Let's kick it off with our first presenter. First up, we have Tony Ottaviano. He's the Managing Director and CEO of Liontown, the ASX-listed lithium producer behind Kathleen Valley in Western Australia. Kathleen Valley is the country's first underground lithium mine and one of the world's largest hard rock lithium deposits, with a mine life of more than 20 years. Tony is a global mining executive with over 30 years' experience. He has held senior roles at BHP and Rio Tinto before joining Liontown. Tony has led the company's transition from explorer to producer, taking Kathleen Valley into production and securing foundation offtake agreements with Tesla, Ford, and LG Energy Solution. Thanks, Tony.
Thanks, Courtney. Thanks to the panel, good afternoon, everyone. It's good to be back in Kalgoorlie. For those that were in the room last year, those lithium producers like ourselves were staring down AUD 630/ tonne spodumene price. We're at the bottom of the cycle. We'd just published our strategy on how we were going to preserve cash and see through the lithium winter. The Street had it coming back into deficit in late 2027 calendar year and 2028. What we had to do is be ready so that if the market did turn, we could pivot with it, and that's exactly what we've done. Today, we'll show you the plan for that and hopefully get your support. Let's start with the disclaimer, the demand, because it's the foundation of everything we do. Fastmarkets has demand growing at 15% out to 2031.
This is not a recovery number. This is structural growth. This number gives us a compelling long-term outlook, and the demand base is broadening. This is the most encouraging piece as an MD of a lithium company. When we approved Kathleen Valley, we were staring down one demand vector. That was EVs. If EVs wobbled, the market wobbled. We have now got a diversifying demand base. We're seeing demand coming from EVs, stationary batteries, larger vehicles, eVTOLs, marine applications, and don't laugh, but humanoids. It's spreading geographically as well, which is another reassuring sign from an investment perspective. We're not just seeing China being the main driver of demand. We're seeing Europe taking it up pretty strongly across all those vectors, as well as Australia and North America.
Whilst the Americans are a little bit more subdued on the EV front, they are big believers in stationary batteries, driven by the move to AI and data centers. More sources of demand mean a more resilient market and a lower-risk investment decision. I want you to hold that thought because it matters when it comes to the next few slides. Now, let's talk about price. Since we stood here, as I mentioned earlier on, the spodumene price has recovered sharply. I'll put that in exact numbers in a minute. The operating environment is much stronger. We need to accept that this market comes with volatility. Given its maturity, the customer concentrations that we have, certain parts of the value chain and size will drive this volatility. Lithium is a high-growth market. Therefore, it will be volatile by definition. Volatility is not demand weakening. It's the opposite.
As I explained before, we're seeing technology change. The chemistry keeps evolving. LFP, nickel-rich chemistries serve different jobs for different customers and will keep changing as manufacturers optimize cost, energy density, safety, and performance. The applications keep multiplying into larger vehicles, as I explained, robotics and marine, and government policy in balance is also accelerating demand, and we see that with the Collie Battery here in West Australia as an example. The key point is that volatility is not a phase that we wait for. We need to adapt and deal with it, performing through it. That is the business we are building at Liontown, a multi-decade business. Our offtake book bears directly on our realized price. When we struck our foundational offtake agreements in 2022 to finance and build Kathleen Valley, there was no consistent market offering a reliable spodumene price.
We had to rely our contracts on the price of chemicals, which was a deeper market. Our spodumene price was linked to the movement of carbonate or hydroxide. At the time, it was more linked to hydroxide. We've seen spodumene develop into its own right, driven by its own supply and demand dynamics. This is the traditional move that all commodity prices do. The point of first saleable product becomes the point where the margin should accrue, and therefore it should have its own pricing system of recognition. We need to move our contracts off these chemically linked indices and move towards spodumene, and we've done that progressively, and you can see this on the slide. By the end of the year, our book will be predominantly spodumene-referenced. Let's look at supply. I like this area of the supply and demand debate.
The same volatility that swings demand, swings supply. It governs how fast supply arrives because approvals cluster, and at the top of the cycle, that's exactly when everyone's confident everyone wants to build. New supply, by definition, will be slower to come on than is expected and as the feasibility studies demonstrate. Look at the lead times. An operation typically today, from the point of approval start, is five to eight years, whereas a brownfield is more like two to three, and the Kathleen Valley brownfield project is on the closer to the two part. We see ourselves with the current estimates put new operations and brownfield expansions roughly at about the same split, but demand is forecast to outstrip supply as this diagram shows, and there will be a structural gap.
If we move forward and we look at the brownfields expansion and some of these shuttered mines that have come back on, then we will see that this supply will take its time, and it'll come on lumpy. There will be that volatility that I referred to as the market digests the new supply. Therefore, we need to be ready to execute our project, and we will do so in a responsible and disciplined way. That's the market, and we'll now move to the operations. The market provides the strong, durable structural supply and the volatility. The next context is we need to design and manage an operation to do that. That continues this year, FY 2027.
I want to take people back to November 2024, when we pivoted our strategy. We moved to reduce the speed of our ramp up and also defer and eliminate capital to preserve cash. That was only a year ago. We've had to pivot in an organization. There's judgment to be applied as to which options do you close out and which ones do you preserve. The business has done that. I'll explain that a little bit further. At the time when lithium was near the bottom, most people expected us to execute a low-price plan, and that's the way it went through all of FY 2026. We saw the market changing. As a board, we went to China at the end of April. Seeing is believing. We saw the evidence of a strong growth cycle emerging.
As we came back from that board meeting in China, we elected to pull the trigger on our pre-commitment funding for the expansion. A little bit that later. The judgment the team and the board used is exactly why I can stand here today, a year later, talk about growth. We're pivoting earlier than most expected. We're doing it from a position of strength. We hold to that through the cycle. Consistency of purpose is one of our operating principles at Liontown. We don't trade away sustained improvement for a quick fix, whether the price is falling or rising. The pathway to 2.8 million tonnes in our underground is one of the key deliverables for the FY 2027 plan. The target we set in November 2024 was to get to 2.8 million tonne run rate by the end of FY 2027. That's exactly on schedule.
The diggers in this room know the trajectory in underground mining isn't linear. We have to develop, establish the infrastructure, push again. The upfront development will unlock seven new mining levels. Each of the lower levels opens 3-5 million tonnes of ore. That is one year's production from one level. That's the size of the tonnes per vertical meter that we're mining at Kathleen Valley. The numbers on this slide tell it all. Work areas go from four to 14, fleet goes from 21 bits of kit to 41 across jumbos, production drills, loaders, trucks. Put it all together, the total material moved doubles almost. To get there faster, we've reallocated equipment in the short term to open up new work areas. We've accelerated the rundown of our open cut stockpiles.
As the underground ore becomes the more dominant feed, grade and contamination improve, recovery improves with them. The result is that we're well-positioned. The ramp accelerates the second quarter of this financial year to deliver the 2.8 million tonne target. That's the platform from which we can grow. Capital. As I explained earlier on, we pivoted in November 2024 to preserve cash. To do that, we stopped capital. We deferred capital. Now with the onset of the growth agenda, a lot of that capital we deferred we need to bring back. We're a 20+ year mine life. There are certain bits of infrastructure that are non-negotiable. The mine services area, we're going to be a 4-million-tonne operation. It needs the infrastructure to support that kind of endeavor. That's what we're building. We're building for multiple decades.
We've got the growth that we need to get to 2.8 million tonnes in development. The most important piece in this slide is we're funded from a position of strength. Our balance sheet is strong. We generated nearly AUD 140 million of cash in that last quarter, and we've got AUD 560 million in the bank at the end of 30th of June. We can do that. We can self-fund this expansion. When we publish our FID on the expansion, we will give more details on that. In summary, we're funding the ramp up first. The growth spend is staged, and more importantly, we have flexibility to slow it if the market tells us to. This discipline is codified in how we operate. Creativity first. Capital is a last resort.
We spend our people's ingenuity before we reach for the balance sheet, and we commit capital only when we cannot improve any further. That is the mantra. That is the Liontown way. This is our guidance for this year. Again, production is in line with what we said we would do in terms of the 2.8 million tonnes run rate by the end of the financial year. Unit costs will demonstrate an investment that we're putting in ahead of time to drive the operational readiness for when we need to get there. We're bringing on people, we're bringing on equipment, but the tonnes take time. We expect those unit costs to decline as we get economies of scale and we defray our fixed costs. I'm going to pivot now and move to our growth agenda.
As I said in my opening, AUD 630/ tonne spodumene, we're now staring at AUD 2,000/tonne. Our focus on our operation earns us the right to grow. The board came back from China. We committed AUD 77 million on early works. We wanted to put that order in for the ball mill, and we've done that, and things are progressing. The mine services area is one particular one that's progressing at rate of knots, and I think this is something we promised the staff and team in the mining area, and now we're delivering on it. As I mentioned, FID is on track for the end of this quarter and subject to the market demands. One of the key areas of focus for the expansion is North West Flats. Just to bring people's memory back, we shut this mine.
We put it into care and maintenance at the end of November 2024 to preserve cash. We've now started to rework this mine. We've got two portals that are heading down towards that. The team have got some rigs down there doing some grade control drilling, and we're going to cut a couple of portals in the bottom of the open pit. This is what time has delivered us, another benefit, because we didn't have that luxury of going into the ore body from the bottom of the pit because we were still mining the open pit. Now that the open pit has ceased, we can access the ore from the bottom of the pit and we're cutting two portals. Here today we've got Monique and Maddie, who are both in the audience, who are in charge of delivering those two things.
Monique on the grade control and Maddie on the portals. Ladies, don't stuff it up. It's crucial. The plant. When we built Kathleen Valley, we built it with 4 million+ tonne optionality in most of that gear. All that blue is already designed for the expansion capacity. This will be an exercise of debottlenecking and lifting the bottleneck and the constraint. It will be a very value-accretive project. It won't have the huge expenses and issues and permitting requirements that a greenfields project has or a duplication of an entire train. It's incrementally going through and debottlenecking these areas. The ball mill has already been ordered and we should get that on site in about October, and there's a mag sep area and then some NPI that we're expanding, but the rest of the circuit is looking strong.
We'll deliver that as part of the FID at the end of September. The most value-accretive option that we have is Kathleen Valley expansion. There's no doubt. We also have Buldania, and we've started to reexamine Buldania. It won't command the same capital that Kathleen Valley did. It's only a 15 million tonne resource, but it is valuable. We will size the capital accordingly to the resource. I've asked the team to look for flotation cells on Temu to see if we can get them nice and cheap, but they're working through it. We can truck it to a DSO product or potentially truck it to Kathleen Valley. We'll work through that in the course of this year. We've reinstigated exploration around Kathleen Valley.
We want to establish whether Kathleen Valley is a unicorn or whether there are other, within trucking distance of Kathleen Valley, ore bodies that we can bring into production. That brings my presentation to a closing, and I want to quickly go through that because I want to show our customary video. Our value proposition is fairly clear. We're operationally responsive. We preserved those options when the market was at its lowest, and they're going to pay dividends. We're financially resilient. We preserved the balance sheet when we had to. We put in that operating discipline. We continue to focus on our cost structure. That's sort of an enduring trait and DNA of the company. We're in a strong position to absolutely launch growth. We've got attractive growth options. We're developing North West Flats. I've spoken about Buldania, and we've got the Kathleen Valley exploration program.
Without too much more effort, I'll now flick over to the hopefully, this video will work. There's Goyder South after our chair. Let's go. In closing, the job's not done. The trend is good and strong, and we've got a great team to deliver. Thank you