High level way. We have a really high quality, long life project that is located in the northern goldfields of Western Australia. We are located in a district with a whole bunch of the majors around us. We have Gold Fields, Northern Star, and others in a very well-endowed greenstone belt. The Bellevue asset itself, we just did a reserve and resource release a week ago, and we now have 1 million ounces of high-grade ore sitting there, just under 3 million ounces of mineral resource. We have a long life and brand new mine. We have just built this mine over the last few years.
It is just in the stage where it is hitting its operational sweet spot, and getting into a spot where the asset is working well, the balance sheet is getting well and truly cleaned up, and we are getting in a position where we have a lot of optionality going forward. Exploration is going to be a key part of that optionality, and I will take you through some of the plans for that as we get through the next few years. We also have a bit of a differentiator in the fact that we have a very high renewable energy power station, so we produce 80%-90% of our electricity through renewables, which means we are the highest renewable energy penetration mine in Australia. As I said, there are lots of options coming forward. Over the past few years, it has really been about building the project.
A lot of cash flow and a lot of optionality going forward. To cover the last couple of years of what we have been trying to do, it has been about delivering the high-quality project that we have always thought that Bellevue was going to be. This is in setting up a pretty complex underground mine. It is getting the operating levels up to a stage where we know that they are sustainable and consistent, and creating that stable base in order to grow off. It is not just about, for us, doing that for one quarter and then having some ups and downs. It has really been about setting up for consistent production day in, day out. That is through that de-risking process. That comes through every part of our business from a mining front, from a processing front, but also from a balance sheet front.
I will take you through in a bit how we have done a lot of work on that over the last, particularly, 12, 18 months. Then, we can start to really talk about the growth side of things. I think that that is something that, over the next couple of years, we will be able to see some real benefit going into the exploration piece, but also into the capital management, as we start to punch out some significant shareholder returns going forward. I will talk a little bit about last financial year to this financial year and show a bit of the comparison. Last year, the midpoint of our guidance was 140,000 ounces, and we delivered above that. The AISC was also within guidance, so it shows just a year of consistent delivery.
But I think what's more important is looking forward, where we're actually going to do a bigger year this year. When you look at last year, the last two quarters of that year delivered in excess of 40,000 ounces per quarter, which is a pretty strong run rate. If we weren't dealing with the hedge book and the balance sheet, then we would have produced significant free cash flow over that time. Looking forward to this year with the midpoint of our guidance being circa 160,000 ounces, you can see all that is keeping that run rate going forward. We've got the same amount of gear on site, the same amount of physicals that we need to do, which is essentially 100,000 tons of ore a month mined and processed. So 1.2 million tons for the year. The head grade's pretty consistent and will deliver that 160,000 ounces.
Importantly, we got a couple of capital projects coming up this year, so you can see our growth CapEx there is $ 90 million-$100 million. We got a couple of one-offs. One's a $40 million paste plant and one's about $10 million for a camp. So once you strip out those one-offs, you can see that our sort of ongoing non-sustaining CapEx is actually about that $ 40 million-$50 million range. That's your vent systems, your declines, your new mining areas, that type of thing. So it's a pretty low ongoing rate, showing that the rest of those dollars will go into the bank. Even the exploration budget, we want to spend $ 25 million-$ 30 million this year, and we really want to maximize the amount of money that we're spending.
But just because of the, I guess, the physical constraints of where we can get to, the amount of drill rigs that we have, that's going to be the number for this year. But if we can increase that over the next couple of years, I really don't think there's a bad dollar that we can spend on exploration at Bellevue in the next two years. When you look at the ore body, we do have a significant long life mine ahead of us. We have mine designs going out to the mid 2030s. We've got six or seven years of reserve life ahead of us. A typical mine in Western Australia will have a two to five year mine life that just rolls on for decades, particularly the ones in the region that we operate in. We see that being the future for Bellevue when we get there.
But at the moment, we still have a pretty decent resource base and that's before exploration and hitting a lot of these targets. I'll just give you a bit of an overview, for those that aren't super familiar with the Bellevue project, of where we sit just by showing you it all in 3D. Essentially, we mine sort of three main mining lodes. We got a Tribune lode through here. We got the Bellevue lode here and the Deacon lode come here. All these lodes were defined by surface drilling, from about 2017 was the first discovery hole through about 2020. They defined 3 million ounces and then decided to go and mine it. There's no drilling to the south here, because of that surface feature that you see, which is the salt lake, that's something that you need to have a look at from underground.
When you have a look at the ore body, it is quite laterally spread out. It is not super deep. You have defined those three main lodes to be 3 million ounces with a different color. You can see them going there. We have designed a pretty robust mine plan around it. We are just incrementally mining in five separate areas, and now you can see those areas as we put it on. All of these areas, importantly, and these are the areas that we are going to be mining for the next 3-5 years, being Marceline, Deacon North, Deacon on the Deacon Lode, Viago on the Bellevue Lode, and Tribune on the Tribune Lode. These are all fully established with all infrastructure in place. That is all ventilation, all pumping, all power.
They have all had recent upgrades, and any future upgrades to that are just going to be little incremental extensions. You do not need to do any significant infrastructure to do it. As I said, we are designed all the way out to the 2030s. When you have a look at a side on like this, you can see the whole ore body is softly plunging in a southerly direction, and all of that is open and undrilled. That is the big part of that future. From an ops perspective, I guess the most significant recent thing that has happened is we have changed over our mining contractor. It has been a point of question from the market about how the contractor transition has gone, and it is always difficult when you change an old contractor to a new one.
We finished up with a company called Develop, who have been there for the last four and a bit years. Did a great job helping us build the mine and transition to an underground contractor called Barminco, who are pretty well-known. Tier one mining contractor. Lots of employees, lots of sites, lots of things going on. Over the contract changeover, if I get you to look at this top graph in the middle here, you can see what has happened during the changeover, which is the last two weeks of Develop. We were under the line that we wanted to be in. The first four weeks of Barminco, we have been in a similar position, just where we have had to use stockpiles, slow the mill down, and it will affect our production a little bit this quarter, not materially.
It is certainly something that we can ramp up and catch up during the year. We are really happy with the initial days of Barminco. They are a tier one company. They come in with all brand-new gear. A good, high-performing workforce. They have brought in some fantastic operators and management there. It is going to be a long-term relationship, so it is a four plus one contract, so they will essentially be around the mine for at least the next four, probably five years. It is early in the financial year, so any shortfalls during that transition will be made up through the year. Another really big positive for us that we are quite excited about has been some of the drilling results that have come to us out of our Deacon North ore body. This is the last of the ore bodies to be ramped up.
We're just in the top couple of levels now. All of those holes that you see across the bottom of the page there, that's all new drilling that we've been defined in the last little while. The Deacon Main area, if you look at the picture on the left-hand side, that has been a core part of the high-grade feed of Bellevue for a long time. What we're seeing with some of the high grade that's going to come out of Deacon North now is that it looks to be replicating. These last two quarters where our head grade has been above 4.5 grams per ton, the core high grade part of that has been from Deacon. Deacon North high grade is not really in the mix now.
You can see that the Deacon North high grade, this bottom high-grade plan, which doesn't even come into the mine plan until like 2029, 2030, 2031. You can see this ability for just consistent high-grade feed for a long time coming out of the mine. From a processing perspective, the processing plant is humming. We operate at about 1.2 million ton per annum. It's got capacity of 1.35. So there's a bit of upside there. But it's one of the highest recovery plants certainly in the WA sector. We do plus 96% recovery on a very consistent basis now. We're really comfortable with how it's working. It is a pretty unique plan. It's not just your stock standard CIL plant. All of the mill feed goes through a gravity circuit. It is a very high sulfide ore body.
If you were to put this ore through just a standard CIL plant, you'd get low recovery because of those reactive sulfides sucking out all your reagents. Our processing plant is built to deal with all of that and still maintain that high recovery. So it's quite a unique plant in the area that we're in. So look, from a balance sheet perspective, for those that have followed us for a while, you will have known that we've had that project loan facility from Macquarie. That helped us to build the project. We're still at the tail end of dealing with that. So we have, if you look on this page, AUD 100 million in the bank owing next year. We still have a hedge book with no deliveries required until June 2027. But look, we're looking to deal with that quickly.
If I take you to this graph here, what you can really see is that if you look at the start of last financial year, we had 150,000 ounces in the hedge book. We're down to about 68,000 ounces now, and that's a conscious decision by us to just de-risk the company by delivering the balance sheet. But look, as that hedge book goes down, the cash position, the cash flow goes up. I think one of the couple of key data points on here to look at is that if we didn't have that hedge book in the March and June quarters, we would've done $ 160 million and $ 110 million bucks of free cash flow during that time. You annualize that run rate, you can see that this mine is going to punch out quite a lot next year when we don't have any more hedging.
You can put it all into your models and see where you are at. That position, if we keep on the track that we are on now, which is what we want to do, we will be back to being hedge-free and delivering into the spot market early next year, calendar year that is. This puts us in a good position where we have got a good balance sheet, we have got a steady project, and we have just been busy, heads down, building the project for the last couple of years. Now it is time to start to focus on growth and see what we can do. As I said earlier, I do not think there is a bad dollar we can spend on exploration in the next couple of years, and we intend on running a few programs around.
We started with two programs, one up in the north here, at an area called Westralia. We have drilled a few early holes there. Our first drill program, we got 3.5 meters at 18.5 grams per ton. It was high sulfide, looked like normal Bellevue rocks. We have now run downhole EM there and are following up the downhole EM targets we got. That hit was 150 meters from existing development, so certainly something we could run out and grab if we wanted to. Tribune South, down to the south here, we have had some good hits out. If you look at those three main line of lodes that we have, Bellevue, we are mining up here. We have got Southern Belle down here, which is a very prospective resource. A lot of opportunity infill in between.
On the Deacon Lode, this is Deacon Main here, Deacon North up here, Marceline up the top. There is certainly room for another couple of production areas down to the south, and then the same in Tribune. Tribune starts at surface and is a relatively low grade compared to the other part of the ore body. We are starting to see, as we get down to these southern areas, that the grade and the, I think importantly in the mineralogy, we are starting to see a higher intensity of sulfides as we come down to that southern end of Tribune. This potentially could be an area we could put in another decline or two and bring new production areas on, and that will drive some growth in coming years. As I said, the southern part of the ore body is the most underexplored.
It has all the downhole EM targets, everything looking there. The reason that we have not got down there and drilled aggressively is due to access. There is a drill drive that we are looking to put in. We have done the first stub of it. We are doing some drilling off the first stub of it right now, but that will extend and keep going. You look to the northern end of the ore body here, there is about 4 million ounces sitting in that box, and who knows what is going to be down there. We are not going to die wondering. We are going to get down, get that drill drive in, and really look to push it in coming forward.
I think that from a growth perspective, I guess, we haven't been in a position as a company where we've had to aggressively push the growth side of things because the highest value thing for us was getting the mine built, getting the mine into steady state operations, and that's something that we're now comfortable we're achieving. It's not that we didn't aspire to do more or we didn't have the drive to get any further. It's more just been about getting the operating platform set. What we can start to look at now, particularly with a clear balance sheet, is really optimizing the asset. We've got about 10% latent capacity in processing that we can push with a new mining contractor. Putting a little bit of extra gear in perhaps, off a high fixed cost base, that will definitely add a lot of value.
Looking at anything incremental we can do. New mining areas might mean that we want to do a plant expansion, nearby assets that might be stranded and be really well suited to our mill. These are all the opportunities that we can look at now that we've got the balance sheet for it. Look, just before I finish, it's probably good to retouch on the sustainability theme and what sustainability means for us at Bellevue. It's about building a better business. We set on the pathway of creating a sustainable platform many years ago, and the project that we've delivered, we are the lowest diesel user on the Street. We've got the lowest exposure cost-wise to diesel price. Certainly in W.A., but I'd argue in many other places. It's only 1.5% of our direct cost is diesel.
That non-reliance on hydrocarbons just means that we have a safer, more de-risked asset. We're a lower exposure to inflation. I think the one that you almost forget on this is that we're all competing for a highly skilled workforce. When you look at that next generation of professionals coming through there, our mine being a sustainable one is something that we've seen has really attracted a lot of our workforce, and we get good feedback on that's the reason that they like to stay working for us at Bellevue. So look, that's the Bellevue story. We've had a really good last 12 months. Delivered a really good project. It's in a really de-risked and positive way right now, with a lot of upside to be unlocked in coming years. Thank you very much. Look. We have time for, yes, one question. Paul, over there.
Thanks, Darren. Yeah, just a couple of quick ones. Just the approximate value to close out the remaining hedges today?
It'd be in the range of $ 300 million, but we've got a bit of cash on the balance sheet, so we can use some of that. We've got some refinancing options which we can pursue. That's something we want to do. It's getting to be at a level now that we'd be able to deal with it pretty quickly.
Yep, sure. You guys had a lot of contingency in place before that, and it looks like maybe it's still been a little bit more disruptive than you'd expected. I'm curious, perhaps more in the broader context of the W.A. mining space, what did you learn from that and what popped up that did cost you those 3,000 or 4,000 ounces you alluded to in your recent release?
Yeah, look, it really comes down to bums in seats, Paul, and just keeping it going. Underground mining's not rocket science, right? It's just about having the machines available, having people in the machines every shift, and being productive when they get down to their work areas. Literally, that was just the issue. Last few weeks of Develop, people didn't have a job to go to, so they just didn't turn up or they were busy cleaning the mine up and ramping down and credit to Develop. They left the mine in a really professional state. Barminco just getting people in, getting it trained up, getting used to how the emulsion systems work, how charge up was, and learning the nuance of the mine was the first sort of challenges.
But within sort of four weeks, they were starting to hit their straps and now we're really comfortable with where they are.
Thank you very much, Darren and Bellevue Gold.