Good morning, everybody. Our next presentation is from 5E Advanced Materials. You have 30 minutes.
Welcome. Good morning, everyone. I am Paul Weibel. I am the CEO of 5E Advanced Materials. Appreciate everyone's attendance today and looking forward to walking you through the opportunity and the story. 5E is a boron-based project. We are located actually two hours south of here, directly off of Interstate 40, south off the 15 in Newberry Springs, California. Our primary mineral is boron. We are in the development cycle of the mining process. We have all major mining permits, that includes a record of decision with the federal BLM, a conditional use and approved reclamation plan with the State of California, and an underground injection control permit with US EPA.
Have been operating a demonstration plant for about the last two years. The focus has been, yes, de-risking, but also producing product, i.e., about a ton a day of either boric acid or gypsum, which goes into cement, and using that product for ultimately customer qualification, funneling that to the customers, and really setting up discussions for offtake agreements. We most recently did sign our first offtake agreement. We're working on that pipeline, and we have various proposals at different points in that process. The boron market is ultimately a structural global oligopoly. Two companies dominate 85% of global supply, with the smaller of the two actually depleting for sale right now and has maybe at most 13 years left. Outside of that, there's only about four or five global deposits of boron globally.
Often get asked, "What does boron go into?" It goes into 300+ different applications, makes life as we know it exist. It's very simple items such as Borax in the cleaning section of the grocery store to all forms of glass. That's textile, fiberglass, Pyrex, and LCD, as well as ferroboron for permanent magnets. There's been a ton of tension on the rare earth side of the magnet chain. The other piece of the magnet chain is ferroboron, which is about 20% of the magnet. Again, that's a Chinese-dominated supply chain. Then the third hardest material on planet Earth is ultimately ferroboron, which is why we have the tank on the front screen because that's what's used for Kevlar and tank armor. Where we are is we did a large equity offering in February that gave us about two years of runway.
That gave us the capital to really focus on the business, work on the offtakes, a couple of the derivative products that we're going to have in our portfolio, and really take this to FID to stand up the next critical mineral mine in the U.S. Ultimately, this project is truly fundamentally underpinned by supply and demand dynamics, which we can get into shortly, where supply is constrained and demand continues to grow. From a capital structure perspective, we have a very clean capital structure, 41.5 million shares outstanding. There is no debt on the project today. We have one tranche of warrants up at $18 a share. That's a good problem to have. Ultimately, very clean. We were at one point in time funded by convertible notes. Those notes have all since equitized. We have two groups that ultimately are our larger shareholders.
You have Bluescape Energy Partners out of Dallas, Texas. They're about 30%. Ascend, which is a Singapore-based private equity fund, sits about 20%. Then the rest of the float is high-quality institutional investors. Just want to use this as an opportunity to talk about our story. Our resource was actually discovered in the 1960s. It was discovered by Duval and Pennzoil. They were drilling for oil and gas. They had operations in Bakersfield, California. Our site's about an hour and a half east of Bakersfield. Didn't hit oil and gas, but actually ended up hitting colemanite, which is a calcium-based boron mineral. That led to a pretty elaborate exploration program and pilot plant operations in the '80s with the major permitting initiative in 1990, where we then in 1994 got the record of decision in the California State Permit.
Fast-forward, project didn't get developed just because the price of boron was not where it is today. Times have changed. There's a lot more future-facing applications that require borates. There's also value in use where there's very few replacements. A group of Australians identified the project, did a share exchange for the operating company that held the resource and the real property and the permits, and IPO'd on the ASX. An initial exploration program to confirm up the resource. That led to the metallurgy. We needed one additional permit, which was the underground injection control permit with U.S. EPA. We obtained that. We built a pilot plant. We've been operating that pilot plant for two years, and now we have completed a pre-feasibility study with proven and probable reserves.
Excellent line of sight on the capital that it's going to cost, and that's really underpinned by ultimately two years of operating data, millions of gallons of solution coming out of the ground. That formed the basis and the scope for our commercial design, and now we're focusing on offtakes, i.e., we know the pricing clauses we need to hit and achieve. Ultimately, we can then go to U.S. EXIM Bank with our $285 million LOI and get a project debt finance facility and know that we actually have the interest coverage ratio to pay back that principal debt as well as meet all of our OPEX obligations. Near-term catalysts here. I think we have a great team today, and the focus and the emphasis is really on we want to build a critical minerals project here in California.
There's probably five or six decent projects in the U.S. We are one of those five or six, and I think you see two of them getting up and running. Obviously, Thacker Pass, Lithium Americas, has gotten their financing. Perpetua just closed their EXIM loan. 5E's now in that development cycle where we're getting ready to go into FEED engineering. The gating item for us on FEED engineering is ultimately we need those customer contracts. We need about 30,000, 40,000 tons under offtake. Then because when you go into FEED, it's about an $8.5 million proposition, we're targeting a smaller EXIM loan for that process. That would be non-dilutive that you could refi with a larger project finance facility.
Going into FEED, from our board's perspective, they're pretty rational in the sense that like, hey, if you're going to go spend that money in FEED, you want to know that you're going to have a plant and that you're ultimately going to produce a product where customers are going to buy. There's a big emphasis right now on working with customers to secure those offtake agreements today. Let's talk about the market per se. The borate market, obviously you start with the geology. There's a handful of minerals where borates come from, and then we'll make a boric acid. Boric acid goes into, as I mentioned, many different applications. For many years it's been dominated by this global oligopoly, which is Rio Tinto's U.S. Borax. They're actually in Boron, California, maybe two hours from here.
65% of global supply is actually the Turkish government. It's a state-owned mining enterprise called Eti Maden. Outside of those two players, you have a few small other producers, one in Russia, one or two in South America, and the production that occurs on those continents tends to be very captive. i.e., if you're going to be producing South America, that's coming from traditional ulexite, which is a high sulfate-based boric acid that tends to go right into agriculture in the South American market. What we've seen here is actually a really interesting time in the borate market. One, Rio Tinto U.S. Borax is for sale right now, that probably a deal will get announced in the next four to six weeks. They do have a very finite mine life, approximately 13 years, and they have a very steep variable cost profile.
Costs are going up, and that's a function of a depleting mine and ultimately as grade decrease, you need to, in an open pit, move that much ore to generate that same equivalent production tonnage. What we saw in 2020 coming into 2025, right now actually everyone in the borate world is negotiating their contracts for this upcoming season. What we saw over the last three years, and this is publicly available data out there, prices have gone up by Rio Tinto, 10% per year , every year. Each year, the Turkish, Eti Maden, did not really follow. This past year, they followed with 11% price increases. Also, both producers did hit their customers with an out-of-contract $65 per ton price increase driven by sulfuric acid pricing. Really interesting dynamics.
With Rio being sold, there was actually always another second, much smaller California producer called Searles Valley Minerals. They are actually based in Trona. They filed bankruptcy on Monday. That's a very sad series of unfortunate events where earthquakes and legacy soda ash became uncompetitive and they ultimately needed to file, and they have exited the boric acid market. What that has done is it essentially pushed the U.S. into a complete deficit where demand has outpaced supply. I subscribe to two different pricing services, and then we heard from a very large LCD glass manufacturer that spot prices today are at $1,400 a ton in China, as well as India and Japan. There is no excess product in the U.S. I actually had an inbound through our website to our commercial team two days ago.
Sodium borate, which is kind of boric acid's cousin on the sodium side. A customer out of Asia looking for 12,000 metric tons a year contract. Decent customer. Some of these LCD glass manufacturers, they'll buy 80,000, 90,000 tons of product a year. A 1,000 ton a month customer, solid customer. You're hitting a single. Desperate, can I get a request for a quote? Finally, called the next day through the website, got me on the line, he's too small that Rio or Eti will sell to him. I asked him, I was like, "Hey, can you be transparent on your pricing?" Because he's buying from distribution in China. He painted this story how these distributors, because this is almost a monopoly market, we have no flexibility.
If we have a relationship with the distributor and they come in and they see we've bought someone else's product, they'll actually cut us off from all of our other chemical supplies. I said, "Well, can you guide me on where you're paying on price." Sodium borate has traditionally been like a $450. It's more of a commodity. It's a bigger piece of the market, but $450 to $500 a ton. He was paying $1,400 a ton from his distributor in China. What we've seen, and we've kind of known this before, is that this market, obviously there's a couple major drivers to price. A reagent like sulfuric acid will drive the price, no questions asked. Freight, in volatile periods of freight, that can impact pricing. So can inflation.
The biggest driver to price, and we've seen this with multiple chemicals and commodities, is supply and demand. When there is no supply, tell me what the price is. You can name your price. This market, because it has that natural oligopoly structure, is that. The second-largest global producer is depleting and not expanding capacity. This fundamental supply and demand, plus you tie in some of the geopolitical aspects, is ultimately why this project is very real and why it will get built. I want to talk a little about what we've done and how we have de-risked this.
We do have a demonstration plant and what we've done, while we were going through our pre-FEED engineering process, we were taking mined solution or solution that had come out through our belt filter or at different points of the process, and we had engaged Fluor out of Greenville, South Carolina, to be our EPC firm. Obviously, Fluor put together a proposed flow sheet, and what they'll do is they'll go and they'll talk to different OEMs that make filters, dryers, centrifuges in our design, and they'll get budgetary bids. That ultimately forms the basis of a capital estimate to build the project. The major litmus test that needs to be done during this time is you need to actually go to those vendors and send them samples of a representation of what their kit will be filtering or drying at commercial scale.
This is how you know that your flow sheet will not change and you can strip out any technical risk. We did, and it was about a half a million dollars, but we did all the vendor testing during the pre-FEED phase. I can say with a high degree of confidence that as you get ready for FEED and we go and stage the gate into FEED , we can maintain time and budget because there's no risk that the flow sheet will change. The other thing we have done is we've focused on qualifying our product in multiple different industry segments. We've gone from cellulose insulation to agriculture to LCD glass as well as boron carbide. We can make a product that all those industries could use our boric acid. Broader economic picture.
The PFS economics have a $435 million capital estimate that has about a $50 million contingency. Also baked into that capital estimate is a 20-megawatt cogen facility. We actually just completed a trade-off study where, listen, we're two miles off Interstate 40. We have options from an infrastructure perspective. We could tie into Kinder Morgan's Mojave Natural Gas Pipeline. We also do have a megawatt of shore power today from Southern California Edison. We asked Southern California Edison to give us a proposal to tie into the grid to provide 20 megawatts of electricity. Their price, $110 million. What's in that 435 is a $53 million solar gas-powered turbine that'll ultimately produce steam and then ultimately produce the power. The power estimate is in that. There's obviously options to go off-balance sheet in that process, but also baked into the estimate.
At commercial scale, we'll produce 130,000-136,000 tons of boric acid. We'll also produce about 140,000-150,000 tons of gypsum. We have optionality to actually toggle into a calcium chloride product. A great example of why we put this into the design. Our two major reagents are hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid. We mine with hydrochloric acid, and we can reproduce hydrochloric acid above ground by. Let's take a step back here. Our mineral is colemanite. Colemanite is predominantly two elements on the periodic table, boron, which is the real high-value item, and calcium. When we mine, we inject solution underground. That dissolves the minerals, and then we have boron and calcium in what we call a pregnant leach solution. We pump that solution to surface, we crystallize out the borates and filter that, dry it, bag it.
You now have a waste stream which is predominantly calcium. What we'll do at that point in time is we'll put sulfuric acid into that process, and that does two things. It precipitates out gypsum, which is drywall. It can go into agriculture. We're blessed that we have Cemex and CalPortland Cement about 45 miles down the road from us. That's who we'll offtake with for that gypsum. It actually aqueously, when you react that calcium and sulfuric acid, it aqueously regenerates hydrochloric acid, which that, with some makeup water, becomes your feedstock to go back downhole and mine again. The price of sulfuric acid recently has been heavily scrutinized because obviously sulfur comes out of the Strait of Hormuz, and then China's a big supplier of sulfuric acid.
What was traditionally a $160 a ton commodity has now been like $400 a ton. You want to talk supply and demand, great example of how that can impact pricing. One of the things, because we have optionality in our design, hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid are incredibly, over long-term periods, positively correlated. There's about a $20-$30 per ton spread. While sulfuric is traditionally $160 a ton, hydrochloric would maybe be $180-$185. What's really interesting is that for the most part, HCl has seen a little bit of uptick in pricing. Maybe it's gone to like $190, $195, while sulfuric has gone to $400. We have flexibility in our design where we wouldn't produce the gypsum, we would just produce more calcium. We could make another by-product, thus we could mitigate the impact of the pricing.
There's flexibility in the design. As you can see on the bottom, we have boric acid. We've added a lithium PEA to the design. That's about $50 a credit, so it'll reduce our cash costs. Cash costs all in, is trending at about $5-$550 per ton. We forecast prices in these economics at like $1,160 per ton. I think there's a ton of upside to run. Seeing sodium borate at $1,400 a ton and boric acid today at $1,400 a ton would greatly impact IRRs and NPVs in this model. We're set up for some real opportunity. From a team perspective, we have the right team. With a smaller microcap company, obviously team matters, and it takes a little bit of time to get there. I can comfortably say we have a great team. I have Lonnie, who was at Albemarle.
Josh comes out of oil and gas. Mark sold borates for both, for the oligopolies. He sold it for Rio and Eti. Ultimately, Rod's built projects all over the globe. Got a great board, we're headed in the right direction. I know we're short on time, just what are the catalysts coming up here? A couple of things. We applied for a $31 million DOE grant. I heard that reviewed as we speak. Could be announced any day. Will be a competitive process, again, would be a major catalyst to rerate. I have a plan B where there's another grant opportunity. We took that $31 million grant, slimmed that down to a $9 million grant, and I submitted that on Monday. The winners for that would be announced by August or early September. It dovetails into a Shark Tank pitch at the end.
They filter you down through that process. There's line of sight on some non-dilutive funding. We took, it was pretty nominal. We're starting to do R&D on ferroboron. We've dialed in the heating parameters needed to go into the arc furnace, and we'll test on July 1 and July 2 in a few weeks. Again, we're under NDA with a handful of the U.S. magnet producers. This is a need. There's pull-through demand where they're asking, "Hey, could you vertically integrate because we need the FeB?" There's discussions with national labs, ultimately, I think there's a smaller EXIM loan in the near term that we've been working on that we're close to getting across the line. There's catalyst opportunities and obviously the offtakes.
My target's about, in the near term, 30,000, 40,000 tons under offtake and the market likes offtakes because that ultimately demonstrates potential future revenue. Just to close it out, California-based project. If you want boron exposure in a portfolio, we are the only stock to play. It's limited clearly by the geology, and ultimately there's been a big emphasis on de-risking this, and we're here to ultimately build this at commercial scale. With that, I can ask any questions. Appreciate the time.