Yeah, thanks, Rob. Thanks for the intro, and great to be back at Beaver Creek, presenting the Bellevue story again. And really good to follow both Luke and Simon, talking about underground gold mining in Western Australia. Both Luke, Simon, and I are all out of the Northern Star stable, and we've all obviously grown up and moved on to different companies and different things. But look, really stoked to be here presenting after those two. So look, pretty excited to take you through Bellevue. You know, we've had a pretty massive twelve months of delivering a project, you know, on time, on budget, producing first gold, getting up to run rate, and then putting a really exciting five-year growth plan on the table.
So I'll take you through all of the, the key points of that going forward. But, you know, I guess, where we sit now is a, you know, AUD 1.5 billion market cap, fully de-risked, have a full project, full team, full operation, where we've proven that, you know, the gold's there. We've got the drilling ahead of us, 1.5 million ounces of reserve ahead. That gives us this platform to, you know, do all the designs, do all the scheduling, and do all the optimization work to put a really strong plan on the table. And, you know, that's kind of the platform that we've got right now to jump off and just go and enact this plan.
Look, you know, when you're building a project, and, you know, these things don't cost zero money, it's pretty hard work and pretty expensive work. Building a mining project, you know, even in Western Australia, which is a pretty good jurisdiction to do business in. You know, one of the things that we really needed to do was, particularly as a single asset producer, you know, get into cash flow, get into cash flow quickly, and, you know, prove that the asset is profitable and was good, and what we said it was gonna be. So, you know, first half of this year, we delivered eighty thousand ounces, which was our guidance for the half year.
During the June quarter, we produced AUD 40 million of free cash flow, which was, you know, a really good tick in the box for Bellevue. And in July, we put out that five-year plan, and we did an AUD 150 million equity raising, really just to fund that plan, to take away all the balance sheet questions that we've gotten. You know, we sit here today with a pro forma of AUD 100 million of cash and AUD 100 million of remaining debt that's not due till 2027. So very clean balance sheet, and really gives us the ability to just go and enact the plan that we've got. What that debt profile does is it just completely de-risks the project execution.
It allows for, you know, funding of that growth plan through operational cash flows, and, you know, it has been very good for the balance sheet, but look, we're currently trading below that equity value rate... Sorry, the equity raise value, you know, due to various reasons, but I think that it actually creates a really high-value play for us now. Just because we have a high-quality operation, we're very de-risked, and all we need to do now is pin our ears back and get to two hundred and fifty thousand ounces per annum, and look, why are we excited to own Bellevue? I think this is one of the key points for us, is that it's a really significant asset.
You know, when you look at it on a global scale, there's only seven assets worldwide that produce over two hundred thousand ounces per annum at over five gram head grade in a Tier One jurisdiction. So, when I talk Tier One jurisdictions, I'm talking, you know, some states of Australia, some states of the U.S., and some states of Canada, and that's it. So, there's seven assets that fit those criteria, and Bellevue is one of them. But what stands Bellevue aside from those other assets is it's the only one that fits those criteria that's owned by a single asset company, and it's the only one that has, prospects of, you know, 45% production growth in the next few years. So, a pretty exciting asset to have a hold of.
Look, it all comes down to the quality of the underground ore body. You know, I wanted to put these drill holes up here, you know, particularly following the last couple of presentations, just to show that, you know, yes, we have high-grade, we're right on top of it, and we've even mined some of it, and we'll be mining it over the next twelve months. You know, we are right there. You can see this, the Deacon Main area, which is one of the high-grade areas that we mined in the first half of this year and will continue to mine. Very good high-grade plunge as we go through it. When you look at the whole, the wider Deacon area, there's actually a lot of potential.
You know, same mineralogy, same thicknesses, same grades that we saw in that, that really high grade plunge in that early Deacon exists across the rest of Deacon. And so we're following up those repeat potentials, and if that comes up, then this is ounces that will get over and above that 250,000-ounce plan that we put out there. So, you know, this is exploration that could produce increased valuation within the five-year plan that we have on the market. You know, it's not just Deacon. This is the Bellevue South, so we get into this in the early part of twenty twenty-five, and this will continue to another 350 meters of plunge extent, but, you know, fantastic thicknesses, fantastic grades.
You know, you can just see the quality of the resource that we have, and, you know, we're happy to be mining this into next year. There is, you know, the whole deposit, we've got three point two million ounces of resource to the south of the deposit. I'll take you through this as a bit of an exploration target on this right-hand side here. But this is an area that we haven't been able to drill from surface. We've got an exploration target on it, so our exploration target's, you know, circa two million ounces, so it'll take the whole system to a five million ounce plus system. We just need to get in a position to drill it, which we've got plans for coming. So look, where are we? We're in Western Australia, Northern Goldfields.
If I spin that around a little bit. There you go. You can see it's the, you know, Northern Goldfields. You've got Leonora down here, so that's where Gwalia is, you know, big deposit. You've got your Jundees, Wilunas to the top. These are 10 million ounce systems. Bellevue's in the middle of the area here. The closest mine to us is Agnew-Lawlers, directly to our south, about 40 Ks, and that's another 5-10 million ounce system. So, you know, it shows you do have the right rocks, the right structures here to have these, you know, very large Archean lode systems. And that's what we think we've got at Bellevue.
Now, when you zoom in, you know, Bellevue was a historic mine back in the eighties and nineties, where they mined one lode through the middle of the deposit here. When Bellevue got a hold of it in the mid-teens and did the first exploration programs, you know, we've only had a very limited amount of real estate that we can drill on from the surface. So it's really been only in these two blue areas that we've been able to drill from the surface. But from these two blue areas, we've been able to find extensions to the ore body, which essentially are Tribune down here. You've got north and south extensions to Bellevue. You've got flat dipping, connecting lodes, and you've got Deakin, which sits in the footwall there, all discovered.
So that three million ounces discovered from surface drilling, and it's just been refined from underground drilling now. And no exploration done since we started building the project, which is something that we're kicking off in the next 12 months. So as you can see, it's you know, not just a deposit that's just plunging to the middle of the earth. It's actually quite spread out. And as I said, the three lodes that you can see there, so you've got Tribune, Bellevue, and Deakin going through the middle. But you know, and as I said, quite well drilled out from surface, you know, within that mine corridor.
So, you know, that three point two million ounces essentially exists all within this area, and there's been not a lot of exploration drilling that's been done outside of that mine corridor, and that's something that we're gonna do now that we've got the mine into production, and we've spent our capital, you know, building the mine over the past couple of years. What we did do while we were building the mine was invest a lot in grade control drilling. So, you know, we spent about AUD 25 million just drilling out the ore body into very high sort of density. So, you know, all our mining areas are drilled, you know, 20 meters by 10-meter spacing. So, you know, that intensity of data just gives you a really high confidence in that mine plan.
You know, that sort of underpins that five-year growth plan I put before, but it also de-risks the ramp-up of operations. You know, you can see, you know, after drilling, you do your development. You can see some of the development areas in different areas of the mine. You know, good thickness, good grade, and importantly, it reconciles really well with the grade control model, which is what you want to see, and that's why you invest in that drilling in the first place. After the development, you get into your stoping, and we've done, you know, quite a bit of stoping now over the first, you know, nine months of operation since we started, you know, stoping. You know, very good conditions.
It's a basalt footwall, basalt hanging wall, very high, very, very high strength. It's a very hard rock. It's some of the hardest rock in Western Australia. But what that means is you can get parameters like this. So, you know, our dilution across our entire stoping database to date is under 10%. So, you know, pretty impressive and, you know, we've gotten better and better at stoping as you go through. It's just stock standard, sub-level open stoping mines. There's some that's narrow vein, as you can see, you know, circa two meters thickness, and there's some that bulks out that you can see there. But, you know, good that way.
And then, you know, for this year, Bellevue's becoming quite a bit of an infrastructure play, so really finalizing all that life of mine infrastructure that allows you to get the productivities from underground that you need to do to enact that plan. And, you know, that's a big focus for us, is, you know, getting different mining areas. So you can see the Tribune portal that we've just started a few weeks ago. This adds an extra work area and a future haulage decline. These ventilation fan setups, you know, these are, you know, on top of the raise bore that sits on, that vent fan setup's AUD 5 million just to put that vent fan on there.
We've got two of those that are being commissioned in a week's time, and that will immediately double the amount of ventilation that we have underground. You know, from a productivity perspective, you think about how quickly that allows you to get into your cycles. You know, it clears out all the blast fumes, and that's something that's been holding us up while we've been using the old vent system. The old vent system is something that has slowed us down quite a bit in the last 12 months. Sorry, probably last 6 months in particular, where at times we were quite restricted in the headings we could get into. You know, we're doing circa 20-25 headings between the four jumbos, which is just not efficient.
For this entire year, we're over 35 headings available for the fleet of those four jumbos, and we've already seen some of the benefits in that where our rate, a jumbo development rate for July and August is actually 24% above what the development rate was for the first half of the year, and that's before all these ventilation improvements go in and everything. Look, we're really breaking the back of it, and it's something that we're able to to really push forward. I'll talk just a little bit on the five-year plan because look, it is a really robust plan. It's fully backed by reserves. You know, the entire five years only has 10% inferred resources in it, but it is fully designed.
It's fully designed in Deswik, which is a mining software that we use, fully scheduled out. And, and look, it's really robust, and what it shows is that we can achieve two hundred and fifty thousand ounces per annum from the mine by simply increasing the underground throughput from a million tonne per annum to one point six million tonne per annum. When you talk about that, that increase, I think it's important to have a look at this slide here, the next one, which is, you know, Bellevue, even from all of the feasibility studies, was looking at mining a million tonne per annum core at six grams per tonne, and that core, a hundred percent still exists. What we're essentially doing is we're mining at about eight hundred thousand tonne of that six-gram core this year.
We do two years at the million tonne per annum run rate, and then the next two years is at one point two million tonne per annum run rate in that high-grade core. So you can see the grade of that at the top there, it's just over six grams per tonne. What happens when you mine that, and this is something we've discovered through the grade control drilling, is that it opens up all of these lower grade areas. So we can access, you know, two to three gram material that basically comes in with all of your infrastructure paid for, all your fixed costs paid for, and is quite profitable. That's on top of that.
By increasing the throughput rate to 1.6 million ton, what you're doing is you're including that medium grade material in it, which is, as I said, that two to three gram material, which is actually, you know, grade material for a lot of underground mines. We basically get that at a very, very low cost while we access this high-grade core, and that really drives, you know, that underground plan. Look, what we do, you know, the underground, as I said, fully designed, so you know, 2025, 2026, 2027, you can see all the heavy lifting's done to set up all these the infrastructure to go into several different mining areas. And it's just then going through the sequence and getting in there.
It also sets us up for a bunch of drill drives. So you can see in red here, a bunch of drill drives that'll all be up and running within the next eighteen months. This gives us those platforms to drill the resource outside of what we could drill from surface, which is pretty important because, sitting in those areas, you know, you can see it here, we have a lot of downhole EM plates, that when you do look at the Bellevue rocks, there is a lot of targets that you can see in those downhole EM. They sit there, and they're places where we can get it.
I think the most important thing, this was in an announcement that we put out this week, is you know the exploration drilling is underway, and when we do explore, we do find at Bellevue. We've got a AUD 30 million budget this year to really get into it, and really start targeting all these levels. We've got all these high priority targets to go. The Tribune portal will let us get into that drill drive, and we've started working with the VRIFY guys as well to do some AI targeting, you know, within that deposit to see what else we could push there. It's an exciting time for us. You know, balance sheet is strong, team is strong, asset's great.
We've just got to pin our ears back and get to two hundred and fifty thousand ounces.
Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Darren. That was a great presentation.