All right. I think it's time for us to get our show on the road, so to speak, 'cause we are on the road. I'd just like to thank you all for coming, both people in attendance here today and people who are joining us over the internet. Thanks very much to join us today and hear about our operational update and the work that we've been working on over the last year with regards to our company. For those who don't know me, my name is David Strang. I'm a Co-founder and CEO of Ero Copper Corp. Today in the room, joined by Mike Richard, our Chief Geological Officer and another co-founder of the company. In the back, we have Pablo Mejia, our chief geologist. Next to him is Courtney Lynn, our VP Corp Dev.
Brett Hannigan, also part of our sustainability and corporate development and investor relations team. He's got a lot of hats he wears. Over by the door, most of you know is Makko DeFilippo, our President, and we should be joined by my co-founder, Noel Dunn, who is the Chairman of the company. Thanks very much for everybody for coming. To start us off today, we have a very special guest joining us from Brazil, and that is Mansueto Almeida. He is the Chief Economist for BTG Pactual. It's one of the banks that we work with in Brazil. Mansueto has a great understanding of the Brazilian economy, the political environment that's there, which is very, very timely right now with respect to the presidential elections.
He can give you a little bit of color over the next 20 minutes to half an hour with respect to where Brazil stands right now, what's happened subsequent to the elections, his views with regards to where he sees the economy and the political scene moving forward from there. Without further ado, I'll pass over to Mansueto. Mansueto, please join us and give us your views.
Hello. How are you? Thank you. Thank you, David, for the introduction. I try to talk a little bit about what is happening here in Brazil, what has happened in the last six years, and the challenges that we have ahead. We've just finished our election for president, and Brazil elected a new president. Let's start by stressing what happened in Brazil in the last six years. I have a presentation here that everybody, you know, can have this presentation after my speech. Let me start by saying that, you know, in the last six years, Brazil approved many important reforms. One of the most important reforms that Brazil approved back in 2016 was a new fiscal strategy that we call Spending Cap Bill.
Brazil, the central government expenditure in Brazil used to grow by 6% in real terms per year from 1997 to 2016. At the end of 2016, in a new government that came from an impeachment process, Brazil approved a Spending Cap Bill saying that from now on, starting 2017 until 2026, the non-financial central government expenditure can only grow according to inflation, meaning that the real growth of the non-financial central government expenditure would be zero starting 2017. Since then, Brazil was able to cut the public debts and was able to cut a little bit the non-financial central government expenditure to GDP.
In 2018, at the end of Temer's government, the non-financial central government expenditure to GDP was around 19.3% of GDP, and it finished this year with central government expenditure to GDP lower than 19%. This never happened in Brazil since 1988. Never in a full year mandate of any president Brazil, never Brazil was able to cut the central government expenditure to GDP in a four-year mandate. For the first time ever, you finish this government with a lower central government expenditure. This is what it was at the beginning of this government. In addition to that, in addition to this fiscal rule, Brazil approved a labor legislation reform back in 2017. Was very important, you know, to cut the judicial fights between enterprise and employees.
We approved a new legislation for state companies in Brazil, forbidding since 2016 the appointment of politicians to participate in the advisory board of any federal or state company in Brazil. In 2016 and before that, you know, it was very common to have politician in the advisory board of the major state company in Brazil. This is not possible anymore because of this new legislation that was approved back in 2016. In this new government that is finished this year, Bolsonaro government, at the beginning of this government in 2019, without a political base, this government was able to approve one of the most important reforms to Brazil. There was a very sensitive topic. It was the pension reform.
Have in mind that Brazil spends a lot on pensions, around 13% of GDP. In average, people used to get retired in Brazil until 2019 at 54 years old. Not anymore. In 2019, Brazil approved the pension reform, setting a minimum age for retirement at 62 for women and 65 for men. At the beginning of a government without a political base, Brazil approved a pension reform back in 2019. After that, last year, Brazil approved another very important reform. It was the central bank independence. We just finished a presidential election. We don't know yet who will be the next Brazilian Minister of Finance? We know for sure who will be the next Brazilian president of Central Bank.
will be exactly the same one that is already there today because for the first time in the last 30 years in Brazil, we now have Central Bank independence. The next president of the Central Bank is already there because it will continue to be the same of this government. This is very good. This is very positive to Brazil. There is another important reform that six, eight years ago was almost impossible even to talk about Central Bank independence. After COVID-19, Brazil got the support to approve the Central Bank independence. Moving forward, what else, I mean, happened in Brazil? You know, we have the COVID-19. This here is the list of many of the reforms that I was talking about. Let's move next.
Let me start by saying that in Brazil, as elsewhere, we had a major problem with COVID-19. In 2020, two years ago, Brazil had, you know, a major problem in terms of the fiscal numbers. We finished 2020 with a primary deficit of 10% of GDP. The public sector primary deficit was 10% of GDP. Because of the huge deficit and because of you know, the fall of GDP, the GDP in Brazil went down in 2020 by 3.9%. Because of that, the debt to GDP in Brazil went up sharply. The debt to GDP in Brazil at the end of 2019 was 74.4% of GDP.
At the end of 2020, it went up to 88% of GDP, a growth of 14 percentage points of GDP in just one year. If you go back to 2020, everybody was expecting that in 2021 and 2022, Brazil would continue to run primary deficit, that it would have a primary deficit for the public sector around 3% of GDP in 2021, and then in 2022, another primary deficit of 1% of GDP. At the end of 2022, this government with a debt to GDP around 94%. That was the base case scenario. The good news is that this will not happen.
Last year, in 2021, despite the fact there was still a tough year because of COVID, Brazil finished 2021 with a public sector primary surplus of 0.7% of GDP. This year, 2022, despite the fact that Brazil had to cut taxes on fuel, despite that, we finished this year with a primary surplus of 1.3% of GDP. Therefore, instead of finishing this government with a public sector debt around 94% of GDP, we will finish this government in December with a gross debt around 76.4% of GDP, only two percentage points of GDP higher vis-à-vis what it was in 2019. This is terrific.
It's very good, positive numbers because it's a debt that grew by only two percentage points of GDP despite the huge expenditure that the government needed to do during the COVID years. This, now we're running a primary surplus. That's quite, very, very positive numbers. In addition to that, let's see here. Let's look to the slide here. If you look to economic activity here, we had a big surprise. Let me show you something quite important in Brazil. As I told you, in 2020, we had a fall in GDP of 3.9%. You know, the investment rate in Brazil in 2020 became flat.
The fall in the investment rate was very, very small, was only 0.5%. Last year, in 2021, the investment rate in Brazil went up by 17%. Last year, our GDP grew by 4.6%. This year, that is supposed to be a very bad year because the interest rates in Brazil are very, very high. I think we will grow around 3%. If you look at this graph, I wanted to call attention to two things. First of all, following the COVID-19 in 2020, Brazil grew 4.6, 3% this year. Next year, you grow only 0.9%.
Because of very high interest rates here in Brazil, as in all over the world, the Central Bank had to increase the short-term interest rates in order to fight inflation. Despite a very, very high interest rate, we will continue to grow next year. We hope that as soon as this new government sends the right message concerning fiscal responsibility, we expect that the short-term interest rate will start going down by the second quarter of next year, which means that probably in 2024, Brazil will grow around 2.5%-3% again. You know, it's good. I mean, I think that after the COVID-19, Brazil has been performing quite well.
If you look to the unemployment rate in Brazil, just to give an idea, the last unemployment rate that was released two weeks ago by the government, the unemployment rate in Brazil today is 8.7%. I know that it seems quite high. It is about developing countries, but we expected that we finish this year with the employment rate around 80% and the current unemployment rate of 8.7% is the lowest since 2015. Brazil is in a much better shape than what it was five, six years ago.
If you look to this graph, you see, in 2015, in 2016, two red lines showing the fall of GDP during the recession that Brazil had in 2015 and 2016. Just to give an idea, this was a major recession in Brazil because two consecutive years of GDP falling is not normal in the history of Brazil. The last time that this happened before 2015 and 2016 was in 1930 and 1931 when the world had the Great Depression. Not even 1980s that Brazil had a problem with inflation, with external debt. You know, this never happened before, two consecutive years of GDP falling.
After 2015 and 2016, Brazil did a lot of important reform, and I think that we increased our potential GDP. Moving forward, we have a better labor market. The economy is growing. We fighting inflation. Last year we had an inflation of 10.1%. This year we're heading to inflation around 5.3%. Look to this graph, you can see there, you know, last year the inflation in Brazil was 10.1%. You know, it was not our highest inflation in 24 years. In 2015, the inflation in Brazil was even higher than that, was 10.7%.
With this new fiscal strategy that I explained to you, the approval of the Spending Cap Bill in 2016, together with monetary policy, we're able to cut down inflation to 6% in 2016 and to 2.9% in 2017. Now the inflation went up again to 10.1% last year. You know, the world has a problem with inflation. It's not only Brazil. The good news is that we started hiking our interest rate last year, and nowadays Brazil has probably the highest interest rate in the world. That's why we expected the inflation this year to be 5.5% or even lower than that. Next year, inflation around 5%, in 2024, inflation around 3.5%.
We're assuming that our central bank will start cutting interest rates in the second quarter of next year. Pretty much, you know, for this inflation goes down to the target in 2024, as I show here in the graph, again, we need to have a new fiscal strategy for the new government. At least you know, we're in the right direction. Moving forward, you know, one of the most important problems that Brazil had after the Second World War until recently, until 10, 12 years ago, was that Brazil had a very low stock of foreign reserves to a very high external debt. This is not the case anymore. What we see today in the history of Brazil is completely different, you know, for the history of Brazil after the Second World War.
After the Second World War trend. Brazil today is a net creditor in dollar. There is a graph here, about the reserves in Brazil and the external debt that. Let's see if I find here. That is very important to understand what has happened in Brazil. It's not this one, but.
Oh.
Yes, this one, please. This one. Look to this graph. This is very, very important. Let's go back 20 years ago, okay? 20 years ago, in 2002, the public sector external debt in Brazil was $125 billion, and the stock of reserves in Brazil was $38 billion. Out of this $38 billion, $30 billion was a loan from IMF. Without this loan from IMF, the stock of foreign reserves in Brazil back in 2002 was only $8 billion to external debt of $125 billion. Brazil was a net debtor in dollar. Move forward and go to 2022. Nowadays, Brazil has a external debt that is pretty much similar to what it was in 2002.
The total public sector external debt in Brazil today is $121 billion. Look, the stock of foreign reserves in Brazil is $326 billion. Brazil became a net creditor in dollar. This is quite different from all the other Latin America countries. Today in Brazil, when the dollar gets higher, the fiscal numbers gets better because Brazil nowadays is a net creditor in dollar. This is completely different from, let's say, 50, 60 years of history after Second World War II. If we move forward to the next slide, please. There is also some good news concerning our current account deficit and our FDI. Last year, the FDI in Brazil was $46 billion, the whole 2021. This year we're expecting an FDI around $92 billion. This year, the FDI in Brazil will increase by 100%.
If you look to this number, our current account deficit, vis-à-vis our FDI, Brazil is running a current account deficit of less than 2% of GDP. The FDI, it'll be over 40% of GDP. It's a very comfortable situation. Again, completely different from many other countries in Latin America. Nowadays, Brazil has a huge, a very comfortable stock position with a huge stock of foreign reserves. These are the focus sectors on that. In addition to that, we have a strong FDI. There is more than enough to finance our current account deficit, which is very, very small. It's less than 2% of GDP. If we move forward, we have again good news because have in mind that similar to Canada, Brazil is a major exporter of commodities.
If you look to the next slide. This is the trade balance. Last year we had a huge, I mean, trade balance here. That's a good point. You know, almost 80% of Brazilian exports are linked to the commodity sector and over 50% of the Brazilian exports are core products, iron ore, oil, meat, and soybean. All these products, the price of this product went up after the COVID-19. You're in a very, very strong position. Here's the, you know, commodities, and you'll see here the four most important one.
Pretty much, you know, we expect that it will continue to be the case in the following years, which, I mean, gave us a lot of, you know, confidence that we'll continue to have a positive effect coming from our balance of trade, our balance of payments. I mean, in a nutshell, we have a better labor market today than we had before COVID-19. The lowest unemployment rate since 2015. The economy is growing faster, probably because, you know, we did many important reforms, as I told you, since 2016. In addition to that, you know, this new world with high commodity price helps Brazil a lot, helps our trade balance, our balance of payments, and inflation is going down.
In a nutshell, it's a very positive scenario. We have a problem. What is this problem? Because we just finished a presidential election campaign, and most candidates were complaining about the, you know, this rule, this fiscal, the Spending Cap Bill. Both candidates were claiming that they want a more fiscal space to increase expenditure, at least in the short term, to increase a little bit the public investment in Brazil. Because of that, because of the uncertainty concerning what will be the next fiscal rule, the long-term interest rate in Brazil went up sharply. The real long-term interest rate in Brazil nowadays is near 6%. It's almost the same that it was back in 2016 before we approved the Spending Cap Bill. Let me tell you the following.
The next president who was already elected was Lula, who was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a very popular politician. When he left the government in 2010, after eight years being the president of Brazil, he left the government in 2010 with approval rating of 85%. When he left the government, he was very popular. After that, he had some problem with justice. He went to prison, but after that, he was released and he was cleared to run for election. He was reelected. You know, Lula is a very smart politician. Lula, you know, he knows how to talk with different political parties. He's very charismatic.
You know, we expect that he will not be radical because he got the support of different political parties. He got the support of many, you know, good economists during his political campaign. We expect that he'll try, you know, to do a government that will show that he will be fiscally responsible as he was back in 2003 to 2006, 2008. He'll put that together with more strong social policy. The challenge in Brazil, you know, because we cut federal taxes on fuel and because we cut the VAT taxes on fuel, energy, and telecommunication, we expected that next year Brazil could start a new government running a primary deficit between 0.5% and 1% of GDP.
In order to control the growth of the gross debt, you know, to stop the growth of the gross debt, Brazil needs to run a primary surplus around 2% of GDP. The challenge for the next government is to show to the market how do you translate a primary deficit of 0.5%-1% of GDP at the beginning of the government next year to a primary surplus of 2% of GDP, at least by the end of next government. If the new government shows that, shows the fiscal strategy to build that in 4 or 5 years, I think it'll be very, very good. I think the market will accept, you know, the strategy. I think long-term interest rate in Brazil at the beginning of next year will go down again.
In order for this to happen, we need to see what is the new fiscal strategy of the new government. You know, many people, the market in Brazil are raising questions whether or not, the new government will be, let's say, a radical in terms of increasing the expenditure or will be fiscal responsible. You know, we don't know yet who will be the new minister of finance, but pretty much, you know, I don't expect a radical government. Again, you know, the congress there was elected in Brazil in both houses, the lower house and the upper house, moved to the right. So it doesn't matter if Lula, the new president elected, even if the new president intends to do something radical, the Congress will block that.
The Congress in Brazil moved to the right, so I think it will be impossible to adopt any radical proposal to send and get approved in the Congress. That's why I'm a little bit optimistic. I think the new president, Lula, I think he will realize that he needs to, you know, to work together with the Congress. Otherwise, he'll not do anything. He wanted to increase social policy, and in order to do that, he'll need to present to the Congress a fiscal strategy, you know, that shows that Brazil continue to be responsible, concerned with the fiscal numbers, with the fiscal account. That's what I am expecting. But we need to wait a little bit to see who will be the new Minister of Finance and the new economic team.
Again, don't expect any radical change in Brazil that happened in many other countries in Latin America, because here in Brazil, different from many other places, you know, the Congress moved to the right, and you have a new president, and in order for this new president to do anything, he needs the backup, he needs the support of the Brazilian Congress. The Brazilian Congress, it's very conservative. I mean, in a nutshell, that's it. I mean, Brazil did many reforms in the last six years. The fiscal number, the growth number, the labor market, they are all better. In order for Brazil to continue to improve, we need to give a simple message. The Brazilian economy, the new government will continue to be responsible in terms of the, you know, in terms of compliance with the fiscal legislation.
We show you need to show how we will transform a primary deficit expected for next year in a primary surplus in the next four, five years, and of course, continue to do reforms. I will end my presentation saying, stressing that the two most important reforms that Brazil needs to do is a tax reform and administrative reform. A tax reform because Brazil has a very high tax burden, around 34% of GDP. You know, we have a very complex tax system. The challenge of the new government is not to cut the tax burden because we don't have fiscal space to do that. The challenge is to make the tax system in Brazil more simple. I think that's the key concern of the next government.
I've been talking to some of the advisors of the next president, and I think, I mean, they will present a good tax reform proposal. Basically, they wanted to deal with some special tax regime, and they wanted to probably increase a little bit the income tax on personal, not on firms. The tax burden on firms in Brazil is already very, very high, and nobody wants to increase anymore. It's quite the opposite. All the advisors of the new president, they recognize, they know that the tax burden on firms in Brazil is already very high, and they don't wanna to do that. They wanna to increase. If they put in place a tax on dividend, they will cut the corporate tax and the net effect to be zero.
I mean, I don't expect a growth in the tax burden on enterprise in Brazil. Probably will have a higher marginal income tax rate than the highest marginal income tax rate in Brazil is 27.5%. This is lower than it is in Canada, than it is in Germany, than it is in United States. Probably the government will try to increase the highest, you know, marginal tax rate on workers to something between 30%-35%. This is, you know, this is not bad at all. This is not something unusual. I mean, don't expect any radical tax reform in Brazil, and tax reform is very important to make the system more simple. And last, administrative reform.
The next government will try to do an administrative reform to improve the productivity and the efficiency of the public sector. You know, that's the most important two reforms after the pension reform they were approved back in 2019. That's it. In a big nutshell, and I'll let you guys have access to my presentation. I went very fast, but there are many numbers in the presentation. Then in a nutshell, that's the big picture about the Brazilian economy, and I'm ready to do some Q&A. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Mansueto. Thanks very much. That was a very good comprehensive overview. Are there any questions that anybody may have while we have Mansueto with us?
I have one question from the internet. This question is, will Brazil sign a free trade agreement with the U.S. under the new administration, as FTA countries are preferred under the critical minerals policy of the U.S.?
Did you get that question?
No. Yeah, a little bit. Can you repeat again? Can you repeat please for me?
Sure. Will Brazil sign a free trade agreement with the U.S. under the new administration as FTA countries are preferred under the critical minerals policy of the U.S.?
You know, I'm not sure, I mean, what the result will look like there. You know, here in Brazil, you have a strong support for new trade agreements, especially with U.S. and European countries. Brazil is making a lot of efforts to become a member of OECD countries. You know, it's too early to say what would be the strategy in terms of, you know, foreign trade agreements with this new administration, with U.S., Europe, et cetera. I hope, you know, but I cannot say nothing any more than that, whether or not they will sign a new trade agreement.
Let me tell you that some of the advisors of the next president I've been talking to, they're quite sensitive, and they understand that you need to do that because have in mind that Brazil needs to increase our investment, private and public. We need to increase our investment on corporate infrastructure, and we still need to do a fiscal adjustment. The government, the public sector in Brazil doesn't have the means to boost the public investment. Brazil, in order to grow faster, we need to rely on private investment. You know, we need to do as many trade agreements as we can possibly do. I hope that the new government will do that, the trade agreements with U.S., with Europe, and continue our effort to become a member of OECD.
Great. Thanks, Mansueto. I don't think there's any further. Oh, one question here at the front. My apologies.
Hi, there. Thanks for your presentation. I'm not sure if I missed it at the very early part of your presentation because I jumped in a little bit late, admittedly. We've seen in Latin America, we've certainly seen other countries move towards, or at least try to think about implementing higher mining royalties and taxes, sort of on foreign and domestic producers. Some of them haven't really worked, and maybe that's relevant for the, you know, the presentation we're at today. Ero obviously operates within the country. Is this something that you think the new administration and Congress would consider? I know there's been rumblings in the past in Brazil, but really no sort of movement. Is it a sector that you think they'd look at, or you're not worried about it? Thank you.
You know, I don't think any problems. They want to increase the tax on mining in Brazil will be something very, very minor. Probably increase a little bit the royalties. You know, it's not the same case as other Latin American countries. Like, here in Brazil, if you ask me what are the two major concerns regarding the tax system in Brazil, first of all, is the VAT tax, because in Brazil we have a VAT, but a different legislation for the 27 states. You know, it's really cumbersome because every single sub-national government in Brazil has a different legislation for VAT tax. The government wants to unify that to make it more simple.
In addition to that, we have a problem in Brazil, you know, not with the tax or enterprise or oils or the mining sectors or in the oil sector. We have a problem in Brazil with income tax. You know, we're talking about a country that what we pay on income tax doesn't depend on your income, depends on your labor contract. Suppose that you were an employee in a big firm in Brazil, the highest tax rate that you pay as income tax is 27.5%. But suppose that you were a kind of, you know, that you sell your service to a company. It's not. You're not employed. You're a subcontractor of that company. You're a supplier of that company.
Then you can be a personal firm without employee, and your tax burden will go down to 14.5% of your income. You have a huge tax benefit being a limited liability company in Brazil. Although you don't have any single employee, you're yourself a single company providing your service to different companies, your tax burden, you can make $100,000 per month, and your tax burden will be 14.5% of your income. That's the kind of problems that the new administration will try to fix it. I mean, I don't see debating with the new administration. I don't see any major concern, you know, regarding the oil sector in terms of taxation, regarding the mining sector.
They are much more concerned with unifying the VAT tax system in Brazil, and second, you know, finishing this special tax regime that benefits many high-income earners in Brazil. I mean, I don't expect any major change in taxation in the mining or the oil sector.
Okay, we're all done with questions? Great. Mansueto, thank you so much again for your time. Hopefully we'll get to see you when Courtney and I are down in Brazil in December. Have a great day. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you, David, and congratulations for the company. It's terrific. I'm very happy, I mean, to be here again. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay, well, hopefully that gives a lot of you who had some interesting thoughts with regards to Brazil some insights. What Mansueto's stating there is very much what we're seeing on the ground and what we're hearing about with President Lula now coming in and with the Congress very much moved to the right. The reforms that are gonna be done are primarily around these areas of taxation and things like that. We don't see anything marked with regards to a movement towards what we've seen in some other Latin American countries towards changes in the mining royalties. There are just way too much other bigger issues that they're dealing with right now to think about that.
I think it's also important to recognize, outside of iron ore, mining sector is not even in the top ten industries in Brazil. With respect to looking at that and looking at significant mining reform with regards to taxation or royalties, we do not see that as being something that is front and center for the new administration. What is good, though, is certainly this movement, to, you know, start protecting the Amazon again and going against illegal mining, which has proliferated in a number of parts of the country. I think that's just good overall for the country and for the industry as well. With that, let's move on to Ero.
Hopefully you all saw last night we put out our news release with regards to the inclusion of Project Honeypot into our new mineral reserves and resources. We're gonna be talking about that today. We're gonna give you an update on our progress with regards to our projects, particularly in Tucumã. Then, of course, towards the end, the real juicy stuff that we all like is around the exploration work and particularly, you know, giving you a little bit more context with regards to the recent news release we did on nickel and the work we're doing in nickel in the Curaçá Valley. Without further ado, let's move forward and get going. I think you all know who we are. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know who we were. We're a high-margin, high-growth, clean copper producer based in Brazil.
Brazil is our home. We have, apart from the 35 employees outside of Brazil, 3,000 colleagues in Brazil. Very much we are a Brazilian company. We're very excited about being in Brazil, and our future is gonna remain in Brazil, and we're gonna continue to grow our business in Brazil. We love the country. It's been great for us, and we think there's significant amounts of opportunity being unlocked in the country, particularly in the base metals and copper, which is not known to date as a big copper producing country. Things that we're seeing around the country, et cetera, it gives us great hope and great opportunity for growing our business. As I said, we are a company that likes to grow organically, and we'll talk about that with regards to our exploration focus.
We have an exploration team I think that can compete with the best in the world, led by Mike and Pablo, and we'll talk about some of that later on. Industry-leading returns. We are not a NAV-focused company. We're a returns-focused company, and that drives everything that we do with regards to investments, et cetera. Of course, I'll strengthen our balance sheet in order to allow us to fund our growth as we're moving forward. I wanted to start here because I think it's important. Some of you know us from when we went public, but I think it's good to step back in time a little bit to kind of reflect on where this company is today from where it started.
Its humble beginnings at the IPO was a company that had a mine life of six years, one that we believed that we could grow extensively and one where, you know, the average life of mine production at that time was about 23,000 tons. Over the course of the next four years to 2020, the last time we were able to see everybody in person, this is what our company looked like back in 2020 and the technical report there, growing the business in terms of increasing to average annual copper production around about 42,000 tons a year, increasing our life of mine. This is us today. Continued growth with Project Honeypot, the ability now and growing our business to where we now have a life of 20+ years, the addition of and growth with the Tucumã operations.
We've really come a long way from where we first started in terms of this country. It's a real credit to our team in Brazil. Again, I cannot emphasize enough the leadership of Mike and Pablo in our exploration because this is built out of all of that work. We didn't buy any of this. We grew this from our internal portfolio. We're now greatly placed. We're a company now that has a long life, good solid production, continuing to grow, and we fundamentally believe that this is now another foundation that if we have this conversation in four years again, that we'll be adding to this and growing from this base again. We're not resting on our laurels. We continue to grow, and we continue to work in growing our business in Brazil.
Let's move on and start talking about what happened yesterday and what we're doing. It needs a little bit of history, because it is, somewhat unusual that we've been able to add over eight million tons at nearly 1.6% copper in the upper reaches of a mine that's been operating for over 40 years. How did that happen? Well, when we acquired the company back in 2017, and we did our original 43-101 work on it, we were told that this area had been mined out, and so to ignore it, which we duly did, and worked and continued to grow our business.
Through a couple of changes that we had in the company, what emerged is a really great young mine planning gentleman named Pedro Yamaguchi, and Pedro started to uncover some work that had not been put in the databases, was still basically on maps, and uncovered that what actually happened here was a significant amount of unmined material. Piecing the history back in, what we now know is back in 1984, when they went underground, this was the first area they were gonna mine. This is one of the super pods that we've always talked about, high grade mineralization. They went in here in 1984 with a view of using paste fill.
At that time, this was the largest underground mine and the first underground mine in Brazil to try and use paste fill, and it was unsuccessful to the extent that they basically abandoned the area and walked away and went and started mining other areas. Their loss was our gain. Over the course of this year, the engineering team, Mike and Pablo's team, have been doing a lot of work to be able to bring Project Honeypot into our updated mineral reserves and resources. As I said, a fantastic addition to our business of eight million tons. We've taken a very conservative approach, though, with regards to our dilution and our mining losses. The reason we've done that right now is some parts of that area do have old paste that sits there.
We're still getting comfortable with regards to mining in and around some of these areas. It's not uniform throughout, but we've decided to just initially take a quite conservative approach with regards to the head grades in this area. As we get more comfortable, as we mine, you may see that grade will go up as we get more comfortable and we start cutting the conservative nature of our dilution factors here. To give you some guidance for the rest of the mine, it's around about 19%-22%, and we've gone with 32% here. This is what we've done with regards to Project Honeypot and how Honeypot comes in. Now, what Honeypot does for us, more importantly, and I said in the news release in my quote, is bring flexibility to our operations, particularly here. There we go.
Before we go on to that, and I'll talk about that. We've added 185,000 tons of copper to our reserves, throughout the valley. As I said, primarily through Honeypot. What does Honeypot do to us? It increases our operational flexibility. As we continue to mine, and we have this area now, it allows us to start to look at opportunities in order to pull different levers, particularly in the marketplace that we're in right now with some uncertainties with regards to costs. As we're moving in with Honeypot and we're looking at that, we can now look at some mine resequencing. That allows us to do some cost savings with regards to some of the capital that we would be spending in terms of developing in certain areas. It provides some material handling debottlenecking in our decline.
We can now delay some of our Pilar expansion capital that we were gonna do with regards to our Baraúna area. Most importantly, it allows us some flexibility with regards to the development of our shaft system and the new shaft for the deepening project. All of these we're working through right now. It allows us, as I said, the flexibility to do that. We're working in that. We looked at like we can be delaying some of the capital requirements that we need to be spending originally. We can now put those off without losing any copper production from the operation. Very, very important to us and a very, very big add-on for us as we move forward. That really plays out with regards to this slide.
This slide, I think we're not the only company that you have in your portfolio or you're investing in with regards to this. We've gone to very remarkable changes and events with regards to inflation, with regards to key inputs. In the mining industry, the key consumable inputs that we know about diesel, cement, steel costs. How you project those going forward has become quite uncertain with regards to the current environment. We all hope that we get back into a more steady commodities and variables inputs pricing, but it is a challenge at the moment for all of us in the industry with regards to as we continue to look forward how we project and work towards projecting our operating capital costs on an ongoing basis. That's something everybody's working through, and we're certainly working through with that right now.
Moving on to our Xavantina operations. Not much new here this year. What we are doing is we are developing over to our Matinho deposit, which is adjacent to the Santo Antonio vein and the mine that we're currently operating. We've implemented a paste fill plant here. It's working extremely well during the year, and the mine is going from strength to strength. We will be coming up with a new mineral reserve and resource update expected in the first half of 2023, and we'll give you some insights into that in the exploration section with regards. Continuing to move on to our NX60 project, moving this mine up to 60,000 ounces per year of gold production. Let's move on to our projects update.
I think it's important before we get there that we just share some of the things that we've done in the past with regards to projects. Historically, we've built mines. We've built the Vermelhos mine on budget and on time. We completed our HIGmill installation on budget, on time. It's actually performing significantly better than what we originally designed it for. Instead of the 2%-3% recovery increase that we've seen, we've seen between 5% and 6% now. We've completed our 15MW cooling plant for the Pilar Mine, and that has come in great. We're actually operating below the temperatures that we actually thought there would be, and this is allowing us now to start look at the potential, and we're working through this, of moving away from the four-shift system down to a three-shift system.
Potentially down the road, we can see some cost savings in our operation as we move to that and greater efficiencies in our business. We didn't even talk about it. We've finished completing a small underground mine at the Surubim operations, and that is beginning production as we speak. At Xavantina, again, completed and built the Santo Antonio mine and have completed, as I mentioned earlier, the paste fill plant. We have a team both outside and within Brazil that has experience and is competent with regards to mine construction. I think that's important as we continue to move forward and we talk about Tucumã and where we are with Tucumã and the development of that operation. Let's talk and bring you up to speed on where we are with Tucumã.
The project is currently ahead of schedule, with critical earthworks completed prior to the rainy season. Some of you, I know when earlier in the year were asking me, you know, what is the critical factor that could cause you being delayed in building this? That was getting the work that we needed to get done before the rainy season. The access roads completed, the drainage around site have been completed, and so we're in really good stead right now, and we've tested it. The good Lord upstairs gave us an incredible rain event a couple of weeks ago. We had 2.5 inches of rain in 15 minutes. That tested the system and it worked extremely well. We're very, very happy where we are with regards to the critical path of moving the project forward in that regard.
The ball mill, all of the critical path items have been ordered. The ball mill is in transit right now to Brazil. The HIG mills have been ordered, and we're in really, really good stead with regards to the project as it continues to move forward. To give you a bit of indication with regards to where we're at with our capital and our visibility, in our earnings news release last week, we gave some guidance with regards to, and I think it's important that we spend a little bit more talking about it. Indicative quotes means that we're in negotiation or final tender with regards to the items. Contracted items are already in place. Our total visibility right now is where you see there on the right-hand side.
With regards to unquoted capital and unallocated contingency, we've got about $56 million that's still outstanding that needs to be quoted. Now, what is that? That is two items. One is a water treatment plant, and the other one is a dry stack tailings. Why both of those haven't been done yet is we are moving towards looking at co-mingling our tailings with regards to our waste dumps. So the requirements that we would have are gonna be significantly less than what potentially is shown here in terms of the outstanding capital. As we continue and finalize that work, so we will get greater visibility into this.
We have, and you'll see, that we've actually gone and spent an additional $5 million of capital that wasn't part of the plan in order to put a liner under our waste dump, so that we already are ahead to be able to look at co-mingling. It looks like we're moving towards a co-mingling strategy right now. We certainly see, with regards to the unquoted and unallocated contingency numbers there, that they're either at the top end of the level or potentially coming down. As it respects to contracted items, I think it's important to highlight with respect to that there are some variables that aren't controllable, those being diesel prices, especially. When we have worked with the number here, we're working with the high-end number that we worked earlier in the year.
That number has come down, and so we are tracking lower than what the contracted items are saying right now. Of course, we cannot give you a definitive until the project's completed with regards to where we're gonna end up with those diesel pricing. Let's have a look quickly. For some of you who came on the analyst trip earlier this year, you would have been on that little road on the upper part. This is a new road below. We've actually got a bit of a problem in Brazil right now. People are driving too fast on this road. Locals, we actually clocked somebody driving 100 km an hour down this road at one point. We need to install some speed bumps.
The road is doing extremely well that somebody can take a pickup truck and drive 100 km an hour down it. We're very, very happy with respect to how the road has come together. As I said, it has been tested significantly in rain events, and we're very, very comfortable with regards to where that is today. This is the mine access road. You can see going up into the mine. On the right-hand side, in the center there, you can see the concrete area. These are one of the four waterways that we use to remove water in and around the mine. All four of those are there with regards to the sumps and our ability to move water. Very, very important that those are in place. There is the top end of the Boa Mountain.
Starting the pre-strip with regards to that. Pre-stripping is ahead of schedule. The company we're using, Fagundes, have done a wonderful job with regards to that. We're ahead of schedule with regards to pre-stripping, and you'll see, we've got one more slide there. There's the liner I was telling you about earlier. As I said, we decided to put this liner in, so that gives us that flexibility. What that will allow us to do is while we spend an extra $5 million on liner, we do see significant capital being decreased with regards to the dry stack tailings option that we had considered previously, because now we'll be using the co-mingling of tails into the waste dump. Lastly, there we see the pre-stripping activities up at the top of the hill.
Moving greatly forward, everything's going great. Right now, the new movement into the earthworks is this the location. In the foreground, you're gonna have the crusher, secondary and tertiary crushing near the pickup truck in the middle, and then the distance is the plant site. This is all now being prepared in terms of anticipation of construction beginning in the first quarter of next year in terms of the erection of the various infrastructure in this area. Very happy. Tucumã is going great.
As I said, we as a team, considering the inflationary environment that we've been experiencing this year, I've got to give a huge hats off to Anthea Bath, our COO, and our project manager in Brazil, Thiago, who have done a tremendous job working in terms of this, in terms of getting our capital to where it is. We're very, very comfortable with those numbers right now. Another aspect that we're seeing coming out in Tucumã you'll see next year is gonna be the updated life of mine plan and mineral reserve and resources for this project. It's coming in two parts. The first part was an 8,000-meter drill program that was done in the areas that we were gonna mine for the first two years.
That has been followed up with a 30,000-meter drill program that's completed now with regards to including things like the gap zone that we have mentioned in the past, and other areas that we have discovered in terms of mineralization in and around the deposit, and updating that. What has been a positive note is that we've seen a 10% positive grade reconciliation in the 8,000-meter drill program for the first two years of production. That's the equivalent of an additional 9,000 tons of copper that we didn't expect in the original plan that will be mined in the first two years. Now, whether that carries through for the rest of the deposit will remains to be seen in terms of that reconciliation, but certainly, we're very, very pleased with the start of the work here in terms of how that's coming together.
Going back into Caraíba, and of course, the deepening project and the shaft for that, what we can show you and we'll explain to you, as I said earlier, with regards to Project Honeypot now, we have now been able to take the pressure off the development of the shaft, and we're now gonna take our time with regards to that. We're currently looking at about a one-year extension in terms of development of it that will lower our capital requirements on the project on an annualized basis, over the next few years. We are still moving forward with the project. We're not deferring it. We're not changing anything with it other than just taking our time in terms of getting it built. What we have here is, on the right-hand side is a picture, aerial picture off site.
I think it's difficult for me to explain to everybody what everything is there, but we've got us some pictures that we'll show you here. In terms of that, foundations have been passed, cast in terms of the the. You can see it right in the center there with regards to the shaft itself. Raise boring is underway. We've already completed 220 meters of that raise boring, so around about 1.8 meter wide hole that then we'll slough off with our mining with our shaft contractor, UMS, as that's completed. All the winders have been refurbished or are being refurbished. They arrive on site the first half of next year. We are having the headframe fabricated right now, and that will be going on-site as well.
We're very happy with respect to where the project is and as we continue to move that forward. We've got some pictures here. Yeah, there we go. This, on the left-hand side in the foreground where it looks brown, that's the temporary winder, base and foundation. Immediately next to that, you'll see two towers. That's the batch plant for the concrete. Just above that, next to the concrete truck, you'll see that is the shaft itself. It's got a concrete plug in it right now as we continue to build infrastructure around it. In the very, very top right-hand corner, you see a hole there. That is actually the long-term winder house. It all comes together in a picture later in the presentation. There we go. There's the shaft and the concrete and the foundations being poured around that.
There we go, and you see the headgear in the foreground, the main winder house. In the background, we've got our currently showing the temporary winder house that is gonna be used as a sink and the associated infrastructure. The project's in good shape. We're very happy with it, and we're very happy that we have the flexibility, particularly in these uncertain times with regards to inflation, that we have the ability to maneuver. That's one of the great things, you know. Can't emphasize that enough about Honeypot, is the flexibility Honeypot is giving us with regards to the development of our operations and continuing to move forward in that regard. Of course, the mill expansion going from 3 million tons to 4.2, this is all part of Pilar 3.0.
Ball mill will arrive in the first half of next year, the Jameson Cell, the second half of the year. The project will be completed by the end of next year. All moving forward, all going well. I think it's important to touch on some of the ESG aspects of our business. With regards to that, one of the things that we're seeing in Brazil, and we were telling the analysts last night, you know, we've got some great success and ability to now attract talent to our operations in Brazil. Reason being is longer mine life with regards to what we've been able to secure. People now see that there is a long-term security in coming to work at our operations, particularly here in Pilar, and we've been able to attract great talent.
The problem with that is we've got a bit of a housing crisis in town because everybody wants to move to town, which is a great thing to have. From our perspective, in terms of our communities, one of the big projects we have is a conversion of our little clinic in town into a full-range hospital, and we're in the process of completing that. That will be completed the first quarter of next year. It's a fantastic opportunity, but we see this as an important aspect, not only from our ESG side of things of helping people in our region, and this hospital will be affecting everybody within our footprint of where we go, so almost a 150-km radius from the hospital.
More importantly, with respect to that, it just gives people the notion that there is a long-term future working with Ero and working in the Pilar area. Just a couple of quick pictures on that. As I said, it's world-class facility in terms of what's being built there. And you can see in terms of the conversion, we're extremely happy, and the community's been fantastic with regards to moving in this direction. The other side of it, and Brett is gonna take a lot of credit for this with regards to our sustainability and our work in this regard, is coming together and continuing to work in terms of getting the data put in the marketplace or into the public with regards to emissions and Scope 1, Scope 2. And we are starting to move towards Scope 3 with respect to that.
As you can see, we benefit. I think one of the aspects about Brazil that will be a competitive advantage down the road is the fact that we get 99% of our power from renewable energy sources. The fact of that, and we operate as a high-grade operating mine, really provides us with the opportunities to get very close to, and we've actually looked at ways that we can now move the company to a net zero producer. We'll be working on those over the course of the next couple of years with regards to moving the company in that regard.
Very excited about this and how we stack up in the world with regards to a producer of copper, which is the green metal, that's gonna be the cornerstone of the greening economy, and being a company that's able to do that with almost zero emissions. Let's move on to our exploration update. In the beginning of the year, Mike and Pablo and Maka were here giving a basis of the work that we would be doing this year from an exploration technical standpoint. As you can see, the objectives on the left-hand side, additions of high-grade tons at an upper part Pilar Mine. A very big check with respect to that. Increase mine life of Vermelhos while improving the grade profile. We didn't meet that target.
Part of the reason we didn't meet that target is in the first half of the year was we were moving rigs into Project Honeypot to work on that, and we weren't able to spend as much time on Vermelhos this year as what we have seen. When you see the NI 43-101 report, you will see that our actual resources and reserves did drop at Vermelhos. However, we do have a slide. It is gonna form the cornerstone of our copper work in the Curaçá Valley next year. Continue testing high-priority regional targets. Obviously, we have done that, and we've really moved the focus there, and will continue to remain the focus for the foreseeable future.
Considering if you look at our life right now with regards to copper, you know, the opportunities in looking at nickel, really from a regional perspective is one that we're gonna just switch our focus for a while and look at that because the opportunities there are significantly high returns if we're able to continue to be as successful in what we found so far. In terms of Xavantina, increase mine reserves life, we're working on that. We'll, as I said earlier, come out with a reserve and resource update in the first half of next year. Progressing with regional exploration program in partnership with Royal Gold. We have continued to see high-priority targets. We were hoping to have some drill results available for you.
The assays didn't come in in time, but we're having some good success with regards to that work as well. At Tucumã, incorporate results of the gap zone. As I said, that will be coming out next year. We've completed all that drill work, and where we are right now is we are actually testing a new project that we see as additive to, Tucumã down the road, and we'll hopefully be able to talk more about that next year. But then we've also tested extension of mineralization beyond. We continue to see, mineralization going to depth, and we're very comfortable longer term, that'll be an area of focus once the mine is built and we start looking at an underground option towards the latter part of the mine's life. Let's talk about Vermelhos.
The Vermelhos East zone, and this is the area that we're talking about here is currently defined by lower grade compared to what we've mined there historically. This area is generally around about one to 1.3, 1.4% compared to the main mine, which has historically been between 2% and 3% grades. Nice grades, but not the same as what they were previously. It was also defined by very wide-spaced drilling from an inferred perspective. All the yellow area that you see there is all inferred.
However, again, Mike and Pablo have been working in this area, and towards the latter half of the year, we started to see some very interesting drill results that suggest that some aspects of the east zone may be more similar to what we've seen historically in terms of our operations than what we're seeing currently. These are highlighted by hole 1537, 68 meters at 2.6% copper. Then hole 1617, which we recently just completed, 12 meters of 4.4% copper. This will form the basis. We'll be doing a lot of work here. The rigs will be moving here. We'll be doing less drilling at Pilar and moving the rigs, underground rigs, to drill this as a priority for next year. This will form the basis of our work there. Looking now.
Oh, I thought we were gonna keep this one for the end, but I guess we're gonna do it now. Let's talk about nickel. Let's give you a bit of a history of this. When we acquired the company, we always felt that this was a magmatic sulfide district that had been misidentified in the academic literature and that nickel had a potential to be found here. In 2018, when we were developing the Vermelhos mine, we started to see areas of pure pentlandite, blobs of it, about a meter by a meter size. We tested that, and grades were up to nearly 22% nickel, which would make it pure pentlandite. That kinda got our interest up.
In late 2018-2019, if you remember the Siriema deposit, we started to see areas of nickel mixed in with the copper. To be honest, we couldn't pull it together. If you looked at it as comparable to Sudbury or comparable to Voisey's Bay or Norilsk, using those as the metrics, we just couldn't see the similar type of mineralization, the type of rocks that you would see there, but we were seeing the nickel. I've always said, and I've said that COVID, what we realized about COVID was we couldn't do a greenfield exploration via Zoom. Mike and Pablo and the team were somewhat hampered during that time period to be able to go and do exploration. Like anything else, there's a silver lining to everything.
During that time period, while they weren't able to travel, they were interacting with some of the top academic people in the world on nickel, people from the University of Leicester, Queen's University here in Canada, a gentleman named John Thompson, who is legendary in our business, to try and understand what was going on in the Curaçá Valley with respect to the depositional environment. Some theories started to come together. At the same time, we were able to hire two fantastic gentlemen. I use their nicknames, Tomazoni and Jacatinga, two gentlemen who loved walking in the bush. A combination of them being on site during that period, working alone, working with the geochemistry and having a university doing significant amounts of geochemistry and field mapping, and then coming back to the airborne EM survey we flew, we started to see things start to coalesce.
We formed a dedicated nickel team in January of this year, led by Tomazoni and Jacatinga, whose only focus was to go and find where the nickel could be in the valley. The first place they went was the LZ zone. It is never been looked at before. There is no previous mapping. There's no previous drilling. There's nothing here. There's barely any outcrop. The third hole that they drilled there in April of this year was a discovery hole. We found economic grades of nickel over minable widths outcropping at surface. We continued to do work at LZ. At the same time, you look at the methodology of how they were doing this. They went further north, about three kilometers to the north, found gossan outcropping, trenched it, came back to Pablo Mejia.
Pablo did what Pablo does in pulling all together a new target area. That became the VB zone that we drilled. VB is interesting. What's different about VB is you're seeing some of the core outside is the fact that we're seeing massive sulfide. We have the building blocks with regards to the work that we're doing here with regards to potentially finding high-grade nickel deposits in the Curaçá Valley. We see the high-grade copper deposits at Pilar and Vermelhos. Based upon academic thinking and knowledge with regards to this around the world, there shouldn't be any reason we shouldn't find similar types of deposits on the nickel side of things. The team has continued to move forward with regards to that. We continue to do field mapping. We continue to step out further to the north.
This is what we showed you in September. This is a fast-moving event, what's happening. Things are changing daily as we continue to move. I was just down there with Mike 10 days ago in the field with the guys. It's incredible what they're doing and what they're finding. This was September. As of last week, we've now found another kilometer to the north of and three km to the north of VB, some additional outcropping of nickel at surface. Pablo has done the work. We're now moving rigs into these areas, and we're gonna start testing them. As we're looking at this, and as we continue to move forward, we are seeing numerous other areas in the valley that look like this. We firmly believe that we are merely at the tip of a massive iceberg with regards to nickel in the Curaçá Valley.
The opportunity for a company like ourselves to have a district of this size with potentially numerous nickel opportunities is one that gives us and the team extreme excitement. As we continue to look, this is some of the work. I'll leave this for those who want to spend time with Pablo and Mike to understand it all. This is essentially the 3D modeling of the ultramafic ore body. This is just Baraúna and what we're seeing at Baraúna. What you're starting to see is a pulling together of these zones where LZ, the purple is what we've drilled. We're now seeing outcrop, as you said, in these new trenches. They line up with potential of these being magma chambers and potential for additional significant mine nickel mineralization. The work needs to be done.
As I said, this is just one area. We have four rigs operating in the area. We've got three operating right now. We've got a fourth moving in. This will be the story in terms of our greenfields exploration work over the course of next year. Some people have said, and there's been some analysts who try to put some numbers around this in terms of size. It's too early for that. It's too early to try and put numbers around what we're seeing. What we're seeing right now and what I think you need to take away from today is that there's something new going on. Specifically, nickel. The opportunity for a company, as I said, to have a nickel district, potential nickel district starting to unfold.
We have all the building blocks within that with regards to massive sulfide, with regards to all the different textures that we see, the rocks, et cetera, to make ultimately a large discovery. We look at it as that is our role for the foreseeable future. The opportunity to run this material through our mill is there. It's the very same process as it is for floating copper. The ability for us ultimately to move down that road and look at producing some of this material is certainly there and one that we're very capable of doing so. We're not gonna be looking at building out resources in the near term. For us, it's right now is discovery and what can we find in the valley.
I think I've said all of that, and that's just a good example, as you'll see, of what we call the loop textures. Loop textures, for those who know nickel in the business, is an important indicator with regards to massive sulfide and traditional sources of nickel in the world. Moving on to some concluding remarks with regards to my presentation and taking us back to the first slide. We've come a long way since 2017 in terms of where we are as a company today. We've built out a significant production growth profile, sort of like what we said at the beginning, and many of you became shareholders with us on this ride when we did an IPO and looked at us and said, "Hey, this team can probably...
I'm willing to give this team a shot to try and see what they can do." I think we've been able to show you that we've been able to do, we did what we said we were gonna do. By no means is it over, and by no means our work at WeLook is we now want to fill in the gap above the where we see the 100,000 tons of production, we wanna start filling that gap in. How are we gonna do that? Well, certainly the operational and growth levers that we have are revolving around our regional nickel and copper in the Curaçá Valley. We have the regional opportunities at Xavantina on the gold side of things. We have neighboring property options that we have around Xavantina as well.
That gold mine and the opportunity potentially to go to full production and utilizing the full capacity of that plant is there, and the potential to go from 60,000 ounces to maybe 80,000 ounces is certainly there. Not tomorrow, but we're working towards that. The Soma property option, this property I told you about earlier in the presentation near Tucumã, we certainly see that as being potentially additive, and we'll talk about that more next year with regards to the work we're doing there. We have other opportunities in the Carajás that we hope to be able to talk to you next year about. Pretty exciting there. We also have a program that we're looking at other parts of Brazil as well for much longer term, a much longer term future. Yep, we've got a lot on the plate.
We've always had a lot on the plate for this company. We're in the process, as I said, of building Tucumã. It's going well. We've got the optionality now and the levers to pull with regards to the Caraíba operations, and specifically as we look at this uncertain time right now with regards to margins, et cetera, the various levers that we can pull with respect to that. Yeah, we're in a great shape and thanks very much to everybody for joining us today in person and people on the internet, and we'll open up the floor for lively questions. Very comprehensive.
I do have a couple of questions from viewers of the webcast. The first question is with respect to the Tucumã opportunity around co-mingling tailings and waste rock. This viewer asks, what expertise do we have in-house or are we working with a third-party engineering firm? How advanced is the geochemistry on this front? And is the waste rock acid generating or non-acid generating?
All great questions. We're probably the most experienced company in the world with co-mingling of tails. We've been doing it at the Caraíba operations for the last 15 years, I believe it's been done there. We've got a lot of experience in co-mingling, and we're bringing that expertise. We have the in-house expertise to be able to bring that to bear with regards to Tucumã. With regards to the geochemistry that you're talking about and the work there, we're in the process of finalizing that with regards to acid mine generation and generating of acid mine waters. Hence, the reason we haven't finalized the numbers with regards to the water treatment plant or the co-mingling capital is because we're still in the final stages of working through that.
We've taken a relatively conservative assumption right now. We think there may be opportunities to improve upon that, hence the reason I was saying that earlier, with regards to some of the early results we've got. We don't wanna say too much more than that with regards to the results of that work.
Thanks for that, Dave. I do have an additional question from one of our webcast viewers. Can you discuss both your short and long-term plans around the nickel system?
Well, the short-term plans is continue to, as we said in the presentation, is to continue to identify new opportunities with regards to nickel, and that was how many deposits are we able to identify ourselves. That will form the basis of our short-term strategy. That short-term strategy, I imagine, Mike, is 12-18 months in terms of that work. Longer term, obviously is looking to drill out and get the best resource that we can draw of these in order to look at mining them, as part of our copper operations. You know, we've done really well with the first two, deposits that or showings that we've found. The question is, are they the best ones or are we gonna find better ones than that? Certainly, we feel that we've got opportunity to find better, than those.
That would be our long term.
Hi there. Thanks, David. You talked about your dedicated nickel team and the plan to sort of the focus being on discovery right now. Is there a dedicated copper team looking at greenfields discoveries, or is that focused still more on sort of near mine additions?
Well, right now that's gonna be near mine. You know, I think right now when we're looking at copper with a 15-year mine life that we have right now, I think there'd be some people raising eyebrows if we were saying that we're gonna do a big copper greenfields program. It's not to say we don't. We continue to do some work there, but certainly, the pressure's off to make a big copper discovery in the district right now. We've got to focus on getting the deepening completed, optimizing Honeypot. Honeypot hasn't been fully optimized. We'll continue to do that over the course of next year and the opportunities it brings to us.
From a standpoint of value add, from a standpoint of company that's focused on returns, if we're able to develop nickel opportunities, they certainly give the highest return, and so we're gonna do that from a greenfields perspective in the near term.
Can you give an update on your local smelter and how they're doing? Where is it nearby? I guess this is a little bit of a side, but where is the nickel smelter nearby?
Okay, our local copper smelter, Paranapanema, which is located in Salvador about 400 km away from the mine site, they're starting to do better. They had a major issue, excuse me, with an accident of a piece of machinery in the middle of the year. We're working with them and chatting in terms of how we can start bringing them back into our customer mix. Nothing updated yet that we can say. We're working with them and another party to see how we can start shipping to them more than we have in the recent past. You know, as I said, we do get some benefits from significant benefits from selling to them.
We'd love to continue to do that, but we're not gonna take on financial risks with regards to receivables, with regards to them, any more than we're doing right now. They're doing okay. With respect to nickel would be exported, and sent to international nickel smelters. There are no nickel smelters in Brazil, with respect to that.
I have another question from one of our webcast viewers. Would the capital expenditures around developing a nickel mine be significant? If so, how would we fund?
Right. Well, we're not even looking at that right now. If you can take the capital that we've spent in the past, for instance, in developing our Vermelhos mine. If you look at the capital requirements with regards to putting a nickel dedicated nickel line in the plant, they aren't that high. We developed Vermelhos for $50 million. This would be an open pit, so certainly less cost than that, and we'd just truck this material to our plant. I'd be speculating to give you a capital number in terms of what a dedicated line would look like in the plant, but you're looking at tens of millions, not hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to build that infrastructure. Again, we're not even close to be even contemplating that right now.
I don't want people to think that you're gonna hear from us next week or in the months ahead saying, "Hey, by the way, we're putting in a nickel line." We're not doing that. We're in the process of doing our exploration and growing the business from that perspective in terms of our nickel exposure.
Thanks, David. I'm not sure if we got into it last night or not, but all year long, we've been talking to costs. Can you talk to how the cost assumptions in the new reserves may or may not have changed? I'm not sure.
Good question. With regards to our resource cutoff, we take quite a conservative approach with all of our resources, in terms of our long-term metal price. I think we're still sitting at $2.70. $2.75? $3? Okay. In resource. Our cutoff grade in the resources, the actual cutoff grade hasn't changed. We take a conservative approach, and we're not gonna get into the reasons why we do that. With regards to the NSR for the reserves, obviously that changes every year. Reserves with regards to that, we take a long-term average cost inputs, and we apply that to our NSR cutoff on a yearly basis. You can see reserves moving around with respect to that metric.
As we go forward, obviously, it's pretty tricky, particularly as we're now looking to provide our five-year guidance in the new year with updated capital and operating costs. You know, we're trying to be very thoughtful with regards to that. I think you will see us taking a reasonably conservative approach with regards to our numbers for next year. With regards to diesel inputs, steel price inputs, et cetera. Please be aware of that as you're looking at our numbers next year. For next year, we are probably gonna take a reasonably conservative approach with regards to the forecast for next year. That also applies into capital with regards to that.
I have another question from a webcast viewer. Have you continued to investigate the presence of PGMs in the Curaçá Valley?
Yes. PGMs in the Curaçá Valley, we are trying. Based upon some of the work that we've done on the nickel now and what we're seeing, we are starting to get a bit of a handle on the distribution of these various metals around. They aren't like the traditional Sudbury and the Norilsk type environments where we see the PGMs associated with the nickel and/or copper. What we do see is we do see some, but not consistently. I would argue that they are platinum and palladium deposits sitting in the valley by themselves. The question is how would you find them? I don't think that's an easy question to answer.
I think with respect to where we are on the PGMs right now, we continue to monitor, we continue to look at it, but we have no clear direction with regards to full understanding of what's happening with the PGMs right now.
We have one additional question from a webcast viewer. Do we have any plans to add an SXEW plant at Caraíba?
At the moment, no. As you know, we do have a mothballed SXEW plant. But as it stands right now, the exploration for oxide material is not a priority for us, and so you won't be seeing us putting and restarting that up, that plant anytime soon. Great. Well, if there's no further questions, and I must have been very comprehensive, so that was great. I'm sure there'll be some questions afterwards. Oh, there's. We got a question.
I have a few questions. When you talked about building out that hospital, is there a capital cost associated with that?
There was. It's pretty much all sunk. It was $4 million.
$4 million. Do you guys expect any regional benefits, like tax breaks or anything in Brazil, kinda just to take on infrastructure for the region? Anything that you've seen.
No. This project, for instance, what we have actually done as a company, we've lent the money to the nonprofit organization that runs the hospital. Then as they get through medical aid, essentially in Brazil, they slowly pay that back. But no, we don't necessarily get significant tax breaks for doing any of that.
With Tucumã, there was $50 million that was unquoted. Are there any material items you can point to that kinda make up that $50 million?
Those two items, as I mentioned in presentation, one is the water treatment plant. Pretty standard stuff. You know, these aren't complicated, and water treatment plants are. You find them all over the world. The second part of that was related to the dry stack tailings operation. As I said, it looks like what we'll be doing is doing a very small dry stack tailings operation for the first couple of years as we build up waste rock, and then we'll transition over from that into putting our co-mingling of tails through the waste rock. That's why that number is uncertain right now. I'd like to think that'll be the high end of that number. I think the number could potentially come down based upon some of the early stage things that we're seeing.
Again, we can't get drawn into that until the work's been completed.
Yep. Thanks. Appreciate a lot of the work you've done de-risking Tucumã development ahead of the rainy season. Maybe just talk through what you've budgeted, 'cause obviously even operations get impacted. Just what type of interruptions have you budgeted through construction?
What type of-
Interruptions, like rain delays, weather events, have you budgeted?
Yeah. With respect to that, one of the biggest thing was getting the infrastructure put in. If we had not done that, we would be delayed, right? What I can tell you operationally-wise right now, following large rain events that we do get, the mine is able to start operating 45 minutes later, which is tremendous. I don't think we budgeted for that, and that's why we've seen the pre-stripping ahead of schedule, as they are doing a very, very good job with regards to that. With regards to any other delays in schedule, we don't see anything there. The big risk factors with delay in schedule was obviously key items. So far, everything that we've got in terms of critical items are in place. Now, could there be some slippage?
You know, right now around the world, one of the issues is transformers and sourcing transformers. We're in the process of securing those transformers right now, being built in Brazil. We don't have to rely on foreign transformers with regards to that part of the business. So far, we don't see anything with regards to that in terms of delay factors.
That's great to hear. Then maybe just on the CapEx commitments you've got out there, maybe just kind of the breakdown on the contracts where there are variable components. Obviously, appreciate the diesel and labor passthroughs, but maybe some of the other items that are more, you know, you've locked in unit prices, but there might be variable components or just some more detail on that.
Right. In the contracted work that we've got, particularly, the biggest single contract we have is the Fagundes mining contractor. They are doing all of the pre-stripping, and they'll be actually mining the deposit for us for the first five years. With respect to them, the variable costs are twofold. One is diesel and one is labor. So far right now, based upon the numbers that we started with them, diesel prices are lower. With regards to labor, you know, that's on an individual basis with regards to the pass-throughs and what they're gonna be doing this year. We are certainly seeing, they'll probably have a higher labor pass-through rate than we will this year in terms of negotiations with the unions.
We're taking a more conservative approach and working with our union this year on labor increase pricing. That's the best I can give you with regards to that. With regards to the mills, obviously, you know that's been purchased, the HIGmill contracts, all of that. We will be going in, and we do have some with regards to the erection of the mill buildings and the construction of the various crushing units, et cetera. All of those are being negotiated off current concrete price, cement pricing, steel pricing, et cetera. The numbers that you see are the current numbers.
I have one last question from a webcast viewer. How have you been able to maintain such capital discipline at Tucumã in this inflationary environment?
It's called Anthea Bath, who is our COO, who is very, very good at beating people a lot bigger than her over the head. No, that's flippant, but yeah, it's been dedication by Anthea, her team, and Thiago and his team on-site with regards to the negotiations of this. Yeah, I mean, earlier it was very interesting earlier in the year, you know, when the first expressions of interest came out, where everything was and where we are now has taken a significant amount of negotiation and work with the various suppliers in order to knock some of those numbers down and get them into line.
I think it's partly because I think as we've moved into the second half of the year, people are a little bit more comfortable in terms of some visibility of what's gonna happen going forward, as opposed to what they were at the beginning of the year, where, you know, inflationary pressures were significantly higher. It's that the real reason why we've been able to do it is a significant amount of emphasis and discipline with regards to negotiation of the various contracts. Wonderful. Well, thank you everybody for coming today and for those of you joining us on the Internet. Just a little bit of brief update on what we're gonna be doing going forward, and that's some next steps and catalysts for you. Yeah.
Ongoing is obviously the project execution that we're doing, Tucumã, et cetera, and you'll be hearing about that on our quarterly updates, as we release our financials every quarter. Ongoing exploration, nickel and copper. We used to put out an exploration update every quarter. We've moved away from that. What we will be doing with regards to updating you is if we make any new significant discoveries, i.e., probably more on the nickel than the copper side of things, we will be releasing that to the marketplace, in a timely manner. We generally only do those. We won't be releasing hole by hole unless we get, you know, a 30-meter at 6% nickel hole, then of course we will.
In general, we wanna try and understand the various areas that we're drilling before we discuss them, because we wanna know that there's some meat on the bone, so to speak. Consolidated five-year guidance, including CapEx and OpEx, will be released in January of next year. In the first half of the year, both the Tucumã and the Xavantina updates mineral reserves and resources. Please be on the lookout for that. I know we're gonna be having Mike and Pablo do another technical session with their team sometime early next year, coming back through to Toronto. I know there's a lot of people who enjoy those sessions with Pablo and Mike. Please be on the lookout for that and that invitation that will come out in the new year.
Again, thanks very much to everybody. I'd like to just thank our team, my business partner, Noel, and everybody has done tremendous amount of work in pulling this presentation together. It's a real credit to everybody on this team. We're not a big team, but they seem to have incredible horsepower. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it for the work that you've done as well. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Bye-bye.