Thanks Kristy. Great to be in my hometown of Adelaide again and good morning everyone. So I'll provide you an update on Chalice Mining, one of the I guess the highest profile names in the critical minerals sector on the ASX. Our usual cautionary statements, disclosures, these are available on our website if you want to read these in full.
So Chalice, as Kristy said, we're developing a palladium nickel copper project just outside of Perth in WA. It's a fantastic long-life large-scale deposit, truly unique in the country. And we put out a pre-feasibility study in December of last year confirming that it's going to be a very attractive and competitive mining operation over at least a 23-year open pit life. So as you'd appreciate, there's not many projects like that in Australia anymore which start out with sort of plus 20 years of mine life. And it's a serious endeavor. So the company is very much gearing up to develop and take this thing into operations.
We're also a well-recognized explorer. We made this discovery in 2020 and that really opened up the western part of WA for other discoveries. We remain very active on that side. We've got about nine geologists in our exploration function. The same people that made the Gonneville discovery and they remain as hungry as ever. And I'll talk to you about some of our new targets in South Australia and Northern Territory a bit later as well which we've recently added to the portfolio and we're going to be drilling in the middle of this year.
The company's in very good financial position, 70 million in cash and listed investments which means we're funded to get our Gonneville project to the FID, I guess the start line for a construction project in 2028. And the big news this week was we brought two of the highest profile individuals in the PGM and base metal space, Mark Cutifani, Antonio Neil of Anglo American. Mark ran Anglo American, one of the largest diversified miners for 10 years. Those two gentlemen have just come on to our advisory board on Tuesday this week. So delighted to welcome them on and it's really the first time those two gentlemen have really had anything to do with a junior company. So we're very privileged to welcome them as well.
And the investment opportunity at the moment for investors that you know it's been a wild ride. Very volatile set of commodities that we have in the ground there. But really this is sort of Lassonde curve investing if you know the Lassonde curve, if you hear sort of people like Hedley Widdup talk. Typically buying sort of development projects during the permitting and feasibility stages is sort of one of the cheaper entry points into a high quality asset. So I'd encourage you to if you haven't had a look at Chalice before or if you're already owning it, this looks like a very attractive entry point.
So the news around Mark Cutifani, obviously a very very high profile name. There is really no higher profile gentleman in the mining sector globally. They've got an advisory group called Odin in London and they're really working now with us to build capability in the company, get us ready for execution and then really on a transactionary mandate as well. Look for the right partners to bring into the project and the company. I myself am from Adelaide originally. I've been running the company for eight years and been on effectively almost a full cycle now in the PGM sector since the discovery of this amazing ore body. But we're as it says there, we're continuing to strengthen our capabilities and getting very much ready to go and build what is going to be a world class mining operation.
Um is in a great financial position as I mentioned. We are part of the Tim Goyder stable. So, Tim was I guess the most pleased out of anyone to bring a person like Mark Cutifani on onto the advisory board. Um the stock has been volatile of late as has everyone's, but sitting at the moment at about 600 million market cap. Um very good financial position and certainly now a platform for growth.
So, what is the asset? Um it's a long life, large scale, globally competitive new critical minerals mine and it's on the outskirts of Perth. It's going to deliver 220,000 oz a year of PGMs, most of that being palladium, about 7,000 t a year of nickel, 8,000 t a year of copper, and 700 t a year of cobalt. It's a pretty phenomenal diversified revenue cost producer of PGM producer in the Western world. So, it's going to have all the sustaining costs of about 370 US dollars per ounce, which is going to be close to the bottom of the cost curve.
The PFS outlines a 1.4 billion Australian dollar pre-tax NPV, 23% IRR on an 800 million Australian dollar investment, 2.7 year payback, and these are effectively at bottom of the cycle commodity prices. Um so, very very robust set of financial metrics. This is going to happen now. This is a true world class tier one, it's a fundable project. It's a low strip ratio deposit. We're going to dig into high grade mineralization from surface, which makes it even more attractive and we've spent a quarter of a billion dollars now getting the project de-risked to this level to get a pre-feasibility study complete and the regulatory approvals advanced.
So, the deposit itself has 17 million oz of precious metals, close to a million tons of contained nickel and half a million tons of contained copper. We've got about half of that in reserve. At the moment, that's just a function of the amount of drilling we've done. I expect that that reserve and the resource is going to grow substantially over time. We've got the highest level of endorsement from state and federal governments as well. So, if you're curious about whether this gets to the finish line, it gets permitted, gets developed, make no mistake, governments are absolutely saying very, very clearly this is a major project for the country and a strategic project for WA.
So, that gives you a lot of comfort that this will get built. It's going to be Australia's first producer of PGMs. We don't currently have an industry. It is largely Russia and South Africa that produce these metals. And we are funded to get through to FID, so don't expect to see any capital raise or anything like that from us anytime soon.
It's a diversified commodity mix. Most of the revenue is going to come from palladium at this sort of bottom of the cycle commodity price environment, but nickel and copper are very meaningful to the project as well. So, it is a nice diversified mix of base and precious metals and that protects you to a degree from big swings and volatility in individual commodity price environments.
It's going to be in the second quartile of the cost curve. This is the PGM cost curve. The orange bar there is where we're going to sit. We're going to produce about 3% of global PGM supply. Russia sits to the left of us. They produce about 40% and to the right of us is very high-cost South African operations primarily. A few operations in Zimbabwe as well, but you can see there we're going to operate at about a third of the average cost of the South Africans and Zimbabweans. And something like a quarter of our sort of competitors in North America. So, that is exactly where you want to be with a long life asset right at the bottom of the cost curve. You are totally bulletproof down there and you're never sort of getting to a situation where the project goes broke or isn't profitable.
The models the PFS was run at is outputting like I said a 1.4 billion pre-tax NPV and an 8% discount rate 23% IRR. You can see this table on the left-hand side effectively shows what those metrics do as you flex palladium price on the left-hand side the rows and nickel and copper price in the columns there. So recently we saw palladium go to 2,000 US dollars an ounce and that implied as you can see there about a 3 to 3.5 billion dollar current valuation on the asset and that's in the context of what you're paying at the moment like I said about 600 million market cap and as you can see on the right-hand side sort of now as like I said is a reasonable time to buy because we are at a low point in terms of the valuation of the stock relative to the valuation of the asset. So if you're considering an investment this is an ideal time to do so.
The palladium itself, it's not a very well-known metal but it has had very very cyclical price behavior. This is the metal price over the last 7 years or so. We made discovery in 2020 when prices were about 2,000 US dollars an ounce, prices went all the way to 3 and a half thousand US per ounce and then they crashed all the way down to about 900. So we've actually recalibrated the asset to make sure it works at that 900 US an ounce price point and recently you've seen the US come out and say that Russian palladium, obviously they are a strategic adversary of the US, Russian palladium which is 40% of the market, that's going to have a tariff of 133% as well. So, immediately the value of our metal in the ground goes up almost instantly with a decision like that. A little bit of volatility in the last month or so, but the trend looks very very clear to us that this is going up and going up considerably.
It's 9 million oz a year of metal. So, if you think about that, that's an order of magnitude smaller than the gold market. It's a very very small quantity of metal that gets produced. And the area that we're really looking at at the moment, it is obviously a critical mineral like five of our six metals are determined as critical minerals by Western governments. The area where we're really paying attention to is the electronic sector.
As most people may be aware, about 8 million oz a year of gold goes into the electronic sector in chips, sort of connectors, platforms for PCBs, things like that. Palladium is about a third of the price at the moment of gold, and it has effectively almost exactly the same characteristics in terms of conductivity as gold. So, that is a big burgeoning area of palladium demand. And there's a lot of substitution already happening from gold to palladium. And the largest producer is actually outlining at least 1.7 million oz of new demand by 2030 as well.
So, you've got a situation where the supply is effectively fixed. The Russians and South Africans are not going to grow supply, but you've got all these new applications coming in, and that we think is going to really outstrip supply very very quickly, and the price is effectively telling you that in the market at the moment.
So, it's a very large ore body, and it's now got a very very simple flow sheet. We're going to produce three products. We're going to use conventional processing. We're going to produce a copper concentrate, a nickel concentrate. Those are going to go to Western copper and nickel smelters. And then we've got a PGM doré product or a bullion product as well. They're going to be produced at the mine site. Hopefully, we're going to process that locally in Perth at the Perth Mint. Um we've spent $15 million de-risking this flow sheet. Like I said, about $250 million spent by Chalice to get to this point. So, we have not under-invested into understanding how to do this. We know we are on very, very firm foundations now in terms of our knowledge of the ore body and this flow sheet. So, we know this PFS is robust. We know how the asset's going to be developed now.
Uh only about 50% of that resource is actually going to be mined in an open pit based on the PFS. Obviously, there's potential for that open pit to go much, much longer than 23 years. You can see here just how small that 23-year open pit is up on the right-hand side there. There's 8 million oz of PGMs in that pit. And then half of the ore body is still in the ground below that. So, you can imagine this is going to go on for decades and decades beyond sort of the life of me and my kids. There is no sort of shortage of resource here at this project. It is a huge ore body and a huge geological complex.
Um in terms of what we're doing at the moment, we're financing the project. Um we're speaking to all the government sources at the moment. They are the lowest cost options to get debt. We're going to finance about 60 to 70% of our $820 million capex through debt. Uh and then really the royalty and streaming companies are being engaged in the near term ready to look at streams on other minor metals. So, we are looking at things like gold and platinum favorably at the moment to finance the project as well. In an ideal world, we leave effectively no further equity to be done to bridge that financing gap. Um but obviously, that's a function of the work ongoing at the moment to finance the project. Like I said, there is no shortage of appetite at the moment to finance large critical minerals projects in safe jurisdictions.
As well as that, um we've got off-take discussions. Uh our approvals are well and truly underway. We're about halfway through the regulatory approvals process. Like I said, we've got all the endorsement from government to support those processes. We're running a bankable feasibility study at the moment. There's about $25 million to spend on that to get that completed. And then we'll be ready to construct the project in the first half of 2028. And certainly welcoming Mark Cutifani and sort of ex-Anglo American type people into the company is a no-brainer to help achieve that.
Um and then we remain very very active on the exploration side. Our primary focus over the last sort of 5 years since the discovery has been the western part of WA. We've got about 40 copper, gold, nickel, PGM targets remaining to be tested. We're very very active on exploration. It's not something that gets a lot of attention in the market when this exploration is getting done alongside such a world-class asset. But I guess what's topical recently as well is we've got five new iron oxide copper gold targets between South Australia and Northern Territory to test in the middle of this year. And I guess some of the more exciting targets are in the northeast part of the Kurnalpi province. Um so north of Kalgoorlie where Sandfire's just gone in and bought that project. Um there's a number of untested gravity targets here that we get very very excited about because they are coincidental or offset slightly from magnetic features. So we're going to drill three diamond holes in the middle of the year, as well as two additional diamond holes into total greenfield targets in the Northern Territory as well. So expect news to come from those programs of exploration over this year as well.
So, it's a fantastic company now supported by absolutely globally recognized leaders in the sector, true industry heavyweights. We've got a fantastic asset, fantastic development project. It is a good time to buy development projects at this point of the Lassonde curve and we remain very active like I said in exploration as well. So, you're getting a bit of a free hit at that exploration upside as well. So, I'd encourage you to take a look and please come and see me at the booth if you'd like to understand more. Thank you.
