Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and good afternoon. Welcome and thank you for taking time out to listen to us. I believe that you will find the subject matter today both important and interesting. Please take note of the safe harbor statement. There's a substantial amount of forecasted information and assumptions in this presentation. There are a number of presenters today. First up, let me say I'm very pleased to introduce Charles Carter, who has joined the Sibanye-Stillwater team as a C-suite member responsible for the Americas region. Charles will provide a fresh perspective. After Charles, Wayne Robinson, the Executive Vice President for the Montana operations, will provide a detailed technical review, followed by Pieter Henning, the Senior Vice President, Finance. He will cover the cost and financial aspects.
I'll lead the presentation, providing the context to the repositioning of this Tier 1 asset, and then I'll wrap up with a brief conclusion. In terms of the context, I'd like to ensure that you're all very aware that we are focused on value. We are very disciplined when it comes to value. I intend to start this presentation with a value discussion. Now, the transaction overview as it was presented in 2017 is this exact slide that you're seeing now. I don't really wanna focus on the right-hand side of this slide, but I'd like to focus on the left-hand side of the slide under the heading of consideration.
After extensive due diligence and very substantial negotiations, we eventually paid $18 per share in cash for all the outstanding common stock of Stillwater. So that amounted to a total amount of $2.2 billion. The total consideration was $2.7 billion. This included the acquisition of about $0.5 Billion of cash and the repayment of about $0.5 billion of convertible notes with a make-whole. You would remember at the time that we arranged a financing bridge of $2.7 billion as well, and that financing came from Citi and HSBC. Towards the end of the presentation, I will certainly focus on how many boxes we can tick regarding the transaction rationale.
Essentially, the point that I'm making here or would want you to remember as we talk through this presentation was the amount of ZAR 2.2 billion. We've never shown the next slide, but this was the Stillwater valuation considerations at the time of acquisition. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see a sum-of-the-parts evaluation, and that's run at a discount rate of 5% and at the time was done on very conservative commodity basket prices.
However, the point I wanna make on this slide is when you look at the right-hand side in the gray bar, Blitz was at a conceptual level, from a project point of view, and we felt it needed to be risk-adjusted. We actually, our final point of view was actually running the Blitz net asset value at a 10% discount rate and risk adjusting it in that fashion. You will note that the total group NAV came in at $2.9 billion, with Blitz having a value of just over $700 million.
Clearly, if you're paying ZAR 2.2 billion, if you deduct the ZAR 700 million value of Blitz from the ZAR 2.9 billion for the total group, it essentially means that we paid for the existing operations and Blitz was acquired at zero cost. That's how we saw the risk of this transaction is that we paid full value, in our minds, for the existing operating assets and Blitz was upside as well as the palladium price, which I'm gonna get to now. If you look at the return on investment, this was largely determined because of the transaction that we were able to negotiate. It was largely determined by our exposure to the palladium price.
You can see when we announced the Stillwater transaction, I dare say it was at a low in the PGM commodity price cycle. I dare say that our timing was impeccable. It was not like we could have done Lonmin when we did Stillwater, and we chose to do the Stillwater transaction based on our understanding of the palladium market balance, but also based on the work we had done to understand that the Russian palladium stockpiles were actually gonna be quite sticky going forward. Therefore, we really wanted to increase our exposure to palladium at that point in time.
As we all know, we've had very significant operational disruptions starting from 2018 when we had the Benbow flooding. I'm not gonna go through all these in detail, and I'm really referring to those operational disruptions, including COVID in the blue circle. These have been significant setbacks and have caused a significant delay to the buildup at Blitz. Not only have they delayed the project, they've also caused operational flexibility issues. Now, despite that, when we look at the payback of these assets, whether you look at it in dollar terms or in rand terms, in less than five years, these assets have paid for themselves.
I suppose the message is there's very significant value upside and operational opportunity or optionality, I should say, looking forward. The payback here is shown in cumulative Adjusted EBITDA. Obviously, the stream proceeds less the capital plus what we call the recycling advances. You can see the payback to date in the blue bar on both sides, in dollar terms and in rand terms. Payback in U.S. dollar terms has been 1.2 x, and payback in rand terms has been 1.37x . This despite the operational setbacks, these assets have been a good investment with very significant optionality looking forward.
When we now look at the right-hand side of the diagram, we can see a number of macroeconomic challenges in front of us. Again, I'm not gonna go through these in detail. Both Charles and Wayne will cover them, but things such as skill shortages, rising global inflation, supply chain constraints, deteriorating global economic outlook, more extreme weather events. We know we've just had a one in 200 year flood at Stillwater, which we will provide updated guidance at the end of this presentation. These are all things that we now need to factor into our business in the U.S., looking forward.
You would also note that what we refer to the gray elephants at our presentations in February of this year referred to the angry planet, multipolarity, the big squeeze and so on. These things are now starting to feature. As you will see from this repositioned plan that we're presenting today, I believe we're on the front foot in ensuring that we come up with an optimum commercial position. Just looking at the palladium market itself, this is not new information, but certainly as we start looking forward, we become, let's say, more confident in the fact that the palladium market will move into a surplus in the middle of this decade.
That's gonna, of course, lead to potential price weakness a few years later. Therefore, it doesn't seem to make good or smart commercial sense to spend millions of dollars on a capital project which will deliver into price weakness somewhere in the future. That just does not make sense. Hence, when you couple our view of the palladium market plus the macroeconomics that we're gonna be dealing with going forward, means we really need to reconsider what's the best way to extract value from this asset. The bottom line is this, the prevailing macro environment and changing palladium market conditions have prompted a strategic revision of the U.S. PGM operations and our previous expansion plans.
As I've indicated, it's prudent to defer capital investment on the original growth project and re-engineer the operations to protect margins and long-term value. With that, I'm going to hand over to Charles Carter, the Chief Regional Officer for Americas. Charles has been with us literally for a few months, and he will offer what we call a fresh perspective. Thank you, Charles.
Thank you, Neal. Good morning and good afternoon. Let me just start with the first insight on this slide, which talks about an angry planet and extreme weather event in Montana. The gray elephant is a sort of scenario planning tool that we use in the company, and it represents a highly probable, high impact, but often neglected catalyst. We've obviously had one recently globally with COVID, and now we've had it with an extreme weather event in Montana. The point of the sort of gray elephant scenario around this is not so much that of the event. It's really the organization resilient in dealing with gray elephant events?
You know, my first overriding impression, new in role, and it's just come up for eight weeks now, and at the end of the second week, we had this significant extreme weather event, one-in-200-year flooding event in Montana. You know, the first insight is this organization resilient in facing this crisis? For me, it's, although it's been a difficult way to start, and more difficult, obviously, for owners and shareholders of the business in seeing lost production, and I'll come to that discussion, it's been an unbelievable way to understand the resilience of the teams in role against a difficult context.
I think most importantly, as we went into the flood event on the 12th and 15th of June, which is coming off a weekend production cycle, the teams did a very orderly shutdown. There were absolutely no incidents, safety-related, both on site and in the surrounding communities. The teams on site at Stillwater Mine had to do a lot of rescue with local campers who were camping in the weekend in the surrounding national forest. Really excellent work done throughout on orderly closeout, safety, and community engagement. What followed immediately in the crisis of the flooding was substantive collaboration across all stakeholders. Not just immediate neighbors to the operations, but the county itself, Stillwater County, had significant damage impact throughout the county.
There have been daily engagements with county officials to support not just the interests of our operations, but to support the whole county in its dealing with the flood. Then from county through to state regulators and then through to federal regulators, there's been a very substantive set of engagements. I think from a stakeholder management perspective, it's been a really good insight into both the robustness, resilience, and the integrity of those engagements. We've had multiple meetings as a team with everyone from Governor Greg Gianforte, Governor of Montana, Senators Tester and Daines, who are in the U.S. Senate. Representatives in the House such as Matt Rosendale. We've even had congressional delegations on site in the last couple of weeks visiting.
These have not been meet and greet. These have been substantive dialogues around how to address the impact of the flood in the greater region, the importance of these operations to the state of Montana, and then dealing with infrastructural activities to rehabilitate. My overriding first impression is this is a team with great collaboration. It's a team with deep relationships that matter at all levels of stakeholders. They've come up with flying colors. The flood event itself, you would have seen from our disclosure to the market, East Boulder Mine not directly impacted by flooding, and similarly, the Columbus Met Plant, not directly impacted.
However, both those operations did have individual disruptions to employees' homes impacted by flooding. In that first week post-flood, both those operations had incremental impact. Stillwater Mine itself very directly impacted. Importantly, not the assets, not the integrity of the assets, be it the operation, be it the plant and be it the tailings. But you will have seen on that opening visual, the photograph in the introductory slide to this set of presentations, that's Stillwater Mine, and you will see that the Stillwater River runs right through it. At the actual mine site, you've got the east portal on the left side, and you've got the rock dump.
You've got production coming out of the east portal, and then you've got from the west side, where you've got the west operations, you've got dump treat material going the other way. On both, you've got many materials in multiple directions. That bridge was knocked out. Then importantly, right at the entrance to the operation, which you can see in the photographs of this slide, the whole access road was completely taken out. That is still the case right now, but there's been a workaround, which you can see in the above photograph, where we've gone onto private land, rehabilitated a temporary road, rehabilitated tailings and water piping. That's allowed us to get back into production.
We've just started production slightly ahead of planned schedule. The net impact has been a significant one of seven weeks no production at Stillwater Mine, and that as you know, accounts for around 60% of mine production. It has had an incremental knock-on effect to the recycling at the Columbus Met plant because the recycling feed is blended with the cons from the two operations, and they really the operating cons sets the limits on what you can do on the recycling side. You will have seen a step down in recycling through this period, but importantly, both East Boulder and the Columbus Met plant have really stepped above and beyond what's been happening to try and mitigate as much as possible the loss of Stillwater production.
I think from a resilience perspective and from a team integrity and capability in the face of a crisis perspective, for me, it's been a really good start to understand that level of resilience and capability in the context of a crisis. I think hats off to everyone for what they've done. Talking about the team itself, there were a number of changes made prior to my arrival, and this was both to strengthen the technical side, the finance side, and the HR side. I've arrived into a very capable team that's got great experience in all critical areas, and we've got good, strong operating leadership, and we've made changes also at the operating team level over the last 12 months or so.
I mean, for those of you who are familiar with these operations, you will see some new faces. I think importantly, it's very experienced. It's a highly capable leadership team. We've also had one very recent change, which you will see on the recycling operations. Justin Froneman is currently on gardening leave and has elected to take up a CEO role of a privately held integrated Fijian recycling business, and he will do that coming off this month. I just wanna give a shout-out to Justin. He's done an incredible job, both in relation to the Stillwater Recycling business, but also obviously to the global build of the recycling strategy. Very sorry to see him go, but wish him all the best in his new leadership role.
I'm sure he will talk to that at the right time, in his own time. Importantly, Grant Stewart has just got feet under the desk in the last couple of days, so new in role on recycling. I think it's gonna be great to work with Grant. Really excited about that. I think it's testament to the Sibanye talent pipeline that there's a strong and deep bench across the business with people able to step up into new roles. That's been really good to see. The second key insight for me is this is a strong, capable and experienced leadership team covering the right sets of issues. Obviously my focus is how to support them in all the ways necessary to make them really effective.
The third insight is really one around context. We do have a rapidly changing macro environment in the U.S.. This will be familiar to investors. You're seeing high inflation. That's well understood. You're seeing constrained supply pipelines. You're seeing a very tight labor market, extremely tight. And you're seeing this at the macro level, and you're seeing it at the local level. That has a number of knock-on impacts on the operations. So we've been revising our plan in the context of a lot of labor turnover and importantly, in critical skills areas. This is not unusual to other mining businesses in North America right now.
It's somewhat compounded in the Montana context because these operations have long travel times to site and there's a lot of regulation around how we do that with busing of team members. There's a real lack of housing proximity to site. There's a very expensive housing market. To retain people and give them opportunities is not easy in that context locally. You will have seen there's high turnover and Wayne will talk to that in terms of how it's impacted productivity. I think importantly, you know, this is a critical piece. The sort of HR training and development and retention piece is a critical piece to the success of these operations on an ongoing basis. Right now, it's a tough context.
What you will see in this plan that we're presenting today is it's not just a near-term fix on the pressures that are facing the business. It's really trying to stand up a medium-term focus on all the things that matter to do justice to this world-class ore body. We've got 26 miles of strike on a truly unique geology. I think investors and analysts will have been frustrated historically by the promise and the various under development or under delivery over a long period of time, even prior to Sibanye-Stillwater's ownership. In this plan, we've really tried to do justice to the longer term optionality of these assets.
We're working hard across multiple fronts to get productivity improved, to get costs right, and to make sure we've got a sustainable business going forward. It's gonna take time to get that right. This is a plan in the medium term that really drives towards the 700,000 oz of production. I think we can do better than that over time, but we're not gonna overpromise now. The question really is the multiple interventions needed to stabilize and then to optimize and to have leverage on these core assets going forward. Wayne will talk through some of the challenges we've got technically on ground conditions, which has also led to backfill challenges and then changing mining methodologies. There's a level of complexity around that.
It's well in focus, and it's well in hand on how we move that forward. He'll also touch on the skills and turnover issues and Pieter will touch on the costs and the capital. But what we are presenting here, we believe is a very solid approach to how to get this stabilized and how to get it optimized and how to get it the time needed to allow our leadership teams operationally to get on the front foot. I think, you know, your takeaway should be that there's no silver bullet here. This is a multi-factor, quite complex set of integrated interventions that are gonna take a bit of time to get right.
Our focus is really the longer term delivery that is sustainable and really does justice to the opportunity here. I firmly believe that we're presenting a medium-term plan that will get us there. It's realistic, it's achievable, and it'll certainly be sustainable. I think for me personally, it's an exciting opportunity to come in to help these teams deliver on this. I firmly hope that over time you will see opportunity and upside on what we're presenting. With that, let me hand off to Wayne. Thank you.
Thank you, Charles, and good afternoon and good morning to everybody, and thanks for joining this session this afternoon. Neal has already spoken about some of the historical operational disruptions and some of the macroeconomic factors that have ultimately resulted in us doing this repositioned plan for the Stillwater operations. You know, Charles has also covered some of the operational impacts more recently, you know, with the flood. He's covered that in quite a bit of detail. I guess just to point out that the Stillwater mine is back up and running and has been running since the end of July.
I'm gonna go into a bit more detail, on some of these impacts and, you know, what they mean to each one of our different operations, being the East Boulder Mine, the Stillwater West Mine, and then the Stillwater East operation or the what has historically been known as the Blitz Project. If I move on to East Boulder, I guess one of the key things about East Boulder is that it has historically had reasonably consistent delivery. I think really at the outset, want to highlight, you know, one of the key reasons for that consistent delivery at East Boulder is its developed state.
Now, when we talk about developed state of these operations, we're talking about mining blocks having all primary development and secondary development in place to allow for mining of that block. In more recent times, however, there've been other impacts, and more specifically in late 2021 and in the first half of 2022, we've had significant impact, you know, as a result of very high levels of attrition at the East Boulder operations. Again, more specifically, I talk about our miners and our geologists who are key technical support staff for the mining operations. In fact, at these operations in the last year, we've sort of peaked at attrition rates of around 20% in some of those critical skills.
What this means is we end up having less experienced miners and geologists on the face that have to deal with mining. As I've highlighted on that section, I can just point it out. If you look at the section on the western side of the East Boulder operations, we are transitioning to more complex geology and more geotechnically challenged ground. Having to move inexperienced miners and geologists in there has a direct impact on our productivities as well as on our grade. Again, just to put it into some context, our miners, you know, by virtue of the fact that they do mechanized mining, they perform all functions of mining.
In other words, they do the support, they drill, they blast, they clean. You know, they're extremely productive, and experience plays a huge part in their levels of productivity. The geologists in turn make sure that they remain on the ore body. In the case of having inexperienced people, as I've already highlighted, that does have a direct impact. What we've done to really offset this challenge is we've increased the amount of training that we're doing at both sites. We have between 30 miner trainees and 40 miner trainees in our training centers. This has been stepped up significantly from historical levels.
There's also a big focus on you know training and supervision to ensure that we can get back up to the previously seen production and productivity levels. We expect by the end of 2022 we'll be back at historical levels and then from there we build up to around the 230,000 oz level going forward into the future. If I look further down that slide I'm gonna refer specifically here to the SA business CapEx. One of the key areas there is to make sure we sustain our 18 months of developed state. But I think more importantly two other impacts that are impacting on the costs.
This is on the sustained business capital, should I say. This applies to both operations. Pieter will probably go into a little bit more detail on this as well. We have made quite a significant investment and a decision to fast-track some of our investment into replacing and upgrading our fleet, you know, which has been an aging fleet. More specifically, we are including advanced proximity detection, and I'll cover that in a little bit more detail when I talk to the Stillwater West operations, and other safety devices together with the fact that the new modern equipment, you know, does have quite a big impact on our emissions and our diesel particulate matter or DPM controls. That is on the underground equipment.
The second bullet there refers to the tailings storage facilities. Right now we have seen a significant increase in the cost of construction type work, which is the expansion of our tailings dam. Going into the future, we're gonna have a new waste rock dump that we're gonna have to construct as well as tailings facilities. Now, what is driving this increase in cost is really it's a supply and demand issue with construction type work, where following the approval of the infrastructure bill, you know, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in the U.S., essentially we're competing for some of the skills, you know, in the construction business. But obviously it's putting a huge demand on construction type of activities.
This has had a double impact both on the attrition side but as well as on the cost side of our business. That's in the labor market in the U.S. where there's almost zero unemployment. At East Boulder then, again, just to remind everybody, for the next couple of years in the sustaining CapEx on our waste handling facilities, currently we are expanding our tailings facility, the existing one. In the next two years-three years, we've got a waste rock that we're required to build, and following that, we have a new tailings facility which needs to be constructed. That obviously does put pressure on those sustaining business costs.
If I move on to the Stillwater West operations, one of the key things that we've been challenged with at these operations is the level of developed state, which I already touched on. You know, it is in pretty good shape at East Boulder. Not quite the same picture at Stillwater, where it is less than six months. I guess a couple of factors there. The key one being the fact that the development has been challenging in the two areas that I'm gonna highlight now. That's in the depression zone, in that red circle, and then the development through the Stillwater fault. The blue circle on the eastern side of the Stillwater West operations.
Really, the challenges there have been, you know, the fact that you've got a lot of development that you're doing and it's not yielding any ore body. It's just not improving the developed state as it, you know, as it happens. That's one of the key challenges. The next one, and we discussed it, I think the last time we presented around these operations, was soon after we had the rail incident on 35 level. 35 level has been demarcated there with that black line horizontally across the slide.
We have a concentration of our mining at this point in time to the west side where we're doing probably 60% of our production, as well as having to develop or advance the mining front, the development front ahead of us on a rail system which has been significantly constrained by the revised standard operating procedure. I guess a combination of all of these, you know, is what is providing the challenge for the developed state at the Stillwater West operations. What are we doing about it? The investment into our equipment, upgrading our fleet from a safety, from a proximity detection point of view, we believe will eliminate the constraints of that SOP.
At the same time, we've introduced a limited number of contractor support to do some of the development for us. That does come at a premium and Pieter will touch on that, you know, when he goes through some of the cost slides. What we do see is that in the next, you know, between now and 2024, we expect the developed state to improve to at least 12 months, and then going further forward, to increase that to 18 months. That flexibility is what underpins the plan to get Stillwater West operations back up to the 300,000 oz at higher levels of productivity than what we are currently seeing and obviously at reduced costs.
If I move over to the Stillwater East operations, you know, as I said, previously known as the Blitz Project, the first thing I'd like to say is we do have a developed mine on Stillwater East. The Benbow Decline, you know, which was flooded for about an 18-month period, that has actually intersected the 56 level. We do have ventilation infrastructure. We've got ore pass infrastructure, ore handling, waste handling infrastructure. We've got rail. So in essence, a mine has been developed, you know, over the last number of years. What has been disappointing as Charles has said is the increase, the levels of increased production.
Although I do need to point out that the Stillwater East has delivered increased production over the last couple of years, just not necessarily at the rate that we've all anticipated. I think a number of the operational disruptions which I've certainly touched on is what has had an impact on the developed state at Stillwater East, which is a challenge, as I've said. Plus the cost of these additional contractors, which I've spoken about at Stillwater West. You know, that also applies at the Stillwater East side. Really we're in a position now, where a certain amount of development has been done. We've done a lot of additional definition drilling of these footwall drives.
What that footwall drilling is showing us is that we require a long-term engineering fill solution for the Stillwater East side of the mine. This is based on two key factors. The one is that we have a wider ore body in certain areas than what was anticipated. We also have ground conditions which require us to use an overhand cemented fill support solution as opposed to the very productive ramp and fill where you would just mine on the sand that you place below you as you mine. Really our preferred mining method in these ore bodies is this overhand cemented ramp and fill. You know, very cost effective, very productive.
In challenging ground and in the wider type of ore body, we are required to move towards having an overhand cemented fill that we could then work under, and really driven to a large extent from a safety perspective. What we've been doing in the interim, and if you look at this diagram, we've been using a small cemented rock fill plant. As a result of its limited capacity and the proximity to the mining front, which is moving further to the east and higher up in the mountain, we really need to have a long-term solution to this support.
What we've decided to do in this revised plan is to look at suspending all the mining areas that require cemented fill until such time as we can complete the installation of a backfill plant. We expect that to take, you know, the next two years- three years at a cost of around $30 million. Now, immediately, that has an impact of around 40,000 oz in 2022. As I've said, you know, that plant would take two years- three years to build. It has an ongoing impact.
Beyond that, obviously, we would then be able to come back and mine these areas where we've exposed a wider ore body in some of the challenging ground conditions. What it has allowed us to do in the immediate short term is to restructure or to take out some of the productivity, or sorry, some of the cost impacts of this very costly and low productivity CRF solution, and that has been built into the numbers going forward. Similar to the Stillwater West and East Boulder operations, you know, you can see a very determined focus on making sure we get our developed state to over 12 months by the end of 2024, and then to continue to build that to 18 months over the longer term.
That really concludes the technical discussion around these operations, and I'd like to hand over to Pieter Henning, who will run through some of the cost impacts as a result of this restructured plan. Thank you.
Thank you, Wayne, and good day, everybody. As highlighted, I will give some analysis to the cost and guidance going forward to our cost metrics. To get some context and understanding of our 2022 cost base, we need to understand that the units of production is obviously lower as impacted by the fleet impact, as highlighted by Wayne. Then also the stopping of the CRF on the eastern side that drives some lower production. Associated with those, there is cost that reduced over the period, and it allowed us to reduce some of our fleet and labor through natural attrition. This restructuring of the cost is mostly done, but is unfortunately factored in for six months into our cost base.
In addition, in the past, we were allowed to capitalize certain operating costs and overheads associated with the project under the Blitz project and seen as growth project for accounting purposes. Now, those costs associated with the project have now been historically classified as growth, therefore forming part of all-in cost and not a part of all-in sustaining cost. With the reduction of growth activities on the eastern side and the review of our strategy, we unfortunately can't capitalize those costs to the growth project anymore, and those costs will naturalize into the sustaining business of our cost structure as part of either working cost or reserve development or stay in business capital.
We expect that there is about $40 million of cost that was historically capitalized in 2021 to the growth project that now will form part of this cost basket, that's now part of all-in sustaining, and that increase our unit cost about $88 an ounce. In addition to this change of accounting treatment, as mentioned by Wayne, we do make use of contractors for development. The contractors do come at a premium. They cost, they've got a bigger crew and fleet, it's cost associated to their activities, and therefore, it's got a direct impact on our ORD numbers as presented for this year and going forward.
We do have strategic intention to reduce our reliance on contractors in the short to medium term, but it does add some risk to the downside if we do not achieve that switch over to local and own labor, as highlighted through our training by Wayne. Currently, the U.S. is also experiencing inflationary pressures around 9% nationally, and these costs do come through into our cost baskets. We do have initiatives and strategies to reduce that cost by strategic sourcing and also through the activities of standardizing our fleet and fleet replacement, as Wayne has mentioned under the CapEx, capital side. We've historically also indicated as part of last year's Investor Day that our royalties do have an impact on all-in sustaining cost.
The higher the market price, it does have a $9 an ounce per $100 impact, and obviously, those costs will filter through into our all-in sustaining cost, especially based on current market conditions. If we look at a longer-term analysis of our cost and guidance going forward, you will see there's a significant drop-off in our cost base over the next three years-four years, and then stabilize below $1,000 an ounce. Especially in the last three years-four years, we're dropping down to the $950 to $990 an ounce over life of mine as we achieve at the 700,000 oz production. Now, as highlighted in the previous Investor Days, obviously it's a big component of our working cost.
Working costs do come down as our production increase, but the main objective here is keeping our eye on dollar per ton. The objective here is to get our dollar per ton in line with 2018 levels, and those we do expect to be achievable as we progress with some of the initiatives. As highlighted, it is dependent on reduction of contractors and also the success on our strategic sourcing activities. If we look at other cost pressures over the next couple of years, we do see ORD has got a significant component over the next couple of years, especially up to 2027. That is as we increase our plant developed state and investment into that does drop off to more levels of around $145 an ounce from 2027.
Then subsequent to that, but in life of mine, that drops down to $50 an ounce as the ore body gets fully developed and we maintain our production profiles. Similarly, as I say, in business, capital is a significant investment over the next couple of years. Especially in 2023, where we do see a significant cost contribution on capital. That will be mostly driven as a result of capital rollovers from the 2022 levels, because we couldn't execute on most probably on all our capital during this period, impacted by the flooding event. Obviously as we finalize this replan, some of that capital has been delayed to make sure we spent our dollars on the right buckets.
Over the next three years, we do spend quite a bit on our infrastructure, power systems and underground infrastructure, and that is to de-risk the underground environments. Also as highlighted by Wayne, East Boulder and Stillwater has got investment into waste rock dumps and tailings facilities. Stillwater's tailings facility is kicking in 2027-2029, and that's why you see that elevated capital continued spend during that period. After which, from 2030, the capital reduced to around $75 an ounce. Our capital spend over the next couple of years is driven by our life of mine and obvious, as highlighted by Wayne, de-risking this production profile. If we look at the growth CapEx, that's a significant change from what we've presented last year in the investor update. Historically, we would have completed the project by 2024.
That has now been reviewed as part of this our strategy, and the cost has been reduced, and the project will mostly be completed by quarter one of next year as originally scoped. The expected cost expenditure for this year remains $70 million. That was a couple of rollovers that came from 2021, but also they are the completion and finalization of the Benbow and rehabilitation of the Benbow site and associated completion of this concentrator plant at Stillwater that is expected in quarter one of next year. New growth CapEx that we've added to the profile, and that is mostly in 2023 and 2024, is associated with this engineered backfill solution that Wayne has highlighted. I think in conclusion, there's quite a significant investment over the next couple of years into the ore body, our infrastructure and equipment.
While we will see the benefit of that cost metrics dropping down to below $1,000 an ounce, which should give us sustaining margins going forward, while we keep a keen eye on our operating cost and making sure we don't lose the ball on that. With that, I hand over to Neal for the conclusion. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you, Pieter. Let me wrap up today's presentation. I think the first thing I want to say when you look at this profile, we've been able to retain a significant but lower build-up at a much lower targeted cost. You will note that it takes a number of years to achieve this. In our view, the Stillwater operations will be well-positioned to be sustainable through the commodity cycles. As you've heard, there's very substantial technical work that has been done that underpins this plan. When you look at updated guidance for 2022, I think important to note that we've included the stoppage that we had to undergo as a result of the flood.
In terms of underground production, U.S. PGM from the U.S. PGM operations, production guidance is now about 450,000 oz at all-in sustaining costs of just over $1,380 per ounce, with capital just over $275 million, which also includes project capital. We are lowering guidance on recycling. We are seeing constraints in the market. Production is forecasted just over 700,000 oz. Correction, let me be clear. 700,000 oz for the year. We have got some capital expenditure there of $3 million. You can see the makeup of the change in guidance.
Half of that is related to the flood impact, and the balance is related to the issues that Wayne and Charles have discussed. In conclusion, we believe that this is, has been and is a transformative value accretive investment. It has delivered on its strategic intent. This strategic intent was well set out in slide one. Its return on investment has been secured. It's already paid back for itself and we are now optimizing future value for all the stakeholders. We have a robust de-risk plan with much greater flexibility now having been built in. I think it's a prudent response to a changing environment.
That environment, as we've outlined, is elevated inflation, substantial skill shortages, and of course, we've taken account of our expected change in the commodity cycles with respect to palladium. As I've said, I'm pleased that, focusing on margins, we've still seen very substantial growth to approximately 700,000 troy ounces by 2027. In terms of protecting margins, we have a plan that shows that the all-in sustaining costs will be below $1,000 per troy ounce in the medium to long term. These assets still has 30 years of life, so long life assets with great optionality. Just to update the return on investment, the original investment, as I outlined at the beginning, was $2.2 billion.
The estimated return so far is shown in the green, $2.6 billion. The life of mine plan on the new plan that you've seen today adds another $3.2 billion. I think that is very substantial value creation for our shareholders. The bottom line, we've repositioned this business for delivery of sustainable value through the commodity cycle. Thank you very much for your time and attendance. Myself together with the rest of the team will be happy to take questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Neal. Thanks to the rest of the team. We do have a couple of questions, so I'll just begin with the first one from Frederic Bolton at BMO Capital Markets. The question is, would Sibanye-Stillwater even be considering the palladium surplus if there was no angry planet scenario? I can't hear it on that side. The question is, Neal, would Sibanye-Stillwater even be considering a palladium surplus scenario if there was no angry planet scenario in place?
Thanks, James. Got to get this right.
Absolutely, we would. To be clear, the angry planet doesn't just refer to the flooding event in Montana. The angry planet is a much broader issue of the world [audio distortion] carbon footprints and therefore driving renewable, let's say energy solutions, which involves a reduction in the use of internal combustion engines. Absolutely, this has been a holistic approach. We've considered all those aspects, and it's not just the angry planet. Thank you.
Thanks, Neal. The next question is from.
James, we can't hear you.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Sorry. Apologies. Let me, Sorry.
Sorry.
Okay. Sorry.
Okay. Sorry.
The question is from Toby Green.
The question is from Toby Green.
Uh, and, uh-
It's Sibanye-Stillwater's own palladium market balance forecast sees significant surpluses, which would be expected to collapse prices until suppliers shaken out. Sibanye-Stillwater is one of the most heavily exposed mines to palladium in the world. Why would a ramp-up profile of 700,000 oz remain viable?
All right. Thanks. That's a good question, and I expected it. Firstly, our focus has been on margins rather than volume. When you develop a mine plan, volume is a very important contributor to the cost profile of a mine. You need to find that optimum balance between volume and cost. Our iterations resulted in, you know, the volume profile of about 700,000 oz, giving us the optimum cost profile.
That is certainly significantly lower than the 850,000 oz that we originally planned. Of course, that's a significant difference, too, also contributing to the surplus. We also look at optimizing the extraction of an ore body with a view to maximizing net present value. This has not been a focus on volume. It's been a focus on getting the optimum commercial solution, but this ore body really deserves to be mined at a slightly greater rate than it's being mined at the moment. That's all being taken into consideration. Thank you, James.
Thanks, Neal. The next question is from Tyler Broda at RBC.
Um-
The question is, considering the wider macro changes, inflation, demand, et cetera, how are you looking at the strategic plans for the SA PGM division, and why or why not are these still appropriate?
Yeah. No, certainly. I think Richard Stewart, who is the Chief Regional Officer for the African region, will be well-positioned to answer that. It is, that is something we have considered as well. Rich, over to you.
Neal, good afternoon, good morning, and thanks, Tyler. Yeah. So I guess, firstly, I think if you just look at the South African, the South African PGM operations, the only place we're spending any real growth capital at the moment is at the K4 project, which is a very long life project, very much through various cycles. Of course, is a Merensky project, so that contributes nicely to our mix from a processing perspective. I think in terms of looking at the short and medium term macros, that is something we watch very closely. At the moment, really our major focus has been on cost reduction.
I think as you would have seen in our previous results, you know, we've actually managed to keep our costs in nominal terms on a decreasing basis. Right now I think cost focus and maintaining the current production base, ensuring that's efficient, it remains appropriate for the macros as we see it. I think the other aspect to take into account is the South African PGMs have got a much wider basket. You know, we produce six elements and certainly some of those elements, iridium, ruthenium, and rhodium in particular, are still core elements for what the market requires. It's certainly not a big growth or capital strategy at the moment. It's about cost efficiency and looking at that wider basket and the demand for the wider basket.
I think the plans as we have them, which are largely steady state, remain very appropriate.
Thank you. Thanks, Richard. The next question is, well, there are two questions to do with the market outlook. The question was about our outlook on PGM prices, and then specifically, one from Asanda Notshe at Mazi Asset Management about the surplus that we predict in palladium and what our assumed metal prices are in the longer term. I just wanna say, we will be updating our market forecasts on market fundamentals at our results, which will be held later this month. Perhaps we can just talk about the palladium prices that we've used for the study, Neal.
Yeah. Certainly. You would have seen that in the very last slide where we calculated the net present value of this life of mine plan was done at $1,250 per ounce long term.
Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from Arnold van Graan, from Nedbank. There have been several external factors impacting these operations, but is the lack of flexibility you are experiencing not the result of over-mining and under-development while the balance sheet was constrained?
Let me have a first go at that. Wayne, I'd like you to also contribute. Arnold, we don't consciously over-mine. I think that what we have tried to do is provide the market with clarity on how many operational disruptions, which look like a litany of excuses, but they were real, they happened. Some of them had a very direct impact on flexibility. I can assure you, it was not a conscious decision to over-mine at the expense of development. Wayne, please contribute.
Neal, yeah. Thanks. Arnold, yeah, I guess one of the things that has really impacted us quite significantly over the last sort of 12 months or so is the impact of that rail incident. You know, I do believe, you know, when we initially looked at it, we didn't believe it was gonna have the impact on the developed state that it has had. That's the first thing. Then specifically on Stillwater East, you know, we have done, you know, quite a large amount of additional footwall lateral development and a significant amount of additional definition drilling. In fact, I think it's something like over 8,000 feet of additional drilling.
That is you know indicating you know a good robust ore body still on the Stillwater East side, a resource grade of above 0.5 oz per ton. A lot of development has taken place. It is really just making sure that that secondary development you know which then converts blocks to being part of the developed state is what is.
What has impacted us and you know that information has given us the indication that we need a long-term solution at Stillwater East. We cannot convert those blocks into developed state at this point in time. I don't know if that answers the question or sheds a little bit more light to that question. Thanks.
Thanks, Wayne. The next question from Arnold again is, why is the staff turnover so high? Is it purely due to higher wages elsewhere, or is there a cultural issue, U.S. operators reporting into SA managers? Where are these operators going, into the fracking industry?
I'm gonna ask Charles and Wayne to comment on that. This is not a unique problem just to Stillwater, Arnold. This is a national and a state issue, and the state issue is, as I think Charles said, even more intense. Charles, why don't you go first and just try and set the scene for Arnold in terms of what's happening with people taking jobs in daylight and selling houses that they paid $300,000 for, and selling them for $1 million and moving on. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Neal. Yeah, Arnold, I mean, it's multifactor and it's difficult to point to one specific thing, but it is a very wide-ranging context, not just in Montana. You know, I was underground last week and in quite a cramped workshop, mechanics working on maintenance at East Boulder and one of them is going to be an RV mechanic in Billings, working on surface, starting salary $75,000 a year. So there's competitiveness for skills, and it's skills across everything. Miners are moving to other jobs that are not mining. There's refining in the area. There's all kinds of mining elsewhere in Nevada. And it's a combination of travel times to sites.
This is a hard one to understand from a distance, but both sites have highly regulated conditions of access to the mine. The longest travel times by bus for hourly paid workers is two hours there and two hours back. Your shift worker is then gonna be getting up at home from the furthest distance, which is not the only distance, at four in the morning, and they're gonna be getting home close to nine at night. It's not a great setup, and it's one we've got to address and figure out solutions to. Part of that is that there is just no housing proximate to both operations. That's less of an issue, obviously, at Columbus Metallurgical Complex. You've got people with skills across all metrics spoiled for choice on job opportunity.
You've got lifestyle choices coming off COVID. Neal touched on the housing environment. You know, these are short-term dynamics, very particular to this moment in time in the U.S.. It's gonna change. I mean, our pricing scenario tells us it's gonna change. Talk of recession, timing unknown, it's gonna change. That doesn't stop an individual who's worked a long career, can suddenly take equity out of his home three times what he thought it was worth. He's cashing out, and he's taking his chances, and he might be knocking on the door in 12 months' time. I don't know. In the face of that, we've got to go to a longer-term game plan. I mean, yes, we have to attract scarce skills, but we also have to train and develop younger talent.
We have to hold it, and we have to create work environments that people wanna be part of. You know, we have endless exit interviews. I've gone through them, and the issue for me is partly the exit interview context. It's actually more important to understand why do people stay. Why does the young miner I engaged underground last week just starting out want that job? Let's make sure they have everything working for them because that's our future. That's a sort of philosophical approach, but it's not a one single item issue on loss turnover. It's wide-ranging, and it's across all skill sets. On the South African management issue, I think that's a unfair characterization.
I mean, this is a team that has got lots of different skill sets and lots of different career experiences. I'm at pains, having worked in and out of the States for the last 20 years in different contexts, to make sure that our South African colleagues working in Montana are very mindful of how they land. They're understood. I'm very mindful that our U.S. colleagues are totally up for understanding what the corporate teams and expertise have to offer. I think the one aspect of a regionalization model that's underway now is that I have a critical role to bridge skills and competencies across the business so that Montana is not just a standalone entity.
It's drawing on all of the skill sets from the global corporate, and these are not just South African skill sets, and suddenly that the global corporate is learning a lot of invaluable lessons from the experience on the ground in the U.S. We have highly sophisticated ESG approaches. We've got really good stakeholder engagement models. We've even got technical innovation we're not touching on during this presentation. Robert van Niekerk, CC colleague who heads up technical and innovation, and all of you will know from his long career in the company was with Wayne and me doing underground site visits last week. He was working out what to bridge from his perspective, and he was seeing things that he hasn't seen on the assets elsewhere. It goes both ways.
It's certainly not a South African managerial issue. I think this is a very collaborative environment. It's a global leadership environment and skill sets are going both ways. Wayne, I don't know if you wanna dig in a bit more. I've been sort of quite philosophical, but I think it's important to make some of those points.
Charles, yeah. Thanks. I guess, you know, just from what you've said, I think people can understand that this is not just a single solution. You know, we have multifaceted approaches to dealing with the attrition. You know, it's not just more training for miners. You know, we're looking at programs within the high schools and colleges to try and attract. We're looking at quality of transport. As you say, people spend a lot of time, you know, doing the transport up to the sites and buses and so on. So again, it's complex and, you know, no single silver bullet to solve that challenge. That's all I'd like to add, Charles.
Yeah. Perhaps I can just add on, and this is not unique to mining, and it's not even unique to Montana. I have a friend who runs a dry cleaning business in Florida, and I can assure you he has the same challenges. Maybe not the transport issues, but a shortage of people to employ, rising wage rates and so on. It's actually. To me, it's wonderful to see a country where you have almost negative unemployment. You have, despite what everyone says, a vibrant economy. It's exactly what we need for South Africa. I'd much rather deal with these challenges than one of underemployment. Thanks.
Thanks. The next question is from Nkateko Mathonsi from Investec. She asks about the life of mine of the complex under this new mining approach. How is that affected?
Wayne, do you wanna pick that up?
Yeah. Sure, Neal. You know, really the life of mine has not been impacted here. You know, the focus is on improving development, getting that developed state up so that we can be sustainable, you know, under these, you know, future price scenarios. Really, the life of these operations still 30+ years . And with further, you know, long-term optionality as well, you know, by going deeper potentially and so on. Definitely 30+ year and not impacted by this plan.
Thanks, Wayne.
Thanks, Wayne.
A further question from Nkateko is about the recycling volumes for 2022, which we've downgraded. What do we think happens to global recycling volumes, particularly palladium? Neal, I'm not sure if you or Richard would like to answer that one.
Yeah. Let me have a first direction, and please feel free to contribute. I think the nature of the economy and the recession that's unfolding before us means that people are holding on to assets longer because there's less cash to spend on luxury goods. That's going to unfold and constrain recycling because people are not going to be scrapping cars as much. In conjunction with that, you have a real logistics or supply chain crunch with shipping. There's difficulty in getting European product to the U.S., which is one of the reasons we are looking at establishing a recycling hub in Europe. We think it's a global phenomenon.
It's not just a Stillwater issue. It was very well handled through the flood. I think global recycling is gonna become much more constrained for the reasons I've outlined. Richard, do you wanna add to that?
Neal, thanks. I think you've pretty much covered the global aspect. You know, obviously, and I'm sure Wayne or Charles could add a bit more, but just the downgrade of Stillwater itself over the short term is obviously linked as well to the mix of the primary ore. In terms of a global perspective, Neal, not much more to add to that. Thank you.
Thanks, Richard and Neal. A further question from Arnold, and probably for Pieter in this instance, is about any insurance claim related to the flood-related production losses. Charles or Pieter, maybe, I don't know if one of you wants to pick that up.
I can assist. Maybe, James, can we just confirm? It sounded like Richard was on mute on his response previously. Don't know if that's.
Okay. I see him on the webcast. Thank you.
Thank you. Yes, we do have insurance claim. We have submitted. The loss adjuster has visited us a couple of weeks or two weeks ago on site. That is obviously a process that we're going through. We obviously as we ramp up our production and the impact of that is being assessed, the insurance claim has not been finalized and can only be finalized once we get to normal levels of production, which will most probably take the next month or two to get to those. We will most probably get a better update in the future. At this point in time, yes, we do have a claim, and for business interruption, for the period that we stood.
I've got a question from Nkateko again about being a very challenging ore body and how much confidence can we have in the new numbers. Sorry. Can you hear me? Looks like I'm being muted.
Yeah.
Okay. Sorry. Excuse me. Looks like a very challenging ore body. How much confidence can we have on the new numbers communicated today?
Yeah. Let me start and then I'll hand over to the team that's responsible for actually delivering. I personally don't think it's a challenging ore body. I think what is important is what I tried to highlight right at the beginning of the presentation is that Stillwater East or Blitz was built off a conceptual study. That was not our decision. That's what we inherited. Building a mine or any project for that matter off a conceptual study is fraught with many risks. Now, some of those risks unfolded in terms of some of the operational disruptions, such as ground conditions in specific areas, which as you've heard to really deal with requires a change in approach in terms of full.
Getting some of the ventilation development scheduling wrong is also part of not doing enough detailed engineering. I wouldn't like to characterize the ore body as a difficult ore body. In fact, it's a brilliant ore body. It's high grade, it's very well understood, and it is probably as predictable as the tabular ore bodies in South Africa. Now, some of that is not meant to defer the question in terms of the disappointment of us having to continuously deal with delays and so on. Again, I think the other point I will make is the one that Charles made, that we have bolstered the team with much more technical focus.
You would know from when we gave, let's say, a heads-up that we would be holding back on guidance, which was literally a year ago, until we had done some, let's say, proper replanning, is indicative of the amount of, let's say, technical input that went into this plan. I personally went to site and spent a few days making sure that I understood what sat behind the plan, what was going to result in the differences, why productivity would go up, why costs would come down. I left there not happy with the exact results, but very happy with the confidence, and the rationale behind the plan. From my perspective, I have a high degree of confidence in the plan.
Now, I'm not the one that will physically deliver on it. Let me pass over to Charles, and I think, Charles, you would probably also wanna ask Wayne to say a thing or two about that.
Sure. Thanks, Neal. Certainly I appreciate the question given the legacy of delivery of these operations. We're putting forward a plan today that we're confident in. We focused very much on getting the medium-term leverage right in the business. We know we're gonna navigate price cycles. We've got to get our cost structures and productivity right and our margin management right to get there. That's baked into these numbers that we're putting forward. I think you will find that this is a leadership team on the ground that will stand by what it says it will do going forward. We will look to deliver. We will have honest discussions with owners along the way as things change. You know, a lot of work has gone into this. The right work has gone into this.
It's complex, shifts going forward, so it'll be very carefully project managed day to day by the team. You know, I will certainly stand by this plan and what we're saying today, and I will talk to you along the way. I'm very hopeful that given right conditions, we will have opportunities to give you green sheets over and above what we are putting forward here. I don't wanna bank that now. I want us to get small wins under our belts, and I want us to move forward with some momentum that gets everybody on the front foot. I'm looking forward to that.
Wayne, you're very welcome to say what you need to say, but know that, you know, this team will hold itself to account on delivery. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Charles. I guess my only additional comment, you know, clearly this team is committed to this plan. A lot of work, you know, from a technical perspective. In fact, we've had independent reviews of this plan. You know, we believe it is definitely achievable. I guess the one comment around the challenging ore body is that it goes around flexibility. Any ore body is challenging if you do not have flexibility to be able to, you know, more selective in terms of where you're mining, how you're mining, what mining methods you're using and so on. So I'll just leave it at that. Thank you.
Thanks. A similar question from Mandi Dungwa, Camissa Asset Management about why grades have dropped so significantly since acquisition. How does that affect production? I think that has been answered. That's it's all the same reasons, Mandi, related to the lack of flexibility, the mining mix, you know, dilution in some of the stopes, et cetera. Those are being addressed and it has been covered, but we can also cover that offline in a lot more detail if you prefer. The next question, Neal, if you don't mind, is from Helen Reid . She's asking about what your view on the Inflation Reduction Act and the focus on critical mineral production in the U.S., or fair trade, free trade agreement. Sorry, let me just pick that up.
The free trade agreement partners to the exclusion of other countries. Does the Inflation Reduction Act change Sibanye-Stillwater's strategy or thinking regarding its U.S. platinum mines? In terms of projects, does it change your internal thinking on whether to prioritize projects in the U.S. over other projects?
Thanks, James. Charles, you might also want to weigh in. Certainly, let me say I'm not that familiar with the Inflation Reduction Act. The way that I understand it is what we see anywhere else in the world, where there's abuse at a time like this by people taking, you know, super profits, and that's wrong. Having said that, the other aspects you raised around the U.S. wanting to stimulate, and that's how I see it, stimulate, let's say, growth in strategic commodities is spot on. If I was running any country, that's exactly what I would be doing.
I think even if it is to the exclusion of other countries. I mean, to be clear, I'm not a politician, those countries are not friendly. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's the right thing for the U.S. From a mining perspective and our interests in the U.S., it's actually wonderful to be part of a system that is looking to stimulate mining, provide incentives, and at the same time, also look at streamlining permitting. Now, I don't think there's any single silver bullet in all of this, but certainly, I don't think, you know, providing financial incentives is gonna change things overnight.
It's indicative of a government, in my mind, wanting to be friendly towards mining, recognizing that they have to become self-sufficient. It's smart. It's exactly the right things to do. Streamlining permitting is going to be, is gonna be very difficult because, while it is absolutely necessary, the financial incentives in their own right won't stimulate mining. You're gonna have to be absolutely careful that you are not seen to compromise environmental standards. I would go as far as saying that, as a responsible mining company, which has got a very heavy bias to, towards ESG and green and very high green standards, we wouldn't want to be part of cutting corners either. I think, holistically, I think it's good for America.
I think we are very supportive, want to be in this ecosystem because it's constructive. I know you actually asked a very complex and broad-ranging question. I hope I covered it in sufficient detail. Charles, you got anything you wanna add?
Yeah. Neal, let me start with the observation that I'm the only member of the team on this call not wearing a blazer. Why that matters is because I'm in Nevada meeting with Ioneer and going to the Rhyolite Ridge project site, so I didn't think to pack a blazer, not realizing this would be the outcome today. Why I go there is that Rhyolite Ridge and Bernard Rowe approach to the changing political intent in the U.S. around rare minerals and local sourcing, and local sourcing from production through to offtake, and the kinds of agreements Ioneer is putting together right now with U.S. offtake agreements. More importantly, the kind of financing they're sourcing from the federal government is very interesting.
I think it's one of the few companies out there in our space that is getting really proactive and really on the front foot of this. Having said that, I think there's a regulatory intent or a political intent on both sides of the aisle that has yet to find itself through all of the frameworks that impact standing up projects and building operations. What you have on the other side, I mean, you've certainly got the political will to favor rare minerals, green metals and local sourcing and supply chains in the U.S., and to become less dependent on China and other players.
You have an existing regulatory framework that is quite complex, and takes time, and it takes time for everybody. I think the issue there is not so much political intent. The issue there is, you know, if you working on federal land like Ioneer is, you're looking to stand up your permits, it'll be about the technical integrity of that work because the agencies that regulate you are absolutely technically focused. It'll be about all of the issues being addressed on the ground that matter. I think those models haven't changed. They shouldn't change because they have a lot of integrity, and they give you a lot of certainty once you're through them. As Neal says, you've got to do the work right.
There are no shortcuts here. I think there's a shift underway in the U.S. around the localization agenda for metals. Long way to go on how it all hangs together. You know, on the interactions I've had with politicians around the Montana operations, and we had, as I mentioned, a mine site tour last week from members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce from multiple states. They are extremely focused on better understanding who the operators are in country. This is a very positive engagement. Your second question, which was, you know, does this change how we think about opportunities going forward?
I mean, one of the reasons for a regionalization approach is to better resource regional intent on the ground as it looks to opportunities. The Americas region stretches from Canada to Argentina. Right now, it's all about Montana. That's a core set of operations going forward. I think anything we add to the mix in future years has to be measured against the returns that we can derive from the Montana operations when they are fully optimized, irrespective of price cycle. I'm very focused on understanding the true leverage points of these assets. You know, we've got a great project, joint venture in Ioneer. Very interesting opportunity. We've got some JVs elsewhere in Argentina and some legacy ones in Canada. We're sort of looking through all of that.
You know, I think going forward, if I had my way, and it's early days, we will certainly look to prioritize opportunities that have cash flow characters to them. I think over and above development, early stage development, although you never rule that out, but we have that already. Those opportunities are not easy to find. This is not a buyer's market right now. We have to be very patient and prudent. I think if you're trying to diversify risk and you're trying to secure future cash flows, you don't wanna simply go to more emerging market jurisdictions. You don't rule those out because they always have opportunities, and they might be fabulous opportunities.
For my own sort of personal ranking that I'll still have to convince my colleagues of and our board at the right time, I would start from where we are. I would use industrial logics to build out from where we are, because if we can crack that, we will have a lot to talk to. It'll be opportunistic as well. I think this Inflation Reduction Act that's going through, it's gone through the Senate, it's going through the House right now, I'm not sure that really changes the next short term. I think we have yet to see how these all land and what they do.
I have no doubt that U.S. politicians, both sides of the aisle, are very focused on all of the right things right now on how to support, fund, and stand up opportunities in their backyard that secure their future on precious metals, green metals, rare minerals and the like.
Thanks. We've just got a couple of questions on the conference call line. There are some more general questions on the webcast.
I think we'd rather answer those at the results, which, as I said, we'll be hosting in a couple of weeks. If you don't mind, we'll keep the more general questions to that event. If we can just go to the lines, I think there are five questions on the line from some of the analysts.
Yes, there are. Thank you, sir. The first question comes from Patrick Mann from Bank of America. Please proceed with your question, Patrick.
Thanks very much. Thank you for the presentation. Could you just give us an idea of the level of development that there's been at Stillwater over time? You're saying it's, you know, less than six months now, unless you want to build it back up to 12 months and then 18 months. I mean, what was it on acquisition, and has it been deteriorating over time, or has there been a sort of precipitous decline over COVID and the flood events? The second question, apologies, James, if this is a general one, but does this change at all your views around possibly wanting to do gold M&A? You haven't spoken about that for a little bit, for a little while. I'm just wondering where your head's at around that one. Thank you very much.
All right, James. Patrick, yeah, hi. Hi. I'll kick off with the gold M&A, and then, Wayne, if you can pick up on Patrick's question on what I understood is the state of flexibility over time. Patrick, our strategy has remained consistent in terms of the basket of commodities that we'd like exposure to. As Charles said, it's not a buyer's market, which is why we've been quiet. It's not a buyer's market just in the U.S., it's not a buyer's market literally anywhere in the world. There's still too much froth.
We are moving into a recession that sort of indicates that there's gonna be opportunities and we've been focused on getting our cost structures down. We've been focused on operational stability. Gold M&A still forms part of our longer term plans in terms of having what I believe is the safe haven benefits of gold when you also have a large industrial metal portfolio. Nothing's really changed. The market is just not conducive at this stage to you know doing value accretive transactions. Wayne, will you pick up Patrick's question on the state of development over time?
Yeah. Neal, thanks. And Patrick, yeah, to answer the question, you know, from 2018, you know, I guess we were probably sitting at the Stillwater operations at around 12 months. There was some drop off in development, and that's related to some of those issues that were covered in the presentation. You know, from a COVID point of view, you know, there was a period where we had no contractors on site and so on. But other than that, it has been reasonably flat. Really the plan now is to step that development up, you know, as I've said, to build up to that 12 months, ultimately ending in 18 months worth of developed state.
Sorry, just to add, East Boulder has consistently been around, you know, at around the 18-month developed state. No change there.
Is that why East Boulder has historically been so much better, sort of more stable operation?
Yeah. I think it links to my comment that I made earlier. You know, the more flexibility, and when I say flexibility, you know, a well-developed state, the more flexibility you have, the more selective or not selective, the more opportunities you have to deal with, you know, any challenges that may come your way, you know, both from a grade as well as from a productivity point of view.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Patrick, absolutely. In my mind, just reinforcing what Wayne says, your best and most sustainable mining operations are those that manage flexibility the best. Thank you.
Okay.
You can take the next call.
Thank you. The next question comes from Adrian Hammond from SBG Securities. Please proceed with your question, Adrian.
Afternoon, Neal. Thanks for this update. Yeah, very disappointing, I guess, given the outlook. I'm just curious to know what risk mitigation you can do should palladium prices fall further, beyond below your long-term. I'm quite surprised you still have growth, and that's coming largely from Stillwater West, which is the aging older mine, and you're going deeper. I wanna know how confident you are that that's gonna be able to deliver to the 700,000 oz you're forecasting. Does that also speak to your step change in sustaining CapEx for next year?
Yeah, certainly. Wayne, do you wanna pick up Adrian's question, you and Pieter?
Neal. Adrian, just quickly on the Stillwater West, you know, I think as you said, disappointing, you know, the fact that it has dropped off. You know, that was really always planned at around the 300,000 oz level. If you look at that cross-section that I showed in the operations, you know, we have a concentration of mining on the Stillwater West Side, as a result of not having those two mining fronts, you know, at the lower levels of the mine, you know, which I think are circled sort of blue and red in that cross-section. Once we have developed through that, we then have three major mining fronts that we can mine from.
Just from a mining selectivity point of view, from a mining method point of view, you know, you heard me say, you know, we can do more, well more of the productive overhand cut and fill, ramp and fill kind of operations. We are confident through the technical reviews, you know, once we are through that depression zone and once we're through that Stillwater fault, that Stillwater West will, you know, will build up to that 300,000 oz level.
Pieter, you wanna pick up the.
For the West
Sorry, Adrian. You perhaps just let Pieter comment on the capital.
Yes. Adrian, obviously some of the capital is related to fleet and replacement of fleet at Stillwater as a whole. Then as we've highlighted, is infrastructure spend as it relates to power systems, and that is linked to the developed state environment that we're obviously driving at this point in time to make sure you get obviously the ore that we've processed to our main haulages to transport out of the mine. It is interlinked to the developed state environment.
Yeah. While you're on the line then, just what's the cost profile look like across the portfolio between Blitz West and East, so such that where you would perhaps consider shutting down operations on a very bear case scenario?
Pieter, did you get that?
Yeah, Wayne, you can add, we did evaluate between Stillwater East and West as one of the scenarios. At this point in time, based, obviously from a production point of view and the base that we've got, the decision was to keep it, obviously both sides of the river operational. Clearly, it's very similar to an extent, but obviously the western side do have the lowest off-shaft areas which got the base plant, different mining processes to both sides of the, let's call it the river. At this point in time, it was more beneficial to keep both sides operational.
Pieter Henning, maybe just to add.
Just while looking there.
You know, East Boulder obviously consistently. Sorry.
I think go ahead, Wayne.
Yeah. Well, I was just gonna comment on East Boulder. You know, as I said, we expect that to get to historical levels by the end of the year. You know, East Boulder remains a low-cost operation. That was not considered. As Pieter said, we have evaluated as part of this, you know, optimizing NPV, you know, for the operations. We looked at Stillwater East, Stillwater West. Are there areas of the mine, you know, that we could close down? Ultimately we believe this is the optimal solution.
Wayne.
Thanks.
To add, I think, Adrian, you also need to recognize that East Boulder has a slightly lower grade. If anything, Stillwater East probably has the best grade of the entire suite. It's not. There are many factors that come into a decision like that. I think in my mind they all deserve to be run as mines. No, we're not cross-subsidizing or doing anything of that nature. Thanks, Adrian. Go ahead.
Thanks. Lastly, just the Wheaton deal. Are there any implications on that transaction with this change of mine plan?
Not as far as we're aware. We've engaged with Wheaton. We specifically around the flood. We've got our completion test, which we're confident we'll deliver on. No. Wheaton in fact announced the results today and we've been engaging with them.
Thanks, Neal. Thanks everyone else.
Thank you. The next question comes from Chris Nicholson from RMB Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question, Chris.
Hi. Good afternoon, Neal and team. I wondered if you had any comments on where you see this revised plan putting the Stillwater combined assets on the cost curve. I'm not specifically just referring to the $1,000 an ounce all-in sustaining cost. You know, typically you find in industries that that you know, if you're towards the bottom of the cost curve, you just produce, right? 'Cause it's someone else's problem. If you're at the top of the cost curve, then you know, you act as a bit of a swing producer. It looks like your plan here is acting as a bit of a swing producer, given maybe a slightly more negative longer term outlook for palladium. Maybe if you could just comment on that.
You know, I'm just wary that, you know, as recently as 2018, we had palladium below $1,000 an ounce. Thanks.
Yeah. Chris, your question is really a good one in terms of how we think about our business as a whole, not just Stillwater. The one thing that we can control is cost. Therefore, we position all our businesses to move them down the cost curve, for exactly the reason you outline. Those at the top of the cost curve are gonna become the swing factors, or they're gonna go out of business first. We don't wanna be the swing factor. Our assessment is that all our operations, by the time we move into palladium weakness will be in a safe position.
We are taking action well ahead of let's call it middle decade potential price weakness. Now I don't believe that palladium will go below $1,000 an ounce. Certainly I don't believe it will go below $700 an ounce. Now, if it does, I can assure you we will come up with a plan at the right time to work at those sort of levels. What we have done here is we've taken a long-term view. Our view is the palladium price will come back and you've seen it to around $1,250, $1,300, maybe $1,400. I also want to make the point that we don't think it's the end of the internal combustion engine.
I think, you know, we believe in green fuels. We believe in hybrids. We are not gonna be ostriches with our heads in the sand and just continue to invest shareholders' money only to deliver into what is potentially a weakening and quite highly risky market. This is a step back, a relook, taking the learnings of the challenges that we've had and ensure that we are commercially well-positioned. That's your question is really a large part of what sat behind what we have presented today and engineered and designed. We can certainly, you know, come up with other models at lower costs, but that's not the optimum plan.
We don't believe there's nothing in our supply and demand models that shows palladium going back to 700, 500 or anywhere near those sort of levels.
Okay. Thank you, Neal. Thanks for your time.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you. The next question comes from Raj Ray from BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question, Raj.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, Neal and team. My first question is a bit technical one on the development rate. Now you're looking to get to 12 months and then potentially 18 months development rate from the current six months. Just wanted to get a sense of what your development rates currently are in terms of meters per day. What do you need to get to, and how soon do you need to get to a certain rate to be able to meet those targets of 12 months development rate by 2024?
Yeah, Raj, I'm definitely gonna hand that question to Wayne. It was one that we interrogated Wayne in-depth, Charles and myself, when we were in Montana. I'm not sure there's a simple answer to it, but give it a go, Wayne.
Yeah, look, Ray, obviously we've had this direct flooding impact. You know, that is, you know, impacted on the rate of development. We believe right now with the crews that we have, our own crews together with the contractor crews, we're going to do, you know, sort of middle medium to longer term. We're gonna be doing about 75,000 feet of total development. I don't have it on a daily rate, but it's about 75,000 feet of total development. That'll include obviously the primary footwall lateral as well as our secondary development. That would be up from, you know, probably 50,000 feet-60,000 feet levels. I hope that answers the question.
We can convert that to a daily rate, but I don't have it off the top of my head.
Sorry, the 75,000 feet, you said that's on a monthly basis, is it? Oh.
No, sorry, that's per annum. Per annum.
Oh, sorry, per annum. Okay. Okay. Also.
Can I-
Yeah.
Raj, in terms of that question, I would be very happy if you spend some time offline with Wayne and got more of the details should you want more detail there.
Yeah, sure. That'll be great, if I can do that. I just have couple more follow-up questions. One on the cost front. I think one of the comment was that on a per ton basis, you intend to get back to 2018 levels. I was wondering if you can give us some idea what your mining costs per ton on a dollar ton basis is currently, and then what was the 2018 level that you were achieving.
Yeah. Pieter, you should be well placed to answer that. I just wanna make a general comment, Raj, it's for the broader audience. One of the things we have experienced through our lives in mining is when you have the benefit of a very high grade ore body, such as we do at Stillwater and as we've had in some of our gold businesses in South Africa. When you focus on a dollar per ounce cost, whether it's ounce of gold or ounce of two Es, or four Es or six Es, depending where you are, you tend to lose sight of your real mining costs.
One of the challenges we've had at Stillwater is the benefit of being able to, you know, mine at half an ounce a ton. We have got them to more recently focus on a dollar per ton so that the actual cost, your efficiency of the business, what you are in control of is much better understood. With that, Pieter, maybe you can talk about, you know, the $125-odd per ton in 2018, and I think we get to about a $134 a ton. That's total. That includes development and mining. Pieter, please, over to you.
Thanks, Neal, and thanks, Raj. Yeah, Raj, so as Neal has mentioned, so from a cost point of view, we measure it from a total tons broken point of view. As Neal mentioned, it includes obviously your waste, your development areas as well. We currently or let's call it 2021 or on a constant basis, we're running around $145 a ton. And we're clawing back that to the $125 a ton in life of mine. It does step down over, let's call it from 2023 to 2024 to those levels in 2025, 2026. And the reason is, as we've mentioned before, it's the cost of the development at this point in time as it relates to contractors that we've used.
also as we see some benefits from a supply chain sourcing point of view, standardizing of fleet between the two sites and other procurement initiatives that we get. Efficiencies, part of the obvious some of the initiatives includes mining efficiencies, and those will filter through into the dollar per ton metrics.
Thanks, Pieter, for that. While I have you, can I quickly ask one last question? On the CapEx front, the project CapEx remaining to be spent is ZAR 118 million. Just wanted to get a sense of how does it compare with the previous plan in terms of how much was spent and, or is there a difference between the new plan and the previous plan in terms of the project capital remaining to be spent?
If you look at last year, what we presented in the Investor Day, the project remaining was over ZAR 300 million to be spent on the project, what we presented last year in the Investor Update. That's clawed back to the, let's call it ZAR 90 million, and then the additional ZAR 30 million that we add for the cemented fill. I hope that answers your question, Raj.
Yeah. That does. You also said that some of that capital is now incorporated into your sustaining capital, right?
Yeah. It's quite difficult, as is normal, your normal development costs and other infrastructure costs would have formed part of that project capital. That will filter into your ORD number. As, for instance, a power system now will be a separate cost basket. It's really difficult to really compare apples with apples on that front 'cause the profiles are so much different.
Okay. Thank you for that. That's all my questions.
Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions on the phone lines.
Thanks very much.
Thanks very much. I think again, we do have a couple of questions on the webcast, but they are more general in nature. I think let's try and keep this as we've been going for two hours now almost. Let's keep it specific to the U.S.PGM operations, and we'll respond to more general questions at our results in the next couple of weeks. Thank you to everybody for participating this afternoon. Hope that you got some value out of this presentation. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to just reach out to the IR team and we'll respond with any detail that you need. Thanks very much.