To start with, so that you can see we've had a continual ramp-up with an improvement every quarter since our production started. In the last quarter, EBITDA of just over AUD 32 million produced AUD 8.5 million of free cash flow, but that was after AUD 15 million being spent on a new underground development at Scotia. So this operation is strongly profitable. We have a long-term board and management team that has been together for a long time. So myself as the Managing Director and the senior management that you see there have all worked together in different capacities over the last roughly 20 years, and the board's been quite stable over the time that we've held the Norseman asset. So the company's in a fantastic position.
We have, as of the end of last quarter, AUD 112 million of cash and gold and only AUD 18 million of debt, which is in the form of a convertible note that matures in 2027. So no real debt to speak of. In terms of our shareholder base, we've been able to build a strong institutional holder base. We have roughly 46% held by institutions. It's a good spread between primarily Australia, but also North America, the U.K., and other parts of Europe. In terms of our commitment within the community, we have got a strong ESG presence. We provide a lot of support to the local community. The picture that you see there is part of our education program within the town that we work in.
We are building to having a live platform in the very near term, which will show alignment with all of the major ESG standards and organizations. So in terms of the project itself, it's a large property. It's approximately 70 km from north to south. There's a number of different resources that make up that 5 million ounces. I think really importantly, when we picked this project up, it had zero reserve. We picked the six areas that we felt that were the least time and the least capital to production, and they're marked with the red pick and axe on the diagram there, and then we went about building the project. So the processing plant that you see there, like I said, we built it with a one million tonne per annum nameplate.
We've comfortably operated at 1.2 million tonnes per annum over the majority of the past year, and we continue to do that. We've also tested the plant up to 1.4 million tonnes per annum and very comfortable that between 1.4 and 1.5 we can achieve without any major upgrades to that plant. Basically, we need to change mill feed pumps and tailings pumps to achieve that increased throughput, and everything else has capacity to get up there. So you're talking sub AUD 2 million to achieve a roughly 1.5 million tonne throughput. The other thing you'll note there is very, very high recovery, sitting at just below 95%. The mine that you see here, the open pit, is what we mined from the commencement in 2022, and you can see that in the middle of that we've now developed an underground mine.
So the open pit mining, as it stood, was completed in October this year, and that's left us with an underground mine at Scotia, which is under development now. So we're on the left-hand side or the southern side of the slide there. We have been operating there since May. We've been developing ore over the last two months, and we fired our first production stopes in there last week. At full production rate, as it stands at the moment, and you'll see that there is a lot of expansion to be had here, and I'll show you that later in the presentation, we expect to be doing 65,000 ounces per annum out of this mine starting from the first quarter of next calendar year. You'll note the very, very high grades as we plunge deeper into the ore body.
We've drilled it on the northern side down to 500 meters below surface, and it continues to be completely open at depth and down plunge. The second underground mine that we have is the OK Mine. So we've been mining this area since 2022. It's only 8 kilometers from our processing plant. This mine has been a standout success for us. So there's two areas that we are mining. First of all, the yellow lode, which is the O2 Lode. That was mined to 500 meters depth by previous operators. It was flooded. The bottom 100 meters vertical were underwater and required dewatering and rehabilitation. The Star of Erin Lode that you can see extensive development on there hadn't been mined previously. So all of that development and stoping has been delivered by us.
Year on year, we've increased the reserve on this mine after mining depletion, and we're sitting at a run rate of about 40,000 ounces per annum from this mine. So we've got guidance in the market at 100,000 ounces at AUD 1,900. You can see that once that Scotia underground mine is up at full capacity along with this OK Mine, we expect those two underground mines to achieve that run rate, but you'll see that we have additional open pits to continue to fill that mill as well. So in terms of going into growth now, you can see we have a large mineral resource, and a big part of that is a very high-grade underground resource. And in fact, Norseman was not only the longest running mine in Australia, continuously running from 1935 until the early 2010s. It was also the highest grade field in Western Australia.
And so the growth program that we're stepping into now is all about drilling additional high-grade underground mines, and we have the target of having at least two additional mines running within the next two years and using that higher grade sort of five to seven gram per tonne material to replace the lower grade open pit material, which we're currently feeding it at roughly two grams a tonne. So it's a very simple strategy to get that increase. It doesn't involve big capital and building a much, much bigger processing plant. It's all about increasing the grade into that plant. So to give you an idea of Norseman as it's been historically, you can see there's been three major production centers on top of what we have made into significant centers at Scotia and OK.
The Main Field, North Royal and Harlequin, between them they have mined the best part of 6 million ounces of gold. Each of them you can see has got in the order of 500,000 ounces left in resource, and they've all been very, very lightly explored. Just looking first of all at the ramp-up that we expect to see in production, you can see that on the left-hand side we've had primarily open pit feed, and that really reduces over FY 2025 and 2026 and gets replaced with the underground mines that you see there. The aim is to increase the grade, which is shown by the dashed line there from just under two grams per tonne last year up into that order of five and six grams a tonne.
If we can achieve 4.5 grams a tonne through the plant as it stands, we'll be above 200,000 ounces per annum. So the first part of the growth strategy is Scotia. The easiest place to add production is where you're already mining. You can see that there's a red dashed line there which is marked as the limit of drilling. So that's our limit of drilling. We chose to drill the northern side of the mine to 500 meters deep as a test case through the feasibility study. In conserving cash in that tight period, we drilled the southern side to about half that depth, so about 250 meters. There's nothing to suggest that we shouldn't see that ongoing grade at depth in the southern area of the mine as well, and every deposit that we've tested at Norseman has had really good legs.
So the effect of that will be to take on the north and the south of that pit, we have approximately 1,000 ounces per vertical meter on each side. In a decline mine like this, you do approximately sort of 60-70 meters vertically per year. So you can see that if we can increase the size of the southern ore body there, this mine goes from sort of 65,000 ounces a year up to 120,000 ounces or more. In addition to that, you can see a couple of other lodes that are around the areas that we're mining. So the Panda Lode and the inferred lode are marked by the blue dashed lines that lie there.
The Panda Lode sits next to the northern ore body, so on the right-hand side of that slide, and the Eastern Lode sits out of the page from that large area that we're drilling now in the southern side. So first of all, on the Panda Lode, you can see that unfortunately it's got a historical waste dump sitting over about two-thirds of it. We discovered this Lode in 2021. Where we've drilled it on either end, you can see that it hangs very well together, and that's a typical section that is shown in the diagram on the middle there. This Lode is very much the same mineralization as Scotia, same sort of depth, same sort of width, same sort of grade, and it's about the same strike length as we have on the right-hand side there.
Similarly, on the Eastern Lode, it's had a very small amount of drilling near surface, but you can see with the drill traces in plan view on the right-hand side there that we're now drilling through that Eastern Lode as we're drilling out the red zone in the southern area there. Again, about the same strike length as the other ore bodies that are here. So there's very real potential for us to go from the sort of 65,000 ounces that we're operating now to potentially double, triple, and even quadruple if all of these things pull together in the best way that we could hope. So some great growth to be had at Scotia. I think our really big target is the Main Field. So the Main Field has produced about 3 million ounces of gold historically.
It's six kilometers long, and most of that gold has come from the Crown Reef, which you can see the thick red line on the left-hand side, and the Mararoa Reef, which is the thicker reef down the middle of the field. You can see all of the drilling that we did on surface before we've had underground. We've got very typical narrow high-grade lodes that we see at Norseman. This is the plan view of all of the data in that whole six kilometers. So first of all, you'll see how little drilling has been done historically. Western Mining developed this site in 1935, and their approach was to push the shaft down on the ore. It's all inclined shafts, and then develop out, mine those levels out, and then extend the shaft. So they did very little drilling in front of themselves.
I think that's really highlighted by the Bullen Mine. So you can see that cross-cutting lode, and it's got the label there for Bullen at 500,000 ounces at 10 grams a ton. That lode was only discovered in 1985. Mining in the Mararoa Reef, which is only meters away, started in 1935. So they mined right next to it for 50 years before they recognized that it was there. We are actually targeting the Crown Reef as the first thing there. It was last mined in the 1970s. You can see it's quite proximal to the Bullen decline. And this is a picture of the Bullen decline and me driving down it roughly 12 weeks ago now. So no one had been down there for somewhere between 7 and 8 years, and you can see the fantastic condition that it's in.
So we're going through a program with modern standards now to add surface support through mesh onto the rock to comply with the Western Australian regulations, but it gives us a perfect platform then to be drilling that Crown Reef out. And we expect that drilling to be starting around March, and we see genuine sort of million-ounce targets at both Crown South and the Crown Reef together. And I think this diagram really illustrates the massive opportunity that we've got. So the colored areas that you see here on the Crown Reef are the stoping zones. You can see the grades very, very high. What is shown as stope there has produced 1.2 million ounces of gold at 11.3 grams a tonne historically as a mined grade. So phenomenally high grade.
You can see also the inset picture and the hole that we've drilled in the middle of one of those top blocks. It's the very first hole we've drilled into these areas that have been left unmined, produced 5.7 meters at 36 grams a ton. So certainly not left because there was no gold, and I think finally at the base of the Crown Reef, which is 1.5 kilometers long, just the main section there. The development grades we have, the face grades right through there very much replicate the grades that were seen in the development up above, so you're potentially talking about three declines worth of material here. We're drilling into areas that are known to contain high-grade gold. It's already been demonstrated by development, and it's simply getting the data in there and then going in and doing the development.
And finally, we have one surface area approximately 1.5 kilometers south of that Bullen decline. There's another decline called the Viking decline. We can ultimately re-access that decline. Unfortunately, they buried the access to it when they closed the mine, but we have three different lodes there that you can see that have produced very high grades. So again, we've currently got a 35,000 meter drill program going through there. We're drilling into those three different lodes, and we have a very, very high confidence of success in both of those areas. So hopefully that sort of demonstrates that our path to those sort of additional two underground mines is a fairly smooth process from here.
Paul, thank you very much and very enthusiastically delivered. You've got a lot going on. Unfortunately, no time for questions, so people can find you outside. Absolutely. All right. Thank you very much.
Thanks very much.