All right, let's get going, ladies and gentlemen. Very good morning to all of you here in the New York Stock Exchange. Appreciate you getting up early to join us, and to those online, again, welcome to our Investor Day. This is the agenda for the day. We will take you through sustainability and our global operations first, and then we'll stop for a break, and the second session will include mineral resources, exploration, and finance and supply chain, and we plan to complete these presentations by midday, with time at the end for questions. Those who are with us in person are also invited to join us for lunch. Before I start, I'd like to draw your attention to our customary cautionary statement, which also can be viewed on our website.
It has been two years since our last Investor Day here in New York, and in that time, we have made significant progress in building a future-focused mining business, and that's what we want to share with you today. The team today will showcase Barrick's peerless asset portfolio, underpinned by our Tier One focus and filters, as well as a strategy that continues to uncover and unlock value, while also fostering productive partnerships in our host countries. This approach is reflected by our holistic commitment to sustainability, which is foundational to all that we do. As we will show you in the course of this presentation, since 2019, we have generated $23 billion in operating cash flow, of which we've invested $15 billion in our ore bodies, operational infrastructure, and growth projects, effectively recapitalizing them for the next 10 years and beyond.
We've also reduced the net debt we inherited with the merger by nearly $4 billion and returned over $5 billion to our shareholders. The team will also demonstrate how our world-class projects are set to deliver a new growth phase. Our targeted exploration programs are on course to maintain Barrick's unique record of reserve replacement, and both brownfields and greenfield discoveries are set to deliver real long-term value. Barrick has long-lived sustainable mines and projects across the world's most prospective regions. The experience we have gained globally and our highly skilled host country operational teams have given us the competence to manage complex risks and create value in jurisdictions deemed too challenging by others, such as the Reko Diq copper and gold project in Pakistan.
We will show you how we are opening up exciting new frontiers in Peru and Ecuador, as well as unlocking more value creation opportunities within our own portfolio. In Nevada, we're making significant progress with mine extension projects at Leeville, Goldr ush, Hanson, Robertson, Swift, and new extensions to Turquoise Ridge. The newly permitted Goldr ush mine is ramping up production, and the adjacent 100% Barrick-owned Fourm ile project, as Simon will explain, and I assume some of you saw the press release today, is turning out to be a truly world-class asset, which can best be compared to the original Goldstrike deposit that was the foundation on which the original Barrick was built back in the 1980s and 1990s. Today's presentation will show you not only what our teams are achieving, but also by whom they are led.
The team members presenting are shown on the slide and will introduce themselves when they give their presentations. However, we also have here today additional executives from Barrick, from strategic matters, communications, investor relations, finance, corporate, and projects and engineering. So I'd encourage you during the break and over lunch to reach out and meet some of them, because they are the future leaders of this company. We will also tell you how we are investing in the recruitment and training of our workforce, aligned to the demands of a future-facing business, and how we are preparing a new generation of managers to lead them. With that, I'll now hand over to Grant to take you through how sustainability is core to our goals and our strategy. Grant.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning to you all. I'm Grant Beringer, Barrick's executive for sustainability. At Barrick, our approach to business has always been differentiated, one that consistently unlocks value where others cannot, and fosters genuine partnerships in jurisdictions deemed too complex or challenging by many. This unique approach is fully reflected in how we view sustainability, a term that for us extends beyond the narrow confines of ESG. For years, Mark and I have been vocal in warning the industry that the direction of the prevailing ESG model is too reactive, short-sighted, and fraught with unintended consequences that are not understood. Far too often, the E, S, and G components have become fragmented, compliance-driven silos. ESG has become little more than a tick-the-box exercise, focused on abstract targets that will likely never be met.
It is a game of optics designed to keep investors happy without actually making a difference. This is where the industry has gone wrong. It has lost sight of what true sustainability is. At Barrick, we see things differently. We understand that sustainability is not a set of isolated targets. It's an integrated, long-term strategy that requires a comprehensive approach. While others are busy setting aspirational targets to placate the market and kick the can down the road, we're already delivering real impact in the communities where we operate. By aligning our work with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, we focus on all aspects: environmental, social, and economic, because they are interconnected. It's about addressing local context, creating actionable solutions, and delivering real-world results. That's how we lead, and that's how we are shaping the future of mining.
It is this real, on-the-ground impact, with a relentless focus on long-term value creation, that I want to emphasize above all else today. At Barrick, we don't just talk about sustainability. We live it, and we're delivering results that will benefit generations to come. Mining, like any human activity, does have an environmental footprint, but it is critical that we approach global environmental concerns such as climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and socioeconomic challenges not as isolated issues, but as part of a broader sustainability agenda. At Barrick, we emphasize that focusing solely on the environmental aspects for our operations, as is common in many Western markets, often overlooks the broader impact of our business. The true value of our work lies in its holistic nature. Take, for example, our support for Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This is often hailed as a biodiversity project, and sure, we're proud of the success of reintroducing white rhinos into the park, but it's far more than that. This project is an interconnected story, a journey almost, one that involved the social aspects, the community, bringing peace to a troubled region, and transformed a previously unstable and unsafe area into one where communities now have access to education, healthcare, and a chance for economic development through ecotourism. All of this has been made possible through the partnership of Barrick, local governments, communities, and traditional leaders. Barrick's investments do not stop with environmental projects. They extend to the energy and social initiatives that uplift communities.
For instance, our clean energy projects, such as providing remote communities with renewable power for both mining operations and local use, are a perfect example of how we minimize our environmental impact, but also generate economic and social value in the process. The reality is this: the ESG world has been narrowly focused on environmental metrics while ignoring social issues. We are here to challenge that. Our philosophy is simple: sustainability is most impactful when environmental and social issues are addressed simultaneously with solutions tailored to local needs and conditions. Mining is not just an economic driver. It has the power to catalyze broad positive change with both immediate effect and over a longer period, particularly in the world's most remote regions. At Barrick, we recognize that mining, when done responsibly, is one of the most powerful tools for poverty alleviation and socioeconomic upliftment.
Unlike others in the industry who measure success by flashy reports or investor-friendly targets, we measure it by the impact we make in the real world. These are the facts. We directly employ 26,000 people across 13 countries, with 97% of those employees being host country nationals, something few companies in our industry can match. In addition, Barrick has created over 28,000 contractor jobs, and the multiplier effect from these jobs is enormous, generating demand for goods, services, and creating even more employment. In 2023, we paid $2.8 billion to host governments in taxes and royalties alone, and $2 billion to employees. For the same period, we spent almost $7 billion on in-country procurement, supporting businesses and entrepreneurs in our host countries. We're not just creating jobs. We're creating economic ecosystems. In Mali, Barrick's operations have contributed a staggering $10 billion to the economy over the last 24 years.
In the Dominican Republic, over the last 10 years, we accounted for 15% of the total income tax paid by corporations. And in Papua New Guinea, we've paid over $1.7 billion in tax, excise duty, and dividends to the government since 1990. These are not just numbers. They're a testament to the transformative power of responsible mining and the execution of a holistic approach to sustainability. But the most profound impact comes not only from financial contributions, but from investing in the people who live in the communities surrounding our operations. We believe in the power of education as a means to break the cycle of poverty, which is why Barrick has partnered with NGOs like World Education to provide teacher training and support. These efforts have helped drive school pass rates in local areas to an impressive 91% compared to just 64% in the surrounding regions.
By tackling the fundamental human rights that many of us take for granted, access to quality healthcare, a clean environment, safe drinking water, and food security, we're not just addressing basic needs, but we're laying the foundation for a prosperous future for hundreds of thousands of people who have long been forgotten in the conversation about global progress. We are championing a bold, comprehensive approach that will not only lift entire communities out of poverty, but also create a future where prosperity is no longer reserved for the few, but shared by the many. Importantly, we place special emphasis on supporting women and the importance they play, recognizing that gender equality is a cornerstone of sustainable development. From ensuring girls attend primary school in Pakistan to skill-building initiatives in Nevada and women-led businesses in Mali, we are committed to empowering women and helping them access economic opportunities.
Climate change and biodiversity loss are global issues, but the consequences will be felt most acutely by the world's most isolated and vulnerable. Barrick gets this and strives to take a balanced approach that considers both the need for climate and nature action and the need for economic development in areas that are still struggling with poverty. For nearly a decade, we have been leading the way in green energy at our Kibali mine in the DRC, where we have built hydroelectric power stations not just for our operations, but to provide clean electricity to local communities as well. This is not a one-off project. It's part of our broader strategy to help build climate resilience, and it's working. Our investments in renewable energy are not just about reducing emissions. They're about giving communities the power they need to build a more sustainable future.
We believe that the transition to a low-carbon economy cannot leave anyone behind. That's why we are working with our local partners to ensure they have the tools and infrastructure they need to weather the storm. And we're not waiting for governments and NGOs to act. We're doing it ourselves. Sustainability is not possible without a workforce, and that workforce must go home every day to their families and to their communities safe and healthy. We know that safety is the foundation of all we do. We are unwavering in our commitment to zero harm, with the ultimate goal of eliminating fatalities and injuries across our operations. We have made significant strides in reducing incidents, but we know that one fatality is one too many. This Journey to Zero starts with leadership, engagement, and a culture that demands accountability at every level.
We have redefined safety across the organization with a new set of fatal risk standards that must be met before any work can begin. This is not a suggestion. It is a requirement. And these standards are being rolled out across our sites, accompanied by rigorous training and oversight. Safety is more than a priority for us. It's a core value, and we're putting every ounce of our leadership behind it. How we close our mines is more than just a detail. It's a fundamental differentiator in how we create long-lasting value. At Barrick, we don't wait until the end to think about closure. We plan it before we even started designing the mine, because the truth is, just because a mine is no longer operational does not mean its impacts are gone.
We approach mine closure with the same rigor, discipline, and vision that we apply to building and operating them. Sustainable closure is not a side project. It's a core part of our strategy. Reclamation and closure are not afterthoughts. They're integral to our commitment to responsible long-term value. And unlike our competitors who are watching their liabilities balloon year after year, we are turning the tide. While others face rising environmental and reclamation costs, our proactive approach to understanding and mitigating closure risks is setting us apart. Since 2018, we've slashed our closure liabilities by more than $1 billion through relentless optimization, continuous review, and disciplined execution. We're not just managing risk. We're reducing it dramatically. Our North American legacy portfolio is brimming with opportunities for value creation.
Over the last five years, we've been persistently refining and optimizing it through strategic divestitures, fine-tuning post-closure management plans, and forging stronger relationships with the local communities and stakeholders. We've set a bold goal to reduce liabilities by 80% in the next decade by eliminating the costly long-term environmental liabilities like active water treatment, turning them into real, sustainable solutions. Barrick doesn't just talk about responsible closure. We're out there making it happen. Our commitment to owning, understanding, and actively managing long-term closure risks ensures that we leave behind resilient post-closure conditions where value can be realized long after the mine has closed. Most importantly, we are protecting our social license to operate by making sure we do not leave communities to shoulder the burden. While others are scrambling to catch up, Barrick is leading the way.
It is clear that the world of ESG is at a crossroads, and reality is setting in. The obsession with ratings, rankings, and box-ticking from offices far removed from the reality on the ground has led to empty promises, and most concerning for me, lost opportunities for real-life change. It has become an ecosystem that reinforces the inaction, particularly in those regions that need change the most, and polarizes the haves and the have-nots even further. Many investors are starting to see through the smoke and mirrors, and they're walking away from the ESG game because it's become too politicized and fragmented and lost sight of its first principles. At Barrick, we've never wavered from our belief that sustainability is about action, not words, and we're proving it every single day in the communities where we operate.
We're leading the charge by sticking to our strategy of holistic, integrated sustainability, by staying true to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, and by delivering results that matter, and if the last number of years of our sustained delivery in community and environmental upliftment is not evidence enough, then you are all in the fortunate position of having front-row seats to witness how we will impact one of the most remote and forgotten parts of the world through our Reko Diq project in Pakistan. In fact, we've already started changing the lives of people in this corner of Balochistan.
We have invested in education even before a single shovel has hit the ground, with children, both boys and girls, now able to attend primary school, something they've not had the opportunity to do for more than a decade, or through the health facilities and access to water treatment that will increase the low life expectancy. We will not compromise on our principles and will continue to do what others are too afraid to do: create real, lasting change. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to continuing this journey with you. I'll now hand over to Christine to take you through our North American operations.
Thank you, Grant. That's definitely going to be a tough act to follow, and even harder if we cannot scroll. There we go. All right. Good morning, everybody.
My name is Christine Keener, and I joined the Barrick team two and a half years ago to lead the North American region. I also have the pleasure of having Henri Gonin , who is the Managing Director of Nevada Gold Mines, be presenting with me this morning. As you all know, North America is Barrick's value foundation. In this presentation, Henri and I will emphasize the key areas that make North America this value engine, highlighting our accomplishments since the last investor day two years ago and where we will be focusing our efforts going forward to deliver value now and drive growth for the future. There is nothing more valuable than human life and no ounce is worth producing to the detriment of safety. As you heard from Grant and will see in all the regional presentations, we have fully embarked on our Journey to Zero .
As a region, we have steadily improved our safety performance over the last two years. Since January of 2022, both our lost-time injury and total recordable injury frequency rates are down 53% and 35%, respectively. We are also seeing a decrease in incident severity, and I am very proud to report that in the current year, we had six months lost-time injury-free as of the end of October. We focused much of our efforts on our safety culture, recognizing that while it's critical to keep track and to learn from lagging indicators, incident prevention and driving safety performance begins with a sharp focus on leading indicators. Specifically, we are concentrating our efforts on critical control verifications, close calls, and corrective actions. And as you can see on the slide, we are already making significant progress with these metrics.
In Barrick North America, we own and operate the largest gold mining complex in the United States, which is also a world-class ore body whose value is unlocked by world-class people. While we are still working to improve our labor efficiencies, North America produces 46% of the company's gold, or as you can see on the pie charts behind me, 36% on a gold-equivalent basis, despite having only 19% of the workforce, given our high grades. We also have a proven track record of reserves replacement. Not only have we replaced the mine reserves since the inception of the Nevada Gold Mines Joint Venture, we have also added 11.5 million ounces of inferred resources as of the end of 2023.
We've come a long way as a region since our last investor day, and we've accomplished much of what we had outlined back then, such as the reserve and resource replacement that I just mentioned, growth of our exploration portfolio that I will touch on later, and optimization of the closure sites to reduce our liabilities, as Grant highlighted. Key to our success, given the life of mine extensions that we have delivered and continue to do so, is having to reinvest in our infrastructure and equipment to extend their useful life and capture efficiencies. Examples of this are the successful completion of the Gold Quarry expansion project to increase throughput by 20%, and the successful conversion of the Goldstrike autoclave from resin-in-leach to carbon-in-leach to enable higher recoveries, lower unit costs, and earlier processing of material from Carlin South.
We also invested significantly in underground development, bringing in contractors to accelerate this progress. In our open pits, investments in 63 new Komatsu trucks, 47 of which have been delivered, are increasing the average payload per truck by approximately 15% and improving availability by 7%-25%, while materially lowering maintenance spend. From a project standpoint, we received the record of decision for Gold rush in Q4 of last year and have since been ramping up construction of the associated infrastructure and vent shafts that enable increased mining rates. Additionally, we received the record of decision for Robertson last week and are now working to capture the full value of that project. Also of note, the TS Solar plant was completed on time and on budget in Q3 of this year. The full 200-megawatt array is now in operation, with commercial production expected to be declared later this month.
Turning now from what we have achieved to what we will be focusing on moving forward. Gold rush is an obvious value driver for us. Continuing its ramp-up to the 400,000 ounce per annum production rate is a key imperative. Also, Four mile, which is wholly owned by Barrick, is a significant asset of material strategic importance that Simon will highlight later. And as Mark mentioned, I'm sure a lot of you saw the press release on it and already know some of the good news. We have certainly not been shielded from the post-pandemic inflationary environment. To offset cost pressures, we will be relentless in our pursuit to drive efficiencies, investigate innovation and automation opportunities, and importantly, develop our people through the training mine and Barrick Academy.
We are also implementing One Mine to provide real-time data that will enhance decision-making and operational performance, which Seb will talk about later in more detail. We are proceeding with fit-for-purpose investments and projects that are required to recapitalize the business and enable our growth. That growth will be driven further by our significant near-mine potential and value-adding gold and copper discoveries. Of course, nothing is possible without the support of our host communities. That is why we strive to be the mining partner of preference, strengthening our social license through engagement, sustainable investment, and partnerships. One example of sustainable investment and partnership is our commitment to solar energy in Nevada.
In addition to the TS Solar plant, NGM is embarking on site solar generation and battery storage facilities at Turquoise Ridge and Cortez, for which we recently received a cost-share award from the Office of Clean Energy Development for $14.6 million for phase I , with a total award of $95 million expected. As mentioned, and as Graham will discuss later, we have not been shielded from inflation. The weakening dollar, while it helped with gold's momentum and record-breaking prices, further impacted our costs for commodities sourced outside of the United States. It is important to note that the costs on these graphs are on a dollar-per-ounce basis and therefore partly a reflection of the fewer ounces produced since 2021.
Further, while our spend on consumables and maintenance spares has increased, this has been affected by a larger proportion of refractory ounces in the sales mix, from 68% in 2021 to 74% in 2024, which requires more reagents to unlock the gold. Additionally, we've invested significantly in our infrastructure, which is partly reflected in the maintenance spend due to some of the costs not being classified as capital. Given the decrease in energy costs from the 2022 peak, energy shifted from 15% of our cost base to 9% in 2024. We will share the key actions we are taking to reverse this upward trend and drive down operating costs throughout the remainder of this presentation.
Looking at the five-year attributable profile for North America, Cortez is driving the step change in 2027, owing to Crossroads being primarily in ore following the stripping of phase VI that we are in currently, combined with increased production from Goldrush. Our five-year profile is dynamic. We previously disclosed a wall failure at the Gold Quarry open pit earlier in the year, which delays some near-term ounces as we redesign the pit. It is also reflective of open pit optimization work completed to maximize long-term value. Henri will fully explain this effort in our open pit strategy. We are making investments in our business to set the operations up for longer mine lives and improved efficiencies. As these investments pay dividends and we return to our natural sustaining capital run rate, as well as increased production, unit costs are projected to taper off and margins to significantly improve.
I will now turn it over to my colleague Henri, who will dive deeper into the sustaining capital profile for Nevada Gold Mines and highlight the NGM operations.
Thank you, Christine. And good morning, everyone. My name is Henri Gonin . I'm the Managing Director of Nevada Gold Mines. I started my career in South Africa in the 1990s, and I've been working in Nevada since 2005. As you know, Nevada Gold Mines is operated by Barrick, and we own three of the top 10 tier-one gold mines in the world. And we are still one of the largest employers in the state of Nevada. We are also the largest gold-producing complex in the world. I'm going to start the conversation today by discussing capital.
The graph above shows the historic sustaining capital spend for the complex, and you can clearly see that both partner companies underinvested capital from the years 2014 to 2019. Since the formation of the joint venture, we have been and will continue to systematically reinvest in the facilities and the fleets to address the long-term impacts of that underinvestment. This is shown in the hatched portion on the stack bars. To secure that healthy future for our ore bodies, we must improve our plant reliability in the roasters and autoclaves and reduce our operating costs. Many of those projects are classified as sustaining capital, although they increase capacity, and as an example of that is the de-bottlenecking project that we completed in the third quarter at Gold Quarry roaster. That unlocked a 20% increase in capacity for us compared to what it was before the joint venture.
When we consider our depreciation and amortization rates of our assets, and we use that as a baseline to determine a healthy sustainable capital run, we are targeting that $250 per ounce investment line. And that will include sustaining capital, development, stripping, and then drilling capital. In order not to fall in the same trap as that 2014 to 2019 era, we do expect to be spending more than that for the next three years. And that's focused in four key areas. The first is the reinvestment projects. And examples would be the Juniper Mill carbon stripping circuit, the Gold Quarry roaster crusher project, autoclave boiler refurbishments, and then the remaining commitments on replacement fleet. Second, additional projects that deliver growth to our mines, but they do not qualify under our financial guidelines to be categorized as growth.
Those would be Turquoise Ridge's paste plant and Meikle paste plant and the East Carlin portals. And then third, increased development rates in our underground mines ahead of stockpile production. This will secure increased levels of flexibility, and it is required to facilitate the increased ounce production from underground sources in the near future. And finally, active grade control drilling programs to further drive down the variability in our models. There is no doubt that North America and particularly Nevada Gold Mines is the value foundation for Barrick, and that's why we focus on fit-for-purpose investments to continue delivering value to those shareholders. With that said, and as you know, we suffered that pit wall failure in the Gold Quarry pit during the first quarter of this year.
Our subsequent actions were to pivot the mining fleet to the South Arturo pit, and that impacted ounce production for us, but at end costs because it effectively brought forward stripping costs into 2024. Now, looking forward then, we have to consider a few things. The first is the longer-term impact of the wall failure and the improved understanding of the geotechnical constraints around that pit, and then the impact that that has on strip ratio and costs and ounces. The second is objectives and impacts of our reinvestment projects, specifically making sure that we can realize the benefits in the open pit fleets and in the roaster projects, and that means driving down operating costs, and then the third is we have the current inventory that we carry in our long-term stockpiles in the open pit in front of the roasters.
That forces us then to make a decision on whether we're going to continue driving the previous ounce profile, which would be at a much reduced value, or recut the open pit business to balance our ounce profile and costs and to sustain value delivery. On that note, it is worth highlighting that NGM has distributed $9.2 billion to its owners since the JV inception. Selecting value generation then, our strategic actions have shifted in three primary areas. The first is we adjust the open pit mining strategy. We do that by mining at the appropriate rate that will limit the growth in stockpile volumes and hence limit locking up additional working capital. We reduce the operating cost of the mines by retiring old equipment and increasing efficiency that comes with the newer technology that the new fleet brings, and we embark on an automation strategy.
The second is we will continue to expand capacity in the production of our underground ounces by driving development. And as you can see on the graph on the top, the split in underground and open pit ounces shifts from approximately equal contributions now to a two-thirds, one-third ratio in the next five years. This is currently being accelerated by third-party contractors in several of our mines. However, with our retention rates improving a lot and the continued expansion of our training mine facility, we are working on converting more of those mines back to owner-operated development and therefore drive the cost down. And then thirdly, we strategically adjust capital expenditures to catch up, number one, and then to sequence with a revised ounce profile without falling in the same trap as the 2014 to 2019 era. So what does this mean for us?
Over the next two years, this results in fewer ounces produced compared to the previously disclosed profile. However, we expect to sustain free cash flow generated on the back of the lower open pit and roaster operating costs and deliver higher margin ounces while we manage our capital spend rate. The graph at the bottom shows the projected ounce profile going forward. The yellow line depicts the arithmetic sum of the combined partner plans at the time when the joint venture was formed. If you compare that to the current profile in blue, you will see that we have successfully replaced our ounces that we have mined, and this clearly supports the focus on value, and not just for the next few years, but well into the future, and it underscores our ability to remain agile in responding to changes in our business.
The gray shaded area is our opportunity to bring forward ounces into the years from 2011 - 2020 and to sustain a 3 million ounce production rate with Hanson and North Leeville and Four mile as the primary opportunities. On NGM then, we have significantly improved since inception. We continue to see improvements in our efficiencies and in flexibility in our mines, and we continually strengthen our team. Carlin and Turquoise Ridge will both deliver near the lower end of their guidance for this year, while Cortez will finish near the top and Phoenix around the middle. That'll keep us on track to deliver ounce production within guidance for NGM, albeit at the lower end. Increased stripping costs following the pivot from Gold Quarry to South Arturo and the infrastructure repairs combined with the ounces at the lower end are expected to drive our costs up above guidance.
Within NGM, the two Carlin roasters are our primary ounce producers. Both Carlin and Cortez deliver refractory tons to these facilities. For us to maintain a steady increase in our production over the next five years, we need to remain flexible as an organization, and rather than trying to optimize each mine on its own, in the subsequent slides, you will see that our production profiles for Carlin and Cortez are variable from one year to the next, but overall, we project a steady increase, and as discussed on the previous two slides, we decided to continue driving value to the partners rather than delivering ounces at any cost, and hence the reduced profile for the next two years, while we will maintain free cash flow and continue to complete the workshops on those reinvestment and operational improvement projects.
The major impacts on the optimization work for the next five years comes then from Gold Quarry and Crossroads. Carlin is the largest gold-producing hub in the world, and when you consider the mining and the combined processing infrastructure, several events this year had impacted our production, notably the high wall failure, but then also Carlin ounces got displaced by higher-grade Cortez tons, which benefited NGM overall. The reinvestment in the open pit fleet continues, and to drive further reductions in cost, we identified 40 pieces of mining fleet that are now in various stages of being shut down and retired. And in accordance with the revised mining strategy, we also will be able to reallocate the associated operators and maintenance personnel to other areas in NGM where the current vacancies exist. And thereby, we reduce our overall headcount and we increase efficiency.
Additional to the fleet rationalization and the open pit mine rescheduling, we also continue to achieve increased efficiencies in our underground mines. With completion of the Gold Quarry roaster project then, we also lower overall operating costs. In support of our development efforts, we have successfully completed the first phase of a new portal into the Pete Bajo and Rita K sections of the Portal Mines, providing the required ventilation to secure the ounce production as planned and increasing efficiencies through improved logistics. The dip in the ounce profile for 2027 for Carlin is offset by a spike in the ounce profile for Cortez in the same year, and you'll see that on the next slide. We have stripped Cortez pits into delivering ore, and we've also completed a direct haul road up to the Cortez Hills open pit buttress.
That reduces our requirement for rehandle and obviously then reduces cost. The Gold rush underground ramp-up, as already said, is continuing on track, and our first ventilation shaft is now nearing completion. The graph at the bottom there is included to illustrate the impact of the investment in the replacement whole truck fleet, and you can see the inflection point at the unit cost per ton happening in 2023. The subsequent downward trend is as a result of shutting down the old and more expensive and less reliable equipment, which was the plan, but then furthermore realizing higher than expected efficiencies, allowing us to shut down additional trucks and to relocate them to Phoenix. Cortez will continue to grow through spectacular opportunities like Fourm ile and Hanson in the Cortez Hills underground and Swift on the west side of the valley.
Moving to Turquoise Ridge, this is one of the highest-grade underground mines that exist. It also makes it a low-cost operator. We started the year with challenges throughout the mine, and we have been systematically dealing with these, leveraging the broader experience across Barrick, and we are seeing significant improvement in the performance right now. Similar to Carlin, the reinvestment projects completed that the Turquoise Ridge Sage Mill started to deliver lower operating costs and much improved reliability, and if you combine that with the underground improvements we are seeing, it puts us on track to deliver a very strong fourth quarter. Future growth potential includes extensions along the main mineralization controls supported by a refined new geologic model at Turquoise Ridge underground and expansions in the Mega open pit.
Then at Phoenix, we are in the final phase of completing a sulfur concentrate plant that will treat and extract sulfur from the tailings stream. This sulfur concentrate produced here will be shipped over the road to Carlin to be burnt as a supplemental fuel in the roaster, further reducing the operating costs through Gold Quarry. The increased efficiency of the new operating fleet at Cortez enabled the relocation then of four trucks and their crews to Phoenix, and that delivered increased copper production for us. We have now also embarked on finding future expansion opportunities at Phoenix, and there are two specific targets that we are exploring and studying now: Copper Basin, which is a high-grade copper gold deposit, and Copper Canyon, which is a porphyry. And I'll hand it back to Christine now. Thank you, Henri.
Our Canadian operating mine, Hemlo, is on track to deliver near production guidance. However, costs are now expected to be above guidance on the back of higher royalties and production at the lower end of expectations. Hemlo is a steady producer with a new site leadership team that is focused on improving efficiencies to maintain healthy margins. In 2022, we announced that we were studying a new, larger open pit, and those studies are now focused on optimizing the size of the pit to maximize the value of the project. While those studies progress, we are concurrently advancing permitting. Further, we have a significant drill program planned for next year to extend the life of the underground. Moving to Donlin, our pipeline project in Alaska and a 50/50 joint venture with NOVAGOLD.
The focus over the last three years has centered on building ore body knowledge around the controls and mineralization. The current work streams are targeted at moving the project up the value chain. As such, the work program includes updating the resource model, progressing mine planning, optimizing the power sources and infrastructure, completing a cost update, and advancing the remaining permitting. An infill drilling program is planned for 2025 to refine the mine planning assumptions along with some conversion drilling. In conjunction with the state of Alaska and our Alaska Native Corporation partners and resource owners, we are exploring a power solution for the project with the potential to contribute to a regional and statewide energy solution. At this event in 2022, I introduced the tailings reprocessing project at Golden Sunlight in Montana.
This project is a great example of how, with some creativity and engineering, we were able to turn a liability from a closure property that ceased operations in 2019 into an asset, providing a valuable fuel source for the Carlin roasters. Since the start of production, around 49,000 tons of concentrate were produced and delivered to Carlin, which is equivalent to approximately 22,000 tons of pure sulfur. Once mining of the tailings has been completed, we will have reduced the environmental liability by approximately $80 million and eliminated the need for perpetual water treatment. Barrick's DNA and ability to deliver on our promises is underpinned by our world-class people. We are committed to addressing our need for skilled trades and mining professionals by fostering strong relationships and actively engaging with key trade schools, the military, and universities. We significantly reduced our turnover rate from the pandemic highs.
To ensure we retain that talent, we developed various programs to provide our workforce with opportunities to grow and develop within the organization. We expanded the training mine, and early next year, we will be launching the Barrick Academy, which you will hear more about from Seb. Given the high cost of labor in North America, we continually seek ways to optimize labor and reduce costs, such as the Carlin open pit optimization and subsequent redeployment of the workforce that Henri noted. At Barrick, we are committed to being a positive and responsible presence in the communities where we operate. Central to our strategy is meaningful engagement at every stage of our projects, from exploration to closure. We work hand in hand with communities to understand their needs, listen to their concerns, and support initiatives that foster sustainable development and long-term prosperity.
Through our community development and engagement strategy, we prioritize five key investment areas: education, environment, economic development, cultural heritage, and health. This slide lists only a selection of our many initiatives. The picture on the slide is a rendering of the long-term care facility in Marathon, Ontario, near our Hemlo operation, for which Barrick invested CAD 1 million to fill a critical gap in the care continuum for surrounding communities, including First Nation communities. Pivoting now to growth, where we are actively expanding our exploration portfolio to look farther afield into other well-endowed belts for both gold and copper, while also delineating future growth drivers to extend our current assets. Simon and Joel's presentations will provide more detail to show you that the North America portfolio is a balanced investment towards future growth that will sustain the business for decades to come.
In closing, I wanted to show you our five-year production profile one more time to highlight the growing trend in our production in the coming years, a trend you will also see in the other regions. I firmly believe, and hopefully this presentation has convinced you, that despite some challenges, we have significant runway ahead of us to further improve and grow our North American business and create tremendous shareholder value. Thank you, and I will now turn it over to Mark Hill.
Okay, thanks, Christine. So for those who don't know me, I'm Mark Hill, the Chief Operating Officer for Latin America and Asia-Pacific region. Tim Cribb is going to join me today as well, who is the project director for Reko Diq, and he'll present the Reko Diq slides.
So today, I would like to give you an update on what we've achieved since we last spoke and some of the challenges we still face. And I'll also highlight what the future for the region looks like. The last two years have not been without challenges, but we've made some significant progress on the projects and stabilization of the operating assets. The PV plant expansion was completed and is currently going through the ramp-up process. Reko Diq continues to advance on schedule with the feasibility due at the end of the year, which will significantly de-risk the project. We've restarted Porgera on time and on budget, and Veladero has delivered strong operational performance and returned cash to the shareholders. We've also dealt with some significant historical liabilities in Chile and Peru. And finally, we have advanced several future growth opportunities. So moving to safety.
So on safety, as you can tell from the slide, we have made significant improvements through our Journey to Zero program, and in particular by focusing on contractor management, the leading indicators, and engagement with the relevant unions. We now face a new challenge bringing on large workforces in PNG and Pakistan. So we have focused on these two sites to make sure the downward trend in incident frequency and severity continues during the ramp-up of these assets. So since we last spoke, we delivered on or significantly advanced many of our key commitments from the 2022 Investor Day. I was not going to go through this slide in detail. It's more just a roadmap for the presentation, and I'll address the majority of the items as we progress. So looking ahead, Latam and AP will deliver substantial and sustainable growth.
Viejo will ramp up to produce greater than 800,000 ounces a year at industry-leading margins. Veladero will provide consistent production and returns. And the Reko Diq project will more than double the region's attributable gold equivalent production when stage one is commissioned and add another world-class copper asset to our portfolio. Finally, as Joel will show, we will also have a significant portfolio of greenfields and brownfields opportunities across the region in several countries. So moving to costs. So delivery of growth should not come at the expense of our margins. And through our team's tireless efforts, the region remains on track to meet its cost guidance for the year. This slide shows that through the ramp-up of volumes and other optimization measures, we have been able to lower costs across all major categories on a per-ounce basis year over year. This is obviously comparing 2023 to 2024.
This was achieved despite increased plant maintenance driving higher consumables and spares consumption of PV and inflationary pressures in Argentina, where we have now managed to unwind our gold inventory, as can be seen in the other category on this graph. Obviously, costs will continue to be an ongoing focus in 2025 and beyond, so moving to the five-year profiles, starting with gold, our five-year business plan is focused on first ramping up production from incrementally at PV and Porgera following the completion of the PV plant expansion and Porgera's full restart, and second, Reko Diq also starting to contribute gold as a byproduct from 2028 onwards. Pueblo Viejo's profile now reflects a more conservative ramp-up, hitting the 14 million ton per annum run rate in 2026, with 2027 being the first full year of nameplate throughput. This will require the completion of several engineering projects, which I'll expand upon later.
Our capital spend is shown by the lowest line in this graph in blue. You can see that it will be elevated in the short term as we invest growth capital, mainly in connection with the additional tailings capacity at PV and future leach pad expansions for phases VIII and IX of Veladero, after which it will taper off as these projects reach steady state. As for costs, increased production from PV, a lower cost site, is expected to substantially reduce our cost per ounce run rates from 2026 onwards, as shown on the graph. And it's also worth noting the narrowing gap between AISC and total cash cost. So turning to copper, our copper story over the next five years is characterized by two factors: steady performance from our 50% interest in Zaldivar, of which we are not the operators, and our expected capital investment in Reko Diq.
Looking at Reko Diq, you will note that this profile reflects our capital spend for the project at our 50% attributable stake and does not reflect the project financing, which Graham will expand upon later. As can be seen from the graph, our region's copper production is expected to more than triple from 2029 when Reko Diq phase I comes online. Okay, so moving to PV. So despite the completion of the process plant expansion, the associated ramp-up has been slower than expected and continues to be so. Initially, we experienced equipment failures at the crusher and the flotation areas. While these are now largely rectified, we are executing further engineering work to achieve the throughput and recoveries as planned. We have replanned the ramp-up, which includes the impact of executing this work. And in the next few slides, we'll run through some of the engineering projects.
So if we start with throughput, so if we look at the thickener optimization, which will provide the required capacity to handle increased fines from the new milling circuit, the original engineering suggested that capacity could be achieved with some optimization work, but now we know the equipment actually needs to be upgraded. Put simply, without the thickener optimization, too much water is fed to the autoclaves, which reduces the autoclave's total throughput. To complete this work, there is a planned 35-day impact in Q1 of 2025. The new de-slime system for the original milling circuit will also address the increased fines, freeing up more grinding capacity in the ball mill. This was part of the original design, but its implementation was pending stabilization of the new flotation circuit. We have now achieved that stabilization, so we're ready to implement the new system.
On recovery projects, first on the flotation side, the main focus is on optimization of the reagents, both in terms of quantity and specific type in the circuit. Second, the slurry cooling tower will allow us higher lime boil temperatures with the ability to cool down the slurry ahead of the cyanide addition at the CIL. Again, this project was always on the list of sustaining projects, but has now been accelerated to ensure we have enough cyanide in the circuit to maintain the increased throughput. Finally, additional carbon handling systems are needed. These are new projects arising from the expansion. For example, we need more regeneration capacity to deal with the increased organic loading from the flotation reagents.
We need more retort capacity to deal with the higher sludge loading in the gold room and grit removal spirals in the CI L to improve the carbon quality harvested to the elution circuit, so in addition to the plant expansion, we also need to construct a new tailings facility. This additional facility supports the 13.9 million ounce reserves we have added when compared to our pre-expansion plans. Our current timeline for the delivery of the new tailings dam is Q4 2029, and our updated capital estimate for the plant and the tailings project is now $2.6 billion, of which $1.2 billion has already been invested. The increase from our previous estimate of $2.1 billion is mainly due to inflation, extended delivery time, moving out from three to five years, updated engineering requirements, and adding provision for future expansion.
In that respect, it is worth noting the dam design provides us with the optionality to increase the capacity of the TSF in the future by approximately eight years if the resource is expanded. So we're making this additional investment now to preserve the future optionality at PV, which cannot otherwise be achieved if we put it off till later in the mine life. In addition, the combined projects will drop PV further down the cost curve, as is shown in the bottom right graph, so further down the lowest quartile. So just taking a step back and putting things in context, it's worth remembering that prior to the expansion, PV would have finished operations in 2030, and mining would have ceased in 2028, with production going below 500,000 ounces a year as of 2026.
So if we had not taken this accelerated agile approach to the expansion, a care and maintenance period, or at very least, mining production ramp-down would have occurred. Through the expansion and despite the various challenges, the team, Isaac, Megan, and Juana have done an excellent job of managing the risks so that the operation continued at elevated production levels without interruption during the expansion. So the end result is a new mine life is now to 2046, with a growth capital number of $187 an ounce, which is obviously a good outcome for the Dominican Republic, the PV employees, and the shareholders. And it's also worth noting we achieved this while transforming PV's safety performance to become an industry leader and also improving the environmental performance across the board. Now I'll just hand over to Tim to give you an update on Reko Diq. Thanks, Mark.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Tim Cribb, the project director of Reko Diq. My background is mining engineering, and I joined Barrick in 2017, working as a general manager operations at Porgera, and I've been working on the Reko Diq project since its reconstitution in 2022. The Reko Diq project is based on an amazing ore body and is one of the largest undeveloped copper gold deposits in the world. The feasibility study for the project includes only the M&I portion of the resource and has a 37-year mine life. This is before we consider the significant exploration potential, which we've commenced drilling this year, and the initial results have been positive. Joel will talk to this later on today in his presentation.
When we consider these exploration opportunities, we see the potential life of mine of Reko Diq to be between two to three times what is covered in the feasibility life of mine plan. The mineral resource information shown in the table is consistent with what we presented last year, and we'll be updating this with the completion of the feasibility study. As you can see in the slide, the feasibility study has increased the throughput of each phase of the project to 45 million tons per annum, and we've also updated the project construction capital for both phase I and phase II , with the p hase I capital now expected to be between $5.5-$6 billion. Importantly, as you can see from the red cross in the slide, Reko Diq will have one of the lowest C1 cash costs in the industry.
The robust economics are driven by a low strip ratio and a simple and proven processing circuit that will deliver some of the highest margins on a per pound of copper basis. A key aspect of Reko Diq, which sets Reko Diq apart from many other greenfield projects, is the agreements which were finalized with Pakistan in 2022. This is a very important point. These agreements define all the permitting and approvals processes the project needs in order to advance straight from the feasibility study and into construction, and we've worked on these concurrently with the study. This enables Reko Diq to be brought into production quickly, with first copper planned to be delivered in 2028, positioning Reko Diq to deliver into a growing supply and demand gap for copper. The feasibility study has advanced well and is on track to be completed by the end of the year.
The study has been taken as part of an execution strategy to deliver first production in 2028, and the team has maintained a constant focus on ensuring the project can be delivered and the associated construction risks are minimized as much as possible. The study has delivered a number of improvements and updates which significantly de-risked the project. These include the updated geometallurgy and recovery test work, which has enabled the process plan to be designed with a 5 million ton per annum increase in throughput for each phase. The study has also advanced the understanding of local groundwater options. Water was a key item for the study, and the work the team completed has demonstrated that water can be sourced from a northern aquifer for the life of mine of the project. A backup aquifer to the south has also been studied and secured as a contingency.
The confidence in the transport and logistics infrastructure has been improved through the use of existing rail infrastructure, which runs past the mine, a distance of approximately 70 km from the mine site. The rail runs all the way to the existing port infrastructure at the Port Qasim. Utilizing this infrastructure significantly de-risked the delivery of the total Reko Diq project. Importantly, this study has added renewable power to the energy mix for the project. Phase I will have a HFO power plant of approximately 200 MW, which will be accompanied by a 150 MW solar installation. Phase II will duplicate this setup with the mine plan to connect to the grid from year 15.
Early works have commenced at the site to further de-risk the project delivery, with construction of camp accommodation, which can already accommodate 1,100 people, the installation of a 70-kilometer security perimeter fence line, and the setup of water ponds and associated water supply infrastructure to provide construction water. We've entered into key contracts with key suppliers, the engineering and long lead items. Metso, Weir, and Wärtsilä are advancing the design process and long lead works for the process plant and power supply aspects of the project. This early equipment selection enables us to advance the engineering design ahead of schedule, further de-risking the project delivery. What makes mining so rewarding is our ability to transform local communities in partnership with our host countries. Reko Diq is a great example of this. Few other projects have demonstrated our ability to change people's lives in such a rapid timeframe.
The Reko Diq deal recognized the importance of this, and we structured the agreements to ensure that advanced social development contributions were made before the mine became operational. This has been very important in driving the local support for the project. All our social development programs are conducted in line with Barrick's proven approach to sustainability, focusing on the pillars of water, health, and education. For water, we've installed boreholes and reverse osmosis plants at all four of the closest local communities, providing them potable water. On health, we've installed medical clinics at the closest communities and developed a large hospital in the nearest main town of Nok Kundi, and for education, we've opened numerous primary schools at the local communities and launched skill development and graduate programs. Thank you, and I'll now pass back over to Mark.
Okay, thanks, Tim. Look, before we go on, just to close out Reko Diq, I mean, it's a credit to Tim and his team, what they've achieved. It really is a world-class deposit, but it's also a world-class feasibility that he's done, and he's also managed to get the early work started on the ground safely and while maintaining all the relationships with the community. So a real credit to Tim and his team. So if I now move to Veladero, another success story has been the dramatic turnaround of Veladero operation in Argentina, where the team has done an excellent job of turning a struggling business into a solid cash-generating asset. Our disciplined approach has enabled the operation to beat guidance in 2023, and it's put us on track to do the same in 2024.
Our near-term leach pad expansions are on track, and we continue to work on extensions of the mine life past 2033. So moving to Porgera, when we last spoke, Porgera was nearing its third year of care and maintenance following the non-renewal of the special mining lease at the start of 2020. Through the efforts of the team, we have managed to resolve our differences with the PNG government while maintaining our stake of economic benefits. We have also successfully restarted the mine in the face of enormous challenges, including the tragedy of the Maip-Mulitaka landslide in May and the ongoing tribal conflicts and law and order issues in the area, while staying true to our cost and capital discipline, keeping us on track to make our cost guidance.
We are currently developing a bypass road around the Maip-Mulitaka slip, expected to be completed in January 2025, and this road is the only access to Porgera, so it's on the critical path to maintaining full throughput. In the meantime, we have been managing supplies through pumping fuel and lifting supplies via helicopter across the slip. Finally, as you can see from the five-year plan, the operation is expected to ramp up sequentially and contribute cash to the region from 2026 onwards at consensus prices and obviously sooner at the current spot prices, so moving to historical liabilities, we've made significant progress in both Peru and Chile, so in Peru, the Pierina closure advanced well and will be completed in 2025 to an industry-leading standard.
And in Chile, we have fully resolved our significant legacy tax issues associated with Pascua-Lama and Zaldivar through rebuilding our relationship with the Chilean government, and we are now keen to explore future growth opportunities in this country. So that's two big achievements for 2024. I'm not sure you recall, but those liabilities were north of $1.4 billion. So moving to people, so we've built capable teams at the regional and the mine site level. We've continued with our commitment to local development, especially at PV, which is now run by Dominicans. In addition, Argentina, Chile, Peru are all managed by South Africans, South Americans. There's another slip there. Despite some uphill, we have also maintained a diverse management team at the regional level consisting of Brazilians, Argentinians, Peruvians, Americans, Australians, Chileans, and even a token South African.
We've also made big strides in improving our female representation in the region. It currently sits at average at 25% across Latin and 30% at PV. And full credit needs to go to Juana, our country manager in the Dominican Republic. Megan, who was ex-GM of PV, has now gone to Cortez, and Vanina, our head of HR, who spearheaded this program and achieved so much in a very short period of time. We also continue to source top talent and develop tomorrow's leaders through our scholarship and graduates program, which Tim also discussed during the Reko Diq presentation. This is obviously the final slide. It speaks for itself, but I will say it shows how the region has turned around since we spoke to you last.
We now have stable operations and growth projects, and we have increasing gold and copper production year on year for the next five years and even back to 2023, as you can see. So this was also achieved by optimizing and developing existing assets and projects. The increase in production will also result in a decrease in cost profile, obviously. So thank you for your attention, and I'll hand over to Seb to give you an update on AME. Thank you.
Thanks, Mark and Tim. And good morning, everyone. The good news is I'm the last presentation before the break. I'm Seb Bock, and I lead Barrick's AME region. With operations stretching across Africa and the Middle East, I've learned two things over the years. One, in mining terms, my team and I have the privilege to manage some of the world's top assets and most exciting projects. And two, in real-world terms, I spend a lot of time on planes and occasionally explaining to my kids why I think rocks are so fascinating. Since assuming my role a few years ago, we have worked diligently to shape AME into a true reflection of Barrick's mission and DNA, a region that combines all aspects of our business strengths. With seven operating mines and a balanced portfolio of copper and gold, the AME region holds some of Barrick's most significant assets.
Among our Tier One gold operations, Kibali stands out as Africa's largest and most automated gold mine, while Loulo-Gounkoto, the second largest, is a significant contributor to Barrick's bottom line. Following the acquisition of the minority interest in Acacia, we further strengthened our position by assuming operatorship and integrating the production of North Mara and Bulyanhulu into the portfolio. Together, these operations now have a combined 10-year production profile, which is a Tier One equivalent at above 500,000 ounces per annum. Additionally, of course, we're advancing Lumwana, which is currently Barrick's largest copper producer, towards Tier One status. Our operational focus is clear. We drive optimal ore-body extraction and efficiencies, which delivers better margins and ultimately delivers long-term value to all our stakeholders. Safety is a core value that's embedded in every aspect of our operations and one we must continuously uphold.
Our Journey to Zero , as Grant would have pointed out, is our commitment to achieving zero incidents. This commitment has been brought into sharp focus by the fatalities we've experienced in recent years. Even as we've improved our total and our lost-time injury frequency rates, we recognize that each incident underscores why we need to continuously reinforce a culture of responsibility and professional standards at every level of our teams. Our Journey to Zero initiative is not merely a goal; it's a shared responsibility that runs through every level of our workforce. As part of this journey, we continue to implement targeted strategies from our fatal risk standards rollout to a continued focus on upholding standards across all operations, including our contractors.
When you look at the landscape of global gold mining companies, AME stands out as a significant standalone business, and it ranks third largest globally in terms of gold equivalent ounces managed. It's not only the biggest miner in Africa. It's Barrick's largest contributor by gold equivalent and revenue. The AME workforce of over 30,000 people is the largest in Barrick. It's more than half of its entire workforce, but it's also a very cost-effective workforce because of where we operate and our commitment to employ in-country nationals. Over the last five years, as you can see on the graph, we've delivered on our gold production guidance, and we will do so again in 2024.
Excluding the impact of royalties, we've met our AISC guidance for four of the past five years, with 2022 being the only exception, which all of you will recall was a year of peak inflation and increased costs. We remain Barrick's highest-margin business, driven by our consistent low-cost profile. We've refreshed our leadership over the last few years, emphasizing a good balance between experience and younger talent. Notably, the AME executive level, we now have 50% of our team under 40. They bring fresh ideas, energy, and music preferences that makes me question my Spotify playlist sometimes. Beyond the AME executive team, we've invested in developing a very deep and robust succession pipeline. Today, we are confident that there's a qualified and a capable individual ready to seamlessly step into any leadership position as needed. Partnership is another critical pillar of our success. There are no safe jurisdictions anymore.
Navigating today's global and geopolitical complexities requires genuine partnerships across all levels, whether it's with local communities, our workforce, business partners, or governments. In the past two years, we've really focused on getting back to basics. It starts, of course, with operational delivery. It also needs a real focus on cost efficiencies and margins. We've extended our 10-year production profile, consistently replaced our production, and ensured that our growth of our 15-year plus pipeline is intact for years to come. These metal additions have also consistently driven increases in the net present values of our operations. Our work in Tanzania continues to transform lives, and we've expanded this with additional funding for education and infrastructure projects. The Lumwana expansion isn't just about mining. It's about building a legacy. In addition to the direct investment into the expansion, we are developing a new town for our workforce.
There's an airstrip and an industrial supply park. This industrial supply park will enable local and global suppliers to establish themselves in the area, which creates an economic engine that will fuel growth and development in the wider region. At the same time, our renewable energy initiatives continued with the Loulo solar plant expansion and battery energy storage system. We've now performed all the optimization work to maximize its output, and we've now reduced fuel costs and energy costs effectively to an all-time low. Our contributions to host countries are central to our mission, and we're proud that AME has contributed over $4 billion to our host economies over the last two years. Of course, we're not just focused on what we've achieved. We're constantly looking forward to where we are heading next.
Our immediate priority is to continue delivering on our commitments and to advance the various projects currently underway in the region. But longer term, we aim to grow our portfolio to a plus three million ounce attributable gold equivalent profile by the end of this decade, and we have the inherent optionality to do this. Our ongoing brownfield exploration in our Tier One assets has positioned us well to replenish and grow our reserves. This supports our goal of steady organic growth, complemented by select M&A opportunities to align with our strategic objectives. Key near-term targets for expanding our sustainability initiatives include completing Kibali's solar plant and battery system, and then achieving the Jabal grid connection by 2025.
As you can see on this graph, our success in growing our reserves while delivering significant production is highlighted by both Kibali and the Loulo complex, and it relies on a solid pipeline. The ability to operate efficiently is what drives value, and our plans have a reliable mix of open pit and underground ounces, supporting a flexible mining profile and the ability to deliver. We also continue to invest in obtaining storage facilities to cater for further potential life-of-mine extensions and to maintain them within Barrick and internationally accepted standards. Navigating the challenges of an inflationary market, we have remained focused and proactive in minimizing the impact on our costs. Inflation has had a substantial impact on consumables and spares as suppliers have adjusted their pricing in line with market trends.
We have actively countered this by focusing on cost efficiencies, establishing agreements with supply chain partners to retain our flexibility as the cost pressures subside, and then we've leveraged our global partnerships to keep costs under control. We've made targeted energy investments, as I've pointed to, to reduce our exposure to fuel and energy price fluctuations in recent years as power costs have continued to rise, driven by pricing and power supply challenges, such as in Zambia. We will continue our management of this by introducing solar, optimizing maintenance and our self-generating power sites, and enhancing infrastructure to stabilize our power supply. AME, as you can see, benefits from a cost-efficient labor base, as I pointed to earlier, with a relatively limited pressure on our labor costs to date.
While the higher gold price has improved margins, it has also led to an increase in revenue-based royalty taxes, which is a positive challenge reflected in this graph. Looking at our five-year production profile for gold, it provides us with a solid Tier One asset base, except for Tongon, where the profile starts to reduce towards the latter years. Although we've continued extending Tongon's life, it has become increasingly non-core to Barrick, and therefore we are currently looking at strategic options for this asset. Excluding Tongon will result in a consistent production profile for the region beyond the next 10 years, but even more importantly, it will increase the quality of the portfolio, and it will reduce the cost profile by more than $50 per ounce. I will now briefly run through five of our key operations.
Kibali stands out as a testament to what can be achieved with a world-class team and a world-class asset, even in what many perceive as a highly complex environment. It maintains a plus 700,000-ounce profile over the next five years and beyond, and it remains a high-margin operation as a result of its low power costs and its high-quality ore body. We've also shown that automation increases efficiency. It improves the quality of the jobs, and we manage this with the 96% Congolese workforce. Loulo-Gounkoto has continued its consistent performance, and it will deliver comfortably within guidance this year. This is even more impressive as this operation is led by a 100% Malian management team. Gounkoto, which is our third underground at the complex, has been in operation since 2023, and it's delivering high-grade ore into the plant.
We continue to successfully replace our mined ounces, and our refreshed view of the license has exposed further opportunities to come. As you would have seen in the press, the situation in Mali remains dynamic with the dissolution of the government recently and the appointment of a new prime minister. We continue to engage with the intent to settle outstanding differences and to establish the principles that would guide Barrick's partnership with the government in the future, including an increase in the state's share of economic benefits generated by the Loulo-Gounkoto complex. Tanzania showcases the benefit of a true partnership with your host country. North Mara continues to excel, recently delivering a record-breaking production quarter, driven by the strong performance of the Gokona underground operation and the exceptional efforts of a team that has grown immensely, establishing itself as one of our top-performing operating teams.
Now that we've stabilized the operation in Bulyanhulu, we have commenced studies to equip a new ventilation shaft, as Simon will talk about, and increase the hoisting capacity at the mine. We look forward to the outcome of this over the next year. Barrick's post-merger focus on developing a clear understanding of the geological structures underlying its assets has unlocked enormous potential across the group, as my colleagues have shown already. The Lumwana expansion project, of which Barrick owns 100%, is just another example of this, and we are all truly excited by the transformation this project will not only bring to Lumwana and Zambia, but also to Barrick as a whole. By leveraging our existing body of knowledge and de-bottlenecking the existing operational infrastructure, we will capitalize on some strong copper fundamentals.
With its significant resource but low-grade profile, Lumwana really shines when you apply economies of scale to unlock its true value and potential. For nearly a decade, Lumwana showed poor production performance and efficiencies, with rising costs causing record losses and ultimately impairments. The mine was left financially unsustainable following years of high-grade mining and lack of reinvestment. Since Barrick refocused its strategy in 2019 after the Barrick-Randgold merger, the once struggling Lumwana mine has been restructured and re-engineered into a significant contributor to Barrick's expanding copper portfolio. One of the key drivers for the Super Pit expansion is delivering on the mining ramp-up. We're going to average over 300 million tons per annum by the end of this decade.
We've already demonstrated that through our targeted selection and simulated training program, our top 10 Zambian national excavator operators have been able to consistently deliver above the 3,200 tons per operating hour that we've assumed in our feasibility plans. This is not only important to deliver the values, but in turn, it delivers a reduction in our overall mining unit rates and opportunities, of course, on the upside. As Graham will show you later, our five-year plan for copper reflects the capital investment we'll be making at Lumwana over the next three years and the resulting production uplift in 2028. This is underpinned by a steady business plan at Jabal Sayid, where we are focusing on the development and expansion of the underground mining infrastructure for the Lode 1 Deeps expansion. The Barrick Academy represents the culmination of years of executive effort and dedicated focus on developing our frontline management.
You must recognize the tremendous opportunity it provides to directly shape your frontline managers and the critical decisions they make on the ground, because these decisions ultimately drive the daily outcomes and the success of your business. The Foundations Program is a customized curriculum, which the AME executive has developed over the past two years to ensure we deliver something that is fit for purpose. We will train more than 2,600 frontline managers in AME alone by the end of 2025, and the Academy is now being expanded globally into the rest of Barrick over the course of the year. This is another example, as Grant has pointed out, of how closing our mines is just as important to us as building and operating them. Our Buzwagi mine was a significant economic powerhouse in the region for nearly 15 years before pouring its last gold in 2021.
We have now transformed it into an alternative productive asset that will continue to benefit the community and the region for decades to come. Good leaders make considered decisions, carefully weighing options and planning their course. Great leaders, however, go a step further. They make considered decisions with agility, adapting swiftly to challenges and opportunities while staying focused on their objectives. It's this combination of thoughtfulness and flexibility that drives exceptional outcomes. Driving decision-making in our business has required shifting away from relying on the rearview mirror to ensuring accurate real-time information is at our fingertips. A key step in this transformation was firstly to overhaul our transactional systems, such as SAP. However, the real breakthrough came in improving our business intelligence and standardizing information across the organization. Today, our global executives receive daily reports that outline all the key parameters and performance metrics across the business.
With the recent implementation of One Mine, we have taken this one step further, gaining access to real-time data from any of our operational systems. This enables us to adjust course when plans deviate and address critical issues with speed and agility. Of course, Mark receives the same reports every day, and when we digress, believe me, I get a phone call, proving once again that bad news does travel faster than good news. As Joel and Simon will demonstrate, we have world-class operations because we are in a world-class destination. This is the reason why AME is a critical growth engine for Barrick. We continue to build and optimize our exploration portfolio focused on these districts and new frontiers. There are also some exciting greenfield opportunities in Zambia and the DRC, which we will announce over the coming months.
As I conclude, the numbers on this slide represent more than growth. It's a culmination of thousands of decisions, countless hours of effort, and an unrelenting commitment to a vision of growth, sustainability, and excellence. Our business, as I've shown you, is a lot more than a collection of mines. It's a dynamic ecosystem of people, innovation, and partnership driving us forward. Every ounce of gold and every ton of copper and every project we undertake, from expanding Lumwana to advancing our energy projects, reflects the commitment to deliver sustained value to our stakeholders. It's not just about getting bigger. It's about getting better, continually improving margins, and driving sustainable growth. There's an old saying: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." It's our responsibility to seize those opportunities and to deliver on them.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time, and we will now take a short break and return at 11:00 A.M. Thank you.
Ask me what I did with my life. I spent it with you. If I lose my fame and fortune, it don't matter as long as I got you, baby. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right. As long as I got you, baby. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right. As long as I got you. Ask me what I did with my life. I spent it with you. If I lose my fame and fortune, it don't matter as long as I got you, baby. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right. Let the hands rock so right.
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What y'all trying to do? 24 karat magic in the air. Here's a toast so clear. Look out. Everywhere I go, they be like, "Ooh, so clear." Everywhere I go, they be like, "Ooh, so clear." Everywhere I go, they be like, "Ooh, so clear." Now, now, now, now, watch me break it down like 24 karat, 24 karat magic. What's that sound? 24 karat magic. Come on now. 24 karat, 24 karat magic. Don't fight the feeling, invite the feeling. Just put your pinky fingers to the moon. Girls, what y'all trying to do? Tell me what you're trying to do. 24 karat magic in the air. Here's a toast so clear. Put your pinky fingers to the moon. Girls, what y'all trying to do? 24 karat magic in the air. Here's a toast so clear. Look out. What they're ready for.
Make me hotter, make me lose my breath. Make me water, make me sweat. Make me hotter, make me lose my breath. Make me water. Normally, I could keep my cool, but tonight I'm wild. I'm a beast in a dangerous mood. Can you match my timing? Telling me that you're really bold and what you're hiding. Oh, talk is cheap. So show me that you understand I like it. Can you blow my mind? Set off my whole body. If I give you my time, can you search my soul for me? I don't want away. Come take it, take me where I ain't been before. Can you blow my mind? Set off my whole body, whole body. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water.
Hopefully, we can last all night. Don't get too excited. Oh, privacy. You ain't gotta go nowhere. You can stay inside it. Can you blow my mind? Set off my whole body. If I give you my time, can you search my soul for me? I don't want away. Come take it, take me where I ain't been before. Can you blow my mind? Set off my whole body, whole body. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter. Make me lose my breath, make me water. Make me sweat, make me hotter.
Make me lose my breath, make me water. Think about it. There must be a higher love down in the heart or hidden in the stars above. Without it, life is a wasted time. Look inside your heart and I'll look inside mine. Things look so bad everywhere in this whole world. What is fair? We walk the line and try to see falling behind and what could be. Oh, bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Where's that higher love? I keep thinking of. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Worlds are turning, and we're just hanging on, facing our fear and standing out there alone.
I yearn it, yeah, and it's real to me that I must be someone who's feeling for me. Things look so bad everywhere in this whole world. What is fair? We walk the line and try to see falling behind and what could be. Oh, bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Oh, bring me a higher love. Where's that higher love? I keep thinking of. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Make me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Make me a higher love. We need a higher love. Make me a higher love. Bring me, bring me, yeah, a higher love. I keep thinking of. Where's that higher love? Bring me a higher love. Make me a higher love. Bring me a higher love.
Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. A higher love. I keep thinking of. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Things haven't been quite the same. There's a haze on the horizon, babe. It's only been a couple of days, and I miss you. Yeah, nothing really goes to plan. You stub your toe or break your arm. I'll do everything I can to help you through. If you're feeling down, I just want to make you happier, baby. Wish I was around. I just want to make you happier, baby. We've been doing all this late night talking about anything you want until the morning. Now you're in my life. I can't get you off my mind. I've never been a fan of change, but if I lead you to any place, if it's Hollywood or Bishopsgate, I'm coming too.
If you're feeling down, I just want to make you happier, baby. Wish I was around. I just want to make you happier, baby. We've been doing all this late night talking about anything you want until the morning. Now you're in my life. I can't get you off my mind. Can't get you off my mind. Can't get you off my mind. Can't get you off my mind. I won't even try. I won't even try to get you off my mind. Can't get you off my mind. We've been doing all this late night talking about anything you want until the morning. Now you're in my life. I can't get you off my mind. Can't get you off my mind. Late night talking. Can't get you off my mind. Late night talking. I won't even try. Late night talking. Can't get you off my mind.
All this late night talking. It's a human sign when things go wrong, when the scent of her layers intense and strong. Cold, cold heart, heart done by you. Some things look better, baby, just pass it through, and I think it's gonna be a long, long time till touchdown brings me round again to find another man they think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no, and this is what I should have said, well, I thought it, but I kept it here. Cold, cold heart, heart done by you. Some things look better, babe, just pass it through, and I think it's gonna be a long, long time till touchdown brings me round again to find another man they think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no, and this is what I should have said, well, I thought it, but I kept it here.
Cold, cold heart, heart done by you. Some things look better, babe, just pass it through. And I think it's gonna be a long, long time till touchdown brings me round again to find another man they think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no. And this is what I should have said. Touchdown brings me round again. Well, I thought it, but I kept it here. Oh, no, no, no. In your eyes, there's a heavy blue. Want to love and want to lose. Sweet divine, a heavy truth. Water and wine, don't make me choose. I don't want to feel the way that we did last Sunday night, night. Drunk on a feeling alone with the stars in the sky. I've been running through the jungle. I've been running with the wolves to get to you, to get to you.
I've been down the darkest alleys of the dark side of the moon to get to you, to get to you. I look for love in every stranger. Took too much to ease the anger. All for you, yeah, all for you. I've been running through the jungle. I've been crying with the wolves to get to you, to get to you, to get to you. Your fingertips trace my skin to places I have never been. Blindly, I've been following victims' warmth income on in. I don't want to feel the way that we did last Sunday night, night. Drunk on a feeling alone with the stars in the sky. I've been running through the jungle. I've been running with the wolves to get to you, to get to you.
I've been down the darkest alleys of the dark side of the moon to get to you, to get to you. I look for love in every stranger. Took too much to ease the anger. All for you, yeah, all for you. I've been running through the jungle. I've been crying with the wolves to get to you, to get to you, to get to you. It's funny through the jungle. I've been running with the wolves to get to you, to get to you. I've been down the darkest alleys of the dark side of the moon to get to you, to get to you. I look for love in every stranger. Took too much to ease the anger. All for you, yeah, all for you. I've been running through the jungle.
I've been crying with the wolves to get to you, to get to you, to get to you. Something's got a hold on me lately. No, I don't know myself. 30 seconds.
Do you want to? Uh-oh. It's 30 seconds early. Okay. Good morning, everyone. For those that don't know me, my name is Simon Bottoms, and I'm the Mineral Resource Management and Evaluation Executive for Barrick. Part of my role, I'm responsible for all technical studies across the Barrick Group, from preliminary economic assessments through to feasibility studies. And more importantly, ensuring that we stick to our strategy through all aspects of our everyday business. Accordingly, I'm also the lead qualified person signing off the Barrick Group Resources and Reserves. To firstly, looking to our strategic filters that provide the key framework to guide our investments and capital allocation in our everyday operations.
The first of our strategic filters is that we only invest in ore bodies where the primary revenue is generated from gold or copper mineralization, albeit we acknowledge that some will come with other byproduct credits. With specific regards to our asset quality filters, we have clearly defined criteria for Tier One assets, for which gold projects need to have the potential to produce more than 500,000 ounces per annum for at least 10 years, and copper projects need to have the potential for reserves of more than 5 million tons of contained copper, both of which require life-of-mine costs to be in the lower half of the industry cost curve. For Tier One assets and investments, we look for a return of 15%.
For long-life copper and gold assets with more than a 20-year life, we reduce this return on investment requirement to 10%, reflecting the increased levels of returns provided by exposure to multiple commodity cycles post-return of initial capital investment. We always use input cost models to set our reserve prices. In the current high gold price environment, using our reserve prices provides us with opportunities for increased margins to support reinvestment in the growth of the business, while also providing returns to host countries and shareholders. As mentioned by Mark at our recent quarterly, we will be lifting the 2024 gold mineral reserve price to $1,400 an ounce for all Tier One assets, reflecting the inflation of key input costs, with some exceptions, notably for non-core and non-operated assets.
Our copper reserve prices remain unchanged at $3 a pound for 2024, which is directly linked to the imminent completion of the ongoing feasibility studies at both Lumwana and Reko Diq, both of which are on track to meet our Tier One criteria with the completion of these feasibility studies. As you may have heard us mention previously, many of the Barrick Tier One gold mineral reserves are geologically constrained. This means the existing mine designs already optimally extract the entire ore body. To illustrate this point, the cross-sections on this slide are from two of our Tier One assets at Kibali and Turquoise Ridge. The red stope-shaped outlines are at $1,400 an ounce, and the blue stope-shaped outlines are at $2,500 an ounce.
The blue stope-shaped outlines on this slide add approximately 10% more ounces of marginal sub-1.5 gram a ton peripheral mineralization, but also add 40% more tons, resulting in 20% lower mine grades. As illustrated in these images, the red $1,400 an ounce stope outline already effectively extracts the entirety of the geologically defined ore body, which in essence extracts the highest amount of value and is reflective of the quality of what we call Tier One assets. Within our open pit operations, increased commodity prices can always be used to incorporate additional pushbacks, but these will inevitably come at higher strip ratios. To ensure that we preserve the long-term optionality of bringing additional pushbacks into our mine plans in the future, we use our mineral resource prices to position key capital infrastructure such as process plants and tailings dams.
Accordingly, at the end of 2024, we're also planning on lifting our gold mineral resource prices to $1,900 an ounce, while again maintaining our copper mineral resource prices at $4 a pound. Overall, this approach is complemented by our reserve replacement strategy, where we aim to add value by delineating ore body extensions and satellites at our long-term reserve prices, rather than diluting the quality of our reserves and mine plans through lifting reserve prices beyond the relative levels of inflation. A commonly overlooked but critical aspect of our strategic investment filters that differentiates the quality of what we as Barrick call Tier One is the fact that we look for deposits to be located in world-class districts with the potential for organic reserve growth. Kibali is a perfect example of this, whereby we initially purchased the project in 2009 with a mineral reserve base of 5.5 million ounces.
After logging more than 20 km of core, it was evident that the KCD underground ore body contained at least 10 million ounces. Fast forward to the present day, and our ongoing reserve replacement strategy has grown reserves over and above depletion consistently for the last five years, resulting in more than 10 million ounces in remaining reserves despite pouring over 7.7 million ounces of gold to date. Ongoing resource conversion drilling is again on track to continue this depletion replacement track record at Kibali this year. And as shown on the slide, we are investing in exploration drives for future conversion, which will later be reused for mine haulage and ventilation. The results of our peerless focus on organic reserve growth are demonstrated by our delivery of some 32 million ounces of attributable gold equivalent reserves since 2019 for an all-in cost of $23 an ounce.
On a 100% basis, this represents nearly 44 million ounces added across our asset reserve base. This track record is a clear illustration of what we term to be Tier One assets as part of our strategic filters. It is important to note that this organic reserve growth within our portfolio has been delivered through extensions to our existing mines, thereby truly leveraging our already installed capital base. This slide illustrates the comparison of the results of our strategy relative to recent industry M&A transactions on a $ per ounce basis, and as can be seen clearly here, the return on investment delivered by the Barrick strategy is exponentially higher than all other recent M&A transactions, then when you consider our expected year-end 2024 position, we forecast to include another year of successful depletion replacement combined with the completion of both Reko Diq and Lumwana feasibility studies.
This places the gold equivalent ounces on par with the largest-scale M&A transactions in the industry, for approximately 2.5% of the industry average cost of reserve acquisition through M&A. Turning now to our value foundation in Nevada. When we first completed the NGM merger, Barrick had been high-grading their ore bodies for a number of years, the result of which was significant underinvestment in the geological understanding that underpinned our resource estimates. As a result of this, we have been focused on building our geological foundations back into our ore body models, and as you can see from the cross-sections on this slide, in the Turquoise Ridge example, this improved geological resolution drives substantial changes to the resulting resource estimates. Historical mining areas within the high-grade cores of the ore body are still consistent in both models.
The continuity of the mineralization hosted in what we term to be the basal slope facies that now sustains many of our mining areas today has dramatically improved in resolution. During the last two years, we have been sequentially drill testing these updated interpretations and building our detailed grade control drilling coverage, both of which were substantially neglected prior to the NGM merger. As mentioned by Henri earlier, this improved geological resolution has provided us with the foundation to re-optimize our mine plans across the whole of Nevada, both in open pit and underground. This re-optimization and associated reinvestment in our operational flexibility has delivered a 20-year mine profile built on robust geologically supported resource models. By leveraging this geological understanding, we've been able to add in excess of 19 million ounces on a 100% basis to the life-of-mine plan since the formation of the JV.
Today, this still excludes both the additional exploration upside that we still see and the world-class Fourmile asset that I will talk to you more about later in this presentation. I truly believe that this positions us to continue to sustain Nevada as our value foundation for future generations to come. A prime example of another asset where we have drastically overhauled the geological understanding that underpins the resource model is at Bulyanhulu in Tanzania. Previous operators substantially overstated the annual production profiles by trying to develop the mine infrastructure without the requisite geological understanding. Since we took operatorship, we have successfully defined and delivered a plus 200,000 ounce per annum production profile that extends out beyond 2040.
We have recently turned to investment in new mine infrastructure to generate production flexibility, including two surface box cuts, which allow us to mine from shallower areas while ramping up both development and stoping in the deep areas of the mine. Added to that, as mentioned by Seb earlier, next year, we are commencing a feasibility study to evaluate the option of equipping new vent raises for hoisting, which could potentially increase annual production profiles between 20% and 30%. And in turn, this could reduce the overall operating cost as we fully utilize the installed capacity of the processing plant. As mentioned by Seb earlier, Lumwana is another core example of where leveraging our ore body knowledge and debottlenecking the existing infrastructure unlocks this world-class resource base and enables us to reposition Lumwana as a long-life, high-yielding copper producer capable of withstanding the volatility in inherent copper demand cycles.
The expansion is driven by two key elements. Firstly, the doubling of the throughput by twinning the existing process circuit, effectively increasing the average annual copper production from the current 120,000-140,000-ton range to a life-of-mine average of 240,000 tons per annum. All of the design parameters that we've used for this process expansion are not only linked back to test work, but also drawn directly from existing operational data, ensuring a robust, high-confidence design. The second key component of the expansion is the ramp-up of total mining volumes. These are expected to increase incrementally year on year from 150 million tons this year to approximately 290 million tons in 2029, and then to an average run rate of 300 million tons from 2030 for the subsequent 10 years.
Throughout the course of this ramp-up, we will increase the current ultra-class trucking fleet to a total of 10 ultra-class shovels and 70 ultra-class trucks by 2030. The expansion plan is currently projected to consist of some 8.3 million tons of contained copper at an average grade of 0.53%, which we expect to form part of our year-end mineral reserve update with the conclusion of the feasibility study. The Lumwana expansion layout design is a prime example of how our core values drive our mine optimization process. As you can see on the layout map, the TSF expansion immediately abuts the western wall of the current TSF, and all waste rock dumps are positioned over already disturbed areas, thereby minimizing the impact on our environment and communities.
The Kamisengo conveying infrastructure is scheduled to be constructed in 2037, allowing mining to commence in 2039, which will sustain the process plant feed during the stripping phases of the deeper pushbacks within the Chimiwungo Super Pit from 2040 onwards. At this time, the overall mining rate will step up to 340 million tons, as the satellite pit provides a distinctly separate mining area to support an independent fleet. As I indicated earlier, all long-term infrastructure, such as the process plant, TSF, and water storage facilities, are normally positioned outside of our resource pit shells. But in the case of both Lumwana and Reko Diq, due to the extended mine lines, we have positioned all key infrastructure outside of the $5 a pound pit shells, preserving the optionality for further expansions and pushbacks after 2056. The profitability of this expansion is secured by making tangible changes in the mine infrastructure.
One such example of this is the utilization of a new pit rim crusher and conveyor in the Chimiwungo Pit from 2028 onwards, which cuts our current ultra-class trucking haul cycles by at least 15%, and then, from 2034 onwards, we plan to incorporate in-pit crushing and conveying within the Chimiwungo Super Pit, again providing continuity of the trucking requirements as the pit continues to get incrementally deeper. The expanded process circuit will introduce a high level of automation through proven advanced process control systems. Once this new circuit is fully commissioned and producing copper, the existing plant will be taken offline to install these same upgrades into the existing process stream, which, when fully ramped up, will enable us to deliver an overall reduction in costs by providing a substantial increase in productivity per man-hour and lowering overall reagent consumptions.
More details on the Lumwana expansion are available in our Lumwana Super Pit expansion update on our website. We now turn to Barrick's 100% owned world-class Fourmile project, which deserves a section of this presentation unto itself. As you may have seen in our press release this morning, the results of the ongoing drilling in Fourmile, for which Mark showed you a number of the results in our recent Q3 presentation, have defined an updated mineral resource in the southernmost portion of the Fourmile ore body, immediately abutting Goldrush. This updated resource is a result of 25 new drill holes at a spacing of at least 90 meters across the highlighted area, resulting in 187% growth in indicated resources and 138% growth in inferred, both with notable increases in grade.
This initial mineral resource only covers approximately one-third of the overall ore body, as we have defined by drilling to date. As the ongoing resource conversion drilling progresses incrementally to the north, the ore body grades continue to increase as a result of the silicified breccias from Rose System through to Dorothy. This truly world-class Fourmile ore body can only really be compared to the Goldstrike underground mine, which to date has produced some 12.7 million ounces of gold with head grades of more than 10 grams a ton and still has remaining resources of more than 4 million ounces. Looking at all the drilling results to date, I see absolutely no reason why Fourmile will not become a new benchmark in the history of Nevada Gold Mines for both grade and size.
Before I show you the potential value that this can generate, I would like to show you a short video to illustrate the size and continuity of the ore body as we know it to date, with a snapshot of the access infrastructure that we are currently planning. Firstly, as you can see, the Fourmile permit covers the substantial topographic high between two canyons underneath which the ore body is located. The northern exploration access that we plan to develop is located at Bullion Hill, where the portal is situated approximately 800 meters below the ridgeline. The decline from this will provide a continuous four-kilometer-long access that extends over the top of the Fourmile ore body and ultimately connects with the Gold rush multipurpose development and provides further platforms for drilling.
Geotechnical drilling has shown that the majority of the decline will be located within highly competent non-permeable rock units in and immediately adjacent to the Mill Canyon stock, meaning that only localized water seepage management is required during underground access development. We believe this development will also provide a number of long-term benefits to the immediately adjacent Goldrush mine, including potential for increased levels of production. As I have mentioned, the updated mineral resource only covers approximately one-third of the overall ore body, which still remains open today, with further step-out drilling currently underway. To illustrate the potential value that a truly world-class ore body like Fourmile has, we've completed an updated preliminary economic assessment using criteria and costs which draw directly from the Goldrush mine plan.
These operating costs provide an ultra-conservative benchmark due to the clear geotechnical indications that the silicified reaches within Fourmile will support a much higher tonnage and lower cost underground stoping profile than ever seen in Nevada before. Despite these very conservative parameters, the embedded value of the project is abundantly clear, achieving potential Tier One production and costs at very low annual mining rates. Even when using these very conservative parameters, the annual operating cash flows resulting from Fourmile are expected to be more than 70% higher than the already world-class Goldrush project, purely as a result of the ore body grades. The main components of the project capital costs are currently forecast to consist of the underground mine development, including dual vent raises, upgrades to electrical reticulation, and construction of a new paste back fill plant.
Initial metallurgical test work has indicated that the highly silicified competent breccias are potentially single refractory, and thus they may be able to make use of existing autoclave capacity, which will only defer low-grade two grams per ton stockpiles from the current mine plan, yielding the potential to add significant incremental production. The upper sub-horizontal cavity breccias are thought to be more analogous to that of the mineralization in Goldrush in terms of both ore body geometry, which ultimately defines the mining stope sizes, and in their contained carbon content, which results in the requirement for them being fed to the roasters.
From 2025 onwards, we plan to commence a three-year pre-feasibility study, which will continue to define substantial resources and ultimately reserves across the entire ore body from surface, while also permitting and developing the northern Bullion Hill access, linking up with the Gold rush multipurpose development and completing pilot-scale autoclave and roaster test work. Turning now to Carlin, the 14 million ounce Leeville complex is another example of a geological frontier that has been completely revived since the Nevada Gold Mines joint venture. We plan to deliver the next phase of growth, which could more than double the size of the existing Leeville complex, by undertaking several campaigns of step-out drilling along these emerging corridors to evaluate the continuity of economic mineralization in support of new potential surface access points.
Drill results to date have consistently returned results supporting the concept that these Leeville operations will continue to deliver some of the largest growth operations outside of our existing mine plans, which underpin the future of Carlin Complex amongst the world-class giants of TR and Cortez districts. To date, both Leeville and Ren have been significant contributors to our growth in Carlin, and we expect to continue to see this trend in our year-end reserve updates later this year. Now, taking a step back to look at our 10-year production profile, which reflects the overall results of the mine plan updates that my colleagues and I have highlighted to you today. The majority of this profile is driven by a true Tier One portfolio with high-quality reserve and resource foundations and geologically constrained mine designs, which provides a true reflection of the quality of our assets.
This profile maintains our outlook of growing attributable production to more than six and a half million ounces of gold equivalent by the end of the decade and continues to sustain production at and around this level thereafter as a result of the imminent development of the Reko Diq and Lumwana projects. As you can see, these world-class projects deliver significant growth in both our copper and gold profiles without the need for expensive M&A or diluting our existing shareholder base. We are confident that we can continue to grow this profile organically as we bring Fourmile into the Nevada Gold Mines joint venture profile, evaluate the potential of Greater Leeville, and incorporate the Hanson production potential into Cortez underground.
We believe this truly sets us apart from our peers within the industry as we continue to find, develop the best assets with the best people to deliver sustainable returns for all of our stakeholders. Now, I will hand you over to Joe, who will provide an insight into our Greenfields exploration opportunities that we expect to provide future growth opportunities.
Thank you, Simon, and good morning, everyone. I'm Joel Holliday, and I'm responsible for ensuring that exploration adds long-term value to the business through discovery. I'm pleased to be here this morning with you to share some key points of our exploration strategy, as well as some of the more exciting projects in our portfolio. I wanted to start this morning by setting the scene with this well-known chart, which shows the declining discovery rate of new gold deposits over time.
I haven't included it here, but the chart for copper discoveries looks remarkably similar. In short, and for a multitude of reasons, as an industry, we have largely lost the ability to discover new deposits. The long-term impacts of this lack of success against the backdrop of increasing production are manifold and cannot be understated. To name just two, we are witnessing ever-increasing competition for a shrinking pool of assets, with growth more often achieved through expensive M&A rather than discovery. And secondly, deposits are being high-graded, while depletion is replaced with lower quality reserves, if at all. This decline in new discoveries isn't going to be reversed by the eagerly awaited silver bullet of artificial intelligence. And unfortunately, as an industry, we will never experience the spectacular discovery rates of the last century again.
However, those organizations which have a strategically driven long-term approach to organic growth, built on a foundation of geological understanding, will be able to buck this trend and create enormous value. Both Barrick and Randgold, prior to the merger, excelled in organic value creation, and many of you will be familiar with our exploration strategy and will recognize our successful long-term approach to growth. This chart shows how Barrick has built and continues to build enormous value through exploration success, both with new greenfields discoveries and significant brownfield resource additions. As you've heard, this growth success remains one of our core competencies, with Goldrush and Fourmile being the most recent standout examples. The total amount we've discovered, and which is displayed in this graph, is an exceptional 250 million ounces, up from 235 million ounces when I last presented an equivalent slide two years ago.
Of course, not all ounces or pounds are equal, and the first prize is to identify and secure opportunities at an early stage, capturing the maximum value as their scale and quality is realized, then progressed through development and into production. That is why Barrick has teams focused on generative geological work and early-stage exploration, one of an increasingly small group of majors that does this. The blue arrow on this graph depicts the value added through the critical task of brownfields exploration, where the focus is more on depletion replacement and resource growth by adding ounces at an equivalent or higher quality to existing reserves to maximize the value from invested capital, and as Simon has just shown, Barrick is a world leader in this field. Our investment filters, shown again here in the table, apply equally to all exploration opportunities, both early stage and more advanced.
This slide depicts the range of geological environments where world-class gold and copper deposits are formed, and as you can see, there are many different settings, each with their own unique processes and characteristics. To be successful in the search for these varying deposit types, a world-class team of experts is required to guide on where to go and how to execute effective and efficient exploration programs to make those discoveries. Barrick's exploration teams are exploring for a range of different deposits across the globe, most notably orogenic gold deposits in Canada, Western Central Africa, porphyry copper deposits in the American Cordilleras and the Tethyan Belt, high sulfidation gold deposits in the Andes and the Caribbean, and Carlin-type epithermal gold systems in Nevada, not to mention the sedimentary copper deposits of the Copperb elt in Zambia and the DRC, or the VMS copper deposits of the Arabian Shield.
Of course, not all places are equal in terms of prospectivity, and certain special parts of the globe have been the focus of multiple long-lived ore-forming events, which is where we want to be exploring. To be a world-class exploration and mining business, one has to have a global outlook and be prepared to go where the world-class deposits are most likely to occur. As a result, in recent years, we've started exploring in new jurisdictions across all our regions. We rigorously apply our investment filters in the evaluation of any new opportunity, and this discipline means that sometimes we have to walk away from otherwise compelling opportunities where we can't tick all of those boxes.
In this slide, the red stars show where we have active exploration projects, some of which are in countries where we do not yet have an operating mine, and you can clearly see that we're active in almost all of the world's most prospective geological terrains. A key to sustainable and long-term value creation in this industry is the careful stewardship of a pipeline of near-medium and long-term opportunities. As with any investment portfolio, we constantly reprioritize targets as they're evaluated. It's a dynamic process, and there's no shortage of exciting targets, which we've been successfully promoting towards the top of this triangle. While standalone greenfields targets need to surpass our Tier Two filter at a minimum, shorter-term near-mine opportunities around our operations may be smaller but need to offer a quicker pathway to significant value addition and optionality.
Importantly, and by design, our exploration budgets do not fluctuate with the metal prices or to accommodate our expanding portfolio. Expenditure is therefore controlled by budgetary as well as technical discipline, which results in lower priority targets being removed quickly from the portfolio, with our budget being focused on only the very best prospects. With that introduction complete, I'd like to take you through a summary of our projects starting in the Africa and Middle East region. Our geological teams here are active on both greenfields and brownfields targets that extend across eight countries, which account for a large part of our lower-risk brownfields exploration portfolio. Over the last two years, we've had significant exploration success, particularly around our Tier One gold operations, and I'll speak to Loulo and Kibali in the next slides.
In Tanzania, we continue to test targets around the North Mara and Bulyanhulu deposits, as well as along the major structures hosting them, identifying significant potential for further discovery. Meanwhile, our greenfields exploration portfolio in Tanzania has undergone a major expansion with the consolidation of several large-scale, highly prospective ground positions in the Lake Victoria Goldfields region, where historical exploration is limited and in many cases failed to recognize the complexity of post-mineral cover. On the copper front in Saudi Arabia, we continue to return exciting results from an expanding portfolio around Jabal Sayid, while beyond Lumwana, our exploration teams are consolidating ground and assessing opportunities across the Central African Copperb elt with the goal of delivering the Copperb elt's next major discovery. Kibali, in the northeast of DRC, is a special place with a total endowment greater than 20 million ounces.
On the next slide, I'll show the opportunities for growth around the main KCD deposits, including the nearby ARK target, which I've circled in red here, while elsewhere we are evaluating targets along the 50 km-long mineralized KZ trend, much of which we've only really scratched the surface of. As a direct result of our work at Oere, which we converted from a discontinuous geochemical anomaly into a significant resource, our focus shifted to other weaker surface showings along the KZ trend, which hosts most of the known mineralization at Kibali, and led to the drilling and confirmation of continuity of mineralization at the Aindi Watsa target, which is located along a particularly sparsely explored segment of the trend. Exploration work at Kibali continues to identify the potential for further discovery, and the ARK target is beginning to look like the next emerging satellite deposit in the district.
For context, much of the mineralization at Kibali is developed within plunging chutes controlled by tight fold hinges, and in some special parts of the project, these form in sufficient density to create large, high-grade deposits like KCD, where you can see from the intersections at the bottom of this slide, we continue to extend the high-grade mineralization downplunge, highlighting significant long-term growth potential. Immediately adjacent to KCD, at the ARK target, there are several historical pits and a small past-producing underground mine. Our drilling in the area has not only significantly extended known mineralization downplunge, but continues to identify additional chutes of mineralization, of which we believe there are more to be discovered and are now sufficient in scale and number for it to be considered a really exciting target.
You'll appreciate that a recent drill intersection, 12 meters at 231 grams per ton from a newly identified chute, gives us the confidence to be bullish about the remaining potential at ARK and at Kibali in general. The world-class Loulo district in Mali and Senegal is certainly a place where our perseverance has paid off, with multiple major discoveries made throughout the project's history and where we continue to find new zones of significant mineralization. With our mines here growing and continuing to grow reserves net of depletion, exploration is focused on evaluating targets with high-impact potential, including large-scale extensions and repetitions of the Gounkoto and Yalea ore bodies, as well as stepping out along the key structural corridors in the district, which are still under-explored away from the existing deposits.
This prolific district certainly has more to deliver, and our focus recently turned to an exciting opportunity at the Baboto target on the Loulo mining lease. Baboto was explored in the early days of Randgold's time in the Loulo district, resulting in the discovery and delineation of several relatively small deposits which were mined for their oxide resources. Using the geological learnings from our other discoveries in the district since then, the exploration team recently returned to reinterpret and reevaluate Baboto. The evaluation of the full scale of this system is still ongoing, but the results to date support the potential of this target developing into a valuable satellite deposit and is an excellent example of the value of continually reevaluating old geological models, even in mature districts.
The restructuring and refocusing of the Latin America and Asia-Pacific exploration team has continued since our last investor presentation and has resulted in material changes in both the team and the portfolio across the continent. The strategy remains focused on providing optionality to the operations in the region, but with an increasing drive on the developing new greenfields targets, and the teams have been very successful in cleaning up our portfolio and defining some very significant, but as yet untested opportunities, particularly in the Andes, as I'll show in the next slide. We're also progressing a number of early-stage projects across the Dominican Republic. We're evaluating virtually the entire country of Jamaica and are now drill testing the best targets from the last portfolio we accessed and evaluated in Japan. Furthermore, it has been immensely exciting to restart the exploration around Reko Diq in Pakistan, which I'll speak to shortly.
Moving to Latin America, I'll start with Peru. Barrick has a long and very successful operational history in Peru, which, as you may know, has an exceptional endowment of world-class deposits and a proactive, pro-mining government and administration. Our refocused exploration portfolio contains several targets, all with the potential to be our next discovery, including the Karapura copper and gold porphyry project in the south, and at another target, Libelula, in the center of the country, our teams have identified a large high sulfidation gold system close to our Pierina closure project, and drilling begins there next week. Ecuador is a new frontier for Barrick, but one that is very exciting, and I believe will in time fully justify our entry there.
Our generative and new business work identified opportunities to secure significant porphyry and epithermal prospects in the well-endowed Jurassic Belt in the south of the country, which we secured through a successful public tender process with ENAMI, the state-owned mining company, last year. We now have multiple geological teams carrying out early-stage fieldwork on those projects, and we look forward to reporting our progress there in coming quarters. The Reko Diq project in Pakistan is a large cluster of mineralized porphyries at the western end of the Chagai Belt, which you can see in this slide with the Reko Diq mining and exploration permits shown as red polygons. As I mentioned before, as a geologist, it is an incredibly exciting district to be working in with outcropping porphyry mineralization across the permits.
For various reasons, we believe we can deliver significant upside around this already world-class project, and our geological teams are supporting the feasibility study update and currently testing a portfolio of opportunities across the mining lease, where the priority is testing targets which have the potential to add value to the project in the near term rather than just extending the significant life of mine. In the map on the left of this slide, which zooms into the Reko Diq mining license, you can see various mineralized porphyries which are labeled in the map and shown in red or purple, with the main western porphyries in the largest green ellipse. The Reko Diq geology team, supported by a number of our global porphyry experts, has been working meticulously through a huge relogging, reinterpretation, and target generation exercise.
As part of that process, the first exploration holes drilled in the area in more than 15 years have all confirmed mineralized extensions outside our existing resources. I've shown one example of this work in the cross-section on this slide, where a recent hole drilled outside the known mineralization at the H8 deposit, one of the porphyry systems inside the mining lease, intersected strong mineralization from surface, which remains open and is probably the best hole drilled in this target to date. We think this speaks to the massive potential at Reko Diq, confirmation of which I'm sure I'll be sharing with you for many years to come, and finally, to North America, where the lion's share of our exploration budget is devoted. In the last two years, the exploration team in the region has built on the mandate to expand in the U.S. beyond Nevada.
For obvious reasons, I don't want to say too much about our greenfield work here, but we've consolidated multiple projects for both gold and copper outside the Carlin district, and we'll obviously share this progress with you in more detail as and when we can. In Canada, the team has successfully expanded our exploration portfolio across the Superior Craton in Ontario and Quebec, with early-stage and exciting projects. The Sturgeon Lake project is a belt-scale opportunity where our mapping has identified multiple mineralized intrusions associated with large structures which are as yet untested by drilling, whilst Norris is a covered and poorly tested segment of the world-famous Cadillac Larder Lake fault zone, which we are preparing to drill.
We are identifying and testing geochemical anomalies until at the Patris project in Quebec, which is located on a splay off the same fault in a similar geological setting to the nearby Malartic mine. Carlin exploration, as you probably know, can be slow and expensive due to the thickness of barren cover on top of the prospective lithologies. This is one of the world's highest-grade and most endowed gold districts, and so any risk is well balanced by the potential. Of course, we mitigate this risk further through the understanding and application of geological models. As you heard from Simon, the team has had great success extending the known mineralization around Leeville, generating deeper and as yet untested targets from surface mapping and geochemistry.
As the MRM team successfully continues to extend the mineralization around the mines in Nevada, the exploration team has focused on drilling in two large basins within the main trends, resulting in the identification of two substantial untested targets characterized by strong Carlin alteration and geochemical anomalism. At Swift, shown in this map in red, we've recently intersected the first narrow zones of higher-grade mineralization within one of these very large altered areas, which is very exciting for a target so close to the world-class Pipeline deposit. You've already heard about Gold rush and Fourm ile, but I wanted to finish on this slide to show that as the development is ramped up at Gold rush and the drilling at Fourm ile continues to confirm its huge potential, the exploration work around these deposits has not stopped.
We are driving target generation along strike from known mineralization and along parallel structures around Fourm ile, shown here in red, which will be prioritized and drill tested as the studies at Fourm ile progress. When you consider the existing endowment of this area, the sheer scale of the Cortez district, and the track record of discovery and value creation from this team, you'll understand why we're confident in our ability to keep delivering on our growth strategy, both from here and also across our wider global portfolio, and I hope I've been able to give you a flavor of that exciting potential this morning, and with that, I'd like to thank you for your attention, and I'll now hand over to Graham Shuttleworth. Thank you.
Good morning and good afternoon. I believe I know most of the people in the room here today, but for those who do not know me, my name is Graham Shuttleworth. I'm the CFO for the group, having assumed that position in 2019 at the time of the merger with Randgold. In that context, I've spoken to many of you before, and specifically at this Investor Day two years ago. So in part, my presentation is a continuation of some of the themes we have previously touched on, as well as some new insights. I'll start my presentation today on a review of our supply chain initiatives before moving into some more of the key financial aspects. This is a quick snapshot of our supply chain activities across the globe.
The supply chain team, which is headed by Riaan Grobler, manages some $8.5 billion of annual spend across five continents with over 8,000 suppliers. Having said that, it's not a large team, with our philosophy being one where day-to-day operating responsibility is devolved to each operating mine, with a small but highly effective central supply team providing oversight, coordination, and strategic direction. Through a combination of on-the-ground knowledge and collaborative demand planning, utilizing the investments we have made in our global systems, notably SAP, and working together with tried-and-tested supply partners in each region, the team is able to align on standards, minimize investments, leverage the buying power of the group, and deliver meaningful results, as I will show you in the next few slides.
This team is also integrally involved in our new projects and over the last year has been working closely with our Reko Diq and Lumwana project teams to ensure we deliver on schedule and on budget. I wanted to share with you a snapshot of the underlying price trends in some of the key input parameters. This is obviously by no means exhaustive, but illustrative of the point that while we experience significant inflationary pressure over 2022 and 2023 on the back of COVID and the Ukraine crisis, in a lot of cases, these prices have come back down to 2021 levels. That is not to say that our suppliers brought their prices down, but rather our team had to work hard to realize these savings through a combination of renegotiations, supplier rotation, leveraging our buying power, while strengthening our relationships with our key long-term supply partners.
Some areas still remain elevated, particularly in North America with cyanide, cement and lime, but we continue to engage and are working to get these down in the future. With respect to diesel, for the purposes of our budgeting, we are assuming a slight increase in 2025, and that reflects our assumption on the oil price, which we have increased to $80 a barrel, WTI, from $70 last year. So given where spot prices are currently, there could be some benefits in the year ahead. At the time of the merger, we set ourselves a target to reduce the amount of working capital locked up in inventory at our mines. Managing mine site inventory requires the participation of the whole team to ensure a balance between enough stock to ensure the mine keeps operating but not holding more stock than is necessary.
As you can see from this slide, we have reduced this amount by over 20%, while at the same time increasing the cover we have in place on the key gold stopper items to ensure up to five months of consumption on site from our previous one-month target, as well as supporting the PV expansion construction project and startup. This is even more impressive when you consider that U.S. dollar inflation is up over 25% over this period. Our aim is to maintain this discipline going forward. Some of you will recall the savings targets we set ourselves at the time of the merger, and since then, we have been consistently setting and achieving new targets. Every year, the team identifies new opportunities for savings and sets objectives to push themselves to ensure we minimize our cost base and do not lose sight of even the smallest opportunities.
It's a constant process, but given the savings achieved annually, the continual value add to the business is significant. This year, initiatives are underway at NGM between the technical, financial, and commercial teams to drive efficiencies, specifically on equipment lifecycle management, as well as focusing on process control technology to crystallize efficiency gains in our business and drive down costs going forward. Our supply chain strategy is not just about what we buy. It also considers our broader sustainability objectives, one of which is ensuring our operations benefit the countries and communities within which we operate and to expand our local footprint. This means that we actively set targets for local supplier procurement, which in a lot of cases means developing local suppliers and helping them grow into businesses that can compete on an international scale.
These numbers reflect just direct supplies and do not include the benefits of salaries, taxes, and other payments we make in-country. The local procurement strategy has the added benefit of increasing our alignment with our stakeholders and is a key part of managing risk in the countries we operate in. Scope 3 emissions are the indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur in Barrick's supply chain. We have identified category one, purchased goods and services, as the most material and impactful Scope 3 emissions category to address. Our Scope 3 reduction roadmap categorizes our suppliers. We then prioritize and engage with priority suppliers where we have determined that reductions are possible. We will assist these suppliers to determine their own emissions profile and quantify their GHG footprint, then work with them to identify and achieve reduction targets.
Turning to our financials, here we highlight what we have achieved since the merger at the start of 2019. Despite changes in our production profile, for example, with the removal of Long Canyon from our profile, the graph in the top left-hand corner illustrates our strong operating cash flow, and the other graphs on this slide show how we have deployed this across our business. Firstly, as you can see in the top right-hand graph, we have reduced our net debt by almost $4 billion to a level where we have now one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry and can fund our future through multiple commodity price cycles.
At the same time, we have continued to invest in our business, not only recapitalizing the underinvestment in our plant and infrastructure, notably in Nevada, but also investing in new growth projects which will maintain and grow our production in years to come, as can be seen in the bottom left-hand graph, and even after this investment in our business, we have generated significant free cash flow, which has allowed us to increase returns to shareholders, as seen in the bottom right-hand graph. I now want to focus on one of our key growth projects, Reko Diq. As part of managing our capital and risk, we have been working with a consortium of Western multilateral lenders to raise up to $3 billion in limited recourse project financing to fund phase I of the project.
This represents a substantial portion of the overall funding needs and will substantially reduce Barrick's equity funding needs as well as that of our local partners. As can be seen here, our equity contribution is expected to be just over $1.5 billion. The contemplated loan structure is broadly consistent with other large-scale multi-source mining project financings, with each sponsor responsible for its ratable share of the debt. However, these guarantees will fall away once Reko Diq passes completion tests, at which point the financing will become non-recourse to Barrick. The lender group is primarily comprised of multilateral and agency lenders, most of whom have extensive experience financing mining projects and have previously supported large-scale capital projects in jurisdictions with similar risk profiles, notably the IFC, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.
As you can see, there is a lot of work and diligence that goes into financing of this nature, and we have been in discussions with the lenders and guarantors for over a year. At this time, we expect to be in a position to be able to draw upon the facility from the second half of 2025. The project already has substantial risk mitigation measures in place through, amongst other things, the protections built into the reconstitution documentation and the alignment through the joint ownership with our local Pakistani partners. In addition, the lender group was purposefully selected to be centered around those agencies that already have significant exposure to Pakistan, including a number of Pakistan's largest sovereign creditors, as I've already touched on.
Their involvement in the projects and initiatives across the country helps to further align the interests of the project owners and all local stakeholders, serving as a powerful increment to managing risk. The extensive tenor of the debt, expected to be 12 plus years, also ensures that these risk-sharing benefits will remain with the project for a long time. Thus far, the potential lenders have been extremely supportive of the financing plan and the project and have been reviewing every aspect of the project: technical, environmental, social, security, and economic very closely, which also provides us and our partners with an independent validation of the quality of the project and our approach to developing the operation. Another area that we also focus on, but which often does not receive the same level of attention, is what we refer to internally as our non-operating spend.
This is cash flow allocated to corporate costs as well as closure, which, as you can see, we've been working to reduce. This includes our greenfield exploration spending, which we believe creates significant value over the longer term, albeit the benefits are not immediately obvious in our five-year plans. We aim to maintain our spend at around the same level each year and force our exploration teams to compete for these dollars to ensure they pursue the most prospective options in the portfolio. Some of you may recall me talking about our complicated and inefficient corporate structure, which we inherited at the time of the merger. Since that time, we have simplified the ownership structure of a number of our operating assets and eliminated over 40 legal entities from the group and restructured over $15 billion in intergroup corporate loans.
All in all, we expect to reduce non-operating spend to below $600 million going forward, again a significant annual saving from where we started. Taking a deeper dive into our G&A, we've been able to significantly reduce this cost since the merger and have maintained this lean structure over the past five years. Here, we have benchmarked our G&A cost to our peers, and as you can see, whichever way you measure it, we are the industry leader, which is a testament to our lean management structure. I turn now to our operating cost metrics. You've already had some insight from each of the regions on the evolution of these costs and the underlying cost drivers. So this provides a quick snapshot of how the group cost profile has evolved over the last few years, as well as where we incur these costs.
You will note that the percentages of the pie chart are not dissimilar to 2022 when we showed you this slide, although one point to note is that the direct spend on energy has reduced, partly reflecting lower oil prices, but also our significant investment in renewable energy sources. As noted earlier, while inflation has been a real factor over this period, a large portion of these increases have been driven by increased spending on our infrastructure through maintenance, as well as increased underground mining costs and grade control drilling, a large portion of which we expect to moderate in future years. As was mentioned earlier, grades and recovery have also impacted the cost-per-ounce numbers in addition to the fixed cost dilution, as does the ore feed changing both in terms of underground versus open pit and refractory versus non-refractory, as Christine touched on earlier.
You will be familiar with this graph, and this reflects the overall group view, which my colleagues have already explained in relation to their individual businesses. As you can see in the bars, we are growing gold production and delivering a cost reduction over this five-year period. The benefits of the increasing production are noticeable from 2027 onwards as we spread the fixed costs over more ounces. If you include our gold equivalent ounces, the growth is significant, as you can see in the dotted line. To note, these costs and capital profiles are all in real terms, as has always been our practice. On capital, as Henri explained, we expect the reinvestment phase at NGM will turn the corner in 2025 and return to normal levels by 2027. So that is evident in the group picture too.
Every year, we add more ounces to our mine plans and add years of life, but with that, we also need to add more capital, some of which you will only see the benefits of beyond this five-year window, so that explains a lot of the change from prior versions of this graph. Looking at our copper business, this is where the bulk of our growth capital will be focused over the 2025 to 2027 year period as we advance both Lumwana and Reko Diq, and as you heard earlier, the feasibility studies for both these projects are expected to be completed by the end of this year, and now that 2029 is inside our five-year horizon, the benefits of these investments are clear to see, so we expect to see the value of these significant assets start to reflect in our share price.
The fundamentals for copper remain very strong, with a significant supply-demand imbalance forecast over the coming years just as we start to deliver these projects' outputs into the market. When one considers the lead times and capital for new projects of this size, it's incredible what our team has achieved and is planning to deliver in a relatively short period of time. This graph conveys the outcome of our production and cost profiles in the five-year plans in terms of cash generation at different price point assumptions. In other words, the cash we expect to generate from the operations in this five-year period. Although it shows some leverage to copper, it's worth noting that this leverage understates the true value leverage of the copper business, given our ramp-up and production is at the end of the five-year window.
This chart explains why we are investors in buying our own stock back at the current prices that are not representative of this inherent value. To finish, I thought it would be worth recapping the returns we have already provided to shareholders. At the start of 2022, we set out a clear dividend policy that we have consistently followed since this time, unlike some of our peers, and which has contributed to over $5 billion in returns to shareholders. This dividend policy was supplemented by an introduction of a $1 billion share buyback program, which has been renewed on an annual basis and which allows us to increase returns and take advantage of the significant value we see in our shares. We have been active in this program since the second quarter of this year and expect to continue to do so going forward.
With that, I'll hand you back to Mark to wrap up today's presentation.
Thank you, Graham, and to all the presenters. Well done. Good job. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure that after the information we've shared with you today, you will understand why we have the confidence to forecast a 30% increase in our gold equivalent production by the end of this decade. What we have built in the last five years is a sustainably profitable enterprise capable of weathering the cycles and structured around long-term, long-life, Tier One assets that deliver both gold and copper in the bottom half of the cost curve. Why do we share our 10-year profiles with you? Not because they are cast in stone, but because the mining business is a long game, aiming to deliver real returns by investing long-term capital.
Our rolling ten-year plans identify the opportunities and potential pitfalls that force us to plan ahead. Not everything that we have shared with you today is baked into these plans, but the teams have shared some of the opportunities, and I have no doubt there will be more. Finally, I would like to stress again how central sustainability is to every aspect of our value-driven business. It enables us to make the most of our peerless gold assets while also building a world-class copper business. It supports the evolution of a partnership model that benefits all stakeholders. It is the key to the management of the mines that generate the free cash flow to fund our organic growth projects and support the strong balance sheet that enables a disciplined return to shareholders.
And last but not least, it is now allowing us to attract the best and the brightest new skills because our DNA resonates with their own values. I trust that you have found the presentations today both informative and interesting, and as I've been saying for a while, Barrick offers standout value that we are focused on delivering. Thank you for your attention, and I'm now going to invite the other speakers to join me on the stage, and we'll be happy to take questions both from those in the room and our guests online. Hey, guys.
Good morning. Thank you very much for today's presentation, Mark and team. Intriguing update. I wanted to ask actually about Reko Diq and the CapEx update. So you've increased the CapEx, but actually quite modestly, so from 5 to 5.5 to 6 for phase I .
Could you just walk us through what were the key elements driving that $500 million increase, particularly between cost inflation and then scope change?
You're okay. So look, there's a few things there. The original price that was put in on the $5 billion was taken from an inflation adjustment from the 2010 feasibility study. So that was how that number was derived. The $5.5-$6 billion is actually derived by the tenders and all of the price inquiries to the market. So as you can appreciate, there's therefore a lot of movement between the individual lines. But if you look at the entire thing, there's probably a few main drivers.
The inclusion and finalization of the solar and the power was one of the key items, particularly when you tie it back to the 45 million tons per annum because we locked in that higher throughput. So there was a cost differential that was driven by that higher throughput and its associated requirements. And then there's also a CPI inflation component that does occur between that update you received in 2023 through to an update, which is basically derived on pricing that we've received in the past six months. So it's an end of 2024 price. So there's a 5%-10% movement in CPI in that period as well. And they're probably the main drivers. And then a similar question for the significant reduction in the C1 cash cost estimate for the project.
Was that mostly driven by the gold price assumption, or is there some benefit to OpEx from the higher CapEx scope? Yeah, it's both of them. So you get a benefit of the high throughput, so your unit costs do get a benefit from that side of it as well. But yeah, as you're noting, they're the main drivers, what you said.
Lawson, just to remember, this is just at the cusp of feasibility study, and it's a bankable feasibility study. So when the project comes out, you'll see everything's provided for only reserves, and it's quite a different project than originally envisaged. We've gone with the IFC, you can imagine, big focus on renewable energy, so bringing in the solar, and also it includes a railway upgrade down to the port, which wasn't contemplated initially.
There was an assumption that the road down to the Gwadar port would have been constructed by Pakistan and the ongoing Belt and Road project. So there's a lot. And today, when you look at the logistics and the rail support, significantly more reliable. And we can see ourselves managing both the consumables and also the export of the concentrate down to Qasim, which the team shared with you. So quite a different scope, a 5 million ton for each phase increase in the throughput as well. So that's significant. So when you look at the NAV of the asset, it's been enhanced, and we put a lot more infrastructure into the mine that will be carried, that'll carry phase II as well. So you need to look at the total number when you look at the number.
Mark, maybe if I could just quickly reinforce on that, because we've got this landing party with the IFC, their technical teams, their technical consultants. They've got a security consultant and an environmental social consultant. They're engaged with us through this whole process. So they're reviewing our work and testing these assumptions as well. So there's that additional check, I think, on Reko Diq and the process because of the funding that's going on concurrently.
Thanks. Daniel McConvey, Rossport Investments. On Reko Diq, how have your partners kind of made you more comfortable through this process? Remind me, how have your partners kind of made you more comfortable through this process? And in terms of the contractor selection,
just say that again.
How have your partners, the government and your joint venture partner, your lenders, how have they kept you more comfortable through this process to date?
I'm wondering, in terms of the contractor selection you're making, I guess at the end of this year pretty soon, what you're looking at in terms of criteria for the strongest contractor to build it?
Say it again. Why don't you just repeat your question? Sorry, we just couldn't hear the question about the partners.
Okay. How have your partners made you more comfortable in just the process of going ahead? We talked about this a bit a couple of years ago. Then second, I was going to ask you about the contractor selection. You're talking about the internal partners, the government?
Yeah. So the project is, as you know, a negotiated project on the back of an arbitration award.
The whole concept was that we needed to negotiate a settlement, which what we did was reach out to the then Prime Minister, Imran Khan, and say, "How are we going to deliver something that's going to benefit everyone?" And because there's significant tax incentives and other incentives baked into the framework where we can see the value. And at that point, we felt that this is a new way of building mines. And as you know, we've done a number of them now, Tanzania is one example. Pueblo Viejo is another one, and so is Papua New Guinea. And so we said, "Well, let's split the equity." And the equity, and more importantly, Balochistan gets 25% because that was one of the big issues back in 2013, is what was Pakistan Inc. going to benefit from?
So then it was the 10% is free carried under the mining code. So we pick up 5%. And so as 50% shareholders, we pick up 5%. And as 40% shareholders, the rest of Pakistan picks up 5%. And then the debate was, who's going to actually carry the investment on behalf of Pakistan? And so the Pakistan government allocated the ownership of the equity to three SOEs, who are all oil and gas companies and have strong US dollar balance sheets. And so with that, there was the 15% outstanding that was still Balochistan, and the Pakistan government guaranteed that 15%. And then it was a case of funding. And we've been co-funding this since the beginning. So right now, the lending syndicate has been through the process of ensuring that they are comfortable with the guarantees that sit with the Pakistan Inc. part of the equity.
We have an arrangement that is now secured, and the lenders are comfortable with the source of funds out of Pakistan. The engagement we've had with the team, and I will just point out that the team that negotiated with us from the time we reached out to say, "Let's find a win-win situation," stayed even when the government changed. We signed the framework agreement with Imran Khan, and we signed the final agreements with Shehbaz Sharif. What we did is we took, because remember, the whole issue revolved around a Supreme Court decision back in 2013, the full settlement back to the Supreme Court. This is completely endorsed, and we asked a couple of questions. Is it good for Pakistan? Is it good for Balochistan?
Or we didn't ask them. Actually, the president of the country asked the Supreme Court because he's authorized to do this. Is there any risk that the agreements that we've got now can be challenged by the Supreme Court going forward, etc., etc.? And there's a series of questions. And the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court sat for 30 days and reviewed any challenges over that period of time. And so we're comfortable that that endorsement of where we're going is as solid as you can get, as both with the governments, the different governments, the political spectrum, and also under law, under Pakistan law. And Pakistan is a complicated situation. You have the establishment, which is the military, and then you have the government, and then you have the civil service. And the civil service is very efficient.
And so we then sat down and talked about how we were going to do this. And our agreements laid out, as Simon explained, laid out the whole process of how we're going to permit. Oh, sorry, it was Tim. How we were going to permit this project. And we've been working on that. So Tim, I talk to the senior members of government and the establishment every time there's a wrinkle. So we have an open communication at my level. We've got an open communication at Mark's level. And Tim and his team are constantly engaged on the ground and back into the oversight. And that means Ministry of Petroleum and all the other ministers. And the Prime Minister's office has set a touchpoint that we can work through.
The commitment is, and it was a public commitment, we're going to change the red tape for a red carpet for investors. This is the big challenge for all of us. It's such a big project. The team has done so well in actually touching the community even. We've got our CDCs, which you know about. That's community development committees. We talk all the time. We've established schools, infrastructure, invested. We agreed under the settlement that we would advance monies based on while we were preparing the feasibility. Then once we started investing, we would take a portion of our investment and put it back in the community. This is what I've learned in my career. So we bring some of the mining industry always insisted they got all their capital back before anyone benefited. That's backfired in many places around the world.
And what we've done is we put money into the communities and the country ahead of getting all the capital back. And we start sharing dividends, distributions on a slightly lower ratio, but that everyone starts winning. Otherwise, you have one big blob of money coming at the end of the mine or way into the life of the mine. And so right now, we do not suffer from roadblocks. We certainly manage challenges every day. But we've got a series of elevated engagements at different levels of government that we escalate very quickly. And when you see where we've got to already on all the critical permits, we've just finished and submitted the environmental impact assessment, for instance. And so we have a timeline to get all the permitting in place. We have no issues with that. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. Am I?
Yes, you have, Mark. Okay. Yeah.
Thank you.
Hi, guys. Just quick on one of your slides, Graham. You have your upstream taxes and PV streaming declining pretty substantially over the next couple of years. What is that about?
So Chris, it's really a function of where we've come from rather than the future. So the elevated portion of that in the past relates to some of the specifically higher taxes that we paid, specifically in the U.S. So it's really about the inflated past rather than the reducing future.
Do you expect your cash tax rate to decline then over the next couple of years, the percentage tax rate?
We currently have an effective tax rate of somewhere around 30%, depending on what gold price you use.
Obviously, the higher gold price you have, the more profitability you have, the less the impact of those parts of our business, which, where we don't have a tax shield and a tax benefit. So we tend to have a lower effective tax rate in a higher profitable environment. But somewhere around that 28%-30% effective tax rate is what we expect to see going forward. Okay, great. And just a quick question also on the Nevada Gold Mines. Does the 10-year outlook include Fourmile and the extension of the Chukar in that Hanson and that kind of stuff, or not?
There's a very small contribution at the end of the 10-year outlook from development or coming out of Fourmile , but there's no primary production at all, so essentially no. The Chukar-Hanson extension hasn't been incorporated at all into that outlook yet.
That's one of the things we're working on upcoming this year.
Okay. The Chukar, as it stands now, goes for 10 years. The Chukar Reserve goes 10 years. Okay.
I think it's important when you take the size of Fourmile , the relative capital to develop Fourmile is very low because it's really two access drives, twin declines into the main part of the ore body. The rest of the infrastructure for a mine that size, if you had to build it anywhere else, because it's right in the middle of the Carlin infrastructure, so it's significant. When you look at the slide that Simon showed, Gold rush is still ramping up. What he did is just took the Gold rush numbers and changed the grade. There's a whole lot of other benefits because the rock is much more competent because it's silicified.
The ore bodies are breccias, so they're much bigger. Your mining methodology will be different to that in Goldrush. It's a very significant benefit. I would also add that we've got the 14 million ounces in Leeville, but the Greater Leeville is still work in progress. That isn't in those plans. What we're busy, we've got to do what we're doing in Fourmile. We've got to design some additional infrastructure because this Greater Leeville has multiple ore bodies that we are going to be investing and evaluating going forward. You know, well, if you look at the Barrick portfolio, we've got this sort of opportunity through all the big deposits. We're now on top of Nevada, really on top of Nevada.
The big drive is the cost, that extra sustaining cost, which is an extra capital cost that we need to take out. And we've got a focus to do that. And hopefully, we shared that with you today, that we know what it is. It's not some magic that we're going to sort of remove by not doing anything. We're going to finish investing. And then it goes back to its normal sustaining costs. And so the upside of, and we still haven't found that next Fourmile , but we're going to because if you just think Fourmile took 30 years, it was one mile away from the main Cortez gold bodies. So there's a lot of opportunity as we unpack the geology across all three trends that we're working at the moment.
Okay. I just have a quick question for Grant.
In terms of how you - what are the methods by which you do reduce the closure liability? So you said something about Pierina. Can you give an example of how that happens? Because it is a lot of money.
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of what we've looked at is how we take away the big liabilities from these. And more often than not, it's long-term water treatment. So many of the closure plans that we inherited were reliant on treating water in perpetuity. And where we come from, that's not closing an operation because you still have to have people there that have to maintain that water treatment. You need to make sure it meets those criteria. And what we've looked at in Pierina, in particular, is just alternative ways that we can treat that water, quicker ways of doing it, and also benefiting the community.
And that's what we've achieved, actually, through that. And same goes for many of our North American legacy sites. We've focused in on the water treatment aspects, looking at passive water treatment. You heard Christine mention Golden Sunlight, where we're removing the source of that potential contamination in a tailings facility, which you'll know from the Randg old days. We pioneered. We've done that before. And it's providing a benefit to Nevada. So those are some of the ways that we're doing it. There's a lot of research and development that we're doing with the team too, not only in water treatment, but revegetation that we're doing. And I think that's unlocking that value I was talking about earlier, and I think why we've got that $1 billion reduction since 2019 in our liabilities. Yeah.
Just following up on Fourmile , given the potential huge scale, it just seems it would be very challenging to fold that into the JV at its full scale. So are there strategies to potentially mitigate that, folding it in tranches or something just to make that process easier? Thank you.
Yeah, and there's a process to go through. So the joint venture agreement provides effectively an automatic put and call, both sides. But as you can see, if you look at the optimal way to do it for Nevada Gold Mines, it's to roll it in over time. And it's also less costly to do it that way. I'll just give you an example. There's a potential $500 million saving if we put those declines in early and we drill the ore bodies out from underground and not from surface. So there's a motivation already, a substantial saving.
There's a process here. The key is to finish this work that we're doing where we're nearly done, and then to embark on a pre-feasibility program. By the time we finish this program at the end of the year, the critical thing is geotech. We'll know what those declines are and what rocks we're going to be developing through. The other shoe to drop is metallurgical test work because what we're seeing is less carbon in some parts of the ore bodies. We know that some of it is single refractory, which means it's autoclave process feed. We've got lots of autoclave capacity. Our critical bottleneck is roaster feed.
If you play that video back on our website, you'll see generally that subhorizontal material is more the double refractory material, as I said, and that vertically continuous silicified material.
That's what we expect to be primarily single refractory from results so far. And again, that subvertical mineralization, that's the much more competent rock unit, which will support potentially quite bigger mining scales than ever done before in Nevada, but more equivalent to that that we do elsewhere in the world in Africa.
Thanks. And then just a bigger picture question around your forecasting process, I guess, maybe for Graham or for Mark. If we go back to this event two years ago, the forecast for 2024 was something like 4.5 million ounces, right? And we haven't achieved that. Mining's a hard business. Stuff happens. Assets were underinvested. But as we look at the forecast that you've presented today, are you comfortable that all those risks are now reflected?
Because I think gold investors, unfortunately, have been conditioned that forecasts from large North American gold miners aren't necessarily to be relied upon, right, and that's part of the challenge of what we've seen with the stock prices. Thank you.
Yeah, I think I've been in this industry a long time, and we go from instant gratification to appreciation of long-term capital, and we're in that short-term trading phase, but if you look at the Barrick shareholders, a lot of them are long-term owners who understand this, and the two drivers in the change in the guidance, which, by the way, we guided with our MD&A at the previous quarter and gave the market, and we had already guided the two challenges, and that is that there's a slower ramp-up in PV, but that doesn't take away from the value of PV.
We've still got lots of upside just in the gold price. In the Gold Quarry, the other impact is Gold Quarry and the redesign of Gold Quarry. This is so we are at the stage in Nevada where we understand our ore bodies. But you travel that road with us. When we started in 2019, and we were very clear to the market, we had no cover on anything. So we relied, and we had no geologists, by the way. And we now have full MRM. We had no mineral resource management structures or anything like that. And we started on hand-to-mouth. From both, Newmont's assets were, some of them were 18 months behind on plans. And Barrick was high-grading and really not wanted to take all the money, so very little forward investment. Today, we've got real cover on all the ore bodies.
The last two that really we had to work on was Crossroads, which you saw that impact of Crossroads when we forecast and then got it wrong because it was a different mix of ore, and we had to redrill it, but once we got the drills in there and we covered the ore body, then we were able to plan it properly, and it's a key component of the pickup in Cortez, and Gold Quarry has had a history of slips, and this is the first wall failure which we called and monitored, so it's the first time it's been properly monitored and called, and we are drilling out, we're still drilling out that ore body, and we've got another challenge in that on the backside, what do you call it?
Phase VI , we've still got some issues with water that we need to evaluate and see if we can dewater, and so given those situations, and we've done a replan that we know we can deliver against, and we've got work to do to optimize it, and once we have it optimized, we'll come back with an update, but as we stand at the moment, I think what you should take away from this series of presentations is we live this game all the time, and I've never been a person who sandbags a forecast, so we've been through some challenges. Some of ours are homemade, particularly on PV. We're on top of that now, but the ones that weren't homemade is inflation in the U.S. because we are a U.S. producer, and COVID hurt every U.S. business because of the impact on people.
And we've got through that very well. And today, when you look at the quality of our leadership, the quality of our labor force, it's a whole lot better than it was before COVID. And so we will create more and more agility to be able to deal with these things. And I would much rather have a company where everyone in the company understands what returns is and focuses on creating value rather than spending an inordinate amount of time sandbagging the plans. And I would just point out that we're on track to get within guidance. And in my career, these last two years have been difficult years to manage that. But over my whole career, I've pretty much met annual guidance, but very seldom met quarterly guidance on both sides.
And that's what we do, is we give you a budget plan, and we shoot to meet it. And ultimately, at the end of the day, there's a huge amount of value embedded in Barrick. And what we want you to do is hold us accountable for unlocking that value rather than seeing if we produce the gold because gold is really, it's about value. How are we going to create that value? And I'm very comfortable we will. And by the way, probably some people know it. But as a member of our executive team, we are all owners. And I own a substantial amount, more than most of your funds own in the company, and Graham does. And every executive here has a requirement on multiple of their gross salaries to own shares in the company. So we are absolutely aligned with our shareholders as an organization.
Just one more question. So on the Reko Diq, to follow on the question that Dan was asking, one is just in terms of the equity contribution of the partners. So those are the SOEs. Those are the Pakistani SOEs, and they're fully on board with their portion of the equity. So that's all good. I mean.
Affirmative, yeah. So they carry their share of the capital in the same way that we do. And as Mark touched on earlier, these are some of the largest, if not the largest, businesses in Pakistan. They are petrochemical-based businesses, so they're generating dollar-based revenues. So our choice to partner with them was a deliberate strategy in terms of aligning ourselves with the strongest corporate entities, as well as the fact that they have very real experience of operating in Pakistan and in Balochistan. So they're very useful, valuable, capable partners.
It's probably also worth mentioning that a large portion of the spend on the project is actually going to be in Pakistani rupees. Along with our strategy of trying to maximize local procurement, local spending, we will be using a lot of local partners. So to the extent that there is local spending, it's very easy for our Pakistani partners to fund that because they are local. And our funding, naturally, would come from dollars. So there's a natural partnership here that makes it very affordable and sensible.
Okay. And then in terms of the contractor, have you been talking with potential EPCMs in terms of who will actually build the plant and develop the mine?
So we're right in the middle of that adjudication, and we'll share that with you. We've just about finished the process in Lumwana.
And again, Pakistan, as Tim's pointed to, the power. So we'll package some of the big infrastructure up and do it separately. So power is a classic example. The railroad upgrade is the responsibility of the railroad company. We'll supply the wheels through some sort of structure, and that means a project. And then the construction of the actual processing facility, that's the big focus. Right now, where we are is that, as we've done in Kibali, we'll modularize that, and we're going to do the same in Lumwana. And so then it's finding the sources where you're going to construct and how you access the steel. And we will definitely have at least one, if not more, engineering partner, as we've done in all our construction projects. And that is really about critical is design procurement, QA/QC, and then it's how you assemble it on site.
So that's what the team is currently really focused on to get to the end of our feasibility and sign off on it.
Okay. And just a quick question on the water. You said you aren't going to use a desalination plant anymore. And you also mentioned that it's desert. So where are you going to get the water from, and what have you been able to, how has that been able to happen in terms of also providing the drinking water and all that other stuff?
Yeah. So I mean, and Tim can add a bit here too in terms of the work. But I mean, really, for us, that was one of the biggest aspects of this project. Essentially, we approached it like an exploration project. We were exploring for water.
We had a good idea based on the previous work that had been done, but we knew we needed to do more to better quantify that aquifer. So essentially, there were a number of aquifers we looked at. What we're calling the northern groundwater system or the fan sediments is what we really looked at. We did the geotech, the geophysical work that we needed to do. And we quantified and modeled that aquifer. And what we saw is that it had a lot more capacity than originally thought. So essentially, it could provide water for both phases of the project. There's no issues in terms of the quantity there. And I think we've even modeled it very conservatively in terms of what it can yield. So it has, we believe, greater potential than that. So that excluded the desal, the pipeline.
But also sort of in our back pockets, we've got the southern groundwater system, which we're going to continue with the same rigor. We're going to do the same work that we've done previously on the northern groundwater system and firm that up. So really, I think it does eliminate, certainly for the first two phases of the project, the desal and potentially beyond that. I mean, for water on site, again, the fan sediments, we've already put the early works ESIA in place. It's been approved. We're going to construct that pipeline already from the fan sediments to the project for the construction phase. And then as we ramp up, we'll obviously put in the bore field at the fan sediments. I don't know. Tim, is there anything you want to add to that?
I'd just add that, I mean, there's no users of this water at the fan sediments, and that's one of the key reasons why it's a suitable target. It's also got a hard cap over the top, and it sits at quite a depth, 350-700 meters. We spent a huge amount of time in the study on water. It really was something that wasn't that well advanced in the prior feasibility study. With the way that the world's changed using these groundwater sources, we felt that a lot of work needed to be done there. So the drilling, the borehole testing, and the final point I'd say is that it's very saline. So again, it's not drinking water. So any water that you need for drinking needs to be treated.
As I touched on, all the communities in the area, we work with them to put bores in place, put RO plants in place. The volumes you're talking for drinking water, they're a drop in the ocean compared to what we're having to feed for this plant, right? We're more than capable and willing to work with the communities to put drinking water facilities in place.
Great. Thanks. Okay.
We've got some questions from our online guests. First two, I'll read them together from Mike Parkin. Is the weaker outlook for PV in 2025 factored into today's multi-year outlook? And are the multi-year cost CapEx forecasts based on reserve lives only, or do they factor in needed investment for resource-to-reserve conversion?
Yes, to both.
PV's updated forecast is in the outlooks for both the five years that Mark showed in detail and the 10 years that I showed. And then the growth capital requirements for resource-to-reserve conversion are incorporated within our five-year capital expenditure profiles.
Okay. Then from Anita Soni, what is the gold price used to estimate cash costs and AISC for 2025, 2026, etc.?
The price is $2,400 for the gold price assumptions and for copper it's $4 a pound.
Then another one from Mike Parkin.
Just for Anita too, because I see she came out with her numbers on the capital, which we've now covered. Just to remind Anita, we've been doing a feasibility study, and this is the first time we've sort of given you the full monty.
As was said earlier, the previous numbers, particularly for Reko Diq, were based on the 2013 feasibility study adjusted for inflation. So it's a completely different project, and it's got another significant increase in throughput and production. So different project that we've shared with you today.
Okay. Another one from Mike Parkin. What year does Fourm ile PEA assume commercial production by?
So the PEA at the moment would assume first pour to commence in 2030. So.
Okay. Then I have one from David Haughton. Thank you for your presentation. A few questions, please. One, interesting exploration activities in LATAM, but no mention of Norte Abierto, Alturas, or Pascua-Lama. What is the status of those projects? Two, a not necessarily related question. Are you interested in the sale of non-core assets, especially given the prices received by Newmont recently? What assets could be on that list?
And then three, are your activities in Canada other than Hemlo based on generative targets? You have substantial Canadian tax credits available, as I recall.
So it's a pleasure, David. Just on the non-core assets, we are always looking at thinning out on non-core assets. And as we get to the point of making the decision, we'll share it to the market. We've done it from the very first day of the merger back in 2019, and we look for that. And there are a number of potentially non-core assets in our portfolio, which we've shared with the market from time to time.
On Norte Abierto, obviously, Newmont are the operators of that project, and we are actively working with them on updates to the pre-feasibility study in support of that.
On Pascua-Lama, we're at a point where we understand the potential resource, but there's a lot of work to be done to be able to confirm it. The initial indications are that there's potentially more leachable material than was originally contemplated. The big focus is to finalize that economic assessment. We'll give a heads-up, as we said, at the end of the year, so in our 2024 year-end quarterly. The big focus has been closing down the old legacy Pascua, and that has taken our focus. We've recently applied for the DIA to be able to complete that water treatment program. Then we will be, and we've addressed all the liabilities in Chile today. Once we get to that EIA approval, then there's a discussion to be held with the Chilean government because we still own the mining, the exploration rights.
And for us to fully evaluate what the Pascua would look like as an opportunity, we need to put some boreholes in. So we would have to apply for permits to be able to drill those holes. So that's where we are. And we'll give you a further update in January when we, I mean, February when we talk about the year-end results.
Okay. Then a yes to our activities in Canada outside of Hemlo being generative.
So as you know, we've looked at most of the deals that have come forward, and we'll continue to look at opportunities. In the meantime, as Joel explained, we have built a substantial portfolio of exploration rights. And I think you'll see that our considered approach to opportunities will be demonstrated as the appropriate way to look at building a long-term business that does focus on value.
From today's work, you can see the margins are big, and they're baked in. We didn't have to go and issue additional paper to get there. We did the deals. They were at market. We've worked tirelessly since then to make sure that we deliver on what we said. We've replaced all the gold and copper we've mined, and we've done it all organically. We haven't asked anyone for any extra money. We've reduced our net debt. The company is in a. It's a standout position in our industry, and we're really excited about delivering on that. By the way, we did it in Randgold back from 2011 to 2015. We had built three mines. We had lots of debt. We took the margin instead of chasing the M&A. We delivered real value, outperformed the FTSE for 10 years.
So I think we're in good shape. And to your point, we have the firepower to utilize the tax shield, and we have the liquidity to pursue opportunities should they arrive and should they meet the investment criteria that Simon shared with you in his presentation.
Okay. Did you want to say something? Question from Brian MacArthur. I realize the numbers for Fourmile are preliminary, but for processing, you appear to have assumed the same costs as Gold rush. So I assume in this preliminary analysis, all of Fourmile goes to the roasters. If Fourmile can be sent to the autoclaves, does that help the processing costs as well as getting higher overall grade in production? Because you can get higher grade through the autoclave and free up roaster capacity to process other high-grade material.
Also, what are your latest thoughts on when and if you would build an autoclave at Cortez or Fourmile? Thanks.
Fairly straightforward answers. Yes, yes, and yes. Yes, we have used the roaster costs at present. Yes, there is potential for benefits with autoclave, using autoclave. Yes, we do currently see capacity in the current installed autoclave base, particularly out in 2030 and beyond, where the autoclaves are currently only fed by low-grade stockpiles. That displacement uplift, as I explained in my presentation, is substantial when you're going from 2 gram a ton feed to potentially upwards of 13 grams a ton feed. What is the last question? We've taken a break. I think in terms of building new facilities, as we go through the pre-feasibility for Fourmile, we'll understand the overall metallurgical split in a lot more detail.
But at the moment, the initial indications are that we have capacity within our current facilities.
Okay. Another question from Anita Soni. Does the basis for the Phase 1 CapEx for Reko Diq start from 2025 onward or include all spending to date?
So that includes all of the capital, including what we've done to date, right? So yeah, the early works that was capitalized is in that number.
Thanks, Tim. Another one from Daniel Major, also in Reko Diq. Can you talk about the scope change for Reko Diq? Throughput has increased by 5 million tons for p hase I and 10 million tons for phase—million or megatons—for phase I and II, but targeted annual copper and gold production for phase I and two is unchanged at 400 kilotons copper and 500 kilo ounces gold.
Yes.
The production numbers were kept the same from last time, and they'll be updated with the feasibility study. The 5 million tons per annum is basically a function of the work the team has done on the grind size recovery. We did look at coarse particle flotation, and as part of that work, we ended up landing on leaving the real estate in our plant design for coarse particle flotation should that technology advance and should it pick up, but certainly, as we worked through that, we landed on a different grind size. The prior study worked at 212 micron, and that equated to a 40 million tons per annum through the circuit. We've been able to coarsen the grind up to 300 micron.
And then as a function of doing that, looking at the rest, the capacity, yes, you have to change some things in the conditioning circuit, and you have to add some power. But overall, you basically get 45 million tons per annum through the old 40 circuit by coarsening the grind.
Okay. I have two questions. One from Josh Wilson and another one from Tanya Jakusconek, both on PV. So I'll ask them together. Barrick's new PV El Naranjo tailings schedule outlines completion in 2029. Historically, the company reviewed tailings constraints beginning in 2027, absent this facility. How is the company managing this risk, and how much scheduling flexibility is there with updated tailings construction timelines? And then the next one is the $500 million more in capital cost for the tailings facility at PV. Can you update us on what the main components are?
Okay.
So the 2027 and how we get to 2029 is we do those raises on El Llagal, which we've talked about before. And then we also are going to do something with the Hondo waste dump as well. So that gets us out there. And we still have, I think, four to six months of float. So there's plenty of time for that. As to what the cost changes are, it's largely inflation, like I said. It's also re-engineering. We've finished the full feasibility on it. And there is a significant change in what we had to do based on what was required and giving us that optionality going forward.
And as Mark mentioned, the new design gives us the potential to add extra capacity in the future once Joel's exploration is successful. So that's an important additional flexibility. Yeah.
I think that, as Mark said, the critical thing here is when you look at how you drive the cost down and that capital per ounce, it's significant. It's significantly low, $187 an ounce to put that capital in, and part of that extra capital is the Llagal extension, so we've got to lift the Llagal's wall, so overall, it adds additional capacity, and then just to remind you, Tanya, this is a new dam. It's a dam. Remember, our first choice, we agreed to move to the current position, and this dam wall is bigger, as we pointed out, and we're still finishing the geotech drilling to make sure that we design the foundations and the dam wall correctly, and we are dealing with a very seismically active environment, so this dam is a proper dam wall, just like Llagal's, and it's designed to withstand seismic activity.
So there's no way that we're going to skimp on the design and the construction of this dam wall. And we are still bringing. It's already come down a bit to the number that we shared with you today. And of course, as we drill out the final geotech holes, we'll be tightening up on that design.
And already, that expanded tailings facility is opening up additional reserves. So again, you'll see that reflected at our year-end statement with a substantial change in PV's reserves accounting for having the extra tailings capacity. So there's life-of-mine benefits to this as well.
Okay. We don't have no more questions.
Very good. Anybody want to have a crack from here?
What's the total capital? Just get the mark there. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just where is total CapEx coming in for this year?
I know you had something on what looks like slide 13 and the financial piece. That looks like it's sort of coming in at $3.2 billion or something. And then what do you think it's going to be next year based on those incremental copper and gold capital lines on some later charts? Looks like it goes up by $1 billion or more from wherever it was this year. Is that?
Yeah. So capital for this year on an attributable basis is looking to be within our guidance, probably around the $2.7 billion level, which is within the guidance that we provided at the start of the year. In terms of 2025, yeah, there's a big step up, probably just over $1 billion more than that. We'll obviously be giving full guidance in February when we do our normal annual guidance.
As you can imagine, we've got elevated capital from 2025 through to 2027 as we've got these two significant growth projects, both basically being constructed over that same period. So you see the capital elevate over those three years and then start to decline after that.
Thank you. Regarding Ecuador, I'm just interested. You're looking at, obviously, great geological potential. It's been a tough place to mine. Footprints are probably more important there than they are in, obviously, in Chile, etc. Just in terms of getting a mine permitted and built there, especially an open cast one, I would just be interested in your thoughts.
So the thing about Ecuador, I was there just the other day with the team. They've done an amazing job. It's that you've got to choose your areas that you're going to go and invest in.
As you know, we partnered with ENAMI, as Joel explained. You've also got to worry about the social component of the environment that you're investing in. As you know, there's Fruta del Norte, which has been very successful. Further to the west, there's a Chinese investment. We are part of our portfolios positioned near that. Then further to the west, is it, Joel? Yeah. Further to the west, we've got another block of ground. We believe, and we've done all the on-ground work. Our two grounds points, that's our first stop, is engagement with the communities and the government and ENAMI, which is the State Mining Company. We are on the ground. We've built those relationships. Certainly, this is an area of Ecuador where there's an acceptance of mining. That's the right way.
By the way, that's a very real and important step in most of South America. It's to the mining industry's big mistakes have been ignoring communities and doing the job that we've grown up doing. So we're aware of that, and we'll walk that walk. Even today, I can share with you in other parts of, particularly in Peru, there are places where we can go as Barrick, where other miners can't go because of the reputation. The work around Pierina has been exceptional. With that, we've earned a differentiated social license in parts of Peru. The southern project we've just now getting drill permits for in Peru, that required a presidential decree to be able to operate within that band of the border band across the Chilean border. So again, that's further in the cap of the team.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Okay.
Thank you very much, everyone. We're going to invite you for those who've got a bit of time, join us for lunch, and again, to all the presenters, thank you for your hard work and appreciate it.