Last but definitely not least in our morning session is Evolution Mining. It's a pleasure to introduce the Managing Director and CEO, Lawrie Conway, who's a close friend of mine. Lawrie has over three decades of experience in the resources sector across operational, commercial, and financial roles. Lawrie has held various senior leadership roles, including Chief Financial Officer at Evolution. Before joining Evolution in 2014, Lawrie worked at Newcrest and BHP, gaining extensive experience across Australia, PNG, and Chile. Lawrie.
Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm really pleased that you're moderating this session, Andrew, because it reduces the probability of you heckling me from the other side of the stage as a very strong supporter of us when you were on the other side of the fence and as a shareholder. I'm glad that you're moderating today. Also, thank Canaccord for your ongoing sponsorship of a wonderful forum. Today, I'd really like to touch on a number of things around the company, the gold industry in general, and where this is all heading. They're the forward-looking customer statements, so I won't spend any time on that one for you. I do want to really just start on something that is very close to me, which is around mental health.
In the industry, we do our pre-starts, our huddles every shift, focusing on making sure that people can safely perform their job. Also, mental health, which has risen in sort of prominence over the last few years, has started to have a role to play for us. Because really, when you look at it, you know, in my personal view, the mining industry is the most rewarding and satisfying industry to work in. It is also, I think, one of the toughest. When people come to work, you know, they can be working alone for extended periods. They're on very long rosters, long days. What really highlighted it for me, and you see the picture here on the right, it is a tank at Mungari that was a part of the expansion project.
It was the brainchild of a contractor who was working on site, but he's also an artist, Von der Leyen. When the project was being constructed, he asked the project director, what are we doing with these tanks? We said, they'll just be painted normal white. He said, I think I could do something better than that. He came up with this initiative that he presented to Scott Barber, our General Manager, which was to really focus on making something visible when our team comes to site each and every day. It captures in that mural a lot of things that are outside of work: family, sport, relaxation, and making sure that people, as it says there, that they're not alone. What stood out for me, this three months in design, six days doing this tank, and over 1,000 cans of spray paint to put this together.
von really did a great job because on the first day that this became visible, someone reached out to him and said that it had made a difference because of what they were going through with their own mental health issues. We've got many examples of these across each of our operations. I just thought it was a nice way to start because that's what we do each and every day at our operations. Thought it worthwhile just touching a little bit on the team that we've got in place. In July, we did transition with Jake, where he's moved to a traditional Non-Executive Chair role. It was well planned and executed, this transition over the last couple of years. I've worked with Jake for 15 years, and that will continue as we go forward.
Interestingly, Jake has said that, you know, in stepping back to that role, it means that I've got to work harder and longer. I said to Jake that he's more than welcome to do what a traditional Non-Executive Chair does, which is sip cocktails on the beach. I've sent him off to do that. What we have done is really built an experienced team who knows how to deliver. If you look at it, we've got Matt O’Neill, our Chief Operating Officer; Nancy Guay, our Chief Technical Officer; and Fran Summer-Hayes, our Chief Financial Officer. They've joined us from Glencore, Agnico Eagle, and BHP. Fran will start with us next month. They bring years of experience around their areas of capability. It's certainly with Matt and Nancy being in the organization for the last 12- 14 months, we've seen that improvement in consistency, delivery, and our safety performance.
Just as important on the rest of the team, as you'll see there with Evan, Kieran, Fiona, Glenn, and Paul, they've been involved in the organization for many years, a number of them over 10 years. They've been involved in the strategy that we've had since day one, and they've been able to execute successfully. We do have that team in place. Over the last 13 years as an organization, as you can see in the chart, we have executed against our strategy consistently each and every time. What that is, is that today, every one of the assets in our portfolio were not in our portfolio when the company started in 2011. Every asset that was in our portfolio, with the exception of Mount Rawdon, has been sold at the right time.
What that has done, that has increased certainly the quality of the organization, the quality of the portfolio, and the generation of cash that we're able to do. It isn't just merely on the back of the rising gold price that we've seen over the last 10 years. If you look at it, what it's done now with the portfolio is those FY 2025 results were really exceptional. They'll build off delivering to group production and cost guidance, giving us record cash flows, AUD 787 million at AUD 1,050 an ounce. That was delivered at an achieved gold price that's about AUD 800 an ounce below what the spot price is.
As we go forward, you know, we see in FY 2026, as we put our group guidance out last month, it's almost a rinse and repeat of what we did in FY 2025, which is safely delivered to the plan and bank a lot of money for our shareholders. As I said just a minute ago, that was all delivered at a price that was AUD 800 an ounce below what the current spot price is. Turning attention to our only asset here in Western Australia. While it's our only asset, it's truly amazing what we've achieved at Mungari in the last couple of years with this expansion project. To give you context, back in June 2023, when we were taking the project to the board, the market was certainly a lot hotter than it is today.
Availability of people, availability of equipment, inflation was certainly on the rise, and the gold price was only AUD 2,450 an ounce. The board was just starting to see the successes that we were having in the exploration around the underground to give confidence of that higher-grade ore source to the plant. Fortunately for us, the board backed the project. What we saw is that it enables us to expand our production by 50% through a 4.2 million-ton plant, taking production over the next five years at least to 200,000 ounces per annum, which is up 50%, as I said. It extends the mine life to at least 2038. Importantly, in the last 18 months to two years, we've delivered this project under budget by 9%.
I think when Scott and the team finish the commissioning and get to commercial production, we'll actually see that come in a bit better than that 9%. We brought it in nine months ahead of the original schedule. For me, that is a real, not only a success for us as an organization, but is a success for the industry that you're able to deliver that project on budget and ahead of schedule. To give a little bit of context there, this is the plant. Scott and the team are really happy because essentially they've been handed a brand new plant a couple of months ago. If you look at it, the existing crushing and in the SAG mill area, in between those two is where the old plant was. We built around that over the 18 months.
Now you see the new crushing, that SAG mill, the stockpile coming from that crusher, the leaching facility that I was talking about earlier. We've started to commission that. In the next six months, we'd expect to go into full commercial production, delivering strong cash flows out of Mungari going forward. To give a little bit more of an insight, I thought it would be good to have a quick look at how the project was built and built successfully over the last 18 months. It's a short one-minute video where you don't have to actually listen to me. I think it'll show how well the project went and what we've got coming ahead for us at Mungari. I do congratulate Scott and the project team on that project. Shifting more towards the actual gold sector and specifically, you know, why invest in gold.
Really, when you look at it, it's been a changing dynamic over the last 18 months to two years. Unfortunately, for the gold industry, we really do benefit from the economy not going well or rising geopolitical tensions or things that actually don't mean well for the rest of the world. Certainly, what we've seen over the last couple of years is that people's confidence has changed dramatically. Their confidence in world order, their confidence in the U.S. currency has certainly shifted. What we've seen is central banks buying more gold as a reserve rather than the US dollar. There are many examples. A couple that I saw recently is that if you look in Ghana, the Ghanaian government has reached agreement with nine mining companies there, whereby they will procure 20% of all production to put into their reserves.
In Saudi Arabia, in the last year alone, their reserves have risen 16% year- on- year. There is seeing that shift. Certainly, what you see on this chart is that strong correlation between the gold equities and the gold price that has happened over these time frames as the sentiment has shifted. What you sort of see between 2016 and 2020, the equities outperformed as there was margin expansion. You saw that there was low inflation, low interest rates. The costs were not as high. There was a rising gold price, and that caused the equities to outperform. As we came out of COVID, inflation started to come through, rising interest rates. You saw that compression of margin in the sector. Therefore, you started to see the gold sector and the equity side underperform in that period. Now what we're seeing is that breakout in terms of the gold price.
It was quite interesting in talking to Rocky, our GM of Investor Relations. If you track the gold price movement in terms of how long it takes to move AUD 1,000, the last AUD 1,000 took just on four months. That's a record movement. It does show what's happening out there in terms of the economy and people's sentiment. What that's meaning is that you're starting to see that margin expansion for gold companies. I think as an industry, we've been poor allocators of capital through these periods of when you get record margins. It's imperative for us as we go through this cycle that we apply that discipline in terms of capital investment so that when you do see that cycle turn, our shareholders aren't left looking and saying, "Where is the cash?" Copper is certainly a differentiator in our portfolio.
We're really pleased to have assets such as Ernest Henry and Northparkes into our portfolio. It comprises about 25% - 30% of our revenue, and it gives us that buffer with the gold price that then through the cycle, with those two commodities, we're able to sustain our margin and not have that volatility in the portfolio. If you look at copper's role in renewables, it's got a major place that needs to be performed. However, the pathway is not easy. When you look at it, it takes the average time is 20 years from discovery to production. It's going to take in the order of $2 trillion in investment in copper mines to achieve that net zero target by 2050. If you look at it, the supply-demand gap is widening.
If you look at the treating and refining costs on the supply side, they are at all-time lows, which means there's not enough copper being produced to meet the demand side, and therefore there's not enough to keep those smelters operating. The outlook is for higher prices as we go forward in real terms. That is that great differentiator with us. We've got Ernest Henry and Northparkes, as I said, they are low-cost copper mines in reality. They're in tier-one jurisdictions. More importantly, both of them have got around 1.5 million tons excess processing capacity currently over and above what we can mine at. I think the true value of those two assets and the role they play in our portfolio will be better understood as we go forward.
Looking at it from a portfolio perspective for Evolution as I said earlier, over the last sort of 12- 13 years, as we've executed that strategy of bringing assets in and selling assets to lift the quality, we now have a high-return portfolio with long life and more upside than we had five or six years ago. If you look at Cowal, Cowal last year generated over AUD 880 million of operating cash flow. We've seen companies present that have got annual production of around 300,000 ounces. Cowal generated more cash than a company that has 300,000 ounce production, and that's what Cowal currently produces. We approved in April the Open Pit Continuation project that extends the mine out to 2042.
If you think about it, for an additional 2 million ounces, the AUD 430 million that we'll invest over the next seven years, that's going to deliver at a rate of return of between 35% and 70%. The 70% is at the spot gold price. It was a perfect time to approve that project. Therefore, what we see, Cowal will be a cornerstone asset for us for many decades to come. Ernest Henry, you know, we acquired that in 2016, took full ownership in 2022. It continues to generate strong cash for us. We know it extends below the current 1,200 level. We're seeing drilling results that see that it will extend below the 775 level. We don't expect this operation to finish in 2040. We expect it to go longer.
We've got Bert, which is sitting up at the top of the old open pit that gives us an opportunity for additional ore. We've got land that we picked up from Rio Tinto last year, the Correla project, that's all in and around the Ernest Henry ore bodies that we can bring to that plant and expand the production rates as well. Northparkes is very interesting for us. 18 months ago, when we acquired it, there was a view in the market that this would not generate cash in the near term. In the first 18 months, it generated AUD 180 million of net cash flow at a rate of return of just over 30%. It's been operating for 30 years. It's got 600 million tons of resource. Therefore, it's got a long life ahead of it. We've got many ore bodies that we can operate there.
We've got E48 going into production and E22, which is the next major opportunity for us to really scale up production there. Red Lake has been doing what we've asked of it in the last 18 months, which is consistent cash generation, safely delivering quarter in, quarter out. We got AUD 74 million of net mine cash flow in 2025, and we expect that to continue. It's got about a 17-year mine life ahead of it. Lastly, why Evolution? Right when we started back in 2011, we had a clear strategy, and it's been a consistent one that we've executed against. We've got an underlying focus on margin over ounces and continually improving the portfolio. We've seen our production increase three and a half fold. We've increased our mine life out to 18 years, from five years when we started and 10 years when we started to acquire assets.
We've seen an increase in reserves, and we've also been increasing our dividends, and we expect to continue to do that as we go forward in this rising price environment. Thank you for your time today.