It is high time to welcome the next guest. Can we need your mics, gentlemen?
Thank you. Speak to you later.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's high time to welcome the next speaker. That's Garrett Ainsworth, District Metals. It's a Canadian company, but listed in Sweden. It's a very Swedish company, not only listed in Sweden, but with assets in Sweden. You have your mic. Please. I was a bit afraid that all the mics have gone. Nice to see you.
Hey, yeah, nice to see you.
Go ahead. The stage is yours.
Excellent. Thanks very much. At District Metals, when we entered Sweden in 2020, I never imagined that I'd be so excited about politics in Sweden. Here we are. I'll get more into that in the presentation, and you'll see. Cautionary statement. You can find this on our website, also on news releases and whatnot. I won't go into detail there. From a high level, investors ask, you know, why should we invest in District Metals? Main reasons are we've got the team all the way from exploration, discovery, through to development and production. We're solely focused on Sweden. It's an amazing jurisdiction to be in. It's ranked number 6 by the Fraser Institute just fairly recently. Of course, our flagship project is the Viken property. It is the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the world, along with many other critical raw materials.
We also have four other uranium polymetallic projects that are fairly advanced along the way. I won't go into too much detail about the team here. Myself, I'm a geologist. A lot of my background is with high-grade uranium in the Athabasca. I had a lot of success with Alpha Minerals and NexGen Energy with the Triple R deposit discovery, the Arrow deposit discovery as well. I spent my career in 2007, 2018, won some industry awards for my work there, and then got a hold of District Metals as a shell company and found our Tomtebo project in Sweden. It took off from there towards being more uranium polymetallic focused in 2022. Our CFO, Marlis Yassin, she makes sure all of our I's are dotted, T's are crossed, was a big driver behind us getting our listing on the NASDAQ First North Growth Market.
We've got a great technical team with Hein Raat and Rodney Allen, a very well-rounded off board with Joanna Cameron being a lawyer by training. Doug Ramshaw is a geologist slash capital markets banker past, and Jonathan Challis is a mine engineer with banking experience. On the advisory side, geological marketing and analyst type experience on the team there. Our share structure up to August 31st, 2023, we're very proud of our share registry. We have some very significant shareholders that hold large positions. Some I can't name, but there's many funds out of Sweden, out of the EU, and also Canada and the U.S. that bolster our share registry. We also have fairly good insider holdings as well in the company. Sweden, it truly is a top jurisdiction in the world. Like I said, number six with the Fraser Institute.
It's got a history of mining that goes back to 400 BC. It's a powerhouse for iron, for zinc, lead, silver, copper, gold, and hopefully soon it'll be also for uranium. The big player in Sweden is obviously Boliden and LKB. There's also BHP. Agnico Eagle are also big in there as well. Our experience in Sweden is that there's a form for everything. In terms of permitting for exploration, things go very quickly compared to other parts of the world, including Canada. Let's jump into more of the nuclear uranium project side of things. This is where the politics starts to get really exciting for us. Obviously, Sweden had a moratorium on uranium mining. That got put in place in 2018. The current government is looking to lift that ban before the end of the year with legislation changing January 1st, 2026.
This has huge implications for District Metals and our uranium polymetallic holdings. They're very pro. Sweden is very pro-nuclear. About 30% of electricity is coming from nuclear energy, and the plan is to build out 10 more nuclear reactors by 2045. With District, we've got some very strategically placed uranium polymetallic projects across Sweden in very well-known uranium districts. The whole timeline, I won't go through in detail with uranium in Sweden, but the moratorium got put in place in 2018. Some of the most significant recent moves have been the Minister of Environment submitted the formal proposal to Parliament in late August. There's been all sorts of meetings in September. That proposal to lift the uranium ban is now within special committee in the Swedish Parliament.
That will end on October 31, and the government should have a recommendation, or the special committee should have a recommendation at that point. This sets up a general vote within Parliament, and the current government has basically said they have a majority to approve this bill. Upon approval, then the change in legislation will happen on January 1st, 2026. This is a massive political decision that affects District Metals very, very positively. Looking at our Viken property, it's in central Sweden, initially discovered in the late 1970s by the Geological Survey of Sweden. There wasn't really any substantial work done until around 2005 by a company called Continental Precious Minerals. They did a lot of drilling, some mineral resource estimates, some economic studies. They actually reached a market capitalization of SEK 330 million during that time. However, Fukushima was a bit of a major problem.
The moratorium on uranium in 2018 was kind of the final blow for Continental. We also have next-door neighbors that have done some really good work on their alum shale project called the Häggån deposit. In April of 2025, we did our own NI 43-101 mineral resource estimate with indicated and inferred values. The inferred is obviously the largest category here with 4.3 billion tons of material. That's 1.5 billion lbs of uranium, 24.3 billion lbs of vanadium. There are billions upon billions of pounds of molybdenum, nickel, copper, zinc. There's also potash and phosphate and some rare earth elements. There's a heap of very important and critical raw materials that are within the Viken deposit, which make it very strategic and also, I would think, would be very helpful for permitting in the future.
More recently, in late September of this year, we released the airborne geophysical results from a survey that we flew called Mobile MT. We did line spacing 200 m apart. It was a helicopter that went back and forth. Essentially, in this figure, you've got the black outline as our Viken property outline. Anywhere you see pink or magenta is extremely positive because the host rock, the alum shale, is very conductive because of the graphite. One thing that I found really interesting was you can see the outline of, okay, there we go, of the Viken deposit. That's the inferred mineral resource estimate in the blue outline. There's not a lot of pink in there. There is some, but then you look at target area A, area B, area C, and it's very clear that this survey has picked up better looking areas outside the current mineral resource estimate.
What it's telling us is that there is a very good chance that there are multiple Viken deposits located within the Viken property. The current Viken deposit is already the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the world. It could have very good potential to get much larger. Now, let's talk about valuation here. Some people say, oh, it's a low grade. It's, you know, not really that interesting. What you might find interesting in the last uranium cycle, the monetizing events or the buyouts of uranium, low grade uranium deposits were multi-billion dollar monetizing events, which is higher than any other high grade uranium type monetizing events during that same time. In 2007, Euromin was bought out for $2.5 billion U.S. dollars by Areva, or now Orano, a state-run French company. In 2012, Extract Capital was bought out for AUD 2.2 billion Australian dollars by CGN.
This is a Chinese state-owned nuclear company, and for the Husab deposit, which is actually in production right now. It is very interesting to see these multi-billion dollar transactions or monetizing events that happened of uranium deposits that were low grade. It is also to be noted, these deposits do not have any vanadium. They do not have potash. They do not have any of the other important or critical raw materials that we have in our Viken deposit in Sweden. I really love this table. It was a lot of fun to put together. What we are basically looking at is the value in enterprise value divided by our inferred resource and enterprise value divided by measured and indicated resource, and then comparing it to all of our peers that are exploration stage, developer stage.
Just looking at the EV divided by inferred resource, you can see that we are valued at about $0.09 U.S. per lbs in the ground, and the average peer group is showing about $3.64. I am not saying that we are going to that level of $3.64, but there is a huge valuation gap here and something needs to give. I would say one of the main reasons why we are getting that valuation for our pounds in the ground is quite, quite, quite up to the moratorium that has been in place in Sweden since 2018. Now I have just got to get into some of our other uranium projects. Sågtjärn is not an alum shale type project, so it is higher grade on the uranium front, but it is going to be a smaller number of pounds.
The Sågtjärn deposit is 1.14 million lbs of uranium at a grade of about 700 parts per million and open in all directions. It has some intercepts that range from 4-9 m of 0.13 - 0.18. These are the kind of values you would see in the U.S.A. on the Colorado Plateau with the idea you have smaller deposits and those would feed into a hub and spoke type mill operation. I should note that Sågtjärn, we flew a drone radiometric and magnetic survey, and it was very successful in showing us some of the radioactive anomalies that we knew about, but it showed us some brand new ones. Next year, we'll be hitting the ground and we should be in a position potentially to drill Sågtjärn as well.
We actually ended up staking some more ground because we had anomalies on the edge of one of the mineral licenses as well. Nianfors, which is a very similar type property to Sågtjärn, it's actually never been drilled, but we flew this with the drone radiometric survey and it lit up at Majsaberget , where you have almost 1,000 boulders of uranium with average grades of 0.16%, with the highest grade being 1.4% uranium. Now we're talking pretty high grades here at Nianfors. The Geological Survey of Sweden pinned an exploration target at Majsaberget of minimum 13 million lbs, ranging from 0.07%- 0.14% U3O8. This will be a really fun project to hit the ground and it's got a little bit more work till we get drill ready, but it's a great project that we handpicked for the portfolio.
Ardnasvare, now I mentioned that I've spent a lot of my career in the Athabasca Basin looking for high-grade uranium. Ardnasvare is a similar geological environment where you've got that yellow rock as a sandstone. It's sitting on top of the red rock, which is basement. Where those two rocks contact, there's something called an unconformity. That's where you can get really high grades of uranium. We know there's some boulder trains with uranium that come off of that that have never been drilled. This is a really high octane exploration project where we know there's uranium mineralization within the sandstone, the yellow unit. We know there's mineralization within the basement, which is the red unit. This theory has never been tested. Of course, we've got some more alum shale properties located to the north of our Viken property. We actually flew all of these with our Mobile MT survey.
We will be putting out results on this probably later in October. The whole plan here with the alum shale properties is we're trying to find another Viken deposit or Viken deposits. It's been a really busy 2025. As we come to the end here, we've got more news coming out on drone results from Ardnasvare. We'll also have Mobile MT results coming out from the alum shale properties. Of course, we'll be watching the political situation very closely in Sweden because of the impact that it has for us and putting out our own kind of follow-up comment news releases. If everything goes according to plan, it looks like the moratorium should be lifted on January 1st, 2026, in the legislation. Just a quick kind of summary of what we've got here. We've got a team with extensive experience in uranium, also in base metals.
We're obviously focused in Sweden. We've got an excellent portfolio of uranium and base metal projects. We are very proud of our shareholders that have joined us along the way, and we look forward to more shareholders joining.
Thank you for that. We have time for some questions. Do we have any questions here? Just raise your hand, and we have one question over there as we walk around with a mic.
Is it working?
Yeah.
I have a quick question. Thanks, Garrett. Does the political situation with the January 1 implementation, if the vote goes ahead, can you talk in addition about any local community opposition? Does that somewhat get solved with the national political decision? Is there the potential risk of further opposition after that decision is made?
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, no matter where you go in the world, if you're proposing an open pit mine, even though what we're looking at would be much smaller, which has been proposed in the past, you're going to get not in my backyard. I think it's very helpful on the federal level with the moratorium being lifted. It puts us in a position where it's easier to talk about uranium when it's legal to explore, it's legal to mine it. There's a lot of work to be done from a social license standpoint. One of the biggest problems in Sweden that we've identified is there's not a formal mechanism for transferring the benefits from a mining operation to the municipalities. We'll be having in-depth conversations with all the municipal parties and discussing certain things like impact benefit agreements. I think this is so important.
This is something that's done in Canada with First Nations, because if you're a mining company and you're operating in an area, then the local people and the municipalities, they should also participate in the benefits from a financial standpoint, from a social standpoint, and from environmental guarantees.
We have the last question there.
Yeah, I'm adding to that in previous comments. I think that the making or breaking of your projects is with the environmental authorities. If you can convince them that you can mine this, your mining process avoids spillage to the waters nearby. That is the key.
I couldn't agree with you more. Actually, on Saturday, I was in Jämtland talking with political parties there, having all sorts of really constructive discussions. The thing that's not really realized is that this is 2025. The technologies that we have to protect the environment, like you can do dry stack tailings. There are all sorts of really good water treatment facilities. There's hybrid open pit strip mining where you're reclaiming, restoring the land as you move forward so that you can return the land back to be used for agricultural purposes. We've got some great ideas. This was never previously really a big thing with Continental Precious Minerals. There are some legacy issues there that we intend to fix.
To be continued.
Yes.