Institutions, some key shareholders in Hawke's Point and Paradice. Board and management have a meaningful chunk, so they're there representing the long-term value. Definitely want to build the company over long-term value. Despite FY 2026 being a standout year for us, really that was just the transition for us as we move forward. When you're looking at us as a business, where we're going, we've spent the last really four years. On FY 2023, it was a small open pit in a centrally located mill. What that was just subscale, struggling to get out of any cash flow, so losing money. We transitioned to an underground, and also fixed up the infrastructure to support that, and organically have grown from 48,000 oz to 140,000 oz last year. We did that, but in the process, we bottlenecked all the infrastructure.
Basically, across our whole infrastructure suite, the mill got bottlenecked. We overmined the mill by 600,000 ton. Our camps, our airstrips, our roads, everything started getting overwhelmed. Importantly, in doing that, we saw the value opportunity to rightsize that infrastructure. In getting to 140,000 oz in FY 2026, we've brought out a new plan, DRIVE to 300, which is to get to +300,000 ounces in FY 2029. Really, that transforms the business. What we'd say is four years of fixing, then two years of growing to get to the start of that journey. It's been a seven-year journey to actually articulate the value, and then we can actually have a stable business. Our costs move from third quartile down to first quartile costs because they get the benefit of scale, and we get the benefit of multiple assets coming through.
Production obviously coming up. It's an important part, but it's a heavy CapEx period to achieve that. We've spent a lot of time getting strength in the balance sheet. Really, the building blocks to deliver DRIVE to 300, we're spending about AUD 375 million on a new mill. Of that, AUD 233 million is quarantined to an EPC with GR Engineering, who have already started on site. All the earthworks is done. Then we're working through the concreting at the moment. That's been on schedule, although early days. Then the non-processing infrastructure is getting worked on as well. That's a key part. To give you a feel of really what that adds to the business is we're currently doing 1.2 million tonne. That costs us about AUD 75 million a year to run as a business.
Adding in the extra 3 million tonnes will cost about AUD 84 million to run. So you're spending an extra AUD 9 million to get almost triple the production through there. That's really where the scale piece comes in. Also, recovery points jump up by a few percentage points. So you get the benefit of scale, and you get the benefit of recovery from that perspective. That infrastructure is a key piece. The other piece is this other infrastructure which I mentioned, which is airstrips, on-site assay labs, roads getting upgraded, camps getting upgraded. So that supports everything to be a much simpler business, a more scalable model. The other thing is bringing in two more mines. I'll talk the mines in a bit, but we've got Riverina as an underground, Sand King as an underground.
We have just started Waihi as an underground mine, and we have also got, from a PFS perspective, Round Dam's big open pits. When you are looking at the business, what it comes to is getting you the 300,000 oz from centralized two mills, one doing 1.2 million tonne, one doing 3 million tonne, and four mines feeding that, which is three undergrounds and one big open pit. In parallel to that is the investment piece that we are doing on the geology. I mentioned at the start, we are a massively underexplored belt. Last year in FY 2026, we invested AUD 75 million, about 320 km of drilling. Our resources jumped over 1.5 million ounces. Our reserve doubled. Now we are onto these big systems. What we want to do is keep drilling them and keep that investment.
While we are rightsizing the business on one track with the capital investment and turning on the new mines, we are also protecting the medium long term with the exploration to push out our reserve and resource position. To fund this over the next couple of years, the balance sheet has been improving from where it has been. We finished last financial year with AUD 260 million odd in cash, plus a AUD 200 million revolver. Importantly, what we did over this period is we protected the business with put options. From November, in a month's time, all the way through to June 2028, we have got 80%-85% of our production from the one mill covered at AUD 6,000. Every time the gold price dips below that over that period, we can sell at AUD 6,000.
What we did there was we wanted to protect that investment phase regardless of the commodity market, while it gives us maximum degree of upside. So well-placed from that perspective. While we are building the new mill, we are producing from the old mill, so it is not directly coming down. We are always bringing cashflow in. Also we have taken out the risk of commodity to a significant degree. When you look at the investment in exploration, just to see, like the AUD 14 million, did that found one underground? The AUD 16 million found the second one. So Riv, then Sand King, we got our eye, and then this AUD 75 million brought in sort of that 1.6 million ounces in resources. Now we are onto these big systems. We expect to be able to drill them out to a far greater degree from that perspective. Moving on to the assets in particular.
One thing we are doing is we are not adding on to the old mill, which sits there. That is the 1.2 million tonne. This is a brand new mill that has been built right beside it. We are expanding the ROM to be able to take up to sort of 300,000 tonne- 500,000 tonne of ore, and then the new mill. There is no tie and risk. We can actually fully quarantine that workforce. We have got a camp here that covers them so they can operate in isolation. We can keep our operations going with minimal impact from the capital projects team, which are doing a great job so far. Then moving on to the mining side of things.
So Sand King, when we started this mine sort of two years ago, we were thinking it would be a 60,000 oz a year mine for three years, and now we have been in there, we have got in a double decline instead of single decline. We think it is more closer to 90,000 oz- 100,000 oz for more years than that. Our resource and reserve position is covered by this box, and then we see this as a big growth area to the north. We have done surface drilling to prove that, and you have got sort of two load systems going there. So before the end of the year, we will come in and we will put a decline off this Palmerston open pit. We will put drill drives left and right. And what you will see is starting to just drill lines through this whole ore body.
So basically what we want to do, like I said earlier, while we are right-sizing, building the infrastructure, we are starting to extend the mine lives on our mines. So Sand King, like I said, gone from 60,000 oz to 100,000 oz, and we think that will be something we can extend going forward. Our other current producer at the moment is Riverina. So it has been a really good contributor. We started that one three years ago. We have mined about sort of 250 m below surface. We have tagged this ore body down to a 1 km deep. Because it is going to sort of sit in that sort of 50,000 odd ounce a year contribution, we do not plan on drilling these to an indicated spacing to get to reserve. So this one, we have got a 100,000 oz reserve.
Our current plan is we just keep pushing down, put in some drill drives and convert each year as we go down, because our investment dollars are spent better elsewhere. But it is a good grade, 3.7 g, 100,000 oz reserve, so we can get that visibility and keep that bow wave going forward. And so they have been the existing mines for the last couple of years, ramped them up. And then in order to get to the 300,000 oz, we are kicking off the Waihi underground. And importantly, what is happening within the business is we currently toll treat that extra ore that we have mined in FY 2026. There is about 600,000 ton that went to a toll treat. Going forward, we are going to stop that towards the end of this year while we build stockpiles ahead of our new mill turning on.
So what that does is we stop being a volume play from a processing perspective and we actually start wanting to attract more of the high grade. So we have started Waihi because it has got some known high grade loads to come into play. And most importantly, this one, Golden Pole, so it is a 5-g reserve, 40,000 odd ounces. And if we think of the capital intensity, it is really over the next 14 months. So we expect to turn that new mill on by the end of next calendar year. This really starts supporting us from about June, July next calendar year. So as you approach the bottom of the J-curve, you actually start getting grade through our old mill, the 1.2 million tonne and it means we can increase our ounce production and cash flows, to really soften that CapEx burden.
It is a key part of the strategy. It is also worth noting that it is actually similar to the other assets. It has been very under-drilled. What we have been doing is we drill this to investment case from a surface perspective, and then we really want to establish underground infrastructure to get in there. We have done that previously at Riverina. We have done that at Sand King and now we are doing that at Waihi. What that looks like is we have got an open pit there. We are going to cut the portal that comes off here and we will do the decline that is sitting here. Then we will put a drill drive north and a drill drive south to really open that up. You have got three major lines of load to work in, and then we will get the underground drills doing that. This is what the Golden Pole plan is there.
That is the 40,000-odd ounces of 5 g. The decline will attack them first. We will be drilling there. The drill drive sort of goes left and right here. Importantly, it is very early days in this system. We did some step-out holes and a couple of these holes, 500-m step outs, we hit 1.6 m to 65 g. Then we drilled this one, which is 11.5 m at 26 g and then 10.3 m at 3.4 g, and they are separated by a little bit of waste. All totaled, that one drill hole is 27 m at 13 grams. It is actually quite a big intercept. You have got 500 m in the middle between there that this decline will give us a drill drive to be able to drill from.
We think this can provide not just sort of bulk tonnes in these areas, but high-grade tonnes coming through, and it will be important to get that density from that underground drilling. It is exciting to get in there. It is early days. We only cut the portal from early September. Basically, we will start seeing production from that mid-next year onwards. Then we move on to our next deposit. I will just show the overview first. This is Round Dam. Waihi sits at the top of that trend, then 20 km south is the whole of the Round Dam trend. We are focused on sort of a 3.5-km section there at the moment.
This is the area that we started drilling that around October last year, and we turned it from 100,000 oz to 1.3 million ounces. We see this as scale that we have not seen in the other deposits yet, although early days, but this is part of a 20-km massive scale system that we are just starting to unlock. One of the reasons for that is previous understanding of the geology from 20 years ago was it was a single lode coming through offset by faults, and so these pits kind of came in and just took the one fault. What we have since found is it is actually a whole series of lodes that sort of come through. Each pit was mining a slightly different lode, but we have got up to five stacked lodes rather than one.
When we drill that through section, you can kind of see the impact there is, you've got these lodes coming through. Previous pits kind of focused on that or that. We've come back and drilled all five, so we get the benefit of the multi-lode system. Not only that, when you sort of break it into the long section, you're getting these high-grade, northerly plunging shoots. These are about 600 m- 800 m long to give you a feel for scale. We're seeing them. As the geology flexes around, we see those high grades form. At the moment, we've got sort of 700,000 odd ounces in a PFS there. We're drilling that out, to indicate it, to be able to take that to the board around April next year for the FID.
That'll feed about 2 million tons a year into the up-scaled capital processing infrastructure, getting us to that 300,000 oz. In addition to that, from an exploration perspective, if we go back to sort of Riverina, which is where we were up there, a key change from a geological perspective of how we're looking at these from previous iterations is just, I guess the scale or the camp scale perspective. While it was previously looked at as little mines, we look at these as big trends. This is a 10-km trend where everywhere you drill, you'll hit mineralization in a stacked sequence. Now we're really trying to find sort of the high-grade concentrations. Riverina was the very start, but we've since been working on Little Gem, which is about a 2-km-wide window there with stacked lodes, high grades, bulk low grades.
When you cut that into a section, we're drilling that out. Just give you a scale, that's 100 m wide, but we see potential for undergrounds there and also big open pits as well. Importantly for Little Gem, we haven't brought the MRE out, so we're still waiting for all the assays to come back. That MRE will come out either just before end of the year or early next year. Really this is a whole growth piece that's outside of the DRIVE to 300. Once we get the maiden MRE, we can dissect that a little bit more and we can actually kind of work out how we're going to approach the next phase of drill out and how it fits into the plan. At the moment, the infrastructure will be full with the other assets we're talking about.
It just really highlights that, I guess, organic growth potential of the belt. The other thing that highlights it, we've got seven major trends, and they all play the same way that, for 100 years, everyone focused on the top 100 m, despite all the gold coming from down here. We're just starting to unpack things like the Mulline trend as well. There'll be a lot of areas, but the bow wave of this is certainly pushing out. All in all, where are we at? We're just on the way to really going from sort of an uncomfortable 140,000 oz to really pushing towards that 300,000+ oz , 300,000-oz run rate, but in a right-sized infrastructure and up-scaled quality of assets to see our unit costs come down and production come up.
This is, I say to people, it looks easy when you whack it on a few pages on a screen, but basically the building blocks are the new plant. The old plant keeps running, build a new plant for commissioning, ideally finishing by December next year and commissioning that first half of CY 2028. Sand King and Riv keep going. Waihi Underground's started. We bring the FID out for Round Dam in April, as I mentioned. Importantly, we start building stockpiles. By the time we turn on that new mill, we've got big stockpiles to just bring a lot more flexibility into the business, and a lot more just consistency in production. We're looking forward to it. We're in a really exciting phase, as a business.
What was an 18-month plan is now a 14-month plan, so it comes around very, very quickly. We're just looking forward to it, looking internally, delivering on the operations, delivering on the capital and, in that next 14 months, turning it all on and being in a whole different world. That's Ora Banda. Thank you all for listening.
Any questions? I'll just give you a quick one. Obviously, compelling regional exploration opportunity, extensions at all your mines. As you step up the mill capacity in your production, is there any short-term impetus for pushing out the reserve life, or are you just comfortable where that is, it'll take care of itself?
No, it's a good question. Our focus of that AUD 75 million for that FY 2026 was resourcing, getting resources onto the books. More so than that, just working out the scale of the systems so we could actually go, "Okay, how big can these get?" We're a long way towards answering the initial phase of that, which means there's a lot more investment to come. From now on, we'll actually split that sort of exploration res dev, especially like Round Dam and Little Gem. It'll be a 50/50 split between resource growth and then reserve conversion within the mine plans that'll follow. You'll see that strategy change, but ideally, over the next two to three years, we will get to north of seven years reserve life, north of 15 years resource life to get there.
Yeah. Outstanding. Thanks very much, Luke and Ora Banda.
Thanks, Alex.