Good morning, and welcome to Franco-Nevada Corporation's 2022 virtual investor day. This presentation is being recorded on April 14, 2022. For audience members unable to join the webcast and listening on the audio telephone line, you may view or download the accompanying presentation, which is available on franconevada.com at your convenience. Two Q&A sessions will be conducted where questions submitted through the webcast and questions from the phone lines will be answered. The first Q&A session will take place halfway through the presentation and the second at the end of the presentation. You may submit written questions through the webcast at any time during the presentation. Alternatively, dial-in instructions will be provided at the start of each Q&A session. I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host, Paul Brink, President and CEO of Franco-Nevada. Mr. Brink, please go ahead.
Please go ahead, Mr. Brink. Mr. Brink, you may begin.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning. Welcome to the launch of our 2022 ESG report and asset handbook. The session is planned to take two hours, and we'll break it into two halves. Some of our presentations contain forward-looking information, so please note our cautionary statement on slide 2. We'll start with the highlights of our ESG report and asset handbook, and we'll follow that with three of our partners speaking about the success stories at Candelaria, Condestable, and Eskay Creek that we're very proud to be part of. At that point, we'll open it up for 10 minutes of Q&A. Second half of the session will focus on our portfolio. We'll cover our major assets and then selected assets where there are either recent developments or where we think the additional discussion will help you model it.
A number of our team will present, and we're proud to display the depth of the organization. There'll be time for 10 minutes of Q&A at the end. A few items I'd like to highlight about Franco-Nevada before we launch into the session. First, on our track record. With the IPO, our share price has outperformed the market, the gold price, and the gold equities with a CAGR of greater than 18%. A year ago, we were announcing we had exceeded $1 billion in revenue for the first time. For 2021, that number has climbed to $1.3 billion, and now our Adjusted EBITDA exceeds $1 billion. We have a low-risk business model. Our top-line interests are not exposed to capital calls and have little exposure to operating cost inflation, which is particularly appealing in today's environment.
Our portfolio is well diversified with more than 400 interests in total. Our focus is on adding gold assets, but we remain open to adding exposure to other metals and minerals when good opportunities present themselves. Our energy assets are performing particularly well in the strong price environment. We are, however, not looking to grow our energy holdings through acquisition at present to manage the ESG exposure. If the energy contribution is higher from strong prices, then that's all upside. Much of what we'll cover today is the built-in growth and optionality in the portfolio. I hope it will leave you with a good sense for the powerful combination of our stable long-life streams and the optionality of our royalty portfolio. While today we'll focus on our holdings, our people are equally important assets.
We're blessed with a tremendous team, not just because of their individual capabilities, but how well they work together. The relationship between management, sourcing, and structuring opportunities and the board acting as an investment committee is critical. Both groups have tremendous experience and commitment and the common objective of making good investment decisions that increase the value of our shares. Less tangible, but arguably our greatest asset is a coherent and firmly held philosophy. It's a mindset of ownership to ensure alignment with our investors. It's a long-term investment outlook that recognizes success in resource markets, requires patience in choosing your entry points. It's an approach to financial risk that puts a premium on the optionality of available capital over trying to financially leverage returns. I believe this intangible is one of the biggest differentiators for Franco-Nevada. Heading now to the presentation, starting with ESG.
The principles behind ESG have long been a focus for Franco-Nevada. ESG is incorporated in our board mandate and our executive compensation, and it extends throughout our organization. In particular, we believe responsible mining is essential to positioning the industry as a progressive player in the future economy. Lloyd Hong, our Chief Legal Officer, has a central role in our ESG effort. I'll hand it over to Lloyd.
Thanks, Paul. It's my pleasure to be providing an overview of our commitment to ESG at Franco-Nevada. Our tagline is, "Franco-Nevada is the gold investment that works," and we are committed to ensuring it does work for our shareholders, our operating partners, and our communities. ESG is a critical part of this commitment. I'm gonna highlight some of our ESG commitments in the following slides, starting with responsible capital allocation on slide 10. We recognize that our shareholders rely on us to responsibly allocate capital in the mining and energy industries. This can only be achieved with a focus on allocating capital to operators and operations with strong ESG track records and to projects that have been well designed around these elements.
We commend all of our operators' efforts to implement best ESG and operating practices, including over this past year, their focus on the safety of their employees through another year of COVID, and also their focus on emissions reductions. A few of the efforts that stand out are First Quantum, Teck, and Glencore's commitments to emissions reduction targets, and Continental Resources' recent commitment to invest in a $4.5 billion carbon capture and sequestration project. Our greatest point of impact is our investment decision. Whenever we look at a new investment, we conduct comprehensive due diligence on all aspects of a project, including a focus on ESG. We review all material aspects of a project, including tailings management, water management, climate risks, community relations, and others. We also structure our investments to address ESG issues.
All of this is focused on ensuring that a project will be responsibly operated. Our board is deeply involved in the review of new investments and keeps management accountable to review all ESG risks. On a number of occasions, we have refrained from allocating capital where we have identified ESG issues that don't meet our criteria. We are actively involved in industry leadership, including in the development of the World Gold Council's Responsible Gold Mining Principles, a comprehensive framework as to what constitutes responsible gold mining. As a royalty and streaming company, we work with gold miners to adopt the RGMPs, and we also monitor how our gold mining operators are performing against the RGMPs. Since the introduction of the RGMPs in 2019, we've also been committed to voluntarily doing more.
We have engaged an independent third party to review and provide external assurance on our efforts to implement our commitment. This is not required for royalty and streaming companies, but we believe it will provide further confidence to our stakeholders. Let's move to diversity and inclusion on slide 11. We're proud of our diversity at Franco-Nevada and recognize that it is a key part of our success. We believe that it is important to achieve diversity at the highest levels and for diverse persons to have equal opportunities to realize their full potential. In terms of gender diversity, our first female director joined our board six years ago in 2015. In 2019, we adopted a 30% target for women directors by 2022, and we achieved this goal in 2021 with Catharine Farrow, Jennifer Maki, and Maureen Jensen now serving on our board.
They bring leading technical, financial, and regulatory expertise. At the executive level, both Sandip Rana, our Chief Financial Officer, and myself are members of visible minorities, and we have been with Franco since 2010 and 2012. Recognizing that we want to do more to progress diversity, our board adopted a new goal in 2021 of 40% representation of diverse persons at the board and senior management level on an aggregated basis by 2025. Since 2021, we have promoted three members of visible minorities to VP positions. We're proud to see development of our team. We have also committed to seeking out diverse candidates when considering new hires. In early 2022, we recruited another member of a visible minority to be our new VP mining. Outside of our company, we are committed to several diversity initiatives, including BlackNorth and The Prosperity Project.
Under our commitments, we have established a diversity leadership council within Franco-Nevada, have hired diverse summer students, and helped to fund research projects. As well, we established the Franco-Nevada Diversity Scholarship last year, and the first recipient was Feroze Shah, pictured with Paul on this slide, who was attending the Lassonde Mineral Engineering Program at the University of Toronto. We're now in the process of expanding the scholarship to additional universities and additional recipients with up to four new scholarships this year. We are excited to help encourage diverse persons to enter the mining industry. I'd now look into governance at slide 12. Management and the board are committed to the highest governance practices. We've been one of the first royalty and streaming companies to incorporate ESG goals into the executive compensation program starting in 2020.
We ensure that we are aligned with shareholder interests and act and think like owners because we are. Between the board and management, we own more than $200 million in stock. We are pleased that we've been recognized for our efforts, including the top ESG rankings by Sustainalytics, MSCI, and ISS, as well as the Globe and Mail Board Games. I'd now like to turn to transparency and disclosure at slide 13. We've been an industry leader for transparent disclosure, starting with our asset handbook in 2012 and our ESG report starting in 2019. Our fourth annual ESG report is now available on our website. Every year, we look to improve our disclosure where we can.
Starting last year, we provided first-time SASB and TCFD disclosure. This year, we've conducted a TCFD gap analysis, and we've also provided asset level emissions data for all of our producing mining assets using McKinsey's MineSpans data platform. I would like to recognize and thank our team as it takes an enormous effort to put together the ESG report. I would highly recommend everyone to download a copy as it is a great resource to help understand our ESG efforts and how we are managing ESG issues and risks. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Nalinie Mahon, our VP, Finance and Operations at Franco-Nevada (Barbados), who will talk about our community contributions.
Thanks, Lloyd. Good morning, everyone. As Lloyd mentioned, one of our ESG focus areas is community contributions. I'm going to share with you some of the projects that we've been proud to be involved with. On this first slide is Enseña Perú or Teach Perú, which we're involved with through our investment in the Antamina project. Enseña Perú is a network partner of the global Teach For All organization. Franco-Nevada provides funding for the Efecto Áncash project, which is Enseña Perú's largest and longest running program in Peru. The project aims to achieve a systematic and also a permanent improvement in the quality of education in rural Peru. It is an ambitious program run by a passionate group of individuals, and Franco-Nevada has been very proud to be involved for several years now. The next slide shows our involvement in some other community projects and commitments.
We contributed to a project to improve living conditions in partnership with Coeur Mining and our investment in the Guadalupe mine in Mexico. The project provided running water and improved sanitization and hygiene to a community close to the mine site. We've also partnered with Lundin Mining and our investment in the Candelaria mine in Chile on a COVID mental health initiative for residents in the Atacama region of Chile. At the Antapaccay operation in Peru, we've partnered with Glencore on a potable water project benefiting a community close to the mine site. We also have an ongoing commitment to community initiatives at Southern Peaks Mining Condestable mine in Peru. Some other commitments that we've made where programs are being developed are a community waste collection program with SolGold, and that's in the Cascabel area and with Noront supporting First Nations communities in the Ring of Fire.
We'll have more to report on those programs in next year's report. Thank you. I'll now turn it over to Sandip Rana, CFO of Franco-Nevada.
Thank you, Nalini. Good morning, everyone. We're proud today to launch our 11th annual asset handbook. The handbook is a key document for anyone who wants to understand our business. It provides an overview of many aspects of Franco-Nevada, including performance over the last 14+ years, how the portfolio has grown and become more diverse over this period, as well as the increase in reserves and resources on our royalty and stream interest. The asset handbook provides a detailed review of our portfolio of 404 assets. It is the most diversified portfolio within our industry, whether it's by commodity, by asset, by geography, or by operator.
One key component of our business is our resource growth, and the handbook highlights the continued increase in royalty ounces attributable to our royalty and stream interest, with the increase being 14.8% for M&I resources from 2020 to 2021. The 2022 asset handbook is available on our website. I encourage you to go to the website and download a copy. The handbook provides the detailed assumptions used to generate our guidance. On this slide, we provide guidance for 2022 and our five-year outlook along with our 2021 results. I will reiterate the key items today and also highlight the areas where we have evolved our approach this year.
First, I'd like to make it clear that the guidance we provide is on GEOs we have received and sold, and not just on those produced by the operator, as is the approach with some of our peers. It represents the gold and gold equivalent ounces that Franco-Nevada earns from its royalties and streams after recoveries, refining deductions, and payabilities. It is a more accurate measure to forecast revenue and EBITDA than production GEOs. Also, please note that beginning in fourth quarter 2021 and going forward, we are providing all of our guidance in the form of gold equivalent ounces sold. We are providing precious metals GEOs guidance and then also total GEO guidance that includes our diversified revenues, principally iron ore and energy. We believe this provides a more comprehensive measure of our business and will be useful to investors to evaluate the full scale of our portfolio.
For 2021, the company recorded approximately 728,000 GEOs sold, which was a 27% increase over 2020. For 2022, we have guided to a GEO sold range of 680,000-740,000. Within this range, we expect precious metal GEOs to be 510,000-550,000, compared to 558,000 actual for 2021. In terms of the major changes year- over- year, we do expect less ounces from a few assets, Antapaccay, Antamina, and Q, but these will be partially offset by higher ounces from Tasiast and Subika. As we look forward to 2026, the company already has built-in growth with expected GEOs sold to be between 765,000-825,000 for the year.
The key drivers of that growth are highlighted on the slide. Of this range, precious metal GEOs are expected to be 570,000-610,000. Key contributors to the growth are the expansion of Cobre Panamá, which is going to 100 million tons per year from 85 currently. We will see a number of new mines developed, some of which are currently under construction. Salares Norte with Gold Fields, Greenstone with Equinox and Orion, and Séguéla with Fortuna. Others we expect built by 2026 are SK Creek with Skeena and Valentine Lake with Marathon. In 2021, the company recorded $1.3 billion in revenue for the year.
Looking out to 2026, the projected overall growth in revenue for the company is expected to be over 10% at the commodity prices we've used for our guidance. Please note this does not assume any additional transactions being completed. With the low fixed cost nature of our business model, this will increase. This increase will filter down and be reflected in EBITDA and earnings. One of the core principles of the Franco-Nevada board and management is to have a progressive and sustainable dividend. We're proud of the fact that the dividend has been increased for 15 consecutive years, providing a yield of 10.6% to Canadian investors and 8.4% to U.S. investors from the IPO. Franco-Nevada has paid an increasing amount of dividends each year since IPO, despite the volatility in the gold price.
With the long life and steady cash flow expected from our core assets, we are confident we can continue to raise our dividend for years to come. For 2022, the company has increased the dividend by approximately 7% to $0.32 per share per quarter. This increase was effective Q1 2022, when in prior years it would have been effective in second quarter. With respect to available capital, the company is debt-free and has approximately $1.6 billion in available capital to continue to add to the portfolio. I would now like to turn it over to David Milstead, Director, Asset Management, who will speak to the updated Royalty Ounces.
Thank you, Sandip. In the next few slides, we'll look at the underlying reserves and resources on properties in our portfolio and Franco-Nevada's attributable share of those reserves and resources. Turning to slide 22. The chart on this slide shows the change in underlying gold equivalent ounces in reserves and exclusive M&I resources in our portfolio since IPO in 2007. As well as the steady growth reflected in the chart, these same assets have produced over 57 million GEOs since acquisition. We do want to emphasize that the chart shows 100% of the operator's disclosed gold and silver reserves and resources and not Franco-Nevada's attributable share. We show it because it's easily verifiable using almost exclusively public data, involves the fewest assumptions, estimates, and adjustments, and still gives a good indication of growth in the underlying portfolio.
The main disadvantage is that it doesn't tell you what Franco-Nevada's attributable share is, and we'll address this later. Turning to slide 23. The waterfall chart shows the growth in gold and silver reserve GEOs by region. Geographically, Canada has shown the biggest increase, with Detour and Greenstone Hard Rock being particularly notable. Cobre Panama, Candelaria, and Salares Norte have made significant contributions in Central and South America, and Tasiast internationally in Africa. It is worth noting that approximately 35% of this growth has come from the original IPO assets and 65% has come from acquisitions. Moving to the concept of royalty ounces on slide 24. We introduced royalty ounces a few years ago. To estimate royalty ounces, we normalize the value of an NPI or stream ounce to that of a gold NSR ounce.
Said another way, these are ounces where 100% of the cash flow is attributable to Franco-Nevada. To do this involves making certain adjustments to the simple ounce count, such as estimating the percentage of land covered by our agreement. In some instances, our royalty doesn't cover all of the property. A great example of this is Nevada Gold Mines in Nevada. We also adjust for the relative economics of a stream or NPI. Finally, we reflect our other commodities as gold equivalent. The resulting royalty ounces reflect our best estimate of GEOs we can expect to receive in time. I'd like to conclude by showing the growth in our royalty ounces over the last 11 years on slide 25.
We estimate there's been a 3.3-fold increase in royalty ounces from reserves and a further 3.2-fold increase in resource royalty ounces, and that's after mine depletion. As of the end of 2021, by our estimation, we expect to receive approximately 11.9 million royalty ounces based on reserves and a further 6.6 million royalty ounces based on M&I resources. An additional way to look at this, and this isn't perfect, but it is directional, is that if you take the midpoint of our 2022 precious metals and diversified mining guidance, which is 575,000 GEOs, it would take 20 years to deplete the 2P royalty ounces and 32 years to deplete the 2P and M&I royalty ounces. It's been a great growth story since IPO, and we're looking forward to continued growth.
With that, I'd like to hand it back to Paul to introduce our guest presenters. Thank you.
Thank you, David. We're delighted to have some of our partners join us today and to share with you their success stories. First up is Adolfo Vera, President and CEO of Southern Peak s Mining to speak on Condestable Mine in Peru. Welcome, Adolfo.
Hi, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Yes, I'd like to present a brief story and what Condestable is gonna look like in the years to come. I'm delighted to be here, Paul. Congratulations on your Investors' Day and presentation. If I may, I'd like to change to slide 28. So Southern Peaks is a portfolio of assets. We have Condestable, which is subject to a stream which Franco-Nevada provide us with. We have 20,000 tons per annum copper equivalent production at the time of speaking now.
We have a good track record of operational and ESG improvements. We acquired Condestable around eight years ago, and we've done a number of things with it. I'm gonna talk about things we did in this presentation. Basically, I'd like to change to slide 29. We have a clear path to grow from 20,000-40,000 tons per annum of copper equivalent production. The way to do that is gonna be basically slide 30. We're showing what our expansion is gonna look like. We've grown from 7,000 tons per day production to 8,400 tons per day today.
We have a feasibility study that takes us to 10,000 or 12,000 tons per day. We're still deciding which one is going to be, and we're in the process of getting permits for that. In the process of expanding both reserves and resources in Condestable, we noticed that we have some potential for the old open pit areas, which at these prices obviously work much better than they did before. Also the new interpretation, the new geological interpretation of the mine has given us the confidence to go and start the works for putting those open pit opportunities into work.
We have our Ariana project that we intend to recommence construction sometime this year, most likely by the fourth quarter of this year. The combined effects of the expansion of Condestable both on underground and the open pit opportunities and the construction of Ariana will take us to be a producer of around 40,000 tons of copper equivalent per year, with a substantial increase in the ounces of gold and silver that we produce from what we're producing right now. Slide 31, please. We also have...
We understand that, you know, more than the technical challenges that mining is facing these days, we have the ESG challenge and we have decided to embrace and try to obtain the Copper Mark certification. We're well on the way of getting that certification. We've had our first documentary review of the process and by Copper Mark, and we've passed that last week. We're starting the audits week after next, and we are supposed to be getting the certificate by July. This is a major accomplishment for Condestable and for Southern Peaks Mining.
This has been one of the most challenging targets in my professional career, but also one of the most rewarding. I'm looking at mining much different today than I did before, thanks to embracing the principles of Copper Mark. Slide 32. As I said, Condestable is a stable cash generating producing asset. We are the second largest underground mine in Peru. We've been able to replenish and expand the reserve base significantly since we acquired that. All our reserve and resources are NI 43-101 compliant. For an underground mine, we are a very competitive cash cost producer.
Post-stream, we're gonna be in an average of $180 per pound once we accomplish the expansion in 2025, which is our target date. We have also, you know, the underground mine is not near to being finished. We have good prospects of expansion, both at depth as well as alongside the geological structures. Slide 33, please. We're located very conveniently in Peru. Condestable is on the coast of Peru. It's 100 kilometers, 89 kilometers actually, south from Lima. It sits alongside the Pan American Highway, which is this main road infrastructure in Peru.
It will be very difficult for Condestable to get into one of the blockages that have been so suddenly famous in Peru lately. The area is in the main corridor of mines in the Central Andes in Peru, which also has good connectivity both through highways and railroads. In slide 34 please. Sorry, 35. No, 34. 34. I'm showing here the long and consistent history of reserve replacement in Condestable. When we bought Condestable, it used to be a mine which had, you know, between three and four years life.
It was the case for the last eight to 10 years. We decided to go into a drilling campaign in 2017. We essentially doubled the reserves at that time. Lately, we have been able to triple the reserve from where we bought Condestable. As I said, Condestable has very high potential of further expanding the reserves in the underground mine. We intend to get as much as we can from drilling and geological interpretation that we now are doing. Slide 36. We have expanded, as I said, our plant capacity. We intend to go to between 10 and 12.
We have really not made a decision yet. 10 is a number that is easily obtainable with today's infrastructure. 12, we can go to 12 by a simple procedure in for permitting in Peru. I guess my preferred number would be 12 about three to four years from now. But we'll get there when we get there. We're not gonna risk the permitting process, which is something that is difficult these days in the country, by trying to be, so you know, more ambitious than we should in our expansions. Slide 37 gives us a section of what Condestable mine is like.
We have, as you will see in this slide, some intercepts at depth. In the level - 1,000, we have some drills that have got the same structures that we're mining at higher depths. Also, the continuity of all structures continue to be the case for all the different structures that we have in both Condestable, Raúl, and Vinchos. Slide 38. We spoke about this open pit potential a few minutes ago. In the process of reinterpreting the geology, once we had this new geological model, we discovered that this is a true opportunity for Condestable.
There is a potential between 60 million-65 million tons of additional reserves and for open pit with a lower head grade, but obviously a much lower cost of mining. Which makes it very attractive, you know, for a new concentrator that probably will have a size of between 20-25,000 tons per day. Combined with the underground potential, we're very excited about what the future looks like for Condestable once we develop these open pit opportunities. Slide 39, please. The regional exploration in Condestable is also something that we have not had the opportunity to develop. We have 45,000 hectares of land in Condestable.
The Condestable mine itself occupies less than 3,000 hectares, so there's a lot of exploration potential there. It sits in a well-defined belt of mineralization, where you have the new Mina Justa for Minsur, where you have Cerro Lindo for Nexa and, you know, a lot of other IOCG type deposits. It wouldn't be surprising if we can find something similar or bigger than Condestable within the land that we have to explore. With that, I finish my presentation. I appreciate the opportunity to present Condestable and Southern Peaks Mining. I thank Franco-Nevada for this. Back to Paul, please. Thank you.
Thank you, Adolfo. It's fitting that we follow your presentation with Candelaria. When our team first visited Condestable, it was the similarity of the ore bodies to the Candelaria underground that had them so excited. Mark Turner, VP, Business Valuations and Investor Relations at Lundin, is next up to tell the Candelaria story. Mark, please go ahead.
Great. Thank you, Paul, and I really appreciate the opportunity and I'm excited to talk about our Candelaria copper mining complex in Chile. Actually, the photo on the background of this cover slide here, you can see the open pit operations and then our main Candelaria plant to the bottom left. Next slide, please, Jason. Just as he flips there, we can flip quickly through it. It'll be our cautionary statements. Gonna make several forward-looking statements here, and then hopefully in the Q&A with questions as well too. Just for context on how Candelaria fits in our strategy to operate, upgrade, and grow a portfolio of base metal mines providing leading returns for our shareholders throughout the cycle.
Candelaria is really a core asset in our portfolio and key in our ability to continue to deliver on that strategy. We acquired our 80% ownership stake and the operatorship of the asset in 2014 for about $1.8 billion. Though we're operating several mines at the time, including a few you can see here, the Neves-Corvo mine in Portugal, Zinkgruvan in Sweden, and we're finishing construction of Eagle. It was really the acquisition of Candelaria that materially changed the growth profile of our company, Lundin Mining.
We had effectively raised our market cap at the time to fund the purchase through a combination of high yield notes, $1 billion of secured high yield notes, some equity, and then the $655 million upfront from Franco-Nevada with the precious metal stream. The sale of that stream really allowed us to maintain an optimal capital structure as we were going forward, both during the acquisition and then post. That in turn afforded us the financial capacity and capability to reinvest in Candelaria for future growth, and then also create significant value from that asset as well as the rest of our portfolio. The next step, we were able to repay early some of our senior secured notes.
With the divestment of one of our other assets, we had an excellent balance sheet, and enabled us to acquire Chapada mine in Brazil in 2019, and now we're closing in the next few days here or within the month on another exciting acquisition, Josemaria in Argentina. On the slide that's up now, just a little bit about the complex. We call it a copper mining complex, though it clearly produces meaningful amounts of gold and silver. Our current guidance for the next few years is 83,000-98,000 ounces of gold per year. The map on the left, which we borrowed kindly from our hosts here, illustrates why we call it the complex.
We operate the open pit and four underground mines, as well as two processing plants. We'll be developing a second open pit, El Espino, evaluating the potential to further expand our underground mines in a project we creatively call the Candelaria Underground Expansion Project or CUEP. The Franco-Nevada gold and silver streams cover the current property positions outlined here with an additional area of interest on the map should we acquire and produce from those additional lands. The streams cover about 68% of the payable gold and silver from the mine. 85% of Lundin Mining's attributable 80%.
It's set to reduce after we deliver to 40% after we deliver 720,000 ounces of gold and 12 million ounces of silver. Based on our current mine plans, that's late 2026 without considering CUEP, which could increase our production profile in the shorter term. Next slide, please. Just a little bit more about Candelaria itself. Really a fantastic asset in our view. Believe, if not the one of the largest open pit copper mines in Chile, not owned by a major, so by Codelco or some of the other major diversifieds. The open pit itself in continuous production since the mid-1990s and a few of the underground mines prior to that as well.
With QIP would actually be one of the larger underground operations as well too. The mine, the plant, low elevation, so not high up in the Andes or the Front Range, about 650 meters. Workforce is all local. I don't believe we have any expats on site at the moment. And even the majority of the workforce is from Copiapó, which is a mining center about 20 kilometers to the northwest. I think, you know, we're really important, especially in the current context of Chile and some of the constitutional reforms and what they're looking to have of that. There's excellent supporting infrastructure, including our wholly owned desalination plant and the port facilities there.
Both of them have the ability to expand in the future, and some have additional capacity already as well. Also importantly, in that context, we recycle, reuse, reclaim about 85% of our processed water already, with the additional makeup water being sourced entirely from that desalination plant. Kicking in next year, we have a new power purchase agreement guarantees a minimum of 80% of our electricity from renewable resources, and then in addition to the benefit of the ESG benefits of that, also actually lowering our per energy unit costs. At the time of the acquisition back in 2014, the operations were to have about a remaining 14-year mine life.
I think as you've probably learned the last number of years, both through our disclosures and Franco-Nevada's, we've been very successful in successive iterations, having improved the production profile several times, and roughly seven years later now, have an operational life of at least another 20 years. Next slide, please. Just speaking to that, we have been in our view, extremely successful in growing Candelaria's mineral reserves and resources. As mentioned at the time of the acquisition, we really believed in the upside of the ability to optimize the production profile, but also extend the mine life, particularly from underground.
Over the last number of years, really since 2010, so a little bit prior to our ownership, but also the majority within our ownership, $265 million has been invested in exploration over that timeframe. Really to the benefit of our shareholders, Franco-Nevada shareholders, as well as our many other stakeholders in the region, we've been able to increase the contained copper, significantly 130% net of depletion, and also gold by over 120% with in our view, clear, potential for further additions down the line here. Now deposits, Candelaria in reserves, 3.6 million tons of copper, 2.7 million ounces of gold, and 39 million ounces of silver.
In the M&I, which we believe we'll be able to convert a lot of that, about 7.8 million tons of copper, 5.6 million ounces of gold, and 83 million ounces of silver. As I said, I think we believe there's still upside from there. Our exploration focus really continues on to known mantos and veins and breccias in the area, really around our existing underground infrastructure. At the same time that we've been investing in the exploration itself, we've invested heavily in other aspects, sustaining and I'd say sustaining quasi expansionary capital. Over the last five years, invested over about another $1.7 billion in initiatives, including renewal of the entirety of the mine fleet and the support fleet of the open pit.
We've advanced timing and really increased production from the undergrounds, completed construction of a new tailings facility, and improved the throughput capacity of the Candelaria plant and recoveries there, as well as just doing some stripping work to improve and rephase the overall life of the complex. With that exploration success and the capital we invested, as was mentioned before, the operation now has a mine life, which was 2028 at the time of the acquisition to beyond 2040 right now, and production expected to be on the order of 40%-50% higher than the levels of the time of the acquisition, and continuing to evaluate these even further as we go forward with the asset.
Just on the last slide here, in the near term, our guidance and three-year outlook has copper production ranging 150,000-175,000 tons per year, gold 83,000-98,000 ounces. Those that may be a little bit more familiar with the asset, we're continuing to mine this year, primarily from our phase 10 pushback with first ore coming in from our next Phase 11. Moving away from a challenging, more challenging area of the pit, which last year caused us to reset our 2021 production guidance sort of halfway through the year. But certainly moving away from that and, you know, excited and think we can deliver really on our plans for the next three years.
We're undertaking additional initiatives to debottleneck the plant, which will help with increased capacity and really beyond this timeframe, additional throughput when we get into a little bit softer ore. Just outside this timeframe, think that we can increase the production levels from there. As mentioned, considering potentially increasing the rate of two of our underground mines, Candelaria North and South sectors, to a combined 26,000 tons per day underground. Right now, those two are doing combined about 14,000 tons per day. Really the basis of that is the underground ore is roughly double the grade, both copper and gold as our stockpile.
As we can displace some of that stockpiled material that we're processing, we can increase the production profile of the operation. You know, on a copper basis, we've said that would add about 20,000-21,000 tons of copper production per year, so more than 10%, and the gold would likely be similar to that. I guess just quickly, Paul, I'd like to wrap up before turning it over to you. Summarize the point that Candelaria has been a very core asset and portfolio, continues to be a key asset for us, crucial in us delivering on our strategy of operating and upgrading and growing our portfolio. Very happy to have been involved with you before, in helping us acquire that asset.
Thank you, Mark. I think Candelaria is just such a great story about the value that can be created when an asset is in the right hands and when an asset is a focus asset for the operator. I know much of the team at Candelaria are involved in strategic planning sessions today, so I assume there's even more good news to come. Our third presentation is on Eskay Creek, and Kelly Earle, SVP Corporate Development at Skeena, will present. Welcome, Kelly.
Thanks very much, Paul. Good morning, everybody. I think unlike our other two presenters, Eskay Creek will be the only presentation thus far that's not yet in production. We are developing the past producing Eskay Creek mine, which we acquired from Barrick. I'll guide you through our upcoming feasibility study and our exploration potential yet to come, and hopefully how we'll grow future ounces and the timeline to production. The obligatory forward-looking statement. Eskay Creek is located in the Golden Triangle of northwest British Columbia in Tahltan territory. They are our First Nation partners on the project. Skeena inherited Franco-Nevada as a shareholder. Sorry, as a royalty holder on the project.
I'm pleased to report that in December, they also made an equity investment into Skeena to acquire a ROFR, so a right of first refusal, on an extra half a percent royalty on the project as a whole. We took that as a huge seal of approval from Franco-Nevada on Eskay Creek, and we're really excited to get it into production. I think I'll skip the management team other than to say we're pretty young and keen and driven, and the company is really a new company. Since about six years ago, the entire management team at N4 is new since then. A reason why we like Eskay Creek so much, and you can see we have a few projects in the area.
We have Eskay Creek and Snip, and then also we're acquiring some new ground in the area. We just announced a deal to acquire a project called KSP and Kingpin, which were our exploration stage projects, but we are very hopeful that there's gonna be some feed there for the Eskay Creek mill in the future. One of the reasons we like this area is that there's been vast improvements in infrastructure since the mine was in production. The mine was in production in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, we've had Highway 37 and the Northwest Transmission Line, which goes all the way up to what is now Newcrest Red Chris mine. We've had three hydroelectric facilities built within the last decade.
An area that was once remote, fly in, fly out and diesel-powered, now has access to cheap, clean, hydroelectric power. It's a big turning point in terms of the cutoff grade at which you can mine at Eskay Creek. A little bit on historical production. Produced from 1994 until 2008, produced 3.3 million ounces of gold and 160 million ounces of silver. It produced at a staggering 2.5 ounces gold equivalent per ton. It was the highest grade gold mine in the world when it was in production. I'll guide you through a little bit about why it shut down. As I mentioned, it was extremely remote and cutoff grades were very high, anywhere from 15 grams-30 grams per ton.
That meant anything below those extremely high cutoff grades was considered waste. This is because of the remoteness, and the price of gold was a lot lower. Again, it was diesel-powered. I was told at certain times during the mine life, 50% of the operating expenses were fuel. Fast-forward, now we have this cheap green hydropower we can connect to. It means we can drop the cutoff grade substantially. This is our current resource estimate that we released last year. We've got 5.6 million ounces of resource total. But what's important is what moved over to the reserves. We've got 3.88 million ounces of gold equivalent reserves, and it's grading 4.6 grams per ton gold equivalent open pit. It's extremely high grade for an open pit.
We are in the process of updating this resource for our feasibility study, which will be out in May, most likely. Won't be a huge difference from the pre-feas to the feasibility study. There are a few ounces in the open pit that'll convert over to reserves. You can see there's some underground ounces there. Those are gonna stay as measured and indicated and inferred for now because we need to do a bit more drilling to prove up an underground component. Open pit only to start with, but we're fairly confident there'll be an underground component to the mine in the future. I'll take you through the PFS numbers, which came out last July. Again, the full feasibility will be out shortly. I'll talk a bit about some changes.
You can see the base case there at $1,550 gold, $22 silver, $1 billion after-tax NPV at a 5% discount, 56% after-tax IRR, 1.4-year payback. It's an extremely robust project, and that's because the grade is just so high for an open pit mine. Currently, we're looking at a 10-year mine life producing and shipping concentrate, which is exactly what they did historically. Very low all-in sustaining cost of $548 U.S. an ounce. We'll be producing about 352,000 gold equivalent ounces per year. Again, the CapEx is very modest, and this is because it's a brownfield site. We have road access. We'll be connecting to hydropower nearby. We have buildings on site already. We were able to recycle some of the old buildings that were on site.
We also have a permanent tailings storage facility. This all helps to keep the CapEx quite low. For the full feasibility study, which is about to come out, there will be an increase in CapEx. Everyone's aware of inflation issues. We are less affected by inflation because there is less to build because we do have some existing infrastructure. But even, you know, if it rises to $500 million, it's a very robust project, especially since we expect the ounces we're producing a year to increase from 350 to closer to 400,000 ounces a year on average. I wanted to touch a bit on the average annual production. I mentioned right now it's at 352,000 on average over the life of mine, and that's gonna go up to 400,000.
As you can see here, it's very front-weighted. That's because there's a very high-grade horizon that was mostly mined out historically where we start mining. That means that we're producing more ounces per year. You can see for the first five years it's more like 450,000 ounces, and that should get closer to 500,000 ounces in the feasibility study, and then it drops off in the later years of the mine life. We're planning to do an increase to the throughput in year 6, because once we hit the peak through the high-grade horizon, there'll be a lower-grade horizon right below that. We'll have more lower-grade material, which means that we'll need to be able to put more through the mill to keep the average ounces a year the same. That's our goal.
We're very confident that we'll be able to find more ounces for Eskay Creek, and I'll show you through some of the exploration results we've had so far. I just wanted to touch on the mine layout. I really just wanted to point out the permitted tailings storage facility. This is what's called a dead lake or a non-fish-bearing lake. It has ample storage capacity for all the tailings and part of the waste rock. Any of the potentially acid generating waste rock will go in here. We are very fortunate to have this. It's in one drainage point. It's been continuously monitored since closure. It's a permitted tailings storage facility
It's usually the most difficult part to get permitted in Canada, so we're extremely fortunate to already have this and it will very much help expedite our permitting process, which we're deep in right now. A little bit about the upside potential at Eskay Creek. You can see there's one main pit, the 21 zone pit, and then a satellite 22 zone pit to the south. I mentioned that we've got some different horizons here. There's a very high-grade contact mudstone that was eaten out historically by the past operators. Because this is a VMS deposit, and I won't get too technical, even though I'm a geologist, VMS is a volcanogenic massive sulfide that is known to come in stacked sequences.
It's simply the main contact mudstone horizon simply represents the sea floor, and the sea floor can move over geologic time. When I say stacked sequences, it means where the sea floor was earlier in geologic time. It's known that they come in stacked sequences, like I mentioned. We've only, you know, it's only been mined through the top mudstone layer. There's opportunity just for us to find lower mudstone layers that could potentially lead to us having an underground component. We've had some success with our drilling so far from an underground standpoint and also a surface standpoint. Our target at the end of last year and into this year is surface ounces, so any other open pittable ounces.
We've reported only 16,000 meters so far, and we've had two new discoveries already, the 23 zone and the 21 A West zone. Those are both in open pittable. They won't be included in our upcoming feasibility because we still have to do infill drilling. We're excited that we've already found more ounces, so we'll go back and infill them, and I suspect we'll have updated resource at some point next year. I mentioned, we've had some discovery in lower mudstone horizons. Like I mentioned, stacked sequences. We have this spectacular intercept of 314 grams over 2.21 meters. Extremely excited about that. It's very high grade. This leads us to believe that there's lots of potential for underground.
Then the final place where we'll be exploring is that lower mudstone horizon on the bottom left of the slide there. Shallow ounces were cheap ounces historically. They didn't mine much below 250 meters from underground. Sorry, they didn't drill much below that because it was so expensive to drill and their cutoff grades were so high. We will be chasing that ultra-high-grade horizon with some super deep holes later this year as well. This is just a quick view of the new discovery that we had to show. We're quite excited about it. You can see where the pit limits are there on the left-hand side. It's only about 150 meters from where the pit is right now, and it starts 15 meters below surface.
It's not as high grade as the contact mudstone material, but it's still very respectable grade for open pit. This is why we're so excited about the drilling that we've completed so far, and we've got another 60,000 meters to come this summer. Eskay Creek is really a tier one asset. This image here shows where Eskay Creek would be in producing mines in Canada if it was in production right now. We'd be at 352,000 gold equivalent ounces a year. These are real numbers from other operating mines in Canada. I mentioned we'll be closer to 400,000 ounces a year. I hope we'll hit about the third largest operating open-pit mine in Canada once we're in production.
What's really makes Eskay Creek stand out is the grade. Average open pit mines around the world are 1.5 grams, and Eskay Creek's sitting all the way up here at 4.6. What also makes Eskay Creek unique is our low GHG and carbon emissions. You'll see here, average GHG emissions from mines around the world. The average for an open pit is 0.73 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The average for an underground is 0.36. Eskay Creek's sitting all the way down here at 0.18 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per ounce of Gold Equivalent produced. This is of course because it's such a high grade mine, so you're moving less rock to get an ounce of gold out of the ground.
It's also because we're reflecting, connecting to green hydropower. I'm excited to announce that we're looking at even more modifications that we could announce later on, like the electrification of the fleet, other things like that that will hopefully get our GHG emissions even lower. There's a quick timeline through to just the end of this year. We don't wanna be too forward-looking. We're in the middle of 60,000 meters of exploration drilling. We have the feasibility study coming out in Q2 this year. We're also working on a permitting process charter, which is very exciting. One of the things that will be very unique about Eskay Creek is this will be the first project in British Columbia that has full First Nation consent.
I mentioned before that the Tahltan are our partners on this project, and the government of British Columbia under the guise of UNDRIP, United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, and their interpretation of that, which is called DRIPA, which is roughly the same words but in a different acronym. BC government's really focused on reconciliation with First Nations, and they feel one of the best ways to do this is through consent on big projects like mining projects. Eskay Creek will be the first one to go through with full First Nations consent, which means it should expedite the permitting process. First Nations will have more guidance on what has to go through an environmental assessment process and what doesn't, so we're very excited about that.
This process permitting charter that's coming out will be a document that'll lay the timeline out to production. It'll be signed off on by the several different ministries within the BC government, Ministry of Mining, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Transportation, First Nations, the Tahltan Nation, and Skeena Resources, and it'll lay out a pathway to production, which is very exciting that we get to be part of this first-time ever consent for mining in British Columbia. Then in the fall, we expect to have our full impact benefits agreement sorted with the Tahltan Nation, and then we look to announce project financing towards later in the year. Timeline of exactly to production is not yet known. It'll be part of this permitting process charter, and more information will be in the feasibility study.
We're very hopeful we'll be in production by late 2025. That's our goal for right now, but again, more information to come out on that in the future. Just quickly wanted to touch on our unique relationship with the Tahltan. We consider them to be friends. We started a mining alliance with the Tahltan, which is a partnership between industry, First Nations, and the British Columbia government. Tahltan also made a $5 million equity investment into Skeena last year, so they are our shareholders. I'm also excited to announce that we created a nature conservancy with Tahltan last year. We had an area of ground called the Spectrum Properties that was beside a sacred mountain to the Tahltan called Mount Edziza.
They informed us that it was never gonna be a mine, so we needed to get creative on what to do with those lands. Collectively, along with two NGOs and the BC government, we returned the claims, and we were able to create a new nature conservancy. Tahltan truly are our partners on the project, and we look forward to advancing the project alongside with them. That is everything that I have, and I will flip it back over to Paul for any Q&A.
Thank you, Kelly. I gotta say, listening to the story again, I just can't help but think about Detour Lake. Detour was how Franco bought a royalty on it once it had run its course as a fairly poor underground mine. We couldn't have imagined what it would have become as an open pit mine. Here we have Eskay Creek that was one of the highest grade mines in Canada. I firmly believe we're in the early innings of revealing the full extent of the ore bodies at Eskay Creek. We'll now start our first Q&A session. We've got a bit of time for questions. A reminder that we'll have a second Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
Operator, would you begin by taking any questions from the phone line?
Of course. We will begin taking questions from those already on the phone line and from those on the webcast who wish to dial in to ask a question. To ask a question through the telephone line, simply press star then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. For operator assistance, please press star zero at any time. Your first question will be from Tanya Jakusconek at Scotiabank.
Good morning, everybody, and thank you so much for doing this. A very interesting presentation so far and really nice to see presentation from the partners. I'd like to ask one of the partners, Adolfo, just a few things about Peru. I actually have two questions for him if he's available to answer. My first one actually has to just do with the leadership change in Peru. I would just like to have his thoughts about what he's hearing in terms of any taxation changes and or other. The second question is, he talked about blockages that are occurring in Peru. I'd like to have a little bit more information in exactly what he's seeing and what is happening with these blockages. Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Yes, there's been a number of news around the situation in Peru. There is the intention of the government to raise taxes on mining. The recent studies suggest that Peru is paying. The Peruvian mining companies are paying an aggregate of taxes that is higher than our competing countries for capital resources like Chile, for instance, and much higher than Canada and the U.S. for certain. There is not a lot of room for getting raises in taxes, in my opinion. We are subjected to obviously a government that has promised that something is gonna be done in that regard.
Therefore, we might have a marginal increase in taxes in the foreseeable future for sure, I guess. Regarding the blockages, yes, the social tension against mining in Peru has been increasing in the last months. I would classify the difficulties as much more serious when it comes to new to mining territories in Peru. The traditional mining territories in Peru are inhabited by people who understand what mining is like and where mining companies are doing a much collaborative job with communities. Therefore, there's a lot less potential for conflict.
Blockages today respond more to political than a social agenda in my view. That should probably end in the short run. We're hoping that the government either correct its course, you know, regarding mining or, you know, that we're facing a much more difficult time with probably soon too, no.
Adolfo, when you're mentioning that there are these blockages, is it basically that the local communities and/or communities are blocking roads, blocking the mine site entrance, and you do not have government support in terms of helping to assist to kind of deblock these social situations? I'm just trying to understand a little bit more information on these blockages.
Well, you know, there are a couple of mines that have or depend on roads that are far and away from the mine sites per se. The communities through which those roads pass are claiming rights that are normally given to surrounding communities with mine site, no? They want to have the same rights that the surrounding communities of a mine site have. That is the origin of the problem.
That is obviously something that doesn't resist any analysis and doesn't hold any logic into a rationale of why you should be giving a community that is hundreds of kilometers away from your site the same rights or cooperation that you give to your surrounding communities. Again, what I see on these claims is more a political stance rather than anything else. There's been a worldwide claim that everybody benefits from mining in the same light as the surrounding communities. That goes beyond what a mining company can do, no?
The entity that should be actually giving those populations some rights is the government, not the mining companies, no?
Thank you so much for your insights. I'll let someone else ask a question.
Thank you.
Thank you. A quick reminder to press star one for a phone live question. Next question will be from Brian MacArthur at Raymond James.
Good morning, and thank you for the presentations. They're very helpful. Adolfo, just a follow-up question to Tanya's. I believe there's a buyback option on your deal up until March 2025, with Franco. Just given, you know, commodity prices are higher than where we started. I mean, you're a private company. I don't know how much money you have. Just any philosophy from your side on whether your view of the potential buyback. I mean, obviously there's some math, but maybe indirectly, is there anything with all this uncertainty in Peru right now which makes you less likely to use your option? Any color on that would be helpful from your perspective. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, there is effectively a buyback option in our agreement with Franco-Nevada. In all honesty, the buyback is there to give comfort to you know the shareholders of Southern Peaks Mining. I will say this very candidly, the cost of capital of the Franco-Nevada solution is low enough that it's a deterrent to exercise any buyback option, in my view. I don't think our company will get access to capital in a you know with a lower cost to make this option attractive to us at this point.
Great. Thank you very much. That's very helpful.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time from the phone line. I will turn the Q&A over to Lloyd Hong, who will read questions submitted through the webcast. Mr. Hong, please go ahead.
Thanks, operator. Just one question online. What do you think are the major ESG risks for your business in the short term, over the next two years, and the long term, the next 10-20 years out? Submitted by Cosmos Chiu at CIBC.
Thank you, Cosmos. I'll take that. You know, thinking through the risk in the short term on ESG, you know, it's always one of those events that can happen immediately. The top of those, obviously, is worker safety. That would top the list. You know, other catastrophic events, you know, could be tailings failures, could be spillages impacting water systems. Those are the things that we worry about in the short term. In the longer term, it's more about the acceptability of mining within communities and within economies. The industry has been able to demonstrate on particular operations that there are benefits for communities over time. It's been able to show that we can build mines, operate mines, close mines, and reclaim mines successfully.
It's also about carbon footprint. It's about showing that the industry can produce the metals that the world economy needs, and to do that with a low carbon footprint. Lloyd, I think we're running just about on time. What I will do here is move it on to the next presentation. John Blanchette will be speaking next. John is the President of Franco-Nevada Barbados. He'll be joined by Bonavie Tek, who's the Vice President of Finance for Franco-Nevada, to discuss our core assets. Go ahead, John.
Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. In this section, starting on slide 31, we will discuss a few of our core streaming assets, including Cobre Panama, Candelaria, Antamina, and Antamina. These four assets represent approximately 43% of 2021 revenue and are all precious metal streams on world-class copper assets. Cobre Panama is our largest contributor at 18% of 2021 revenues, with no other single asset representing greater than 10%. Moving to slide 32, our largest single investment to date of $1.36 billion is a precious metal stream on First Quantum's Cobre Panama mine. We structured the gold and silver deliveries to initially be indexed to copper and concentrate to best align our interests with First Quantum's.
First Quantum's team have done an excellent job, and the mine has successfully ramped up to 85 million tons per annum, with the CP100 expansion on track. Notably, First Quantum is planning to secure renewable energy for the incremental power required for the expansion. As an update on Law 9, First Quantum and the Panamanian government have agreed on two fiscal principles, $375 million in benefits per year from Cobre Panama, and replacing the existing revenue royalty with a gross profits royalty. The details continue to be finalized with resolution hopeful in the near term. Turning to slide 33, the chart on the right illustrates First Quantum's guidance for Cobre Panama over the next three years and their attributable GEOs to Franco-Nevada.
First Quantum Minerals increased its near-term guidance for Cobre Panama in January and is now targeting 330,000-360,000 tons of copper in 2022, growing to 370,000-400,000 tons of copper by 2024. Importantly, the proposed expansion is on track to achieve target throughput rate of 100 million tons per annum by late 2023. Our guidance for 2022 is 120,000-140,000 GEOs, in line with the 131,000 GEOs received in 2021, with growth expected in 2023 and 2024 to reflect the ramp-up profile. We have to commend the efforts by First Quantum Minerals to safely continue its ramp-up plans during the pandemic. We expect more good news to come from Cobre Panama over its 35+ year mine life.
Turning to slide 34. Candelaria is one of our largest revenue generators, representing approximately 9% of 2021 revenues. Lundin has had tremendous success with Candelaria, and the mine has outperformed original expectations. Exploration success has extended the mine life from 2028 at the time of the acquisition to 2044 today. Lundin is advancing an internal feasibility study on the Candelaria underground expansion following the success from the underground reserve growth. In addition, the recently discovered La Espuela open pit demonstrates continued strong exploration potential on the broader land package. Most of the Espuela deposit is on our royalty ground with a small portion in the area of interest. We have the option to buy into any production on the AOI grounds. Turning to slide 35, the chart on the right illustrates Lundin's guidance for Candelaria over the next three years and the triple GEOs to Franco-Nevada.
Production is forecasted to increase primarily on improved copper grades and de-bottlenecking of the primary crushing circuit, as Mark mentioned earlier. Franco-Nevada's 2022 guidance of 60,000-70,000 GEOs is in line with 2021 deliveries. Over the long term, both El Espino, which is expected to be in production around 2025, and the underground expansion is expected to further enhance production. Turning to slide 36, Glencore's Antapaccay mine is one of our largest revenue generators, representing 9% of Franco-Nevada's total revenue in 2021. The stream covers 100% of the entire 997 sq km concessions, which offers a number of large scale regional targets. One such example is the Coroccohuayco deposit, which is now planned as an open pit. The rescope plan is in the PFS stage with the consultation process started.
Turning to slide 37, the chart on the right illustrates Franco-Nevada's historical attributable GEOs from Antapaccay and the 2022 guidance. While Glencore does not provide specific asset level guidance for Antapaccay, the team has a proven history of recent reserve replacement. In addition, Coroccohuayco has the potential to materially extend the mine life with an M&I resource of 634 million tons at 50% higher grades than Antapaccay reserves. Franco-Nevada's 2022 guidance of 47.5-57.5 thousand GEOs is below 2021 levels due to lower plant head grades. Grades in production are expected to return to more normalized levels in 2023. Given the large land package and the Coroccohuayco development project, we are excited about the long-term growth prospects for this asset.
I will now turn it over to Bonavie Tek, Vice President of Finance, to provide an overview on Antamina.
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Antamina is our fourth-largest asset and contributed 7% of our total revenue in 2021. The mine has been in operation since 2001, and it is one of the highest grade major base metal mines globally. It's also one of the lowest cost, ranking in the first quartile for copper mines. The mine has the potential for significant mine life extension and could be one of our longest life streams. Today's reserves of 336 million tons are constrained primarily by the currently permitted tailings storage capacity. Based on current capacity, the mine life extends to 2028, but this has the potential to be extended to 2036 by raising the height of its current tailings impoundment. For this, Antamina has requested a modification to the current environmental impact assessment certificate in 2019.
There are ongoing engineering studies for additional tailing storage options and alternative mine plans being evaluated, and these would extend the mine life even further. Now turning over to the next slide, we see that Antamina has outperformed our acquisition expectations. This is in part because of conservative silver reserve modeling, which has, from time to time, led to better than anticipated grades and recoveries. At the time of acquisition, we expected our share of silver production to range between 2.8 million-3.2 million ounces per year. In 2021, actual silver deliveries exceeded this guidance with 3.8 million ounces delivered to Franco-Nevada. Looking forward to 2022, we anticipate silver deliveries to be at the higher end of our long-term guidance.
Thank you, everyone, and I will now turn it over to Eaun Gray, our Senior Vice President, Business Development, to provide an overview of our growth assets.
Thank you, Bonavie, and good morning to everyone on the line. Today, I'll highlight some of the exciting growth assets that we have within the portfolio. We've summarized these drivers on the next slide. Quite excited to say that this is a space to watch, so please keep a keen eye on these assets. Turning to the next page, the first asset that I'll touch on is Stillwater, where we have a 5% NSR royalty. The strategic nature of this asset has really been demonstrated given the heightened geopolitical tensions at the moment. PGMs are also key to fuel cell vehicles, and we think these commodities will have a strong future. This asset has extensive reserves and resources, and we really think it'll provide many decades of mine life. On the next slide, we provide an overview of the three mining areas, which are East Boulder, Stillwater, and Blitz.
The small portion that Franco-Nevada does not cover on the property is at the original Stillwater mine, whereas we fully cover Blitz and East Boulder, fueling growth going forward. We've shown the growth profile provided by Sabodala on the following slide. The growth is expected through 2024, with Sabodala now working through some of the short-term issues they experienced during 2021. The company is doing optimization work on its North American assets, and we expect some results from that later this year. Moving on, we'd also like to highlight our 2% NSR royalty on Detour Lake, which Paul touched on earlier. It's been quite exciting to watch the rapid growth at this asset over the last couple years. Last year alone, inclusive of reserves, M&A increased from 20 million ounces to 30 million ounces.
Recent drilling continues to point to potential beyond this resource. I'd like to highlight that the technical report is slated for Q2, and this has potential for significant growth in reserves and an enhanced production profile, as highlighted in the Agnico Eagle's most recent investor presentation. We've included a summary production profile on the following slide, but we really wanna highlight this is a space to watch over the coming weeks as Agnico Eagle will update their plan. On the next slide, we've shown our 2% NSR royalty at Subika. On slide 48, we can see the increased GEOs from Subika that we're expecting this year. This is as the mining is really focusing more on the Subika open pit and underground and Awonsu, where we have partial coverage. We are expecting an uptick.
Looking at the chart, you can see in the past that as mining moves on the property, we can see increased focus in our geos. On the following slide, we can see that going forward, actually over the next few years, we expect growth from Subika as the underground mine is ramping up and higher-grade ore is gonna be mined at the open pit. It's also worth highlighting that we're quite excited about the longer-term exploration potential at Subika. On slide 50, we've shown our Salares Norte royalties. Salares Norte will likely be one of the best mines in the gold space to come on stream in the next several years. The mine is a high-grade open pit in Chile, and Gold Fields has guided toward an early 2023 start. On slide 51, we've shown Gold Fields' recent production guidance.
You'll note the partial year in 2023, followed by a large bump in 2024 as the mine focuses on high grade up front. It's worth noting that we expect the buyback proceeds in 2023 and the royalty from there to be 1%. Our team remains very excited about the potential for on-strike resource additions here, which is why we acquired the Rio Baker royalty most recently. Now moving to Greenstone, also known as Hard Rock, on the following slide, we've seen great progress at this operation over the last year. We have a 3% royalty here, and this is a mine that Equinox and Orion are in the process of building. On the following slide, we've shown the production profile, and we see significant contribution coming from this mine after 2024 and a quite long mine life thereafter.
Valentine Lake, which we've highlighted on the following slide, has also seen great progress recently. We have a 2% royalty here and are hopeful that permitting will be completed in the near term, with progress on the EA recently announced. Drilling success also continues at the Berry deposit, and it looks like there's great potential here to enhance the production profile going forward. An updated resource was just announced that is expected by mid-year and a new technical report by Q4 of this year. Keep an eye out for that. On slide 55, we've shown the reserve mine plan, but we see good potential for improvement with recent drilling success, especially at Berry, but also elsewhere on the property. Moving on slide 56, we've provided a quick overview of Rosemont and Copper World.
These are porphyry deposits in southern Arizona, where we just recently increased our royalty to 2%. Hudbay has had great recent exploration success at Copper World over the last year, and we will be publishing a PEA in the first half, so quite soon now. We're excited about the potential of Copper World, both to grow in terms of resource size, but also because it offers a more straightforward permitting process focused primarily on private land. Thank you. With that, I'll hand it back to Sandip to discuss our NPIs.
Thanks, Eaun. As you know, we have a vast portfolio of assets in excess of 400 in total. Within this portfolio are a number of net profit interests. A net profit interest is typically a royalty that is payable after the operator recoups all costs, operating and capital. Depending on the contract, the profit calculation could be on a life of mine basis, which basically means that an NPI royalty is not payable until an operator has recouped cumulative operating and capital costs. Or it could be based on an annual calculation, regardless of what has happened in previous periods. We have both types of NPIs. As you can see from the chart on the slide, we have seen an increased benefit from our NPIs over time. The actual net book value for the royalties is minimal, but in any given year, the revenue generated can be significant.
2020 was our peak year, where NPI revenue was in excess of $80 million. I'll briefly highlight the NPIs within our portfolio. Our longest-standing net profit interest royalty is Goldstrike. The operation is in Nevada and operated by the joint venture between Barrick and Newmont, Nevada Gold Mines. The NPI royalties range from 2.4%-6%, depending on the specific claim. Overall, our estimate is that we cover approximately 50% of Goldstrike reserves. Goldstrike has been in operation for decades, and the NPI has been consistently paying each year. Our expectation is that the NPI will continue to pay out at current levels for the foreseeable future. The NPIs at Goldstrike are life of mine, so the operator is able to recoup cumulative costs before payout. The claims where the NPIs are currently being paid are SJ, SPs, and Bazza.
In recent years, our largest NPI contributor has been Hemlo. Here we have a 50% NPI on a portion of the western down dip underground extension, principally the lower C zone. The interlake ore, as we call it, is the highest grade ore at Hemlo, and from what Barrick disclosed with its year-end results, the exploration drilling continued to highlight that the biggest success was on Franco lands. The operation did have some challenges in 2021, with lower production and higher costs, but we do expect some improvements in 2022. We've seen the leverage that this NPI has to higher gold prices as it generated over 36,000 GEOs in 2020 and $64 million in revenue. In 2021, we saw lower GEOs and revenue as less ounces were mined overall at the property and on our lands.
In addition, we benefited from development that had occurred in prior years. The Hemlo NPI is also a life of mine NPI royalty. Musselwhite is operated by Newmont and previously Goldcorp. Franco-Nevada has a 5% NPI royalty on the original land package, and the NPI began paying in 2011 and paid annually until 2019. A fire occurred at the mine in 2019, which has resulted in no payment since. However, based on information provided by Newmont, we expect the NPI to be payable in the second half of 2022. Planned production for 2022 is 200,000 ounces of gold with an all-in sustaining cost of $1,150 per ounce, and current reserves are approximately 1.8 million ounces of gold.
Some of our other NPIs are Macassa, also known as Kirkland Lake, which is now operated by Agnico Eagle after the Kirkland Lake merger, along with an NSR that covers much of the Kirkland Lake camp and other NSR royalties on individual claims. Franco-Nevada has a 20% profit-based royalty immediately to the southwest of the South Mine complex. The royalty is on two claims, Gracie East and St. Joseph. The NPI is a quarterly accounting profit calculation, thus not life of mine. It has been paying a few hundred thousand dollars per year as some mining has occurred on our claims. Kirkland Lake had been having successful exploration results near the South Mine complex and towards our claims, so we are hopeful we will see more mining on the claims in the future. Our final precious metal NPI royalty is on Pandora.
It is a 5% NPI on Sibanye-Stillwater's Pandora mine, which is part of the Marikana complex in South Africa. The property forms part of the Bushveld complex, approximately 40 km east of the town of Rustenburg. The property was previously operated by Lonmin before Sibanye acquired it. There is an annual minimum of ZAR 100,000 that is payable. However, we do anticipate NPI payments going forward, as with current PGM prices, the mine will be profitable. We estimate that 80% of current reserves on the Pandora lands is on Franco-Nevada royalty lands. Currently, Pandora is a small operation on a large resource. Finally, we have a nickel NPI royalty on BHP's Mount Keith mine in Australia. It was acquired in 2009 and has paid out historically. The royalty rate is 0.25%.
It has not paid out recently, but with current nickel prices, it does provide long-term nickel optionality to the company. Now I will hand it over to Matt Begeman, Director of Business Development, to discuss our iron ore assets.
Thank you, Sandip, and good morning, everyone. I will be covering our high-quality and long-lived iron ore assets that provide diversified exposure to some of the world's best mineral deposits. Starting first with the Vale royalty, where we acquired our 14.7% interest in April 2021. The royalty provides an effective net sales royalty on Vale's northern system in Brazil and a portion of the southeastern system upon meeting a production threshold. In addition, the royalty also applies to the Sossego copper and gold mine, as well as to a large land package of more than 15,000 hectares. The assets primarily produce high-quality iron ore that is used to produce greener steel with lower carbon emissions. The Vale royalty is expected to provide cash flow well into the 2050s and beyond with mine life extensions.
We know that the royalty is benefited by the strong demand for high-quality iron ore during 2021, which exceeded our expectations at acquisition, generating a pre-tax cash yield of approximately 13% in 2021 based on the declared distributions in Franco-Nevada's acquisition price. Starting with the Northern System, where Franco-Nevada's attributable royalty is 0.264% of net sales. The Northern System is a fully integrated operation consisting of several mining complexes with an integrated rail and port facility. The Northern System includes three active operations, Serra Norte, Serra Sul, also known as S11D, and Serra Leste. The operations are among the largest in the world and some of the lowest costs while producing high-grade iron ore primarily through dry processing.
In 2021, the Northern system produced 189 million tons of iron ore and ended the year at a capacity of 203 million tons per year. Long term, the capacity of the Northern system is being expanded to 240 million-260 million tons per year. Vale is actively working to reach this expanded capacity with 2022 projects, including jaspeite crushers and the startup of the +10 million tons per year projects, both in S11D. Moving next to the Southeastern System. Our royalty in the Southeastern System is also at 0.264% of net sales on the portion covered. However, it is only payable once a threshold of 1.7 billion tons has been produced. The Southeastern System is also fully integrated from mine to port.
The covered assets of the system are estimated to be approximately 70% of total system capacity over the medium term, with contributions from three complexes: Itabira, Minas Centrais (largely Brucutu), and Mariana, including Fazendão and, to a lesser extent, Capanema. The current capacity of the Southeastern System on a 100% basis is 70 million tons per year, and it is expected to be 110 million-120 million tons per year long term. I also forecast that the production threshold to commence royalty payments will be met in 2024-2025, adding organic growth to the royalty. The Southeastern System is continuing to ramp up, with both Itabira and Brucutu expected to complete tailings filtration plants and incremental dam capacity during this year.
Leaving our Brazil iron assets, we also hold a 9.9% equity interest in Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation, which in turn holds a 7% gross revenue royalty, a 15.1% equity interest, and a 0.10 a-ton commission on Iron Ore Company of Canada's Carol Lake mine located in Labrador. Labrador Iron Ore largely passes through cash flow directly to shareholders as dividends, and in 2021, Franco-Nevada achieved full payback of our investment. The Carol Lake mine is fully integrated from mine to port and is operated by Rio Tinto. The mine sold 16.8 million tons of iron ore in 2021, of which 60% was premium pellets, including DR pellets used for low emission electric arc furnaces, with the balance of sales as high grade concentrate.
Rio Tinto has provided production guidance for the mine of 17 million tons-18.7 million tons in 2022, as well as guided for higher capital expenditures of more than $600 million, including tailings systems redesign to extend the life of mine in a lower electricity and water usage. The Q1 2022 dividend was thus lower than recent quarters as IOC did not issue a partner dividend. Finally, as the dividend chart shows, Labrador Iron Ore has been an excellent investment for Franco-Nevada, with 2021 dividends generating a 40% cash yield on our acquisition price. With that, I will turn it over to Jason O'Connell, Senior Vice President, Diversified, to discuss our energy assets.
Thanks, Matt, and hello, everyone. Turning to our energy portfolio. We do have a diversified portfolio of energy assets, which has long been a good complement to our core precious metals business. Investing in energy has allowed us to grow revenues and add resource optionality during times when acquisitions are either less attractive or sometimes not available in precious metals. The criteria that we look for in our energy investments are, in essence, the same as mining. Those criteria include secure title, where we often have a permanent interest in the land. Long life assets, which will provide cash flow for many decades and exposure through multiple commodity price cycles. Low risk through diversification of operators and basins, and with little exposure to capital or operating costs.
Lastly, we look for upside exposure in the form of multiple reservoirs at depth, and through advances in drilling and extraction technologies. Slide 71 provides a map of our most significant energy assets, along with outlines of the sedimentary basins where they reside. Oil assets are shown on the left side of the page, and gas-weighted assets are shown on the right. Our royalties cover the majority of the foremost energy plays in North America, ranging from northern Alberta down to Texas. Each of these assets have very meaningful reserve lives, which will allow them to generate cash flow well into the future. The Canadian properties are low decline, stable producers, while the U.S. properties consist of shale plays that rely on continued drilling activity to generate volumes.
The revenue contributions from each of the key contributors is provided, showing strong diversification across the portfolio and a good balance of oil, gas, and natural gas liquids. On slide 72, revenue from our energy division is a function of both commodity prices as well as production volumes. As mentioned, while our Canadian assets are characterized by stable volumes coming mostly from the Weyburn and Orion operations, our U.S. shale assets are short cycle in nature, where wells have a steep initial decline rate and which require continued capital spending by operators to drill new wells in order to sustain production volumes. Drilling levels are generally correlated with commodity prices, with higher prices allowing operators the flexibility to deploy more capital. The chart on this slide shows the rig count or number of rigs operating in each of the major U.S. basins where we own royalties.
You can see that rig activity declined with oil prices in 2015 and 2016, improved as commodity prices strengthened into 2017 and through 2019, and then fell off dramatically when oil prices collapsed in 2020. Drilling activity has been recovering through 2021 and into this year. Currently, activity levels are on average approximately 65% of their 2019 highs for oil basins, and they're on par with 2019 highs in the gas basins, namely the Marcellus and Haynesville. The outlook for drilling activity is positive, owing to strong commodity prices and also recent support from the U.S. government, which is now looking to increase domestic energy supply amidst recent geopolitical turmoil. Turning to slide 73. The chart on this slide shows the contribution of energy to our corporate revenues over time and highlights assets that have been added.
There are a couple of items worth noting. Until 2016, we had a portfolio of royalty assets focused solely in Western Canada that we have grown and since expanded as we've invested in the growth of the U.S. shale plays. The last two transactions that we completed were in gas basins, anticipating a shift in the capital flows in energy with the ongoing global energy transition. You'll notice that energy as a percentage of total revenue has fluctuated over time with the addition of new assets over the last number of years and a strengthening in commodity prices. Energy represented 16% of total revenues in 2021. Given the current commodity mix, our focus for new investments, as mentioned earlier, will be in gold and precious metals. Slide 74 expands a little bit on the previous slide.
The investments that we've made in the last several years have really changed the complexion of our portfolio. This slide compares our 2021 revenue with the same period five years earlier. From left to right, the charts highlight that our portfolio has had a significant absolute revenue growth on the order of nearly seven-fold. We now have an increased exposure to the United States, with about 70% of revenue coming from south of the border. Portfolio has become more gas weighted, with gas now representing a much larger portion of the commodity mix at 38% and with another 10% coming from natural gas liquids. Whereas the portfolio was historically concentrated in Weyburn, the asset base has become much more diverse across many different basins.
To finish off, the portfolio is now highly diversified and is really well positioned to benefit from strong energy prices going forward. I'd now like to turn it over to Chris Bell, Vice President, Geology, to discuss long-term options.
Thanks, Jason. 2021 was a great year for exploration success across our expanding portfolio. Turning to slide 76, we have summarized key long-term drivers with our Royalty Ounces breakdown. Long-term assets comprise 2.9 million of a total 17.4 million measured and indicated Royalty Ounces. Today, I will present two of Franco-Nevada's exciting long-term options, starting with Cascabel in Northern Ecuador. Turning to slide 77, Franco-Nevada holds a 1% NSR on the Cascabel claim, which covers the Alpala and Tandayama-America copper-gold porphyry deposits. Alpala has a large high-grade core containing 3.8 million tons of copper and 12.3 million ounces of gold. The license map shows the large footprint of mineralization at these deposits.
In October last year, SolGold released their maiden mineral resource estimate for Tandayama-America and are actively drilling with mineralization now extending down over 1,000 meters from surface. Cascabel benefits from strong shareholders with extensive mine building experience in BHP and block caving experience in Newcrest. Cascabel is world-class. We are excited to see the pre-feasibility study next week on April twentieth, and the asset advance through to production. Turning to slide 78, we'll shift focus to Northern Ontario, where Franco-Nevada holds royalties on the Ring of Fire deposits recently acquired by Wyloo Metals in a bidding war with BHP for Noront. The area gets its name from a 100-kilometer diameter circular magnetic feature defining a belt of mafic and ultramafic rocks hosting deposits of chromite, nickel, copper, platinum, palladium, and copper zinc. With three advanced development projects, Eagle's Nest, Blackbird, and Black Thor.
Eagle's Nest is a high-grade nickel, copper, platinum, palladium deposit expected to produce 3,000 tons of ore per day and to deliver approximately 150,000 tons of nickel-bearing concentrate per year. Blackbird and Black Thor are large tonnage, high-quality chromite deposits with significant potential due to their size, grade, and proximity to Eagle's Nest. The endorsement of the play and deep pockets of Wyloo make its development that more likely. Next steps are the completion of permitting and funding for the planned road access up to the Ring of Fire. Now I'll hand it back to Paul for concluding remarks and our second Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Chris. I hope the team has conveyed our excitement around our portfolio and the organic growth that's unfolding. We've now got time for some questions. We've run a little bit long, so, but we still have a bit more time. Sylvie, would you begin by taking questions from the phone line?
Certainly. We will begin taking questions from those already on the phone line and from those on the webcast who wish to dial in to ask a question. As a reminder, to ask a question through the telephone line, simply press star then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star and number two. For assistance, please press star zero at any time for the operator. Your first question will be from Adrian Day at Adrian Day Asset Management.
Yeah, good morning, and thank you very much for this. I want to ask a more general question, if I may. That is, you know, there's been a sort of evolving in Franco-Nevada, and your willingness to buy non-gold assets. I realize you've had the oil for a long time, but, you know, I'm thinking of things like iron ore, et cetera. I wanted to look at how your thinking has evolved and how you think it might evolve in the future as you get larger.
Thanks, Adrian. The thinking has evolved incrementally. You would have seen at the back end of last year after acquiring the iron ore assets.
We indicated a bit more openness on the diversified side, and part of that is just where we are in terms of the current commodity balance. We did indicate at the time, as we chat a bit about today, we're happy with the current exposure we have on the energy side. Don't think that we should add to that at the moment through acquisition because of the ESG perspectives. It's not a line in the sand. Over the longer term, if the rest of the portfolio is bigger and we've got the ability to add more energy without increasing the percentage too much in the portfolio, we're open to doing it again. Overall, still the focus is on gold and precious metals. That's always our number one focus.
We would love to have as much of the portfolio in gold and precious metals. The reason that we've always said investors give us a bit of latitude in terms of investing in other commodities is it's a cyclical industry. It's not always a good time to add gold and precious metal assets. We found that we can create better value for shareholders over time, having more avenues for growth and being able to add good exposure to resource growth and resource optionality in other commodities, when it's not a good time to do it in gold. None of that has changed.
The focus is on gold, but as we say, we are open to adding those other diversified assets if they come available at good value, if we think we can add more value to the company than precious metal at that stage. We don't control the timing of when those assets come to market. What our objective is to manage the portfolio. We're very well aware that we need to keep the vast majority of assets in precious metals in order to get a premium multiple on all of our cash flows and we're planning to do that going forward.
Okay. Thank you. That's helpful.
Thank you. Next question will be from John Tumazos at John Tumazos Very Independent Research. Please go ahead, Mr. Tumazos.
We don't hear you coming through, John.
Thank you. Thank you very much. By the way, congratulations on all the progress and kudos to the spectacular energy investments and having base metals as another theater to play. Do you think that buying back Franco's stock is a good alternative given the scarcity of good values for gold and silver investments?
It's an interesting question, John. Certainly, something we think about from time to time, but it all comes down to capital allocation. What we found so far is the best use of our capital has been adding assets. We try to add assets at NAV, and then to get the benefit, the upside of that optionality. You know, our job as a management team is to make sure that the market fully appreciates that optionality and it's reflected in our share price. I think David would say that I was failing if we didn't do that and made the argument that we need to buy the stock back. In short, I think the best use of capital is still buying into assets.
We do see good opportunities in the gold space. The industry is back to building mines, so I think we'll see plenty of use for our capital.
If somebody else outbids you and you have a pause during frothy market conditions, you're just gonna build cash.
We're comfortable building cash on the balance sheet. You know, it's very firm in our minds that this is a cyclical industry. There'll certainly be downturns. There'll be times in the cycle where capital is more scarce. Our plan is to spend most of our capital when there's a shortage of capital in the market.
Congratulations. I'm so glad that you're figuring out how to spend $2 million or $3 million a day and not me.
Thank you, John.
Thank you. Your next question will be from Adam Josephson at KeyBank.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Paul, can you hear me okay?
Coming through loud and clear.
Wonderful. Thank you. Just in response to one of the previous questions about the energy portfolio, I believe you mentioned that you're reluctant to expand it further owing to ESG concerns, and obviously, you highlighted your excellent ESG record early on in the presentation. I'm just trying to understand. I mean, the reason the world finds itself in this energy crisis is precisely because of ESG concerns. I'm wondering just how you're balancing your desire to be as ESG compliant as you have been with future return opportunities. I know it's. I imagine it's a rather delicate one, but can you just walk us through your thoughts along those lines?
Sure. I'd say that there are two issues there, maybe to the first in terms of the balance of energy in the portfolio. We're trying to appeal to a range of shareholders. Different shareholders have different views. There is a large and a growing amount of shareholders where ESG is a concern, exposure to fossil fuels is a concern and climate change. We're very happy with the oil and gas assets we have in our portfolio. We think we'll do very well. We know we need to manage that balance for those set of shareholders where exposure to fossil fuels is concerned.
That's why, you know, managing that as a subset of our portfolio, but making sure it isn't too big, that it's a concern for those shareholders. Second part of that is, you know, how do we manage our business and you know, how do we think about ESG and our impact on it? This applies to both the mining space and the energy space. You know, both industries have ESG challenges and need to prove that they can operate with a good ESG footprint. Our objective is obviously support the better operators, support the better operations. There are many aspects of ESG in all that, safety, community, water, climate change.
We spend a lot of time when we're doing our due diligence on our investors, making sure that we are investing in the better players and the better operations so that we are always putting money to work, we're shifting both industries into a better position so that they can be progressive industries as we go forward. Thanks very much, Paul.
Thank you. There are no further questions from the phone line. I will now turn the Q&A over to Lloyd Hong, who will read questions submitted through the webcast. Mr. Hong, please go ahead.
Thanks, Sylvie. There are two questions submitted, Paul. The first one is from Heiko Ihle from H.C. Wainwright. Multi-part question here. What are you seeing with appetite for transactions given recent geopolitical issues across the globe? On the one hand, metal pricing has been quite strong. Gold pricing is still up about $170 per ounce in the last six months. But in contrast, people seem quite scared of general market risks, especially in secondary jurisdictions. Then building on this, what are you seeing with other bidders and their interest in transactions and how much does this answer differ based on the metal? If there is a difference with metals, what are you seeing? Where are you seeing strength and where would you say you are seeing some weakness?
A couple elements there. I'll maybe lump some of those questions together. Obviously, what's going on at the moment, there's a good amount of volatility in a lot of different commodities. I mean, some of those commodities, particularly in the energy space where you see pricing where it currently is, it wouldn't be a good time to get into it. You've seen some of the other commodities run very hard, things like nickel, things like palladium, so not a good time for us to be investing in those metals. Where the current focus is on gold and precious metals. This environment is obviously highly inflationary. What's going on in terms of the terrible war is only adding to that.
I think it's a very chances of precious metal prices being higher for the longer term here is very good. What does that mean in terms of doing deals? Yes, it does mean if we do deals right now in precious metals, it is a bit more expensive. That's not deterring us in terms of things that we're looking at. We think we can get deals done based on reasonable valuations. It's always a balance in investing in that we need to be in an environment where the industry is building new gold mines. They only do that in a supportive gold price environment. I think we have a supportive gold price environment. We're not trying to be all of the capital going into those deals.
You know, in particular, for people to be building new gold mines, they need to be able to raise the equity portion of their financing. I think this is a good market for us. There is gold equity available to support the building of those new mines. That means there are a number of players that are going ahead with new mine builds. The equity markets aren't crazy. Stocks are trading at a discount to NAV, which is where you need it to be for our financing to be attractive. I think in this environment, it's a good environment for us to put more capital to work, and that capital is most likely to help build new gold and precious metal mines.
Okay. Our last question submitted online is from Carey MacRury at Canaccord Genuity. There are still a lot of precious metals sitting in large base metal producers, BHP, Rio, et cetera. Is it safe to assume that those ounces are likely to stay in-house despite the clear value arbitrage, therefore, growth in streams is likely to remain a function of financing new projects and/or future deleveraging cycles?
At this stage of the cycle, I would say that is a safe bet. Although the only thing we know for certainty in this business is the cycles change. You know, obviously, you know, large diversified players have access to low-cost capital. It's often difficult for us to compete with that. You know, at any point in the cycle, we have to be a competitive source of capital. You know, so that does mean, you know, in particular, you know, in today's market, debt is cheap. It's tough for us to compete with that. We're spending most of our time with operators that are usually either single asset development companies or junior intermediate companies where they don't have a corporate balance sheet with very low cost debt.
That really is the best playing field for us today.
There are no further questions online, Paul.
Thank you, Lloyd. With that, we will wrap up today's session. Thank you again to our partner presenters. We are so proud to be part of your success stories. Thank you to everybody who has joined us today. Operator, please conclude the presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Brink. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude today's presentation. We do thank you for attending, and at this time ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a good day.