Okay, we're good to go. Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to our annual results presentation. You would've got them on the line last night and analyzed them. We've had a few texts this morning and emails, and sort of got a feel for where everyone's at. So, look, I'm gonna briefly. I'll briefly run you through where we've been over the year, where we're heading over the next twelve months. There's no five-year outlook at this point in time. I mean, we're obviously working through incredibly low lithium prices. I mean, just for the record, I mean, no one is making money in this market. I mean, let's be really, really clear on that. There's no lithium companies making money.
We're just battering down for the downturn, while we feel like we're dragging our feet along the bottom at the moment. So, we're just gonna make sure that we throw everything off the deck, as we've done many times. I mean, a lot of companies would say that they've been through many cycles, many downturns. I mean, we've got a fairly long-term management team, none the least of myself. I've been through all of the downturns. It's not a fun time. I mean, this is the shittiest time to be the MD of a company. I mean, you've got to really carve the costs out of everything you're doing. You look at every single person. We're doing that. We're throwing everything off the deck, just to make sure we conserve cash.
Anyone out there in our position, and our position is, if you're mining in lithium, you've just got to take those steps. John Kaup is joining me today with the financials, and he'll answer any of your financial questions. Mark could not fly, I mean. And Mark is fine. He's online listening to us now, but unfortunately, he had a quite nasty ear infection, and it was viral, so he just couldn't fly without blowing his eardrum. So, but Mark's online, listening to us. So as I said, look, I'll cover off on where we've been and where we're going. We've had a pretty amazing year.
If you take away the fact that if lithium was sitting at $2,500-$3,000 a ton, I mean, it would be a much different and better atmosphere. But we've delivered on Onslow Iron, and we'll show you how we got that done on budget. Contrary to the notes that I'm getting, we got it done on budget. We got it about a month and/or six weeks ahead of time, which is pretty phenomenal. I mean, no one in the last four or five years, since COVID completely wrecked the supply chain worldwide, no one has built a project on time, let alone on budget. It's a great project. It's gonna be around for a long time. Doubled our mining services business, so we put the foundations in to do that.
We've done that in a number of different ways, which I'll walk you through. But fundamentally, the mining services that comes along with Onslow Iron is significant, and it's completely separate from the ownership and the joint venture of the commodity price, and we're out there now. We're in the best time we've seen in a long, long time on the mining services front. We're winning more contracts than ever. Sadly, that adds to our CapEx. Every time we win a crushing job, we've actually got to go and buy some stuff, and we've got to put it on the ground, but you know the net result of that. We've created a fairly phenomenal infrastructure business over the last couple of years.
Most people think of our mining services business, you relate it to dump trucks and the like. It's not. Ours is mainly made up of large, long-term infrastructure assets. Somewhere around between 70%-80% of our contracts run from 20 out to 50 years. So, you know, I'd prefer to own that than an airport, but I can't get that same price-earnings ratio yet. Bald Hill. We tracked Bald Hill in the mix. We'll talk about that. We've been in there now for about 9 or 10 months, and we're starting to get a feel for it. We sold the Onslow Iron Haul Road. We got a market cap of AUD 2.6 billion on that.
And we've got that sold, and we've found a really great partner in Morgan Stanley. They're very similar in our culture and like-minded. They've got a great team on it, so really happy to have those guys coming on board. And we've discovered an awful lot of gas and oil up in the Perth Basin. I mean, probably some of the best onshore finds in Australia. Business is strong. As I said, challenging times ahead, but we can manage that. It's a day-by-day thing. We manage the business in line with the economic environment that we're sitting in. When iron ore is at $200 a ton, we're out there building whatever we like. When it's at $100 a ton, we're not building anything.
Just a bit of a summary of the year that's been. It's gonna be a lot more fun over the next six months. Financials. We've done pretty well. Solid performance. We're delivered to guidance. We've had record mining services. Revenues up at AUD 5.3 billion, so about 10% up on year-on-year. EBITDA of about AUD 1.1 billion. And of course, the earnings have been dramatically affected by the lithium earnings. No final dividend this year. We choose to make sure that we conserve cash on every front. So, shareholders, I'm sure, will be happy for us to conserve that cash and keep it in the bank.
ROIC, we're down this year at 5.3%, but we got AUD 4.8 billion in capital parked in assets that is only just starting to earn. So, give me another 12 to 18 months on that when they're all at full earnings. And we'll have a very different picture on it. We've invested around about AUD 3 billion of that. AUD 4.8's gone into Onslow Iron. That is starting to produce. Average ROIC over the past 18 years, we're still sitting at 15%. As you know, 20% is the number that we aim for. And once we get these assets up and running, we're gonna be back into a much better number. Total shareholder return, 29%, since we listed, so we're still looking after our shareholders.
Safety, people, wellbeing, critical in our business. We really prioritize that. We're industry leaders. We're in the top 5% in terms of our safety management and statistics, the way we look after our people. TRIF is slightly up this year, 2.74, which is still down at the very bottom quartile in the mining industry. I mean, it's still a great result, considering we grew over 12-15 months. We went from 5,600 people to 8,500 people. So bringing new people in and trying to adjust them, get them to your culture, make sure that they're savvy with our expectations on looking after themselves. We've done a pretty amazing job on getting that done.
We're currently at the moment, as you know, we're moving out of the Yilgarn progressively between now and Christmas, so we've got about nine hundred people coming out of there. We had two and a half thousand people on the Onslow Iron build, as we wind down off there, we're also winding down out of a head office. We had an announcement a little while back, where we're gonna move some people on, and we've started doing that progressively. We moved about a hundred and forty people out of the Perth office. So there's gonna be a downturn in head count between now and Christmas, as we keep going. We're building diverse and really safe environments for all of our people.
And particularly, we're really being focused on growing female participation in the business. We've done a whole range of things with that, and we've been really focused on retention of our people. Over the last ten, two years, we've seen about a 50% reduction in people departing MinRes, so we're really starting to nail that down. It's going pretty well. 250 grads, trainees, and apprentices we've got on the books. Women make up a third of our entry-level programs, including machine operators coming into the business. So, a lot of the women don't have the experience the guys have, so we've got great training programs in there to help them catch up and get in line so they can pick up on promotions.
As a matter of interest, for anyone that is interested, we've got about 460 of what we call Next Gens. Next Gens means they've got a mum or a dad working in the business. We've been doing that for probably about 15 years. They're the ones that are really sticky. They hang around a long time. They get the culture. They've grown up around the breakfast table, understanding what MinRes and the mining industry is all about. So, if you've been with us three years or more, and if you've got a kid that wants to do an apprenticeship or a grad at uni, MinRes will take up the cause, and we really hunt them for our payroll. Two of them, those 460 are mine.
I'm very proud to say that they're following along, and a bit of the culture that I've tried to breed. Well-being focus is on mental and physical health. We've had, as you know, we've had a really big focus on mental health over the last few years. We've currently got nine psychologists on the payroll. We've got seven of them running on FIFO. We had a young lady about three weeks ago that went home on R&R to Brisbane and took her own life. So, like anywhere, I mean, all we're doing is we're taking people out of society, we're putting them on our payroll and putting them on site. There's a whole range of issues out there, and we're trying to make sure that we can do a lot more to be able to prevent that sort of thing.
I mean, it's gut-wrenching when you see that happening. Head Office and Onslow Iron is sort of two of the new areas we're trying to change the mining industry. Head Office is a place that a lot of our people want to be, and they love working in there. We've got a lot of different benefits that were brought on. Why have I done all that? Because when I get them first up in the morning, I want to hold them captive all day long. I don't want them leaving the building, and we do that. So I don't want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs. Wandering out around lunchtime, we've got a restaurant in there.
We've also got a gym, and we've got other facilities that keeps them glued in there. Recently, and I've had a battle. I have a no work from home policy. I wish everyone else would get on board with that, the sooner, the better, but the industry can't afford it. We can't have people working three days a week and picking up five days a week pay or four days. We've now got the industry all heading out there going, "Why don't we do a four-day week? We got used to it over COVID." So if I can encourage us all to do the same, we're putting in a daycare.
I found out one of the, the key things for our women in particular, was that they spend about AUD 180 a day on daycare, and we have, we're installing one now. It'll take 105 kids, and it'll cost them about AUD 20 a day. So another reason for them to come and enjoy work, drop the little tykes off next door. We've got doctors on board and nurses. We're gonna feed them, but mom and dad will be working, in our office. So, Onslow Iron, we've done the same thing. We're really out there trying to make sure, again, getting more women in the, in the workforce. So that means that right now, we've got about 76 couples out there so far. We've got, 750 pods that we're installing in total.
We've got 500 out at Ken's Bore. Well, of those 500, there's about 350 occupied, about 76 couples in them now. So, that's working. That's growing our female population. We'll train them. We'll make them machine operators, going out, restaurant, tavern, pool, all of the good things that we got out there, completely changing the mining industry. MinRes Air, no frequent flyer points available, not even to shareholders. But we started MinRes Air. Why? Because, the cost to, to MinRes has just been ridiculous. We've been losing, over the last 12 months, an average of about 11,000 man-hours on changeover on people on different sites. That's not the big number.
The big number, tens of millions of dollars we're using, shutting down mining fleets in the middle of a shift and shutting down processing, crushing plants, so we can change people out. Literally, I mean, tens of millions of dollars. What can we do about it? The answer is we bring it in-house. We've got two A319s and an A320. We've got a great, experienced, management team. They've got a couple of hundred years experience between them in the airline industry. We're running under a license from a company based in Melbourne, until we get our own, which we should have around about middle of next year. We started running from the East Coast and hauling people out of Brisbane.
So instead of a day and a half each way to get people from the East Coast back. And why the East Coast? 23 million people out there, 3 million in WA. We need a labor pool to draw on. So now it's five and a half hours direct into our mine sites, so into Wodgina, direct into Ken's Bore. We are shortly gonna be coming into Kambalda. And then I'm hoping within about the next four weeks, the airline will be in full blast, so we'll be doing all of our FIFO stuff coming out of Perth. But tens of millions AUD of saving and the cost on doing it, it's pretty much in the first year, it's about cost neutral with what we were gonna spend with the airline.
So no difference in physical cost, but huge difference in our savings and being able to manage that. And we've got, as I said, when we advertised for people to staff that thing, it was insane the number of responses we got. In 48 hours, we had over 640 hosties applying for the job. Why? Because they understand the culture and the caring that we put into our people. Sustainability, always at the forefront of what we're doing. We're out there working on it. WA, probably the best mining jurisdiction in the world, bar none. I mean, in terms of the way that we understand how to look after the environment, rehabilitation, the care that we give our people, I mean, we're up there in one of the best of the best.
So we're working on all of the sustainability that we have to have within the business. I mean, it's a fairly major job. We got a bunch of people that keep working on that. I mean, I keep repeating the thing: we're committed to getting to zero by 2050, and we're doing everything we can to get there. We're not gonna invent any green juice or anything magic. I mean, we're a mining company. We're out there doing what we can. We're using gas to get out of diesel. Diesel is the main thing that we want, that we're focused on, so it's the biggest carbon emitter going in the atmosphere, so getting out of diesel is the priority. Gas is sort of helping us with that. Of course, we're putting in wind farms where we can.
We're putting in solar panels by the thousands. They don't help us a huge amount. During the middle of the day in the Pilbara, they tip some power into us, but come four in the afternoon, we're back on those gas plants. So hopefully, someone's gonna invent green juice in the next 10 or 15 years. Local business is the other thing that we're really focused on with the indigenous communities, and with all the remote communities where we work. We spent AUD 4.8 billion last year with Australian suppliers mainly across WA, but across Australia. AUD 8 million in social investment with charities and 125 charities that we're supporting out there in various ways. So we've been pretty strong on doing that. Just a bit more on the Traditional Owners.
What we do with the Traditional Land Owners around the communities that we work is our aim is to be able to get them to the same standard of living that we have. So making sure they got affordability for decent housing, medical, education for their kids, so the kids can grow up and have good, permanent, long-term jobs and eventually run our mines for us. Really focused on that. Look, we've got credit facilities in place. We put AUD 25 million credit facilities in with a number of different banks so that they can go borrow money to buy equipment, to go and fulfill five and ten-year contracts we give them. So they've got these long-term earning streams, and that we stand behind that. We make sure they buy everything at the right price. We help them maintain it. We maintain it for them a lot.
So we're doing a whole bunch of things around that. Education, getting kids to year twelve, trying to get them into uni. Passionate about trying to make a difference there. A couple of hundred years behind the eight ball and, it's... But we're getting there. We're making good inroads. John, I'll hand over and let you run us through the financials.
Thanks, Chris. Good morning. It's my pleasure to present to you the MinRes financial results for FY 2024. It's been another busy year for MinRes. We've continued to invest for the future, developing high quality, long life assets, and we've further demonstrated our ability to recycle capital to fund growth. Starting with the P&L, underlying EBITDA of AUD 1.057 billion reflects solid underlying performance. Mining services EBITDA grew by 14% to AUD 550 million. This demonstrates the strength of the MinRes business model. The commodities, lithium's underlying EBITDA, AUD 384 million, reflects a sharp reduction in lithium prices despite record volumes. Iron ore's underlying EBITDA of AUD 394 million benefited from improved achieved prices. You can see FY 2024's depreciation and amortization is higher.
This is driven by growth in mine development, and our net financing costs are relatively consistent with FY 2023. This reflects capitalized interest costs, predominantly relating to Onslow construction. As announced, Yilgarn is moving into care and maintenance from December. We've recognized an associated impairment charge, net of tax, of AUD 61 million. Alongside other impairments, total impairment charges, net of tax, were AUD 99 million. This impairment charge is not part of or not reflected in the group's underlying results, and there's a reconciliation provided in the appendices. FY 2024's adjusted tax excludes the impact of tax arising on non-recurring transactions. These are transactions linked to the Marble transaction and the ending of the marketing agreement. We had foreign tax losses on sales through China, which have been discontinued, and we had U.S. taxes on battery chemical sales via Albemarle.
Again, a reconciliation of statutory results is included in the appendix. I won't spend too much time on this slide. The chart shows the strength of operational performance of our business over the year, and you can see controllable EBITDA improved significantly. This was driven by lithium volumes and cost performance, however, more than offset by a significant fall in lithium prices. Turning to cash flow. Consistent with prior years, MinRes has demonstrated its ability to convert profits to cash in FY 2024. You will see, again, a solid operating cash flow of AUD 1.9 billion, impacted by a large positive movement in working capital. This includes AUD 0.6 billion of iron prepayments from one of our customers, as announced at the recent quarterly result. This was a non-dilutive, non-debt form of unlocking capital that boosted liquidity.
Excluding this, our cash conversion was a very healthy 124%. We've continued to invest in the future, positioning MinRes to benefit over the long term. This included strategic investments, predominantly in lithium, where we acquired 100% of Bald Hill, as well as several stakes in WA junior lithium miners. We also invested in the development of Onslow, achieving first ore ahead of schedule in May 2024. In the first half, we received AUD 588 million from the restructure of our Wodgina JV with Albemarle. That divestiture divested our interest in the Kemerton lithium hydroxide plant, remove our exposure to downstream lithium, and increase our ownership in Wodgina to 50%. We also, in the first half, completed an offering of $1.1 billion of bonds.
The net result, as it shows, was a strong cash position of AUD 900 million at the end of the period. MinRes is well-placed to complete its elevated capital program arising from the development of Onslow. As at June thirty, in addition to the closing cash of AUD 900 million, we had nearly AUD 2 billion of undrawn credit lines. In addition, we have a number of levers we can pull to manage the balance sheet as we progress through this elevated capital expenditure period to bring the Onslow project online, and we've demonstrated some of those in FY twenty-four. Turning to the balance sheet, you can see it reflects the significant investment made during the financial year. Capital employed increased to AUD 8 billion, funded in part by additional borrowings.
We saw the creation of the carry loan, which provides a receivable to MinRes, which we'll start to repay in FY 2025, and as I have alluded to on the previous slide, there still remains significant optionality within the business to monetize assets, should we need to. The next six months was always going to be our peak net debt, and this is in line with expectations. Our capital is prioritized for Onslow, for the completion and ramp up to 35 million tons, and we will prioritize deleveraging as we move into the H2 2025, FY 2025. If I can just turn your attention to how we think about capital. MinRes has a huge focus on the balance sheet over the past few years, and this is gonna continue.
Over our thirty-plus year history, we have a disciplined capital allocation, and we have a strong track record of allocating capital to generate outsized returns. We're committed to targeting a two times gross leverage through the cycle and a capital structure commensurate with our existing double B credit ratings. We have a strong track record of recycling capital to enhance our returns, and there has been several transactions involving Wodgina over the last few years, and now with the Onslow ore sale. We'll always look for ways to release capital from underappreciated assets. While our dividend policy is up to 50% of underlying NPAT, we've demonstrated flexibility to reduce dividends to preserve cash and balance sheet strength, as we've done this year.
We're focused on generating strong cash flow through the cycle, and while this is variable in the commodities business, our mining services earnings are predictable and growing. And as we've always stated, we will invest in growth projects if they can achieve at least 20% ROIC post-tax on a long-term, consensus commodity pricing. In recent years, this has been the Onslow Iron Project, which has required the largest capital investment in the business has ever embarked upon, but it's expected to generate significant returns over the long term. I'd like to take a minute to remind you how we set up a durable capital structure for the group's long-term success. We chose to access the U.S. unsecured bond markets for several reasons. Firstly, it gives us debt with long tenor.
With our first maturity not until 2027, three years after we turn on Onslow and two years of full ramp up. The absence of financial maintenance covenants provides flexibility through the commodity cycles. And of course, our interest is fixed, and it's more than covered by our mining services earnings today before the Onslow ramp-up. As of June 30, our net debt was AUD 4.4 billion, and our net debt to underlying EBITDA was 4.2 times. We expect net debt will peak in half one FY 2025 before beginning to deleverage in the second half as Onslow project ramps up. Our liquidity sat at a very healthy AUD 2.8 billion at June 30, and include an upsized revolving credit facility of AUD 800 million with new and existing banks.
Lastly, I'd like to remind you that Onslow, having now shipped its first ore, we're now owed over AUD 400 million by our JV partners for funding them into the project. This loan, or receivable, accrues interest at about 7.25%, and it's repaid from 80% of our JV partners' free cash flow from the Onslow mine. Effectively, MinRes will get about 90% of the free cash flow from that mine for the first couple of years. At current prices, the Onslow mine core will be free cash positive by around December. I'll cover this next slide fairly quickly. It shows FY 2024 capital expenditure. It's marginally ahead of guidance, which reflected additional investment in lithium. The net debt waterfall slide is fairly self-explanatory. As stated, our net debt is expected to peak in half one financial year 2025.
We've committed to a major investment programs many times over our thirty-year history, and we have a clear path to get debt levels back to where we want them. After this coming half, we expect to naturally deleverage through EBITDA, once Onslow's fully ramped up. We will also explore options to decrease gross debt levels, as each of our unsecured bond becomes callable at par, which is well in advance of their maturity. We continue to have several significant levers available at our disposal and options to unlock capital throughout the business. Looking at FY twenty-five guidance, this slide sets out guidance for the year. As you can see, iron ore reflects Yilgarn moving to care and maintenance, as previously advised. Onslow, at the volumes and the cost are per the ramp-up profile.
Lithium is slightly lower as we look to optimize based upon current market conditions and preserve cash. Mining services continues to be very predictable for both volumes and margins. In terms of CapEx guidance, for next financial year, AUD 1.9 billion reflects a significant pullback as the capital as Onslow approaches completion, but obviously, we do have to complete it. Chris will outline our plans for our assets shortly, but I just would point out of note that the CapEx, in growth CapEx for mining services, includes AUD 235 million to support growth in projects. These are projects that deliver in excess of 20% return on invested capital to MinRes. This slide recaps what we've previously announced. Realized proceeds of AUD 1.3 billion.
The transaction values are all ordered about AUD 2.7 billion, representing a 9.4 times EBITDA, based on the project's nameplate capacity. The introduction of a new partner and a pool of capital is consistent with our focus on long-term shareholder value creation and our agile approach to capital management and allocation. We expect this transaction to conclude and reach financial close imminently as early as September. This slide shows how we think about our investment in Onslow. So AUD 2.8 billion for our initial investment in 30 million tons, point five billion for the expansion to 35 million tons, which takes it to AUD 3.3 billion.
Now, just to point out, our JV partner will contribute over AUD 200 million of that increased cost via the carry loan, which we expect to reach around AUD 800 million once we had capitalized interest within it. Once you factor in the road sale, you have a net investment of AUD 1.4 billion to MinRes for a project which, at spot prices, when fully ramped up, will generate around AUD 1.5 billion EBITDA each year. So it's effectively a one-year payback for a thirty-plus year mine life. And finally, this is just an illustrative slide only, to show the value Onslow brings to MinRes once it's fully ramped up, which we expect from June 2025. You can see the quality of earnings generated by Onslow.
It's important to note, Onslow will boost our mining services EBITDA to about AUD 1 billion a year. This is sustainable, repeatable earnings, not impacted by commodity swings, which is more than able to support our current debt levels. And you can also see how quick we will delever. Again, I will reiterate, we are committed to our two times gross leverage target through the cycle. And so whilst there is a near-term focus on the balance sheet, as we finalize the construction of Onslow, I just want to give the market an idea of just how much Onslow will transform MinRes once ramped up. I'll now hand back over to Chris, who'll provide an operational overview.
Thanks, John. Thanks. I think, I hope, you got a bit out of that, particularly around the Onslow Iron and the spin. I'll just run you through now, basically, a bit about the pillars in the business on what we've been doing, and where I'm taking them over the sort of short to medium term. Start with mining services. Another pretty good year with it. Production volumes, I mean, we've also learned to measure them in the tons that we produce now. So up 8%, year-on-year. Record EBITDA, so we're sitting at about AUD 550 million, but on our way to doubling that over the next 12-18 months on the run rate where we're heading. And it's more than half the group's EBITDA.
So, I mean, if you understand the MinRes model, I mean, my background is basically around mining services and trying to make sure that I have those long returning, recurring incomes, and we spread that right across the industry. When we get a project like Onslow Iron or a Mount Marion, we own the mining services on those projects. At any given time, if we choose to, we can go and sell our shareholding in the, in the iron ore or the lithium. But those projects that we got for mining services are life of mine. So, Onslow Iron, it's probably around 50 years plus. Mount Marion, the likes of that, is probably, if you have a look at what we've got in the ground at the moment, I'll talk about the tons.
We're probably gonna double those tons, but we're probably another 40 or so years down at Mount Marion, so MinRes owns the whole of the Mount Marion site, so everything we do down there is mining services, but then we have great tier one customers out there. We've got crushing, processing plants, trucks, all the like on it, and that business has been incredibly strong, so as we've grown the business over the years, we've not only grown it in terms of volume, we've averaged generally, I always say we average about 15% a year, year-on-year in growth in the mining services, and we've been able to maintain that. As the bigger a business gets, the harder it is to keep those sort of growth paces up, but we're doing it in volumes.
We're not only increasing the volume that we put through that business, we're increasing the margin. We've moved that margin up to around about AUD 2 a ton. It was a bit under AUD 1.80 eighteen months ago. Look, I suspect eighteen months down the track, it'll be closer to AUD 2.20. Great business. We've added in FY 2024 six new contracts, three crushing, one ore sorting, a whole of mine operation, and then we've also moved into North Queensland with some of these big jumbo haul trucks that you saw up on the screen. We've had three extensions, so our retention with existing contracts is second to none. We have the best record in the industry for that.
I can tell you how many contracts we've lost over the last twenty-four years, and I can tell you the pain that I went through when I done that. So three extensions, two crushing, a crushing and a haulage operation. So 100% retention over the last twelve months. And then, of course, we're moving into a new industry with the transshippers. So that's part of the mining services, too, an operation. Service we offer at MinRes, it's unique, can't be replicated because a lot of the stuff sitting in there is a MinRes design-built innovation. So the crushing plants that we build, we're the largest crushing contractor in the world. We're probably the largest owner of road trains. I'm not overly proud of that, but these things make us an incredibly good margin.
So to be able to move three hundred and thirty ton with one Prime Mover, it's unique in the world, and thanks to the help we have with Kenworth, but everything outside of the Prime Mover is designed and developed over the last twenty-five years by MinRes and the technology that's gone into those trailers. And we've just ironically had approval from Kenworth. We can drop a fourth trailer on behind these things now, so we go from eighty down to seventy-eight Ks an hour. Our carbon emissions per ton hauled actually drops. We spread more tons over one engine. So we can get up to four hundred and forty tons, yet to do that, but we're heading down the path. We're concentrating on getting these trucks autonomous, hoping to do that by about March, April next year.
So pluck the drivers out of them. If you're running 140 trucks, you need three drivers per truck, day shift, night shift, and at home, and then a few spare, so more than AUD 100 million saving. That's not the big the big saving is when you got a computer running these big beasts, because the computer makes sure they get the gear change right, the tire wear is perfect. I mean, everything just goes to perfection, and I don't have any humans mixing with this, so my chances of having any sort of serious accidents between machinery and humans is zero. So really looking forward to getting that to happen. Transshippers brought them online, performed exceptionally well. I mean, beyond our expectations, they've just been unbelievable.
But, we're experts in materials handling. I mean, we should get them right. And, our team, our internal team, have done a pretty amazing job on pulling them together and getting them all crewed up and running. Rehab, too, is another big part of our business in the mining services. So a lot of the big tier one companies are getting us out there now and doing a lot of their rehab for them, and it's quite a growing market. The mining service, it's a cash generator in the business. It's not affected by commodity prices, and the rates are always protected. We review them annually, and they get adjusted with inflation, and we also have a sliding scale.
So if we don't get as many tons as they committed to do, then the rate per ton sort of goes up. So it's, as I said, amazing business. 70% of those contracts have got a life of more than thirty years. Since 2006, we've averaged EBITDA growth of about 18% in that business. The chart shows the progress over the last five years. We've been up about 21% per annum on EBITDA, and we've actually increased our EBITDA margin per unit ton by 24%, which is quite a phenomenal thing. No one else I know can achieve that. So we're going through, at the moment, probably our strongest growth period ever in mining services. This year and next year, it's really going to ramp up. I mean, we're going to get...
My expectation is I'll be at a run rate about 18 months out from now, about AUD 1.25 billion to AUD 1.3 billion a year. So, a phenomenal business, and it's a game changer for us. The Onslow Iron coming on board adds about AUD 450 million a year in EBITDA, bit over, at 35 million ton run rate, and it's unrelated to the price of iron ore. So that project, quite phenomenal, on what it's gonna do for us over the next 35 to 50 years. Engineering construction, it's kind of the secret weapon inside the business. We've got the best construction team in the country, bar none. So we do all our own internal design, engineering, innovation. We make everything. We have...
Sadly, as I was saying earlier, around the work from home scenario, Australia is one of the most expensive countries in the world today for anything around manufacturing. We can't manufacture anything now. We've just priced ourselves out of it. Downstream processing is almost out of the question for us as well. We did a lot of work around trying to build hydroxide in Australia. As you know, I joined up with Albemarle, and then forgot to mention at the beginning, I exited all of the downstreaming with Albemarle at the end of last year, and I'm very happy I did. We just can't afford it in Australia. You know what? We're spending $1.8 billion building here in Australia.
We can replicate that in 20 other countries outside of Australia for 400 million, exactly the same. So that's a real issue that we, we try and address. You know, we're fabricating steel in China to a really high quality for AUD 1,800 a ton. The stuff that we build here, right here in Australia is twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a ton. So just to give you an understanding of where we're at, and we've got to compete on the world stage with all these products. So our engineering business, we've got a combination of being able to get stuff made and built offshore, and we bring it in, and we glue it to the ground.
We pour the concrete, do all of those things incredibly economically well, and I think if you have a look at what we've got, 35 million ton for the number that we've got on the ground, and the payback that project gives you, gives you a really good understanding of that. And we do some stuff externally for our clients as well.
So, yeah, a great business, and that adds a lot of value. We're gonna give you a quick video now, are we, Chris? Just two minutes that will really let you get the feel of what we've got at Onslow and how it operates. So let it roll. ...
Really good overview of what we're gonna do and what it would achieve for Australia and for Western Australia.
So we had this thing permitted in 12 months, pretty much a record time. Got the last approvals through in July of 2023, for the road, and then in May of 2024, first ore on ship. I mean, phenomenal what we've been able to achieve with that. So, and thanks to the, the government, both the governments were just, phenomenal with it. But, I mean, we whine and bitch a lot about how long it takes to get things approved, but Australia is one of the best countries bar none in the world. I mean, they're quite outstanding, and if you get organized as a miner, you can reduce those times substantially. Transparency is the key with the government to make sure that, you're working with them.
We moved 35 million tons of waste and ore so far since we've been out there, so, just barely a year, the whole thing was tussock plains up there, and, where we are now, we're down to we're moving 1 million tons a week up on the site. The Next Gen Crushers, as I said, they're all gonna be online by the time we get to the end of October, as is the, the haul road. Right now, we're hauling with the big jumbos up the side of the, the main haul road on what we call a service road, which is for the light vehicles to get to and from the port. So we're hauling up there at the moment. But come the end of October, everything is sort of open and, online.
A hundred and fifty K's, that big haul road, specially built. I mean, the foundation going into that road is phenomenal. It's not like your average highway that you drive on. Plus, all of the service roads and overpasses we're doing, so about two hundred and fifty K's up there we're building. If you've been to WA, it's about equivalent from Perth to Margaret River, with a big freeway that carries those big trucks. So far, so good. I mean, and the surface, we've had a lot of experts around on exactly what goes into that, fill in the mix. The quality of the bitumen, the bitumen sort of changes when we're on an uphill gradient. You've got those big tri drives on the tracks trying to tear the bitumen up.
So we've sort of think we've got all that figured out, and it seems to be working, so pretty good so far. Autonomous, as I said, you know, April, May next year, sometime, hopefully, we'll be autonomous. It's hard to get it pinned down. We've been working on it for about two years, and we're awfully close. We've got trucks running around now that are driverless, but they've got the drivers sitting in them. Everything else, basically, like the port, pretty much fully operational now. As you can see out there, the big storage shed, truck maintenance bay. We can run 13 of those big road trains simultaneously through the workshop at any given time and make sure they get their grease and a refuel, and about every second trip, they call through there. Resort-style accommodation going unbelievably well.
We're the place. We've got the best accommodation in the mining industry by far, so we are, we got flights landing direct on those sites off the East Coast and, shortly out of Perth. So I mean, we are the go-to company. That's all about retention. If you get any of these mining operations, process plants, the lithium plants in particular, you want to have your people there long, long term. You want the same people turning up, doing the same thing every day. The difference in production is millions and millions a year, so that's why we're so fixated on retention. So iron ore, overall for the year, it's been a pretty good performer for us. And iron ore is not the sexiest product in the world. It doesn't have that ring like lithium, or diamonds, or, copper, but it's the best.
Of any commodity that's mined, the biggest mining companies are only the biggest mining companies because they've got iron ore in their portfolio. You take the iron ore out of the big miners, and there is nothing there. And have a look at their bottom line, year in, year out, what the biggest contributor is to that, and which is the most boring. I mean, every year, those big tier one guys are gonna turn out billions and billions on those iron ore commodities they produce. I mean, we've been fortunate enough to find the last region in Australia, so the best mining region in the world. Sitting down, you've got sort of up the top of the Pilbara, you've got the Fortescue, Roy Hill, BHP.
In the center, you've got Hamersley Iron Ore, Rio Tinto, and down a bit further, the Robe River that they operate. And then right below that, you've got us, and we're gonna be there for a long, long time. And as John said, I mean, on a bad year, it's gonna make AUD 1.5 billion for us in commodity and mining services. If it bounces up to 130-ish a ton USD, it's probably gonna make AUD 3 billion for us. So somewhere around the traps over the next few years, we will see iron ore at 130.
I mean, we remember not that long ago. I mean, shit, this is about my fourth Iron Ore downturn I've done in the last 20 years, but we remember it at $38 a ton, and then the next port of call was $180-something a ton, and then down to whatever. You only need 12 or 18 months in the sun with Iron Ore, and it just completely. I mean, why you go, "What the...?" So great project. Onslow. As I said, we've loaded 4 mini Capes and a couple of Capes. We're into full time into the Capes. That's what they're built for. So the Cape carriers are sort of, you know, 180- to 250,000 tonners, much lower cost per ton, shipping up into China. 18 million ton run rates, where we're gonna be come December.
Come June next year, we're gonna be sitting at around about 35 million tons run rate. Pilbara. The Pilbara hubs perform pretty well. We've been at the top end of guidance up there for the year on that. We lost the berth up there for 10 days. We've had 10 record loadings out there this year, towards the back end of this year, on tons per hour going on the ships. We've really done a pretty amazing job. We bought BCI out of Iron Valley, too, you might have noticed. So why did we do that? Because we wanna have control over the rehab, and if it hangs around for the next... There's more than 100 million tons still in the ground out there, but we need to be able to be putting that on rail somewhere down the track.
Somewhere in the next few years, we hope to get cracking on that berth three up there in a joint venture that we've got with Hancock. Yilgarn hub, we announced that we're gonna shut that down. We're winding our way out of that now, so all the capital spend down there is stopped. We've moved probably about 150 people out of there so far, but come Christmas, we'll be turning the lights out down there. We've mined since the beginning of time down there. We first went down there for Carina. We've mined about a bit over 73 million tons we've been able to get out of there. High cost area, so this time next year, when Yilgarn's not in the mix, you'll have a look at what our average cost is of iron ore going out.
It's gonna be much lower and more sustainable. So our iron ore, our transition to the long life, low cost. As I said, it's a 50-year project. It'll earn us money every year. Great partners in there, Baowu, POSCO, AMCI, incredibly good partners, and it's a complete fines operation, so no lump coming out of there. The good thing with that, 75% of that ore, ore for the next 50 years of the MinRes ore, goes to Baowu. They're committed to taking that. They've spent, it's quite a few hundred million dollars on buying a couple of big blending yards up in China. So as Simandou comes online, all of the Onslow Iron ore is gonna be blended with Simandou, and it's a perfect fit. I mean, how lucky can you get?
A lot of organizations out there rightfully see Simandou as a threat. For us, it's quite the opposite. The other thing that's quite ironic is, and we're not really clear on this, but under the strategy in China, they've been working over the last couple of years to develop a business out there that buys most of the iron ore. Ironically, they call it China Mineral Resources. The deputy chairman of it used to be on the Aquila board, and he loves Mineral Resources, so he's taken our name. Because we're blending, and we're working our ores going to Baowu, we are not part of that, so we will continue as... We will forever trade on the spot market. So a lot of good value in the partnerships we've got with them.
If you have a look at our FOB cost, $29 a ton, FOB. $45 up in China, if you add shipping and royalties. That $29 a ton, I know I keep saying it, that's including the mining services. So, you know, we're on board for a pretty low cost. So this thing is pretty good in any market. I mean, it's quite phenomenal. I mean, if we're selling at around $100 a ton, we're gonna get probably. Take out the moisture, take out the impurities out of it, we're probably gonna get around $80-ish a ton for it. So you can do the math on that. It's pretty good. 50 thousand, 50 million ton operation, let me be really clear on this.
I'm gonna keep doing what I've done for 32 years in MinRes. We operate this business to market conditions. If we're trading at AUD 200 a ton for iron ore, we're out there, we'll be going to 80 million ton, but we're not going any further than 35 right now. We're gonna pause. We're gonna let the cash roll over the top of us. We're doing nothing. I'm saying zero in terms of capital in the next 12 months beyond 35, and it might be 18 months, it might be 2 years, but zero in the next 12 months. If I'm gonna do something, I will come and tell you I'm thinking about it. I'm not doing it. I'm thinking about it, okay? So let's get off the ledge on that one. Why am I doing that? Because the price of price of lithium has tanked.
No one's making money. We're fairly comfortable where we're at with iron ore. I mean, we see a lot of resistance around $100 a ton. I'm comfortable that, we're probably. I'm not gonna call it we're sitting on the bottom. I have no more idea than you guys have on where the price is going, but we are seeing an awful lot of resistance where it is, so it's pretty good. So we're clear on the thirty-five going up to fifty. The one thing that we can do, by the way, we've got transshippers 6 and 7 coming in 2026. With the help of Baowu, I got that. They were aiming at 2029, was the earliest I could get those things out of the shipyards with Baowu's help.
Chairman to chairman in Beijing, it's amazing what can be done when they're both owned by the same owner, the government. Mr. Xi owns COSCO and Bao. So we're getting them in 2026, because once these things get up to nearly five years old, you've got to freight them up to Singapore, and you've got to run them over the slip every five years, so I need that. Plus, on top of it, there's a couple of other transshipping opportunities out there, and like I do with the crushers, I always have a crusher up my sleeve somewhere, so I can move very quickly, and I can get it nailed.
So, and these things here, and I'm not gonna publicly say this, but we're gonna really sweat that 35 million ton and see how hard we can push it with the capital that we've got, and we think we can move it in the right direction. So lithium, a little bit about record production out of Wodgina and Mount Marion. Underlying EBITDA, AUD 384 million. We average AUD 1,279 a ton. If you had told me in 2018, I was gonna be selling it for that, I would have packed up and gone on holiday. I mean, that would have been an amazing number. When I started these mines, we were lucky to get AUD 400 a ton for lithium, so let's not forget that.
But we've got used to higher prices, and we've put a lot more gear in there and got greedier and tried to get more product. We're paying attention to that. So at Marion, we shipped 218,000 tons of SC6 equivalent, FOB cost of AUD 498. We're reducing costs down there. We're improving the feed quality and the plant performance. We're still gonna progress the underground. We're about 70 meters down on a vertical basis, so we're putting in a drive down there, so we get down to about 350 meters. Why are we doing that? Because we put three or four drill rods in the ground. We know that we've got 10 million tons down there. We probably suspect we've got about 40 or 50 million.
What happens, these feeder systems, if you're lucky enough to find them, and we've found two at Mount Marion. It's a bit like a cyclone. They come up from kilometers down, so we chase this thing down with about three or four drill rods, about 1.2 km, and the geos have said there's 10 million tons in that space. We suspect there could be an awful lot more than that, so we're gonna get down there. What it does overall for us is it reduces the overall strip ratio down at Mount Marion. It actually shaves several billion AUD over the life of the mine, three or four billion AUD, just being down at that face. So you're only bringing out quality ore. You get that with the open cut; you got a great blend. 20-25% will be underground feed.
It doesn't really change the mix of total cost, FOB, so you get in there and get that done early. I suspect, look, five years down the track, we might be thinking of doing something similar up at Wodgina. What we're doing right now, to be clear, I'm pulling back the production down at Mount Marion. I'm doing exactly the same at Wodgina. I'm really throttling them back up there. I'm starving the product going in the market. I don't want to oversupply the market. I don't wanna waste my ore. And it is the best result in terms of cash out of my bank account over the next twelve months, is to do the pullback I'm doing at Mount Marion. We're also, so down there, I'm gonna move a dig fleet off-site.
A dig fleet's a 600-ton digger, and about nine big dump trucks, 280-tonners, I think they are. People are going off-site, yellow goods are going off-site. I'm really pulling back on the cash spend down there, but I'm starving product going into the market, for obvious reasons. Wodgina is run pretty well. Up there, we slowed down on the strip up there. We've really pulled we pulled a big dig fleet out of there and a bunch of gear. So the cash going out the door, again, cash is precious, so we've reduced doing that. And we shipped out of there about... What did we put? About 200,000 ton went out. We're also, as you know, committed to a process with hydroxide with Albemarle.
That finished, that expired in June this year, but we were sort of stuck with that and committed to it. We got all that stuff processed up in China. And believe me, I mean, once I got a really clear view of what it's like operating in China, I mean, I wanted out of there as quick as I could get out. The costs are pretty ridiculous. So we're done with that now. I can probably tell you, in my time, MinRes will never be a downstream processor of lithium. I mean, we're good at digging it, we're good at converting it to spod, put it on a ship, and that's, in my view, that's about 80-85% of the value.
The ROIC on anything to do with downstream, no matter where you do it, is a waste of time, and it's left to those that want a marginal return, but less than us. So wherever we can, the message is this: What am I gonna be doing in three months from now? Spending as little as I can on these mines, conserving cash, pulling them back hard. I'm not gonna shut them down because there's a lot of development work we've got going on, on all of these sites, and that development work's important. We're improving recoveries. We're putting in some equipment down there so that we can pull the iron out of the feed going into Mount Marion. That means that we've got more quality feed going in the plant.
You get all that stuff out, it takes up less real estate, and we get a better quality product and a better volume of product coming out of the plants. Bald Hill, as I said before, we've owned Bald Hill probably for about 10 months now. So main focus on there on day one was clearing the decks, getting the high gear out, getting all the rorts and the schemes out that had been put in there, and it was pretty ugly. They were operating at high costs. We carved everything out. We've commissioned a new crushing plant down there. It's 100% MinRes own gear down there. We picked up some very good people down at Bald Hill and a great little culture down there, and we've really worked hard to preserve that.
Put in a really good team down there, and that little place is running well. We are looking at trying to grow that, and I'll talk about that in a sec. But look, our costs down there for FY twenty-five, we think we're gonna be running at around about AUD 560 a ton coming out of that then, but lots of good things. Ironically, Bald Hill has got the best recoveries of any hard rock lithium plant, literally in the world. And the reason for that is that it's the type of material down there. It's very coarse-grained, and it loves getting separated. So we sit around about 75%-76%. And that's just one pass through the plant.
So typically, if you all understand the PLS, that they run dense media to grab the coarse grain out, and then they run flotation. Wodgina, we're 100% flotation. Mount Marion, 100% dense media, and we're gonna be adding some flotation down there, probably in about a year, eighteen months' time. Bald Hill is just dense media. Pretty, pretty amazing little plant. It only does about 150,000 tons a year of product at the moment. So as I said before, we're in a tough market. We're in one of those downturns. It's nothing we need to panic about. You just need to close your eyes and go, "We're in a downturn. No one's making money." I mean, we get that. I mean, we just gotta wait, 'cause eventually a couple of things need to happen.
Our first-world car manufacturers in Europe and China, all of the leaders in those companies, are making great profits out of combustion engines. They don't want to invest the money and waste their profits on developing the electric vehicle. You have a look at China. China's been working on it for a long, long time. Get a company like BYD, they can go and build a really neat car that you put your kids, your wife, and kids in to go to school. I mean, very safe, great cars, low cost. Our Western world friends haven't done that.
And just to encourage them and tell them they're doing good, we go, "We're gonna put some tariff protection on you." I see Canada recently, this morning, have just come out and said they're gonna protect cars going into Canada because they can't make electric cars, and they're gonna give all of their car manufacturers a free ticket to keep making combustion engines. It's coming. The world's not gonna stop demanding we get carbon out of the atmosphere. The cheapest and quickest way of getting it out is we've got technology that gets it out now. Run electric cars, and the amount of carbon you take out of the atmosphere worldwide is phenomenal. So I think we're probably a couple of years behind where we wanted to be.
I think that probably, by the time we get up around late 2026, early 2027, we're gonna see a big change in the supply-demand curve. So in the meantime, we'll keep doing what we're doing: reducing costs across both our sites, making changes, getting the quality up, getting improvements on recovery. We're looking at a little desktop at the moment. We think for under about AUD 10 million, we can wind Bald Hill up from about 150 to 200 thousand tons a year. That does two things. Obviously, we get more revenue, but the other thing it does, it pushes our unit costs down. So we think that we can do that quite cheaply. We think we can probably build a plant. We're gonna build a plant in China, haul it over here, and glue it in the ground.
It's probably 18 months away before we do that, but we think for about AUD 30 million, we can build a, about a 300,000-ton plant, so we're pretty much there, but not right now. I've been consolidating, as you know. I'm a strong believer in lithium, where it's one of the things we can dominate in. We're the largest lithium, hard rock lithium producer in the world. I wanna get bigger on it as the demand comes back on board. In the meantime, what I've done over the last year or so is I've picked up about 2,000 sq km of land in what I consider the most prospective land in the world, down in the Goldfields. That does not include the strategic shareholdings I've got in the juniors, so it excludes that.
Good example of what we've got, if you have a look up around Mount Marion. I picked up the Goldfields land up there. I did that, probably over six months ago. We don't advertise that we're doing this, and we don't advertise because we don't want to try and give our competition the heads-up on what we're doing. But we've got some really great land down there. We've put some drill rods, only a few drill rods, down into right next to Mount Marion, in the St Ives Ground. And we think we've got a solid fifty-ish million tons we've picked up in there. We've got about that same volume, up at Bald Hill. Our geos up there think it's another Mount Marion, but again, we're running operations up there at the moment and trying to get the drill rigs in.
We are getting them in, but it's taking us a little bit longer than we expected. So we need to get those drill rigs in the ground before we can come out with a reserve and a resource, and then we'll come out with a mine plan on where we're heading. But that's probably, you know, I'll roll out a little bit more news at the AGM, but realistically, it's gonna be during next year. So yeah, working really hard on that consolidation down in the Goldfields. As I said earlier, you know, if the price of lithium was, you know, fifteen hundred, two thousand a ton, I mean, this would be a different atmosphere this morning, but it's not. Energy, again, a lot of great success up there.
We have got 7,300 square kilometers in the Perth Basin, so we're the biggest landholders up there. And, as one of the past shareholders from the company I accumulated that off keeps reminding me in nasty emails, I didn't pay much for it. But we've had great success. We've found we've had four significant gas discoveries up there, and one very significant oil discovery, and we've had one duster. So we drilled in, and we got no gas to speak of. So, five out of six is a pretty good hit rate when you're looking for gas. Two of those are production wells, but this is basically... These two tenements are what we call Lockyer and Erregulla. So, lots and lots of gas up there.
I think we've probably got the most gas in the Perth Basin so far. We recently bought our own drill rig that'll go down 5K, so that gives us a lot more control over cost and timing and what we're doing. We call it the MinRes Explorer. It's probably about 2Ks down at the moment on its first hole for us. Another hole we're drilling. We expect highly likely. Our guys have done good seismic up there. We're probably gonna find some more gas. We're waiting on the government to come out and give us their position on whether they'll let us export LNG. My guess is it's highly likely they will because we've made the right commitments. We're gonna sell on the spot market.
If there's a shortage of gas in WA, we'll turn our gas back inbound, and we'll fill that gap for them, provided the others are putting their share in. And it's about a five-year deal. Beyond that, we want to be doing down streaming in WA. So we'd want to be looking at urea, methanol, power generation, all those sort of things, so that we can do down streaming and get the right return on what we're doing. Carnarvon Basin, we got 70.5 thousand square km up there running down that coast. That's inland, adjacent the Chevron gas field. So, doing a lot of seismic work up there now, and then the drill rigs will be heading up there next year.
So that's sort of about where we're at, in the business, where we're going, what we're doing, what's happened over the last year. As I said, it was our biggest and best year ever. I know it doesn't feel it right here this morning while we're standing here, but it was a great year for MinRes. I mean, if, if the lights go out and we don't do any more development for the next thirty, forty years, I mean, the business is gonna make a lot of money no matter what. We've sunk the capital, got a bit more. I mean, we'll be running through till late October, on what we're doing up at Onslow Iron.
After that, I mean, we're pretty much shutting everything down, and we'll just be parked up catching fish and watching the cash come in. The headline on Onslow Iron, we got it built on time. Actually, we got it built ahead of time. We got it built on budget, as we said. When I started, just so youse understand, for me to get approval out there to get iron ore going out of Onslow, which they called a petrochemical hub, I couldn't get the Liberal government to support me on that at all. When Labor come into power, they had a look at it. Economically, they saw that the state needed cash income. They've been very practical. Anything that is good for the state, I mean, they get behind, and this is a...
This is gonna deliver a lot of, obviously, benefits to WA in a whole lot of different ways. So they saw their way clear, that they said they don't see any harm in five million tons going out. So I nodded my head at five million tons. Then I had a commitment with them that I would be dust-free. I'm not gonna do what Port Hedland's done to Hedland, and I'm not gonna do what it does in Dampier, so we will make it dust-free. And then I sort of quietly got up to fifteen-ish million tons, and then twenty million tons, then thirty, and that was a promise that I wouldn't go any further than thirty. And then Mark, Mark McGowan went out of office and Roger Cook come in, so during that period I went clunk with another five million tons.
We were sort of sitting at around about AUD 2.7 billion to get that 30 million tons delivered, and that little sneaky 5 million tons that went in. The joint venture issued MinRes Construction with about a AUD 560 million variation to add that extra tonnage. So you do the math on 5 million tons after you got, and it works incredibly well. So I hope that gives you a good understanding of cost and time. We were always committed. First ore was due on ship in October this year. They also gave me a little variation to try and speed that up.
I got a variation for about AUD 100 million to speed the project up and pull it back to June, and we really stretched that, and we got that first shipment out in May, which is pretty phenomenal. So look, all in all, going forward, I mean, we're gonna do what we always do. I can't tell you exactly what we're gonna do. I'll give you a good flavor for what it looks like, but I'm gonna say that we're gonna be unbelievably conservative, and we're gonna rope in every dollar. We scrutinize every dollar we're spending. Why are we doing that? Because if we come out the other side of this with a bucket load of cash, I mean, that's where the opportunity sits in these times. I mean, I've had my best opportunities.
I'm not gonna go and spend money, but we will develop some opportunities going through where we're heading. So very, very conservative year. It's gonna be a little bit tough with the lithium. We all know that. I don't know where the price is going. I mean, I would have thought a couple of months ago, we were dragging on the bottom, but we've sort of inched it. We've gone down a little bit further than that. It'll be any new mines coming on stream at the moment, I'd hate to be there, because the cash rate will be phenomenal. Whereas we're in the opposite direction, us and PLS and the likes of Albemarle and Greenbushes are in a pretty good place. I mean, we'll weather the storm. It ain't gonna be pretty, but we will get there.
So balance sheet is a focus. If I fast-forward 12 months and 18 months out from now, balance sheet, the cash that'll roll in, I mean, the loans that we've got with our JV partners, they have to prioritize them out of the value coming out of that iron ore until they pay those down to us. So we've got some pretty good income coming at us. Got a great, experienced management team. I've got people that have got good, strong, contracting background, commodity background. I mean, we know what we're doing. We're hands-on operators. We get in the weeds. We understand the detail. I mean, that's really, really critical. I know every part of my business, front and back, and as I said, I've been through a number of cycles.
I've run a company in administration, got it out of receivership back in the eighties. I've had a lot of practice, not that I need that practice now, but I know how to make sure and sadly, how you got to pull back on businesses. It costs people jobs. It's not a pretty time to be around. But look, we've got good balance sheet management. And as I said, we've got lots of great opportunities ahead, but we're gonna manage to the times. So if you've got any questions, more than happy to answer them.
Thank you, Chris. For those I've not met, my name's James Bruce. I'm the treasurer here at MinRes. In a moment, we'll open up both the floor and the online portal for questions. So for those attending virtually, if you've not submitted your question yet or joined the live audio queue, please do so now. For those in the room with questions, please raise your hand, and Kate and myself will head over to you with a microphone. Please ensure to start your question with your name and company affiliation. We'd ask if you could please limit to a single question to allow time for other participants, and we'll circle back if the time permits. We intend to go back and forth between live questions in the room and online questions throughout the session. With that, I'll open the floor to questions initially.
... Yeah, thanks. Morning, Chris. Can I ask two? Firstly, on the lithium business, you know, obviously, it's a year where, as you said, you're throwing out the deck chairs, but your all-in cost for the business, including capital, is probably around AUD 1,800 a ton. Where do you think costs across the lithium business can get to? Obviously, it's a function of how much you produce, and you're trying to be restrained in that respect. But what do you see as the ultimate goal for the all-in sustaining cost of the lithium business? Thanks.
Good question, because, I mean, the capital we're spending down there, and we need to get that done so that we can come on stronger when the price comes back. Look, my expectation is that we might be down at these sort of levels for six months or so. I mean, I would expect sort of getting early into the next year that the first, the prices are gonna go up somewhat. If they don't, then there's gonna be a lot of operations that'll just turn off. I don't wanna guess where I can get with all of that because we're still trying to figure out what we're gonna spend that capital on. We've got a good idea. And it also largely depends on where the dirt's coming from out of the ore body.
Some parts of the ore body will literally yield twice as many tons per day in process through the plant. So, other than the guidance we give you, I don't wanna sort of go too much further.
Okay, thanks for that. And then secondly, you gave the detail on the waterfall of the CapEx that's been spent at Onslow, et cetera, and obviously, your guidance for FY twenty-five. Beyond FY twenty-five, is there any CapEx remaining to complete Onslow to thirty-five million tons per annum? Any growth CapEx? Obviously, there'll be sustaining, but-
No. Look, if I said there's a lot of bits and pieces all around on tidy up work and sort of comms and stuff up the road. If I said that, after Christmas, you know, we're gonna spend AUD 100 million-ish spread over the next sort of six months would be probably tops I'm thinking, John?
That's right.
Yeah. AUD 100 million, it just runs off the tongue. It's not much, is it? Bang.
Hi, good morning, Chris. Thank you. Kate McCutcheon at Citi. At the June quarter results, I certainly got the sense that Onslow, 50 million tons, was something that was happening. You were going to 40 million tons and 50 million tons. Today, it seems like that shifted to the right, which is, which is fine, but just wondering what sort of changed, and then secondly, what does that mean for going to 50 million tons in terms of CapEx when you decide to do it? Because I assume you've got a construction workforce that's rolling off, and then you'll have to come in. If you can sort of talk through that.
Yeah. And that construction workforce, I mean, for 30 years, we've managed it. We do external work with it. Some of them will disappear. But it's managing the business of the times. I mean, why are we not going with it? Because price in iron ore has dropped down to $100 a ton, and the, the lithium business is basically dragging along the bottom. And until we get some improvements in both the balance sheet and the outlook, we just don't spend the money. But when we said we were gonna go to 50 million tons, iron ore was $130 a ton. We were sort of sitting around 1,500-1,600 dollars a ton on lithium, and, I kinda had an expectation. I thought that lithium would struggle to get under $1,000 a ton.
It's gone under, sort of once it breaks that barrier. So when that sort of thing happens, I mean, the spend just completely changes.
Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. And then the lithium volumes, you've obviously got two joint venture partners you're working with. You talked about the CapEx that you're spending, so it looks like it'll be a tough year with pricing here. Is this a collaborative guidance plan with your joint venture partners, or any comments around how they're feeling around putting CapEx and money in, I guess?
Yeah. Look, I was up in London a month ago. I spent three days with Albemarle, and we sat down, and we had a look at where we're heading over the next sort of one year, and then the next five years, and look, they've been a fantastic partner. We went through some changes, as you know, with Albemarle around my view on downstream processing and having plants ownership in China with lithium, but a great partner. I mean, we're pretty much as one on where we're going. I mean, they leave us to manage it around the plan, but I mean, clearly, capital is king going forward, and it's not happening. I mean, we're still...
Look, on the 50 million ton on train four, five, and six at Wodgina, we're still going down the path. We're doing the engineering. We're having a look at all of those white-collar things, sort of from sitting in the office. We're doing all of the agreements with the traditional landowners. We're getting all the approvals done, particularly, you know, around Onslow to go out to 50 million tons. I mean, that might take us another year or so, but getting all that done doesn't cost a heap of beans, but having it set and ready to go, and I got a question a while ago, why was the capital intensity on going from 35 to 50 so high?
I mean, the reason for that is that we probably haven't openly disclosed this, but there's a channel that comes in for about 20 miles, that thanks to Uncle Chevron. They dredged that. It's 14 meters deep, and then it comes to a stop just past their, their LNG product loadout, and then it goes to 8 meters into a little service wharf, and that's sort of that area we got our trains shipping. So on one side of that 14-meter basin, Chevron, on the other side, you can go and drop a berth in there. You can bring Capesize carriers into that, and you can two-thirds load them and sail them out. They really need 18 meters of trench. We don't wanna dig it, so we can sail them out two-thirds loaded, and economically, we get quite a big saving on doing that.
So we've sort of fudged all that into that AUD 15 million add-on because the operating costs, again, kind of plummet. Yeah, look, I hope that gives you, there's always a lot more than meets the eye that's going on when I explain that about the berth and, you know, the savings are. What we aim for is if you overspend on the capital, because you get those operating costs down, that, that's the thing that's gonna be around. Capital is a one-off thing. It's nothing. You know, by the time I get to this time next year, you'll go, you'll be like my bondholders in the U.S. They go, "What's the problem?
What are these guys not getting?" And I go, "You need to go talk to them." I mean, when I go to the U.S., go to the bondholders, we just sit around, talk about fishing, and they go, "We love the business. It's amazing. Can we lend you some more money?" And I, not right now, I've got a nervous bunch of nellies in Australia.
Thank you, Chris.
We'll switch to online for the next one.
Thanks, James. For those participants attending virtually, a reminder, you can ask both text and live audio questions during today's event. To ask a text question, select the Messaging tab, type your question in the box towards the top of the screen, and hit the arrow symbol to send. To ask a live audio question, press the Request to Speak button at the bottom of the broadcast window. The broadcast will be replaced by the Audio Questions interface. Press Join Queue, and if prompted, select Allow in the pop-up to grant access to your microphone. If you have any issues asking a question via the web, a backup phone line is available. Dialing details can be found on the Request to Speak page or on the Home tab under Asking Audio Questions. I will introduce each caller by name and ask you to go ahead.
You'll then hear a beep indicating your microphone is live. Our first online question today comes from Rahul Anand from Morgan Stanley. Rahul, please go ahead after the beep.
Oh, hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for the call. Look, I have two questions. One was related to the mining services, Chris, where you talked about in the next eighteen months, you expect to get to AUD 2.20 a ton, which is about a 10% lift in your margins. I would think that that continues down that trajectory where your mining services margins continue improving into, you know, the medium term. Beyond that, if you could provide a bit of color on that, that'd be great. And then the second one is just your plan on the gas assets. You've had a few good holes there. What's the strategy?
Is it similar to part sale, or do you want to prove it up a bit more before you get to that stage and try to get a bit of cash in? Thanks.
Yeah, okay, thanks for that. And look, firstly, on the margins, I mean, I astound myself year after year that we not only keep growing that business at 15%, some years 20%, 25%, but we also grow the margins. I mean, it's getting tougher and tougher to do that. I mean, I do have that expectation. We're washing out some of the low-end stuff down around the Yilgarn. We're bringing on some better, longer-term, high quality. And the reason we get those margins too, by the way, is that when you tip innovation, and so our crushing plants, 15 million ton, we can put them on ground for a pretty low capital cost. So Onslow Iron, I'm gonna think that we probably put that in for about AUD 230 million. We got 45 million ton up there.
I mean, if you were doing that on any of the major sites, the tier one sites, they wouldn't get it done for AUD 1.5 billion. So that attracts margin. That helps us to be able to do that. These big road trains were developed. There's nothing like it. I mean, they move dirt at a low number, and, they're incredibly popular. I mean, I'm fighting my guys to make sure I've got enough trucks at Onslow Iron, 'cause they're putting them everywhere. Yeah, I do think I'm gonna get to AUD 2.20, eighteen months, two years down the track from now, and sustainably. I'm not sure how much more I can keep lifting those margins. Someone's gonna shoot me one day. And the gas, what's the plan on the gas?
The gas was to be self-sufficient on day one. That's why I got those tenements self-sufficient and just have another cost that we can control. So it's like opening an airline. The more costs we control and the more we can control when we turn our operations on, the more money we make. We found a huge amount of gas, more than we expected. I mean, we've got a pretty good crew working on it. What is the plan? The plan is to see if I can go and export. I've got a number of organizations out there that wanna provide the capital, so they wanna provide it. And similar to what we've done on the road, they tip in the capital at 8-9%, and we're looking for, you know, 20-25% return. So, that opportunity is sitting there.
But, you know, we're opportunists as well. If part of our model is to lock down long-term mining services agreements and not necessarily own the product beyond that. So, you know, who knows what will happen?
Thank you. Our next online question comes from Kaan Peker from RBC. Khan, please go ahead after the beep.
Good morning, Chris. I just wanted to talk or ask you around the changes at Mount Marion, sort of increasing the quality of the final product. What operationally has been done there, and is there any possibility of reducing capital at Mount Marion? You know, I think obviously you talked about underground and flotation. How committed to the capital are you at Mount Marion? Thanks.
Yeah, look, Wodgina, I wanna keep spending this money down there on these improvements, so we're gonna put in WHIMS down there, and we're putting on ore sorters. Ore sorters pulls the iron out, so much higher quality feed going to the plant. Eventually, we'll have all fresh feed coming at that plant as well. We're probably a year away from that. But once I get to that level, I mean, I want to one day get back to where we were in terms of the cost. So once I get my strip ratio down, I get all of those incremental changes and improvements done, I mean, I'm gonna guess I wanna be sitting down around about below $500 a ton FOB with that operation.
And look, right now, we have to pull back on the tons going into the market. I mean, that makes common sense to do that. I get rid of cash burn out of there, so a whole dig fleet, 600-ton digger and about 9 big trucks and a whole bunch of dozers and stuff, and the people associated with that are all gonna go. That pokes my unit costs up a little bit, but I'm also... What we've been doing is scavenging that product down there. So a lot of stuff that was normally going to tails, we've been grabbing it at 3, 3.25%. We're now pushing that over 4%. When you do that, when you turn the dial up, your yield drops, so you're getting less tons out, but at high quality, if that makes sense.
But that does push the costs up in the short term, but so I need to have that combination running for the next 12 months.
Our next online question comes from Rob Stein, from Macquarie. Rob, please go ahead after the beep.
Hi, Chris and team. Thanks for the opportunity. Just a question about Mount Marion. So obviously, you can see that volumes have pulled back. Some of that pull back undoubtedly is a market response with offtakes and the impacts of the market in China. But similarly, can you sort of comment on what you're expecting to do at Mount Marion around the underground? Noticing the increased capital in lithium, given the market environment, is that related to the underground development that you're continuing there? And can we expect volumes to respond once that's fully developed?
Yeah, of course. I mean, we're spending capital on that, but, you know, as I said earlier, I mean, we literally, in terms of the savings we get on strip down there, we save billions, and I can't give you the number, but it's more than three billion that we save on that strip down there. So yes, we're about a year away from getting down to about 350-meter vertical level. Once we're down there, well, obviously, we'll pull some dirt out for the plant. We'll pause a little bit, 'cause once we get there, we've got to put the drill rigs in again and pump some more holes in once you're down at that level, and then we'll develop a mine plan.
But yeah, the overall result is that hopefully, within about 12-15 months, so now we're gonna get down to a sort of a longer life, bottom cost per ton.
Thanks. I'll hand back to the in-room questions now.
Thank you. Morning, Chris. Mitch Ryan from Jefferies. Two questions. My first one is, on slide sixteen, you've shown us your debt profile as at the end of June. Can you talk to us as we sit here today, how much of the revolver and the seven fifty s- bridging facility have been drawn?
Yeah. So, none of the bridging facility has been drawn. We've drawn down on three revolving credit facilities, about AUD 270 million.
Thank you. And secondly, can you give us an update on Onslow, how that's going operationally? Obviously, you said you were mining at around roughly 100 million tons per week. How much are you shipping? Like, what's your ship loading rate at this point in time?
So we're. It's 1 million tonnes a week that we're moving, so a bit over 50 million a year.
Going on a ship?
No. So that's a combination of the strip and ore, waste and ore coming out to get the 35 million ton. So we're currently ramping up progressively. We'll be at a 18 million ton run rate by December. End of December, 18 million tons. So if you divide 18 million tons by 12, that'll give you the monthly run rate for December.
Going on a ship?
Going on a ship. Yep, and then we'll progressively push that out to thirty-five by June, July next year, we'll be sitting at thirty-five.
Sorry, to clarify, you said that's eighteen million tons by December.
Yep.
How are we going today?
So for the month of August, I'm gonna guess we're probably doing 450-
Yeah.
thousand tons this month, and that's a pure guess. I haven't... I mean, I've been so wound up in a whole bunch of stuff. I've lost touch of it in the last couple of weeks, but I think we're doing maybe two Cape carriers and maybe pushing for three, so that's somewhere between two twenty and six forty.
Thanks, Rob.
Sorry, 420-620.
Hey, Chris, it's Glyn Lawcock at Barrenjoey. Can you just help me understand a little bit? I mean, it's tough times. You're battening down the hatches and it's, you know, but it's cyclical, not structural. Right? So I think you'd probably agree, you've been through many cycles. So why didn't you push ahead? I mean, there are ways to bridge the debt problem you've got and push ahead and act procyclically versus restricting. 'Cause I mean, you've got some of the lowest cost assets in the lithium market, particularly Wodgina.
Yep.
Yet you're pulling it back, and I remember you said last time you were upset Albemarle made you turn it off.
Yeah.
Then the market turned. You know, I feel like you...
No, no.
Did it again.
Yeah, you're right in what you're saying, but I was really upset with Albemarle turning it off, and we should have kept those two trains running. But that's a view of mine. I don't wanna, I don't want that to end up in the paper. I mean, we've got a great partnership with them. The reason for that is that our experience is mining, theirs is in chemical process. We needed to be moving the top off that mountain back in two thousand and eighteen. We'd have been in a different position. If we had, when we caught that cycle, we'd have been in a way different position. So right now, I don't want to turn off. I wanna keep all the development work running, and I wanna keep that idling over, and I'll do that.
I don't wanna change, so I'm pretty much locked into that for the next twelve months. We've sort of agreed that we're not gonna do anything different, but conserve capital. But we will keep the two trains running. I mean, you could go a lot more conservative, and we could shut down an operation if we chose. I don't wanna do that, and the other part of that, too, is that, I mean, we've got a social responsibility, too. We can't just keep turning people on and off as well. I mean, we've got some good people and, years of training to get them where we are. Losing that experience would be painful.
Yeah, I get it. So you think this is the optimum to manage cash flow today, is what you're aiming for?
Yes. Yeah, this is my view. We're doing everything we can to both balance and keep it operating and get development done. So as we come out the other side, we're in a much better condition. I've maintained the workforce. I don't want to lose that skill set that I've got, and I think I'll get this back in spades when the price gets back to something normal.
Okay, thanks.
Understanding, too. I mean, a lot of this is a judgment call.
We'll head back to the online portal now. Thanks. Our next question comes from Lachlan Shaw from UBS. Lachlan, please go ahead after the beep.
Morning, Chris and team. Thank you for your time. Just a couple from me. Maybe if I could start on lithium and Mount Marion. So focus here to improve grade, margin, et cetera. So what's the potential to, I suppose, maintain margin? So, yeah, spot spodumene $770 SC6. You know, the moves that you're putting in place here, would that get the asset to positive cash flow, breakeven? How do we think about that going forward? And I'll come back for my second question.
Well, look, the answer to that is yes. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think that we're gonna come out the other side like that. So, I don't know what more I can say on Mount Marion.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you. And then just, just secondly, just a couple of clarifications on capital guidance, CapEx guidance for FY 2025. So sustaining, about AUD 500 million, how do we think about that moving forward, as, you know, the business gets bigger, as Onslow ramps up? And then just a point of clarification, the mining services growth CapEx of AUD 235 million, just wondering, you know, that the projects that you've cited, does any of that relate to Onslow? Thank you.
I think obviously we haven't provided guidance beyond FY twenty-five, so I think it's difficult to call what sustaining will look like at that time. I think what I would say is you can always optimize sustaining depending on price environments to be able to accommodate cash. Sorry, what was your second question? Second part of your question?
Sorry, just a clarification on the mining services growth capital of what was it? 235 or thereabout. I'm just wondering if any of that relates to works at Onslow or it's sort of separate projects. Thank you.
There's a strong demand for external projects for mining services, as Chris alluded to. You know, what they do is pretty exceptional in the market, and they're increasing their demand and their service, and so that's typically external-looking contracts.
Thanks. Our next question comes from Paul Young from Goldman Sachs. Paul, please go ahead after the beep.
Thanks. Thanks. Morning, Chris. Chris, it's been a pretty wild twelve months then, but you've been here before, particularly back in twenty fifteen, and I know you've made some pretty tough decisions by pausing growth on Wodgina and also Ashburton, and reducing the workforce. So they're not easy decisions. Looking at your balance sheet and just iterations, it does seem like this, you've come out with plan B today, which is, you know, cutting costs and also CapEx. I know you've previously said that you've got a lot of levers you can pull. And, you know, and to your point around the lithium price, you weren't expecting prices to fall below a thousand.
So I'm just wondering, if things do stay at current levels and iron ore does derate further, do you have a plan C? So do you have any options around asset sales or further cost out?
So asset sales, no. The answer is I don't. I have assets that people would like to buy. I don't have any plans on selling them. And what I'll do is, if the price of lithium continues to drop, I mean, there won't be a mine on the planet that's making money, so we will really just start pulling more and harder and harder on the spend until we strangle it. The iron ore, look, I don't know where the iron ore is going either, but I suspect it's sort of bouncing around where it's gonna be. I'm not overly concerned about iron ore. You know, at $100 a ton, I mean, I'm happy with that. If it stays there for the next 50 years, I'm really happy.
But yeah, lithium. I don't think lithium is sustainable where it is. I just don't see any companies out there that are gonna turn a dollar. So at a point in time, if it got worse and it was gonna go for longer, we'd take much more drastic action. We'd probably think about what the next steps were. I don't wanna go and say them here, but I mean, we'll take whatever steps we have to do to save the beast.
Thanks. That's the last question we have time for. I'll hand it back to you, Chris.
Okay. Well, look, thanks, everyone, for your attendance. Not the best set of annual results we've ever turned out, but I mean, we're victims of the circumstances like everyone. But, be assured that we will continue to do what we've done for a long time. We'll manage the cash, we'll manage the business, and we'll come out as we always do. I mean, we'll come out much stronger. I mean, we've got a pretty amazing business. I mean, we've got great assets, and we've got a great management team. And, you know, by and large, I mean, we've mostly got some great shareholders that have been around a long time. So, bear with us. We're just on another cycle.
We'll come out the other side of this, and we'll be in much better shape. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning.