Welcome everyone. Happy to tell you about our story. It's a very unique one. Power Metallic is a standout entity. We are the world's highest grade copper and PGE discovery in the world. We're located in Quebec. We've got a key discovery called Lion and others in the mix. I'd like to explain why we are so excited about what we've got on the go. First of all, though, we'll give you the Pinocchio page. I'm going to tell you things that I believe are true, but please do your own due diligence and show traditional cautions on information. Right to it, the Lion Zone was a company changer for us. It established us as a very rare discovery. It's what's called a orthomagmatic. It's a sub-series of polymetallics, meaning there's many metals here in this discovery. There's only 20 of these discoveries in the world.
We're the 21st. These are all typically district plays with multiple mines. They are the richest, most valuable mines in the world. The granddaddy of them all is Norilsk in Russia. It's worth over $1 trillion. There's others like Sakatti in Finland. There's us. One of the things that stands out is just the amazing rock that we're finding in this deposit. It's 45% copper by composition, 55% PGEs, platinum, palladium, gold is about 10%, silver is 5%. You can see on this chart exceptional intervals. We're looking at typically finding stuff like 22 m+ in length. The grades are certainly exceptional. On these five that we've profiled, we're averaging double digits over 10% copper equivalent.
For perspective, your typical copper mine out there, they're ecstatic if they're 0.5% or 0.6%, and we're obviously moving the decimal point substantially here. That's what's important on this. This deposit this picture gives you part of what the deposit looks like. It's bigger. It extends to the east and the west. We're at surface down to about 800 m. We know it goes down to about 1,200 m and possibly substantially deeper than that, but that's where we're sitting at this point. One of the keys, especially in mining, is where you are located. We're in the province of Quebec, southeast of James Bay. We're just outside the town of Nemaska. It has its own regional airport. Our property is right beside a three-lane major highway. You can drive to our site from that.
We have a Quebec Hydro substation across the street with power lines going over our land. Another sort of key ingredient for successful mines. If you have to build the infrastructure in the middle of nowhere, you need roads and power and food and all that sort of stuff. It comes out of your net profits. This is all well established. Really, this area was quite developed with the Quebec Hydro work from the 1960s. It made the Indigenous guys, the James Bay Cree, incredibly wealthy guys. They're the most sophisticated Indigenous group. They're very supportive of us. They provide housing and food for our guys, and they've been instrumental in some important strategic initiatives that we've taken on. They're also shareholders, and we expect them to amplify their holdings during this summer. Quebec has a bunch of other aspects to it that make it a top-tier locale.
They provide tax credits between the provincial government and the federal government that will pay 55% of the costs of building your facilities there to put the stuff into production. At the point of post-feasibility, you look at half the cost being borne by these tax credits and the other half from a banking traditional format. It means, from our perspective, that the capital stack needs are incredibly low on our part. A couple other aspects that have been beneficial for us. We've typically done financings utilizing the charitable flow-through share of financing model, and that's basically where a bunch of people who have substantial tax bills buy these specialized flow-through shares, then they almost immediately sell it to our back-end guys and they get to drop their tax rate from the low 50%s to the low 40%s.
They're a winner on this, we're a winner because we got twice as much money working for us with half the dilution. As an example, the last raise we did was last February. We did CAD 40 million of these flow-through shares plus CAD 10 million of the hard dollars. The flow-through we did at CAD 2.83. The buyback was done at CAD 1.45, and we brought in some substantial players, like Robert Friedland and Rob McEwen and others, to lead that financing. Very happy about this environment. We started off initially here about four or five years ago. Our CEO had done some work for a company called Critical Elements. They're trying to get their Rose lithium mine put into production. Our CEO helped finance them and get them on their feet. He looked around and said, "You have this non-core asset.
It's a nickel discovery that dates back to the early 1960s with Inco work. Why don't we take that off your hands? They agreed. We came to terms. We started working on the bottom left-hand corner with what we call Nisk Main. We've developed that from about 3 million tons of high-grade nickel up to 43-101 in 2023, showing north of 7 million at about one and a quarter-plus nickel. During the drilling of this stuff, it was typically from surface down to about 500 m. We ended up with a drill budget down to about 200 m. We didn't really want to go to the market at that point and write personal checks. We asked our geos, "What do you have that we can kick the tires on with 200 m of drilling?" They proposed an area that's now called the Lion Zone.
We drilled that. It was the third-best platinum-palladium hole in the world that year. That was the start of the transformation of our company, really not only in name, but from Power Nickel to Power Metallic. That was the discovery of the Lion Zone, which is a orthomagmatic. Incredible results. It truly transformed us. Part of the reason I think we're doing well is we've got a lot of smart guys on board. As one of my friends way back when said when I asked him, "What do you think makes great investments?" He goes, "Always invest in a bunch of good guys, Dun. They'll make things happen. You can have a fantastic project with a bunch of idiots, and they'll burn it to the ground." We think we qualify on that front. I'm going to highlight three people here aside from our CEO, Terry Lynch.
In the middle bottom is Dr. Steve Beresford. In Australia, he's sort of viewed as a demigod in the geos side. Fantastic CV. He's responsible for three multi-billion dollar discoveries. First Quantum, MMG, and IGO. He's probably the foremost mind out there when it comes to these orthomagmatic and polymetallics discoveries. He has spent so much money for these companies, learning how to discover these things and transform them. He is basically our thought leader. By coincidence, he's also a Western Mining-trained guy. Western was a top-class Australian mining firm that was taken over by BHP. A fellow alumni there is our VP exploration, Joe Campbell. He's on the bottom left. Joe runs a company called GeoVector out of Ottawa. They're one of the top geological consulting companies. GeoVector does all the work for us on the geological side at our property.
In between is a different character, Seamus O'Regan. He's the latest director added to the mix. At some point, you go from discovering rocks to dealing with bureaucracy, and that's where he's going to be coming in. He's the former Federal Minister in Canada of both Indigenous Affairs and Natural Resources. A perfect fit for us dealing with Ottawa as we go forward. I'm going to show three charts today. We nicknamed them the good, the bad, and the ugly. We'll start off with the good. We made our discovery, and our stock took off, got a lot of interest. We were basically a 10-bagger, and we were the top mining stock, and I think third best on the exchange overall in 2024. That made everybody pretty happy and large expectations going forward.
What it also did was bring in some absolutely significant players in the mining world. Robert Friedland, fantastic history unto himself. He led our last two financings. Rob McEwen has been in our last three. These guys are incredibly supportive for us, have lots of ideas to help out, and we're really pleased to have them on board. We talked to Gina Rinehart about this early days. She wanted to come in and buy 10% of the company. We were sitting on a whole bunch of assays we knew were quite fantastic. We suggested back when the stock was about CAD 0.30, CAD 0.35, she could do that for CAD 1. She balked, you throw whatever expletives you want in there. We said, "Hey, listen, why don't you go into the marketplace, and you can buy it.
You can probably get it cheaper than that." She did, and like a bull in the China shop, she really moved our stock. At the end of the day, this CAD 50 million financing gave us the budget to do a 100,000-m drill program. We started that last year. We got about 35,000 m done last year, and we're well on our way into a 65,000-m program this year. We have six rigs on the go. Guys work 24/7 for about 40 or 41 weeks of the year. We take breaks during the year for a number of events. Right now, rigs are basically shut down. We're doing other work, but it's goose hunting season for the James Bay Cree, and we take a break in the middle of September for moose hunting season. Then we give the guys off a couple weeks at Christmas time.
We are incredibly busy and focused on this project. Pretty standard sort of structure for this company. The thing that's the salient point here is that a number of key shareholders own roughly half the company. Another dozen or so that are, again, long-term players of merit are owning another 25%. Our CEO is the largest shareholder, Terry Lynch and his family, at about 19% right now. We have some of the top fund guys on board here as well. We go from the good to the bad. Last year, our stock went nowhere. We were a bit flummoxed by that. Commodity prices had gone up substantially, and we'd grown our resource, but we really weren't getting the respect in the marketplace. This is despite the fact that commodities at this point, the mining companies look exceptionally cheap, especially against other industry groups in the marketplace.
If you go back 15 years ago, mining stocks were roughly 10% of the S&P 500. Now they're just above 1%. We think we're going to see some traction coming as we work back towards the mean. Clearly, commodities are top of focus for an awful lot of investors. As I mentioned, commodity prices have changed substantially for us since that February financing last year. You're looking at 65%-70% on average increase in these key commodities that we have. When we did this financing, we realized one of the attributes of these orthomagmatic discoveries is they're typically district plays, and they usually have multiple mines on them. We're at the point where we believe we have two, but we thought there's a bigger picture here.
We went from having about a 40,000 sq km land package to one that's well over 300,000 sq km, 600% increase in the land. We identified about eight major targets in the area. We now own seven of them, and we're trying to get the eighth. We'll see what happens on that front. One of the keys, though, was an area that was controlled by Quebec Hydro. Back in the '60s, they had segregated all sorts of property areas in the area with the idea that they might be used for future considerations, either flood plains or putting in additional power plants. No one was allowed to go on these properties. We looked at it as a company out of Ontario thinking if we tried to get into the Quebec Hydro bureaucracy, we'd be in the waiting room for another decade.
We called the chief of the James Bay Cree and told them, "Look, this is super significant land that we need to get a hold of. We've got a pretty significant discovery, which you're going to be profiting from, but we think we've got a major one on our hands." They intervened on our behalf, and we were able to get this property. It took about 14 months+ . Now we have it. It's right beside some of our key discoveries like Lion and Nisk Main. It's right in what we call a fold hinge. We believe that's sort of the other side of Lion. We just got on that property about two months ago for the initial work on it, and we'll be very active on this as we get back drilling in June. Good, the bad. Now time to look at the ugly.
At the beginning of the year, we're trading at CAD 1.70. Next thing you know, we blink and it's CAD 0.90. Background, you had Trump and Iran causing a lot of kerfuffle in the marketplace. We decided to take a little more critical look and we said, "What are the naysayers saying about us and what are their issues that they see?" Three things come up on that subject. One, the potential for the metallurgy to be bad. You've seen some disasters in Australia where metallurgy work was done on multi-billion dollar cap entities and they couldn't make things work. Basically, how much of your metals can you get out of your rocks? That was a potential negative.
Some people thought we were too small to be a mine, and when you take a look at these classic sort of copper projects, they're typically costing billions and billions of dollars. You need a ton of equipment, energy, et cetera, to make them work. All these things are not the case for us, and so we set out to prove that in different fashions for the marketplace. First thing that we did was a report with SGS. Again, top of the food line company. They did our metallurgical work. Best they've ever seen. No one's come up with numbers like this. For instance, copper, the recovery rates there are 98.9%. Platinum and palladium in the mid to high 90%s. Gold and silver are in the mid to high 80%s.
Basically, this says one thing to people, this will be a mine, and it will be a very profitable one. When you take a look at the economics on this stuff, the guys who have problems are typically the low-grade porphyry plays. Again, their IRR numbers are pretty low and their cost to put these things together, again, typically in the billions. We're ultra high on this stuff. We've got phenomenal grades, which means valuable rock. We'll deal with our actual IRR numbers when we publish our preliminary economic assessment in December. Before that, we'll put out a mineral resource estimate sometime in July of this year. It will show a project that's worth billions of dollars and has, on an open pit basis, less than a one-year payback on the project. Analysts have different views.
If you're playing around with your AI tools, you can look at their different ideas on what they have in terms of tonnage and grade estimates, then run these recoveries, payables, and taxes and come up with a value, and it will be substantial even if you use the lowest numbers here. The guys that cover us are GBC out of Germany, Hannam Partners in the U.K., Noble Capital and Roth in the U.S., and Red Cloud in Toronto. Polymetallics. I'm going to show two quick graphs here. These orthomagmatics are typically a combination of PGEs, platinum group metals, so platinum, palladium, gold, and silver, copper, and nickel. Where we sit in this pyramid at this point is just above Oktyabrsky, which is Norilsk, and the other one that's somewhat similar on the scale here is Sakatti in Finland with Anglo American.
Another way of looking at this is we're very copper rich at this point, and there's only two comparisons in the world that are like us. One is Norilsk or Oktyabrsky. The other one is Morrison, which is the Sudbury Footwall deposits. Again, multiple mines, almost two dozen plus mines created with the Morrison area. Not to go in detail today, but can at a later date with people, but we're extremely active. We've got six rigs on the go, and we've got all sorts of very interesting targets that we're working on. Some basic comparisons. The closest thing to us sort of in the marketplace is Foran. They were recently taken over for just under CAD 4 billion. Their resource size is about the same as us. Our grades are superior. They paid about CAD 900 million to develop their facility.
Not quite apples to apples, but the basic message at the end of the day is we're substantially cheap at a $250 million market cap. Really quickly, exploration's ramping up. The commodity environment is fantastic for us. We've done a whole bunch of de-risk stuff. Metallurgy is out. PEA is coming. We are trying to get bigger in terms of land package. We're looking at listing on the Nasdaq in August, September, and we've been busy doing stuff in other areas as well that look like the new frontier, especially in Saudi Arabia. Another one of our spinoffs that we did is in Chile and British Columbia, and that's starting to get active now on the drilling side. That's the quick thumbnail of Power Metallic, and happy to answer questions as they come.
Well, thanks very much, Duncan. Fascinating. We did have a couple questions come in. Let me read them off. The mineral resource estimate and PEA are two of the biggest milestones coming up this year. What are the most important things investors should look for in these reports to judge whether the project is progressing as expected?
Different version on that. What you want to see is that you have a substantial resource, and that at the end of the day, it's economic. It's fine to have a large resource, but if you can't get it out of the ground and make money on it's not worth your time. Our expectation is that we will clearly show value and economics with those reports.
A related question. You have six rigs actively working now, 100,000-m drill program underway. How does management think about balancing the pace of exploration against the need to preserve financial flexibility for shareholders?
Well, one of the keys was the CAD 50 million we raised last year. It gave us the money for the full coverage of our 100,000-m drill program that we started last year and we'll finish this year. Basically, we're working our ass off to go as intelligently and strategically as fast as we can. We did ramp up our facilities to accommodate all those rigs in terms of core shacks and other facilities. We are careful with how we do things. We only spend money on two things: getting our story out to investors and putting holes in the ground. That's our focus. We're a virtual company. No big office, none of that fancy stuff. We sub out everything. We have one employee. Everyone else is a consultant. We're efficient with our capital.
One question came in that is a little away from Nisk and the Lion Zone. You recently won a major concession in Saudi Arabia, and you were on the ground there just before the regional conflict escalated. How is the current environment affecting your plans and timeline for that asset?
We're not the subject of targets for missiles. We're in the middle of sort of nowhere in Saudi. We're actually fairly busy over there doing our work at this point. It's still early days. This is a new frontier, though, we actually just announced a deal with one of the Saudi royal family groups for a joint partnership. We still own 100% of our original 200,000 sq km project. Going forward, we'll have a joint venture deal with the Saudis, 50/50 on ownership, they put up 75% of the money for the first CAD 10 million. We're very active there. We think there's some more concessions that we'd like to win. We're pretty excited with the potential that exists there.
Interesting. Well, back to Lion Zone, just to clarify something. Am I correct that you're envisioning a open pit mine?
Yeah. The best sort of approach on this stuff is an open pit. It's probably good for the first three years of work. Again, as I mentioned, we're looking at such valuable rock there that it's less than a one-year payback with what we have. After that, we'd go underground.
Turning to that valuable rock, it is an exceptional grade level, just to give you that feedback. We've had a lot of miners present. Nobody's close to that.
No one is.
Is all that valuable rock accessible from the surface, or is the really valuable rock deep underneath and you'd have to go underground?
It's almost right at surface for us, so there's not a lot of overburden that we have to deal with. It's permeated with all these different metals. There isn't a zone of one metal, then a zone of another, then another. They're all mixed somewhat together. You will see that when you look at our assays that are released. They're containing all these different metals. We expect substantial revenue from these ores.
I know you still have the PEA to finish and the feasibility study is ahead of you, but assuming all of that goes well, roughly when would you be expecting to produce metal?
The CAD 64 question is, how long does it take permitting process to get done on that? We have started the early days of putting together a feasibility study that will really ramp up after the PEA in December. You would typically seen sort of two years plus for permitting, but our conversations with the Quebec government and such, we're led to believe that that process might be less. Maybe around one year for that processing aspect to get done on the bureaucratic side. That means we could be there in production as early as possibly 2029. 2030 to be cautious, 2029. Overall, just an incredible pace for us on this project with an awful lot of help from the James Bay Cree and the Quebec government.
Okay, good. Thank you for those ballpark timelines. Just looking, for example, at copper, which I know is one of the key resources you'll be mining. Of course, we're well above CAD 5 copper. It was nowhere close to that a year ago. Recently, a very large copper mine in Arizona that had been delayed literally for decades recently got permitted resolution. I think that if I understand them, they're on sort of the same sort of timeline that you are. If someone suddenly starts producing a lot of copper, it is a very large deposit, what do you think that will mean for your mine?
You want to take a look at the macros. There's incredible demand for copper, and it's basically a function typically of population growth. There's some extraordinary pushes on the demand curve right now with what's going on with AI, the demands for electricity, that are really showcasing a high demand curve for copper, which is why it's come alive here in the last little while. In the supply side, you've been seeing more and more productions being reduced by majors and not that many new discoveries that will be coming online in the shorter term to make up for that, let alone make up for the increased demand that's out there. If I was a commodity player, I'd be happy buying copper futures as a casual.
Well, speaking of the markets, someone pointed out to me the other day the role that metal ETFs had been playing. They don't use the copper that they buy. They put it in a warehouse and count it periodically. Do you see them as a big factor in the copper markets as well?
Hard to say. The thing I look at is what ETFs are doing with our stock, and I would highlight Sprott with some of theirs owning as much as 3 million shares of our company. I'd focus on what we're doing.
Got it. You certainly do have some high-profile players in your stock. We have just about 30 seconds left. Is there anything you'd like to say by way of closing remarks?
You know what? If you're a buyer, you can buy our company with confidence here. We're absolutely, we think cheap with absolutely significant news flow coming out. We've got a whole bunch of assays that are looking strong for release in the next week, two, and three. We have some significant strategic things that we're working on. We have these de-risk aspects like the MRE and PEA to look forward to. We intend to surprise the market with some surprises going forward. Just the stuff that we have today makes us really valuable.
Well, excellent. Great presentation. Thank you again. Thanks everyone who joined us. Look forward to seeing you again, and we'll hope to be talking with you again as well, Duncan.
Michael, thanks very much. Have a great day. Guys, thank you very much for your patience. All the best. Good luck.
Very good.