There's only a few uranium fans here. We'll tell you about something that's actually in production and cash flowing and having a good time with it. So it's been an exciting year for enCore. For those of you that aren't familiar with it, we're 100% dedicated to in-situ recovery in the U.S. We have two plants operational. There are only 11 in the entire country. About half of those are operational if someone were wishing to push something through it. We're neck and neck with one other company in terms of who's producing the most. That would be Ur-Energy, just in disclosure. Very good company. I own them, but I own a heck of a lot more enCore.
So the usual disclaimer: we are a U.S. r eporting issuer, so I'm not going to be telling you too much insight other than what we filed and what's public information already. Here again, we've focused on in- situ because of the short permitting time, the environmentally friendly nature of it, as well as the quick reclamation associated with it. I think in most uranium projects, they have 20-year reclamation projects or more, with 50-year monitoring sometimes. So to be able to pull the uranium out in an economic manner and walk away from it within two or three years is really a key advantage for us. We do have S-K 1300 resources, almost 50 million between the categories, and as you can see, we do point out our industry-leading experts.
Since the company started, I've always maintained that we have the strongest bench strength, the deepest set of talent in the business in terms of in-situ uranium, and definitely our strongest asset. Uranium is quite common, the eighth most abundant element on the planet. But the technical people to be able to extract it profitably and market it are in a very scarce manner, especially since we're missing about three sets of professionals coming into the industry after Three Mile Island back in 1979. There have been a few blips along the way, but this is the first time we really see a huge demand increase. And quite frankly, production is lagging behind that considerably on a worldwide basis. Our uranium sales strategy, 50% is ideal in terms of being contracted with 50% exposure to the spot market.
We do have 14 contracts with about a half a dozen or more U.S. utilities that are spread out over the next eight or nine years. We were very front-end heavily loaded. Obviously, we'd like to recoup some of our capital early. So this year we were 100% contracted. Last year we were about 110% contracted, which caused us to have to buy a little bit of uranium at the high of the year almost and then sell it a little bit lower, which brought on some other changes during the year, and I'll come to those shortly. We also have a number of other assets, including holdings in other companies. We've spun off or created a couple of other entities. I have access to the largest database in the U.S. and quite frankly, a very large global database for uranium.
And we also have Prompt Fission Neutron, which is a proprietary technology that gives us real-time uranium value right on the drill rig site. Gamma tells you where uranium was. PFN tells you where the uranium is. And simply because uranium doesn't emit gamma. Its daughter products do. And uranium is quite soluble. One of the main reasons ISR works. I'm not going to go into this. I'm sure you all have been reading and aware of the big boom in nuclear that's coming with AI. Even before AI, there was a critical shortage developing. But quite frankly, without uranium, there is no AI, without nuclear power. The U.S. produced about two million pounds last year. We'll probably make about three or four this year, including one underground operation and then the two ISR operators.
You can see here that we've produced virtually nothing in the last two decades against a pretty significant demand. Our demand is the peaceful demand is right at 48 million pounds a year. There is a military demand, obviously, for submarines and aircraft carriers and that sort of thing and other less desirable items, but the U.S. does have the ability to be 100% self-sufficient. We're a long ways from it. I'd point out in 1980, there were 22 conventional mills operating in the country. Now there's one. There were a number of ISR operations. Now there's two in commercial production, so lots of upside available for us. This one I won't go over too much. It's just sort of a history of the lineage of the major group and the company. We started in uranium back in 1986, acquiring Union Carbide database.
Then we had Energy Metals from 2004- 2007, sold out to Uranium One. I stayed on the board as a number of our technical people went into Uranium One. We pulled them out just in time when the Russians started helping fund Uranium One. We decided to start enCore. We were about two months ahead of Fukushima. Fortunately, we were able to fund before that, but it gave us a good decade to plan our future. Then in 2019, 2020, we started seeing the bottom form. And I called it very accurately and were able to pick up our first two plants. We own three currently. Our first two plants, we were able to pick up. Someone paid us $3 million to take them. So the scenery has changed quite a lot, but it does illustrate a bit about timing in terms of success.
Market cap's about $500 million. We've got a large number of shares. Our cash balance is around $100 million, $110 million, $115 million, something like that. We just completed a $115 million convertible note, paid off some debt that was there earlier. And that funds us for several years going forward in terms of our exploration activities. And some of the initial capital that'll be required to bring on our next multi-decade project, which is Dewey Burdock in South Dakota. That one will be running for quite a while. And I will come back and touch on it. But it just recently, within the last couple of weeks, was listed on the FAST-41 U.S. government fast track program to get it into production. It is the most advanced. I think there are three ISRs in the FAST-41, and it is by far and away the most advanced.
So we look forward to seeing that come online in probably 2028. Here's a picture of our board. A number of them have had extensive experience in the industry, notably Mark Pelizza, 40-some years in operations and permitting, almost entirely in Texas and New Mexico. Dr. Stover was one of the two inventors of the process and continues to be active in the field when needed. Will Harris was audit chair of a number of our uranium enterprises, including Energy Metals. And Susan Hoxie-Key, she gives us a real insight into our customer base. She served with Southern Company for a number of years, as well as the U.S. government at Y-12, and as a nuclear engineer and fuel procurement agent for Southern. So really important. Here again, we did as good time as any to talk about our incident in March.
We had a major management change the very first day or two of March. And it was simply a gentleman that was replaced and a couple of other key people, COO and plant manager, extremely gifted in the industry. And we wouldn't be where we are without them. But it was time to make a change and impart a bit more of a sense of urgency throughout the organization. Simple fact of the matter is you go to Wyoming or most places where you see in-situ uranium, and it takes 12-18 months, sometimes 24 months, to deplete a well field and get 90% of your uranium recovered. South Texas, we have the opposite problem. It comes out so easily and so quickly. We get 90% of it in four to five months.
What that results in is great cash flow, great payback time, but you have to drill like crazy to stay in front of it. Somewhat like frack gas. You get very quick recovery, but you need to keep drilling ahead of it. We've made remarkable changes since then. That move probably would have destroyed a number of companies. Most folks don't have three people that know about uranium extraction to start with. We were able to immediately make adjustments inside the company. It was not a spur-of-the-moment change. From promotions entirely within, most significantly Dain McCoig going up to our COO, we've now almost tripled our production in three short months, four short months. The trend is certainly moving higher. I should mention Daniel Calderon as well. He's had a number of years operating plants, and we promote from within.
As advertised, our people are our best strength. And it really came through in shining colors with this. Since then, we've backfilled a few of those key positions. And so we're ready to take on the next challenge in terms of another plant. What you see there is a remote Ion Exchange Plant. This is what we use in an area where we find mineralization that's not where the central plants are. This particular unit cost us about $1 million. And it was around 100,000-150,000 pounds a year of production. Very small, almost a test plant, if you will. You see the three tanks in the background. These hold resin. We pump water out of a uranium aquifer. It's obviously got uranium in it, so it's been excluded from agricultural or domestic use. Pump it to the surface. Put oxygen in it. Send it back down the hole.
The oxygen gas oxidizes the uranium, making it soluble, goes into the water, comes back up. Run it through the plant, much like an industrial water treatment plant. Take the uranium out, and that's our saleable product. In this instance, the resin, once it's coated with uranium, is put into the tanker truck, is slurry, hauled to the plant. And we can do this up to 300 or 400 miles away from the plant without too big of an impact on our cost, just due to the high value of the commodity. We're currently building our next operation. It's in construction now. That's Upper Spring Creek. It's about 50 or 60 miles away from our Rosita plant that's currently on standby after having depleted this particular field. We expect construction to be done by the end of October. We are partially permitted.
We expect the other permit to come from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in the next month or two, certainly by year-end. Once we have that, we'll be off in production there. The significance of permitting. Texas is an Agreement State. We don't deal with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Texas is very motivated for new business. We've received four significant permits over the last few years. One of them took 36 months, one of them 30 months, one of them 20 months, and one of them 17 months. You can't permit a parking lot in a big city in 20 months. We're very happy to be working in Texas. However, given that, we still don't have exact day certainty. I know investors want to know, what day are you going to turn the plant on? We more have a window than a day.
And it does make a difference because if we get our permitting finished this month, then we may very well see some ramp-up production in December. If we get it in December, we'll see ramp-up in February. So that makes a big difference in terms of forecasting amounts in a given year. And it also is a good time to mention that our income is very lumpy. We spend money every day, yet we get five or six paydays a year when we actually sell or deliver our product into contracts with the utilities. So when you're looking at cash flow of us or anyone else in this business, until you have a big number of contracts like Cameco, you've got to realize cash flow is going to be a bit bumpy. So you're going to have to look at it more than a quarterly basis.
We've delivered the bulk of our deliveries this year come in the third and fourth quarter. So I think you'll see the rest of the year looking pretty good. Given the time, I won't run through the fuel cycle, but I will point out that each part of it, uranium procurement, conversion into uranium hexafluoride gas, enrichment through the centrifuges you've probably heard of, and then fabrication are all separately contracted by our customers, the U.S. nuclear electrical generators. Already explained how it works. This is a more detailed look in our PowerPoint of actually what happens within the plant. This is, I guess, the guts of it. This is our hopeful project pipeline. Alta Mesa has been in production for a number of years. We see it extending for quite a lot longer.
mentioned to you the other in situ projects coming on, one in early 2026 being Upper Spring Creek. Then we have another unit of Upper Spring Creek scheduled for mid-2027. We're bringing that along and permitting as we speak. Further out is Rosita South. We have not started permitting on that yet. I just finished land procurement on it. Then Mesteña Grande, which has got a well over 10 million pounds inferred resource on the Alta Mesa project. It's deeper. It's a little more difficult drilling. We will be working on that continuously, but we'll be focusing much more of our time on a new piece of property we just picked up. I'll tell you about that in the last couple of minutes here. Rosita plant's the upper right. The Alta Mesa is lower left. Rosita has 800,000 pounds a year capacity.
Alta Mesa has 1.5 million pounds primary with an additional 500,000-pound satellite, or rather secondary recovery where we have a dryer. We do have 200,000 acres under lease there and a bit more. I'm going to jump right to the most recent acquisition. On the right side, you see Alta Mesa East, also known by some as Tacubaya. We're trying to get rid of that name just because it's very difficult to catch, and it really is the eastern extension of the Alta Mesa well fields. You can see the seven productive well fields throughout the last 10 or 15 years on the left side. We've been involved since we picked it up on Wellfield 7, which is in purple at the top of the screen, and you can see a lot of these well fields end abruptly along a north-south line.
Well, that was a property line, not a big fault. And so we've been working for over two years. There are over 200 landowners in a family that own that tract. So it was very difficult to get them in agreement. We now have 99%+ of the property under option. And we'll start drilling there in October. The area in stipples is a previous area that's been noted by Chevron to contain economic mineralization. They drilled in 1979 and 1980 here, again, Three Mile Island, putting into that. They had mineralization in five sands. We'll pick right up there and confirm that. These are obviously extensions of the well fields coming in from the updip side or the west side that we've been operating on. We also have gone into a more granular study of our well fields on the west side. And it found different layers.
We have seven different layers that are mineralized or seven different geologic units, seven sands. And typically, each one of these well fields has been limited to a single one. So we've gone back through the immense number of thousands of drill holes. And we've been able to pick up the area you see in green there, labeled three extension. This is in an underlying sand. It is already under permitting, and it will extend the life of the project as well. We're nowhere near depleting seven yet, so it'll keep going. See the two large orange blobs? These are ones where we've picked up clear indications of roll front mineralization in either upper or lower sands above or below the area that we've exploited. We're going back in and doing infill drilling on those as we speak.
And we'll have some resources out on that at some point in the future. We are not finished with the granular research on the east side or on the west side, rather. So we would expect to see continued improvements along those lines, as well as new feed coming on the eastern side.
William, thank you very much. I'm going to have to ask you to stop that.