Reflects my background with Northern Star that Hayden referred to, where we bought six assets off global majors, reinvested in the drill bit, reinvested in productivity to create value for shareholders. Our first full year of production, we think, was very successful. 330,000 ounces gold production, almost 15,000 tons of copper produced at those same mines. That left us in this incredibly strong financial position at the end of the calendar year, with over AUD 1.25 billion in the bank, zero debt. What is important about that is it set the platform for growth. It set the table so we can deliver shareholder value over the coming years. This slide, I think, really captures that growth. You can see the original acquisition there in the dark blue for just over AUD 500 million of cash and scrip. In just cash build, we have eclipsed that.
We actually paid back the transaction in five months. At AUD 7.3 billion today, we have returned over 13x to shareholders in that initial 18 months. What we have is this fantastic infrastructure at Telfer. Tier 1 infrastructure, one of Australia's largest processing centers, and a globally significant endowment. It is a 20-million-ounce endowment at Havieron. Another 10-million-ounces endowment down the road at Havieron. 30 million ounces is globally significant, and the infrastructure to match that. With Havieron, we have the opportunity now fully permitted, and we are spinning up there in terms of the mobilization to deliver West Australia's largest underground gold mine, which will go through that Telfer mill, and together Telfer and Havieron operating together will deliver one of Australia's Tier 1 assets.
When you look at this from a standing start 14 months ago, just over a year ago when we listed on the ASX, we have emerged as one of the core gold platforms in Australia. The free cash flow in that first year of operation, I think, was really the focus for us. We were able to simultaneously invest in Telfer, both in terms of the drill bit at Havieron but also recapitalizing Telfer and generate sector-leading free cash flow. In terms of Telfer itself, I talked about just the infrastructure endowment. At 20 million tons, other than the two assets sitting inside Newmont, the global super major of Cadia and Boddington, effectively, Telfer is the third largest processing center in Australia. For good order, KCGM is doing expansion and will catch us up sometime probably this year. It just shows you the world-class infrastructure that we inherit.
That gives us this scale of processing together with a relatively simple physical flow sheet, gives us a quartile all of our own in terms of size of production. At AUD 17 a ton, it is a competitive advantage for us in terms of the cost of production. Even when KCGM jumps out to the right because they have the UFG circuit, they should be a more expensive processing option. That continues to be sector-leading for Greatland. If you have a look at what we have done post-acquisition, this is probably my favorite slide in the deck because we have really had these two core approaches. One is invest in the drill bit but also operational excellence. In the open pit, we have actually increased productivity measured by total material move by 59% over the six quarters since acquisition, just quarter- on- quarter driving that productivity.
In the underground, it has actually been a little bit more significant. We have taken underground meter development from about 275 m to averaging over 650 m of development. More than doubling underground productivity. When you go into that top left-hand slide, you look at gold recovery. When we did due diligence, we were sitting there seeing that the availability on that CIL circuit was around 40%. That is now running north of 90%, and we have taken long-term gold recoveries from around 81%- 88.1% average last year. For copper, we have taken it from around 71% long-term recoveries to presently sitting around 81%. That means we are getting more metal for the same mining, for the same processing cost.
When you have a look at what that does in that top right-hand corner, you would normally over this four-year period expect to see some northerly creep in your all-in sustaining cost just from the impact of inflation. What you have actually seen at Greatland Resources is it slowly walked down. Plus, we have had the benefit of the sector's strong gold price. We have done all that safer. We have taken it from a 10- 14 TRIFR rate down to four point five last year. We are really proud of the operational turnaround that we have achieved at Telfer. The other half of the strategy coming into Telfer was to reinvest in the drill bit. We took it from two rigs spinning at acquisition to a peak of 14 rigs, presently at 11. We inherited just 600,000 ounces at Telfer in that dark blue across in the corner there.
Just 12 months later, it was 7.9 million ounces. That is tremendous growth. On top of that, we also have the 7 million ounces delineated at Havieron. We now have a 15 million ounce endowment. On top of that, we inherited zero reserves at Telfer. Today, it is 1.8 million ounces. This is all part of this 450,000 m surge in drilling. The outcome, what you are seeing there in terms of the 7.9 million ounces at Telfer, plus the 1.8 million ounces of reserves, is just from the first 110,000 m of this 450,000 m drilling campaign. When we update these again in the March quarter, you will see the impact of another 250,000 m of drill. I think you will see a lot of infill drilling, which will continue to add to the resource growth, but particularly around the reserve and the demonstrated mine life.
This is just a schematic of the mine. The center of gravity is in that West Dome open pit. We are currently in that Stage 7 extension that sits out the back there of West Dome. You look at that big Stage 2 halo. It is already 140 million tonnes, and we continue to expand that. We think that is just a huge opportunity to demonstrate multi-decade open pit mine life at Telfer. The Main Dome has not had a pit shell put around it since gold was AUD 2,400. It has not been accessed for about eight years. It has already got a 20 million tonne cut back sitting there. We will have a couple of rigs spinning on that late this calendar year. What we like about that is with a multi-decade mine life at West Dome open pit.
We don't need to reenter that straight away, but we love to think about creating the resilience and the flexibility in the mine plan by having a Main Dome mine plan sitting there ready to go. Also, historically, the Main Dome was a notch higher in grade, and that gives us the optionality of actually bringing forward that Main Dome open pit ounces. If we transition into the underground, you've got the Main Dome underground. That's been a 25-year underground mine. It continues to push along. That's where we've been adding a lot of the ounces over the last 15 months at Telfer, and we continue to see that. One of the beautiful things about the installed infrastructure at Telfer, it's got the underground crusher and the hoist to surface. Beautifully efficient piece of infrastructure. Then post-acquisition, the discovery by Greatland of the West Dome underground.
We're currently drilling out a 600 m strike length from that. This is the highest average grade seen at Telfer since 2005. It's running north of 4 g plus 1% copper on that eastern lens of the Lower Limey Unit, where we'd first enter the West Dome underground. Then the team stepped out 1.2 km with this Pinnacles hole and hit maiden drill intercept was 60 m at 6.5 g. We're now just doing a series of wedge holes into that. One swallow summer doesn't make, but when we get to go in there and then bring back these wedges, then we'll fence it out a couple of times. We're really excited about adding, well, tripling the strike length of that West Dome underground. It's a huge opportunity when you think about 25 years and counting of underground mining at Main Dome.
The size of the prize at West Dome underground is tremendous. It's just sitting 1.5 km off that existing infrastructure, that underground crusher and hoist again. So the capital intensity here is incredibly low. We should be able to bring this area online and literally measure that in terms of tens of millions of Australian dollars. We'll bring out the study either in the December or the March quarter on this, which I think will demonstrate. But we've already driven out there. We've got those two initial drives where we're drilling off, which are now complete, and we're actually driving out on that haulage drive, that dedicated haul drive. Really, we plan for this ore to come through the mill in FY 2028, although there's an opportunity, just given the development meters we're getting there, maybe to see a little bit of this development ore sneaking into late FY 2027.
The opportunity there is tremendous. Then we go to Havieron. This is fully permitted. We got full permit during the course of this quarter, so we're just mobilizing up there now. But this Havieron ore will be truck hauled back to Telfer and go through the existing infrastructure. It should generate about 270,000 ounces per annum. Already has a 17-year mine life, plus another 80 million tonnes of JORC resource that wasn't in that initial feasibility study. In addition to that, it will do another 10,000 tonnes of copper. Should take us to a circa 25,000-tonne copper producer when taken as a whole. So we love what this does to the platform. But if I take you back to the study, the study told you we'd be the lowest cost all-in sustaining cost mine on the ASX, but it was done on a standalone Havieron basis.
Because at the time, we still hadn't delineated that decades of life at Telfer. What we did there is did a study with just 4 million lonely tonnes of Havieron ore going through the 20 million tonne Telfer infrastructure. In reality now, it's likely that Greatland is when you're running both Telfer and Havieron in parallel. When you look at that study where our cost of processing at Telfer presently is AUD 17 a tonne, the study assumed AUD 37 a tonne. We will take that down to a lower micron. So we'll put a little bit more energy into that ore, so it will cost a little bit more than AUD 17. But even if we were to take the midpoint of AUD 27, we would save AUD 10 a tonne. Plus the site services, plus the sustaining CapEx synergies of running both Telfer and Havieron together.
You'd expect us to be saving north of AUD 15 a tonne across another 4 million tonnes of Havieron ore. So Havieron looks good with that initial study. It looks even better now. When you think about Havieron, because we grind a little bit higher, don't just think of it as 4 million tonnes going through that mill. When you express the capacity of the Telfer mill as a function of Telfer ore, 20 million tonnes, you should amplify it by about one point six times. So it will take about 1/3 of one train. That will allow us to be a little bit more selective in the Telfer ore we take through. Also, as we bring on West Dome Underground, you see just more and more opportunities to lift up that average grade going through that Telfer mill. This is Havieron.
The other thing to really emphasize here is it's half built. So we're already down 340 m vertical. The basement, so where the ore body starts is 415 m. There's this barren Permian zone that sits across it. But we've already got the experience, the understanding of having gone through almost 2,200 m of development here, down to that 340 m. What we do is we'll get that main decline in, the brown line in first. That will allow us to start with truck haulage to surface. Then that red line is the conveyor decline. Once we get that conveyor in place, that allows us to have a more efficient, lower cost, mass transport platform for the vertical haulage and take us up to the 3.94 million tonnes a year at Havieron.
Just to wrap it up, just sitting within the portfolio we think is some option value around our tungsten asset. Just 10 km to the south of Telfer is the world's second or third best tungsten deposit. Tungsten's gone from about AUD 400 a TMU- AUD 3,000 a TMU. It's one of these critical minerals which has got a lot of attention right now. Our base case is to spin this off as, say, called Greatland Tungsten onto the ASX. Having said that, we've got some inbounds. We continue to look at what's best for shareholders, but there's an opportunity to do this in a tax-effective way where we get demerger relief and get that into the hands of shareholders. But given our organic gold-copper growth profile, we just don't think we can put the time, energy, or effort into O'Callaghans in the next five years.
We think we can daylight and surface value for shareholders quicker by bringing this to market. Effectively, that would be a dividend for our Greatland shareholders. With that, Hayden, I can open it up for questions.
Brilliant. Thanks, Shaun. If there's any questions from the floor, please raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone over. First one from me, just on Havieron as that ramps up. What's the best ore, do you think, in Telfer to blend with it? Is it from West Dome or some of the deeper stuff underground, or is it some of the low-grade open pit?
The way we've got the two trains configured is we actually put the higher grade underground ore through train one because that flows into the CIL circuit. I think what you'd end up doing is seeing that Havieron ore either being batched or being blended together with the high-grade Telfer ore, where it's probably worth also grinding that down to a lower micron size to get the higher recoveries. It's nice to have the optionality of doing both. One of the dividends of the Havieron study is we're actually putting in a new CIP, a much bigger CIP circuit to replace that CIL circuit. That means more Telfer ore will be going through that carbon and leach process, which we think might also notch up your broader recoveries across Telfer.
We're putting it in for Havieron but it will also give better milling outcomes or recovery outcomes for the Telfer ore as well. It's a little bit of a sleeper benefit in there for us.
And you're drilling a lot of meters every year. You've done a great job in building that inventory of open pit feed. You've now got this West Dome target as well. Can you do justice to sort of all the regional things that have got potential that could be high-grade feed as well? Or is there just so much going on at the site itself that that's where the focus is?
Yeah, look, our center of gravity, Hayden, as you'd expect, is those in-mine opportunities, particularly West Dome. West Dome is just a glittering prize, and to have just 1.5 km sitting off the existing Telfer infrastructure, this kind of deposit as a new maiden mining area for us, or independent mining area for us, is tremendous. So that is our focus. But when you look at the portfolio, we also have the South East Hub. We do have some rigs spinning on that. This is a series of relatively high-grade, shallow open pits. We like, again, bringing into the mine plan those. That will be a slower plan because really the West Dome open pit and the West Dome underground is attracting a lot of those drill meters. But again, we love trying to create resilience and flexibility in the mine plan.
So having a series of ready-to-go open pits, they're already on mining lease, sitting within 5 km-10 km of the processing plant is another bit of option value sitting within that portfolio, and we do have a couple of rigs sitting on them as we speak.
All right, brilliant. We're out of time, Shaun, so thanks very much for presenting this morning.
Thanks very much, Hayden.