Warm welcome to everybody, and good morning. Welcome to Anglo American's 2022 full year results. You'll have seen the numbers go out a couple of hours ago, and before I hand over to Duncan and Stephen to take you through all of that, just a few short remarks from me. First of all, a couple of board changes since we last met in this way in July. We've had Elisabeth Brinton, one of our non-executive directors, step down in September, and Tony O'Neill also stepped down at the end of the year in advance of his retirement in June. We're also actually in the advanced stages of a recruitment of our new non-executive director, and we'll be making an announcement about that quite soon.
Whilst this is our second-best EBITDA performance ever, we're all very mindful of the fact that we can always do more on the important area of operational stability, and that's something we're very focused on. The macro environment, of course, is quite unstable, including things like weather. But in spite of these, sorry, rather somewhat uncontrollable headwinds that we have, we still believe we can drive operating performance further. Of course, if we achieve that, with operational stability comes improvements in safety as well as operational performance. As we know, those two things go very much hand in hand. Duncan will no doubt talk a little bit more about this.
Finally, let me assure you, from the Anglo American board as well as management, that we're very focused, in particular in two areas: safety and sustainability in its broadest sense among the larger suite of performance delivery that we do. We're very mindful of the responsibilities we have across the full spectrum of our stakeholders in these two areas. Without any further ado, let me hand over to our Chief Executive, Duncan.
Thanks, Stuart. Thanks again, Stuart, and good morning to everybody. Thanks, thanks for being with us again, and I know that many are online, so welcome to you all. Always appreciate your time. Our lawyers tell me I have to pause on this statement, but I'm not going to do that for very long because you know what it's all about, and I know that you'll get through that all in your own time. By now, I guess, we have a fairly well-trodden formula in terms of how to run these days. I'm going to start, and take you through, you know, sort of the headlines.
Stephen will then take over from me, drill into some of the numbers for you, I'm going to come back and talk about how we position the business for the long run. This time, I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time taking us through Woodsmith, how we think about it, why we think it's such an incredibly good project, and why we're so confident in the product. We promised you last year that we would do it. It's now. Buckle up for that 'cause it's coming soon. All right.
Have to start as always with safety and safety performance, and as Stuart mentioned, it is clearly still my number one priority, and it will always be my number one priority as it is the priority for the whole of the GMC and the senior leadership of this organization. I am very much deeply saddened to remind us all that we did have two fatalities due to incidents at our managed operations during the year, and extremely disappointed to report yet another fatality at Kolomela last week. Kolomela now is seven years without a fatality, but last week we had one in a drilling-related environment, so four people around a drill rig.
I think that that just goes to show how very fragile this environment is and how much you can never take your eye off the ball in terms of what we have to do to ensure that people go home safely every day. As you know, we were very dissatisfied at the beginning of the year, last year, with our Total Recordable Incident Frequency Rate. That's the measure that we look at because it's a much more sophisticated measure than some of the other blunt instruments that are out there to demonstrate our performance on how we're getting to grips, you know, with the culture of safety more than anything else in the business. We responded to that quite urgently at the beginning of last year.
As Stuart pointed out, actually, the Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate for us is a clear leading indicator as to the stability of the whole of the business. You can't really talk about safety in a different silo from production. They have to go together. They live together 100% of the time. When your leading indicator starts to shake, it's telling you that there's a stability issue in the business, and we clearly saw that. We stood the whole of the business down. We refreshed our psyche around what it is that we were trying to do.
We went back to some of the basics on this and very pleased to say, that we did see a material turnaround in the performance of the business, both from a safety point of view and from an operations point of view during the second half of last year. In fact, on this particular indicator, in December, we ended up with our best performance in the history of the company at 0.96. We know that we can do it, and we're gonna keep doing it. We have a pretty consistent approach with the way we think about all of safety, health, and environment. Similar mindset insofar as the idea of achieving zero harm is the core driver here.
Zero harm to our people and zero harm to the environment. On health, I have to report that we had five new cases of occupational disease. All of these were related to noise-induced hearing loss. In the near term, our focus remains on very clearly on the execution of planned and rigorously risk-assessed work in the idea of removing people from the exposure of noise. We try on all of these things to come up with engineering solutions and engineer people out of the environment in which these exposures exist. On the environmental front, we had one level three water discharge incident, that happened towards the end of the year. This was a confluence of two things. Polokwane Smelter was down, so it happened at Polokwane Smelter.
The ponds that store the water for circulation of operating water, obviously were relatively full as the furnace was down. We then had a several-day, multi-day storm and we just slightly overtopped the dam. Lots to learn out of that. Very pleased to say that the team got on top of that very quickly, cleaned up everything that they could, and our assessment is that there's no material or meaningful environmental impact as a result of that. It was a reportable incident, and I just wanted to clarify that. Looking now at the key components of our environmental and social performance. Our energy consumption in absolute terms did decrease year-on-year, and that was despite the fact that we'd ramped up Quellaveco.
I think it does reflect the fact because of the ramp up of Quellaveco, that actually we were under the energy utilization in the balance of the business, probably because we weren't producing at the plan that we expected to produce. Quite a lot of that is also a function of the Polokwane smelter being down towards the end of the year. We did, however, see very pleasing improvement in our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and that reflects the transition of Grasstree to Aquila in Australia, as well as the renewable electricity contracts that we have now installed in all of our South America businesses. They all kicked in in 2022 with Quellaveco being the last to come on stream, and that'll be on stream during the course of this year.
We continue to make really good progress on our longer term sustainability targets too. I'm going to unpack that in a slide or two's time. On our social performance, very pleased to report some great progress made here on the implementation of our Social Way 3.0. I did point out to you in December that, you know, we're now on version three of this process. This current version is a significant uplift, much higher bar for us than the previous version. For the management team to have been able to got to the point where during the course of the year of its implementation, they were independently assessed as having delivered 66% of the foundational requirements of this new policy, I think is great news.
We know that attaining this level of performance does represent a much higher bar than anything that we've seen of a similar ilk in the industry to date. Some of the stuff is deeply entwined in our long-term sustainability goals, our Sustainable Mining Plan goals. For example, the delivery of five jobs off-site for every one job that we have on site. It's because we have systems and processes like this that we're confident that we're going to deliver into our Sustainable Mining Plan targets. On the numbers, just briefly from me. As a summary, EBITDA of fourteen and a half billion dollars and an EBITDA margin of 47%, and all of that in the face of very significant cost pressures.
I think this is a testament to the quality and the diversification of our portfolio. As we spoke about in December, the production was a little bit lower compared to 2021. We saw a significant step up, as I referred to earlier in the second half, as we, you know, we stopped the business, got on top of the basics of it and started to turn around again. I'm very confident now that the focus on this operational excellence is, and getting the basics right, has put us in good shape for 2023. Good start to the year so far. Unit costs were impacted by a combination of very high inflation, as well as lower volumes. Stephen, myself, and the rest of the GMC are incredibly focused on mitigating the impacts of those cost drivers.
To reiterate, safe, stable, and capable operations remain our number one and number two priorities, we are absolutely determined to keep getting that right. Overall, I think a really strong set of financial results. Could have been a little bit better had we hit all of our marks, but we are a work in progress, we're definitely going to get there. Just breaking the business performance out through the business units. De Beers, an excellent year for this team. Operationally, performance was very strong. This was coupled with the benefit of some high-grade ore that came out of the Goodbye Cut at the Venetia Open Pit. Now that is closed, we are fully in transition mode to the underground operations at Venetia.
We also saw very strong markets in the U.S., particularly in the first half of the year. We're now slightly seeing a bit of shareholder or Sightholder caution as a result of the current weaker global economic outlooks. The long-term fundamentals, however, for the business remain incredibly promising. I am very, very pleased with the provenance work that the De Beers team had done in the run-up to the beginning of last year, which really stood us in great stead as the invasion of the Ukraine played out and people's real focus on buying the right types of diamonds really come out to the fore. What's more, is I think that this is a real indicator of how people are going to be thinking about acquiring all metals in the future.
Metals that are produced in the right way and have the right impact at the source of their production, not just at the endpoint of their use. Great, great path-finding way there led by the De Beers team. Of course, the GRB remains an extremely important partner to us and we to them, and we are looking forward to refreshing that agreement with them during the course of this year. As you know, Bruce has now transitioned out of the role of chief executive. Al Cook took over from Monday, it's all his now. Bruce is going to join me for the rest of this year, at least, as the co-chair of De Beers.
We will preserve the value and the knowledge that he has in this business for a while yet. In base metals, very pleased with the delivery of Quellaveco, of course, on time and on budget, contributing to just over 100,000 tons of copper production since it started. I do think this is testimony, again, to Tom and the wider team who delivered that project through some really difficult circumstances. In Chile, we saw some great work there by the team in terms of mitigating the water constraints that Los Bronces has been experiencing, as well as the expected lower grades from the two big operations at Los Bronces and Collahuasi. The team now has taken a number of steps to manage the harder ore impact, so the mine became monofasic.
As a result of that, they've decided to split a bench so they can get different types of ore through the plant and mitigate the impacts of some of that hardness, and that's starting to work very well for them at the moment too. We remain very confident that we're going to reach a pragmatic solution too with the authorities in Chile in terms of the integrated permit for Los Bronces. In our PGM business, we saw a much more normalized set of operating performances following the benefit of having the ACP back up and running at the end of 2021, despite the impact of the lower grades that we saw coming through at Mogalakwena.
At Amandelbult, Natasha has shut down some of the higher cost areas of the mine and the concentrators to focus on more productive, more value-adding, and lower cost ounces, and that work is going very well. The Polokwane smelter was finally completed to a very high level of specification in December. Is back up and running and at full production at the moment. In our bulks business, a much more challenging year. Both the iron ore businesses were hit by wet weather events, particularly in the first half. At Kumba, we have to, of course, continue to monitor the impacts of the logistics performance quite closely, definitely towards the end of last year and right now as we're into the beginning of 2023.
At Minas-Rio, the initiatives there to address the challenges that we've been seeing in terms of the ore characteristics are now actually starting to pay dividends. Finally, at steel making coal, we finished the year flat on 21, but that was really a good performance, and I am quite encouraged by the way the team have taken on the challenges, defined by the new operating regime, specified by the strata and the and the gas control requirements as a result of our learnings from the incident a few years ago and the change of shape of the regulations in the country. Very good and pleasing start from them at the beginning of 2023 too. All in all, I think a really decent performance.
Importantly, I'm very encouraged that we are focused on the right things as we progress into the beginning of this year. I said I'd come back to some of the sustainability highlights. I said I covered the headlines of the environmental and social performance a moment ago, I'm sure that that doesn't really capture a lot of the really great progress that we have made towards meeting our Sustainable Mining Plan targets. On carbon, I'm sure that not many of you in this room missed this, but we did actually launch the hydrogen truck as a prototype in the first half of 2022. The really good news is that truck actually is in operation at the moment.
It's going through its paces, getting a whole lot of data for the engineers to improve the design for the second version of the prototype. It is quite something to see it in a circuit with all the other mining vehicles, presenting itself to shovels, taking the material to either the waste dump or the product stockpile. I think great progress made there and on plan to get that rolled out at scale. We also announced the first 600 MW of our renewable energy projects in Southern Africa. That's first 600 MW out of a vision of 3-5 GW of energy as part of the Envusa Energy program.
This is now very happily been given the status in South Africa of a Strategic Integrated Project. That's very helpful in terms of consolidating government support for this program. More good news on that front overnight from the Minister of Finance too. We are on track to commence the construction of the first two of those projects in that 600 MW bucket during the course of this year. In Chile, we were able to secure a desalinated water project for more than 45% of Los Bronces' needs from 2025 onwards. Of course, you'll all remember that this is now such a water-strapped area and has really struggled over the last few years with extreme weather events, in this particular instance, generally droughts rather than excessive rain.
To be able to now not have to rely virtually 100% on the abstraction of continental water, but have an alternative source of water that is more in our control is very liberating for an operation like Los Bronces. There's a second part to this. This is as yet an unapproved phase, but I think this also goes to the mindset of how we holistically think about creating value from these sorts of things. That is that we are in the process of trying to swap every kiloliter of water in this project for double the volume of gray water that is currently just being put to waste.
Legislation in Chile is that no gray water can be used for human consumption, but we can absolutely use it in the plant, and we have a way that we might be able to swap this out, and that would bring us to almost complete independence from the normal ways of abstracting water in Chile. A great way to think about that and of course the community benefits very significantly out of water security as a result of this program too. The social contribution that we make is probably one of the hardest elements of our ESG program or performance that to measure. I do think that it's also probably one of the most powerful things that we do.
In terms of the direct impact that it has on improving people's lives. I'm very proud of the work that the team has done in building an inclusive workplace, and our focus particularly on gender-based violence, not only in the operations, but in the communities in and around the operations. Gender-based violence, bullying, harassment, and victimization, all the fundamental tenants of an inclusive workplace that we are busy creating in Anglo American. We have now established, as a result of all of these policies, a Living With Dignity Hub in South Africa. This is a place where independent support mechanisms are available for not only our employees, but our contractors and their families to the extent that any of them are victims.
A similar facility is also in place in Australia now and continuing to grow. With that, Stephen, I think I'll hand over to you and you can take us through the numbers.
Thank you, sir. Oh, don't need that one. Thanks, Duncan. Morning to all. As you know, I always like to start with the three sort of key themes that I'd like you to take away from my section. As Duncan mentioned, in spite of some operating challenges, we did deliver the second highest EBITDA performance for the year. Through the second half, we really focused on those efforts in terms of delivering safe, consistent, stable operational momentum, and that is poised to continue into 2023. The second theme, one of my constant themes in these things, strong balance sheet, 40% dividend payout is maintained, and that gives us a yield around 5%, or at least it was at the start of the week. It's probably a bit more at the end of the week.
We continue to invest in value-adding growth, and that positions the portfolio for the two major demand drivers that we see, and while our technology and innovation programs enable us to supply those metals and minerals in the most sustainable way. Turning to the 2022 performance. EBITDA of $14.5 billion. I'll unpack that for you a little bit in the next couple of slides. Healthy pricing helped to mitigate the impact of those higher unit costs. That gave us an EPS of $4.97, and reflecting that 40% payout policy, dividends were $1.98 per share, and that results in $2.4 billion of shareholder returns from this year's result.
Net debt landed at $6.9 billion, that was a little bit better than we expected when we spoke to you in December, as prices started to rise towards the end of the year. All of that results in a healthy Return on Capital Employed for the year of 30%. If we break that EBITDA performance down across the different business units, diamonds, strong operational performance and healthy markets, a full-year EBITDA of $1.4 billion and a 52% mining margin. In 2023, we're watching those macro themes closely and the opening up of China. The 2022 holiday season was robust, we had a slightly lower Sight One. We remain hopeful that things should pick up as this year progresses. In base metals, $2.6 billion EBITDA.
Focusing on copper, expected lower grades, water, and ore hardness at Los Bronces. We did have high inflation in that part of the world in terms of our input costs, and C1 unit costs were up 31% as a result of that inflation and the reduced volumes. In 2023, obviously, Quellaveco, much more sizable contribution is expected. In PGMs, a healthy $4.4 billion EBITDA, a 54% mining margin and a 24% processing and trading margin. A robust basket price of $2,550 an ounce, and remembering that 2022 was impacted by the Polokwane smelter rebuild. In bulks, $6.6 billion EBITDA. Wet weather impacts across the various operations. Start of 2023, we have seen continued heavy rain, particularly at Minas-Rio and in Queensland, but a 49% margin reflecting the premium nature of our steelmaking ingredients.
Overall, a good set of numbers in the circumstances, and I am encouraged by that operational momentum that we're carrying into 2023 as we focus on getting that consistency and rhythm back. Let's look at the drivers of EBITDA. A reminder that our 2021 EBITDA was our highest ever, supported by those high prices. 2022 EBITDA, our second highest ever. Prices have remained robust, although lower than 2021, but they do remain above long-term averages. There were a number of known factors that came into 2022, particularly when comparing to the 2021 period. In 2021, we had the rundown of the ACP stocks that we'd built up, and that wasn't repeated in 2022. We had planned lower grades in Chile, just with the mine sequencing, but we also had water challenges at Los Bronces and higher input costs.
Other factors in 2022, I also mentioned the Polokwane smelter, the re-ramp-up of the steelmaking coal longwalls, and obviously the weather impacts that we've spoken about. Inflationary headwinds and lower volumes and how that played out in terms of unit costs. Up 15% across the full year, but that was an improvement on where we sat at the end of H1. At that point, we were up 18%. Breaking that down, volumes contributed 5% of that impact, and that really is that valuable prize that we know we can chase through the year as we get that stability back. Inflation overall totaled 14%, and I think as others have reported, diesel was the biggest part of that above CPI inflation at around 75% of that above CPI inflation impact.
The work that we're doing on the sustainability front in terms of our lower emissions, renewable energy, et cetera, is gonna really position us well to take that sort of variability out of our results as we go forward. Of course, in our case, weaker producer currencies help offset some of those effects that you see above. Looking ahead to 2023, as we said in December, we're expecting around a 3% increase in unit costs, step up in our volumes, particularly with the addition of Quellaveco should help. It is that major prize that we're chasing to help offset ongoing impacts of inflation. Economic contribution. I have to say, this is something I'm really proud of that significant economic contribution that we make, and it totaled $30.6 billion across the year.
Importantly, a large part of that impact is directly on people's lives in the countries that we operate in. A key part of that contribution is the tax and royalty payments that we make, which total $5.9 billion for 2022. It's down on 2021, but very much in line with earnings. The dramatic increase in royalty rates in Queensland, coupled with higher earnings there, resulted in a significant increase in our royalty payments in Australia. The change in royalty rates meant that we paid an additional $200 million in royalties during the second half compared to the previous regime, with total royalty payments for the year being over $700 million. The increase in coal royalty rates was forecast to deliver an additional AUD 1.2 billion to the Queensland Government over a four-year period.
The budget measure is now expected to deliver AUD 3 billion just in this year alone, and it only came in halfway through the year. With the industry, we continue to seek meaningful dialogue with the Queensland Government to review those royalty rates, particularly in light of the miscalculation of the impact of that change. While in South Africa, the headline corporate tax rate is set to decrease in 2023 from 28%- 27%. We do see increases elsewhere. Tax rates and tax bases in all of our operating countries are something we watch carefully as governments manage fiscal deficits impacted by the pandemic. Chile is one such example, where the government's looking to raise additional tax revenues from sectors that have seen increased profits in recent years, such as mining.
While the royalty outlook there remains uncertain, the most recent proposal that's now passing through the various approval stages, while still high, has moderated significantly from where it started. We're continuing to actively engage with a full range of stakeholders to ensure that they recognize the full economic value that we generate. Now, taxes and royalty contributions in Chile increased this year to over $1 billion. Turning to the balance sheet, I know this is a topic you will all be interested in today. While Tom and the Woodsmith team continuing to work across the various streams of the project, we're clear at this stage to maximize the long-term value of this multigenerational ore body, we need to invest more upfront to expand the capacity of some of that core infrastructure, very similar to the approach that we adopted with Quellaveco.
That helps lock in the options for future expansions as the market for polyhalite develops. We are being prudent. We're taking a phased approach to the build where we can to ensure that we invest capital in the right way when we need to. Importantly, as the market develops. As a result, we expect to take longer and cost more to bring the configuration we want for Woodsmith into operation. We mentioned in December that we'd feed this latest thinking into our models for year-end accounting purposes, and this results in us impairing the carrying value of $2.6 billion by $1.7 billion. As we progress through the remaining studies and as we de-risk the remaining schedule, I expect the value and the discount rate should both move in our favor over time.
For accounting purposes, we continue to take a positive, but still conservative view of the POLY4 market price in our models. We do incorporate varying pricing methodologies, including blend substitution, and we weight them based on probabilities of outcome. This is a market that we need to develop over time in order to realize full value for the product's qualities. That's why we're comfortable with a longer timeframe and why we're putting so much effort into the marketing capabilities of the business. We're building up a bank of agronomic, scientific, and commercial evidence for both the yield and the environmental performance of the product, so that we can market that effectively and attract a significant premium for it in the future. Duncan will talk you more about the product attributes in particular in a moment.
Until we've done that work, it's still a little early to incorporate that value into these sort of accounting models. As you know, these models can be highly sensitive to changes in near-term expenditures. While this expanded scope will increase the overall cost and push out initial ramp up and cash flow, it also gives us more confidence in our ability to maximize the value from Woodsmith over the longer term. Turning to CapEx, $5.7 billion for the year. It was up on 2021, driven by higher sustaining spend, partly as we caught up on some of those projects that were deferred or delayed during the pandemic, as well as specific projects such as the Kolomela diesel plant, the start-up of Quellaveco, the smelter rebuild in PGMs, some higher spend at Los Bronces, and also some impact from inflation.
Growth CapEx of $1.6 billion largely reflects spending at Quellaveco and Woodsmith. Guidance for 2023 remains at $6 billion-$6.5 billion, higher due to the SA renewables and the nuGen truck program, the Kolomela diesel, work at the PGM smelters, the Minas-Rio plant, as well as some cost inflation and the ramp-up of operations at Quellaveco and in steelmaking coal. Net debt increased to $6.9 billion, lower than we were expecting when we spoke to you back in December. Impact of higher metal prices running into the year-end, and we also had some higher dividend receipts from some of our associate operations.
We paid $3.7 billion to shareholders during the year. That includes the additional dividend declared that we declared at 2021 full year results on that year's record on earnings, as well as the remainder of the buyback that we announced in the half prior. Working capital increased by $2.1 billion. That reflects inventory builds at PGMs owing to the Polokwane smelter rebuild, as well as builds at Copper, Kumba, and De Beers that we discussed in December. We are making great strides in 2023 in terms of our Sustainable Mining Plan goals. In 2022, we put our money where our mouth is with two sustainability-linked debt issuances.
A $745 million bond, as well as the $100 million loan with the IFC, both are linked to deliverables from our Sustainable Mining Plan. Importantly, this holds us to account in reporting against our progress against those metrics. You'll see that in our reporting suite over the next couple of weeks. With our strong and flexible balance sheet, we're well-positioned to continue that discipline investment in the pipeline of our growth opportunities. To recap, I always like to report against our capital allocation scorecard. Cash generation of $3.3 billion after funding sustaining capital, $2.4 billion for the base dividend, with a further $0.6 billion being the additional returns we announced this time last year, and the $0.2 billion, the tail end of the buyback that we announced at the 2021 half.
We allocated $1.6 billion to growth capital. Finally, we are committed to our capital allocation framework. It delivers us a strong balance sheet, an attractive 40% payout ratio, and that translates into a healthy dividend yield and offers us flexibility in terms of how we invest in discretionary capital options, both organic and inorganic, as well as how we consider additional returns to shareholders. More than 90% of our growth CapEx is allocated to value-adding high-margin projects that deliver products into the long-term demand themes that we see. With that, I'll hand back to Duncan. Thanks.
Thanks, Stephen. Just before I get to the Woodsmith section, I want to start with what I think the big picture again. I am sure that, you know, today across our demand portfolio, the metals and minerals, more broadly, not only the ones that we produce, but I think that that world looks and feels really, really good from a fundamental perspective. So many prices have now been elevated above their long-term average for quite a while now, and the demand outlook is just set to get stronger from here, in our view. Yet, despite all of that, no massive flood of new projects into this market. You know, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, supply is quite constrained here in terms of these dynamics.
Recycling, substitution, thrifting, these are all gonna be really, really important contributors, and boy, do we need them. Even with all of that, there's still going to be, I believe, the structural shortage of metals and minerals. The industry supply will also, I think, continue to disappoint a little bit. It rather underwhelms expectations than exceeds expectations. A reason I think that that will continue to be the case is for all the reasons that I laid out in December, which is that, you know, there are permitting issues across the world. There are disruptions that we're seeing more and more, more frequent and extreme weather events, grade declines, fiscal uncertainty, and so on and so on.
You know, on things that are outside of our world too, so having a look at independent sources and commentators in this space, well-renowned and well-respected, such as Climate Action Tracker. Their view of life is that currently the world is on a trajectory to reach 2.7 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, and that is quite a long way mathematically from the one and a half degree C that is required by the Paris Agreement. All of that, I think, is going to continue to serve to put an extraordinary amount of pressure on metals intensity and the use of the metals and minerals. So what of all of that for me is that it still feels that we are structurally headed towards higher pricing in the future.
From our perspective, our geographically diverse portfolio is supplying into two major demand trends that are becoming ever more clear to us. The first is the one that we really just touched on now, and that is of decarbonization of our energy and our transport systems to get us to this cleaner, greener, and more sustainable world that we all want to see. The second continues to be this broader drive to the improvement of living standards for a growing and urbanizing population, and that means demand for everything from homes to electronics and for food to consumer luxuries. That's really what we mean by a future-enabling portfolio rather than just a future-facing portfolio.
Turning to projects very briefly, Quellaveco, the new mine in Peru, continues to ramp up both lines, running very well, and actually they produced 80,000 tons in the last quarter of last year. A hundred thousand tons for the year, 80,000 in the last quarter. Reason for me saying that is that I want you to understand that it's going to be about 30,000 tons lower than that in the first quarter of this year for some very good reasons. Two of those are because we have to take the plant down now as part of the normal ramp-up and commissioning process. We're doing some big maintenance. We're doing some resets from the learnings and some of the systems that happens naturally during those first phases of commissioning.
We'll get it back up and running again. The second reason is that the Quellaveco tailings dam is at a very delicate stage of its initial construction. It has to be, you know, it is rate limited in terms of how much material we can deposit at this particular point in time until we get the basal cone of this dam properly stabilized. Of course, this is a dam that's going to be there for many, many years. It behooves us to get this right, and we are following the engineer's instructions to the letter in terms of doing that.
The third, the third element here, of course, is, whilst we haven't seen any material impact of this, we continue need to be very mindful of the fact that there's a lot of unrest, and sociopolitical, driven issues that may well affect the supply of materials into the mine and the removal of concentrate from the mine. We have to be mindful of that. At this point in time, as I say, no major impacts, and actually the team on the ground tell me that things seem to be quietening down, and improving a little bit from their perspective at the moment too. Okay. Let's talk about Woodsmith. Stephen did give you a flavor of it, just a moment ago.
I'd like to set out for you our view of the significance of this project, and particularly the product POLY4, and how uniquely we think this is now positioned, to address the agricultural industry's very important and emerging challenges. I'd like to cover through this section why we believe Woodsmith is a Tier 1 asset and how we expect to deliver high margin returns and cash flows from this multi-generational asset. I mean, this will be a cornerstone of the Anglo American portfolio for decades to come. I've said before that we really do need to get the design and the engineering on a project like this right.
When we took it over, we did say that we were going to bring it in-house, and we were going to study it and bring it up to a standard that we as Anglo American were going to be happy with, in terms of how it was going to be delivered. I said to you in December, I'll give you a sense of what the shape and the size of this project looks like now. Quite a lot has happened since we acquired Woodsmith. It just was, by the way, immediately just before the pandemic set in. Of course, last year was a massive reset year for us on many fronts.
As we further integrated it, but also we're able to interpolate some of the outcomes of those studies and the technical review that we did after bringing it on board. Firstly, on the core development areas of the project, we've made some big changes to the scope of the design. They may look really small when you look at it from a picture at a high level, but actually, they are quite significant, and I'll unpack some of those for you now. Ensuring that we get this project to a standard that we're happy with, and we get it set up so that it can effectively continue to optimize its output over the multiple decades that it's going to be in existence for. We've changed also, under Tom's leadership, the execution strategy on this.
When he took over the project in, was it April or so last year, Tom? The one of the first things that he did was shut it all down. It was very distressing for me, I have to tell you. Then, three or four months later, he started up again. When he started up again, it was a completely different picture in terms of the way it was operating and the, and the actual production performance, in terms of the shaft sinks and the, and the tunnel progression. In terms of doing that, we now have an EPCM model, which follows quite closely the approach that we had at Quellaveco. Tom has also engaged some specialist contractors to execute the sink of the two deep shafts.
Secondly, on the timeline and the scope of the work for this project. We are still making some changes for an extension to the scope, and I'm going to explain that shortly. This is specifically to align with the market potential for our product. What we want to do is be sure that we set this up right. You know, a key point to remember here, it's a deep underground mine. You have more options to course-correct for strategy in an open-pit mine in flight than you do in an underground mine. Setting it up with that in mind is very, very key, and that's what the work of our technical and marketing team has been doing in the last couple of years.
None of us want to turn around in 10 years' time and say, "Don, I wish we'd done it just a little bit differently," and can't now avail ourselves of the options and the opportunities that we really do believe that this product is going to bring to the market. There still are a considerable number of studies that need to do as we progress this core infrastructure. One, in terms of the configuration of the perfect outcome or the best outcome that we can come up with. Two, to minimize the risk of the actual cost of the development of this project. I said before, quite a lot of this is a function of the level of engineering, what you know and understand, and therefore that defines your execution strategies, particularly during the shaft sinking time.
As it stands today, we have a project that's circa 25%-35%, Tom, I think I'm right in those numbers, that are in concept and pre-feasibility stage, and that's why we haven't taken it to the board for approval yet. We have the balance of the project more or less equally weighted between construction-level assurance and feasibility-level assurance. really great progress being made on those fronts. As I said before, we do now have a very highly experienced project management team led by Tom and working very closely with specialists both internally and externally and building on all the learnings that we had coming out of not only Minas-Rio, but even the successes coming out of Quellaveco. Significant progress on the core infrastructure.
Great picture on this on two this slide. Absolutely love what that looks like. While the scoping work is ongoing. On the two deep shafts, both being excavated by these machines called Shaft Boring Roadheaders. They're not a first for us. They're the 3rd generation of these type of machines, well-trodden in Canada and Belarus. We are now having had Tom do the reconfiguration of the, sort of some of the technical issues on these units during the first half of last year. Over 20% down on the server shaft. We hit a really big milestone in January of this year, where we started the sink on the production shaft. On the tunnel, we are now over halfway in terms of the tunnel boring activities.
Currently around 21.7 km of a total of 37 km. You remember the original configuration of this was assumed that we might use three tunnel boring machines. We're now going to use one tunnel boring machine to drive the whole 37 km. There are three shallower intermediate shafts that are going to sink down to tunnel for various reasons. Second egress, ventilation purposes, maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. Those will all hit a final depth of somewhere between 320 and 360 m, all progressing exceptionally well. Very close to the intersection point on the MTS shaft. At Woodsmith, we are complete on Lockwood Beck and the Ladycross Shaft has just started, but progressing exactly as expected it to do.
Like to just lay out now the dimensions of the project, as we see it today from an optimized configuration or a very close to optimized configuration since we took ownership of the asset. We are now going to set it up to be able to deliver 13 million tons. That's a 30% larger project than it was originally intended to be. This doesn't mean that we go to 13 million tons on day one. I think that I want to be very clear about that.
You have the options to be able to grow it into that, and that is going to be very optimized from a capital execution point of view or capital efficiency point of view over time. We are going bigger because we believe in this asset, and we absolutely believe in the product and what that product is going to be able to do in the market. The annual spend is going to vary year to year on this thing. We've approved $0.8 billion for this year, and it will be in the order of $1 billion between now and 2027 when we would expect it to be in first production.
At that point, we'll start geting our own product out and into the market, then we will build it up to 5 million tons per annum in 2030. During that period of time, we still have a lot of these studies to do to optimize not only the mining, but also the distribution of the product, and getting the product to market, as well as building the value case, you know, the value accretive case for the product rather than just relying on product price substitution. It's going to therefore take a little bit longer and cost a little bit more than might have been envisaged under the previous owner.
Certainly, as Stephen has described to you from an accounting perspective, you can appreciate how just that from an NPV perspective, by pushing some of the early cash flows out a little bit for these very good reasons, has had the impact that it has done. You know, I would like to assure you that under our hands we are taking a very long-term view and a very focused view on how to maximize the value from this asset, an asset that's going to, as I say, be a cornerstone of the Anglo American portfolio for at least five decades from the time that it comes into production.
Gone are the days now, I think, I pointed this out sometime last year too, where we would come up with a concept design, get enough of the engineering into sort of 30% of detail and say, "That's the equivalent of a feasibility study, and therefore we're going to put that into the market." We are going to do the homework on this thing. We're going to get it right. We're going to understand what the real risks and where the real risk areas are, and we're going to develop detailed engineering strategies to eliminate those risks and create more and more surety of cost, time, and executability of the project as we take it forward. I think that's absolutely critical for a project at any scale in mining, but particularly for deep shaft mining projects.
Just to visualize, you know, what this project looks like. Very good cartoon here in terms of the schematic. Paul Dunne, he did a great job. Two deep-level shafts on the left-hand side, 1.6 km to the point where they intersect what he's drawn as a wonderfully tabular wide seam, polyhalite seam. Mine is really looking forward to getting into that, Paul. Thank you. And as I said, you know, that sink done by these two SBRs. Secondly, given the proximity to the port, the connection, I mean, this is an amazing advantage for this project too, by the way. I mean, there are very few bulk product market projects that are only 37 km away from their port.
That's the materials transport system that's being developed at the moment with a tunnel boring machine. Finally, I think you can see the three s maller shafts that I referred to, the MTS shaft, almost at the intersection point. That's where the mid-shaft loading, as we would call it in mining terms, occurs to transfer the product from the underground onto the conveyance to take it to the processing plant and the port. All going relatively well. There's still more work to do here on the non-critical path items, but these are still going to obviously be part of the core infrastructure.
There's a port area where we will have a granulation plant, and there's a priority, and we will hopefully have the access out on a priority basis to the export facilities. Limited processing here, so not a lot of chemical processing that occurs here. None at all, in fact. It is granulation. Our ability to make a product that looks and feels like those that farmers are currently using today is a very important part of our go-to-market strategy. Continue to make good process and we'll get a lot more work done during 2023. In 2024, we're going to hit that seam above the Polyhalite seam, which is the sandstone seam. That's an area that we don't understand a lot about. It's a water-bearing layer.
You know, what we need is to be sure that our water sealing strategies and our sink rate mechanism through that zone is well understood and we are well prepared for that. We get into there in 2024. At that particular point in time, we're in a completely different level of understanding of the time it's going to take then to complete the project. What do you have to think about from going from 5 million tons- 13 million tons? Well, if you set it up right, not a hell of a lot, really. In underground mines, you obviously have to get the core infrastructure sizing and shape right if you're looking to potentially expand.
The one thing that is real value destructive in any deep-level underground mines is when you put part of the infrastructure in and then a few years later, you really can't put another set of the same type of infrastructure in. You nail your productivity year on year with declines and sub-declines and subverticals to the point where the mine becomes completely uneconomic. You have a chance to get it right in a world where there's such a huge amount of potential upside to the product valuation, and that's what we would have to do here. One of the things that we did do, actually, a small thing, so you can't even see it on the schematic that we've done here, but we will have to bring some ventilation forward.
There was always ventilation in the planning of this mine. It was out some 20 years. Now we want to bring it forward slightly. Actually, one of the big pieces of work that the technical team did was just simply expand the diameter of each of those two deep shafts by 75 cm. There was some configuration that Tom and the team had to do to those Shaft Boring Roadheaders to be able to get that done. Just that little bit, it doesn't seem like a hell of a lot in the total diameter, has a material impact on timing, size, shape, and cost of the future infrastructure. Those are the kind of things that the team has been thinking about and executing over the last few years.
Some of the other key infrastructure things that, again, as I say, not on the critical path at the moment, that are going to be required to deliver 13 million tons. Important to say that this overview is of the potential plan and there are still quite a few studies. They say 25%-35% of the project still in concept and pre-fee stage. The blue bits on this graph show us those types of scope changes are gonna be required. First, something that we have previously raised is the addressing of the ventilation issue, and then getting on to work out how we optimize the mining method. Right now, the base mining method here is just simply conventional Board and Pillar mining.
You know, given the rate at which technology is developing for mining, given the time that it's gonna take to get us here, we have a very solid plan A, but Matt is all over plan B and plan C. There may be other ways that we can get into this that has a lower ventilation load that is even more productive than we're currently seeing it. We have the opportunity here bearing in mind the length of life of an ore body such as this. Of course, it's how you configure the materials extraction shaft or the transport shaft, how you set the conveyor to go from 5 million tons- 13 million tons. That's really simply what's going on at that point.
How to develop the market is another fundamental part of the, of the strategy, of the development of the mine in and of itself. It's not necessarily true that we have to put all of the granulating capabilities at one place, which might have been an original concept. In the work that Alex and his team are being able to do with many of our partners and our off-takers of this thing, there are other ways that we might think about distributing, blending, and bringing this product to market at various nodes and points across the globe. That means it's really important to take our time, get those things right, understand those markets, and then deploy the capital, as Stephen said, at the right time and in the right place, on the right things.
I have talked a lot about the project itself now, but really what makes this thing so exciting is the product and the very unique nature of this product and the things that made us so attracted to it in the first instance. It does play into those global mega trends that we see. You know, farmers have to produce more food, and they have to do this because the population is growing. At the same time, consumers, so the farmers' customers, you know, and all the supply chain and government expectations that are around today also have to improve their own sustainability and reduce the impact of their production on, you know, on the world or on the globe itself.
That growing global population demand requiring improved living standards, including nutrition, is all a very important fundamental part to how food is going to be provided in the first instance and then secured. The one thing that we know is land is not becoming more available. We know that fertilizers have had a massive role in increasing the productivity of farming. Since the 1960s, we know that there's been a 150% improvement in food productivity with only a 12% increase in the use of arable land. We just don't see there's another 12% of arable land easily available for similar sorts of food rate growth that are going to be required to feed a population of 10 billion, 10 billion people. Of course, you know, that has not come without a cost.
There are environmental impacts of the way fertilizers are used today. They have greenhouse gas emission impacts. There is pollution of waterways. There is biodiversity loss as a result of the application of some of these fertilizers. Farmers and consumers have to, just as mining companies and steelmaking companies, et cetera, have to look for more sustainable practices in the future. There's a third element here, which is the impact directly on nature and the deterioration of soil health being a key issue, and is now sort of right on the top of the agri-industry's agenda. The long-term use of chemical fertilizers versus our product, which is an organic fertilizer, does have a...
I mean, there's really good evidence that this does have a detrimental effect on soil strength, on soil structure, and therefore, on the productivity that is then being able to be attributed to whatever parcel of arable land is available. We need fertilizers. I think the case for that is really clear. It would be great if we didn't have to incur the same sorts of impacts that current types of fertilizers have on a sustainable basis going forward. POLY4 is that product. It's not the savior for everything, but it does make a huge difference to some of these key drivers that this industry is now very rapidly trying to start to get its head around. There are no other natural organic mineral fertilizers that look and feel like this.
Anglo American has the only scalable source of polyhalite globally. I mean, that is a very unique and attractive proposition for shareholders. This mineral is so distinct in its composition, its behavior, and its benefits, and therefore, in its value. Let's just talk about this value equation a little bit more. We have to develop our commercial strategies in terms of how to bring this to market, right? This is, this one left-hand side of the equation is you just substitute it, the other side is you create a premium for it, and you be very careful about how you, how you put it into the, into the marketplace.
We now have an interesting collection, in addition to engineers and social scientists, in the Anglo American stable, teams of agronomists and crop scientists working across the globe on numerous crop trials, and development projects for this product. We now have conducted over 1,500 commercial on-farm demonstration projects, and we can show the benefit in a very, very positive way. At the time that we acquired this project, only 400 crop trials had been done. They all looked great. Now 1,500, some at demonstration scale, and excellent results. We are seeing now on average a 3%-5% yield improvement that can increase revenue not just for us, but for our customers too, those being the farmers. Very important in a low margin business like theirs.
More than that, we are beginning to see results that really do now start to set POLY4 apart from conventional and chemical fertilizers. First one is that we do now have this evidence that it will improve the uptake of nutrients in the soil, and it can reduce the need for much of the chemical fertilizers. Not all right. This is not a complete substitution for current chemical fertilizers, but it can materially impact the volume of those that will be used in the future. It's a 6% uptake. This is what we've seen from our trials of nitrogen and phosphorus, just relative to that you see when MOP is applied directly. This is down to the prolonged nutrient release profile and the multi-nutrient nature of POLY4 versus some of the others.
Just like you and me, a plant needs a balanced diet if it's going to be healthy, and this is a good core component of that diet going forward. Lastly, it does have the potential to materially reduce some of those environmental impacts that I was speaking about earlier. It's a low waste product, i.e., your product, ore to product ratio is 1 to 1, given the size and the nature of this seam and ore body, the material comes out of the mine. There's no waste dump. It goes straight to the granulator, onto the ship or onto the ship directly. That's really important from a land use point of view, from a chemical inputs processing point of view, and obviously, also from a cost point of view.
Because of the fact that there is no chemical processing that sits on the back end of this thing, the product already has a carbon footprint that's 85% lower than any of the conventional fertilizers that are available in the market today. It is the only known mineral fertilizer product that can do all of these things. We do continue to work. Alex and his team continues to work with all the partners that we have in this value chain from the farmer to the customer through the supermarkets and the distributors. In fact, POLY4 is now being used in commercial trial of low carbon fertilizers led by a major U.K. supermarket to cut the carbon footprint of their own food supply chains.
These are a few of the reasons that we think that the fundamentals are so strong and supportive of a product of this nature going forward. How do we price it then? Okay. First of all, it's not a commodity. Okay? This is a marketed product. I think that's the important thing to remember. You can treat it as a commodity, but it actually is a marketed product. Its worth will reflect ultimately all of these things that I've been describing in the last couple of slide. The conversion of those benefits has to be into the value, and therefore will reflect in the price at some point in time.
By the way, we're not just dreaming this up because we have some experience of how this is done, and I think De Beers is obviously the best example of how to take something and create value, tangible value around that offering. More increasingly, we're applying that system and that logic, and that thinking and that approach to just some of the conventional mining project products. What Pete and his team have been able to do with the premium associated with some of our iron ore and steelmaking coal products is exactly a good indicator of what I'm talking about here. This slide outlines how we might be looking at value. On the left-hand side of the slide, there's just the pure substitution bucket, right?
You can buy a bag of fertilizer from your local hardware store or garden center. In that, there's a ratio of N, P, and K. What we can do is just extract the components in that bag that are in polyhalite, resubstitute them with polyhalite, and that bag is going to cost less, okay? Just the value of that bag, exactly the same thing, that's $170 per ton in the market today, and that's a blunt substitution approach. You start applying some of these other benefits that we've started to talk about and the direct yield.
Now the farmer hasn't paid for any of the yield benefits that come out of this, certainly hasn't started to think about the value associated with the sustainability benefits of this project. When you look at this on a crop-by-crop basis, district-by-district basis, there are more enhanced value things in terms of time to get the stuff to the market, how it deploys on the market, how quickly it liberates in the soil, what it does for soil and soil structure, and the fact that you now get the yield benefits. It costs less. It's got yield benefits associated with it.
Ultimately, you can start pricing in some of the things associated with the provenance of the product, as I mentioned earlier, and the sustainability elements of the product going forward. You can see where it goes to at the end, and it's not going to go there on day one. Let's be clear. We know that on day one. That was very much what Tom and the team brought to the board at the end of last year, was this more thoughtful way of setting ourselves up to get into this, but at the same time being very thoughtful and very pragmatic about creating the market, developing it, and building off the success of it as it goes forward.
You know, we haven't taken all of these benefits into account at all in the way that we thought about the valuation of this today in terms of the model that Stephen was talking about earlier. You know, if we did, you know, just get 30% of the upside that I've just described, the price of this would be about $100 a ton more than we're thinking about. Very prudently, we've only captured $20 a ton of that in our current $190 a ton mark. It's not unhelpful that today, as you look on the screens for a very similar type of product, it's currently trading at just over $300 a ton.
To recap then, first, making really good progress on delivering the critical path aspects of the infrastructure on this project, particularly in the shafts and the tunnels. Secondly, we will continue to study and optimize the scope of this work, particularly from a phasing into the market perspective, as well as understanding and minimization of the risk to capital and the timing and the spend of the capital. Thirdly, in case it wasn't very clear, I am very excited about this product and what it will do and the role it will have in the world in the next 50 years. Woodsmith is a Tier 1 asset in a very low-risk jurisdiction, offering long-term value to our shareholders.
It has structural advantages in the quality of the ore body and the proximity of the mine to logistics channels. It is scale. It has low operating costs and will have a very low capital intensity too, by the way, from an SIB perspective. I think there's lots of upside in terms of the creation of price and value for a product like this, where we will be able to crystallize some of these premium that I spoke about. It clearly does still have quite long-term potential and optionality for even more expansions. The product and the asset are outstanding, and we really are now at the start of this journey. It is a very scarce and multi-generational asset, and we'll use the time that we have to get this absolutely right, but really great progress in terms of where it is today.
Finally, whilst I've hope I've given you a slightly deeper understanding of how we think about this project, how it's dimensioned, and where it's going to from here, I think the best way for you to really get your head around is come and see it. We are planning a site visit for this later this year, probably October, Paul? October-ish. We'd love to take you around show. There you'll have not just me, but you can meet the team, led by Tom, who are thinking about every day how to execute this safely, more productively, and at lower cost.
The team under Alex, working for Tom, who are thinking very hard about how to develop this market and how strategically to take the product from where it is today to a point where it gets a large chunk of the value premium that it should, that it deserves to get. Right. That was Woodsmith. Quickly looking forward and how this all comes together from a broader growth optionality perspective. With our focus on operational excellence, and coupled with our organic and very attractive internal options, focused on products that are aligned to those future demand themes that we've been speaking about, we still have internal options to offer 25% growth from inside the portfolio over the next decade or so.
We believe that there's even more upside from fully embedding the operating model in this business, and realizing the full potential of our current assets under management, which will be delivered by our P101 program. We believe that the FutureSmart Mining program, which is our technology offering and our integrated approach to all matters sustainable in the round, is both differentiated and industry-leading. Will enable us to unlock, I think, the full capacity or capability of our assets. Alun Atkinson's appointment last month to lead our project and development opportunities will continue to progress our leading-edge technology and digital programs as well. Quellaveco and Woodsmith are key, clear major contributors to Anglo American's growth profile, so too are Collahuasi, Mogalakwena, and Sakatti. We're going to sequence these options through Stephen's capital allocation model, absolutely appropriately.
As always, we will compare the value upsides in all of the organic opportunities with any inorganic opportunities that arise during that period of time. Our customer-centric marketing capabilities help to optimize value and identify opportunities as a broader material solutions provider. We need to ensure that we produce as sustainably as possible, and that we supply to these customers who value both the work that we do in terms of limiting our impact on the environment and the positive difference we make to and around our mines. This is my last slide. In summary, we have shown, I think, real resilience through 2022. We had to navigate some really tough operating challenges amid quite a volatile macro backdrop. We adjusted our plans rapidly, and we focused our efforts on safer and more consistent operational execution.
I am very pleased with the progress that we did make during the second half of 22 and so far into the early months of 2023. I do believe that we are well-positioned to execute on our strategy. As Stephen said, we do offer balance across a number of dimensions, a geographically diverse portfolio, delivering many of the metals and minerals that the world now so desperately needs, underpinned by a strong balance sheet from which we do pay attractive returns and then also develop our pipeline of future enabling organic growth projects. Okay. Questions. Jason.
Do you want to wait for a microphone?
What?
Just want to
Thanks. It's Jason Fairclough, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, or Bank of America. Thanks for that, Duncan. You're obviously really excited about Woodsmith, which is great. It's a little bit of a mixed message, right? You're super excited about it. There's all this upside.
You're taking a quite a big write-down, right, very early in the project. I guess the question is, what has surprised you about the project? Why the write-down? Did the accountants win over the dreamers?
I'd say.
You call the government.
I'd say, Stephen's quite a dreamer, too, I have to tell you. He is constrained by a set of rules that he has to apply very diligently. I think that we have done that in this case. You know, the write-down now is very much a function of the application of accounting rules and the prudence that we would have to apply to these things, given what we know of the project today. It does not build in all of the upsides that I've been speaking about that we are very confident is going to be there. We have to deliver it right, Jason, and that's the work that we're planning to do. Stephen, do you want to talk a little bit more about the mechanics of?
of the write-down?
It is a tough one. Obviously, I don't wanna talk down the accounting profession in any sense. There is a fundamental difference between what you have to do, both from a management and an audit perspective, in terms of a long-dated discounted cash flow model and the assumptions that you have to be able to verify and tick off to put in that over time. Versus a model and a belief that you would have in terms of the true value that you think you could deliver over time, we're just in that circumstance. You'll note if you get to...
I can't remember the note number, but the detailed note on the carrying value and the write-down, we've put sensitivities in there for you because we are using a very high discount rate, which is appropriate for accounting models at the moment. It's greenfield nature, but we've put sensitivities. You can see if that comes back to the corporate WACC, in theory, the NPV and accounting view of the value rises significantly. Similarly with the price, we've put the sensitivity in there for you as well, so that if you do believe, as we believe, in the value the product brings, you can also see the sensitivity that that will drive into the value. That probably reflects our true belief in the value of this product rather than the accounting model. Hopefully you can work through that and we can help you.
Paul and the team can help you through that in the next few days.
Okay. Just to follow up. What's surprised you as you've taken over the project?
Not a lot, Jason, if I'm perfectly honest with you. I mean, when we, when we acquired the project, it was, it was one of the most attractive options that we saw. We knew we were gonna have to do a lot of work to really get under the skin of this and do it, do it in a way that was consistent with a project that would exist in Anglo American for multiple decades. A lot of the things that we, we picked up, during the diligence that we had, access to at that particular point in time are all playing out as expected, in the, in the design and the delivery of the project. I would say no major surprises at all.
Thanks. Oh, there he is.
Thank you. Danielle Chigumira from Credit Suisse. A couple more on Woodsmith, if I may. When Woodsmith goes to Board for approval, at what form will it be in? Will it be the 5 million ton version, the 13 million ton version, something in between?
Yeah, no. We will take the project in phases to the board for approval. The board approved the $800 million for this year. We will have to go back to the board at the end of this year to give them an update on where we are with the project, you know, how the development has turned out. We will get partial approvals to get to the point where we have dimensioned all of the risk and got the capital into a point where we are really happy with it. The right level of engineering, the right level of risk in the project. I would suggest that there's another couple of years.
We'd certainly want to get more detail in the sandstones before we had completed the design on this project, and then really understood the sink rate and time to get to the bottom before we took it to the board for final approval. It's at least two years out, I would think, from a final approval for full notice to proceed in the way that you would have thought about at Quellaveco.
When in 2024, when you're in the sandstone, you'll be in a position to take the 13 million ton version to the board for approval. Is that how we should think about it?
I'm not sure that it would be 13 million tons, but it would certainly at very least be the 5 million tons at that point.
Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Just thinking about it from the marketing perspective, you're speaking about up to 5 million tons in 2030. What would you need to see in terms of feedback from crop studies and so on to get to have confidence in that 5 million tons and then ultimately to the 13 million tons? The commentary that you make around the value of the product and the fairly slow ramp up, there seems to be a bit of inconsistency in that.
Oh, no.
How do I think about that?
No, no, that's very, very much a market development strategy that's coming to play here. I mean, you know, we could put quite a lot of this product into the market relatively early on, just simply on the substitution basis. I think it'll be really hard at that point to start building the premier that should be associated with this product. We'll have to let it earn its stripes in the market, right? I mean, the one thing that the farmer really wants to know and understand is that this thing isn't going to have any detrimental effect to the way that he runs the farm today, for instance, right? Very important that they get real life opportunity, not just from crop trials and external bodies with who we work with, who are providing a lot of this information today.
On their own farms as to, you know, when this stuff is in their store, that it exists in their store in the way that it does with other products. When they put it into the distributor, and they run it on the tractor through the farm, that it distributes in the same way. Of course, when it's in the soil, it does what it needs to do. All of these things need to be known. They learn, and they experience the yield benefits and so on and so on, and so we can build into it on that basis. No, this is a very, very deliberate strategy.
The pace of uptake of that might be different in different parts of the world for all sorts of reasons, and that's why we say up to. We'll get there.
Great. Thank you.
Yeah.
We'll just keep going along the lines, yeah.
Thank you. Sylvain Brunet.
Sylvain
BNP Paribas Exane. Just another one on Woodsmith.
A quick one. Not too sure I understand why the discount rate has changed compared to the beginning, even if you run sensitivities around that?
Sorry.
Why was it changed compared to when the acquisition took place in 2020?
Why has the discount rate changed?
Yeah.
Discount rate hasn't changed. Actually, we use the same discount rate in the acquisition model as we have in this model. Remember, they're two very fundamentally different projects here in terms of what we're building in terms of time, scale, progress, pre-investment. The thing I'd also encourage you to think about, you know, this is very different to a normal... Quellaveco is probably a good example where you've got, and Matt, forgive me here, but a relatively, and Tom, a relatively simple mine with more complex processing and logistics, and everything that goes with that. Whereas this is all about the pre-investment and the infrastructure with very simple processing and logistics. It's actually totally a flip around to how you would normally think it.
Just to back up Duncan's point here on the pre-investment that you need to make, I'd also liken it a little bit to almost a greenfield iron ore mine, where the building of the mine is actually relatively simple, particularly if you're thinking of Pilbara type operations. The investment in the rail and the port infrastructure that you nail to the ground, and you sort of get 1 chance. Yes, you can expand them later, but you get 1 chance to invest in that and scale it and get the efficiencies right. This is almost an identical scenario here. It's just about, you know, I'd just encourage you to think about it a little bit differently to a normal large scale open cut. You know, other deep shaft mines think in exactly the same way as what we're thinking here.
Second question, on iron ore, and back to Kolomela. If you could perhaps help us understand a bit the difference there is between the challenges that Kolomela is experiencing now versus Sishen. These last few years, Kumba was actually good example of a good recovery, and it looks like things have become more difficult. It's a little bit difficult to understand from the outside.
My last question is on Botswana, just to understand what is being discussed at the moment. Is it purely fiscal terms? Have you agreed on some of the items already? Or, and why are you sure that 2023 should be the timeline for the final agreement?
Okay. Thanks, Sylvain. On Kolomela. Kolomela was hampered in a slightly different way last year from Sishen. Some of the fundamental underlying issues associated with the weather and the mine development were very similar to Sishen, all turn around-able in a short space of time. Of course, it had a three to four-month period where it, in addition to that, had had a misfire on one of the main benches in the mine. Phumi and the team, absolutely quite rightly, needed to navigate that misfire in a very, very careful way. You know, that slowed the mining rate down significantly during that period of time. You know, by the end of the year, Kolomela was doing very well.
Now, there is a differentiator too between Kolomela and Sishen in the context of access to rail. At the end of the year, when we started to really struggle with rail access during the strike at Transnet and then the extended maintenance period that happened at Transnet, we elected to prioritize the Kumba material onto the rail and we stocked the Kolomela. Those two shouldn't be conflated. Kolomela did get through the misfire situation. The issues that they had similar to Sishen related to the mine issues. That is in progress and doing really well at this point in time, but we will probably still prioritize Sishen to Kolomela onto the rail. Okay. On Botswana.
Actually the vast majority of all of the elements of the negotiation have been completed. I can't remember how many work streams there are, but there's only one outstanding work stream, and that's where the team is working at the moment. Okay.
Morning. Ian Rossouw from Barclays. Just a couple of questions on firstly on Woodsmith. From memory, the serious plan was to get to 13 million tons eventually, so with the bigger shaft, et cetera, is that ultimately the capacity the shafts can do, or is there upside longer term? Stephen, maybe just remind us, I think from memory, the long-term price, you mentioned at the time of the deal was more like $120-$140. Just maybe explain the bridge to the new long-term price. Just lastly on working capital, what should we expect for this year and sort of roll-off of the platinum inventories as well, please?
Stephen, last two for you. On the Sirius plan to 13 million tons, you know, the real constraints in that mine are probably not the ore body. It is really the shaft capacity and the tunnel capacity to get to the port. It's not just simply the size of the conveyances that you need to put in there, which are really important, but actually fundamentally constrained by the ventilation. And our approach to ventilation and, you know, ventilation very important in the context of the mining method that you select, the equipment that you put down there and so on and so on. You know, our approach always was likely to be different from Sirius.
I don't really want to comment on the comparison between our plan and the Sirius plan, because from day one we said we were really attracted to this opportunity because of the nature of the product, because of the size scale of this ore body. What we wanted to do was do our own review on it, work out how we were going to optimize the execution of it, and these are our plans.
On the price, yeah, your recollection is correct. I think we were talking around $125-$140 at the time that we acquired the project. You were spot on there, Ian. What have we done since to inform our view? The economists have gone to town in terms of, you know, fundamental supply-demand balances across the four main nutrients that make up the four main aspects of the product. It's that view of the fundamental supply, demand balance over time expressed as a real price for the relative percentages that informs the $170. We've then gone through and looked at, well, how do we feel about on a balance of probabilities where some of that value is? In a fairly conservative approach, we've added $20 to it.
As Duncan mentioned, if you know, took a different approach, you'd add 100 pretty quickly, and the current market view of that is over 300. We've tried to stick relatively conservative, but it's that fundamental economic build-up view that of the four main nutrients into the 170 as a starting point. I hope that answers the question. On working capital. Yeah, listen, we've had to build a working capital, and it hasn't always been. Some for good reasons, as I think I said in December, and some that we'd love not to see through interruptions of production. De Beers is probably one where we've had a bit of a tick-up in finished goods. Some of that's obviously a view of the team leading into the new year and potential China reopening.
Trying to position for that. Hopefully we'd see that flow through. The other is because we've got the transition of Venetia this year from underground, which the last cut's now been completed. Sorry, the open cut. The last cut has been completed and the underground transition as that starts to ramp up through the year. Again, the team are keen to make sure we've got the appropriate mix of diamonds to take to the market through the year as we go through that transition. We're carrying a little bit of extra stock through there. We have seen, though I'd have to say the last couple of years, we're probably coming into the year, we've had positive views and that's played out well. It's fed into some of the results as we've carried some stock.
It just happens to be across 31 December as we go into site one, so it varies then a little bit through the year. On copper, Quellaveco ramp up, that's good, obviously, in terms of that operation coming up, so we see a little bit of build up there. You'd be aware that there was a fire at the third-party port that we use near Los Bronces that we use to take the product out. That saw a little bit of build up in December. While it's back up and running at lower volumes at the moment, it'll take another few months, I suspect, through the half year. Don't expect an impact on full year sales and certainly no impact on production from that. PGMs is probably the biggest whip build up that we've had across the portfolio.
Some of that's the POC material, you know, the purchase concentrate that we bring in off of current pricing, and so that feeds into our carrying value. Some of it's the Polokwane smelter. You would have seen in the plat result that indicated. That'll take a little bit of time actually to run out. Even though it's up and running and processing well, you get another pinch point just this side of the ACP as you balance the right mix and feed through the ACP. That'll take through 2023 and 2024 to run out. They're the main things that we're watching on the working capital front.
Couple of billion dollars, I'd love to get, you know, at least half of that back in the near term to keep that side happy and that side happy as well in terms of working capital management.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks. Alain Gabriel at Morgan Stanley. Duncan, first question is on Woodsmith. Do you have a sense of the operating costs, if you were to achieve 5 million tons and then subsequently 13 million tons? That's the first question. My second question is, outside of Woodsmith, your growth options for the next five years appears to have stalled or are paused, especially around Mogalakwena and Collahuasi, the expansion. Can you give us an update of where we stand on these growth options outside of Woodsmith, at least for the next five years? Thanks.
Thanks, Alain. Operating costs at Woodsmith still sort of around the 10 million ton mark. We're circa $50 a ton. It'll be slightly higher than that at 5 million tons, but possibly lower than that at 13. The growth options outside of Woodsmith, stalled, I'm not sure that I would characterize it as that. Just that it takes longer to get these things done. The really big projects, in there other than Woodsmith and Collahuasi, are Collahuasi, Sakatti in Finland and Mogalakwena. Those are the big, big options and prizes to go for.
Quite a lot still to have been done on extracting, you know, the optionality that existed certainly at Collahuasi. Team done an excellent job there. Now is the time to start getting our heads around how to bring that forward. That is, you know, also in a world where permitting is a very different type of world today than it was just five years ago. Jorge and the team had to start working out how to re-permit the water that they were using in their current operations before they had to get through thinking about how they were going to expand the operation. I think that that's that's what underpins some of the timing associated with that. Mogalakwena itself absolutely made great progress.
Natasha had the six pillars of work that she was going through to get her head around how we were going to expand this, what the best deployment of capital was between the mine and the plant, what the plant configuration could and should look like in the time to this. I think that in terms of her own program, we're bang on track in terms of where we should be with that at this particular point in time. Sakatti also going great guns from an engineering point of view, but in a really interesting world of permitting, given where that resource is located.
I spent some time in Finland, a month or so ago. Spoke to people. I mean, very, very much all incentivized to want to try and make this happen, but still quite a lot of work to do, from an EIA perspective.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Good morning. Richard Hatch from Berenberg. Question on capital allocation. You've just bought 9.9% of Canada Nickel for $25 million. It's a really interesting project. Looks like it could be quite big, long life. I wouldn't want to say it, but if you did acquire it and we sit here five, 10 years down the line, we're talking about the same things. You know, Junior takes a project forward, you then have to recapitalize it, put it right. You know, the CapEx is significantly more than what was initially envisioned. Why not buy it now? You can buy it for $150 million, put a small premium on it.
You know, for the amount of cash that you generate, you could easily put your foot on an interesting province in a commodity you like, which you're underweight on based on your pie chart. Why not buy the whole thing now and get it done? That's the first one.
You wanna answer that one? Try and delegate that one.
Is this gonna go to capital allocation and balance?
All right. I'll take it. It's an interesting project, but a very early stage. I suppose we're, you know, we're looking at it from almost a technology sort of perspective on it. It's really quite low grade, but potentially large scale, but very early day in its life. You know, we're happy to come in as I can't remember the number, 9-point something% shareholder, with others. It's early days and happy to be part of.
Part of that work program in the next few years. Let's see, let's see how it develops. It is quite early days. Large-scale, low-grade, maybe technology can work for us here as well, and a few other little twists that we'll work on.
Yeah. In the first instance, the, you know, the off-take component to that was very attractive and important to us. As Stephen said, the idea that we could actually deploy some of our thinking in terms of the technologies around the dry stack management, et cetera, et cetera, was also attractive. We, you know, we're in. We have, you know, we have a seat at the table there, which is very helpful for us in terms of thinking about what the options are in the future.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Sorry. Going back to Woodsmith, I mean, using $50 per ton cost, it's hard to see how this project can generate more than single-digit ROICs 5-10 years down the line, right? Given the $5 billion upfront CapEx. I'm just thinking how it stacks up against all the other options that you have, like Mogalakwena. I mean, in terms of going back to the capital allocation framework. Was this still the best project you could do at this point in time? Is it kind of the sunk cost fallacy holding you back into you've, you know, you already sunk 300 meters of shaft, so let's go ahead with it?
Stephen's going to answer that question. Before he does, I want to tell you that this project and the allocation of capital to this project is not holding up either, Mogalakwena or Quellaveco in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah. Correct answer. Well done. Totally agree with that. Listen, we have a very strong view of the value that we think we can deliver from this. You know, you can do some simple sums in terms of, you know, a $50 cost and potential revenue number per ton. The cash flow that this thing can generate for a very, very long period of time is very attractive to have as part of that portfolio. If you put that through your calcs, as we have done, obviously you're missing a few bits and pieces in terms of your own simple models, and we will hopefully help you with that over time.
If you then de-risk the project as it comes through its natural life cycle of time and certainty, with our view of the market, we think it'll stack up really quite attractively. Just at the moment, you're not allowed to put in certain other benefits from an accounting perspective that we would see. You know, having a strong cash flow revenue generating, a business in your home head office country is something that we haven't had ever since we moved to London. To have that as part of the portfolio is also quite an attractive thing in terms of overall economics.
Is it possible to get further tax benefits given lots of projects like, you know, Britishvolt megaplant there, et cetera, in that region has fallen off?
Listen, one of the things that this project does bring is very attractive, growth and activity to a region of the U.K. that needs attractive growth and activity. You know, it's one of the biggest capital projects, you know, north of London. In terms of both the government priorities, our priorities and the value and community activity and social aspects, we think it can bring, it plays very well, into that whole story.
Thanks, Miles. Also a few of you asked, maybe just on Woodsmith as well seeing as I've got a few questions, but not all the answers yet. Would you bring in a partner? I mean, to de-risk like you did with Quellaveco. On the tax, are we right to say at the moment there is no tax benefit other than sort of the offset to head office costs, but there's no kind of sort of lower tax rate for a certain period of time or anything like that?
There's no lower tax rate, and there is no head office tax benefit in the models as we present them today. Under the accounting standards, you're not permitted to do that. Those would be upside, if they were to play out in eventually.
I mean, I'm sure you have, but you probably won't share it. With the IRR on the project is, you know, the base case. Is that sort of over 10% or over 15%?
I expect it will meet our hurdles around when we get to that final decision point, as we factor in our view of value and the optionality that this project brings through time, and how we see the product in the market. We've got to prove up some of those things as we get towards final decision. Where I sit today, and I think where we are as a management team and a board, is that we're confident that will play out into that sort of territory, to cross the hurdles.
Just your point on potential syndication of the project.
Yeah.
Always open to that, Miles. There are two really good reasons to think about these things from time to time. You know, one is there a partner that's additive to you and and can enhance an outcome that that you on your own couldn't do? Or is this is this a good way to manage risk given the nature and type of the project and location of the project going forward? All of that said, it has to be the right partner, and it should really be at the right time if it's going to be value accretive to shareholders. There are no plans to do it right now, but that doesn't mean that there won't ever be.
Maybe just on platinum as well. I mean, Mogalakwena is starting to look like more of a mediocre asset rather than a super special asset that we like to believe. You know, when you look at the lower grades and sort of performance over the last 12 months. You know, could you give us a sense as to how the grade profile will evolve and how we'll get Mogalakwena back at the left-hand side of the cost curve?
Matt's in the room, so as he's in the room, I'm gonna ask him to talk to that grade profile. I think the most important thing to remember is that every asset, so we see it at Los Bronces, we see it at Collahuasi, has a grade profile through the whole of that asset. There are times in the phasing of the development of that asset, where you go through higher grade, lower grade, harder ore kind of characteristics and so on and so on. That is a phase that Mogalakwena has been in at the moment, and it has had some difficulties that have been really made starkly prevalent by the elimination of the interprocessing stockpile associated with the geometallurgical model from a predictability point of view.
We are getting on top of that, and that we will solve during the course of this year, I'm sure. It is still an incredibly good asset. I mean, the underground elements of this asset, so the ore body at depth is still probably a differentiator ore body from any in its class. Matt, do you want to talk to a little bit more detail about the grade profile?
Certainly, Duncan. Thanks for the question. I guess starting from an endowment standpoint, this is an incredibly remarkable resource. The extent is 18 km along strike. It's not closed at depth. Ore body width, you know, varies from 40 to a couple of hundred meters. Depending on where you are in the pit, there's a lot of variability from north to south. Where we're moving the next few years into the southern part of the pit, where you see much higher grades in the next two or three pushbacks, which will definitely help that grade profile. When you start to look at the transition to underground, we'd be a lot more selective in how we mine.
We're looking at having grades, you know, closer to the four, five, six grams per tonns instead of the run of mine from the open cut around that two to three. Looking over the next, you know, 10, 15 years as some of those potential options become real, I think you'll see some really exciting things around that grade profile actually improving.
Liam.
Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank. I'll give you a break from Woodsmith. Two questions. One on De Beers. I just wanted to come back to your comments about everything almost being done. Should we take that as meaning that there's not gonna be any material change in kind of the ownership and the economics as they've stood for the last 10 years? Secondly, I guess more of a broader question on the group. You know, Anglo still is a fairly complicated business when you look at how many assets you have, the different regions and so on. Do you think about, you know, streamlining or divestment steps from here just to really kind of perhaps take the simplification another step forward? Thank you.
On De Beers, Liam, I mean, it is clearly a negotiation, right? It's one that happens every five years for us, and it is in both parties' interests to come up with a value accretive deal on both sides of the fence here. I, you know, I don't want to forerun any of the detail of this thing. I mean, we are in the middle of a negotiation at this point in time, but the negotiation is being done in good spirits on both sides of the fence here. From an Anglo structure point of view, you know, of course, if I had a blank sheet of paper, it wouldn't look like this from a structure point of view.
What I am really very comforted by is the quality of the underlying asset base that exists in that structure. There's not a lot I can do about this, you know, in the, in the short run at all. I know that we are quite effective at being able to manage through that complexity, and we'll continue to do that for as long as we can. Yeah.
Thanks. Tyler Broda from RBC. The Woodsmith project, it's $5 billion or $5 billion, $1 billion a year for 5 years to get to the 5 million tons. What is the sort of capital intensity we should be looking at for the 5-13 million ton next steps? Should we think that you go straight from 5- 13, depending on how the market develops? When do we expect this to become free cash flow positive, I guess, as well?
Yeah. Okay. Tyler Broda, on the rate at which we progress from 5- 13, I think very much a function on how we, how the market strategies in terms of development are playing out. I don't have the capital intensity numbers at my fingertips here, but certainly, yeah, it was a significant drop, between 13 and 5. Paul Dunne, you don't have them to hand, do you?
About a third.
It's about a third of the capital intensity to go from 5- 13, as it was from 0- 5.
That's all because of that pre-investment in the main elements.
Thank you.
of infrastructure to get you there.
Just a quick follow-up, if I could? The opposite of Liam's question. You're seeing a lot of talk now about M&A in the space. How do you think Anglo American is viewing M&A at this point from an acquisition standpoint?
Same way we've always viewed M&A. you know, I mean, to the extent that there is an M&A opportunity for us where we can actually lean into with a real difference at the end of the day, so make differentiated outcome from a value perspective, you know, it is in play. it will always have to compete with any of the internal options that we have. we look at it all of the time. None of that's changed.
Right. We've got two last questions on the telephones. Dom, can we go to you first, please? We are, unfortunately, quite strapped for time. Do you wanna go to the telephones?
You need to say that into the microphone.
If you've got Dominic O'Kane from JPMorgan, your line is open.
I've got two questions. First one on, again, going back to capital allocation. Duncan, you made the comment that Woodsmith isn't constraining your ability to move forward with your growth options. I would argue that it is having an impact on your shareholder distributions by virtue of your net debt number. Can you just help us or remind us what your guardrails are on excess capital distributions from this point forward? I.e., how can shareholders access returns greater than the 40% payout? My second question is just on South Africa generally. I think this is the first full year where you've not been subject to capital controls.
Can you just maybe remind us what the impact that is on your day-to-day business and treasury management?
Why don't I deal with that one first, if you're happy to. Yeah, it's actually almost been probably two full years, I'd suggest, that we've had the restrictions on the capital controls lifted in practice.
You know, I suppose the country used to have a pretty much you can't move it out unless you get permission policy. Now that's moved to everything can go out unless you need to get specific approval type policy. The main institutions through finance ministry, reserve bank, et cetera, have been really committed to that journey. We now benefit from that. That's more like an Australian FX management regime than perhaps what they had previously, just to use an example. We have full freedom. You know, we notify them after the event for, you know, large things that exceed certain limits, as opposed to having to seek permission in any way for, you know, dividend payments or for balance sheet management.
It is just a routine movement of cash flow across borders like it would be for any other, for any other country now. It's been really pleasing to see that they've really committed to that policy change and delivered very clearly on that policy change. It's been a great assistance to us. Do you want me to have a go at the other one or you wanna crack first? Yeah.
Let me just say Dom, and Stephen, you can add to this. You know, we are absolutely looking to profitably grow this company, and we're doing this because it is definitely in the shareholders' interests for us to do that. You know, from a net debt per point of view and how we think about that in terms of distributions, you know, our position on this hasn't changed a hell of a lot. Just to sort of, you know, roughly dimension that. You know, if net debt ever ended up well below $3 billion, of course, you know, we'd be almost certain that there'd be a redistribution of some of that excess capital.
If it were between $3 billion and $5 billion, there's always a conversation that we have. In fact, we debate this every half, with the board as to where the money is going. Above $5 billion, unlikely that there'd be major distributions in addition to the 40% payout ratio. Stephen, do you wanna add to that?
Yeah. Not a lot to add. I think you've answered it pretty well. I think really it's about that balance that I often speak about, and we weigh those things up over time. I think we've had a pretty good track record of considering those extra returns when prices, markets, and balance sheet position allow for that. We do actively consider it, and I think we've demonstrated we do act on it as well.
Well, we've actually lost our last question. I think Mark's last. The last question has gone. Because of the time, five to eleven, thank you very much indeed. We'll call it to an end. Thanks for joining us this morning.
Thanks all.
You too.