All attendees are in a listen-only mode. If you would like to ask a question directly to the company, please use the raise hand function within Zoom. For those phoning in, dial star nine. I'll now hand over to West African Executive Chairman and CEO Richard Hyde. Thank you, Richard.
Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for joining us for WAF's annual resource reserve and 10-year production plan update. I'm in WAF HQ in Perth at the moment. Joining me on the call here is Lyndon Hopkins, our Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer. Also, I've got Padraig O'Donoghue, who is our CFO and also Company Secretary. And also I've got Todd Giltay, who's our General Manager of Finance. So as you can see in today's report, WAF is set to produce more than 4 million ounces of gold from our Burkina Faso operations over the next decade. 82% of the mine plan is based on ore reserves. And today's report is a 72-page document which is full of detail for keen followers of the company.
I don't need another listed company our size on the ASX, whether their operations are in Africa or Australia, that provides the same level of disclosure or can produce a 10-year mine plan. I'd like to thank our technical team, our Competent Persons, for their hard work and diligence pulling this together over the last few months. I'll run through the highlights of the report, and then I'll open the call up to questions. I hope there's some good ones out there. As I mentioned, we're about to produce 4 million ounces of gold from 2024 to 2033. This forecast is a 415,000-ounce increase over the previous plan. Our group annual production will now peak at 473,000 ounces in 2029, with annual production building steadily between now and then. Our updated Life of Mine plans now extend to 2034 at Sanbrado and to 2042 at Kiaka.
This is based on a conservative gold price of $1,400. We've kept the gold price at $1,400 for our reserves because we have long-life assets, and we've developed those assets through sound exploration, or we've picked up new projects like Kiaka through smart acquisitions. Mineral resources have increased by just under 200,000 ounces of gold. We've updated our gold price used for constraining resources this year. We've increased that from last year was $1,850 per ounce for pit shells for reporting resources. This year, we've increased that to $2,000 an ounce. We've seen an increase in resources net of mining depletion from 2023. Our ore reserves have decreased by about 275,000 ounces to 6.1 million ounces of gold. That's net of 2023 mining depletion.
But 2024's focus will be back on replacing ore reserves through some underground drilling, both at M1 South and we plan to do some drilling at M5 underground as well. The production for 2024, we've already guided at 190,000-210,000 ounces of gold at less than $1,300 per ounce, all-in sustaining costs. And that's all-in sustaining costs as guided by the World Gold Council, as some of our peers don't report to the same standards that we do. Our production number for this year is 196,000 ounces. You can see that in Table 5. So our budget production number last year was 196,000 ounces. So we've guided the same number for 2024 for the last two years. The main change in this year's production plan is that we are minimizing CAPEX. So we still have Toega starting in the second half of 2025.
We're not opening up any new pits in 2024. We're very focused on keeping a healthy cash buffer in the company all the way through the first gold at Kiaka. So what we're doing this year is we're pushing the underground at M1 South, and we're going to pull out over 500,000 tonnes, which will be slightly more than last year. I think we did about 450,000 tonnes last year. We've got a budget grade of 7.6, but if you've been following us for a few years, I think that grade is going to be conservative. So that'll set us with over 120,000 ounces coming out of the underground this year. And the rest of the mine plan will be made up from mostly the M5 open pit. The M5 South open pit is coming to an end shortly.
We'll have some good box cuts , which we should win some nice grade out of as we retreat out of the southern end of M5 and then focus shift to the middle and the northern parts of that open pit, which is still very shallow, and we're still pulling some oxide material out of there. We've pushed production at moving on to Kiaka for 2025 by a quarter. So we guided previously around 400,000 ounces for 2025, but we've pulled that back to 338,000 ounces, given that we've had a few challenges in 2022 in country geopolitically. We got our debt in place by the end of last year, and we're leaving ourselves some room in the schedule. We might be able to bring that forward, but at this stage, we're being conservative by pushing that production out to July 1, 2025.
So instead of guiding a range or mid or second half of 2025, we're guiding to the 1st of July now, with the schedule firming up quite well, given that we've made good progress at the start of this year. We've also put away a lot of the long lead items for, obviously, start of construction or for construction during the end of 2022 and also through 2023. The big change in the production plan really has been the Sanbrado underground M5 underground coming into Sanbrado. And that sees a production profile increase by over 15%. Previously, it was averaging less than 200,000 ounces, I think around 185,000 ounces through the back of the schedule. Now we're back up averaging 211,000 ounces from 2024 to 2033, with the underground coming into the mine plan for M5.
That'll see Sanbrado peaking at over 250,000 ounces in 2030 when we've got ore coming in from both M5 underground and also from Toega, which is about 12 km away. We previously mentioned that we're fully funded for the construction at Kiaka. We've now drawn down $100 million on the debt facility from Sprott and Coris Bank. So that's a $265 million facility. We expect to be drawing a further $50 million in the early weeks of March. That will allow us to really push the schedule and try and accelerate the build. Obviously, we know from previous build at Sanbrado, the faster we build, the cheaper it'll be with our fixed costs over a shorter period. The construction costs at Kiaka are tracking to budget. We find that our August 2022 feasibility study is still quite accurate.
We've seen very little change in CAPEX since we've released that report in 2022. We're on schedule for July 1 first gold. On growth, so 2024 is going to see us putting a lot of effort into underground drilling, both at M1 South and M5. We've got some figures through the report, which you can see where we're focusing on drilling beneath reserves at M1 South, converting the inferred resources into indicated, and in some parts, converting those indicated resources to ore reserves. We also expect to drive out about 800 meters from M1 South towards M5, and we're going to drill off the rest of M5 from underground.
That'll allow us to not only convert the Indicated and Inferred resources to ore reserves beneath the M5 South open pit, but also we can have a crack at the exploration target that we put together beneath the resources, which I think is really an area where we can add a lot of reserves or resources and reserves to Sanbrado. Currently, we've only got about 3.5-four years of Sanbrado underground in the mine plan. And clearly, all of the deposits that we've got at Sanbrado have got very strong continuity in the vertical direction. We've seen it at M1 South where we've drilled it from surface down to 1 kilometer. We've only drilled M5 down to about 500 vertical meters, but with this new drilling program, we should be able to take it down to 700-800 vertical meters.
I expect that to add a lot of potential to operations at Sanbrado. With Kiaka, we've already guided that we're spending around about $250 million this year. That will see us largely spent on the project this year, with a lot of work finishing off early in 2025. And the earlier we can finish that build, the cheaper it'll be, as I mentioned previously. All right. Well, I think that kind of covers the plans for this year. It's a very detailed document. I know it hasn't been out in the market very long, but I'm sure there'll be some questions. So, Nathan, I'll just hand back to questions now.
Thank you. Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question directly to the company, please use the raise hand function within Zoom. We'll just pause there and give people just some time to. Richard, it looks like you've covered everything. There's no further questions. Sorry. We've just had one come in. So we'll just go to Richard Knight at Barrenjoey . Please go ahead, Richard. You're on mute, Richard.
There we go. Sorry about that. Thanks for the call, Rich. Just a question on the ramp-up at Kiaka. I'm just looking at the ounces that are coming through. You were sort of saying July 1 you're expecting first of all through the mill in 2025. Just trying to understand that ramp-up there. I think there's quite a small number of ounces coming through there in 2025.
I'm just going to get to Table 5 and have a look. So Kiaka is going to be processing well, we're moving 15 million tonnes, and we've got about 5.8 million tonnes of ore going through in the second half of 2025. So, I mean, that's still well above nameplate. There'll be a lot of oxide going through the plant. If I go back to our ramp-up at Sanbrado, we ran for 12 hours at almost nameplate. We shut down, checked everything, and then from the night shift the following day, I think we're at 25% above nameplate. But that was a very good ramp-up. Everything went well. I wouldn't see a reason why I think in the schedule, we've got a six-week ramp-up, but I think that everything going well. Generally, these things sort of they switch on and they run at full speed.
So we've got pre-production mining starting in Q1 2025, so we're going to have a ROM pad full of ore. We've done a lot of stripping already. It's a very low strip ratio ore body, so it's an operation where we want to take ore from the pit and put it straight through the plant. We don't want to rehandle if we can help it. But did that answer your question, Richard? Because there's only 6 million tonnes of ore being processed, but a significant proportion of that will be oxide.
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. No worries. Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Mike Millikan at Euroz Hartleys. Please go ahead, Mike.
Thanks, Richard. Just a very quick question on CAPEX for M5 underground. Is there any sort of indicative or should you kind of guide us for that underground? Thanks.
Yeah. The number we're using internally right now, obviously, there's a study underway on that, and we'll declare Ore Reserves with our annual update next year because we've already got obviously, we've got it into a mine plan, so I think investors can get a fair idea of what to expect. I'm probably guiding between $20 million-$30 million for pre-production. That would include, obviously, development and ventilation. Lyndon, would you have any other comments on that?
No. That's pretty much where we're landing, I'd say.
Okay. Good.
Cool. Thanks very much for that. Also on the exploration front, obviously, M1 South underground, a bit more drilling going on there. Any sort of expectations for any other kind of loads that are kind of developing there?
Look, we've done some drilling just to the north of M1, the main lode. Look, we should have some results out in the next few weeks on that. We haven't mined beneath the northern part of the—is it M1 South open pit? But I think if you have a look at some of the figures we put in here, the main lode at M1 South is sort of 100-120 meters. It's up to 40 meters wide. It's kind of a fat sausage. It just drives straight down, and we've drilled it, obviously, down to 1 kilometer. The northern part of the pit, mineralization is separated into two lodes, and we've put some results out there in today's report. Historically, we've hit mineralization at depth, but it was a bit spotty. But it did start to come together when we did the grade control.
I can just say, if you have a look towards the back of the announcement, I think page 20. Page 20's got some of the grade control results from the last bench of the open pit: 6 at 124, 7 at 45, at 34, 6 at 48, 16 at 17. So there's some really nice numbers in there. It's not as consistent as the main lode, but I think we've got a good chance of pulling some ounces out of there as well. We've done some drilling directly beneath the northern end of the pit, and I think it's shaping up. But because we've had a pretty full schedule and we've really had to get the development into the main chute, we haven't focused on it so far.
But if you have a look at figure 16, you can see we've got 2 drives that punch across into that area, and we've done some drilling. So yeah, stand by. We'll have some results out in the next one or two weeks.
Great. Thanks for that. Yeah. Thanks. Very good disclosure. So really appreciate all the data. Cheers.
Thanks, Mike.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Justin Chan at SCP Resource Finance. Please go ahead, Justin.
Hey, guys.
Am I on now? Can you hear me?
You're on.
Okay. Perfect. Just looking at your schedule, you've got kind of throughput reverting to normal levels in 2026 at Kiaka. I'm just wondering, if you're running so much higher than nameplate, will you in practice, do you think you'll be through those oxides that allow you to run so far above nameplate by 2026, or is there potential for uplift there?
Well, I think there's potential for uplift. I mean, we haven't banked it into the schedule. We've run the schedule at 20% above nameplate, which is utilizing design capacity. Excuse me. If you have a look at what we've done at Sanbrado, I mean, that was supposed to be 1.8 million tonnes per annum on hard rock and a 2.2 million tonnes per annum blend. We're running at 3.2 million tonnes per annum, which is 50% above nameplate. I'm not saying that we'll do that at Kiaka, but I definitely think that the 20% above nameplate's conservative. We've oversized the crushers and the mills, so they're not going to be bottlenecks. So look, yeah, oxide in the early part of the schedule, that's why we've got a big sort of first half for the second part of 2025.
But look, I think we've got to push it and maintain that certainly above 8.4.
Gotcha. So I guess the update on that won't be driven as much by exploration and oxides and just more once you have data coming from the mill, whether you feel comfortable kind of resetting the assumptions there.
That's correct. And look, we won't know until we ramp up. But certainly, I think 8.4 is conservative. Yeah.
Okay. Perfect.
Basically, we've gone with the same suppliers. We've got Metso Outotec providing crushers and mills for Kiaka, the same suppliers for Sanbrado. We haven't gone for cheap Chinese mills where we know that there's issues with them. We've gone for quality European-built product.
Okay. Awesome. Thanks, Richard. Appreciate the color.
No worries.
Thank you. Richard, we've had some questions that have been typed in that are regarding Burkina Faso. This one probably summarises a selection of them. It's, "Have the political issues that have impacted Burkina Faso in the last several years impacted your ability to access capital equipment for drilling, etc.?
No. I mean, we've just proven that good companies like West African Resources with a quality team can still access capital. So we've just drawn down $100 million at the end of 2023 for Kiaka. Nothing's easy, but with quality we haven't had our operations impacted either. So we've had three years of either meeting or beating guidance each quarter. And that's not to say in between quarters we don't have issues. Every operation, whether it's in Australia or Africa, has issues. So certainly, there's different sorts of challenges working in West Africa. But if you have a look at our peers in Australia, we've got often we're generating twice the NPAT, but we've got half the market cap.
So investors need to look at our track record and say, "Well, West Africans built a track record of meeting guidance and producing gold and not missing guidance." So back the team, back the company. And if you benchmark West African Resources against a number of Australian producers, we're significantly discounted. But all we can do is bang the drum and say, "This is what we're doing." It's up to investors to decide if they want to invest or not.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, so I'll now hand back to Richard for closing remarks.
Thanks, Nathan. And thank you for everyone for dialing in. Thanks again to our technical team and our CPs for pulling this report together with me. We'll have some more exploration news out, as I mentioned, in the next few weeks. We'll have continuous updates on the construction progress at Kiaka as well over this quarter and next. You'll start to see Kiaka really shaping up and looking like a mine site over the next 6-8 weeks with lots of concrete going down at the moment and also still CIL tanks being erected. We'll be providing some nice video and photo updates. All right. Well, thanks very much for dialing in, and I wish everyone a good week. Cheers. Bye.