Good morning and welcome to the Aurelia Metals 2025 Investor Day. My name is Martin Cummings. I'm the CFO of Aurelia. Let's just shut this up then. This is a really exciting event for us to take you through our business, our strategy, and our plans to execute what is an exciting growth story. You've all been following us over the last couple of years, where we have focused on recapitalizing the business, stabilizing our operating performance at our Peak operation, and developing our new high-grade zinc mine at Federation on budget. The culmination of this work is today, where we can take you through our outlook for the next three years, which continues to build on that foundation.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land that we meet today, and I pay my respects to Elders both past and present. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we operate. Just to the next slide, and I'd just like to introduce the Aurelia team that we have here today. Firstly, to my colleagues on the executive team, led by Bryan Quinn, our Managing Director and CEO. Andrew Graham, over near the tree, is our Chief Development and Technical Officer, and he leads our growth, technical exploration, and sustainability activities. Angus Wyllie, in front of me here, is our General Manager for the Cobar Region, and he previously ran our Dargues operation. Jessie Hommelhoff, sitting over there, is our General Manager of People and Culture, who recently joined the company.
Rochelle Carey, our General Counsel and Company Secretary. It is also great to have some of our other senior leaders, our high talent that we have in the business with us today, who will present to you. Ryan Cunningham, excuse me, is our Technical Services Manager for the Cobar Region, and he leads our mine engineering, planning, and mine geology teams. Jonathon Thompson is not in the room currently, but will be here shortly, who is our Head of Sustainability, which covers our safety, environment, and community activities. Todd McGilvray, our Head of Exploration, over with Andrew, and he has been driving the excellent results we have been seeing in discovery lately. Just onto the agenda for today, we will begin with Bryan taking you through an overview of the business and our strategy. From there, we have organized the day into the pillars of our strategy.
The first pillar being operate with discipline. Angus and Ryan will take you through what we are doing to maximize the value of our operations in the Cobar Region and the ramp-up of Federation and the commencement of development of Great Cobar. For right people, right mindset, Jessie will outline how we plan to attract, build, and retain a high-achieving workforce. She will then hand over to Andrew and Todd, who will take you through focused growth, outlining our exciting exploration opportunities, as well as the projects we are looking at next to deliver our strategic ambitions. Finally, I will provide an overview of our balance sheet and capital management priorities, and I will take you through our FY 2026 guidance and our outlook for FY 2027 and FY 2028. I apologize, in between there, it will actually be Andrew and Jona, who will take you through our sustainability as well.
At that point, we'll break for 10 minutes. We'll end the audio stream at that point, and then we'll come back for Q&A. If I could please ask all questions, we'll take them as part of the Q&A. With that, I'd just like to hand over to Bryan. Bryan is a qualified mining engineer, Bachelor of Engineering in Mining, and a Master's of Finance. He has a long, distinguished career spanning 35 years, both in international and local roles, covering many commodities, both upstream and downstream. Bryan worked in both technical and operational and board-level roles across BHP for most of that time. Before leaving BHP, he had President Accountabilities across Africa and the Americas before joining Oz Minerals in a senior executive role.
BHP, when they took over Oz Minerals, Bryan chose not to return to the mothership and instead decided to embark on another challenge with us at Aurelia. He joined the business in June 2023. Just an interesting fact about Bryan, you will see him limping around, and many of you have seen him limping much more than he is today. He did a pretty major skiing accident back at the start of the year. He tells me he tore his MCL, ACL, PCL, and meniscus. I'm not sure exactly what else there is in a knee to tear, but it sounds like he did the full set. He does intend on being at this year's ski trip, so the rehab is well underway. With that, I'll hand over to you, Bryan.
Yeah, thanks. It's Bryan Quinn, the Managing Director and CEO. Thanks for joining everyone today. Look, this is a really important milestone, as Martin pointed out. We've got the opportunity to take you through some of the strategic objectives of the company and also look at the timing of some of the projects, outcomes we expect to deliver, and also the value we're creating for the shareholders. My objective today in today's presentation is that you leave with the information you need to be confident in your investments with Aurelia and get to meet some of our team as well, which is important so that you can understand what they're working on. Today you'll see a lot of detail on what we're planning to achieve and how it aligns to the strategic outcomes and objectives as well. I really thought it's worthwhile starting with the how.
Before we move into the mechanics of our business, I really think it's important we talk about what the foundations of the company are, which is really the how. It's really the metals and our values because it's the core to how we deliver the plan that you're going to hear today. Both the value and the purpose were actually reset two years ago when I just joined the company. It was actually reset by a broad leadership team. It wasn't just the ERT. It was including a lot of managers in the organization and some superintendents. We defined, first of all, the purpose of the organization to be a developer, an operator of choice, the base metals that power the future.
Once we defined the purpose, we really spent a lot of time with the leaders working through the values that we expect of each other and the values that we're expecting to build the organisation from. These are the fundamental backbone of the organisation. We want people to obviously care for the business, care for safety, care for how we do our job. We want people to be curious on a daily basis. Every day is an opportunity to improve. We want people to work as one team. You don't and you cannot do it by yourself. We obviously want people to be nimble. In a small organisation, we really need people to be nimble so we can do the best we can and get on with the job and get the best value.
As a result, the values are the engine on how we explore, plan, develop, operate, and sell our metals to the market. This is how we expect everyone in the organization to think and the culture that we aspire to have our people living every day. We expect everyone to work as one team with these clear responsibilities. Like I said, care for each other, make sure that people go home safely the way they come to work, make sure that we are empowering our people to have good curiosity, and also making sure that we are doing these things in a very simple, nimble way so that we're not holding up ourselves for bureaucracy.
For those investors and stakeholders who are following today, I guess you will know what it feels like when you're in an organization where you have a good set of values and also where people believe and work toward those values. When everyone has the same sense of purpose and when you're focusing to getting the culture right, you will get the results that follow. For those, obviously, who are listening, you've probably been in those organizations, and that's the organization we're working towards. For context today, what I want to do is just mainly Martin introduced the leadership team, but I think it's worthwhile just talking briefly about how we're organized. When we go through the presentation, you'll see the flow of our strategic pillars and each of our ERT members and their various team members will talk.
It is also important to know how we're actually organized to deliver our objectives as a company since it is very much around deliverable. If I could just start by really sort of saying, as Martin introduced Angus, he's accountable for really delivery of the agreed strategy and plan in the region. He needs to make sure that we're obviously doing the plan, committing to the plan, and actually achieving the plan. That includes both deliverables and also both operational and in a sustainable way also. He will talk through our operating with discipline pillar. Jessie joined us recently. Her accountability really is to ensure that our culture in town is what we need to deliver the current performance levels and also deliver the future growth of the company as well.
We want to attract and retain the right people at all levels, and we really need a really good framework and process to ensure we get there because it's a tough market, as we all know, in the mining industry to get good people, retain them, and to have them maximize our performance. Andrew, as Martin also introduced, he's looking for the right opportunities and value options for the business to grow in a value-add way, provide governance on the delivery of our plans for both sustainability and technical. Andrew's focused on growth through our exploration using our existing infrastructure, but also keeping a sharp eye on what's coming around us over the fence as well with our neighbors and others. Andrew also took the opportunity to help us with and lead the Dargues remediation and rehabilitation process we're going through at the moment as well.
As Martin introduced himself, obviously, Martin's role is really to ensure our revenue is maximized through the marketing and sales, cash and balance sheets remain robust, and we have good capital management, a profit-generating business, in addition to looking around the corner at what risks are coming and what improvement we need to be adopting to the business as well. Lastly, Rochelle in the corner is obviously in charge of ensuring our team are working within the regulations and protecting the company for legal matters, upholding governance standards, compliance requirements, and oversight of our contracts, while also supporting our board governance.
This is the executive leadership team who are accountable to deliver the purpose and embed the values of the company and take the strategic objectives forward that we're going to discuss today and ensuring that we set these expectations of the company and everyone inside the company so we can deliver the results. Sorry, how do I go back? At a high level, Aurelia has been performing well against our peers over the past two years with over 200% increase. What does this mean? I guess if you invested two years ago, well done on your investment so far, and please stay with us. For those investing more recently, we're welcome to the journey. As you'll see today, we have a lot more coming and a lot more opportunity that we can really generate further value for this company.
Hopefully, both the groups before and current and more recent can appreciate from the presentation of the leadership team today that we have got a strong desire to really continue the journey of increasing market value and profits beyond the current value of the company, as shown in the graph, and provide profits and returns to shareholders for the future. At just over AUD 500 million market cap and over AUD 106 million cash in the bank and no debt, we have a very strong foundation that we intend to use to build the value for shareholders going forward. Let me just maybe talk through our competitive advantage that we believe we have to start with. Our location is definitely a tier-one location jurisdiction, great infrastructure, on-grid power and supply and water supply, access to a very good mining community, and we have good government services provided also.
We have very good government relations in this region, which is fantastic and a very good enabler for us. We're also established and located in the center of many other operations and exploration companies, which also opens opportunities in the future for our business, especially as we have two very good processing plants, one at the top and one down the bottom of that exploration tenement, which is the Peak plant and the Hera plant. Once again, all of these are in the middle of all these businesses that are either operating or looking to operate at some stage in the future. We have a large resource base, which is highly prospective. A great factor of turning drill meters into resource. In fact, our constraint is really how much we spend each year on unlocking this resource.
Andrew and Todd will talk through that more when we get to the exploration section. Because of our location, we actually do attract people to the Cobar region. We also have FIFO with a charter, and we have a Dido from regional New South Wales. Our focus on people is paramount to really building our own capability in this region and ensuring that we have the skills so as we grow, we grow with the right skills to support our business going forward. Angus and Jessie will both talk about how we are doing that in their various sections. More broadly, if you look at the map and our footprint, all of the resource tenements, which is the gray areas on the slide I am showing now, which is our footprint slide, is obviously under our control.
We have three operating mines that are all close to processing infrastructure, and towns, and infrastructure. It is always first priority in my mind when you can have your mines, your tenements, and your infrastructure in place around your processing facilities because obviously that is the best place to be able to put your material at the lowest cost. This is our competitive advantage. As we drill and find and develop and operate in this region, we can actually use our facilities to continue to grow and build our shareholder value. Angus will talk to more details of that in his section. Our value proposition to the investors, and these value propositions are really key to management. I mean, the resource in the ground in the region is very suitable for our processing infrastructure.
If you look at the commodities of copper, gold, zinc, lead, and some silver, these metals are the metals for the future. They're critical for the future battery world and the decarbonisation era we're going into. It is great that we have exposure for our investors in these commodities. This range of metals is very useful in a volatile market where you can have good gold prices and you can have other prices not so good, and you can balance out your portfolio quite well from a cash flow and revenue point of view. In fact, while gold is strong, you'll see in our plans, we've designed our plans in the coming years to maximise recovery of gold and the cash that comes from that as well to really fund our transition into the base metals future we have.
You'll also see from FY 2028, our current plans move to 50% copper gold and 50% zinc lead as part of our portfolio as we move to base metals. It's important to remember that we have the only plant in the region that can produce metals for all these commodities, and this is great for our growth plans. In the future, I can foresee other neighbours wanting to toll through our plant because they won't be able to obviously process their commodities through their single circuit plants. That's actually a very good value proposition for our investors. Another important proposition has been the fact that we've been able to grow our business, and we've got three growth projects, Federation's obviously coming to completion, Great Cobar, and the Peak optimisation plants. We've been able to self-fund those projects using the cash flow from our business.
It really supports that we're focusing on getting good cash flow, operating well, and making sure our projects are fit for purpose at the right sort of capital levels as well. I think being a self-funded business in this commodity mix is obviously fundamental, and it's a differentiator and a good value proposition for this company. You'll also note that we've actively been hedging to sort of look at how to protect our revenue using good sort of prudent capital management, and Martin will talk more to that in the future as well. In terms of our exploration, and Andrew and Todd will talk in more detail, we have a large exploration tenement that stretches over 105 km, which accesses the Rookery Fault.
I think I was told at some stage in the last 12 months that we had over 200 old shafts in the region, but obviously people had explored and found resources in the past. These are all within our tenements, and they're all areas that we'll be focusing on, which is the best one for us in the future to go after. One other really interesting proposition for us is we've shown we can actually deliver from discovery to mining leases at Federation in four years' time. Importantly, it's not all about exploring and growing our business. We also need to have a clear focus on productivity performance to drive us to the lowest half of the cost curve.
Angus will present some of the projects underway to deliver our aspirational AUD 100 a tonne mining costs while raising the bar also on site about making sure our processes and systems are at a good standard. At the right time, if we want to expand beyond where we are now, we have those things in place and they are replicable wherever we want to go. What are the strategic objectives over the next five years? This is an important slide because obviously this sort of paints the picture for things you are going to hear and see for the rest of the duration of the session. Ultimately, we are going to be transitioning to a base metals dominant business in the next three years from FY 2028. We are following the geology. We are following our drilling programs.
We're following what's in front of us, and we're basically using our existing processing facilities to basically take advantage of what's in front of us from a geology point of view. Second one, our plans that we're actually right now will deliver approximately 40,000 plus copper equivalent tonnes leading from FY 2028 onwards. Through the execution of those projects you're going to see today, we will be at that point and looking to go beyond. We've got a strict capital management plan in place to really retain strong balance sheet, and we've developed trigger action plans to deal with any market volatility. That's very important to us as an objective as a company.
We're putting in place actions to deliver sort of a cash flow in the next from FY 2028 between AUD 100 million and AUD 195 million, so AUD 105 million-AUD 200 million once the projects are completed and we have 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes. We're going to continue to focus on safe and sustainable productivity and maximise margins quarter on quarter, and we have done that for investors who have been following us. We've been coming back quarter on quarter delivering our results and talking to the investors about that, and we're going to continue to do that.
That is obviously something that is a clear objective for us to make sure we put things in place to do that, but also make sure our studies and projects to use our resources are sort of fit for purpose and ready to go so that we can actually develop our business to go beyond 50,000 copper equivalent tonnes with our own processing facilities we have in the region. Lastly, it is my personal aspiration target that we can leverage this business results in the next five years with the strong cash flows coming from the business from FY 2028 to really look at how we can build this business beyond 80,000 copper equivalent tonnes in five years plus. There is nothing saying that this cannot be done with the sort of deliverables we will have and the cash flows we will generate from the business that we are working toward.
To recap on the objectives, we'll be base metals dominant in three years, plus 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes in three years, greater than or between AUD 105 million-AUD 200 million operating cash flow from 2028. Productivity is key, obviously, for us to get AUD 100 a tonne in mining costs. We're obviously looking very carefully and seriously at what are the projects we need to bring on board to take us beyond FY 2028 to plus 50,000 copper equivalent tonnes with our current infrastructure we have and the resources we have. This is a simple waterfall to really show the journey we're taking. The waterfall demonstrates how we're building capacity in our business, starting with Federation ramp-up through to Great Cobar, through to future projects that Andrew will be talking about today that we're looking into to see how do we go to above 40,000 towards 50,000 and above.
This is an exciting journey for us on the objective we actually have at the moment. Like I said, to date, we've delivered the first project and we're ramping up, and we believe we can repeat that through the various projects we're doing. Obviously, what's important is we're going to talk a bit more about strategic pillars today, and each of the ELT and the team members will sort of go into more detail. To achieve the outcomes and the strategic objectives, we really need to make sure we focus very heavily on operating with discipline, have the right people, the right mindset, sustainably delivering with value, and also making sure we are focused on our growth journey and not distracted by things that do not add value to us or do not meet our financial hurdles.
In terms of operating with discipline, just as a bit of a flavor for what that means and how we're going to do that, this is really delivering budgets, rates, commitments on quarterly sort of reporting, making sure that we have our mine operating system in place so that from life of mine design through to budgets through to our quarterly, monthly, daily, and shiftly targets are very aligned and that everyone in the company knows what needs to be done to deliver that. If we're not, what are the actions to make sure we can get back on track? That's how we want to operate with discipline across the company. When we commit, we achieve. In terms of right people, right mindset, it's really about us attracting, retaining, and building the capability of the organization to grow with us.
It's important everyone feels empowered to deliver what's in their plans and KPIs and support the business outcomes. Obviously, it's a tough market with people in general in the mining industry. I guess we want to be the company people want to work with. Sustainability, delivering value. We defined a sustainability strategy that Jonathon will talk to in his section, really focusing on how do we get improvements in water and energy that can not only do great things for the environment, but also can actually improve our business outcomes as well from a point of view of cost of using those consumables.
We also want to be a good neighbour, and we continue to be a good neighbour and make sure that we are looking after the health and safety of our people in a way that people feel that we care that they come to work every day and can return to work the next day. Lastly, our focused strategic pillar is on focused growth. It is really to build our business, create more value. We need to have a clear focus, meet our sort of financial hurdles the board's actually set for us to work towards that Martin will talk to in his section. That is really going to be important for us to make sure we have a very clear plan that the investors can understand and can sequence into our thinking. We are not trying to do too much all at once.
We're trying to sequence these things and build the business in a sustainable way so you as the investors can get the returns that you're investing into. Just as a snapshot, and some of you may have seen a similar picture to this in the past, I want to show the projects and schedule of our journey that we have in front of us at this very present. This does not include other future projects that Andrew will talk to. This is more of what's on our pipeline right now in FY 2026 and FY 2027 that you'll see them across for as well. This simplified chart really highlights Federation is ramping up, moves out of project phase and into operational phase from July. Obviously, that's sequenced quite well with Great Cobar project kicking off in July. Similarly, in parallel, the optimisation work both at the Peak plant is kicking off.
Those projects in general, even though I've broken them into pieces, the sum of the costs of those are still less than the cost of the budgeted cost of what Federation project was. We just broke them out so people can see the difference in how we're going to work on those and the timing of those for the various models people may run. In summary, these projects will deliver the 1.1 million-1.2 million throughput that we've talked about from FY 2028 as we ramp up the organization and sort of deliver those copper equivalent tonnes I talked about earlier in our strategic goals. Our guidance and our aspirational outlooks we'll present today is based on our business roadmaps and plans we have right now. It's important that when we talk about the guidance, it's obviously what we're going to report to the market.
But we also thought to show some aspirational outlook numbers so you can see what happens beyond FY 2026 into FY 2027 and FY 2028. It is trying to directionally show you where we're going. It's still subject to a lot more details and assessment work we need to do, but allows us as a business to demonstrate how we're getting to be a business that's going to generate very good cash flows in FY 2028 and beyond, which is important for all investors involved. Without further ado, I'm going to move the show on, and I wanted to introduce Angus to talk through his pillar first. And just a bit of background about Angus. He's been in the industry for a while, just over 25 years. He's got a mining engineering degree and an MBA.
Has worked with several mining houses, Barrick, Rio Tinto, Northparkes, and found his calling and came to Aurelia. This is his fourth year. Has deep technical experience and operational roles and was actually very successful in delivering, I guess, the last couple of years of production and performance out of Dargues to closure. We obviously appointed Angus as the Regional General Manager for Cobar. He looks after the three mines and the two processing plants out there and the camps and everything else that happens in the Cobar region. Just as an interesting fact, and just to show Angus's commitment to the region, he's actually the star goal attacker for the Aurelia mixed netball team. Very involved in the community and very much a team player, as you can sort of see from how he gets involved in community work.
I'll hand it over to you, Angus.
Thanks, Bryan. Yeah, Tito Height helps with netball, so it's good fun. Yeah, no, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, Angus Wyllie, General Manager of the Cobar region. Yeah, Ryan and I will be talking about the operating with discipline pillar. As you've probably seen throughout quarterlies, we believe we've seen far more consistent and stable production each quarter over the last year. The first step, obviously, in operating with discipline is safety and environmental performance. Making sure that each and every one of our people go home the same way they came to work as they are our greatest asset. We've seen our total recordable injury frequency rate, our TRIFR, reduced by 60% across the last 12 months. This is a great improvement.
We're also working across the last 12 months in updating our fatal hazard standards and our critical control reviews. This is part of helping strengthen our daily risk management tools that our people use to identify hazards and ensure they're completing each task safely. This year, as we go forward, we're also focused on our respiratory protection standard and updating and rolling that out to make sure that our people are also not impacted by the long-term health effects associated with respirable crystalline silica, dust, airborne contaminants, and lead. Certainly making sure that we are caring for our people in all aspects in alignment with our values. As I said, success is delivered by our people. Retaining and attracting the right mindset, which, as Bryan touched on, Jessie will talk through further. That starts with ensuring diversity of thought and outlook to drive improvement.
Through our group-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion committee that both Bryan and I are a part of, we are looking to continue ways to make sure everyone has the opportunity to perform at their best every day. When we have the right people on board, we are working with the site teams, looking at what programs, projects, and initiatives our employees want. As a result of our engagement surveys and the feedback from our workforce, we are rolling out our new employee value proposition. An example of this is going to a quarterly bonus scheme, making sure we are giving regular reward to our team members for focusing on the right things. Simplifying the process, having clear operational physicals, and safe production that is rewarded each quarter to our workforce.
That's going to be an improvement as part of that employee value proposition, and there'll be further aspects of that rolled out this year. The other thing we're working through on the culture is working with our leaders from the top down. Coaching, mentoring, and leadership programs. We have leadership essentials for our frontline supervisors, working to coach and get everyone on board. We're developing a stronger culture of high performance to really drive the operation forward. Where are we located? There it goes. As we zoom in at Cobar, we are in the heart of the Western District, three hours from Dubbo. You can see New Cobar, Peak, Hera, and Federation highlighted there. They're really an hour apart by road. As we zoom into the north, you can see the Cobar Township.
The Peak main operations are about 10 km south of Cobar for those who have not been out there. As we zoom into Peak, you can see the tailings storage facility. Further two lifts are already approved in that, and our processing plant and the administration building. Bryan touched on our processing plant is able to produce lead, zinc, and copper concentrates as well as doré. The Peak Decline, so we have decline access to both our underground operations. The decline was broken through in 2007. This zooms over the plant. You can see the ROM pad and infrastructure, the gold room. We have the advantage of both a gravity gold circuit and a cyanide leach circuit. As we zoom to the north, we pass over New Occidental to our Chesney and New Cobar area.
The New Cobar pit to the north and Chesney is linked to Chesney underground at the New Cobar site. The pit was mined from 2000- 2004, and the Great Cobar decline will start from 50 level, I do believe. The New Cobar decline started in 2004 at the completion of the pit, and it is actually its 21st anniversary of the first cut on Monday, so the 30th of June. That kicked off. We will be celebrating that on site next week. We are now zooming down to the south to where Hera and Federation are located. Federation is about 10 km south of Nymagee township, and Hera sits about 3 km south of there. As we zoom in, we can see the Hera tailings facility, processing plant, the camp, and the core shed that services the region down there. The Hera plant is on care and maintenance.
We have a small team of electricians and fitters looking after that plant along with the surface infrastructure compressors plants. The core shed facility is quite impressive. Two core saws, managing core from Federation, exploration drilling, infill mine drilling in that facility. The camp is set up for 138 rooms. We've recently upgraded the gymnasium and making sure that facilities are available for the same people. Zooming down to Federation as we come down Berthong Road. Berthong Road has been sealed from the Federation entrance up to Join Priory Tank Road. The administration buildings, workshop, and box cut. We can see the Rompad to the right-hand side of the image, the waste dumps in position. All the surface infrastructure has been completed. Fresh air and exhaust raisers, pumping infrastructure in place. 360 Logistics is engaged as the haulage contractor.
We're able to run AB triples on sealed roads from Federation all the way up to Peak. They've shown their ability to ramp up to 1,600 tonnes a day and trucking consistently from that operation. We currently have about 9,000 tonnes on stockpile and moving that material up. This yellow line shows the haulage route on the sealed roads all the way between the two operations. Just from that, that gives you a good overview of where we're seated. As Bryan said, we're really in the heart of the Cobar Basin and have a great deal of exploration camera as well. Moving on to the next slide. This really shows our strategic transition of the Peak operations over the next three years as we move from the South Mine into the North Mine and Great Cobar.
Currently, we're ramping up Federation, and this gives us that continued flexibility, exposure to a multiple income stream from future-facing diverse minerals. We've got a number of aspects there with the lead, zinc from Federation, and then the copper gold from Great Cobar. We have a clear path to FY 2028 to 1.1 million tonnes and further upside opportunity with New Occidental tailings reprocessing. From FY 2030, we have two clear defined ore sources with Federation and Great Cobar as mill feed and continuing exploration to further expand, extend beyond our current life of mine as Andrew and Todd touched. As we work to optimize the Cobar Basin, we're obviously still working to improve our existing operations. As Bryan touched on, working on productivity improvements. We've engaged Partners in Performance. They've been helping to define our improvement ideas and work with us on the value opportunities there.
We're looking to drive productivity improvements really around utilization, making sure that we've got getting the most out of our assets and availability to make sure we're lowering unit mining costs. As we outlined in the quarterly presentation, we're aiming to get down to AUD 100 per tonne to sustain and improve our margin. There's a number of aspects laid down there which target that 18% reduction. One of the examples of this that is underway is standardizing our mining fleet. We already have a standard fleet of trucks and loaders being MT65 trucks and 2,900 loaders, but we're transitioning to a single model of production and development drill. Not only is this intended to reduce stores inventory and improve spare parts availability, but it also provides that focus for our operators and maintainers.
Having a single asset or machine type to work on improves the training, improves the skill set and expertise, and ultimately the output from these machines. We continue to work through the range of ideas for productive time. One of these is looking at additional refuelling stations underground. Making sure we have refuelling closer to the work fronts reduces off-circuit tramming and improves the productive time from both our trucks and our loaders. We are working not only to optimise the region, but continuing to make those productivity improvements on site. You obviously see a lot of improvement planning or mining improvement projects. I really want to show and give some case studies of the work that we have already completed. This year, we have been working with WebGen. WebGen is an explosive detonator able to be fired remotely.
What we've been able to do is two different ways of looking at improving dilution and increased mining recovery utilizing this technology. The first option, first example we've used is creating rib pillars to extend the length of our stopes by leaving a bridge of supporting material in the middle of that stope. That stops the stope walls from falling in and maintaining a larger span. We are able to still recover that material by firing it remotely with the WebGen afterwards. Once the rest of the material has been extracted, we are able to fire that pillar and still recover the ore while having a much larger stope with less dilution. The second method is where we've had a stoping panel backfilled with waste.
We leave a pillar next to that waste material, again able to fire that pillar later at the end of the stope and recover that material. By having the pillar there, it holds back that waste. We're not seeing that internal dilution coming in over the valuable ore, mixing with that and losing mining recovery as that material potentially could become uneconomic. By holding that material back, we're again reducing internal dilution as shown in the numbers there. We've actually been able to move less ore, but at a much higher grade throughout this year. It has given us a significant improvement, and we will continue to use those methods going forward. The second case study is really looking at the step change we've made with our development activities. I think we've talked in the quarterly previously.
have had five consecutive quarters consistently at that 700 m per month. We have made the step change up to 900 m per month for the last two quarters, and we are on track to achieve the 1,000 m for the quarter this coming quarter that we are in at the moment. How have we worked through that? Like most organizations, we do have a lot of data. What we have been doing is really looking to better use our data to paint a relatable picture to the crews, giving them that feedback on a shift-by-shift basis. Engaging with the site teams comes back to our values around care and teamwork and our strategy operating disciplines.
Talking to the shifts, each shift, about why the shift was red, amber, or green allows that active discussion and involvement so that we can work to improve and maintain the green days and have the best day every day. Moving on to Great Cobar. We released the feasibility study for Great Cobar earlier this year with strong base case financials that are shown here. We are very excited to head back to the original Great Cobar mine. Great Cobar was the foundation of the Cobar region back in 1869 with the discovery of the first copper. We actually still have team members on site with family links to those historic operations. This is a great path forward for us and really important for the Cobar region and for us as an operation.
This going to Great Cobar really provides that transition to copper and that ramp up to the 40 kilotons per annum equivalent that Bryan talked to earlier. Attractive investment with large upsiders Todd and Andrew will talk to later. What does Great Cobar look like? I will have to pause this as we go. As we kick off from the 50 level at Jubilee, Jubilee ore body is shown in the pink. We establish initially the green lines to create a ventilation loop. There is an existing exhaust air raise at the 50 level. Breaking through to that provides that initial ventilation structure. We head off towards Great Cobar with the twin declines. If I pause there again. By FY 2027, we break off to the third drive, and that is actually the base of the fresh air raise.
There will be a fresh airways to surface. This is looking down in plan view, and it will rotate shortly around to a long section. By the end of quarter three, FY 2027, as we come across here, we have hit the Great Cobar ore body and begin incline and decline and level access development. The gray area shown here as we rotate is the historic Great Cobar workings. Those have been mapped. There has been a lot of work through the hydrogeological and geotechnical study for standoffs there. We are also actively working to dewater those old structures. That water actually will come back to the Peak processing plant, and that reduces our reliance on water from the Cobar council.
As we move forward through the end of the 2030s, 2028, we have first stoping ore, and we continue incline and decline development through there with different stoping blocks coming online as we develop. The blue line across to the right is the first exploration drill drive. You can see the second and third ones coming online on the page there. That will allow us to access and provide drill platforms to drill out and look at the upside material that Todd will talk about later. Where are we up to at the moment? Recruitment is well advanced. We have filled the jumbo and bogger operator roles. Our primary roles for development are filled. We have people onboarding and coming on site throughout this month.
The new loader, so 2,900 loader for Great Cobar has arrived on site, and we're expecting a truck and additional jumbo towards the end of the month. Site services are being installed and set up, and we're on track to commence development in a couple of weeks at the 1st of July. Pretty exciting there. Across the Federation, Federation really is ready to transition from project to operations. The expanded mobile maintenance workshop is nearing completion. The emulsion explosive yard has been set up and licensed. Red Path have a second jumbo on site, and we're opening up work areas to really hit 500 m per month next quarter. Production is also ramping up. Red Path also have a second truck and loader on site to support production, and we're on track to meet our targets for the year from down there.
The Kidman Way intersections remain to be completed, so they will be on next quarter. The Federation really is tracking well within our plans and budget. With Federation tracking well, I will pass on now to Ryan Cunningham. Ryan's our Tech Services Manager, and he'll be talking about the excellent work the technical team has been doing down at Federation. Ryan joined Aurelia just over a year ago, about 14 months after over six years in the Mount Isa region with Glencore. He also has previous experience across New Zealand and Queensland. Like me, Ryan comes from a dairy farming background, and he also really likes green shirts. Unfortunately, it's not one of Aurelia's colors. You're getting Bryan in blue today. Thank you, Ryan.
Thank you very much for that introduction there, Angus.
It's an absolute pleasure to get the opportunity here to represent and meet you all. Thank you for your time. Over the past 12 months, our infill drilling program has significantly improved our understanding of the upper levels of our ore body at Federation. As shown on the left-hand side of this slide, the original feasibility study indicated a large lead zinc mineralized zone from the left-hand side. As is typical for this kind of deposit, additional data from infill drilling and underground mapping has given us a much clearer picture of our ore body. This is a standard part of underground mining as we transition from what is theory into what is reality.
What this additional data has shown is the ore body actually consists of a series of smaller ore bodies illustrated on the right-hand side of this panel. As expected and communicated in both our December and March quarterly reports, the ore body would change once we were underground and able to define it with more precision. While the general direction of the ore body still maintains its east-northeast trend with the detailed drilling and the underground mapping, what we have revealed is their individual lenses are more situated to a north-northeast trend, which has required a rethink and a design change to our design or our level design. With these revised lenses, they still align broadly with the outlined area in the original feasibility study, although with lower grades, lower volumes, but higher metal grades in the lenses.
The infill drilling completed to date has focused on the upper levels of the mine. These are the immediate production fronts. This work has allowed us to bring ore into production earlier, essentially generating cash flow as we progress. As of quarter four, we have initiated drilling in the lower levels of Federation and expect to continue building more comprehensive understanding of our ore body over the next 12 months. This is a normal process of underground mining, and this is in line with what we do at our Peak operations. This drilling allows us to better define the ore body and reduce the amount of volume taken with the stopes, or waste taken with the stopes, increasing the grade and the quality of the ore that is trucked to Peak. We will now take a look at the 1180 level.
This is a typical level of the Federation ore body. On the left, you'll see the initial feasibility geological model and the April 2023 mining shapes overlaid. It's clear that there were two main mineralized ore zones, which the economic material was extracted from within those two zones. On the right, you will see the updated grade control showing the new ore bodies and the mine design that reflects it. This is a typical level in the upper east and west zones of the Federation ore body. Now, while there has been a reduction in the size of the initial stopes, this has been offset by an increase in the number of lenses and the number of stoping areas. The expanded number of stoping fronts provides the operational team's flexibility compared to the original mine plan.
It is important to note, though, that at least in the upper levels, this revised design will increase the development requirements. However, it is not expected to be a material increase. The upper level increase is offset by a change in the mining method from a transverse mining through to a longitudinal panel retreat in the lower levels of the mine. This change in mining method allows for more efficient development. This development will occur along the ore drives, bringing forward ore rather than in the waste drives. This will also allow us to optimize our stoping shapes. This allows us to be selective. This allows us to mine skinnier, smaller stopes, but at higher grade and in line with the ore body, which again increases the quality of the ore that we will then truck to Federation to Peak.
Furthermore, any delays in a particular stoping front can be mitigated by access to the nearby mining fronts. This further increases the schedule flexibility and the ability to provide a consistent ore source. Looking further ahead, we will continue to build a deeper understanding of our ore body from the current drilling horizons on the 1100 level and the 1180 level. This work will inform our decline and our level design moving forward. Additional infill drilling will follow the decline as it progresses down. Over the next two financial years, we expect this drilling to give us a more complete picture of our ore body. Our production fronts will continue to follow both decline development and the infill drilling programs as we move into the lower levels and the larger stoping areas. I would now like to introduce Jessie Hommelhoff.
She has joined Aurelia Metals as the General Manager of People and Culture in April 2025. She brings over 20 years of experience in HR. Prior to joining Aurelia, Jessie has spent 15 years with BHP in a range of senior roles, including Head of Global Transformation. She has spent over five years in the professional service and most recently served as the Chief People Officer at a digital consulting firm in the Middle East. She also holds a Senior Executive MBA from the Melbourne Business School.
Thank you, Ryan. Good morning. It is a privilege to speak with you all about our forward-facing people strategy. Today, I will share the vision for our employee value proposition and discuss how we are responding to the critical skill shortage. The Australian mining industry is facing a very real challenge.
There are simply not enough skilled people, and it is predicted that there will be a gap of 8,000 qualified workers by 2026. The shortage is being felt even more acutely in New South Wales, where we are competing with Western Australia's higher wages and larger mining operations. McKinsey reports a 63% drop in mining engineering enrolment in Australia since 2014, highlighting a growing lack of interest amongst younger people. The pressure on skills in technical and trade roles means we need new approaches to our attraction and retention strategies. We are focusing on initiatives that will reduce our reliance on recruitment by doubling down on our retention strategies. We are taking greater accountability for growth and development of our people and helping shape their career and build a future with us.
We have been listening to our people and building trust through action and reflecting what we've heard in our employee value proposition strategy. In response, we are focusing our efforts around five key themes. These have been purposely designed to make it easier for people to want to join us and harder for them to want to leave. I'd like to highlight a couple of things that we're doing under each of the areas. For award and recognition, you heard Angus speak about some of the recent initiatives that we've brought on site. More broadly, we are regularly reviewing salaries and benefits and making adjustments on market trends and benchmarking to remain competitive. We recently conducted a gender pay gap analysis and found no material gaps between men and women in the same roles, a result we are exceptionally proud of.
We are introducing fun ways to recognize great work without adding to fixed costs. One example is the new quarterly award for outstanding performance. Team members are nominated by their peers, and winners are celebrated with gifts and a quarterly ceremony. We are also helping Cobar residents buy their own homes. We contribute AUD 20,000 towards the purchase of a house in Cobar for our employees, a benefit in which we're seeing a strong uptake. Wellbeing links to our core value of care. Showing care is one of the most important ways that we can create meaningful and trusting relationships with our employees. Over the past year, we've rolled out mental health first aid training on site. This has helped grow a network of support for anyone who may be experiencing mental health challenges.
It has also given our people the knowledge and skills they need to confidently support their teammates in difficult times. We have partnered with Mental Health Movement to run sessions with our teams to help us identify and manage key risks that support to keep our workplace free from sexual harassment, bullying, and violence. Work environments and living environments, our FIFO and DIDO people spend a lot of time away from home. It is our responsibility to make their time away as comfortable as possible. We have streamlined our logistics, adding a charter flight from Brisbane and a bus service to reduce the overall travel time. At Hera Camp, we undertook a comprehensive review to identify areas for improvement, resulting in several upgrades, including changing our accommodation service provider and refurbishing the gym.
For employees travelling to Peak, we have partnered with Town and Country Hotel to secure 57 rooms on an ongoing basis. This decision allows our team to stay in the center of town, close to the gym, where we do cover the membership, and bring people together during mealtimes rather than having them scattered across town in different hotels. We continue to focus on providing downtime options that make time away more enjoyable and less isolating for our people. We know that strong leadership is the cornerstone of both culture and retention. Line leaders have the most significant day-to-day impact on our people, which is why our senior leadership are actively participating in an ongoing leadership development program. This includes individual coaching sessions aimed at building capability and confidence.
We are committed to expanding this program to emerging leaders and strengthening the tools that will help them develop, coach, and motivate our people. Innovation and technology. We believe the emergence of technology provides an opportunity for us to redesign how we traditionally think about how we perform roles. Through AI, smarter systems, and automation, we can reduce the need for certain roles to be physically based on site. Not only would this improve safety, but it also opens up access to broader talent pools. We are exploring these possibilities as part of our workforce planning process and challenging our traditional thinking. I will now speak around what we are doing to secure critical skills. We have undergone a process to identify and prioritize hard-to-fill roles. Skills attraction and retention is one of our critical managed risks.
For roles with operational dependencies, we are offering more flexible employment options, expanding our search internationally, and adjusting salary packages where needed. We will also continue to advocate for hard-to-fill roles to be included in the skills occupation list based on current and predicted shortages. As mentioned, we focus on retaining employees through value that extends beyond just financial benefits by creating a work environment where people stay because they feel supported, challenged, and connected. We are achieving this through tailored development planning, structured career conversations that help employees map out the next steps in their development, from technical upskilling to leadership roles. We believe one of the biggest benefits of working with us is on-the-ground access to leadership. Our flat structure and visible leadership team let people learn from leaders, share their feedback, and feel connected to the company's vision.
We are building skills from within and seeing strong success because internal candidates already fit our culture and understand how we work. A key enabler has been our strategic shift from contractors to direct employment in areas like production, drilling, and charge-up roles. Expanding the core skills that we want to be exceptional at at Aurelia has allowed us to open up wider and clear career paths. For example, we recently invested in cross-skilling five employees by supporting them to complete their blasting and explosive license course. This is part of our plan to provide multi-skilling opportunities for our people and to ease skill-constrained areas of the business. Beyond operational positions, we've seen a number of internal promotions into key leadership roles, which gives us confidence that our development and succession plans are working. For a smaller-sized miner, we are punching above our weight to grow the future talent pipeline.
We are proud to be doing our part to promote and encourage young people to join the mining industry. We regularly host vacation students, a number of whom have returned to us as graduates. We maintain strong engagement with local schools and communities and are proud to offer apprenticeship opportunities to local youth, including a growing number of female participants. Our CEO, Bryan Quinn, serves on the advisory board for the University of New South Wales, where he actively contributes to shaping the future of engineering education and supports the development of high-potential students. We continue to be humbled that top-tier graduates are choosing to begin their career with Aurelia because of the hands-on experience we have on offer. Access to talent will continue to be a critical risk area for us and for the foreseeable future. We are not standing still, and we are making real progress.
Through continued practical steps, we are confident that Aurelia will gain a reputation for being a place where people feel supported, connected, and proud to work for. That is how we're going to bring great people in, and that's how we're going to give them a reason to stay. Thank you. I'll now introduce Andrew Graham, our Chief Development and Technical Officer. Andrew is a trained mining engineer who started his career with BHP working in operations and later in business evaluation and improvement in the aluminium division in London. He moved into business development roles in Zinifex, Oz Minerals, and MMG, where he also led major projects, strategy, and M&A. Andrew joined Aurelia in 2022 to lead the business development. He later became interim CEO, helping to turn the company around during a period of operational and financial changes.
Today, as Chief Development and Technical Officer, he leads exploration, technical services, sustainability, major projects, and business development.
We owe you a break at some point. We might run through the sustainability strategic pillar, and then we might take a short break just so people can stretch their legs and have a cup of tea. We will talk through sustainability. It is our third strategic pillar. Really purposeful why we call it sustainability adding value. We genuinely believe in sustainability, and as an industry, it is where we need to be. We also believe that if it is done right, you can actually add substantial value to your business through sustainable practice. We will have a few examples of that as we go. The first example is our approach to closure with Dargues.
Firstly, be assured that we treat the Dargues closure as we would any other asset: well-managed, well-planned, budgeted, and looking for opportunity all the way through to reduce costs and deliver a sustainable outcome in a reasonable timeframe for a reasonable cost. Through FY 2025, a number of key objectives delivered. FY 2025 for Dargues closure was really a planning phase, trying to understand the steps it would take, the sequence it will take them so that when we deliver the closure, we do it cost-effectively and in a timely way. Some big hits for the year, though: exploration, drill holes, and drill pads largely rehabilitated. We did a process of selling mobile equipment and offices, which netted about AUD 750,000 for the business. Interestingly, we started stage one of our planting, our biodiversity planting.
Jona, I will talk about it in a minute, the relationship we have created with Landcare on the site. Through that, we were able to achieve our first objective of planting through autumn. Just on that picture on the right-hand side, a little bit hard to see, but you can see that. This is an exploration drill area, rehabilitated, grass growing. In that part of the world, one of the benefits we have is that things do grow very well. You can see dotted up the hillside the tree guards for our planting. Well on the way in this particular area to achieving our biodiversity objectives. Water and weed management is a key activity for the team on site, and it has been as we progress through to the next phase in FY 2026.
FY 2026, the key piece for us is to get a modification to put water underground. Water currently on the TSF stops our ability to cap the TSF. We have an application at the moment, currently on advertisement, to then be able to take that water and put it underground. The quality of the water in the TSF at Dargues is exceptional. Effectively, we were floating the pyrite out of the ore to get the gold. It is not acid-generating. If anything, it is slightly basic. The intent will be to get that approval to be able to put the water underground and then cap that TSF through FY 2026. The other piece we did in FY 2025 was an irrigation trial where we did take good quality water and were able to irrigate it over paddocks.
It was a trial, as I say, 30 days, just to demonstrate that it did not cause any harm or pooling of water or erosion. That was very successful, and we have also got that application in at the moment to try to get approval to allow us to keep that going on an ongoing basis. As I mentioned, cap the TSF, that is the plan for FY 2026. It is the largest piece of earthworks that we need to do, and a lot of the material will come from the waste rock dump. We will actually rehabilitate the waste rock dump at the same time. We will continue with planting. Jona will talk about the Landcare arrangement, but we have got two more phases of planting through FY 2026, one in autumn, one in spring, which will largely achieve most of our biodiversity objectives on the site.
There is one piece we are trying to get resolution on, which is biodiversity offsetting. Those familiar with New South Wales will know it's a requirement for these types of projects, and we're in discussion with the government around what their expectation is to achieve that in an effective way, the goal being to be able to turn the land back into farmland. Our key player in the rehabilitation of Dargues has been Jonathon Thompson. He's our Group Manager of Sustainability. I'll pass to Jonathon . at the moment just to introduce Jonathon . He's been with us since 2014, originally at Hera as an environmental officer. He's held several roles in the business and most recently as Group Manager of Sustainability. He came from Broken Hill, probably as Broken Hill Mine. Probably the most notable achievements for Jona .
In his time with us have been the state significant development approvals for both Federation and Great Cobar, as you would have seen with other players in New South Wales. Not necessarily the easiest things to achieve, and to have achieved two of them in Jona 's career with us has been exceptional. It allows us to be where we are today with Federation coming to commercial production and Great Cobar setting off on development. I'll pass across to you, Jona .
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks for the introduction. I think I met most people on their way out today, but thank you everyone for coming. Like Andrew said, sustainability adding value is Aurelia's mantra. Sustainability is a very big topic these days and something that can consume your business and consume a lot of time.
Aurelia is a relatively small team, and we wanted to focus on things that we believe add value for our company. We sort of landed on four pillars, and we developed this a couple of years ago and implemented it. The health and safety of our people, energy intensity, water consumption intensity, and community. Bryan and Angus have both already spoken a bit about health and safety and the improvements we're seeing in that space. We are very much focused on people leaving our sites the way they come to our sites. All of their fingers intact and their mental health the same as when they came. We are focused on physical and psychosocial injury to people. We have seen some really good progress in the last 12 months with our focus on fatal hazard standards.
Energy intensity and water intensity or water consumption intensity are both very similar. Aurelia as a business, we want to grow. We want to process more ore. We want to find more ore bodies. We want to grow, which obviously means we are going to consume more total energy and more total water and obviously more carbon emissions. Instead of focusing on total consumption, we're focused on intensity. The tonnes of carbon we produce per tonne processed, sorry, and the liters of water we use per tonne of ore processed. By doing this, it means that we can still increase our processing through rates and achieve our targets, but it also means we can focus on our efficiency, which will lead to cost savings for Aurelia as well. An added benefit to the environment, but also our company and our shareholders.
Our last pillar is one of our most important pillars, and that's the communities where we operate. Aurelia has been very successful in this space. Dargues Mine is a classic example for you. When Aurelia took over that operation in and around 2020, we were getting 200+ complaints a month. By the time we closed that operation, we were getting sort of less than five complaints a month. Most are related to noise, but we worked really hard on that relationship with the local community. We have also successfully done that in Cobar. We have a very grassroots approach, but we have a really good relationship with the community in Cobar and also the small community down at Nymagee.
I just wanted to spend the rest of my presentation just talking about a couple of case studies that we have of things that we've done in our business that show how sustainability can add value. Andrew mentioned this one, but the Landcare agreement with the local Upper Schullhaven Landcare Group. Now, this was a bit of a group effort between ourselves, Landcare, and the local council. Obviously, with the closure of Dargues, we have assets that are there that have value to somebody. They do not have much value to us at the moment, sitting there not doing much. We had an old geology shed on site. Now, being a geology shed, it had lots of hoses in place. It is an insulated shed. It had lots of space for tables.
We were able to do an agreement with the local Landcare group to have them on site to propagate tube stock for their projects around the region. Nothing to do with our projects, but basically to grow tube stock to plant on their rehab and their regeneration projects around the community. The benefit for Aurelia or the shared value for Aurelia has been that they're also supplying tube stock to our projects. The slide that Andrew showed before with the tree planting, some of those trees were supplied by the Landcare group on site. It's an example of shared value between us and the community. The next one, which is something we've done relatively recently, we've opened a community hub in Cobar.
We opened this in late 2024 in the main street of Cobar, and the hub reinforces our long-lasting positive relationship with Cobar and the surrounding community. It exemplifies our commitment to the Cobar Basin, and it is a place where Aurelia and the community can come together to proactively engage and consult on future development, employment opportunities, operational concerns, and growth plans. The last case study I will speak to is the establishment of our biodiversity offset property. In 2012, 2013, we purchased a property about 20 km-25 km south of our Hera mine called Chelsea. It is a 2,000-hectare block. And pretty much since then, we have been working on trying to establish a biodiversity stewardship agreement, and we were successful in 2022. That offset property generated credits to offset biodiversity impacts at both our Hera mine and also our Federation project.
It has also generated a significant amount of excess credit types that we've been able to sell to other developers. Just recently, we've been able to generate about AUD 7.3 million in sale of credits to other developers. It's allowed us to fully fund our total fund deposit. The total fund deposit is a fund that the New South Wales government holds and pays a portion of it back to us each year for us to do projects that we've committed to to increase the biodiversity value of the project. Now, the obvious statement or question to ask on Chelsea is, why did it take so long for us to get that biodiversity stewardship agreement established? It's important to remember that there was a lot of fingers in the pie to establish this. There was draft legislation rolled out in 2014.
The Biodiversity Conservation Act was introduced in 2016, and we had lots of parties to consult with: Forestry, Crown Lands, Local Land Services, Department of Planning, and the Biodiversity Conservation Division as well. Look, it's something we're really proud of, and it was a very long-term project for me, but it's generated a lot of benefits for Aurelia. Thank you. Back over to Andrew.
I can break it out or keep going? Keep going.
We'll get to our fourth strategic pillar, which obviously is dear to our hearts and I'm sure all of yours, which is focused growth. There's a few projects on the go that have been touched on. If I think back to the Aurelia I joined and the changes we've made, there's been a few key structural changes along the way. Obviously, closing Hera in 2022 when things were a bit tight was a key piece to that. More recently, Great Cobar getting the approval and starting, as Angus touched on earlier, starting the development of that next quarter, a key strategic piece for us. I think out of all of them, the key structural change, the most exciting one for me has been the Cobar optimization work. That was released in October 2024, explaining why we were looking to do what we did.
Those who are with us around the equity raise will recall we had talked at that stage about restarting Hera, the process, Federation, so first ore up to Peak, and once Peak was full, bring that ore through Hera. At the time, we had said that we felt there was a better way to do it. The better way, which we released in October 2024, was to take all the Federation to Peak. Critical for our business. The question is, why taking it to Peak makes sense? First of all, Peak, as has been touched on earlier today, makes separate concentrate products. When we take the high-grade lead zinc out of Federation to Peak, we can make a lead product and a zinc product and get paid appropriately for that.
A fringe benefit of that, the amount of copper that's in Federation will then report into the lead concentrate where it gets paid at 30% of the value of the copper. The other bit also touched on today is Peak's a very unique plant. It has a full CIL circuit on the back end of the float circuit. The gold, precious metals, gold and silver that comes out of Federation then gets the best chance of recovery through gravity, through flotation, and then through the CIL. Substantial value comes from the revenue side of the equation when taking Federation through Peak. Also, substantial value comes through the fact that Peak's operational. They're incremental tonnes. They're not total tonnes. They're low operating cost tonnes. The other bit is Peak's on grid. We get the benefit that Jona talked about, decarbonization.
We get the benefit of decarbonizing Peak plant as the New South Wales grid decarbonizes, but also the cost of power on grid is obviously substantially less than the cost of off-grid power that we used to use to run Hera. A large number of reasons why it makes infinite sense to take Federation to Peak. The other interesting bit, and I'll touch on it as we go through the project, is substantial latent capacity within the Peak plant. On lead zinc, we're largely snookered by the flotation capacity, but on copper, we had loads of flotation capacity and filter capacity. All we had to do was resolve the front end of the plant, the crushing and the grinding. It meant a very, very capital-efficient expansion there of the Peak plant. I'll touch on that as we talk through the projects.
Importantly, a key enabler to all of this was the ability to truck Federation material to Peak at the appropriate amounts at that 600,000 tonnes. Pleasingly, as we reported in March this year, we got that permission. We also got permission to truck a slightly wider set of hours at that time. Really, one of the things that could have got in the way of making this whole thing work has been resolved, and we're now well on the way to processing Federation Peak. The other piece it does is it leaves Hera available. Angus showed a picture of Hera before. Hera's fully functioning, fully permitted flotation plant with tailings dam in that Cobar region, that southern end of the Cobar region. That is now available for us to think a little bit about what we do with it, and I'll touch a bit on that.
We'll step through the projects. The first project, and each of these has a 3D. The 3D's out of our Asinco model. Asinco's working with us to do the detailed engineering on these projects. The first one's almost a fringe benefit that came out of the expansion study work. It was looking, and we are bowling ahead with this one. We've released that to the market in April as well because it had substantial value. The interesting piece is Peak has that unique CIL plant on the back, but because it did not have enough capacity to dewater the feed to the CIL, we could not recycle all of the water coming out of the CIL back in just into that part of the circuit.
What happens at Peak is it all gets blended together, and you end up with effectively cyanide in the water going through your flotation. It depresses flotation and depresses recovery. A really simple solution is to then create more thickener capacity on the leach feed. To do that, we have at the moment a leach feed thickener and a tailings thickener next to each other. We are simply converting the tailings thickener into a second leach feed thickener and building a new tailings thickener. You can see it on the picture here. The new tailings thickener with the switch room, which is coming up from Dargues, associated tanks, and flocculant mixing system. AUD 9.6 million. It is in execution at the moment.
We've secured or contracted to buy the thickener from Tacraf being built in Vietnam, and we'll be looking to install that probably right at the start of next calendar year. Fair bit of work to do in the meantime, foundations, the electrical work, those sorts of things. Yeah, we should be through FY 2026, we should have that project functioning. Really, benefits to us right now through greater recovery. We're talking sort of 2.5% recovery improvement on zinc and also copper. Better use of cyanide in that at the moment, that cyanide that goes back into floats, we actually lose it as valuable cyanide leach product. The benefit is too we get to reuse that or we use less cyanide going forward. It fits very well within our current footprint. Second project we talked about on the Cobar optimization was the ball mill.
As I mentioned, we need additional grinding capacity, particularly on copper, to be able to run that 150+ tonnes an hour to allow us to achieve that 1.1 million- 1.2 million tonnes throughput. When we looked at it and the work Asinco did suggest that we need about another 500 kW of grinding capacity. At Dargues, we have an 800 kW ball mill. Another benefit to this is we get to reuse that ball mill, move it to Peak, install it. The intention will be to install it as a sort of tertiary grind. We have the SAG mill, the ball mill that you can see at the front, and then a second ball mill. We will use it only on copper.
It's there if we need it on lead zinc, but the view is we don't need it on the lead zinc out of feed at that lower throughput. We use it on copper, and it becomes available to us when we're on the lead zinc run. I'll talk about that in a minute. Key on lead times, and something we're working on is the cyclone cluster that you can see in the picture here. Obviously, the ball mill's ours. It's already on site. It can be moved whenever we're ready. There is quite a lead time on the cyclone cluster that we need for classification materials. It'll benefit from the switch room that we put in place from Dargues for the thickener project. Some of that, all the projects are kind of intertwined, albeit independently justifiable. We're suggesting CapEx in a range of AUD 8 million-AUD 9 million.
It's in feasibility. The hope is we take it to the board through July and take it to approval. The third project then, and this is a bit around, well, how do you get 150+ tonnes an hour through the front end of the mill in order to then go to that 1.1 million- 1.2 million tonnes? The key is we needed a way to get additional material through the front of the plant. Now, some positives at Peak, and this is a bit of that latent capacity. In the live pile that exists today, you can see in the green, bright green here, there are three feeders underneath that, more than enough feeder capacity to feed at that higher rate. The challenge was, how do you take advantage of that and how do you use that rather than replicating that and trying to build additional feeders?
Now, an interesting solution came from our Plant Manager, Todd Whitler, when we were looking at it. He said, "Why don't we just run a conveyor to a head frame?" And there's already a bin on the head frame for ore coming from underground. That is effectively what this design shows. On the side of the rung, we've put a new feeder onto a belt up onto that bin on the head frame. It has some fringe benefits because, as Angus showed, South Mine's not finishing right now. To run this as well as South Mine was quite complicated. This solves all those problems. Effectively, we can take material off the rung through the new feeder into the bin on the shaft and at the same time be able to hoist from underground, all going onto that current live pile with feeders into the plant.
A very capital-efficient solution. The capital will include a crusher. At this stage, we're looking to include a high-capacity mobile crusher just to give us some flexibility. We're suggesting AUD 8 million-AUD 10 million. Again, we'll look to come to the board in July, and we'll come back to you at that stage with a capital estimate. My hope is we end up lower than that. Keen eye will have seen if you add those two projects together. We were previously suggesting in the feasibility study or the scoping study, AUD 20 million-AUD 25 million. It's probably now that AUD 15 million-AUD 20 million range for the expansion project. Jumping ahead then to what's next after those. Unfortunately, there's no mega project like the Cobar optimization piece, but there's certainly some value-adding projects. First of those is New Occidental Tales.
If you were keenly watching Angus's fly-through before, you mentioned we flew over the top of New Ox. At New Occidental, which is between South Mine and North Mine at Peak, there are these stockpiles of tailings, and you can just see them in the aerial shot there, two of them. The intention through this year is to drill those out and get a resource and be able to put a reserve on that. Just to give you a rough idea, it is in the order of about 2.5 million tonnes of material at about 0.6 gr gold. We have done the exercise through this year of taking a sample off those, a substantial bulk sample, and putting it through the plant. A couple of learnings came from that.
First of all, just throwing it through the plant and through floats and all the rest of it to get to the back end of the CIL was not such a good thing because it does impact floats. It also suggested to get appropriate recovery if you did want to give it a little bit of a grind. Now, I mentioned before the third ball mill from Dargues not being used on lead zinc. The beauty of that is we can take this material and feed it straight into that mill and from that mill straight into the CIL while we are processing lead zinc from Federation. They can run in parallel at about roughly 240,000 tonnes a year. It is a piece of work we will do through this year. Intention is to do a pre-feasibility study and hopefully be able to declare a reserve on that while we are getting the permission.
We need a permit to be able to do that. It'll take up TSF capacity. The benefit there, though, is a rehab benefit as well because you move those piles, we don't have to rehab them. A couple of other projects. Copper, if you look at the Federation inventory, it includes some copper. The copper floats really easily. There's always from the Mets this desire to, well, maybe we could float a copper product first before we float lead zinc for Federation. We'll look into that this year. We'd need some additional float cells. It would need a regrind mill of sorts to get enough grade in the concentrate. We'll see where that one lands. The other bit is the back end of the plant.
Just thinking a bit about particularly that transition from lead zinc where we're using our two big filters to copper and how we handle that transition and thickeners and filters. We'll do a bit of work on that, particularly to the current small copper thickener and filter. Need a bit of work anyway. There's some potential for some opportunity there. The final one I mentioned earlier, Hera restart. We've done a little bit of engineering work on what that could be for a copper plant and the sort of capital required. We'll need to do some more work on that this year. The most important bit on the Hera restart is feed and identifying what might feed into that. We've obviously talked a bit about imaging in the past. Todd's going to talk about that just now or alternatively third-party sources or some other discovery.
Anyway, it's probably a good opportunity to introduce Todd. As mentioned at the start, Todd McGilvray is our Group Manager of Exploration. Todd has a master's in economic geology from CODES at the University of Tasmania. He began his career at WMC, worked Queensland, Northern Territory, joined Zinifex, worked in Tassie at Rosebery, where he did actually discover a number of lenses. That operation's still going in some ways thanks to Todd's work. Transitioned to Oz Minerals, MMG, became the global or part of the global zinc team, which is really good. Got an opportunity to work across particularly South America. Moved into Northern Australia. Left there, joined Argent, did a bit of work as their exploration manager, and then in 2021 came and joined Aurelia. Todd's team's kicking goals, as you've seen.
Pretty much all those releases that have my quote on them are really Todd's hard work and Todd's team's hard work. It's a small team, but it's a high-performing team delivering great inventory for us at a really good cost. I'll hand over to you, Todd.
Thanks, Mike. Hi everyone. Thanks for attending. Also to those who've dialed in. The exploration journey, as Bryan put it well at the start of the presentation, really is a journey. The last few years, we focused on getting resources out in front of mining. There's been a real focus on in-mining exploration, which is resource expansion-type drilling, and also refining deposit models and preparing really for pushing out into discovery-type activities for near-mining and also regional. This is the tenement package. You can see up on the screen, the bold black line through the middle of the section there, planned section, is the Rookery Fault, highly prospective, very fertile. Most of the deposits are on the western side of the Rookery Fault. In the Cobar Basin, on the east side, it's the Jurra-Lambone Basin, which Triton and so on sit within. Very metal-rich.
The other point, which I'll cover at the Great Cobar on the next slide, is also there's a gradation of the deposits and lenses are hosted within structures. They grade from copper-gold-rich through to copper and lead zinc as you head west as well. That's pretty consistent. Yeah. Currently, Aurelia own, have got 72% of the Rookery Fault under exploration license. Total length of the fault is 145 km. Currently, we've got three rigs working on surface and three rigs underground, split between resource infill and exploration activities. For FY2026, we're going to looking to increase that to consistently two surface rigs, possibly three, and shifting to four underground rigs. Two at Federation, two in the Peak mine complex. The three-year focus we've had really on resource expansion is shifting to discovery phases.
As we have been putting resources in front of the operations to de-risk their opportunities, which Angus and Ryan have done a fantastic job with, that gives exploration a bit more breathing space to push out and start doing some fun stuff, discovery work. Previously, the in-mining exploration budget was roughly 80%. That has graded down to about 30%, 20% for near-mining exploration, and 30% for regional exploration for FY 2026. We have a really great year coming up. It is an exciting time to be with Aurelia. Discovery costs are also great out at Cobar. The total Federation discovery cost from discovery through to handover to mining is just over AUD 6 a tonne. That includes a lot of deep drilling. At Nymagee, at the moment, we have just started work there in the last two years, it is AUD 0.63 a tonne.
Peak North is AUD 1.10 a tonne and Peak South AUD 3 to short of AUD 3.20 a tonne. So very cheap exploration and a really good success rate with drilling. Also on this slide, there are three areas highlighted in red. They will be the coming slides that I'll discuss in more detail. Great Cobar feasibility study, we did some really deep drilling, 1,800 m holes in FY 2022. Got really, really good results out of that and showed that there is significant unknown potential at Great Cobar. As you can see on the slide here, the Upper Great Cobar deposit, the resource block shape, is outside of the feasibility study as well, as well as the upper part of B Zone. Also, the lower part of the exploration holes, which were spaced at about 100 m- 120 m spacing, is also not in the resource or the feasibility study.
There's plenty more potential at Great Cobar. The drilling out to the north, where C zone and the extent of B zone is characterized, is based on 1950s drilling, which is non-compliant for JORC. We know there's mineralization out there. We just haven't been able to report it publicly, under JORC compliance. We still need to do some work around testing the integrity of where the drill holes were and maybe do some twin work once we get underground and fill out that B and C area. As Angus mentioned in his slide, you could see the rapid exploration drive pushing out. As soon as we drive across and start inclining, declining, we're pushing straight out for exploration. There's a really high potential of joining up B and C zones. The ore types out there are basic copper, siliceous copper, lead, zinc.
We've also got increasing gold with depth as the lenses. There are five main structures there, lenses. As they're pushing towards the east, they're becoming more gold-rich. We've also got work to do further to the west to check if there's an offset lead zinc lens as well. Lots of work to do out there. Yeah. Also, B and C zone are similar habit to A zone as well. We're hoping they're going to merge. We've also got a magnetic inversion modelling work done, which is you get your 2D magnetic data set, you invert it into 3D through predictive modelling. We've got the anchors of the depth of CSA, the Peak depths, and also Federation, Hera, and so on to guide that modelling. That modelling has put Great Cobar just over 2 km depth.
We have drilled down to around that 1,500 mark with the curvature of the drill holes. It is currently open at depth and along strike. The mineral resource estimate is restricted really by JORC-compliant drilling. Federation West, discovered in April 2024. What really led to that was once we got into Federation, started looking at it more closely. This was supported with mining. It was much more structurally complex than what information we got out of the exploration drilling at the wider spacing. That triggered us to structurally model the deposit at the time and also start looking at the impact of the distribution of the deposit and tested out a theory to see if there was a significant offset to the west. It turned out that there was. There is also stacking to the west as well.
From a geological term, it's on echelon and on echelon habit. 215 m was an outstanding discovery hole, just short of 5 m at over 30% zinc, sorry, 20% lead with also really high gold and elevated gold, high copper, good silver. Recent drilling, which we just announced yesterday, is another position about 50 m west again of feed west. It's a small structure at this stage. We have some more work to do to make sure it's a lens and consistent on a particular plane. The grades there are outstanding as well. It's very high zinc and lead, lesser copper and gold, and increasing silver. To date, Federation West drilling is continuing. It's expected to continue to the end of the financial year. We will just reassess where we are with the program and the results.
FY 2026, the plan is to pause for a little, reassess the results that we've got, and then continue drilling to the west and also take significant steps further west. Surface geochemical sampling to see if there's elevated geochemistry further west, if there's more lenses with a significant step out from the deposit, supporting geophysical programs and further drilling. The Feed West deposit is limited east and west at this stage. It's open at depth. It's a high-grade chute. It's like a pipe of sorts, which we see in the Federation deposit as well. These really high-grade structural pipes. Yeah, they're under chase. Nymagee is one of our advanced projects. It's located 5 km north of the Hera plant, just to the west of Nymagee township. Started exploring in FY 2024. There's a reasonable resource there. The grade's quite good.
The drive there was really that it was one of the more advanced projects. We looked at Nymagee and Queen Bee. Nymagee is persistently giving us extensions around the main resource. The first step with that exploration was really just to test the integrity of the resource and location and quality of the ore and see if it was all consistent. This financial year, we have conducted, which was announced yesterday, a resource expansion program around Nymagee Main. We are currently drilling in Nymagee North, which is about 500 m north of Nymagee. It is not in a resource. There is some historic drilling there, which has got significant mineralization in it. Once we finish that program, we will have an update for the market.
The drill program from the previous year was highest zinc assays to date, really high zinc load to the west on the west side of the deposit. Some of the highest copper assays, up to 13.4% copper, and really high silver. There's not a lot of gold there. Silver is much, much higher than what we see at Federation. Following that program, we used Dan Holey M as a guide to give us a bit of an indication for it once we're going to start drilling deeper, where to position those drill holes. We've got some really good conductive plates that have coupled really well and given a strong response at depth. That will guide further exploration for FY 2026. Moving on, in summary, really, a large regional component for exploration and pushing resource expansion along as much as we can.
I'd like to introduce Martin Cummings, our CFO. Martin did a Bachelor of Commerce majoring in accounting. He's CPA qualified with a graduate diploma in corporate governance and risk management. He's got a career of over 20 years in resources with the majority in commercial and planning roles. He started his mining career at Leghia Gold, which was then taken over by Newcrest. After several years at Newcrest, he led the commercial group for Australia and Indonesia with Evolution Mining. After almost 10 years with Evolution Mining there, leading the commercial group and supporting the amazing growth journey to become a major gold and copper producer, he must have saw potential in Aurelia and has jumped over with us. A fun fact about Martin is he's a proud New South Wales state of origin supporter. He had a rough night last night.
It is great to be in Sydney rather than Brisbane this morning. I must admit that I did not see much of the game. I recognize you have been sitting for a while. I just want to wrap up with our balance sheet and obviously with the guidance. I just really want to touch on a few themes in FY 2025. Really, the theme I have been talking to you all about is the ability for our operations to fund our growth activities. If we go back to when we did the refinance, once all the cash washed through, we started with around AUD 111 million in the bank. As you can see in March, we have still got around AUD 107 million. In FY 2024, our two operations funded the restart of the development at Federation and generated AUD 76 million of cash flow.
When Dargues closed in Q1 of FY 2025, the question was, could Peak step up and continue that theme? As you can see there, over the year, Peak really has started to generate really consistent cash flow. In the March quarter of this year, it generated the same amount of cash flow as the group did in the half before it. Given we are on track for our guidance, both on costs and production, you can see we are expecting a strong second half as well. With that, I am expecting Group EBITDA to be over AUD 100 million for this year. As I say, that leaves the balance sheet in great shape. To just talk through our capital management plan, I summarize this plan as one focused on growth over this outlook period.
This means ensuring our balance sheet has sufficient resilience to be able to fund our growth projects so they're completed efficiently and without disruption. Our plan's also committed to funding exploration that Todd's just taken you through to organically grow our business. The opportunity there is to add tremendous value. We want to be able to make those funding commitments in a range of price environments. While we have strong cash on hand, a key part of the plan is ensuring that Peak and now Federation will continue to drive appropriate operating cash flow. As you can see, we have a number of areas in our business to reduce our costs and increase our margin in a structured way. Angus is now taking on that challenge. This will provide so we have the benefit of the diversified revenue mix as well.
Along with that higher margin, we will provide insulation to price volatility. I do acknowledge, though, that we are benefiting from gold price, which is helping drive our cash flow. To provide capital certainty for our capital programs, we will continue to consider hedging. As you know, I do not consider hedging to be for a speculative endeavor, and I do not pretend to be able to pick the future prices. When I see a price that can de-risk our project delivery and meets our hedging principles, I recommend that we lock in some of that exposure. The value upside from delivery of these projects outweighs any short-term gains on favorable price movements. Just back to the balance sheet, I am targeting a refinance in FY 2026 with really three key aims.
The first one is to remove the requirement to cash back our performance bonds, which has now started under our Traffic HERA program. We also have AUD 14 million at March in restricted cash for bonds that we've issued over and above our AUD 65 million limit of Traffic HERA. Aiming to get that cash returned as well. Getting that cash back is the best use of that capital for us right now in this capital period. The second aim is I want to term the facility out, which currently expires in August 2027, but also reinstate the facility limit, which has also started to amortise now that we're around two years into the Traffic facility. That, again, will provide further balance sheet resilience, albeit I'm not looking at debt as a major funding source for this capital program.
Thirdly, and probably obviously, I'm looking for a more cost-effective facility than we have today. Finally, on this slide is really just how we're thinking about capital to ensure that both our growth and sustaining capital is allocated and we get appropriate returns on our investments, and to ensure that our investments are also prioritised on the right projects. Simply, in addition to the investment actually aligning to our strategy, we want an internal rate of return post-tax of at least 15% at conservative price assumptions. The most recent example you saw of that was our investment in Great Cobar with an IRR post-tax of around 20%. That was run at quite a conservative gold price of $2,300 an ounce. The copper price we used was a bit below spot at $9,500 a tonne.
When we ran the spot price through that, it jumped to 33%, which is quite sensitive too. For sustaining capital, we do take a strict approach in prioritizing our projects to make sure they have a clear linkage to either improvements in our safety or to de-risk the delivery of our plans. We do not run GM discretionary budgets for sustaining capital. Each project has to stand on its own merits, and the ultimate funding of that project will be when the business case is presented. I will take you on now to our production guidance and our outlook for FY 2027 and FY 2028. I just thought I would touch on some of the operational things that are happening within this guidance, underlying this guidance. Firstly, we are ramping up Federation, which is the primary driver of the progressively higher process tonnes at Peak.
As you can see, as you saw before, we're targeting 320,000-340,000 tonnes from Federation in FY 2026. That's up from around 100,000 this year. Secondly, Peak is going through a natural transition of ore production, and you saw that as the South Mine is declining and the New Cobar Mine is taking the place and will ultimately be the main ore source at Peak. What we are seeing in the South Mine is lower lead zinc grades, but strong gold. The gold production in our forecast is maintained. We're losing lead zinc production from that South Mine ore, but that is being replaced by the higher grade Federation ore coming into the plant. Ultimately, in FY 2028, you see that Great Cobar production starts.
From there, with Federation at nameplate capacity and Great Cobar now producing, you see the jump in our copper production and also our zinc production. We've used this slide before, but I just want to point out the transition we're going to go through in our revenue mix. In FY 2025, as I said, we are still dominated by gold revenue. That has been great. As we bring Great Cobar and Federation into production, you see that it really does swing to predominantly a base metals mix. FY 2028 is where we aspirationally say is a 40,000 copper equivalent production rate. Just going on to our cost guidance and our outlook, there are some pieces moving in the operating costs this year, which explain the transition from 2025 to 2026. Firstly, at Peak, we have two main things happening in the spend profile there.
The first one is that there is more operating mine development coming through the operating costs at Peak, whereas this year we were predominantly capital development. The second piece to the Peak spend is that we are processing around about 240,000 tonnes more through the plant this year. In terms of unit rates, our mining costs factor in some of the benefit that Angus took us through before, but not all. That remains upside to these numbers. Also, our processing costs are dropping to around AUD 60 a tonne, but will drop further as we build the throughput rates through the Peak plant and get it up to 1.1 million tonnes. At Federation, this is probably the largest change. It is actually coming into operating costs this year. The guidance of AUD 70 million-AUD 80 million does convert to a fairly high mining cost, excuse me.
This is really because there is a large amount of operating development in there this year and where the volume has not ramped up to full nameplate. In terms of profile of Federation, it will start quite high. I am intending to declare commercial production from 1 July. That is notionally where we start with a break-even EBITDA. It has a reasonably high unit cost for Federation, but it will trend down as those tonnes start to build up through the year. Our care and maintenance costs cover both Hera and Dargues. Hera is pretty consistent around AUD 1 million a quarter, which it has been since we closed the operation. The difference in there, we have allowed for around AUD 7 million-AUD 8 million for the rehabilitation activities that Andrew has taken you through before. Our corporate costs are holding at around AUD 10 million-AUD 15 million.
I'll just point out we're not guiding all-in sustaining cost again this year. We are still in this transition period. We'll continue to report our all-in sustaining cost. But as Federation has come into this plan at a higher cost as it starts to build up, I do expect our all-in sustaining costs per ounce to increase. Based on the numbers I've run, we do expect to be around the AUD 2,500-AUD 3,000 an ounce, which is up from this year. As Federation production builds, that number comes down quite quickly. Sorry. This year? This year. Yep. This year, all-in sustaining costs will be quite high. As Federation and as the process tonnes step up in the plant over the three years, that drops down back to sort of where we're at now. I am flagging that all-in sustaining costs will be higher in FY 2026.
Just onto our capital guidance. For sustaining, really the main difference is we're bringing Federation in and the sustaining capital that goes with that. There is an element of growth capital to complete the AUD 143 million project that we've been tracking over the last two years. That is the AUD 15 million-AUD 20 million in growth. That is the decline to get that finished. The sustaining capital jump then at Federation really is, and it's about half of that, sorry, the bulk of that jump from FY 2025 is then the ongoing mine development where we're building up the production levels and the underground infrastructure. The other item that sits in both FY 2026 and FY 2027 is an investment we're making at Peak to overhaul our mobile fleet. It really is a key part of getting our availabilities up and getting our mining efficiency improved.
We are committed, as I said, to exploration, and next year we are guiding AUD 13 million-AUD 18 million for investments in that. To just bring that together, what does this mean? In FY 2028, based on this outlook, if you take the low and high of our production guidance at a spot price from earlier this week, if you deduct our group operating cost guidance or outlook range there and sustaining capital range, we are looking at a highly cash-generative business, albeit an overly simplistic assessment of this. As you can see in FY 2028, a range of between AUD 105 million and AUD 200 million of group cash flow when we get up to that production level. I just wanted to leave you with that.
What I will stress, though, is that this does not include any of the other organic options that Andrew's talked through and certainly does not rely on any of the inorganic options to deliver that outcome. Thank you, and I'll hand it back to Bryan just to wrap us up.
Thanks, Martin. I think just to summarize before we move into a break. We do have a significant mineral resource in the Cobar Basin, and obviously Todd's talked through that. I think it's very important that we have a plan to keep working through and exploring the region and bringing resource online that we can put into our mine plans and then extract value. You've seen what we've got on the plans. Readily on the plans is a clear path to get to 1.1 million-1.2 million tonnes.
It is not highly capital-intensive to do that. It is basically taking the Great Cobar, the Federation, and some optimisation work, and we are very strongly positioned in the market. We are, as you would have heard from Jesse, from myself, and from Angus, definitely working on building strong capable teams, and we are seeing some really good people join the business. I think that is going to help us be very credible going forward as we continue to build the business. We are at a strong cash balance, and I think this year will be a testament to that as well, where we funded our growth and we continue to sort of deliver strong cash, strong commitment against our sort of guidances that we have set to the market.
We have a clear pathway, as I said, with those projects and with our delivery of our performance, clear pathway to get to the equivalent production. Obviously, we have an aspiration. Once we get to FY 2028 and in terms of the very stepping stones we are taking to get there, we have a great opportunity to grow beyond that with the really solid foundation we have. As Martin talked about, there is still much upside in our business in terms of improving our costs. We have projects on the way to do some of that now, and there are many more we have not talked about today that we will be building into the plan in the next 12 to 18 months.
I believe, obviously, we should continue to see a very strong position cash-wise for our business going forward, especially relative to our peers as well, where I believe we have really got a strong case to build a company going forward. I think what we are going to do is thank you very much for listening and for joining online today. We will basically have a break and then come back and do some Q&A. That will allow us to finish off the session online and do the Q&A with the people here. With that, we will wrap it up from a presentation point of view and have a 10-minute break to then come back and have our Q&A session. Thank you.