The next three presenters really don't need much of an introduction in these parts of the world. We're going to kick it off with Northern Star. Steve McClare is NST's Chief Technical Officer. A mining engineer by profession, Steve has more than 35 years' experience across operations, technical services, project development, and executive leadership. A graduate of WASM, he held senior leadership roles with Newmont, OZ Minerals, Hillgrove, before joining Northern Star. As Chief Technical Officer, Steve has played a key role in the company's growth, leading the delivery of the KCGM mill plant expansion, one of the most significant investments in Northern Star's history, and a transformational project for KCGM. Steve.
Thank you very much. It's an honor to be standing here today talking on behalf of Northern Star. I'll be talking about KCGM and the area in this region, this wonderful region. What we will cover, building scale by removing complexity, not adding to it, or cover what we've built, why it matters, and what it unlocks. Firstly, just the disclaimers. We do have reserve and resource statements here. We have forward-looking statements. You can read that at your leisure. With this opening slide, if you look, most people know where the Super Pit is, the city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder sitting on the lower left of the slide. Interestingly, it's called the Golden Mile. It's multiple miles long. It's more than a mile deep, with the latest approvals, and we just commenced mining, we're now over a mile wide.
We might have to work on a rebranding exercise because it's become a bit out of date. In terms of just above the pit there, you can see the 27,000,000 ton per annum processing hub. That's what we've actually built there, and although it's been seen as an upgrade, what I'll show you as we walk through this, most of what existed in the Fimiston Mt Charlotte role is new when we push into that space. What we're repurposing as some of those areas is basically taking the Gidji facility, which is about 20 km out of town, off the screen, out to the left.
That is coming back to the one location. In addition, what we've been doing recently, the Fimiston III TSF, the Tailings Storage Facility. That is much larger than the pit as it sits out the back. We're built that up and that's ready to receive tailings now. Over to the right, the Fimiston II Cell G. That's also a large new facility
Part of the works we've been doing in the near term, and they're just wrapping up, is basically getting those tailing facilities so we can cope with the scale to make sure we've got a rate of rise and flexibility in where we place tails. The next stage, as we wind down the construction workforce on the 27,000,000 Ton build, and the Primero crews wind down, is to basically start with the thermal power generation. We have 120 MW engines sitting in Henderson, down in Perth, raring to go. And we're just waiting on the final approvals of that to basically commence.
Out the back, about 5 km past the TSF, is a behind-the-meter renewables energy location of substance that I'll talk to a little bit later. Interestingly, also above the processing hub to the right and to the left is large stockpiles that I'll talk to, but right on the footstep of the new mill. They play a large part in why we actually did this upgrade, to unlock value. When you look at this picture, the thing I'd like, hopefully, you can see, it's the global mining industry. My experience is we've spent decades adding complexity. Anyone that does a safety induction recently, layer upon layer, comprehension goes down, and the volume goes up. It's no different to processing facilities. Every idea that went into that historic plant of Mt Charlotte and Fimiston was a good idea at the time.
I'm sure everyone thought it was wonderful. What you actually end up with is a fragmented system built up over decades with multiple plants and multiple interfaces. What I've labeled there is Stage 1, and it's just sitting on the gray, which is quite difficult to see on that screen. To the gray, to the right is a bright yellow, shiny thing. If you look in this picture, all the shiny yellow things, that's the new part of the plant. Through the word decades down the bottom, that's where we basically come off our new coarse ore stockpile. We basically go up into the top of the plant and the cyclone cluster, and we have gravity flow across to the right, left, sorry, and then down into a 60 m concrete thickener. From there, that is Stage 1.
Everything to the right, 2.25's bigger, fits in that little bit sitting below that Stage 1 in the front. Going up the left of the screen in the straight line is oxygen plants and all the connections into Stage 2. Stage 2 gives us our recovery uplift, and it brings Gidji back into the operation. Currently, we actually take material, we dry it out, produce a concentrate, we load it into semi-trailers, and we drive that out to Gidji. After treatment in the Gidji processing facility, we then bring back the loaded carbon, and we process it into gold bars on the site. In the future, everything will go from the liquid to the gold bars in the one location, no trucking, et cetera. It's about trying to get the cost down and the value up as we work through this design.
How do you explain that? It's quite difficult. What we actually tried to do was eliminate that complexity. If you orientate yourself from where we started before, if you start under the word cost as a structural change to the cost base, that's the conveyor coming straight down. You've got a very large, the largest twin drive mechanical-SAG mill in the world being built and a large ball mill on the right. That comes across the gravity trains and then into the thickener. That is Stage 1. That's 27,000,000 Tons, and that's finished, and we're in the final stages of commissioning right now. Coming down from the screen, once again, you can see there's some topper tank work going on there. We've got some elution columns and other stuff. That is Stage 2. What is the rest?
If you start at the top left in the green area, that is the Fimiston primary crusher. The coarse ore stockpile cover is at the round circle, and then you step across and come down, and you get to the Fimiston SAG mill. The Fimiston SAG mill, the reliability of it, et cetera, there's been a lot of questions about. A lot of its issues are actually downstream, particularly the ball mills, where there's multiple mills. We go from five mills to three mills at 2.25 times the scale. The tie-in as people hear it when we've talked about finishing the project and shutting down the old plants, is simply a pipe that sits between the green and the mills to the right, literally 10 m- 20 m as we sit in that space.
Everything in red is redundant to the left of that and coming down, and then you've got the gold rooms and everything sitting in the green there, and continuing with the red, all gone, redundant. The area in the blue is basically we've repurposed that area, and that's the concentrate leaching. That is the area that basically does a lot of the work that we currently do out at Gidji. When you actually look at this picture, one of the things we keep going. The thickener has water in it. It's gone through its C2 commissioning. Everything from the tails is C3 commissioning, so running. All the old plants are running off the tails lines, and at the front end, we've crushed about 100,000 tons sitting on the coarse ore stockpile through the new primary crusher and through to that coarse ore stockpile.
Very shortly, we're actually spinning the mills. They're full of water. The tanks, our visitors that we had yesterday, saw the tanks were full of water flowing rapidly around them. What you actually see in this picture is the use of gravity. If you got into our previous plant, the hundreds of pumps, under the crane that you can see prominent at the top there, we pump up to the top of that cyclone feed cluster, and then we gravitate all the way down to the thickener. There is no pumping anywhere from the pump that's on the ground on that other side. A single pump pushing through that area. The bit we just want to emphasize, this was never about building a bigger plant.
It was about replacing the fractured regional system of shifting dirt between plants and adding cost into a single world-class processing hub. It's really about unlocking value, not gaining scale. Scale is how we unlock the value. When I talk to my team, I talk about the simplicity is not the absence of engineering. It is actually the advanced engineering. Putting the thoughts, getting the engineering right, getting the design right, that's where we make the big decisions. In terms of what we have here, there were three big decision choices, fewer units of operation, larger equipment, and the automation, all of which is designed to reduce labor, decrease the maintenance or ease of maintenance, and basically get use of the power intensity and improve reliability. The benefit comes from the design, as I stated before, not the throughput.
The key big levers, though, this is not just about the plant, as I touched at the start. KCGM is an unbelievable ore body. I've worked at a fair few gold mines around the country. I was involved in bringing Callie to life in the Tanami. We put backfill plants in out there, and we basically bought it up to a large-scale mine. I was involved in the shaft sink and creation of sub-level cave up at Telfer as we regenerated that region. I was involved in the Cadia Valley, and we basically took a lot of Codelco's 100 years of experience, integrated their ideas, and put it into an Australian efficiency model. Taking the learnings, but not just cookie cutting as we push through there. This is about the same. It's about the integration of all the elements.
When we put them together, the processing efficiency, simple to operate, simple to maintain. The operating efficiency of the mines, they've got more flexibility, and the flexibility basically means more value, less rehandle, that type of stuff. Energy efficiency is the one that is often understated. Energy is not a cost item. It's a major cost driver to the future. Together, we actually attempt to structurally break the cost cycle and light up this entire region. If we talk to the processing efficiency at the start, a lot of people have been to our plant. They're very impressed with what they see. There's been a lot of capital go into there over the last three years, and we've put a lot of work before anyone saw anything.
The study phases, it's been through a scoping, a pre-feasibility, a feasibility, a front-end engineering design, and then a value engineering. In addition to that, we've modified things as we've actually done the build, and we've learned things. We've upgraded the mill motors. We've changed to different vendors. We've done stuff to make sure when we build this is built for many, many decades to come. That operability and maintainability as guiding principles, we have not relented on. That has cost us some time, that has cost us some efficiency, but we only get one chance to get this right. In addition, we're giving the operators the data and tools to manage the various ore types. When we go into commissioning now, our operators have had to put up with that old plant. They've had to mechanically fix things on a regular basis.
They've had to hold things together in what is pretty average conditions. I take my hat off to all of them in terms of getting us to this point now. Shortly, as they walk into the new facilities, they will be the ones that actually run it. We get questions about, why won't the operators just This will get run down over time. We don't have a problem with our operators. Our operators are excellent. We have to set up the systems and the professionalism in this new plant to take us in this multi-decade approach. We've put the tools, we've put the digital tablets, we've put all the modern things we can in here. Now we're building the operating systems and operating models.
We're doing things like the new general manager of processing that's coming into this facility, has run plants of this scale and complexity, and they're coming back from the U.S. very shortly. We've separated the maintenance and engineering to make sure we have the discipline. Reliability, asset management. We want people that can take an hour out of every shift, et cetera, and we basically use the weapon we've built. The outcome, when you get to the end of all this, why are we doing it? It basically gets to the point where what we want to do is halve our processing cost over our FY 2026 number. That's our ambition.
That's on a steady state basis, I basically say, if we're running the plant today and we're up to our full 27 million ton per annum, that is my ambition as we push into this, a complete halving. When we move on to the pit and then the underground, and I'll talk to the underground a little bit more at the moment, the operating efficiencies that come with the new mill is the ability to match the ore body. The Super Pit, we've been in a position where with a mill-constrained operation, we've had to be segregating material. We've got high grade, medium grade, low grade, different poles, rehandle it, feed it through. What that now becomes is simply ore or waste. We have the opportunity to basically move between those areas.
Direct tip, direct tip as much as possible, handle material once, as every rehandle is cost without value. The result is a simpler, more productive mining system and, very importantly, the stockpile we have on the surface, the one I mentioned before, is 153,000,000 tons of 0.6 g/ ton. We have no mining cost. The mining cost will show in our AISC, but we only have to pick that dirt up, truck it downhill, tip it into the mill, and it's the processing cost and the gold. If we treated that alone today, we'd actually run about six weeks short in this new plant, six weeks short of six years of production without mining another ton.
It gives the buffer, and within the mining areas, the ability to more naturally flow the mining cycles and not have to continually adjust the pit to do that, get rid of this rehandle, will continue to drive out costs. The last one, the one I said is actually understated, it's the energy. Anyone that knows energy in the Goldfields knows it's a bit of a poor country cousin in terms of the South West Interconnected System. I say that, there's a single wire that connects Perth to the Goldfields. It's at full capacity, and if anything happens, there's basically black in Kalgoorlie. There's a facility in Kalgoorlie for black start or starting a cold electrical system. It's 37 years old, and it's proven on multiple occasions unsuccessful at restarting, and that's why we've had blackouts in this region.
When we look at what we are doing here, there's no use us having power every day of the week if our employees can't sleep at night. Part of looking at how the region fits together, we've probably put as much work into this energy front as we have some of the mining and processing fronts, and it's really about how do we get the cost down, how do we get the reliability up, and how do we actually work hand in hand with the state government and Western Power to improve the Goldfields?
We've recently signed an MOU with the state government to basically provide with joint venture partners in the Parkeston Power Station to, in the future, once we have met our needs, Parkeston Power Station will go from supplying KCGM and the startup of the plant now over to being a replacement for that power line to Perth when it's down. It won't be ideal in terms of that, and we're yet to finish the contracts in doing that. We're into negotiations of those right now.
The intent is that a good, solid, reliable power station is actually used once again for a decade or more on a limited basis to provide that support to the Goldfields. In addition, we'll try and do the engineering, or we will do the engineering, and if successful, we'll have black start capability at Parkeston Power Station and be able to warm that network back up.
Why we do that as well is we have that power station I was talking about earlier sitting down in Perth, and we need Western Power and the state government committed to getting that in as soon as possible. We wish to basically all three parties be working on this together, and as we do that, we push out into this space of lowering the power cost. I'd love to be able to say I could halve the power cost. I could probably only get about a third out of it with the system we have. We end up with about 256 MW of wind. That's 32 8 MW turbines. We first started this journey, and we had a met mast out here.
We actually found the breeze was good, you could only get about 35% capacity factor compared to about 50% if you're in Geraldton in the world's best location. Over time, watching that met mast, we lifted ourselves up another 20 m or 30 m, went to a larger size turbine, and we actually get up well into the 40s in terms of those numbers. That had a very good match to the solar system, then the batteries that we have. We expect to get somewhere around 80% of our energy from renewables in the future, and as I say, take about a third of our cost base. When you actually look at why, and I talk about the costs all the time, you look at this graph. Anyone that's here, doesn't matter if you're in the mining industry or not, costs are rising at a rapid rate.
The unmitigated cost trajectory, it is very, very difficult to constrain. The idea of the processing efficiency is it's basically taking that structural change, halving that processing cost, and driving that through. The mine, we're yet to quantify exactly what we'll get out of that, but we have the huge opportunity and flexibility to become productive and push into that space. The power, as I said, if we take one third of that out as we get into the future, we not only have lowered our cost base off that trajectory, and this might be a little bit exaggerated on the right, but it basically exposes us to a lot less cost. Only about 10% of energy would need gas, stuff like that.
By doing less, having less maintenance, having less cranes every time we do a shut, et cetera, our exposure to the cost increases becomes less and less. All I wanted to go through here is the scale of the operation, the 42,000,000 oz the 15,000,000 oz there, the 27,000,000 ton per annum. The underground, my only point on this is we've been going for 60 years at Mt Charlotte. It moved from less than a million tons, and now the Fimiston underground joins it in partnership as we head towards a pathway towards that 8,000,000 tons. The region is full of prospectivity. 50 km, we've got 1,500 km squared of exploration. As we get into the region, we're putting the drilling in, we're increasing our resource and reserve. We're improving our core shed facilities. We're using new technology.
We basically look at what we have through a completely different lens. As we wrap up, I think we have a wonderful platform. The foundations have been set, and our leader of the last 13 years, Stu Tonkin, has decided that he's departing. On behalf of all the employees of Northern Star, we'd like to take your hat off to you, Stu. You've backed us to get this project up and running. You've got us to this point. The mill's about to start, and you've set us up for the next era. Thank you from all the employees.