Hello, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Equinox Gold Corp. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. If you participate in today's meeting and disclose personal information, you will be deemed to consent to the recording, transfer, and use of same. If you disclose personal information of another person in today's meeting, you will be deemed to represent and warrant to Computershare and the company that you first obtained all required consent for the disclosure, recording, transfer, and use of such personal information from all appropriate persons before your disclosure. During the meeting, we will have a question and answer session. You may submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the Q&A icon. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Mr. Ross Beaty, Chairman of the Board of Equinox Gold Corp. Mr. Beaty, the floor is yours.
Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Annual and Special Meeting of the Shareholders of Equinox Gold Corp. On behalf of Equinox Gold's directors, management, employees, I wanna thank you for joining us today. The format today is going to be, we're gonna do this formal business and try to get through that as quickly as we can. We're going to go and have a short update on what we're up to right now, for any interested person listening in today. It's a bit of a brutal day in the market today for us. We put out our quarterly results this morning, and markets were not terribly responsive to it.
I'm gonna try to talk to that and explain why it's an overreaction, I think, to what was otherwise a pretty good corporate development and what's going on in the company right now. We're in great shape and have some fabulous prospects. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that right after the meeting. For the moment, we're going to go through the business and try to get through that fairly quickly. We're holding this meeting by live webcast, and after the full meeting, we're also gonna have an opportunity for Q&A so you can ask and answer questions of me.
In the room here in Vancouver at our head office is Susan Toews, the General Counsel, Rhylin Bailie, who's our Vice President of Investor Relations, Christian Milau, who's the CEO, Doug Reddy, our COO, and Peter Hardie, the Chief Financial Officer of Equinox. We're going to apply the following process for conduct of the meeting. First of all, questions about a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or proxyholder using the Q&A icon on your screen. If you don't know how to navigate that system, refer to the AGM guide that was mailed to you, and it's also available for download at our website. If you ask a question, indicate your name, which entity you represent, and then if you're a shareholder or a proxyholder.
Unless questions are procedural or directly related to motions before the meeting, they'll be addressed in the company update after the formal business. We'll also address any meeting-related questions that were submitted through the website at that time. Rhylin Bailie, our Vice President of Investor Relations, will act as question moderator. For the purposes of the meeting today, voting on all matters will be conducted by electronic ballot. To give registered holders and proxy holders sufficient time to vote, we've opened the ballots and will keep them open while I present each item of business to be conducted at the meeting. If you've already voted by proxy, it's important that you do not vote again here at the meeting unless you intend to change your initial vote. We'll now proceed with the formal portion of today's meeting, which should take about 10 minutes.
I'm going to move and second all motions to expedite matters. The meeting will now come to order, and I'll act as Chair. I appoint Susan Toews, Equinox Gold's General Counsel, as Secretary of the Meeting. I also appoint Computershare Investor Services through its representatives as scrutineer for this meeting to compute the votes of any polls taken at the meeting and to report the results to me as chairman. The purposes of today's meeting are set out in the company's Management Information Circular dated March 22nd, 2022. I confirm that the Notice for this Meeting, circular, and the form of proxy were mailed to shareholders on March 25th, 2022. The company has received an affidavit confirming proof of mailing from our transfer agent, Computershare Investor Services. A copy of the affidavit will be a.
affidavit will be attached to, as a schedule to the minutes of this meeting. Unless there's any objection, I'll dispense of the reading of the Notice of Meeting. Copies of the circular and other materials are available on Equinox Gold's website and under the company's profile on SEDAR and on EDGAR. Our scrutineer has advised that proxies were received from the holders of a sufficient number of common shares to constitute a quorum. I therefore call, declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. The formal report of the scrutineer will be attached as a schedule to the minutes of this meeting. As most of you are aware, at annual meetings, most shares are represented by proxies given to management.
The scrutineer has advised that a significant majority of the proxies received by management have been voted in favor of each of the director nominees and in favor of each of the other items of business. We thank you for your confidence. As this is a virtual meeting, today's voting will be conducted by online ballot for all matters. All registered shareholders and proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control number or invite code in which to vote will be able to see on the screen all items of business to be voted on at this meeting. Please remember that if you have previously recorded your vote by proxy, you should not vote again unless you wish to revote and change your initial vote. The polls are currently open for all items of business to be voted on at today's meeting.
This means you can vote on each item immediately, or you can wait until the conclusion of discussion on each item before casting your vote. The items of business to be voted on and your available voting options will be visible on the voting panel on your screen. Please register your votes by selecting the for, withhold, or against buttons next to the name of each proposed director and next to each of the other resolutions. Once discussion has concluded on all matters of business, we'll provide a few additional moments for you to enter your votes. I will then declare voting closed on all matters of business. As a reminder, the online voting polls open for all items of business are open.
I now present to the meeting the audited consolidated financial statements of Equinox Gold for the year ended December 31st, 2021, together with the auditor's report on the financial statements. Copies of these documents have been mailed to the shareholders who requested such statements, and it is not proposed to read them to the meeting. Thank you. We would be pleased, however, to deal with any questions regarding the financial statements during my update following the formal business of the meeting. The next item of business is the election of directors. Management nominates the following nine individuals to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed. Ross Beaty, Lenard Boggio, Maryse Bélanger, François Bellemare, Gordon Campbell, General Wesley Clark, Dr. Sally Eyre, Marshall Koval, Christian Milau.
Each nominee has confirmed that he or she is prepared to serve as a director. Equinox Gold has adopted an Advance Notice Policy that requires shareholders to give the company Advance Notice of Proposed Director Nominations at the Annual Director Shareholders Meeting. Equinox Gold did not receive notice of any such nominations for this meeting. As a result, I declare the nominations closed, and I move and second the motion to elect each of the directors. Unless there are any questions, I will move on.
We have not received any questions.
Thank you, Rhylin. The next item of business is the appointment of Equinox Gold's auditor. I move and second the motion to appoint KPMG LLP as auditor of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders and that the Board be authorized to fix KPMG's remuneration. Unless there are any questions, I'll move on.
We have not received any questions.
Thank you. The next item of business is the proposed amendment to the company's restricted shares, Restricted Share Unit plan to increase the number, the maximum number of Equinox Gold shares that may be reserved for issuance under the plan. The plan is a key component of the company's long-term incentive program that provides for the grant of time-based Restricted Share Unit awards and performance-based share unit awards to eligible employees, officers, and consultants of the company and its affiliates. The company uses the plan to encourage tenure and longevity of employment, to recognize and reward significant contributions to the long-term success of the company, and to align participants' interests more closely with shareholders' interests. The current maximum number of shares that may be issued under the plan is 7 million. This maximum has not been increased since shareholders originally adopted the plan in 2018.
The company is now seeking approval to increase the maximum number of Equinox Gold shares that may be issued under the plan to 12.4 million shares. I move and second the motion that the maximum number of shares issuable upon vesting of Restricted Share Units granted under the company's Restricted Share Unit plan be increased from 7 million to 2.4 million. That any director or officer of the company is authorized and directed, acting for and in the name of and, of and on behalf of the company, to execute or cause to be executed and deliver and cause to be delivered all such public documents required to give effect to these resolutions. Unless there's any questions, I'll move on.
We have not received any questions.
The last item of business is the Say on Pay advisory vote. I move and second the motion that on an advisory basis, and not to diminish the role and responsibilities of the Equinox Board of Directors, Equinox's shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the company's Management Information Circular dated March 22nd, 2022, delivered in advance of this meeting. Unless there's any questions, I will move on.
We have not received any questions.
There, these are all the resolutions before the meeting. We will provide a few more moments for you to complete your electronic ballots, and so there'll be a pause here for, say, 30 seconds.
Yep. Need to wait for a few moments. Great. I can now confirm on behalf of Computershare that the polls have closed.
Thank you, Rhylin. I ask that the scrutineer compile the report regarding the results of voting on all business matters. The results of voting will be included with the minutes of this meeting and will be announced in a press release later today in accordance with the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Is there any further business for the formal portion of the meeting?
There are no outstanding questions related to the business of the meeting.
Okay. Since there's no further business, I move and second that this meeting now terminate and declare the formal part of this annual general and special general meeting to be concluded. Okay, thank you very much, everyone for that formal bit of business. I'm gonna go into the more interesting part perhaps for some of you, which is the state of the union of Equinox Gold and our very ambitious plans to build ourselves into a world-class gold mining company focused on the Americas. Is stuff up now, Rhylin? People are able to see this? On our website, I'm gonna be walking you through some slides that are up on our website, and I hope you're able to follow with me.
The very first page is our cautionary note, and you'll notice a lot of fine print there that says nothing I say is to be believed. It's anything that's forward-looking. It has a lot of caveats in it, and you should have a look at that to understand that. Today we reappointed all of the Board of Directors you see on page three here. It's a very strong board, very experienced board. I'm very happy to work with everybody here.
They all contribute greatly on our committees, and I want to extend my thanks to each and every one of them for their part in building Equinox Gold as quickly as we've built it so far and as strongly as we have right now, with such great prospects for the future. I'm just going to go through on page four, you know, where we've come from and where we're going. It'll kind of inform where we're going. We've been one of the fastest-growing gold companies in the world. We started our business at the beginning of 2018. We had one mine in, or one gold deposit in Brazil, Aurizona. We had another one in California, Castle Mountain. We had ambitious plans to build and build ourselves from nothing into a significant operating company.
This is much easier said than done, but we've done it. The very first thing we did is we started construction of our Brazil mine, the Aurizona mine. We started and completed work on a pre-feasibility study for Castle Mountain, both positive. We spun out a non-core copper asset to Equinox shareholders, which was then named Solaris Resources and put under the management of Richard Warke and his team at Augusta Group. To be an operating business in our first year, we went out and acquired the Mesquite mine. Mesquite was a big, low-grade heap leach mine in Southern California, or it is. It had a very short life when we bought it.
We paid $150 million, give or take, to buy that, and we've made that back and significantly on top of that, and yet we have a longer reserve life today than we had when we bought the mine four years ago. Mesquite's been an absolutely fabulous asset for us and very, very successful transaction. We produced 25,000 ounces in 2018 based on that one partial year at the Mesquite mine. In 2019, we added a very important investor, Mubadala, a big Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, to our shareholder base. They were very instrumental in financing us for the early stages of the company's life through a convertible debenture in 2019 and another one in 2020 to support our growth. We increased our Mesquite reserves.
We listed on the U.S., graduated to the TSX main board. At the end of the year, we announced the acquisition of Leagold, which brought us four operating mines and a large development project. Three mines in Brazil, one in Mexico, and a development project in Brazil. We produced 201,000 ounces in 2019. In 2020, we digested the Leagold acquisition, sold one of the smaller mines, Pilar. Because of our scale, a very rapid scale, we were added to all of the gold indexes, the GDX, GDXJ, TSX indexes. Aurizona came into production. Mesquite continued its reserve life extension. That was very successful. At the end of the year, we started construction of.
We built our Castle Mountain phase one mine, started operation in 2020 of that mine. Started construction in Brazil of the Santa Luz mine. At the end of the year, announced the acquisition of Premier Gold. What we did with Premier Gold or why we did Premier Gold, as many of you will recall, is to again add scale and add a very large gold development project in Canada, very good jurisdiction, that would offset, or balance the other three jurisdictions we have, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. That asset, Greenstone, is going to become the, you know, the core flagship asset of Equinox Gold when it's completed in a year or so. That was a very significant transaction.
It also brought with it a smaller mine in Mexico. We, again, have been trying to improve the quality of our portfolio, the size of the mines we have. The Mesquite, the Mercedes mine that we got with Premier Gold didn't fit our portfolio. We sold that, and that transaction just closed in April this year, just a month ago. In the meantime, with that transaction, we also became a material 25% or 30% of i-80?
We're 26%.
26% shareholders of i-80, a brand new gold company focused on Nevada run by Ewan Downie, the former CEO of Premier that we bought. We watched the great success Richard Warke and his team have had in Ecuador with the Lundin Gold copper development within Solaris Resources. It's been very wealth creating, very satisfying to watch. In 2021, what did we do last year? Well, we began construction of Greenstone. We took a few months to kind of digest it and make sure the team was in place. We increased our interest from 50% to 60%. We have a great partnership there with Orion.
That is now a very major construction project, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. We completed the feasibility study for Castle Mountain. We've moved that from feasibility now into permitting, which again, I'll talk a little bit more about that to come. We've done a lot more work at Aurizona in Brazil, where we've defined a very large upside from additional open pit targets, but also a very large underground deposit below the open pit that we'll be mining in future years. We've strengthened our balance sheet. We've done a lot of team building as well. We've really fleshed out our overall team. I think we have 7,000 employees now in Equinox Gold.
You know, you can understand that when you realize also that after only sort of 3.5 years or, say, four years of development as a company, we had more than $1 billion in revenues in 2021. It was a big year on the operations side, and none of that happens without building a really, really strong team. The other thing that we did in the last couple of years is we boosted our environmental, social, and governance protocols and reporting.
This is a really important thing, and I'm super proud of what we've done. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes, but we've been really beefing up the attention we give to environmental, social, and governance matters company-wide across the platform, in every mine, in every location. So it's been a really, really busy four years. Our team is strong, our Board is strong. And I think on page five, moving to page five, what is important to me is it hasn't been growth just for growth's sake, but it's been growth per share. We've actually created wealth to shareholders' account on a per share basis. You can see this on the first, the left-hand side of that. Our reserves have increased per share and our resources have increased per share.
Today, we have about 30 million ounces of gold resources. Reserves and resources, 30 million. It gives us fabulous leverage to higher gold prices on a long-term basis as we execute operating mines that will take those reserves and resources and actually move them towards production. On a cash flow, growth in operating cash flow per share, again, very satisfying growth since we started in 2018. You can see those numbers here in green in the middle table. On a production growth per share, once again, significant increase. What I really wanna highlight here is the growth that is yet to come. We're just midstream now in where we are as a growth company. We're midstream. We have a ton of internal growth, and I'll talk a little bit more about that.
A ton of internal growth. As we execute these growth plans, our operating costs per ounce of gold produced should go down, our financial returns should go up, and all of our metrics will get better. That's really why we're growing, trying to build scale, satisfy market needs for scale right now, and actually drive our operating costs down and increase all the good things that come from having a larger, more diversified mining company. Page six is just a little snapshot of the six operating mines we have to date. Mesquite in California, again, produced about 120,000 ounces-130,000 ounces. These are our guidance for 2020, 2022.
We expect it's going to produce 120,000 ounces-130,000 ounces this year. Quarter one was a very weak quarter following a blowout quarter in Q4 last year. I really wanna emphasize to our shareholders that you cannot judge a gold mining company on a quarterly basis. You can't judge any mining company quarter to quarter. You've got to look at a longer term timeline because things happen in this business. It's a risky business. Weather happens, things break, operating challenges happen, or you move into lower grade areas in an ordinary mining sequence where you have higher stripping ratios, which increase your costs on a short-term basis. You've just got to look at a longer term timeline than a quarter by quarter review.
I think today's reaction in the market which vexes me a lot is really a reflection of that. Just watch how we do in the balance of 2022. You will see much better results almost certainly. Unless we have more, you know, unforeseen events happen, we should have a much better year to come, and that's exactly what we guided. We put our guidance early this year. We guided we were going to have a weak Q1, a better Q2, and much better second half of 2022, where we will produce 60% of our ounces in the second half and 85% of our cash flow. That's the thing for our shareholders to remember. Q1 was guided to be weak. It was weak.
It shouldn't justify the kind of major reaction we saw in our market today. Okay, in Castle Mountain, that's a mine just up the road from Mesquite. It's a real nice unit. We have very similar operating conditions there. They're both large, low-grade heap leach mines. Castle Mountain's run right now is a small-scale mine, but the real big expense is gonna come when we get permitted for the larger operation there that will allow that to run on a long-term basis at a much lower cash cost than it currently operates at. Further south in Mexico, the Los Filos mine, a world-class deposit in a fairly challenging social environment. We saw some of those challenges in 2020, shortly after we concluded our transaction with Leagold. Those trans.
Those challenges continued in 2021. The last social disruption ended in August or September. Since then, it's been a fairly smooth operation. The mine's running well right now, and we hope that that's gonna continue for the foreseeable future. We've done a lot more community work. We hope that the community now understands who we are, we have more confidence, more trust, and that that's a reciprocal positive relationship. Los Filos is a core asset of ours, and it's got plenty of growth potential. At the current guidance, it's gonna run between 160,000 ounces-180 ,000 ounces per year of production. Aurizona down in Brazil. Three mines in Brazil, Aurizona, Fazenda, and RDM.
Aurizona is a big open pit mine. It's run really well. It's made us a ton of money. We've paid off our capital costs twice over, I think now. It's been a very profitable mine for us over the last two years since we opened it up. Again, Q1 was a weak quarter. Shouldn't be like that the rest of the year. On target for about 120,000 ounces-130,000 ounces of gold per year. Just like other places in Brazil, the first quarter of every year is the middle of the rainy season. The rainy season really hammers production, but we get that back when the dry season comes along later in the year, and we expect this year will be exactly like last year when that identical thing happened.
Smaller mines at Fazenda. What is interesting about Fazenda is that it's right in a belt called the Bahia Belt, very close to our new Santa Luz mine, such that they're going to run kind of like Mesquite and Castle Mountain do as a unit where there's plenty of synergies. Fazenda and our new Santa Luz mine are very close to each other in Bahia State. Lots of upside there. They've been running for a long time. Each of those mines, well, especially Fazenda, has been running for 30 or 40 years, and we expect it's got a long way ahead of it. Our guidance this year is for 60,000 ounces-65 ,000 ounces from Fazenda and about the same from Santa Luz, once it's up and running fully later in Q2. Then RDM.
RDM's been a frustrating mine. It should produce more than it has, and it should do better than it has. We've been bedeviled by some shifting sands in the regulatory environment in Brazil, and in that specific area. Minas Gerais is the state that RDM is in. We've been having some difficulties doing what we've done for years and years in recent years, permitting and having approved permits to increase tailings dams. This year, we ran into some problems with the regulators. It's probably, I hope at least, just a kind of a bureaucracy issue. We're hard at work on this.
We've flagged today in our news about our quarter that if we cannot resolve problems, we may have to shut the mine down for a while. We're hoping that won't happen. That's the only thing that's stopping that thing from hitting guidance yet. The mine otherwise is doing well. Those are the operating mines. You know, we're full on growth. We have five big growth projects in the company. The two biggest right now are getting our Santa Luz mine, you know, up and running properly. We did our first gold pour. I'll say, just to put Santa Luz in context, Santa Luz is the third mine that Equinox has built in the last three years. We've built one mine a year.
Each one of those mines, Aurizona and then Castle Mountain and now Santa Luz, each one of those mines has been built on time, on budget, and Santa Luz is no exception. The budget was about $100 million. We forecast, you know, a year ago when we started construction, we'd be pouring gold by the end of Q1, and we hit that target, and our budget was $100 million, notwithstanding COVID, notwithstanding inflationary pressures. You know, let not the gold analyst community say that inflationary pressures necessarily mean capital costs will blow out of budget. They don't always, and we're a poster child for that through Santa Luz. We're commissioning it right now. It's gonna be a nice long life mine. We're very excited about it.
It's also a very not unique, but it's using a technology that's really world-class. It's really leading edge. We're using resin rather than cyanide to leach gold from the rock. This is something we hopefully will be very proud of showing as a poster child for operations that require that technology as opposed to cyanide. Anyway, that's under commissioning before the end of this year, 70,000 ounces-90,000 ounces of gold. Then on an annual basis, about 100,000 ounces long term. Santa Luz, happy story. In Greenstone, this is something I have to dwell on a bit. Greenstone is this great big development project we acquired from Premier.
We got construction going last September, October. We had a groundbreaking ceremony. We've got fantastic social relations with five First Nations communities. Lots of support from government, lots of support from the local community. It's a great big ore body. It's gonna produce about 400,000 ounces a year for the first five years. It'll be Canada's fourth-largest gold mine. It's a big deposit, low cost, long life, everything you want in a gold deposit. The problem is it's not in production today. It's under construction. You know, our budget for this was $1.1 billion.
$1.23 billion.
$1.23 billion when we announced construction last October. There's a lot of nervousness by investors about big Canadian gold mine development projects because there's been a number of companies that have fallen on their face and had big capital blowouts and construction schedule delays. COVID didn't help any of this, but it's a reality. We have had to fight that wall of doubt that we're continuing to fight, especially today, because yesterday, IAMGOLD put out a rather disastrous announcement that their Côté project in Ontario has had big construction cost increases and schedule delays. I think investors are just tarring us with the same brush as they now tar IAMGOLD.
This has caused a lot of nervousness, and a lot of questions we've had today have been, "Are you on schedule? Are you on budget? Are you okay with the estimates that you've put out where we've said we'll be up and running by the first half of 2024, and we're gonna hit our construction budget of $1.23 billion?" Our answer to that is yes and yes. At this moment, we're on schedule, we're on target, and we expect for all sorts of detailed reasons that maybe we can go to if there's questions here, and I'll get Doug to answer these or Christian. We are expecting this project to be a successful project. Currently tracked, we've got about 20% complete. We are tracking on schedule and on budget.
We hope that we'll have the same great record we've had at the other three mines we've built from scratch in the last three years, where we will be able to say that when we complete construction in early 2024. Growth. What are we about? We're a value stock right now. We're a growth stock. Where are we in our current kind of growth platform? Well, we've had to grow through M&A until now because you can't grow from nothing into a large mid-tier stock without doing M&A if you wanna do it quickly. We've done that. But what we have now in-house in assets we already own is we have these five big internal growth projects that will take our production up by another approximately 600,000 ounces.
What are they? Well, there's Aurizona, that's going to be ramping up to full capacity. It'll be running at 100,000 ounces a year from sort of 2023 on, and that'll add another 30,000 ounces off of this year's guidance of 70,000 ounces. The big one, of course, is Greenstone. Greenstone is gonna add about 240,000 ounces to our production base at a much lower cash cost. The other thing that happens when you build scale is you drop your costs down. You have more ounces to offset fixed costs, particularly overhead, for example. These are bigger mines. They should have a much lower cost profile that will drive Equinox into a very large earning cash flow generating business, ultimately dividend producing business in a few years.
Beyond Greenstone, we have a lot of growth coming also at Los Filos. When we're satisfied about the social stability and peace there and the fact that the communities are all on the same page as we are with respect to increasing that mine, making it a longer life mine, creating wealth for a lot of people in the local community over the long term, we're going to add about 50,000 ounces simply by going to the higher grade areas in the next year or two. That's programmed in the current mine plan. Then we're hoping to build a carbon-in-leach plant which will allow us to increase recoveries and go and add about another 75,000 ounces of incremental production to Los Filos.
We're not going to do that until Greenstone is complete, but we think it will be a very relatively cost-efficient way to boost our production, decrease our costs, and make Los Filos into the mine that we really saw it could be when we acquired Leagold. At Castle Mountain, we produce currently about 20,000 ounces-30,000 ounces a year from the small scale heap leach operation. We're permitting now. We just submitted our permits at the end of March to build up another 180,000 ounces to make this about 200,000+ ounce a year mine for about a 16-year mine life on current reserves. It's a brownfield development.
This was an existing operating mine during the 1990s and early 2000s, and we think it should generate a lot of value for communities, for governments in California and, of course, for our shareholders, and yet be done in a way that's as environmentally sensitive as possible. So that, when we get the permits for that expansion, it'll take another year or two to build. We'll do that again after Castle Mountain is finished. We'll be looking at new production coming from Castle Mountain, assuming we have a two-year or so permitting window sometime in the 2020s, say 2025, 2026. That's gonna sequence very well with Greenstone and then Los Filos and Castle Mountain.
We have a very cool growth project in Brazil at the Aurizona mine, where underneath the open pit, we have a large slice of gold mineralized material. You're going to see some results from that fairly shortly. That should add when we can combine that with open pit production. We should add about 30,000 ounces a year from the underground. I personally think it's gonna be more than that, but that's kinda what we're showing right now. All those are internal growth. We're fully financed for these projects. We should have one coming after the other, and when we have them all done, we're gonna add about 600,000 ounces if we do nothing else.
That's why we say confidently we should have gold production over 1 million ounces in the relatively near future. That's always been our strategy. 1 million ounces isn't anything particular, it's just a number, but it represents scale, and scale counts. Scale counts for the reason shown on the right-hand side of that eighth slide there. You get a revaluation when you have scale. You get a revaluation because you're bigger, you're stronger, you're more diversified, and you should have much higher cash flows than we have right now as you get more scale for reasons I've already mentioned. You know, the multiple we have today of maybe 0.6x or 0.7x should go up above 1x if we're going to be comparable to any of the other large producers when we get to that scale. That's kind of the operational review.
I'm gonna finish off with two things. One, a little talk about what we're doing on the responsible and ethical mining side and then finish off with a few words about gold. This is something that, you know, the ESG stuff, it's just so very important today for every company, every mining company, every company, period. You know, what do you do? You look after your environment as best you can. You look after your employees. You try to have them safe, go home every day, safely and not end up in the hospital. No fatalities. You know, we absolutely have to work on our greenhouse gas emissions, try to reduce them as much as possible, reduce our energy consumption as much as possible. We have to work with our communities.
Our communities support us, and we have to support them. It's just basic good business to do this kind of stuff. We actually have had a pretty good record everywhere. We're very proud. I mean, we didn't lose any time for COVID during the COVID pandemic. This is very different than most companies who had to close mines because they had sick employees. We didn't have any production days lost. We supported community education programs, vaccination programs. Every one of our mines tested. We had doctors, nurses available and it really showed in results. Today, we published our 2021 ESG report, which you can now read at our ESG portal at our website. Please read it. You know, look at our governance.
Look at the attention we spend on human rights. Look at our achievements. Don't just look at our words. Look at what we've done. This is what I'm proud of. This is the focus of every single one of our senior management team around this table and beyond, and they're engaging the whole company to look after our employees, look after our communities, look after the environment as best we can. Employ good human rights policies, good grievance policies, across the board, diversity, inclusion, all that stuff. It's really important stuff, and I'm just so proud of our team for having focused on this so much. You know, we walk the talk. You're gonna see those results in our report. Please have a look at it. It's good stuff. I really recommend it to you all.
Okay, I'm gonna end on and then I'll open it to questions. I'm gonna end on a couple of slides on gold. You know, this is our business. We exist to give investors leverage to gold prices. Leverage immediately with a large production base. If gold goes up $100 and we're producing, you know, 700,000 ounces a year, for example, you know, we're gonna have increased income of $70 million. It's just a straight line. And then also on the capital side, on our basic assets, our reserves and resources. If we have 3 million ounces of reserves and resources, and the gold price goes up $100 , bingo. That's a very significant bit of capital leverage for every single owner of this company.
That's why we exist. I don't think we would've started Equinox Gold four years ago had we been bearish on the gold price. I mean, why would you build a gold company in that market? We weren't. We were very bullish. Gold was trading for about $1,550 in early 2018, and I think we definitely got that side right. All of the macro environments why gold should perform well right now, they're actually happening, and gold has responded. I confess to being disappointed that it hasn't responded as well as I expected it would. I thought gold would blow through $2,000 an ounce, but it hasn't. It's been pushing it, you know, a couple of times, last year and early this year.
It managed $2,000 an ounce, but it's still not done as well as I thought it would, given all of these incredibly bullish macro fundamentals on the demand side. I'm gonna talk about demand because most people focus on demand, and then I'm gonna talk about supply, because very few investors think about gold supply as a bullish factor, but it is. Well, if you look on the demand side, I mean, how could you have a more bullish fundamental picture for gold than we have today? You have global geopolitical crises. You've had an absolute binge of government spending and government debasing of currencies, not just due to COVID. It happened before COVID. COVID just added fuel to the fire.
You've had this explosion in sovereign debt, and it surely doesn't take a rocket scientist to expect you would have an inflationary outcome from all that and a rise in the gold price. Well, both of them happened. Inflation is here. Inflation is here, and it's gonna be here for quite a while. I just don't see that the Fed or any central bank has any ability to really stem inflation significantly. In fact, they actually benefit from inflation because it reduces their debt-to-GDP ratio. It's one of the solutions governments have to get out of debt. You know, they talk the talk.
You know, Powell has been talking about more rate increases, and that scares people into thinking, "Oh, well, you know, he's actually gonna do something to reduce the liquidity that has been injected into global markets and reduce the inflationary impact." I don't think it's gonna happen. I just don't think it's gonna happen. I think even if he increases rates the way he states he says he's gonna do, you're still going to have net negative real rates. So why would anybody buy bonds in that environment? In terms of macro markets or stock markets, I think you're going to have a significantly reduced froth in major markets like we've had in the last few years.
You know, why would anybody buy gold when major markets are going up 20% a year? That party's over. I think the crypto party has waned. Certainly, cryptos have a place. They're a form of a store of value in a certain sense. I'm not dissing the value of crypto in certain instances, but I don't think, you know, this mania of crypto is replacing gold is a logical story. We've seen the meme stocks, the technology stocks, all the FANG stocks, they've all weakened. Well, they were overpriced. I think in that environment or in this environment we see ourselves in today, gold becomes a significantly interesting alternative asset that people ought to look at.
Generally speaking, on a 50-year trend, investors, institutional investors particularly, are underweight gold. A little bit of money going into gold is gonna make a big difference on the price, and it's also going to protect them from weakness in other major markets. Lots of people are buying gold. Central banks are buying gold. The U.S. Mint had our second record year last year of gold investors buying coins. China's consumed a huge amount of gold recently. India imported a record amount of gold in 2021. Of course, gold ETFs added a lot of gold last year. That's one of the reasons why gold has been strong. I think that all of these reasons are reasons that should compel gold as being a continuing store of value. I don't see it underperforming.
I see it outperforming in the next, in the balance of 2022 and beyond. I think currently it's last week or two of correction is going to be fairly quickly corrected again or re-corrected, it's gonna. This gold will continue to go up in price as people realize that the Fed hasn't got a lot of option and is not likely to throw the market into recession as it increases rates, if it increases rates too much. As soon as the market realizes rates won't be increased, either the dollar will weaken or people will just go back into gold as a good, safe place to hold value, as a store of value. Then on the supply side, since 2011 , you've had a lot of.
This is really across the board for the whole mining industry. You know, not just have you had a lot of noise in Russian gold production or Russian mine production from the war and from people sanctioning Russia, but the fact is that today, gold mines are harder to find. They're lower grade typically, they're in more difficult places to mine, and they take longer to go into production. Gold is relatively inelastic in terms of the supply response to higher prices. Price goes up, you're just not going to see a supply reaction for five or 10 or even 15 years, simply because of the long time it takes to discover, develop, and build mines, get social license, political license, and so on.
That's one of the reasons the total gold supply has been flat since 2014. The supply side's bullish, the demand side's bullish. I'm very optimistic that in the next year or so, we're going to have continuing strong gold markets. In that environment, Equinox Gold should be looked at as a core investment for any gold interested investor. We have diversity, scale, increasing gold production, solid balance sheet. We don't need to do any more equity issues. We can finance everything we've got with our own cash flow and capital resources. Once we hit that 1 million ounces of production, we're gonna click our heels and say, temporarily, "Mission accomplished." There won't be any more M&A until we get there as far as I expect.
That's the story. We're all pretty proud of what we've built. Again, I am very happy to deliver this report to our shareholders after only this is only the fourth time we've done this since we started. It's my joy and my appreciation of the whole team for getting us to where we've got to, which, as you can imagine, is a huge amount of work and requires a lot of talent. Only modify that a little bit by the sort of knee-jerk reaction that investors face occasionally on quarterly results. I'm a little ranty today, but please look beyond our first quarter results to the big picture. Look at the forest, not the trees.
If you look at that, you're going to see a fabulous company, well managed, well financed, tons of growth, in great shape that's come out of nowhere and in just four years has sold itself into one of the world's great gold companies. More to come. With that, I think I'll close and open it to questions.
We only got one question so far, so I'll remind listeners, if you do wanna ask a question, you'll see a Q&A tab on your screen. If you click on that, it will open up a text box. You can type your question in there. It will come to me, and I will read it out to Ross. The only question we've got so far is that as you were listening, it was rather rusty on the market today. What sort of catalyst can shareholders look forward to in the upcoming months that will hopefully support the share price?
It's Christian.
Yeah, it's Christian here. I'll take that. You know, we have a period here where we're focused on execution, and it may seem a little bit boring at times, but what we really wanna do is continue to show the delivery of our plans. Again, as Ross said, it's over multiple quarters, not just one quarter. In the near term, they'll be hitting sort of its stride in Santa Luz and hitting commercial production in the next sort of quarter or so. On the back of that, we're going into the summer season at Greenstone, so there's gonna be a heck of a lot of work going on there with the snow gone now and the team's ready and ramped up.
You're gonna see lots of photos, lots of equipment arriving, buildings going up, de-risking that project in a major way this year. We hope to get investors and analysts to the site early in the fall, in September, and see all that work for the first time ever because, during COVID, we weren't able to do site visits. You're gonna see regular updates on that. You're gonna see gradually increasing production and reducing costs over the year, which will show very heavy cash flow orientation to the second half, as Ross said, 85% and costs coming down, you know, below $1,500 is the plan. Also, there will be periodic drill results as we continue to drill and mostly in areas that are prospective or shorter life mines. That'll continue to happen.
We also have, you know, continuing focus on studies and work at sites that have expansion projects that are a little bit further behind Greenstone. Aurizona Underground, if we get access to a portal there late this year, next year, we'll be able to start kind of going underground and providing updates on that. Permitting at Castle Mountain might take two years +, but obviously any updates on that we'll be able to provide. You'll just see the production base start to stabilize as Santa Luz comes up and mines that were second half or Q1 start to stabilize call it Q2, Q3 here. There's a lot on the go still this year, despite it being more internally focused.
We'll continue to basically germinate and look after our investment portfolio and any other small assets we have in our portfolio to surface value like we've done very successfully with Solaris and i-80 in the past.
Thank you. There are no further questions. I'll turn it to you for closing remarks if you have any.
I have none.
All right.
I think I've said everything. Thank you all very much for joining us today, and I look forward to speaking to you again one year from now.
Perfect. Thank you, operator. You can now conclude the call.
Thank you. This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect and have a pleasant day.