Management teams, as is the case in royalty companies, are quite small, but the people that we have are quite experienced. So we have decades of experience in exploration, mine development, marketing, finance in the space. Very small overhead for a company our size. We're CAD 300 million market cap. We can grow double, triple in size with largely the G&A that we have in place, which is about CAD 5 million a year to run this company. A lot of those costs are the holding costs of the physical uranium. So quite an efficient model as it should be in uranium space. UEC, I'll mention, is the largest shareholder. They hold a 15% interest, but it's a very separate business model, separate business structure.
But we're held quite extensively, both retail and institutional investors. We're in all the ETFs, URA, URNM, all hold UROY in the portfolio. Again, market cap at about CAD 3 billion. We have no debt and pretty lean share structure. We're covered by three companies. Sometimes it's hard for investors to get their heads around. It's hard enough to model one or two mines in a company's portfolio, but when you have to model 19 mines, you might find the research coverage by H.C. Wainwright, Canaccord, Paradigm as helpful to help you try to put a proper valuation on the company. Diversification is key for any royalty company. We want to be diversified in geography, stage of development, size of mines across the entire industry. And we've set out to do that. To date, all of our royalties were acquired in the secondary market, meaning they were existing royalties.
They were remnants of M&A transactions, landowners. Some of these have been quite innovative. We've bought them out of the estates of wealthy families that held these royalties, and they were just sitting in the kind of wealth transfer in their generational transfer. The desire to monetize that either in cash, selling their royalty to us, or taking shares in a broader investment like Uranium Royalty is quite attractive to them. But I will say of our pipeline of new business opportunities, and it's quite a full pipeline right now, six or seven projects we're looking at. 80% of those are new financings where we're competing with debt and equity to provide $25 million, $50 million, maybe even as much as $100 million to a miner developer to get over the hump and into production, and in exchange, they'll grant us a royalty interest on the project.
I'm often asked, well, how do you compete against debt and equity? And quite frankly, it comes down to cost of capital. If you can be the lowest cost of capital for that developer, they'll go forward with you. But even if it was about even basis with debt or equity, we have a lot of advantages in that as uranium experts, people with decades of experience in the uranium industry, when we come alongside and we invest in a project, it's a third-party endorsement of that project in capital markets. It's also an expansion of our counterparties' capital markets activities. When we're out talking to investors like yourselves, we're talking about their projects. And it expands more eyes, more ears on our counterparties' projects. And we've also advised our various counterparties on marketing decisions, development decisions. We are truly a partner.
We're not an uncaring bank that just has a financial interest. We're partners in those companies' success. And these are the companies that we are invested in, have investments in their projects. Some of the largest companies in the world, Cameco, Orano, Paladin, some of the entrepreneurial juniors, enCore Energy, Energy Fuels, Paladin, Laramide, Peninsula. These are the companies that's interesting in the uranium space. A lot of the new mine development's not being done by the majors. It's the juniors that are building the new mines. And so we want to be invested alongside of them. To date, I would say we're overweight in North America, Canada and the United States.
That's not such a bad thing, given geopolitics in the world today with Russia, Ukraine, and potential issues in China, to have interests in conventional and in-situ mining assets in the United States and be present in the Athabasca Basin of Saskatchewan and in Eastern Canada is a good thing. We do have interests in Africa and a small interest in the Salamanca Mine in Spain. We took a very conscious decision, as I said, to buy uranium off the bottom of the market. We to date have acquired close to a little over 3.5 million pounds at a cost of under $60 a pound. As a way to park our cash, our war chest is parked in uranium, which has gained significantly over this period of time. We've sold some material to fund acquisitions and will continue to do so.
We have about 2.7 million pounds of uranium in inventory today at a cost of under $60. When uranium prices went up to $160 and pulled back to $80, all the uranium equities pulled back along with it. There was a point where the value of our uranium inventory, which we can turn to cash tomorrow, was approaching our market cap and was like a flashing buy signal for a lot of individual and institutional investors. So we've been on quite a run in the last week. We're up 18%-20% on strong uranium nuclear news. But you can think of this as a transitional strategy. We don't want to be a competitor to the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, for example, or Yellow Cake plc. We want to turn this uranium in the drum into cash to invest in uranium in the ground.
I can't go in depth into all the royalties, but I can touch on a couple of the larger ones that we hold. We're quite proud to have interests in the world's richest, highest-grade mines that are operated by Cameco and Orano in Saskatchewan, the McArthur River Mine and Cigar Lake Mine. McArthur, we have a physical uranium royalty where we get book-transferred pounds from the mine as they're produced in payment of our royalty interest. Has been paying it about 1 million a year. It will obviously go up as production increases and uranium prices increase. The Cigar Lake interest is a net profit interest, not as good as a top-line revenue, but we're getting to the point now where the expenses have worked down and we're beginning to see payouts probably in the next two-to-three years under Cigar Lake.
But between these two projects, it could be 5million-6 million a year just from these two interests. Roughrider is a mine that was acquired by Rio Tinto, recently sold to Uranium Energy Corp. We have a 2% NSR on a mine that could produce 6 million pounds a year and sell, you know, if that uranium sold at $100 a pound, you can see the value of what a 2% interest is. The 2% of the value of that uranium produced is quite significant. We do have longer-dated royalties. And I normally don't talk about expiration royalties because there's such a long time to pay back on these. But I will point out Dawn Lake is an interesting one. It's a Cameco project, which is the extension of the Hurricane Deposit, which is owned and controlled by IsoE nergy.
ISO is a smaller company, publicly traded company that has published all their drill results right up to the Dawn Lake boundary. Cameco, not being as open with their drilling, is beginning to acknowledge that they're spending a lot on this project. And we know the deposit doesn't end on the borderline. So this could be quite a nice future royalty payment for us. We love U.S. ISRs, in-situ recovery. This is the mining method in the U.S. It's very low impact, low cost, capital cost, operating cost. It allows U.S. mines to be competitive with Canadian or Kazakh mines. And we're invested in Reno Creek, which will be the next area of development for UEC in Wyoming. Lance, which is in development to be in production by the end of this year.
We have a nice 1% royalty on the whole mine and a 5% interest on parts of the mine. So nice coverage. Dewey Burdock is an ISR mine that will be developed by enCore Energy in South Dakota. Church Rock, we just increased our interest to 10% with 10% royalty on a mine in New Mexico that is an in-situ mine. It's not conventional. Fortunately for New Mexico, it's not on Navajo lands, which has been a real challenge to develop on tribal lands. Conventional assets globally, we have Langer Heinrich, which is one of the world's biggest mines that's been producing for many, many years. It was shut in for a period of low uranium prices, now restarting. We have a fixed royalty payment under Langer. Michelin is a 100-million pound deposit owned and operated, the exploration and development program by Paladin in Labrador.
Salamanca is a mine you may have heard of in Spain, which to date, the local government has not given authority to go forward with the mine. But if we had to rank mines outside of the geopolitical issues, it would be in our top 10. We invested a very little amount, $350,000 USD to acquire what is a call option on politics changing in Spain. We'll tuck that away and see if the Spanish change course on that. In the US, we have a number of conventional underground royalties in what we call the Colorado Plateau area, which is Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah. These are companies like Energy Fuels, Western Uranium, and like UEC. Now with the uranium price increasing the $80-$90 range, a number of these mines are restarting like Whirlwind, Energy Queen.
We'll begin to see. You begin to see the value crystallizing now that the uranium market is recovering. If we had to estimate our revenue expectations in the coming years, I would say by 2027, CAD 10 million in annual revenue, CAD 20 million by 2030, CAD 40 million by 2033 if we did nothing more, if we just sat on the current portfolio, and that's a nice move to probably about CAD 50 million by mid-2030s. But we're very active and we are looking to add and grow the portfolio, so look for catalysts as we announce new deals that broaden our exposure. We want to have royalty interests in every uranium district in the world. And frankly, I'd like to have interests on every mine in the world if we could, so just know that that's the kind of growth trajectory that we're on.
So in closing, this is just, listen, the investment thesis around uranium has never been better. In my 40 years, I've never seen the combination of the green energy transition, the demand for more energy for electrification of modern society with transportation, data centers, homes, and businesses. I've never seen the fundamentals so strong for nuclear and never seen a greater need for more uranium mines to be built more quickly around the world than we see today. So this is another way, if you want to be invested in that story and not be invested in just a single mine or single company, have diversification, but exposure to the uranium space, royalty and streams are an excellent way to play the uranium investment.
Scott, this is mind-boggling, I would say. Can I just expose my ignorance, which I've done two days in a row?
You've been saying that all weekend. You're not that ignorant.
But I mean, how should we look at Uranium Royalty Corp. and where would you be happy in a stock perspective? Is this a financial stock or is it really a mining stock?
It has elements of an equity investment in a mine. It has elements of the physical commodity ETFs and it has elements of an ETF with the diversification. So I would like to say that we take some of the best aspects of all those investments and we put it in one without a lot of the downsides. Like if you think of in a high inflationary environment where CapEx blow-ups are quite common in mining projects today, if you have a top-line royalty gross revenue interest, you're protected from the inflationary effect. Obviously, you don't want the inflation to blow up the viability of the mine, but if the costs go up, we still get paid off the top, which is a really nice position to be in.
As the mine produces more, it's very common at the end of mine life that more resources are discovered at depth and/or discovered in the vicinity of the mine. We get the upside without having effectively paid for that. So we've got some examples like Cigar Lake. Our royalty covers not only the first phase, but now Cameco and Orano look to be going into the second phase. So that's all gravy on top of what we've gotten from the first phase of operations.
If I summarize it here, when you make your investments, we're looking at the stock. We would know the risk you take because you pay for the royalties, whereas the upside is really how much they can get. And as you said, if they would find more of your investment in this case, then obviously you will get the percentage of that.
Exactly.
That's a very, very interesting and shrewd move, I must say.
Thank you. Well, it's not a new idea. Franco-Nevada and some of these other companies have really pioneered it and made it a multi-billion-dollar industry. We're just bringing it to uranium for the first time. So thank you very much.
Thank you.