That to, give that to Alex. Okay, give that to Alex Passmore as he springs up here onto the stage. If you've just only arrived in the room, Pete Berwick is actually Prospector of the Year for 2025. Go and have a look at the gold nugget in his pocket. It wasn't actually found by him, but by one of his children, who he's dragged into the profession with him. Alex Passmore, how are you feeling?
Very well, thanks, Chrissy.
You're a happy CEO, aren't you?
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
New Murchison Gold in production.
Very much.
That's pretty tricky.
Yes.
And then he's got another challenge to make him even happier.
Yeah, that's right.
You said you've got another challenge to make you even happier?
Yes.
... because he keeps drilling holes, and he keeps finding more gold.
That's right.
Shall we hear the story? Big round of applause. Welcome, Alex, please. Let's hear about New Murchison Gold.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Chrissy, and thank you all for hanging around for the late session. So New Murchison Gold is in the Murchison Goldfield that's been spoken about a bit today, so in the Meekatharra area. And some of you would have heard this story a few times, a few of you might be new to it. So I'd like to just summarize what's been a really, really exciting 12 months, and then show you the growth that we've got ahead. So New Murchison Gold is and trades under the code NMG. And we're capped at around AUD 620 million at the moment. And that's, you know, that, that...
We've had a great performance share price-wise over the last 12 months, and that's come with an improving gold price, no doubt, but also, as we brought the Crown Prince open pit mine into production. So, we're making good cash flows and enjoying a good gold price in a stable, you know, obviously in a stable jurisdiction. And we are well positioned to grow that production, and we'll grow the mine life and also the production over the coming 18 months, and, you know, and improve a long life at the project. So New Murchison Gold, you know, has moved from production to...
into production recently, which gives us real financial flexibility when we're looking at our new projects. So we're a well-funded. We're a high-margin producer with exploration spice. And we've got 677 square kilometers of ground in the Abbotts Greenstone Belt near Meekatharra, and there's an enormous amount of opportunities in that belt. And we've got four rigs running at the moment, and plenty of news flow coming, and that ranges from greenfields opportunities to, you know, incremental resource growth.
So in the last 12 months, some of the highlights have been our Mineral Resource Estimate being published for Crown Prince, which is 280,000 oz at 4 g. A reserve, sorry, an OPI being announced and struck with Westgold, which owns the Bluebird Mill, 36 kilometers to the south of Crown Prince. And so, that's really turbocharged our timeline for being able to get into production. So we send gold in ore down to Bluebird at the rate of around 60,000 tons per month.
The ore purchase agreement, you know, envisaged about 30,000 tons-50,000 tons per month, but the arrangement's working so well that, you know, we've agreed to, we agree on a month-by-month basis what it will be, but we're quite comfortably doing 60,000 tons per month down there at the moment. So we have a reserve there, obviously, as we're in production, and we've had a really, really strong start to the mine in the September and December quarters. Yes, and so the December - the September quarter was just a small amount of production, as first gold sales were made, but then the December quarter was our first real, real full quarter of production.
So, the plan that we, that we've had, for the last, two years at, at New Murchison has been to build our Crown Prince project up to, up to a relevant scale and a scale that justifies, developing it. So we've managed to do that over the last couple of years. We've then, we then, you know, looking back through, you know, some of the past presentations that you might have seen me give at, at the RIU conference, we were to commercialize Crown Prince, and that was: Do we build our own mill? Do we sell the project, or do we go to someone else's mill?
And so, you know, after looking at the options and, you know, and there were various options in front of us, we decided that a partnership with Westgold was definitely, you know, the most valuable pathway forward for us. That OPI was struck, as I mentioned, and then we've been able to get into production. From here, we're optimizing what we're doing at the mine site. That is, you know, we operated at a fairly rapid pace to get into production. Now we're just making sure that we're, you know, we're employing the right people. We've got, you know, the very best equipment that suits our mining, that suits our mining environment.
You know, that our drill and blast practices are right, that you know, the pit wall stability is good and it's been looked after, that dewatering is going okay. So we feel very confident in how we've stabilized the operation, and so now we can look to expanding the group mineral resource base and then developing growth beyond that. So just as a recap, as I was saying, so September quarter production was just a couple of weeks of production, and then in the December quarter, just to give you sort of a guide or an indication of where we see production being as we go forward.
So, you know, 184,000 tons produced in the December quarter at 4 g. So we sold 22,700 oz in the quarter to Westgold at a cash cost of around AUD 2,200 an ounce. So, a fairly good margin, given the current gold price of around AUD 7,000 . So that cost is, it has in it, you know, the OPA costs, the costs that we pay Westgold to process our ore. So that's between AUD 30-AUD 45 a ton. It's currently at the low end of that range.
Then a margin for that is sort of a repayment to Westgold, if you like, for us not having to build a mill. So that's their, that's the Westgold return on capital sort of charge. And apart from that, you know, we've just got our standard mining costs, and then haulage down to Westgold, down to Bluebird. So it's fairly simple, fairly simple cost structure and fairly simple operation, really. So that let us generate about AUD 72 million in the December quarter. And from what we see in January and February, we're seeing that similar sort of AUD 25 million free cash flow per month. So that then lets us get on and think about growth.
And so we've got, like I was saying before, we've got four rigs running in the Abbotts Greenstone Belt, and we're looking at various growth projects. So the Crown Prince, when we think about growth, we think about near-term, near mine growth, and we also think about regional growth. Now, the Crown Prince mine, so this is an aerial view of the West Pit, and the main Crown Prince operation, and the offices, the waste dump, and all the other infrastructure. But you can see here, you know, that we're only just starting in that West Pit, so there's growth to come there. Then a long strike from West Pit, there's Crown Prince East, which you'll hear me talk more and more about, you know, as a growth project.
And then also Lydia, which is down on the bottom left of that slide. So now we're looking at a perspective diagram or an orthogonal diagram looking north through that Crown Prince mine. So you can see there the pit design that goes for three years and then a conceptual underground below that. So, you know, our ore reserve is 140,000 ounces. That's just in that first open pit. And look, we can see a much longer life here, but we do have the work to do to update that reserve by the middle of the year.
So looking at the second area that we can see will add to the production profile, that's Lydia, and this is another orthogonal diagram. We're looking to the northwest now, and you can see here two conceptual pit designs, which capture the high-grade portions of the Lydia mineralization. And we think there may be a third pit on this tenement as well, so we look forward to bringing that Lydia open pit production online this year. So just to have a look at some of the high grades that we see at that project. So, 3 m at 33 g from 46 m, 9.1 m at 10.3 g from 89 m, and 8 m at 9 g per ton from 20 m.
So they're good grades to have in the open pit environment. So we have a fairly simple plan to unlock the value that we have on our tenement ground. It is to move things from exploration to production, optimize the, you know, that process, and the production that we do have, and to squeeze the very best out of the operating mines that we do have. And then to expand our long-term production pathway via regional targeting. So the tenement package is big, and that's where that growth is going to come from. The project, the project pipeline, is there, and I'll let you read more detail on that at our booth or in the presentation. Thank you.