Thanks very much, Sam, and thanks everyone for joining our webinar today. Very pleased to put this quarterly update out today. We've had a strong quarter in line with our guidance during the September period. We've closed the period with a balance sheet of AUD 240 million of cash and gold. We continue to be debt free and we continue to be unhedged. Our operational cash flow has been strong at AUD 63 million of EBITDA, and we've had a solid increase in our cash and gold position. You'll note that subsequent to the end of the quarter, we did recommence some buyback activity on the back of that cash flow generation.
Our production has been in line with guidance, as I said, and that's been really aided by the commencement of mining at the Green Lantern open pit, as well as the ongoing improvements that we've talked about for some time at our existing mines. A very exciting development over this quarter and the previous quarter has been the discovery of the Racetrack deposit. It is shaping up to be a very important part of our growth focus, and I'll spend some time on that today. Just looking at the key metrics over the last quarter, you can see that our production and our cash flows are up, our costs have come down. We did note in the quarterly that the diesel price, as has affected many operators through the quarter, has also had an impact on our costing.
I should note, though, that the all-in sustaining cost is around the guidance level expected when you consider that the first half of the financial year is expected to generate between 40% and 45% of our gold. Moving into the operations and first of all, looking at safety and community as we do in these webinars. First up, very pleased to see our safety statistics continuing to trend in the right direction. We've now been LTI free for 15 months across the Norseman operation, which is a great achievement and a real reflection of the focus that's been placed on safety across the site. We've also seen medically treated injuries and total injury reports reducing over the period. We've had a busy period in the community. Once again, we have hosted a visit by the Carmel Adventist College. We do that each year.
They have a great mining program, and it's great for us to be part of that and attract additional students into the field. In terms of other community initiatives, we've continued to support functions within the Norseman community. Looking at the results from our Norseman quarter, you can see that we sold just under 23,000 oz of gold at just over AUD 6,000 an ounce. I think key drivers for that have been increasing grades in both of our underground mines as well as our open pits, and therefore less reliance on those lower grade stockpiles. We could expect that trend to continue as we move forward through the year. The processing plant throughput has been around where it has been over the last year at 260,000 tonnes during the quarter.
I'm pleased to say that early in this quarter, we have had additional fresh rock available from the Green Lantern open pit, and as a result, we're processing at higher throughput rates. We expect to be above that 1.2 million tonne per annum throughput rate once again as we move forward. We've only had a minor contribution from third party ore during this quarter. We expect to see slightly more than that in this current quarter, but we will certainly not be relying on that. The majority of our production will continue to be from our own ore sources. The last thing that I should point out here is that our exploration spend continues to increase.
With 10 drill rigs now in operation across the site, as well as an air core rig on the lakes, we are generating a huge amount of exploration data, and that is starting to pay us some handsome dividends as you'll see through this presentation. Moving into the various mines and into the discoveries that we're seeing in those areas. The OK Underground Mine has performed well during the quarter. Our management plans with regard to seismicity have worked very well. We haven't had any significant delays from any geotechnical related items during the quarter. We expect that to continue to be the case with the changes that we've made within the mine development stoping sequence and also with the installation of the seismic system at the mine.
The production has been significantly up on the quarter, and we expect that to stay around the levels that we're at now for the remainder of the year. You can see on the top left-hand side of the diagram, the proposed access decline to the Racetrack discovery, which I'm going to spend a little bit of time on now. You can see on the right-hand side there, the plan view diagram of the OK Underground Mine. What you're seeing in three dimensions in this slide is looking straight down in plan view. From the top, straight down on the mine, on this diagram. We are mining in the O2 lode and the Star of Erin lode.
You can see the Racetrack deposit approximately 600 m to the north with a decline that has now been approved by the Pantoro board, and that development has commenced out towards that lode. I think you can see the scale of the Racetrack lode there. The overall strike length is very significant compared with what we've been mining in the O2 lode and in the Star of Erin. I must point out that it continues to be open both at depth and to the east, and we will also continue to test the additional repeats to the west. Early in the stages of this very exciting deposit, but already a very large footprint of 900 m along strike and 600 m of depth have returned strong results. You can see the results in the center of the page there.
They've been nothing short of spectacular and very consistent. As we said in the first release on this deposit, it's rare for Norseman, which is known for very high grade but nuggety gold, to have so many very strong results throughout ore body. Generally, we would expect to have a mix of lower grade and high-grade results, but the high grade's been very consistent to date in this deposit. I've put a comparison here with the Bullen mine, which was one of the last discoveries made in Norseman. It was discovered in the early 1980s and mined from the mid-1980s through until around the year 2000. Over that period of time, the cross-link structure, which is on the same sort of orientation as Racetrack, produced about 500,000 oz of gold at 10 g per tonne.
What I've done in the diagram on the left-hand side here is overlaid the entirety of the Bullen mine development over the Racetrack deposit as we see it at the moment. You can see that Racetrack already has a longer strike than we're seeing at Bullen. We've already proven it over the full depth that Bullen saw and continuing to test beyond that. Very much a similar size at the moment to what Bullen was, but huge scope to grow. I think really interestingly, before mining commenced at Bullen, there was 90 holes drilled within the area. Those holes averaged 1.37 m wide at 10.3 g a tonne. With that nuggety nature, there was an upgrade seen, and they ended up mining it at 10 g per tonne.
The Racetrack deposit to date, we've drilled 43 holes, about half of what was drilled in Bullen to date. We have averaged a width of 3.6 m, and we've averaged a grade at 18.6 g per tonne. You can see there that just based on the raw data without any modeling and putting it into context in terms of where those results lie, we're sitting at just over two times the width and nearly twice the grade compared to the early data at Bullen. It is shaping up very, very well, and we strongly believe that this is going to be a very important deposit in our growth journey and is really, I guess, affirming the potential of Norseman and what we saw when we set out on this large growth drilling program back in September 2024. Moving on now to the Scotia Underground Mine.
We're getting to a point now where mining at Scotia is getting towards business as usual. We have the three areas in the mine, Scotia South, Scotia Central and Scotia North, all active. If you compare this diagram with the previous diagram from last quarter, you'll see that we have advanced that next level on the southern side of Scotia. We've certainly continued to advance both the stoping and the development in the central area, and quite a bit of additional stoping has occurred in the northern part of the mine, which has been really the real driver to increasing grade and flexibility in the mine with multiple areas now under production. We expect to continue to see strong performance out of Scotia throughout the year with these additional areas, both in production and development on an ongoing basis.
Moving on to open pit mining now, it is very busy on site. You can see on the two diagrams on the right-hand side, we have an open pit going at Green Lantern, which is part of the Scotia mining center right down in the south of our tenure. It is a photo of Green Lantern that you see there on the left-hand side. We are also mining at Gladstone, which we have talked about quite a bit over the last couple of quarters since we started mining there. A big part of the reason that we are mining in Green Lantern is that, as you can see from this photo, it moves into fresh rock very close to surface, and it gives us that fresh rock feed into the processing plant, which allows us to materially increase our throughput, right throughout and regardless of the weather conditions.
While it is slightly lower grade, the overall pit grade here is about 1.5 g per tonne. We expect to see just under 500,000 tonnes mined. Sorry, 350,000 tonnes mined at a grade of about 1.8 and another 350,000 tonnes mined at about 1 g per tonne. Over this year, we will build a very large stockpile, which will ensure that we have a very smooth flow into that processing plant over the next couple of years. This pit, with a single fleet, would continue to run for four years if we do run it through the entire period. At this point in time, we expect to run it for somewhere between 12 and 18 months, and then give it a rest while we are utilizing those stockpiles that we will build.
At the same time, the Green Lantern open pit is going through the Stage 3 cutback at the moment. By late in this quarter, we will be back strongly in ore. That open pit produces roughly 20,000 oz in the back half of the year at grades above 3 g per tonne, and continues into the next financial year for another 30,000 oz at around 3.5 g per tonne. Gladstone is a long-term high grade feed while we get the additional underground mines up and operating. Green Lantern is a long-term feed that we can turn on and off as required to continue the operation at optimal throughput rates. Looking at our additional development now in the Mainfield, we have progressed very well in this area.
The dark blue that is shown represents both rehabilitated areas of existing development and new development that we have advanced during our last sort of 15 months in the Bullen Underground Mine. The result of that is we have rehabilitated roughly 8 km of development. We have done roughly 2 km of new development, and we have done a large amount of drilling, which has allowed us to identify three initial areas now, which as you can see in the overall scale of Mainfield look small, but in fact, the strike lengths there are very similar to what we are mining in total at the OK Mine. We have three individual areas that are coming into development. The Phoenix area on the right-hand side with the red circle currently has an in ore ramp going through that block.
The Butterfly area on the bottom left-hand side, we are developing the first levels towards that area. As a result, we have gone a little bit slower on the dewatering and rehabilitation towards O'Briens, but the O'Briens area will come into ore in the later part of this year. We don't have any substantial production planned from the Mainfield in this current financial year. We have extensive workings being set up, which will see the Mainfield becoming a very important production source through that growth journey that we expect over the next few years. You can see there that from the mineral resource update that we've done, we now have a mineral resource in this Mainfield area of just under 1.5 million ounces. Importantly, our ore reserve stands at 1.7 million tonnes at 5 g for 280,000 oz.
Quite a significant portion of our ore reserve now, and we could expect to continue to see that growing as we develop these areas and we continue to drill over the whole length of the field and establish additional areas throughout the life of this mine. Finally, on our greenfield exploration, we've talked a lot about exploration on these salt lake areas and the real potential that they have for some time now. As we reported last quarter, we gained access into this area at the end of April this year. We started drilling in June and we've continued to drill right throughout. The Lake Cowan program, which is just over half of the total aircore program, is now 50% complete and continuing to drill. Over the next few months, we will have completed all of the holes that are shown in orange there.
That will allow us to pull the anomalies that we experience in those drill holes together and move forward with planned RC and diamond drilling into the anomalies that best fit that next stage of exploration. It's a very exciting time for us here. It's not something that generates a huge amount of news for the market while we're in this aircore phase, but we're very confident that the work we're doing is going to result in some substantial additional targets that we will get on and drill as we finish this initial phase. Just looking at the mineral resource and ore reserve update that we put out at the end of the quarter, it's been another successful period for us. We've seen the mineral resource stay relatively flat, but increase by 2% over the period after mining depletion. Importantly, we've grown the ore reserve by 9% after depletion.
We're continuing to extend that ore reserve despite the mining that is going on. Really important to note that this does not yet include the Racetrack discovery. We expect a very substantial increase in the Racetrack discovery when we put a resource and then an ore reserve on this area. We're aiming for a maiden mineral resource towards the end of the first half of next calendar year, and we'll aim to have some ore reserves on Racetrack when we do the annual reserve updates during September. During that period, however, we will develop out to the ore body. We will commence some development in the upper levels while all of that information is being put together.
Having that underground access gives us the ability to do fairly short range drilling once we are out there and ensure that we are well and truly in the right location for those first levels. Our aim is that within 12 months, we will be in a position to be developing the first of our levels in that Racetrack deposit. Summarizing what we have talked about today then, I think Pantoro continues to be in a fantastic position as we have been for some time. We are continuing to build cash. Our cash and gold position at the end of the quarter was very strong and it allows us now to really consider stepping up the drilling, both within the Racetrack deposit and in the other exploration zones that we have across the site. The maiden reserve at the Mainfield at that 280,000 oz is very much interim.
As we have said there, we fully expect the Mainfield to become a very significant producer over a very long period of time as we continue to drill there. I think something that I had not mentioned earlier in the presentation, but probably should have, is that a big part of the improving performance at Norseman has been that the workforce numbers within our underground areas particularly, has been largely addressed. We are at contract manning levels at this point in time. We are continuing to attract additional people to ensure that we have good redundancy for turnover and absenteeism. But for all intents and purposes, we are at the levels that we intend to be at now. I think that is really important with the two underground mines in operation, in production, a third underground mine in development, and those two open pit mines operating as well.
We are at a great position to carry on throughout this year and have a good positive result for the period. Thank you very much for your time today. We are very happy to take some questions.
Paul, the first one that has come through is with regards to diesel. Fuel cost 31% above budget in October. Can you remind us what share of costs attributable to diesel and approximate impact on full year all-in sustaining costs if current prices hold? Is it still within guided range?
Yeah. Look, diesel as a total cost on site represents between 6% and 7% of our total cost. If you take it as 7%, for all intents and purposes. So, an increase of 30% as we see now sees that going to roughly 9% of our total cost. So it's not a massive impost in terms of that total cost per ounce. Certainly, it's having an impact and in raw dollar terms, it is a significant number. But, we believe that the costs that we see when we have particularly strong months, we believe that we will land within that guidance range.
Thank you. The next one is with regards to Mainfield. When do Phoenix and Butterfly move from development ore into stoping, and when does O'Brien's contribute meaningful ounces?
Yeah. Look, like I said in the presentation, during this financial year, we don't expect any substantial production from the Mainfield. So it's very much an establishment period. As you can see from the areas that we're developing there, each of them is a very similar size to what we're mining at the OK area now. So there's substantial establishment required to get those things into full production. In some of that initial development, we are seeing small amounts of ore being produced at the current time. We're seeing some good, strong mineralized structures through that work. But within our guidance, we haven't included the Mainfield for this year. Moving into next year, we'd expect it to be a much more substantial sort of input.
If you think of it as something similar to what the OK Mine is doing presently, and we expect that to continue to grow over the subsequent one, two, and three years beyond there.
Can you break down the FY 2027 production guidance by mine ore source?
Yeah. To give you a rough sort of breakdown. The OK mine sits at approximately 25,000 oz. The Scotia Underground Mine sits at between 45,000 and 50,000 oz. The remainder coming from those open pits with a large portion of the Green Lantern production, in particular, expecting to be stockpiled. We do expect to have in the order of 600,000 tonnes stockpiled by the end of the financial year.
On Green Lantern, how quickly does Green Lantern ramp and what contribution follows Gladstone Stage 3 ore access late in December?
Sorry, I missed the last bit on Gladstone there. First of all, on Green Lantern. It is generating good ore now, so the ore sits there from the surface. The overall strip ratio is about 6 : 1 on Green Lantern. It generates a significant amount of ore very quickly and we expect to see some fairly strong stockpiles building, as early as this December quarter. By the end of December, we should see those stockpiles starting to build. Gladstone as a—
The question on Gladstone was what contribution follows Gladstone Stage 3 ore access late in December?
Yeah. As I said during the presentation, in the second half of the year, Gladstone will produce roughly 20,000 oz. It's reasonably consistent from the start of next quarter throughout the remainder of the year in terms of how that's distributed.
Thanks, Paul. That's all the questions we've had to this point. I'll pass back to you for some closing comments.
Great. Thanks very much, Sam, and thanks everyone for attending the webinar today. Hopefully, you can see that Norseman is in a strong position, and we are getting some great results from that long-term growth program that we commenced two years ago now. I think that we're going to continue to see that big sort of exploration growth and that the mine is on track to deliver the growth that we predicted during that initial period when we communicated this growth program. I think I've said it previously, but we said when we started that growth program that by this financial year, during this financial year, we wanted to see two additional mines commence. As you can see, we've got substantial areas in the Mainfield that are up and running now and will come to production, and we're also developing out towards that Racetrack period.
From that growth program point of view, we've had some very, very strong success, and I think that's going to translate into growth in these subsequent years. You will see that in our updated five-year plan, which we're aiming to have out by the end of this current quarter. Obviously, the Racetrack deposit is a very important part of that. We just want to ensure that we have adequate data in Racetrack before we put that plan out, but we're confident that we can do that by the end of this current quarter. Thank you very much, and look forward to updating you again next quarter.