Cents a share at the time, and we might have had a market capitalization of maybe $25 million. And here we are back 23 years later, and we're sitting with a market capitalization around $8 billion. We've come a long, long way over that time. I have to say that if it wasn't for the support that we had from investors out of Zurich in those very early days, I could make a good case for the fact that I wouldn't be standing here right now. So sometimes you're going to come across these much smaller companies run by a group of probably much younger Canadians than I am today, and they're really working hard on building value. It's tough to do. It's a very, very tough sector. But there's definitely going to be more money made for investors in the gold mining business.
We're at a point now where we're producing 500,000 ounces of gold a year. We did about 530,000 last year. We're forecasted to do just over 500 this year. Our costs are declining as we've been in the process of the last few years of replacing higher-cost ounces from our older operations with new ounces that are produced at lower cost. There's been a real change in our early days. We were 100% focused in Mexico. We started out with one mining operation called Mulatos, and now we have two Canadian mining operations in Ontario. We're adding a third through the development of the Lynn Lake project in northern Manitoba. And most of you probably have been following the news where we've just announced the acquisition of our neighbor, Argonaut Gold, which will bring on the Magino deposit. And I'll talk a little bit about that.
That will push about 90% of our net asset value into Canada. All of our mines are long-life mines, and they're all first-quartile costs and, as I said, getting lower. Alamos has had a tremendous run over the last couple of years. It really started in 2022 when we announced the Phase 3 Expansion at Island Gold. Island Gold, when we first acquired it, had a relatively small reserve, somewhat larger reserve resource base. But the insight we had into Island Gold when we acquired it is that most of that resource was going to convert into reserve, and the potential to grow reserves beyond that was significant. And that was a very good call because we took the mine from 700,000 ounces of reserves and roughly 1.1 million ounces of resource.
Today, it sits at 1.7 million ounces of reserves and over, what, 4.5 million ounces or so of resource. So we're over 6 million ounces combined, and it's still growing. And that's net of depletion. We've mined something like 1.5 million ounces out of that deposit. We're developing it further. And the good news has really been that the ounces that we've added, not just in Island Gold but also in our project in Manitoba and in Mexico as well, that reserve growth has been a real driver of our value, and it allows us to point to these very, very long-life, low-cost operations. There's been this ongoing problem and probably one of the reasons why you haven't seen a really immediate sort of response to the rising gold prices, as you might have expected.
That's because costs have tended to rise across the sector. This has happened before. It's not the first time we've seen it. Generally, when there's inflation driving gold prices, inflation is affecting costs in the industry as well. In Canada, I can speak to labor costs in particular. Alamos is a little different because while we are going to see rising production, we're not going to see rising production at the expense of rising costs. We actually are forecasting even lower costs and mostly derived through productivity gains that we're going to achieve through economies of scale and through mining more of our production from our high-grade, low-cost operations. In terms of our value creation, we probably have one of the best track records in the sector for M&A. This is not a sector that has done terribly well where M&A is concerned.
In fact, I've attended some conferences over the last year or more where one of the primary criticisms leveled against the sector is it doesn't really allocate capital very well. As a result, it tends to destroy value rather than create value for investors. When I get asked that question, "Why aren't we attracting a broader spectrum of investors to the sector?" that has to be the answer. If you can't make money for investors, they're going to find an investment that will. We've always tried to differentiate ourselves by running our gold mining operations. We run it like a business. If we can't make money on an investment, we won't make an investment. If we don't see an opportunity through an acquisition, we won't make it. One of the things we're quite well known for is to be buying countercyclically.
If you see from the far left-hand side of your slide, we acquired Mulatos for $10 million. By now, we've generated something like nearly $500 million in free cash flow. The market still has more than a $600 million valuation on that asset. Mulatos has been producing now since 2005, and it's going to produce well into 2030s based on what we can see with reserve development at PDA and other sort of sulfide resources that we're defining there. Young- Davidson is a project that we acquired. It was our entry into Canada. We took it on in 2015 when the gold price was not much more than $1,100 an ounce. Over time, through development and production, we've increased the value so that you can see on a combined basis like $1.5 billion in value.
Island Gold is an even more extreme example where we paid $640 million for the asset at the end of 2017 when gold was under $1,300 an ounce. The market was very skeptical, I must say, when we made that acquisition. We can now point to $2.5 billion of value created through the cash flow that we've generated plus the ongoing, very exciting exploration results that we've achieved as we've been drilling out that deposit. We've added millions of ounces of gold at Island. The interesting thing is we've added it at $13 an ounce. If that question is confronting you, "Where should I go for exposure to gold?
Should I go buy an ETF, or maybe I should buy a gold equity?" Well, if the CEO in front of you is able to say, "Well, I'm adding millions and millions of ounces of gold to our reserves at $13 an ounce," he's doing somewhat better than the ETF who has to go into the market that day and buy the gold at whatever the prevailing price is. What is it today? $2,350. So I think there is a good value proposition, but not enough CEOs are able to stand in front of you and say that. We are going to continue to invest heavily in exploration. We have done so for years, again, in a very countercyclical way. When the market was really sort of drawing in its dollars and not really investing heavily in exploration, we've been going gangbusters.
This year alone, we have a budget of $62 million, which must be one of the biggest exploration budgets for any company of our size. Why wouldn't you do that when you're adding these high-quality ounces at such a low cost? Again, we envision with our most recent acquisition of Argonaut Gold a similar sort of value proposition where it looks like a relatively small transaction from the front end, but the value creation is going to be very obvious as time goes on. Combined, Island Gold and Magino, which are only 300 meters apart, interestingly enough, they're going to have over 11.5 million ounces. That's a Tier one asset, if ever there was.
Between the mill that's in place there and other infrastructure, including a tailings facility, which will handle probably double what we'll need on the basis of what we know about those deposits today, that is tremendously valuable to us. The mill is permitted to go to 35,000 tons a day. The tailings facilities can hold 150 million tons of material. That is a very interesting proposition when we're talking about a world where permitting things like tailings facilities and mill expansions and so forth, these are tough things to accomplish in Canada. We can see so much optionality in the ability of Alamos to expand those operations, expanding at the open pit, expanding our underground operations to the point where we can envision one day as much as 500,000 ounces of production per year coming out of this complex.
The way it will start is by 2026, when we finish the Island Gold expansion, we'll be doing roughly 2,400 ounces a year out of 24 tons a day, pardon me, out of the Island Gold side of things and 10,000 tons a day out of the Magino side. That will generate 400,000 ounces of production. A few people have noticed that Magino has really struggled as they've tried to commission the mine and bring it into commercial production, well aware of that. We've looked at it in a very, very conservative manner, and we're quite satisfied that, first of all, all the ounces are there. That's a question that's come up more than once. The ounces are indeed there.
We think with the operational expertise that we can bring to bear and given the fact that we have time and capital, two things that our predecessors lacked, those are the things that are absolutely key to getting operations like this to run properly. I can remember getting our first mine going back in 2005 when we were trying to get Mulatos up and running, and every conceivable thing seemed to go wrong. But it took us just over a year, and we had that thing humming, and it went on to make fantastic profits for our shareholders. I think we're going to see something very similar here. There is tremendous potential here in the long term. This is an interesting slide. It shows better than anything why we have such excellent synergies. The big blue patch that you see on the slide, that's the Magino open pit.
You can see how closely it's located relative to our underground operations at Island. We control a massive land position now in this belt. We essentially have a claim position that extends something like 100 km from Magino to the west to Renabie in the east. It's a massive land package. And we probably know better than most how prospective it is. The opportunity for us now, with all this additional milling capacity, our opportunities of even adding mid-grade deposits, Island Gold is running 11 grams. Magino is probably something just under a gram. But there are opportunities now, with all that mill capacity, to add something even in the 4-5 gram range. And we've got all the capacity that we need to process it. So I think the future for this asset looks incredibly bright.
I'm going to save a little time for Andrew to answer some questions. Here's how we envision it going. It's going to start off initially at both operations running separate mills. But going into 2025, we intend to combine Island Gold ore and the ore coming from Magino into the Magino mill. So it'll produce 11,200 tons a day. That's a very easily achieved goal. The next step, getting ready for the Island Gold expansion completion in 2026, we'll have to invest roughly $40 million to get the throughput rate of that mill up to 12,400 tons a day. And that will allow it to accommodate all the ore coming from Magino and from Island. And on that basis, we're going to bring down the unit cost of milling in quite a significant way.
It's a lot cheaper to run the new Magino mill than it is to run our mill on the Island side. So the synergies here are just really exceptional. And we pointed to something like $500 million and I think it was $550 million of synergies against something like a $530 million acquisition cost when you add up the equity plus the debt side of things, so the enterprise value. That's really an exceptional deal. You'll very seldom see these kinds of synergies. So this is an interesting slide. It basically shows how we started when we acquired Island Gold itself. We subsequently added in our first acquisition a private company called Trillium Mining, which owned the ground right next to us. That was a good acquisition to make since we could already see the Island Gold ore body extending down onto the Trillium ground.
We then added a company called Manitou, which brought in this very, very large, better than 50,000-hectare land package extending all the way over to Renabie in the east, as you can see. Now, of course, with the Magino acquisition, we add the Magino mine plus all the ground to the west. A really extraordinary growth story from virtually every perspective. It's one of the few complexes in Canada with this kind of resource base already. Its potential to grow, it's not to be underestimated. What does it do for us as a company? Well, you can see looking forward, we have an opportunity without any further expansions at Island, without concerning ourselves with that at all. We have the opportunity to grow to 900,000 ounces a year of annualized production with 15 years of mine life and growing and declining costs.
And I think this is a very, very compelling story and really one which differentiates Alamos Gold from most of what you're going to hear about from the sector. I think across the board, everybody is going to do substantially better these days with gold prices running the way they are. But Alamos has been ahead of the pack now for several years, and I think we're going to maintain that position. It's just a company that has been very focused on growth when growth has not necessarily been what investors have been terribly concerned with. But ultimately, that's what underpins a good investment. And that's why we remain focused in that regard. So that sort of concludes the formal part of my presentation. Shall we?
Sure. A couple of questions?
Just join me, for we have time for a couple of questions anyways. I think you sort of outlined the benefits and the opportunities with the Argonaut acquisition. So I think that's good. But you talked about a declining cost profile over the near term. What are the key drivers of realizing that declining cost profile?
So while we were going through the final phases of the main Mulatos pit from roughly 2019 through 2023 when we mined out the last of the reserves, we were deep in the pit, and we were down into the mixed oxide sulfide. And so recoveries were somewhat lower, costs were somewhat higher. So our cost profile was higher than it is now, in the high $1,200s. We mined out the remnants of the pit, and that was replaced by La Yaqui Grande, which has been—it's a brand new open pit oxide heap leach operation in Mexico. It's very, very low cost. And that was the first significant driver of bringing our costs down. And then more of our production was also coming out of the very high-grade Island Gold mine, where, again, we saw significant improvement in costs year-over-year.
And then, of course, our very steady production coming from Young-Davidson, which at roughly $1,100 an ounce, you could just see how, on a combined basis, our costs were effectively reducing. Now we're going to be introducing the Island Gold expansion. And just from economies of scale, going from 1,200 tons a day to 2,400 tons a day, now operating through a much more efficient mill, you're going to see costs drop again. On a standalone basis, Island Gold would do something like sub-$600 all-in sustaining costs. And with more of your production coming out of that high-grade operation, that has a way of bringing down the costs across the board. Even combining it with Magino through the one mill, we're going to end up with more production and still, ultimately, we're going to see our all-in sustaining costs around $1,000 an ounce.
Okay. You talked about Magino and the opportunities that presents. Introducing that, does that have any effect on the rest of your growth pipeline, any of your other projects that you're looking to?
Not in terms of timing. I mean, so over the last couple of years, we've been obtaining the permits and moving Lynn Lake closer to a production decision. And that's slated for next year. We haven't changed that at all. We're still going to bring, in fact, working quite a bit this year on road, power line. We're effectively upgrading the power line that already exists. Plus, we're putting in a camp facility. We're also drilling off two new deposits there called Burnt Timber and Linkwood. They're sitting in inferred resource right now. We're going to bring them up to reserve and add those to the production pipeline at Lynn Lake. And then, of course, we're working on this new discovery in Mexico called PDA. It's already over a million ounces at six grams. So some of the highest-grade material we'll ever mine out of Mexico.
And that is the beginning of our sort of transition from mining oxides in Mexico to mining sulfides. That will continue to grow. We don't see any need to back off on any of those timelines.
Okay. Excellent. I think we're just about out of time. But you alluded to sort of the more than two-decade history of coming here. I think the consistency of leadership and the disciplined strategy that you've sort of conveyed during that time is, like you said, really unique. Congratulations.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks.
Thank you.