Now it's time to welcome our next guest, Leading Edge Materials. Kurt, how do you pronounce your surname?
Budge.
Budge. It wasn't that difficult. Leading Edge Materials is developing a portfolio of projects within the borders of the European Union. T hat's very interesting because then you have things working for you, I would take it, but take it away.
I think so. Thanks very much. I just draw everybody's attention to our disclaimer. I would ask you to read that at your leisure. Leading Edge Materials is defined where our portfolio is all critical raw materials and our projects are all located in the European Union. I've got a slide which will come on to the assets in more detail, but we have natural graphite in Sweden, rare earth elements here also in Sweden, cobalt and nickel exploration in Romania, and also polymetallic exploration in Romania. We've got a highly experienced leadership team, significant insider shareholders holding 41% of the company, and we're listed in Toronto and Stockholm. C oming on to the assets. I n Sweden, we have a built and permitted graphite mine called Woxna. Woxna has been on care and maintenance for a number of years, like a lot of graphite plays in Europe.
We've looked to go downstream, and so there was an anode materials project that was done in 2021 at a scoping study level that produced a strong set of economics. T he Chinese dominance of the flake graphite market and also the battery, the anode material space and anode manufacturing means that there's never been the right time to bring that asset into production. I joined the company in May this year. My focus in the last few months has been on Norra Kärr. We'll touch on that in a minute. I'm now starting to turn my attention to what the commercial options are available for Woxna. Graphite is a critical raw material in the European Union, and so I'm looking at all the available options for commercializing that asset. With Norra Kärr, heavy rare earths are also on the strategic projects list for critical raw materials in Europe.
Norra Kärr has been known about for about 120 years. It's described as Europe's most advanced heavy rare earth project. It's distinguished by its heavy rare earth component and especially dysprosium and terbium. It's got a great location, great infrastructure. We can get to lots of ports by road and rail. And this year has been one of real change in terms of the application for Strategic Project status last month under the Critical Raw Materials Act, and also later this year the application for a new mining lease. So momentum really building behind Norra Kärr. T hen finally, in Romania, we have an exploration program, brownfields exploration. We're looking into a historic mining district in the Tethyan Belt. It's a well-known geological region responsible for many of the major copper and gold discoveries going from central Europe all the way through to Turkey.
We have an alliance there with a local partner who owns 49% of the company. We can move from 51%- 90%. We're currently exploring for nickel and cobalt. At the end of 2023, we put some high-grade results out for cobalt and nickel, but we've also got significant polymetallic, lead, zinc, copper, silver mineralization to go at. We've got a very experienced leadership team. Lars-Eric Johansson is a former CEO of Ivanhoe Mines. He worked for Robert Friedland for 13 years, and t he list of companies that he has worked for during his career makes him somewhat like mining royalty. Daniel Major is the CEO of another Canadian listed company, GoviEx Uranium. Eric Krafft is our cornerstone shareholder. He's been investing in the company for the last eight years and is the first name on the book build every time we're doing a non-brokered private placement.
I joined the company in May this year. I'm the former CEO of Beowulf Mining. Beowulf was listed in London and Stockholm, and I was working in Sweden for the last eight and a half years and where I got the Kallak Iron Ore project permitted. As I said, we're listed in Toronto and here in Stockholm. We're just under CAD 25 million market cap, 225 million shares in issue, and that's around 300 million shares fully diluted. As I touched on earlier, 41% of the shares are held by insiders. We have a core group of shareholders which are investing in the company at every financing round. I'm sure you've probably heard about the criticality of raw materials in the European Union and the European Union's desire to onshore supply chains that have been allowed to be outsourced over decades.
I'm not going to dwell on this slide or the next one, which shows that China dominates. This isn't new to anybody. With key raw materials that are used for green technologies or other applications such as defense, China is the dominant force, and so what the European Union, with the Critical Raw Materials Act, has been looking to do is to create diversity of sources of supply and to create the capabilities which we've allowed to be exported offshore over many decades. They used to exist, but we've let them go, so we're going through a real transformation at this point in time, and it's very exciting for a company like Leading Edge Materials that has critical raw materials projects in the EU. If we come to Woxna, so Woxna is a built and permitted mine. We actually have on site the mine and a concentrator.
As I touched on, it's never been in production for any real length of time. Lots of technical work done over many years in terms of moving downstream and value adding to the production. L ooking at producing anode materials, but also looking at selling it to traditional markets such as expandable graphite. O ne of the tasks that I have, along with focusing on Norra Kärr, is to look at how we commercialize this asset. The battery industry over many years now in Europe has been expanding rapidly, g iga factories, but also cathode materials projects, a nd anode materials has been somewhat of the forgotten story. There's been no real development of graphite mines in Europe. Woxna is one of three that I can think of.
There's a real opportunity for us to be at the front end of the upstream stage of a supply chain that is established to go from raw material to anode materials and have a European supply chain. I mentioned there was a scoping study done in 2021. This had a strong set of economics. The company has maintained both its exploration licenses and its mining leases over a significant period of time and just managed the site in such a manner that we have very good relations with the County Administrative Board, and the asset is ready to go at the right time when we find the commercial opportunity. What the market isn't doing is they aren't buying the leader in terms of sustainability.
What this graph shows is the low carbon footprint done by a life cycle assessment of the anode materials project, which shows that Woxna is far ahead of any competing project, be it natural graphite from China or synthetic graphite. Y et the market isn't compelled to buy on this basis, t hey're still able on the free market to be able to buy those products from China which have a much higher carbon footprint. C oming on to Norra Kärr. Heavy rare earths is a strategic critical raw material in the EU. The heavy rare earths go into permanent magnets which go into green technologies, electric vehicles, magnets in electric vehicles, and also wind power. T hey go also into the defense sector, which is clearly at the front of mind for a lot of Europeans these days.
Both rare earths in terms of our overreliance on China and dependency, but also Norra Kärr specifically, have been talked about for a decade within Europe by lots of different agencies, separate projects. Norra Kärr has been spoken about specifically in terms of its strategic importance to the EU when it comes to heavy rare earths, and there was even one study that actually said if Europe managed to fix issues around permitting and access to capital, that Norra Kärr could have been in production by 2020. Now, clearly it's 2024, and that hasn't proven to be the case. It's an ideal location. We are the most advanced heavy rare earth project in Europe. There is no other. It's a strategic resource in the composition of the heavy rare earths as part of the overall rare earth distribution. Our current scoping study is 30% of the resource that's been defined, s o there's a lot to go at.
In my previous role, I also dealt with a project that had been running 15 years prior to getting its mining lease. With Norra Kärr, the body of technical work that I went through in order to prepare our strategic project application for the EU, which was submitted last month, is significant. This project actually had a mining lease in 2013 because of the twists and turns in Swedish permitting that was appealed and reverted to an application by the Supreme Court here, b ut the project did have a mining lease, and it also had a pre-feasibility study s o the actual technical work done on rare earths is at an advanced stage. With the introduction of a new investor and significant investment around 2018, 2019, there was a rethink about the project as a whole and a redesign.
That redesign formed the basis of the scoping study that was done in 2021. To anybody looking from the outside in, it could seem that Norra Kärr is at an early stage of project development, but in actual fact, the only reason it's a scoping study is because we increased new products into the overall production story. And we changed the configuration of the project at site, at the Norra Kärr site, which means that in actual fact, what we have now is a quarrying operation. We've got a quarry that is actually producing a heavy rare earth concentrate and a nepheline syenite industrial mineral rather than aggregates, which you would usually expect to experience with a quarry b ut it is a quarry. It's mining and it's physical processing.
All the industrial processes and the chemical processes that were originally located on site and for which the company got a mining lease in 2013 are now conceptually relocated to a remote facility, which is an industrial site which is able to permit and control those processes in the right location. So we have a very simplified project actually at Norra Kärr. This shows the decoupling of both the mining project, which is the quarry, and the downstream offsite. So all the to get to the rare earth oxides, which is conceptually put in Luleå. The project as it stands is a 26-year mine life, but as I touched on, there's only a third of the heavy rare earth resource that's actually included in these numbers. So we have significant upside which we can generate. And then, as I mentioned, we've got the industrial mineral nepheline syenite.
Again, we're conservative assumptions around the nepheline syenite because it wasn't as well understood as it could be at the scoping study stage, but this is a huge opportunity for the company in terms of improving on the economic story for Norra Kärr. Again, strong set of economics, heavy contribution from heavy rare earths which are in demand, the dysprosium, terbium, and neodymium. This study was clearly done in 2021, but it updates. It's to be updated. W hat we have is, with a strategic project status, a submission of mining lease, we are building momentum behind this project. And if we're successful with strategic project status, and it's probably worth just dwelling on that a little bit, is that if we do get a strategic project designation from the EU, what that does is it puts a definitive timeline on permitting of the mining project.
In an extraction project, that's 27 months. In my experience operating in this country for a number of years, that's an absolute game changer. We didn't have definitive timelines before. It took me seven and a half years to get an exploitation concession for an iron ore project north of the Arctic Circle. 27 months sounds pretty damn good to me, to be honest with you. In addition to that, you get the strategic project status, and then that puts the focus on the Swedish authorities to get to permit the mining lease. We, as I touched on, and I come on to the next slide. Again, this is the economically strong operating margin. What we have done with the new mining project is we've reduced the land area by 65%. We've reduced the water consumption of the project at site by 30%.
What we have is a mining project, which I now call a quarry, which is of lower environmental impact. We've increased the sustainability such that 50% of the material that we're moving now, we're actually processing and producing products from instead of what was 1% before, s o you've got a reduction in environmental impact. You've got a simplification of the project at site because you've decoupled all the industrial processes, and now they're happening on an industrial site remote from Norra Kärr. Y ou've increased the sustainability because now you're producing a whole number of product streams. So it's quite compelling in that respect. T here are further upsides to be generated outside of the products which I've shown you. This is a depiction of the areas that have been eliminated from the project design.
This is a separate study that's been done by a bunch of scientists in 2018 to show the life cycle assessment of producing dysprosium metal from different sources of mineralization and eudialyte in the same way that I showed you the Woxna slide, which shows you the life cycle analysis of producing anode materials from Woxna compared to Chinese natural flake graphite or synthetic. This is the same story. You've got the life cycle analysis of footprint for eudialyte leagues ahead of any other source of mineralization. T hen finally, the European conversation is about creating supply chains. And so we have all these players at work in the space. When it comes to OEMs, another thing around the pre-feasibility done on the rare earths in 2015 is the study's findings were that the flow sheet is available from equipment manufacturers now.
We've got some of the best players in this space. Metso Outotec out of Finland are the leaders in their field. When it comes to the downstream, there are some significant players in terms of both the downstream processing, but the consumers of heavy rare earths in Europe, and Solvay being the biggest player. This has all come together. I personally, from having now worked in Sweden for a period of 10 years, I'm excited about operating in this country. It's one of the most collaborative, one of the most innovative places I know. It's had its problems in the past in terms of permitting, but we're living in a new era now where we have the Critical Raw Materials Act, and we have the ability to get Strategic Project status.
Things are starting to move with wind in the sails and a pull factor from Europe, which I'm personally very excited about. Coming on to Bihor Sud Exploration Project. So this is the Tethyan Belt, which I touched on. It's a very well-known geological region that runs from central Europe to Turkey. Been responsible for many copper and gold discoveries. What we have at Bihor Sud is an area that was mined historically for uranium and under Soviet control was also explored extensively for uranium. T he way that exploration was done was to actually do underground development. So we have kilometers and kilometers of underground roadways which we can get geologists into to actually observe mineralization and sample. We announced yesterday that we were into Gallery G7. G7, we put out news releases last year around cobalt nickel mineralization that we'd encountered.
Then once we've done our work there, we're going to transition to G2. In G2 system, we have eight kilometers of underground development to get into. We've already identified hundreds of meters of polymetallic mineralization within the gallery itself, which we now have to go in and drill. What we intend to do is to prove scale and grade. These are some of the pictures of the visible mineralization. I'm not going to dwell on this. We had a delay over the summer. The delay was purely because the rig didn't arrive on site, and we were making sure that we had a safe working environment for our employees to get underground. Team is underground now. We've got geologists mapping G2, and we've got the drill rig in G7. News flow coming on Bihor Sud over the coming months.
Finally, just to finish on what the near-term action plan is. With Norra Kärr, we submitted the application for Strategic Project status last month. I touched on the definitive timeline for permitting. One of the other issues that juniors have faced in my time in this part of the world is access to capital. The Strategic Project status will also suggest it's going to give us assistance with access to capital. And then in addition to that, matchmaking in terms of the different counterparties in offtake arrangements. So the EU is saying that decisions will be taken on which projects get Strategic Project status in mid-March 2025. The mining lease application goes in at the end of the year.
I would hope that the decision on the mining lease comes shortly after we get the Strategic Project status or from submission to when we get the mining lease, maybe six to nine months. Then there's a focus of mine, which is to look at all possible ways to accelerate the development of the project. We've got 15 years of technical work. We had a pre-feasibility done on the project. We had a mining lease in 2013. There's a lot of knowledge to go at, which should enable me, with some intelligent thinking, to then both with what we have to determine what the path forward looks like, but also to identify the right strategic partners out there in the supply chain to really accelerate this project.
The Critical Raw Materials Act wants producers to make a contribution by 2030, and it's our intention to make a contribution to heavy rare earth supply in Europe well before that. With Woxna , as I touched on, it's a case of looking at the options for making that asset commercial, and then with Bihor Sud is a very exciting exploration campaign benefited by the fact that we're already underground in what I hope is the guts of what could be a deposit, and we're already observing mineralization. There is plenty to go at, and we're really excited about that. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, and we have time for a couple of questions here, Kurt, so I just wanted to start here with, if we look at the map, you got three projects. W ould you consider that you have your hands full, or are you looking for other assets in Europe within, let's say, your portfolio or your scope?
I'm very much about focusing on what we have in the portfolio. We've got a number of challenges, historical challenges around looking at the options to find a commercial path forward for Woxna. It's not good having a mine that sits on your books for a while and is not actually in operation s o, my immediate focus has been on Norra Kärr. It's a very exciting time for that project in terms of the Strategic Project status, the mining lease application, and then what we do next. T hen Bihor Sud, is not because I'm lazy. My plate feels pretty full, but what's to come on Bihor Sud we as a company are very excited about.
So am I wrong then in assuming that you are on a path to be a producer rather than exploring and then selling on?
With Norra Kärr, there's definitely a drive at the moment to realize the production from Norra Kärr. I think, again, I'm a big believer in collaboration, and they're looking at those partnerships that can de-risk the project development path and increase the certainty of getting to that point in the future, so as I touched on, part of me is now actually starting to consider who are the right people to approach, and I've already had conversations, but we're not actually putting meat on the bones, so it's a case of what can we actually make happen and who wants to work with us? Because we have the deposit. We have the project. We just need to, in that environment of the Critical Raw Materials Act and the role that the EU is going to play, clearly we've got the policy. Now we need the action.
So yeah, so in summary, I mean, you're in the right spot here, and you, well, let's say, beefed up the board because you have some quality names there, obviously, which will not make it harder, at least, to find a good partner b ut as it is, these are the three projects, and you will work through them to, let's say, a production phase in one way or another. Is that the way to put it?
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. If you take Bihor Sud, we're already underground. So my fellow non-executive director, Daniel Major, is a mining engineer. I come from a mining engineering background. We get excited when we actually find something we can mine. And we're already in there in what I hope is the guts of something. So yeah, there'll be more development required underground, but we're already underground. It's not like exploring from surface. We're in the guts of something. So yeah, that's what I find most exciting, a nd the fact that it's a historic mining camp and people have been there before looking for minerals and metals.
Kurt, very interesting and intriguing. A s a Swedish company, it's nice to see a Swedish company every now and then. T hank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.