Good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here in London for our 2024 Investor Seminar. Also, hello to those joining us online, particularly in Australia where it's the evening time. My name is Tom Gallop. I'm the Acting Head of Investor Relations at Rio Tinto. Just some formalities first. So if there isn't a fire alarm planned today, if you do hear a fire alarm, exit through the doors and just follow instructions. And also, I'd just ask if you could please turn off your mobile phones. As always, please take heed of the cautionary statements. We've got a really exciting agenda today, we think. It's spread over two sessions. There's a Q&A session for 45 minutes after each of those sessions. So I would ask if you could just focus your questions, take note of the agenda, and focus your questions on that basis.
There'll be plenty of opportunities to ask questions of the ExCo also through the day and for those that can join us for lunch after. And with that, I'll introduce Jakob.
Yeah. Good morning, London. Good evening, Australia. And thank you to everyone here and those of you tuning in virtually. I'd like to start with acknowledging and pay my respect to all traditional owners and First Nation people that host our operations around the world. We had a major highlight last week, first lithium produced from our Rincon project in Argentina. So for our safety share today, I want to show you how we managed to achieve this safely in just two and a half years.
Hi, I'm Guillermo Caló, Managing Director of the Rincon Lithium Project. I'm extremely proud to share a significant milestone for the Rincon project. We have produced first lithium from our starter plant. This is a monumental achievement for us. Firstly, we have achieved it safely. This is always our top priority. Secondly, it gives us further confidence in our ability to produce lithium at scale, even in extreme environments. It confirms the potential of the Rincon project. Rio Tinto took over Rincon in March 2022 and has completed greenfield production in 32 months. We are designing an expanded plan to optimize water use, limit impacts to the environment, and ensure we protect our people and surrounding communities. South America is crucial to meeting the rapidly growing demand for lithium, but it must be produced responsibly to the highest environmental standards and safely.
Operating at 3,700 meters above sea level on the Salta Plateau is challenging. We take every precaution to manage safety, health, and well-being of our people. Before workers arrive on site, they undergo rigorous preparations at our training center in Salta. They are familiarized with a replica of the operating environment and equipment they will encounter on site. This includes working at height, confined spaces, and in hot, dry environments. Further training is provided on site, though they arrive knowing what to expect. When workers first arrive here, they are given time to adapt and acclimatize. They are advised to move slowly and pay attention to how their body feels. High altitude affects everyone differently. Staying hydrated is crucial, and so is protecting yourself from the sun and extreme weather.
Sunscreen, aware of the right clothing and PPE, is crucial to working comfortably and safely, given the solar radiation at this altitude is intense. Our safety procedures involve conducting regular medical checks here on site to test oxygen saturation and blood pressure. These checks help ensure decision-making is not impaired and people's cardiovascular health is suitable for the work they are doing. Construction of the Rincon pilot plant has achieved 3.5 million hours without a major safety incident. We know, however, that safety, health, and well-being cannot be taken for granted.
Our mission here at Rincon is to move forward responsibly. Working at altitude requires additional focus and a committed approach from all employees. We are all responsible for taking care of ourselves and each other. Safety and health come first.
Safely producing first lithium at Rincon is a considerable achievement. And I must say, I feel very proud when I watch that video. However, I also want to acknowledge from the outset that we have had two devastating safety incidents this year. We are heartbroken by the loss of Morlaye Camara, who was an employee of one of our contractors at the Simandou port in Guinea. He was injured and subsequently passed away from his injuries in October. Nearly a year on, we also remember the six people who lost their lives on a plane crash on the way to our diamond mine in Canada in January. Our thoughts remain with all their families and loved ones. Thank you. I'm delighted to have the whole team here today.
We've been on a journey together for almost four years, and I hope you today will see that we are unfolding the historic strengths of Rio Tinto. We're doing this through a combination of leadership and culture and execution of a clear strategy. We set this strategy in 2021, and we have been consistent ever since. Now, we are even more confident that it's the right one because we have again tested the assumptions behind it, as clarity of strategy is vital to success. Our team has gone back to first principles, back to the periodic table, and back to the strategic context we are navigating within. The long-term view is critical to the portfolio decisions we take in the short term. So let me now give the floor to our Chief Scientist, Nigel, and then in a moment, our CFO, Peter, to share the bigger picture.
Over to you, Nigel.
Thanks very much, Jakob. As we know, to address climate change, the world has to go through a significant energy transition, and I just really want to talk about that transition and what it really means. You can see from the slide here, we're going to be going from having 80% of our energy supplied by fossil fuels to down to less than 10%. And that 10% won't be used to provide energy. It will be used as a feedstock to make some of the materials that we need in the world, things like plastics. Also, electricity is going to move from about 21% of our energy supply to greater than 70%, and this is going to be with renewables and with nuclear, those zero-carbon forms of energy.
This means that we're going to have to make a substantial build-out of renewables and nuclear, also some other supportive technologies, which I'll talk about in a little while. That will be a significant spend. And we're going to have to electrify mobility. All of these changes, as we address climate change through the energy transition, will require significant amounts of aluminum and copper because they are the materials that carry electricity as we electrify the world. Also, lithium for mobility. And also, we shouldn't forget steel. Steel is a very, very important component of that infrastructure build-out. An example is the overhead cables that carry electricity around the world. That aluminum is suspended in the air using steel structures, steel pylons. One of the big challenges that we face with renewables as we bring them onto the grid is they're not firm.
Solar and wind, they vary from minute to minute, day to day, obviously day and night. The sun doesn't shine at night, so the solar panels don't work. But also, there are longer time horizons where there is variability as well: seasonal, annual, and even decadal. The challenge is we need to actually firm that electricity up. And the way we need to do that is with some form of energy storage or firming of that power. Batteries, things like lithium-ion batteries, are already used on the grid, and they're used to stabilize electricity over a very, very short time period. So when a cloud goes over, when the sun just drops a little bit, and it can do day and night as well. But to go longer than that requires different technologies.
Just to put that in context, if you think about Tesla's Gigafactory, the largest battery factory in the world, if you take its annual output, charge all of those batteries up, it can supply the United States with power for three minutes. That's going to be the key challenge. How do we firm power over longer time periods? There are other long-duration energy storage technologies that are being developed, things like liquid air energy storage, flow batteries, and metal air batteries. They can take us through about a week, not much more than that. To go further, we can think about biomass. Biomass is quite interesting because it's countercyclical to solar. If you think what a crop does, it grows in the summer when the sun shines. That's when the solar power is also very, very high.
Then at the end of autumn, you harvest the crop. The waste that gets left behind, you can burn over the winter when the solar resources are much less. So that's quite an interesting technology in terms of seasonal stability. But when we look at longer term and zero-carbon firming, we have hydropower, but we know from our own hydropower assets that firming on an annual basis and decadal basis can change. That leaves us really finally at the end of the day with only two sources of zero-carbon power that we can stabilize the grid with, and it's nuclear and geothermal. So as we can see going forward, there's a whole plethora of technologies that need to be developed. The ones that will succeed will be ones that fulfill the cost requirements, that meet our land access needs, social acceptance.
Therefore, what we're going to see in the future is a portfolio of technologies to firm up the renewable grid as we grow it and grow that zero-carbon grid. With that, I'll hand over to Peter.
Nigel, thanks very much. And I just want to build on some of Nigel's observations to sort of say what are some of the themes then that translate into our strategy. So firstly, I think the dominant theme is clearly the energy transition. And if I sort of look to our sort of scenarios we've used in the past, we've sort of equated sort of higher growth with higher response on decarbonization, lower growth with lower response. But I think what we've found over the last few years is it's much more complex than that. And in fact, even though we're sort of seeing a fragmented response, we are seeing momentum. And a lot of that momentum is coming from technology, the early response through electric vehicles and through the deployment of wind and solar.
So we do think there is some upward momentum we're going to see over the next decade around climate change mitigation and through the energy transition. But what we also think is that that will really speed up post-2035. So those technologies that Nigel's talked to will really give us the impetus. And clearly, all of that, as Nigel says, is very, very positive for metals' intensification in the economy. There are four other themes that I think it's worthwhile drawing out right at the start of this conversation. The first one is the rise of the global south. And I'll talk a bit more about that in the last slide. But I always like to say that in terms of baseload demand in this industry, urbanization and industrialization is critical and will remain so. The second one is resource access and ESG requirements.
I mean, clearly, it is getting harder to bring projects to market in this industry. We experience it certainly in our portfolio, and I think you'll hear examples of that. But elsewhere across the industry, it is absolutely one of the key themes. I think the third one we'd talk about is processing and supply chain. So a whole amalgam of issues from the growth of the global south and where processing will be through where fragmented policies around sort of the energy transition, how will that affect processing, to just having sort of security of supply around cost goods. All of that affects processing. And we as a company have more capabilities around processing than others. And the last one is the rise of recycling. I mean, recycling clearly will become a bigger part of the supply chain into the industry.
It's about sort of 30% now for the major metals: copper, aluminum, and steel. The only interesting thing is it hasn't actually changed that much in the last sort of few years, but we do think it will and will become a bigger part. We did have the acquisition of Matalco last year. So in terms of that rise of the global south, I think the critical piece is that when economies hit around the $5,000 per capita GDP, suddenly the intensification of metals in the economy gets much larger. China hit that in the late 2000s, and actually, then we'll hit the point at which that tends to fade a bit from over $15,000 per head GDP in later this decade. I think the key point is that the countries in the global south don't hit that 5,000 on average until the mid-2030s.
That is a huge future for metals usage in just building out the urbanization and industrialization base of those countries, given that 1.4 billion people in India, 700 million in ASEAN, and then the rest of the global south. The chart on the right just looks at the sort of future construction profile of those countries. I think it's just really important as we think about this industry to reflect on that ongoing urbanization and industrialization trend. The last slide I wanted to present was just in terms of bringing all that together. In our modeling, what does that mean for metals? I think it's much easier to look in absolute terms rather than CAGRs, because with base effect, sometimes you lose just that sheer absolute growth.
But by 2050, we're looking at pretty big numbers there in terms of the amount of metal that we think that the world is going to need going forward. Jakob, back to you.
Yeah, thank you, Peter, and thank you, Nigel. This is a long-term logic backed by science and market analysis behind our strategy to deliver profitable growth. As Peter says, it is the reason why we see an attractive future for the products we produce. Now, let me tell you how this translates into building the portfolio. This year, we went through an extensive strategy process. We looked at our position across all the stable elements in the periodic table, our products, co-products, byproducts, as well as our feasible options. We looked at the market for each element, and we thought through the size of the price to determine where we want to play. We ask ourselves, is this key to the energy transition? What is the industry size and structure? Does it have an attractive cost curve? And what are the barriers to entry? Our portfolio meets these criteria.
We are the world's largest producer of iron ore and of bauxite. We are the Western world's largest aluminum producer, and we have one of the fastest-growing copper businesses. We are also leading producers of titanium dioxide, borates, and other minerals. The size of the pie here is smaller, but we like our market positions. We identified that we are able to reap the benefits of the demand from the energy transition and that we should continue to strengthen our position in all these materials. The clearest opportunity beyond that is in strengthening our position in lithium. Look at how the lithium bubble changes in the forecast to 2035. It has huge attractive growth potential. It grows five times in size. Lithium is absolutely a cornerstone of the energy transition. The question is whether you can make a profitable business out of it.
This is where we benefit from the current value environment. The capacity needed to meet future demand is not being built. So you will, over time, see a supply and demand gap. We have learned so much from the first phase of Rincon, from greenfield to first lithium in just two and a half years. And in a moment, Sinead will share much more. With the acquisition of Arcadium, we will be one of the world's largest resource holders of lithium with the unique optionality to turn it into production. Combining Rincon with Arcadium's operations in Argentina means creating three super sites with a resource base of long-lasting tier-one assets at the very low end of the cost curve, and each with a long-term production potential of 60-100,000 tons per year. And the size and proximity of assets allows us to realize real economies of scale.
Combining our capabilities also means we can drive the use of technology that are more sustainable, using less energy, water, and land while recovering a higher proportion of lithium. We have the building blocks for an incredibly strong, diversified, and growing business. Stack those blocks together, and you have a clear picture of growth across three horizons. We are passing the first horizon, a phase of stabilizing our operations. We're now moving into the second horizon through our push to become best operator and the delivery of major projects. Simandou is on track for first ore next year. Oyu Tolgoi is ramping up to schedule, and we are optimizing our aluminum production. Here's the best part. Even if we don't include lithium, we expect overall production growth around 3% a year from the end of 2024 to 2028. Add lithium into the mix, our horizons truly expand.
Lithium, including Arcadium, boosts our compound annual growth rate to 4% to 2028 and takes us to the third horizon, extending our growth by a 3% trajectory in the five years after that, with lithium accounting for 2% at this point. So we are already underwriting a decade of growth, not to mention future projects to come. Now, are we able to deliver growth and create value? To answer that question, let's examine where we are against the four objectives. We are moving the dial on impeccable ESG. Our decarbonization program is scaling up tremendously as we aim for value-accretive portfolio that will meet our 50% reduction target by 2030. You'll hear more about our approach today and, in particular, in our session tomorrow. On social license, it is up to society to determine our progress.
We still need to win more hearts and minds in some cases, but overall, the feedback tells us we are improving. Next, we are becoming an organization that can deliver projects of massive scale across the globe on time, on budget. We are strengthening our business overall as we learn rapidly from the process of excelling in development. Finally, to be the best owner of assets, we also need to become the best operator. There has been plenty of progress this year. We are achieving consistent iron ore production in the Pilbara. Aluminum is actually massively improving, particularly bauxite. I hope you will see this in the presentations from Mark, Sinead, Simon, Katie, and Jerome today, and in general, we're getting much better cost management in place. Like for like, we have fewer people in our operations at the end of the year than at the beginning.
We still need to stabilize IOC, RTIT, and Kennecott, and we will have a laser focus on this. But I actually just see it as an opportunity. Even better, as we go deeper into our assets with the safe production system, we realize just how much more potential there is across all our assets. We are also determined to stay the course in strengthening our work culture, a key enabler of our four objectives. We have worked very hard on our leadership development to become better at executing and lifting our performance. Meanwhile, the everyday respect progress review confirms that there remains serious improvement to make across Rio Tinto. But our people believe we are heading in the right direction. We'll share more in a panel later. So back to my question, are we able to deliver growth and create value? Judging by our progress, I know we can.
I know we would not be doing the best job for you, our shareholders, if we did not pursue these opportunities. As we pursue the opportunities, our portfolio is truly evolving. That has been the case throughout our 150-year run history. Rio Tinto is a company that can find, build, and operate commodity agnostic. Starting from being a 100% copper company, our portfolio has vastly changed in history. As you can see right now, due to our investment program, there will be another massive change in the portfolio towards commodities where demand growth is the strongest. It is in our DNA to deliver quality assets of scale at the lowest part of the cost curve and to continuously align our portfolio according to our purpose of finding better ways to provide the materials the worlds need.
Today, our team will show you how we are tapping into this DNA to unlock the full potential of our assets, shaping our portfolio backed by deep scientific knowledge and market analysis and setting a pathway for a decade of profitable growth. Mark is up next. I'm proud of what his team is achieving in terms of physically building projects and accelerating learning to build stronger capabilities. He's also the one who's holding our feet to the fire on best operator. Then we'll dive into the different product groups, starting with our minerals business and lithium, which has evolved significantly. We will also get into our markets and decarbonization as well as our culture journey. Finally, we will ask the crucial question, can we afford this strategy, and Peter will explain that we will indeed maintain financial discipline while we deliver value to our shareholders.
Thank you very much, and over to you, Mark.
Thank you very much, Jakob, and good morning. For those of you who I haven't met, I'm Mark Davies, Chief Technical Officer. Becoming best operator is a critical objective for us that underpins our other objectives. For us, best operator means great teams bringing their best every day to realize the full potential of our assets. For 2025, there are three key focus areas to accelerate our journey towards best operator. Firstly, SPS provides a strong foundation in operational excellence, and we are prioritizing key practices and improving our maturity. Secondly, we're expanding our use of system analytics to focus our efforts on the most valuable opportunities across the group. Lastly, we are working on simplifying our organization to reduce the number of interfaces and make faster decisions. I took on responsibility for our safe production system from Arnaud when he retired earlier this year.
Since then, we've continued to deploy SPS at eight more sites, reaching about 65% of our operations and improving our maturity along the way. I've visited a number of our operating sites, and I've seen some encouraging performance uplift, particularly at our most mature sites. In iron ore, SPS is on track to deliver a 5 million-ton year-on-year uplift with a 6% reduction in unscheduled plant losses. And as Jérôme will discuss, the Amrun plant reached its nameplate capacity for the first time in history. It is also great to see that beyond productivity, SPS is shaping our culture and the felt experience of our employees. Employee satisfaction scores have increased on average by about two points at SPS-deployed sites, and SPS sites typically achieve higher safety maturity scores. We're shifting from a culture-driven performance model to a performance-driven culture.
We're doing that by improving our performance management through globally standard key practices. All of our operating sites will deploy clearly defined cascaded priorities right down to the front line, a structured improvement life cycle, and an integrated cadence to track, monitor, and sustain performance. In addition, we're transitioning from being an organization of fixers to one of problem solvers. And this involves equipping every individual with the skills and tools necessary to address root causes and prevent issues from recurring. I'd now like to share a short video that shows you some examples of the impact our problem-solving tools are having at our operations.
I'm really excited to be participating in this guys' workshop here at IOC to see how the process works, how it operates, the routines, and the thinking.
The team is really dealing with a big challenge. Shutdown maintenance of a mill here in the concentrator is something the team does every 12 weeks on every mill, and there's four mills, right, so they do this job 16 times a year.
Often, we're looking for an answer to a problem, and we think it needs to be really quite complex. But actually, it's often the little things that can make a big difference.
Our leadership team actively participated in our workshops, also asking focused questions to make us think outside of the box and challenge the way that we normally do things.
It's always valuable to see stuff from a different perspective. So you've got more information to pull from when you make a decision.
So my colleagues will give you some more details. But as you can see from the video and the Kaizen examples on this slide, our SPS tools are having a huge impact. And we're seeing great engagement from our employees and some real tangible value. But while SPS is critical delivering on our best operator objective, we actually know there's more we must do. For example, the health and management of our assets is critical to delivering on our plan. So this year, we delivered a very targeted asset management uplift to enhance the performance and reliability of assets at our most critical sites. We focused on improving the quality of our maintenance tactics, embedding a standardized defect elimination program, improving operational discipline to work management practices, and building the asset management capability of our workforces.
Combined with SPS, this program is delivering real value, including, as an example, a 25% reduction in unscheduled losses at the Gudai-Darri fix plant. SPS has also helped increase the impact of our value stream improvement work. About two weeks ago, I spent some time with the iron team, and it's absolutely clear that by combining the operational discipline of SPS with the established systems thinking techniques, we've been able to unlock significant value by optimizing the flow through our value chains. At Rhodes Ridge, the systems thinking has delivered a 9% uplift in tons, and we're now working to expand this to our broader Pilbara system and throughout the group. Finally, we are working to simplify our organization and the way we work by reducing the interfaces and where interfaces are necessary, ensuring they're extremely clear.
We're also providing our employees with a clarity of role so that they know what they have to do to have a good day every day. And through this simplification, we will enable faster decision-making and improve efficiency and productivity. You're going to hear a lot more about our progress on best operator from my colleagues. But in summary, we are accelerating and maturing SPS through key practices, expanding and codifying our use of systems thinking, and simplifying our organization.
Everything that we are doing ultimately links to our people and to our culture, shaping how we learn and continuously improve, how we draw on the power of psychologically safe work environments, how we use and apply data and technology, how we make it as easy as possible for our people to get things done, and ultimately, how we put our assets and our operations at the center of what we do so that they can bring their best to every shift, which will enable us to become the best operator. So I'd now like to sort of hand on to myself to pick up on excellent development, and obviously, excellent development is another key priority. We have a very strong pipeline of projects in almost 20 countries, from exploration through to studies and construction.
Today, I want to tell you about some key attributes of excellent development that we believe give us competitive advantage in finding and building future operations all across the globe. These are our in-house capability in everything from HSE to innovation, our ability to efficiently find and develop new ore bodies, and our experienced team of technical and construction professionals. Rio Tinto Exploration has almost 75 years of experience in finding new ore bodies, including many of our foundational businesses. Iron ore in the Pilbara and bauxite at Weipa are just two examples. Today, we maintain a $200-$250 million base budget, depending on the level of advanced projects. We have over 400 people across 17 countries looking for eight priority commodities, with over 50% of that spent targeted at greenfield copper and 30% in lithium. Most of our brownfield work is focused on iron ore.
But in greenfield exploration, we're pursuing a portfolio of opportunities with some of the most advanced in copper, like Winu, Nuevo Cobre, and Cometa. Winu is a great example of a recent discovery from our exploration team, which we are now progressing through studies with the aim to add to our operations. And you'll hear more on Winu from Katie. We acquired our 58% stake in Nuevo Cobre copper project in Chile in November 2023. And we're currently working on permitting and in parallel, reviewing the historic core assays for copper mineralization. The former operator of these tenements was a gold and silver miner. So the majority of the core has not been previously assayed for copper. And so far, we've seen some very promising results. And this data helps us to plan priority areas for drilling once our permitting is complete.
At the Cometa copper project in Colombia, we've seen some encouraging results from our initial work. So the team are heading back on site to do further drilling. A 75-year history in exploration doesn't just mean deep technical expertise. It also comes with a virtual treasure trove of historic data, which we can combine with publicly available data to provide some unique insights. And advances in technology such as AI help us accelerate the discovery process through the collection, compilation, and evaluation of that data. For example, with Lumo Labs, we're able to extract information from drill core in a matter of minutes rather than months. And we also use AI and machine learning to compare new images of core samples with a database of images from past discoveries, identifying similarities and increasing our ore body knowledge.
Moving on to projects, we established a centralized in-house projects capability about 15 years ago. Today, we have an enviable talent pool of globally experienced construction and project management professionals who can help us capture and embed learnings from each of our projects and supply a future talent pipeline. For example, the work we have done at OT is world-class. Today, there are Mongolian mining and construction engineers who have honed their experience at OT working at our other projects, including Resolution and Simandou. Looking ahead to 2025, we'll be managing 22 projects in execution and 26 studies, increasing our managed spend by about 12% compared to this year's plan, while maintaining a lean central structure and a ratio of in-house team costs to managed spends of about 2%. My colleagues will give some further detail on the projects that are growing their product groups.
But I would like to briefly touch on a few of the key projects that are in execution next year. We'll be building a mine a year over the next five years in the Pilbara, and Simandou will achieve first ore in late 2025. We have projects in Canada to expand our smelting capacity through AP60 and the work to refurbish the 100-year-old Centrale Isle-Maligne Hydro Power Station so it's fit for another century of green power supply. At OT, we've delivered first ore on the Kavada surface in October this year, and the underground project will complete next year. And as Jakob has mentioned, we've just achieved lithium production from Rincón 3000 and will be shortly seeking approvals to progress to Rincón full potential. An in-house projects execution team is not just about efficient construction.
We are committed to build the foundations that will deliver safe and sustainable operations into the future. We embed HSE and CSP capabilities into each project, not only ensuring safe and efficient project delivery, but also aligning to our future operating protocols. We're also using SPS practices to streamline and improve project execution. And on the innovation front, the Bundoora Technical Center looks at first-of-a-kind opportunities such as developing the flow sheet for processing Jadar, efforts in dry stack tailings, as well as testing and enhancing our direct lithium extraction technologies. And now, with the proposed Arcadium acquisition, there is exciting potential to leverage our projects expertise to accelerate growth options and bring the Arcadium technical capabilities in to complement those within our own R&D community. Another key in-house capability is optimizing value.
Our world-class studies and R&D teams help us shape and maximize the value of our projects before construction begins, and just this year, we've created a projects office in China to help us apply the lessons we're learning from our Chinese construction partners to improve capital intensity and ultimately project value. At our largest project, I wanted to share an update on Simandou, and starting with safety, as Jakob mentioned in his introduction, the tragic death of our colleague, Morlaye Camara, in the port in October. I was in Guinea at the time of the incident, and I saw firsthand how deeply this has affected our teams, and as of today, we are continuing to put significant effort into supporting Morlaye's family as well as building and maturing our safety culture.
This is an incredibly complex project encompassing over 620 kilometers of rail, a mine situated on top of a mountain, and very significant port infrastructure. As of November, the workforce on the SimFer scope exceeds 12,500, with 80% of those being Guinean nationals. But to give you a better idea of the progress we're making, I'd like to share with you a short video. So as you can see, we're making great progress, and we are continuing to meet or exceed our co-development agreements with the government of Guinea and deliver the project on schedule. In late October, I was in Guinea to celebrate the completion of a key piece of the Simandou Railway infrastructure, the 275-meter-long bridge spanning the Milo River. That bridge went from earthworks to completion in less than nine months.
We've commenced laying track at the connection point to the Trans-Guinean Railway, completed 100% of the bridge piles for all five bridges, and excavated over 650 meters, or 75%, of the tunnel. At the port, the excavation of the car dumper area and the work on the TSV wharves is ahead of schedule and on track to deliver our 2024 milestones. At the mine, we have been hampered with some wet season rain, which is much higher than average for this time of year. But despite this, we remain on track for our critical path activities and our overall completion date. And coming out of the wet season, our earthworks contract partners are picking up pace, consistently delivering above target. Our team in Simandou is also dedicated to supporting local communities.
This year, we've inaugurated seven new schools for nearly 2,500 children and organized free healthcare screenings for more than 1,600 people. This project is a very important collaboration with the government of Guinea and our Chinese partners. We're learning a huge amount from our Chinese partners, especially in relation to speed, simplification, modularization, and fabrication. These suppliers are resourceful and solution-focused, with very quick decision-making, resulting in great productivity. We're finding the quality of work comparable to our other international suppliers. We've learned that their standardized integrated delivery model is crucial. Any deviations cause significant disruptions and the potential loss of value. The large scale of these Chinese EPCs enables them to undertake numerous projects, which results in extensive experience and highly skilled people.
But performance in any project depends significantly on the behavior of our owners' team, making it crucial that we maintain strong relationships with our Chinese partners. The establishment of our China projects office has therefore been extremely valuable. Many of our future growth opportunities are going to be in complex environments. And we're confident that the lessons we're learning at Simandou will set us up for that. So in summary, our ability to excel in development is underpinned by strong, experienced internal capability in exploration, studies, R&D, and projects. And these capabilities are helping us to quickly find, study, and optimize options and develop assets by efficiently applying the lessons from the past to improve each new project. Finally, our people are key to this. We have a broad and experienced cohort of technical and construction professionals that we can deploy globally, transferring talent, capability, and knowledge between projects.
Thank you very much, and I'll hand over to Sinead.
Good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to be here today to be presenting Minerals to you all, and for those that don't know me, my name is Sinead Kaufman. I've been with the business for about 28 years now, working in a variety of different product groups and different locations, so Minerals is the most diverse and geographically spread group within Rio Tinto, and our products are the essential ingredients of many of the items that are in this room and that we use every day, everything from your mobile phone to paints on the wall to the toothpaste that you use, and very shortly also to include batteries in your electric vehicles, so we have four key operating businesses that are the foundations of our portfolio: Boron in California and Europe, which is a leader of refined borates.
That market is supplying; we supply about 30% of global demand from that business. It's predominantly a chemical processing business, which has been operating for over 150 years. It's a stable cash-generative business within the product group. IOC, or Iron Ore Company of Canada, produces some of the world's highest-grade, low-impurity iron ore, which is a critical input for the decarbonization of the steel industry. Our iron and titanium business in Canada, South Africa, and Madagascar feeds the paint and pigment and titanium metal industries and maintains a 14% market share. Diavik is a high-quality diamond mine in the Northwest Territories of Canada. It's been a difficult year for Diavik this year as we near the end of mine life. What we expect to see next year is an increase in production as we mine the final accessible pipe at Diavik ahead of closure.
We covered IOC in September in Montreal. So I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on it today. But I do want to reiterate our commitment to best operator. IOC has seen a lot of production challenges in recent years. And the focus going forward is to stabilize the operation to achieve safe, effective, and consistent production. And our focus there really continues to remain on improving performance towards nameplate capacity, really through the implementation of the Safe Production System, as Mark has referenced. And that's running it across the whole value chain. For iron and titanium, we continue to work to increase our return on capital and also to position the business for growth.
Our focus is on accessing and developing the right ore bodies to grow our business and also to ensure that we can grow the business's demand increases as the market returns next year. The IOC and iron ore businesses are core to Minerals, but I really want to spend most of the time today to talk about lithium, so it's a new addition to the Minerals product group, and we really have seen some long-term exciting prospects come forward that can support the energy transition, so you've already heard from Jakob and also from Mark and from Guillermo this morning around first lithium at Rincon. So that is a notable milestone achievement and what has been a really remarkable journey so far over the last couple of years. As Jakob said, Rincon was a greenfield project 32 months ago. We only completed acquisition in March 2022.
So in that time, we've improved our recycling technology to halve the amount of water that's required to produce a ton of lithium carbonate equivalent. We've increased our mineral resources by 60%. And in the intervening months, we've also developed a really strong in-house technical operational capability that gives us the confidence to really scale up the operations both safely and sustainably. So this includes across logistics, engineering, and operating also at an extreme altitude. And the application of technology has been a real standout. The project is using direct lithium extraction, which has been very efficient both from an environmental perspective, also from a recovery perspective, and from a water use point of view. It reduces waste. And it also produces lithium more consistently as well from a quality perspective.
This work at Rincon has really reinforced our confidence in being able to expand up to an additional 60,000 tons, a total of 60,000 tons at Rincon, and will do that over the next few stages of growth. In mid-2025, we expect to have closed the Arcadium transition acquisition as we go through the approvals. We're really well advanced into thinking about our integrating of Arcadium into Rio Tinto. Acquiring Arcadium has been really exciting for us. It solidifies our belief in the potential of the lithium market and also the position that we're building with the commodity. We're acquiring a network of hard rock and brine resources in locations that we're very familiar in, such as Argentina and Canada. We have strong relationships in those areas with governments, with communities, and also with First Nations.
These are complemented by a suite of downstream chemical processing plants that Arcadium brings in China, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., all countries where Rio Tinto has long histories. Upon completion in these assets, it will give Rio Tinto an industry-leading lithium resource development. This cost curve that you see on the screen, which comes from benchmark minerals, really looks at the operating costs for different lithium assets across the world. We have also done our own thorough internal analysis and looked at every single lithium asset available globally. It has confirmed for us that the brine projects and our Jadar project really do sit at the bottom of the cost curve. It's also confirmed for us the competitiveness of the other opportunities available. We have the ambition and the balance sheet to unlock the full potential of Arcadium's assets at pace.
We intend to undertake an accelerated phased development of the projects post-acquisition, timed to meet future demand growth. In Horizon 2, on this graph, you can see we have a pathway to doubling Arcadium's current production over the next four years through the development of Phoenix 1B in Catamarca and also the Galaxy project in Quebec. Phoenix 1B is already in construction. However, the construction's been paused due to capital constraints. Phoenix 1A has just been delivered by Arcadium. 1B is essentially a replica of the plant at 1A. It's a very good basis to recommence construction and move this forward. Similarly, Arcadium has slowed down the Galaxy project due to capital constraints. This is quite an attractive project in Quebec with most of the permits already in place. We want to take another look at this opportunity.
In the Horizon 3, we can see that there's an opportunity to unlock further growth through applying DLE technology to develop a series of Arcadium greenfield opportunities in Canada and Argentina. And this time horizon also allows us to do some debottlenecking at Rincon and potentially add additional tons there and also develop the Jadar project, which is another 58,000 tons per year. We also have, as Marc has said, an active exploration program, which is looking for further potential upsides. And this represents an industry-leading growth pipeline. I want to talk a little bit more about Argentina. And so Argentina is continuing to make great progress, positioning itself as a producing leader in the world for lithium. Within that, we see the opportunity to leverage the proximity of Arcadium's assets with Rincon and create some super sites in the northwest of Argentina.
At its heart will be a combined capacity of about 230,000 tons a year, with an additional 50,000 that we believe we can unlock through technology advancements that we can make through brine extraction and also brine reinjection technologies. This really aligns with our overarching ESG strategy to limit water use, land use, and minimize the impact on nature. These sites will allow us to realize economies of scale in the region, notably optimizing supply chains for logistics and raw materials and also unlocking technology. As Mark has already said, our Bundoora technology facility in Australia has really been the cornerstone of our own technological development to unlock ore bodies at Jadar and Rincon. Arcadium is also considered a technologically advanced company. Combining the two of those together gives us opportunities to really improve efficiencies, costs, and flexibility while also creating new market opportunities for lithium.
At the same time, the Argentinian government's efforts to enhance the investment climate, including the RIGI legislation, continues to make Argentina an increasingly attractive investment destination. We have spent time with the new administration and we also hosted the governors from the resource-rich provinces here in London recently. We are reassured by their commitment to developing the lithium sector further and also to creating a competitive industry environment in Argentina. Rincon and Arcadium are not the only exciting opportunities. Jadar also remains a potential transformational project for Serbia and also for the European lithium industry. 2024 has been a watershed year for us. The spatial plan was reinstated in July and we're making good progress on the next phase of permitting. We've continued talking to everybody and key stakeholders about the environmental and economic merits of the project.
And this has helped us to counter some of the spread of misinformation that has tainted public perception of Jadar. The next key milestone for the project is progressing through the environmental impact assessment process and then receiving the next stage of permits, which is called the exploitation field license, which will allow us to then do additional field drilling and also work to progress the project further. More broadly, our exploration team have also continued to identify greenfield options. And we have encouraging drill results at the Galinée pegmatite project in Quebec, which is very near to the Arcadium assets that I spoke about earlier. We also have identified attractive brine opportunities in Chile. And the Chilean government has also earmarked lithium as a key sector to support future economic development.
As you'll hear from Katie, our wider portfolio activities in Chile have given us strong insight into that country's mining industry and the opportunities that are associated with it. In Africa, we've identified multiple pegmatites from early stage exploration also in Rwanda. Look, I'm very proud to be able to lead the Minerals business. We're a product group that has a really strong set of existing market-leading businesses, which we'll continue to drive value from, and also to build a truly world-leading lithium business that we're building with the right assets at the right time and with strong capital discipline. Our focus on long-life, low-cost, high-value assets really positions us strongly in this market, and our financial strength and project delivery expertise will enable the acceleration of Arcadium's growth pipeline, creating significant value. Rio Tinto is the right home to unlock Arcadium's potential.
We're developing these assets with a focus on maintaining impeccable ESG, a reliable, low-cost, sustainable supply of a commodity that is critical to the energy transition.
Thank you. I'll hand over to Simon.
Thanks very much, Sinead. Hello and good morning to each of you. Listening to Jakob talking earlier about the tragic death of some of our colleagues earlier this year is going to reflect on the tragic consequences and impact that has on colleagues, on friends, on family. It does bring front of mind what I'm doing to drive safety and well-being in our Iron Ore business. This year, we've had 11 potentially fatal incidents in Iron Ore. While that is more than halved over the last few years, we have work to do because everyone has the right to go home safely at the end of each and every shift.
Today, I want to focus on three main areas: the progress we have made during 2024, our focus areas as we now head into 2025, and how our global iron ore portfolio is coming together. The strategy is unchanged to be the most valued resource business as measured by total free cash flow and from the perspective of our employees, community, customers, and of course, our partners. Looking back now on 2024, we've made strong progress implementing this strategy. We will deliver the 10 million tons uplift from productivity that I promised standing here last year from both the safe production system and from taking good old Gudai-Darri above its nameplate capacity within two years of its commissioning. SPS is now rolled out across the Pilbara, and we're now focusing on system-level improvements to drive further uplift, which I'll talk about more in a moment.
Western Range is on track for commissioning in the first half of next year on time and on budget, with 85% of construction now completed. And good old Gudai-Darri, as I touched on earlier, is making strong progress to deliver the 50 million tons per annum run rates during 2024. All of this gives us great confidence as we progress that next tranche of new mine developments that we need to sustain our business into the future. On social license, we are embedding co-design and co-management practices into our approach, leading to better relationships with traditional owners. There are areas of alignment with traditional owners and areas of difference. And we will continue to engage as we progress those discussions. Our global portfolio differentiates our business from our competitors. As I talked about last year, success in a bulk business like iron ore has always been driven by access to infrastructure.
Increasingly, it is also about access to resources and access to markets. Building on our rail and port infrastructure position in the Pilbara, the steps we are now taking across our global portfolio will provide the access to markets and the access to resources that we need into the future. As the chart here shows, in the Pilbara, our blended grade profile of our bedded products, both Pilbara Blend and SP10, is ideally suited to Chinese steel mills. Simandou's commissioning and Rhodes Ridge's future development will further strengthen our market position in both the mid and the high-grade sectors. Iron ore demand remains constructive. As we've talked about for a number of years, while Chinese steel production has likely peaked, as much steel will be demanded in the next 20 years as the last 30 years, a time when we've seen enormous demand growth in China.
CO2 abatement will drive strong growth in direct reduction iron, which is beneficial for both IOC and Simandou, and a relatively young blast furnace fleet in China and steel capacities elsewhere in Asia translates into strong ongoing demand for Pilbara products. On the supply side, over the next decade, major producers, including ourselves, will need to develop new projects to offset depletion. For example, around 40% of today's mine production will need to be replaced by the early 2030s. At the same time as that requirement, increased societal expectation and mine approval timelines reduce the pace of new mine development. As we announced at the Q3, we have commenced a review of our product strategy. Our flagship product, Pilbara Blend, has been the most traded iron ore product in the market for over two decades.
Since its inception, we've sold over three billion tons of Pilbara Blend, with customers valuing both its scale and its consistency. The review will determine the highest value mix for our customers and our business based on our view of future demand preferences and changes in our resource base. Now, there are three main drivers of reviewing product strategy now. Simandou will achieve first ore by end of 2025. We need to consider how we bring those iron units to the market. Rhodes Ridge contains 6.8 billion tons of mineral resources with a combination of both Marra Mamba and Brockman ores. This provides options as well as choices for its development. Thirdly, capital expenditure costs in the Pilbara have escalated, and approval timelines have lengthened. Adjusting product specifications may enable greater access, greater utilization of ore bodies, additional product tons, and lower costs.
We're engaging with our customers and our partners as we progress that work through 2025. Turning to best operator, and I loved Marc's description earlier about a great day every day, and that really is the heart of SPS. And across the supply chain, SPS is being embedded into our core practices and our mindsets. Some examples. We diagnosed inefficiencies in our maintenance shutdown procedures across the Pilbara. Centralized shutdown planning has moved all operations to a standard 13-week shut cycle. This also enables our contract partners to set up programs of work with greater confidence of demand profiles. A dedicated team then is focused on core work practices undertaken during shutdowns to reduce the time taken to change out assets and components, and rolling this across all of our fixed plants has led to a 6% reduction in unscheduled loss across our plants in the last two years.
That translates into around a million tons of additional plant capacity. We've also been standardizing our organizational design as we seek to reduce interfaces and make it easier to get our work done. So this has reduced small teams by 50%, increased spans and control by 35%, and reduced individual role types across our Iron Ore business by 30%. SPS is leading to stronger operational performance. For this to translate to headline growth and offset depletion, we require further mine development. Across that next tranche of replacement projects, as I mentioned, Western Range will be commissioned in the first half of 2025. We anticipate government approvals and will seek final board endorsements for Brockman 4, Hope Downs 1, and West Angelas, sustaining by the end of 2025. The Rhodes Ridge pre-feasibility study is advancing.
We've selected the initial mining areas and key locations for infrastructure, with a target of first ore by the end of the decade, and where possible, we're replicating the Gudai-Darri plant at Rhodes Ridge, providing both design and operating benefits as we modify it where required for differences in ore type. In 2025, our production guidance is 323-338 million tons, and similar to our approach last year, the midpoint of guidance is derived by taking our last 12-month run rate of 329 million tons, which is to the end of Q3, subtracting 2025 projected depletion of 19 million tons, and then adding targeted SPS productivity measures and the new tons we expect from Western Range as it commissions and then begins to ramp up. While I'm pushing for more production next year as SPS delivery continues, it is a challenging year.
Depletion in 2025 peaks at around 19 million tons, but then moderates to 5 to 10 million tons in 2026 and 2027, at the same time as those replacement projects begin to be commissioned. Our midterm capacity remains 345 to 360 million tons. And over the next five years, depletion equals around 80 million tons. And we'll install 130 million tons of nameplate capacity over that period, as well as chasing further productivity and capacity enhancements. So in summary, our near-term focus is on improving our performance and delivering that next tranche of replacement mines. Simandou and Rhodes Ridge development will provide the market access and resource access we need for future market demand. And all of this is underpinned by a culture that drives performance through continuous improvement and generates deeper engagements with the customers as well as the communities that host us. Thanks very much.
Hand back to you, Tom, for Q&A.
Thanks, Simon. Thank you, all of the speakers. So we'll do our Q&A session, the first one. Just a reminder with the questions, let's try and focus them on the sessions that have just been. There'll be a second Q&A session at the end of the day. We will take three questions from the room and then a couple from online. Just with your questions, if I could ask if you could just limit it to one question and then one follow-up, that would be great. Jason.
So it's Jason Fairclough, Bank of America. Just a question, I guess, on value versus volume. And in a way, it seems to apply here to both iron ore and also to lithium. And I guess I'm thinking here both about the growth projects, but then also your production decisions, right?
So if I look at lithium, I mean, we see it oversupplied for a couple of years. It looks like you've got monster plans in lithium, right? Absolutely monster. And similarly, if we look at iron ore, everybody's bearish, and they're bearish because of the project you're building, right? So how are you thinking about that in terms of production and also in terms of capital allocation?
Thank you. I think about two things. First of all, you have to get your years right. So if we take a decision to build Rincon, for example, that will produce 2028, 2029. So actually, the lower the price goes, the more oversupply there is in the years in between is only good because it means that less will be produced out there. So you need to sit down in your spreadsheets and get your years right. We're working out in the future.
That gives me confidence. Secondly, if you take the overall growth plans, 3% is not that much. And if you look at Peters and you do the projections he did, we're basically growing with the market, and we are aligning our portfolio towards areas where the demand growth will be the highest. And then you ask yourself, a company like Rio Tinto, with our competences, why should we not grow with the market? That would be my answer to your question.
Okay. And what about the decisions around producing iron ore into a weak market?
Well, as far as I could see this morning, the spot price was $106 per ton. So that must be your conclusion about a weak market. Thank you.
Alan Spence, BNP Paribas. A bit of a follow-up question, specifically around fast-tracking some of Arcadium's projects. Why fast-track fourth quartile projects?
How does that stack up versus allocating capital elsewhere?
Speaking about Arcadium, a couple of things, and Sinead can elaborate, but first of all, we just have to be clear about that it's still not our business. The shareholder vote will happen on the December 23rd, and then we need clearance. With a bit luck, we can close the acquisition in, say, second quarter next year. We don't know much more than we did at the time of the acquisition, but what is very clear is that we can, together with Rincon, build three super sites in Argentina. We have enormous experience in Canada. We are by far the biggest operator with our aluminum business in Canada. The challenge is to find out how we are going to unlock the Canadian assets.
Obviously, as Arcadium is not a Rio Tinto business, I cannot give you full answers on that yet. It's a good question. And we love good challenges. So let's see whether we can crack that one.
And then, sorry, to follow, just a bit more about the broader portfolio. You made the case for nuclear being a strong stabilizer and power generation going forward. Any views on how uranium might fit into the portfolio if that's an area of focus or interest?
Do you want to say something about Peter?
Well, Alan, I think we've been in uranium for quite some years, and so we know it well. But we have made sort of decisions there to exit. I mean, I think what we're talking about is a sort of multi-decadal sort of change that may happen and may not.
And at this moment, we don't see that as sort of core to our future sort of aspirations.
Thanks for the presentations. Maybe on Simandou, you've given 2025 guidance for everything else, but nothing for Simandou. Does that mean it's close to nothing? And with Simandou as well, maybe we should think about politics and the delay in the transition to a civilian government. Is that a concern as we kind of get closer to ramp up?
Yeah, thank you. I think, Mark, if you can just give me a ton between Christmas and New Year next year, we'll be happy. Because let's face it, it's not only the world's largest mining project, it's basically also the fastest execution. So you shouldn't think about any production. We will have first production, but not a lot in 2025.
On your second question, we are obviously working very closely with the government. So far, they keep on strengthening what they're doing. They're becoming a more and more capable government. They're taking the right steps. We're getting the right signals from other places, ECOWAS and the U.S. State Department. So we have all the confidence that that will work. May I remind you, we have operated for more than 50 years in Guinea, and there has been quite a lot of, say, political disruption, but it hasn't disrupted our business. Just a quick follow-up on the iron ore side and production guidance. With Simon, you're kind of alluding to lower depletion in 2026, 2027. Should that mean that production steps up from that 330 level closer to the low end of the longer-term range? Yeah. As I said, so 2025, depletion of about 19 million tons.
And then it does step down at the same time as that next tranche of new mine developments I outlined on the bubble chart starts to come through. So the net effect of that should be beneficial. We'll obviously assess that as we go. Depletion this year, last year, I said would be about 12. It was thereabouts. It was slightly higher as a few of those pits came to a close, so probably more like 14 or so. That average of about 80 million tons, I think, is consistent with where we were last year. But it does come in lumps just as that new capacity comes on in box as we commission those projects. Thanks, Mark. We'll take a question online, please.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. We will now take your first phone question. One moment, please. And the question comes from the line of, oh, one second. Rahul Anand from Morgan Stanley, please go ahead.
Hi, thank you. Good morning. One question for me around the Pilbara. Look, I understand heritage issues and access are key drivers for the pace of depletion offset, perhaps being a bit slower. However, when you think about the medium term, how are you viewing that SP10 target? Do you think you're going to be able to get into the single digits as you earlier thought? And when does that come through for us?
I guess if I look at your guidance, you haven't explicitly talked about it, but it seems like SP10 stays at about 20% in 2025. Is that the right way to think about it? Thanks.
Probably two points. SP10 will remain elevated, really, until we get through that next tranche of new developments. This year, we've given range 65%-70%, and it will continue to be elevated, really, until we get most of those projects on board. Having said that, one of the things we're going to look at with the product strategy review is what's the best way of bringing our iron units to market. We'll certainly consider around how we approach SP10 and PB. One thing we do hear from customers is what they really value with PB is its scale and its consistency. That gives considerable liquidity.
And so that's one of the factors that we'll be taking into account with that review.
Excellent. Just a quick follow-up then, perhaps switching over to Simandou. Good progress there. And obviously, you're looking at initial stages at about 60 million tons. Now, obviously, the project has potential to be much larger. So can you perhaps give us a bit of an idea on sort of the flexibility that you're perhaps building into or is being built into the infrastructure there to perhaps be able to exploit some of that additional capacity in the future? That's all for me. Thanks.
There is no additional capacity. Simandou is, as you know, two mines, one railway network, two ports next to each other. They will have the critical limitation is a port, and that has 120 million tons, 60 million tons to each of the joint ventures.
So the only question there is, is what will the ramp-up schedule be? When you have been there and you see the river delta, you realize that there is no alternative. And if you really want to expand that, you have to build a deep-sea port at an incredibly expensive price. So the way to think about it is 120. Peter, do you want to comment about the ramp-up?
No, I think the ramp-up we started pretty much in 2026, going up and ramping up as we put in place the full infrastructure and then the TSVs in 2027. That means a meaningful change for our port and finishing over those 30 months.
Thanks, Rahul. We'll take one more online and then back into the room. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Rob Stein from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi, team.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask a few questions. Just on the Arcadium approval, can you give us an update on what U.S. approvals are required, where you're currently placed, and what potential risks you see relating to any foreign entity control restrictions that may be in place?
Isabelle, I don't know whether you're mic'd up. No, I'm not. You're not mic'd up. Sinead?
Yeah, thanks for the question. So we're currently going through the regulatory approvals across all the different jurisdictions. We have a shareholder vote, as Jakob said, scheduled on the 23rd of December. And we're starting to engage in the U.S. around CFIUS approvals. I think as we work through that process, not that dissimilar to the process we went through last year with Matalco, we'll just continue to work with the regulatory authorities.
But we don't have any concerns at this point around that process going forward.
In fact, everything has gone faster than I had expected, I must say. We have filed everything we should file. There's always uncertainty. And Arcadium has been extremely efficient as well in terms of bringing forward a shareholder vote before Christmas. So that was why I said earlier, we announced this in Q4, and it's not impossible that we can close it in Q2 next year. And that would be excellent.
Hello, Dominic from J.P. Morgan. You've outlined in your presentation very much a global business, global growth potential. So I suppose this question is as relevant now or later. This morning, you had a proposal from one of your shareholders to consolidate your listing under the Australian listing. So I wonder if you could, Jakob, maybe provide your thoughts and some thoughts on that proposal.
Yeah, Peter is really the expert. When the first comment was made about that, I said, "Look, anyone in this room and outside the room who has any ideas on how can we improve the value of Rio Tinto, bring it on." So we looked carefully at all the questions. We mobilized. We also used our advisors. We looked through everything. And it just does not make any economic sense. That's the very simple fact. I have not read anything this morning. With all due respect, I have focused on Capital Markets Day today. So I don't know what has been announced. I'm surprised about that announcement because I actually accepted to take a meeting this afternoon with the shareholder, despite the fact that the shareholder is a very small shareholder. So it would not normally have a meeting with management.
But so far, we have just not got anything that tells us that the structure we have is not the best structure. You have to bear in mind it's a fairly unique structure where the vast majority of shares are floated through the PLC here in the U.K., which is efficient for international investors. And then we have the limited shares mainly for Australian investors that have got tax benefits from getting fully-franked dividends and limited. And that justifies a value difference. And I mean, we could perhaps strengthen the Australian register, some states, Peter. That's one of the things we are looking at. But actually, when you look at it, if you can go through the complexity of having two company secretaries, that's about it. And we can. And there is a lot of value preserved in that structure. Peter, do you want to comment?
Yeah, Dominic, I think the points we laid out at half a year, the friction cost in the mid-single sort of digits, billions, the fact that 7723 is a very big sort of unification, and how the share prices would actually work, our view is they would blend together. And that clearly would bring down limited share price a long way. Future franking capacity, I mean, if you look at the growth that we're going through, it is global. It is global and increasing. And then finally, we don't see the DLE, as Jakob says, and it is an encumbrance to us fulfilling our strategy. In fact, probably the reverse.
Thank you. Alain Gabriel at Morgan Stanley. My question is on the CapEx guidance, which will come later, but the difference versus last year's guidance is around $1 billion, which seems to be driven by replacement CapEx. Is that?
Why don't we take it later? Because let Peter present, and we'll take it.
Okay. Thanks. From Berenberg. Question on IOC. I appreciate you saying that you're going to try and improve this asset, but it's struggled for a long time. So can you give us perhaps a decent medium-term, long-term target for production? And can we push you on costs because you don't give us cost guidance, and it'd be really helpful to have that, please? Thanks.
Yeah, sure. Look, I think IOC, as you've rightly said, has struggled with performance. We've really, over the last couple of years, focused initially with the safe production system on de-bottlenecking the concentrator. And we saw an uplift in concentrator production two years ago. We've then worked on rail and now on the mine.
Over the last two years, we've really seen production disruptions through forest fires both years that have really impacted on the business. Our focus going forward is very much around building a resilient plan, which is increasing the run rate of IOC. We want to get to nameplate capacity of 23 million tons. We haven't achieved that. Really doing a lot of analysis at the moment on what are the steps we need to take to improve. A strong focus at IOC on SPS implementation and a series of incredibly well-targeted processes. We've seen uplift in Q4 in the mine performance to be able to enable increased tons next year. It really is about resilience from an asset management perspective.
And lastly, from a cost point of view, similar to what Mark had presented, we're running through the same sort of process around our safe production system, reducing headcount, and really building a business that is more resilient long-term from a plan point of view.
I like your question, and I hope you like our transparency as well because normally, it's been kind of one of those assets that you kind of don't talk too much about. It's far away up in Labrador, etc. But this Capital Markets Day, we're just calling it out and saying, "Well, we haven't got the full potential of it." And the reality is we bought the asset in 2001 as part of the NorthSAC position. I think we associate no value with it. But when you think about it, it produced the highest quality iron ore. It has got a 100-year ore body.
It's got access to renewable energy. What's not to like here? And what we're doing now is we have looked at each other. We have never really given it the full Rio Tinto resources, but just left it a bit alone. And we are now, I mean, Simon's team, people from Simon's team have gone to IOC, helped Sinead and the team to get on and get the best practices from Pilbara up there. I'm absolutely convinced you will see uplift in IOC.
So when do you think you'll be able to come to the market with a proper plan, right, to actually say, "We'll get 23 by this point and give us a cost number"? Fair enough. But we actually gave you a lot in the investor tour of the North American here in, when was it, two months ago.
I appreciate we haven't given you cost guidance, and I'll tell you why. It's super simple. The first thing is it's so valuable tons. Let's get the tons right, get the stable production, and then we work hard on the cost.
Yeah, right. Simon, just the second one. Just on your capital intensity slide 46, I was just curious to understand a bit about why those four other mines were materially lower capital intensity than the top left one. I can't remember.
Yeah. So all of those mines are brownfield extensions. And so it's really around how much earth you've got to move. Most of them are driving additional haul roads, sometimes land bridges across to access new areas. And that really drives the capital intensity of each of those.
Right. Can we get two more questions online, please?
Your next question online comes from the line of Glyn Lawcock from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Jakob. Hopefully, you can hear me okay. I just wanted to drill down a little bit more into the replacement projects. It looks like roughly a two-plus-year build. And if we're not going to get anything approved till late 2025 and add up all your depletion, it looks like any slippage beyond late 2025 means you could actually run backwards, or am I missing something in that analysis? Thanks.
Thank you. I love the question. I asked the same question to Simon.
So I think my exact words, Glyn, were during 2025. And so they'll be staged through the year. And as I say, a lot of those are, well, they're all brownfield extensions. There's varying degrees of work we've got to do for each one of those.
And so you begin to see tons 2026, 2027, and beyond. It's probably fair to say as well, when is it that we are finalizing Western Range? Because that will have limited impact in 2025 and full impact in 2026, so Western Range is commissioned in the first half of 2025, and it'll ramp up from there. That ramp-up is a little bit different from GD, whereas the main determinant is accessing the ore body. It's along a ridge. There's heritage areas along those regions, so that's the main determinant, Glyn, of the access to tons for Western Range.
Okay. And then Greater Nammuldi is obviously delayed. Is there anything in the other three, Hope Downs 1, Brockman 4, West Angelas, that you're worried about from a permitting perspective? Or is it just time? We need to work through each of them.
Each of them needs to go through both government approvals, heritage approvals, heritage clearances. Each of them have different characteristics, Glyn, in terms of the sensitivity of areas depending on where they're located. We called out Nammuldi because it had deviated from our initial plans. As you can see on the slide, it's still in around about the same place as we worked through some of those challenges. We've made better progress on that in the last six months. But we'll continue to be really transparent on those bubbles and ratings as we work through them.
Okay. Thanks very much.
I have one more. Thank you. One more from online, please.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Lachlan Shaw from UBS. Please go ahead. Hello. Good morning, Jakob and Sam. Thanks for the opportunity and your time.
So can I start with the question on, I suppose, the iron ore product quality review? When you speak to Chinese mills, your customers, your JV partners, and you think about decarbonization, the Chinese steel sector is about to embark on, what are they signaling to you about how their preferred iron ore blend might change as that process gets underway at the end of this year? And how does that sort of dovetail in with the product strategy review? And I'll come back with my second question. Thanks.
Sure. Thanks, Lachlan. The conversations we're having with customers that we'll have through 2025, what we do hear from customers is they really value the scale and consistency of Pilbara Blend. We're working with a lot of our customers on decarbonization of their blast furnaces.
We're progressing pilot and NeoSmelt with BHP and BlueScope as we make sure that we're well-positioned for Pilbara ores, and that is certainly one of the factors that we'll take into that review, but we've got that work ahead of us, Lachlan, in terms of really defining the characteristics, but we've got amazing ore bodies. We've got great options going into the future, and certainly, that scale and consistency that customers value will be a centerpiece of that review.
I think that's the reason, well, that is the reason why we have chosen the approach to talk about that we are looking at it rather than coming out with the conclusions. I was in China months ago, and our Chinese customers, CMI, etc., really appreciate that we actually just put things on the table. Just think about it.
I mean, there's a geology to look at, and there's a set of plants, and how do you optimize that? You do it between the producer and the customers. I think we are actually entering a very valuable discussion that will lead to exactly the right outcomes.
Lachlan, I think it's you and I have talked about before as well. When you look across our portfolio, the Pilbara, Simandou, IOC, a range of options in low grade, mid grade, and high grade, that positions us really well to be able to respond to however the market evolves as we go forward.
Hi, it's Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs. Sinead, a question you touched on. You're exploring greenfield lithium opportunities in Chile. The government through Codelco and Enami seems to be nearing a decision on a partner.
They're looking for someone with proven DLE technology, financial capacity to build and operate, and also downstream exposure. All boxes ticked since 2006. And I think Arcadium certainly complements that. So how are you weighing up partnerships in lithium, which would diversify your production base versus the organic options? And just following on from that, if any partnership were to eventuate in Chile, how does that impact the project and timing on Horizon 1 and 2 you highlighted today?
Yeah, thank you. Look, the opportunity in Chile, and I know Katie will talk a bit more about the Nuevo Cobre project. We're in a process with Codelco on Maricunga. What we really like about Maricunga and the other assets in Chile, very similar to Argentina, is low-cost, long-life assets, really good quality ore bodies, and the ability to be able to bring them online with our own DLE technology.
As you can see, we're quite serious about expanding that technology. So we are quite interested in that process. But the focus is, location-wise, we're quite agnostic. We really are looking at the ore bodies and where they sit on the cost curve. And Chile fits that really well for us. But of course, you have to bear in mind, I mean, we can't overpay for these things. And the beauty is when you have many options, you can be very selective. But there is one little beauty about Maricunga. It is, what is it, in a straight line 30-40 kilometers away from Nuevo Cobre. So there's a lot of synergies between the two projects, one being lithium, one being copper, but nonetheless, project activities. And maybe on the other comment on options, I am an exploration geologist, so I'm an optimist by nature.
So I think at this point, as we have really explored all the options globally, we want to keep our options open and keep looking at opportunities as they arise.
Any more questions? Operator, is there any more questions online? Okay. Well, that's a good segue to a break. So could I please ask that everyone returns in 15 minutes, which is around 9:50 A.M. here? For those in the room, there'll be tea, coffee, and refreshments downstairs. Please make sure you're back in your seat at 9:50 A.M. to continue the discussion.
Hello everyone. For those that don't know me, I'm Isabelle Deschamps. I'm the Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer at Rio Tinto. And we've got a bit of a panel today to discuss culture and our culture journey.
You will have heard Jakob talk with a lot of passion around why culture is so important to enabling our key objectives. Today, with our panelists, my colleagues, we will talk about our culture journey in more detail. Let me just introduce Kellie Parker, Chief Executive for Australia, Simon you've just met, and James Martin, who's our Chief People Officer. You will remember that in 2021, we invited Elizabeth Broderick & Co to carry out an independent review of our workplace culture. We published their report in 2022, in February 2022. Since then, very recently, on the 20th of November of this year, we publish a progress review from Elizabeth Broderick & Co and with giving us an update as to where we are on our culture journey. In the first report, there were 26 recommendations that were made by Elizabeth Broderick & Co.
Maybe I'll just start kicking off the conversation by asking you, James, where are we on these 26 recommendations?
Yeah, thanks, Isabelle. The 26 are largely complete. I feel incredibly proud of what we've delivered over the last two and a half years. We put considerable investment into training, into policies that really help support our people, and into facilities. There's three areas that are going to need continued investment. One is around facilities. Actually, if you think about it, that's work that never ends. Because as our assets evolve, as the mix of our employees evolves, then you need to continue to refocus on that. The other two are broadly around talent management. We've been working hard to find a way of managing our talent across the group that is fairer and more transparent.
We've actually started implementing that now on a leading-edge digital platform. That will be a continued area of focus going forward. I think what I'd say is there's no lack of appetite. Irrespective of those 26 recommendations, I think we're going to continue to try and find better ways to support our people going forward.
We've also made some progress on the reporting as well and helping people report behaviors through My Voice, but also getting the support. We've implemented a Care Hub to provide alternative resolutions to situations and problems. We've seen some of the progress as well there. Maybe just Kellie, you've been in this company for many years. You've lived the culture.
Can you describe to us what's been your observations over the last couple of years since the first report and what you see today when you're going especially to operations and meeting the front line?
Yeah, I think to build on your point, Isabelle, it's certainly been a lot more reporting. People talk about everyday respect. They talk about diversity. They talk about differences being inclusion. You hear it and feel it, but you really feel how the facilities have changed. Only last week, I was in the Northern Territory. I'm in the GOAT camp. I'm interacting with how I get into the camp, the security, the lighting, the different places that you can sit and interact with people is also different. And I think that is such a felt experience that as you move around the organization, the facilities have changed. And so you go, "Why has that happened?
What's the investment? How does it happen?" And it's because we're caring for people. And your facilities are a way that you show respect. But I think the other thing too is that the purple banners have happened. So just like a safety banner in Simon's organization, they started as purple banners where if someone's been disrespected or been a victim, then with their permission, a purple banner can go out and talk about what's the disrespectful behavior and what do we learn from that. And I've seen that just be adopted right across Australia. Really, people were really wanting it. And now we're seeing it globally. People really want to know, "How do we keep improving? How do we set the bar of what is acceptable behavior in our business?" And you've probably got way more examples.
And I think you have to acknowledge that teams as well.
Talking about behaviors, self-reflecting on your own behaviors is hard, and standing in a pre-start meeting or actually probably a better example is the Stop for Respect. Every year, we take the Pilbara system offline. Jakob always has a bit of a coronary when we do that, but we take the Pilbara system online. We break up into small groups and talk about everyday respect and behaviors. I guess the thing that really stood out this year to me, standing in one of those teams talking, was just the openness that people were talking about.
Not just things that they'd seen or changes, which is a little bit more the conversation last year, but actually talking about that and then self-reflecting as well around, "I did this or thought about this differently." And if you can get there so people are really opening up like that, then that's when you drive real change. Liz Broderick said something that's always stuck with me. She said, "Culture change, you know, is when there's upstanders, people step forward when something's not right. But when you get real culture change, it's actually when someone steps forward to help the upstander." And you can start to see that starting to take hold in our business.
And this is good. This is what you feel. This is what you've experienced as well.
But actually, when you look at the report, we've got a bit looking at it and the one we released in November, there's some metrics that have gone worse. So maybe, James, can you share what's been your reflection on that and how should we view this, actually?
Well, I mean, my first reflection, frankly, was that I was upset. And for anybody who's suffered from any poor behaviors, there's still too much of it going on. And I deeply apologize to anybody who's been impacted by that. It just shouldn't happen. But there is a sort of silver lining in everything. And one is that bear in mind, we have been actively teaching people about what's acceptable and not acceptable for the past two and a half years. And we've been actively encouraging people to report. And so seeing an increase in reporting actually helps us to fix things.
So there is a benefit to that. And we saw exactly the same pattern when we went on our safety journey, started on that 20 years ago. And there's other green shoots that I'd point to. One is there's a question in our people survey that says, "I am treated with respect at work." And that score increased from 72% to 77% over the last couple of years. And also, even you've talked about reporting and what we're doing with our confidential hotline. And one thing that I look at is how many people want to stay confidential with their personal details when they report. And actually, that's reduced by 25%. So more people are reporting and willing to share their details, which shows a faith in the system. And I'd say the final bit of evidence is what Mark was talking about with best operator.
Because all the positive indications that we've seen and that Simon was pointing out, that's all a consequence of creating a better psychologically safe environment in the workplace. And so that's the ultimate evidence I think you'll see of our culture journey.
And maybe, Simon, can you add a little bit on the SPS journey for you and Mark talking about how he's embedded?
How do you see it in the Pilbara?
I think it's a real alignment with what we're doing around SPS, everyday respect, driving that culture of continuous improvement. And ultimately, culture's a sum of all of our behaviors and all of our actions. And if you think about a high-performing team, people feeling empowered, diverse teams, people included, people wanting to raise their voice and being heard and those views being incorporated. And it's exactly the same for everyday respect.
As we stand up at a pre-start and talk about purple banners, it's exactly that. We want people to be able to feel that they can step forward and raise their voice. But more than that, we want those views to be included. And it's that that you want with continuous improvement. It's that that SPS and I think the difference with SPS compared to some other programs I've seen is it really started with that cultural piece first, making sure we're really empowering and hearing the front line. And that's consistent with the work that we're doing.
Very good. So now, what are we going to do? So maybe, Kelly, where does it take us? How do we continue on this journey?
So one of the really challenging things that's in the report, and I'm really pleased it's visible, is the backlash.
We see this backlash in our people survey as well. Our people survey is done twice a year. And when you read the comments, it's there. People are fighting against the change and are worried against the change and are reacting. So the good thing is that we know then we are pushing against change and we're moving because we have got backlash, which we now need to be able to address. And I think it's really great that Liz has been able to make that really visible. Because once it's visible, you can start working on it. So not only do we want a safe and inclusive workforce and a workplace, and we've got SPS to really do mindset and behaviors work with our front line. And we need to upskill our front line leaders to help have these conversations.
Because they start in small conversations and you have to meet people where they're at. Like, why is it that they don't want a safe and inclusive, respectful workforce and workplace? It's because something's changing for them that they're not happy with or they don't like. And you just need to meet them where they're at. So there's going to be lots and lots more conversations. We need to meet people where they're at. But because it's visible now, we can do that. And we need to upskill more and more leaders to be able to have those conversations, to have confidence and courage to have those conversations. Because that's when we'll really change.
But what do you think, Isabelle? I mean, you joined right in the middle of when we were working out what to do with the first report.
And so I know it was a bit of a shock to you on joining.
Yeah. So I joined in October 2021. And we were getting the first results from the Elizabeth Broderick report. And I have to say it was really a shock when I joined. And I felt really sad by what I was reading. Where it gave me a lot of hope in that journey is that we had a lot of discussion in the ExCo and at the board around how can we really embrace this cultural journey in a different way. And what encouraged me is that we took the decision to actually not only release and publish the report in its entirety, but we actually shared it deeply with our employees. And that's what started the conversation. That started giving a voice to people. A lot of people have reported anonymously at the time.
But after that, it gave the voice for people to openly share, to openly be active upstanders of behaviors and the values. So it gave a voice. It gave words to name what is not acceptable. And it started the conversation quite deeply in the operations, but also in offices. So it's a journey. And I think we continue. But it gave me a lot of encouragement after the first initial shock.
And do you think that it's been great, Isabelle, working with you and James as sponsors of this work? How do you think that we'll keep the momentum going?
So for us, and when you're on a culture journey, it's quite something that you kind of need to live every day. You need, as a leadership, to live it. You need to talk about it. It's difficult conversations often, but you need to live it.
We need to enable our teams to live it. For us, the journey, and I think it was great to hear Mark talking about having grace every day, making our teams be grace every day. This is around living every day respect. We will continue that journey through best operator, through SPS, through empowering our teams to talk, through diversity. We'll continue that journey through that to live it every day. Then I think the most important is we continue updating our employees, our stakeholders on a regular basis on our journey. It's part of who we are. It's part of what we do as a leadership. We will continue on that journey. Jakob mentioned it. It's about staying the course. We've had a first shock. We had to implement the six recommendations. We've made progress.
We know where to go and how to do that. Now it's staying the course every day, so that's probably what our time is up as a panel, but I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts. We'll continue the dialogue, so keep posted on this, on our journey, because we will continue and stay the course on this one.
Thank you, and Katie Jackson, can you come up, please, to talk about copper? Thank you.
Thank you, Isabelle, and thanks to the panel. Good morning. It's a real pleasure to be speaking to you today. I joined Rio Tinto in September, so it's still relatively new days for me.
Just to give you a bit of my background, I started out on rigs in drilling roles in Shell and then moved into some time at investment banks before going into business development and strategy in both oil and gas and power and infrastructure, so while I'm new to mining, I've spent my whole career in the extractive industries. I've always had a real energy and passion for helping to find solutions to operational and financial complexities, and through my career, I've found purpose operating in industries and companies that I believe provide materials that are crucial for so many, so all of that brings me to Rio Tinto, and the three things that I'm going to keep in focus: maximizing value of our existing portfolio, delivering profitable growth, and making the most of our high-quality partnerships.
So for me, a major positive about coming from oil and gas is the robust long-term demand outlook for copper. And as Nigel said in his segment, we see volumes almost doubling by 2050. And just as important is the source of this demand growth, copper's role in electrification and the energy transition, which we estimate makes up 50% of this demand growth. So this all speaks to a material need for growth in primary copper supply alongside an increasing role for scrap. The demand outlook is good. But as you know, there are many, many supply-side challenges. And even if we could magic all of these away, both volumes and time to market are still expected to fall short and result in a 10 million ton per year supply gap by 2035. We see this as an opportunity.
It should mean upside on commodity prices and also upside on the value of pre-permitted growth options. I've now been lucky enough to spend time at all three of our core producing assets: Oyu Tolgoi, Kennecott, and just last week at Escondida. I'm really excited by their scale and quality as well as the options to grow their contributions to the group. In both the near and long term, our copper portfolio is well positioned for sustainable and profitable growth with a globally diverse mix of attractive, large-scale, long-life assets and projects. We continue to target one million tons of annual production towards the end of the decade, as Bold set out in 2023. For 2025, we're already on track to achieve our highest-ever levels of copper production, between 780 and 850 thousand tons from our current portfolio.
This record volume will be driven by the delivery of the underground ramp-up at OT, and I was very impressed by this world-class asset when I visited a few weeks ago. Of course, in addition, in 2024, in addition to the strong copper prices, we saw revenue strengthened by ongoing momentum in gold, and we expect this to continue next year with strong gold production at OT. I'm going to talk about Kennecott in more detail in a moment, but production this year has disappointed, and work is underway to address near-term geotechnical constraints, but at Escondida, solid production momentum so far this year is expected to continue into 2025. We're also pushing forward with our pipeline of growth projects, and we're not doing that alone. We have attractive partnerships across the value chain that bring added capabilities and expertise to help deliver value.
We have a great growth story of which Mongolia is very much at the heart. We expect production from OT to grow by more than 50% next year. Beyond this, we're also on track to ramp up to our goal of 500,000 tons per year on average from 2028 to 2036. This will make OT the world's fourth-largest copper producer. To get there, we need to complete the underground infrastructure, which we expect to achieve by the end of next year. We're currently 97% there as of last month. We're still completing the expansion of the concentrator and a second primary crusher. The new conveyor to surface is now operational. I saw it moving when I visited, with first ore to surface achieved in October and load testing in November.
The cave continues to perform above expectations, with panel zero now fully operational and the last of the 124 drawbells fired ahead of plan in November. Our focus will now shift to the development of panels one and two. These involve more than 400 drawbells in total, just to give you a sense of the work that still lies ahead. As Mark said, we continue to see OT as a great example of our best operator principles in action. When I visited Mongolia in October, I was really impressed by the high level of national participation. Our workforce is now 97% Mongolian, a crucial indicator of our focus on growing OT's social license. This is particularly important as we continue to focus with our government partners on resolving legacy shareholder issues. By working together, we're going to deliver the full long-term potential of this world-class asset.
So turning to the U.S., our top priority is overcoming the current geotechnical constraints at Kennecott's open pit, where movement in the south wall has reduced access to ore in slice one. We've revised the mine plan with smaller benches, lower bench stack height and step-outs, and increased waste movement to unload the area around the fault. Production will be impacted in 2025 and 2026. This will be in line with the annualized mine production run rate you've seen over the last three quarters, with some improvement expected in 2026. To adapt to this period of decreased production, work is underway to reduce cost and capital expenditure. Our focus is on overheads and contractor management costs and finding efficiencies in our truck and excavator fleet. We're also supplementing our smelter with third-party concentrate to maintain its throughput.
Looking further ahead, production from slice two will start in the second half of 2027 as we enter into the next cut of the south wall. We also expect production from the underground to ramp up to more than 30,000 tons by 2027. So if I take a step back and look at Kennecott, despite the current challenges, this remains an attractive, well-located ore body with significant long-term growth options at a time when, as I highlighted earlier, fully permitted brownfield operations will only become more valuable and with only one of only two remaining operational copper smelters in the U.S. So to summarize, we remain absolutely focused on managing the immediate challenges ahead so that we can advance our longer-term growth options at Kennecott.
Moving to our growth projects, we've just announced a significant step forward on Winu, our copper and gold project in Western Australia, where we will partner with Sumitomo Metal Mining. Rio Tinto will continue to develop and operate as the Winu managing partner. Sumitomo will take a 30% share for a consideration of $399 million. This includes $204 million of deferred conditional payments and values the development at more than $1 billion. This is a unique opportunity to further de-risk our investment and work with an experienced partner. We're targeting finalizing this joint venture in the first half of 2025 as we also move the project forward. Our aim is to deliver initial processing capacity of up to 10 million tons per annum.
This is a low-risk, long-life copper-gold deposit that's not only highly prospective for expansion but also located in a stable jurisdiction close to Pilbara Iron Ore operations. Beyond Winu, we're also looking to finalize a broader strategic partnership with Sumitomo across copper and other base metals and lithium. Of course, Winu is just one project in our growth pipeline alongside one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world, Resolution, where we continue to monitor legal proceedings closely and also Nuevo Cobre in Chile that Sinead has also highlighted. Another thing to highlight is the progress that we're making on Nuton, our proprietary bio-leaching venture. We're approaching a real milestone: first copper from our industrial-scale demonstration at Johnson Camp Mine in Arizona. The demonstration site will be 40 times larger than any previous pilot, and we currently expect to achieve first copper in the second half of 2025.
We now have a total of 10 Nuton partnerships in five countries and a second potential industrial-scale deployment under review for next year. So I'm really excited by Nuton's potential to add copper from a range of partnerships and sites that would otherwise be inaccessible to Rio. So to conclude, my first months with the company have left me impressed by the balance and the strength of our copper portfolio. I believe we have a robust mix of options to deliver profitable growth. Our conviction on copper is clear, as is our focus: maximizing value from our existing assets. And a highlight this year is going to be the increased cash flow from OT, which will go from next year onwards, delivering profitable growth as we pursue our pipeline and continuing to invest in high-quality partnerships that add value, as you see from our announcement today on Winu. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Jérôme Pécresse, and I'm CEO of Rio Tinto Aluminum. One year ago in Sydney, I was quite new to Rio Tinto. Today, one year after, I must say I feel very optimistic about our aluminum business. I think it can be a great business for Rio Tinto, a differentiator for the company, and one which paves the way into areas which are strategic for our group's future: processing, recycling, and also in terms of regions. That business can grow. It can create value for our shareholders. We announced to those of you who are with us in Canada in September our objective to increase ROCE by five points before the end of the decade. I think this conviction is predicated on our team. It's predicated on our footprint of high-class leading assets globally.
It's predicated on the strong relationship that we have with governments and partners wherever we operate. We have a clear path to leverage our core competitive advantage, our state-of-the-art technology, our unique access to North America, our best operator journey is lined with what Mark explained, and our repowering strategy. That's where I'd like to start. I'd like to spend a few minutes on that, on this repowering strategy. I think it's important to understand that it serves a dual purpose. The first one is to bring to the right part of the cluster, actually means the left part, those assets which are not there today in our aluminum smelting portfolio. The second is to help reduce our CO2 emissions. I remind you that our two smelters on the East Coast of Australia represent today 50% of Rio Tinto's total CO2 emissions.
As you can see on this slide, if I take a step back, our assets in Canada already enjoy a very strong position on the curve, thanks to our uniquely owned hydropower dams and our water rights, and 11 out of the 14 smelters in which we own a stake run on hydropower. As I said, and you can also see it on that slide, our assets in Australia are not there. I mean, they are in part due to expensive fossil fuel-based electricity contracts, so that's why we are implementing, for these two smelters and starting with Boyne, a repowering strategy, so our Boyne smelter will move, at the expiry of the current electricity contract, to a mix of renewables, wind, solar, complemented with battery storage, and we have already announced significant power purchase agreements, and we continue to move on a total solution.
I think that's important. And as you can see, that will contribute very meaningfully to expand the competitiveness of that smelter with a much lower net energy cost. You will see on the next slide what we have also done to renegotiate our energy contract for our New Zealand smelter. But I think there is a common theme to all this. I mean, we have to embrace the fact that when we are in aluminum, we are in the energy business, that this can be a significant source of profit closely linked to our core business, and that we have to build accordingly the relevant capabilities. So moving to New Zealand now, we had a smelter there, and we still have it, which was on the wrong part of the cluster.
We have to renegotiate the hydropower energy contract at expiration. It's just expiring at the end of this month. We have secured this year, and I think it was a great achievement by the teams, a new 20-year contract where we moved from one energy supplier to three energy suppliers, where we moved from hydro only to a more diversified panel of renewables. I think the big difference is that we managed to create a win-win possibility where we have the option to manage the load on the smelter in a flexible way to help the New Zealand South Island energy system in case of severe drought. If that happens, we can curtail our pots, and we are fairly compensated for this. I think this is a big change. It's changing for good the economic model of the smelter and upgrading the profitability of the operation.
It's also pushing us to run the smelter differently. So we learn and we improve every day on how we can flex our power usage across different time horizons and also how we can shut and start our aluminum pots in a very orderly manner. It's, I think, again, a game changer. We also now own 100% of that smelter in Tiwai Point after having bought the mIron Oreity shareholders. This smelter is one of the two only producers in the world of high-purity aluminum, and this transaction, I think, represents a very good uplift in production and profit for Rio Tinto Aluminum into next year. Now back to our core business. Our integrated value chain from bauxite to alumina to aluminum, which is proving its strategic merit today when you see the upward volatility in the price of bauxite and the price of alumina.
I think our larger source of satisfaction this year is how we managed to stabilize and to increase our production in our bauxite mines in our aluminum smelters. In aluminum, as you can see, we are now tracking to the midpoint of our guidance despite having been curtailed due to low hydrology in Iceland, in British Columbia at Kitimat, and in New Zealand. In bauxite, we have reached record high levels in a very strong pricing environment, and we are now confident that we'll exceed the highest point of the guidance that you have on this slide. Alumina was more difficult, but it was primarily due to external factors, namely the curtailment of our gas supply in Gladstone. In December, we'll now be back to 100% gas supply, so we had to manage through it.
The good news is we succeeded to meet our external commitments and our internal supplies. We are now expecting to be at the high point of our revised guidance for alumina production in 2024. This progress was achieved across the operation thanks to our positive movement and continuous improvement, our path to best operator, which I'm going to spend the next slide on. I think it's important we have a few words on this key topic. I mean, Mark, you explained it for Rio Tinto, and I'm going to say what it means for Rio Tinto Aluminium. In 2024, we accelerated the deployment of SPS across RTA. We also strive to monitor the performance of our smelter in a more rigorous basis based on key leading operational KPIs, targeting continuous progress towards best-in-class metrics.
We developed a culture of continuous improvement, putting the front line at the center, and let me take here the example of our Amrun bauxite mine in Australia. It has achieved, over the past 12 months, several production improvements. It's now running at nameplate capacity, and that was thanks to the commitment of the site leaders to SPS and to asset management uplift. We have had two Kaizen, which were particularly successful. In March, the first one was to improve material handling and throughput in the cycle circuit, increasing the plant feed rate by 9%, and you can see here it was due to a very simple solution found through the Kaizen, which is an installation of a shear beam which cost probably a few hundred thousand dollars, which took place of a big CapEx project which was costed at $30 million and got to the same outcome even better.
A second Kaizen optimized the effectiveness of the shutdown, reducing the downtimes in Amrun from more than 600 hours to 380 hours. And all that together allowed us to achieve the production record, allowed us to create a culture where we learn from the front line, where it's safe to try new things. It's also good to make mistakes provided the risks are properly assessed. And that's a culture that we want to keep developing across the Rio Tinto Aluminum operations. So we are running the business better, but we are also growing the business. On the left part of this slide, you can see our track record in growing production on a copper-equivalent basis. We anticipate continued growth next year due to three things. The first one is our alumina refineries being operating with normal gas supply in Gladstone.
Second, our increased ownership in our smelters in Boyne, in Australia, and in New Zealand. And third, our other smelter running well and compensating from the progressive shutdown of our pots in our Arvida smelter in Quebec. On the right part, you see two growth initiatives underway. The first one is our Matalco Joint Venture, which was closed almost a year ago. And as I say, every month, we get more convinced about the strategic logic of that move, the quality of that partnership, and the synergy that we can build between our secondary aluminum position and our primary aluminum business. Then our AP60 investment in Quebec. I mean, many of you were there earlier in the fall. We are adding 96 pots to our existing 38 pots of AP60 technology, which is our latest deploy aluminum smelting technology, which allows better production and lower emissions.
We are too done on that project on time and on budget. Then those 96 pots are progressively replacing the Arvida pots, which we are closing. We are on time, we are on budget again, and we are planning to produce first metal for AP60 by 2026. Besides these projects already on the go that you know about, today we are announcing a significant move. We are entering a partnership with Vargas Group to work together to explore the possibility of building a greenfield low-carbon aluminum smelter in Finland. We are planning to be an early investor in the project, which is now moving to feasibility study. We are planning to be the technology provider with our AP60 technology, and that will be the first time AP60 would be deployed outside Canada.
And we have the objective to be ultimately a substantial shareholder together with other partners and to be a commercial staker in that project. I personally think it's a very exciting project as it could benefit from low-carbon competitive energy supply and good access to the European market. It would allow Rio Tinto Aluminium to expand back into Europe, which, as you know, is a key market for primary aluminium. Europe consumes around a bit more than seven million tons of primary aluminium every year out of a bit more than 30 million tons consumed outside China. And Europe is also the market which values the most the low-carbon component of your aluminium. So a very interesting project, and we look forward to moving to the next steps with our partners. So, as you can see, to conclude, our aluminium business is firmly established on the path of growth.
We are confident in our markets. We are confident in our competitive advantage and in our strategy. We have a clear vision to be the leader in sustainable low-carbon Western aluminium production, and we have an ambitious strategy. Growth should continue in 2025 as we plan for around 5% compound growth rate and for volume guidance that you can see on this slide for bauxite, alumina, and aluminium. We are also confident in our prospects beyond 2025. Thank you. And now I welcome Bold and Mark to join me for a panel on commercial and decarbonization. That should be working. So we now have a panel on commercial and decarbonization. And maybe, Bold, I think we should start by our customers, which are core to our performance, and maybe for you telling us what you see today in the markets, what our customers are telling us.
Yeah, next year, Peter, we should start with customers because they provide the revenues. But I'm really happy to be here on this panel. Obviously, I've taken over the Chief Commercial Officer role a few months ago. And it feels like I'm back home because after running, having two product groups and also having worked in commercial, I do think there's a huge opportunity for us to even get closer for value with our customers. So let me start with the broader outlook. I think, as Jakob said, when iron ore is $106 and copper is over $9,000, aluminium is at $2,700, who's complaining? It's an incredibly good environment because we had a 1.5-2.5% growth across all of our commodities this year. And next year, we expect to have that over 2-3%. Then there's a question around China.
And then the question immediately flows into what's happening in the property market. One thing that people don't realize fully is that the property percentage in steel demand dropped from 33% to 25%. We have seen a massive uptick in energy transition industries in China. Particularly, if you look at solar, China has built for two years in a row 250 gigawatts of solar capacity per annum. The total power production and consumption in the U.S. is about 500 gigawatts. In two years, they built the entire power system of the United States. This is what's been driving some of the fixed asset investment and the infrastructure that we're seeing in China that is keeping the robust demand for our minerals outside of iron ore, outside the property sector. There is a good side to the story, which is there's an uptick around energy transition.
The property sector was weak. It's stabilized. We're not expecting a massive rebound, but we're also not seeing a massive downside either based on some of the most recent. Let me switch to a couple of other points. Electric vehicles continues to surprise us. 10 million electric vehicles in China, nearly 50% penetration rate, and I think Jakob drives a Tesla, and I ask him, "Okay, what do you think of electric vehicles?" He just says, "They're better cars." And if you look at the price difference between internal combustion engine electric vehicle, that has dropped in China to less than $2,000, where in the Western world, there continues to be $15,000-$16,000 dollar difference. And that is what's driving. So I do think that the electric vehicle prices will continue coming down, in particular, obviously, with maybe the Chinese exports into the global south of electric vehicles.
We're obviously seeing some tariffs in Europe, etc. But what we also don't realize is actually half the exports coming out of China are Tesla models. So there's an interesting dilemma around what's happening with the trade flow. And I understand Tesla will stop manufacturers who are exporting and will start manufacturing in Europe. And then the last piece I would just say is that the economic scale, I know we always focus on the percentage of growth slowing down in China. I actually think like it in dollars. So at $18 trillion, 4.5-5% growth is still $900 billion. And that is nearly, it's much larger than the U.S. growth on a much lower percentage. So when the economy is growing at $900 billion, it is still materials intensive because the urbanization rate in China is still at 66% and Western world is at 85%.
I'm not saying that there was going to be a very robust demand for iron ore. I think we're all agreed it's going to be relatively flat, but I do think that in our space and commodities, I hope we get to enjoy this environment. Jérôme?
No, I think we do. I think it's also about now how we develop, I mean, more low-carbon products. I think when we showed here the cost curve for aluminum, I think now we are ranking our smelter on this cost curve, but also the carbon cost curve. For aluminum, our strategy to go toward fully traceable, sustainable, low-carbon aluminum is cornerstone. Because I think first, it allows us to create a great competitive advantage starting by building a deeper relationship and a bigger share of wallet by talking to the customers, our customers.
I mean, Bold and you are in charge of this relationship with the OEMs, and what we can see now with these OEMs are more and more caring about their Scope 3 upstream, which is the aluminium they buy. And they are more and more interested to tell their suppliers, which are typically our customers, "We want that carbon content. We want that ESG footprint for the aluminium." And some pay the premium. And over time, some will pay premium. I agree. It's coming in Europe, and it will be global at some stage, but I think this move toward sustainable low-carbon aluminium is critical to our commercial strategy, and I think we achieve it in two ways, three ways. The first one is our expansion into secondary aluminium, our Matalco position in the U.S. with our seven casthouses producing secondary aluminium, six in the U.S., one in Canada.
Second is the effort we make towards traceability of aluminum, so being able to sell an aluminum where we can guarantee the CO2 content and the ESG footprint up to the bauxite mine, which is what customers ultimately want, and third, how do we decarbonize our value chain for producing aluminum? So over time, there will be a decrease. But before that, and we are working with our team, with Jonathan and the team around how do we get lower carbon content in our bauxite production, in our alumina refining, in our logistic chain, and in aluminum smelting, and I think, Mark, it's a good segue into updating us about our work on decarb in general for Rio Tinto. Yeah, thanks, Jerome, and on Scope 1 and 2, I think we set ourselves some pretty ambitious targets.
But the good news is that we have a very clear plan, and we're executing against that plan. And I think you can see that in the projects that we've abated in this year. I think we approved about three million tons of abatement projects this year, which compares to two million tons the year before and only 200,000 tons the year before that. And those projects that we've approved, actually, as a portfolio of value accretive. So up to our 2030 target, we're really switching to renewables, more efficiency in our smelters. Absolutely. What you showed for Boyne, transitioning our business, but 2.2 gigawatts in Eastern Australia, but also at RBM. So I think we are really making very strong progress, but in a value accretive way. I think we're also working in real partnership.
I think you shared the work you've done at Elysis, but also with Simon in the Pilbara working with our traditional owners on how we build renewables in a way that's a win-win and creates a future opportunity for our traditional owners. I guess our longer-term outcomes are going to depend a little bit on the evolution of society and carbon pricing and policy, but also our ability to permit more renewables and our ability to get transmission lines built, and probably even longer term, I guess it's about breakthrough technologies. Yeah. Look, certainly, up to 2030, we actually are deploying existing technologies, and as I said, we can do that in a value accretive way. Post 2030, we really do need to start to get into breakthrough technologies and R&D, and that really requires us to have multiple options.
If you think about diesel is a big chunk of our emissions, and there's sort of multiple pathways. We're looking at how we go electric. We're partnering with BHP to look at the big electric trucks from the existing suppliers. But we're also piloting innovative technologies at OT, battery swapping technologies from Chinese suppliers. And then if you think about our processing, yeah, we've got multiple options there as well. We're obviously developing Elysis. Yep. This is a big next step next year as we start building our 10 pilot pods of 100,000 amps. So I think when that's done, we'll be much smarter about our Elysis production. And we're also looking at alternatives like Elysis, which is our joint venture around biocarbon. It's a company that we took a venture investment in, and now we're actually producing designer biocarbon, which we're using at RTIT to replace anthracite.
As you said, this approach to our partnership, I think, is a bit new to Rio Tinto and critical to our future. So maybe, Bold, you want to say a few words on how we partner with customers as well because that's.
Yeah, I think this is where we get into Scope 3 discussions, which are obviously not within our control, and we absolutely must partner with the customers because we don't have the answer. It's not our core competency. So we approach it from a couple of different angles. One is what are our most valuable existing customers doing in Japan and China? And as we talked about, they are looking at a 25%-35% carbon reduction by 2035. And that is based on existing technologies around trying lump with Baowu and trialing a few things.
Then there is a partnership with our industry peers, so BlueScope, for example, with BHP in Western Australia and how we can partner in building electric arc furnace in Australia, which is going to be the first. And then we'll look at what are the emerging new technologies as well as new products. And I think Simandou and IOC have a role to play because 50% of the Simandou ore body is direct reduction iron feed grade, so with low impurity. So we're hoping maybe that will open up markets in the Middle East and kind of Middle East region. And then the last piece is around kind of new technologies that are emerging. And so I think we signed a bit similar in steel, like you did in aluminum, two projects. One is H2 Green Steel. We're going to supply some high-grade IOC feed to them.
Hopefully, that project is up and running. So that opens up a new market for us. And with the same, we're going to be in your motherland in France. We signed up an agreement with GravitHy that will be also hydrogen-based steelmaking. So we're looking intensively at how to work with our customers, competitors, peers, new technology providers, and how we just partner because we don't have the answer on Scope 3, but we definitely want to be part of the solution. But Jérôme, the other thing I was going to mention is on bauxite, and obviously, it's been in the press recently, but we are the largest third-party bauxite seller in the market. And this year, I was surprised how well our technical market teams have penetrated more new refiners. And new refiners are very complex things about the type of bauxite it takes.
So they opened up, again, new markets for our 35 million tons of bauxite exports. And so I thought that was pretty interesting. But what else are you seeing in your space?
I take no call. And we benefit a lot from the increased China imports because probably we can deepen this technical relationship about the value we use of our Australian bauxite. And we also provide geographic diversification of supplies between Brazil, Guinea, and Australia into China. So I think it's a good example. I mean, we have many others. I mean, Elysis is a partnership with Alcoa, where we learn with each other to develop probably the most advanced carbon-free electrolysis process. And then you can also mention this partnership in Finland. I mean, the name is now Arctia, which I need to learn how to pronounce, Arctic Aluminum.
But I think here also, we are with Vargas, we are with Mitsubishi, and we have other partners who will join us on the way to produce low-carbon aluminium for some customers who are interested for our core European markets. So I think that's another good example, and I'm confident we'll find more. So thanks to all of you. I think we now close this panel. And Peter, you need to bring us home on the presentation.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Jérôme. As you've heard today, we're putting our strategy into action, and we're making strong progress on our objectives. You've heard from Mark on how we're intensifying our focus on best operator and how we are delivering profitable growth from major projects. On decarbonization, we're de-risking our assets through disciplined execution, finding ways to lower capital intensity and increase overall returns.
These actions are creating significant value, enhancing our cash flows, and supporting consistent capital allocation and balance sheet strength. Our operating cash flows average $17 billion over the period 2019 to 2023. We prioritized our best operator focus on those operations that generate most cash. In the Pilbara, as Simon has highlighted, SPS would have delivered a 15 million ton cumulative uplift by the end of 2025. The cash generation from aluminum is strengthening, as Jerome said, and we're seeing the increasing benefits from operational stability. In bauxite, production is 9% higher so far this year, and this uplift has been particularly timely given the strength of the market. Best operator is not just about production, but also cost competitiveness, and we now have a much more stable cost base.
Our cost per unit of copper equivalent production has marginally reduced since 2022, and we expect that trend to continue in 2025. For example, in our core businesses, our like-for-like full-time equivalent employees are lower than in 2022. Likewise, our functional support costs on a like-for-like basis are also lower over the same timeframe. Best operator is also critical to realizing full value from our projects. 2025 is a pivotal year for the ramp-up of production at Oyu Tolgoi, as Katie covered earlier, delivering free cash flow, and we're now going much deeper to address system bottlenecks and strategic challenges at assets which have underperformed in recent years. Despite delivering a reasonable cash production contribution, production at IOC has not met our expectations over recent years, and we're focused on how to bridge the gap to the nameplate capacity of 23 million tons.
We believe that we have a pathway to achieve a significant production uplift in 2025. At Iron Ore, we have set demanding cost and production targets to drive a near-term improvement in ROCE, and Kennecott remains a real opportunity to unlock value, with production soon to be supplemented by the underground while we address near-term geotechnical challenges at the open pit. As Jakob highlighted, we are poised for significant growth, setting us apart from our peers with a compound annual growth rate of 3% to 2028. We expect to realize a third of this from our current assets and two-thirds from Oyu Tolgoi and Simandou, and this will support a gradual diversification of our portfolio. Now, clearly, iron ore will remain the strong foundation driven by our high-margin Pilbara system, while our copper and aluminum businesses become ever more significant.
In simple terms, this 3% per annum growth at long-run copper prices equates to approximately a $3 billion uplift in our equity share of EBITDA in 2028 and a similar level of cash flow. This level of earnings and cash flow uplift gives us confidence in our ability to invest in growth while remaining true to our shareholder returns policy and retaining a strong balance sheet. Looking further ahead, lithium is also expected to become a meaningful contributor, with Arcadium adding 1% to our growth through to 2028 and together with our existing lithium options representing close to 2% CAGR through to 2033, further diversifying the portfolio. Now, we're confident that our strong pipeline of other options will take our growth rate above 3%.
Jakob and Sinead have set out why we believe in lithium as a commodity and why the Arcadium acquisition makes sense for us, in particular due to its countercyclical timing. What I particularly like is the deep set of options that we now have in lithium. We will utilize our strong balance sheet to accelerate projects with the new supply due to come onto market just as lithium moves into deficit. Our commitment to our 2030 decarbonization target is unchanged, but our pathway, as Mark says, has matured significantly. We're now targeting the majority of our carbon abatement to 2030 to be met by commercial initiatives and a value accretive at an aggregate portfolio level, preserving our capital for investment and new productive capacity. Our decarbonization capital guidance to 2030 of $5-$6 billion includes projects that contribute to post-2030 abatement.
Now, our current view is this spend will ramp up at the back end of the decade as technology breakthroughs mature, such as Elysis and Alumina Process Heat. However, there is a lot of work to do to firm up the projects that underpin this spend profile. Let's unpack our expectations for capital for this year, next year, and over the medium term. Sustaining CapEx remains at around $4 billion a year. This ensures the integrity of our assets and is expected to be fairly stable. Replacement capital, which delivers attractive returns, is currently in the $2-$3 billion range. However, it is forecast to rise to between $3-$4 billion in 2025, primarily due to the replacement projects in the Pilbara Simon talked to and the underground lateral development at Oyu Tolgoi.
Investment for decarbonization remains fairly modest, at $500 million-$1 billion in total for the three years to 2026. Our largest growth project remains our equity share of Simandou. In addition, we have around $500 million remaining to be spent at the Oyu Tolgoi underground project. As Simandou and OT spend declines in 2026, capacity opens up for new project commitments, and we're confident that we can accommodate the lithium growth pipeline outlined in this presentation within this guidance. We now estimate we'll spend about $20 billion this year and next, but with some spend slipping from 2024 to 2025. Our best view for 2024 is now around $9.5 billion, and we estimate spending close to $11 billion next year. In the midterm, we see capital in the $10-$11 billion range.
We'll continue to look to drive capital productivity to offset inflation while maintaining the health of our assets. As I've said many times before, investment in growth is highly dependent on the timing of commitments as we prove up the value of opportunities. And if we don't progress those options, we'll then just follow our well-established capital allocation framework. As always, I'd like to make a few comments about the balance sheet. This chart shows the evolution of our absolute level of net debt and net debt to underlying EBITDA ratio since 2012. Now, you can see on the right-hand side our pro forma net debt of $11.8 billion, comprising our half-year 2024 net debt of $5.1 billion, and the Arcadium acquisition cost and assumed debt of $6.7 billion. This chart shows that debt remains relatively modest to history.
As I have consistently said, we have chosen not to have a net debt target, but we've adopted a principles-based approach around a single-A credit rating. The rating agencies have confirmed our credit rating post the Arcadium acquisition announcement. We have put in place acquisition bridge funding of $7 billion at competitive rates for 12 months, with two six-month extension options at our discretion. To conclude, our existing business is delivering strong cash flows, which will be enhanced by the delivery of our projects. We remain very committed to our capital framework, including the dividend policy and practice, and we intend to keep our balance sheet strong. It enables us to run the business consistently and maintain investment through the cycle, offering resilience and creating optionality.
Our strategy is about growing in the materials the world needs, and this will ensure Rio Tinto remains strong in the short, medium, and long term, with the ability to invest for the long term while paying attractive returns, and with that, let me pass back to Jakob. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Peter. Thank you all from the team here today. As you have heard, the actions we're taking now will ensure Rio Tinto remains strong, as Peter said, short, medium, and long term, continuing to pay attractive returns to shareholders. As I said at the beginning of the day, we've been on a journey as a team for four years now. The first part of our journey was to stabilize our assets.
Now, we are unlocking their full potential as we go deeper with the Safe Production System, deliver improved cost management, and learn from the execution of really big, complex projects. This is putting us on course to be more competitive as we grow. I must say, I feel really good entering the new year with the guidance we have disclosed today. The midpoint indicates 3% copper equivalent growth from 2022- 2025. My colleagues have shown you that as we shape our portfolio to align with what the world needs, backed by science and market analysis, we are opening a clear pathway to a decade of profitable growth. With improved performance, we can afford both the growth and decarbonization and continue our dividend policy and practice while preserving a strong balance sheet.
I hope you see we are now unfolding the historic strengths of Rio Tinto, flexing our operational and project-building muscle and building a portfolio that positions us to a bright and profitable future. Thank you. Over to you.
Thank you, Jakob. Same rules apply. We'll start with three in the room again, and then we'll go to the lines, starting with Liam here.
From Deutsche Bank. What do you want to be the best predictable on CapEx? A year ago, you told us $10 billion was the level that you felt you could keep CapEx at, and that would ensure good execution on projects. We've now seen this lift up to $11 billion. Are you confident that you can keep it in this channel, or has the view on how much you can take on in terms of projects changed? Thank you.
I think you've got to answer Tom's question there. Justin. Another one. But that's another one. Listen, I think that the key, as I said, I think we're going to spend slightly less this year in 2024 and slightly more next year. So over the two years, we'll be just over $10 billion on average. So I think it's not that we're taking on more. I think it's much more that what we're seeing at the moment, particularly in the replacement projects, is the confluence of a lot of projects coming together at the same time. The mine is delivering in the Pilbara, but we're sort of also the OT lateral development, so the build-out of the other panels and then the AP60 developments as well. We've just got more projects in that space for next year going through the spend.
But as I said, I think for the longer term, we're saying $10-$11. I would hope to keep it close to $10 going forward. But year on year, you are fighting sort of increasing costs and inflation as well, but we're trying to keep it down to that $10.
And allow me to just say. Yes, I feel more confident, and I hope you feel more confident because our projects right now are on schedule, on budget, and they're pretty big and large and complex. We are growing competencies in project execution, and there's actually no change from last year. We made the choice to buy Arcadium, and if that goes through, and we expect that to go through, of course, part of it is to develop the enormous resource base, both what we have and what we're getting with Arcadium. So it's very little change.
I clearly feel better this year than a year ago because we are making progress.
And as a quick follow-up, a cynical way of looking at your growth strategy is you're taking returns from your highest margin business. Oh, we all know. There we go. You're taking returns from your highest returning business, I know, and putting it into lower return commodities. So you've shown us what it will do to the business mix in terms of EBITDA, but what does that do to the returns and the EBITDA margins for the group if you get to that target in the early 2030s?
We don't know. But I think we're not going to invest if it's not value accretive. I mean, you can't just look at sort of return on capital employed for historical capital versus new capital.
But what we're very clear on is we'll only invest new capital in things that give fundamental value to shareholders. And we'll do that in a very balanced way between maintaining our shareholder returns policy and investing in growth. So to us, I think it's all about having the sort of right options in the portfolio that give the right level of returns for new capital, as well as making the most from our existing business and being consistent. Hello? Thank you. I've got a couple of questions. One on the CapEx creep? Should we assume a similar magnitude of creep on the OpEx as well? You will give your guidance at the year-end for iron ore, but if you can give us some teasers now on the OpEx. That's the first question. So I think there's a couple of things.
I mean, one, I think all across the board, we're seeing much more stability in costs. So that is absolutely when we look right across, I think stability and a lot of continuous improvement starting to come through the cost base. I think in some areas, there's still a fair amount of inflation that you're balancing off as well. So it's that balance. How do you fight the effects of sort of localized inflation with the effects of driving continuous improvement? And that's the piece that creates for some, and probably particularly Simon, that completes the challenge. But that's the equation we're backing with.
Thank you. And my second question is for Katie. So you're new to the firm. What is your number one or number two priorities for the next 12 months?
And do you think the Arcadium deal takes away from the copper business any ambitions for Iron Oreganic growth? Thank you.
That's a tough first question. So no, I have a very positive experience of my first three months at Rio and in the copper portfolio. I think actually one of the things that has most impressed me is the level of captured growth that we have in the portfolio. And so that leads me on to my first two priorities, which is very much delivering the growth to come next year in OT, which is crucial, but also, I think, stabilizing Kennecott, where it has disappointed over the last year. But indeed, just going back to my first comment, I think the quality of the growth in the portfolio is one of my great sort of takeaway messages.
So whilst I hope to be able to bring opportunities and ask for some of Peter's resources, that's not my first priority at the moment.
Thanks. Amos Fletcher from Barclays. First question on aluminum. I just wanted to ask this potential investment in greenfield smelting capacity in Finland versus your CO2 reduction targets. Effectively, you're locking in emissions over 30-40 years by doing this. Are you suggesting there's some risk around the commercialization of Elysis as a result of this investment?
No, I think it's two different topics. I mean, on one side, we said Elysis, we are moving to a critical industrial pilot stage between now and the end of the decade, and that technology will be deployed after 2030.
I think separately, I think we have an interest to reinvest into our European market, and we see a lot of merit of that project with AP60, including because it's going to be able to source electricity in a place where you source from hydro, from nuclear, so that we'll have very low carbon footprint, and it will not increase our emissions when you compare it to the average to what we have today in aluminum. So two different type dimensions.
Okay. And then follow-up, I guess, to ask Alain's question a slightly different way on copper. If we look at the growth options post-OT, I'd say there's a fair amount of risks around the deliverability, scalability of the options you've got. The industry is consolidating.
Can you talk to your current thinking on M&A and whether it's a realistic option for you to add world-class assets to the copper portfolio?
So I think the first thing I would say is I have just been here three months, and so I can ask others for their views and opinions too. But I think the things that I would say is that, firstly, we have real conviction about growing in copper, and I think that's something that you heard from Bold and that I will continue to remain focused on. I do think the first priority is delivering what's in the portfolio. I recognize that the next wave of projects have opportunity and challenge, but I think actually that's a common theme across the industry. And I think we think that we can move our project pipeline forward, and Winu is a step along that.
But of course, I think we need to keep alive to all options, but it needs to be things that are on strategy where we have some sort of added value that we bring to an equation. But yeah, I wouldn't.
Look, we're not competing in that way. I mean, we're all owning Rio Tinto shares. So it's a matter of where can you deploy the capital the best, and cyclicality plays in. I mean, right now, the lithium price is, what is it, 15% of what it was at the peak two years ago. So it's probably not a bad time if you can get in and, as we have demonstrated today, get some of the real tier-one assets at the bottom of the cost curve at a reasonable price, go for that. It's so expensive to buy copper right now.
And may I remind you, we have a Resolution. We have a La Granja. We have Nuevo Cobre. You have seen today there's a price mark set on Winu. It's amazing. No one has got such a pipeline. So it actually keeps you busy. And should the copper price fall, we'll probably have an even better discussion about should we add to that pipeline. But do it now. As a shareholder, I would feel kind of there could be some downside to that.
Thanks. Operator, could we take two questions from the line, please?
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone keypad. Your next question online comes from the line of Paul Young from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, Jakob and team. Thanks for taking the question. Jakob, question on the Pilbara.
Just looking at the flagship guidance for 2025, and then we're still keeping the midterm guidance or target of 345-360. I know we've rolled a year, but the midterm has stayed the same. So I just want to clarify what your definition of midterm is and maybe bring Simon into the conversation because I know that a lot of the replacement mines, there's two or three of them that are supposed to come online in the first half of 2027. So do you define midterm as that uptick in 2027?
Paul, thank you. Thanks for staying up so late in Australia and for your diligence. I'd definitely like to have Simon Trott on record for answering that question. Thank you both.
So the definition of midterm hasn't changed, Paul.
So midterm, we define as after that next tranche of new mine developments that we've got outlined there on the bubble chart. As I said during the presentation, 80 million tons of depletion. That's over the next five years. We've rolled that a year, but consistent with what I said last year on the Pilbara visit. Through that period, we add 130 million tons of capacity outlined there on the slide. Now, not all of that ramps up, obviously, during that five-year period, but the net of those numbers gets us well into the 345 as we bridge across to Rhodes at the end of the decade, which we'll need to get deep into that range.
Thanks, Simon. And another question just on the product strategy.
I know you might have answered this a little bit in a prior question from my understanding, but we saw Vale yesterday come out with more of a margin maximization strategy and lowering their sort of target grades. I just want to confirm the SP10. Look, it might not be a bad thing, i.e., the fact that you can actually it actually might be margin accretive and value accretive by targeting higher SP10, which can be lower strip, shorter haul distances, etc. So I just want to confirm, with the SP10 strategy, is this actually a margin and value maximization strategy?
Yeah. Probably two points, Paul. Really happy with our current product strategy. What we're doing is there a better value mix for us going forward?
I think when you look at it, if you look at Simandou and roll it out a few years, Simandou plus our mix this year in terms of mass balance into China, in a few years, it'll be about the same as a few years ago with a PB strategy. And so mass balance will be about the same. What's the highest value option for us to take to market, as I've talked about on the slide? Obviously, if you utilize more of your ore body, maybe you don't need as much capital to go in in terms of new mine development, and your operating costs are lower. And there's some of the trade-offs we'll do as part of that review through 2025.
Perfect. Thanks. Thanks, Simon.
We'll just take one more on the line, please. Thank you.
Your next question online was from the line of Rob Stein from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks again. Just on the capacity to invest in lithium, look, using a ruler on a PowerPoint, it looks like roughly around $5 billion you're expecting to have the capacity to invest in lithium over the forward sort of three years. What sort of returns are you looking for in that incremental investment? We saw, obviously, BHP, which you're connected with, nominate somewhere in the vicinity of $13-$14 billion to get in the vicinity of 15% return for its copper business. What are you looking at and targeting for lithium?
So we never give specific guidance, but I can help you a little bit here because Jerome, I, and Peter, we have spent quite a lot of time.
We've just prepared ourselves for a board meeting next week in Montreal where we will be discussing the full-scope Rincon proposal, and I think worthwhile listening carefully to what Jeanette said. I mean, it's so wonderful how we have solved technical issues, less water usage, etc. And despite the fact that, of course, we have seen some inflation over the last three or four years since we looked at the acquisition, we actually ended up with capital intensity to the tune of $43,000 per ton, and it's a very low OPEX, and it's a very long-term asset. You can do your math on getting 60,000 tons produced a year. It looks like a very attractive project. I can't really say anything meaningful about Arcadium. You know as much as I have, as you know, it's not my company, so we are dependent upon public disclosures.
But if you just do that, I think that would help you to see that it probably makes a lot of sense to allocate capital there.
Thank you.
Sorry, it's giving me a bit of a navel-gazing. Great question over there. I have two questions. So just maybe a clarification on the last comment and a couple of questions on the CapEx. Do you internally see a scenario where group CapEx could materially dip in 2028, 2029 when Simandou CapEx falls away?
Dominic, given the strength of options we've got right across the portfolio, probably not would be the answer. I mean, I would be actually a bit disappointed if it does because I think we've got so many things we're working on that they should come through on that sort of amount.
But I think there's one thing that's important, which is difficult to, you can't capture it in a spreadsheet, is that we have maximum optionality. So, for example, the lithium portfolio we bring in here, we don't have to do them, but we have the projects, and we can look at the latest market analysis, and we can make decisions, rational decisions. And a spreadsheet never takes any value or option value, but it's actually huge for a company like ours.
And my second question is on optionality. I'm really interested in the Winu transaction that you announced last night because you've essentially de-risked what is, in my eyes, a relatively low-risk project with very low capital at risk, but you also have 100% ownership of a, or 66% ownership of a project that you have a lot of capital in and is high risk. So how do you think about the optionality going forward for OT?
So, I mean, I think maybe the red thread between the two is creating strong partnerships. And, of course, SMM bring more to Winu than just the capital. I think as I came into the business, frankly, I asked the same question on Winu because I think I sense conviction around that project has really increased over the last year about the resource, but also the sort of potential expandability of the project. But on the other hand, and I think, as was emphasized as I came in, prudent risk diversification does make sense, and bringing in a good long-term partner with a mid and downstream eye to that project, I think makes a lot of sense. So it's a balanced approach.
I think we continue also, and I am very new to what is a very deep relationship in Mongolia. So I will ask Jakob and maybe Bold to comment as well. But, of course, that's a relationship that's hugely important for both sides where we continue to put a lot of effort into it. We have real scale there, but also, I think, a partnership that benefits both. So, yeah.
Excuse me. Alex Pearce at BMO Capital Markets. You've spoken to some of the geotechnical challenges at Kennecott over the near term. This isn't the first fairly large geotechnical issue at that operation. So I just wondered how confident you are in terms of it being a near-term issue, or could you see actually some more permanent changes that need to be made in terms of the pit design that could actually impact reserves in the kind of mid-long term?
So I think it is worth recognizing, and certainly, I was amazed by the scale of the pit when I went to visit. And it's a pit that's been operating for 120 years. And I think that is just a kind of reality. So it will always be an operation with some complexities. Having said that, I think I was super impressed, actually, by the amount of geotechnical capability and monitoring that we have on site. And I do also very much believe that the team has put forward a really credible plan for essentially sort of adapting to current circumstances, running less equipment in a more constrained setup in the pit to work through this current phase of instability. So I think it's a very credible plan to stabilize.
And then I think the other thing I should point to is, of course, the underground should be ramping up over a similar time period as we sort of stabilize the bottom of the pit. And hence, I think those two things can create a sort of return to normality for Kennecott. And then, as I alluded to, I think taking a step back, looking at the overall sort of dynamics of the copper market, it remains a very attractive ore body in a very attractive jurisdiction. And I think once we've got to that point, then we can look at what are the future investments. And it is part of the optionality that we're talking about in the copper portfolio.
Jason Fairclough of Bank of America. A bit of a big-picture question.
So I've been marketing, talking to clients lately, and everybody's sort of focused on January the 20th for some reason. So as we get a change in the U.S., how do you think about the opportunities and the threats on your business? I mean, Canada seems to be in the crosshairs. U.S. maybe is an opportunity, but then, of course, the elephant in the room is China.
Look, thank you. I really like the way you asked the question. You said, "What do you see as the opportunity or the threats?" Because very often, people start saying, "Whew, change, and it's very difficult," etc. There is a desire in both blocs of the world to grow. Grow is good for our business. There might be some changes. We can cope with that. We are a global business.
And last time, under the first Trump administration, there were some changes, and they actually came out very favorable to us. It has worked very well, that regime, the Section 232 since then. So we don't have any fear for this. We are trying to figure out what the various governments want to achieve because we are in the business of trying to help supporting national developments. So I don't want to speculate because so far, there is no new government in place. But I would say to you, it could as well be an upside as seeing it as a threat. Thank you. Just to follow up, again, does your relationship with China, and for that matter, the fact that China owns no small part of the PLC shares, do you think that figures into any kind of approval process around Arcadium? Again, few investors asking that.
I have obviously asked questions, and first of all, we have evidence that that's not the case because we went through a CFIUS review when we bought our Matalco. There was no questions. So we have no issues. I have asked questions, and as far as all the answers I've got is that there should be absolutely no issues because we are a public-listed global company. Anyone on this planet can buy shares in Rio Tinto. All right. Thank you.
Emma also at BBS. Maybe a first question for Peter. The dividend policy, obviously, 40%-60%. We've had 60% for quite a few years. Does that mean we're going to have 40% for a few more years looking forward, or should we change it to a 60% payout?
Thanks, Emma. I think we've been pretty consistent.
I kind of said, "There's policy and there's practice." We're pretty keen to be consistent with both. So 60%.
Maybe the other question, obviously, changes in the U.S. around Resolution. Is that still included in the million tons by 2030, or is that looking a little bit more of a stretch? How are those legal proceedings moving forward?
I mean, just on the million tons, I think the biggest factor in that actually is the ramp-up at OT. That's fundamentally the driver of that ambition. I think in terms of Resolution, I think we remain positive. We hope for sort of clarity on the legal front, which will allow us to move forward more rapidly.
But, of course, it remains a deep, very attractive ore body, but I think it's something that is going to take some work, both in terms of receiving all of the necessary permits, but also having the appropriate mine plan and engineering. So it'll be a big development when it comes, but we remain very positive. Jakob, Evy Hambro from BlackRock.
Y ou talked about anybody being able to buy your shares, but you can't buy your shares at the moment. So have you got any updates on when that restriction might become a bit easier? And I've got a second question.
Oh, wow. That's a good question. Oh, sorry. Okay. Evy, thank you. I, representing Rio Tinto, can buy shares, but it would collide with the Chinese ownership because Kennecott owns pretty close to the limit of 14.99%.
That was set out as a condition by the treasurer at the time of acquisition in 2008, and we don't want to create geopolitical tension between China and Australia. We know with pleasure that the relationship between the two countries have improved a lot, and I am certainly very committed to try to find a solution because it would be good. It's in the company's interest that we, without having any problems, can do share buyback as well. I have not delivered on that yet, Evy. It is definitely on my list. I would love to solve that, and what I will say to you is we have a very constructive cooperation with Kennecott, and one of the really unlockers have been that we have been in a joint venture around Simandou for 10 years, and let's put it like that.
There have been ups, and there have certainly also been downs, and right now, I hope all of you are leaving the room and can see we're really executing that project, and that changed the relationship there, so let me see whether I'm on the back of that can make a bit of progress for you on that.
That's hopes there. We don't want Rio Tinto to be the only group that can't buy Rio Tinto shares. The second question is for Peter. If you assume a cost of capital, cost of debt for Arcadium, how long before Arcadium actually can pay its own interest bill?
I mean, Evy, I would look upon it more that if we look at the sort of free cash flow that they're developing, or the cash flow it's paying for the capital for the next few years.
As we ramp up to that wave of first tranche projects by the end of the decade, you're getting to a very profitable business at the end of the decade and going forward from there. But it will take those years in terms of interest, but I couldn't probably do the calculation. But just think of it in those horizons. Basically, pretty much the cash generated paying for the first tranche of growth and then sort of really ramping up once the volumes come through.
So a contribution towards the dividend in the 2030s? Yeah.
The challenge we have, Eddie, is we still don't know more than at the time of acquisition. But I hope you noticed that Arcadium is one of the few lithium producers that actually have positive EBITDA. But we don't know the content of their commercial contracts yet.
So it's quite difficult to say too much about that. But it's noted, and we will try to make lithium profitable as soon as we can.
Hello. Richard Hatch from Berenberg. Two questions. First one, Peter, just on Escondida non-operated JVs, I think it's contributed about $600-$700 million of dividends to the company over the last few years, a bit more, a bit less. With that capital investment cycle going into Escondida, what do you think the outlook is for that? Do we need to start bringing that number down, or do you need to start putting cash into Escondida to start funding that growth and/or maintain the profile?
Thanks. Richard, we'll see when we see the final numbers and the profiles going forward. I mean, it's always been the case.
If you look back to the major program of investment at Escondida, 2012, 2013, 2014, around that time, again, dividends lowered to pay for capital. That's the profile that you have, and then you sort of enjoy that. The returns on that thereafter, I would expect that to be pretty much the similar profile.
Okay. Thanks, and the second one's just on OT. Just on the geotech, it's always been something I've been a bit nervy about. And obviously, in the past, you had to adjust the mine plan to leave pillars in for stability, right? So with panels one and two, how confident are you that you've got geotech in a position where you're not going to disappoint the market again?
So I mean, the comment I would make, but then I would also open it up to those wiser on geotech than I, would just be that because I obviously asked similar questions when I went to visit. I mean, I think the performance of panel zero is very encouraging so far. So we've done 124 drawbells. They all remain in place. The panel is performing very well. The cave is performing very well. So I think when I went there, what I sensed was increasing confidence in understanding of the geotech. And so, yes, it's a positive trajectory from my perspective, but other.
I think the thing to note here is, have we been prudent? And we had a geotech concern, as you recall, what is that, four years ago? And touch wood, we still haven't lost a single drawbell. That's not very normal for an underground development.
It shows that we have done a lot prudent. Bold clearly wants to say something here.
Neither. But if you recall, we redesigned our mine plan because there was a significant loss of number of access areas in some other mines, like in Indonesia. So we looked at that and said, "Okay, it's just better to be prudent and have dual access." So that was one of the key reasons. I think the other point I would make is most of our ore body knowledge at that time was a drilling from the top, so 1,300 meters and across a wider area. Now in panel one and two, and this is why the ore body knowledge is important, we're always horizontal with drilling. So the accumulation of knowledge and information is just vastly different in terms of meters than what we had before.
So I think also we have a bit more experience in running that underground. So knock on wood, I think we're doing our best. I think there is certainly more information and knowledge at the moment.
Thank you.
Thanks. Alan Spence from BNP. Just a quick one for me. At the time of the Arcadium acquisition, Jakob, you made a comment about considering issuing shares. With the pro forma balance sheet we've seen that showing the bridge financing there, can I assume you're no longer considering that?
No, we would consider it. I mean, we have absolutely taken no decision. It's entirely a rational decision. I think, as Peter demonstrated today, it's still little leverage. We have confirmed our credit rating so it's not something we have to do, but it's something that's worthwhile considering.
Actually, there is some option that tells you something about the option value we have from having a DLC where the limited share is valued higher because of tax reasons in Australia. Peter, do you want to?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's simple that we'll just look at all options. I mean, it's a case of we've got that funding sort of in place for 12 and with the extensions now. And how we actually deal with that, we'll see. I mean, the other thing I've noticed is that we've kind of made some portfolio moves as well. We sold the Lake MacLeod sort of dried salt operation. We closed that on Monday, $250 million. All of that is a mixture of different options we've got as we look to forward manage the balance sheet.
Okay. Thank you.
That could be it. Good. Oh. Sorry.
Sorry, just a very quick one. I just wondered whether we're in the position that the Alcoa business might see a write-up rather than write-downs, which I think was probably the last scenario. And also OT, I'm not sure whether OT is on the balance sheet at what price and whether we're at a stage where that could be written up as well. And the second thing is on the shareholders' dispute. Katie, you said that there were still resolutions to be done at OT around that. Can you just remind us what those are?
So maybe just starting on the accounting, it's a pretty nice problem to have where you can write stuff up. But certainly, I think Jerome's giving us that challenge on sort of New Zealand to think about because we pretty heavily wrote that down in the past.
Now we're looking at where we held that at the year-end. It's certainly, as we sort of look at the value, we have to contemplate that. Katie?
Yeah, on OT. No, no, no. No, I mean, I guess one of the things that I was impressed by going to Mongolia, visiting OT, fundamentally, the scale of the investment that Rio has made in the country is huge. And that sort of integration between our operations there and our partnership with the government of Mongolia, I think, is vastly important from both perspectives. But there is, of course, always, I think, a little bit of movement and of kind of growing together through such a mega project.
I would say, I mean, also similar to what I've seen in similar kind of mega projects in oil and gas, some of those frictions around applications of investment frameworks and detailed applications of tax, all of those sorts of things, I think, can cause this friction or maybe a little bit of grit in the relationship. So I think those are the sorts of things that I was alluding to when I said continuing to work on stakeholder issues. I think the other thing, of course, is continuing to work together to develop the full potential of OT because it is really a world-class asset and ore body. And so, yeah, we need to work on that sort of alignment and that future vision. But those would be the things I would highlight
. Rest assured, Katie, Bold, and myself, we still work.
We know we still have a tax dispute. We are working on trying to solve those things. But the way I look at it is we have a very good relationship with the Mongolian government, and we have solved 90% of the issues. And there will always be a few outstanding issues. And with the recent track record, we should be able to overcome the last few things as well.
Hi, François from Generali Asset Management. In the stewardship team, this will be the dedicated ESG question. So one comment on culture and one question on local communities. On culture, I think you deserve to be- I mean, congratulations on the transparency you gave on the Everyday Respect report. And you deserve to be encouraged for that. Question on local communities. Maybe for you, Jakob, because you mentioned this at the beginning of your presentation.
Throughout the presentation, this is a common line. How do you make sure that your relationships with these local communities, the trust building with the local communities, help you to secure the access to resource, to secure supply? This is also a common line throughout the presentation. How you manage the related costs and risks, which is, I mean, as an investor, for us, it's a long-term concern.
Yeah. Thank you. No, thank you. Thanks for your kind words. What I always say is, well, you cannot operate without getting a social license. You can never take it for granted. The local community will always be your Achilles heel. It always will be. It's not that much about money. It is actually much more about really paying attention to it, to go out there, meet people.
And you have to, if you cannot come up with a mining project that is good for me, good for you, that is a win-win, it's just uphill battle. And you have to, because there will always be pluses and minuses when you open a mining. But people need to feel, first of all, that there needs to be trust. And secondly, there needs to be a feeling of that this is actually in everybody's interest to progress. And that's why I'll just be very blunt with it. I'm so kind. None of you have spoken about it today, but we have had issues in Serbia because actually, I went there five years ago when I was CFO, and there was harmony with the local community, but a lot of disinformation had made people nervous. And that is very uncomfortable. And then we just have to communicate even more.
It's really, really hard work because ultimately, the local community has to have trust and see that what's in it for them as well. I still believe we have an incredible attractive value proposition for the local community, for Serbia as a whole, and in the interest of European industry as well. We'll take the time it takes. As you have seen, there has been robust resistance. That just tells that we have to keep on doing our work well. I'm actually very pleased you're mentioning it here because for all shareholders, this is super critical because we can do all our spreadsheets. This is kind of actually yes, no. If this is not right, then we have no business. Thank you. Thank you.
I think that was also time and a nice way to finish. Two advertisements for myself first.
So please join us for lunch downstairs and continue the discussion. And also tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. London time, we're doing a decarbonization briefing where we can go a bit deeper on those topics. So hopefully, you can join that. I'll just pass on to Jakob for a closing statement.
Look, enough have been said. I just want, first of all, to say thank you to so many people in Australia joining us today and hope we can get some direct feedback straight here in the lunchroom. I must say, personally, I've been very, very pleased to see the presentations from the teams. Your questions are all the right ones, the same questions I asked to my team, etc. And then I just wanted to recognize all of you investing the time in this because we are a public-listed company.
And if people are not investing time to understand a big global business, then the whole thing of being public-listed doesn't work. So thank you for turning up here today. And let's adjourn and go for lunch. Thank you.