So I am Adrian O'Brien, Director of Marketing Communications for Midnight Sun Mining. And of course, we are working in Zambia. So this is a really unique project. You know, I jokingly call it a unicorn in our sector, because at the end of the day, it is so intrinsically rare to find a company that is both an explorer with very large-scale exploration assets and a near-term producer. That's what Midnight Sun is, and that's what we've built out. So we're working in an area called the Domes Region of Zambia. It is the number one place on the planet right now for copper exploration. And there's a few different reasons for that. Number one, we're surrounded by majors. As I'll show you in a moment, every major copper player on the planet is within a stone's throw of our property. And these deposits are really unique.
The geological setting of the Domes region of Zambia is that the deposits are extremely large, and when I say large, I'm talking a billion tons plus. They are very high grade, and they're very shallow, and those are the three most important critical aspects of a deposit that you need right now if you want to develop an asset that can actually have global impact. So I won't waste a lot of time here. Let's dive in, and I'll show you what we're working on. We have a 506 sq km property. We're located, as I mentioned, in the Domes Region of Zambia, and basically, if you throw a 100 km net over our property, you're going to capture First Quantum, Barrick, Rio Tinto, Anglo, KoBold Metals through our partnership, Ivanhoe, you know, China Molybdenum.
I mean, there is just an absolute host of all the top copper companies in the world in this district, and we're talking a district that's only maybe 150 km east to west by 150 km north to south. It's a small region, but absolutely jam-packed with very large deposits, and our strategy for moving these assets forward, we actually have four separate targets for one of these large Domes Region deposits. We wanted to bring in a major. We wanted to bring in a strategic, so what we did was we cut a $15.5 million earn-in with KoBold Metals. KoBold, of course, getting a lot of attention for their backers. They do have investment from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, generally through the Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund, which is a critical metals fund started by Bill Gates and run by Bill Gates.
They're using AI technology, so bleeding-edge technology and geoscience. And at the end of the day, they have the best geoscientific team we've seen in a very, very long time, if not ever. So we're working with KoBold. They're earning into 75% of one of our targets, which is the most advanced out of ours and a really outstanding copper target. And then we have a second agreement. This is the near-term production aspect of our deal. We have a cooperative exploration plan in place with First Quantum. Of course, First Quantum has had a lot of attention over the last couple of years with the loss of Cobre Panamá and what they're doing now, refocusing at Kansanshi. Kansanshi is the top producer in Africa for copper today, and they're located only six kilometers away from our property.
So we have an arrangement, if you will, to develop assets and get them into production at Kansanshi, get near-surface material into production at Kansanshi. And that's a situation that should see us in production within 12 months. So that is an extremely unique circumstance, not just to be in production, but seeing near-term cash flow very, very quickly at a large scale. So in terms of financing, we are fully funded. At this point, we raised $10 million. That gives us enough money for the work we're about to set out and do and to get us all the way to cash flow at this oxide copper plant. So we're in a great spot. We're moving these assets forward, and we're fully funded to do that. So timing's everything with what's to come in the copper market today. We're in a great spot.
And I don't think I need to tell you or the audience this, but why copper? At the end of the day, it's electrification. It's manufacturing. EVs, AI data centers are driving us towards a copper cliff, if you will. There is a deficit looming. We need copper. We need it as quickly as possible. And at the end of the day, you're going to hear a lot of companies talking about copper assets. You have to look at those copper assets in terms of jurisdiction, in terms of size, and in terms of type of deposit. There's a lot of talk about porphyry deposits. And at the end of the day, you know, can the asset be put into production? Does it have a CapEx that a company can tackle? And is it in a jurisdiction that can actually move forward?
In the case of Zambia, there's a reason why every major copper company is there. You know, a good example of that being the announcement most recently by Ivanhoe Metals or Ivanhoe Mining. Ivanhoe has now announced that they have partnered with the Zambian government to go in and develop geological assets that the government has highlighted as being top-tier assets. And so, you know, you're seeing now major investment from Ivanhoe, who owns Kamoa-Kakula, the largest copper deposit on the planet, just north of us inside the DRC. So it's a top-tier jurisdiction. 75% of their export earnings are copper. They've been a mining powerhouse for 100 years. They have a democratically elected government. They have a proper mining act in place. In short, this is a district where if you find it, you can build it. And that's exactly where you want to be.
So we are in a top-tier location. This graphic gives you a great idea of where we're sitting. This is the traditional Zambian Congo Copper belt on the right-hand side of the screen, trends northwest, southeast, dozens of big operating mines and deposits. But it's this area with all the bubbles you can see in the middle of the screen that really matters. This is the Domes Region. This is ground zero, top place on the planet right now for copper exploration. And here's the reason why. First Quantum Sentinel Mine to the west, that's a billion tons at 0.51% copper. Barrick's Lumwana Mine, that's a billion tons at 0.55% copper. That asset is a subject of a brand new feasibility study.
That's for a satellite deposit that was recently announced and discovered by our Chief Operating Officer, former Barrick geologist, I was going to say former chief geologist, and the fellow that's responsible for unraveling Lumwana. That's Kevin Bonel, who I'll tell you about in a moment. But this is going to be one of the largest copper deposits in the belt. Ivanhoe's Kamoa-Kakula, 1.4 billion tons at 3%. It's an absolute monster. But that asset sits inside the DRC border. So you come with a completely different set of parameters around moving an asset forward. In Zambia, it's very easy. There's no nationalization. There's no percentage of the deposit taken by the Zambian government. If you get into production, there is a small percentage of royalty that kicks in. And otherwise, tax rates are basically identical to working in Canada. It's a very easy jurisdiction to work in.
In the case of something like Kamoa-Kakula, Ivanhoe owns about 36% of that asset at this point, as they needed to bring in other parties and bring in other entities and, of course, give the DRC a significant interest in the project. China Molybdenum's Tenke deposit, 122 million tons at 2%, very, very large. And First Quantum's Kansanshi Mine, which is a big part of our story, that's a billion tons at 0.66%. These are extremely large copper deposits, and we are completely surrounded. So in the middle of this, you can see this property block. This is Midnight Sun. We have 506 sq km, and we're just 6 km away from the Kansanshi Mine with a haul road that's owned by First Quantum cutting right through our property. So that, of course, sets the stage for what we're about to do.
Zooming in, let's leave the DRC out of the equation. Zoom in on the Zambian aspect here, and you have Sentinel, Lumwana, Kansanshi, and Midnight Sun in the middle. The key piece is that you'll notice our property is broken up into pieces. There are actually four separate targets for one of these billion-ton deposits. You'll notice one outlined in green. That is where we're working with KoBold Metals. You'll notice that the property blocks on the left-hand side are surrounded in purple. Those are the pieces of property that we are working on with First Quantum, and we have two targets up here to the northwest. This is called Kaziba, and down here to the southwest, this is called Mitu, and those are going to form a production plan following a cooperative exploration attack plan that we've put in place here. It's going to kick in.
It's actually underway now, and this will form the first piece to go to Kansanshi. This will form the second piece to go to Kansanshi, and it's going to be super exciting now as we explore and work on those assets, so I'm going to move forward a little bit quickly here because I know we have a little shorter window than I typically present this project in, and I think we can cover the key pieces really quickly. This is Dumbwa. This is the reason that everybody is so excited about what we're doing in Zambia today, and what you see there on the right-hand side within the green boundary is a big purple magenta blob. That is a geochem anomaly. It's not just a geochem anomaly. That's the highest grade and largest soil anomaly on record in Zambia.
It's 20 km long with a peak value of 0.73% copper. That is ore-grade copper in soil at surface. And not only do we have this giant soil anomaly, that's overlaid by what they call a vegetation kill zone. Vegetation kill zone is essentially caused by soil toxicity from a large sediment-hosted copper system at depth. And when you look at both the soil anomaly based on thousands and thousands of samples and the vegetation kill zone, those are beyond strong indicators that you have a very large system here. Take that a step further. These are our drilled, or what I like to call our discovery holes. Every one of those is an economic intercept. These deposits are flat-lying. They're typically 10-20 meters thick, and you build your tonnage on strike.
So when you're seeing these 13- 15 meters, even up to 20 meters of material and over a cutoff of like 0.2, 0.15, 0.2, you're into the right stuff. These intercepts are much, much higher grade. In the case of something like this hole here, 13.5 meters of 0.77, that's an ore-grade intercept right from surface into bedrock. So we know we've got something really great going on. But what really set the wheels in motion is just to the southern end of our property. This property to the south of us is owned by a major. And they drilled the tip of that anomaly to test it out about 18 months ago. They hit 15 meters of 5% copper, came back to the camp and said, "We hit it, but we hit the tail of the anomaly, and it's on your property.
It's the Dumbwa anomaly." That got everybody excited. Of course, KoBold came to the table, and we ended up with a deal with KoBold. I'm going to jump forward to the KoBold deal itself. $15.5 million over four and a half years. That will get KoBold to a 75% interest. We will have a remaining 25% interest. There's two key parts to this. Number one, there's no partial earn-in. KoBold has to complete the entire deal to get their ownership. Number two, there's a follow-on agreement. KoBold is a passive producer, means they want to own 20%-30% of this, but bring in another entity to put it into production. Our 25% gets matched with whatever they want to sell, and we all get sold at the same time.
M&A is the name of the game for Midnight Sun, and that puts us in a perfect position to move this forward. But this entity right here, this fellow, Dr. David Broughton, is the reason we did the deal with KoBold. Not just their geological team in general, but David is arguably one of the top sediment-hosted or stratobound-hosted copper deposit experts in the world. He found Kamoa-Kakula. He also did all the development work and was part of the discovery team at Kansanshi. And he is an incredible geologist. And I'm going to give you a quick anecdote. Eight years ago, David came to us. And David said over lunch, "Look, I don't know how you got this deposit.
I don't know how you managed to acquire it or not develop a project at the time. He said, "Whatever you do, sell your house, mortgage your house, do what you have to do. Don't ever lose this property. This is the most important Zambian target, and you need to hang on to it." We listened to him. And of course, he was with Ivanhoe at the time. They were developing Kamoa-Kakula. David retired from Ivanhoe about four years ago. He was approached by KoBold to join as their chief copper geologist. He did. And as soon as he joined, he brought them to the table for Dumbwa and told them that it was the top target and that they needed to do something with us. So we ended up with KoBold at the table. The other fellow I want to tell you about really quickly is Kevin Bonal.
Kevin is our Chief Operating Officer. He is the geologist that was parachuted in by Barrick four years ago to unravel Lumwana. They paid $8 billion for Lumwana 20 years ago, couldn't make it work for 15 years. They brought Kevin in. Kevin gave them 50 years of reserves in 24 months and turned it into a tier one asset. That is the subject of the $80 million feasibility study that Barrick just launched, and Kevin is responsible for that and all of the development to add Lumwana, so Kevin left Barrick and joined us because he believes that Dumbwa has the same potential, if not larger and higher grade, so he's super excited about Dumbwa and wants to be a part of the discovery team as we develop this asset, so we have put together an absolute geological dream team.
The other half of our property or our project is our oxide copper cooperative exploration plan with First Quantum. We're going to be working on Kaziba and Mitu to get this into production very quickly. But I'm going to give you a quick explanation of how this works. At the First Quantum Kansanshi Mine, there are three circuits: sulfide circuit, a mixed ore circuit, and an oxide SX-EW circuit. They also have a smelter on site, and the smelter produces 1.3 million tons of sulfuric acid a year. Huge environmental liability. They need to get rid of it, but there's no local market, and you can't ship it out of the country. So they've had to develop a way of getting that acid neutralized in situ.
And what they've developed over the last 20 years, which works beautifully, is they heap leach copper oxides with the sulfuric acid that's free, and they neutralize the acid. So the acid is gone. Secondarily, that liberates the copper in the oxides, and they can sell that as a byproduct by electrowinning it, selling it as a plate. And they make between $250-$400 million a year on that byproduct. Luckily for us, something has developed at Kansanshi that put us in an absolutely unbelievable position. We have a large concentration of oxides at Kaziba at surface, no strip. This is mineralization that can be scooped up with an excavator and taken straight to the mine. We also have a large concentration of oxides at Mitu, and Kansanshi has run out of oxides. This is the only thing that can satisfy what they need at Kansanshi.
They cannot be stockpiling acid. It can't be losing a $300 million a year revenue stream, particularly after losing Cobre Panamá last year, and so we're in a position to supply Kansanshi for the next 5-10 years, and very simply, we're going to start with Kaziba. We're going to run a program. It's going to be roughly 57 RC holes. This program is now underway. We have funded this. We raised C$10 million in May, 57 RC holes. That accounts to just under 3,000 meters. Max depth of 50 meters. We're going to drill off this grid. We have a target there that's about 300 meters wide. We believe it's about 3.9 million tons today, but the grade is really impressive. It's about 1.3% in the average of the 31 drill holes we currently have.
We're going to go in, verify that target, build out as much tonnage as we can. We're aiming for somewhere between 4 and 15 million tons. It'll give us a few years of production at Kansanshi. Then moving down to Mitu, we have a target that's 30-50 million tons. It could give us an extra 5-7 years. Those are our goals. We have not drilled those off yet, but we do believe that there's a large concentration there, and that we can take care of that for a very long time. We have put this plan together. First Quantum's working with us. They're supplying a geological team, an engineering team, taking care of the assaying and metallurgy at Kansanshi.
Once we're ready to engineer these and get them into production, we're going to hand the keys to First Quantum and let them do their job. That's where we sit today. The company has 165 million shares out. We have CAD 10 million in the bank. We're fully funded through to cash flow. We should see cash flow within about 12 months. Market cap actually has moved up. We're up about $0.10 over the last week or so. We're probably sitting at about a CAD 70- CAD 75 million market cap today. With that, I will hand it back to Arlen and take any questions that might be out there.
Right on. Great job, Adrian. Just a reminder to the audience, if you have any questions, pop them in the Q&A there. I got a couple. We'll start with. Okay, I'm ready for them. Can you tell the audience the difference between a porphyry deposit and a sediment-hosted deposit?
For sure. You know, porphyry deposits are really what you hear the most about in the copper space, right? From a geological perspective, they tend to extend downward. So you tend to have a deposit that could be partially near surface, but they tend to extend downward. So you have to look at, in some cases, open pit mining, in a lot of cases, underground mining. But what you're looking at in somewhere like Zambia, where you're dealing with these stratobound deposits, is a flat-lying layer of material. So let's call it, you know, literally a flat layer that's maybe 50- 100 meters underground, which is extremely shallow. I mean, that's nothing in the mining world. They might tip one direction or another, maybe 15 degrees or so.
But generally speaking, once you find them, you just drill them off on strike. You continue on. They might run for kilometers. And they're very easy to open pit mine. In the case of porphyry deposits, because they extend downward and because they have traditionally been mined so heavily, we're kind of at a point now where most of the low-hanging fruit's kind of been picked. Most of the easy ones and really high-grade near-surface ones have been found. And so people are looking at different models for porphyry deposits now. Porphyry deposits that might be higher grade, but are much deeper and require underground mining, and in a lot of cases, require block cave mining. And in the copper world, historically, the biggest hurdle that companies have to face is CapEx.
Copper deposits are notoriously expensive to get into production, and they, in a lot of cases, can be multi-billions of dollars. For a small company, that's just not feasible. So your only hope is to bring in one of the two or three or four majors that, you know, can get in there and do that work. In the case of these large underground porphyries that require something like block cave, all that CapEx is required upfront, so in year one, you would need to put up two or three billion dollars, which is just astronomical, and it's a hurdle that I don't think many companies will ever be able to climb over, and so, you know, these stratobound deposits are really what everyone's looking for now because they're kind of the answer to lower CapEx, quicker production, and just simpler, easier open pit operations.
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. The questions have started firing in. Okay. Question here. Any indications on potential margins, assuming high since they'll be running operations? So I guess it's around any ideas on potential margins on the supply deal with First Quantum and total and any top-line revenue?
I think at the end of the day, there's not much we can say yet about the deal simply because what we're doing is attacking the exploration plan first. They're obviously working hand in hand with us. It should be pointed out that First Quantum needs this material in a desperate way. There's only two ways you can solve the acid issue. One is limestone, and there's not enough limestone in all of sub-Saharan Africa to solve this issue. The other is oxide copper. There's not enough oxide copper in the belt.
When First Quantum depleted their resources, they began bringing material in from Sentinel, which is 120 km away. They're losing money on that. That doesn't really work. And so, you know, there's a specific situation here where they're desperate for the material. We have the material, but we need to get it to them as quickly as we possibly can to solve this problem for them. And of course, that benefits us greatly. In terms of the actual mining arrangement, I think a few things that you can look at taken directly from their financials. The first is their tons per day at the mill. They're doing 25,000 tons per day. Now, we feel that we'll be able to get enough material together to keep that going, keep them full at 25,000 tons per day. They were mining typically at 0.2%-0.3%.
That's the typical grade running through their mill. The material that we're looking at supplying is 1+% . So it's very high grade with almost no strip. So your cost to take that out is really just the moving of material from one spot to the other and running it through. So from an economics perspective, you can pull the economics almost directly from their financials and look at what those margins will be.
But you can also use a theoretical idea that, you know, if you're running 25,000 tons per day at 1%, you're going to produce about 80 million pounds of copper a year. And, you know, what we're going forward with is the idea that we will take a minority percentage, but allow them to do all of the production work. Simply, you know, they have the geological and engineering infrastructure to do it. We don't. So that's kind of the plan.
On the exploration side, who's operating these assets?
That's us.
That's you guys.
But what we should point out is that we're doing it in concert with them. So they've actually supplied both the geological team and an engineering team. So they're working hand in hand with us. So I say we're the operator. Kevin Bonal is running the program, but their team is intimately involved in every piece of how we're putting this together so that when we go out and do the work we're doing, you know. I'll give you a little explanation. When we first set out to do this and we first talked to First Quantum eight months ago, we were planning to do 150 drill holes, 150, sorry, 150 drill holes, 50-meter spacing, 50-meter max depth.
They came back to us with their engineering team and said, "You don't need to do that. You need 50 drill holes, 50 meter max depth, ionic leach sampling, and an IP survey." So instead of a $1 million cost that we had budgeted, it's $500,000. And the timeline is 45 days instead of six months.
And they don't need a 43-101?
Absolutely not.
To make their own decisions.
Not at all. What we'll do is our plan is to take the detailed information that they'll supply us following the program. I mean, we're looking at a resource before Christmas. And so what we'll do is take that detailed information and we'll create our own 43-101 and be able to talk about numbers and size. I think that's really beneficial for our shareholders.
Yeah, right on. I got too many questions to ask for the time that we have here. So Adrian, I'll put you in touch with the investors that have got these questions.
That sounds good.
Yeah, that's awesome. Best of luck on all this. This sounds really exciting.
Really appreciate it, Arlen.
Timing looks good. One last question here. Actually, I think we got time for. At what stage do you see M&A down there? Is it a discovery stage? Is it, you know, you got to get through a PFS or like where does someone say, "Well, we see it all here"?
Well, I'll tell you, there's a couple different ways this can roll out. I always talked about there being two re-rates on Midnight Sun. There's going to be a re-rate around what we find with KoBold at Dumbwa. And if it's a billion tons at, let's call it 0.5% average grade in the belt, that is a very big asset. And if we own 25% of that, we're certainly going to be in the crosshairs of a lot of companies.
If you look at the re-rate that's going to be in line from meeting near-term production at Kansanshi, that is a very, very significant asset as well that's going to see us in cash flow. I think you can look at either of those as a pivot point where M&A should be starting because at the end of the day, it's a very, very large multiple on Midnight Sun's current market cap and share price. And companies are going to be looking at us. We're not a producer. We're never going to be a producer.
But you're surrounded by Barrick, First Quantum, all of these groups, Rio Tinto, Ivanhoe. They all are producers and want to be producers. So I think as quickly as companies can start to swoop in, I think that that activity will start. So I don't think it's going to be very long.
Right on. Adrian, great job. Thanks for joining the show.
Appreciate it, Arlen.
See you around. Take care.
All right. Take care. See you.