Hello, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's virtual non-deal roadshow. My name is Noella Alexander- Young, virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in Houston and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Alamos Gold, trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol AGI. Presenting today is Scott K. Parsons, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. The presentation will last approximately twenty-five minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session, for which you can participate using the chat box in the top right-hand corner of your screen. With that being said, I will now hand this over to Scott.
Thank you, Noella, and welcome to everybody from the Houston and surrounding areas. It is a great time to be looking at gold. Gold averaged a record high in the second quarter of just under $2,340 an ounce. It just averaged another record high in the third quarter of $2,478 per ounce. And if you look at where gold is sitting today, north of $2,600 per ounce, if we hang in anywhere near where we are sitting today, we're gonna average a new record in the fourth quarter. So great time to be looking at gold. Even better time to be looking at the gold equities, which have lagged the performance of the gold price. So, there's some great opportunities to be looking at across the gold sector.
As I'm gonna be outlining to you through this presentation, we think Alamos stands out as one of the best opportunities, given the type of high-quality assets we have, the type of growth we have, and where our assets are located, concentrated in Canada. I'm gonna be making forward-looking statements throughout this presentation, so please do review our cautionary notes. I'll start with an overview of Alamos, for those of you not familiar with the company. We're a diversified intermediate gold producer, but we're also a growth company. We started this year producing at a rate of about 500,000 ounces of gold per year. With the recently completed acquisition of the Magino Mine in Ontario, Canada, we're now producing at a run rate of about 600,000 ounces per year.
We've got a couple of high-return growth projects, our Phase 3 Expansion at Island Gold and our Lynn Lake Project in Manitoba, Canada, that ultimately can take us up to a run rate of over 900,000 ounces per year. And we think there's additional growth opportunities within our existing assets that ultimately take us up closer to a million ounces per year. So that's, that's double where we started at the beginning of this year. The really appealing part about this growth is it's all lower costs. We're already a low-cost producer. If you look at our all-in sustaining costs this year, they're expected to be around $1,275 per ounce, so that compares quite favorably to industry costs, which are north of $1,400 per ounce.
But as we bring on this low-cost growth, you're gonna see our costs steadily decline over the next few years, about 10% to closer to $1,150 per ounce. Looking beyond 2026, as we bring on our low-cost Lynn Lake Project, we ultimately expect our all-sustaining costs to decrease below $1,100 per ounce. The other key facet of the Alamos Gold story is our low political risk profile. So, the majority of our current production is coming from Canada. Nearly all of our growth is coming from Canada, and that means about 90% of our net asset value is supported by our Canadian assets.
And that's really anchored by two really high-quality, long-life operations, being Young-Davidson and the Island Gold District, which is comprised of our Island Gold Mine and the newly acquired Magino Mine, which are located in northern Ontario, about six hours apart. Between these assets, they have an eighteen-year average mine life, and that's conservative, given the type of exploration potential we see across these assets. So that gives us a really long runway and very strong foundation to continue building this company from. If you look at our performance over the past three years, we've been a consistent outperformer in each and every one of those years, and a more significant outperformer over the aggregate period.
Since the start of 2022, we're up more than 150%, and that has absolutely outpaced the price of gold, the various gold equity ETFs, as well as the S&P 500 itself, and it's not any one thing that's driving this outperformance, but really a number of attributes that, you know, collectively, if you put them together, they're unique to Alamos, and it's really a growing appreciation of the type of high-quality, long-life assets we have. The fact that these assets are concentrated in Canada, giving us that really low political risk profile, which is something that's just becoming increasingly important in the world we live in today. We've got a portfolio of really high-return growth projects in an industry that's generally lacking good growth opportunities.
Our costs are declining in an industry that's facing rising costs, and you know, the two of the most important factors, which I think have contributed to this outperformance and why we think this outperformance is sustainable, is just you know, a really good track record of hitting our targets, so consistent execution with our operations, consistent execution with our growth projects, and you know, continuing to create value from within our portfolio. If you look at what we've done with our Island Gold Mine, and our newly defined development project, PDA, we've been discovering ounces there at a very effective cost per ounce, so Island Gold, for instance, we've discovered several million ounces of some of the highest grade ounces in the world at a discovery cost of $13 per ounce.
Similarly, at PDA, that's a deposit that had no reserves as of three years ago and now contains 1 million ounces of reserves, and we've discovered those at a cost of about $20 per ounce. So, we're finding ounces at less than $20 per ounce, and we're selling them today at a gold price of, you know, north of $2,600 per ounce. So that's the type of really high-return investment that's helping support the growth of our asset base. And as our reserves and resources have been growing within these assets, that's supported expansions of these particular operations. It's supported the development of new projects in the case of of PDA, and it's helping grow the value of our overall asset base.
So that's really underpinning the growth of the company and that rising share price as you see it on this slide to the right of screen. And the other thing that's contributed to our value creation is just really smart and accretive M&A. And the acquisition of Magino, which I'll touch on shortly, is a good example of that. So, we are a growth company. I mentioned at the outset, and we've got the financial track record to support it. If you look at our EBITDA performance over the past ten years, it's increased tenfold, and combined with the growth we have upcoming and the rising gold price, our EBITDA is almost going to double over the next several years.
So, a growth company, yet we're trading at an attractive valuation. We're trading currently at a forward EV to EBITDA multiple of about eight times, which is well below where you'd expect us to be trading, based on historical standards, during peak gold price environments like we're seeing today. And it's also significantly below virtually every other sector within the S&P 500. So, a growth company with a very attractive valuation, and we're in a very supportive environment for gold. I don't think we've seen peak gold prices. Gold performs very well during rate cutting cycles.
And there's a number of other factors on the screen here that point to the fact that we expect gold prices to continue heading higher, and supporting that really strong growth financial trajectory on the left-hand side of your screen. So M&A has been a key driver of our growth as a company, and this is really our report card on how we've done in terms of our transactions, our investments in our assets, and what they're worth today. In each and every case, you see our three operating mines on there and our Lynn Lake Project. They're worth substantially more than what we've paid for and invested in these projects. Mulatos, this is an old story. Many of you have probably heard it before, but it's one of my favorite stories about Alamos Gold.
It's our founding asset. We bought it back in 2003 for $10 million, built it for $70 million over the next couple of years. It entered production in 2005, and to date, it has generated more than $600 million of free cash flow and growing, and it carries a consensus value of about $700 million. So that's about $1.3 billion of value created from a $10 million initial investment. Island Gold, very similar story and our most recent success story. We bought that back in 2017 for $600 million, and for those of you that remember that transaction, we underperformed after we made that transaction. We were down 17% on the day of that announcement.
The market took the view that we had dramatically overpaid for that asset. You know, I'm happy to illustrate on this screen that the value of the asset has continued to grow and has, you know, is up more than fourfold from what we paid for it. By the end of twenty twenty-three, the consensus value of Island Gold had increased to $2.1 billion. With the acquisition of Magino and now integration with Island Gold, the combined asset is now worth about $3.6 billion, based on consensus analyst estimates. If you look at what we've done across these assets, and you include our Lynn Lake Project, that's about $4 billion of value created since their respective acquisitions, and that's a track record we fully expect to continue to build upon.
So, I mentioned the Magino acquisition. That's relatively fresh. We just closed that transaction in July, and you can see from the picture on the screen that really tells you what this transaction was all about. Magino is literally right beside our Island Gold Mine, the two deposits, if you look at a long section of the deposits, they're 300 meters apart. So given the close proximity of these two operations, they can be combined to create a much larger and much more profitable operation, and that's what we're in the process of doing. We're integrating the two assets. You can see. I'll put my pointer on to hopefully show you. So, this is the Island Gold shaft, the headframe.
Below that, we're in the process of sinking a shaft into the high-grade underground Island Gold deposit. Across this lake over here is the Magino open pit and the Magino Mill. So, these are the three central pieces of the operation. Once we complete the phase 3 expansion, which is really installing a shaft at Island Gold in 2026, you're gonna see the combined output from these two operations total more than four hundred thousand ounces per year. You're gonna see the all-in sustaining cost for this combined operation drop below $1,000 per ounce. So that's, that means this is gonna be one of the biggest, one of the lowest costs, and one of the most profitable gold mines in Canada.
And it's going to be around for a very long time, given its large reserve and resource base, which currently totals eleven million ounces, supporting close to a twenty-year mine life. And there's excellent exploration upside at both of these deposits, which we think is going to extend that mine life well beyond 20 years. The other really attractive element to this story is, given the proximity of the two operations and our ability to integrate them, effectively take the Magino Mill, shut down the Island Gold Mill, utilize one tailings facility, we're gonna realize some pretty meaningful synergies. There's about $140 million of capital savings by combining the two operations and another $375 million of operating synergies by putting Island Gold ore through a significantly larger and more productive and lower-cost Magino Mill.
So, in total, we expect to realize more than $500 million of synergies, and that figure, I expect, is ultimately gonna prove conservative, given the type of ongoing growth we're seeing within the Island Gold deposit. The other really attractive element to this transaction is something we're gonna be working on over the next year, and that's significant longer-term upside opportunities. This is a 10,000 ton per day mill that will be expanding to 11,000 tonnes per day and then 12,000 tonnes per day over the next couple of years to accommodate ore from both Magino and Island Gold. But longer term, this mill is scalable.
We're gonna be evaluating taking this mill up to something in the neighborhood of 15 to 20,000 tonnes per day, and with a larger expansion of that mill, that means we can potentially expand this Magino open pit, potentially expand the underground at Island Gold, as well as start to incorporate some of the regional opportunities we're seeing within our land package to support a combined operation that will likely end up producing more than five hundred thousand ounces of gold per year. And Magino fits really nicely within our growth profile. We started the year producing at a rate of about five hundred thousand ounces per year. With Magino now integrated in our operations, we're producing at a run rate of about 600,000 ounces per year.
You look out towards 2026, which is when we expect to complete that big Phase 3+ shaft expansion at Island Gold. You're gonna start to see that production growth from Island Gold really kick in, and those costs come down. That's gonna take us up closer to a run rate of about 700,000 ounces per year, and you're gonna see our all-in sustaining costs decrease to approximately $1,150 per ounce. Out towards, you know, the latter part of 2027 and into 2028 and beyond, that's when we expect our Lynn Lake Project to start contributing production, and that's the piece that takes us from approximately 700,000 ounces per year to 900,000 ounces per year. We also expect that to drive our costs down below $1,100 per ounce.
That longer-term Magino Mill expansion that I just touched on, that's the real optionality in there, and that's the piece we think ultimately takes us up north of a million ounces per year. And that's something we'll be working on over the next year, and we'll have more information on towards the latter part of 2025. So, we've got, you know, really strong growth profile. All of this growth is fully funded, all of this growth is lower cost, and virtually all of this growth is coming in Canada. So, there's three key pillars to our growth story. The Phase 3 E xpansion, which I've touched on a little bit already, and I'm gonna go into a bit more detail over the coming slides.
But this is effectively an expansion which is gonna double the size of the operation by sinking a shaft. It's not only gonna double the size of the operation and double the gold output, but it's also gonna make this operation significantly more productive by transitioning from ramp access mining to a shaft operation. PDA is a new project. We just put a development plan out in September. It's located within the Mulatos District. It's just off the side of the Mulatos pit, and it's another high-return project that's going to significantly extend the mine life in Mulatos. It's effectively tripled the mine life of the Mulatos District out to 2035, and again, this has really good exploration upside.
So, we ultimately expect to be producing well beyond 2035 from within the district. And the other key aspect of our growth story is Lynn Lake. Another attractive long-life project located in northern Manitoba, Canada. We're looking at getting going on construction of Lynn Lake in 2025, which would put it on a path to see first production towards the end of 2027 and into early 2028. And, you know, similar to Island Gold, Puerto Del Aire, this has really good exploration upside. So, you know, two central points for all three of these projects. They're all high-return projects, and they all have significant upside opportunities, given the exploration potential we see in and around these deposits. So, this is a really quick snapshot of the Phase 3 expansion.
We're about halfway through the expansion. We're sinking a shaft down to a depth of about 1.4 kilometers. We're currently just past the halfway point, down to a depth of 700 meters. You can see the headframe right here. The shaft is being sunk right below that headframe. This is a view from inside of the shaft, and this is a view from inside of the hoist house. So we're down to a depth of about 700 meters, and we expect to be down to our ultimate depth of 1,400 meters into the second half of this year. We're at the halfway point in terms of the capital spend.
There's about $400 million left to spend on this project, and it's on track to be completed in the first half of 2026, and it's really gonna be a game changer for this operation. So, by putting in a shaft, we're taking this operation from 1,200 tonnes per day to 2,400 tonnes per day, so doubling the size of the operation. But more importantly, we're converting this operation from ramp access mining, where you're driving a fleet of diesel-powered haul trucks up and down a ramp to bring your ore and waste up to surface, to putting that within skips and skipping it to surface within minutes.
And to illustrate the type of cost savings we're gonna see and productivity improvements we're gonna see by putting it in a shaft, you know, when, if we were to continue with ramp access mining down to a depth of about 1,500 meters, you'd need about 18 haul trucks just to sustain 1,200 tonnes per day. By putting in a shaft, we're gonna be able to double our throughput to 2,400 tonnes per day and reduce the number of haul trucks we're using to somewhere in the neighborhood of five or so. So that helps illustrate why this operation is gonna be so much more productive, and what is going to help drive our costs substantially lower once this expansion is completed. The charts on the screen here really demonstrate why we're expanding this operation.
When we acquired Island Gold back in 2017, it had 1.7 million ounces of reserves and resources. In each and every year that we've owned it, we've seen that reserve and resource base grow to now sit at 6.1 million ounces of high-grade reserves and resources. We've also seen the reserve grade and the resource grade grow over that timeframe, so this is not only one of the fastest-growing deposits in the world, it's also one of the highest grade gold deposits, and you know, again, I touched on this at the beginning, but one of the really attractive elements of this growth story is we're finding some of the highest grade ounces in the world at a discovery cost of $13 per ounce, and that is translating into this growth in the value of the asset.
So as this asset has grown, it's supported expansions of the operations. So between the increase in reserves and resources and expanding that operation, you've seen the value of this asset grow in each and every year that we've owned it, from $600 million when we bought it, to $2.1 billion at the end of 2023, and now sitting at $3.6 billion with the acquisition of Magino. And with the type of ongoing exploration success we're having at Island Gold, and the potential we see at both Island Gold and Magino, we fully expect this value is going to continue to grow. So that growth continued at a really fast clip last year.
We added a million ounces of reserves and resources before depletion in twenty twenty-three, and given the ongoing success we're seeing into twenty twenty-four, we expect that growth to continue with our year-end statement that we'll be putting out in February of twenty twenty-five. In July of this year, we put out an exploration update on Island Gold, which was the best exploration update we've ever put out, just in terms of the volume and significance of high-grade results across the extent of the deposit. We're seeing high-grade mineralization being extended to the west. We're seeing it in the east. We're also infilling gaps between the Island Main and East zones.
And if you turn the deposit sideways, it's hard to show on the screen here, but this is a bit of an oblique cross-section view of the deposit. Through our underground exploration program, we're also having a lot of success defining sub-parallel structures that are outside of the main structure that hosts the majority of reserves and resources at Island Gold. So, you know, the main deposit's open laterally. It's open at depth. We've only drilled this deposit down to a depth of 1.7 kilometers. It's all completely open down here. We just don't have the information, and these types of deposits in the Canadian Shield can very easily extend below 3 kilometers in depth.
There's lots of untapped potential to continue growing this deposit, but even within the existing structure, we're having a lot of success, and a good example of that was this exploration release we put out in July. We typically don't ever include delineation or infill drilling holes. We're typically focused on just reporting the exploration holes, which is gonna demonstrate the growth in reserves and resources. But some of the holes that we're seeing in this Island East area, they're significantly higher grade, and they're significantly wider than what we typically see across this ore body. And a good example of two of the highlights was 100 grams per tonne over 17 meters. Another highlight hole was 135 grams per tonne over 8 meters.
So that compares quite favorably to the average reserve grade of this deposit, which is ten grams per tonne, and the average width of this ore body, which is around four meters per tonne. So there's a pocket in here that we've defined, which is 80 by 100 and 30 meters, where we're seeing significantly higher grades over much wider widths. And what this all means is, you know, based on the drilling we've already completed year to date, we expect another year of reserve and resource growth with our year-end statement, and potentially at higher grades, given the type of really high-grade intercepts that we're seeing across the deposit.
PDA is the other asset I touched on in the beginning when I was talking about the really attractive discovery cost, and it's another area within the company where we're having really good exploration success. So this is a high-grade underground deposit within our Mulatos District. It's right off the side of the Mulatos pit. We knew there was high-grade sulfide mineralization, but we had not done much in the way of drilling up until three years ago. So three years ago, this deposit had no reserves. Today, it has a million ounces of reserves and growing. We just put that million ounces of reserves into a development plan that we announced last month. Another really attractive higher return project that's going to extend the mine life at Mulatos.
It's got currently an eight-year mine life. It'll start out producing at an average rate of approximately 130,000 ounces per year. Low all-in sustaining costs of about $1,000 per ounce. Low capital of $165 million, which Mulatos can self-finance. And that all lends itself to an attractive return , 46% IRR at a $1,950 gold price. If you start to plug in closer to spot gold prices, that internal rate of return increases to north of 70%, and there's really good upside here. We put out an exploration update just ahead of that development plan in September, which is demonstrating we're continuing to hit high-grade mineralization beyond our existing reserves.
So, we do expect PDA to grow, but the other appealing aspect of this PDA development plan is we're gonna put in a 2,000 ton per day mill to process the high-grade sulfide mineralization from Puerto del Aire. That's going to open up new opportunities in the Mulatos District for additional high-grade mineralization that we did not previously have the processing capacity to accommodate, and one of those examples is Cerro Pelon. That was part of that exploration release we put out in September. It's a previously mined-out open pit deposit. We knew there was high-grade sulfide mineralization below that pit. One of the highlight holes from 2015 was 15 grams per tonne over 50 meters, but we did not have the processing capacity, so we didn't follow up on it.
Now that we have the processing capacity, or we're gonna be constructing that processing capacity, we're going back and drilling targets like Cerro Pelon and defining additional high-grade mineralization that ultimately, we plan on incorporating into that PDA development plan. So, we've got some really nice intercepts from Cerro Pelon already. We've defined multiple new zones of high-grade mineralization. We'll be putting that into an initial resource at the end of this year, and then ultimately look to incorporate that into the PDA plan. And Lynn Lake is our other growth project, so this is, you know, again, located in northern Manitoba. It's a long-life, low-cost project. It's got about a 17-year mine life based on what we've defined currently.
It'll start out producing at around 180,000 ounces per year, with very attractive all-in sustaining costs of approximately $700 per ounce. So again, another attractive project, 22% IRR at a conservative $1,950 gold price, but if you're plugging in a $2,500 gold price, which is again, below spot prices, you're looking at closer to a you know a 32% after-tax IRR and a project that's worth about $1.1 billion. So that compares quite favorably to what we paid for this project. We acquired this back in 2016 for twenty-two billion... or $22 million, sorry. So $22 million. We've invested about $100 million into the project since then.
It now carries a consensus value of $700 million, and you're gonna see that value continue to grow as we bring this project closer to production. We are looking at getting going on construction of this project in 2025, which would put it on a path to see first production in late 2027, early 2028. And again, this is the piece that takes us up to that 900,000 ounce per year range. And, you know, similar to our other projects, this has really good exploration upside. We're working on two advanced stage targets, Burnt Timber and Lakewood. They were not incorporated in the feasibility study we put out last year. They're 25 kilometers away. They're well within trucking distance.
We're in the process of converting the existing resource there to a reserve, and we're gonna put a, you know, an internal study around those two deposits towards the latter part of this year, on how it looks incorporating this into the, the Lynn Lake, development plan. So, this is, this is upside, and, we expect this is going to, improve already attractive economics for Lynn Lake. You know, this is a quick summary of our, our balance sheet. We're in great shape financially to support all of this growth. We've got about $300 million in cash at the end of, Q2, more than $500 million of available liquidity, and we're generating free cash flow over and above our reinvestment and growth.
If you look at our performance through the first half of this year, we generated $131 million of free cash flow while funding the Phase 3 Expansion at Island Gold. And as we continue on the Phase 3 Expansion and we start construction on Lynn Lake, we expect to continue generating free cash flow. So, we're in great shape to fund this growth. And looking out towards 2026, when you start to see that Phase 3 Expansion completed, that capital is gonna come off. You're gonna see that production grow and our costs come off. You're really gonna see our free cash flow start to increase meaningfully higher and continue to grow into 2027 and 2028 as we complete construction of Lynn Lake.
This is a snapshot of our Q2 results. We're well past the quarter, so I'm not gonna go into any detail on how we performed on the individual metrics, but really just a quick summary of the overall performance. It was a record quarter in terms of production, record quarter in terms of our financial performance. We saw our costs come down quarter over quarter, and combined with the rising gold price, we generated record revenue, record cash flow from operations, and record free cash flow while we were continuing to reinvest in growth. So, this is really a good indication of what you can expect to see over the coming years from Alamos Gold, or from Alamos Gold, as we execute on our growth plans. We are seeing our production grow.
We are expecting our costs to come down, and combined with that, rising gold price, that's expected to translate into multiple new financial records over the years to come, so I'm gonna close out the presentation there. You know, really high-level summary, we're performing well as a company. All of our operations are performing well. We've got a really strong growth profile. We have everything we need internally to support that growth and continue that success, and we've got a number of really high-profile catalysts coming up over the next year, starting with that Burnt Timber and Lakewood study on incorporating them into Lynn Lake towards the end of this year.
We expect to have a positive year-end mineral reserve and resource update, particularly at Island Gold, given the exploration success we've seen year to date. You can expect some additional exploration updates across our operations over the next year. Towards the middle of next year, we'll be putting out an updated life of mine plan, which is gonna be a more complete view of the combined Island Gold and Magino operation. Towards the end of twenty twenty-five, that's where we expect to have more information on what a larger and longer-term expansion of that Island Gold District would look like, and how that's going to influence our longer-term production profile. Ultimately, we expect will take us up closer to a million ounces of production per year. So, thank you.
I'll turn it back over to Noella for any questions you may have.
Thank you very much, Scott, for the presentation. As you said, we'll now begin the Q&A. Your first question is: Alamos has consistently performed as a top gold producer over the past three years. Do you see the momentum continuing, and what strategies are in place to sustain this growth?
We, we do. I mean, it's one of the slides I touched on at the beginning of the presentation, and maybe we can share the screen again, Noella. It's really the collective attributes that we possess as a company, which I think is gonna continue to support that continued outperformance. And the most important pieces within there are the consistent execution. So that's executing on our growth plan, which can double our rate of production over the next several years to closer to a million ounces per year and continuing to create value within. And, you know, I think there, there's two really important things you need to be able to continue to create value within your portfolio.
You need, you need the team, and you need the assets, and we have both. If you look across all three of our producing assets and our Lynn Lake Project, all of them have really good exploration upside, and you've been seeing it over the last several years, where we're continuing to grow our reserve and resource base, and we're continuing to add even higher quality ounces. So if you look at our reserve and resource base over the last several years, it's increasing in terms of the number of ounces. You've also seen our reserve grade increase over that timeframe because we're adding higher grade ounces at both Island Gold and PDA.
So, you know, given the type of potential we see across these assets, we do expect to continue to have exploration success, which is not only gonna help sustain their mine lives, but we think ultimately gonna support bigger and more valuable operations. And, you know, just continuing to look to optimize and make our operations more productive and more valuable. And the, you know, the Phase 3 Expansion at Island Gold is a great example of that. You know, it's a very profitable mine. We could continue operating that via ramp access mining and generate very strong free cash flow.
But it's taking that longer-term view and seeing the growth in reserves and resources, and putting together a longer-term plan that's going to ultimately create way more value than just continuing with the status quo. So we're, you know, we're continuously looking at our assets and looking for opportunities to make them more efficient, make them more productive, and increase the value.
Thank you, Scott, for that response. The next question for you is: Is the $300 million in debt all related to the Magino acquisition, and is the plan to reduce debt to zero? What timeline do you have?
Absolutely. The plan is to reduce it to zero, and that's a hallmark of Alamos Gold. We've always kept a very clean balance sheet with no debt through most of our history. The few times we have taken on debt have been acquisitions, where we acquired a company with debt. So, yes, to answer your question, the $300 million of debt is from the acquisition of Magino. It was Argonaut Gold debt. We've taken that on now. That was comprised of about $250 million of term debt, and money that was drawn on their revolving credit facility, and then $57 million of convertible debentures.
We put out an offer to repurchase those convertible debentures during the third quarter, so those are likely to have all been repaid by the end of the third quarter, and that was part of the change of control provision with the acquisition. So those, that $57 million will be gone by the end of the third quarter. We'll be left with about $250 million of debt, which is currently sitting on our revolving credit facility, and our plan with that is to pay it off. We'll probably keep it on the balance sheet for a year, maybe a couple of years, because we're focused on growth as a company right now. So we, we're working on the Phase 3 Expansion .
We do expect to get going on full-scale construction of Lynn Lake into 2025. So you're gonna see our rate of capital spending increase into 2025. At current gold prices, we do expect to be generating positive free cash flow over and above that growth spending. But we wanna stay conservative and wait until we're generating higher levels of free cash flow to pay off that debt. And if that comes sooner through higher gold prices, we'll absolutely look to pay off that debt sooner. But I think you can expect in two years' time that debt will be paid off, and we'll be back to a zero debt balance.
Thank you for clarifying. The next question is: Does Island Gold have the same type of reserves as Young-Davidson?
They're different ore bodies. Young-Davidson has about 3 million ounces of reserves. Island Gold currently has 1.7 million ounces of reserves, so a different size in terms of the overall reserve. Island Gold, substantially higher grade, so its reserves are sitting at 10 grams per ton. Young-Davidson's reserves are sitting at 2.3 grams per ton. So, you know, similar in that we have large reserve bases at both assets, but we currently have more reserves at Young-Davidson. But behind those 1.7 million ounces of reserves at Island Gold, there's another 4+ million ounce of resources that has been not only growing but also converting to reserves at a pace of close to 1-to-1.
So ultimately, as we continue to convert those resources at Island Gold to reserves, I would expect that reserve base to grow larger than what we have at Young-Davidson.
Thank you, Scott. The next question is: With continued growth being the focal point, can we expect an increase in exploration spend for 2025 and 2026?
It's a good question. We're going through the exploration and global budgeting process right now. If you look at our exploration budget for 2024, it was the largest ever at $62 million, so that's a big budget. Looking out to 2025, I would expect to see us in a similar range of that $60-$65 million, but longer term, as we're... I would say it's really success dependent. As we're having success at places like Island Gold and PDA and Young-Davidson, we tend to increase the budget, but I would say $62 million is a good kind of run rate for the next couple of years.
Thank you for your response. The next question is: Regarding Mexico, there seems to be a lot of confusion over the state of open pits in Mexico, and Sheinbaum's pre-press conference didn't seem to clarify. What are you planning for as the most likely outcome and effect of Alamos, allowing for the fact that your open pit operation there does not seem to have much left in the way of resource?
You're right. La Yaqui Grande is expected to operate until the middle of twenty twenty-seven, so we've got a few years ahead of it, and then PDA is an underground deposit. The way Mulatos is trending, we expect to be, by 2028 , an underground operation at Mulatos. In terms of some of the comments that have come out of Mexico, yes, I mean, the 100 pledges or 100 commitments that Claudia Sheinbaum provided earlier this month didn't clarify the previous proposals to ban open-pit mining in Mexico. Our understanding of those proposals are they would ban the granting of new concessions that would allow for new open-pit mines, but we would not expect that to impact existing operations like La Yaqui Grande.
So, we're not expecting these proposals to... First of all, they still need to go through Congress, so it's, there's not a lot of clarity on whether these proposals will actually be brought into effect. But even if they are, we don't expect them to impact existing operations. Looking out longer term at Mulatos, PDA is an underground deposit, so that was not something that was targeted as part of these proposals. It's located within our existing concessions, just off the side of the main Mulatos pit. It- we're gonna be producing a concentrate, so there'll be no use of cyanide in recovering gold on-site. We're not gonna need to construct a tailings dam.
We're gonna utilize dry stack tailings, and this is an operation that's gonna be connected to grid power. So underground, small environmental footprint, we don't envision any significant permitting challenges, bringing PDA into production.
Thank you, Scott. The next question for you is: How does the company manage a cautious approach to capital allocation in the current environment?
... It's all about balance. If you look at our ten-year philosophy on capital allocation, we like to balance our free cash flow, roughly equally between reinvesting in growth, building up the balance sheet, so building up our cash balance, and capital returns to our shareholders, so primarily in the way of dividend, but share buybacks when appropriate, so it's really taking a balanced approach. There are gonna be periods of time, like where we are right now, where more of our cash flow is being reinvested in growth, but over a ten-year stretch, that will balance out.
So, you start to see more in the way of capital returns as you start to see the benefit of that growth in terms of higher levels of free cash flow, which in turn will support higher dividends to our shareholders and overall higher capital returns. So, it's, you know, it's. I think it really speaks to the Alamos philosophy of conservatism. You know, operate in safe jurisdictions, keep a clean and strong balance sheet, and build at a pace that we can afford, which feeds into that balanced capital allocation strategy.
Thank you for your insight on that, Scott. The next question is: What is the target depth of the phase three shaft that... and is that the maximum depth you need to reach for the deposit?
The planned initial depth is 1,378 meters, or 1.4 kilometers. We expect to get there the middle or second half of next year. We've built in the hoisting capacity to ultimately deepen that shaft to 2,000 meters, but we're gonna start out at a 1,400-meter depth. There is additional capacity to deepen that shaft, given the existing infrastructure that we are constructing and have designed into that operation. And there's also additional capacity to skip more ore and waste. At its current planned depth of 1.4 kilometers, we've got an additional 1,000 tonnes per day of capacity, should we be able to increase mining rates beyond 2,400 tonnes per day.
So yeah, there's. We are taking a longer-term view with this deposit, particularly given the type of growth we're seeing in terms of reserves and resources.
Thank you for that response. Next, a viewer asked: Is hydroelectric power sufficient for all the needs of Lynn Lake? What are you budgeting for Lynn Lake next year?
We, I mean, our budget for capital spending at Lynn Lake will be provided early next year. So we, you know, if we-- It's a $630 million initial capital spend. So, assuming we get going early in 2025, you can expect us to spend, you know, anywhere in the neighborhood of a third of that $630 million spend. But that really depends on when we start construction on that project, and we'll have more detail on that early next year.
And to answer the first part of your question, yes, we're planning on connecting that project up to power from the Churchill Falls Dam, which is hydroelectric power, and that will be more than sufficient to supply all of our electricity needs for that project. And in fact, it gives us the opportunity to electrify more of the operation than you traditionally see, and we're gonna look to continue to electrify as much of that operation as possible to take advantage of that hydroelectric power. So, you know, an example of that is we'll be utilizing, you know, electric shovels within the open pit at MacLellan.
Thank you for clarifying that, Scott. The next question is: At Magino, is the lake itself going to become a problem/issue? Looks like the open pit is very close to it.
No, no. We don't expect it to. I mean, if the pit was to expand significantly bigger, then that could be a problem down the road, but based on the current pit design and what we envision in terms of a larger resource pit, we don't expect any issues in terms of the lake and/or water management across Magino and/or Island Gold.
Thank you, Scott. Next, did the increase in gold price play a role in the Q2 revenue growth, or was it more based on increased gold production?
It was both. So gold, our production increased to a new record high, and we also realized record high gold prices. So, both contributed to the record revenue. We also saw our costs decrease quarter over quarter, so that was a big contributor to the type of margin expansion we saw in Q2. If you look at from Q1 to Q2, our all-in sustaining costs margins increased by more than 50%. So that was a combination of that rising gold price, but also lower costs.
Thank you for clarifying that, Scott. Next question: Are there higher grade zones at Magino near surface?
There's higher grade pockets within the Magino deposit, but it's, you know, it's a very different deposit than what we have at Island Gold. So, Island Gold, despite the fact that the two deposits are 300 meters away, Island Gold's a very structurally controlled, high-grade ore body. Magino does have high grades. They've intersected high grades, but it's more broadly disseminated within a host rock called the Webb Lake Stock. So, there are higher grade pockets, but it's more broadly disseminated. So, we're not expecting to mine substantially higher grades over the life of mine at Magino. The grades will stay relatively consistent in and around that 1 gram per tonne range.
... Thank you for that response. We're coming up on your last three questions. The first one is: how do you see the ESG platform evolving with the projected growth Alamos has set?
It's, I mean, ESG has always been a focus of this company, well before ESG became a, you know, a focus of the investment community. How do I see it evolving? I, you know, I think, you know, we're, we're gonna be continuing to do the same things. We're gonna be continuing to invest more in reporting what we're doing, from an ESG perspective, and continuing to invest in areas that are going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And that's, we've got a, we've got a target out for 2030, where we expect to reduce our GHG emissions by 30%. So, it's continuing to find ways to achieve that target, so we already have a plan in place, through the Phase 3 Expansion at Island Gold.
So that, I mean, that's a really attractive element about this expansion, where... You know, I touched on the productivity improvements that we'll see from sinking a shaft and converting that operation from ramp access mining to a shaft operation. By eliminating the, you know, significant number of diesel-powered haul trucks and converting to a shaft operation that's connected to clean hydroelectric and nuclear power in, in Ontario, we're gonna see a significant reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, we're doubling the size of that, that operation. So, you know, similarly down in Mexico, we're just in the process of connecting that operation up to, grid power, which is gonna drive a, a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions.
So, we're continuously looking at and evaluating initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint, continuing to invest in safety. We're never satisfied with our safety performance. We wanna continue to see that safety performance continues to improve. So, it's really a focus on continuous improvement across the board.
Thank you for shedding some light on that. The next question: how are you looking at the M&A environment moving into 2025?
So, Noella, maybe we could share my screen again.
Certainly.
You know, I think this slide does a great job of speaking to our thoughts on M&A. We've got the capacity to nearly double our rate of production through a portfolio of really high-return organic growth projects. That's our focus right now. Our focus is executing on this growth plan. We'll keep an eye on M&A opportunities but given the type of really attractive growth opportunities we have already within the company, there's no pressure to do anything significant external. If you know, something really attractive comes along, like Magino, we'll certainly take a very close look at it, and if we think we can create value, we'll act on it.
But, you know, I'd say our current priority right now and into 2025 is continuing to execute on this development plan.
Thank you for expanding on that, Scott, and your last question is: how are your shares distributed with institutions?
If you look at our institutional ownership versus retail ownership, it's about 70% institutional and 30% retail. Within the institutional ownership, about you know 35% of the company is held by our 10 largest institutional shareholders. We're fairly broadly held and widely held by some of the blue-chip investors that you'd expect within the gold sector, as well as some generalist funds. We're broadly held by a number of different institutions.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Scott, for your responses today, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions. If you did not get a chance to submit your question, you can reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark. That concludes our presentation for today, but before we go, I will turn back the floor to Scott for final remarks.
Thank you, Noella, and thank you, everybody, for joining us in this presentation today. We look forward to speaking to you soon, and please do not hesitate to reach out to myself or any member of the Alamos team should you have any questions or are interested in an update.
Thank you, Scott, and once again, this was Alamos Gold, trading on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol AGI. Thank you to everyone in Houston and surrounding areas for joining us today. The playback for this virtual non-deal roadshow will be available on our website twenty-four to forty-eight hours after this presentation under the VNDR Library tab. Please stay tuned for other presentations in your area and see you next time.