That generates about 40,000-45,000 ounces a year. Kiniéro, which is currently on track to meet or exceed the top end of guidance at about 176,000 ounces for the year. We've got, I think, probably the finest development asset in West Africa at the moment in Bankan, where we've had some very positive steps towards getting that permitted, including the meeting with the president in the last two weeks. We think we're really on a path to starting that probably next quarter of this year and bringing it into production first quarter of 2028. That's track record of me and my team through West Africa. You can see, we started with Nordgold, in about 2010, building Bissa.
I went through as General Manager of Lefa for just over 12 months, Project Director of Bouly, Project Director of Gross in Southern Siberia in Russia, CDO and Project Director of Sanbrado, COO and MD of Tietto Minerals Avezi Project, and most recently MD for Robex and now MD for PDI Gold, which is the merger of the two companies. That's our register and it's our performance against the GDXJ, the indexes we're included in.
We've outperformed the index over the last 12-15 months, and we're hoping with the announcement of our permitting, which we think is imminent at the moment, that we're going to have a reroute on that news. We still aim to be in construction later this year. That was our last quarter performance. We poured over 64,000 ounces, at an all-in sustaining cost of just over $1,400.
Kiniéro's all-in sustaining was $1,250 odd, which puts us pretty much at the lowest end of all the all-in sustaining costs in West African sphere. At the end of last quarter, we had $364 million cash and bullion in bank. We made a $10 million investment in Awalé in Côte d'Ivoire, and we're having a great quarter so far and hoping to announce those results at the end of the quarter. That's where we sit in comparison to our peers. I was actually surprised to see we're the lowest cost producer in the region for gold at 1,408. That's slightly increased by our small operation in Nampala in Mali, which, as Chris explained earlier, is a difficult jurisdiction to operate in and it certainly drags the cost curve up a little bit.
We've done well to control costs in our first six months of operation at Kiniéro, and we're really looking forward to having a producing mine in Kiniéro. That's our flagship, at least until Bankan is in production. That's where Kiniéro sits, and you can see there it sort of borders right on the Bankan deposit. There's four major operators in Guinea at the moment, that being Nordgold, AngloGold Ashanti, Managem, and us with a smaller operator in Mansa Resources, just in the Kouroussa, just to the North of our Kiniéro deposit. We've had a pretty good time in Guinea. Obviously, the permitting situation has been slower than we would've liked, but we built Kiniéro on time and on budget during possibly the most busiest time in Guinea that's ever existed with the construction of the Simandou Gold Mine.
They put in over 500 km of rail and I think 750 bridges and port and road facilities to get that whole thing into production. Meanwhile, our entire CapEx was a weekly spend for Rio Tinto during that project. We were the small project that got built while they were working through it. We had a fantastic ramp-up in production. January, we were really still commissioning. We only got the ball mill going halfway through January. We ramped up very quickly to over nameplate, and now we have reset nameplate to slightly over eight million tons per annum, mostly processing very soft saprolite. We have got sap in the blend for at least the next seven years. We will probably add that well past 10.
We have got an incredible amount of exploration potential through the whole thing and we're just going to be finding more gold and making more gold for the foreseeable future. We just did a reserve update today. Between economic factors and drilling, we've managed to add about 500,000 to the reserve, which is slightly depleted by the 100,000 we mined in the first half of the year. We had a very good startup.
We think we're going to be able to run in this sort of nameplate indefinitely, and we're really happy to be operating in Guinea, which is a very safe jurisdiction, and it's working pretty well for us. As you can see there, they are the two mining licenses of the two companies with Bankan in the North. Kiniéro is in the South. You can see, the Mansounia one, which is currently under application at the moment.
I will not try point, but yeah. There we go. I'm not going to bother with that. The Mansounia one is just to the south of Kiniéro. That's an extension of our current Sabali pit. It should join up to create a pit that's approximately 2.5 km long. The ore body is 500 m wide. The ore body is at surface. It's a one-to-one strip ratio life of mine pit. It starts off with basically zero strip. It is all oxidized to about 100 m and it's going to join up with Sabali to create what's a super pit in the region. That is a 1 km long and just a massive, easy ore body to mine, which will continue to fill our mill for the foreseeable future.
We've had a lot of exploration over the last three to six months. We were hoping to bring you some exploration updates today, but that got delayed. Those should be out later this week. We are really looking for some very high-grade shoots that extend under the Gobele cluster, which is where Semafo mined for just over 10 years at 3.5 g per tonne in oxide. There are some very high-grade extensions there. We have hit them recently, and we are hoping to bring you those results very shortly. We're looking for some really good oxide targets around Zone C and some high-grade shoots down in Farabana and Kobane. There' s just a lot of greenfields exploration potential up the North, in Philomble and Mansounia.
We've got enough gold to find to continue to increase our reserves much faster than we deplete for the foreseeable future. It's just going to continue to deliver for us. Bankan's obviously, I think, the best development project in West Africa, bar none, probably in the world. It's a massive, thick ore body that extends at depth into an underground and an open pit. It's got fantastic development ground around. There's currently 5.5 million ounces of resources and just under three million of reserves. We're hoping to start commence drilling there again later this year, by the end of the year. Hopefully, finding some more saprolite to add to our mine blend and increase our DFS nameplate throughput. The DFS had us at a 12-year average production rate of 250,000 ounces per year.
We're redoing that DFS, sort of playing with the optimization of the mine plan and the size of the mill, and we're hoping to reduce that CapEx number and increase the milling throughput and the overall production rate. We're aiming to have that out December of this year. That's what Bankan looks like. As you can see, it's just a beautiful, big, wide ore body. Mining's going to be really simple. We'll have one side of the pit that's ore, one side that's waste. You'll be doing whole ore blasts and whole waste blasts. It's a big, thick underground, sort of 4 g a tonne. It extends at depth. At this stage, we don't know how far down, but it continues at depth. We' re playing with that optimization now.
We're really looking to potentially push back the underground to maybe year three or year four, increase the overall size of the open pit, put that crown pillar slightly deeper in the mine, and, yeah, obviously increase the milling throughput to make up for that in the blend. We're working through that now. We're hoping to have it complete by the end of this year.
In the meantime, we've been pretty busy. We've started detail engineering. We're about 25% through. We've put down initial purchase orders for the mills and the power station. Working with well-known partners that we work with. We've tended almost all of our mechanical equipment now. We've actually received our structural steel tenders back. We' re really as shovel-ready as a project can possibly be to start work as soon as we can. The wet season's finishing in the next two weeks.
We're hoping to put shovels in the ground pretty soon after that, permitting allowable, and then we'll be moving into what we think is an 18-month construction period, and hopefully pouring gold in the first quarter of 2028. It is an exciting project and we can't wait to get started. That's the exploration potential.
As you can see there in the blue, I'm not going to attempt to point, but that's the current resource shells. There's a lot of really interesting results that haven't really been included in any resource yet, and there's some excellent hits in that thing. We're then getting some RC rigs busy towards the end of the year. We can certainly add to the overall saprolite blend in the mill, sort of increase the first few years of production to displace the underground ore that probably not going to come until later now.
We've just had a stellar record of discovery. This was discovered, first hole was drilled in 2020, so it is really only six years from first hole to what we think is going to be the first concrete, and it is just an outstanding project. That's our Nampala operation. We have managed to operate in Mali relatively undisturbed through the last few years. It's obviously been a challenging operating environment, as a lot of people will tell you. Nampala's managed to generate free cash flow month on month through the whole thing. We're still pulling over $25 million a year out of Mali. It's still cash generating. We just increased the overall reserve today. It's still an asset that's well-supported by the government, it's well-supported by the community, and it's well-supported by the workforce. So we're still operating it.
It's relatively low-grade ore saprolite, no blasting required, so we haven't any problems with explosives supply. We continue to operate in Mali and we continue to make money there. Awalé is where we've invested a relatively small investment. We put $10 million U.S. into 11.6% of Awalé. It is kind of a crowded register with Fortuna and obviously Newmont dominating. Our opinion is Newmont will eventually look to exit this asset, and we'd really like to be there when they do.
It's a tremendous asset that's been led by Andrew Pardey, and we're hoping it grows into something bigger and, yeah, one day possibly get the chance to bid for it and possibly build it. So it's a great asset in Côte d'Ivoire, in the Guinean border. It's in a safe jurisdiction, and as has been mentioned earlier today, Côte d'Ivoire is a great jurisdiction.
Great infrastructure, great power, great everything really. It's a grown-up, mature jurisdiction that we're quite interested to operate in again. In terms of our sustainability, we're over 90% local employees in Guinea already. We've only been in operations for just over six months. Our Malian operation's over 97% Malian operated, with the 3% of expats there all coming from the West African sphere. So it is very much an African-operated asset.
Overall, we've got about 2,000 contract and direct jobs. We probably generate another 2,000 employees during the construction of Bankan and another 1,000 direct jobs post that. We've got an excellent safety record at all our operations and what we see is the development of Bankan and Mansounia should add over $5 billion, not just to the economy, to their state resources in royalties, free carried interests, and corporate taxes over the next 12 years.
It is a massive contributor for the Guinean economy, and we see that's one of the main reasons we're pretty confident it's going to be permitted very soon. This is our objectives for this year. We are on track to meet or exceed both cost and production guidance at Kiniéro. We're somewhere in the middle of guidance at Nampala. We are very much advancing towards both those permits, and we've had some very good news of recent, and hopefully that'll be shared in the next couple of weeks.
We really want to get Bankan compensated and construction underway this year, if at all possible. Then, yeah, work to continue drilling to extend the mile offs at both Kiniéro and Nampala and Bankan as we do that. So it's a great sort of pathway towards 400,000+ ounces a year, which we think is going to happen.
It is our board and management. Just quickly, we just look at the reserve update as of today. We added just over 400,000 ounces to the Kiniéro reserves. It was just over 100,000 in depletion, 25,000 of that still in stockpiles. We went from 1.4 million ounces at the start of the year to over 1.75 at the moment. We did that through, I guess, economic factors in setting gold price for the reserve calculations at $2,200 and the resources at 24. We have obviously had a fair bit of drilling success at Nampala and have extended those ore reserves out. We haven't attempted to update Bankan. There' s a lot of drilling to do there, and we will hopefully do that sometime next year. That' s it from me. Open up the floor to questions.
Excuse me. Does anyone have any questions from the floor? We have got one here in the front row. Do you foresee that any of these operations, either currently producing or will be producing, will have higher average ore grade? Have h igher average ore grade?
I guess, it's possible. I guess with the higher gold prices we have been experiencing lately, it's economically better to process a lot more tons at lower grades, especially in saprolite. As gold prices climb, I think the average grades globally are going to drop, and that is just a function of straight economics and pit optimization. I doubt we will be mining them at higher grades, but we will definitely be producing, well, we're hopefully overproducing on our gold forecast and obviously cash accretion.
Any other questions from the floor? Maybe just on the permitting, at Bankan, you're expecting that imminently. Are you ready to execute on that project, and what have you done to prepare?
Yeah. We're very much ready to execute the project. Our team's in place. We've been building gold mines in West Africa for 20 years on average, and we've already started design and procurement activities. We'll hit the ground running. As I said, it'll be an 18-month start to finish construction. So it'll be quick and easy, and we're expecting a fast ramp-up into full production as well.
If there is further optimization that you're working through with the DFS and exploration potential proves positive, what, if any, do you need to do to permitting to get more production, expand the mill?
You don't need to change the permitting at all. There's no permitting updates required for overproducing in Guinea.
Any last questions from the floor? At this stage, I would just like to thank Matthew Wilcox for presenting from PDI Gold.
Thanks very much.
Thank you so much.