Now presenting John LaGourgue of F C Graphite.
Awesome. Happy Wednesday. I would just like to thank everybody for coming here today. I am going to be talking about F C Graphite. We are a pure-play graphite exploration company with a fantastic project in Quebec. My name is John LaGourgue, as you know now. I am the right guy for this job because I have got enough experience doing the wrong things or some of the lessons over the years. I have been a MicroCapClub member for 10, so I have got a lot of experience working with management teams, making investments, and those types of things. I am trying to approach this from a commercial side and do the right thing for the shareholders in the company in as quick a time as possible because Ian doesn't like me to waste time. Here we go.
I believe we have got one of the top 5%-10% graphite companies in the world. We have got a district that is showing some of the highest grades, 16%, 17%, whereas the worldwide average is around 5%-6%. The grade and composition is outstanding as well. Basically, it is large and jumbo flake, so you get a premium for that product, and you can make anything that you would like from it. We are also in a great jurisdiction in Quebec, so if you look at the graphite market, the domestic production is basically very small at this point and almost non-existent. There is a large opportunity there. Quebec is mining-friendly. There are some fantastic tax incentives there, and the infrastructure we have in place is actually perfect. We have year-round access through roads. There is rail and shipping worldwide. Basically rail to North America, as well as shipping worldwide through a deep seaport.
Very good spot to be. I like our management team and board, and I will go into that a little bit more, but I have got the right team. We are all focused, shareholder-friendly, and incentivized in that manner. A simple goal for me, it is basically we want to try to increase the size of the resource. Let us call it 10x to call it 30 million tons, so it is significant. Then move to production as quick as possible. We are not wasting any time with that. I started in February with the company as a turnaround. The previous management wasn't executing, and so I was asked to come in and get things going, advance the asset, and make something of it. We have gone from discovery in basically January to hopefully to have a maiden resource here in Q1 of next year.
Quite quickly, I will talk about some of the other goals we have as well. Lots of catalysts. I guess right now we are sitting at the most exciting time for me in the company. We are going to start drilling next month. We are fully funded for that as well. Lots going to be happening there. We have also done some metallurgy we are waiting on. We did get the head grades back on that, coming in at 22%-44%. The grades we are experiencing and the data that we are getting back on the work we are doing is outstanding. The reason why I joined the company, it has got a small market cap. We are about $25 million today, and when I look at the asset, it has got multibillion-dollar potential, and I will run through some of those numbers as well. Why our company? It is large, right?
We have a district scale and an amazing amount of claims. We have 230 sq km of claims there. The region is great, and we have good neighbors. We have a discovery that we found through heliborne electromagnetic surveys we have flown two this year. We have come up with a 10 km strike on zone 13, and we validated the geophysical interpretation of that by going into the field and taking surface samples. Assays came back up to 43%, and like I mentioned, we took some larger samples with the metallurgy and got 22%-44%. The region is high as well. There are a couple of other companies in the area with larger deposits at about 16%, 17%. Ranking on the worldwide scale, it is about as high as it gets. Again, going back to location, we are in Canada, we are in Quebec, so it is friendly infrastructure.
Where we are at in the north coast there, we are about three hours north of a place called Baie-Comeau. I will show you a map here in a second. The Hydro-Québec power is out of there. There is the Manicouagan Dam near us. The highways and the infrastructure are very well maintained, so we can get to the property year-round. There is also grid power there because of the dam. There is a hotel that we can work out of. We have our own storage facilities. We have a core shack. We have a grader, so we can make sure we can clear the snow. We have really got a lot of things going for us that we do not have to use helicopters, we do not have to do any of these other things.
Really efficient, and I guess that is maybe a good idea to talk about the leverage that we get on a critical mineral play versus, say, a gold exploration. The drilling that we will do, and I will go through that, is fairly shallow. These are 150-meter holes, and really, we are looking at doing a 20,000-meter program, which will cost about CAD 6.5 million. That will allow us to prove up to 50 million tons or more of a resource if Mother Nature gives it to us, which it certainly looks like it wants to. You think about this, we are not going to have to continue to drill and drill and spend millions on that. Really to be able to prove a resource and then move towards that PEA right away. That really was exciting for me. In 2026, we have been quite active.
I came in, we raised a bit of money. We flew an EM and found that new discovery in zone 13, that we went out and validated that, as I mentioned, and then we flew some more EM, which expanded that discovery and the opportunity. We are doing metallurgy. We have started the steps towards the PEA with environmental, archaeological, and baseline studies. We are not waiting for results before we take the next step. We are moving everything in lockstep. In 2027, 2028, basically, we want to increase that resource and move towards that PEA and production as fast as possible. It is pretty simple. It is good for a guy like me just to have the steps to go and execute on. This is a map here. It just shows, there is Ottawa's on the map there. Basically, you have got the road to the port.
We can ship to Europe quite easily. You can also ship or barge anywhere there in the world. There are also rail spurs there. So we can rail to anywhere in North America, Canada, or the U.S. So, to have this type of access to sales routes is very positive. As you know, every time you move the ore, it is going to cost money. Here is our team. This is I say we are building a family versus a company. My CFO, Scott Kelly, is right behind you there. You should come see us if you get a chance. He has been in high-level accounting and in the mineral space, the mining space for over 20 years. He has got some big five experience as well. Just awesome guy. I lucked out with Antoine Fournier.
He is a critical minerals and rare earth specialist, and he drilled his first graphite in 1987, so he is part of that Lac Knife discovery. He is based in Montreal, so he is in this whole Quebec infrastructure ecosystem. Super passionate and when we met up in January, we hit it off right away. He has become a really good friend, but he is just an amazing guy, and he is all over this. We just brought on Shawn Dubois. He was a 15-year geo, and he worked with Antoine for a couple of years at Winsome, I believe. So now we have got another guy that we already know. We are being careful who we bring in and everybody is really excited and motivated to forward the company. Then Shelley, our corporate secretary, makes sure all our filings are good.
She works really hard, very accessible and keeps us out of trouble because the regulatory stuff is fun with public companies, as you probably know. When I came in, I wanted to create a company that could move forward. Not a standard Vancouver-based mining company with friends and family on the board and things like that. So I put together my dream list, and I got it. If we start with Rich Beaven there, he is known by quite a few of you, but he runs Insignia Capital. He is an owner. He has about $250 million under management there a small cap fund. He is also on the board of Idaho Strategic Resources, and that is a mining company out of Idaho that has gone from about a $2 million market cap to as high as $5 million in about 10 years. The gentleman running that is John Swallow.
He has been very helpful with us with some ideas around what we are doing. So we get some good people through Rich. Albert De Luca is a senior partner from Deloitte, and he retired recently, so he is very connected, very smart, and he really looks at the transparency in the accounting side. He has also done a lot of large deals in mining, so fantastic to have him on the team. Then we got the Honorable Christian Paradis. He is the ex-energy minister of Canada, for the Harper team. Again, now you have got the legal, the policy, regulatory assistance. So he is just fantastic. He is Montreal-based as well as Albert. Mike Iverson, he is a mining guy, friend of mine. I have known him for a long time, but he is tough. He is not a rubber stamp guy either. He sold NioGold to Osisko about 10 years ago.
He's got some. That was a company based in Quebec. He also is a founder of Fortuna Silver, and so he's really good to have on. All those four board members are all independent. I have proper compensation committees and all the things that are challenging, but it sets things up right to make sure that I'm doing the right thing for the shareholders. Tony LaMantia is an advisor here, and he's the President of Waterloo EDC in this area. He's an ex-ADM, Assistant Deputy Minister in the area, so he's got great connections. He understands critical minerals. He's got some really nice routes for us to go into in the EV space, like for batteries, when we get closer to looking for those offtake agreements for the graphite. Our cap structure, I think we're really well-held.
Some of you own shares, some of you own a lot of them. Management, I've been buying stock since I joined and before. We're currently doing a financing right now. I kind of talked about being fully funded for everything, but all the participants, all the insiders will be taking part in that. We have $3 million in cash today. I'm working on a $6 million financing, which should close in the next week or two. It's been oversubscribed, so that's been really exciting to be a mining company and being funded to go execute on the business rather than worry about capital markets. It's really a blessing. When I came in too, I tried to align the board and with the shareholders. When the price was coming up, we set all options at $0.50.
Really being very careful about what we're doing with the options and things like that, and where the stock's going as well. In a tough market, our stock trades quite well, and that's all because of the good shareholders that we have. The PSUs are all based on milestones of increasing that resource. Again, aligned with everybody and current market cap's about $25 million. We do have some warrants out there, but it also brings in quite a bit of extra money. There's about $2 million in warrants in the money today, and so that's just another funding opportunity that we don't have to go look for money. If we get a little more into the project, this is the area of the project, kind of looking south. You've got the Manic- 5 down there.
You've got the deep seaport and the rail at Baie-Comeau, and then if you drive another eight hours, you get to Montreal. Everything's pretty easy and accessible to get to. It might be a little hard to see here, but you've got our claim map in green. In the blue there's Nouveau Monde, and that's an 80 million ton resource averaging about 16%, 17%. We're in closeology. That is a $3.6 billion NPV, and if you go into the PEA there, that's based on fine graphite. Really the lower quality. What they've done with that is to build anode material is grinding it to a lower quality. $3.6 billion NPV, I would be happy with that if we can achieve something similar. Focus Graphite is up there, too.
When I talk pure play, it is important to really look at, we are not doing things like these other companies have built these integrated businesses. They are going to be spheroidizing and processing that graphite themselves and then trying to build or building batteries or something like that. I believe Focus wants to do ballistic materials. I do not want to be that complicated. I just want to basically find the resource, create a high-quality concentrate, which is quite simple, and then sell that to the processors. That is really, today the business plan is to go into production as soon as possible, finding these offtake agreements as fast as possible, and then selling a high-quality concentrate. We are not doing anything besides just being a miner. The project has been around, as I mentioned, I was brought in this year to help it move forward.
We do have a historical resource. There are a lot of outcrops. There has been some, I would not say systematic exploration, and that is why we got the opportunity. The work that has been done there, the outcrops are there. There is a historical resource on Zone one, which is one of the smaller anomalies, and if you look at Zone 13, which is really our focus now. I will show you a map here. You can kind of see here. We have multiple opportunities. Again, Zone 13 being our priority now, but that is a 10 km strike, and I will show you a little 3D model here in a minute. The historical resources on Zone one, so if you take a look at there, the size between Zone one and Zone 13 here is 10, 20 times larger.
There is about 3.2 million tons inferred and indicated resource on Zone one, averaging that 16%, 17%. I really look at that as our proof of concept. We do have some other opportunities, three, four, and six, that could be 50 million ton opportunities. But the accessibility and the size and the information we got back on Zone 13 really made that the priority. This is just basically a geophysical interpretation that came out of the first EM that we flew in January. Those brighter spots are where the high conductors were at surface, and when we sent the people, our team out into the field to go for the assays, they hit on every single one of those. We really felt that the model lined up with the EM and gave us the excitement to go and fly more, and that is what has brought in the larger target.
Now we are waiting on that information because it always takes these guys a few months to really go through the data. There is a lot of data to compile before coming up with the next iteration of that. I really like this. This is Zone 13. This is off that first EM, so it is only one piece of it. But this is 4 km, and then the EM was done down to about 200 meters in depth. Really if you look at it is like a mountain underground. The nice thing about EM and graphite is graphite is extremely conductive, so when you fly the EM, it lights up like a light bulb. The target is that is what brought us to do the assays and some of these other things, and this is really what we are seeing.
Really, to get your head around the numbers and why I am so excited and some of our shareholders are, 2 km by 100 meters wide by 100 meters deep is 50 million tons of ore. This is 4 km here, and it is wider than 100 meters in many aspects and double the depth. The opportunity just on this 4 km, it is exciting. We will be drilling here on this in three to four weeks. Like I said, they are only 150-meter holes, so we will have information back right away. If you know graphite, it is really easy to spot. You would spot it at surface. We knew we had it when you run into it.
When we drill, we will be able to see in the core if we are in graphite at all, and it is at surface, so it will be really great to see how deep it goes and how much we have. This is the outcropping. This is how close it is to surface. Really, we have not had the permit to use any heavy machinery, excavators, or things like that. The guys had to go out with little tools and basically dig down a couple inches or a foot to get the outcroppings on 13. I went out there and took some samples too. We used an electric jackhammer. We got the permit to drill, I guess it was yesterday. Or yeah, we got it Monday night.
We announced that, and so we will be able to go out there and use an excavator to do a little more of this surface work. It is a three year permit, so we will get the chance to do all the work that we need to. Let me just finish up and then we will go into the questions. Again, I have run through this. We have flown the airborne. We have got the assays. We are getting great grades at surface. The metallurgy is coming back outstanding so far. These grades are some of the highest in the world. Yeah, we are finished with our summer. So we are going to basically go drill here in three weeks and really try to prove this up. We started all our surveys for that PEA, which is fantastic. I guess another thing to mention here is we are partnered with First Nations.
We work with the Pessamit Innu. There is a group there, it is called Groupe Nipi and they are actually assisting us with the exploration. Then we are training them on some of the drilling to do core splitting and things like that. We also hired them to do the environmental and archaeological surveys. It is not me or my team saying that we are doing the right thing for the First Nations. They are actually reporting on it themselves. I have got somebody I work with, Suzanne Methot, and she is just fantastic. She has been doing it for 20 years, and so we are really aligned with the stakeholders like the First Nations. All right. I should have the metallurgy that we talked about. We got those grades, but still waiting on the flake size distribution. We know it is mostly large and jumbo flakes, so I just have to validate that.
I am probably going to say jumbo one more time just for Ian, because we were having a little bit of fun with that word. If we go into the graphite market, traditionally or historically, China is currently about 80%-90% of the world's production. If you follow batteries, this is the thing, the lithium-ion battery, graphite's 25%-30% of every one of those. Now you have the battery energy systems that are coming online. Battery demand's tripling between 2025 and 2030. No domestic supply. This is happening worldwide. It's really put graphite in an interesting space because in 2030, it should be the number one or number two critical mineral resource in deficit. We are seeing tailwinds. There's tremendous government support from Canada, from the U.S., from the European Union, that type of thing.
There's a lot of different ways to go after the business, whether that be government or private sector. The growth rates are good. Again, with limited production, especially with North America, we need a tremendous amount of new mines in graphite to be able to service all the expansion of batteries and technology. I was just going to show you that China's up there at the top. Just some of the numbers that we run, and Ian challenged me a little bit on asking about what's Nouveau Monde's Uatnan PEA based on. Looking into that, they actually based it on that fine anode material, so the lower cost. We are seeing $1,500 is the going rate for some higher quality.
Again, graphite's pretty specific, so as I get into the metallurgy a little bit more, have the data, we can go start working on proper contracts and understand what those long-term contracts would look like. Summary. We got a fantastic project. We are in a great district. I do not know if I mentioned, but the mining tax credit on the exploration, we get 45% back from the government. It's almost half-price drilling on non-flow-through dollars, and it's excellent there. If you are following what the federal government's doing, they've really allowed the write-off of all the capital equipment off. It's dropped the effective tax rate for mining companies down to about 6%. Oh, wow, I got a minute left. We are going to start drilling. We are going to try to put this into production as quick as possible.
I do not know if we got time for any questions here.
John?
Yeah.
I'm just curious, there are roads where your project is. How far is it to a road?
The question is, how far is the project from the actual highway? It's maybe 20 km, but that whole area was forested before or logged. Oh, it's all infrastructure. All the large roads are in there. Easy to get around. Yeah. You'll have to come out. Hi there. Sorry. Yeah.
[audio distortion ]
Yeah, that's a few steps away. The milestones for me right now is drilling, getting drilling results, putting together a maiden resource estimate. Then we'll start working towards that PEA, preliminary economic assessment. Feasibility comes after that. Hopefully, we'd like to be permitted and in production in three to four years. But again, some of this we don't control, but we are moving at light speed. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, and I hope to-