Okay, we'll get started. Thank you, everyone, for coming. I see some new faces in the crowd, so that's always great. I'm Nolan Peterson, the CEO of Atlas Salt. A little bit of a different story here. A mining company, but also not a gold company or a copper company. We're very, very unique. We're the only publicly traded salt development company in North America right now. We are developing the Great Atlantic Salt Project. It's on the west coast of Newfoundland. The intention for this is to make sodium chloride, NaCl, the same type of salt you put on your food. But for our purposes of discussion, it's for the de-icing of roads in the Northeast U.S., the Midwest, Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic provinces. The heaviest users of de-icing road salt. That's the largest regional market for de-icing road salt in the world as well.
Despite this, North America has not built a new salt mine in 25 years. We're aiming to rectify that. Sorry, before that, I should say, heavy users of de-icing road salt, heavy users of salt, but North America doesn't make enough salt. I'm going to say domestic, foreign, North America, I'm talking about Canada, the U.S. as one integrated market. Despite the fact that we don't make enough salt, import a tremendous amount, about 30%-40% of it, there hasn't been a new salt mine built in nearly 30 years. Why is that? Starting with thinking about resource development, it always starts with the resource. Like you think about the existing mines that operate today, and there are mines in North America that are operating. Most of them are very deep.
Actually, all of them are very deep, about 500- 600 m deep or deeper, and most of them also sit under bodies of water. This creates operational challenges, it creates environmental concerns, it creates safety concerns as well. There was a mine in 2022 that shut down because they were under a lake in Louisiana. It's called Avery Island Salt Mine. Breached the underside of the lake, drained into the lake, and killed two people, and they shut that mine down. There are a number of mines that are in operations today that are under a similar risk. Not saying it's going to happen, but definitely in the back of people's minds. Of course, that also causes concern in the local communities.
Against this backdrop, it's very hard to find a good salt deposit that's worth developing and can overcome the concerns of the communities and environment and permitting, and is the juice worth the squeeze, right? What makes Atlas Salt different is that instead of being deep and under a body of water, we are shallow and a dry mine. Instead of being 500 m deep, we're 200 m deep. Instead of being under a body of water, we are not. The shallowness allows us to access the mine inexpensively, operate it inexpensively, and then also develop it faster than a shaft access mine. Those deep mines require a shaft, we can be a horizontal drift access. We also don't have to deal with the water issues, constant dewatering, or the possibility of disrupting the local water tables and whatnot.
That's what makes this deposit viable. This deposit, like many great mines and deposits, was found by accident. That's why we're having this discussion, because it's actually not that hard to find salt deposits, but it's hard to find them with these characteristics. The other characteristic that's arguably as important to the viability of a salt mine is the logistics element. Salt is a bulk commodity, low margin generally. Shipping and logistics can account sometimes for 60%-70% of the final sale price. These are our markets here. Sorry, my pointer doesn't work on the screen, but the major cities up and down the St. Lawrence in Canada and the U.S., of course, on the East Coast. That's where everybody lives.
We're up here on the island of Newfoundland, seems a little bit odd that we can get our product to these markets, that's the other key advantage this site has, which is proximity to, right there, Turf Point, an existing deepwater port that's open year-round, ice-free, fully permitted, and can move 50,000 ton bulk carrier vessels. We're only 2 km away from this port. We can connect this port to our site via conveyor, convey the material from the underground to the port. No rehandling, no trucking, no processing as well, no process plant. We'll talk about that in a second. Very low-cost distribution. That's arguably, again, the other half of the coin that makes this a salt deposit worth pursuing. If you think about it, if you find a salt deposit, it's probably going to be under a lake. Cities are near lakes.
People don't like mines being built near them. It's in the middle of nowhere. People need salt. You need customers. This is how we can get that salt to those customers. In North America, we would have the most efficient and cost-effective shipping and distribution option with this port, moving 50,000 tons vessels. The same vessels that are being brought in from foreign distributors, which we'll talk about. While I'm on this slide, I'll point out we're 2 km away from a tie-in to the Newfoundland hydro grid. We are 10 km away from the Trans-Canada Highway, and we're within the city limits of a town of 1,000 called St. George's. Within 15 minutes, we have a town called Stephenville. It's about 10,000. That's also the riding of the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, that helps for getting this project developed.
Within about an hour drive of us, we have about 50,000 people living. When you think about developing a mine, we're right in the heart of all the infrastructure's been built. We don't have to build very much more except our mine, which helps again to keep costs low. The key advantage of being tied into hydro can't be understated. This site will be 100% battery electric operated when we're in operations. That means no diesel, no exposure to fuel shocks, no explosives, and no drilling and blasting. We'll have zero greenhouse gas footprint. The equivalent of four Newfoundland households a year of greenhouse gases will be emitted from this site. The advantages of that, of course, on marketing and fundraising opens up avenues that aren't available to other mining projects.
Because we're tied into hydro, one of our biggest cost drivers then becomes hydroelectricity, which we pay about CAD 0.06- CAD 0.07 per kWh for that electricity. All these things make the margins much more attractive on our project than a typical salt deposit, and actually many other mining projects in general. We've got a possible mine here. What's the next step? For those who pursue mining projects, you're probably going to think, "Okay, he's going to tell me about all the studies he's got to do." They're done. You're investing in a project that has completed feasibility studies. 43-101s, you may have heard those numbers, of course. Completed October of last year, fresh. Standout is CAD 188 million a year life of mine average annual free cash flow for 25 years.
We have 50 years of additional resource already defined by drilling. For those who are familiar with mining, oftentimes they'll say, "We've got 10 years of gold." We're going to look for more. We're going to high grade this for the first five years and then hope to find better stuff because our geologists are confident. We don't have any of that. We already have 75 years of mine life on paper drilled out. There's no more drilling required. Done. Steady cash flows, not spiky. I should say, we'll talk about the market in a second, but we're selling this salt to cities and governments and municipalities. It's a road safety issue. They buy salt whether the market is good or the market is bad, whether we're in a recession or not.
When the winters are bad for us and good for the salt industry, the price goes up and supplies become short, and we'll talk about that in a second. The next thing that comes after the study is the permitting. Big bad wolf in, especially in Canada and U.S., permitting. How are we going to get this thing permitted? Already has an environmental assessment approved on this project. It took 6 weeks to receive that approval from the provincial government. Not six years. Not six indigenous groups have to be satisfied before they move on with the project. Six weeks. Full support from the community. We have the permits that come out of that EA already in hand as well. We started construction on this project in March of this year. We've started clearing the site, and we started preparing the ground already.
It's very important for us to build the momentum to show that we are building this thing. The elephant in the room, somebody will think initial capital cost. This is a big project. This is not small. It's not a small quarry operation. CAD 600 million is the initial capital cost. Canadian, so not American. We have already engaged a group called Endeavour Financial, very specialized in raising financing packages for the mining industry. 60% of that is going to come from senior secured lenders, export credit agencies, major infrastructure banks, sovereign wealth funds. The type of debt that typically is not even available for a mining project because it's too risky. Gold price could halve tomorrow, and they can't be sure in 5- 10 years they're going to get paid back. This salt industry doesn't operate like that.
You're pretty much guaranteed to get your money back. That opens up. We are going to layer on subordinate debt. This is the type of debt that's at the top of the stack for a traditional mining company and opportunities for government support. Of course, Canada and the U.S. and others are really boosting local development. Then, of course, equity, which we can maybe address at the end. We'll try to minimize that. Let's talk briefly about the market. What underpins our thesis. Salt is a global commodity. Probably not one that people give much thought to. It's just there when we need it, but it's a massive global commodity. Trades globally, but doesn't trade in between regional markets. Because shipping and distribution is so expensive, you get these pockets. North America, China and Australia, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, et cetera.
There's very little salt trade between Canada and Australia or China. Really, we're just focusing on North America and the de-icing market. Within that market, about 36 million tons a year, metric tons a year of salt is consumed, again, primarily 60%-70% of that by cities, governments, municipalities, DOTs, states, and provinces. The rest of it by landowners, airports, parking lots, malls, old folks' homes, people who are worried about liability and things like that. What people don't understand, as I mentioned earlier, is that we import a lot of salt into North America, about 8 million-10 million tons, about 30%-40% in some years, primarily from as far away as Chile and Egypt. These guys can make salt inexpensively. Right? Inexpensively. The minute they put it onto a boat, they're paying global shipping rates.
You can't low-cost labor your way out of global shipping. Boat costs the same everywhere on the water, pretty much. What of course is not built into our base case is what happened in the last three months. The price of fuel skyrocketed 30%, 40%. That, in a low-margin product like salt, the customer bears that cost. The domestic producers use diesel equipment, so their costs are going to go up. We're electric, and our shipping, instead of three weeks from Egypt and Chile, is three days. We're relatively insulated from that. On the cost basis, we are actually competitive with Chile and Egypt at the mine site for the production of salt. Surprising, I know. They make it very inexpensively, because of all those margin advantages that I told you about earlier, it all starts stacking up in our favor.
Then, of course, we have a huge structural shipping advantage, which is where we really derive our profit. These are some headlines, primarily in Ontario, you can see in New York as well, and in the U.S. Major national news, salt shortages. The price of salt tripled overnight in Ontario in January, the spot price. Gold does well, but it doesn't triple in one month, usually. Hundreds of empty trucks outside the largest underground salt mine in the world in Goderich, Ontario. It's a good market when the salt is short, and in a base case market, we're still importing a lot. This is the context of where we're trying to get our salt mine built. Why should you care, right? How do you value salt mine? How do you wrap your head around it? There's not a lot of comps out there.
This is a select list there. On the right is Atlas Salt. We're the only publicly traded salt development company. At the bottom there is our enterprise value, which if you've checked our chart the last couple of days, is out of date already significantly. You can see I've got our feasibility study numbers in Canadian dollars and converted to U.S.. On the left is Compass Minerals. They're the only publicly traded salt-producing company in North America. They trade on the NYSE, enterprise value of about $2 billion. They trade at about a 9x EV to EBITDA multiplier. Point out that if we were in operations today, our EBITDA and free cash flow would be greater than the entirety of Compass Minerals with one quarter of the revenues. That suggests a huge margin advantage, which you can see there. Our EBITDA margin is pushing 80%. Do you have a question?
I do.
Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Pertaining to this particular slide, how did you derive, what kind of multiple did you use to establish an enterprise value for K+S in the U.S. when they were private?
That's the purchase price. CAD 3.2 billion was the purchase price.
Oh, I see. Those were assets.
They were private transactions.
Okay. Thank you.
In 2022, a private equity group called Stone Canyon acquired K+S Americas' salt-producing assets of K+S, which is a German conglomerate, and they paid $3.2 billion for that. K+S is public, still is, but they reported it. That implies close to 13x EV to EBITDA. In December, another private equity group purchased an evaporative salt producer in upstate New York, and paid $900 million in a precedent transaction at nearly 17x EV to EBITDA. The standout is EV to EBITDA. Well, I guess in some industries, it's a typical multiplier. Not typical to see double digits, especially in a boring industry like mining. Mining gold projects get six to eight. Right? Remember, what every point of EV to EBITDA implies is one year of guaranteed cash flow. Right? That's what you're buying, that future cash flow.
This is saying buying a salt mine gets you, at least today, of course, with all the risk and discounting, 12, double-digit EBITDA multipliers. Not a lot of industries have that certainty that they will get that cash. Private equity, smart money knows that cash is good. We can invest it. We can bank on it for decades. These projects are generational. Remember, 75 years I've got in reserve and resource. It's also, though, remember, bankable. Lenders look at this as well. They see the stability of the cash flows. They know that that CAD 257 million there, you don't drop CAD 3.2 billion if you think that that CAD 257 million could be CAD 100 million tomorrow. Right? The lenders aren't going to give you money if they think it could be CAD 100 million tomorrow as well. They know they have that confidence. That's how salt operates.
We just have to build it, obviously. Add about CAD 500 million to our EV. Do the multipliers. Even if you take Compass Minerals, which is a depressed multiplier for reasons that are unrelated to salt, more corporate on their side, 10X, we'd be a CAD 2.3 billion company. Add CAD 500 million, that leaves the room for improvement for the equity investor as we de-risk it. This is a good slide here just to show how simple. A lot of people think mines, for those that have given it much thought, open pits, dams, water ponds are underground. This is under here, about a kilometer and a half underground, or, well, it's 200 m deep, but kilometer and a half horizontally, is our mine. Under there, we have a salt cavern. We have a crushing plant.
Use continuous miners, think Parmesan cheese graters at the restaurant, put into the crushing plant, crushed, conveyed to the surface, and then to the port. No processing plant, no tailing storage facility, no heap leach pad, no waste rock piles. We're 96% pure salt. There's very little waste. The waste goes with the salt, so you don't have to worry about that. No water retention dams, no cyanide, no sulfuric acid, no drilling and blasting, no explosives, no diesel. Clean and green, nice tight footprint. Let's talk about. Ooh, is this a new slide? I should have seen this one. These guys put the slide deck together for us. This just shows how we've started to add institutional support to this company. I'll talk about it here. In 2019, this company was at CAD 0.05. This is typical, right? You have your market debut, CAD 0.05.
During COVID, we need toilet paper, we need necessities like salt. There was a marketing program, normal marketing, but it hit fire at the right time, took the company to over CAD 4. I wasn't here. I joined a year ago. Took the company to over CAD 4, they hired a guy who'd never run a public company before. He didn't know about the capital markets. He didn't know about investor relations. He didn't come to conferences. He didn't do events, or didn't even pick up the phone and talk to his shareholders. When I started, and my CFO in the corner there, when we started a year ago, our share price was CAD 0.36, CAD 0.37. The day before we joined, we did 973 shares were traded that day, before we were announced. Yesterday, we closed at CAD 1.42.
We're at CAD 1.50 right now, and we did 2 million shares in the last 2 days, trade. This is our normal volumes now, 300,000-400,000 shares a day. Share price is up significantly. Why is that? Getting the message out there, doing all the work that had already been done in the background, but also showing that there's value here. Listen, we don't have the benefit of gold uplift or things that are going on in the world that suddenly people start paying attention. We're one salt company trying to get the market and message out there. For those that have invested, we did a raise in October at CAD 0.80. We just closed one on Thursday at CAD 1, or closed one at flow-through, but we closed one just 4 days ago in the market, at CAD 1.20, so they're already up to CAD 1.50 on that.
We're bringing in institutional investors. This is not just a retail story before. This is what happens when it's all retail. Goes up and goes down. This is what happens when you are building the base of the investors who will help you build this company, and that's where we are right now. Last thing I'll leave you with, we've got, 124 million shares outstanding. The three-month daily trading is actually probably more like 300,000 now. We now have about CAD 20 million cash in the bank. All of it's going to running the company and building the asset. Remember, we're permitted already, allowing us to accelerate until we get that project financing secured, which is coming in the next few months as well. We have over 30% insider ownership. No warrants. Last two deals, no warrants we've sold.
That shows that people are investing for the long. They're not here to just clip it and flip it, right? We have a clean balance sheet. And we're starting to get analyst coverage. Company never had analyst coverage before. Again, previous management never talked to investment banks, never tried to build those relationships. Yeah, it's a very exciting time at Atlas Salt. We've got a lot of things on the go, lot of things, like the project financing is obviously what the market is very heavily focused on because that will be significant de-risk on the financing side. We will know that this project is going ahead. I mean, it already is. I would say we're very confident in that project financing. Then we have other things that we can't tell you about, but could be a nice treat in the short term as well.
Thank you very much, everyone.