How the team's performance was appearing because of a hedge book. We got rid of that a bit over two years ago. You can see the impact that removal of that, as well as the great consistent production that we've been delivering. Back at the end of June in 2024, two years ago, we basically had a balance sheet that was net zero or I think, AUD -5 million. Here we are 24 months later and we've got AUD 1.2 billion sitting in our bank account. We have another AUD 300 million in revolving credit should we need it. In that time, we have also paid nearly AUD 152 million in fully franked dividends as well. Regis has got a long history of paying dividends.
We had to stop because our cash flows got challenged with the hedge book and some other operational capital that we needed to put into the business to get it consistent again. Now we're back, and this is the result. Those that have seen some of these slides have actually been around for quite a while, and most of this one is a slide that we've been using to talk about how we see Duketon performing in this 200,000 to 250,000 ounce range, and how we see Tropicana performing. The bar on the far right is our guidance for this year. A key thing to notice is that actually Duketon is doing considerably better than we were anticipating. Instead of 200,000 to 250,000, we see that our guidance range there is 240,000 to 270,000 ounces.
We've been able to deliver that by utilizing one of our mills that had gone at Duketon North or at Moolart Well. We put it on care and maintenance, and we saw an opportunity in the high gold price environment and we've taken it. What do we do? There's been some commentary around Regis' costs, all-in sustaining costs have been pushing up. Yes, they have pushed up, and they've pushed up because we've done the smart thing. We're taking advantage of marginal ounces in a high gold price environment, utilizing what would otherwise be an unutilized mill. We'd be crazy not to do it. Our geos had a look. At Duketon North, we've got some old pits, Buckwell, Buckingham and Wellington.
Our geos, who are now really building some good knowledge on our greenstone belt, remodeled it and said, "There's a real opportunity here for us to be able to pull this mine, pull some ore out, put it through a mill that was underutilized." As a result, we get Buckwell. Ore reserves of 250,000 ounces at a grade of 0.89. We'll recover 223,000 ounces over the next five and a half years. Not much growth capital, AUD 80 million split over a couple of years. Maximum cash out of AUD 59 million. Average all-in sustaining cost at AUD 35.24. Certainly relative to the rest of our business there, you'd argue that they are costs that are pushing up. Look at the margin that we're going to be making on that. We would be crazy not to do this rather than just leaving the mill sit idle.
What does it deliver? At AUD 5,387 an ounce, it gives us an internal rate of return of 127%. We see it as being absolutely sensible to do in our strategy. We've added it into our production. We're increasing our cash flow. By the nature of the fact that it's marginal, sure, it pushes up our cost per ounce a little bit. What would we rather do? Have lower production and lower costs or higher production and a cost that will certainly deliver higher cash flows? It just is a no-brainer. I just want to talk a little bit now about something that perhaps got lost. Obviously, there's the Vault deal, and we saw that we lost the opportunity there and congratulations to Ral and the team for getting that. Disappointing, of course.
One of the things that it's done, I think it's overshadowed or people have been looking at where our growth has been sitting outside the company, and I don't think everybody particularly appreciates what the team has been able to do over the last few years. This is a pretty standard pipeline. Stage one is where the geos get around and do what they do to come up with crazy ideas. Then all the way through to stage five and six, where we were in production. We've got multiple projects that have been running here. We've been running this program for a few years now. What's it done? This graph shows back in 2021 at Duketon, we had 1.4 million ounces. We have 1.389 million ounces today or at the end of December 2025 in our reserves. Pretty much the same.
In that time, we have produced 1.2 million ounces. That is genuine value creation. It's not through acquisition. It is through finding it and converting it into reserves. Half of those ounces, it's not off changing gold price, which some skeptics might say. Half of those ounces are coming from the underground. This is a great value growth story that our team on site and that are exploring through Duketon are really just starting to deliver. There's so much more runway in front of them. This is a small snapshot to have a look and see, if we just have a look at the undergrounds in particular. Over on the chart on the left-hand side, back when we first went underground, we went underground with about 123,000 ounces of reserves.
Here we are six years later, we've got 714,000 ounces of reserves, we have produced already 475. The value that's been created by the team on this front from discovery, again, is incredible. There's a question of, these are underground. How much life do you have in the reserves? We've been doing some down plunge drilling. Now that we've got a good understanding of the ore body over the last few years, we've been able to let the exploration guys and girls loose a little bit and let them to drill a bit down plunge now that they understand the geology.
The two diagrams that are here over on the right-hand side with the red circles are showing, say, for example, here we've got, I'm not sure if you can see it, but this is Garden Well Main, one of our underground production areas. We've drilled 500 m down plunge of the nearest piece of block of resource, and we have found 10 m or 10.4 m at nearly 3 g a ton. Same geology. Very encouraging that this thing continues on. Not too dissimilar, in fact, to how Tropicana looks for us as well, by the way. Over on a little bit to the south, we did the same thing underneath Garden Well South.
These are going to be like a good typical underground, Western Australian ore body, two or three years of mine life in reserves, and they will do for the next 20 years, like so many operations that are well known around this part of the world. The pointers are all there. The one on the bottom, that's Rosemont. We've been drilling further down plunge there, a lot further away than what we normally do. We're waiting for the assays, but the mineralogy or the geology, it's exactly the same. This is what our team has been building in value over the last few years. This is an interesting one. This is Beamish South. This was an open pit. This is actually a clean paper greenfields exploration discovery. It's currently sitting at about 270,000 ounces of resource, about 1.1 g a ton.
It's a cracker of a little pit. It looks like very early days. It's got good high-grade bits in it. That means it might be something that continues on at depth for us to follow. I think the really important thing about this one is if you have a look at the plan over on the left-hand side, it's 4 km away from the mill. We've been walking over this ground for 20 years, and this was a clean discovery. There was a hole there that had no color, but it had interesting geology. Now our geologists understand the country so well, they looked at it and said, "Hmm, there's something here. Let's go and drill a little bit further south." Bang, this is what we found.
This is not off the back of some old drilling from 20 years ago with a bit of color that everybody forgot about. This is greenfields discovery. It's a great sign of the successful work our team is really starting to deliver. We said, it's discovery under the headframe. Of course, we don't have a headframe, but it's a great statement and it sort of gives you the idea. It was right under our noses and we've been walking over it all that time, and now we found it. That's Beamish and Ben Hur. Ben Hur is the underground that we've been drilling out. Could these be, and when might they be new production sources? Ben Hur has been a great one. We put an exploration target on that a couple of years ago of 300,000-550,000 ounces. We've now got in resource 240,000 ounces.
It's shaping up. We're still drilling it. We'll see. Hopefully, that will continue, and we might get our fourth underground from Ben Hur. If it doesn't, we've got other options elsewhere on our ground. Beamish South, of course, I just touched on. Now, moving from Duketon to Tropicana, it's the same story for the underground. When the team there first went underground, 317,000 ounces of reserves. These are 100%. Here we are, seven or so years later, 851,000 ounces of reserves, so nearly 3x what was there originally. In that period, also produced from underground over 800,000. Something that started off as a 300,000-ounce reserve has basically generated, either in gold bars or still waiting to be mined, 1.6 million ounces of reserves.
What we see there, we've got drill holes drilled well down plunge, 800 m down plunge of Boston Shaker, telling us that this thing has got all the indications of continuing on. It's a cracker, which, by the way, we did have questions about back in the day when we bought it for a little bit over 900. It was about AUD 948 million, including all the fees. We've pulled more than AUD 1 billion out of that mine for us since we bought it. Absolutely cracking investment for us, it just continues to deliver. Look, it's got so much more underground mine life. Coming back to McPhillamys, I mentioned earlier on, it's a great deposit, 1.9 million ounces sitting in the ground waiting to be mined. We've rerun the design. We're actually running two pathways here, two options. One is the judicial review.
We're challenging the process that the Section 10 declaration was made on. We're still waiting for a decision. We've had our day in court, we're waiting for the legal system to catch up with us, hopefully, we get a sensible decision out of that. If we don't, we're also running a path where we're going to develop and get approved what's called an integrated waste landform, which is basically taking the tailings, dewatering it, and co-mingling it in the waste rock dump. It's a great project. You can see there the metrics. People say, "Why you keep pushing on?" Look, at AUD 4,000 an ounce, this project's got a rate of return of 22% after tax. An NPV of just over AUD 2 billion. If you put in AUD 6,000, the rate of return is over 50%.
This is a great deposit, well worth the effort and the time that we're putting into it. Not only that, it's not just the deposit that's there that'll go for about 10 years. Average is about 187,000 ounces a year. There's material and there's exploration all around it. There's Kings Plains, there's little underground shows. We've got Discovery Ridge, which is 400,000 ounces of resource just down the road. This is great country. We will continue to put our effort to get this to FID. We currently think on the timing that FID would be sometime in the H1 of calendar 2028, notwithstanding anything that might allow us to bring that forward or delay us, that's certainly what we think is a practical timeline for either of the options that we're pursuing.
Two years to build, assuming that if it gets FID, then this thing will be cracking away all of next decade. It is a great project in our portfolio. Starting to wrap up. This is our guidance, 360,000 to 400,000 ounces for the group for the year. It's a step up. Again, it's not huge, but it's just steady. We don't aspire, we deliver. We just have continued to push and eke more out of our operations, and this will be another good year for us. You can see the all-in sustaining costs, as I said. You might look at those and wonder about them and why certainly at Duketon. As I explained before, there are some marginal ounces that we've put in there that do have some modestly higher costs which lifts it.
There are other things that we're all enjoying at the moment that are putting a bit of pressure on our all-in sustaining, not the least of which is the diesel price. We think that we can quite comfortably with that make a very significant cash flow in addition to our balance sheet over the next 12 months if the price stays where it is. You can see that our exploration has lifted a little bit relative. Well, you can't see it there, but trust me, it is. It's lifted a little bit on last year off the back of the success that we continue to have across our sites. What do we do with the money?
It's obviously part of the reason why you're a company is to grow, the other part of the reason is to return profits and provide a return to your shareholders who have given you their capital and entrusted you. We now have a capital management policy, it provides a framework for dividend returns. It basically structured that it says that we will pay. We'll assess a lot of things as we put in here, investment and is there anything significant coming up? What do we need to assess about our cash flows? Our guidance in that is somewhere between 25%-50% of our free cash flow before any kind of, we adjust, put back in any dividends that we will pay, gets paid out in our dividends over the year.
We do have the ability as well for special dividend payments, also we'll be considering the application of share buybacks as well. The key one to recognize in there that we are back paying a dividend. We have a long history of it. Since starting to pay a dividend back in 2012, 2013, the company has paid over AUD 700 million in fully franked dividends. We are not afraid to return the money to our shareholders, we have the capacity to continue to build on that, we have a very strong balance sheet. The golden opportunity. We are unhedged. We are debt-free, we are delivering consistent operational performance, we are delivering yield returns. We've got a spotless balance sheet. As I said, AUD 1.2 billion, and that's delivered in just 24 months. We've got clear ongoing cash-generating capacity.
We've reinstated dividends with a history of it. We're exploiting sensible opportunistic ounces. By the way, if the unexpected happens and the gold price softens, we can turn that off straight away. We have not made long-term commitments to something that once we're on, we're on. We can turn it off. We're very flexible with that if it turns out that circumstances change and it's not worth pursuing. We continue to deliver value growth through incremental discovery. It's a real message that I'm wanting to make sure that people get from our company. For the last few years, I think it's been a little bit of an unrecognized trait of our exploration team.
Undergrounds, extensions, they're clear open pit reserves, and we're building a pipeline to continue to build on that production well into, our reserves take us well into next decade. This will allow us to continue on. As I said, we've established a new permitting pathway for the McPhillamys project as well. All the while, we continue to seek out inorganic value-accretive opportunities for our shareholders. Okay, thank you