Alright, welcome everyone to the Final Session of Day 2 of Diggers & Dealers. My name is Cameron Bill. I'm from Canaccord Genuity's research team. First up, we have Tony Ottaviano, the Managing Director and CEO of Liontown Resources. Prior to joining Liontown, Tony held senior executive roles with two of the world's largest mining companies, BHP and Rio Tinto, and has led across the mining value chain from strategy to operations. Mr. Ottaviano joined Liontown as MD and CEO in 2021 and oversaw the delivery of the definitive feasibility study for Kathleen Valley Lithium Project, the execution of foundational offtake agreements, and a final investment decision clearing the way for construction. Liontown has transitioned from a junior explorer to one of the largest lithium producers globally and Australia's first underground lithium mine. Thanks, Tony.
Thanks, Cameron, and good to see we've got a few true believers in the audience. I wore my gold tie specifically because I was hoping to get some gold magic onto the lithium price. Let's see. Thanks for Canaccord and Diggers to have me present today. I will start with the customary disclaimer and important information, and then I'll move to our strategy. This has been consistently our strategy for well past three years. The beauty about strategy is it's got to be enduring through the cycle, and ours is, and it's got to be consistent, and especially you've got to execute against it. That's exactly what we're doing. At the moment, the focus is very much on the first horizon, which is bringing Kathleen Valley to its full potential. Most of my presentation today will be centered around the Kathleen Valley operation.
We are not losing sight of Horizon 2 and especially Horizon 3. We'll start with the market. We have seen developments in recent times where government policy is starting to intervene, and very senior members of the Chinese government are concerned about overcapacity and this propensity for the Chinese economy to overbuild. They're calling it involution. It's not just a passing or a market speculation. There is tangible action being put together by the central government to control this relentless push for overcapacity. We'll see how that plays out. If we move to the demand side, what encourages me about this particular graph is the movement of Europe and, more importantly, the movement of the rest of the world. Everyone seems to get fixated about North America. Yes, it is subdued. Yes, government policy in that jurisdiction is creating headwinds. Frankly, it doesn't represent the overall market.
You're seeing movement in these countries and the rest of the world, which have populations greater than the United States, Brazil, Mexico. We're encouraged by when we see this sort of 20%+ growth annually coming from our demand. Then we move to energy storage. What we're predicting is, as the future pans out, by 2029, you can see from this graph, one in every four lithium units will direct themselves into energy storage. We believe the market continues to underestimate the demand coming from this sector. What have we achieved since last Diggers? It's been a full dance card. Our first shipment to our customer, LG, in September 2024. We then had to pivot as the market started to decline and revise our entire strategy around our mine plan, and we did that.
We instigated a fairly aggressive business optimization program, and we delivered $112 million worth of savings and deferred costings. We started production in our underground on schedule in April 2025. We received the government assistance package from the WA government, and we thanked them for that. It was well timed and well considered. We commissioned Australia's largest paste plant on schedule, 4 million tons per annum of pastefield capacity. Finally, we released our full-year results. It actually wasn't full-year; it was 11 months, six of which were ramp-up, and we had five months to try and glean as much operational data as we could so that we can manage the next 12 months, which we're calling our transition year, FY 2026. I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. ESG. I've titled this lead in the real economics.
Whilst we believe that it's the right thing to do, it also makes good economic sense. Let's look at power. Until recently, we had the largest hybrid renewable power station in Australia at 95 MW with our partner Zenith . We did that because it made economic sense. We've got a very, very competitive energy price. If Zenith is in the audience, not competitive enough. When you compare it with the alternative, a fossil-fueled power station, we have the benefit of consistent power, given 80% of it is renewable. We're not exposed to the variances of the fossil fuel price changes. Another hidden sleeper of benefit is because we were able to minimize our carbon emissions to less than 100,000 tons a year, we could accelerate the approvals timeline, meaning that our first tons to market were earlier than otherwise would have been the case.
In retrospect, maybe I should have taken a longer line to try and line two for first production, but it is what it is. We hurt less people than we did last year, but that's still not good enough. Safety is an ever-consistent journey for all mining companies. We've got strong community and traditional owner relationships. Two contracts that we awarded to Jawal are probably one of the largest Aboriginal contracts in the gold fields. We're very proud of that fact, and we continue to work on our partnership with Jawal. Here's a snapshot of our last 11 months. 321,000 tons of spodumene production in 11 months. We're very proud of that fact. There are many of our competitors that took a lot longer to get to that figure. We sold 280-odd thousand tons of product to our key customers and the spot market.
We achieved a 58% recovery figure, but that's including six months of ramp-up. There were times when we fed underground ore for a month, we achieved well over 70% recoveries. We have confidence in this processing plan. You can see that with the plant availability. In a ramp-up year, we exceeded 89%, and at times in the last quarter, 93% availability. That's uptime available for utilization. If we look at the financial metrics, again, $300 million of revenue in our first year, an operating cost of $802 in a ramp-up year, and we're one of the only lithium companies that disclose all-in sustaining, and we've got an all-in sustaining of just over $1,000 Australian on a 5.2 basis. Sorry, the most important point on that is a cash balance at the end of the year of $156 million. Where does it start?
It starts with a world-class ore body, and we have that at Kathleen Valley. What you see in front of you here is our Mt Mann deposit. We have two ore bodies there, North-West flats and Mt Mann. We've put the North-West flats on hold as we pivoted in November, and now the focus is on Mt Mann. This is a bulk tons operation. We focused in November on high margin. We specifically chose those words, not high- grading as some of the hedge funds want to put out in the market. You can see from the color coding, there is a nice balance of grade through that next five-year plan. Those rectangles don't do it justice. Some of the stopes there are north of 80,000 tons- 100,000 tons of ore. A small stope for us is 12,000 tons- 15,000 tons, and I'll speak about that in a minute.
What you see in front of you is the five-year plan, and then there's another five years underneath that that we're well and truly advanced in our planning, and then there's a further five to six years under that. What are the key enablers? We put them into position well before we needed them. Firstly, we're seeing excellent ground conditions, consistent with our definitive feasibility study work. We're getting good fragmentation. We were told that it couldn't be done. You couldn't mine lithium underground. The rocks would be as big as boulders. You wouldn't be able to move them. We have proven all that wrong. So far, things have been consistent with our thinking and our planning. We put all our enabling infrastructure in place before we needed it.
A four million-ton paste plant, the largest in Australia, and we've got all our ventilation, as you can see on the picture in front of you, producing 11,000 cubic meters or 1,100 cubic meters a second. This mine, given its bulk tons and its large stopes, we can defray our fixed costs from our underground mining operations over greater tons. That's why we have confidence on two fronts. We can deliver within our cost targets, and we can deliver the ramp-up. We already are, after three months, at half a million tons per annum. We're going to progressively move to a million and then a million and a half, and I can talk about that in a slide to come. Where is all the magic? This diagram tells you this.
If you look at RL260, from that level alone, we can deliver more than 3 million tons of annual production from one level. It comes down to tons per vertical meter, which at those levels is over 125,000 tons, and the size of the stopes. Again, I cannot reinforce the power that this delivers us in terms of getting our unit costs where they need to be. Now, we shift from the underground, the mining, to the other side of the equation, which is the processing plant. We're very proud that this plant has overachieved. It has produced where we think it should have produced, but more importantly, it has illustrated to us how adaptable and flexible it is to tolerate the vagrancies of mill feed quality. What kills you in lithium is contamination. Dilution needs to be kept to a minimum.
The host rock has a similar SG to the primary ore body, and therefore, it's difficult to float with high levels of contamination. What our plant has been able to demonstrate is the design limit for most of these plants is less than 5% contamination. We are producing salable corn at well above that, to the tune of 15%- 20% dilution. If we get dilution in the underground, which we don't expect because we believe this is an open pit issue more than it is an underground, then if it's 5% or 6% dilution underground, we don't care. Given those sizes of stopes, it will be diluted. We're not just standing and sitting there and waiting for this plant to deliver more. We are investing.
As we learn more, we understand where the constraints are, where the bottlenecks are, and we invest really targeted capital because that's all we can afford and ensure to unlock more capability. These are two examples. We do that through our ability to put on stream particle analyzing to size distribution. We get that in real time, and then mill control, which most plants have, but we believe is a first in lithium. What do we plan to do for Diggers 2026? It is going to be another full dance card. We are going to start by finishing the underground infrastructure. We have got a major suite of shutdowns, which are planned as part of the first quarter. We have got a mill reline, which was just completed. There is some more work to be done to the dry plant.
The first quarter is really setting ourselves up for the rest of the year in terms of planned maintenance. We are going to deploy the technology I have just spoken about. We will complete the open pit by the end of December on schedule, and we will rely on our strategic stockpiles that we have planned since the feasibility study. As we ramp up the underground, those strategic stockpiles will come into play. Finally, we will be 100% underground mill feed by quarter one, FY 2027. I have got a slide on that too. Here it is. You can see this is a sort of tale of two halves.
The first half is very much processing that low-grade stockpile and getting it through the plant so that we can then set the plant up for 100% underground, which is higher grade, cleaner, and we are expecting greater performance from the processing plant. Ultimately, in FY 2027, we will be 100% mill feed coming from the underground. We will see, and we will have to prove it, we understand that, that our competitive advantage will be the underground. Producing that quality of ore, the ore hygiene, will give us that edge in performance in the plant.
Now, operating costs, and I have got a slide on guidance. I have spoken about this slide, and we can see from this, it is all about design for scale. We have got two declines. We are going to de-risk the ramp-up by these high-volume stopes, and ultimately, we will be able to amortize our fixed costs over more tons. We can see the drop-off in our unit operating costs in FY 2027. Lastly, we have left the optionality for expansion. We have not torched the future. Should the market change, we are in a fantastic position with a low capital intensity expansion. We have got low debt, sorry, we have got good debt, it is low cost, and it is flexible. We have demonstrated that by a lot of debt being customer-led because the customer's interests are aligned with us. This is not project finance.
There's no hedging, there's no covenants. It's very, very flexible, and some of the interest rates, I don't think you can get a home loan at those rates. Finally, just to wrap up, it's a high-quality deposit. We've demonstrated our operational capability in five months, and we continue to do so. We're well- positioned for the recovery in the lithium prices, given our upside optionality. We've got a rapid expansion from 2.8 Mtpa- 4 Mtpa, given a lot of the infrastructure is already designed for 4 Mtpa. Finally, we've got that optionality around the second horizon with two strategic partnerships, one with LG Energy Solution and the other one with Sumitomo. Finally, this is our sort of signature video. It's customary for us to show one. I'd like to share with you our Kathleen Valley.
It's been just over a year since we kicked off production at Kathleen Valley. In less than six months, we ramped up the plant and did commercial production, powered by renewables from the start. We also commissioned and started producing tantalum with customer deliveries regularly this time. While remaining focused on business optimization, we've rolled out a suite of projects to lift recoveries, enhance technology, support sustainability, and expand the TSF to deliver strong production results. We've made history as Australia's first underground lithium mine, hitting high development rates and commencing underground production on schedule. We're laser-focused on hitting our production schedule. The underground fleet is increasing. We're dialing in the largest paste plant in Australia, and we're building our tech team to support the ramp-up.
Thanks, everyone. I'll leave you with this picture.