Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Bob Cross, and it is my pleasure to welcome you and to call to order the 2018 annual general and special meeting of the shareholders of B2Gold Corp. I will act as Chairman of this meeting And I appoint Roger Sage, my left, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the Company, to act as recording secretary of this meeting and Anita Bazi of Computershare Investors Services, Inc, to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are my fellow directors Clive Johnson, President CEO of B2Gold, Robert Gaitan, Jerry Corpan, Boongani Machisee, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, and Robin Weisman. The other officers of the company with us today include Mike Cinnamon, Senior Vice President of Finance And Chief Financial Officer Roger Richey, which I've introduced Tom Garrigan, Senior VP of Exploration, Dennis Stansbury, Senior VP of Engineering And Project evaluations William Lytle, Senior VP Operations Ian MacLean, VP of Investor Relations, Dale Craig, VP Operations Ed Bartz, VP, taxation, and external reporting Bryan Scott, VP Geology, and Technical Services, Hugh McKinnon, VP Geology, and John Rahala, VP Metallurgy.
Now for the business of the meeting. Notice of this meeting was filed and a notice calling this meeting of shareholders together with the management information, Circular and proxy form was mailed to the shareholders on May 18, 2018. I have received a declaration attesting to the publication and mailing and the recording secretary will annex the declaration to the minutes of this meeting These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered I propose that we waive reading the notice of meeting unless anyone specifically requests that it be read at this time. The recording secretary has notified me that the scrutineers report is complete and that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting to be properly constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer being annexed to the minutes of this meeting.
Before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I would like to remind everyone that only registered shareholders or proxy holders can move motions, ask questions, make comments or vote. I propose that we deal first with all of the routine business requirements of this meeting and then terminate the formal meeting. After the formal meeting, there will be full presentation by the senior executives of the company, and I would ask that any questions pertaining to operations or financials wait until that time and also the execs will be, available after during the social time for questions and discussion. I propose to conduct the vote on the resolution setting a number of directors and appointing and fixing the remuneration of the auditor by show of hands. Unless a ballot is demanded or directed on a particular item of business.
On a vote by a show of hands, please hold up your card. A ballot will be taken on the resolutions to elect directors to approve the company's incentive stock option plan and to approve the restricted share unit plan. I understand that each registered shareholder and proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting received a ballot at the time of registration. The first item of business is a presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2017. And the auditors report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Business Corporation Act.
The financial statements were mailed to the shareholders on May 2, 2018, and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. Representative of the auditors here today, if registered shareholders or proxy holders have questions for the auditor, Ken Scott of PricewaterhouseCoopers, charter accountants is available to respond. The next item of business is to set the number of directors of the company Is there any discussion on the motion? May I have a vote on the matter by a show of hands, all those in favor?
Any against? Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the election of directors for the ensuing year. The persons who are proposed by management for election are listed in the management information circular.
All of them have indicated their willingness to serve as directors for the ensuing year. In accordance with the company's advanced notice policy, Nominations for directors other than those proposed by management must have been given to the Secretary of the company by May 8, 2018, as no such nominations were received management's nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors? I would ask for a motion that the eight persons nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next annual general meeting of shareholders or until their successors are accordance with the company's majority voting policy, I direct that a poll be held on the motion and at the scrutiny of conduct a balancing and report the results in writing. Ballots were handed out to registered shareholders and proxy holders when they registered for the meeting, the PURA filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote it is not necessary to complete a ballot. Register chair holders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make an x or other mark in a square associated with the word 4 or the word withhold and sign the ballot.
Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated record the number of shares that you were entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more ballots to be collected? I declare the ballot in closed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. The the majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated.
Therefore, I declare that the 8 since nominated have been elected as directors of the company. The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers, chartered accountants. Management reposes that it be reappointed until the next annual general meeting May I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and that the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration of the author? During a discussion on the motion, may I have a vote on the matter by show of hands, please? All those in favor, Any opposed?
Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is to consider and if deemed advisable pass a resolution approving certain matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan, including the grant of stock options. A summary of the amended incentive stock option plan, including the grant stock options and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 7 through 10 of the management information Circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving matters relating to the company's stock option plan and the grant of stock options.
To take effect, the resolution approving the matters relating to the company's stock option plan must be approved by majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy. May I have a motion to approve the matters relating to the company's stock option plan and grant of stock options in the form of the resolution set out on page 10 of the management information circular. Is there any discussion with respect to this resolution? If there is no further discussion, I direct that a poll be held on a motion and that the scrutineer conducts the balloting and report the results in writing. Fallot papers were handed up to registered shareholders and proxy nominees when he registered for the meeting.
If you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, is not necessary to complete a ballot. As mentioned, shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make the check mark in the square associated with the word for or the word against and sign the ballot. Also, please put your name beside your signature where indicated cord the number of shares that you were entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more Terry when they are ready to report.
While we wait for the Scrutinue's report, we will proceed to the next item of business. Next time of business is to consider and have deemed advisable past resolution approving certain amendments to the restricted share unit plan of the company. A summary of the amended restricted share unit plan and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 10 through 12 of the management information circular The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving the amended restricted share unit plan. To take effect, the resolution approving the amended restricted share unit plan must be approved by majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy. Now I have a motion to approve the amended restricted share unit plan in the form of the resolution set on page 12 of the management information circular.
Is there any discussion with respect to this resolution? If there's no further discussion, I direct that a poll be held on a motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in Reading. Fellow papers were handed out to register shareholders and proxy nominees when you register for the meeting. As stated previously, if you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, it is not necessary to complete a ballot. Once again, shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make a check mark in the square associated with the word for or the word against and sign the ballot.
Also, please print your name beside your signature were indicated and record the number of shares that you were entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more valves to be collected? I declare the valve enclosed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording quotary when they're ready to report. I now have the report of a scrutineer on the ballots taken on the resolution to approve matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan and the grant of stock options and the resolution to approve amendments to the restricted share unit plan.
I declare that the resolution to approve certain matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan and the grant of stock options has been carried. And the resolution to approve amendments to the restricted share unit plan has also been carried. I direct the recording secretary to attach the report of a scrutineer to the minutes of the meeting. I'd like to note that we had 80% of our shareholders engaged in the voting process, which is terrific. All of the business for which this meeting was was called, have been completed.
Following the termination of this formal part of a meeting, registered shareholders and policyholders who wish to ask questions or make comments, we'll be invited to do so. I would just suggest we we wait till the corporate presentations occur and then feel free to ask questions to the executives. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting? May I have Against? Thank you.
I declare that motion carried in the formal part of this meeting is now terminated. I'd like to introduce Clive Johnson at this moment, CEO, to begin the presentation.
Bob? I'd like to start by thanking you all for coming out today and also welcome people that are thing on, and watching on the webcast. This, presentation you're about to see is going to be shown, it'll be on our website early next week.
First of
all, I'd like to thank our Board of Directors, our Chairman, Bob Cross, and our, Board of Directors for their tremendous support of the vision of the company. They're very experienced diverse board and, they lend a lot of guidance to us, but they've been very supportive when there are certain times we've done a few things that some might have considered a little contrarian. So appreciate their support. Obviously, to our shareholders, Bob mentioned, 80% of the shares were voted. That's quite a remarkable number.
That's very unusual. We very much believe in accountability, and it's nice to see, that response from our shoulders having their voice and also so supportive we do as a public company work for our shareholders. Bob introduced, to mention the executive group that you see up here. Earlier today, I was thinking about, is there a secret sauce given our, rather remarkable success? This is, I'm sorry, this is a cautionary statement.
This is the legal cover your ass slide. What this means in great detail is that certain things are going to be said here are going to be they are going to be forward looking, and therefore, may be subject to change. Good read if you're on the sound of the day. So when you look up here and look at this group of distinguished gentlemen, I've decided to think about what is the secret sauce? Is there a secret sauce that has made beach your gold, the fastest growing gold producer in the world over the last 10 years and got us to where we are today.
Well, it's about a couple of things. I think it's about culture. We're very proud of our culture, fairness, respect, transparency, and accountability. Big words, but we try to live them every day everywhere around the world. And this group is, quite remarkably experienced, just to give you some indication.
So this is, between B2 and BimaGold, predecessor company, some of the years of experience working together. Gloudera Richey, 32, to the Lytle 17, Tom Garrigan, 32, Clive 40. Dennis Stansbury 24, Ian MacLean 18, Dale Creek 10, He McKinnon 20, Bryan Scott 25, Neil Leader or Nubi at 1.5, like Cinnamon, relative Nubi at 5 years, Ed Bart's 22, John Rahala 11. For a total experience time of working together of 258 point 5 years. Some of them are actually over than they look.
And a few the other way. Well, maybe not so much. But if you add to that, the people at the beachy gold office here in Vancouver that have been with B2 and many of them with Bima back in the day. You can add probably, I would say, another 80 years of experience of working together. Then if you look around the world at the mine sites and offices around the world and our construction team, long term site management, and staff, you can add another 100 years to that.
At the end of the day, it's about experience, it's about people, and it's about the culture, and we try to extend that culture to our over 5000 employees around the world. This slide, some of you have seen before, And, that's really rather remarkable in terms of the pace of growth we've seen over 10 years. Dramatic growth. And to me, this is pretty remarkable in what we've been able to do in 4 different countries and 5 different mines around the world. But to me, when I stop and think about it, one of the remarkable things is in addition to this rapid growth rate, it's the way we've done it.
Because we I believe we've done this setting the highest standards for ourselves of safety, corporate social responsibility, and treating our employees as I mentioned in our culture about with fairness respect and transparency. So you're going to hear today from addition to myself, Bill Lytle is going to get up our senior VP operations and talk about overview of our operations. And then you're going to hear from of our country managers about the remarkable CSR programs, corporate social responsibility programs that we do around the world. So this, slide, pretty self evident, but at the end of the day, we are now see ourselves at approaching a 1,000,000 ounces to gold production a year from the various mines. This is, as I said, been a wrap period of rapid growth, but this year, the challenge I've made to all of our employees is let's make sure we're the best we can be.
Let's continue to improve on these very high standards we've set in terms of safety, corporate social responsibility, and the way we treat people around the world. But when I stop to think about it, there are areas we can improve, but we're pretty damn good at everything we've done. And to me, to be able to keep those standards at this rapid growth rate is quite remarkable because some would think that when you're in a growth period, you might think things we'll catch up on later because we're so busy growing. We've always maintained the standards, which I'm extremely proud of. Bill's going to talk more in detail about this, but what you've seen is a drop, in operating costs and all the sustaining costs as we've gone through, especially over the last few years.
As we brought on Jacobo mine and then the Fekola mine most recently. Just a few highlights from 2017. We did have record annual gold production for the 9th year in a row and 630,000 ounces of gold. Well above the upper end of our original guidance of 545,000 to 595,000 ounces for the year. Annual consolidated revenue of $638,000,000, which is another record And the, obviously, a major event this year was the commencement of production, completion of construction at the Fekola mine in Namibia.
Bill will talk about that. That's, an unusual, unfortunately occurrence in the industry lately, a gold mine coming on, not only on schedule, but actually 3 months ahead of schedule. One of the things about accountability is that we build our own minds. In fact, we do as much as we can. Ourselves.
And that is part of our drive and continued belief in accountability. Bill will talk in a little more detail about this remarkable construction accomplishment in Fekola. It's great project. You're going to hear from Tom Garrigan. He's going to talk about some of the exploration upside potential that we see.
The operating costs at Fekola are very low as well. They were $2.77 an ounce in the fourth quarter of 2017 operating costs and $4.19 all in sustaining costs as well below what we'd expected. When you start up a mine, as we did here, September of last year, you normally anticipate at least 3 months to ramp up the mine to full capacity as you adjust the mills the conveyors and all the other things. So we've projected about 55,000 ounces of gold production from Fekola in the fourth quarter of 2017. In fact, we produced 113,000 ounces in that startup ramp up quarter and our cost we projected them to be around 550 an ounce because it was the ramp up.
In fact, as I said, they came in about half of that. So a rather remarkable job done by our construction team that you'll hear more about and this is the 5th mine they built between the mines they built for bema gold and for beachy gold. Through our full year consolidated production, as I mentioned, of 630,000 ounces, and that came with a consolidated operating costs. Of $5.42 an ounce. Sorry, that was well below our guidance of 610 to 650 ounces.
We also maintained a very strong financial position in the company, and I think one of the great accomplishments over the last few years was the ability to finance the Fekola mine without issuing any more shares of the company. So we did that with a combination of our cash flow from operations, the success of Fekola is a direct result of the success of our other mines providing cash from operations that we could use to build Fekola. And combining that with a $250,000,000 revolving credit facility from a great group of international banks that became a $350,000,000 revolving credit facility that became a $500,000,000 revolving credit facility. So tremendous support from the banks, which we really appreciate, and all of the all of the players that enable us to get to a point and to fund with no equity issuance, which is quite something. And the reason for that's important is because we went through some pretty tough markets over the last few years.
We were doing something that was really uncommon in contrarian, we were growing most of the mining companies, unfortunately, weren't growing during the time, partly because of such a Unfortunately, poor job, in many cases of construction, investors lost faith and the ability of gold mining companies to grow, were one of the exceptions to the rule. In addition to that, we continue to advance our exploration and development projects. You're here going to hear more about that as well. And the focus for this year, as I said, is to be the best we can be, but now we are not building another mine at the moment. We're not going to be in the game of mergers and acquisitions for a while.
We did the heavy lifting and acquired the mines accretively when very few were acquiring projects. It's hard to believe that the Fekola mine we acquired it for half a $1,000,000,000 worth of our shares as an accretive deal for what was in the ground. There was no competition. One of the well known gold belts in the world in Southwest Molly. So it was very important to be able to do that and not to dilute our shareholders in the process.
So for now, the continued growth of the company is going to be based on what's in our pipeline. Why go out and acquire another mine to build? When we believed within the pipeline of projects we have, we have tremendous potential to expand our mines, to increase them with exploration success and ultimately expansion and also making additional new discoveries. So let's find out what's in the pipeline. We're not going to play the M and A games I mentioned, partly because it's more competitive.
Many analysts, and I think the right, think that if the Fekola mine was owned by Papillon Resources, of Australia when we did a friendly takeover. A lot of people believed that if that mine was, as it was 3 years ago, with a great feasibility study, great economic a mining permit in hand in a very good part of the world to be in gold mining with a belt of 8 gold mines. A lot of people believe as I do that the bidding today would probably start at a $1,000,000,000 we wouldn't be competing at that level. So we were able to acquire Fekola and the other projects and the rules are very strict and very strong about what we do. We will not acquire any project that needs a higher goal place and or exploration success to justify the purchase price.
When I say that, I always expect someone to say, well, the doesn't ever really do that. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases that hasn't been a case. So we don't want to be relying on gold going up or finding more gold to justify the purchase price. We don't want people to feel they buy our shares because I think gold might go up or we're going to make a major new discovery. We are one of the few gold mining companies that can appeal to generalist funds.
Growth funds, not just the gold investment funds. Because at the end of the day, we are a cash flow machine now, and we've demonstrated the ability to grow irrespective of the gold price. So that's an area that for us will be a focus to tell our story, not just to investors who believe that gold is going higher or want gold exposure, but actually people that just want to buy a very well run company with great cash flow and the ability to continue to grow. So 2018, let's talk about some of the highlights so far. We've had record quarterly production of 239,000 ounces.
For the quarter, an 81% increase over the same period of 2017. This is due to the strong performance, of course, with the new Fekola mine and also importantly, the Masbate mine in the Philippines and the Ojoko mine in Namibia. Record quarterly consolidated gold revenue of $344,000,000, a 135% increase over the same period last year. Difficult mine continued to operate above plan since achieving commercial production in November 30, 2017. We produced in the first quarter 114,000 ounces of gold, 11% above our budget.
Consolidated Q1 cash operating cost of $4.81 an ounce, well below budget by $67 an ounce, and $83 an ounce lower than the prior year quarter. Consolidated all in sustaining costs of $7.50 an ounce significantly below our budget of $147 16 lower $139 an ounce lower than the prior year quarter. Consolidated cash flows from operating activities, this is a very dramatic from about $147,000,000 last year, cash flow from operations being the mines to this year and looking at averaging over the next 3 years, $500,000,000 of cash from operations. As I mentioned in 2017, we continue to advance our pipeline of development exploration projects that continues in 2018 with expansion coming on the Masbate mine, And also we've had a dramatic new discovery at the El Limon mine in Nicaragua, which we're going to hear about as well. We ended Q1 with a very strong cash position, 18 of $168,000,000.
We have paid down a substantial amount of our revolving corporate facility, now have $200,000,000 drawn on the facility if that's with $500,000,000 available in that facility. So we're well on track to achieve transformational growth in 2018 and meet our guidance of 910 to 9 50,000 ounces of production this year, and our projected operating costs are $505 an ounce or between $505 to $550 an ounce as of the range and all in sustaining cost to range between $7.80 $8.30 an ounce. That's about a 35% increase in our annual production over when you have this kind of a dramatic increase in production and cash flow and a reduction in cost, all of it without putting issuing major equity, financing, you would expect a rerating in the share price. It's not the gold price isn't the problem. The gold price has been quite stable.
This graph shows you The relative performance of our shares in gold, the GDX Gold Index and the gold price So the GDX Gold Index is the gray line represented on the slide, and the blue line is the gold price. So you can see the gold price in the index have pretty much tracked. There's been a recent disconnect in most gold producers and the gold price, but for us has been very dramatic in the sense of our outperformance, even though we're trading at much lower levels than many mining analysts believe we should be, based on our transformation over the last several months, we still have great performance, relatively speaking. At the end of the day, there's 17 mining analysts that have an average target price for B2Gold for this year of $5.40 a share. 15 of them have a buyer or a strong buy on our shares.
So why isn't the shares moving? Because there's not a lot of money coming in, not a lot of new money coming into gold funds. Gold has been out of favor at the moment, even though the price is okay. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, it's been the performance of others, sadly, that has really hurt us in the sense that involved in the penalty box together and we don't belong and haven't belonged in the penalty box. So I believe that if we keep doing what we're doing and generate the kind of cash flow we're seeing, we'll see a rerating.
Either a lot of other Golar Company shares are going to come down quite a
bit or we're going to
go up or maybe somewhere in the middle. This is a bit of an indication when I talked earlier about being contrarian. This slide here shows you the performance of each of gold. Versus our peers in terms of growing production. So it's obviously a bit of a sad story on the left hand half of the slide because many, many gold producers have seen their production levels drop.
So rather than growing, they've actually been reducing in annual production. And of the few that have actually shown some growth, We've all pieced everyone. This is all, as I mentioned, part of being contrarian, and that is part of believing in your long term strategy. I mentioned our long term strategy and our focus, on acquisitions and our discipline around that. So this remarkable performance is clearly exceeded the rest of the industry.
And despite the perception of me being direct, I must tell you that I don't take any pleasure in the in the feelings of others. Life is not easy, and then the gold mining industry definitely is not easy. We wish everyone had similar success to us, not just because that way probably be trading closer to the target price the Atlas have. But the industry, unfortunately, has over the last 10 or 15 years, for the most part had to well deserved self inflicted black eyes. And the industry has to regain the credibility of investors.
One of the reasons for our poor performance is because people stop believing in the ability of gold mining companies to grow. And I think our ability to find it, acquire it accretively, build it, operate mines extremely well, and do all of that with our responsible approach to our employees, to safety and corporate social responsibilities is one of the keys. And we talked a bit about the experience of this group and of the board of directors. So the secret sauce, it's about the people, it's about experience, it's about the culture. This is another one that's quite interesting if you look at a total shareholder return since 2010.
Once again, a little depressing. Because if you look from the left hand side, I won't read out the names of the companies, but at the end of the day, if you look at, unfortunately, there's been this very negative trend. This is if you invested in any of these companies, the return you would have bought since 2010. Once again, we don't think we're reflecting the current value of the company, as many mining in Alice feel as well. But even with our performance to date, we have outperformed so many companies up 134 percent on an investment in 2010.
So it's a long term game for us. We're clearly based on the 8 based on the years I read out about our, executives. We're obviously in it for the long game, and we will continue to be very focused on the long term of building this company. So where do we go? Well, I mentioned the fact that we're going to continue to look to grow, but first of all, we're going to continue to optimize our gold production and therefore, our cash flow from operations.
I mentioned the challenge of being the best B2 we can be. That is ongoing. In addition, we, as part of that, will maintain our outstanding safety track record, which you'll hear about often Bill and our commitment to corporate social responsibility. Our focus on continued growth will be advancing, as I mentioned, our pipeline of existing projects through expiration with our remarkable team that's made a number of world class discoveries and continues to get exploration success or have exploration success on each of the properties we've acquired. We don't pay for ounces that might be there.
But in every acquisition we've done, we have found more gold adding value to the acquisition and adding mine life in the some cases expansion. So continue exploration of our pipeline, development, while developing the assets that we have and also looking to expand our projects you can hear a bit more about that as well. In addition to that, with our tremendous exploration team, you know, led by Tom Garrigan and Hugh and Brian, We will continue to evaluate other exploration opportunities through joint ventures with high quality exploration junior companies who unfortunately are are certainly in the finance because they're competing with the Bitcoin and marijuana stocks. At the end of the day, though, there's some quality projects out there and there's not a lot of exploration really going on in the world, which speaks to the lack of good projects out there today and also speaks to eventually, we probably a reduction in gold being produced. A lot of people think we've seen peak gold production in the world.
In addition, we'll maintain a strong cash position. We have We will reduce our debt. We have a convertible venture for $258,000,000 U. S. That comes due on October 1st this year.
It's convertible at 3.93 U. S. So unless we see a surge in the rerating of the company, it is unlikely that will not get converted. Our intention is to pay it back. We can pay back that $258,000,000 of convertible debt through cash from operations and using part of our our line or revolving credit facility.
In addition to that, we are going to be looking in the near term at, starting to discuss a dividend policy. We aspire to be a company that will always continue to grow and use a portion of our cash from operations to grow the company, but we believe that we will look at our dividend policy, I'm not seeing in the very near term, but over the next few months, we'll be looking at it and then maybe in 2019 or perhaps at the end of 'nineteen, we may be in a position to start paying a dividend to our shareholders as well. So I'm going to pass it on to Bill. Before I do that though, I have a few other people I would like to thank. Obviously, our 5000 employees around the world.
I do wanna make a special recognition, of to our Nicaragua employees. We love Nicaragua. We love the people. And unfortunately Nicaragua has been going through quite a turbulent political time right now with, unfortunately, quite a lot of violence associated with that. So as a Canadian company, we certainly believe in and promote constructive dialogue for peaceful resolution of the situation in Nicaragua.
Our focus is to support our 3000 direct and indirect employees and their families. They have expressed to us that they want to continue to work and maintain stability within our communities as much as possible. Our communities remain peaceful. Our minds continue to operate and our thoughts and prayers go out to all of our friends and colleagues and all the people of Nicaragua. In addition, I'd like to thank the other people that help us do what we do.
The consultants, the lawyers, the auditors, insurance providers, bankers, and brokers, stock brokers that help us accomplish our goals. We couldn't do it without the support of a great professional groups in those areas.
So with that, I think I'm going to
pass it on to Bill Lidl, Bill is our Senior VP Operations. Bill, as I mentioned, has been with us for a long time. He was involved in both the for B Mail in Russia, the Jolietta mine and the Couple mine. And Bill has been, rising up to the ranks. He was the country manager in Namibia during this successful construction of the Otjikoto mine, and then you moved on to be it was promoted to senior BP operations, but responsible overall for the construction of the Nicola mine and also responsible for all of our operations.
George was mentored by George Johnson, It was a director today and was a long time senior VP operations, both at Dima and B2Gold and a lot of the engineering technical team was put together by George and Bill has done an admirable job continuing to support the team and also grow the team as well. So I'll pass it on to Bill. Then you're going to hear from Tom, and I think I mentioned Tom's 32 years. We've been working together. We were started working together in Yukon 32 years ago.
I know what you're thinking. We were 1213. But just a remarkable accomplished exploration geologist that has a phenomenal team and their successes though way back in there and they continue. So now I'll pass it on to Bill.
Bring the mic down a little. So, obviously, following Clive is never an easy task. When I when I the way it normally works is it goes Clive and then Mike and then Bill and then Tom, if there's something exciting. When you follow Mike, it's just kind of a bunch of garbled numbers and record. And so it makes it easy to follow.
But, obviously, Clive is the hell of a speaker. And Tom is speaking today, so that also means there's exciting stuff on the exploration side. But Clive asked me to speak on behalf of the operations and in particular Fekola as he put it, he'd like the operations group to take a little victory lap. Certainly. So my thesis today is that we have delivered time and again on every commitment that operations has made and that we will continue to, to optimize and maximize what we do.
We're going to start, as I said, with Fekola, We're going to spend a little bit of time, a little bit of extra time on Fekola than the other projects. If everyone remembers, we acquired the Fekola project in 2014, it had a permit in hand to construct. So basically once we had that permit, we immediately sent our traction team in to do some of the early works to cut the road and then make an airstrip to get the camp, going. At the same time, we optimize the feasibility which was done in June of 2015 and for everyone's recollection, that was at 4,000,000 tons per annum. We started construction immediately upon approval in June 2015 with a construction period of 27 months.
27 months starts start to end. And during that time, we actually expanded it from 4,000,000 tons per annum to 5,000,000 tons per annum. During that time, we had more than 1300 construction workers on-site move more than 5,000,000 cubic meters of material, fully lined a 670,000 square meter tailings facility brought in more than 43,000 tons of material from through 2 borders for more than 35,000 cubic meters of concrete, 2600 tons of steel, more than 58 kilometers of piping and more than 5.73 tons of plate work, a major, major construction project. Obviously, as you can see from the slide, we ended up being 3 months ahead of schedule. We got to commercial production in November 2017, 1 month ahead of the revised schedule.
Remember, we originally talking about Q1. We actually ended up doing it in the fourth quarter of 2017. And as Clive already mentioned, coming out of the gate, an amazing 111,000 450 ounces of gold, which was more than double what we had predicted into the market more than 55,000. And he already talked about the cash costs with operating costs with something with a 2 in front of it. Pretty amazing.
So how did we do it? I mean, this is, this is always asking when we go to these conferences and we talk to analysts, the question's always, what makes you guys different? Well, certainly, It's the in house team, really, that is, that is the secret. Kieran Loughran is here. He's been with us for all 5 of our construction projects.
And, Richard Mattson, another guy that's been with us since the early VEMA days. And these guys take it personally. If you ever talk to either one of them out on a construction site, they treat it like it's their own project and their own money. Every day is fought in 1, every day. They also take accountability for what they're doing.
For example, we actually had just come off of the Otjikoto project when we went to Fekola. So we literally went right from Otjikoto commissioning in the Fekola construction. But before we did that, we got the whole team together. That being John Rahala, the commissioning team at Otjikoto, the, engineering team, the construction team, the operating team, we actually talked how do we make things better? We and the reality is this, you know, visually, Otjikoto was was a roaring success.
But of course, there's always the little things you want to do better, schedules you can tweak, the equipment that you think you can organize better. And so when we got Fekola, we had just an amazing chance to come out of the gate, and right from the start, it was amazing. John and, in, in the lycopodium team designed a mill, which was expandable right from the beginning. That's kind of a B2 trademark. Clive often talks about how maybe we're a little bit different in the sense that we're always doing exploration during construction.
And of course, that, that was the case at Fekola. So we found out early on, and the construction team said, let's not wait until we're finished to expand. Let's go ahead and do it now. So we got that approval and we did it. And we, we've developed longstanding relationships with the government.
When we come into a country, of course, we make sure that we hire professionals that have the local expertise that are respected in country In this case, Mohammed Diorra, who you'll hear from in just a little bit, was brought on to the team. And early on, when we met with the regulators, explained our concepts, we gave promises, and then we kept those promises. I guess, I'd also like to talk about very quickly before I move on something that's not really talked about a lot in B2, but really, he deserves a lot of credit. And that, that's how we develop and acquire properties. Certainly, you've got the exploration group that goes out, but you've also got Dennis Stansbury and his team.
And Dennis is really the key person that goes out and looks at these things early on. And puts together the preliminary model, which, which makes it possible for us to actually acquire project. And then he's obviously very much integrated during the design and all the way up into construction. So a very critical part of our, of our
team. So
the next couple of slides, there's not a lot of text on it. You haven't seen that aren't in the press releases for sure. So I'm going to put up the numbers and you can look at them while I'm talking. But I I wanted to talk a little bit about Fekola and the operations. Obviously, we've had it's come out it's come out of the gates like a house on fire.
And that really relates to the team that we have on-site and, of course, what we built. We hired Randy Ryker. Randy Ryker is the general manager at Fekola, We hired him way back in August 2016, a year before we were commissioning. We felt this was going to be a good project and we want to get the right person. It actually worked out that both Kieran and Richard Matson named Randy Record is the only person that they wanted to work with through construction.
So it actually worked out very well. I don't know if you know Randy. Randy Randy is a 30 plus year guy in the mining industry, he spent the 1st 10 years working with another company, Kuminko, but then he actually came to us when we were working in Russia. He was the general manager at Julieta, and he was the general manager also at Kupol. Then he went off and did some other stuff we want to talk about.
But in the end, in August 20 CNT came back into the fold, and he's been with us ever since, and absolutely a critical, critical aspect of our success. And, he brought a pro he brought with him his operational team, and by kind of Q1 2017, they were already up in mining. So we had a great jump on the mining.
Well, as I said, I think
I already said, we reported we got commercial production on November 30, 2017. Doubling our projections for 2017, obviously very strong ramp up. But I do want to remind people what we are projecting out of this. Sometimes it's lost in this amazing ramp up what this thing is going to do, right? So we actually created a new life of mine last year where we had 400,000 ounces per year for the 1st 3 years with an operating cost of about $3.60 an ounce.
Our 7 year projection, 374,000 ounces per year at 391. And of course, the 10 year life of mine 345,000 ounces at 4:28. So this thing is this thing is absolutely a beast. And the other thing I'd like to recognize to everybody is that we, we had these internal meetings this week, these engineering meetings, and we asked all of the GMs to come in and present, right? So remember, this thing 1st gold port in September, 2017, we just we're over 300,000 ounces already, right?
So we're halfway through 2018. We're talking about 300,000 ounces already. Another fascinating or wonderful statistics, 80% of the people that we hired construction. So that's 80% of the people that were hired in Mali, local people, people that had never worked in an industrial environment, they've now been transferred across into operation, so people that have never worked with mechanized with mechanized equipment are now running our mine in Molly. And with that being said, we've gone more than 2 years without an LTI there, a phenomenal statistic and a, and a true credit to the team that's on-site.
And the last thing on Fekola, spoiler alert, I know Tom's going to talk about Fekola, Clive's already been asking us, how would we expand this? How would we make it bigger? So we've got the group, John Mahalo and Peter Montagna already looking at what is scenarios? Can this thing get bigger? Can we do more with it?
And Tom's going to talk about if there's the potential to actually do that. Okay, Masbate, I'm going to start just by introducing a couple of people that aren't going to speak today, but obviously critical, critical to our operations there. I'm going to start with Chris Acosta. Chris Acosta is the president in the Macadio office. He's the country manager and president of Filminera Resources Corporation, which is a subsidiary of B2, been with he actually been with the company and the project for over 10 years.
And Chris in case you didn't guess, it never talked to Chris, extremely bright guy, graduate of the U. S. Westpoint Academy, full bright scholar, to Cornell and MIT, So be careful when you're around them. And then you've got Gloria, Gloria Climaco, Gloria is the chairman of our board. Gloria joined us last year, working she's been working with us for a while on government relations.
She's been on very, some very important boards inside of Philippines and is highly respected within the country. So B2 took over operations in, the Philippines in 2013. We ended up going owner operator or owner mining in 2014. We upgraded the plant in 2016, And then in 2017, that being last year, we actually exceeded our production guidelines by more than 9%. That obviously, we, if you remember the story, we benefited from some stockpiles that we'd accumulated in 2016.
But we also benefited through benefited for some higher oxide in the Colorado pit, which basically gave us kind of this holy trinity of milling. We had better grade, better recovery, better throughput. We also commissioned a new fleet and worked on continuous improvements. So all these things have really come together, and that place is absolutely firing on all cylinders. With that, we've decided to expand that plant to 8,000,000 tons per annum.
So we will, we believe that we will continue to see great recoveries or great ounce production there at Masbate. And once again, coming back to lost time accidents, the leader in our group is actually Masbate, more than 9 60 days without an LTI. I don't think there's a Tim Hortons here in Vancouver that's got those statistics. Ochicoto was, purchase from Rx Gold in 2011. We completed a feasibility, a definitive feasibility, at the end of 2012 and immediately began construction in 2013, once again, led by Kieran and Richard.
We commissioned in 2015, late 2014, early 2015, basically 24 months after starting construction. And if you remember, if you think back to the Fekola project, The group was already leaving at that time, and I was with that group. So we had to hire Mark Daw. Mark Daw is the country manager and Managing Director for, for Otjikoto. In 2016, we had a great year.
We met and exceeded our ounce profile, but 2017 was even better. Had a record year, 9% above the original budget forecast. And that was related a lot to Wolfshag, the zone that was defined and delineated by the expiration group in 2014, 2015, and also the continuous improvements and the controls that were put on the operations. And for example, I don't know if any of you know, recoveries at Otjikoto budgeted recoveries are 98%. We exceed that on a regular basis, we're up above 98.5 Throughput, the throughput at Otjikoto this year by budget is 3,300,000 tons, which is above what we designed, by the way.
But we exceed that as well. And the cost consistently beat budget. We also, this year, commissioned a solar power plant. Mark's going to talk a little bit about that, so I'm not going to steal a thunder, but obviously to a, it was a resounding test there there at Otjikoto. I was just down there for that.
Now Libertad, kind of echoing Clive statement as a Canadian company, we believe and promote the dialogue for peaceful resolutions of the situation in Nicaragua. We are, in fact, concerned and supportive of our 3000 direct and indirect employees in their families there in Nicaragua, but they have expressed to us through the manager there that they would like to continue to work and maintain stability within our communities. And they want, obviously, the communities to remain, remain peaceful. And just so you know, our mines do continue to operate there. So that's the reason, now is when I would normally introduce the country managers and the general managers there, but they're actually not here today.
That, that would be Omar Vega, Andrei Gonzalez and Jorge Marine. They're dealing with the situation in Nicaragua. I'm sure everyone's aware of 2017 or 2017, we did not meet budget at Libertad, and that was really a direct result of not getting some permits. We, in the fourth quarter of last year, rectified that after Clive and some of the management team went down and talked with some senior personnel there. They made a plan and 2 of the 3 permits came out.
That being San Juan and San Diego. So as of Q1, we had opened up and those, those two pits were operating fully, and things are definitely moving in the right direction. The Jabali Antenna permit, the one we're missing is currently scheduled for Q3 of this year. We don't know how that's work out obviously with the situation behind Nicaragua, what we've done, and we actually put it out in the last press release, was we've made adjustments and certainly we do not need that permit to maintain guidance for this year. Also, I'd like to point out a positive for last year.
Certainly, although we didn't make our ounces, our mining costs are processing costs and our G and A costs, all were below budget. The only reason the costs were so high is the ounce profile versus what we had budgeted was much lower. We also, this year, at the beginning of this year, signed a new union agreement, a 2 year agreement that went very peacefully and was very positive. And the plant continues to operate amazingly.
I'm skipping the slides here. So Limon,
if you follow B2, we had some issues with some water. And some maintenance of our underground equipment. In the middle of last year, we made some decisions. We changed, we did changed some management there. We changed the way we do maintenance there.
We worked on that. And I can and I'm happy to tell you that both of those issues have been resolved for 2018. And the underground is back on track with water controls in place. The Mercedes permit was received the Mercedes open permit was received at the end of last year, and production is ongoing there. This provides us flexibility of ore sources in 2018.
We've also commenced the development of the Veda Nueva Underground Project, and that will come on stream in 2019. Labor remains stable there. And the plant continues. Once again, there's a, there's a theme here, John. The plant continues to operate well.
The big news, I suppose, once again, a bit of a spoiler alert is that Limon Central that everybody's talking about. I know Tom's going to talk about it, Lamonte Central, it provides we have an initial inferred resource of 5,100,000 tons at 4.92 grams per tonne and the drilling continues there. So a real game changer there. On that, on that, area, the permitting is ongoing. The EIA has been submitted.
All of the land required to build all the infrastructure that would go around that facility has been purchased. And metallurgical and engineering studies to evaluate processing expansion options are in progress. So there's a very real chance that we could expand Limon. So in general, I just want I, I said a bunch of maybe things which you already read all about and certainly in any press release, you can find out about it. But I want you to think about really the schedule that we've done.
And I just wrote it down here because for me, it's amazing. Let's jump back to 2009 when we acquired Nicaragua, right? So by the in 2010, we built Libertad reaching commercial production. In 2011, we acquired Otjikoto, 2012, we complete the feasibility, start construction 2013, acquire Papion in 2013, complete construction at the end of 2014, That's what Chikoto now achieved commercial production in 2015, acquire Fekola in 2014, complete the feasibility in June 2015, commence construction, complete construction in 2017 initiate record production at the in 2017 and now increase that to more than 900 and- or a target range of 910,000 to 950,000 ounces in 2018. I would say that we have done everything that we said we do, we do, and then some.
Just looking quickly, it's easy to talk about statistical numbers as far as operations and stuff, but really, I always have confidence that the guys are going to deliver on the process side. That is really, that's not the stuff that keeps me up at night. And it's probably not the stuff that keeps the GM up at night as well. If you look at our health and safety record, we have basically halved our lost time incident frequency rate, We are now right there with kind of industry best. And what I'm really proud of is as we brought it down and we're able to maintain it so far this year.
On environment, we've got initiatives that every one of our operations, which I, what I would say is best in class. I would argue that, that we're doing some of the best biodiversity and conservation work in the industry and certainly all of the and country managed, we'll talk a little bit about some of the biodiversity initiatives we have ongoing at each operation. On the corporate social responsibility side, I'll tell you this, this morning, we actually had an interview on the solar plant. Somebody called up and was asking about the solar plants. So we were talking to him, myself, and Mark Daugh.
And the, the, the journalist said to me that, hey, it's really strange that mining companies are thinking about sustainability because it's a finite resource and what do you, you know, finite means that obviously it's not sustainable. I said, well, we would argue with you and hopefully over a couple of beers, but we would argue with you that sustainability is not really the resource in the ground. Sustainability is what you do while you have that resource, what kind of things can you promote that makes a legacy for you? And so from our side, we, as a company, we, we really focus on livelihood and public health education and conservation. These are things that we do at all of our sites.
Once again, they're gonna, the manager's gonna talk a little bit about it. But it's just part of our DNA. As part of that, we've actually started, if you ever go to any of these projects and talk to the regulators, they'll start talking to you about That's, that's well and good. You've got, however, many thousands of jobs, and you're just paying all your taxes, but that doesn't necessarily help us long term. We'd really like you to develop some of the spin off economy and work with local procurement.
So we started an initiative in 2018 where we're going to work with all of our to TriNet identify areas where we can improve upon local procurement. And I'll have to say I was actually very pleased and proud when the consultant came through and told us that quite frankly, we're doing very well. And the, the, the, the mere fact that the management itself supports us and drives this as an indicator that it's important to us and that will succeed. This is an interesting initiative that we started actually last year. This is our sustainability report.
In 2017, we decided that we were going to try and summarize all of the things, all of the indicators that we do and try and show you in our, in report format that's in the same format as many of, many of our peers report, just how good we are. And the good thing about this report is it's not actually a rah rah brochure. This is an actual report, which talks about not only all the positive things we do. It certainly talks about areas where we can improve. It's a single body of vetted information.
And it can be used as due diligence from some of the, for some of the investors and analysts, and it's a transparent look at who we are as a company. It'll be used to dialogue with all of our stakeholders, NGOs, government authorities, shareholders, And I would encourage you. I, I think there's actually some copies outside. So when you finish, grab a copy, if you'd like, And if you don't want to carry the paper home, I think we're actually, we're, launching in on our website either today or Monday. So 2017, the report actually when it came to me was, was a real tome of a document, a heavy document, and there's so much information in there.
And I asked, why is it so much different than 2017? Why did you guys do so much more? And the answer was simple. As you become a 1,000,000 ounce producer, you're in a different group. And in order to be in that group, you gonna have to provide more information.
So the report illustrates our management approach on how we deal our management approach towards economics, environment, social and human rights. The report demonstrates our performance and identifies gaps in our and how we actually will manage those gaps. As, as I said, we now have 5 mines, so it's important for us to get this right. Also, as part of this report, there's some human interest stories. Throughout the report, there's several very unique store things that are unique to be too that we do and we talk about how how we've done them and really how we manage them.
I guess with that, maybe maybe I'll stop there. I I'd like to what I what I'd want to do now is is some of the some of the key people that are on-site I'd like to bring them up here and have them tell you a little bit about CSR. And I'm going to start, as I did with the presentation with, with Fekola, Mohammed Dior. Mohammed Dior is a country manager of B2Gold. He's been with us since 2015.
I first met him when he worked for the Ministry of Mines. The Old Master of Science And Minerals And Energy Economics from Curt And Graduate School of Business in Perth, Australia And he also has a bachelor of finance from the Unarissa Tallahassee in Florida. From 2013 2015, he was a technical advisor at the Ministry of Mines, and he's obviously fluent in both English and French. So with that, Mel, I'll turn it over to you for a couple of slides.
Good afternoon. Okay. Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me speak today. I just wanted to come in and probably complete some of the things that Bill said, just on the various issues, especially when it comes to community, social relations in Mali.
So I'd just like to start by saying that in 2015 when the project first started, which will, had already licensed to operate in a way that we didn't have to do anything with the village. But as Clive mentioned, the view of the company of respect fairness and transparency, which I just kind of repeat what he's saying, he's actually showed his will with government of promoting the welfare of the villagers next to the mine. So, as a proof of a will to, enhance the quality of life of the village. The board actually awarded a $20,000,000 funds to locate the village. So it wasn't mandatory, but it was more like it was the right thing to do.
So $20,000,000 was, voted and, we actually started building the new village next to the mine. A little bit further down. So the villages don't have to suffer from, any dust, any explosions around a bit. And it's already 50% complete. So we're expecting to have on the first quarter of next year, the first villagers moving that village.
In addition to that, we can see that we actually contribute to actions around the village. So you'll have different villages like Tim Tiva, many nandi, Musala, which are benefiting from B2Gold different donation for T2Gold as far as farming. We get some tractors that we give to villagers, some indications, the nations like if you see schools, we do all things with various masks and we're actually promoting B2Gold's presence in that region. So the relationship is going. We have a good CSR team on-site, which is doing a we're doing a very good job with that.
In addition to what Bill was saying for local content, the local content actually we actually making an effort to promote local content in the region, which, we have hired just now a new local content to superintendent will be in charge of promoting the VUMD2 goal on what's necessary in the region to actually promote entrepreneurship and also the way we work in training the villagers and try to get a more involved with B2B in the region. As far as like as a transition from local content, we have had a new project in coordination with the government of Canada called Afek It's a trending education program, which will help the people around the the mind to, actually be more ready when we have a entrepreneurship opportunity. So the Canadian government is actually bringing about $5,500,000 and Vitragul is bringing about $1,800,000. We've already completed year 1, and we support your program. So we're thinking that within the next 3 years, we will complete a pilot project already and also create like a training center in the Geneva region.
And lastly, we would like just to remind everybody that Clive and the whole executive team were in Mali in the beginning of February 2018. So the president of Mali came to site and inaugurated the mine. It was a very big event. So we brought a couple of ministers within other local government and decentralized authorities were there. It was a very big event.
So it was very well received by the authorities, the president came and actually said in his speech that he was a win win operation for Mali. He was very happy with what he saw. And actually congratulate his Clive and said that he was very welcome in Mali. So I think some of those initiatives that we've done and also the way we prepare for this event actually also increase also show license to operate in country. Just to add to two things good.
We have a very good relationship with the 2 ministries that we work in with that I keep to us, which is the Ministry of Finance And Ministry of Mines. See on the picture that the guy would have had is the Minister of Mines. We which between, we have a very good relationship, Clive made in several times, it would be this is our mind in Namibia. And he came to the committee to meet with Clive and the minister of Finance, who I used to work for when I was in ministry of mines with minister of Finance and he's actually having very good relationship with us as well. So this will do that a few points that I wanted to mention and thank you for listening.
Back down.
Go to speaker today. Just out of interest, I had actually also taken a couple of quotes from, from that grand opening that we had in February. When the president spoke, if you were there, for those who are there, he spoke really from the heart. First of all, he spoke in English, apparently is his first time he's really publicly spoke in English, and then he also spoke about things which were near and dear to him. He talked about the fact we had created an asset for all Mollyans.
And he talked about the fact that he praised the company's commitment to the environment and the education programs that we had. It was actually very, very moving. And then, well, I actually probably should have done the other way, way around, because Clive actually spoke first. Clive got up and everyone knows Clive's, decent speaker for sure, but Clive got up and spoke really directly from the heart and was talking because he also was very moved by what he saw. And I'll just use, I'll just use his quotes.
I mean, this is directly from Clive. The construction of this mine would not have been possible without the sustained and ongoing support of the government and the support of the local and regional governments and local communities. So it really was this very moving situation. And if you get a chance to talk to Mueller Abraham, who's here, about how it was received in Molly and how it played over and over. It was obviously recorded and played over and over again on TV in the, in the, in the time after that, really quite moving.
Okay. Moving on maybe to the Philippines, I'm gonna have Ray Mead stand up and talk about some of the CSR initiatives. Ray has got 35 years of mining under his belt. He commenced at Mont's body during the construction phase, and he's been there 10 years. So he he definitely knows the Philippines.
He's been the GM since 2012. He also has experienced throughout Africa, Australia, and the Philippines, right?
Thanks, Bill. Taking off from, I guess, Clive's mandate of being the best that we can be. I think this slide sort of illustrates to us that, one of the things that hasn't been touched on a lot is the environment. And as minors, we don't often give it the respect of reserves, but what we've moved to in the Philippines is, is using, our environmental programs to really show, the government of the Philippines, other operators in the Philippines just how good, we can be. And how well we can present a mine site.
So, what you can see up there is waste dumps rehabilitated, waste dumps. The main photo that white waste dump is less than two years old So right from the very beginning, we've started revegetation, shaping, putting water, run off controls, and the like. To really, prove to ourselves, and the government that What we do at Mezbardi is best in class. Some of the smaller photos, the little one down the bottom, is a revegetated dump. That's where we can get to, given a little bit of time, it's 5 years of vegetation growing, growing on a waste dump.
The importance of all of this, I guess, is particularly in an environment like the Philippines where there's an active anti mining lobby. The government, reacts very much to what this lobby has to say. And it's always looking for, ways to combat what they, what they come up with. Here, a couple of tabloid, snapshots where we've had high level visits of government ministers to our site. And through, environmental programs, what we've been able to show them, we've won their respect In fact, they've gone to press to indicate that we are the best mine that they've seen in the Philippines we believe they believe that we, are a responsible minor, and that we can be a model for the industry and our peers, certainly within the Philippines.
It also gives them ammunition to fight back against an anti mining lobby, to really show that we're not all tar with the same brush. So, again, to what Clive says, we are the best, we are the best that we can be in the Philippines, and that's starting to show out. Masbate operation is in a fairly unique setting. So I guess some of our CSR programs, are interesting in themselves and sort of veer away from, from the norm of what you would see at a typical mining operation So, what, what would come up with, and it's a livelihood initiative is to restore a coral reef. Now you're probably thinking to yourself what's coral and what's a reef got to do with the mine site.
Our location is on the, on, on the coast of the Maserati Island. We are also, surrounded by coastal communities. So the community that, that, communities that are close to us are coastal communities. One of the big problems within the Philippines, is Philippines is an area of rapid population growth. So, very difficult to feed feed that rapid rapidly growing population.
So the fishermen coastal people to to really subsist have, have gone to more and more aggressive lengths to feed themselves. And unfortunately, that's, that's had major impacts to, the environment that we, that they live in and that we work So we did baseline studies back in 2008 before the operation kicked off. There was coral cover at about 46% of what we would expect, for a healthy reef in the area. By 2016, that had dropped to between 12% 20%. And 2017, further reduction down to a less than 12% coral cover in the coastal community near the mine, nothing to do with the mine site, from, from a damage perspective.
What's happened is that the community trying to feed themselves have seen dwindling fish stocks. So they resorted to more and more and more aggressive fishing methods So they've started with, finer finer mesh nets moved on to using cyanide to stun and capture fish and then finally to dynamite fishing, which is really then destroyed their coral habitat breeding, areas for fish. And so therefore, the fish stocks continue to dwindle off and therefore feeding that population becomes extremely difficult. So Our environmental group, coupled with our community relations group, had a look at this problem, and worked, worked on a, CSR initiative where we could do something about restoring the reef firstly and foremost, and ultimately, restore the fish life in the area to, allow the community feed themselves. So we paired with, a group called the REIT Ball Foundation.
There are renowned group, based in Florida, in the United States, who've got a technology for enhancing, reef life. At the same time, we work with the local government to, establish a marine protected area. So we've got 129 hectares of water that's now protected. It's a no fish, no stop zone. We provide wardens for the area to, make sure people abide by, the protection of the area.
And then we work with the community to, start construction of an engineered reef to, improve what's already there. We believe the natural corals will regenerate but it, it will take time and we believe that by, putting in reef balls, we can speed up the whole process for them. So some photos there, certainly on the, on the left is, is the current state of the reef, which is fairly decimated. The blow picture is, some of the local community. We now employ them to make their own reef.
So there's the livelihood that they've been lacking from, from the loss of the fishing capability. We then, deploy these reef balls into, a planned area. Then we plant them out with corals that we picked up that have, just fragments of coral and the like that are laying on the seafloor from from the dynamite fishing exercises. So far we've put in 125 REIT bulls. There's another 500 going in this weekend.
Coming. We planted over 2000 corals on those. And, the right hand side at the bottom, what you can see is is not what we've got, but what we expect to have within 4 or 5 years, and that'll be a healthy coral habitat, we have noticed already a return of fish life to the area. So if we can provide further habitat for them. We expect that there will actually be quite a rapid, improvement in the area.
And what we hope is that other coastal communities adopt the same sort of process. We'll work with them to, to help them along, and hopefully get to the point where we have several more marine protected areas and the like, and really we reestablish the fish life in the area and therefore the livelihood, and the subsystems for all groups that are around. So something unusual, something unique for a mining operation, something we're quite proud of, and it's certainly in its early, early stages, but we're expecting big things from it. So that's Masbate. Thank you.
Thanks, Ray. Now I'm going to ask Mark Daut to come up and about Otjikoto. Mark is, actually met Mark. He was the first person I met when I went to Namibia to build a project there. At the time, he was a vice president of Solvay, which is a big European mining house and also the Managing Director of a Fluorspar mine there.
But probably more importantly, he was the president of the Namibian ChamberMinds, highly respected, very well connected and we share the same passion for conservation and sustainability. So, Mark could come up with me. I've limited him to three slides. This guy could literally talk for 3 hours. We've given him 10 minutes, so, it's going to be quick.
Where is the microphone here? So I was going to decline when Bill only gave me 10 minutes to talk on CSI. Didn't think it was worthwhile, but I guess I better think it's my boss. The first one, first slide that we have here is the new solar plant. And, why is this about CSR?
I will tell you a bit about the plant and then about why it's how it relates to CSR. There's 63,000 panels there. We just commissioned the plant It took us 9 months to build on time, on budget as with everything in B2. It's a, partly consists of thin film solar panels, the caterpillar thin film, it's basically produced in the United States or the panel that produced in the United States, by a company called First Solar. And it's a full tracking plant, which means that it follows the sun from east to west as it goes down.
As you probably know, Namibia, we have a lot of sun, probably one of the most, highly selective countries with highest three radiations in the world. So it was kind of an no brainer for us. What this plant is currently doing and it's and we've proven the numbers that we're integrated by our finance team here at corporate, we are generating about 13% of our power from solar at the moment. It's, the 1st fully autonomous hybridized plant we believe in the world. In other words, the engines are stopping and starting themselves as the comes up as cars come along.
We have high speed engines and, lower speed engines, the big engines, 5 Megawatts, 12 CM32 caliper. MAK engines, they do not start autonomously, but the high speed engines do, which gives us the time to start up the lower speed engines. The bigger ones. And we're finding that, it's exceeding our expectations in terms of, solar production just operational as of 18th May. So it's hot off the principal, as he just said, has been to Namibia to, to, provide us the commissioning of the plant.
We're really, really excited about it. Now why is this, relevant to our CSR programs? Well, I presented this to the board just a year ago in June last year. Taken us, as I say, less than a year 9 months we've had it producing. And one of the things I've very cheekily suggested to support is that when we finish mining, when our mine is depleted and we walk away from Machakoto, we'll have a big solar plant there.
And if we link into the grid, which we aren't at the moment, I an island producer, do we really want to make money out of, energy produced by the sun? Because we make our money from gold. And, the senior vice president said, well, great idea. We could start or continue to support our CSR programs, which are huge. We're putting so much into CSR, as Bill said, I could bore you for hours about that.
But what we're looking at and it is a very strong possibility after mine closure, we'll be pumping all of this, energy back into the National Grid. And the solar plant will be earning 1,000,000 of $1,000,000, 100 of 1000 of U. S. Dollars a year, that we could then put into our CSR programs to literally make them truly sustainable, as Bill was saying, we had the discussion with the journalist this morning, and he said, come on, mining is not really sustainable, even though you're in the business of depleting a nonrenewable resource, and, you know, Bill kind of argued with him and said we can. What we do today can be sustainable forever.
So this is a very exciting project for us and it is fully operational now. There's a possibility we can expand it to. The other thing I'll talk about very briefly, the education center, what do we do there? We've had thousands of children pass through there. At this stage, I think we have a 5000 children.
We teach them all about, beauty of science, mathematics, physics. We've got a program running there actually started, through one of our American colleagues who, came across this program called the Dul Shop of Physics in the Colorado State University. So a couple of years ago, in 2016, we brought the props and teachers out from CSU and, they introduced the program to us. And also to the Ministry of Education. And, what we found is that the Namibians in general are actually quite well educated.
The programs, the curriculum, the schools are pretty comprehensive, but the practical application of their learnings of what they learn in schools is almost missing, not only missing with the teachers or the pupils, but also the teachers. And so we started off by teaching the teachers, And they just love this program so much, we bought him a living Institute of Educational Development, so that he's presiding body over education in the country. They loved it too. We expanded it and it's now become part of the national curriculum in every school in the country will be we'll be learning about, maths and physics and chemistry experiments through the little shop of physics, which is actually based out of Otjikoto Mine, but it will be in each of the universities and each of the schools as well. So we're very, very proud of that.
At the education center, by the way, we also teach about the environment. Very passionate about conservation, as Bill mentioned. And, we have a number of programs where we support a whole lot of different environmental groups as some of you might know, Namibia is very famous for pristine, the pristine wilderness, but in terms of the countryside, as well as the animals, the fallen, and the flora. And, we're very passionate about supporting that. One of the few places on Earth, we have a lot of wild roaming endangered species.
And we actually have a 20,000 hectare piece of land there, of which about 12,000 hectares is under conservation. This next slide shows a project that we're really passionate about, and we're calling it rewilding the future. So we're saying rewinding the future, So our intention is to join one of the national parks. It's called the Waterburg plateau park up to our Nature reserve, the Otjikoto Nature reserve. It's, going to be a park of about 400,000 hectares.
It's a multi use park to support the people, the owners of the land, the communities in the area that hadn't previously been supported by, nature conservation or the national pockets there. The tribe folk there are actually called Herreros in that area, and they had never received any benefit from wildlife or nature, in that area at all. So when we floated this project to the, corporate board, as always, they said, we'll go for it. How much money do you want? And I said, nothing at this stage.
Thank you very much. And so that was EMEA 6 months ago that I was here. And, we're almost at the final stages of floating this new natural park which we're going to be calling the Greater Waterburg Partnership Park. And, the idea is that each of the landowners with their communities or their individual farmers or they could even be, NGOs such as CCF GD Conservation Fund, they would earn a portion of this park and become a shareholder of the park and derived benefits from it that aren't way in excess of the benefits they've received from owning the land themselves. So very exciting initiative watch that space.
It's going to be one of the largest parks in Namibia and very exciting.
As I said, Mark can wax politically for hours on that. He's actually created a video a CSR video, which I think is running outside, and it'll also be running. If you're coming to the party tonight, it'll also be running there, I believe. The last person is actually a stand in because Nicaragua was not here. But also another guy that can talk a long time about CSR for sure, Dale Craig, he's the VP of Operations.
He's in charge of both the Philippines and Nicaragua. He's been with the team since 2009. He actually came to us via Nicaragua, he was actually the GM at Libertad and then moved across as country manager and eventually was elevated up to a VP of Operations. He'll be talking about the CSR in Nicaragua.
Thank you, Bill. And I anticipate, as indicated, I will be the shortest speaker here. In fact, I already am. Have to move the microphone down of 2 or 3 inches years. Today, I'll talk a little bit about our CSR programs in Nicaragua.
And I'll also talk about our water management programs in Nicaragua. We've been operating almost 10 years there. And we have a well developed, mature CSR program, and all the aspects that you would come to expect from a, well developed CSR program. The slide here, simply focuses on our community investment aspects, which are health, livelihood, education and infrastructure. Early on in the mine development, we focused largely on infrastructure.
We've tried to derate that in favor of sustainable programs that will live long past the development of the mines. We still see infrastructure returning. The truth is the term in Nicaragua Aracrisso Zescadas, scarce resources from time to time, communities needed assistance with finance expertise and construction techniques for roads, bridges, and walkways in the community. It's no coincidence that 2 of the projects or 2 of the areas discussed today have to do with water. Because the truth is in every community and every country, water is at the top of the list of concerns for stakeholders.
So we owe it ourselves to be responsible and show the development of water practices within the community In Nicaragua, we have a well developed program that starts with control and prevention. That really means what is our impact and how do we mitigate that. Source Water protection, which really means looking after existing sources to ensure that they stay clean. And are and are monitored, environmental education, both for our employees and for the communities. And finally, water for the community.
The first side is actually interesting. It's in Spanish, which would serve perhaps to reduce the number of questions here. But it also is something that we show in the communities where we visit. And what it does is it takes a local example with local locations and explains how we, how we implement water control measures and how we monitor in the field. So it's very easy to show in a simple manner what we're doing says that that we're undertaking and allows people to understand when we talk about monitoring results and what they do and where they are.
Very simple to understand. So for us, our responsibility have 1st class control measures in place, monitor those precipitously and share those monitoring results. Practice, grant, certification, and practice education. So, this provides education both for our employees who can be good spokespersons for us and for the local population. 2nd aspect of water management practices, source water control.
Now since 2010, we've planted more than 1,000,000 trees in Nicaragua. We work with Innophore, which is the National Forest III agency in Nicaragua. And we target mostly runoff control areas, so areas adjacent to rivers that typically have been clear cut. By, by ranchers. We replant those and that controls runoff and ensures the quality of water in the streams.
Also, we target source water areas, headwaters for reforestation. And to date, we've populated with reforestation more than 2.72 hectares. Also, in Southern Domingo, we've targeted an area of headwater and declared it a, a national reserve for wildlife, and that in turn has sequestered that area as, a protected source for water. So I've mentioned education all through this. Brief short presentation.
And, finally, let's talk about water for the community always a concern for La Libertad and Santa Domingo, we have constructed potable water systems for both populations. We did that in conjunction with, with Anacao, and that's the water resource, management agency in Nicaragua. So with them, we design these plants, we construct them, and then we turn them over to Enercal and to the local community so that they can be operated sustainably. To date, we've constructed plants and provided delivery services that give water to more than 13,000 inhabitants in the local area. And this is a very effective way of democratically distributing benefits that arrive to the, to the communities through our work.
And it also provides a good example for the communities about what kind of benefits can be accrued when miners are in the neighborhood? I'll summarize there. And, and leaving, I would say, we owe it to ourselves to institute these kinds of programs. It clearly demonstrates benefits that accrue to the local communities, and it serves as an excellent example so that in our next project, people can see these projects being undertaken and delayed their concerns about what will happen when B2Gold shows up in the neighborhood. Thank you very much.
All right. That's it for the CSR section. There's only one more, one more speaker. And quite frankly, I'm sure that's what most of you probably come here to, to hear. Tom Garrigan, the senior VP of Exploration.
I love hearing him speak because quite frankly, first of all, he's professional amongst professionals for sure, and he always brings something very exciting and new.
Bill? It's only appropriate that Bill still is a thunder because really he's the guy who's gonna have to mind the stuff we would find. So our exploration budget, for this year is, $52,000,000. We're going to be drilling over 2 130,000 meters Most of this work is being done, brownfields exploration around the mine sites. I'm only going to talk about a couple of projects because as I said last year, if I started going on everything, I'd be here all night and you'd be sleeping.
Which may not be a bad thing. You may already be there. One of the most exciting things we're working on right now is Fekola, the extension 2 Fekola. We're drilling, well north of the pitch you can see in this diagram up here is a long section through Fekola. The green pit is the, the green line is the, reserve pit.
The privileged blue line is the, resource line. And then on the right hand side of that, which is to the north, is where all our drilling is going on. We've just recently finished a good portion of this drilling, some pretty significant results in the area that's outlined by a blue circle or a blue egg shaped circle is an area where we've seen that the mineralization is actually coming closer to service surface than previously thought with some pretty good results As a result of that, we started to look at, you know, what if scenarios about whether this, area could be mined at one point And certainly as a result of these studies, we, we're at the opinion now that this, this pit can get bigger Obviously, we have a lot more work to do and a lot more drilling to do. But in the goal of this drilling is to have later on in the year, sometime in October probably is to have a brand new resource. And that'll give the chance for the engineers to start looking at, with some real numbers to look at the ability to expand Fekola.
In addition to the Fekola itself, we're doing a lot of work in what we call the snakes or the Anaconda project. We had a large saprolite resource of, almost a 1,000,000 ounces at close to a gram. We are now drilling in the bedrock areas underneath, this saprolite resource and you can see some of these numbers there, you know, 24 meters of foreground is obviously a good one, but you know, 20 meters of 2, forty six meters of 1.6 These are all intersections in the sulfides below the saprolite, which suggests that there is very, very good potential to look for or find another Fekola style deposit underneath the saprolite. Just by scale, this area in pink is the area of the saprolite resource, which in my view, just represents a geocheminol. We that's over 4 kilometers long.
So we have a 4 kilometer long potentially minable saprolite resource sitting on top of install mineralization. I'm not saying it's all mineralized for 4 kilometers, but it certainly indicates the potential to find something new. That's, West Africa. Just go quickly to Limon. Here's this one's, we've just finished the resource just recently and already is starting to get into the mine plan.
So current resource is about 800,000 ounces. We're drilling in within the resource area and certainly within the open pit area to get it to a point where we can declare reserves and do much more detailed mine planning. But in addition to that, if you look at the bottom part of the slide, this is a long section through the whole lemon, vein system. And you can see that we're doing drilling well away from the current model off to the right hand side in area called cacao. And we're also drilling below the, the, current resource pits because we think there's very good potential to have a future underground mine beyond this resource.
And as I said, it's already getting into the mine plan. And I think the plan was to start, stripping later this year. Is that correct? That's pretty rewarding to find something and all of a sudden it's in the mine plan. Your baby's gone right away.
This is just a view of the Limon, the plan view of the Limon vein. You can see it's a North Southern vein and the area that's March central is the area that we're going to start mining. And if you look at off to the north as cacao and Tigra's areas that we still think it's open, and there's potential to expand it. So Clive asked me to just say a little bit about our philosophy and how we look at exploration. You know, we, we divide exploration into 3 portions, the area around the mine, you know, brownfields typical or standard brownfields exploration, you know, anything that we can do to help the mine, extend mineralization, maybe extend mine life.
We certainly had success with that last year. At Colorado where we probably added close to a year to the Colorado mine life, which is near mine expiration. 2nd stage that we look at is, midterm replacement of resources and potential expansion. So in this case, Fekola, extension, Anaconda, we mold vastolic expiration. And now what's coming into the Thursdays long term is, you know, we spend a lot of time looking at projects.
And, that's where we based our, you know, acquisitions on is, is identifying projects that have value. On current market, there's a couple of things that have happened There's not a whole lot of new discoveries out there. And even more so, what has been found, it's really hard to find value from a market point of view, something that we can see value in And, that's because a lot of the analysts are really too good at their job, I guess. But the, so not only do we, are we not looking at from, you know, we've got to see value in our company, but we're not looking at acquisitions because it's hard to find value. So we've changed our exploration philosophy a little bit long term.
We're still looking at doing joint ventures with companies. But we've now set up, you know, I put a couple of $1,000,000 in the budget this year to look at early stage or grassroots projects back to what it was like in the late '70s, early '80s when I started is to look at early stage projects of other places in the world to start identifying what I call big ass deposits, at a much earlier stage. And that's, how we've changed our exploration going forward. We also, have, had some discussions about potentially doing, financings in junior companies, but we're not there yet. With that, I'll pass it back to the boss.
Almost done.
Thank you guys. As much as I do like to talk, it's sure nice to not do all the talking and I'd be able to share with with some of these, some of the team. Unfortunately, I can't get all the team up here would be for a very long time. Just, in my thanks. I'm I, didn't read all my notes.
And I think I'd like you to mention just a couple of people, very important, and I wanted to acknowledge Mike Cinnamon, our our CFO. And yes, he's a relative newbie in 5 years, but he's been in an awesome job as our Chief Financial Officer leads an incredible team in Accounting and done a great job working with our bank and our investors, Roger Richey, who are in house counsel and VP, senior VP admin, Roger, and Tom and I were actually in Yukon in the early 80s working to get Rogers in law school, and he inherited my trailer in the small town of Mayo in the central Yukon to do some expediting there between years of law school. I got promoted to the big smoke to white horse in the Yukon. So Roger does an incredible job and has an amazing team of admin and legal people. Also, I just want to mention Ian MacLean's outstanding job in Investor Relations.
Yes, he's the youngest one of the group that he's been around for an awfully long time as well. We've a graduate from his youth sometimes. At the end of the day, also, I really want to recognize that the far end Neil Reeder. Neil is another newbie, a year and a half, but Neil joined us as these vice president, government relations. Neil is an interesting background.
Neil was the Canadian ambassador to Nicaragua when we first went to, Nicaragua. And then we went to the Philippines and guest who was the Canadian ambassador to the Philippines. It was Neil. So I asked Neil, are you following us around the world, or are we following you? Neil retired a year and a half ago, And, we started talking, and I thought, Ronny would be a great addition to our board of directors of our group, and Neil said he's very keen to work and travel around the world government relations.
He's been excellent addition to our group, and I think you can take it from that, the seriousness we place on government relations. So with that, I'll just suggest that, there are a couple of videos that are going to be showing in the back 2 new videos. One of them is an outstanding video of the story of, Fekola, and the other one is a new CSR video on Namibia. And now I will just quickly ask if there's any questions. I know it's been quite a long time.
Appreciate your patience and your focus on time. And, if they're, you know, wants to ask a question right now, we will attempt to answer it, or we will be in the back, inviting to join us for a beverage over which we can answer questions as well. Is there anything, any questions we can answer at this point? Well, I guess that's a complete presentation. Okay.
Thank you very much, and, appreciate your time and patience on all of you for your support and your hard work. Thank you.