Welcome to the Westgold Resources second quarter FY25 quarterly presentation. With me, I have Wayne Bramwell, Managing Director and CEO of Westgold Resources. If you'd like to ask a question, you can click the question mark icon on your screens at any time during the presentation and just type your question into the chat window. We'll go through questions at the end of today's presentation, and now I'd like to hand over to Wayne. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve, and welcome everyone for joining us today for the Q2 FY25 Westgold Quarterly Results webinar. I can start by acknowledging that I'm speaking from Perth, Western Australia, on the traditional land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. We respectfully acknowledge all the traditional owners of the land on which we operate and honor their enduring connection to country. We pay our respects to elders past and present. Let's go straight to slide five. Slide five. As normal, all of the executive team will speak to today's presentation and introduce everyone who's online with me today. Joining me today in order of appearance are Kaisan Critchell, our Interim Chief Safety and Sustainability Officer; Mel Reyes, our Chief People Officer; Tommy Heng, our Chief Financial Officer; Jacob Macer, Interim COO, who is dialing in from site; and Simon Rigby, our Chief Growth Officer. Slide five.
A half to stabilize the expanded business. We finalized the merger with Karora Resources on the 1st of August. It's taken two halves to stabilize the business, and this was as we expected. In the last two quarters, we've been prioritizing capital projects with a specific approach to invest in areas which were enablers of higher productivity within the mine. We'll talk to where this capital went during this presentation. It's been a really busy quarter for Westgold. Concurrently, we've been expanding the Bluebird Underground and the Beta Hunt Underground mines at the same time. That's some feat, but this team is really good at managing this complexity. Financially, the result was far better than I would have expected. Net Mine Cash Flow of AUD 45 million is a fantastic result with the amount of work that's been happening.
That AUD 45 million in free cash has been reinvested into the business in specific areas to generate additional cash in the next half and into FY26. One of the more pleasing points of this presentation is that our investment in resource development and exploration drilling has not slowed down. Today, we have 17 drill rigs across our operations focused on res dev and exploration, and Simon will talk to some of the fantastic results that these rigs have been delivering. Slide number six. Slide number six is, in some sense, our corporate scorecard. It speaks to our FY25 guidance, and we run this slide every quarter. It depicts what our FY25 guidance target was, our Q1 results, and our Q2 results, and here, for production, the trend is your friend. We've got a much larger business now.
We've effectively doubled the scale of Westgold's output and 80,000 ounces of production in Q2, a little lighter than we expected, but still a fantastic result, which has grown from Q1. All-in sustaining costs are a little above where we expected, but again, we've told the market in terms of costs, second half production will be much higher, and with increased outputs comes a lower cost profile. Growth capital pretty much bang on to the half and exploration expenditure the same. Slide number seven. As I spoke to in the previous slide, 80,886 ounces was probably of the order of 10,000 ounces lighter than what we would have liked for this quarter. The market and the shareholders need to understand putting these two businesses together takes a bit of time. The integration is ongoing.
There are lots of things that are happening concurrently, and there are challenges with putting two businesses together. 80,000 ounces, as I said, probably needed to be 90,000 ounces for the quarter. Westgold is very focused on recovering the ounces, the circa 10,000 ounces. We didn't recover that quarter in the second half. Some of the more pleasing things on this chart is really our mine operating cash flow margin, over AUD 1,300 above the achieved gold price. Being completely unhedged has been one of Westgold's strengths, and that's a situation that we will retain and remain. All-in sustaining costs will improve over the quarter, will improve quarter on quarter, and you only have to look back to the previous version of Westgold, where it did take us one half to stabilize the purchasing business before we started to build cash.
We are implementing the same strategy in the Southern Goldfields. Slide number eight. Where did the capital go? Our capital investment is very much focused on areas which can enhance mine productivity and generate greater free cash flow into the second half. Look at the graph on the left-hand side in terms of the Bluebird Underground. Mine momentum certainly was picking up between July, August, and September as we started to expand this mine towards 100,000 tons per annum. We had some issues in October and November. We changed our ground support management plan, and that steered us back a little. You can see the December numbers. That momentum has been regained. Flip to the right-hand side of the chart. The Beta Hunt scenario, in some sense, was quite surprising to all of us.
We got this mine to an annualized run rate of 1.9 million tons in October. Had an absolute cracking month. November and December, some of the limitations around critical mine infrastructure bit us and restricted production. Where is our capital going in Beta Hunt? Specifically into the critical mine infrastructure, which will bring the productivity up. Slide nine. At this point, I'll hand over to Kaisan Critchell.
Thank you, Wayne. Slide 10. Westgold has maintained a strong focus on safety, particularly with the continued rollout of our critical risk management program, seeing a positive trend across key performance indicators. Our total recordable injury frequency rate decreased by five injuries per million hours worked, representing a 7% reduction on the previous quarter. We've been working hard through the integration process of the Southern Goldfields to bring to our processes, and it's great to demonstrate the progress has been made. We had no lost-time injuries in the quarter, reducing our lost-time injury frequency rate to 0.98 injuries per million hours worked. The high potential incident frequency increased to 6.09 from 5.18. One of our values is chief safety. It remains our priority to support our expanded team to achieve this with a uniform focus on safety across the whole business.
I'll pass over to Mel now, our Chief People Officer.
Thanks, Kaisan. Slide 11. We added 600 people to the Westgold team in the course of the merger with Karora, and we continue to merge systems and processes. We are pleased with the results so far, with the key focus being workplace culture throughout the integrated process. To support this, we have this quarter rolled out respect in the workplace training to the workforce. We have also established a respect hotline as another avenue for which our employees can raise concerns. Our work on diversity inclusion has been acknowledged at the AMEC awards held in this quarter, with Westgold celebrated as a finalist in the diversity inclusion awards. At the end of the quarter, we employed a team of 2,100 employees and contractors across the expanded group. Now I'll hand over to Tommy to talk about the Q2 results, our people delivered.
Thank you, Mel. Slide 13. This picture tells the story of where our cash position at the end of the quarter sits. The key takeaway is that our operations delivered AUD 45 million of net mine cash flow while funding our operational and growth capital requirements. We've essentially doubled the size of our business, and that requires a much larger working capital base. We drew down AUD 50 million from the corporate facility to prudently manage our working capital. During the quarter, we increased the size of our facility by AUD 200 million, taking the full capacity of the facility to AUD 300 million, from which we have now drawn down AUD 50 million. Importantly, we invested AUD 54 million in growth capital, with the majority of this investment focused on Beta Hunt, Bluebird, Great Fingall, and Starlight.
Westgold has made a concerted effort to prioritize capital towards the projects that really move the dial for the company. That prioritization process has seen us forward the Big Bell Deeps project, which we expect will reduce our capital expenditure for the remainder of the financial year by circa AUD 20 million. We paid around AUD 6 million in dividends announced in August 2024 in accordance with Westgold's dividend policy, displaying our commitment to shareholder returns. This quarter, we also had a AUD 13 million outlay for Karora's North American advisory costs. With that, we closed the quarter with AUD 152 million in cash, bullion, and listed investments. Slide 14. This next graph highlights our monthly cost performance. The red bars show the total All-In Sustaining Costs with the increase in August, a result of incorporating the Southern Goldfields cost base post-merger.
In the earlier months of the calendar year 2024, you can see the effect of our efforts in the mergers and operations to optimize our cost base and prioritize profitability, taking total All-In Sustaining Costs from the highs of $40 million to the mid-$30 million mark. We intend to do this again with the Southern Goldfields operations, and we are confident we can achieve this. Right now, I'll highlight that though it's early days, we've managed to maintain control over our group costs despite being a much bigger and somewhat more complicated business. Slide 15.
Delving on our identified synergies, particularly as it relates to the commercial contracts and professional services, is key to this. So far, we've realized AUD 28 million of pre-tax synergies. Most of this is from the rationalization of Karora's corporate teams and board. We've still got more to do, and we've identified further opportunities, which we are working to bring to bear in the contracts and professional services space. With that, I'll hand over to Jacob to comment on our operational performance.
Slide 16. Thank you, Tommy. Slide 17. From a group perspective, we achieved record gold production of 80,886 ounces, a record achieved gold price, and generated AUD 45 million of net mine cash flow. That said, we had some issues at Bluebird and Beta Hunt. That could make that number even higher.
Our growth capital investment of AUD 56 million was largely in line with the previous quarter, with the majority of that investment going into Bluebird, Beta Hunt, and Great Fingall, the key projects for us going forward. We are continuing to focus on the integration of two asset portfolios, two teams, and deploying our people and our own fleet where they're needed most. Slide 18. Our operations and Murchison delivered 46,461 ounces of gold for the period, lower than the prior quarter, predominantly due to low production at Bluebird and reduced access to low-grade stockpiles at Bluebird Mill. Our total AISC was in line with the prior quarter, AUD 119 million. Importantly, looking at average AISCs over the last few years, our costs are trending down, showing our focus on profitability and cost optimization in the Murchison working.
Capital investment in the Murchison is progressing well, with the predominant expenditure being towards Bluebird South Junction as we continue to ramp up from 500,000 tons per annum to 1.2 million tons per annum, which we now expect in Q4 FY25. Slide 19. In the southern ops, we produced 34,425 ounces of gold from the Southern Goldfields, registering a full quarter of ownership. The key to driving production up at Beta Hunt is investing to catch up on the underinvestment in infrastructure at the mine, namely in ventilation, power, and water. We have also identified some key issues with grade reconciliation. To that end, we are updating legacy resource models with substantial amounts of new drilling data, and we are establishing 24-hour geology support for our operations.
We have already achieved a 1.9 million ton per annum run rate in October, and are confident we'll be able to reach 2 million tons per annum consistently going forward once we fix these engineering issues, and with that, I'll hand over to Simon to discuss exploration and resource drilling.
Thanks, Jacob. Moving to slide 20. It was another very busy quarter for the exploration and resource definition teams, with at times up to 22 drill rigs working across the business, 18 underground, and four on surface. Turning to slide 21 at Bluebird South Junction, the resource definition drilling program continued at Bluebird South Junction during the quarter, with surface rigs continuing to build the employed resources to the south and down plunge, and underground drill rigs continuing to infill to upgrade resources to ore reserves. These drilling programs have now been running for over 12 months, with outstanding success as demonstrated by nearly one million ounces of new resources being added and the ore reserve being doubled during 2024 to 573,000 ounces, as announced to the market on the 4th of December. This very substantial ore deposit remains open down dip and along strike with drilling continuing.
Turning to slide 22, Great Fingall. As shown, the new Great Fingall decline is approaching the first with emergent stope panels, with first ore expected in late Q4. This will be the first time underground mining has been undertaken at Great Fingall since the 1920s and represents the culmination of a fantastic team effort from the exploration team that drilled the first deep holes in late 2022, through the technical services team who completed the modeling and mine design, to the operations team who have pushed the new decline in at a fantastic pace. We are all greatly looking forward to the first ore getting to surface. Resource definition drilling also continued at Great Fingall, with focus on the upper Fingall Flats and upper remnant targets.
The Fingall Flats reef splay off the historically mined steeper Great Fingall reef and were the target of various open pit mining campaigns between 1995 and 2018. The current work is looking at opportunities to mine bulk underground Fingall Flats stopes beneath it along strike from the historic open pit. Moving to the Southern Goldfields now on slide 23. At the exciting Beta Hunt operation, resource definition drilling has continued across various ore bodies, with some of the more significant results shown. The aim of this work is to sustain the plus two million tons per annum run rate into the future. Importantly, on the 16th of September, the company released an exploration target for the new Fletcher Zone of 1.6-2.1 million ounces, with a stage one target of 0.8-1.2 million ounces.
During the quarter, drilling of the stage one area has advanced with three to four drill rigs in operation. Some of the more impressive Fletcher results to date include 6.6 meters at 41 grams per ton gold, 31 meters at 5.6 grams per ton gold, and 24 meters at 6.9 grams per ton gold. Drilling of this exciting target continues. Finally, on slide 24, the Greenfields Exploration Team has also been very busy, with significant drill programs being completed at the Mountain View target proximal to Great Fingall and the Champion target at Nannine, both of which returned encouragement. In addition, drill programs commenced both at the Peak Hill target near Fortnum and the Erons target at Higginsville, with assays pending. With that, I will now hand back to Wayne.
Slide 25. What's ahead in the second half of FY25 for Westgold? Firstly, thank you, Simon. Some of those drill hits from the resource and exploration part of this presentation, absolute crackers. We're looking forward to seeing more. Slide 26. What is the focus? The expanded business really has two major growth engines. In the Murchison, it's the Bluebird South Junction underground mine. In the Southern Goldfields, it's Beta. Effectively, Westgold's gone from a four-cylinder engine now to a V8. We are very much in the process of tuning this engine with the focus at Bluebird South Junction of increasing mine productivity very quickly to be between one and 1.5 million tons per annum. Simplifying our business in the Murchison is very much hinged on a Bluebird South Junction that can fully support production at the Bluebird Mill. In the Southern Goldfields, the objective is very clear.
We've seen that Beta Hunt very quickly can do 1.9 million tons per annum run rate, but it can't do it consistently. To get it to throughput outputs of greater than 2 million tons per annum, we need to invest in critical mine infrastructure, which is a freshwater source, which we've solved, pumping, power, and ventilation upgrades, and facilities for our staff. When all those things are complete over the next half, this mine, we are confident of being able to do 2 to 2.2 million tons per annum out of two working areas, being the A Zone and Western Flanks. The portfolio now in the third part of that slide really is trying to explain how big the business is. 3,200 square kilometers of tenure between the Murchison and the Southern Goldfields is a massive land package.
We are very quickly starting to rationalize the areas in terms of what does a simpler business look like with fewer mills, but larger mills, and fewer mines and bigger mines. Right-sizing the package is all about trying to maximize margin and build a far larger, more profitable, and sustainable business. Slide 27. The point I was trying to make before was the strategy going forward is really simple. Larger mines feeding larger mills. In terms of a strategic review of all our assets, one of the first outputs was released to the market during the quarter, and it was our view of a much longer life, larger project for our smallest project, Fortnum.
That ASX release is a fantastic read and shows our view of what Starlight can become, a 10-year integrated mine plan, which brings open pit and underground together, and the potential to expand our existing 1 million ton per annum mill to circa 1.5 million tons per annum with a small amount of incremental capital. This little project, which I must say, completely underdrilled two years ago, is now starting to show its real potential through one thing, drilling and a new view of making decisions based upon data. Expect to see more of these expansion plans as we go through the broader asset review. Slide 28.
This is the last slide in the deck, and I must say there's been a lot to unpack and go through for the shareholders in today's presentation, but that's a fair assessment of the amount of work that this team has done over the last quarter and certainly over the last half. We only closed the transaction on August 1st in Q1. We only had stewardship of the Southern Goldfields assets for two months of the quarter, and Q2 was the first full quarter where the Westgold team had stewardship of the Southern Goldfields assets. We know how to optimize this business. We know how to drive costs out. We demonstrated that during FY 2022 and 2023 in the Murchison, and we put together six quarters of positive cash.
It took us two quarters to stabilize that Murchison business, and then six quarters of positive cash put us in a position to take a really big swing at an opportunity like the Southern Goldfields assets. We're running the same model now. One half to stabilize the Southern Goldfields assets. We're already seeing positive signs at both Beta Hunt and the Higginsville assets, and our expectation is the second half will generate much stronger cash flow for the shareholders. Today, that's the end of my presentation, and now I revert to Steve to open up the chat line for questions.
Thanks, Steve. I'll take it from there. And thanks for the amount of questions that are coming through on the chat line. There's nearly 100 people online, and so thank you for taking the time to listen to myself and my team. I'll try not to unpack this as best we can and break it down into areas because some of the questions do overlap. Let's start with Beta Hunt. Some fantastic questions on Beta Hunt. One of the questions is from Paul Cannell. When should we expect Beta Hunt to get up to 2 million ton per annum, given the learnings to date? Thanks, Paul. That's a great question. Look, what we've seen during Q2 is that in October, we hit 1.9 million tons of run rate out of Beta Hunt. Everything lined up, which was in some sense what we didn't expect.
We knew when we took these assets on, there'd been underinvestment in key areas which enable higher productivity. That's very soon. Strike an agreement with our neighbors at Gold Fields. Once we get clean water into the mine, productivity will lift consistently. And the key word is out. The underground pumping system at Beta Hunt is quite antiquated and quite inefficient. We knew this when we did DD, and we're in the process of upgrading that pumping system now. That being able to get the water out is another productivity enhancement. The third key issue with Beta Hunt in terms of driving higher productivity is ventilation. Karora had started a vent upgrade prior to this transaction closing, and we're in the process of advancing out as fast as we can. This is another really simple equation.
More air into this mine means we can run more trucks underground and move more dirt. That too adds to higher productivity and more consistent outputs around two to 2.2 million tons per annum. A power upgrade. There's some of the underground power infrastructure there is sort of old in some sense and needs to be replaced, and we're upgrading that as we speak. So if this was a cake, the real four ingredients are water, power, vent, and people. People don't underestimate the impact of people here. Being able to keep having trucks available and not having them fully manned or having enough personnel to run them has been a constraint in the Southern Goldfields for some time. We've got a really high utilization of our trucks in October.
Truck drivers were plentiful, and what we saw was this 1.9 million ton per annum output. So hence, we're very much focused on all those productivity enablers: people, power, water, pumping, and vent. Sorry, that's five, but four of those are engineering issues, and one is a management issue. We get those things right. This mine, we're confident this mine can do more than the two million tons that it's been set up for. Another question around Beta Hunt, and I think it's from Larry. Thank you for patching into this, Larry, about further CapEx. Look, the 235 we budgeted this year in growth CapEx, a big chunk of that we knew would be spent. The total engineering fix around power, water, and pumping for Beta Hunt is sort of circa AUD 15 million-AUD 20 million. There's four or five projects associated there. We're already spending that money.
We're already working our way through. So really, if you want to talk about a microcosm, the rising main at Beta Hunt is very old. It's a pipe from the surface down to the main pumping level. It's got one pumping station. We have drilled a new hole and installed multiple pumping stations to remove a problem that Karora had for its whole journey forever. So a small amount of CapEx across a range of projects fixed this mine, will enhance its productivity in this mine for the next decade. And people should remember, Beta Hunt is a mine that's been running for five decades over a multitude of different owners. So there is some reconfiguring and repair to be done, but we've dived into this thing eyes wide open. What we are really confident about is the fixes in this mine are engineering fixes.
There's nothing wrong with this ore body. This ore body delights us most days and will continue to do so. The trick is to be able to mine this thing more efficiently, and that's all about critical mine infrastructure. Another comment there. Let me just jump into one of the other questions. I've spoken about CapEx, about. I'll stick with Beta Hunt, and it's from Tim Mack. Thanks for the question, Tim. It's really about the grade reconciliation for the quarter. What we're seeing in the resource model doesn't really surprise us in some sense. The resource model is only as good as the quantum and quality of the data you have in it. What we've found is that there is this resource model. There's a lot of data that's not in it.
There's a lot of drilling that's been done at Beta Hunt that's never been put into this resource model. So as we speak today, we've had two or three additional resources uploading, if you like, existing or drill data from the previous operators into this model. More data, better decision-making, better resolution on these ore bodies. On top of that, we are drilling this ore body like demons. Currently today, we've got four drill rigs drilling the Fletcher Zone, so our data set is growing significantly every day. More data, more resolution on the ore body, better mining outcomes. We give the miners much better chance if we can define these ore bodies better. So that really speaks to the commentary around the resource model. Other comments here around Beta Hunt. Just bear with me as I'm scrolling through.
I've spoken about run rate, about the nature of the capital projects, and there's another one really from Alex. The former Karora asset seems like a few equipment failures you've called out. Were you expecting a few issues, or is upgrading the site fleet and infrastructure going to be a bigger task than you first thought? No, Alex. I mean, we understood what the state of this project was, and in some sense, that drove our excitement. The things which were holding Beta Hunt back are all engineering fixes, and we're in the process of fixing those things as we start to do it properly, remove this as an operational risk going forward. Just the bulk of the questions around Beta. I'll just jump up to the question about Big Bell. In the quarterly report, there is a lot of information.
And look, we don't shy away from being a transparent organization. We tell it like it is. On these calls, my executive team fronts up and gets in front of the shareholders and answers the questions. I think that's an important thing that the executive team gets to be face front, even in a virtual sense with the shareholder base, and take these questions. With Big Bell, we've paused the expansion of Big Bell. And what's that really about? That's really about the fact we've got two expansions running. Trying to do a third at the same time was too much for this management team. The priorities in the business really now are getting Beta Hunt optimized, getting it consistently above two million tons per annum. We're not too far away from that.
Getting its peer, the Bluebird South Junction mine, somewhere between one and 1.5 million tonnes per annum runway in the north. Those two things are the key growth drivers in the business. On that basis, it was ambitious to be able to try and run three expansions at once. There's a better return for our issued capital at Beta Hunt and Bluebird South Junction. That's about Bluebird South Junction. Bear with me as I scroll through some of these things. The question I'm struggling to find was really about the changing ground support management at Bluebird South Junction. The real difference is this. The Bluebird lodes within Bluebird South Junction, in some sense, are quite narrower and much higher grade. The ground support regime there, in some sense, is quite light.
The South Junction side of the mine, much wider slopes, much bigger tonnage needed a different requirement, which that different requirement really is now. Compare and contrast. The basic level of ground support would be shotcrete mesh and bolts. All we've done on the Bluebird South Junction side now is added cable bolts. So really, there's a step process where in previously, we were running a three-step process. Why the change? We've gone to transverse stoping in the South Junction side because these stopes are much bigger. This additional step is, in some sense, exactly the same ground support regime that we run at Big Bell so the team knows how to do it. We've just had to mobilize additional equipment and people to the South Junction side of the mine to do it. We lost a bit of momentum in that process during Q2.
You can see in one of the slides in the slide deck the momentum. We see this additional ground support as an investment, which reduces operational very. That's really the key to so effectively, we've got a new mining method in Bluebird in the South Junction side, which is different than the Bluebird side. We can't take a carte blanche or one-size-fits-all approach to ground support. The ground tells you what it needs. On the South Junction side, the nature of the stoping being much larger needs a different support regime. Great Fingall Flats. Hey, Nate. How are you? We are looking at Great Fingall Flats. Again, Great Fingall Flats, if you like, has been an opportunistic opportunity for Westgold. The main game at Great Fingall that Simon spoke to is the virgin ore body. We are very close to the virgin ore body.
The Great Fingall Flats are flat-lying lodes between Golden Crown and Great Fingall that we've identified on the way down. There was an opportunity to take them during Q2, but again, we didn't like the risk profile of that. We will take some Great Fingall Flats probably during Q3, but we will take that opportunity from underground. So really, the question was risk versus return. The original and different execution method where the return and risk is the right way to go. So expect to see some early ounces out of Great Fingall, hopefully during Q3, certainly during Q4. But the key point with Great Fingall is the main game is the virgin ore body. That decline is very close now.
So late in Q4, when we fire the first stope, and you can actually see the first three stopes planned in the virgin ore body on the image in the deck. Simon said it very well. This is a return to mining of one of Western Australia's most iconic mines, and being able to fire a stope in the virgin part of this ore body will be a proud day for everyone who's involved in it. I might start to switch the questions over to Tommy. There's some financial questions there. Tommy, if you want to jump in there, have a swing. Sure.
Thank you, Wayne. Question here on the financials in regards to the working capital. Basically, the question came from just give us two seconds while we scroll down to it. Yep.
From Alex, working capital, does this payable position at normalized level, and are there any other additional merger costs we should be aware of? We believe that's it for the merger costs. I'm not expecting any more, and I am confident there is no more. The payables are there at the normalized level. We hope that we would extract more out of the next quarter where we continue to manage our costs, which means a lower payable position. Question in regards to working capital. Again, does the AUD 29 million working capital movement in creditor payments get reversed in Q3? I don't believe so from Alex. The 29 is the timing of creditor payments this quarter. What you will see when half-year financials come up is a reduction in trade and creditor payables quarter to quarter. Thank you.
I think Wayne has answered the reduction in capital expenditure at Big Bell, and
Tommy, I'll hand it back when you're ready. Yep.
Wayne, I think I'll hand it back to you. I can't see any more on the financial side.
Thanks, Tommy. Some more technical questions from Ken Fair about the Two Boys mine potential. Two Boys is fascinating. A small mine which hasn't seen a drill rig in, I don't know how long, could be 10-15 years. One of our underground rigs there now, Ken. I mean, this little mine has suffered from one thing, lack of drilling. So look, we're going to give it a red-hot go over the next three months. We've had a rig in there now for about two or three weeks. And not surprisingly, different data may give us a different outcome there. But the reality will be this.
If it can wash its face at a decent scale, we'll keep doing it. But if it's too small, then we'll reprioritize because for us, we'll spend the capital where the capital gets the best return. At the moment, Two Boys, we don't have a case to close it because it just doesn't have any drilling. So we're going to give it this next three months to see what it can really be because the reality is there's very little data in front of it. There's another question here. I think it's from Larry about the expansion. Bear with me. There is a question about Higginsville expansion. Let me talk to that, Larry. There's a study that's been run at the moment about an expansion of the Higginsville mill, and this really is a part of the broader asset review.
We've done an expansion study on Fortnum. You can see we've got a view of what that looks like and what the capital could be. We're doing the same at. I'm expecting to be able to show the market sometime in February what our view is of an expanded Higginsville mill. This is all tied to the thematic of bigger mines feeding bigger mills. We've got a bigger mine in the Southern Goldfields. I mean, we're confident of being able to get Beta Hunt above 2-2.5 million tons per annum. It needs to be fed into our lowest cost mill, which currently is Higginsville. Higginsville currently on Hard Rock is about 1.6 million tons per annum throughput. The study that we're looking at is looking at upsizing that to somewhere between 2 and 3 million tons per annum.
A two to three million ton per annum mill sitting at Higginsville, consuming all of Beta Hunt plus whatever else that we can mine in the area, will generate a lot of free cash because the operating cost of a mill that size is far lower than the current milling costs we're seeing with a 1.6 mill. The real question I think you've asked here, Larry, is priorities. We're really looking at which is the right priority at the moment. My gut feel, and until the numbers come back, is that Higginsville will be the thing that needs to advance first before Fortnum because we're managing the squeeze a bit more out of Fortnum already. But the reality is all of our milling facilities and all of our projects are competing for capital. So we'll spend the capital where we get the best return.
If the capital expenditure at Fortnum gives us a better return than Higginsville, maybe we can do both. We do have the financial capacity to do both. I just don't have the clarity on what that number is at Higginsville just yet. But we will be in a position to show the market what our view of expanded Higginsville looks like, certainly in February. In some sense, that's where we're at in the business. We've got so many organic opportunities, but the focus is about optimization. How do we simplify and optimize this business for maximum cash flow? We don't have to look outside the fence. We've got enough inside. We know how to optimize and drive costs out. We've done that in the merger. And every time you optimize, well, then we expand. Case in point being the Bluebird South Junction underground.
That started off as a 250,000 tons per annum underground mine two years ago. It's now on track to be doing a million tons per annum. So every time you optimize, you get a different outcome. With the drilling in that system, we still don't know how big Bluebird South Junction could be. Sorry. Other questions here? I'm just conscious of the time that we've had here. Obviously, a key question. There seems to be multiple questions coming through about guidance. Let me be clear about guidance. I mean, our business is kinetic. We are monitoring the opportunities every day in terms of optimizing this business. But guidance, in some sense, is a single parameter. We don't have a single parameter business. We have a multivariate business. And for me, the key parameter to focus on is free cash flow. We have doubled the scale of the business.
We've now got a team of 2,100 people working. We've got a portfolio which, in some areas, has been underinvested for 10-15 years. Certainly, that is the Higginsville area. And what we're trying to do is work out what is the key driver. The key driver for this team is free cash flow. So in terms of our confidence about delivering guidance, I just think it's a very narrow window. To me, the guidance number is interesting, but what I find more interesting is free cash. We will spend the shareholders' capital to generate the highest free cash. That's what drives us in trying to look at the business on a one-year basis. I find a little narrow. It probably ties into another question here about our exit run rate.
What I've probably clumsily tried to write in quarterly is this: judge our performance on the Q4 exit rate, i.e., look at how many ounces we generate in Q4. That tells you whether the strategy we've taken around simplification and optimization is working. That will tell you what our Westgold's business looks like into FY26. We are still in a phase of optimizing. And as I said multiple times, even from the get-go we saw the second half of this year as being much stronger in terms of production than the first half because we knew it would take us six months to work our way through some of these engineering issues. We're still doing it. We're doing it every day. If we run out of ideas, which I don't think this team will do, well, then we'll come back to the market and tell them.
But the things that I'm confident about, I'm confident about our people. We've got some smart people in this business. They're finding ways to generate more ounces every day. I'm very confident about the portfolio. We've now got a much bigger portfolio. We've got a monster or a tiger by the tail with Beta Hunt. 2 million tons per annum underground is a big mine. It's the biggest mine in the fleet. I'm really confident about how that looks going forward. And we'll start to show more of the drilling data during February about what we've seen in Fletcher. And thirdly, it's about people. It's about portfolio. And it's about productivity. All the things we're doing now is investing in areas to make these mines more productive. Look, that might have been a politician's answer for many, but the bottom line is what drives us is free cash flow.
That is the thing we should be judged by. Everything else, in some sense, is quite secondary. We're unhedged. We sold gold at AUD 4,400 this week. This is a great time to be optimizing this business. If we get it right, this V8 will be tuned to perfection during Q4. That's probably the last question for me, Steve. I'm just about spent. And if the rest of the team wants to grab one of these things. I want to apologize for the wait for the quarterly. We'd rather put more data in there because, as I said, the business is kinetic. There's a lot going on. And I'd rather give people the detail, good or bad, of what we're doing and let them determine whether we're on the right.
Great. Look, thanks for that, Wayne. And I think we'll wrap it up there. Thanks, everyone, for joining us.
We did receive a lot of questions. So if we didn't answer your particular question, look, we'll follow up after the webcast. We appreciate it's a busy time. Thanks again. Bye. Thanks again.