Our last, but certainly not least speaker for this session is Luke Creagh, Managing Director of Ora Banda Mining. Luke has over 20 years experience in the mining sector, bringing a wealth of knowledge from both contracting and mining operations across Australia and internationally. Prior to joining Ora Banda, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Northern Star Resources, one of Australia's leading gold producers. Thanks, Luke.
Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks to Diggers & Dealers for the opportunity to present an update on the Ora Banda story. We're at a really exciting time in our existence. As the title suggests, we're going to be organically building the next 300,000 oz , really that unfolds in a very quick timeframe. Before we get into that, just to reorientate everyone where we're at. This is Kalgoorlie, where we are today. Our Sand King operation's about an hour northwest of here. Importantly, we've got about 140 km of strike across two major regional systems, the Ida Fault and the Zuleika Shear coming through. Known to host massive systems of high-grade gold. The important thing about this is it's been underexplored for forever. Our recent investment in exploration is just the very start of unlocking this belt.
We're at the very start of showing the true potential of what the organic growth looks like. We're a centrally- located mill here at Davyhurst at 1.2 million tons. We've got seven major trends, which we've only really just starting to look at two of them, and unlock. From a corporate perspective, we're going really well. Great balance sheet. We've got cash, AUD 268 million, an undrawn revolver of AUD 200. A really solid register. All the disciplines covered at the board level. A great board, very engaged. Then senior management as well, just genuine experts in their field. We've got a really outstanding leadership group that's so important to help shape this next phase of growth and also deliver on our strategy going forward. What does it really look like? Well, this kind of summed it up in totality.
Back here, four years ago, we were an open pit producer. We lost about AUD 50 million that year. We pivoted to an underground strategy on that underexplored belt. We sort of got to 140,000 oz this year. That was all organic. Everything that we're mining now didn't exist from a resource or reserve perspective, four years ago. Really what it did though, is it started bottlenecking all our infrastructure as well. The best way to describe it is we got to a sort of an uncomfortable 140,000 oz.
You got to be unplugged.
Oh, sorry, it's not working. I'm doing a drawing on the screen. Thank you for that. Not much help from the audience though. Thanks, everyone. W e'll see if this one works. Different tech?
Let's try this one. Actually, it might have been that.
That one might have been popped out there.
It might have.
Plug it back in there.
See if that comes back up now.
Pick something up.
There we go.
Awesome. Cheers. Where were we? We were drawing pictures on this, so I was showing Zuleika and Ida Fault through here. Really what that kind of gives a picture of where we're sitting, Kalgoorlie down here. What I was talking about was when we were back here at FY 2023 doing the 50,000 oz, getting to the 140,000 oz. All organic, all finding, all bodies and mining them, that didn't exist four years ago. We're data poor. When we started over mining the mill 12 months ago, we started putting together what the next phase could look like. The two mines, Riverina and Sand King at the northern southern end of the belt, do about 1.6 million-1.7 million tons between them, but our infrastructure only does about 1.2 million tons. We did a third-party processing through FY 2026 to get to the 140,000 oz.
It comes at a higher cost, but it's really testament to start seeing what these mines can do. In conjunction with that, importantly, in FY 2026, we committed to AUD 75 million exploration, which is about a 320 km drill program, which is kind of bigger than the sum of all the previous parts ever on the belt. That really started shaping what it could look like going forward. What we found there quickly was it wasn't just the existing mines we had. We were going to be able to turn on a couple more mines. Really what we had to do is get the infrastructure right, and that started with a new mill. We've just finished the study and launched the building of the new mill.
What that really does to your belt when you're going from small- scale, high-cost milling, it costs about AUD 75 million a year to run our mill at 1.2 million tons. The new mill at 3 million tons will cost about AUD 84 million. For an extra AUD 9 million a year, you get 2.5 x the throughput. That starts giving you a feel for the leverage of scale and how that really transforms your unit costs going from third quartile down to first quartile. It's also all the other infrastructure that comes into play. It's camps, it's airstrips, it's roads, it's onsite assay labs. It's all those things that actually make your business scalable. We're embarking on that as well. We've got a couple of new mines to turn on, Waihi underground and Round Dam, which I'll talk about in a bit.
This investment back into exploration again at the AUD 75 million. Really what we're starting to do is we're an uncomfortable 140,000 oz, or we want to go to a comfortable + 300,000 oz where the infrastructure's right-size. You push down to first quartile on sustaining costs, you can really then start leveraging the belt and getting competition with capital. It happens pretty quick. This year we stopped toll treating in October. We go back to putting it through our mill and building stockpiles. The new mill sort of finishes. We've got an 18-month build time, and we've allowed up to a six-month delay in that. Really, what we'll do is fully transform the business into more than a doubling of production and a significant reduction in unit costs as we go forward.
To afford that, the balance sheet's in really good shape. We ended the year with about AUD 270 odd million in cash. We've got an AUD 200 million revolver. Importantly, when we ran the scenarios of sort of gold price reduction or CapEx blowouts and six-month delays into the mill, you could kind of see that it got uncomfortable in a low gold price and a mill delay. We've put in a lot of put options at AUD 6,000 an ounce. What that does to the business, it gives us all the upside above AUD 6,000 an ounce, but it sets a floor for 100,000 oz a year run rate at AUD 6,000 an ounce. That's what really sort of gives us the conviction that we can pursue all these capital initiatives while we're producing. The gold price fluctuations have broadly been taken out from that perspective.
In terms of what the exploration piece does, that's still our number one value driver for what we're seeing across the belt. You can kind of see this year, FY 2026. Midyear, we brought a sort of a 1.5 million ounce increase in resource. We doubled reserves as well. Importantly, that didn't include all the drilling we did at Little Gem Prospect, which I'll talk to at the end and is sort of out of our drive to 300,000 oz. What it was is a massive resource growth year on these big systems that are only just starting to get data on and unlock. From this year onwards, we start doing resource and reserve growth equally. We've been data poor a lot of this time.
The systems aren't drilled out at all, it's not like we're sort of re-optimizing old drill databases at lower cutoffs. We are genuinely just gathering data and uncovering systems that should have been mined many years ago with systematic exploration. Getting into the detail of all of this. The new mill, this is our existing 1.2 million ton per annum mill. This is the layout of the new mill. It's cleared. We're starting to pour concrete now. This is the + 3 million ton. The good thing about this one, there's no tie-in. It's fully separate, the old mill can keep running, our base case is to keep running both of them with an optimized case being able to upscale the new mill.
Basically allows you to keep pouring gold, keep generating good operational cash flows while funding a new mill that can be built and operated in complete isolation. When you look at our assets, we're only just starting to unlock these as well. Sand King, this is what the FID looked like. It was a 60,000-oz a year operation for three years. We've been mining it for two years, and now we're a 100,000-oz a year operation, and we're seeing sort of growth, particularly over to the north, but south at a depth and with a second decline and potentially third going there. This is part of the area that we're starting to really unlock and sort of push in further sort of exploration across the belt. This is the current Sand King mine.
We'll put a decline in here and some drill drives and unlock these northern areas. You're starting to get bang for buck with stack lodes, single decline, accessing many lodes, and the convergence of lodes providing bulk and high-grade opportunity. Very early days with Sand King. Our other currently operating mine, from an underground sense is Riverina. We're mining at about 200 m below surface. We've tagged it down to 1 km . It's a really good support play. It's sort of a 50,000-oz, 60,000-oz a year mine when it's got the two jumbos going. We see that sort of as sort of the base case, like I spoke about, sort of 150,000 oz a year. We just see this as continuing and repeating. Each year, we'll just look for replenishment as we drive down going forward.
When we're going forward, we've got two new mines to start. We're just doing an open pit here at Waihi, which is right beside the mill. That finishes at the end of this year, and we're starting underground. The underground is pretty exciting because it's got some really high-grade lodes. This is the Golden Pole lode here. It's your 5-g reserve. Also we've got these massive trends of sort of bulk low-grade opportunities, and they sort of go down. The analogy here is it's also very under-drilled, but it's much cheaper to get a decline in there, get some drill drives set up, and be able to sort of unlock it from underground. Importantly, with this high grade, we can go and access that pretty quickly.
While we're mill-constrained, when we pivot, when we turn off the toll treating, we actually then can bring in the high grade sort of from mid next year. We're in a heavy CapEx period, and our volume play gets offset by a grade play through that period, which is increasing business resilience substantially. When you look at it from close up, this was mined 100 years ago. It was mined at ounce dirt and never really followed up. We're looking at parallels here, and sort of that's 200 m of strike along there. We've only tagged it down to about 200 m, but you sort of get 1-oz to 2-oz dirt from sort of 2 m to 4 m, 5 m wide. We're pretty excited to get in there. Like I said, that comes into the mill feed from mid next year.
On a different scale, we are starting to unlock the Round Dam trend. Waihi is at the very top of it, and then you come 15 km south, and we are starting to do that. This was just a reinterpret of that trend from the geos, did a great job. Originally, it was looked at one lode and then not really followed up on all these others. Previous pits were kind of looking at doing that. That was mined about 30 years ago. We have come back and drilled them all and targeting the multiple lode, and that has been substantially rewarding. We brought out an updated resource, went from 100,000 oz to 1.3 million ounces with four months of drilling, and then also reserve. Really the PFS, it outlines eight years at over 700,000 oz.
We are starting to do that infill program there now, but this is very, very early days on the scale of Round Dam. When you look at that, it is hard to appreciate that is 7 km from there to there. Our focus was this 3.5 km belt down to about 200 m. You get these big geological flexures that bring stacked high grades coming into play. The pit is kind of optimized through there, but we need to test all at depth and we need to test south. The next bit of data we have to the north, it goes about 40 m under cover. There is an old pit there as well. We are pretty bullish on this whole trend, not just this 3.5 km to 7 km, but the whole 20 km.
Initially there will be an infill piece to form part of that final investment decision for Round Dam, then we will start moving on to the in parallel, the expansion piece. They are the ingredients that make up the 300,000 oz, which is really want to be in two years' time. Ultimately, you have got four mine feed, feeding it through. You get 100,000 oz and 100,000 oz from Waihi and Sand King, then 60,000 odd oz from the other two coming through. As we drill them, we will start extending resource and reserve positions from there. That is certainly not the end state. It is really only just getting to the start of where we want to get to as a company. Like I say, you get to that comfortable where you can start flexing, getting competition for capital.
An area that really is starting to excite us is the Little Gem system. This is just south of Riverina. This is our Riverina mine through here. That was the long section through there that I showed before. There is about a 7-km trend that everywhere you drill hits mineralization. Not all of it economically mineralized, but all of it mineralized. To give you a feel of the scale of that system. What we are seeing is stacked trends through here, on the Gem trends and the Sapphire. Our first really big drill out is on the Little Gem prospect, and we have got Little Gem and Sunraysia through here, which are follow-up ones. When you are looking at that, this is recent drill holes that we are doing. You are kind of starting to see this is the window we are targeting.
That's about a mile wide, 1.8 km from there to there. You've got two major sort of trends in Gem and Sapphire. Just to give you a feel of scale, that's kind of like 80-m window through there, 50 m, 50 m. There's multiple lodes through these systems, and you can see that we're getting sort of pit or even deeper potential there and there, as well as centralized decline could access a lot of the underground. Very, very early days, but this is a growth option above what we're seeing as a 300,000-oz-a-year center. Just to highlight, we've spoken about sort of three trends on the belt. This is the Mulline trend. It's another one which about 20% of the exploration spend will start unlocking. Really, this sums up the investment thesis in a whole.
There's been so much exploration on the surface, that top 100 m, no follow-up at all. All of these trends, as we're going deeper, all the surface gold has come from underneath. This is when we're finding these high-grade undergrounds and big open pit opportunities. Really, we're in a really good spot there where we're starting to push the bow wave of exploration out and we're catching up on resource and reserves. Importantly for us, though, we are in a booming market, this is the time to do a massive shout-out to the Ora Banda team and business partners, because we need people, you need great people to unlock it, and you need great culture to unlock value. We spend a lot of time with our employees.
We've got a lot of programs in terms of development programs, clinics like working on culture, working on initiatives to improve culture and performance. Really, that's where the game is really won and lost. You get good employees, you get good culture. You see injury frequency, reduced 30% last year, which is a phenomenal effort. Respect for the environment, that we're getting better and better. Progressive rehab, better reporting, better management. Also stakeholder and community engagement just starting to get more and more out. We had a team down here in the Masters Camp over the weekend, which was phenomenal to see. You get the right people, it really is what is your leverage to be able to unlock further value. Ultimately, that's about it. It's a pretty straightforward story.
Really, we've just got to get on and build a mill and a couple of new mines to really transform the business. It looks easy when you put it on paper like this. Really, existing mines keep going. The mill construction is targeted for an 18-month window, that should finish end of next year, early 2028. Waihi Underground starts to bring on the grade. Round Dam, we'll be pushing hard to get the FID before the end of this financial year. We start building stockpiles ahead of that new mill, which is another de-risking business opportunity. Importantly, outside of all that, we bring out Little Gem MRE, which we're pretty excited to see the start of the potential of what that deposit could be. That'll be coming out before the end of the year, which will be good to see.
That's all from Ora Banda. We are just getting on with building that next phase, and then we'll look beyond that to what we can do. Thanks, everyone, for your time.