Welcome, everybody. My name's Janet Lee Sheriff. I'm the Chief Communications Officer with enCore Energy. I've been with enCore since its inception, and I've served in many different roles. Now today, I'm your moderator. On behalf of everyone at enCore, I wanted to thank everyone for joining us today. I also want to thank the team at Nasdaq for the fabulous job that they did at our opening bell ceremony, and for providing this exceptional venue for our first investor day. A few housekeeping items: what you'll see on the table is some USB sticks that are in the shape of nuclear fuel pellets. Those contain all of the presentations today, along with our corporate presentation and the video you're about to see. Printed material is the agenda and all of the bios for the speakers today.
Little housekeeping: we're going to be making some forward-looking statements, so we urge you to go to our website, and I'll save the presenters from having to say that each time. The washrooms are down the hall, and this is being recorded. It will be made available after. So over the next hour, what we want to leave you with is a stronger understanding of the nuclear industry, our technology in situ recovery, and enCore's role in the present and future role providing the United States with a source of domestic uranium. enCore has assembled an elite team of professionals who are going to provide you with an overview of our dramatic growth and our significant accomplishments over the last three years. This foundation has provided our team with the plans that really are going to show you how we've achieved those accomplishments today.
It really is a time of tremendous growth and opportunity for our company and for the sector, and I hope, if nothing else, you're left with that today. The program today is based around reducing the U.S. dependence on foreign uranium. We are in an exceptional time, and our team's going to illustrate how we're going to become an even larger supplier of uranium to the United States. How it's going to work today is I'm going to play a short video after my brief introductions, and then each of the speakers is going to speak and introduce the other one. We do have a guest today. Treva is here from TradeTech, and she will be our guest speaker, and she'll give you an overview of the industry: William Sheriff, Paul Goranson, Dennis Stover, Peter Luthiger, Seonaid Wilson , Rob Willette, and James Israel.
Dennis is actually one of the founders of the in situ recovery technology, and he's going to give you a brief history of that technology. So with that, I'm going to just move into a brief video with an overview of the company, and then I'll introduce Treva. Thank you.
Nuclear energy is gaining attention as the world's most cost-effective and reliable non-carbon fuel source and is now projected to grow significantly in importance as a zero-carbon energy source over the next few decades. The United States is the world's largest consumer of nuclear energy, powering about 19% of the country's electrical needs using over 46 million pounds of uranium annually. Since 1980, the United States has shifted essentially from full production to virtually no production of domestic uranium. enCore Energy, America's clean energy company, is changing this. enCore Energy is the newest domestic producer of uranium in the United States. With its Rosita Central Processing Plant now in production, enCore is proud to be the first Texas producer in 10 years and one of only three uranium producers in the United States.
enCore Energy is now able to provide the fuel needed for the nuclear renaissance now underway in the United States and globally. The next phase in production development for enCore Energy is the Alta Mesa Central Processing Plant, scheduled to begin production in early 2024. Both plants are located in South Texas, and Texas is an Agreement State, which puts the permitting process in the control of the state, making this process much more efficient and timely. The Rosita plant is located adjacent to over 2,700 enCore Energy-controlled acres with surrounding satellite operations, while the Alta Mesa plant lies adjacent to over 200,000 enCore Energy-controlled acres, with both in proximity to Corpus Christi, Texas. enCore Energy utilizes only in situ recovery, ISR, to extract uranium from sand-hosted deposits.
This technology operates through injection and extraction wells in well fields, much like oil and gas production, and only utilizes water and oxygen to extract uranium. Upon completion, 99% of the water utilized is recycled. Uranium is typically transported directly to the central processing plant from well fields via pipelines, where the uranium is recovered on ion exchange resin beads and the uranium is processed and packaged as dry uranium product. When the distances from the well field to the central processing plant become longer, a satellite ion exchange plant located at the well field is used, where the uranium-coated ion exchange resin beads are shipped to the central processing plant by truck. These operations are efficient, safe, and low-cost, with minimal footprint, water use, and reclamation requirements. For more information about enCore and our operations, including the in situ recovery process, please visit www.encoreuranium.com.
enCore Energy, America's clean energy company.
I'd like to have Treva join us. You'll see in the bio we couldn't have picked a better guest speaker to give you a very objective and thorough come up overview of the uranium industry, so I will pass it off to you, and you will find her bio on the sheets. Thank you.
Great. Thank you. All right. Can everybody hear me? Great. Thank you so much, Janet, for the introduction. Thank you, everybody at enCore, for inviting me to be here. It's really thrilling to see your success. I've known you from the beginning, and it's fabulous to be here with you today, and I'm really honored that you've asked me to kick off the discussion about the uranium market and where it's going. Thank you all of you for giving me a few minutes of your time. I know it's really valuable. There's a lot going on, and we'll try to jump into where we see the major recent developments and where things are going. So is that yours, Armadillo?
Yes.
Well, let's get to mine. Okay. Even though Janet has said we don't have to all say this again, please do not make any investment decisions based on my comments today. So with that out of the way, we're going to go right into the important part: the price. TradeTech's uranium spot price reached historic levels in the past few months, actually peaking at $107 per pound U3O8 in early February. The price has since come down to $88 per pound U3O8. Now, one of the reasons for this recent dip in the price is that a number of financial entities have recently taken advantage of that price rise that we saw to $107 by selling some of their physical holdings.
However, these entities have not offered large quantities, and since that material has cleared, the price is on the move up again, primarily due to concerns around potential Russian sanctions. Now, I'm going to cover more of that in a minute, but I first want to note that this level of price volatility is likely to remain a feature in the spot market for some time to come. The spot uranium market has trended upward for the last several years, showing notable volatility along the way as it's moved up. And this is reflecting the diverse interests, the expectations, and some of the externalities that the uranium market has to deal with, and it basically plays out in price movement in the spot price at any particular time.
Now, on a weekly basis, since September, the spot price has moved by as much as $7 per pound week to week, and it currently exhibits annualized volatility of 30%. So I want you to keep that in mind. This volatility is quite normal, and we expect it to continue. Nevertheless, the underlying market fundamentals remain largely unaffected by the discrete events that we see week to week and the variations in the spot price. The factors that are behind the recent rise in prices include an existing supply deficit, increased spot market buying by producers, physical funds, and other intermediaries, and long lead times associated with bringing on new production. All of this is happening in a global environment that is largely defined by geopolitical unrest, increasing demand related to climate change mitigation and initiatives, and uncertainty surrounding Russian nuclear fuel imports.
Now, on that last point, there have been several drafts of bills that would ban Russian uranium imports into the United States, and a few have advanced quite far in the House and the Senate. All are aimed at further curtailing Russian nuclear fuel imports into the U.S. And just recently, there was a U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting concerning Rosatom and Russian uranium imports. Now, this meeting included a discussion with expert witnesses on the relevance and, more importantly, the potential success of sanctions on Rosatom and certain subsidiaries. And just last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that she encouraged Congress to ban uranium supplies from Russia because doing so would free up funds to support domestic development of fuel for next-generation reactors.
Now, even without sanctions in place in the U.S., Russia's invasion of Ukraine has already fundamentally altered the uranium market by shifting buyer preference towards non-CIS-affiliated supplies. And this has occurred when there was already significant upward price pressure. What these developments highlight is that the world needs new uranium mines. Here, we see the impact of uranium demand on the established supply base as a compound depletion of in-ground production inventories. TradeTech's analysis tells us that a project's economically recoverable uranium resources over life of mine are being depleted. Up to 77 million pounds of annual production is forecast to be depleted, and their economic reserves will decrease between now and 2035. Now, keep in mind that this is likely to occur in tandem with a net growth in uranium requirements through the period, and it's going to amplify the need for new supply.
What this presents is a significant gap in available production to fill existing and forecasted requirements, not to mention the additional secondary supply that we expect to see that will be presented by investment funds, which will only widen the gap. Looking at this another way, this reduction just adds to the existing production base and is widening the supply-demand gap. And that's already tipped into deficit. What we see here in this chart is a notable gap between the global uranium requirements shown by yellow and the established production base, including secondary supply shown by the blue columns. And you'll notice that that gap widens over time as the production base is depleted. The resulting deficit must be filled by new production, amounting to around 100 million pounds U3O8 by 2035.
We see new uranium demand rising steadily over the next several years as we face a future that is defined by higher energy demand. As reported by Bloomberg, by 2030, the surge in AI alone means U.S. data centers may gobble up more power than households. We simply need more electricity-generating capacity, and current policies are steering us towards carbon-free sources of power like nuclear. We do not see demand for nuclear power, whether in the Western or global markets, easing anytime soon. And this has set the stage for a shift in the power balance in the market, from a buyer's market, which has persisted basically since 2012 through 2021, to the seller's market we see today. There's a lot more attention on domestic and geopolitically friendly sources of supply than before. This is putting pressure on suppliers to find the necessary production capacity.
They're trying to meet this emerging demand. We see it here with companies like enCore. The pressure is on buyers to incentivize producers to bring on that new production. Buyers have demonstrated through recent contracting that they will support new domestic production. So I hope you take away from this very brief overview that whether from a global or a Western market perspective, requirements are growing, and so is the supply deficit underneath it, which is drawing ever greater attention to emerging production and to companies like enCore. So that concludes my comments. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Treva. Bill Sheriff, I think there might be one or two of you I haven't met so far, but I'm the Executive Chairman of enCore. It's a real treat to be here today with the entire team. We've prided ourselves here at enCore building the most elite team in the business in terms of in situ. A couple of things first. Obviously, the forward-looking statements that have already been mentioned will key on that one more time. A couple of misconceptions I want to clear up. First off, people think of it as a mining company because we're producing a metal. We're really not a mining company. We are much more akin to the oil and gas industry. We don't have big yellow trucks. We don't dig open pits. We don't have tailings dams, and we don't have tailings pits.
We do almost all of it through drilling and pumping and through water chemistry. At that point, I'd point out 60-some% of the uranium in the world is done through the in situ means, as I've just described. However, the bulk of that's done with acid injection into the ground in Kazakhstan. The United States is noted for using benign chemistry for the most part. All we do at enCore is oxygen with a bit of baking soda, and you'll find it to be a very, very good environmentally friendly way to make an environmentally friendly fuel for us. The U.S.'s current situation, where we're relying upon 99-plus% of our uranium from imports, has not always been the case. As recently as 1980, we were essentially self-sufficient, having produced over 40 million pounds. Our current use is about 47 million pounds a year.
We will be the world's largest consumer throughout this decade, although early next decade, the Chinese will probably eclipse us. In the meantime of that import, a good roughly half of it comes from friendly sources such as Canada and Australia. Unfortunately, the other half, while it doesn't come directly from Russia, it comes through Russia, the port of St. Petersburg. So Mr. Putin has a bit of an unfair finger on our supply. And of course, that wasn't a problem when we were doing megatons to megawatts and when we were chummies with the fall of the Soviet Union. But times have changed. And just like many industries, our outsourcing is coming home to roost, just like the pharmaceuticals industry being heavily reliant upon China. So this slide is simply meant to show you we do have the ability.
We have been a leader in the production of uranium in the past, and we can return to that point, although it will not be overnight. We have permitting issues. We have certainly technical challenges in terms of how many people there are with the technical expertise. Going back 40-some years, we haven't really had a buoyant market. You can see there since 1980, over 40 years. So we're missing several generations of new talent to come in. And here again, that's the strength of enCore, is our talented team. We have experienced people all the way from the top all the way down to supervisory level in the plant. We have a couple of our gentlemen from the plants here with us that I encourage you to talk to as we mingle around and just take a sampling of the talent we do have on board.
We obviously are based in South Texas. I'd point out there's 11 ISR plants in the United States. We own 3 of them. All 3 of those are located in Texas. We've got a rather large inventory of advanced assets. You can look at us. We don't do exploration per se. We simply put things into production. We've got the team that's dedicated to doing that, and it's been custom-built to do that. We avoid the risk of exploration by taking these advanced projects that are ready for production and putting them into the production pipeline. Here again, in situ recovery, the experts, and our sales strategy, which you'll hear a little bit more about from some of the other folks, Jamie Israel in particular.
We tend to, in a static market, which is something we haven't seen, and I'm not sure you will with the volatility that Treva mentioned, we'd like to see about a 50% dedication toward spot sales and a 50% dedication toward contracts. As it is now, we have a handful of contracts. These are all but one of them are with floor and ceiling or collars as to pricing, which ensures us a viable base level of income to the company while at the same time being exposed to the possible upside of the shortage and the increasing prices. So it's a balanced strategy, although that's set by the board, and it ebbs and flows with market conditions. We also have quite a large number of assets that are not advertised in the company. These tend to be non-in situ or conventional assets.
These we have been vending off to third parties and will continue to do so through either leases or joint ventures, farm-outs, potentially spin-offs, that sort of thing, such that we concentrate on our main business, which is revenue generation from the sale and production of uranium in the United States. Just a little bit about our corporate makeup, if you will, our market cap's just a hair over $800 million. We've got about 880 million shares outstanding. You can see the warrants there. All of those are in the money. You can see the options. And we have about $80 million in cash and about another $18 million or so in marketable securities. I'd point out it's been an extremely transformational 9-12-month period for us. If you were to look back last summer, we were a company with no revenue.
We were busily Paul and Peter and their teams were busy putting together the plants, spending a lot of money, as you do when you're getting ready for going into production with CapEx and whatnot, $60 million in debt, maybe $5 or $6 million in the Treasury. We were relying upon the public markets to not only finance our day-to-day operations but also our asset acquisitions that are now yielding extremely positive benefits. We transformed that to where we are today. Obviously, no debt, roughly $80 million in cash in the bank, one revenue source with Rosita, and we're a handful of weeks away from our second revenue producer, the much larger Alta Mesa plant. You'll hear about these as well. I'd also like to acknowledge a number of our analysts in the office or present here with us rather today.
We thank you for your coverage of the enCore story. This is our goal. We do have our first three years dedicated towards reaching a production level of 3 million pounds a year, such that 2027 would be the first year we would anticipate hitting this level. And what you can see there in the dark colors are our original plans. You may have seen recently we sold a 30% interest in terms of a joint venture participation to Boss Energy in Australia. And that was done solely with the idea of being able to accelerate our timelines. We've been very active in M&A, having done three transactions in three years. The predecessor company many of us were involved with did five in 30 months. So we're well adept at that, and we'll continue to look at opportunities.
But through the Boss investment of $70 million into the company, we're able to accelerate our entire portfolio of production-ready assets, as you can see in the stippled area on these charts. Prior to this, we were having to do these one at a time in line based on financial constraints. But with this acceleration, we should be able to reach our goal. And then ultimately, after that, we'll be moving into Wyoming and South Dakota. You can see with the second phase in the five-year plan of eventually reaching a 5 million-pound-a-year production. Our long-term assets are in New Mexico. New Mexico is faced with indigenous or Aboriginal challenges. There are also opportunities that go with these. And as such, we'll be making efforts towards that. But it's considerably down the road, probably early into the next decade. Nonetheless, all of our initial production comes straight out of Texas.
So there are certainly some economies of scale, having all of our operations in Texas within about a 100-mile radius of Corpus Christi. That's where our plant is. With that brief introduction, I'll turn it over to Paul Goranson, our CEO.
Thanks, Bill. All right. Well, I'm going to get into a little bit more details here. We like to trade off. Bill gets to talk about the high-level stuff, and I get to get into the more of the nitty-gritty. One of the things I want to talk about, and Treva touched on this as well, is that we're seeing a sector change. We've transitioned from a supply-dominated market to a demand-dominated market. And that's been to a lot of reasons. As you can see, we talked about geopolitics. There's additional domestic supply that's needed now to meet those geopolitical challenges. Getting uranium from Kazakhstan is not that easy these days. The other thing we see is that within government is kind of almost switching to not a whole of government, but a significant load from government to drive to onshore the nuclear fuel cycle.
We've allowed it to atrophy over the last 30 years, for almost as long as I've been in the business, to where we have no capacity to be able to make up our own fuel cycle. We have to rely on others to do that and other foreign technology to do that. So there's a desperate attempt by the U.S. government to be able to address that. Not only do we need it for our nuclear fuel supply, the unsaid part of it is we need it for our national security. The entire national security apparatus has been relying on stockpiles, and those that have been dwindled need to be addressed. So that's what you see is this push by the government to rebound us.
And so when we talk about the moves of funding a program to rebuild the enrichment program in the United States, it's done as one of the most bipartisan ways to do it. How many votes do you see where you get 96-3 in support and then unanimous on the Russia ban, unanimous support in the House, and 99-1? Actually, it wasn't actually a vote, but nonetheless, it's unanimous support to support the banning of Russian uranium because they see that as a threat to the market we have that we need to sustain. The U.S. is quite a bit different where government has not been directly involved with the fuel cycle from a what I would call a productive manner. It's been more of a destructive manner, but that's my opinion. But that's all changing.
It's because of a drive to clean energy and a drive to more energy and supporting more energy ban and getting these new advanced reactors deployed, whether it's SMRs, Gen IV or V reactors. Those are what the government's looking to see as a next step for us. So we're focused, as Bill mentioned, we're focused in South Texas initially for our first phase of production. Why do we like Texas? First of all, well, we have three very good facilities that we acquired that allows us to leverage resources in South Texas. There's a tremendous wealth of mineral resources in South Texas. It's never been fully exploited, but a lot of people don't realize that over 80 million pounds of uranium has been produced out of state.
Everybody hears about New Mexico and Wyoming, but Texas has been a big supplier in the past and a significant supplier of in situ recovery, production from in situ recovery. And there's a tremendous amount of opportunity upside with respect to additional resources in the future. USGS put out a report indicating there could be over 300 million pounds of in-place resources at economic prices. And those economics have improved dramatically as the prices moved up as well to sustain that development. So we believe we're ideally suited to be able to leverage our success in South Texas to support the demand that we're seeing in the market and also leverage our revenue as well. A little bit about Rosita. It's located in the this is in the laser, right? The little dot in the center is Rosita.
It's built as a satellite or central processing plant receiving satellite feed. That allows us to support, increase the capacity from multiple sources at Rosita. There's a lot of areas where we've got properties where there's mineral resources that we're advancing right now. We should hope to have them in production within a year, hopefully, to be able and within a year to get those into production to sustain what we've already done at Rosita and increase capacity, production capacity. They're all in cost or what we believe are going to be are very economic and very competitive. And I don't want to get much more specific than that at this point. But I feel very good about our production cost. And if you go out and see our sites, you can see why.
The infrastructure is relatively light with respect to drill holes, just cased wells in the ground, small footprints. You saw the video, and you saw the satellite plant. That was less than $1 million to build that satellite plant. That allows us to leverage and deploy more production sources out there and feed in the Rosita to sustain it. The next production is going to be coming from Upper Spring Creek, which you see on the map. It's about 60 miles, 45 miles away. We can do that economically. Alta Mesa, I've been associated with the Alta Mesa, so is Peter. Alta Mesa plant since 2005 or 2004 and through various owners, but we got it back. It's a big opportunity. It's a large plant. It has 1.5 million pounds of capacity per year through the current configuration of ion exchange.
But we're going to be changing that. We're going to be applying to allow us to do satellite plant like we do at Rosita and process more production and leverage the backend capacity at the plant to over 2 million pounds per year. That's going to give us a long-term sustainability. And as you can see from the footprint, that's 200,000 acres where we have significant mineral resources out there. And I believe, and this is just my opinion, I believe there's a whole lot more there based on my long association with the properties. And I even think that the 52 linear miles of stacked roll fronts may be a bit conservative, but that's just me. But we love Alta Mesa as being the long-term sustainable production in South Texas to establish that 3 million pounds per year of production capacity.
As Bill alluded to, we did a joint venture with Boss Energy. We basically were able to acquire Alta Mesa for $120 million from Energy Fuels back in early well, just about a year ago, just over a year ago. We paid $120 million, and people thought we got some criticism for kind of paying a whole lot more than anybody else did. But it was definitely a risk I knew we could take, and we can leverage into success. But the market, you had to show that the value is there. We've had long discussions with Boss Energy. They're an Australian company. They've got a good technical team, a good strong team. So we've been having conversation how we can do something together.
This seemed to be the ideal way to do it, leverage 30% of Alta Mesa to allow Boss to have an exposure to the U.S. But also, we can get the cash from that leverage and raise money in a non-dilutive way. We dilute one asset instead of the whole company to raise that money and then take that and apply that cash to advance, to accelerate our production timelines. So we were able to establish a value of Alta Mesa through this transaction of $200 million. It's a fairly substantial upgrade of the valuation. And we have several other items. There's an additional $10 million private placement of the company, collaboration on our Prompt Fission Neutron tools.
Those are key for us because they are the ones that allow us to have great in situ, great control into our plants and help us improve our cost of production. And then a 200,000-pound loan to allow us to leverage our market, our current contracts, etc. And I'll turn it over to my dear friend, Dr. Stover. And he's going to teach you about everything he taught me since I've been in this business.
Okay. Now, the.
Okay.
Hold on. Hold on. I'm just going to.
Share the screen?
Okay.
Well, thank you, Paul. Well, first of all, it's great to see so many familiar faces and new ones here as well. It's safe to say we all greatly appreciate the support and the commitment that you have in investing in enCore Energy Corp. Now, as you may suspect, this is not my first rodeo. I would like to share with you some of the history of the uranium ISR. This multidisciplinary technology has evolved over 50-plus years to become the principal worldwide production method for uranium. The significance of this is best appreciated when we note, as others have before me, that uranium fuels the supply of clean nuclear energy, which has become so important as we move forward into a truly green economy. Now, looking back, for the first time in 1968, the U.S. government permitted private ownership of natural uranium concentrates.
Previously, the federal government had purchased uranium ore for its sole purpose, national defense. Uranium recovery at the time was really aimed at high-grade deposits of uranium ore that were recovered by conventional mining methods, both open pit and underground. However, at the same time, the first recorded ISR project in the United States occurred in Wyoming in the very early 1960s. It was used as a secondary method to expedite uranium production from a conventional open pit operation. This singular event utilized a mixture of strong acids to dissolve the uranium mineral. This site was then conventionally mined as an extension of the open pit. As a result of all this, there was very little information available about the details of that operation. But that clearly was the first ISR operation in North America.
The modern benign ISR technology that we now widely practice in the United States and the sole focus of us at enCore Energy was developed primarily in South Texas with the involvement of several major oil and gas companies alongside other companies, including Union Carbide, Westinghouse, and U.S. Steel. Let me get the first slide. I should have had that up ahead of time. Sorry about that. But as others have noted, that's the gist of our technology and our mining method. But the keys to development of ISR really began with the fact that Texas oil and gas leases included mineral rights such that the major oil and gas companies held the rights to uranium as part of their oil and gas activities.
Early on, in the dawn of the nuclear age and rising demand for uranium, many of the oil and gas companies recognized that they had gamma anomalies on the geophysical logs at shallow depths. Hence, a number of companies mounted additional exploration companies or groups that were specifically targeting uranium, which, in fact, led to a number of significant discoveries of uranium, again, in the late 1960s, early 1970s. However, it soon became obvious that, particularly in South Texas, the subsurface rock did not have the strength and the structure necessary to support deep conventional mining, whether it be open pit or underground mining. In fact, with open pits, you probably couldn't go any deeper than about 250 feet.
At the same time, again, with the exploration that had been going on by the major oil and gas companies, it was recognized that there were significant additional uranium deposits that should be recovered, if possible, but they were at deeper depths. That's where the significant role of the oil and gas companies really came into play because of their strong emphasis on reservoir engineering. Those companies, they've brought the key technology that we now have based and developed into the ISR technology that we practice today. Those companies brought everything from the know-how on well drilling and completion to understanding fluid flow underground, all of which is so important today. At the same time, Westinghouse, who had committed to supply fuel along with a sale of nuclear reactors to the growing domestic nuclear industry, came to recognize the fact that they had a serious supply shortage problem.
So Westinghouse got involved also and formed a subsidiary called Wyoming Mineral, which was totally aimed, again, at developing in situ uranium technologies. As a result of all this effort in the late '60s, early '70s, the first commercial United States ISR project really came online on April 1st, 1975, near Corpus Christi and just 50 miles from Corpus Christi outside George West, Texas. So next week, we're going to be celebrating the 49th anniversary of that first domestic commercial project, which is pretty significant, I think. That operation was operated by Atlantic Richfield, and they were in partnership with U.S. Steel and Dalco. And Dalco was a small Dallas-based oil and gas company, but they held the patent for the use of oxygen as an oxidant for the uranium process.
Ultimately, as those that have looked back at the history will realize, in the early 1980s, we experienced a very sharp decline in the price of uranium. Actually, that turned out to be, in retrospect, advantageous to those of us that survived because it led to the major refinements of our early ISR technology and laid the foundation for today's low-cost operations. Expensive oxidants were replaced with the use of oxygen and, as Bill said, with dilute baking soda. So that those conditions were more closely managed, the natural groundwater conditions that we work within, which makes restoration or cleanup post-mining much more readily achievable. Today, these modifications and refinements of the U.S. ISR operation, along with the efforts in ISR operations in Australia and Kazakhstan, have led all of us to be able to compete with the high-grade conventional mines in Canada and elsewhere.
Finally, I guess speaking with Kazakhstan and its large role as a uranium ISR producer leads me to acknowledge an early parallel ISR development. Much like the United States, the early uranium mining in the former Soviet Union was aimed at high-grade hard rock deposits, principally in Siberia. Along the way, though, they recognized that there were adjacent low-grade deposits, similar to what we see in the U.S., that likewise were permeable in sedimentary zones. However, unlike the Western technology, the Soviet and now Russian ISR design projects employ very strong acid solution. This is the Russian approach that we see today in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Asia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, though, we've been able to exchange and compare our different technologies. We've had numerous constructive technology exchanges, often sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So today, as we talk about ISR uranium, we, in fact, have a set of parallel international technologies which supply well over 50% of all the essential fuel for the worldwide efforts to develop clean nuclear energy. I will say I've been fortunate to have had an opportunity to be in the midst of these evolving technologies from the days of the pilot testing and the earliest commercial projects in South Texas. And then finally, I must acknowledge with shout-outs to my enCore colleagues, Mark Pelizza and Paul Goranson in particular, both of whom joined this industry shortly after I did. Mark has played a long pivotal role in the regulatory environment for ISL as an industrial leader in the ever-evolving conversations we have between our industry and our regulators. Paul brings his wide breadth of industrial experience and firsthand knowledge to his leadership role.
Paul and I have worked together from time to time over the years, and his direct involvement has encompassed all aspects of our business, from engineering to regulatory issues to government affairs and corporate management. Each of these gentlemen continues to leave his indelible mark on the growth of enCore in our environmentally friendly industry. I thank you for the opportunity to share this very brief look back at the history of our business. I turn this over to Peter Luthiger, our Chief Operating Officer and another well-versed member of the enCore team.
You got to keep going.
I'm just letting people see because the one thing that Dennis didn't say, that we have a test for you in a little bit, and we're going to be collecting. We're passing them out and let you about 10 minutes to do that exam here. But look real quick. You'll need this information. A lot of this stuff we've already covered briefly, and I'll do the same. We'll make it brief but give you some additional highlights. Rosita is the current facility that we are producing uranium from. The central plant is designed for 800,000-pound annual production. It is situated for an additional drying capacity that we have at the site. We're just bringing in another dryer. We'll do some permitting. We'll be able to increase the production there. The current production is coming from an area we call in Texas Production Area Authorizations or PAAs.
The big aspect that we have to go through is permitting. As you know, you can't do nothing without a permit or a license, and then there's usually a tax on that on top of that. But the production area five, typically in Texas, 10 months to a year would take to get a permit approved. We did this one in five months, and it was through the direct collaboration with the agency, letting them know the importance of this project to not only enCore but also to Texas. And they were on board with that, and they're continuing to be on board with our future permitting needs. It's been really beneficial to have a good team up in the regulatory agency that will be helping us promote uranium in Texas and then will be advancing into the other states.
I apologize for my voice, but come to New York to get a cold. Rosita's been in the uranium production business for a while. You see on the side there over 2.6 million pounds produced in the Rosita license area. It's located fairly close to the other properties, if you saw on the map that Paul and Bill had on there, that we can utilize the synergy of the proximity of those other areas to use the other facilities as either satellite or feed to either one. It'll be very beneficial. Kingsville is part of the asset that was acquired under URI, and they do have a processing facility there that is currently in a standby mode. So we do have opportunities to utilize existing facilities, existing licensed facilities, to advance any additional production in the areas. As Paul indicated, this is an image of the satellite plant.
It's a methodology that's used to when you have these well fields, they'll get into a large enough area where it's not feasible to pipe all your water to the central location. So this has been around for decades on utilizing these little things called a satellite or a remote ion exchange facility where you just pump to the central location in the well field and then transport the resin that's loaded with the uranium we're recovering with that dangerous chemical called oxygen. And we do further processing at the central plant. As Paul mentioned, this was constructed for less than $1 million. It was all existing equipment except one pump that was there. So once this area is completed in the production and the restoration, all this equipment, including the pipelines, can be picked up, relocated, and reused. So we're being able to minimize that capital cost going in.
This one is designed for 1,000 gallons per minute, and we have plans for these other areas. One of the ones Paul mentioned was Upper Spring Creek, where we're permitting up to 4,000 gallons per minute processing facilities. The crown jewel that we have down in South Texas, as Paul mentioned, is the Alta Mesa Central Processing Plant. He didn't mention it, but he was actually the one who changed that pasture land, if you want to call it pasture land, brush country, into this facility. Again, it's just amazing what he did in one year to get that plant up and running. It has been in production since 2005. We did have some downtimes, but obviously, the market controlled the production. We have 4.6 million pounds of production over there.
The plant is designed for 1.5 million IX capacity and then 2 million pounds of drying capacity. It's set up to have individual trains so we can run multiple feeds into the plant, which was done from 2005 through 2010. We have been doing some recent drilling in the area. We will be producing from an area that's called Production Area Seven at that location. That's going to be starting up here Q2 this year. Q2 r starts in what? Dennis, April 1st, right? Monday. So we're really excited to have that advancing to that point.
But the drilling that we've done to advance that, we've also identified additional resources that we knew were in the area, but we couldn't say, "Yeah, they're over here." But the drilling has confirmed what we were thinking of, that we have these trains that go on and on and on. And having that big land position that Paul described is so beneficial to allow that to move forward in an advanced pace rather than having to work with multiple landowners and mineral owners. So we are very fortunate to have that big asset there. And as you can tell from up here, we need the people who are going to take it over for all of us. And the young folks that are in the audience here that join us, there are some of them in the back table, some up here in the front table.
They are the ones who are going to take this industry all the way into those big trends that Trevor was showing you in 2035, 2050. That we need that technical expertise to be carried on. And as you know, when you have these up and downturns in any market, you have that brain drain that just is so critical to try to prevent from happening. But we're fortunate to have these folks here that will be taking over the industry and making it very successful and prosperous well into the future. With that, I'm going to turn it over to our new Chief Financial Officer, Seonaid Wilson .
Thank you, everybody.
Well, thank you for everybody for coming out today. It's a pleasure to speak to you. So as you've heard from other speakers, it's really exciting time for enCore. We're producing. We're delivering into sales contracts. And we're financially stable. This time last year, it was a very different period for us, and this is all new and great information. I am, unlike these guys, I'm new to the company. I'm actually new to the uranium markets. My background is finance and structuring, primarily in oil and gas and power. What excites me about enCore is its positioning in the market and the market trajectory itself. I'm hoping that you, as investors, actually feel the same way.
When you think of the financial stability and growth, we really are in a position where we now have the liquidity and the capitalization to do the things that we want to be able to do. The Boss transaction is allowing us to move forward, as you saw before, we're being able to execute on our plan. From a strategic standpoint, you can see that historically, we've been a very M&A-oriented organization. We intend to keep looking at transactions. The market's very different now, but I expect there'll be some things coming down the pipe that we'll be interested in. When you think of the continuous improvement, as I noted, we were a very different company a year ago. And really, what worked then doesn't necessarily work now for us. We have a lot of additional things that we need to do.
One of the great things we get to do this year is SOX. We'll be looking inward, and we'll be doing a lot of work to make sure that we're meeting the SOX requirements. I hope that that will help you guys as investors feel that we have the right processes and controls that we need to. When you think of risk management and the way I think of risk management in the uranium market, it's very different than the markets that I've come from. There are not as many players. The market's opaque. I think getting the right mix between contracting, what that contracting looks like, and what we're selling spot is more of an art than a science. Jamie will be talking more about that.
It looks like, from my background, I'll be able to help in figuring out what kind of deals are how and help Jamie understand how we want to balance this in the marketplace. Sorry. I also got a cold in New York, so I'm really kind of struggling more than I would hope so. But yeah, from a stakeholder engagement perspective, I haven't met a lot of you yet. I would like to go ahead and do that, hopefully over the next couple of days. I want to understand what the risk tolerances are of our investors and how we can work together. And from a transparency and compliance standpoint, again, I think we have a great set of financials. I think you'll be happy to see what's coming out, and I look forward to working with you guys. Thanks. Can I introduce Rob, the Chief Legal Officer?
Thank you, Shona, for the introduction. Again, I'm Rob Willette, the Chief Legal Officer. Like Shona, I'm fairly new to enCore. I've been here about 2 months now, so still kind of learning my way around. And like Shona and unlike the rest of the group here and many of you out there, I'm very new to the uranium industry as well. I've spent the last 15+ years in the energy industry, but it's all been in oil and gas, downstream, upstream, midstream. So I've been in manufacturing, production, transportation. A lot of the crossover aspects of those industries do appeal and apply here, but still learning about this beautiful stuff called Yellow Cake. So I appreciate all the expertise up here because I'm a sponge soaking it all in, but it's been really great so far.
Today, I'm just going to talk about a few of the things that we're looking at from a legal perspective. Obviously, as we talked with Mark and his experience in regulatory and the environment we're in, this is a very regulated environment. And so as an organization, we're making a commitment to ensure that we always maintain a key focus to our efforts promoting a culture of strict compliance with both the state and federal regulations that apply to us. We do have very close relationships with the state agencies as well as the federal agencies, and we intend to continue to promote those and work closely with those agencies. Peter talked about the difference. The relationships is one thing I come from working with FERC and other agencies. When you have those commitments and those relationships, speed and timing is critical to getting projects online.
Having those relationships is very critical to be able to do that. Going from a year down to 5-6 months of getting a project online saves you $millions and millions. So that's something that's very important to us, something we'll continue to focus on. Secondly, as Bill and Shona and some of the others have talked about, our M&A initiatives. We did 3 last year. We just wrapped up Boss. The week I walked in, we were just wrapping it up. So it's kind of fun coming on the tail end of that. But there are a number of other opportunities out there in the markets. And we firmly believe that those opportunities are ripe for an organization, a company like ours, to take advantage of.
We'll look at those, but we're going to do it strategically and intentionally and make sure it's the right opportunity. We do want to make sure that we're doing these things in an effort to make sure that it enhances the value not just to our organization, but to our shareholders, our employees, and the overall industry as a whole. Not just going to do a deal because it might look like a good deal. It's got to make sense for enCore, make sense for our shareholders that are out there. To that end, we're also going to look at opportunities in the capital markets. As Bill mentioned at the very beginning, we've aligned ourselves structurally in a way now that I think really opens up some opportunities for us to explore those. We've got an ATM out there. We've got no debt on the books.
We're going to start producing revenue here very shortly as we start going out into, as Jamie's getting the sales out in the markets. So to that end, we believe the capital markets are a great opportunity for us to explore things like an ABL, even the bond market. I've had experience working on SLBs and things like that. And I think a company like enCore and the products that we do and the way we operate really allows us to align very well with those kinds of opportunities. And lastly, on the sustainability front, this is a great company that aligns very well with the sustainability. And when we talk about sustainability, everyone naturally thinks like the ESG. I've worked for a long time on the ESG front, all different aspects of it. And it's more than just that.
But we want to make sure as a company, as a whole, with our employees and with the communities that we work in, that we're promoting the highest standards of corporate social responsibility. And so at enCore, we've set out some initiatives, and Janet has done a great job with that. We'll kind of talk about that here briefly. As a leader in the in-situ recovery uranium producer, we want to make sure that we understand that not only are we impacted by, but the impact that we have on the communities that we work in from a sustainability standpoint. And so we've started an initiative, and Janet and Jamie and Dane have started an effort doing a materiality assessment. And so we want to look at how do our sustainability efforts impact us? How do they impact our stakeholders? And what does that look like?
That's going to allow us to really focus and key in on the key goals that we want as an organization to make sure we're good stewards of our communities. Three of the key initiatives that we're focused on is, first and foremost, we're starting an education society, which we think is critical. As Peter alluded to, we're an aging group here, an aging industry. We need to find that next generation of young people that are coming up, the next nuclear engineers, right? The next people that are going to run our plants.
All these people out there, we're focusing efforts within our communities to provide resources and tools to the young people in the communities where our projects are to help enhance them and give them the opportunities to hopefully take a liking to the nuclear and the uranium industry and one day take over my job, right? In addition to that, we're creating scholarship opportunities within the areas and the projects where we're at, give these young teens that are out there getting ready to go to college opportunities to go to colleges where maybe they couldn't afford it, or even just opportunities to go into the industry and, again, bring up that next generation. Then lastly, we've got an internship program that we're in the process of working on. I've been part of those. They work wonderfully.
Not only does it work great to give these young people opportunities to kind of see the real world, but a lot of times, it's your next pipeline to the next great people that might come on board. And so we believe those three opportunities really are fantastic for our education society. Secondly, a sustainability report. That's a really amazing thing for us to be able to even focus on that literally a year, two years out in the running. But the materiality assessment is the first key to that. Once we get that in place, we're going to really be able to focus in, hone in on our goals. And it's going to basically create a roadmap for us on how we can become good stewards in our communities, within our organization, from a sustainability front.
And then lastly would be our greenhouse gas emissions report, which we're currently working on as well. Those three things we think are really going to define and show how we are the clean energy company out there, the best. That's where our goal is, to be the best clean energy company out there. With that, I think that wraps it up again. I apologize that I don't have all this exciting stuff. It's legal, but that's who we are. We're going to keep you safe. Anyway, pass it off to Jamie Israel, in charge of our business and development.
I think there was a conspiracy to give me more time, but I also know, not as the last speaker, don't go too long before lunch. So let's see. There we go. I've been in the industry almost as long as Paul. I think 1990 I started. But for once, I can go into a bar at an industry conference and get drinks paid for. Usually, I would have to pay for the drinks, but lately, they're buying it for me. So real quick, we've talked. Treva talked about the price and the, I call it, the flip between a demand-driven industry to supply-driven industry. And there's some major reasons why that is that I want to just point out to everybody. In 2017, Cameco Corporation decided to install a new supply discipline, and they shut down McArthur River in 2018 for four years.
That alone removed 72 million pounds of uranium from the market. At the same time, Kazatomprom decided to go to 80% of licensed capacity. That removed another 15 million. So the supply was decreased by between the two of those actions, 87 million pounds, roughly. Then Vladimir decided he wanted to expand Russia, invaded the Ukraine. And at the same time, Kazatomprom was having a hard time finding enough sulfuric acid for their facilities, so they had production cut back. Again, then the strengthening of the investment community, SPUT, a Sprott product, they've purchased 65 million pounds. Under their investment form, they can't liquidate that uranium, so that's off the market. Secondly, there's another fund, Yellow Cake. They've purchased 22 million. I would say that they can liquidate, but and they have sold, but they've sold and purchased back. So I think they're a pretty reliable fund.
Needless to say, nearly one whole year, almost 180 million pounds, one whole year's worth of demand was removed from the market, which is what has flipped it a little bit because now the utilities who had postponed their contracting are now coming to the market at a time when supply is extremely tight. So we have a bump. And I can confirm that today's opening price is still $88 per pound. So good. So we just, I think Bill said it. We just executed our sixth contract, five of which are with U.S. utilities. And the majority of those are multi-reactor utilities that have long-term investments in our industry. And I'm quite proud to be able to supply them. Our first delivery happened on March 14th, almost the Ides of March. Thank goodness it wasn't.
A physical delivery to the U.S. converter to supply to one of our big U.S. contract holders. So it was very exciting. So we're moving towards more contracting, but we're not running towards it. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. In fact, right now, there's high demand in the 2024-2027 time frame. Unfortunately, when I get those calls, it's like, "Sorry, we're just sold out through 2027." Now, if we have some production victories, let's call them, additional capacity, it'll line us up for what Bill was talking about and being able to put it into the spot market when it's advantageous to enCore. So then finally, I think Treva brought it up. Great news out of Washington. They finally did something, $2.7 billion. Not only did they pass it, the money's there. There's one catch.
It's not released until there's a Russian ban. So over the next couple, three weeks, hopefully, there'll be some movement on that because the DOE wants that $2.7 billion to be released because for enrichment, as I think Paul was talking about, but I think it also will filter down to uranium, especially if they need HEU or HALEU material, it's going to be required to have U.S. origin uranium. So the market has a bright future. So as we sit now, we have about 4.65 million pounds under contract through 2032. And post-2027, we really open up based on our production forecast. But again, we're being very methodical as to when we produce and when we put it under contract and under certain terms. Our contracts do support our longer-range growth plans, but we're heavily dependent upon market-related.
We feel that gives us the best upside. With the collars that Bill talked about, we also protect our investment on the downside. And the collars on the downside are well above what we feel will provide us a significant return to both us and to our investors. So going forward, we're going to emphasize market-related. We're also going to minimize any flexibility because flexibility for a producer is bad. It's a no-win. You never increase flexibility under a contract when the prices are high. They always go to the utility or the customer's advantage. We'll look at base-escalated type pricing, but only as a part or called a hybrid pricing, where you have maybe 70% market, 30% base-escalated, something like that. But even under the hybrid, I do foresee that we will be more heavily towards the market-related because we don't see this as stopping anytime soon.
In my opinion, I think the new low is probably about where it hit last week. As you can see, it bounced up back pretty quick. With demand increasing in the post-2027 time frame, we need new supply, and enCore is going to be there to supply it. That's basically all I have. So questions? Oops. There we go. Oh, I do want to. Let's see. That's our first shipment right there. That's the truck left in, and that's the group from Mesteña. I just wanted to point that out, so. Great team effort.
Thank you, Jamie. Again, thank you, everyone, for coming. A couple of things. We've saved the questions and answers till the end. I'd like to point out Maddie and Maud. We have some microphones if you have any questions for the team. This is going to become an annual event with Investor Day. We will do it after the year ends in the future. This was the only opportunity, I think the first time we've ever had the entire management team in one place in New York other than down in Corpus or Dallas. It's a unique opportunity to get to hear a little bit from everybody. I hope this has been beneficial. There is going to be lunch served at noon, so I hope everyone stays for lunch. Please, if you have any questions, there's a couple of mics.
Maybe we'll just take one and leave it up at the front for people to answer. But if you don't have any, we've also posted this on social media, and we have a number of questions for the team. But anyone at first?
I was going to ask a simple but maybe it's more relevant.
Sorry. Let's just get a mic for you. And then.
Maybe it's more relevant for Treva. Sorry. The cost curve of uranium production. I know you are not giving guidance on your costs, but just in general, where is it, and what does it look like going forward? And you mentioned you have these collars, right? You have calls and puts, I assume, with some derivative market maker, right? So I just wondered how you decided on the low end.
Can I? I'm going to ask Paul to answer this question because I know he didn't want to state the cost. But you have historic experience in order to establish costs.
Yeah. So can you hear it? I can't tell. Is the mic working?
Yes.
Yeah. Okay. Good. So there's a couple of things. One is that I'm going to give a little bit of a shout-out to TradeTech and their production cost indicator, which has been a great tool for supporting our ask for our floors. It sets a it sets a independent view of what that number should be. And so we know what our costs are. Our costs are if you take the way Alta Mesa operated back when it was operating over 1 million pounds per year, that would relate to if you adjusted for today's cost, about in the low 20s per pound. And the same goes for the all-in cost, around $40-$40-something per pound. But again, different markets, different with inflation and everything. But that's kind of if you were take those costs and adjust it. And so you see those numbers are consistent with the PCI that's published.
So, it really allows us to set these, use it to, it helps Jamie with setting floors on contracts and everything else. The good thing is, right now, we can pretty much, without too much argument, get decent floors and much above even what the PCI is. So, with that, I'll I think that hope that addressed your question.
Where do you think Kazakhstan is in its cost curve? Are they losing their share of the question?
The question is, where's Kazakhstan in the costs?
Well, I'm going to try to avoid getting into detailed cost discussion here. But Kazakhstan is well known for being at the lower end of the cost curve. So they really have lower costs. But one of the things that we have seen in especially the last couple of years, those costs are moving up. The cost of the sulfuric acid is going up. They're having difficulties getting the sulfuric acid. They've had difficulties with their supply chain. So their costs are moving up pretty significantly. And they have dominated the lower end of the cost curve, but that is starting to change. So it's something to keep an eye on. And it's a great question, in fact.
I might just also add you mentioned puts and calls. The liquidity in any sort of futures or puts and calls market in the uranium market is virtually nonexistent. So when we talk about floors and ceilings, those are actual contractual floors and ceilings with the customer, which is almost always a nuclear utility in the U.S. for us. Those are always indexed to inflation so that they go up as time goes on as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Just if you could wait for Maud, just so others can hear the question. But Rob? Yeah. Thank you. Go ahead.
Simple. Is Russian uranium and Kazakh uranium treated as one and the same? And I understand the Port of St. Petersburg and its relevance, but just your thoughts on that. Geopolitically, I guess.
Let me, I'm going to call it your answer. In terms of the buyers, basically, what everyone has done is that they have started self-sanctioning. So essentially, what they do is they're avoiding Russian buying, signing new Russian contracts. Within Kazakhstan, you do have projects that are owned 100% by the Russians. So you have to be careful when you look at Kazakhstan. There are projects that are owned with Western joint ventures, and those are considered very differently by the Western buyers than those projects that have Russian involvement in Kazakhstan. So when you look at Kazakhstan, you have to look at it and realize that it is a patchwork of ownership in those projects. Thank you.
Thank you. We have another question over here, Maud.
Oh, Katie had a question as well.
Oh. Okay. We'll give the mic to Katie. Thank you. We do have you, Rob.
Thank you. Just in terms of labor, it's a key constraint that I know we've discussed over the last couple of months. How comfortable are you feeling with your current labor force? Do you foresee that as being a challenge as you look to ramp up production going forward? Then maybe for Treva, if there's any comments on sort of labor being a key constraint to increasing uranium supply over the next decade.
I'm going to let Peter because he has the bulk of the workforce. It works for him.
Good question. And I think we alluded to that, to have that workforce available through some of these initiatives that we started with education, we'd look to be able to increase that ability to attract the local folks to stay local because a lot of these families, their parents gone through 10, 20 years of uranium production. And some of them are we got their second- and sometimes third-generation kids at the sites, which is great to see. We just got to make sure we continue that in the future. We're lucky in South Texas. We have Texas A&M A&I. Texas A&M Kingsville is a hub for a lot of engineers that we have at our sites, Texas A&M Corpus Christi as well. Geological support is coming from there. So we see and the oil and gas industry is help in Texas where you have a lot of people.
It's just trying to be able to provide a compensation package that keeps the kids local because the oil and gas company can draw them away. But that's only part of the picture, the compensation side. They find out after 3, 4 months that they're living away from home. It does present different issues for the family life. So we have this ability now to keep the kids local through some of these programs that we're implementing. So we see we should be able to keep the technical workforce available as well as getting the folks that realize, "I don't need college, but I just want to have a good paying job in the crafts." And we have people coming to the door all the time looking for work. And we feel we have a great story to provide them. And we want them to come work and stay local.
Maud, if you could pass the mic to Treva just to speak about the industry as a whole. A couple of additional questions. What is your labor force presently at enCore?
At enCore, it's around 90, is it?
No, just under 100 now.
Yeah.
It's just under 100. We are also talking about internships. There's some interesting programs out of the University of Texas, El Paso. That is of interest to the company. Before Treva answers, there's a few gentlemen in the room. I'd like them to stand that work for enCore, Dane and Arturo and Len. This is the future right here, that these are the people that are out in the field, and they're going to replace all of us. So Maud, if you want to let not right now, though. Go ahead.
I would just add one thing about the labor force. One of the real advantages we have in ISR is we have, as Paul just indicated, a relatively small workforce, perhaps 100 people at one of these projects, unlike conventional mining where you may be talking about a few thousand people. So our ability to attract and retain people locally is amplified by the fact that we have a workforce size that's consistent with these small rural areas where we work.
So I'll try to answer Katie's question on a broader scale in terms of what we're seeing with labor. We think we're at the bottom of what we can expect for the labor pool, primarily because we do see this embracing of nuclear power again as green energy. And that attracts new, young people into the market. And so that's made a big difference. We see more people showing interest in enrolling in programs, internships like what enCore is talking about. So we think that, essentially, labor will go up and be attracted to this industry because we do see energy growth. We see growth in the sector. And because, really, the acceptance of nuclear power is the biggest issue that has really, I think, kept people from coming into the industry.
One other thing I would add is that a drawing of workforce is sort of really tied to your location. And one of the things that is impacting the ability to draw workers right now is the shift to remote working that everyone became accustomed to. And being out in a field where you don't have a city nearby is really a detriment. That's an advantage that enCore has because they do have Corpus Christi, and they are close to city centers. That's not true for all of the other emerging producers. So I want to add that. And then separately, one thing it does do is for everybody across the board and this applies even to Kazakhstan is that one of the major costs that is driving one of the major factors driving costs up is the cost for labor because of inflation.
That's one of the things to keep in mind as well.
Thank you. And Rob?
I think you said you had contracts with six domestic utilities and one other. Can you tell us what the other one is?
Yeah. We disclosed this back in 2021 with a trading company called UG U.S.A. They're a division of Orano, the French mining company. But their U.S. entity primarily does trading. They've been a very good partner for us as well.
Is there a question at the back table, Maud?
Yeah. Thanks. So you're saying initial production at Alta Mesa in Q2, which is great. What's your best estimate as to when you'd hit the full 1.5 million pounds per year run rate?
So it'd probably be it'll take a couple of years to get to that run rate because we've got, as you know, if you followed any of the in-situ operations, you have to drill out well fields. It's not a permitting issue. It's just a capacity of drilling and getting the well fields put in. So it's going to take about 18-24 months from start to get to the full capacity, simply because it just that's how much time it just takes to get up there and get the pounds effectively into the can.
Okay. Thanks. Then my follow-up is, in new contract discussions that you have with your customers, where are floors and ceilings today? Your best guess.
I'd say the ceilings are triple digits. The floors are probably somewhere around $70-$75.
Okay. Thanks.
Any other questions? I have actually, maybe I don't follow it. Sorry. Let's just get the mic so others can hear.
What does that mean, floors and ceilings, for you? I thought it was a call or a point. But it's completely something different, right?
Yes, sir. Good question. Our contracts are based on the published weekly price of TradeTech and the other UX. And what we do is we take the average of multiple postings for a delivery. And if the price of the published price is below the floor, then we get the floor, which is escalating. If it's above, let's say we had a ceiling of $125, and the market's $130, I can only invoice $125.
Got it. Okay. Now that makes sense.
Any other questions? I have two that have been sent in. But I want to make sure everybody has a chance. Yep. Go ahead, Rob.
You mentioned earlier financial buyers in the market that have moved the spot price around and so forth. For a financial buyer, very simplistically, what's involved? Do they actually take possession of the pounds, or how does that work? Yes.
It's on. It's on.
Yeah. They actually have accounts at converters. They acquire the uranium, and it sits in their account. Their investors get the return on the value of that inventory.
I want to explain what we do, the accounts on how we handle the inventories at the converters, like a bank, almost like a checking account.
Yeah. Yeah. So there's no physical delivery per se. We physically deliver to the converter. But everything done at the converters, the transfers of the title and material, all by book transfer.
Right. Okay. That's good.
So yeah, there's no physical.
That's what I was getting at. Okay. Understood. Thank you.
You can't take it home with you. Yeah. You can't drive it in the hall. Take it back.
Any other.
Everybody would do it. She's really there. Yes. Yes.
We have another question. Let's just wait for the mic, if you can, so others can hear.
Is there a move in the country to add more conversion capability?
That right now is the bottleneck. We only have one converter in the United States. It's in Metropolis, Illinois. It had nameplate capacity of 14,000 tons. They shut down for nearly three years, almost at the same time as the uranium production. They actually shut down and bought all the conversion they could, a lot of it from Russia, to supply their contracts. They recently reopened last year. But they're only going to 7,000 tons. There is one possible new converter on the horizon, GLE, Global Laser Enrichment. They're going to enrich tails from the U.S. government from 0.2-0.3, up to 0.711. So technically, they're going to be able to add 2,000 tons. But their startup is still in question. It may not be until the end of this decade, so.
Is that in U.S. or Canada?
That'll be in Paducah, Kentucky.
Any other questions?
You also mentioned enrichment, which is the other bottleneck.
Enrichment, GLE is laser. So they would hope to add to domestic enrichment capacity. There's a company called Centris that has centrifuges that they're trying to commercialize. But currently, the only domestic enrichment facility is located in Eunice, New Mexico. But it's owned by a European consortium. So it's not U.S. technology. Part of this $2.7 billion is to come up with domestic because then our security needs can be met. We cannot meet our security needs for enriched products using the current technology in the United States.
One of the questions, and I'm going to leave the mic with you, Jamie, so you can answer it, is, in 2019 and I believe it was Mark Pelizza from the board saw that the uranium price and the SWU, Separative Work Unit, which we haven't even discussed today, were moving in unison together up. And that was one of the factors that showed that the industry is changing. So maybe for the benefit, what is SWU?
SWU, Separative Work Units. If I get too technical, it's because I used to work for the Department of Energy selling the enrichment. But you're separating 235. And you're robbing Peter to feed Paul, OK? So you're.
Not Peter.
So a normal fabricated fuel pellet right there is anywhere between 3.5%-4.95% U-235. Our uranium, we take out of the grounds, 0.711. So you're enriching, right? And what happened in 2019 was a flip. Prior to that, the enrichers were operating at a tails assay different than what they were charging the customer, and therefore creating free uranium. In 2019, 2020, and especially after the invasion in February, the enrichers had to turn their capacity to actually enriching for the customers because they needed the additional SWU because they weren't getting it from Russia. So now you've got operating tails actually above transaction tails. So now the enricher is operating its stripping less to make more SWU. And it's an interesting concept. But they have to do that. Well, that means they need more uranium.
So in fact, the enrichers had a uranium purchase program in 1920, maybe even into 1921, where they were short uranium and had to go into the market and buy it. That also assisted in decreasing the overhang of inventories in the uranium market. They were soaked up by Urenco and Orano.
I think Paul wants to add something. Just so you know, they sent me on a course for four days. And I still don't understand SWU. But I know it's a big factor.
One of the things that has driven this market and that has been occurring is that in the past and even today, there was always this transition. You can either buy uranium, or you can buy enrichment. You can switch off one or the other, like a utility or the enricher could do that. By putting a little bit more enrichment energy, that's SWU. That's how they pay how you get charged for your energy going in to get the enrichment done. That's what it represents. You can spend more SWU to get the uranium out of a ton of uranium, or you can buy more uranium. In the past, it was cheaper because there's so much excess enrichment capacity. It was cheaper to do that. The enrichers are going to run. The centrifuges have to operate continuously. They can't shut down.
When they do it, it's catastrophic. So they're constantly spinning at 62,000 RPM. And by not shutting down, they can get as much economic value out of it. And so when they were talking about underfeeding, they had excess capacity. They could swap enrichment. Instead of selling you regular uranium, they could produce uranium by stripping off, running the enrichment cycle further, similar to what they do with barrel oil. They put more refining capacity into it to get more gasoline, which is a high-value part out of it. And when the price of gasoline is too low, but diesel goes up, they'll put less energy to produce more diesel. That's how I tell people who don't understand enrichment is try to compare. Everybody understands gasoline and diesel. But they don't understand SWU versus pounds. But effectively, it's been an economic decision.
But now that economic decision, when it was identified the SWU price was going up and uranium price was moving up, we suddenly lost that selectivity that was going on. And now when the SWU price has reached at the levels so that's what gave me the confidence. When I saw the SWU prices move up and uranium was moving up some, that's when we made a decision. It was time to go to production. That's when because I knew the price was going to continue to go up because SWU was finally at a level where it was more economically advantageous for the enrichers to enrich real uranium instead of produce underfeed. Treva can counter that if she wants to.
The price of SWU went from $50 to what is about $120-$130 today?
$139.
$139.
One last real layman's view of what SWU is, which might really help, is think of squeezing an orange and getting orange juice out of it. It doesn't take much squeezing to get some orange juice out of it. You can keep squeezing that one really, really hard to get more. Or you can take a fresh orange and get it easier and easier. So that's the difference between overfeeding and underfeeding in a very layman's view.
That's a good one. I finally get it, Bill. Thank you.
Four days in Atlanta. I still didn't get it. Bill, you can keep the mic. Here's a question for you. The recent drill results at Alta Mesa, can you explain the economic grade for standard ISR and compare it to the grades that you saw in your last drill results?
Get past it, Paul. He's been seeing this Alta Mesa stuff for a long time.
Yeah. So at Alta Mesa, generally, what we use is what we call our economic cutoff is a GT content of GT is grade thickness. So that's the percent uranium in the ground times the thickness of the intercept is about 0.3. That's a ratio. And I'm not going to do the math backwards. But in our percent in the ground, U3O8 equivalent is 0.02% uranium. That's our cutoff. What we're seeing right now is that the drilling we've been doing out at Alta Mesa and this is no shock to Peter and I because we've worked at this project, and we know how it delivers on results is that the grades have dramatically gone up as we've come into the more advanced to these roll fronts. Keep in mind, these are stacked roll fronts. So they're roll fronts that are relatively narrow. They're 30-40 feet, maybe 50 feet wide.
They're 8-10 feet thick. But they stack. And they look like a nest of snakes or a bad recipe of spaghetti. And as a result, when they start to stack up and accumulate and build up, you get stacks and stacks and stacks. And that really dries up to great thickness. So we've seen great thicknesses over 8, which is roughly, what, 100 times or is it 0.3, 100 times higher? No, I don't know. I'm not going to worry about the math. 25 times higher than what the cutoff grade is. So that means it's going to be rather and this is not unusual for Alta Mesa. But you don't find it on widespread drilling. It's not until you start putting in the well field that you start building out this definition, where you've got the number of penetrations into the ore body.
One of the reasons why we don't go to feasibility studies and reserves is because by the time you get to that level of drilling, we've already got a well field in. And that means your decision's already made. So we started inferred and indicated. And that's what gives us the ability to go to production. And I know that doesn't always fit the regulatory structure on reporting and everything else. We're definitely a round peg that fits in a square hole on how we do our calculations and everything. But having those results gives us very strong confidence that we're going to see really good, and if I had to, I'm not going to speculate. I do too much forward looking. But the expectation is that there's roughly 1.3 million pounds of uranium in the original 43-101 for Production Area 7.
I suspect, based on these results, it's going to be significantly higher.
A follow-up question because you're a bit of a and I'll make this the last one. Then we'll have lunch. Because you're a bit of a square peg and a round hole, how are you going to be able to provide some guidance going forward? And Shona is really happy. She's not getting that one.
Yeah. So under NI 43-101 and S-K 1300, obviously, to get to reserves and other things, we have to do a full feasibility and everything else to get there, or at least get to DFS. I mean, we could get to a preliminary feasibility study. But typically, we may go to what is called a PEA, the come on, preliminary economic assessment, as probably as good as you'll see us do to make decisions on production. That would be the next level you would see coming out if we were going to put in any kind of financial information. And that's simply because as you keep drilling out, at that point, you might as well put it in production. And you're not going to have time to do a full feasibility study.
That's one of the things that's really hard to communicate to regulators, but also to people who are on the hard rock side, hard rock part of the mining business because typically, you do that level of work to get there because you've got a significant investment. Because our costs are so low, our CapEx, our development costs are so low, the risk on it is we're much less risk sensitive in making our economic decisions. So that's why we feel we can rely on a PEA level or at least on past experience. As Bill mentioned, none of these are new sites that are operating. They have an operating history. And there's a lot of experience. You've got Peter, myself. Let's not forget about our geologists. You've got Dane. You've got Len. You've got A.J. and Alden in the back there. This has been a business that's pretty mature.
But these sites are not surprises. When they are surprising, they're usually very pleasant surprises.
Go ahead.
I'd just add that in terms of forward forecasting, once the actual well field's in production, then you have your normal decline curves and production curves. So you'll be able to get a better handle on what's coming for the next year once the well fields are in and in production.
To put it in scope, and I believe this is the number. You can correct me if I'm wrong. There's been 148 shipments of uranium from Alta Mesa.
Is that right?
Peter.
127. I was wrong. So there is a historic base for information. Are there any other questions? I want to thank everybody for coming today. Lunch is going to be available. Please stay. Treva from TradeTech, I'm thankful for you joining us today to give us an independent overview of the market. Maddie and Maud, thank you for your work. You can come on up. So when we had the grand opening at Rosita, one of the things that somebody wanted was Yellow Cake. And Bill, our chairman, did not get a piece of Yellow Cake. I have been hearing about it almost every day since. So Bill, you can say thank you and wrap up.
Thank you very much.
You want to cut again?
No, I'm going to have lunch first.
He's going to have some lunch. But please.
You watch it and make sure to get out of sight.
Now you've had your Yellow Cake. Thank you, everybody. And please.