Good afternoon, and welcome to Franco-Nevada's Investor Day. Thank you for attending this presentation in person, and welcome to those joining us online. My name is Candida Hayden, and I am the Senior Analyst, Investor Relations at Franco-Nevada. The presentations today are planned to take two hours. Questions will be taken in person and via the webcast at the end of the presentation. A reminder to kindly mute your devices for the session. Please note that some of today's commentary contains forward-looking information. Kindly see our cautionary statement on slide two and other cautionary statements contained in this presentation. I would now like to welcome Paul Brink, President and CEO of Franco-Nevada, to the podium.
Thank you, Candida, and welcome everybody. Thank you for those of you attending in person, and welcome to all the folks who are on the webcast as well. I'm going to start off today, speak about the objectives in our business, our approach to our business, and our portfolio. Next up will be Euan Gray, our CIO, who will speak about our business development strategy. Then by popular demand, we have a number of our partners who will be speaking. So a very special welcome to Richard Young from I-80, Paddy Downey from Orezone, Mark Wooding from Discovery, who are here in person and will be presenting. Then also we have online, Ryan King from Equinox, who will also be presenting online. We'll also have Metals 260, who we are piping in from Australia. Appreciate them staying up late at night.
Two core things about our business, and the first is we believe gold should be a risk-off investment. In designing our business, if we can design a low risk business, we feel we'll have the greatest appeal to investors. The second is the incredible value that is created if you can expose yourselves to resource optionality. The first part of that is most predictable thing in mining is as the industry mines deeper every year, at the end of the year, they expose more ore in their ore bodies, and we can participate in that. Even better than that, every once in a while, an exploration program or somebody mines deeper, you find an ore body that is multiple times bigger than what you ever imagined. That approach has worked terrifically well for us. Over the last 18 years, the CAGR on our stock is around 19%.
We've outperformed all of our peers. We've outperformed all of the relevant benchmarks. We've outperformed bullion itself. Interestingly, bullion has returned about 9% over that period. We've been able to double the return that you could get investing in bullion alone. It starts with the portfolio, and our portfolio was built up over much more than 18 years. It's actually been more than 40 years in the making, building up this portfolio, both in the old Franco and in the new Franco. It's given us the broadest, most diversified portfolio in the industry. We've also been tremendously lucky. We've been exposed to some of the greatest successes in the industry, and that's allowed us to generate some of the highest returns of capital. If you look on the average, the last five years, that's a 12% return on invested capital.
Those investment returns have driven our share price, and it's that share price appreciation that's allowed us to produce industry-leading returns. Looking forward, we're set up for robust growth going forward in the business. We have no debt. We've got more than $3 billion available capital. That's the fuel that allow us to drive the next leg of growth in Franco-Nevada. In the royalty and streaming place, there are a number of players that are in the game. We think we're different, and we think mostly because we play the game differently. What I mean by that, the first is our approach to growing the business and where it starts with is ownership. The first thing we think is to be aligned with your shareholders. You want to own the stock.
It really changes the way that you think about the business because you're not thinking about growth for the sake of growth. You're thinking that every deal that you do, you've got to increase cash flow per share, you've got to increase NAV per share. You've got to make sure that when we do a deal, we get the share price up. Second is financial flexibility, and it's a discussion we're often having with companies that we're dealing with, but we believe it honestly ourselves. We think financial flexibility is more important than cost of capital. What that means is having the capital available when you need it most. The way we run our business is to make sure that through the cycle, we always have a lot of capital available so that we can deploy capital when the industry needs it the most. Next is being adaptable.
We don't just think of ourselves as a royalty and stream financier. We think of ourselves as capital providers to the industry, and it's to an industry that is highly capital intensive. Our thought is, if we can find the right assets. We can find the strong teams to back, and we can be flexible in how we provide capital to those teams. We can create a lot of success, both for them and for ourselves. Next up is a focus on optionality, and that's the incredible value that can be created through the drill bit in the industry. It's imbued in our DNA at Franco-Nevada because of the successes that our company has had over time to make sure that every deal that we do, the one core tenet is we expose ourselves to that potential resource optionality.
The last thing there, differently in terms of how we think about this business is we understand cyclicality. That is gold and all commodities, at the end of the day, have their bull and their bear markets. You have to be able to decide when you want to spend a lot of capital, when you want to pull back. You've got to decide when's the right time to let organic growth lead, when you want your growth to be through acquisitions. When you need to make the calls in terms of, is this the time to put a lot of money in gold, or are there other commodities where you can actually get better value in these markets? Also it's thinking about how to use your balance sheet.
What is the right time to take down debt, so that you can maximize returns without taking on the risk of carrying financial leverage potentially into a downturn? In terms of our sustainability focus, there are six core pillars that we have. Responsible capital allocation is making sure when we're financing companies, that we're financing teams that design their mines to have a minimum impact on the environment, that there are net benefits for the communities. We contribute ourselves, get involved with the operators, programs that they feel will benefit their communities, that will build social license at their operations. We work with them and support financially those operations. I already mentioned in terms of good governance, the number one thing we believe is shareholder alignment. That comes through share ownership. Climate action is always on the agenda.
When we're looking at investments, part of our due diligence, part of our evaluation is making sure that these are operators that are at least in the best half of their space, so that any investment we're making is making the world a better place in terms of climate performance. We're a tiny organization ourselves, but we also look at ourselves and say every year, how can we improve, just to show that we're doing what we can to contribute to that effort. We want to be a good employer. We want to create good jobs for our employees. We want to create great careers for our employees. We're very proud of the diversity that we've been able to attract to our business by being inclusive. Overall, in terms of our approach on sustainability, number one is we want to be pragmatic.
We want to be genuine in everything that we do. We want to make sure that the efforts that we make are effective. We also want to be open about it and transparent, so that all of that is clear. We're tremendously proud that that's been recognized by the rating agencies. We're perennially top-rated by Sustainalytics. An achievement this year is Corporate Knights. Previously, we've been in their top 50 most sustainable Canadian companies. This year, we were also included in the top 100 sustainable companies globally. Most recently, we were just upgraded by MSCI. We were A A-rated by MSCI. We are now AAA-rated by MSCI. While the United States is no longer AA A-rated, I can say honestly, Franco-Nevada is AA A-rated.
What I think is most unique about our portfolio, it's not just its breadth, but it's the combination of royalties on gold mines and streams, principally on copper mines, that I think makes it so attractive, and I'll speak a bit to each. We all know typically in gold mines, gold mineralization is very hard to drill up. It's seldom that an operator will drill up more than 10 years at a time. It doesn't mean that that's the full extent of the ore body. The history of our company has shown from time to time, as you drill deeper, you can reveal ore bodies that are multiple times bigger. In the old Franco-Nevada, the two winners were Goldstrike and Stillwater. Many hundreds of times the value of the investment is what you see the value today.
When we show the value here, that is the cash we've received so far, and then the analyst consensus NAV going forward. In a way, it's a bit of a conservative way to do this. If I just took the total expected cash that we generate, the numbers would be far higher here. In the new Franco-Nevada, we've had a couple of those, too. Detour Lake, Tasiast, Ukon down in Australia, all of those up to 100x our investment that we're making. Even more recently, an investment we made a couple of years back now, $6 million on Greenstone. The mine has only been operating two years. The value of that investment today is more than $300 million. That's 50x the value that we paid for making that investment. For the streams, it's a different calculus. Most of our precious metal streams are on big copper mines.
Copper mines, we all know geologically, they just tend to be much bigger endowments. It's also much more massive mineralization, much easier to drill up 30 years of reserves at the outset. When we invest in a stream on a copper mine. It's not likely that you're going to get 100x your money. That doesn't mean they don't get a whole lot better and still generate great returns over time. I'd say that what we've found with investing in ore bodies over time is, the bigger the mineral endowment to start with, the more likely it is that you'll find more ore around that mineral endowment. If the conditions were there to create that mineralization, there inevitably is more. Most predictably, these are the assets that do get better.
To put in perspective what that can be, when we did the Candelaria deal, it was 12 years ago now, we financed Lundin Mining buying that asset out of Freeport. At the time, the mine life on Candelaria, the go-forward mine life was 14 years. It's 12 years later, the go-forward mine life today goes out 20 years. That 14 years has become 32 years at Candelaria. Those are the sort of returns you can get on these big stream assets. Antapaccay, a very similar story. John will actually speak to it later. The potential expansion there through the Coroccohuayco deposit. Putting all of that together, I've given you some good examples for the portfolio, but if you take the portfolio as a whole and you look at the returns of capital, and I have to thank the Scotia team here, these are their numbers that I'm presenting.
The return on invested capital for Franco-Nevada, the last five years, leading the pack, 12% return on invested capital. If you look at what that is projected to achieve with the run in the gold prices, 2026 and 2027, that's looking at over 20% return on capital that we're generating in the business. I'll turn now to our growth outlook. What we show on the slide is what we achieved in 2025, and what the outlook is in 2030. The growth that we already know is taking place in the portfolio is in the order of 12%-13% growth from those assets. The big potential is obviously Cobre Panamá . If Cobre Panamá is operating at full strength again within the next five years, I think there's a very good likelihood it is, that would boost our growth, would be in the order of 45% growth over the next five years.
I think that is very achievable. In the last column that we show there, we put on top of that long-term options. These are assets we don't expect them produced in the next five years. We're not certain on the timing of them, but they are what is going to drive and sustain us over the longer term. This is a breakdown of those assets that make up those long-term assets. In terms of potential annual contribution, if you put it all together, it's 222,000 GEOs. Now, they're not all going to operate at the same time, but that is an indication of the annual contributions that they individually could make. We've also shown there what that is in terms of royalty ounces, and I'm going to speak a bit more about that in detail on that in a minute.
The main takeaway from the slide is we've got good growth, hopefully with Cobre, it's that 45% over the next five years. There's a lot of gas in the tank with these assets. I'm absolutely confident we can sustain that level for the following five years, if not grow it, with the assets that we've been able to add over the last couple of years. I'll turn now to royalty ounces. Every year, what our team does is we go through the reserves and resources of all the underlying assets, that will be out in our asset handbook. Then we do a calculation of royalty ounces. It's a Franco-Nevada term. What we're doing is taking the ounces and say, if you convert them into an ounce that is 100% attributable to us, so it's converting stream ounces to be the equivalent of royalty ounces.
These are ounces where 100% of the value will accrue to us over time, and what are those across the portfolio. Shown here, reserves, Measured and Indicated, exclusive of reserves, and also the inferred ounces. As you look at the changes year-over-year, there are a couple of moving parts. We did have a buyback on our Cascabel stream, so we lost some ounces as a result of that. Nonetheless, a very attractive buyback on good terms, so John will speak to you about it later on. Second impact that we had is obviously we've been active with acquisitions. Biggest one last year was Côté, so we added ounces through the acquisitions. Some changes due to commodity prices. We do have some NPIs.
Obviously, with the gold price being that much higher year on year, the NPIs convert into more ounces because we're assuming a higher margin on them. On the flip side, for the diversified assets on the iron ore, and the copper, gold price is relatively higher. When you convert that, slightly lower royalty ounces coming from those. What's the underlying impact, the underlying driver obviously is what are the reserves and resources of the assets doing. There is good growth across the board, reserves, M&I, and inferred. The underlying reserves and resources grew in each of those categories. What were the big contributors for reserves? It was Guadalupe, Taca Taca, Magino, Brucejack were the most notable. In the resource categories, Detour, Malartic, and an asset I've mentioned before, some of you may be familiar with it, Rogozna. We'll speak a bit about it over in Serbia.
What I've also added on this slide, we don't have them officially in our royalty ounce calculations, is Cobre Panamá and New Prosperity. Obviously, those are potential. We'd want to have greater certainty on Cobre returning to production, New Prosperity moving into production, before we put those back into the official ounces. It is important potential that we have in our portfolio. Just a quick snapshot. Where are all those ounces? You'll see heavily weighted, the biggest jurisdictions, all safe mining jurisdictions, Canada, the United States, Chile, Peru are our biggest exposure in terms of where the ounces lie.
This is just a summary chart to break that into categories so that you can both see where is the annual contribution coming from, plus where the royalty ounces are broken out by the assets that are in our five-year outlook, potential for Cobre Panamá, what the long-term assets could contribute to that, and then those totals that take you over 27 million ounces of inventory. Where we put at the bottom is that doesn't include the exploration potential. We have 230 other assets that are not included in that, and there will certainly be value from that portfolio over time. Just for fun, putting a value on all of that. If you take that total inventory, you've got 27.5 million ounces. At today's gold prices, that's $126 billion of value in the portfolio. Contrast that with our enterprise value, $47.8 billion.
The underlying value there is 2.7x what our enterprise value is today. Now, that's undiscounted. Obviously, that value will accrue over time. We don't include our energy assets in doing this. The revenue we get from our energy largely offsets the taxes and the G&A that we have. This is indicative of the ultimate undiscounted cash flow that will ultimately accrue to our shareholders. I put at the top of that a little dashed box, exploration potential, just as a reminder. This doesn't include Minerals 260 exploration assets. It doesn't include the potential growth that we'll have from these assets, which predictably, at year-end, we always do. I'll speak a bit about that exploration potential. They're broken out, first of all, by the amount of ground that we cover. We show that it is spread Canada, Australia, the U.S., South America.
In total, we cover 17.8 million acres. I was trying to put that in perspective in my own mind. I was doing an AI search. I found the individual in the world who owns the most amount of land is Gina Rinehart in Australia. Gina has us beat. She has 22 million acres that she covers. We're right up there with her. In terms of exploration spend, we've identified on our properties more than $600 million of exploration dollars that will be spent this year. Now, that's conservative. A lot of companies don't break out their spend by individual asset. For sure, there will be more than that $600 million spent. In my own head, I was just doing some math to say, let's take an industry average finding cost $50 an ounce.
means probably you get 12 million ounces that'll be discovered on land that we cover just this year, that inevitably will add to our NAV over time. I'm going to finish off. I've spoken broadly about some of the impacts, but more particularly just a couple of the assets to speak about that I really think exemplify the resource optionality of our portfolio. The first one here is Detour Lake. You'll all recall, if you go back 6 years ago, it was Detour Gold that had Detour Lake. They had drilled it out, 20 million ounces was the resource. The mine plan at the time had it growing up to 650,000 ounces a year of production. Tony Makuch at Kirkland Lake Gold at the time had acquired it. They drilled it. They took that 20 million ounces up to 30 million ounces of resource, expanded the mining plan.
Agnico Eagle acquired Kirkland Lake. They have continued to drill. At the end of last year, the total resource in all categories, more than 43 million ounces. You've gone from 20 million ounces to 43 million ounces in just six years. The mine plan currently has them expanding production up to 1 million ounces a year. That's not the end of story yet. They have a big fleet of drills still drilling at Detour Lake. They've extended the mineralization by 2.4 kilometers to the west. I don't know that they will be putting out a technical report this year that they say will look at expanded scenarios. I don't know if that's a bigger underground. I don't know if it is a super pit. Some of the speculation on the Street you hear is that you could see 1.2–1.3 million ounces of production per annum coming out of Detour.
These assets just keep getting better. The next asset to speak about, Côté, and I think it is on a similar trajectory. Côté initially discovered 10 million ounces in the pit. They did the feasibility, got to permitting that. While they were permitting, the discovery was made on Gosselin. Gosselin is roughly another 10 million ounces. The mill was originally scoped for just the 10 at Côté, so it's clearly undersized. IAMGOLD, Renaud Adams has said he will put out a technical report again later this year, looking at a bigger mill to optimize that operation, likely in the order of 50% bigger. Again, you can see they're contemplating a super pit. I think about Côté, it's currently after Detour and Malartic, the third- biggest ore body in Canada. Today it's 20 million ounces.
If Detour can go from 20 to 43 in six years, I'm wondering where's Côté going to be in six years' time. With that, I've finished all my comments. I'm going to hand the mic over to Euan, who's going to speak to you about business development and our acquisition strategy. Euan?
Thank you, Paul. It's my privilege today to speak to you about our growth strategy. Before that, I'd like to thank many of our partners who are here today, because really without them none of this would be possible. Thank you all for joining us. Our growth strategy is anchored on two core tenets. The first is to provide our shareholders with exposure to among the best precious metals royalties and streams. The second is to selectively add long duration, high quality royalties and streams in other commodities. The way we execute on this strategy is by finding the upside, but structuring our deals to mitigate the downside. Our recent deals illustrate that this can be a win-win strategy. By providing patient capital at a low cost, we allow our partners to unlock value for their shareholders.
A word you'll hear us use a lot is optionality, and that's for good reason, because it's core to all of the deals that we do. We actively look for this without giving away the farm. We have to stay disciplined in volatile commodity markets, and that's a core part of our strategy. Finding optionality really starts with deep due diligence. You have to understand what drives the upside of assets over time. We've got an excellent track record of finding just this, as Paul has outlined, starting with Gold Strike, moving on to assets like Detour, Côté and many, many others. In 2024 and 2025, we committed over $3 billion to new transactions.
Given the due diligence that we've done and some of the fantastic drill results and other information that has been coming out of the market, I'm quite confident saying that I think we're just scratching the surface on a number of these wonderful new assets that we've added. In this environment, we expect resources to convert to reserves and continue to grow. The benefits of this approach have manifested a whole lot faster than I think many of us had expected with these higher gold prices. Two great examples would be Magino and Valentine. We have Richard here today, who's certainly familiar with one, and Ryan will speak to Valentine as well a little bit later. These demonstrate exactly what I mean. You've seen announcements of higher throughput rates, increased reserves and continuously improving mine plans over time. Just absolutely wonderful.
To me, it demonstrates that when we harness the skills of our technical team, that our shareholders benefit tremendously. When our team and our board have conviction on an asset and we can mitigate downside, that's when we act. In fact, we think we're truly blessed by having such a strong team and board. These are industry veterans that have seen cycles and projects succeed and fail. Often we see deals where we're offered a small pricing concession in exchange for giving up upside. That's something generally we've learned over time is not a good trade. What we're looking for instead is that winning combination, assets with really good upside, but where we also have confidence that we can get our capital back using conservative parameters around mine plan and commodity price.
Probably comes as no surprise to you that we spend a lot of time thinking about the commodity price setup when we make new investments. We want returns that are there across the cycle, not just for a snapshot in time. Of course, there's the structure of any deal. Legal framework is key to managing risk, and so we take it very seriously when we write our contracts. I look at Lloyd when I say that. Long tenor assets are a defining feature of our portfolio, and diversification enhances that duration. Even more important, though, than security on paper, of course, are the fundamentals of the assets that we invest in, the margins, the license to operate. That's where we spend a lot of our time when we do due diligence. Good environmental and social practices aren't optional anymore.
They're prerequisite to the success of any mine in the long term. Now, the best contractual safeguard in many cases is actually just getting as close to the asset as we possibly can, and this mitigates expropriation risk and insolvency risk in many cases. A good example would be Cobre Panamá. We have undertakings down the chain and a counterparty located in Panamá . This allows us our own arbitration rights, enhancing our leverage and protecting us while mitigating credit exposure. If we're only to rely on a parent guarantee, the likely outcome could just be waiting for a very long time to get your money back. We think our approach is better, and I think in light of recent events, you'll probably agree too.
More broadly, we view international arbitration as a key risk mitigant, especially for assets that are located in developing countries, where many of the highest quality assets are in fact located these days. Finally, we're always refining our approach, looking at what worked, what didn't, and looking to allocate capital more effectively going forward. Now as we look forward, I'm actually incredibly optimistic about our ability to continue to deploy capital successfully. Part of the reason that I'm so optimistic, if you look at the chart that I have on this slide, you'll see that many projects are advancing through new milestones. That's in light of improving gold prices and other commodities. When you see that, it naturally drives more project financing business, which is a core pillar of our growth going forward.
We're very happy with I-80 and Minerals 260 to have two very recent examples of just that. Now, also a very important lesson that I'll highlight with this slide. Your partners matter a lot when you're investing. It's a lesson I think that cannot be understated. A good asset on its own is not sufficient for success. What have we done? We've looked to work with teams such as those you'll hear from today that have the capability to deliver. By backing these strong teams, we deploy capital more effectively. This chart highlights what we mean. You see the step change in the amount of capital and the number of transactions done with our partners.
Now probably the thing that brings the biggest smile to my face is this slide, because as you can see, the shareholders of our partners have succeeded, and that is very key for us moving forward. We are able to effectively help our partners with patient capital to unlock value. Also key here is that many of these partners have vastly outperformed their peers, something they should all be very proud of. We look forward to hearing their stories a little later today. Now shifting onto royalties and streams outside of precious metals. Everything that I've said already remains consistent here as well. We've always kept some of our powder dry to deploy capital into great endowments at good entry levels. This counter-cyclical approach supports a leading return on capital, as Paul highlighted, as well as share price appreciation.
We see fantastic synergy with these investments, complementing our gold investments very well. We're going to stay opportunistic here, though. We're going to make sure that our precious metals revenue remains at least 80% across the cycle. In fact, within this portfolio, we see great upside coming from copper growth in the near future with Taca Taca and Copper World. Franco-Nevada has had meaningful exposure to diversified commodity royalties really since inception. In environments like we're currently in, with cost pressures and energy market tightness, you really see the benefit of this. It's a winning combination. This slide highlights exactly what we mean by counter-cyclical investing. You can see we deployed capital into the energy space during trough commodity prices, and we're reaping the rewards of that today. Now pivoting to another important slide.
What I'd like to highlight is that across the commodity universe, low risk, long duration assets accrue premium multiples. We have some of the best energy basins in North America reflected in our portfolio and leading iron ore producing regions as well. When you look at many of these coveted asset classes, you see those features reflected in what we have in our portfolio. Now, shifting back for a moment to our most recent investments. As I noted, we have several guest speakers here today who will speak about their projects. This represents a cross-section of some of the key areas driving our growth, namely project finance and acquisition finance. Our first speaker here today is Paddy Downey. Paddy is going to speak to us in a moment about his plans and his team's plans for Quebec's Casa Berardi mine. I'm very excited to hear them.
Paddy, will you please join us?
Thanks, Euan, and thanks to the Franco team for inviting us today. We're very excited to sort of unveil where we're going with Casa Berardi. We just acquired it on the March 23, so it's really first sort of weeks of getting going. We expect a lot of work in the next 12-18 months. We are a multi-asset company now, thanks to the help of the Franco team. We have another operating mine in Burkina Faso that's been going since 2021. We have a sort of a unique way of doing things in the sense that we actually manage all of our own growth. The execution, the build, et cetera, is all by us. We're very proud to say that our two operations in Burkina have been built on time, on budget, in very trying conditions. Our just recently started up hard rock plant.
It normally takes about four quarters to reach nameplate on a hard rock operation. We're at nameplate within six weeks. It's a testament to how we do our business, and we look forward to doing the same at Casa. Casa is in Quebec, as you all probably know. We acquired it, as I said, March 25. Gold production last year was about 91,000 ounces. We expect similar this year. We will have about nine months of that, obviously. Reserves, 1.2 million ounces, and resources of 2.3 million ounces. Reserves at Bomboré are 2.4 million ounces at $1,500 gold and resources are 4.5 million ounces at $1,700 gold. A lot of upside there as well. We got involved with the Franco team in September. They knew about this asset. They talked about teams, which was a big part of them joining with us.
Paul said they would love to work with us after a conversation that Euan and I had. I have to say, I'd never worked with Franco-Nevada before. It was a pleasure working with them on this acquisition. It truly was. They really got stuck in with us on the due diligence, did a lot of the heavy lifting, went to site with us for four or five days, I believe. It was a lot of fun. We eventually, after many months of negotiation, which included many sleepless nights, we closed the transaction in January, which included a $270 million upfront payment of cash and equity. Hecla are 9.9% shareholders, which is really a big part of their upside, and we look forward to them sharing in the upside of this asset with us. Franco-Nevada provided $100 million of cash and we put in $60 million.
We have deferred payments of $80 million. That's $30 million in 18 months and $50 million in 30 months. That really is to allow us to invest back into the asset. We see a huge exploration upside here, and we really want to put that money back into the asset very quickly. We have deferred payments of $241 million. There's two large pits here of a grade of about 2.7 grams per tonne, which is quite high grade for open pit. They aren't permitted, and we worked an agreement that we would only pay once we start producing. It's $80 an ounce for the first 500,000 ounces, no matter what the price of gold, and then $180 an ounce up to $240 million of payment. If those pits don't get permit, and we don't mine those open pits, they obviously don't come into the acquisition price.
A clear path here to, we believe, to unlocking significant value. I have to say on the site visit, big part of what we do and what we look at is the team. Are the team there? Are they going to be actively involved with it? What do they think of the asset? How do they look at the asset? Are they actively engaged? Are they looking forward to participating with us in the next phase of the journey? Because sometimes when you take over an asset, the team want out. They're fed up. They've been going through a sale process. They want to go. They're staying to get their bonus payment on the sale process. That was not the case here. Very engaged team. Franco, their team got exactly that same feeling from it.
They really, really wanted to see the new growth on the asset, and that's very important. When you're coming into a new jurisdiction like Quebec, it's very important to have a group of people on the ground who are really actively driving your investment. It is in Quebec. It's north of La Sarre. Some people say it's remote. It's actually not. If you drove from Val-d'Or to La Sarre , it's about the same drive. Most of the team live in La Sarre. Some of them live in La Sarre , others live in Val-d'Or. A very strong technical team. It's an established operation.
Paul has talked about mineral endowment, and that's what really grabbed me here. There's been 3.2 million ounces of production at this asset. There's over 1.7 million ounces in the open pits. There's another 900,000 ounces underground of inferred and measured indicated and proven and probable, and another 600,000 inferred ounces. That's over 6 million ounces of gold down to an average depth of 700 meters. That's a lot of gold per vertical meter. We think it's still very underexplored. When you've got that sort of mineral endowment in an orogenic system in the Abitibi, it's worth exploring. The mill was built for 3,850 tonnes per day. It was built by Inco or what was TVX Gold, I guess.
It was built based on the mineral endowment per vertical meter. There's the east and the west. We actually met the guy who was on the discovery team, and the discovery hole on the west was 33 meters of over an ounce. Hopefully we can drill some of those holes. We see exactly the same here. Right now, they're only mining 1,000 tonnes a day from underground, simply because they were really winding it down, and 2,600 tonnes per day from the open pit. We see that changing back to 3,000 tonnes- plus from underground.
If you take an example down the road, which is Eldorado's mine in Val-d'Or, they're mining at around 1 million tonnes. This is a 1.4 million tonnes per annum. It's a 6-gram-per-tonne ore body. This ore body was always a 7+ gram- per tonne ore body, and they're doing 180,000 ounces a year. That's the sort of vision that we have for this asset. As I said, it was only discovered in the 1980s. It's not like Timmins or Val-d'Or, where you've got a lot of geology, a lot of rock outcrop. You can see it. A lot of mines in the district.
This has a large clay cover of around 30-50 meters. Geophysics in the day would not find this. Inco actually were drilling what they thought was a VMS plug to the south of Casa Berardi, the fault. Nothing there, so they thankfully drilled a fence of holes to the south and a fence of holes to the north and discovered the Casa Berardi deposit. They got it up and running on the east only, and I'll show you that. Running at over 7 grams per tonne. Gold went to $260. They had a few other operational problems, so they sold it to a company called Orezone. I don't know if you remember that. Orezone drilled the west only. They built a mine, sunk a shaft, developed underground, were producing at 7.6 grams per tonne, doing about 150,000–160,000 ounces a year.
They were subject to a hostile takeover by Alamos, and Hecla came in as the white knight. Hecla mined it fairly successfully for a number of years. Really what happened to Hecla was they had a 24-month strike at Lucky Friday, which curtailed their cash flow. They then bought a company called Klondex for $100 million cash plus $200 million of debt. That lasted for three months, and they had to shut it all down. They did not focus on Casa Berardi. It became an unwanted, unloved asset. They didn't put any capital into it. I'm not judging anybody here. That's just the way it went. They focused on the open pits that they could mine, contract mining, so no capital. You can see the underground started to go down in production. The open pit was what sustained it.
We see it completely differently, as did the Franco team, thank God. It's wide open at depth. Literally what you see here in the red is M&I around existing infrastructure. The blue is inferred. The gray is what's been mined, and you'll see why when I show you the next slide. Essentially, if you looked at a cross-section of this ore body in 2013, when they were taken over by Hecla, it looks exactly the same. There's been no major exploration. There's been no underground development. Hecla focused on two open pits called the EMCP, which is now mined out, and the F160, which is still operating. We're looking to develop the West Mine Complex (WMCP) pit and the Principal pit. We see it completely differently. We're going to really go after the underground exploration. We're going to reopen the east mine and start exploring there again.
Right now, they're mining 1,000 tonnes a day, only from underground at the shaft. They're not using the west ramp because they don't have the equipment. That has not been invested back in over the past number of years. We will reinvest back into that. We look at ramping up to 2,000 tonnes a day underground fairly quickly. We will have seven rigs operating here very soon. We're going up to nine, probably by the end of Q2. A lot of drilling. We expect to drill approximately 100,000 meters a year for the next coming years. You'll also see some announcements on some new key team members coming on to help drive that. We will start exploring beneath the east ore body again, which is a very high-grade system. It's narrower. It's about 10–12 meters wide. The west is 20–60 meters wide.
A very significant ore body. There's a large gap between the east and west that has not been explored for various reasons. Just recently, they've been testing that. We can start to see the results of it, and we see a significant exploration right near surface at the gap. Really and truly a lot of exploration ahead of us. Again, it should be very rapidly ramped up. It is a high-grade mine. The magenta here is +15 grams. You can see why it will develop very quickly, and you can see why Inco built a 3,700 tonnes- per day or 1.4 million tonnes- per- annum mill. The east is quite a planar ore body. Very simple to follow. Not complicated whatsoever. The west was more folded, boudinaged, very wide, very high grade, lots of tonnes per vertical meter.
Again, no exploration below around 1,000 meters. Then in the Principal, again like the east, quite high grade in various areas. Again folded, and then these linear structures that go down at depth. Again, wide open. The mustard color is +4 grams . You can see this is quite a significant ore body. The mineralization around the high grade is still very good grade. We will look to reestablish that high grade. You can see our neighbors, like LaRonde down the road, at 3.7 kilometers deep. Red Lake, at 3.7 kilometers. Westwood, over at two kilometers. Macassa, at 2.25 kilometers. The deepest hole being drilled here is 1.5 kilometers. The average depth of development is 700 meters. There's a lot of exploration to happen here, and we're very excited about it. The other key thing, again, attracted both of us, ourselves and Franco.
It's very unusual to grab an ore body like this and have 37 kilometers of the belt. This is in the Abitibi. We're an orogenic system. You're anchored by an operating mine, and you've got 37 kilometers of the belt that has not been actively explored. Lac Germain was actually discovered by Inco in the 1980s. That's how much exploration's been done here. It truly is down to the fact that it's got that 30–50 meters of thick clay cover. It's not easy exploration. You really have to go after it. I did the same in Sweden, where you had to go down through that sort of thick clay. You really look for gold grains, gold counts, glacial movement. You drill into the bedrock, you look for alteration. Really, the key to this will be alteration. We've seen some really interesting stuff underground recently. Very excited about it.
We will have a separate, very focused regional exploration on this 37 kilometers of strike extent. The other key thing about being in Quebec, there's wonderful tax incentives to do this as an operating mine in the region. That's also a big part of what our strategy will be. We will get at that. We started already. We expect to announce a few, some results of that, so that has been ongoing under our tenure for the past couple of weeks. Also in the portfolio, which we bought from Hecla, was the Hecla Quebec assets. It's the advanced-stage Heva-Hosco, not been explored for five years, 1.9 million ounces of mined inventory there, some of it refractory, but we're in the Cadillac-Larder Lake Break there.
Our neighbors are Agnico, IAMGOLD and Eldorado, so we're in a great address, and we own a chunk of ground, and that's something that we will actively follow up on. We have another asset up in the James Bay area nearby the Éléonore Mine, and another one on the Duvernay on the same break as I believe Amex Exploration is on. Again, something we don't know a lot about right now. Our focus has been Casa Berardi, but we will bring a lot of focus to that in the coming months and years as we get ourselves well established in this region. We have 7,000 hectares of property in the region, so we're quite well endowed and in an area that is undergoing a lot of focus and exploration. We have actually established a lot of good relationships right away.
There is, obviously, First Nations. For us, community is a huge part of our DNA. In Burkina, at Bomboré, we've relocated 3,700 people into new communities, built churches, mosques, hospitals, community centers. We've established local businesses. They're all running on their own now. We will look to establish something similar with the First Nations groups there. We have an impact benefits agreement, but we really want to ensure that they know who we are and what we're going to do going forward, and the same with the local government authorities as well as we look to expand this and develop some of these ore bodies. Right away, we went from 110,000 ounces last year, we'll be looking at around 230,000 to 240,000 this year. Clear line of sight to 350,000. We will become a mid-tier very quickly.
We expect Casa to be a major part of that going forward. We have an expansion planned at Bomboré, and we have a lot of drilling going on at both assets right now. We expect to put out a lot of results, hopefully some very exciting results, from Casa going forward. A new development plan that we will lay out probably in Q3 and Q4, where we'll look to lay out our vision for the project, what we're going to be doing over the coming years, where we see production coming from, and where we see growth coming from at that asset. Look forward to that, and as I said, adding to the team as we move forward into the next stage of our growth.
Before I sign off, it was sort of amazing to me that Franco controls, what's it, 17 million acres with such growth, and I'm thinking, "Wow, I come from an 8-acre farm in Ireland, but it still produced a bit of growth." It's a marvelous story to listen. I've never really truly listened to the Francos, and we're really happy to have you as partners and looking forward to doing you proud and doing our shareholders proud in the coming years. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Paddy. When the team was working through this deal, we got comfortable on our base case assumptions, and then we're thinking about the upside case. I said to the team, "Do you really think that Paddy can find the few million ounces that he's pointing to there in his exploration program?" They said, "Well, lucky Irish." We said, "All right. We're good. Deal's done." Thank you, Paddy.
You're lucky every day.
Next up at the podium, please welcome Richard Young, I-80 Gold.
Well, thank you, Paul. Before I get started, I'd like to make a comment about Paddy. I've known him for quite a while. We worked in West Africa together, and he delivered on everything he said he was going to do almost a decade ago. Congratulations. In turning to I-80 Gold, we've got forward-looking statements that I think everybody's accustomed to. We got our name I-80 Gold because we're located just along Interstate 80 in northern Nevada, where some of the biggest gold mines have discovered. We have four past producing gold mines that were owned by Barrick and Newmont. We're able to acquire those as those companies continued to acquire and they were looking to rationalize assets, and we've been very successful with the drill bits. We've got one of the largest resource portfolios in the state behind Nevada Gold Mines, Barrick and Anglo.
All these deposits have been mined, and so we know the mineralogy and the geology. I joined 18 months ago. We've strengthened the team to execute on this plan. We've refreshed the board so that we've got a board that can assist us as we move forward. We currently produce about 50,000 ounces per year. We laid out 18 months ago, just after I started, a three-phase development plan to grow that to over 600,000 ounces per year, and we're well on our way to achieving that. With Franco's help, and this is my fifth company I've worked with Franco on, they provide what you'd call long-term foundational capital that allows us to bring the other partners in because they know the work that Franco does in arriving at their investment decisions. We've got 6.5 million ounces of measured and indicated gold, 7.5 million ounces of inferred.
We've got another 200 million ounces of silver. On a gold equivalent basis, we have about 16.5 million ounces of gold in Nevada. The blue bars are what we're converting to gold bars. We're converting in 2025 and 2026, and really over that two-year period, we'll spend over $100 million on those infill and step-out drill programs. We're going to convert the blue bars to gold bars, and we'll be reporting reserves beginning this year through the next 12 months. The three underground mines average grade about 8.5 grams, good high grade underground that are going to grow. We've got two of the three open pit deposits, Grant Creek open pit and Mineral Point, both oxide, in the current development plan. Lone Tree will come in a little later on.
We put out five PAs for five of these six gold deposits back a year ago, and it showed production rising to 800,000 ounces. Ultimately, as we work through it, we won't hit 800,000. It'll probably be between 600,000 and 700,000. We've got a clear pathway to become a 600,000+ ounce producer , essentially through 2050. Now, that blue bar, we're about 4 million contained ounces short of delivering 600,000 ounces through roughly about 2050. Where will that come from? That'll come from Lone Tree. It's a 3 million ounce resource that we'll ultimately bring into the mine plan. We're currently drilling with the benefit of Franco-Nevada, Mineral Point, our flagship asset. We expect to add between one million and two million ounces to that.
We expect, on a conservative basis, to add a couple million ounces to our three underground, and then we've got some other open pits that we'll build into the plan. We got between 6 and 7 million ounces of M&I that ultimately we think will come into reserves to allow us to be a very solid, strong mid-tier gold producer for the foreseeable future. Again, a year ago, we put out the PEAs. None of us expect gold prices to be at these levels. We put out the base case at $2,175 gold and $1.6 billion at $3,000 gold. The NAV was, with a 5% discount rate, $4.9 billion. We said at the time we expected those were conservative, and that as we complete the infill drill programs and step-out programs, we thought the numbers would grow. We expect that to grow.
At current metal prices, that NAV would be about $10 billion. Today, with the recap, on a fully diluted basis, we have a little bit over 1.2 billion shares outstanding. Roughly a $2 billion U.S. market cap. There's a lot of room to grow in a great jurisdiction. This Gantt chart lays out the three stages of development and the work that is underway. We put that plan out 18 months ago and are largely on track to deliver on that. A couple of caveats. We've moved some of the technical work forward at Archimedes, one of our two underground that's in phase one, as well as Mineral Point, thanks to the investment by Franco-Nevada. We are aggressively pursuing this plan, and we believe that we'll be able to execute on it. In order to execute on it, we had to recap the balance sheet.
We had about $200 million that was coming due when I first started in the fall of 2024. We didn't have any credible plan to actually repay that debt. We put that development plan out, and we've been able to raise over $1 billion with the capital coming from Franco-Nevada, that foundational capital, that allowed us to bring National Bank and Macquarie in on the senior bank side. We were able to complete a convertible debenture last month led by BMO and National Bank. We're fully funded through the three- phases of development that we've laid out. Since I started in September 2024, we've been very active. We put out a new development plan that we've been executing on. We put out those five PAs that allowed both Franco and the other investors in the stack to come in. We've strengthened the team.
We've completed the technical work on the refurbishment of our autoclave. We're one of two companies in Nevada with a permitted autoclave. The other is Nevada Gold Mines. Hatch built that plant for Santa Fe that was acquired by Newmont. They're currently doing refurbishment. We think that work will be done by Q4 of next year. We've completed the capital. We've added board depth, management depth to be able to execute on the plan. As we move forward, we expect to have five technical reports on those five deposits over the next 12–18 months. That will allow us to convert resources to reserves and really lay the foundation out for that growth plan that we've laid out before. We've got two visas coming out in Q2, and what we're seeing is that more than a 1:1 conversion of Inferred into M&I. The programs have gone very strong.
We put out a press release in advance of participating today on our third underground, Archimedes, with very good drill results. Again, we would expect more than a 1:1 conversion of Inferred into M&I. We've begun the Lone Tree refurbishment. I'll talk a little bit about that shortly. That'll be done late next year. Archimedes is our second underground mine. We put the press release out on those drill results earlier today, but that development program is ahead of schedule, so all things are moving forward very well. Maybe just spend a little bit of time talking about some of the optionality. Granite Creek is our current operation in production. We expect it to produce between 30,000–40,000 ounces this year. What we like about this asset is it's within 10 kilometers of Turquoise Ridge. Turquoise Ridge is a 30 million-ounce discovery within Nevada Gold Mines.
All of our senior team worked at Turquoise Ridge. Our mining contractor continues to work at Turquoise Ridge, and everybody says it's in the same system. When you look at the ore body, the upper portion, which we've been mining, looks like Getchell. Anybody from the 1990s will remember Placer buying Getchell, and that was a bit of a challenge. Poor ground conditions, narrow, but as you get deeper in the South Pacific Zone, you see better ground conditions, better grade, and more latitude to be able to increase mining rates. This is the asset that our geologic team believe have the most option. Advancement rates are going above plan. We put out those early drill results that were better than expected. We think this is going to be a good, solid asset.
Between the two of them, we would expect roughly about 200,000 ounces of annual production through our autoclave that's being refurbished. A little over $400 million to refurbish that autoclave. Hatch is doing that work under an EPCM contract. They built the facility. We've spent about $15 million on the engineering work. We're very comfortable with the execution plan, and so we'd expect to be commissioning in September of next year, and first gold by the end of next year. The real carrot with us is Mineral Point. In the tech report, that was 282,000 gold equivalent ounces over a 17-year mine life, $1,400 AISC. We believe that deposit's going to get bigger. We are looking to move that project forward. Part of the $250 million that Franco put in was earmarked for advancing, expediting Mineral Point.
We're going to spend $50 million on infill drilling, over 400,000 feet of drilling, plus the engineering and early permitting work, and this is going to be our flagship asset. In summary, we've got four past- producing properties. We expect to increase production from 50,000 ounces to over 600,000 ounces over the next five or six years. We are fully funded. Current fully diluted market cap is about $2 billion, and we think the NAV is at least 10x, if not higher, as we complete these programs. That's the I-80 Gold story, and sorry it took more than 15 minutes. Thank you.
Thank you, Richard. When we set out on our partnership strategy, the key part of it was we said, how do we provide financing to teams, where we can make them successful? If we make them and their shareholders successful, then we'll have other people that'll come to us and say, "I want to do that." We said, if we can do that, then we can legitimately continue to grow our business over time. It gets even better when it's actually the same team that comes back and says, "We want to do another deal with you." As Richard mentioned, it's the fifth company that Richard's been with, where he's been engaged with Franco-Nevada. It's been a fantastic partnership, Richard. I think this one is going to be the best one yet. Thank you. Now we invite Mark Wooding up to the stage.
Mark is going to speak to Discovery Silver.
Thanks very much. Thanks, Paul. A pleasure to be here. Again, I apologize for Tony not being able to make it, but he is under the weather, so I'm happily filling in. It's a real honor. I can tell you we very much value our partnership with Franco-Nevada. In getting the Porcupine acquisition completed early last year, the working relationship we had with them was extremely valuable, very much appreciated, and as a partnership, I just think it gets better and better. I noted Patrick's comment about getting his deal done, sleepless nights, and we had a few of those, and they went on for a while. This deal took months to get done. It was a very complex deal, that's the reason for it.
When we finished getting this done and we announced the deal in January, we went to BMO. Paul and his team were very kind to take the Discovery team out for dinner around the time of the conference. We were talking about the war stories of getting this thing done, and I believe Paul said something to the effect of, "Getting this done is kind of like having a baby." I remember that very clearly because my wife was standing right beside us, and without skipping a beat, she said, "No, it is not." No, sir, it is not. I think that gave us all a little bit of perspective on that. We did get it done, and it's just been a great relationship so far.
Because of that, I can stand here today and say that we truly believe we've got one of the most compelling growth stories in the gold industry today. We already had and continue to have one of the most compelling and attractive development stories in the silver space with our Cordero project in Mexico. I'll mention that the rest of my talk, I'll really focus on Porcupine and what we're doing there. The other thing I noted in Paul's earlier comments was the number of times he mentioned exploration and exploration optionality. I've worked with Tony. This is my fourth company now, working with Tony. The success we've had, it all starts with the drill bit. It has in every company we've been at.
I was really interested to get a little update on Detour because that was probably one of the most shining examples of where we got drilling really quickly. We had 10 million ounces of reserve in less than two years. Credit to Agnico because they're leading that project to its full potential, and it's just a terrific mine. This year at Porcupine, we'll be drilling over 208,000 meters. We've got over 20 drill rigs turning now because the exploration potential in this over century-old gold camp is absolutely tremendous. We'll be investing somewhere between $55 million and $75 million. We've already had a couple of press releases out that show the results are extremely favorable. This is going to be a big part of the story.
We're going to ramp up production, but we're also going to have a steady stream of exploration releases out because we're getting good results virtually everywhere we're drilling. We have the forward-looking statement and other cautionary language in the deck. We've put it at the end because I know there have been a lot of cautionary slides. I'll quickly go over to those at the end. This really gets to what we expect to do. Last year, the Porcupine assets produced 234,000 ounces, including the period before we owned them. Based on work we are doing today, we expect to take that production to somewhere between half a million and three-quarters of a million ounces of gold over the next three to five years. I'll give you a sense of where that growth is going to come from.
Through Cordero, I'll mention it quickly, over the same, and I should mention this is about three to five years timeframe. Over that same period, we expect to develop Cordero and bring that in, which would give us about 14 million ounces of silver and considerable, over 200 million pounds of zinc a year. We're not just going to add ounces for the sake of adding ounces. We're going to drive down costs, and we're investing today to do that. We plan to be in the lowest half of the cost curve for both gold and silver. Then you see critical minerals there. We recently announced the acquisition of Glencore's Kidd operations, and I'll give you a little bit of color. That acquisition is going to do great things, we believe, for us, for our Porcupine business, as well as have its own optionality.
I won't get into all the details of what our investment philosophy is that are on that slide, but basically, I can tell you we invest capital with maximizing value for the shareholders in mind. Again, as I said before, that really starts to having a very significant commitment to exploration and drilling to make sure we get all the value we can out of the asset. Last year, in conjunction with the financing for the deal to acquire Porcupine, we issued a technical report at the PEA level. It really involved just a portion of what we acquired. It involved the existing mines in operation at the time, Hoyle Pond, Borden and Pamour, which I'll talk about in a second. This shows the production profile as well as the unit cost performance.
What we can say is we're already beating those numbers, and we expect, obviously, to do a lot more than what's here, where more or less the growth trajectory we're moving forward, we expect to basically do what was in that report in 2028, we're going to do that this year. We're also going to continue to invest to grow production from the existing assets. Then you see the arrow on the right. We've got two very significant near-term projects, Dome and TVZ, and we project around 2029. That's where you see a significant step up in what we expect to produce. The technical report itself, just by executing it, we will improve our unit costs from over $1,900 today.
We think we'll even beat the numbers, and our goal would be to get an AISC that's a lot closer to the $1,000 an ounce by 2031, that's currently shown for cash costs. We will continue to manage to drive our costs down. Now I'm just going to get to talking about the Porcupine assets a little bit. For those who don't know, Tony is born and raised in Timmins. He's worked at these assets. I can tell you that statement's true of about half of our executive team. We know these assets extremely well. Basically, the producing assets today are Hoyle Pond, which is one of Canada's highest grade gold mines. It's produced 4 million ounces since 1987. Never really had more than a few years ahead of it, but it just keeps on replacing. It's one of those mines that just keeps on going.
When Tony was the mine manager at Hoyle Pond in the late 1990s, I think they had something like 40,000 ounces in reserve, and that was 3 million ounces ago, and we fully expect that Hoyle Pond's just going to continue to keep going. Borden is about 190 km southwest of Timmins around Chapleau. It, at one point, was Newmont's largest land position in its global portfolio. The key thing about Borden is there's been very little drilling there other than on the one main mining trend that Probe had. We're already seeing exploration success, and I'll just expand that to say everywhere we're drilling. We're having it at Hoyle, we're having it at Borden. We're extending that trend, and we're also doing district drilling. Pamour is an open pit at, it's an historic mine, but we're just ramping up an open pit. It's got tremendous exploration potential.
The technical report there speaks to getting 150,000 ounces over 22 years. That was really dictated by the milling capacity we expect to have. Pamour's got an opportunity to become much larger. It's open in multiple directions and at depth, and we're already getting good results from district targets nearby. The growth mainly will come from those assets. It's also going to come. Dome is a huge project for us. We have 11 million ounces in resource where there's already an open pit. There's been 17 million ounces produced, and the mill is directly beside the existing pit. We're doing a study now about bringing Dome back into production, and I'd say that those 11 million ounces are all open-pittable, but there's also an underground potential, too. TVZ is a large zone directly adjacent to Hoyle Pond.
I'll talk about it in a moment in a little bit more detail, but it basically has an opportunity to be its own mining operation. Owl Creek is a large district target, 3 kilometers to the west of Hoyle Pond, and we've already had very good exploration results there between surface and the 650 level. You can see how we're rolling up to 280,000 meters very quickly here because we've got a very extensive program going. We've got Hollinger-McIntyre, two historic mines that between the two of them have produced 30 million ounces. We are putting the existing Hollinger pit back into production. Newmont had a program they were executing that they closed the mine in 2024. There was still a year plus left in that program, and we're actually putting it back into operation to finish that out.
The grade at the Hollinger open pit is very good, so we're going to do that. Longer term, we have an opportunity to combine those assets and create a super pit concept, and we're going to look at that very closely. That's a longer-term project. It'll probably be the next iteration of the executive team, but we're going to do the drilling and the groundwork to advance that, and it has huge upside. Just going to go to this one. Just quickly, I'll talk about Kidd. The Kidd acquisition was announced on March 2, and it's got huge upside for us. These are Glencore's assets. It includes the Kidd Met site, the Kidd tailings facility, and the Kidd Creek Mine. The Kidd Creek Mine gives us exposure to critical minerals like copper and zinc and silver. It also has a huge land package with exploration potential.
Big upside here, though, is we get the Kidd Met site, which is a four-circuit processing facility. When I talk about getting us to three-quarters of a million ounces, the one issue that anyone who covers us or who knows us has is we need to add milling capacity. I'm going to talk about Dome Mine in a second, but this gives us the opportunity to reconfigure that mill and to support the growth plans that we have for Porcupine. I won't get into too much detail in the time I have, but this is a big win for us to be able to do this deal. Just getting to Dome. This is the Dome site. You'll see the mill is on the left in yellow. It's the yellow blocks you see there. There is a three-stage crushing system that we need to take out.
It's expensive and inefficient, and it happens to be where we plan to push back the existing pit to bring Dome back in. We're doing a study now on resuming mining at Dome, which will be done late this year. Basically, what you see on the slide, the red outline. The purple outline is the 11 million-ounce open-pittable inferred resource. The red outline is a conceptual pit design that would allow us to access, we believe, somewhere between 5 and 7 million ounces, which would keep us mining for well over a decade, and that doesn't require us to relocate the mill. We're also doing a study on the mill itself to remove the three-stage crushing, put in single-stage crushing and a SAG mill, and also to expand the mill.
The milling strategy that'll come out of that study, obviously getting the Kidd Mine site is going to factor into that, and we will have that released late this year as well. TVZ, very quickly, I mentioned it's a large zone right beside Hoyle Pond. That's the Hoyle Pond underground infrastructure there. Key deliverable this year for us is an NI 43-101 resource which we expect to release late this year. There isn't a resource out on it now, but it's a large zone. It is partially refractory, and we're doing metallurgical testing. That's another thing the Kidd Mine site's going to help us with because there's a flotation circuit there that we plan to convert to a gold processing circuit that will help us produce this material, as well as other refractory ores in the area that we may be able to obtain.
This is really a conceptual production outlook. It's not intended as guidance so much, but what it's meant to show is the opportunities that we have. You can see Hoyle Pond's doing about 65,000 ounces a year now. We believe there's upside there. Borden is doing over 100,000 ounces, but we expect to be able to grow it. Both these underground mines were capital- deprived. They need investment in ventilation. They need investment in new mobile fleets. We're bringing in battery-powered equipment, which we have a lot of experience with from our days at Macassa, and there's great growth potential. I mentioned Pamour. We talk about a super pit at Hollinger-McIntyre, talk about a large pit at Dome that we're going to do. Again, Pamour, you can see the 150 including the technical report. We think we can grow that significantly.
There's just a whole lot of additional opportunities from TVZ, Hollinger-McIntyre. We have other properties like Paymaster. Kidd could give us value creation from mining as well, and we've got several hundred million tonnes of tailings, which we could process, particularly they're economic in today's world. On top of that, you add in Cordero, and I think you see an extremely valuable company. With that, I'll leave it and hand it back to you, Paul.
Thank you, Mark. Now for all the women in the audience, I've just got to clear the air about my childbirth comments. That I wasn't trying to equate the pain of doing a deal with having the pain of having a child. Really what it was is that both are painful and just that if we remembered how painful it was, that you would never do it again. Maybe with childbirth, the reason that you do do it again is because the babies that you produce are so beautiful. In this case, with the deal, you at Discovery, you've got some wonderful babies, and we're looking forward to seeing them grow up. Now we're going to move from in-person to onto the webcast. We have Ryan King from Equinox, who is going to join us and present. Ryan, we're seeing you on the screen.
Please go ahead.
Excellent. Well, thanks very much, Paul, and thanks very much, everybody, Ian and team at Franco-Nevada. It's been a journey. We're in the process now of having our babies grow up to be toddlers with Equinox Gold, and we'll talk about a number of assets in our portfolio that Franco has royalties on. If we could advance the slide, please. Well, as you can imagine, I'll be making some forward-looking statements. Please do take the time to read through some of those details. You can also find a version of that on our website, equinoxgold.com. Next slide, please. I guess we'll talk about probably one of our key cornerstone assets in the portfolio today is the Greenstone gold mine in northern Ontario. This asset has got some history to it. It was a historical mine.
This is a brownfield site that the Equinox team has took from conception of old underground and then envisioned a large open pit. As you can see there today, we've got 5.3 million ounces of gold in proven and probable open pit reserves. We've got 3 million ounces of measured and indicated in addition to the 5.3 million ounces of proven and probable reserves, and some of that comes in the form of an underground opportunity. We'll talk about that in a minute. Just recently, the company came out and published updated technical reports at Greenstone and our Valentine asset, both of which are in Canada.
As you can see there, over the next 10 years, we anticipate, based on these technical reports, that we should see an average of 320,000 ounces a year from Greenstone and a little over 1.1 grams per tonne gold in the open pit. This would be running at about 27,000 tonnes per day. This is a large open-pit asset in northern Ontario. Now, this year we've guided 250,000–300,000 ounces as the asset is still in the process of ramping up. This year, we would envision that we'd probably produce about, again, 250,000–300,000 ounces, but process about 25,000–26,000 tonnes a day. We're working towards getting to that 27,000 tonnes- a- day run rate.
By about the middle of the year or third quarter of the year, we anticipate to be there or beyond that. One of the opportunities in front of us when we look at this asset, we say it's 320,000 ounces over the next 10 years, we do see a number of great opportunities here. This is a very large land package. I think it's over a 400 square kilometer land package. These resources and reserves here are directly at the open pit and underground asset at Greenstone. In addition to the opportunity here, we see a great opportunity of potentially bringing underground resources into the reserve category and then expanding that annual production profile. That's one opportunity in front of us here at Greenstone. Second opportunity, and I'll speak to this briefly, but the second opportunity here is increasing throughput.
First and foremost, the focus is getting the asset 27,000 tonnes a day. The second opportunity, and I've just recently been to site with the technical team, is that they believe there is a very good opportunity to push the throughput here. We see an opportunity to immediately, in the near term, go to 30,000 tonnes a day once we hit the 27,000 tonnes a day. There's a potential opportunity to go beyond that, potentially up to 32,000, maybe 33,000 tonnes a day. There is good opportunity from a throughput perspective, bringing on an underground opportunity, feeding that underground grade and material into the plant as well. This technical report that we just came out with, we do truly believe this is a solid base case from where to work from. In addition to those opportunities, this is an old mining camp.
There's about six past producing underground mines on this site, some of which have resources, most of which have had no modern exploration. There is a very good exploration opportunity here where potentially we could see satellite feeds coming into the Greenstone mill, and therefore either potentially expanding the mine life or increasing annual production. A great base to start from, a great opportunity in front of us. This year is going to be a big year of transitioning from investing and transitioning into a real harvesting cash flow mode now. It's a cornerstone asset for Equinox. Next asset in the portfolio that I'll talk about, the next slide, please, is an even newer mine, the Valentine Gold Mine, which is located in the central region of Newfoundland. This is one of the largest open pit gold mines in Atlantic Canada.
This asset's a little bit behind Greenstone. Greenstone started production in 2024. Valentine just started production last year. Actually, we finished construction in August of last year. We had first gold in September of 2025. First gold to commercial production was only a few months, and in fact, Q4 of last year, we produced a little over 23,000 ounces of gold. The commencement of operations, the transition from construction to operations has gone fairly smoothly. We're now in the process of really ramping this asset up in its phase one capacity, which is 6,800 tonnes a day. We're on track for that. Q1 is just finished up here. We had a solid first quarter. The asset is anticipated to produce 150,000 to 200,000 ounces this year.
Again, this asset, we just announced a technical report, an updated technical report here, which as you can see here, based on the next 10 years of reserve life, we'll be producing a little over 220,000 ounces of gold on average a year. Now, Valentine is new and we're actually in the process of just finalizing our phase two expansion. Albeit the original technical report here envisioned that phase two would be maybe year 2, 3, or 4. We're in the process now of looking at potentially investing capital this year to advance our phase two expansion, to take this plant from a 2.5 million tonnes- per- annum throughput capacity up to 5 million tonnes- per- annum capacity. We're very excited about this opportunity.
We do see good opportunities taking this to this scale, and that would then bring us to that 220,000 ounce- a- year average. Now, in addition to this, Valentine presents a very compelling exploration opportunity. If we think back to when Valentine was really first discovered, it was about 2010. This is a large, big fault system in the central region of Valentine, an orogenic gold deposit. Most of the drilling, in fact, if we look back over the last 10-15 years, has been centered on three different pits. I would say that 90% of the drilling has been confirmation or infill drilling. We've recently started doing some exploration drilling around the pits, along the trend, and we found a new zone. We call this new zone the Frank Zone. I don't have an image of it up here, but it's just south of our third pit.
It's early days here, but some incredible drill results outside of these current mineral resources and reserves you see on the slide. They do not include this. Zones that are drill intercepts that have run 190+ meters at 2.0–2.4 grams per ton gold near surface. Very, very good opportunity for resource expansion. We believe there's an opportunity for another new pit there already at this stage. Again, forward-looking statement, but based on mineral inventory there, we think we've got another 500,000–1 million ounces outside of these resources in that one new zone. In total, this tells us there's tremendous exploration potential at Valentine. This fault system runs about 35 kilometers long, and in the three open pits that we have defined there at Valentine, they're about 6 kilometers of the total 35 kilometers strike length. Exciting opportunity for exploration.
This year we've got $25 million budgeted. About 100,000 meters of drilling will go into this asset this year. Stay tuned for additional updates there, across this portfolio of exploration potential. Next slide, please. In addition to the Canadian assets, Franco also has a royalty at our Mesquite mine. Now, this mine is a heap leach mine located in California. It's been in production for many years, and for many years, it's always only had two to three years of reserve life in front of it. Yet it's the little engine that could. It keeps finding new zones. We continue to expand. As you can see on the slide, we've got a little under 300,000 ounces of reserves, but over 1 million ounces of measured and indicated resources.
Again, this is another one opportunity where we believe we'll likely have an opportunity to convert some of those resources to reserves, extend life, and we're investing this year approximately $10 million to $15 million in Mesquite's exploration program. We do see good opportunity there as well. In terms of future growth outside of our operating assets, again, in the United States, an asset called Castle Mountain. Castle Mountain is a historical heap leach operation. The company is actually going through the permitting process to expand this asset. Based on the previous technical report, the asset could produce a little over 220,000 ounces of gold in the United States a year. We're working through the permitting process there, and we're in the FAST-41 process. Just recently, at the end of last year, we went through a public consultation period.
There is a defined process here, so much so that the defined process has stated that we will get a record of decision by the middle of December 2026. At the same time as we work through that, we're updating the technical report as well, looking at all the opportunities and aspects there. We'll publish that in Q4 of this year as well to dovetail with the timing of that permit. There's no guarantee that we'll get a positive record of decision, but given that we got put in the FAST-41, it is a historical asset, and it has been an operating asset, we believe there's a good chance that we should get a positive record of decision.
Now, on the back of that positive record of decision, we finalize permits with county and state the first half of 2027, and we could be in a position where we begin construction, say, the middle to Q3 of 2027. Likely, a two-year build and starting up production of that asset in middle of 2029, giving us another 200,000 ounces of additional production growth, and obviously a great opportunity for Franco as we unlock more value from the growth of that asset and the construction and build of that asset. Things continue along the path of additional growth. In North America, as Paul pointed out in his presentation, these key assets here, all located in Canada and U.S. Tier 1 mining jurisdictions, a great opportunity for that portfolio and a great opportunity for Equinox Gold as we continue to advance.
In total, this year, Equinox is producing 700,000 to 800,000 ounces. That's our official guidance a t $1,775-$1,875 all-in sustaining costs. At these prices, at $4,000-$5,000 an ounce gold that we are collecting now in our top-line revenue, giving us a significant amount of cash flow, a significant amount of free cash flow. We do believe that the future growth here at Castle Mountain, all of our exploration programs and additional non-sustaining capital are fully funded through our cash flow generation. We were fortunate enough to have the partners of Franco-Nevada to allow us to get to this stage and now start to harvest this cash and put it to work on additional opportunities like Castle Mountain. That's the extent of my presentation. Paul and team, I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has, but I appreciate everyone's time.
It's a quick snapshot there for everyone.
Thank you, Ryan. Now, I don't know if any of you noticed that Equinox Gold has been following Franco around. It started with Castle Mountain and Mesquite, where we own royalties, and they got those assets. We bought the royalties on Greenstone. They bought the mine. We bought royalties on Valentine. They bought the mine. Sitting here, and I just realized I figured out the next M&A deal in Canada. Equinox is going to buy Skeena Resources and Eskay Creek.
Yeah. Well,
Ryan, thank you.
We appreciate your relationship so far.
The next presentation we have, the latest deal that we've done is with Metals 260. Luke McFadden is the CEO of Minerals 260. He will be presenting, coming out of Perth, Australia. I think he is on 3:40 a.m. in Perth. We really appreciate you joining us, Luke.
Thanks, Paul, and thanks Franco-Nevada for the opportunity to present this morning. As Paul mentioned, I'm Luke McFadden, the CEO and Managing Director here at Minerals 260. Yes, it's 3:40 a.m., and I'm feeling wide awake. Yeah, look, Minerals 260 is a relatively new gold company on the ASX, so I won't be insulted if you haven't heard about us before. Certainly, hopefully, in the next 10 to 15 minutes, you're as excited about the company as what we are, and certainly Franco-Nevada were recently. We were recently included on the ASX 300. Today, I'm going to talk about our 4.5 million ounce Bullabulling Gold project. Sorry, next slide, please. The project itself is located 65 kilometers from Kalgoorlie. That's the center of gold mining universe in Australia. The closest major mine is Evolution's Mungari mine, which is 20 kilometers away.
It's really the scale and location that makes this an outstanding asset. Bullabulling itself means large rocks in local Traditional Owner language, and we certainly think they were talking about gold when they named it 50,000 years ago. Just for a bit of context, given I'm in Australia, the dollar figures I mention in the presentation are Australian dollars too, which easily enough was trading around parity with Canadian dollar just last night. Minerals 260 acquired the Bullabulling Gold Project just over 12 months ago. Literally, 12 months and one day, we acquired it. It's certainly been a transformational year for the company, to say the least. 12 months ago, the market cap was AUD 200 million. Nine months, AUD 600 million. Three months, AUD 1 billion. Just yesterday, we just tipped over AUD 1.6 billion.
It's certainly been a fast-moving year, and it's all been driven by the asset, our strategy, and our people. Just a bit of background about Bullabulling itself. It was discovered in the 1980s by Western Mining, operated by Resolute in the 1990s. Between the late 1990s and 2012, it really went through a series of small company ownership. At some point, the asset was also split in half. It was put back together in about 2010 by a company called Bullabulling Gold at the time. Zijin, or "Zijin," bought it in 2014 after a feasibility study came out on it, expecting about 180,000 ounces a year for just over a decade. This became one of these assets that just got lost in a large conglomerate's portfolio. The exploration manager for this was based in Belgrade. He had never been to site.
They drilled less than 20 holes over their 12 years of ownership, so it really was lost in their portfolio. Then we acquired it, just like I said, 12 months ago. The resource today stands at 4.5 million ounces. That is the largest resource in Australia not owned by a producer. We're targeting the release of our feasibility study in the middle of this year. Consensus analyst views on that are looking for us to achieve at around 200,000 ounces a year for approximately 20 years, to give you some context of the scale of the project going forward. The team is led by an incredibly high-quality board. Our chairman, Tim Goyder, is a notoriously successful entrepreneur and mining investor in Australia. He's funded, chaired, and run several highly successful companies. Three ASX 300 companies that he's chaired. Two at the moment.
Minerals 260 is one of them, of course. He owns just over 7% of the shares on issue. Before I joined Minerals 260 three years ago, I was the head of strategy at Oz Minerals. Sorry, which was the copper gold company acquired by BHP a few years ago now. Look, in February, we announced what we call our transformational deal with Franco-Nevada, a $220 million royalty and equity investment. We were certainly rapt to be able to bring Franco-Nevada on board as a partner and as an investor, and we certainly see it as a long relationship going forward. It was actually quite unique. We thought that you could get a deal with a counterparty, that you could actually see it from their perspective as well, and we certainly thought the financial metrics were compelling for both sides.
It really was a bit of a cliché, but a win-win that we thought for both sides. Certainly, for Franco, they get the increased exposure to the leading gold project in Australia, the largest resource not owned by a producer. We certainly expect that resource to grow, which I'll talk about in a moment. For Minerals 260, it was actually all about value. This stood out as really value accretive for us. It de-risks and accelerates our development schedule. We're targeting first production by the end of 2028 calendar year. Like I said, we've introduced the company to a fantastic partner who is backing us to develop and operate Bullabulling. We have completely debunked the myth in Australia that royalties are not attractive funding options for developers. There certainly was a myth going around for many years, probably obviously led by the bankers and brokers.
We certainly know many other developers have stood up and taken notice and certainly contacted me about understanding more about the deal. We certainly like the opportunity to, yeah, debunk that myth. Change the slide, please. Look, in the last 12 months, we've drilled 140,000 meters. We acquired 2.3 million ounces, and 9 months later, we updated the resource to 4.5 million ounces. 3 million of that is indicated. We've commenced our feasibility study work. We've acquired a further 600 square kilometers today. Today we sit on 750 square kilometers of greenstone belt, 45-minute drive from Kalgoorlie. Certainly have become very quickly the dominant land holder in the area. With Franco's investment, we will certainly be drilling a lot more meters than what we would have otherwise done.
We will drill 60,000 meters, up until about June, and then we will recommence the program once we've put out that new resource, like I mentioned. More importantly for us, we will very shortly commence construction of a 400-room accommodation village, and we're accelerating the development of this project in several other ways, including the procurement of long-lead items, early site works, and investment in the water infrastructure. All of that will happen this year, while we are concurrently running studies, and FID is targeted early 2027. We're certainly moving at a speed very few companies in Australia have done before, but it's for two reasons. It's the asset itself, of course, and then it's more recently, it's Franco's investment that allows us to unlock this asset at a much faster and different pace than what we otherwise would have done.
Bullabulling certainly stands head and shoulders above the scale of any other resource in Australia not owned by a producer. The resource that comes out in the middle of the year will have 60,000 meters of new drilling. Last year, we drilled 110,000 meters in eight months. To put that into context, that's more meters drilled by Minerals 260 in that eight months than the last 20 years combined at the asset. There was 530,000 meters drilled at the asset before we took ownership. The average drill depth was 50 meters, and all that drilling was completed when the gold price was $1,000 an ounce or less.
We certainly think there's a lot more to go in terms of growing the resource, given we've only owned it for 12 months and a day, and we've only just begun to piece together the tenure package, and we are running this concurrently to the study. It's a unique value proposition that we've got a growing resource that's going to be unlocked and operational within under three years, but at the same time, we're growing it at the pace that we are. Certainly, the drilling results have exceeded our expectations in many ways, especially with the intercepts that have been some of the highest gram times meter intercepts in the history of the project, which is not easy to do given it's a 40-year-old project.
For us, importantly, the highest grade intercepts we've hit are actually not included in the 4.5-million-ounce resource because we hit them in November and December last year, which is after the time that we'd cut off the database for the resource estimation. When we say we're confident about the resource growing, we've certainly got some key data points to point to towards that. For us, we believe Bullabulling will be the next large-scale, long-life, and high-margin gold mine in Australia. It will certainly establish Minerals 260 as the next ASX gold producer and sit alongside our mid-cap peers on the ASX. It'll be the foundations that we continue to grow the company.
Like I said, we've been acquiring a lot of ground around Coolgardie, where the asset is based, hoping to continue to grow the company in addition to the resource at the same time. In the next 12 months, it'll be an incredibly catalyst-rich period where we will release the PFS, the maiden ore reserve, the DFS, the updated resource, targeting final investment decision early 2027, commencement of construction activities. Thank you for listening, and certainly feel free to ask any questions if you've got any. Thanks, Paul.
Thank you, Luke. I know I said earlier on that with our partners when we do the deal, if we can make our partners successful and their shareholders successful, that actually is the best success for ourselves. Luke, your share price has gone up so much since this deal, I'm starting to wonder, did we overpay?
No, not at all.
I'm just kidding. I am kidding on that. Really, Luke mentioned it, the part of doing this deal and what's important for us in it is cracking the code in Australia and getting people to recognize the value of royalty and stream financing in the Australian market. When we set out to do it, we said, we need to find a party to do it who is a really credible party. In finding Luke and Tim, they are such a well-respected team in Australia that really what has got the ripples going is to see their team take on royalty and stream financing. We couldn't be happier with this deal. Thank you, Luke. In terms of next presentations, we're back to the Franco team.
John Blanchette and Matt Baggeman are gonna speak about some of the other big projects that will be driving our longer term growth. John?
Thanks, Paul, and thanks to our partners for a great overview on their respective projects. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, Matt and I will discuss a few long-term options. As Paul mentioned previously, we have a number of assets, not in our five-year guidance, that could contribute significant GEOs to our annual production. We have highlighted a few on the chart here in the lighter blue and the lighter gold that we'll walk through in more detail, including Antapaccay. At Glencore's Capital Markets Day in December, Glencore provided some additional information on the Coroccohuayco project in Peru, which is expected to significantly expand the mine life of Antapaccay, with copper grades that are approximately 50% higher than Antapaccay reserves. Our stream covers the majority of the Antapaccay concession, including Coroccohuayco, but excludes the recently acquired Quechua project.
Glencore expects a construction decision on Coroccohuayco in the H2 2026, with first production targeted for H2 2029. Average annual gold and silver production at Coroccohuayco is expected to be approximately 53,000 ounces of gold and 1.5 million ounces of silver over a 40-plus year mine life. There are also multiple resources within the Antapaccay district which provide for other potential mine life extensions. Our Antapaccay stream is initially linked to copper but is expected to transition from a copper link to 30% of gold and silver production in 2028. We anticipate that the likely Coroccohuayco expansion will help offset the upcoming step down on the Antapaccay stream and significantly extend the mine life by over 40-plus years. One of our largest potential future contributors that is expected to provide significant growth in the medium term is the Cascabel project in Ecuador.
Cascabel is one of the largest copper gold development projects in the world, with an M&I resource of over 31 million ounces of gold. We purchased a 1% NSR from SolGold for $100 million in 2020 and announced a syndicated $750 million stream in July 2024. As you may have seen, last month, JCC completed the acquisition of SolGold and subsequently exercised their 50% buyback option on the stream and the NSR. As compensation for the buybacks, we received a one-time delivery of gold ounces worth approximately $40.7 million, net of the ongoing payment for the 50% buyback on the stream. On the NSR, we have essentially recouped our capital with approximately $97.5 million in cash for the 50% buyback, resulting in significant return on our investment.
Franco-Nevada's portion of the stream now consists of 7% of gold produced, stepping down to 4.2% after 262,500 ounces of gold have been delivered. The NSR has been reduced to 0.5% on all minerals produced, subject to adjustments based on the production rate. We are excited to partner with JCHX on this project and believe that their ownership reduces the financial risk and provides technical expertise to advance the project. The 2024 PFS supported a large block cave with a mine plan that only represented 18% of the known resource. SolGold has also identified an open pit potential at Tandama, which could accelerate initial production while the block cave is being developed. SolGold estimated that the open pit could occur as early as 2028 and the Alpala block cave in 2030.
Cascabel is a long life asset with the potential to add up to 30,000 GEOs per year to our portfolio. Moving on to New Prosperity. The New Prosperity project in BC is owned by Taseko and is one of the largest copper gold porphyries in Canada. The project hosts an M&I resource of 13 million ounces of gold and 5.3 billion pounds of copper, with a historical technical report highlighting an average production of over 400,000 gold equivalent ounces for a 33-year life of mine. In June 2025, Taseko announced the signing of an agreement with the Tsilhqot'in Nation and the province of British Columbia, providing a potential pathway to project development. Taseko is contributing 22.5% equity interest in New Prosperity to a trust for the benefit of the Tsilhqot'in Nation.
The province of British Columbia and the Tsilhqot'in Nation are now currently working together on a land use planning process for New Prosperity. Franco-Nevada has the right to acquire a 22% gold stream on the New Prosperity project for $350 million. Once in full production, New Prosperity has the potential to add approximately 62,000 GEOs per year to Franco-Nevada, representing greater than 10% growth to our portfolio. I will now turn it over to Matt to discuss a few other assets. Thank you.
All right. Well, thank you, John, and thank you everybody for your time being here today. I'll continue on, going more focused on sort of our royalty assets located within North and South America. Particularly, I'll start first with the Yanacocha royalty in Peru, which covers all of Newmont's Yanacocha and associated Peru projects located nearby with a 1.8% NSR. This includes the currently producing oxide and re-leaching operation from the mine today, which has significantly outperformed our expectations, plus a sulfide project located beneath the oxide footprint. Interestingly though, beneath just these projects alone, we also cover the Quillish high-grade oxide project located adjacent to current operations, as well as the large Conga copper-gold project located nearby.
We were able to acquire this royalty from the prior JV partner and benefited from due diligence, including a site visit, which confirmed that this is one of the greatest gold assets in the world. Gold production to date of more than 40 million ounces and, despite this level of production, there's still more than 40 million ounces of gold equivalent across the various projects to come. Production has recently averaged around 500,000 ounces per year from oxides and releaching, and we now expect approximately half of our payback from the oxides alone, far above our initial production assumptions, and that it does not involve the current resources and the extensive projects beyond that.
Going forward, the projects and the exploration upside and the large land package have the opportunity to contribute from the current approximately 9,000 GEOs per year to up to 25,000 GEOs per year if the projects are producing concurrently, and we expect this production level to be able to maintain for decades. Overall, it's been a great illustration of the optionality within the portfolio, as the re-leaching has delivered significant cash flow that was not anticipated at the time, while still maintaining the extensive upside to come. Moving on and turning to the Arthur Gold project located in Nevada, which is AngloGold Ashanti's flagship development project, where Franco-Nevada holds a 1% NSR. This is one of the most exciting gold stories in the industry today, with the potential to be a new Tier 1 district with rapid resource growth and accelerated path to production.
The current resource of 9.4 million ounces M&I and 6.3 million ounces inferred represents a dramatic increase from nearly three and a half times compared to the initial resource declared only four years prior. While we believe there's extensive upside in the resource to come with more drilling, as demonstrated by the active drill program AngloGold Ashanti has, AngloGold Ashanti is moving forward with an accelerated production timeline based on initial PFS mine life of 9 years, which contemplates 500,000 ounces per year production, but is front-ended with more than 800,000 ounces per year starting in the early years. With federal permitting slated to begin in Q1 of 2027, we see excellent potential for medium-term production starting in the early 2030s. We note that AngloGold Ashanti is pointing towards potential for 18-20 million ounces from numerous exploration upside targets on site.
Our team is similarly excited, and we expect significant resource growth to come, and we expect the mine life to extend beyond the initial nine years, and we also see good potential for the initial 800,000-ounce period to be extended either through grade increases or the potential for expansions in the future of the throughput. Moving on and turning here to Ontario, to the Ring of Fire asset, where Franco-Nevada has unique exposure to this future critical metals hub. We have royalties here ranging from 1% GSR on the Eagle's Nest mine to 2%-3% NSR on the broader chromite deposits.
Our royalty coverage here is extensive, noting the fact that we got in fairly early, with approximately 1,000 square kilometer covered, including the Eagle's Nest project as noted, which will likely be the first asset to be developed in this area, which is a high-grade nickel, copper and PGM project. Eagle's Nest represents one of the largest undeveloped high-grade nickel projects globally, with an FS supporting 15 years of initial production and significant potential for extensions at depth. What's really unique about the Ring of Fire is the extensive chromite deposits, which are unique in North America at this scale and have potential to provide significant strategic advantages as a critical metals hub in the future. As the Eagle's Nest mine is first developed, it will provide significant synergies to allow access to some of those chromite deposits, which could provide many decades of GEO's contributions.
This project has very strong government support within the country, and we look forward to being advanced under Wyloo's leadership. Finally, I'm going to speak briefly on Rogozna. As Paul had mentioned earlier on, this is one of the unique optionality plays within our portfolio. Franco-Nevada has a 2% NSR on the gold and 1.5% NSR on the base metals. Serica Metals is advancing this project in Serbia. The deposit has been a very exciting exploration story, both internally and externally, with a rapidly growing resource increased from an initial 2 million ounces of gold equivalent to more than 8.6 million ounces in 2025. Just a four-year time period as well there.
Project is being actively explored with an ongoing exploration program and a PFS due in the H1 of 2027, and we expect resource updates all along the way given the ongoing drill program, which will likely see it continue to grow. The royalty stands out to me as just a great example of the benefits of the royalty model and being able to get in early on some of these exploration plays, with outside capital coming in and moving them forward in sort of unanticipated timelines. This royalty was purchased in a portfolio. We noted it as an attractive exploration target. That was about it. We ascribed very nominal value to it. As you can see now, since that time, effectively nothing but exploration grounds, now 8 million ounces.
It really demonstrates the value and optionality contained within our portfolio, often in places where we might not initially ascribe that value. Hopefully these projects have highlighted some of the unique attributes of our portfolio and give consideration of some of the upside. I think it just scratches the surface of what we have. With that, I'll turn it over to Sandeep Rana.
Thanks, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to briefly talk about our available capital allocation policy, and our guidance and outlook. Just move it here. Okay. At the beginning of 2025, we had about $1.5 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Then during the year with the high commodity prices, we generated another $1.5 billion in operating cash flow. A significant amount of capital to spend. As Ian highlighted, we deployed over $2 billion of capital in 2025 on good long life, high-quality assets in good mineral jurisdictions.
When you factor in that $2 billion that we spent along with the dividend, we ended up the year with about $670 million in cash. Taking that $670 million, adding in the $1.5 billion credit facility that we have, which does include a $500 million accordion, and our equity portfolio of roughly $900 million at the end of 2025, we ended up with about $3.1 billion of available capital, and that's essentially where we sit right now. Subsequent to year-end, we did deploy about another $500 million in the new transactions that we've announced. That has essentially been funded through cash flow from operations. We have a lot of firepower to continue to add to the portfolio. The one area I want to just quickly touch on is on our marketable securities. I don't think it gets enough attention by investors and analysts.
The way the accounting works is any unrealized gains or losses associated with that equity portfolio actually does not flow through EPS. If you look at last year, that portfolio generated an after-tax unrealized gain of $700 million. On an EPS basis, that's $3.60. Our regular adjusted EPS for our royalty stream business was $5.58. That's a significant amount of value that does not go through our earnings. I just wanted to highlight that. One reason we do generate so much cash flow is because we are a very high margin business. In 2025, our EBITDA margin was 90%, and our earnings margin was just under 60%. As you can see on the slide, as the gold price has gone up, our margin has increased quite significantly in 2025. As we all know, the gold price almost doubled that year.
You can see the cost per geo has gone from $242 an ounce in 2020 to $325 in 2025. That's a 34% increase over that time frame. While our margin has gone from $1,528 per ounce to $3,110, over 200%. As the gold price goes up, our margin goes up, and so we do have actual leverage to the gold price. The other element of our cost structure is G&A. I really love this slide because it basically shows how scalable our business model is. From 2008 to 2025, our revenue's gone up almost tenfold, but our G&A has remained essentially flat. We have just over 40 employees, and we could increase the size of our company significantly from an asset standpoint, and our G&A would not increase that much.
It's just the power of the business model, along with optionality, is just the scalability of the business. Obviously, we do generate a lot of cash, significant at these commodity prices, but we do have a credit facility of $1 billion, and a $500 million accordion feature associated with it. We're not opposed to using debt. In fact, the red bars there show that when we were in a net debt position, obviously 2015 and 2016, when we added the precious metals streams on long life base metal assets, and then 2018 and 2019, when we deployed a significant amount of capital in the energy sector. In fact, last year, we drew down on the credit facility as well when we did the Arthur transaction for $175 million, but we repaid that within a couple of months. We're happy to use the credit facility.
We kind of use it like a credit card. You draw on it and then you pay it off as fast as possible. We could easily upsize this, but we just don't like to pay the fees. Right now, we're content with a billion-dollar credit facility. Obviously, our priority is to use our cash to add good assets to the portfolio, long life, big mining jurisdiction. Giving back to shareholders is also important, and our philosophy on the dividend is progressive and sustainable. We want to be in a position where we never have to cut the dividend, but actually raise it every single year, regardless of what's going on with commodity prices. We're very proud of the fact that in January, we raised it 16% to $0.44 USD per share per quarter. That's $1.76 annualized. That's the 19th consecutive year-over-year increase for the dividend.
In total, we paid over $2.8 billion to shareholders since our IPO. That's worked out to about a 13% CAGR on our dividend per year. Just finally, just our guidance and our outlook. I just want to highlight, when we give guidance, we give guidance based on gold equivalent ounces sold and not gold equivalent ounces produced. Our measure is after recoveries, payabilities, and refining deductions. I think it's a better metric when you're trying to derive revenue and obviously the rest of the financial metrics that are associated with that. Two changes for 2026. First of all, we did have discussions with investors and analysts, and so now we are giving ranges for specific commodities. As you can see on the slide, gold ounces sold, we are actually giving a specific range for silver ounces and PGM ounces.
For diversified, that business, we're giving a revenue range. In this case, $245 million to $285 million. Secondly, when we convert all of these to gold equivalent ounces, we are using a fixed conversion ratio. For 2026, we will be using $4,500 gold. Every quarter when we're coming out with our gold equivalent sold metric, it'll all be based off of a $4,500 gold price. The big movers for our guidance in 2026 to that 510,000-570,000 GEOs range is the benefit of full year from acquisitions we did last year, Porcupine and Côté. Obviously, the two new ones we did this year with I -80 Gold and Casa Berardi with Aurzone. Those are key components. Obviously, Valentine Lake, getting a full year ramp up of that mine, adding to our ounces for 2026.
What is not included in here is Cobre Panamá. As you would have seen yesterday, the press release that the Panamanian government has given approval for First Quantum to begin processing the ore stockpile. We estimate that's about 27,000 GEOs to Franco's account. We do expect some ounces this year. We just don't know the timing. Right now our estimate is probably towards the second half of this year, we'll start to receive some ounces with the balance coming in 2027. As we get more information, we'll be happy to disclose more specifics. When you look out to 2030, our geo range increases about 13% to 555,000-615,000 GEOs. Number of components to this is new mines getting built, Cascabel, Eskay Creek, Stibnite Gold, Tandama. Obviously, there's a number of mine expansions that are occurring, Magino, Detour Lake, and Castle Mountain.
This is net of the step downs at Candelaria, which is going to happen in 2027 and Antamina in 2028. A good amount of growth, 13%. If you add in Cobre, which again is not included here, and Cobre fully ramped up is about 150,000-175,000 GEOs a year. It's 45% growth. A key element of this is the bulk of this growth is paid for. We don't have $1 billion to spend to add this growth. For us, our largest capital outlay will be on Cascabel, which will be a couple hundred million- dollars. The bulk of this growth is fully paid for. The other element that's not included here is the organic growth that's still to come.
Because with the amount of money that operators are generating right now, we know there'll be further mine expansions, exploration drilling, as we've heard today. We look forward to that additional growth that is not factored in here. With that, I will turn it over to Paul for closing remarks.
Thank you, Sandy. Sometimes I push Sandy, but I say I need a more aggressive CFO because why can't we give those production numbers like everybody else does for our guidance? Because I see them report it's 10%, 20% higher than what their actual sales are. Anyway, I haven't had any luck in convincing him, I guess. That concludes all of our presentations. Thank you for your patience. We would love to take, first of all, any questions that come from the floor here. You're welcome, questions for anybody in our team, questions for any of our partners here. My one ask is we will pass you a microphone just so that the folks on the webcast can hear any questions. I think we got one right over there.
Thank you, gentlemen, for today's presentation. It's Lawson Winder from Bank of America. I wanted to ask, going back to one of the slides you spoke to earlier in the presentation about the pipeline. You touched on your success at adding ounces in the last year and a bit, but just looking forward, what are you seeing in the pipeline for 2026? You're highlighting $1.5 billion of liquidity. Is it possible there's enough in the pipeline for all of that to be consumed?
Go ahead, Euan.
Thanks for the question, Lawson. The pipeline remains very healthy. Overall, a lot of the key constituents of our growth over the past couple of years, they remain intact. You would have noted already this year, we've participated in project financings. I expect, given the backdrop with higher gold prices, that more projects will advance. I'm hoping to see more of that type of financing. As well, third-party royalties, as you saw last year with Detour, can make up a meaningful component of our growth. I expect to see some of those in light of the current gold prices come through. Notably, I think, given recent transactions in Australia and also with BHP, I think the market has taken notice. I'm hopeful we'll see some by-product streams as well.
If I could just follow up on that in terms of the sizing, and then I'll pass the mic to this gentleman right here. One of your peers recently announced a transaction in which it took on a really enormous amount of debt. You guys have been very conservative through your entire history in terms of the amount of debt, only a very small amount in that 2018 and 2019 period when you added some oil and gas assets. Has your thinking on that changed at all? Could you add a material amount of debt? Particularly when you look at the quality of the business and the margins, what could be the upper limit of the debt that could be added? Are we talking one, two times net leverage? I'll leave it to that. Thank you.
Thanks for the question, Lawson. As I said, we're not opposed to adding debt to the balance sheet. It just comes down to what's the level. In terms of a specific number, 1.0x EBITDA might be reasonable. The way we look at the business is you want as much financial flexibility when opportunities arise, and so if you do have a large amount of debt, because obviously we could manage 2.0x, but if a large transaction comes along, we'll kind of hinder it in terms of being able to complete that transaction. It all comes down to financial flexibility. A certain amount of debt on the balance sheet that we can pay off very quickly, we're open to, but a significant amount that would take longer, that is something that doesn't fit with our business model.
Hi. Francisco Carrillo from Karlo Capital. First of all, thank you for such a wonderful meeting and congratulations. Obviously, the numbers that we see and the information that we hear today from you are years of very consistent underwriting and long-term planning, so congratulations for that. My question is a follow-up on Lawson's, and thinking about the current environment we are living through and looking at some of your competitors' actions and the scarcity of these nice Tier 1 assets that you will look for, how do you think about the underwriting policies?
Do you think that you need to relax a little bit of the hurdles that you might have had in the past of the minimum returns that you would go for a specific project because of the current environment? Will that remain as high as they've been in the past and that have generated what we have today? This comes into question because, how do you think about if you get another $1.5 billion to $2 billion, whatever, cash flow this year, is it okay to have that cash pile grow and just sit in the balance sheet and wait for better opportunities? How are you thinking about all of that?
Well, thanks, Francisco. A couple of things there, and maybe I'll go back to the comment, the transaction that we saw from BHP selling a stream on Antamina, which is a super asset. The main takeaway from that was, here you had world's biggest mining company selling a royalty and stream where they had no financial distress. That was really their only reason for doing the deal was because they felt that it would highlight the daylight value that they had in the portfolio to their investors that wasn't being recognized. The incredible thing is BHP, even the size that they were, they announced that deal, albeit along with their earnings on the same day, their stock price went up 7.5%. That really raised a lot of eyebrows, because for many years, decades, the senior players have not typically done stream and royalty financing.
I do think that has opened the eyes of a lot of people. I think that you would likely see more deal activity that comes on the back of that. That, and along with some of the drivers of the pipeline that Ian mentioned, we think it's gonna be a very productive time. That's a long way to answer your question of, I don't think we need to change our investment metrics at all. I think we will stick to our same disciplines. One of the key things I was alluding to earlier in the presentation is our focus is on gold and precious metals, and we will invest through the market in doing that. You do have to have a gut sense of where are you in the cycle?
If you wanna spend a lot of capital at the bottom of the cycle, you wanna keep spending through the top of the cycle, but you don't wanna be betting the farm at the top of the cycle. We've had a tremendous run in gold. I hope it keeps going on, but it has been a good run. This is also the point in time when you look around to say, let's look at other commodities to see could there be other value in other commodities. In this market, I think we're open. I think there are good opportunities, gold and precious metal. I think there may be some good opportunities in other commodities as well. First thing there is, we've got plenty of capital. I'm not worried. That's gonna build up the stage. We see lots of potential ahead of us.
I think we will deploy it. Even if the opportunities don't come to pass and we do build up capital, we're happy to do that. This is a very long-term business. You can't expect that the day that you got the money, that a great deal is gonna come along and you can spend it. If we need to be patient and wait for the good deals to come along, absolutely we'll do that.
Yes. What can you add on Cobre Panamá timeline and negotiations? Has the environmental assessment been completed? When is the negotiation with the government going to happen? A little bit about maybe if you can talk about the mood in Panamá towards reopening the mine.
Well, thanks. A good question. Very happy to answer it, especially today, having just seen yesterday that the Panamanian government did give formal approval for First Quantum to go ahead and process the stockpiles at the mine site. That follows on, we've seen since Molino came on, in his very first weeks of presidency, he said he was open to a discussion on the mine. Since then, he's approved the preservation safe maintenance plan, approved the shipping of the concentrates that had been trapped at site after the protests, approved the reopening of the power plants. The power plants are now operating again. They're pushing power onto the grid in Panamá . This is now the next step that he's approved, restarting the mills.
I believe First Quantum will start at least one of the lines, so that they can process the ore that was blasted previously but hasn't yet been put through the mill. The first thing, my read of it, is it shows the ongoing intent of the government in Panamá to take this seriously, the potential reopening of the mine. The second thing is, from First Quantum's perspective, it does allow them to start operationalizing. From a 7,000-employee workforce, they were down to 700 for care and maintenance. They are hiring another 1,000 employees that they can take the step to process the stockpiles. I think they have already hired 700, 800 of that 1,000. They're well on their way.
It allows them to start that process so that if and when they get a go decision, they're actually able to get back into production in a reasonable amount of time. You ask about the environmental review, I understand that it is mostly completed. The timeline was to try and get it done in April. I think that will be achieved. I'm hopeful that in a month or so that we could see some announcement out of government that gives the results of that review. I hope that will then help them address what was one of the biggest concerns when you had the protests 18 months or so ago that were around, was there environmental damage that was being done at the site? I'm pretty confident that this report will come out to say there is no material environmental damage. There's no non-conformance.
This is a mine that is very well run. The next part of it, when do negotiations start? I don't know. I would hope that once that environmental report is out, if there is a good response to that, I would hope that that sets the scene that the government can then start a formal negotiation with the company.
Sorry, can you hear me? Brian MacArthur, Raymond James. The business has evolved a lot over the last, whatever, 25 and 30 years. Now you're willing to do debt, equity, but obviously your goal is a stream or a royalty at the end. When you look at the full package, ideally, how much of the stream or royalty component do you want to be of that package, given you get a higher multiple on that? Is my first question. If you did $1 billion deals, would you put in $500 million of equity and $500 million for a stream? The second part is, if you do deals in other commodities, would you be willing to do the same thing, give a full package?
When you look at other commodities counter-cyclically, are those just going to be stream and royalty deals, which is more your traditional business that you get a better multiple?
Thank you, Brian. Good questions. The objective in us doing any deal is to create a new stream or a new royalty. We know we need to address the needs of the operators. We need to help them to achieve their objectives. If doing some debt, some equity along with that helps achieve the objective, then it gets the end result for us. The majority of the deal needs to be the stream or the royalty in terms of the capital deployed. That's been our strategy. We may be wrong because, in fact, on the equity investments we've made, we've done much better so far.
With us.
... than on the streams of royalties. Maybe we'll change that for next year. For now, that is where we're going and extrapolating that to other commodities where potentially we could take some exposure, but we're less inclined. We've got a lot more choice. You've got the whole gamut of all the other commodities. Some of them are much bigger than gold. There's a lot more opportunity. I think we can source opportunities in the other areas without using a lot of debt and equity. Again, there's no hard rules, more just a direction.
Thank you.
Are there any more questions in the room here? I'm not seeing any hands for now, so I'm looking over to Lloyd and Candida, who've got any incoming questions from the webcast. Have we got any from the webcast?
No questions on the webcast.
Okay. Well, with that, we will conclude the events for today. Thank you all very much for your attendance, and thank you to all the folks participating on the webcast and presenting. Hope everybody has a good day. With that, we'll conclude the webcast.