Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, Chrissy, always so kind. I've been coming to this event for many years, and we've been chipping away at Bannerman for 20 years. And I'd like to convey just the extent of the sense of excitement and pride that I have in our whole team with what I'm about to present to you today. That's our mine in construction, and what we are now in the process of doing is delivering Bannerman as a production business. We're fully funded, we're strongly price leveraged, and we're now strategically partnered with the Etango mine in construction.
So if you look at Bannerman as an investment proposition, we now have a fully funded solution both via CNNC and a very healthy cash balance via our capital raising that I'll talk to you about last week. We're a globally significant resource, more than 200 million pounds at the single Etango ore body, very low technical risk, and that's important in the current environment where it hasn't been easy going for new supply or returning brownfield supply coming into the market. We're good at what we do, and we have strong social license in Namibia. We've got a great team, and I'll introduce you to them. And now we're in early works for a year, moving into fully formed construction as soon as we complete the financing at the end of this month.
Quick corporate snapshot. This is the one that's on our website, which was released as part of the underwritten placement that we did last week. So these numbers change a little bit, but the basics of it are that we will have a pro-forma cash and liquid securities balance of more than $200 million once we complete the financing transaction with CNNC that I'll talk to you about shortly. No debt, no corporate debt, and no debt at the project. We will build Etango without any debt in the project as well, which puts us in a tremendously robust position.
Covered by 11 different analysts, so we're now very well recognized in the sector. That's fairly rare for a sub-billion-dollar company on ASX, and a really strong register. Share price has come off a bit, which I think for everyone in the room is good news. Today you can buy at $3.70 when some of the world's largest resources funds, numerous multi-billion-dollar resources specialists, were very happy to bid at $4 a share last week. So good opportunity for everyone in the audience.
We're in Namibia. So if you don't know, Namibia is, in my view, the premier development destination for bringing a uranium mine to market. I've been in Namibian uranium since 2009. Five or six of those years I was living in Namibia. We know the country really well. The country knows us really well. Rössing uranium mine's been going for 50 years, and that would be our expectation with such a massive ore body at Etango, particularly given it's open at depth.
I'd like to talk to you about the financing because that's really the big news for Bannerman since the last time we presented last year at this event. This year we have now created a fully funded and optimal financing solution. We've done that via a strategic financing. So rather than diluting at the headco level in a fairly choppy equities market over the last 12 months, we made the decision that we are far more robust as an entity and as a project if we bring in a partner. And that's been a process that was undertaken for a good couple of years.
I've been really proud with the outcome, not only for its financial and other benefits, but we achieved the prime candidate in terms of who we wanted to work with, and that's CNNC. They're the largest of the Chinese utilities. They own the Rössing uranium mine that I mentioned. So we have a big brother looking after us 40 km away from our development. They've also got the most voracious uranium appetite in the world. They are building the majority of all of those nuclear power plants that are built in China, and we've got to know them because they bought Rössing in 2019. And many of Rössing's management I consider personal friends, and I've got a very detailed understanding of what CNNC are like to work with.
Now, what really makes this partnership hum is, apart from the fact that they deliver all of the construction funding into the joint venture in return for their 45% shareholding, we have an offtake agreement that I'm quite happy to stand up here and tell you is unique in the uranium world, and it is the most powerful offtake agreement that has ever been signed. Now, why would I say that? We have the obligation over the entire life of mine to sell 60% of our uranium to CNNC.
What makes it really work is that it is entirely market-related prices at the time of delivery. It's a blend of the stability that we get from the long-term price as well as the variability and upside that you get from the spot price. Most importantly, as Bannerman, not the joint venture, as Bannerman, we get to decide when we put it on the ship, and CNNC's obligation is to take it. So we can get ahead of time. We can fall behind. Our only obligation is on the day that we shut the mine, we must have made sure that 60% of that actual production has been delivered to CNNC.
In addition to that, the working capital headroom that we get from this is a game changer for a single-asset company like ourselves. We're paid very soon after we put it on the ship. Traditionally in this sector, and certainly with the Western utilities, you put it on the ship, it sails to the converter. They then get a period of time in which they can call for whether they want it or not and when they want it, and then they pay you 30 days after it's moved to their conversion account. That is typically five or six months of working capital, and investors have learned that over the last year with some of our peers who've come back into production and had to grapple with these issues.
So what it also means is that the 40% that doesn't get delivered to CNNC, we as Bannerman have absolute control over who we sell it to, under what terms, and when we sell it. That's important for us building a uranium business because if you don't have the proprietary ownership of those customer relationships, you're a mining business, not a uranium business. But we will have that ownership, and what our partner finds out is what we sold and how much we got.
We can also explicitly, with the agreement of our partner, offer delivery preference to utilities in respect to that 40%. Now, for anyone in this room who, in John's case, has developed uranium mines, or for the others who are close to developing them, utilities like to try and strike a good discount with emerging producers because they claim that there's delivery uncertainty and there's risk. We don't carry that. We're now in a position to negotiate the strongest possible terms with the balance of that production because we can say to them, you're at the front of the queue, not the back of the queue behind CNNC.
And the magic in this deal, I've talked about this being such an extraordinarily strong offtake agreement. And the reason is really simple. Because it's a partnership, it's a joint venture. And CNNC know that they get 45% of the value. And they want this project to succeed as much as we do. That strategic partnership with a global leader over time will develop into a whole range of benefits. But the most important one, I think, for anyone in this room who's looking at advanced developers, you put this alternative up against debt finance.
If things get wobbly in the market, in the country, and what you're doing, maybe ramp up. If you've got a debt finance here, the thing they want coming out of that project is their money back. No matter what, we've got a partner who wants the pounds out of this project to feed their voracious uranium appetite that is going to continue to accelerate over coming decades. I would go as far as saying they want the pounds out of the ground even more than we do, and that will form a very solid basis and gives us an additional level of robustness as we go forward. So if we just move on, just to remind everyone what Etango actually is.
There's been a tremendous amount of work done. I did say 20 years, and that's an actual fact, but we haven't sat around over 20 years. We've done an enormous amount of technical work on this project to de-risk it in every way possible. It benefits from being, as far as uranium mining goes, a really simple, low technical risk project. I'd go as far as saying when we're in production, Etango will be the simplest uranium mine in the world. It's lower grade, but it's heap leachable. It's at surface. It's conventional open pit. It utilizes the skills that Namibia has developed in spades over the last 50 years.
Our initial production we call Etango-8. It's 8 million tons throughput. Thank you for all of that being highlighted earlier by Phil Hoskins. But what's important is we can readily expand to 16 million tons. That means our output goes from 3.5 million pounds up to, at this stage, 6.7 million pounds with the potential to bottleneck from here. Now, because of the financing situation that we're in and the strength that we have and the nature of our joint venture partner, I think the conversation now has changed on our expansion. It's not if we will expand. It's clearly in the mind of all of the investors and those who've come into our raising recently. It's just a question of when we expand and under what circumstances.
Just very quickly, that's the 8 million tons initial production that we call Etango-8. And the key metrics there, we're producing cash cost of 35, just under 36, all-in sustaining cost of under $40. So tremendous margins and a capital cost which of course is now taken care of, and that funding is being provided by CNNC.
Very strong management team. Happy to talk to you about those individuals at the booth, or if you want to talk management teams in the panel session later today, come real prepared with your questions. Gavin Chamberlain as the CEO. Many of you who've been coming to these events will see that my title's changed from CEO to Executive Chairman. And that was to make room for someone of the caliber of Gavin Chamberlain. Etango is an order of magnitude more simple than the last uranium mine he built, which was Husab. 10 times the cost, 10 times the complexity, and as Siobhan's told us, second-largest uranium mine in the world. So for Gavin, this is well within competence, and he's delivered an outstanding job, as I'll show you.
So if I'll just show you a quick video, the good news is the video is working, as you can see. The bad news is if you go to YouTube, you get the lovely voice of Emma Culver, who is our investor relations manager. We're not going to try sound. That's pushing our luck. So you've got me instead. What we're looking at there is that is the Etango site. This video is about three months old. So as soon as we finish the quarter, we'll release a new one. That's the primary crusher. We've half sunk that primary crusher. It's two and a half kilometers away from the secondary crusher. That is just the sheer scale of this mine and how big this deposit is.
The other things you can notice is that topography. Obviously, we don't have people there. We don't have any of the issues that you sometimes get in high-density environments in Africa. And you can see that the environment to work in, that desert environment, is very straightforward. We're about a year into construction, or what we call early works. And I'm enormously proud of the team to say that we have so far delivered on time and on budget.
You're looking at the stockpile, primary stockpile tunnel there. I'll show you a photo at the end that's now been completed. Looking through the comminution circuit, you've got the secondary and tertiary crushers there through to screening and then onto the coarse ore stockpile in the background there. That was what you saw on the very first slide. I was there with the whole board a couple of months ago, and I've been on site twice in the last three months. The quality to which this build is being undertaken is exceptional. It's what we would expect from our team, but we're very proud to see it all the same.
We'll take a left turn just now, and we'll start looking at the heap leaching pads. Heap leaching does not always work in uranium or any other commodity. It does require a very specific group of attributes, and the reason why Etango's come so far and attracted both high-quality investors and partners is that those attributes are there in spades. It's a very, very unique ore that enables it to be heaped just so well. Now, we didn't just rely on labs to tell us that. We built a demonstration plant and operated that since 2014, so that we've got the absolute confidence in this process to allow us, enable us to start investing.
So you can see the heap leach pads there. Those pads in total, that's a kilometer by 300 m, and it's got a 2% fall. So if you can imagine that, anyone who's an engineer in the room, civil engineer, you've got a 300 m distance that needs to fall by 2%. So the precision going on is extraordinary. This is some of the mining that we're doing for the heap leach drainage layer. It's a kilometer by 300 m by 800 mil high. So it's quite a substantial mining operation in itself just for that drainage layer.
As I said, this is all on time, on budget, been delivered exceptionally well by the Namibian team and contractors. And then just finally, we're looking at the water pipeline that's already in construction to ensure that we don't have any long lead items that can trip us up and to ensure that we're very comfortable with everything that's on the critical path of construction. So if I just move forward, that's the latest shots of site progress. We can move through that.
Just in summary, you know, as an investor here, why would you look at Bannerman Energy and an Etango project? First of all, we've got scale, more than 200 million pounds in our ore body. It's scalable. We're building at an initial scale and then doubling it. Exceptional leverage because of that CNNC offtake agreement. As we stand today, we're more than 90% with uncapped, uncollared leverage to future uranium prices with all of the money we need to build our project. There are no other stories like that in the world, let alone ASX. And we will be producing our first uranium from 2028.
As I said, we're fully funded, we're offtake enabled, very financially robust with $200 million in the bank once we've completed the deal. And the simplicity of this mine really de-risks it. So, as I say, we're trading, for all of you folk out there, I've got a discount for you today. We're trading at $3.70 when multi-billion-dollar funds were climbing over themselves to put in at $4. So I'd really commend this to you as an investment, and looking forward to standing here next year with some even more specky videos and photos.
