Welcome everyone to our annual general meeting. I'm going to go through a slide presentation. I'm going to go through it a little more quickly than I otherwise would, because we're going to have this followed by a video presentation that we have put together in recognition of our 20th anniversary as a company. Now to look at the company 2022 year in review. I draw your attention first of all to our cautionary notes. Moving to Slide 3. We've had a very strong year in 2022 on a number of fronts. We continued to execute in our operations, and we were one of the few companies to have met cost guidance in 2022.
We also delivered on a number of key catalysts, which solidified our position as a strong mid-tier company with a very positive outlook. We completed construction on La Yaqui Grande ahead of schedule, which helped drive a very strong second half of the year. Furthermore, we released the Island Gold Phase Three Plus study, outlining a larger and more valuable operation at Island Gold. Turning to Slide 4, I'll just make a few comments on ESG. From an ESG perspective, we continued to make progress and build upon our strengths. We're already an industry leader with regard to our GHG emissions and water usage per ounce of gold produced. We're well below our peer and senior producer average, and we're working on improving things further.
It's an objective of ours to announce, to reach a 30% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030, and that is 30% below what is already one of the lowest GHG readings across our peer group. We have initiatives underway at all three operations, highlighted by our Phase III Expansion at Island Gold, which is expected to drive a 35% reduction in GHG emissions over the life of the mine. Looking at Slide 5. As you can appreciate, safety remains and will remain a core value of this company. We instill a safety-first mindset across our organizations and through our Home Safe Every Day program, and we're seeing results, with a 63% reduction in our lost time injury rate since 2019. However, some...
That is still something that we will continue to improve upon. From a social perspective, wherever we operate, our focus is on creating a net benefit within our communities that will last well beyond the life of our mines. We continue to be recognized for our efforts, particularly at our Mulatos mine, where we've been operating for 18 years. For the last 15 consecutive years, we've been recognized by Mexico for what they call the... Well, the English translation would be an environmentally and socially responsible company. It's a very high bar they set to achieve that, and we've achieved it essentially for 15 consecutive years. Turning to Slide 6. We've also been recognized for our good governance practices and our broader ESG performance.
This is something that's tracked by a number of organizations and media outlets. We're very proud of our record, and we continue to make changes that will ultimately build upon our past success. Moving to Slide 7. Looking at operations, we had a strong 2022 and an exceptional Q4 with record quarterly production, record quarterly revenue, and costs at the lowest level of the year. All 3 operations had a strong year, meeting their respective production guidance. Costs also were met and were below the midpoint of our guidance range, which was a solid performance given the industry-wide inflationary pressures. Looking specifically at Young-Davidson, it was a great year.
Production and costs were well in line with guidance, we generated a record $101 million of free cash flow. For the 15-year reserve life, we expect a similar rate of free cash flow over the long term. At Island Gold, we announced the Phase Three Plus Expansion, outlining a larger and more profitable and greener operation. Construction of the Phase Three Expansion is progressing well, and once completed in 2026, this is going to be a game changer for the operation and for the company. It's going to more than double Island Gold's rate of production. There will be a decrease in All-in Sustaining Costs to industry low levels below $600 per ounce, creating one of the most profitable and valuable operations in Canada.
It's going to significantly reduce our Greenhouse gas emissions as we shift from bringing ore up through our ramp system to using a shaft, which is essentially powered off the Ontario power grid. Looking at La Yaqui Grande. La Yaqui Grande is within our Mulatos District. We completed construction of the mine and achieved initial production in June, which was a key driver of our strong second half performance at Mulatos. The successful ramp-up of operations, La Yaqui Grande, contributed 68,000 ounces in the second half of the year at below $600 in All-in Sustaining Costs, which helped drive our production higher and our costs lower. We have a very strong outlook as we look into 2023.
We expect a very strong performance from all three of our operations and continued profitability, which has obviously been very, very well helped by higher gold prices so far this year. Going to Slide 12. We're off to a very good start with Q1 production above our guidance for the quarter and costs once again in line. The strong performance was driven by solid performances at all three operations, especially at La Yaqui Grande, which is in its third full quarter of operating. With growing production and declining costs, we are on track for a record year on many metrics, including revenue, cash flow, and we expect to see a substantial increase in free cash flow. Looking at Slide 13. The phase III+ Expansion is a key driver of our long-term production growth and cost improvement.
As you can see from the photos here, the expansion is well underway. Construction of the hoist house, building steel and external cladding is complete. The installation of the hoist and headframe are on track to start this quarter, after which the shaft sink is expected to start in the fourth quarter. Once the expansion is completed in 2026, Island Gold is going to be among the largest and lowest cost mines in Canada, and it's certainly going to be the most profitable mine for Alamos Gold. Turning to the next slide, we have a number of low-cost growth initiatives, not least of which is the exploration underway at the PDA zone at our Mulatos project in Mexico. We've had some excellent success there over the last 18 months. It's a deposit that's grading roughly 5 grams.
We announced a 70% increase in reserves and resources to 1 million ounces this past February. As outlined in our exploration update earlier this month, we expect that growth is going to continue, given our ongoing exploration success with a number of high-grade intercepts recently announced. In fact, I'm in Mexico now, and I'm just back from the mine site, where I was reviewing the exploration results, and I must say there's a tremendous atmosphere of enthusiasm. I think that's bolstered by the fact that the results sort of are coming in so well. There's clearly a feeling among our exploration staff that we're going to see a lot of growth over the course of this year.
Our Lynn Lake project in Manitoba is another key part of our longer-term growth strategy. We achieved a significant permitting milestone with the approval of its environmental impact statement in March, this was both approved by the federal and provincial governments. We're working now on updating a feasibility study, which we expect will be completed by mid-year, outlining another long life and low-cost operation. Turning to the next slide. All of these projects are key components of our strong outlook, with growing production and declining costs. This includes a 9% growth in production this year and a 5% reduction in All-in Sustaining Costs. Those costs are going to decline a further 17% to $1,000 an ounce by 2025.
Long term, we expect the completion of the phase III Expansion to drive our annual production to closer to 600,000 ounces a year, with further cost reduction. Once the development of the Lynn Lake Project is factored in, we can see production growing to as much as 800,000 ounces of gold a year. Our growth profile is one of the best in the sector. All our growth is coming within Canada, which is one of the best jurisdictions in the world. Lastly, certainly not least, our broad-based success over the year has been reflected in one of the best price performance for our shares. This has been a reflection of a number of things. The development of long life, high-quality assets. We have one of the lowest political risk profiles in the sector.
We have high return, fully funded growth and declining costs, driving increased profitability, and a long-term track record of creating value and operational execution.
Many companies tick some of these boxes. We're one of the only intermediates that tick all of them. We're a unique company, we have everything we need to be successful, and all the attributes needed to continue that strong performance. That concludes our formal presentation. I'll now in, turn the call over to Scott Parsons, our Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, for any of the questions that might have come through the webcast. Scott?
Thank you, John. There are no questions on the webcast at this time, so I'll return the meeting back to yourself.
Thank you. Finally, for today, I'm proud to say that 2023 is a special year for Alamos Gold, as it is our 20th anniversary. We've had the opportunity to celebrate this occasion with employees across the company. As I mentioned, I'm in Mexico now, where we had such an event with our employees over the last couple of days. It's with great pleasure that I now introduce a video, which we produced, that highlights our growth story, our culture, and the values that we live by every day across Alamos Gold.
If you look at the summary of the 20th anniversary, starts with one man in his home office 20 years ago, you turn the corner. 20 years seems like a long time, it's really not that much. You turn around you have 2,000 employees, 3 world-class operations, one-fourth in the cards that's ready to go. It's pretty darn fantastic, that's not coming out of thin air. This is good decision making, following through on ideas and thoughts that are going some places, having the right people in the right time, working together to deliver on that, having great assets to deliver. That's exciting.
The culture is wonderful. It's really inviting. It's always enjoyable. It's a fun group to work with. I genuinely enjoy coming to work every day. I look forward to being here, and it's like our own little family. It's a home away from home.
En Alamos llevo trabajando 18 años, tres meses, y me encanta la minería, por eso sigo trabajando lo mismo.
The group that we have here is fantastic, not just within my own our own department, but the entire group.
There's a real broad cross-section of people to be able to run the business that we run on an everyday basis. Having the opportunity to work with different disciplines, in those environments, I always find it very rewarding and very challenging.
You know, growing the company wouldn't happen without a really strong management team. We have a long track record of working together, that relationship is really built on collaboration and trust. We have a board that's very supportive of the strategy that we've looked to implement. It's really that type of cohesion that is fundamental for companies to operate successfully over long term.
Celebrar veinte años con Alamos para mí significa que es una empresa firme, una empresa fuerte, y da esperanzas a que siguen muchos años más de trabajo, más tiempo colaborando con esta empresa tan importante.
The whole story really kicks off in about 1994, when my former boss at the first mining company I'd ever worked for, he approached me and he said, "You know, why don't we start a mining company?" We entered into a joint venture in November of 2001 with National Gold, with the idea of exploring and developing the Mulatos project. The vote was taken on the 21st of February of 2003. The companies were merged, and that's when I became CEO, and I had the responsibility at that point of developing Mulatos. Well, at that point, it had no permits. We didn't have any water rights. We didn't have any agreements with the Ejido in order to develop the mine. Virtually everything had to be done.
Desde el inicio de la construcción de Mina Mulatos, hasta la fecha, Alamos ha crecido muchísimo, desde la formación de las personas en infraestructura, en su cultura de la seguridad, su cultura de la sustentabilidad. Alamos ha crecido mucho con su relación en el medio ambiente y sobre todo, comunidad.
Creo que Alamos Gold y específicamente la Mina Mulatos, es una historia de éxito, totalmente. Es increíble ser parte de la historia y presenciar cómo después de 20 años, una mina y una empresa como Alamos Gold, ha podido diversificarse de tal manera, de tener presencia a nivel mundial.
Started out with John's acquisition of the Mulatos mine, got that up and running, optimized and managed to generate a lot of cash flow from that operation, then used that to put ourselves in a position where we had a strong balance sheet and were able to execute on M&A during down cycles in the market.
It took a while before we decided to make an acquisition. We did sort of acquire a few exploration projects along the way. One of them happened to be in Turkey, where we ultimately delineated about 3 million ounces of gold. That was in 2010. We'd been focused on Young-Davidson since about 2010, but it had been acquired by a company called AuRico Gold. We talked to AuRico Gold on and off over the years, but in 2015, myself and the CEO of AuRico Gold got into a serious discussion about merging the companies. We merged the two companies together, and then the further development of Young-Davidson became our responsibility.
We poured several $100 million into Young-Davidson between the completion of that merger in late 2015 and 2020, and ultimately built out all the lower mine infrastructure and turned it into an 8,000 ton per day operation.
We're the biggest gold mine in probably in North America. If not, we're very close. Like, I mean, there's nobody that's mining gold from underground and bringing the tonnage up that we're doing here. It's something to be proud of. Like, we're at the top of the scale.
I'm proud of the fact that we are a team here at YD. You know, it's not just one department. Like, when we think of 8,000 tons per day, right? Naturally, people think, "Okay, that's a production group's target." That's not true. It takes everybody on site, our HR team, our warehouse team, our maintenance team, our mill group, and that kind of overshadows, or we get the blinders put on, thinking, "Oh, okay, that's the mining department's achievement." No, it's not. It's absolutely everybody that comes to site that helps us achieve those. We try and make sure that our workforce understands that.
In 2017, having brought that along quite a long way over the 2 years that we'd owned it, we saw there was another opportunity to acquire the Island Gold mine that was owned by a company called Richmont Mines. Took us over the next several years to drill and to develop a plan for that project that would leave the value proposition in front of our investors beyond question. By the time we published what we call our phase III+ study, the market could see that we were on the brink of developing a mine that could do upwards of 300,000 ounces of gold a year at sub $600 cash costs. There are very few gold mines anywhere in the world that generate that amount of free cash flow.
ultimately, it's gonna prove to be the most profitable gold asset that we own.
I think that's a testament to Alamos. Why I'm excited to be a member of the team, is the fact that we do grow reasonably. We're not like a lot of other companies where we just grab assets in pursuit of being bigger or better in some aspect. We buy quality assets, we develop them well, and we operate them well.
It's a challenging environment in that we're dynamic, we're growing. With phase III going on, there's a lot of exciting stuff there. Expanding the deposit, we're doing the exploration and defining more of the ore and stuff like that is just really cool.
Yeah, if you like the people you work with, which I do, we have a good crew, and everybody clicks, and, you know, everybody pulls together. By the end of my week off, I'm looking forward to coming back to work. Honestly.
It's a nice place to work, right from top to bottom. Everybody knows your name around here, so you don't feel like a number.
We acquired Lynn Lake in January 2016. We had about 1.6 million ounces well defined when we acquired it. Today, it's sitting at about 1 million ounces beyond that. It's about 2.5 million, 2.7 million ounces or so right now. We've just received our permits, both the federal and provincial permits, for developing that mine. We've got an opportunity to build a brand-new gold mine in northern Manitoba. We envision it producing roughly 170,000 ounces a year, but it'll probably be able to keep that up for 17-20 years.
It's a really collegiate atmosphere. I feel like everybody is working together. There's a lot of camaraderie. People respect each other, which I think is really key.
One of my favorite moments was actually the first time I saw the northern lights at that project. It was just spectacular, and I wasn't expecting it, but there's a lot of natural beauty in Lynn Lake, and that's another aspect that makes it fun working up there, too.
We acquired 2 producing assets and a development stage project all over a 3-year period. They were all done at very attractive prices. They were highly accretive to our company, and they were done at a gold price environment that is significantly below where we are today. That really set us up well for the long term in terms of generating shareholder value. If you look at Island Gold and Young-Davidson alone, those 2 combined have generated close to $2 billion of shareholder value.
What are the dominating values that we see as, you know, essential to being not just a successful mining company, but a place where, you know, people genuinely feel they belong, and they want to be part of it? It was asking all those types of questions that helped us, over time, develop the kind of culture that we have here at Alamos.
The culture that we have at Alamos is really centered around our safety systems.
Regardless of who you are and what position you hold in the organization, everybody has that responsibility for your own personal safety, but also for the safety of everybody else on site.
I personally think voices are heard, the workers' voices are heard, and we do a terrific job with health and safety.
Our people go underground safely every morning. Their personal protective equipment is provided to them from day one.
Alamos shows that the value is that everyone should be able to work in a safe environment and have that opportunity to expect that we are following the highest criteria and ensuring that everyone can be safe at the workplace.
You can't be a mining company without putting environmental sustainability right at the forefront of your value statement, because first of all, your employees wanna know that you care about the environment.
Environmental sustainability and health and safety are really at the forefront, which is really important. It's not so much production-based, it's more so we wanna make sure that the land that we are on and that we're impacting, that we can have a positive impact in the future.
El medio ambiente es todo el sitio en lo que convivimos diariamente. Nuestro aire, nuestra nuestra agua, la vegetación. Es parte de nuestra vida.
We've developed our own Sustainability Framework. We have, you know, developed a number of internal standards. We now have a much more comprehensive sustainability report. Last year, for example, we announced a greenhouse gas absolute reduction of 30% by 2030, which was a pretty significant milestone moment for the company.
I do believe that that culture really starts at the top and flows right through the entire organization, and so it really is a culture of trusting the people that you've got on your team.
You win as a team, you have hard time as a team, you can go through them and succeed as a team. I think, you know, having that sense of unity and having that comfort that you're not alone, that's what mining is all about.
Es algo satisfactorio, ¿no? Llegar y conseguir muchas cosas, ¿no? Con este trabajo. Y llegar aquí, el realizar, como lo dije ahorita, ¿no?, las metas, el cooperar, el sentirse alguien que puede ser una base también para los muchachos y llegar, pues, llegar a las metas de cada día, de cada semana, ¿no? Estos 14 días.
Just to be operating a mining company these days and producing minerals from the earth in the 21st century, you really require, long before you get started, a clear understanding of what employees will expect from you, what communities and governments will expect from you.
We support a lot of the initiatives through the various communities. We support a lot of charities and other organizations here. We wanna make sure that we are seen as the good neighbor.
For me, one of the things that gets me excited about coming to work every day is how far we've come as a company in terms of our relationships with indigenous communities here in Canada.
Empezamos siendo una empresa, digamos, pequeña, pionera en el estado, en una zona muy remota, como lo comentaba, siendo, detonando el desarrollo económico con sus comunidades y siempre manteniendo el compromiso con el medio ambiente y la seguridad.
Thinking about what's coming in the next 3- 5 years, it's going to be an awesome place to work. It's going to be one of the most up-to-date companies in the area, if not in Ontario. It's going to be the place that everybody wants to be.
There's a huge future ahead of us in terms of, you know, mine reserves and jobs for the future. Our kids could potentially be working here, and our friends. It's just great for all the communities in which we operate.
Part of that legacy is what attracted me to the company, right? In terms of how much they've been able to grow within that time and, you know, the chance to be a part of carrying that on and being a part of the future. I don't think there's any intent to slow down.
Really, what gets me excited is thinking about the future of the company. You know, the Island Gold expansion is probably the biggest single project that Alamos has ever undertaken. We've got an opportunity to build a brand-new gold mine in northern Manitoba. We've just finished building a brand-new mine down at Mulatos. We brought in the La Yaqui Grande project and just delineated another 1 million ounces, grading about 5 grams , just a little bit below what the main Mulatos pit would be. We could actually ramp into it. We don't have to sink a shaft to go after it. We clearly... We've been on the right course, and I see a bright future ahead for the company, and I'm just excited to still be leading it.
Thank you everyone for staying online and watching that presentation. That concludes our 2023 annual general meeting of shareholders. We appreciate you all attending. SGee you again next year.