Good afternoon, good morning. Thank you for joining us wherever you are. Welcome to Glencore's 2025 Capital Markets Day. Firstly, a bit of housekeeping. As you will have seen, there are quite a few slides, so we'll try and get through the slides first, and we'll call for Q&A at the end of the slides. So I'll hand over to Gary to introduce the team.
Thanks, Martin. Welcome. Good to see everybody here. Thanks for those who are here in person, those who've joined us from webcast. Thank you very much for joining. This is our first Capital Markets Day since, excuse me, 2022. We're going to have a number of presenters today. Normally, you just see mainly Steve and I, excuse me, but we're going to have a whole bunch of others joining us.
Xavier Wagner, who many of you know, our Chief Operating Officer, Jon Evans, Industrial Lead for our Copper Department, Martin Pérez de Solay, CEO of our Argentina business, Christoff Kühn, Head of Major Projects, and particularly focused on the Argentine copper projects, Steve, you know, Jyothish, I think you all know as well, who recently has taken over as Global Head of Marketing for Metals and Bulks, and Andrew Fikkers, our Senior Coal Trader and Analyst, who will be presenting on the coal market. We've also got a few others in the room, just particularly to call out Maxim Kolupaev, who now runs our oil and gas business, our marketing business out of London as well, Colin, who runs the industrial side of that, and Warren Blount, who's our CFO. You'll see some other familiar faces around.
We'll also have some guest appearances from Shah Chaudari on the technical side in copper; Michael Farrelly, who's our CFO of our copper department; and other Glencore people you know: Markus Walt, Sean, Sarah, Charlie, Anne, and the team who are here. So with that, we kick straight off. I'm going to go to the whole slide. Okay, so what is Glencore's strategy? What are we going to do? Who are we? We have a clear vision about what we are and what we want to be, and we have the right elements to get there. So this is how it all fits together. We're a diversified miner across critical minerals, across energy needs, and a world-class marketing business. Our portfolio, in particular copper, is world-class.
We have a base business of terrific producing assets and a best-in-class, and what we believe, are the best portfolio of projects in copper to grow this business. Aligned with that, we have a coal business. The coal business supports the energy needs of today as we transition in the world. It's a high-quality, long-life business, and associated with that is our steelmaking coal business. Steelmaking coal business supporting infrastructure needs going forward, both in decarbonization and general global growth. Steelmaking coal business being low cost, high quality, terrific geography, many, many decades of resources. And pulling it together as the third pillar in that value creation strategy is a best-in-class marketing business.
A marketing business that not only supports the assets that I've spoken about, these unbelievable copper assets and these great coal assets, but also provide to our customers services using our own set of marketing assets, as well as levering off some of the other assets in our business, like our zinc business, our alloys business, our nickel business, etc. So this presentation is more focused on copper, and we're going to spend quite a bit of time on copper, in particular where we sit now today in copper, producing about 850,000 tons of copper this year, rebasing back up to a million tons of base copper production as we were a few years ago, and then the growth beyond that, and the growth beyond that really is going to be big.
We're going to grow in terms of what we can get to in terms of growth is approximately an incremental 1.5 million tons of long-life annual production for many, many decades to come. Moving across to the right, where a key part of our business is our coal business, and why do we keep coal, and why do we need coal? Well, it's not just because our shareholders said we should keep coal. We believe we should keep coal. It makes a lot of sense to keep coal. Look, if shareholders change their minds, they don't want us to keep coal, we can always relook at it.
But as we sit today, and we're going to talk a little bit about the energy mix and the requirements for fossil fuels going forward, we believe there's a strong case for particularly high-quality energy coal for many decades to come, and we'll present you with some of the numbers and some of the facts. On the coking coal side, that does set us apart from many of our other peers. As I said, we're in the best geography in terms of where our steelmaking coal business is: low quality, very high quality material, and very long reserve life. Coking coal is needed. Steelmaking coal is needed for the infrastructure needs of today and for tomorrow. And these businesses throw off huge amounts of cash flow through the cycle.
Even in low coal price environments, we're still seeing a lot of cash flow coming out of these businesses, which is underpinning the value we're creating for shareholders and giving that money back to you. The third big pillar, of course, is our marketing business, a franchise that's over 50 years in the making, and it's one that simply would not work without the asset base or the marketing assets that go with it. It's a very high ROE business, something that we've been very successful with through the years. You've seen our track record since we went public. We put out a range. We always meet that range, whether we're middle end of the range, the last few years, top end of the range. It's been a very good ROI business for this company.
And it gives us the necessary diversification using our marketing assets, using the commodities or the mines and industrial production that we have, both in copper and coal, but as well as the other commodities we have, to be able to service our customers. The service of our customers, and Jyothish will talk a lot of that later, allows us to extract value throughout the value chain. So that's the three big pillars. To achieve that, we've optimized and simplified our operating structure, which has promoted accountability and delivery. Now, yes, we have had criticism from you guys in the room and many around our delivery of production numbers and our ability to deliver. We have changed. We haven't been sitting on our hands. We haven't been doing nothing.
We've made substantial changes in this business, and Jon and Xavier will take you through some of the changes that we've made that allows us to be very confident that what we present today is what will be delivered. And what does all that lead to? It leads to what we've always been here for, which is constant focus on long-term value creation for our shareholders. We've returned nearly $25 billion, or more than $25 billion over the last five years to shareholders, and we believe with the market and our business set up like it is around these key strategies and this portfolio that we have, that we'll be able to continue to provide great returns to our shareholders. So moving down a little bit into some of the detail on why we're so confident on where we are.
On the left-hand side, this is a slide that everybody will have seen in some shape or form. This is around the energy transition in the world and how much money's been spent, and we know everybody has different estimates, but we know it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. That transition is fed by our critical minerals that we have in our business. That transition is fed by the copper, the cobalt, the nickel, the zinc, the lithium, which we trade, all those sorts of things. A key part of the growth that underpins why these operations and why this business is necessary. On the other side, though, let's look at fossil fuels, and everybody says, "coal is dying. We don't need coal. What do we need coal for?" We look at fossil fuels across the business, or across the decades.
Since 2004 to now, in the 20 years, fossil fuels have lost 7% of the market share. That's true, but the fact is, the world has spent nearly $10 trillion, and the use of fossil fuels has gone down from 85% to 79%. That's all $10 trillion has done, and when you look at it on absolute terms, the pie's grown. So in actual fact, the use of absolute units of fossil fuels has gone up from 2004 to 2024, and thinking forward, you want to go build a nuclear power station today? We know Hinkley Point, whatever it's called here in the U.K., you're 20 years away, at least. You want to build a gas-fired power station? You've got a five-year wait time for a gas turbine. So the need for fossil fuels, in particular high-quality steam coal in today's world, is absolutely required.
And that's where we feel strong, and Andrew will take you through it, our strong conviction that the demand for fossil fuels, in particular coal, will remain for a period to come. Now, going forward, that $10 trillion to be able to achieve what the world says they need to achieve is all of a sudden $300 trillion. That's how much needs to be spent on the energy transition. We've all been seeing the numbers, the number of passenger vehicles, the number of solar panels, the number of wind turbines, whatever it may be. They need the commodities we have. It cannot happen without the copper, the cobalt, the nickel, the aluminum, zinc, vanadium, and even the steelmaking coal. It cannot happen. And when you see that kind of spend to come, the need for these is absolutely critical. Another graph on the left that most will have seen.
This is the supply gap in copper to what is needed. Now, different estimates around. This estimate is a 27 million-ton deficit by 2050. We've seen others that are much higher than this, others a little bit lower than that. But needless to say, when you look at this graph and you've got the existing production that we have in the world today, the announced and probable and possible projects that are coming on, the deficit continues to grow. And this is why we need the copper. Now, many people will say, "Glencore, you've told us you're going to build, and you've told us you're waiting to see $12,000 copper," or whatever it is that you're going to say, "You're not really serious about building copper mines. You talk a good game, but you don't really do it." Why today is it different?
Why today can we stand in front of you and tell you today, "Yes, today we are going to build the copper mines." It's not only because of the graph on the left, because that graph on the left has been around for a long time. What we consistently said is we want to see that that deficit that is playing out in the market is being translated into price, consistent price increases that allow for the profitability of these mines, not to cannibalize our existing business, because we want to keep our existing business as profitable as possible, but feed in tons into a growing deficit to allow us to maximize value both on our existing base business and our projects. That's what we want to do. What's given us comfort? Let's look at the graph on the right-hand side.
You can see from 2022, beginning or middle of 2022, somewhere around beginning of 2022 to middle of 2024, prices weren't indicating that this deficit was there. Prices were showing that, in fact, the trend is going the other direction. We did not have the comfort to be able to sanction and bring mines into production in a market that we saw the trend going the wrong way. The price was telling us something different. Now, we didn't sit on our hands and do nothing in that period. We were consolidating, buying things like MARA and doing a whole lot of work in our business. But we wanted to see price starting to reflect the fact that this deficit is coming. Since the middle of 2024, we've seen prices start to grind higher. Every year, going a little bit higher.
We don't like the spikes because we know spikes are because of things in the market which are maybe unnatural. We want to see a continual grind higher of pricing to give us that comfort that we will reach that $12,000, $13,000, $14,000, because you don't turn on a copper mine in five minutes. It does take time, so since the beginning or middle of 2024, I think it's April 2024, we've now started to see a trend change and a step change in copper pricing, and over that period of time, we've seen it. Buyers are getting used to it. We do not see much demand destruction. We do not see buyer strikes.
That's giving us the comfort to say, "Now is the time to sanction these projects." These projects can come in the market, the copper can come into the market, and not cannibalize our existing projects and continue to feed in the deficit shown on the left. So delivering our priorities. What are our priorities and the key priorities? And this is where the team will talk you through, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this slide. Operational excellence. We've heard the market. We've heard you. We know there's some concerns. We made structural changes in our business. There are reasons for some of them.
We're not here to explain all the reasons and the likes, but we've made some changes, and you'll hear from the likes of Jon and Xavier around what we've done to ensure that there will be reliable and safe delivery and performance of our targets. Portfolio optimization, I'll go into in a second, and de-risking the copper growth. That is really why we're here today. And that's why we're going to do a deep dive later on with the team, going through each of our projects and our existing operations to show you how we've de-risked this and that what we're telling you today will and can be delivered. Okay. So as I said on the previous slide, we'll go back into portfolio optimization.
Since 2021, we've sold approximately 35 different assets or shut down different assets in this business, assets that either are not fit for scale, subpar, didn't fit in with our strategy, or was a good ability for us to be able to recycle capital. So we brought in nearly $6.5 billion through key disposals. We've disposed of things like Viterra, Koniambo, and Mopani and a few others. And associated with that, we've also streamlined our operating structure and our leadership. And that's where Xavier will get into. Now, that's $6.3 billion. Some of it's gone back to shareholders. Some of it has been invested back in the business. But net-net, the business is better and bigger as a result of these disposals. We've enhanced our portfolio materially, buying EVR, and I've spent some time talking about it already, a high-quality steelmaking coal business.
We've bought out the rest of MARA, which will be a key pillar in our copper growth strategy. And Jon and Martin and Christoph will talk about that. We've created a NewRange joint venture with Teck. We bought a tier-one alumina refinery in Brazil with a bauxite operation. And importantly, we've bought back a lot of our own Glencore stock at what we believe is cheap. If what we saw last week at BHP, we're bidding 25% premium for Anglo for their suite of copper assets. We're buying our suite of copper assets much cheaper at a discount versus paying premiums for, in some cases, the very same assets. Cost efficiency. We announced earlier in the year a $1 billion cost savings, over 300 different initiatives. We can update you a little bit on that, but that's going very well.
More than $500 million already implemented, or will be implemented by the end of this year, and very confident to achieve at least that $1 billion by the end of next year. Okay. So delivering our priorities and de-risking the copper growth. Market fundamentals are spoken about. That is why we're here today. The market fundamentals have changed. We've seen a step change in how things are, and that gives us the comfort now through pricing and through demand or supply-demand deficits to be able to bring these copper projects in. Country risks are improving. Not only are they improving, but having a diversified model across Peru, across Chile, across Argentina, across the DRC, that gives us risk mitigation as well. But we've seen improvements in Argentina. We've seen U.S. policy changes, which make things a lot better.
Even the DRC have taken proactive measures around cobalt. That's a pro-investment sign for us to be able to continue running those operations and growing those operations. As a result of those two, our project returns have improved enough so that we can sanction projects, and we've built a team of people, and we continue to build on that team to be able to develop these projects on time and on budget in a professional way, so this is what you'll hear more about during today from the team. I'm not going to go through each one of these. I only need to say this covers our copper portfolio, best-in-class assets, both base business and projects across Peru, Chile, Argentina, DRC, and NewRange in the U.S.. This is what you're going to hear for today, and this is what you're going to hear about.
This is where we are. This is our current base business and what it looks like. Small dip in 2026. That's as a result of the closing of the MICO underground in particular. Then we kick back up into the 2020s back to our base business of a million tons. As you've heard, I think Duncan spoke a lot about it at the Goldman Sachs presentation, or what was it, the fireside that he had at LME Week. He spoke about the challenges we're having at Collahuasi. We're not going to re-ventilate that. Jon and Michael will talk about Collahuasi, but there have been some challenges around Collahuasi, which we come back out of from 2027, 2028. That brings us back up to our million-ton a year base business.
In fact, come the fourth quarter of this year, we're already running at an annualized rate of a million tons. The first half of the year was obviously much lower, and we always said the second half would be production would be heavily weighted towards the second half. So we'll be back up to our million-ton a year base business, largely as a result of the recovery of Collahuasi by 2028. And then where do we go from there? Alumbrera restart. We announced the Alumbrera restart this morning. Alumbrera operated very successfully for many years in Argentina, even under Peronist government. And we announced that this morning. It's a low-capital investment as a standalone business or a standalone investment. Makes a lot of sense for us, higher IRRs. But the key part of Alumbrera, it readies us for the start of MARA. We spoke about Collahuasi.
They're investing in low-grade stockpile leaching. That will add extra volume for the long term, taking all the low-grade stockpiles and additional low-grade material that comes out of any mining and being able to mine that for a period up to 2045. The Peru district around Antapaccay, Antapaccay, Coroccohuayco, and the extended district, in fact, is a huge growth area for us. This is something we spend a lot of time on. Very brownfield. We have existing infrastructure. These are satellite pits that just connect into existing infrastructure. Upgrades, huge amount of value and volume that will come out of our Peru operations. MUMI sulfides, very low capital intensity. In fact, it makes so much sense that we're even considering stopping the oxides earlier and going into the sulfides a bit earlier to be able to capture the value that we get out of MUMI.
Then we bring on MARA, Agua Rica. That'll be effectively the extension of Alumbrera, 36 km away. Christoff and Martin will talk you through that. NewRange, JV with Teck, massive resource. We haven't defined the full resource. That's the first part of NewRange, which is the smaller part, which is the southern part of the resource. As you go further north, the grade improves and the ability to extract additional tonnage increases materially. Collahuasi new concentrator plant. That's the fourth line. That'll add significant value, significant tonnage, low cost, very high grade always, you know. El Pachón is next. Now we're at the top of Everest. I don't think we have enough space in that graph to see the top of it. So that's where we sit Pachón. And then beyond that comes the next stage of NewRange. I spoke about the deposit further to the north.
We continue to grow this business, and we have multiple levers we can pull. This is not all dependent on one mine, one operation, one country, one process. This is multiple levers we can pull to be able to continue growing. Beyond that, the Antapaccay district has further growth opportunities. These are not pie-in-the-sky stuff. This is stuff we know about. It's there. It's achievable, and it's just going to be bolt-on to existing infrastructure. As we stand here today and we have our growth opportunities, our multiple levers we can pull, we're not going to sit here and tell you, "Well, we're going to go and build all at the same time another 2 million or have a business of over 2 million ton of copper." Now, it's possible we do.
It is possible that we do, because if the market needs it and we can de-risk it and the price is there and the way we can do it is possible. But to stand here today and say, "We're going to build all of these at the same time and deliver them all on time on budget," we've said, "We're going to target 1.6 million tons of production by 2035." That is our target. We want to get there. Could it be a little bit more? Yes. Could it be a lot more? Yes. But I think it's fair to say, given the amount of levers we can pull and the optionality we have in this portfolio across multiple countries, a 1.6 million target is probably reasonably conservative and certainly very achievable with the kind of headroom that we have.
So there it is on a page as well, a little bit more detail. You'll all go through this, dates of FRDs, dates of first production, some capital, some long-term sort of lump production numbers, average production numbers. I'm sure you'll go through this after the presentation, but that gives you as much information as you can get here. There's a lot more that can come, but this will give you a flavor of what that toolbox we have to be able to bring the extra tonnage on is. In terms of cost, very, very low cost or capital efficiency. If you look across the business or across the portfolio, our brownfield projects are very low, just about $13,000 a ton, very low compared to industry.
Again, there's not one, okay. Maybe MUMI sulfides very low and Antapaccay district very low, but there's not one that really outweighs the other and why we can pull the trigger on any of these in any order that we want. Even our greenfield, the Pachón district or the Pachón operation, despite the fact, in fact, it's actually quite beneficial that it's in an area that doesn't have much around. It allows us to develop it without the constraints of existing communities or whatever it may be is a relatively low capital intensity for a greenfield operation. The pathway, by 2029, we will be the fourth biggest copper company in the world. By the time we get to 2035 at our 1.6 million tons of copper, we will be the biggest copper producer in the world.
That's excluding any additional optionality above that 1.6 million tons. Importantly, though, on the right-hand side of the graph, we will be on the low end of the cost quartile, first quartile cost producers of copper, the biggest copper producer in the world. With that, I'm going to turn you over to Xavier.
Okay. Thank you, everybody. Morning, and thanks for joining us. I'm going to walk you through some of the changes that we've undertaken over the last few years within the business and really try and give you a sense of why we think delivering that from a production and a project perspective actually is achievable, notwithstanding anything Gary said. The first slide that you see up there really talks to an improvement in bedrock processes. Why do we talk about this?
There's a lot of focus on the structure and how the business works, but really, this is the secret sauce. These are the fundamentals any operating business should have. We've taken these processes over the last few years, really integrated them so we have a consistency of approach in terms of how all of these things work. We get better visibility of the risks and the resourcing that's required to deliver those plans, and we can see where the opportunities are. So ultimately, we can improve the underlying quality of these plans. There's the usual stuff in there around business planning, but also all the work we've done over the last few years on things like tailings, our approach to indigenous peoples, and so on and so forth.
We have a very robust performance review process across each of the business that we run on a quarterly basis that measures a number of performance points across all those elements in there. And of course, we then have an assurance process which underpins that to make sure that we're not just drinking the Kool-Aid. When you look at it from a structure perspective before the reorganization, which I'll talk you through in a minute, what you can see there really reflects the classic Glencore federated model to running the business. Each of these commodity departments are structured slightly differently, and we don't have really a consistent approach to how we run each of those departments. We're not clear that we have the appropriate span that reflects the right level of work across each of those assets. And it's a structure we had to apply our mind.
What is the right structure that lends itself to the ownership and accountability to give us the quality of the decision-making that we need? And we saw an opportunity to kind of improve that to allow us to fulfill our ambition. If you go forward to where we are today in terms of the new structure, you can see obviously what we've done is simplified it dramatically. Ultimately, what we want to see is that the operating businesses operate and the builders go and build effectively that new horizon that we've just spoken about. And what that does is it drives focus on the right issues, importantly by the right people. What you can see in there is obviously the prominence of Argentina taking that out from copper and really elevating it to the same level as some of those other departments.
And Martin will talk through that a bit later in terms of how we've done that. And then off on the right, you can see what we've called special projects. These are really areas that need dedicated management bandwidth to make sure that we take a structured approach to liberating the value that's within that portfolio. The list is there. You see previously [audio distortion] sat in there as well, which we subsequently sold. I think just as you look at that restructure, some thousand roles have been made redundant through that process. That's through removing duplication, capturing regional and local synergies, and getting more focused assurance across the whole business. So that's everything from monitoring, checking, validating, and so on and so forth. These are above-asset overheads that we're talking about in terms of those roles.
If I go to the next one, this really kind of just explains what we did to try and inform how that model is going to work. Copper, Jon will talk a bit more later on today to kind of demonstrate how optimizing that structure allows them to achieve better results, safe, reliable production. I think with nickel, as that portfolio has changed, we've come to the end of some mines, mine life, and so on. We put KNS into care and maintenance. Didn't have the scale to carry and implement the type of systems we need. We considered the scale of that business and what was the best way to ensure we get the performance that we need from it.
Similarly, in zinc, as we've had assets come to the end of their life or we've sold pieces of that business off, we could see that there's natural synergies between that zinc business and the nickel department, both in terms of geographical location, but also with the fleet of metallurgical processing assets that live within both of those departments, and we needed to capture those. Hence, putting the nickel and zinc departments together like you saw on the previous slide. We spoke a bit about that collection of distracting sort of non-core assets, and ultimately, they have real requirements in terms of important stakeholder engagements. They have an opportunity set that potentially comes from business development opportunities for those sites.
And then also we've got revenue-generating businesses in there as well, such as Glencore Technology and XPS, which does a lot of sort of work both internally for us and outside to the market. Projects obviously are key opportunity for us and delivering those projects. And Martin and Christoff will talk a bit later about how it is both in terms of the structure that we've put in place for that. And ultimately, putting the structure in place really gives us the opportunity and the platform by standardizing and harmonizing how each of these departments work to go and capture additional savings through efficiencies and through the way we operate. Ultimately, the idea is to take accountability and put it at the right place in the organization. And that's really what we've done. I'll talk a bit about what that means for the business on the next slide.
Really, once we've settled that structure, we wanted to leverage it to try and deliver the synergies and the savings and the reliability that we expect to see within the business, everything from how the departments function and all the way down to our group functions at the bottom so that we're not managing to the lowest common denominator, but that consistency of approach allows for repeatability and allows for consistency of results that we want to see. Ultimately, fixing the structure, however, doesn't get us all the way there. We can have the right people in the right structure. It's how people work that makes the difference. We looked across the business and tried to determine where is it that we do see evidence of this reliable repeatability that we expect within the business. Our coal business really demonstrated that over a long period of time.
What you see on the slide here reflects the acquisition of a number of businesses over a long period of time. There's also a number of projects which have been built very successfully over a long period of time across that business. We effectively looked at this and studied it and said, "How is it that the coal department went through a process of integrating each one of these businesses as they went through that acquisition so that it performed in line with A, the expectations, but B, could operate consistently with the existing business as these new businesses came in place?" What we did was, and this was really developed from initially in our coal Australia business, but ultimately through the coal business, and I won't go through all of those.
There's a set of key principles which are used to drive and define the way each of those businesses operate. If I call out just perhaps one or two of them in there, if creating your own space, if you're performing, you get left alone. But if you're not, you get help whether you want it or not. We focus on running the business day to day, every day. That's really what it's about. And ultimately, we're managing this business by the numbers. We forget the gut feel. We say this is a data-driven business. Data doesn't make decisions. We want our people to make decisions. Hence, accountability is very important, and we expect them to make the right decisions using that data. So this really underpins that.
When we took this through to all the industrial leads across all the departments, this really resonated as a tool that we could use to try and inform that operating mindset, the accountability model that is so important to us. Each of the departments have gone and taken this and harmonised it for and synthesised it into their particular operating context, but ultimately underpins what we were trying to do. If we look at safety as a proxy for that operating discipline, we know that businesses that have the discipline to do safety well have the discipline to do everything else well also. This is our safe work framework that we use to ultimately drive that safe delivery. It's based on effectively a Deming Cycle plan, do, check, act, which continuously improves.
You can see the key elements within that really underpinned by things like our fatal hazard protocols and some of these other tools that we use. Ultimately, this is our approach to actually delivering those safe outcomes. It goes hand in hand with all those elements around leadership, around structure, around decision-making, and accountability. You can see as we've matured and implemented safe work through our business over a long period of time, a consistent improvement in our safety performance. This represents our fatality performance over that period. You can see as you progress through time, that performance has improved remarkably over that period. Of course, we still have a long way to go. How does that performance compare to our peers?
When we look at this from the ICMM perspective, if you look at the red dot that you see on the screen above Glencore there, that is our TRIF, our injury frequency rate relative to the average, which is the red line, dashed line that you see on the screen, we do a lot better. When you look at it at fatality frequency rate, that's the green bar relative to the green line. You can see at the end of last year, we were bang on pretty much the average. This year, we've halved that. So again, we expect to see that continuous improvement, and fundamentally, what that tells us is that this is an inherently safe business. We know how to operate it. We understand the complexity. We understand the culture and the way we approach accountability. Decision-making really delivers us benefits.
Of course, we don't only manage by the lagging indicators. These are history. We focus on leading indicators. You don't drive the car looking in the rearview mirror, and so we have a whole suite of work that I haven't covered here that really looks at what those leading indicators are like the rest of the business. If we go to outcomes in terms of production, really, this is a high-level look forward of what that copper equivalent production profile looks like going forward. I think important to note, there's a steadily improving trend that you can see across that. They're underpinned by robust quality plans. There's no hockey stick. There's no click the fingers. Don't worry. It'll be right tomorrow. There's really a good quality set of plans which informs that.
Ultimately, you see that if I start on the left-hand side, there's a bit of a dip in 2026. Really, there's two key things there on the zinc side. Obviously, Antamina goes into a different phase of the ore body, so we see a lot less zinc being produced at Antamina. Also, we've got some closures in there as well. MICO, which closed this year. Lady Loretta, which will close at the end of this year. Ultimately, from 2027, if you look forward, our copper business continues to grow in line with that profile that Gary spoke about before. And really, very important to see the detail of those plans as we go through Jon's presentation later on. I think important just to contextualize what that looks like for copper specifically.
I think to confirm, our view is that the low end of that guidance that we committed to will be met at the end of this year. That is where we're trending towards and we aim to deliver. Importantly, as Gary mentioned before, for Q4, we're running at that million-ton annualized rate, which demonstrates to us that in fact, the performance that we aspire to achieve, we have in the business today. Our processing plants can do it. We can plate at that production level. And so we expect to see the ability to lean into that production capacity going forward.
I think if you look at the graph on the left-hand side there, this really tries to say, "Okay, back in December 2022, where did we say we would be for 2025 production?" We said we'd be at just over a million tons of copper production at that point in time. And here we are saying we're going to get to the bottom end of guidance at 850. What's the difference from? The first bar that you see there really relates to African copper and KCC in particular. We are down at KCC, and this is principally in the first instance because of access to land. At the time, we forecast this production level for KCC. The idea was that we had executed a transaction to get access to land, and unfortunately, that land was not delivered for us.
What that does is it complicates the mine plan because it means that all the contingency that you have, you now have to sub-optimize. I can't access the dumps I wanted to. I can't progress the pit in the way I'd like to. And so the whole mine plan gets deteriorated. Ultimately, what that means is that you don't have operating contingency within that. We've also had other issues around power stability within the DRC that we've had to contend with as well. But principally, the key issue there is that lack of access to land really has impacted the quality of the mine plan that we've been able to deliver. We've also sold Cobar over that period. Again, that was not in the plan back in 2022 when this forecast was made.
I think when you look at the performance of the joint ventures, Antamina has performed quite consistently and reliably. The bulk of that really sitting with Collahuasi, which I think we've spoken about for some time. Ultimately, when you look at the shortfall there, the 31, that really relates to where we haven't performed and met our expectation. Part of that, probably a third of that sits with MICO, where we've come actually to the end of life. And the balance really is within the norms. You're talking 2022 for 2025 performance, and that's really the only margin of error. I think when you look more recently and you say, "Okay, in February, where did we think we would be?" The graph on the right really attempts to explain that. We said we would have a midpoint of 880 for this year.
Where have we lost relative to the 880 that we were guiding in February? You can see Collahuasi has been a key contributor to that loss that we've sustained over there with the balance of assets effectively performing largely in line with the plan, and really, that's explaining what we've seen for this year's guidance. If we looked at 2026 and what we said at the beginning of this year in February for 2026, we were guiding for a 930,000-ton year. What are we saying 2026 looks like now? Probably around the 840. The first and probably the most notable thing there is that you can see our African copper business continues to perform in line with our expectations. We've bolstered that business significantly with leadership and routines, and Jon will talk through that in a moment.
The key variance there really sitting with Collahuasi, which I think we've ventilated now sufficiently, really slower production from Collahuasi. But of course, that's expected to recover, and we'll get a bit more detail on that later on. Really, the others have been largely immaterial relative to where we are, and that kind of explains it. On the right-hand side, what you see is effectively the split H1, H2. And compared to this year, it's a lot even, a lot more even than it was this year. I think in the copper department, in and of itself, it's closer to a 49-51, and the contribution from nickel zinc really weights it slightly more to H2, but a far more balanced performance for next year.
Some of the items in there, Antamina has a mill outage in the second half of the year, so that weighs some of that towards the front end. We expect African copper, KCC in particular, to continue performing. I think when you look at the production scorecard, really just looking at the underlying copper business there, you can see that copper volumes are up for next year. The loss in copper volumes really coming out of nickel zinc, in particular, MICO, as we mentioned before, you can see that in there. In the zinc department itself, you can see principally in the base business, we have the closure of Lady Loretta and a few other small losses elsewhere, but principally Lady Loretta. Antamina is a big mover in those figures.
As I mentioned before, as Antamina goes and accesses different parts of the mine, they're principally producing significantly less zinc. I think with nickel, there's a slight haircut there, and principally that's in response to where prices are. We use the opportunity to take some volume out and invest more in maintenance to improve operating reliability within that business. So ultimately, that is what the scorecard looks like going forward, basis that. But I think going into the copper presentation now, we'll hear from Jon and try and get a bit more detail on what's in those plans. Thank you.
Thanks, everybody. Good afternoon. I'm going to explain today why we are ready for growth, and obviously, with Michael Farrelly, our CFO of Copper and also Shah Chaudari, our head of technical, we'll take you through the reason why we are ready and positioning ourselves for the next stage.
Just before I go through all of the points, I'd like to sit on point one for simplifying the business and also build on what Xavier presented earlier. So we talked about a devolved and decentralized model, and what Xavier talked about was the principles, basically, of what we call our DNA. So we set a clear set of expectations. It's a smart philosophy. I know it's a back-to-basics approach. So specific, measurable, attainable, reliable, and time-bound. So it's the accountability model, and we drive that all the way through our operations. We also do what we say we do. We also walk the line. We're line-owned and line-led. So that's all the way through our businesses, and that's why we will deliver. And so it's the accountability model driven all the way to the front line. We lead by example, and we also create and encourage ownership.
So that's that small business mentality that's part of our DNA and also being commercially astute. So that's coming from the marketing side of our business and the way that we run, right? We also manage by numbers, and so that's transparency of reporting. And everything that we do is performance-driven. We have to drive performance to deliver the promise and also continue to grow. And so why does this matter to Glencore? Well, it builds high-performance teams that will deliver into the future. And that's what we need to do, right? It creates trust and supports success. We build good teams, and we support for success all the way to the front line and creates an environment of improvement and innovation in line with our entrepreneurial value. On the second point, we also empower the regions and the assets with the right people and the resources.
We have a small center. We've actually reduced the center to very similar to our coal business, so we've replicated the coal model. That enables us to push resources back to the regions and the assets, so we're supporting the assets for success. We've standardized structures, so we've got the industrial model, the financial model, and also the marketing model, but also the technical model, and that's replicated all the way through the business, and that enables us to deliver on time and also be agile and simple in the way that we deliver. We've also elevated the importance of the mine plans and expectations, and Shah Chaudari will take us through what we're doing on the technical side to make sure that we always deliver on time when we're sitting in that planning environment, and what we also do is that we're always on site.
We're present on the site for all of our quarterly reviews. There's no helicopter management in this business. We're going to be back to the front line and face-to-face support for success and get some skin in the game in the way that we deliver and high levels of operational visibility. This team's always in the trenches and will be in the trenches. There's no surprise objective, and we focus on absolute delivery. That's the only way we will continue to grow. On the asset side, it's planned to deliver. Again, Shah will take us through that. It's making sure that we've got the appropriate structures on site and professionally supported. We're resourcing for the right capability and ensuring that we've got standardized planning systems and training and development of our people and dynamic planning tools.
We adjust quickly to any variables that may come through. In terms of delivering the plan, it's the accountability model, as I mentioned before. It's predictable and risk-based, so no surprise objective. That way, we'll always deliver in line with our promise. In terms of the improvement side, it's the operation. It's just a back-to-basics approach, right? We're going back to the way that we've always been. We've always worked in Glencore and that operational discipline focus. Also, we focus on the high priorities. We focus on the critical few and the stuff that matters. In terms of the team, I'd like to just introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Michael Farrelly. He has more than 30 years of experience and obviously 20 years actually working in LATAM.
He has worked across Alumbrera, Lomas, Antapaccay, Antamina, and also 10 years as Chief Financial Officer of Collahuasi. That's why Michael will take us through the joint ventures today, and he is intimately across all things Collahuasi. We also have our Head of Technical, Shah Chaudari. He is returning back to Glencore, and he has also worked across the geographies and commodities for more than 25 years, but also has a track record of establishing technical excellence and high-performance planning teams. We have assembled a team with a track record of delivery, and it is a combination of internal Glencore promotions and new leaders in building the capability that we need to deliver the future. Each leader is basically a subject matter expert, and we have got more than 330 years of experience in this team.
It's a high-quality team and focused on functional excellence and delivery and safe, reliable production, as Xavier mentioned before. So also walking across and moving across to the right-hand side. And I'm not going to talk about the functions, but I'll probably focus on what we have in terms of our operators. So in Africa, we have Mark Davis and Marie-Chantal Kaninda, and they're driving our African operations. They also have experience across the globe in multiple commodities, but they're also driving enormous success. And this year, our African assets have been the best performance, and particularly in the second half, where we've now been on the 1 million-ton run rate. The African assets are at the bottom and the base of everything that we've achieved in the second half, and we believe we'll continue to build on that, and I'll explain that further.
Our Chief Operating Officer of South America is Luis Rivera. He's just returned back to Glencore and has 33 years of experience and worked in Alumbrera and Antapaccay. He actually built Antapaccay. So he worked Antamina and Antapaccay and actually developed the project. Him coming back is going to add value to us and what we do in that district, in that mineralized district. In that change that we made through the year, if you recall, we had issues in April in Antamina, and we were able to, and at that stage, Abraham Chahuán was our Chief Operating Officer for LATAM, and he went back into Antamina Joint Venture. He was in there previously for nine years, so we parachuted him back in to turn that performance around for the shareholders.
We also parachuted four Glencore operators in, a Vice President of Operations, Vice President of Planning, Vice President of Health and Safety, and also a Mine Manager to assist and support that turnaround in Antamina. And Antamina is now on target to hit all of its targets for the year, which is really impressive. In terms of Collahuasi and one of our other joint ventures, we've talked a lot today, probably about some of the surprises from Collahuasi, but what we can do is say that Jorge Gómez and Dalibor Dragicevic, the Chief Operating Officer, they've got a record of delivery, and we know that that will return very soon.
So again, we know that we need to transition through some of the issues that we are facing, the primary, secondary ore, and Michael and Shah will take us through the reasons where we are, but we're confident that that'll turn around really quickly. And it's a generational asset. From my side of things, listen, I've worked across Mount Isa. I was responsible for the Blackstar Open Cut as well. Ernest Henry was some of the assets that we did divest. And I've worked four years in Argentina and six years in Chile between Lomas and Altonorte and was President of Collahuasi for a short period for two years. And also have experience across Peru and Africa. I guess in terms of the new team, it's a combination, as I said, of promotions, new leaders, and new blood.
Listen, the first half was a slow start, and we saw that in the way that we performed. But what we have seen is green shoots. And the second half, we've delivered really well, and we've come home really strong. So we're now on that 1 million ton run rate, and it's been able to test the business. And what we have done is develop the teams below that and seen real success coming through. And on the right-hand side, obviously, Martin and Christoff will take you through our growth objectives. What I can say is what we will do is, and you'll see the theme through this presentation, we're leveraging on our installed capacity, and we bring ourselves back to the growth strategy that we've always had. So just in terms of going through each of the operations, so through KCC has been the base of our recovery this year.
Just to go through each of the numbers quickly. I know it's not easy to see, but if you look at what's in KCC and look at number one and number two, that's our KOV pit and Mashamba pit. That's where we mine the oxides that we provide to the oxide, the hydrometallurgical plants and oxide leaching. In number three, we've also got our KTO underground, so there's an enormous opportunity for further growth in this area. It's got latent capacity, and obviously, we're looking to see what we can do is leverage that. We've got further capacity in roasting in the Luilu refinery, which is number five. That's what we're looking to do to grow KCC. We've got the KCC concentrator supplying Luilu refinery, and we're sending concentrates and also oxides through that process to then recover the Luilu refinery to 300,000 ton.
We've been on a 300,000 ton run rate for the second half of this year, so we're excited about what's going on here as well. I just want to touch on a couple of more points, and this is the Mupine TSF, which you can see up the top there in number six and the Near West TSF. Xavier touched on the fact that we have been restricted with land access, etc., and that does change sequencing a lot, but some of those things are being resolved at the moment, and we're looking forward to opening that mine up to breathe and sequence properly so that we can effectively recover the plan back to the 300,000 tons of installed capacity that we have. The other opportunity that we do have is number eight, is basically growing the mine towards that T-17 area.
So that's the opportunity that we do see with the KOV pit in moving and sequencing in that particular direction. Just in terms of the life of mine drivers, obviously, this is a long-life mine, 18 years plus with further opportunities. We have been constrained in the past, and we touched on that earlier, which has provided some sequencing issues in terms of waste and delivery. And it's not the most effective way to plan, but we're now finalizing the land access package, and we believe we're going to be seeing further improvements coming through as a result of that and obviously unlocking the pathway through to 300,000 tons, which is the run rate we're sitting on at the moment. We also have additional potential, and so we have more than 20 million tons of 1% copper in inventory sitting there.
So we're looking at what we can do in terms of ore sorting, etc., which should multiply that by about 300% in terms of copper grades. So that gives us an enormous amount of inventory to then provide to the Luilu refinery and move us back into that 300,000-ton run rate. We've also renewed basically the entire leadership team, and we're seeing absolute demonstrated strong results coming through, which is really building momentum as we move into next year as well. So the recoveries, as I keep saying, it's come through our African operations, which we're very proud of at the moment, and the team's doing really, really well. So if you look at the graph below, the whole objective of what we do is bringing copper forward. As you can see, there's a trajectory from 2025 onwards in terms of moving back to that 300,000 capacity.
We're doing everything possible to try and bring some of that forward. So that's optimizing that inventory, as I mentioned before. We've got the underground that has further capacity. We've got roasting capacity in the Luilu refinery, and everything we do, we'll keep building on that. So I want to hand over to Shah, and he'll take you through what we're doing on the technical side.
I'll spend a bit of time on this slide because it highlights our planning concepts, which are common for all of our mines, and KCC is a very good example to talk through that. So starting on the left-hand side here with our pit optimization. So for KCC, this is the footprint of our public reported JORC reserves. So the coloring is what we call a revenue factor.
And so the red area, for example, is the current void. The red area is what we say is marginal ore at 60% of what our long-term copper price is. So for our reserves, we're using $9,100 per ton. And so obviously, this is the highest margin, this area and this area. And we have the subsequent cuts go through, so cut five, cut six, all the way through to cut twelve. So what we then do is we take the optimization of the sequencing, and this is the current base case, which Jon showed in the previous slide. And so what you can see here is we have opportunities that are in our base case that we can bring forward. So this cut twelve area, for example, is an option that we're looking at. The current pit here is strip ratio of one to fourteen.
This area here is seven to one. So what that means, sorry, this is 14 to one. This is seven to one. So what this means is we're currently looking at the opportunity to bring cut 12 forward into the four-year budget. The hauling efficiency is very important for our cost driving. So our haulage cost is two-thirds of our mining cost. And so we can almost on real time see how efficiently we're hauling. So industry average is that we have about 30% inefficiency in our haulage. So efficiency basically means that your truck should always be heading to its destination, which is the dump. If you're hauling away from the dump and you're not going up at a ramp at one in ten, you're leaving money on the table. And so currently, we're sitting around that average of 30% inefficiency because you can't always drive straight towards the dumps.
But what we feel is that we could improve that by at least 10%, get to about 20% inefficiency. And so we're talking large amounts of dollars, which isn't in our current cost profile. So for example, if we reduce our hauling distance by 100 m, every 100 m, that's about $25 million worth of OpEx you're pulling out and about $5 million of annual CapEx through reduced equipment replacement from less truck hours. The next one is sinking rate. So the importance of sinking rate can't be understated. Sinking rate basically is saying if we have a—for every shovel, we need 150 by 300 m to operate each shovel. The sinking rate is how fast or hmetow many benches do we sink per year. So we're basically taking the volume that a shovel does and then dividing by the area that it operates in.
What we like to see is sinking rate over 100 m a year. Almost real time, we can see on a week-by-week, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter basis on how fast we're sinking. A higher sinking rate means that we get to high grade as fast as possible. That's basically how our pits are designed. We have a safe geotechnical angle, which is used to get to the highest grade ore in the bottom of the pit. The faster we sink, the faster we can get to ore, and we have a constant supply of fresh high-grade ore to put into our stockpiles. At the same time, the faster you sink, the less overburden in advance that you're carrying, so advanced stripping cost gets reduced. The next one, number five, is mining compliance to plan. We report this weekly on every single site.
We receive monthly reports, and then every quarter, Jon, Michael, and I, we go to every single site and we do a quarterly review and we go through any non-compliances to plan with each of the sites to understand what drove those non-compliances, and then getting right down into the operational, the final process of mining, we currently have about, at KCC, 15% dilution when we're mining our ROM ore, and so obviously, any reduction in that dilution adds to plant throughput, so if we can reduce that dilution down to 10%, that means we're getting an additional 5% throughput through our plants per year on a metal basis.
When we look at all of these opportunities which aren't included in the base plan, there's significant room to actually bring that growth back to that 300,000 ton per year run rate, which is our installed capacity on our electrowinning plant. Jon mentioned the low-grade sorting. That's something we don't have in our base plan. We currently have 20 million tons of ore sitting on stockpile at 1.1% copper. We have ore sorters being delivered. Our first two ore sorters arrive at the end of this month from China. We've sent quite a few tons away for testing. What we're seeing is the ore sorters are taking that 1.1% low-grade stockpile and we're getting out the back end of those sorters, which is essentially a sea container, 3.5% copper.
What we're going to start trialing at the end of this month is each one of those units. We can run 100 tons an hour through. If we can get that successful tripling of the grade, we intend to bring another eight on. Then we intend to duplicate that at MUMI. MUMI also has 20 million or 25 million tons sitting at 1.1% grade on the ground. None of that is included in our base plan. Jon touched on the underground opportunity at KCC or at KTO. We have two roasters in Lualaba. We have only one roaster running. Our underground produces about 800,000 tons or this year 800,000 tons at about 2.7% grade. Roaster capacity for that underground ore is 4 million tons a year. We can easily triple the underground production and we have roaster capacity.
Hoisting capacity, we've got capacity of six million tons per year, and so there's enormous opportunity to improve our underground performance. We have the equipment, we have the capacity, and that's not in the base plan. Back to you.
Just moving across to MUMI. There's enormous opportunity that we're seeing in front of us at the moment. Obviously, we want to sequence that in the right way and claw that back for the future. Everything you see and what Shah's explained, we're applying that to all of our operations across the board. There's opportunities, obviously, to claw back to that 1 million tons that Gary and also Xavier talked about. That's going to be our first and foremost objective back to in terms of clawing back into 2028 or even improve on that. In terms of MUMI, I'll just go through the numbers fairly quickly. You can see the central North West pit that we have. These are all oxide pits at the moment. Then we've got the Central pit and East pit.
We've got sulfides also coming through the east pit. This is going to help us with the transition. We've got the SX-EW plant. The installed capacity at MUMI is 200,000 tons of plating capacity. Again, coming back to stockpiles, etc., this offers us an opportunity. We've got 200,000 tons of latent capacity sitting in Africa at the moment that we're going to go after. We also don't have any issues with TSF storage, etc., and further opportunities. I'm talking five and six, sorry, on the numbers. We also have further exploration opportunities in the Kansuki lease. You can see from a mineral district perspective, we've got Deziwa on one side and Kisanfu and Kisanfu on the other side as well. It's mineral-rich and offers us an opportunity to further advance and improve in terms of MUMI options.
Just in terms of the life of mine drivers, I mean, MUMI, we've actually restarted mining this year. It was processing ores from stockpiles previously. So it's ramped up to 60,000 tons or 58,000 tons in this year, and we've had a successful ramp-up and putting that back into operation, and so we're looking at all the asset integrity of bringing additional processing capacity back online and getting back to that 200,000 tons of capacity, and there's further options for sulfides. Gary talked about, obviously, the trade-off between oxides and sulfides, and we're going through that process at the moment and looking at FID for H1 2027 in terms of looking at producing concentrate and then further down the track of roasting and leaching. We also, Shah's mentioned the stockpile opportunities that exist currently. We're looking at this across the board. It's just having additional installed capacity.
And it's already mined, already costed, and it's just sitting there for us to process. And as I mentioned before, we've got the Kansuki lease, which provides further exploration in the area. We would see an oxide to sulfide transition. And we're looking at to see if we can do that in a streamlined manner. You can see the ramp-up between 2025 and 2029. And we're looking at further increasing that if possible. As I said, we've got the installed capacity and we've got to keep clawing that back. And then we look at open-cut sulfides and eventually looking at the underground potential. MUMI's got an enormous resource base. And we haven't talked about cobalt as yet as well, but we're focused on copper today. But obviously, we've got the cobalt byproduct credits as well. And I'm sure Jyot will take us through the cobalt strategy for the DRC.
Shah, did you want to touch on this quickly?
Yeah. So we took Mutanda through the same process that we did for KCC, the planning process. When we commenced operations, we re-optimized the pit to target copper. Prior to that, it was all about cobalt. But now the shape of our pit is going for high-grade copper. And so what that's resulted in is on East pit, we have a very large cutback where we're getting high-grade, 2.5%- 3% copper. In the Central North pit and Central pit, we're now joining the two pits and going after this pillar. In the base of Central pit and also at the base of this cutback is where we're starting to see the sulfides coming in. So the timing of this, the installation of the roaster will occur as we start to finish this large cutback.
And then eventually, this is where we'll have the undergrounds coming off to target the underground sulfides.
Michael Farrelly, take us through Collahuasi. Thanks, Michael.
Thanks, Jon. Yeah, as Jon mentioned, I spent a lot of time in Collahuasi, and I've also been involved in Collahuasi continuously since 2006, almost 20 years, so a lot of experience there. As most of you would know, Collahuasi is one of the biggest mines in the world, one of the biggest deposits in the world. You can see in the picture on the following slide; it's located in the High Andes in the Atacama Desert, so that's the driest desert in the world. Obviously, water is key. Good news this year; we're just finalizing the commissioning of the new desalination plant for Collahuasi. That was a $3.2 billion project, a very significant project that had 10,000 people working on it at full capacity, and that's come in on time and a little bit earlier than budget. What that does is that unlocks Collahuasi to grow.
As I said, water's key for Collahuasi and that unlocks it to grow. We've got a couple of projects that are happening. We're in process at the moment of expanding our concentrator plant from 170,000 tons per day to 210,000 tons per day. We're currently at about 185,000-190,000, and we expect to be at 210,000 tons by the end of next year. But most importantly, we have a flotation project. I'll show you on the next slide what that does in terms of production. That would be a new concentrator plant located at the Rosario pit, so closer to the principal pit. That would produce around 180,000 tons per day. That would get our plant up to just under 400,000 tons per day and get us to around a million tons of copper. Glencore share 44% of that, 440,000 tons of copper.
We also have, you'll see over on the far right, a leaching plant. The leaching facility was closed down in around 2016. The ore at the time wasn't economical at those prices. But we're now looking at reopening that leaching plant next year to start processing some of the remaining oxide ores, but also to look at other technologies that exist. So looking at the low-grade sulfide stockpile. So you've got the technologies like Jetti or Ceibo that could help us to take capacity out of that plant and produce up to 64,000 tons a year. All of the Collahuasi shareholders have just approved the fourth line expansion. So that's great. Sorry, the fourth line expansion to go into feasibility, not the fourth line expansion. So the feasibility study has commenced and should be finished during next year. So that's some great news.
In terms of tailings, you can see on the right also, we have a really simple tailings stand. We've got capacity for the life of mine. Whether it's the expansion or not, we can contain up to 6 million tons of tailings. It's a simple tailings stand. It's a downstream tailings stand, and the tailings stand actually sits in a basin, so it's a really safe tailings stand. If there was a breach, there's nowhere for the tailings to go. The asset's been going through some, I guess, some complicated times. It's been covered by a few people today, and what that's really been driven by, and you can see that in 2025, 2026, you see that dip and then we recover after that.
has that really been driven by is the ores that we've had to feed this year are some ores from low-grade stockpiles and there's some ores from the Ujina pit. Both of those ores are oxidized. So they've both been exposed for a long time. So they've oxidized. And it's been hard to get the recoveries that we're used to in Collahuasi. By the end of next year, Shah will go through a little bit more detail. But by the end of next year, we'll be out of those ores. We'll be into fresh ores. We'll be at 210,000 tons per day in throughput. And you'll see the production uplift that's very significant. You can see it's 200,000 tons on a 100% basis. So 88,000 Glencore's share.
Shah.
Michael touched on the recovery issue. Essentially what happened is the part of the pit that we were mining in during the last two years, the geometry modeling was indicating a higher 85%-90% recovery. The ore was oxidized and it wasn't picked up. Basically, they've done a lot more geomet testing. We believe that we're currently sitting with a recovery around 83% is what we're using in the new geomet model. Currently, we're only getting about 75% recoveries. What you'll see over the next year to one and a half years is that that will increase back to around 85% recovery. Part of that is the stockpile material that's currently going in is heavily oxidized. It's getting very, very low recoveries down around 55%-60%. That gets phased out by the end of next year.
We start coming into these fresh ores in these pushbacks. Part of the issue getting access to fresh ore and what pushed us into the stockpile was the working room that was available. You'll see that at the start of next year, we've got 3 km of strike here on this bench, 2 km, 2 km. Each of the shovels needs about a kmeter. I have 300 m of digging, 300 m of drilling, 300 m of loading. That enables us to have the sufficient working room to be able to sink at that 150 m a year to get down into this high recovery fresh ore in the bottom of the pit.
So that's basically how we're going to turn around the shovel productivity and also access to fresh ore. Michael also touched on water. So what you'll see as we move through the first half of next year is the desal plant ramps right up, which enables the concentrator to run at full capacity by mid-next year.
Thanks, Shah. Now, just quickly to talk about Antamina. So there's Antamina there. I won't go through all of the detail on Antamina. As Jon said, we had some difficulties in the first half of the year at Antamina. And fortunately, from a Glencore perspective, we were able to send in about four, I think four of our really highly qualified operators. And they've really managed to turn Antamina around this year. So we're expecting Antamina to come in on their targets and to meet budget. You can see there, Antamina is a great deposit. It's a polymetallic mine, often negative C1 costs depending on the byproduct credits from zinc, very consistent in terms of its production. As Xavier mentioned, there's a bit of a swing between copper and zinc depending where you're in the deposit. But it's a great deposit. It lasts for a long time.
We'll see it going well into the next second half of this century, I guess.
Yes. The catalyst for bringing in the resources from our other operations was the incident that occurred in April. But what that led to was a management team which basically applied the basics to mining. They realized that we were operating at Antamina in one phase. What was happening was they weren't able to turn over the benches quick enough. They made some very simple changes to the operation and increased that sinking rate from below 100 m a year to what they're running at now, which is annualized 150 m a year. Part of those things was replacing the electric drills with diesel drills to reduce the management of cables. We approved the purchase of additional dozers and graders to prepare benches quicker so that we could turn over the benches faster. It's just very, very simple operating basics.
It's what enabled us to go from essentially an operation that was down for several weeks to being back on budget now.
Quickly just covering Lomas Bayas. Just quickly, just looking at the one, two, and three in the center there, we've got the Lomas number one pit, the two pit, we've got the ROM leach as well. On number four and five, we've got the heap leach and the SX-EW plant. And then on six and seven, we've got the exploration areas. The objective for Lomas, we like Lomas. I mean, it's a low grade, it's 0.2 grade soluble copper, and basically embodies the Glencore culture basically of taking the last ton of copper metal wherever we can. It's a great little operation. And also, it's a good place for us to train our leaders. But it exists on significant low grade, as I mentioned before. But there are options in the area. And that's in the spec on the Alice deposits, as I pointed out previously.
Listen, we could see opportunities to extend. There's also sulfide resources in the area. So again, it's a good operation for the future. And again, it's cash generative across the cycle. So this is what we do basically. So we like this one. I also want to talk about Antapaccay. And also in terms of a district, basically, because it's basically a mineral district. And so if you look at the numbers, basically, we've got the north and the south pits. And looking at them on the left-hand side of the screen. And then we've got our waste rock dump adjacent to that. And then if you move across to the Tintaya concentrator and the old Tintaya SX-EW plant, we've ramped up the plant this year. So we've brought that back into production. And that's a plant that has 40,000 tons of capacity.
We've got latent capacity here for further oxides. We believe we'll be able to access further oxides through the Coroccohuayco project, which we're in the process of building at the moment. We've got the Tintaya pit or the old TSF at number seven. We're not restricted by sort of TSF infrastructures, etc. It's nice and stable, etc. Just touching on Coroccohuayco, we're in the process, obviously land acquisitions, etc. That's moving along really well. Heading nicely. Coroccohuayco is about 11 km away from the Antamina concentrator. This is a really simple project. It's just a crusher conveyor system. You dig the mine, you send the crusher crushed ore to the Antamina concentrator. I think we really believe there's further opportunities in the area. It is a mineral district. We're seeing further opportunities for additional satellite pits and further exploration. We're excited about this as well. There's multiple resources. What that would do basically, and I mentioned in point three here, looking at additional upside from additional mining capacity. With Coroccohuayco alone, we're looking at additional ball mill. That gives us another 3% on top for finer grind. There's room in that concentrator for another line. If we're able to secure another nearby resource, then there's further opportunity to add another line. That should give us significant upside in this project. There's also additional leaching opportunities, as I mentioned before. We've got the capacity installed. We're looking at all aspects to try and recover the capacity. If you look at the Coroccohuayco project, it's at feasibility study level.
FID is during next year and first production coming in 2029. Just coming back to the previous slide, just quickly, if you look at Coroccohuayco at Antapaccay, as I said, it's a crusher conveyor system. We can also put a haul road through as well. We're looking at as quick as possible to shovel, first to shovel capacity basically, and then maybe haul there. That might give us some further opportunities as well. Shah.
One of the issues that we were seeing at Antapaccay is what's A x b. It's basically an indication of the softness and the ability to crush the ore. What we started to see, the lower the number on the A x b is the harder the ore. This area in red here is we've been going through in and out. What we've now done is we've got access to a pebble crusher. Essentially what happens with this hard ore is that we get hard pebbles and they stay in the SAG mills and they take capacity and they actually reduce the throughput of our mills. Now what happens is the pebbles actually get spat out of the SAG mill and then we'll crush them in the pebble crusher. It's not an ongoing thing.
The model will show that it comes in and it comes out. So that's probably the main issue that we've been seeing at Antapaccay, and we think that's behind us now.
So just really quickly on NewRange. NewRange is a joint venture we've got with Teck. It's located in Minnesota in the Iron Range area. The JV was formed maybe just a little over 12 months ago. And we brought together the NorthMet Deposit, which was owned by PolyMet originally, a public company that we owned the majority in, and Teck bought in the Sunrise Deposit. So the idea, the Sunrise deposit has more ore. NorthMet was closer to permitting. So Teck hadn't started the permitting side there. So what we're looking at there, we've got the potential to produce up to 300,000 tons copper equivalent. That's on a 100% basis. We have 50% of that. So it's a polymetallic mine.
But the idea is to start small with the NorthMet mine that's close to being permitted to get that up and running and then to see how we progress Sunrise into feasibility and grow the asset later. NorthMet's been designated on the FAST-41 list in the U.S. So that helps in terms of it being a project of significant importance to the U.S. There's potential synergies with our smelters and refineries in Canada as a feed source. And it's probably one of the projects in the U.S. that could have the potential to bring first copper in terms of critical minerals and projects that are there ready to go, albeit on a small scale upfront, but a much bigger scale potentially in the future. Just some details there. You can see the small start. That's our 50% share.
And then if we're able to get the Sunrise growth into the future.
Just to finish off, I mean, we're really excited today, obviously, with the announcement of the Alumbrera restart. I think that leads nicely into the Argentine growth strategy that Martin and Christoff will take us through very shortly. If you look at the pits, we've got the Bajo Alumbrera pits. We're looking at phase 13 and 14. There's further opportunities there and also in the Bajo Durazno number two up in the top right-hand corner. Then we've got the concentrator there as well. The TSF down below. There's further mineralization in the area and also further opportunities also in the TSF for gold concentrates, high-grade gold concentrates. We're excited about this one. It's a standalone project. It will operate in its own right.
But the big one here, and now it's approved and obviously we launched today, the opportunity that we really have is basically de-risking the Agua Rica project. What this enables us to do, the concentrator's in great shape. So we start the concentrator up every single week. All the mills are rolling. Everything's in really good shape. And I guess what we'll do is stress test the concentrator, the pipeline, etc., and get this ready for Agua Rica as Martin and Christoff execute our growth ambitions in Argentina. But very exciting today. And you can see the ramp up down the bottom over the next few years and then up to then bringing in Agua Rica. So I guess just in terms of finishing, before I hand over to Martin, I hope you get a view today.
I mean, the key takeaway is that we're ramping up to one million tons as soon as possible. There's capacity. We've got capability to do it. And obviously, our growth ambition is to get back to something where 1.6 million tons by 2035. And that's the opportunity that we have in front of us. And we're going to go after it. So I'll hand over to Martin.
It's good. Thank you, Jon, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this afternoon. We're going to talk a bit about Argentina. I think Gary had increased the attention on Argentina when he showed our growth profile. When you look at the importance of Agua Rica and Pachón into Glencore's growth strategy, there are two very important projects. Jon has also mentioned Argentina with the restart of Agua Rica. I think it's what's going on with Argentina. I guess we all know that Argentina is a great mining jurisdiction. It shares the Andes with Chile. While Chile produces about 5.5 million tons of copper a year, Argentina produces none. Argentina has roughly seven projects today in advanced exploration status that could, over the next 7- 10 years, put two million tons of copper in the market.
In a market that needs more and more copper, this becomes very attractive. But that's not all of it. Something else had to happen in order to make the country interesting on a jurisdiction where we feel comfortable to continue to invest. Argentina is a jurisdiction in which we have a lot of experience, not only as Glencore, but as a team. Glencore has operated Alumbrera for 30 years in Argentina and has been a very successful operation. And last 35 years in Argentina, you've gone through absolutely any possible economic regime you could think of, even though we were successful in operating it. The Milei administration has recently put out a new regime to incentivize large investment, which is called RIGI. And what the RIGI does, it provides fiscal, tax, and legal stability to the projects that makes us feel comfortable to look and invest in Argentina.
So when you couple both things, a world that, or actually three things, a world that needs a lot of copper, a country that has it, a regime that incentivizes investment, the experience that Glencore has in the country, that tells you that we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this rise in the Argentinian mining industry. As said before, the first objective in a country is to have good assets. And when you look at our assets in Argentina, you'll come to the conclusion very quickly. Christoff will take us through details, that these are large assets, low operating costs, and several stages of growth over time.
With all of that and the experience we have in the country, the restart of Alumbrera that puts Glencore as the first copper producer from Argentina to be able to produce copper back into the world, that sets the tone of what we are trying to do there and what we are trying to achieve in terms of looking at our projects. There it goes. I'll tell you the strategy that we have for Argentina. It's de-risking the projects over the next two years so that we can take them to a successful execution strategy that will also involve partnering at the right point in time. When you talk about the risk in the projects, you have to talk about the risks.
This is the thing beyond the typical three risks that the mining industry has considered throughout its life that are how do we deliver a project on budget, how do we deliver a project on time, and how do we deliver a project that produces what we expected the project to produce. Those are the three key risks that the industry has been looking for years and years. I would add to that risk the fact that the social license to operate is becoming more and more important as a risk factor in all of the projects that are being delivered. Latin America is no different to any other jurisdiction in the world in that regard. Being Argentina, Argentina is a risk by itself based on all that we discussed before. The key strategy here is how do we address these risks.
I will tell you the first thing is let's start from risk, ground zero of risk. And that is the assets. And as said before, the size of the assets, the ability to produce multiple expansions on these projects, the ability to produce high-quality ore at low operating costs enabled us to have very robust projects. So when you think of ground zero, we are well established in terms of our projects. When you think of how do we handle the Argentine risk, we'll cover in a slide going forward what the RIGI regime has and how it minimizes and how it helps us handle the risks in Argentina. But the most important thing I'll tell you to handle the country risk is the experience that we have had in the country. It's not only that we operated in mining in the Alumbrera project for 30 years.
It's also that we operated in the agricultural commodity business through the Viterra joint venture. It's also the fact that all of the team has been able to deliver and execute projects in country. And we do have a great track record in that. When you think of the risk to deliver a project on budget, I think that is highly related to your technical work. It's having a well-established gated process that enables you to move from one stage to the other with discipline and deliver a robust product, a robust project is key in terms of being able to deliver a project on budget. And in that regard, we are setting up a great engineering team and leveraging on the large engineering companies like the Fluors and the Bechtels of the world supporting us on elaborating this detailed engineering process, engineering projects.
When you think of what's key to deliver a project on time, what makes a difference is if you have a well-established local team that is well connected into the local supply networks that understands how to operate and build in country and that can deliver and commit to deliver the projects on time, and that is what we have through the 30 years of experience in Alumbrera. We know where the suppliers are. We know where the projects are. We know how to bring these contractors to work with us. We know how to control these contractors and deliver the projects on time. The third one is how do we deliver a project or production target, and that depends a lot on the knowledge of the technology that we have. Lots of geomet studies have been performed on Agua Rica and Pachón.
But what I will tell you is Agua Rica will leverage on the Alumbrera facilities that we will be restarting with the restart of Alumbrera. So we know those facilities inside out. We know how that plant operates. And we have all of the logistics sorted out for Agua Rica. Alumbrera is a mine to port 100% unified project. We've got the concentrator plant up in Alumbrera. We've got the mineral pipeline down to Tucumán. We've got the filter plant in Tucumán, the train loading station in Tucumán, railway to Rosario, and the ship loader in Rosario. All of that is working. And all of that was part of our well-kept care and maintenance process. And that will help us to be able to very quickly bring Agua Rica into production. Pachón is a bit more challenging.
But the fact that it is a huge project gives us lots of opportunities in terms of dealing with logistics and other issues that are important. In terms of the social license to operate, what we are leveraging is our relationship, a long-standing relationship with the local governments and local communities. Agua Rica is in Catamarca, a province where we have operated for more than 40 years now with the construction of Alumbrera and else. We're present in Catamarca since 1993. So we know the province. We know the communities. We know how things are done there. San Juan, Pachón, we've held the Pachón asset for quite a long period of time. We know San Juan very well. And we've got a great relationship with the provincial authorities. Also, we've got a great relationship with the federal authorities. We met more than once with President Milei at different levels.
The country is highly committed to support Glencore in this objective to deliver these projects. The key objective is very quickly moving to the risk in these projects and be able to move into the next stage, which is actually constructing the projects and finding the right partners to work along with us in the projects. In terms of how are we organizing ourselves, what I think it's important is to highlight that we are putting together a structure that fits a strategy. If you look at the structure this way, I will tell you it's got three key pillars. This part deals with the technical risk, which is delivering the projects on budget, on time, on capacity. This part deals with dealing with the social license to operate, country risk, RIGI, and everything else.
The last part, risk and finance, deal with the appropriate project controls to ensure that what we are planning is being achieved on a weekly, daily, monthly basis. The key part of the project, and Christoff coming to the team with more than 25 years of experience building very large mining projects in the region, has set up a team that will focus on completing studies and bringing Agua Rica and Pachón to final investment decisions. We will go through the detailed timelines on how that will work. We're also setting up a project control function within the technical team to ensure that we follow up the timelines in detail and we make sure that everything that we set is being achieved.
We're also setting up a commercial function within the team to ensure that we maximize our leverage with regional and worldwide original equipment manufacturers, as well as maximizing the contracting leverage that we have with other companies. In terms of the risks, we want to make sure that this project control function talks daily to our risks and financial functions so that we're well aware of anything and we're able to move forward in case we detect any variation with the expected performance. What is key is that the key objective of this is to have a team that clearly understands what the delegated authority is, what the responsibility level is. Everybody is accountable for what they have to deliver.
That will enable us to have a team that makes the decisions in a timely fashion and enables us to move the project within the expected timelines that we have for them. I haven't spoken about myself. Some of you may know me. I come from 25 years of experience in mining and oil and gas. Before that, I did 10 years of finance, which helped me a bit to understand risks. I come from the lithium industry where I put together all the lithium complex that Rio just bought, the Orocobre, Allkem, Arcadium, all that stuff, and did a lot of projects in country, not only in the mining, but in the oil and gas industry lately. In terms of what the RIGI framework brings, I think it is important to highlight how the regime works.
I think a lot has been spoken about RIGI, but we may not be fully understanding what it means. RIGI is a framework that the government has put together basically to attract long-term investment. It is aimed to be focused on the energy and mining and infrastructure sectors, which are the ones that require longer-term investment, and the country wasn't able, based on the last 30 years of performance, to secure that those investments were going to have appropriate returns. So the framework requires a minimum investment per project, which is a minimum of $200 million of investment, of which $80 million have to be invested in the first two years of the project since RIGI has been approved. We submitted RIGI applications for Agua Rica, MARA, and Pachón in August of this year. And we're going through the approval process.
In terms of the tax advantages, it not only brings tax stability, but also reduces the corporate income tax from 35% to 25%, which makes the total government take for projects in Argentina comparable to what the total government take would be for projects in Chile and Peru. That was around 15%-20% lower. That is coupled with a reduction in the withholding tax on dividends from 7% to 3.5%. The famous VAT, which in Argentina, you had to pay VAT when you bring in the investment, when you bring in your imports, you pay to your contractors. That VAT traditionally was kept in pesos and very quickly devalued. At the end of the day, it became a cost. The news of this regime is that you can use fiscal credits to repay your VAT, or you can sell your VAT credits.
So that enables you to recover your VAT very quickly. And that is not a cost. It's actually a VAT. The other thing that is important is the tax loss carry forward. Tax loss carry forwards has always existed in country. But you can imagine a tax loss carry forward in pesos, subject to a very large devaluation, is worth nothing after two or three years. The news is that this regime indexes the tax loss carry forward by the CPI. So if in the long run, CPI and devaluation tend to work more or less the same, the protection is quite significant. And it eliminates the five-year limit on the tax loss carry forward. In terms of foreign exchange controls, for which Argentina became famous for imagining all different ways of foreign exchange, the system is quite clear.
It gives you full access to the official market to repay debt, dividends, or get your profits out of the country within four years from approval of the RIGI framework. All our projects will take us at least three to four years to be built, so this ensures us that we will have access to our FX. In terms of legal stability, and this is seen by a lot of people as the most important thing, is the previous regimes subject any claim under the regimes to the Argentine courts. The new regime gives you the right to claim into any international court if there's any default from the government under the regime, so you can straight go directly into an international arbitration court, which gives a lot of legal stability around the projects.
A wrap-up of what we submitted in our RIGI applications in August, when Gary and I met with President Milei. For MARA, we submitted a total investment of $3.5-$4 billion, clearly north of the minimum $200 million limit that is required for the project. The target date to complete the investment, it's in 2031. As you have seen in Jon's email, this is when the extension of Alumbrera ends, and we kick in with the first oil from Agua Rica. The end of the RIGI benefits are 30 years for each project. In the case of Pachón , a similar case, but a larger investment and a lot larger project. We submitted a RIGI application between $8.5-$10.5 billion. Roughly $9 million is what we said in the summary application. This project encompasses the full development of the first phase of Pachón .
As said before, Pachón is such a large project that would go under different stages of development, and this RIGI covers only the first phase of Pachón, and we expect Pachón to be producing by 2034. This timing also matches the fact that we don't have to build a concentrator in Alumbrera. We're leveraging existing facilities, and we have to build a full concentrator in Pachón, so that enables us to distribute teams and risks appropriately, so as a summary of key objectives, strategy, and risks of Argentina, let me introduce Christoff Kühn, the Head of Major Projects, that will talk to us about the details of the projects.
Thank you, Martin, so I maybe just want to actually go back to the slide that Gary spoke about earlier today, actually showing all of our growth opportunities.
Because there's an underlying project storyline there that I think is quite important to and speaks to both Xavier's operating model that he spoke about, building our people, our processes, and getting the rhythm that we need to actually be cognizant of from a project perspective in LATAM, and that's that we've got Alumbrera restart, which is our first step in order to actually make sure that we start building up that rhythm and routine from a project delivery perspective. We then move across to Peru with Antapaccay, and Jon spoke about our Coroccohuayco project that we're starting up there, which coincidentally, the scope is quite similar to what we are going to talk about with Agua Rica, and we then come back to Argentina for Agua Rica and for Pachón, so I'll quickly look at Agua Rica, and then we'll briefly discuss Pachón as well.
Agua Rica, the key one, and with Alumbrera restart that Jon spoke about and that we announced today, I can now formally actually say it's probably the most attractive brownfield copper resource in the Americas. With the restart, we are significantly de-risking years in advance the production profile coming out of Agua Rica. We're located about 35 km away from the existing Alumbrera facility, which gives us that unique opportunity in order to actually make sure that we can ramp up successfully and just continue utilizing some of that existing infrastructure, resources, and logistic corridors that we've got available from Alumbrera perspective. What is Agua Rica? It's a billion-ton copper resource. I think it's quite important to specifically highlight as well, actually.
We've got a significant byproduct addition actually coming through there with our gold, silver, and moly, pushing us to north of 200,000 equivalent copper ounces tons per year. Apologies. The expected delivery or cost of Agua Rica is expected to be about in the range of $4 billion. And in order to ensure that we actually develop this in a structured and de-risked manner, we are following quite a rigid and disciplined project pipeline development. So from a scope perspective, 35 km, as I said. So what we're really actually looking at is a crusher facility with an overland conveyor feeding into an existing facility, existing processing facility with a tailings facility located in the existing pit in Alumbrera. If we look at the project pipeline, so currently, we're sitting in pre-feasibility phase, the back end of the pre-feasibility phase and the final selection processes.
We are targeting to actually have the pre-feasibility complete together with submitting our IIA applications for environmental permits towards the back end of 2026. This would enable us to actually then commence feasibility planning for execution, as well as, importantly, then expecting to have our approvals in place for final investment decisions in 2027. We've got about a three-year construction sequence and expecting to actually have first production. You would have seen this earlier in Jon's slides as well in 2031 and then starting that ramp up in 2032. If we then go to El Pachón, so El Pachón is a significantly different resource. I think a couple of times today in the industry referred to copper districts nowadays. Best way to probably describe El Pachón is we've got a copper district within a single pit.
It is probably one of the most beautiful resources located in the mining-friendly district of San Juan in Argentina, sitting relatively close to the Chilean border, which also provides us with opportunities to de-risk our logistic corridors, which we're currently exploring. The resource itself is currently sitting at 6 billion tons. One of my biggest challenges is actually to identify locations to place our concentrators. Because as we're speaking today, we're flying Aeromags across the site. And as it progresses, actually, the resource just keeps on growing and growing and growing, actually. So we've got a positive problem actually in terms of the size of this resource, actually. And progressively, you'll probably see us announcing further growth actually on the resource basin within Pachón. Current first phase, 185 kt per day operation, is what we are targeting. And we've completed a number of feasibility studies over the years on this.
If you look at El Pachón, the size of the resource really enables us to grow. And that growth will come at significantly lower capital intensity than any of your traditional greenfields projects. So we've got the capability or the capacity actually in the resource to probably actually grow to 360 kts per day or further north of that, giving us the opportunity of producing up to 600 kts of copper per annum. Key to that is obviously making sure we de-risk our logistics pipelines profiles. And you'll see it within our project development schedule. So while the project is in feasibility phase for the 185, together with completing some of our key environmental baseline work over the next year, we continue to actually explore growth opportunities and our development pathway for Pachón in order to actually drive that capital intensity as low as possible.
With that as the backdrop, we are expecting to actually gate into final feasibility planning and execution planning in 2027, with the expected environmental permits to be in play in 2029, enabling first production in 2034. So Pachón is probably one of those true, really, really magnificent resources, which I think will be around for quite a significant period in LATAM. Okay, Steve.
Thanks. It's nice to finally have a little cameo, [audio distortion], at this forum following those speeches. So I'll keep things relatively quick. It's not a results release. It's not too much on the financial profile of Glencore. It's to highlight clearly the growth in copper, the sort of plans and the structures to deliver on those plans and some of that growth in copper that everyone has articulated as we go through.
If we just go through the, I think it's a good chart just to show the, I mean, that CapEx $23.4 billion seems a big number to try and contextualize it relative to the scale of the copper business as it does ramp up. The mine chart sort of colors on the left, as you can see, that business, that's just a condensed chart of what Gary showed earlier on as it sort of narrows down. Overlaying that in the middle of the chart is just the CapEx profile. So you would have seen the slides, slide 17, which is listed across those nine projects that had the various capital amounts, and that's sequenced and built out over those respective years and ultimately delivers those profiles. This assumes sort of that you're moving ahead at a relatively quick pace across all projects.
But as Jon and the team had sort of mentioned, there is within the base business and some of these projects to look to bring some of those tons forward. And then the key message is that the copper business itself, again, our marketing business and the coal business and the zinc business and the gold business and everything that's generating all the cash, our coal business would be expected to be able to self-fund this entire CapEx and move up through its enhanced volume, get through the CapEx cycle, and ultimately be generating significant free cash flow within this business as it goes forward that discounted into today's dollars at whatever rates appropriate is a significant value proposition for the business. To show you what those lines mean, we've got the base business. We've explained the base business. That's all within Jon.
That does include. You've got the Alumbrera restart effectively, and they're a smallish operation, but really preparing and readying us for the Agua Rica expansions as it comes through. We've adopted consensus prices, so this is after-tax free cash flow, CapEx, fully loaded, unlevered model. We've provided in the appendix the various assumptions, which is just run through our various models. On the one hand, we've got consensus. Page 16, you'll see some of those numbers. It was cut at about middle of November, so that's copper at $99.21. You've got cobalt consensus sort of trailing or people clearly trying to see where the clearing price ultimately, but there was only a $12.60 hydroxide. Spot prices is $22 or something at the moment, so there was a low payability at about $20 a pound. Zinc was at a little over $3.00. Gold was $25.50 consensus.
Obviously, spot prices is where then you see that big gap up, particularly as you're bringing those respective tons, and the various byproducts. You've got sort of $12 billion plus of free cash on a spot basis. You've got the various graphs, so great to note self-funding and terrific business going forward. That's not to say we won't look at potential options to both de-risk from a financial and an operating. Clearly, in a value accretive fashion is how one would want to ensure that Glencore has been paid adequately, risk-sharing adequately to see if there's ways of potentially bringing in a partner or some other source of funding that may be appropriate at various points of time. The various axes here. It looks at some of the structures that we may potentially consider.
This is predominantly geared around the Argentina portfolio, whether through a project scale as well as construction risk on the Y-axis. From the right through to a more passive minority, we'd still continue to operate a Glencore project that would just be more passive financial capital like a sovereign wealth fund or the likes that may look to invest within to one of the structures. That's the blue bar. The yellow bar, it might be a more active investment. It would still be a Glencore asset, but a more strategic or a sort of Japanese-style trading partner that's been quite common within the particular industry. Moving to more sort of strategic, larger options as construction and project scale gears up. The green bar would be strategic partners around a JV structure, Collahuasi and Antamina, maybe something like that.
Or, the other circle there is one that Gary's thought about more, thinking out of the box a little bit more. This would be more relevant for the greenfield project in El Pachón. Is there a way of ultimately getting some investor out there to underwrite some of the project risk and the timeline? We're happy to take that given their own skill sets and their own backing and desire, frankly, to take some equity in the business where it wouldn't be just a straight get the money in and just run it through some normal JV. That would be something, particularly in El Pachón. Other options off to the right would be areas where there could be a cost of capital unlocked through various infrastructure funds. So effectively, you might swap CapEx for OpEx within a typical business. You've always got some of this stuff.
You would have specialist funds or the likes may invest into the logistics, into water and power. Again, particularly irrelevant for the greenfield El Pachón. That may be relevant relative to different costs of capital and capital sequencing. Where is that likely to be more relevant for our business as well? As I said, $23.4 billion of capital, these nine projects. Some are within JVs themselves. Of course, you've got the JV funding structures that would generally play out, whether it's at the Collahuasi level through the smaller projects, new concentrator, fourth line, and various NewRange projects. We've got all of those we would just envisage being sort of funded through the shell. There's nothing particularly fancy. Within those JVs, they may look to do some sort of asset-backed or some of those infrastructure financing that blob off to the right that I had on the earlier.
The two Argentina projects lend themselves to thinking about some form of risk-sharing, both operational and financial. Agua Rica, that's one that would be maybe more of a straightforward minority partner. We'd continue to operate it, consolidate it up, run the project, but just look to share some of the risk and capital, provide us value accretive, and you've got the right partner. That was the yellow and the blue circles on the previous one, and El Pachón would lend itself to any and all of the previous options as to just how best to think about that stuff. I would position for expecting Agua Rica, we may do it ourselves from the MARA stuff. That's not to say that will happen. It's just something that we would potentially look towards, entertain, think about given the size. These are the two big capital projects as well that you've seen.
You've got the $4 billion and you've got the $9.46 billion, the various capital. So something that will part of how we're thinking as well in terms of those projects and sequencing and risk-sharing and capital. Just laying out some facts of a shareholder return. It's been a busy period and a material period over the last five years. We've distributed and made shareholder distributions of $25.3 billion since 2021, a little less than five years, $16.4 billion in cash via the base distribution. We know the formula. The base is $1 billion plus 25% industrial free cash flow. There's also been $8.9 billion of buybacks, which has significantly shrunk the share count.
You can see 14% during that period, which itself has obviously improved earnings per share, dividends per share, cash flow share, and hopefully some value unlocked per share that we presented today in terms of the potential within this business. The green circle is the purchase of EVR. That was something that clearly came in. And if you like, jump the queue around shareholder returns. Everything in this business, whether it's M&A, whether it's marketing returns, whether it's greenfields, brownfields, organic expansions need to compete with buybacks. We know where shares are trading at a point in time. We know what it's discounting. We'll have our models. We'll run some scenarios. It's all about probability of outcomes.
You weigh things to a certain outcome and think, "Well, here's a project that needs to compete with what that buyback has done." We still think there's attractive elements within buying Glencore, which has been one of our significant capital allocations in the last four or five years, as Gary had said earlier on. In terms of CapEx, as we do each year, just to update on that, we're talking towards a base business. I think it's good to segment it between the two. $6.5 billion across the business. This is excluding the various copper projects, which we'll talk to separately. What does that include? Last year's number was even a little bit higher. So it's actually tailed off somewhat, which is great. But we've added more capital that wasn't in the base case, which is generating returns for the business. Alumbrera is now in that number.
Not significant, but you've got sort of $250 million within Alumbrera. And the zinc business, third of the way down, you've got $450 million of $600 because $150 just tapers up into the year four of that average. It's some approvals and some work we're doing to extend the 80,000 gold operation within the Kazzinc unit. That's both for additional pushbacks, both in open cut and ultimately some underground mining that will be the place. That will extend that operation for many, many years. It dips down a little bit as a base case in gold production out of that operation into next year and the following two years. Then it ramps back up in three, four, five years to again get back to well over 500,000 oz of gold per year as those projects are back in. Full steam ahead there.
That was not in those numbers last year. It is now in the $6.5 billion. We'll spend that $450 million as we go through. Otherwise, fairly sort of steady eddy across the sustaining capital. EVR water treatment, beginning of this year, was the first time to bring that onto the books on a pro forma basis. They're running at about $1.3 billion average over the next three years or so. Water treatment investment, the bulk of it is coming to an end. 2027 should be the last material year. We're through the back of that. That's working very well.
There is a phase of investment in that business through additional haulage, additional sort of trucks and shovels just to get capacity within that business up to be able to sustain and grow through the various projects some of you were at the trip that we had. Within a $6.5 billion, you probably roughly $5.5-$5.7 billion is a sustaining level. There's still about a billion or so of what we'd call key projects, major projects that are tailing off that are not sustaining either a bit of growth or various replacement tons that we do have, including the opening depth of the I&O that should wrap up and get commissioned also next year that's been on this chart for a while.
Within the copper projects themselves, that's just flowing through the numbers that we've seen on the previous chart and Gary's slides and my slide that we had before. If we full steam ahead basis that shape of that business, blowing through the 1.6 million tons of copper as we would by 2035, you would be already spending $1 billion in 2026, $1.7 billion in 2027, $1.5 billion in 2028. That would be predominantly. You've got your Coroccohuayco, Agua Rica, MUMI sulfides, El Pachón, Collahuasi, low-grade leaching. That gives you the shape of where most of that. Now, it's going to be a combination of various of those that's going to shape out basis the timings of those particular projects. That's one bookend, cumulative of $4.2 billion across those three years.
I think it would be nice to be able to be on that path and you'd see that shape of copper growth materialize over that period. The other bookend is just doing nothing and just continue to sort of nurture those projects through the studies and the various development work, which might be $500 cumulative. So you've got your two bookends. We'll obviously make announcements as relevant as and when these projects get to more material phases within that particular project, and we'll report on them separately and how it's translating into those timelines and how the future copper growth project looks like. If we look at cost structure, then before we wrap up with the frequently updated spot free cash flow, this is 2026 cost guidance for the first time. This is reflecting midpoint of the guidance that Xavier had put out on slide 34.
If we look at copper off to the left-hand side, you can see just what a year of two halves this really was for our copper business shaped around the $40.60 in terms of H1. We're at just H1, we're at $280. Pre-byproduct, $0.55 of byproduct and cost structure, cash cost was $225. For the full year, we're expecting to be about $176. This means the H2 is way lower than that to average out at that level for the first half material cash flow generation that to expect from the copper business in H2 as we roll out this particular year. And as Jon said, annualizing more recently at the million tons of copper with good prices and good byproduct credits. As it rolls into 2026, we continue to see a lowering, notwithstanding copper volumes on growing until about 2027, particularly with Collahuasi.
We've still got some lower costs coming through and slightly better byproduct credits. It's a function of, notwithstanding lower zinc production at Antamina that normally would have a negative effect. It continues to go positive because you've got high prices. You've still got good units. And we're just following through the quotas on the cobalt. These were prices that we'd used at around the middle of November that have improved. So all these would be post-byproduct and even on the primary would be better cash flow generation at the moment. The zinc business itself, again, you've got a year of not two halves because of production. It's more even, but you've got negative cost structures continue to build in that business, particularly because of the gold credits as it goes from two positive, -$0.18 , and it'll continue to - $0.26 next year, notwithstanding there is slightly less gold.
You do have the higher prices before the 80,000 gold price continues to improve. Pretty stable coal business. We are lowered on the average unit cost on the steelmaking coal given the first full year of EVR coming in. There was only a half year of the previous lease. So you've had a $116 step down into around $110. And the shape, there's a little bit of inflation and projections into 2026, which we'll look at the next slide on the free cash flow illustrative. There is some revenue-linked royalties that depending on which price you're starting with headline, it's going to drive a little bit of cost structure either up or down. It's always nice to have your costs go up because of revenue-linked royalties. Your margin's going to be expanding, as you can see on the various top paths.
So rolling that forward into the final, and then I'll get off the stage and let more interesting presenters come to the stage. Here's our updated illustrative spot cash flow. This is rolling forward now to a 2026 parameterseter. It's using midpoint of 2026 production and those costs that are deployed on the previous page. That's copper rolling from the $840, take out the $50,000 from the zinc. You've got a $473,000, all the footnotes are in there. We take a 96% realization through just quality grade and the likes. And you've got a $5.6 billion of EBITDA. Then there's just the normal running costs of projects. This is part of that $500 million where I said if you spend nothing cumulatively. We've got the spend at the Argentina, NewRange just continuing those projects and you're at $5.3 billion.
This is cobalt at a little under $20 a pound and just quota, so spots are a little bit higher than that. The zinc business, and this was using copper price of $10,850. I see it's about $11,400 today. So that would tick up as well on a spot illustrative. Zinc at $2 billion, gold's really helping the negative $25.5 billion, as you would expect, notwithstanding that there's a tick down in primary zinc production because of Lady Loretta in particular as that stepped down, and the various coal businesses using a forward strip on prime hard coking of $216 and a forward strip on the Newcastle of $115 with the portfolio effects as we roll through the portfolio, got $2,519.
$1 billion across the rest of the portfolio, $16 billion then of EBITDA, $3.9 billion of interest and tax, and $6.6 billion of the CapEx as we normally do to a $5.5 billion illustrative free cash flow, pre-working capital and pre any sort of rehab outflows if we've got some of those assets that's worked their way through the system. They're already provisioned within the business and they get amortized out. Healthy business, copper can self-fund itself even if we choose to go to loan and the rest, all the marketing, all the zinc, all the nickel, everything else comes back to you 100% as shelter. The balance sheet is set up well and can fund that growth as we move forward. With that all, I hand over to Jyothish. Thank you.
I think what I find is I spend a lot of time explaining what marketing is or what marketing does. So I'm going to do a little bit of a version of that again. We have a very unusual business model and it's unique. And there are a bunch of large traders, there are a bunch of large producers, but there is no real comparable company like us. So I thought it's good to spend a little bit of time explaining how it all fits together. So like we saw, we have a host of industrial assets, which are generational assets. We had some discussions around the copper today. The industrial assets, the production from the industrial assets form the baseload that we do in our marketing business. Across the board, loosely speaking, about 50% of what we market comes from our own tons.
About 50% of it comes from other producers we buy, so what we call third-party tons. It's a stream of multiple commodities. As we secure these third-party tons, we look at what we call marketing assets. Some of them are infrastructure investments. Like we have in Peru, we have a blending facility, which we call Perubar, which is crucial to our concentrate operations in Peru, for example. We have a bunch of infrastructure assets, which help us with our marketing. We have processing facilities, like a bunch of custom smelters. We have zinc and copper smelters. We also work with multiple countries in terms of looking at smelting assets. For example, when Adani built a smelter in India, we were one of the early supporters through concentrates through them. In Saudi Arabia, we worked locally in Saudi Arabia with a local partner to investigate building a smelter there.
If we do something like that, we'll find out how to do it in a sort of sensible way in terms of funding. We'll look at funding solutions that make sense. We're working with Codelco potentially to look at building a smelter in Chile. So the smelters provide sources for outlets for concentrates that we have and also sources for the metal. So we have a whole bunch of processing facilities that we use that feed into our marketing business. We also, as part of marketing, look at minority asset ownership. So we have a minority stake in Century Aluminum. We have Alunorte. We've had stakes in [audio distortion], for example, previously. We've had stakes in Champion Iron. So typically, as part of marketing, any asset that has some need for funding, we've either looked at it, we have done some due diligence, we've explored it.
Our industrial assets help us do technical due diligence on it. That also feeds our industrial assets because we have a fairly good understanding across the globe of all the cost structures, all the assets that operate across the globe, and that allows us to pick up industrial assets when they become available once in a while, like we picked up EVR about two years ago. So these three sort of pillars of growth, they feed each other. The industrial assets feed tons to the marketing business. The marketing business gets involved with other assets around the world, which gives us information, which allows us to build our industrial asset portfolio. We've done some sort of more evolutionary changes around our marketing business recently.
Mostly what we realized is instead of operating as independent silos, it makes a lot of sense to operate as teams because increasingly most of these commodities are interconnected. So if I start from one end and just go around, like power markets, we have Maxim as a natural gas business. We have a power desk. We also have a thermal coal business that feeds the power markets, and there's good intersection between them. There's a lot of information exchange. Thermal coal and met coal are connected, but met coal goes into steelmaking raw materials where we supply iron ore, vanadium, manganese, a bunch of raw materials to the steelmaking raw material, the steel industry. Similarly, in the stainless industry, we supply a bunch of raw materials to them. We supply nickel, molybdenum, cobalt. Previously, it was like primarily going into high alloys in the stainless steel sector.
Now with nickel, cobalt, we have a battery metals division, which is sort of four parts to it. We have nickel, cobalt, lithium, and battery metals recycling. What we've realized is structuring it around teams and focusing on the customer allows us to share resources, share information, and be better prepared in terms of trends. So if you look at the recent trends, you take AI, for example, everybody talks about power. We see power generation coming through in multiple sectors. So we see through our power desk, our LNG, thermal coal, we see increase in power generation. Through our copper business, we see grid spending. Through our aluminum, we see copper and aluminum substitution in terms of grids. We see the battery segment benefiting from the power sector. So it allows us to better understand big trends and position ourselves better for it.
Similarly, when we source materials, we have a fairly extensive scope and scale. What we find is in most of these countries, you have similar producers producing multiple commodities. So organized around silos actually is not as efficient as organized around a single team. So if you look at Chile, we have a very strong copper presence, but Chile also has a little bit of iron ore. So the copper team can help secure the iron ore. In Peru, there are zinc and copper concentrates, which are interlinked very integrally. In Africa, we have a whole bunch of businesses. We have a very strong copper business. We have coal. We have ferro alloys. There's a lot of logistics that we can find synergies with. So increasingly, we're finding that if we operate as one team, there's a significant amount of synergies and we can do more with less.
That's basically it in terms of marketing. I'm going to give it to Andrew for coal.
Very good. Thanks, Jyothish. Good afternoon, everyone. This is the penultimate part of the presentation before I hand back to Gary, and he'll talk you through a bit of a summary. But this is the coal business. I'm very proud to talk about the coal business. I've been part of this coal business for 25 years. And in fact, this month marks 40 years since I first walked underground into a coal mine in New South Wales. So coal has been all part of my life for a very, very long time. I'm passionate about it, as are our employees. Coal business, as has already been presented by Steve and presented by others, underpins the cash flow, substantial parts of cash flow for this business.
With the acquisition of EVR, we've added in a great district, a great mining district, and a great product in hard coking coal, which has a great growth profile as we look forward into the future. EVR is among one of the best coking coal businesses in the world, and we saw it for that opportunity and are very proud to now have that part of our business. The business generates huge cash flow, as I just mentioned, and Steve showed you that from a free cash flow perspective on the previous presentation. That's going to continue to contribute for this business and to the supporting of the cash flows for the investments into the copper businesses that you just saw. From a climate strategy perspective, we've told you about how we're going to address the thermal coal business. We do see a tailing off of that business.
It matches the way we see the longer-term supply-demand profile for thermal coal. We think it's the appropriate course of action, and we're going to stay the course on that strategy. This emphasizes just how significant an acquisition EVR was for the steelmaking portfolio. Significant growth into very, very long-life assets with substantial growth opportunities, either through life extension of existing operations or the construction and development of new projects adjacent to existing infrastructure. What we saw in this business is an opportunity. The opportunity sits in terms of steel demand is going to continue to grow. On the right-hand side here, you can see a view on the growth of steel demand going forward. It comes from the IEA. It shows growth at 1% per annum through till 2040. We and others believe that China is going to gradually reduce their steel production.
If we back out that Chinese assumption and steel production, and we have the rest of world, the blue line on this graphic, then we actually see rest of world steel production and steel demand growth being far stronger than the world in total. Where is that growth occurring? That growth is going to occur principally in Southeast Asia and India and the Middle East. Africa may be sometime down in the future, but we underpin the near-term on Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East. We see growth there at 2.3% per annum as we go forward through to 2040. Very importantly, underneath that sits what the profile is for blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace steelmaking. Blast furnace steelmaking is still the lowest cost form of steel production in many, many parts of the world, and in particular, Asia.
That form of steelmaking is not going away, and in fact, there's huge investments continuing to come into that sector. We can see line of sight on 45 million tons of new capacity being constructed in and around Southeast Asia. That's what underpins this forecast and what underpins the demand growth for steelmaking coal going forward into the future. Coking coal is a very technical subject. This is one way of illustrating the importance of those EVR assets within our portfolio. They sit at the top right-hand side of this graphic, the top right-hand quadrant. This graphic shows the coke strength, so a parameterseter that the steel mills absolutely rely upon in terms of being able to maintain safe and efficient operations. You need to be within that target box, blend box, for a steel mill to operate safely.
The weighted average CSR of global suppliers we see today sits below that target range. So the industry has to find a way in which they can blend coals together to meet that target range, and they have a lot of different parameters that they can use. They can look at different blends where you get non-linear outcomes in terms of CSR from that coke blend, or you can use stamp charging, which adds three to four points of CSR as you go through that coking process to help you lift yourself into that target range. The reality is that's necessary because the weighted average portfolio doesn't get it there on its own. Importantly also, as I said before, you're sitting at the top right-hand side of that quadrant where prices are highest.
What we saw happen during this year and we've seen through previous cycles is a disconnect between the premium prices, so the prices for premium-grade coals, and the prices for lower-grade coals. Premium coals maintain a very high level. The lower-grade coals get discounted quite substantially. That reflects oversupply within lower-grade products and an absolute requirement to maintain a premium hard coking coal in your blend. Looking at the industry from a cost perspective, this graphic shows the cost of supply into the industry, into the market for each individual producer, but it's done on a quality-adjusted basis or a margin-adjusted basis. So it's normalizing all the producers with respect to the $216 coking coal price that Steve mentioned previously in our 2026 guidance. Through the course of this year, we've been down as low as 50% of operations globally being cash generative. That's not sustainable.
We know that's not sustainable. It's part of the circular part of this industry that we've always been through. You go through high prices, you end up with low prices, and then you come out the other side. At the moment, there's still a substantial portion of the industry which is loss-making, and we're going to see adjustments to production as we move through into 2026 and into 2027 because of the underinvestment that's gone into the industry because prices have been relatively low. Our business sits at the good side of that cost curve. It sits at the left-hand side of that cost curve, and right throughout the pricing cycle this year has been able to be cash generative because we sit at that end of the curve, and that's why we have confidence in this business going forward.
To pick up on a point I just made around the cyclicality of this business and the cyclicality of pricing within commodities, this goes back for 11 years or 10 years. If I go back for 20 years, you see this same profile occurring over a five-year cycle. What drives this cycle? One reason is because we fall through the cost curve periodically. We go through a period of underinvestment to the industry. Then the industry looks or the demand picks up, and the industry is unable to respond. That lack of response from supply means prices spike. The other factors can come in is obviously weather events in Queensland. We've seen throughout history significant cyclonic events which impact operations. Maybe we get impacted, but now we've got the Canadian business which will benefit from the higher prices that are a result of a weather event in Queensland.
Similarly, if there's a weather event in Canada where an avalanche may interrupt a rail line for a period of time, price spikes. We get the benefit from our Australian business. So we've now got this flexibility and optionality within our business that we didn't have previously. The other thing that comes into this is government-induced supply disruption. So we've seen throughout this period of time the Chinese move in and out of production driven by government policy. And in the last couple of years, in the last 12 months, we've seen China overproduce coal, definitely in the first half of this year. And in July of this year, following a review of that industry, they made a very conscious decision to say, "You are overproducing. Wind back your production.
Put the cost structure back into that industry, which supports the cost structure of that industry because it was at unsustainable levels." Turning from steelmaking coal to energy demand, and energy demand underpins our thermal coal business. This year, we saw, or in fact, just last month, we saw the IEA publish their latest world energy outlook. The 2025 world energy outlook is the first time in six years that they have published what they call a current policy scenario. That reflects where they believe energy demand is going to go under the current policy setting. What the graphic on the left-hand side shows, that that same current policy scenario setting that they saw in 2016 and again in 2019 projected that global energy demand would grow linearly.
It's been growing linearly for 40 years, and the current policy setting that the IEA sees that linear trend continuing into the future. The ability to bend that line, as we've seen presented in alternate scenarios, is incredibly difficult. It's driven by population growth. It's driven by economic growth. And as energy becomes available, people consume that energy. As economies grow, they need that energy. It's a circular equation. It continues to grow linearly. What does that mean for our coal business? We were committed to the coal business because we didn't see that coal demand was going to decline. In 2016, the IEA saw that coal demand in 2024 would be just around that 6 billion ton level under the current policy scenario. In 2019, they shaped that a little bit further and saw that coal demand might actually come lower.
Then, actually, we get to 2024, and coal demand, lo and behold, was at 6 billion tons. Yes, there's been some adjustments. There's been decline in Europe. There's been decline in the U.S., but there's been very, very strong growth in Asia where economies are growing fastest and where coal remains among the cheapest sources of fuel to power stations and provide electricity for those economies to grow. The current policy scenario setting for 2025 from the IEA shows that, again, coal demand could potentially decline between now and 2035. But buried within the assumptions that are made under that policy setting is continued expansion of growth in the rate at which wind and solar come into power grids.
This year sees the first time we're seeing a bit of a slowdown, and we are seeing in many economies where the integration of those technologies is becoming more and more difficult, either because grids are not being able to keep up or because the cost of that integration is actually pushing power tariffs higher and making it more and more difficult for governments to fund. That differential, the IEA says, is equivalent to coal demand is likely to be flat by 2035 if those targets are not achieved. So coal demand remains very strong. The requirement for energy remains very strong. That underpins our thermal coal business as we look forward. An alternate way to look at the cost structure. This is now a margin curve for the thermal coal, seaborne thermal coal supply. Again, our business sits at the correct part of that curve.
On the left-hand side, lowest or top 25% quartile in terms of margins. This curve is shown including sustaining CapEx. It's using the same headline Newcastle price that Steve presented, $115. What's also important about this graphic is that today, still 30% of global seaborne thermal coal supply is losing money on a cash basis. It's not sustainable. We're going to see further supply disruptions if prices do not recover, and there's going to have to therefore be either a price spike or a supply response from an alternate region, which is cost-effective. That will take time. Prices need to increase.
Then just to illustrate, as I did in the steelmaking coal business, we've seen each time that the industry has experienced prices fall through the cost structure of the industry, we go through then a period of increased prices because businesses have not been able to sustain the CapEx. Businesses have reduced strip ratios. So they've taken costs out of operations in an unsustainable way and therefore unable to meet demand or resulting in closure of production because it's no longer affordable to keep going. What we expect as a result of this is that we are going to see further production disruption during the balance of this year and into 2026, and that underpins this business going forward. Thank you.
Okay. Let's wrap this up. Okay. I'm sure everyone needs a drink, something to eat, so we'll probably have a lot of questions.
We've gone a little bit longer than we thought on the presentations, but I thought better to spend more time on that. Hopefully, that does preemptively answer many of your questions, but we still have time, and obviously, for the analysts, we have a dinner tonight where we can spend some time answering your questions then, so to bring it home, our priorities for 2026. Xavier talked about safety, and he talked about safety in the context of how we approach it with a disciplined approach, a systematic approach, but the one thing that we haven't touched on, and it wasn't mentioned for today, but it is the mention of every single day in our business, is it is our number one priority, and we continue to focus on it every day to be zero harm across our business. You've seen the results of the work that we've done.
That same work is being done on the operational side, but let's not forget that the first thing and the most important thing that everybody thinks about in this business every day is safety, and we continue to work on that every day. Operational excellence. The idea of presenting the way we present today was to show you the skill that we have in our business. I didn't mention earlier that Jon, although 43 years of mining experience, probably started when he was five years old, but 43 years of mining experience across multiple commodities, multiple geographies. He's been in the copper role for coming on a year now. This is a change that we've made strategically to ensure that we have the right people in the right businesses to drive that operational excellence.
Xavier, being in our business for a very long time, been in the industry even longer, been in his role two years. This is a strategic change to drive the operational excellence. This is not, "Well, we're sitting on our hands, not doing anything," coming to the market saying, "Okay, we missed because of this, we missed because of that." We have been doing things. We have been changing. We've been the right people in the right roles with the right systems, the right programs to drive it. People like Shah coming back to our business. This is why we are confident in our ability to achieve these results or these forecasts that we've put forward, and it's around change and managing that change properly. Organic growth, that was obviously the main theme of today.
We bring in high-quality individuals, the likes of Martin and the likes of Christoff, to drive that organic growth within our business. That doesn't mean M&A is completely off the table. It's always something that we're good at. We look at, but today's about driving that copper growth. We have the right team. We have the right systems. And most importantly, we have the right portfolio. We will pull the triggers and the right levers that we need in that portfolio to get us to that 1.6 million tons of annual copper production or more in the future. Balance sheet, Steve taking you through the balance sheet, the fact that the business continues to throw off cash, illustrative free cash flow, very strong. The marketing business, big supplier of cash or big generator of cash in the business.
Balance sheet remains very strong, investment grade, and we continue to maintain strong triple B ratings and our dividend policy. Lastly is obviously value creation for shareholders. That's because ultimately that's what we're here for. All of these four first pillars lead to value creation for shareholders. We bought back, I said earlier, 13; it's actually 14% of our stock over the last five years. We've paid back billions and billions of dollars to shareholders because that's what we're here for, is to create value for each and every one of them. So the investment case. And you've heard this. You've heard it in detail.
So to run through just for the last time today, an exceptional portfolio of copper assets, some of the best in the world, a base business of going back to a million tons by 2027 as Collahuasi comes back, and then the incremental growth after that. That for us is the exciting part of this business, to be the world's biggest copper producer by 2035, and I'm absolutely certain we'll be there. I mean, just as a side note, one of the things I didn't mention earlier in all the excitement about all the growth and the Mount Everest of projects that we have is the mention of the Vale-Glencore joint venture that we signed in Sudbury yesterday. I know the Vale mentioned you in there, Investor Day, NRSE. We have a joint venture there where we're going to develop a project together in the Sudbury Basin, mainly copper-focused.
That's not on our chart now. We have some information on in the back of the presentation, the appendix, but another lever for us within this exceptional portfolio. Our coal business, as Andrew stood up, very proud to be in the coal business. Many of us in this room come from the coal business. We believe in the future of the coal business. The fact is it's a tier-one business, both our steelmaking coal business, our energy coal business. There's a need for coal, both of them, for many decades to come, and something that we'll continue to extract maximum value out of. That's in association with our energy assets, our LNG, power, and the likes. The synergies between those are something we extract daily. Our marketing business, Jyothish has spoken through it again. Great presentation.
I think many of you have been following us for many, many years, and you understand our marketing business. Our marketing business continues to get better. We continue to grow. We continue to evolve. Terrific business for us, very unique, as Jyothish said, and something that can only survive within a business that has such a strong industrial base, excellent marketing assets, and a diverse range of commodities that we trade. Our structures, we've changed our structures. We've simplified them. Accountability is key. Jon spoke a lot about that, and that gives us the comfort that we'll be able to deliver what we presented yesterday, and what does that all lead to? As I said on the previous slide, delivery of value for shareholders, so with that, I'd like to say thank you very much. Martin will take over and run the Q&A.
Thanks, Gary. Jason.
Sorry. Yeah.
I guess thanks for the presentation. Pretty comprehensive. Two, I guess, related questions around the Argentine growth projects. So in terms of potential syndication, when do you think about the appropriate time to bring in a partner? So that's the first question. Second question, you've sort of introduced us to some new people today, new old people. So that's your internal capability on projects. What do you think about in terms of external capability? So you say, "Oh, we're going to tap into Fluor. We're going to tap into Bechtel." Do they actually have the people to build all these projects?
Okay. So timing, we won't syndicate until we have taken these projects up the value curve because we don't want to leave value on the table. So we want to take these up post-feasibility and probably to FID phase or state. Syndication at FID?
Most likely somewhere around FID because by FID, we are comfortable on the value and the price. If we syndicate too early, there's a fear that we leave money on the table. We want to know what the size of the price is. Christoff spent a lot of time talking about what Pachón looks like. Right now, we do not know what the size of the price is. The only thing that we know is whatever he put up there, it's bigger, and to syndicate that now would potentially leave value on the table, and we can do the work. We can take that work up to FID when we know what this is, and that's when we can bring partners in. With regards to engineering firms and the ability to provide skills, yes, this is a challenge. And obviously, the question you ask is the right question, Jason.
There are challenges. Within these companies, there are A teams and B teams. We're always focused on the A teams. But Steve talked about and I'll come to the, well, let me go first. When we spoke about a lot of our projects, a lot of our projects are natural extensions of existing mines, which are the Coroccohuayco. That's either a haul road that Jon can build in five minutes or a conveyor belt that Christoff can build in seven minutes. That we'll decide. So these are not things that you need big engineering companies to do. Jon builds haul roads every day of the week. So a lot of our projects, significant amount of projects of brownfield, which are actually mining extensions, mining expansions, these are things we don't need engineering companies for. So most of it, we don't need it.
Then we go to the ones where we do need engineering companies. Your point is right. Do the skills exist? Well, there are skills. They do exist. Not always easy to get the A team for those sorts of things. However, Steve talked about, and particularly on the Pachón side, the ability to look at different structures and bring in partners who take a disproportionate amount of risk around execution and capital rather than just everybody relying on Fluor or whoever the engineering firm is to deliver a project. So we're trying to mitigate the risk that you raise or the question you raise or the risk you raise in your question by looking at these alternative structures.
Okay. Thank you.
Dominic.
Hi. Two questions for me. So I'm really interested in the slide on the copper growth options, but particularly the Collahuasi concentrator expansion.
So no mention of a conveyor belt. So could you maybe unpack for us how you're thinking about that project optionality, the value option? And again, maybe unpack how you're addressing some of those conversations with Anglo at the moment about that concentrator expansion. That's my first question.
Yeah, Dom, we're not ignorant to some adjacent potential synergies. We've had no discussions with Anglo on them. We're clearly aware of the challenges at the adjacent mine. And if and when the time comes to have a discussion with Anglo, we'll have the discussion. But at a minimum, the value proposition or the value attributed to the two assets has materially moved towards Collahuasi, to what everybody thought it may have been two, three, four, six months ago. So that's the minimum starting point.
The other point that we will be very firm on and is clear for us is that if we decide to not go ahead with the fourth line, which is something, as Michael said, we've already mandated and agreed to do the feasibility study. But if we do go ahead with that, and we don't do that, excuse me, and we do do something with a neighboring property, we won't become a junior partner. We will then remain as an equal equity partner that may put in some cash in, whatever it may be. Let's see. And as I say, the cash in will be impacted by that value attributable to each side where now a lot more of it has gone towards the Collahuasi side.
Thank you. Second question.
The presentation makes reference to your credit rating, but you don't make any reference to your $10 billion net debt target. So just in the context of the growth strategy that you're outlining, do you still maintain that $10 billion intention, or is there potential scope to run a slightly tighter, more risk-averse balance sheet looking forward, or no change to the capital distribution strategy?
I'm just not mentioning it in any of my slides, but there is still the appendix that shows very clearly how it's all been done and how we've practiced that over the last three or four years now. We feel like that $10 billion is appropriate now. Effectively, it's all equity funding because that's how it kind of works. I mean, this is post-CapEx. You're generating the cash flow.
We've shown that the copper business itself, under a range of scenarios, either more tightly, even more sort of conservatively, can easily fund that just within its own parameters. I think at some point, the trajectory on that debt level, once you have brought in some of these projects, I think the direction of that 10 is up because the installed base of the business, you're at 1.6. You look at some of those, the right-hand side of where some of the cash flows that that business is then generating relative to today under some debt leverage types of ratio consistent with strong triple-B ratings, even a three where we're on the Moody's side. I think the direction of travel, once we have funded and get to the promised land, I think it's up.
And then the ability to then maintain a less conservative while still meeting those parameters is very strong in the future.
Thank you.
Matt?
Hey, good afternoon. It's Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs. Gary, your opening remarks, you discussed simplification and enhancement of the portfolio. So my question is, how does Glencore define or measure what is strategically core to the company today?
Yeah, Matt. I mean, you would have seen the slide that I put up there where we've, there are 35 different assets that we've divested, some of them for significant cash, which we've been able to reinvest, and others just because it didn't make sense to be here. Now, that doesn't include others that we may have shut down. We shut down [audio distortion] . It didn't make sense. But you also heard Jyothish speak a lot around the marketing assets.
And it's an interesting, and that's maybe a misunderstood part of the business. And I've read your report where you sort of identify some assets that you feel maybe should be divested. And I understand where you come from because when you look at it, you go, "Oh, the ROI on that asset as it stands alone doesn't pass a certain threshold hurdle cash flow." And that is fair if you look at it. And from your perspective, and I think your analysis is done, is right. But what you don't see in your analysis is the value that, let's take Astron Refinery. The value that provides to, for example, Maxim over here, the ability to trade crude around that short is enormous. Now, you don't see any of that value in Astron. Astron , you'll just see a pure refining margin.
And if refining margins are weak, you go, "Whoo, that's not a great business. You've got weak refining margins." Okay, we've had great refining margins too, and it's like anything else. But where Maxim makes a lot of money out of it is having that short. And many of the assets that fit into that bottom left-hand quadrant that you have or that you've identified are exactly those where Jyothish or Maxim, or whoever it may be, or Andrew, are able to trade around those assets. And you don't see the return in that. Now, when we look at the asset to answer your question, we look at it holistically. The returns, the cash flow, doesn't move the needle. Is it irrelevant? And that's the basis for us to decide on those 35 assets that we divested, what makes sense.
It's not just because it sits in a quadrant there because of the standalone returns. It's how it fits within the structure, and that we look at as a group.
That's great. So perhaps that was another question. Yeah, sorry, another question. Just following on from that, you do have a lot of infrastructure in the marketing business, but also in the mining business. Steve, you've said that there could be scope to monetize some non-core infrastructure assets. Are you willing to put a number, perhaps, on what that could unlock and you could recycle elsewhere into the business?
Well, it can be billions. They've just got to sharpen their pencil. We've had some discussion. Sharpen your pencil. Maybe there's a deal to be done at some point.
Thank you.
Thank you. This is Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.
El Pachón is the biggest copper option within your growth portfolio, and you've touched on the different options you're exploring. How prominent is the adjacency option with mines that could lie on the other side of the border? And have you started any discussions with that option at all? That's the first question.
Look, we've got a very good relationship with Antofagasta. We have a commercial relationship with them. Jyothish does a lot of business with them. And there's a clear you don't even have to look at the map to understand how important or how relevant those two operations can be together. And there's certainly an interest and I can't speak for Ivan, and I'm not saying anything that's not public there's an interest on both sides to be able to work together to see if there's ways to optimize both of our businesses for the benefit of all our shareholders.
There's certainly an opportunity to do something there.
Thank you. The second question is on Katanga. I guess the last three or four years, there's been lots of issues with the land access, and you've touched on it as well in the presentation. Where are we in these discussions? How close are we to getting to a breakthrough, and what are the next milestones to look out for?
Yeah, we've had to restructure the entire transaction. The entire transaction was an acquisition of the land, which, due to legal impediments within the DRC, Gécamines were unable to ultimately close that transaction. It's taken a lot of time to get to a position where we can now restructure it. We've now restructured it. I don't want to put a timeline on the land, but we're very close.
I've said before, I hope we could get it done before the end of this year. We're sitting here. It's the 3rd of December. It still is possible to get it done before the end of this year. Now, maybe not, and maybe it drags into the first quarter. But this is not years away anymore. We have made good progress.
Thank you.
Ben.
Thanks. Impressive pipeline of projects. Just wondering, obviously, balance sheet capacity is one of the things. Just in terms of people capacity to do all these projects simultaneously, I mean, if we see a delay in one of them, does that mean the whole pipeline gets pushed, or can Glencore really do these? I mean, you've got three commissionings in several years happening at the same time.
No, I mean, just if one. I mean, I don't think. No, the answer is no.
Firstly, we've got teams, and Jon spoke about the structures where we've pushed capability down into the regions. So when you're doing MUMI, that has nothing to do with what you're doing in Coroccohuayco. You have a team, an empowered team in Coroccohuayco , to do what they need to do while MUMI is doing what they need to do. Now, you may have challenges in each geography. That's fine. That will happen, and we can staff it from the center to the extent that we need. But each one is not dependent on a single team or a single person to be able to execute those projects.
Okay. And just quickly, Century Aluminum, just curious what the plans are around that holding with the recent sell-down.
We're committed to the company. We're a long-term holder of the company. We used to own 47% of it.
We've owned it for a very long time. It doesn't give us any marketing arrangements. In fact, sometimes it's a bit, we hold to a higher standard sometimes when we have to get the marketing or when we offer to do their marketing or we make a proposal to them. And there's no real difference between owning 47% and 35%. And we felt, given that price movements have been very strong, here's a great way to recycle some capital, take some money, and put it into maybe one of these copper projects.
All right.
Hi. Alon Olsha, Bloomberg Intelligence. Just another project-specific question on MUMI sulfide. So $400 million for a new concentrator roaster plant seems pretty low, kind of benchmarking against other projects. So could you kind of run through what's behind that number?
And the second part to that question is, I think you alluded to potentially bringing that project forward. Kind of under what conditions would you consider doing that? I think first production currently is set at 2031.
Jon, you want to take that? You give your. Oh, you've got a. That's marked.
We have. I mean, we're looking at everything. Initially, the way that we would see the project moving forward is to build a small concentrator and start producing concentrates and floating off the cobalt and then sending concentrates into the market. And then we move to a roaster, basically. So we're doing all of that work now. We believe, I mean, FID is 2027. That project's moving fast at the moment. We've got exposed sulfides in the mine. And so the transition to sulfides is really simple for us.
What we're doing at the moment is trying to figure out how we can maintain the oxides and the plating capacity and then move to the sulfides at the same time. So we're in that early study phase at the moment, but it's moving really fast. And as Gary said, we've got the capability that's there. We've installed the capability, and we expect that to move as planned. CapEx, we're still refining. So there's still some work to be done. But as a starter, that number's pretty close to where we think it'll be.
What's the kind of rough size of that plant in terms of throughput?
It's a single-line concentrator, probably 40,000 tons a day type thing. Yeah. And we've got to leverage from the crushing capacity that we've got on site as well. So there's a bit of tying sort of work that we've got to do.
But yeah, it's moving forward. And the team are pretty excited about it. So obviously, we're moving faster. As I mentioned before, we want to move faster, obviously, to bring all that stuff forward as well. But also leveraging from what's happening in the DRC in terms of smelter capacities and all of that as well.
Got it. Thanks.
Thanks. Myles Allsop, UBS. I suppose just, yeah, we've seen the pipeline of copper projects, and yeah, it's pretty impressive. Yeah, we've known about it for the last year, but we're getting more and more information. But the market's not pricing it in. And there's a risk that will be here in two years' time. And the pipeline's moving forward, but the market's still not pricing in. And in two years' time, when CapEx goes up, then cash returns will be falling as well.
You'll be in that trap and still trading at the current level. I mean, obviously, last year was, yeah, the kind of looking at spinning out coal. Maybe one of the impediments with that is kind of the oil kind of marketing kind of business and the market being less comfortable with that. How much synergy is there between oil marketing and the base metal marketing business? And yeah, at what point would you revisit the spin-out and potentially crystallizing huge value for shareholders that way?
There's a lot in that, Myles, but I'll try to get through it. I mean, or [crosstalk] . Yeah, yeah. Okay. Just in terms of the synergies between marketing and base metals, yeah, I mean, Jyot spoke about it, and he put up that graph where we're no longer talking about commodities. We're talking about thematics.
Energy is the key thematic for today. If you want to, oh, data centers, AI. That's not. That's copper. That's power. What is power? That's thermal coal. That's gas. So what is gas? Well, gas relies on, in some respect, what is crude? What is carbon price? So it is an interlinked thematic, and one has to, and that's one of the great pieces of work that Jyot is doing is making those thematics more relevant within our business that we can lever off that for customers, for value, for margin.
So it's not just simply saying, "Oh, okay, the energy business and the spin-off was meant to be the coal business, not the energy business," but to say, "Oh, we don't need the energy business," or "The energy business is a drag on our earnings." I don't believe the energy business, particularly the oil and gas trading business, is a drag on our earnings. In fact, it's better. It's a cash-generative business. It does very well year in, year out. And as I talked about, those synergies. With respect to the coal spin-off, and I think what you were talking about is a drag on our share price, I think we've been clear. We listened to shareholders. Shaheholders didn't want to spin off the business. Of course, if shareholders tell us they want to spin off the business, fine. But we believe in this coal business. We've stood up.
We've told you we believe in it. We believe in the fundamentals of the business, the quality of the assets, and the fundamentals of the supply demand for both steelmaking and thermal coal. That's us as management. If shareholders change their mind, they can change their mind, and then we'll do what we need to do. But we have no intention to follow that path because we believe in this business. The argument that that is a drag on our share price, okay, if that is a drag on our share price and we haven't re-rated, well, we've just bought back 14% of our own stock before it re-rates. So to front-run the re-rate at a discount is far better than buying anybody else at a premium. And we're quite happy to do that.
Given the cash generation that Steve pointed out, where we can fund our projects and pay dividends or pay distributions to shareholders, we'll continue to front-run that re-rate. When we are the world's biggest copper company and we are trading at 15x EBITDA, I think the best piece of business we would have done is buying back our own stock.
Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank. First one on marketing. There seems to be a lot more competition in metals trading. Is that a risk to margins next year? If not, why not?
Jyothish?
We've seen the sort of size and scale of the business we have. It took about 50 years to build. Is it good that others are coming in? Yes. It's always good to have competition.
I don't think it's that easy to build one of these businesses in a very short period of time, and there's a lot of intersections. You look at if you want to do just copper. You saw the world map. We sell copper all around the world. Your start field office is everywhere. Where you source, when we source, there is a lot of intersection between copper and zinc, so if you start copper, you probably want to start zinc, then you think, "Okay, there is zinc. Maybe it's good to have nickel." You start building block by block. It's not easy, so can they succeed? Who knows, but it's not easy,
and we're generating record earnings in the metals business at the moment.
So that is something to point to, where this sort of competitive landscape has been in a certain evolving shape for the best part of nearly two years now.
Second one, another one on disposals, unfortunately. There's been press on Kazzinc and DRC in recent months. I mean, are they options, partial or full sale, to fund some of this copper pipeline that you're outlining?
You know what I like about these approaches and the speculation? They're approaching us on core critical assets. They want our best assets. We've put up what we're doing in the DRC and MUMI today. We didn't obviously put up Kazakhstan because we're not doing a Kazzinc deep dive, and we're happy to do that. These are core assets.
These are assets that add a huge amount of cash flow to our business, a huge amount of value to our business, a huge amount of marketing leverage to our business. And the fact that we get people knocking on the door saying, "We're interested to buy DRC. We're interested to buy Kazzinc," is a compliment to those businesses. Maybe we take Matt Green's bottom quadrant and see who's knocking on the door for what looks like not great assets. No. They're knocking on the door for the best assets in this business. These are core critical assets for our business. We have no interest in selling them. We've got to develop them, grow them, and extract value. But with that said, there's a price for everything.
And if the right buyer for the right value decides to offer us for any asset in this company or the entire company itself, of course, there's a price. And we have to look at those seriously if we are serious about ensuring that we create the most value for shareholders. So that's how we see it.
Thanks. It's Patrick Mann from Investec. One of the bull cases for copper is that it takes a long time to bring sort of greenfield projects to first production. But if I sort of look at the table, it's quite a short time in mining terms from sort of indicative FID to first production.
Is there a risk that that slips from environmental permissions or regulations, or is this something because Argentina through this RIGI program are pushing for this investment that you feel is fast-tracked and maybe that gives? Do you want to talk about?
Are you talking about El Pachón?
El Pachón. [crosstalk] . El Pachón, MARA's brownfields.
El Pachón, listen, we are seeing a lot of support from the government in terms of approving the IIAs and moving forward with the projects and communities as well. FIDs would happen when the IIAs are already approved, and we know exactly what we're building and what cost and into which timeline. The timelines that we put for the projects are comparable to what we have seen in other projects evolving from FID to full construction.
We feel pretty comfortable about meeting those timelines because there's support from the government, there's support from communities, and there's a local team with a deep knowledge of the local market that can perform that. And Christoff and the team, we know how to work.
And these projects have not started work on last month. These projects have already been years in technical and planning and studying.
So maybe that sort of 17 years figure is from first discovery, and you're way along that.
Yeah, maybe. Pachón, maybe more than that. Yeah. And you're older than the average in this one.
And then maybe just a second question, if I may. I mean, how do the cobalt quotas impact your thinking around allocating capital to, it sounded like there's still decent enough returns on offer there, and maybe you changed the pit to focus on maximizing the copper throughput.
But does it impact it at all, or?
No, these assets and these projects are standalone, value accretive beyond our benchmark returns on copper alone. So the cobalt, when we bought and we built these things, we didn't even know what to do with the cobalts at the time. So now, okay, we know what to do with it. We just can't get it all out. But if you look at what the quotas have done, I mean, the price is up 5x. So the fact that value over volume is proof that it's not the end of the world. It stands alone on copper, and any benefit we get out of the cobalt is probably even better now that they have implemented these quotas.
Hi, Richard Hatch from Berenberg. You talked to Gary about the long-term growth in the business.
Short term, if I look at the guidance, it feels like we're facing downgrades again, right? So there's some big cuts in some of these numbers. So I'm just trying to understand a bit more what's going on with zinc. Why has zinc come down so much? I see antimony has come off a bit, but zinc's come down big. And then met coal, we went out to EVR earlier this year. Again, talked to Gary, but are we cutting numbers at EVR? I'm just trying to understand why we've gone from 35 to 33 in met coal. That's the first one.
I mean, EVR is a function. We could go more. It's a matter of getting towards these permits, particularly at Greenhills, the [Cobar] 89s, and ultimately leading into the Fording River Extension.
You're sort of planning for a consistency in that sort of range and managing the risk-based timing that at some point you may have to go down and then sort of back up a bit. It's better just to keep those rates running as per those schedules. I mean, Xavier's very close to it. I don't know if there's anything.
Before you say anything, Xavier, I mean, to be frank, I mean, at $198 coking coal, what do we need to bring extra 2 million tons of coking coal in the market for? I mean, great on the margins, and you can say, yes, the margin curve. But to take a 2 million tons out of the market, does it do anything? Maybe, maybe not, but why?
It is effective. We could be maintaining higher, and then at some point you sort of say, well, what's the next?
But we kind of a little bit slow playing it. That's right.
Xavier, I don't know if you want to add something on.
No, I think. Sorry. The underlying issue for EVR is permits. That is 100% the issue there. Obviously, there's a lot of underlying activity going into the water plants and all that, which provides some distraction. But from an underlying operating perspective, it's a permitting issue more than anything else. The underlying base business continues to perform well. The impact permits have is predominantly related to haul distance and so on. And so you've got a decision to make about whether you invest in additional haulage capacity to maintain your volumes, which is only temporary because once you get the permits, you don't need that anymore. So what's the best way to manage that?
As Gary says, given where prices are, the incremental return on those tons doesn't make sense. And so you have to look at the economics as well. And the zinc?
Zinc was really, Lady Loretta was the main one coming out.
Lady Loretta and then obviously Antamina going through its phases.
I guess the thrust of the question is more, is this the low of the guidance, right? Is this the point where you feel operationally you put a management team in front of us now, an ops management team in front of us, where we can look at these numbers and say, these are the numbers and they're not going to be tweaked 5% lower. I get it. It's just more.
Yeah, we can't do that. That's that chart that Xavier went through. Xavier put that chart out at 34 or something, whatever it was. Yeah. Okay.
And the second one is you made no mention of streaming in your financing package. Is that a consideration, or is that something you would prefer to do?
No.
No? Reason for that?
There's better ways to finance the business. We don't need the streamers. If there's a degree of sort of price management that you think that gold and silver makes sense to lock in some or a portion, one can do it oneself. One doesn't need to be sold. I mean, these things are not. I mean, they are effectively primary gold and zinc and the likes. We're happy to take the tailwind from the precious metals now, but I think the industry has generally transferred more value to the streamers over the last 10-1 5 years than the other way around. And that's not under consideration.
Ephrem Ravi from Citi, two cynical questions, apologies.
First one, like two years ago, same case, copper, we need growth, but the focus was on urban mining and recycling. Breaking rock was so previous century, right? Now it's gmore on greenfield projects. So in terms of returns or how much copper incremental you can get, is recycling still worse off than greenfield, or is there any way to kind of ramp up the billion you are going to spend per year on recycling to bring the same amount of copper into the market and keep the market tighter?
I think you've got a billion a year on recycling, Ephrem. I mean, what we said, and you were on that tour, which was quite a good tour, certainly the food was good, is what we said is we saw recycling as something that had potential.
We said what we would do. We had a good recycling business, and we said, you know what, guys, keep doing it. In fact, Jyot was a key proponent of that, and he can maybe answer better than I can, but I'll give you my perspective. We said clearly at that, we said, look, there's a demand for recycled material. And at that time, the demand for recycled material, there was a clear premium in some markets for recycled material. We said, fine, we have this recycling business. It's generating cash flow. I think it was $200 million-$250 million EBITDA every year. We said to them, take it and reinvest it like a venture capital. Because if recycling does take off like we think and can become a billion-dollar-year business, we don't mind wagering that $200 million-$250 million a year.
And if it doesn't work, it's fine because we have all the levers that we have on the other side of the business that while we were on that tour, we were still doing a lot of the de-risking that you've heard around today, the studies, the land acquisition, all the de-risking and the work that needed to be done. That hasn't happened in five minutes before this presentation. It's happened over that two-year period. There was a time that recycling was looking like it had potential. So we said, okay, let's have a look at it. Let's put a little bit of money towards it. Nothing that is material, certainly not in the numbers that you mentioned, and see if it does go somewhere. I still believe personally that with time, recycling comes back and will be important. Why? Not just about margins, but it's just about sheer volume.
Look at that deficit that we're all expecting. Even halve that deficit. You need to, whether it's you're thinking about responsible mining or urban mining, no, fill that gap. And you need it from everywhere. And I do believe that recycling will come back. And I think some of the work that we've done historically in recycling and some of the infrastructure we have actually in time will come back and pay big dividends.
Thanks. And secondly, on disposals, there are core assets, but you've always had the view that at some price, even core assets are for sale. But given that you are now approving copper projects with arguably a higher sort of long-term price expectations, has your expectation for the price that you would receive for these disposals gone up materially versus, let's say, two years ago? Is it like 20%, 30%, 40%?
There's a price for every asset, Ephrem, at every point in the cycle.
And today versus two years would be 40%?
It's up. It's up. It's up. It's up. For sure.
Thanks. Ian Rossouw from Barclays. Just a quick follow-up on the cobalt and the land access. Is any of the land access assumed in this guidance, or what's the assumptions for that at KCC?
It's not particularly relevant in the shorter term. The long-term plan would sort of depend when we put the big KCC, but the shorter term is not. And I think there's even a footnote that says through land acquisition, it said it's not required for a sort of three-year period or so to underpin that.
Okay. And then just to follow up on the cobalt question and quotas, obviously the production guidance is still quite a bit higher than the quotas.
Is the intention just to stockpile that for a number of years? Yes. How long can you stockpile it? We can have as long as we need. Can you? Okay. And then maybe just lastly on Ephrem and Myles's question around sort of asset sales and disposals. I mean, do you think if you say anything's for sale at the right price, if you sacrifice a bit on the price, you actually get a much bigger re-rating for the business as a whole for some of these assets like Kazzinc or the DRC?
I'm not of the view that would be the case, to be honest. I don't think so. It's not about sort of, and the strange thing about that is that, okay, but then you've got to sell your shares the next day to actually realize that re-rate.
So if we sell an asset at a 20% discount, we've locked in a—we've left 20% of free cash flows, DCF, we've forgone that. That's cash gone. Now, if the share price did re-rate, you have to actually sell the share to be able to capture the value. If you don't sell your share, there's no value creation. You've actually lost money. So that's under that example. I don't believe that is the case, to be honest, but if it is the case, you then need to sell your share.
Okay. Thanks.
Tony Robson. Tony Robson, Global Mining Research. Easier questions. Thermal coal. Can you remind us? Assuming $140 a ton sort of normalized thermal price, what major closures are happening in New South Wales in the coming decade? And Cerrejón in 2033, can you extend that if we still have coal at $140 or something? Thank you.
2033, Cerrejón has billions of tons of resource. And when we do shut it or when the lease comes to expiration, there's a number of leases over 2033, 2034. We've said that we would then hand those leases back to the government at the time, which is the obligation under Colombian law. So when we get to 2033, 2034, that's what we'll do. What the government decides and what they want to do with it at the time, that'll be a discussion then. But our intention remains that we will hand back the leases under the law at the expiration of the leases back to the government at that time. With regards to our Australian coal business, most of the closures actually happen beyond 2030, 2031 and beyond, or sort of the end of the economic lives.
You've got the likes of the one that happened, the one that's happening sooner is Clermont up in Queensland. That shuts in 2028. Oaky comes to the end of life towards the 2029. New South Wales, Mount Owen comes to the end, early 2030s. What else, Xavier's in? Those are the ones.
MacGoular also around that time. Yeah, MacGoular around that time.
MacGoular, MacGoular similar. Yeah, MacGoular is a similar time.
Great. Thank you.
Okay, Ian, one more.
Sorry, just to follow up. I mean, if the current policy scenario is obviously assuming these efficiencies or you can't bend the curve, would you move away from your commitment to cut coal production by 50% by 2035? Our intention is not to do that, and I think Andrew was quite clear.
One can't just simply change what we tell the market and what we've said we're going to do just on a whim. But if we do get to 2035 and the world is screaming for the coal effectively, we're energy short, we're fossil fuel short, and we need the energy and the governments of the world. We have always said, if the governments of the world come together and say, listen, we understand this is the case, and Cerrejón's a perfect example, please continue with a lease. This has got to be the governments of the world have got to say to us, we want this, that this climate change is important and the responsible rundown is great, but we do need these coal mines running for longer to be able to satisfy this hunger for energy.
Well, because prices have gone crazy.
And prices have gone crazy, and we can't fill it with, as I said earlier, you can't get gas turbines and nuclear stations or can't get built in time, and renewables don't prove to be what many think they are. And the world says, please continue to mine. Yes, we will continue to mine.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thanks. We'll stop it there, Gary.
No, thanks very much. I mean, as always, we're always available to you guys. We've got a dinner tonight with the analyst. We can answer some questions then. I want to thank you for the time. I know it was long, but I think it was informative and appreciate all the support. Thank you very much.