First of all, we'd like to thank everyone for coming and joining us today for IAMGOLD's 2018 Investor Day. I'm Ken Chernin, Vice President of Investor Relations at IAMGOLD. Please note that we are webcasting this live. With us today from the executive team are Stephen Letwin, President and CEO of IAMGOLD, Carol Banducci, Executive Vice President and CFO, Gordon Stothart, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Ben Little, SVP Corporate Affairs, HSS, and People, and Craig MacDougall, SVP Exploration. Joining us from our operations team, we have Oumar Toguyeni, who is Regional Vice President, West Africa, Suresh Kalathil, who's General Manager at Rosebel, and Martial Tremblay, General Manager, Westwood. We also have Philip Gauthier, who is Director Development Projects. From our board of directors today, we have Don Charter, who is our Chairman of the Boards, and Mahendra Naik.
As per usual, I'll just have you look at our cautionary statement. Please note that our remarks during today's presentation will include forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary language regarding forward-looking information in our disclosure documents, and be advised that the same cautionary language applies to our remarks during the call. Today's event is largely broken down into four segments. The executive overview, the Americas, West Africa, and closing. In the interest of staying on schedule, we will take questions at the end of each segment. We will also have a brief break period of 10 minutes, which will take place after Philip Gauthier discusses the Côté Gold Project. Finally, in the event of an emergency evacuation, please note that there are two exit signs behind me. Of course, there are corresponding doors with the signs and an exit located by the elevators.
I'll now turn the podium over to our President and CEO, Steve Letwin.
Well, good afternoon, everybody. As Ken said, thank you so much for coming today. I know it is tough out there. I've talked to a number of you about where the gold price sits and where, more importantly, it has fallen to of late, and also the sentiment. We're competing with a lot of different things in the marketplace right now. The cannabis deals obviously have taken a lot of the limelight. ETF flows. It's been hard. I talked to one individual on the sales desk, I think it was about 1:00 P.M. in the afternoon, and he hadn't had one call on gold equities that morning. We know that it is very tough and we are even more appreciative of the fact that you've taken the time to come and listen to our story today.
I also want to say that there are a few of you in my vintage, not a lot of you, a lot younger, but I also know that we are in a cycle where this is a business that has been through many cycles. I do believe, quite sincerely, that we will see an uptick in gold prices. I'm not predicting a Pierre Lassonde kind of rebound in prices to CAD 5,000 an ounce, I do think that gold has a good potential to move up versus down. I do believe that the space for gold, where the demand has remained very strong with buying in Russia, China, India, et cetera, that this environment will prove to be a good one for companies like IAMGOLD and other gold equities going forward.
I know and I absolutely understand the frustration that's out there with respect to the gold business, been through it before in other commodities. I just wanted to tell you that quite sincerely, I feel very confident that we're going to see this commodity perform, and I do believe the sentiment will come back. I believe the US dollar will start behaving a little bit more friendlier to our commodity and we will see the sentiment turn in our favor. On that note, I want to talk a little bit about There we go. What's happened at IAMGOLD? If I can do anything this morning, or this afternoon, I should say, is to maybe leave you with a few key messages.
You're going to hear this afternoon from some of our top performers about what we believe is going to be very exciting for the company going forward. On that note, if you take a look at where the company has gone over the last three to five years, there's been some dramatic changes. I'll start a little bit with the geographic diversification. When I joined the company, we were very heavily focused, as you can see, in Africa and South America. I don't want to leave the impression that we're allergic to Africa or we're biased negatively about having Africa and South America. We are very proactive And very pro in favor of investing in Africa. That's where we started.
I think our view, and I brought this perhaps from my oil and gas experience, was that some geographic diversification from a risk standpoint was probably worthwhile pursuing, and we did that. You can see that from 2011 to 2017, the look of IAMGOLD has changed dramatically, and we put much more weight on North America. As we develop Côté, as we develop Rosebel, as we further develop Westwood, as we further develop Monster Lake, Nelligan, as we further develop Boto, that pie distribution will probably get to a third, a third, a third in its concentration. I particularly like that, because as you know, sentiments change. When I joined this industry, Europe was in love with Africa. Europe isn't so much in love with Africa now.
North America has had its challenges and will continue to have its challenges because it's getting tougher and tougher to find deposits. A lot of the gold-rich deposits, as we know, are in Africa, are in South America. Just to tell you that there has been a meaningful transition to what I believe is a more diversified portfolio. The other comment I'd make is that, the analysts in the room will say this, and I know going back in time, this is where a lot of the challenges and criticisms were for IAMGOLD. We had two major issues we had to deal with, cost structure and reserve life. Listen, we knew and we know today that our costs have to come down.
We were trending like a lot of people that were ounce-driven towards CAD 1,300, CAD 1,400 AISC, and when gold started to fall back towards CAD 1,000, that obviously was totally and completely unacceptable. The other thing that's changed is the management team in this room is 40% lighter than it was 5 years ago. The board of directors is 40% lighter than it was 5 years ago. We have cut our costs dramatically. As we've changed our geographic diversification, as we've changed our strategy around moving towards what I call in the oil and gas business, where I came from, a short cycle approach for reserves discovery and cost reduction, this company has transformed itself. Our costs now are lingering around CAD 1,000 an ounce AISC, and we're forecasting it to drop another 20%-25% over the next 4-5 years. Our production moving up.
One message for you today, count on us continuing the trend of reducing AISC, growing reserves, growing our production, and minimizing risk of discovery because a lot of this is in our backyard. That is a very strong message I hope you take away with you today. The other message belongs to very artful management by our CFO Carol Banducci, around a strong balance sheet. While Gordon Stothart, who very carefully and successfully managed the operations side in reducing costs, and Craig MacDougall continue to discover more and more ounces, Carol maintained and built a very strong balance sheet. Here's the other message. If gold does continue to fall, this company is not the same company it was 3-5 years ago. It is very resilient. We have a lot of cash, CAD 830 million in cash.
We have a very strong position with our creditors in terms of the banks. Our debt's not due till 2025. This company is in much better shape financially than it was 3-5 years ago. Operationally, much improved. Exploration-wise, much more successful with a far smaller budget. Financially, in really good shape to withstand any kind of major trauma in gold prices. Coupled with that is the fact that if gold prices happen to move up, please God, we are highly levered to gold prices, and our stock, as you can tell, is reacting that way. A lot of great success addressing one of those major challenges. You've seen a big increase in our reserves, and you're going to continue to see with announcements that are going to be coming, added reserves.
Our goal is to get basically to a 16-year reserve life with 1 million ounces a year. A far cry from where we were 3 years ago, less than 8 years and falling. Credit to Craig MacDougall and his team for going from a CAD 150 million budget to a CAD 30 million budget and being more successful. A great achievement, and that will be reflected in a lot of what you're going to see today. This particular graph drives the title of our presentation. Our annual report and our presentation is called Execute and Communicate. Those two keywords drive everything we're doing today. All of our metrics at the sites, all of our metrics at corporate, are driven around execution of a strategy that is very well documented and very well understood by every employee of IAMGOLD.
This is extremely critical to us, because if we are successful in delivering on our strategy, we will build our production from where it is today at 875,000 ounces, rounding numbers, to 1.3 million ounces over the next 4 years. At CAD 1,300 gold and a continued reduction in our costs from around CAD 1,000, CAD 1,050 towards CAD 800, CAD 850, our cash flow more than doubles just by executing what we have in front of us. It's not boring. There are a lot of catalysts that we have to deliver on to make this happen. Every morning, and I'm not exaggerating, we check boxes about where we are, and these GMs will tell you, whether it's a phone call from me or Gord or Carol, we're asking, "How are you doing on Saramacca, Suresh? How are you doing on the heap leach, Mark, Bruno? Martial, how is the Westwood ramp-up going?
Phil Gauthier, how is Côté moving along? Steve Walls, how is Côté moving along? Boto, where is that sitting?" In these numbers, we don't have Sadiola. Where's Oumar? There he is. Oumar, who's been a huge contributor to our company and was named extraordinary leader of the year last year by his employee peers and management, has been working hard on Sadiola. Sadiola is not in these numbers, and we'll talk about why later in the presentation. Boto will come later, and the success at Essakane with Oumar and Bruno has been absolutely outstanding. We don't have any M&A in these numbers, and our top 5 shareholders give me this message: "Please do not do something stupid." I get that a lot, and maybe I look stupid, but they say to us, "You have got a great portfolio of opportunities in front of you.
We hold your stock because of the future look it has without taking risk around major acquisitions." That is a critical message that should be pointed out as well, coming from our major shareholders. Our major shareholders have been major shareholders for the last 3 years. Last month, we had 5 new shareholders, and these new shareholders are, for the most part, from family offices. Whether they are in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Norway, Finland, these are some of the countries that are buying our stock. They're buying our stock because they're worried about the Dow, they think the US dollar has been overbought, and they like the look of this graph. They like the risk because it's manageable. Anh, there's Anh, our Internal Audit and Enterprise Risk guy, keeps us on a leash with risk. Don't you, Anh? Those are the messages, ladies and gentlemen.
I've been at this almost eight years, and yes, I'm still here. We don't like some of the train wrecks that have happened in the industry, and our hearts go out to a lot of the gold companies that have gone through it. We've gone through it. The other message is, let's not forget where we came from, and let's not drink too much of our own whiskey. Make sure we execute and communicate to you and ourselves about this particular strategy, which I think is enviable, but let's not take it for granted. Make sure we deliver what we say we're going to deliver, and I think you've seen that in our performance. This sums up contributions from Rosebel, Essakane, Westwood, and Côté. We were just at Côté on the weekend. We were at Essakane with a number of you the week before.
You saw it for yourselves. Beyond this, beyond the 1.3 million, we have some great future growth opportunities that you're going to hear about today. We have a good look. Let's not take it for granted. Execute on it, and deliver these deliverables that we say we're going to do and make sure you can check the box as we go forward towards adding value for our shareholders. On that note, I'll turn it over to Carol Banducci.
Well, good afternoon, everyone. As we look at our financial position for the company, there's really three key messages I want to leave with you today. One, as Steve alluded to, we are managing to an investment-grade balance sheet. Number two is, it wasn't that long ago that we saw gold prices down at $1,060, 2015. We have implemented a lot of financial discipline within this organization, and that continues to today. We manage with a significant amount of financial discipline when it comes to our operating costs and when it comes to our capital deployment. The third message is, we do not hedge our commodity gold, but we won't hesitate hedging some of our input costs, and you've seen us do that as it relates to our currency exposure, and you've seen it as it relates to our fuel exposure.
On top of that, we've also implemented some pretty innovative opportunities where we've put a solar plant both at Rosebel and at Essakane. We'll continue to look for those innovative opportunities to manage our input costs. As I said, we're going to manage to an investment-grade balance sheet. As you can see today, we have an industry-leading balance sheet. We've got CAD 830 million of cash on the balance sheet, and our net cash position, our net debt position is just over CAD 400 million. I should point out that later on this year, we expect to receive another CAD 95 million from the sale of 30% interest in Côté to Sumitomo. We're very well capitalized with a lot of liquidity. We have CAD 400 million of long-term debt that's not due till 2025.
We've got CAD 800 million of cash on the balance sheet. We have almost CAD 250 million of unutilized credit facility. Over CAD 1.1 billion of liquidity. If you take a look at our credit metrics, you can see that our net debt obviously is zero with the cash position, and our gross debt is just around 1 times. Interest coverage at 14 times, and you can see on the right side here what our covenants are relative to our credit facility. Our total debt to total capitalization is below 15%. Again, investment grade. This summarizes, and you have seen this in our disclosure, the hedging programs that we've put in place with respect to the Canadian dollar, the euro, as well as the Brent and WTI.
You can see that we're mostly hedged on the currency side for 2018, and as we've seen the Canadian dollar weaken and the euro weaken, we're looking for opportunities to layer on top of that coverage. On the commodity side, as it pertains to fuel, you can see that over the next five years, we're hedged somewhere between 50% and 75%. Before I turn it over to Ben, one other important message I want to leave with you, and Steve showed what happens to our reserves over the next few years in terms of just the shifting, where they were and where they are today.
As you look at our business and as we look at ramping up Westwood and we're looking at developing Côté, we're going to move from today, with most of our income being generated from Essakane and Rosebel, to a significant amount of income being generated in Canada. It's going to be upwards on a very rounded basis, around 50% by 2022. We're going to achieve a financial benefit from that. Not only are we going to grow the business, and as Steve said, our production is growing, our all-in sustaining costs are coming down, so our margins are improving. Because we've got large tax pools in Canada, we'll be paying mining duties on Westwood and on Côté, so in Quebec and Ontario, but we don't expect to be paying income taxes for a significant number of years in Canada.
We'll get an added benefit from being able to shelter the income with our pools. Just a great position to be in, and our goal is to continue to maintain a very outstanding financial position. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Ben.
I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about how we manage country risk, which is an important part of the business. I think we've all seen recently, in the industry, the consequences of not getting this part of the business right. The focus of our efforts in this area is in Suriname and in Burkina Faso, obviously, where the bulk of our production comes from. Managing country risk includes a pretty wide variety of different items, from local stakeholder engagement, material negotiations, and issue resolution involving governments, permitting approvals, power agreements, advocacy on laws or on actions that affect in a positive way or in a negative way our interests.
Managing disruptive events like coups or security threats, and building up, this is an important part, political capital through corporate social responsibility initiatives, and community engagement, increasingly critical in this industry. What are some of the things that we do to manage these risks and protect our interests? We do a whole bunch of things, but I'll just touch briefly on eight of them. The first thing is reputation matters. We do everything that we can to protect our reputation in the sector. We've received numerous awards in the corporate social responsibility realm. We had a slide that lists them all. I won't go through them all right now. The point is that being a responsible investor is obviously the right thing to do, but it also makes good business sense, importantly, it's a very effective form of risk mitigation.
You lose the support of your host governments, you lose the support of the communities around your mine. You put at risk the mine. It can very easily get shut down. Particularly in the West African context, in Burkina Faso, Mali, community engagement and security, go hand in hand. They fit very closely together. Second, it's essential to have a strong advocacy group, team, in place at the corporate level and also in country, critically. Understanding where power resides in governments is essential, what the key influencers are on decision-makers within governments. Without insight into this, you're flying blind in this industry. Also the advocacy needs to be not just a one-off or a yearly exercise. It needs to be continuous.
You need to make clear the benefits that you're bringing to the host country, to the local communities in the form of employment, in the form of tax revenues, in the form of local community development initiatives, et cetera. There's mention of the solar initiative at Essakane, another example. We do a lot of that. We do major projects, on the ground, then we communicate about the benefits of them. Third, on the negotiation side, again, we've seen examples recently in the industry of this. Don't overplay your hand. I've seen companies negotiate very imbalanced agreements, particularly on the fiscal side. Those agreements don't tend to be sustainable in the long term. Elections happen, governments change.
New governments revisit old agreements. I think the key to managing that aspect of country risk is to negotiate balanced agreements in the first place that are communicated, broadly understood, and if needs be, are easily defendable afterwards. Fourth, understand the importance of the election cycle. This is true everywhere, from Canada to the U.S., West Africa, South America, everywhere. The closer an election is, the less likely it is that you're going to get traction on resolving any issue, whether it's illegal mining, VAT tax arrears, or even security. More generally, it's about timing. Timing is everything in this business in terms of issue resolution. When you have to recognize, and it's part of, I guess, the skill of this part of the business is in recognizing when a window has opened and the timing is right for the resolution of an issue.
When that window opens, go through that window and solve the issue, because the window can close as quickly as it opened. A related point is that, when the window is closed, when you read the politics, you see that window is closed for various reasons, you need to calibrate your advocacy accordingly. If you try to force a resolution at a time when it's politically impossible for whatever reason, to resolve it in the way that you're advocating for, all you're going to do is strain the relationship and perhaps set yourself back rather than advance your interests. Fifth, we do a lot of this, leverage your relationships with the government of Canada. This is foreign affairs. These are the ambassadors. These are the embassies. This is Canadian representation at the IMF, at the World Bank, at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Being Canadian can be a real competitive advantage in this industry. In the West African context, we don't have the history of French colonial legacy to manage. We're also generally perceived more favorably than Americans in that part of the world. It's important for us to play the Canada card, to leverage Canadian resources, and it is a competitive advantage on the global stage right now. Sixth, intelligence gathering is crucial. You really need to understand the thinking and the decisions of decision-makers. This is best done through structured stakeholder engagement programs, which we do a lot of. You want to identify at the earliest possible opportunity, risk and opportunity. Seventh of 8. Profile the local flavor of your business. Hire locally. Use local suppliers wherever possible. Invest in community programming. Importantly, on the communication side, communicate what you've done in these respects.
You don't want to just be another multinational extracting gold. Over 90% of our employees in our host jurisdictions are nationals, and we're very proud of that. That's something we're seeking to get ever higher. It's always the case that these are some of your best ambassadors in the communities, nationally, at every level, regionally. It's also important wherever possible to promote our national employees to higher levels of the organization. I think if you look around at some of the presentations that you'll see over the course of the afternoon, I think you'll see that that's been a real priority for the company, and we've had good success in doing that, being good for the shareholders as well. Eighth, lastly, sometimes discussion, and engagement doesn't get the job done, and you have to use sharper tools in the toolkit.
Understand the legal tools at your disposal when a dispute can't be solved amicably. Know how to use those remedies because sometimes they can be misused. Where are these tools? They're included in mining conventions, mineral agreements, sometimes in local law. Sometimes in bilateral investment treaties, which contain provisions typically for international arbitration. Bilateral investment treaties in Canada, they're called FIPAs, are positive tools for Canadian businesses operating internationally. IAMGOLD and other mining companies here advocate with our government and with host governments to enter into these treaties. The key part is investor-state dispute settlement, the key aspect of that is it gets you out of local courts, it gets you into what might be a more balanced international arbitration venue. It can also have a tactical role.
If you've got an issue that's deadlocked and you're not seeing any ready resolution of the issue, beginning the process of international arbitration, if you believe you have a strong substantive case, can trigger at least a conversation with the backdrop of an arbitration proceeding, get the other side to the table and possibly unblock an issue. We've seen examples of that in the past. That said, international arbitration is risky, you have to play that very carefully because it is, generally in the mining business, it's kind of the nuclear option in terms of issue resolution. There are a few reasons why you want to look at that as a last option. One is it takes forever. Two is it costs a lot of money. Three is it's sometimes difficult to enforce judgments afterwards, an unenforceable judgment isn't worth very much.
Lastly, perhaps most importantly, it's viewed as very provocative by host governments. To bring them to international arbitration can be perceived as embarrassing. It can be perceived as very sharp. It focuses the spotlight on that jurisdiction and on the behavior that led to the arbitration proceeding. We all know governments can kill you through a thousand cuts if they want to. They're the hosts. We're the investors. You have to have a real strong substantive case, you have to be very careful with this, you have to approach international arbitration truly as a last option. To sum up, we have a number of tools at our disposal in safeguarding our investments abroad. Strike fair deals, negotiate hard. Strike fair deals with our governments that include fiscal stability protection, specifically critical for certainty. Localize your operations, localize your workforce.
Integrate yourself into the community. Be transparent. Build trust with the community, with the government. Critically, communicate, publicize your efforts in this respect. Practice principled engagement with the government and try to avoid resorting to legal remedies unless it's truly as a last resort. If all else fails, assess how litigation may be appropriate. With that, I'll turn it over to Chief Operating Officer, Gordon Stothart.
Too loud. Welcome everybody, and thanks for coming. I'm going to be fairly quick through this session. It's fairly high-level stuff. I know everybody's eager to sort of see the details around the operations. We've brought a number of the operating individuals with us. Ken introduced earlier, and Steve mentioned them as well. This is the operations organization, two RVPs, Regional Vice Presidents, one for the Americas, one for West Africa. Oumar is here. The new RVP of the Americas is Bruno Lemelin, who's a former GM at Essakane. He's taking a well-earned week with his sons in a fishing boat in Quebec today. I wish him all the best. The individual operations sit underneath the RVPs.
Out of our Montreal office in Longueuil on the South Shore, we run our project development team with Phil Gauthier, and our technical services team with Dan Vallières, who's not here, as well as our supply chain team, and we're just in the process of putting a new leader on that team. The major projects report through Phil, with the RVPs being the client of those projects, depending on obviously which region the project's in. Saramacca is being managed as a local project under the umbrella of the Rosebel organization, given the nature of the project and the size of the project. That's typically how we organize ourselves. We spend a lot of time in cross-communications. We much prefer to break down walls between different parts of the organization than build them up.
We had a great session last week, I was just talking to Phil about it this morning, where we had a number of operating, maintenance, and technical staff in from our operations to peer review the Côté Gold Project and the Boto Gold Project. Really understanding what we do at the sites and how that information and knowledge can be brought to bear for these projects as they go towards development. I kind of like to spin this chart upside down. I look at myself as in support of the operations, not them depending to me, but me in support of them. Just revisit our production and cost guidance. We're looking to produce 850,000-900,000 ounces this year. We had a great first quarter, but we are maintaining our guidance. On the all-in sustaining cost side, we're looking to come in between CAD 990 and CAD 1,070.
Again, despite a wonderful first quarter, we do know that we had some challenges set out for us in Q2. We're working through those. We're on plan to achieve what we said we're going to achieve. Total cash costs in the CAD 750-CAD 800 range. On the capital side, we're looking to spend about CAD 365 million in total this year, CAD 140 million of that being sustaining capital. Sustaining capital for us, the big ticket items are capital spare parts as part of the maintenance programs, capitalized stripping at the open pit operations, and capitalized development, i.e., in the operating areas, in the producing blocks in our underground mine. Non-sustaining for this year is a bit of a pickup from what it was last year. We're talking CAD 225 million.
The real main drivers for that at Essakane is the startup, the first expenditures on the heap leach operation, as well as an expansion of the tailings dam at Essakane. At Rosebel, the big ticket item there is Saramacca. Saramacca being a more advanced project than anything else right now and driving towards production the second half of next year. At Westwood, it's development in blocks that are not yet in production, so our deeper blocks. You'll understand that a little better after Martial goes through his presentation. Steve spoke to our reserve picture. At year-end, 14.5 million ounces in reserves, proven and probable reserves, which was a very significant pickup from the prior year end of year numbers. M&I Resources, inclusive of reserves, stand at 24.7 million ounces, and our inferred resources stand at 8.8 million ounces.
Both of those seeing increases from the prior year. I'd also point out that these numbers are for year-end 2017, don't include the announcement we came out with three weeks ago on the additional R&R as a result of the heap leach pre-feasibility study at Essakane. We'll talk about those numbers a little bit later. Just speaking strategically before we get down into the operations, it's always fun and usually a bit busy out doing marketing. Our organization has got a lot of stuff going on, a lot of important strategic work going on at each of the operations in the projects. From a strategic level, just like to point out for you where we sit. At Rosebel, we continue to drive towards reduced costs. That was part of the key elements that delivered a huge reserve expansion, resource expansion to us last year.
We continue to drive those costs down. In parallel, we're working on exploiting the Saramacca deposit, Suresh will talk to it a little bit later, and expanding around Saramacca on the Saramacca trend and looking at additional projects we can bring into the fold, and Craig will speak to that later. By 2019, as I said, second half, we expect Saramacca to be in production 2020 to 2028. I say 2028 was the end of life of mine when we announced this reserve expansion. It does not include anything yet from Saramacca and ongoing reserve and resource expansion work at Rosebel. Stay tuned that we continue to be able to drive that number outwards. At Essakane for this year, still to come is the Gosse resource estimate.
As I said, three weeks ago, we came out with a reserve and resource update on the back of the heap leach pre-feasibility study. That in itself delivered a 39% reserve increase to 1.3 million ounces. Considering our company-wide depletion this year is in the order of a million ounces, we've already outpaced our depletion for this year just with the Essakane announcement. Gosse on the way, solar plant commission. We are talking to the solar plant suppliers about a phase two, and those talks are really interesting for us. Production this year commenced at the satellite deposit we call Falagone 2 East, about nine km to the east of the Essakane plant. Next year, we'll look to complete the heap leach feasibility study and move into construction with the heap leach production start in 2020.
Obviously, we'll continue to look at the satellite resources and what those can deliver. Currently, mine life per the announcement is out to 2026. We see line of sight to getting it to 2030 and beyond with satellite resources, and we're looking very aggressively to find a way to do that. At Westwood, we continue to ramp up production. It's a long ramp up. It's a high-grade, narrow vein, underground mine, fairly deep, so it requires a significant ramp-up time. What we love about this asset is the life that comes with it, the long-term stability and the attractive all-in sustaining costs it will deliver. Currently looking at 2033, 2035 with our existing resources, but a lot of upside, and you'll see a slide later speaking to what the longer term opportunities we see at Westwood.
Full production towards the end of 2020 and moving out from there for several years. At Côté, obviously, our most advanced greenfield project, we announced the pre-feasibility at the start of last year, and at mid-year, we announced the pre-feasibility study, a slight improvement over the numbers that came out from the PEA earlier in the year. We also obviously announced the JV agreement with Sumitomo Metal Mining in June of last year. That project continues to go well. Towards the end of last year, we moved into full feasibility study. That's ongoing now. We're working through that. It's progressing very well. Moving towards the end of this year, we'll look to wrap that up and some associated decisions that have to be made around permitting and power agreements and things of that nature.
Very early in the new year, we expect to be making an investment decision and starting construction at Côté with a 2-plus year construction period, targeting production sometime, hopefully in the first half of 2021 or towards the middle of 2021. With the exploration work that we carried out as part of the feasibility study, we're already anticipating that we should see some extensions to the LOM as we've laid it out. We're sitting on a very nice regional package, which I think Craig will talk about a little bit later. Do you have any slides on that? I don't think you do. Yeah. Sits on 540 sq km of exploration on the main Swayze break there. Very quickly touch what's covered by the Americas. Obviously our Westwood Mine, and the Côté advanced project.
We have the Monster Lake and Nelligan exploration assets in Eastern Quebec near Chibougamau. Moving down, we have exploration assets in Nicaragua, in Ecuador through our partnership of INV Metals, in Brazil and in Suriname, where we do active exploration, and obviously the Rosebel Mine. As I said, Bruno Lemelin, he's just currently taking on the role of our VP Americas, and very much eagerly looking forward to that work. Earlier this year, we named Martial Tremblay as General Manager at Westwood, effective January 1st, 2018. Martial spent several years working for us at the Essakane operation. He had left us and was the GM at another underground operation in Quebec for a couple of years and agreed to come back to the fold.
With that, I'm going to pass it on to Martial and let him give you a little bit of a story around what things look like at Westwood. Do you want that? Do you want to use that one or do you want to use this one?
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks. Is it working?
Yeah.
Okay. As you can see. Westwood is located 40 km from Rouyn-Noranda. We've got almost 2,000 hectares of property, consisted of 120 titles. Westwood is one of the major employer near Rouyn-Noranda. We max, we are around 1,000 employees of IAMGOLD and contractor. Our geology is very complex, sorry, but with high potential of increasing our resourcing. You will see in the slide that I will present, that's one of the thing that you need to recall because it's for, I think, for IAMGOLD, Westwood is a hidden gem for the future. What you will see is our Q1 results. In terms of, I could say it was good results. Don't look at the red number in safety.
I will talk it a bit later, what you see in terms of production, in terms of lateral development, in terms of throughput, grade, gold production, cash cost, it's what our intent is to produce month by month, year by year for the rest of the life of LOM. Sure, we got a lot of work to do with our cost structure, a lot of work to do with our productivity. All those things with the people who's working with me at Westwood, it will be fun to do. In terms of health and safety, as you could see on the slide before, the number were red. We were over our target mostly, when you're looking at the tendency since 2016, seem that we are beginning having problem.
In reality, what we are seeing in 2018, it's some the result of the youngest of our workforce. Do you know that 42% of our workforce are 35 years and less. In 2017, when we had to close a lot of hiring, we lost a lot of older miners. Our workforce is younger. They are talented, but need to be trained and continue, and we will put a lot of work and effort to train them to work safely. It's a bad tendency, but with the team, with the people, we are in a process to change the culture, the health and safety culture at Westwood. Our priority for this year. We got four silos, we have labor, sustainability, resources, operation. Like I said a bit earlier, we need to change our health and safety culture.
Our young people need to understand that they will make a lot of money by working safely, and if they don't work safely, they will be hurt, and they will affect themselves and their family. We need to change. Our plan is to, in 3 years, to change the culture. That the job of each person will be able or will understand that safety will be first, and the money will come after. The money will come more and more after. The other part of our labor strategy is our acquisition and retention plans. In Abitibi now, there's a lot of competition between all the mines to steal workers on all levels from a mine to another one. We need to build a plan that will give opportunity to the people we hire to stay and be developed in our mine.
Also, we got in Q3, Q4, we are trying to complete our bargaining negotiations with our union. Sustainability. The complex, Doyon Westwood, is big. You saw the surface. We need to build a strategic plan to close the Doyon pit. We got a technical validation reclamation concept that we're working with the university. A lot of research groups are working with us to help us to put the right technique to reclaim our operation. We are working on engineering plan for the restoration of the GSF1. Resources, we still have a lot of work, and we are very progressive in our resource condition. We are around 100%. We had very talented people who are working in geology, and the result is very interesting. We need to work on updating some blocks of mining.
Also, with time, our knowledge of our geology has been evolved, and we are now working to update our geologic block model. That will help us to improve our design, improve our recovery of our resource reserve, and then be a bit more profitable. In terms of operation, safety will always be the first thing that we'll do at Westwood. We won't produce with harming people. We have bought Bolttech. Bolttech, it's an equipment that you do your ground support with it. The people, the operator is in a cage, well protected. You could have some projection, and the rock projection won't hurt him. We're working also, same thing for the Jumbo. We had purchased JumboCam. It's like a window with bulletproof. If there are projections, because we are in a seismic area, they will be protected.
Part of our improvement to bring on a profitable, steady pace Westwood will be based on a continuous improvement. At Westwood, we have a notion of opportunity to improve. We will work on the productivity, work on improve the recovery. We will work on our cost structure. In no time, I will say it again. We will do that against the people, putting people in a situation that they could hurt themselves. Rapidly. Okay. I am still okay. That is a production plan for 2018. As you can see, block 1, block 2, is where we will produce mostly all of our ore. Our OpEx and CapEx development will be in this area. Our expansion development will be in that area, mostly preparing part of this and part of that production for next year. We are working on the ramp down on the 80 level, 180 level.
On 133, we are drifting a drift to do some exploration. Okay. Development priority for the rest of Q2. We are prioritize the connection between the ramp on the 60 level and 84 level. That will help us to improve our flexibility and also we will be able to reactivate that area. As you should know, block 1 is one of the area in Westwood where we got a lot of possibility of finding higher grade zone. Very interesting to do a mix. The other thing here, we are preparing that area for next year, 2019. Also here, we are preparing the ramp. That part is critical for next year. Up to date, we are doing well. Okay. That is a very interesting slide. That is why I was telling Westwood is a hidden gem of IAMGOLD. We got Doyon, that mine for more than 20 years.
If you are looking at that direction over there, you got the complex of La Ronde, Bousquet, everything. What you see, it is what are the potential of increasing our resources. There is a lot. The ore body of Doyon did not stop there. The information that we have does not stop there. The geology, like I said, is very complex, but almost we got a lot of field to improve our resources and then convert them to reserve. Our success of this year, like I said, we are ahead in our production. We are on track on our development, long term and short term. We achieve our cost target, although we know that we have a lot of work to do to improve it and control it and reduce it. Success in resource conversion. We have improved our geotechnic.
We have a geotechnical risk management plan that help us to be proactive and not be reactive from an event. Actually, we are understanding a little bit more our seismicity and a lot of area we know a bit more the potential of seismic activity or not. We are making better planning, better design, with our knowledge that we have increased since the start-up of Westwood. All adding that were stopped last year, September last year, that have been stopped have been restarted. Continuous improvement will be a must to develop. Actually, we had give two, three session. We have something like 16 Green Belt. We got 3, 4 Black Belt on site. The old thinking is to look at our mine and improve everything. Like I said, it is a ocean of opportunity. New management. Since the beginning of the year, a lot of people left.
A lot of managers left. We are proceeding to replace them. The new team will be as experienced as the old team. We got very bright people who are working with us. Very intelligent, very energetic people. That group of leaders will lead Westwood to the best that we could do. Last one, that's our strategic horizon. As you could see, by 2020, we'll have completed our full ramp up and also will produce for the rest of the reserve that we'll have around 175,000 tons per year at the best cost. With no accident. As you could see, the slide with the blue sky, we got a lot of potential of extension the life of Westwood. Suresh, your turn.
Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Let me take you through the operations and performance update of Rosebel. I'm really excited because in 2015, this was a mine which was supposed to be closed in 2018, and now we are speaking of a mine life of 2028, excluding Saramacca. I have been through this entire transition process. I've been through the entire transformation process. I can visualize the change. I can see the energy, I can see the activity, and I can see the will or the effort of the people in making it happen. Fundamentally, Rosebel is built on five fundamental pillars of performance. One is zero harm, productivity, cost, life of mine, and cash flow. These are the fundamental business drivers. If you see Rosebel, it's built on principally these drivers. It is very well-structured. It's very well-designed.
If you see the presentations now on, you can relate that to the five fundamental pillars of performance and how it has transitioned Rosebel to where it is now. The mine is located around 100 km from the capital city of Paramaribo. We've got an exploitation concession of 17,000 hectares with 74,000 hectares of exploration. We've got a hydroelectric dam, which is on 18 km from the site. Rosebel is one of the largest foreign investments in Suriname, and we are the first commercial gold mine in Suriname. Next year, we are going to have the 15 years of Rosebel operations. Basically, a mine which started with eight years, going up to 15 years and going up to 2028. That perfectly fits both your short-term objectives plus your long-term vision.
This was exactly the mine at some point told, "Come on, this is it." The vision is to be the lowest cost and best-in-class gold-producing mine in the world. Basically, to achieve short-term plan and long-term vision by continuously identifying short and long-term opportunities. It's not only identifying those opportunities, but after identifying those opportunities, you have to sustain those opportunities. If you see in the presentation, I have taken a period between 2015 and 2017 on a longer-term basis to show how consistently Rosebel has performed. It's, again, a very disciplined approach. Focus on economic returns. Return on investment is the principal driver in making any investment decisions. Cost containment. When I talk of cost containment, it's more cost optimization. You spend where you need to spend, and you don't spend where you don't need to spend. It's being very rational in your spend. Innovation.
Technology and innovation plays a very important role in decision-making, because every day, every decision you make is worth sometimes millions of CAD. It's important to be very innovative, keep ahead of time. Again, positioning for the future by developing a pipeline of exploration and development projects. Again, in low gold price environment, a business has to be resilient enough to take shock loads of price. That's exactly what drives Rosebel. Key value drivers. Again, if you have to optimize your cost, you have to understand what are the key value drivers of those cost process. Your spend, your operation cost, and your expansion and your sustaining capital. Those are expenses, you have to have projects which really focuses in delivering that value. You've got a list of things like mill operations, drilling and blasting, load and haul, parts, supply chain, CapEx, dilution.
These are fundamental drivers, your operation should be able to have projects which works on these drivers, so that you reduce your unit cost of operation. If you control your unit cost, the volumes will get controlled by itself. You have to work at the bottom line. This is a location map of Rosebel. We operate around five to six pits at any point of time. You've got the mill here, Rosebel pit is We actually build from good to great and year of capacity building. Every year, every budget, we had different themes. Starting off with 2014, it was mostly year of capacity building. It's to build capacities in the system. Accomplishments 2013, 2017. In 2014, we were around CAD 1,500 an ounce. We are now less than CAD 950. Create a foundation for long-term success. That's exactly what's happening.
These are some of the areas we have worked on, productivity improvements, capital management. We increased reserves by 80% and extended life until 2028, Saramacca is going to be one of the principal drivers. 2017 highlights. We had the lowest CAD per ton mined in five years, lowest G&A in the last five years, lowest sustaining capital in 2010. Basically, if you see this, we produced 20% more production with 20% less workforce. That's a driver which we will continue in for this year. This is a good term slide where it tells in 2013, when we made the budget, in 2017, we were to make only 8 million tons without all the optimizations which we have done. Now, if you see in 2017 actual, we treated 12.8 million tons.
That's basically, a lot of work has gone on the flex drive, sag mill, secondary crusher. We had liner changes, redesigning the liners. You can see on the unit cost, CAD per ton mined, you can see a continuous decrease, the same thing with CAD per ton mill. Basically, is it due to good fortune or is it due to real productivity gains? I'll show that in the next slide. If you see here, your red line shows your % hard rock, if that optimizations which we have done wasn't done, our cost would have gone up from CAD 2 to, in say our 2017 access to CAD 0.31 more, CAD 0.31 more to around CAD 2.33. CAD 0.35 of that has come only by productivity increases. This is the manpower productivity. You can see an increasing trend starting 2015, 2016, 2017.
The same is the case with milling costs. Again, you can see those productivity gains. Despite having higher hard rock, we were able to reduce almost CAD 0.50 by only productivity improvements and throughput. Again, on mill, you can see an increase in labor productivity because labor productivity plays a very important role in the performance. Our key initiatives for 2018. We did supply chain contract negotiations. We are doing something on behavior-based safety and strategic workforce planning. This has to do with Steve was honored the Honorary Order of the Yellow Star by the President of Suriname for the great work which Steve done in Rosebel and IAMGOLD. This is the first time a foreign national was presented or awarded that. Great work. We had a Surinamese Day in Suriname. We had the entire Suriname team here and some of the ministers.
It's basically to do with how do we engage with people, how do we engage, and that connection, exactly like what Ben told, is to give that local content. This is the economic value for Suriname. We have contributed almost CAD 3.3 billion. CAD 2.3 billion comes from Suriname suppliers, labor cost, and CSR, and CAD 1 billion from income tax, royalties, and payroll taxes. Cost optimization, again, like when I was talking of the key value drivers, is we almost CAD 23 all-in sustaining cost was reduced by contract negotiations. This is for the life of mine and for one-off savings of around CAD 26 per ounce. This is an increasing trend. Some of the productivity numbers I've put in starting from January 2015 to March 2018. This again shows that whatever we put in place is sustainable and it's still delivering. All in unit productivity, you can see an increase.
Tire life, compared to 2015, we saw a decrease, but it's coming up in 2018. You can see the numbers going up. Again, to improve productivity, we have put beaver tails and side boards on trucks. We are improving the tonnages almost by 18% for 777. That will give us around four and a half million tons and 16% for 785. That will give around 2.3 million tons. It's again, going to the fundamentals of business. How do you improve productivity? The productivity improvement will not cost you much, but will give you tremendous value. We are planning 67 million tons for 2018 without any increase in labor or equipment. Some of the mill initiatives, we've completed the secondary crusher. We almost 100% increased the aggregate plant. The liner design is going on. It's a revision C, which is in place now.
Pulverize and leach is another sampling mechanism we have put. With that, we are able to reduce our per sample cost from CAD 4.50 for fire assay to CAD 1.50 by PAL. Innovation again here. Carbon in columns. We have started a project on this, will likely to be completed by end of Q4. We will increase by 1,000 ounces a year. Debottlenecking of the carbon handling, it'll give us around 4,500 ounces a year. Commination, again, liner design is going to give us another 1,500 ounces a year, and advanced process control looking at 3,000 ounces a year. That's on Rosebel, and now I will take you through Saramacca. This is the location map of Saramacca. Saramacca from the Rosebel mill, Saramacca is around 25 kilometers. There's a mining district coming up here. Craig will talk more about it.
The operating philosophy and the project introduction. Saramacca is going to be a brownfield project of Rosebel. Basically, it will be run as a joint operation. We are looking at around 50,000 ounces a year at between 2 and 3 million tons annum. Life of mine is going to be around 10-12 years. The good thing here is that we are looking at around 4-5 years of saprolite feed. It goes into transition and hard rock, with the district coming up and Brokolonko coming up, we should have a continued sustained feed of softer rock for quite a long period of time. The operating philosophy is like what I told, we will synergize energies with Rosebel and Saramacca together.
We will do a very optimum recruitment, plus we will try to leverage the equipment which we have got in Rosebel to Saramacca. With diligent use of capital, that's going to be one of the critical things. Concept of operation is we will mine in Saramacca, and we will transport the whole ore through our haulage trucks to Rosebel Mill. What we're doing here is we've got a CAD 1 billion asset in Rosebel. We will leverage that from Saramacca. Saramacca is going to be a satellite pit. Geology, 2017 September resources, we're looking at 1 million ounces and 14.4 million tons at 2.2 grams. Infill resource of 0.5 million ounces, around 13.6 million tons at 1.1 gram. We have completed the infill drilling in January and April. The new block model has been planned for Q3 2018 and resources update by Q3 2018.
The current status, we are on the finishing stage of completion of the ESIA, which will be submitted to the government in July. We have finished the metallurgical test work. The geotech is completed. Detailed site investigations are going on. We have completed our long-haul truck collection. Everything which is planned is on time. This is how the Saramacca pit is going to look like. We have got an open pit. We're going to have two waste dumps, the infrastructure pad, and the run-of-mine pad. If you see on the infrastructure part, a lot is not being planned there because we have got Rosebel on the other side, which can cater a lot on some of the infrastructure needs. This is a cross-section of the pit. If you see the ore body, very high grade. It's extending down below, so future potential for underground mining.
That's another area we can really look into. On infrastructure, the production road, field detail engineering and investigation have been completed. Camp expansion, we should be adding another 140 people, the camp is going to be based in Rosebel, again, leveraging the synergies. Saramacca infrastructure, basic engineering has started, construction planned in 2019. This is a road update. This is a haul road we are looking at. Initially, we thought of running it from here to here, that's going to be expensive. We, again, optimize, reduce the distances by around 9 kilometers, because we are using long-haul trucks. This should actually work in our favor, especially in managing capital. This is a project timeline. Q2 2018, we are on time, the rest of the activities are planned to start mining H2 in 2019. That's it. Thank you.
I'll ask Phil to take us through Côté.
Switch?
Okay.
Getting older. I was going to take the word from Steve when he started off, execute. Execute is something IAMGOLD has a lot of reputation on. We started back right from the construction of Rosebel back in 2002. We've done many executions on it since as well. Essakane, the construction first and second phases, and even Niobec when we were doing projects there, we also added a lot of value in doing those projects. We've always been able to execute these projects either ahead of time and below budget, and that's not going to stop with Côté. This is our next flagship, Côté Gold. For me, this project here is such a You couldn't place an ore body better. In the middle of two big mining camps. Sorry? Oops. There we go. Yeah. It's even better when you see it on the screen.
In the middle of two great mining camps, Timmins and Sudbury. I mean, the labor pool that's in both of those areas are fantastic. We've seen that time and time out. We go up there every time, and we see the assets, the people, the energy for Côté Gold is very high. Again, one other element that's really beneficial for Côté Gold going forward is our EA. Our EA has been approved both provincially and federally on a design that's a small differences to this one here. Again, with the work that we're doing, we're going to get it to improve. This is one of the things that we talk about the accomplishments. There's many accomplishments that we did. The recent pre-feasibility study bringing in 5.9 million ounces into the reserve side. That's an excellent accomplishment, as well as Sumitomo bringing them on.
As well, something you don't see on that slide is when we did bring in Santana, that really changed the land package for us to build a work on Côté to bring it much tighter, bringing the TMF, which you see in yellow, much closer to the infrastructure, making it much more attractive. Bringing in Sumitomo was more than just bringing in the funds that go with it and the 30% venture, but we also have a lot of Sumitomo's expertise and knowledge. One of the things that we were able to benefit quite quickly from Sumitomo is working with a lot of the companies that they've been involved with. We've been able to go to Sierra Gorda. We've been able to go and see Morenci. We've been able to leverage from a lot of their operations and a lot of their know-how.
That's gone very well for us. I won't go through the details of the life of mine for Côté. You have it on the screen. A good long project, 300,000-plus ounces capacity year-over-year with, again, a low all-in sustaining capital cost. Now the feasibility study. That the right button? That's it. Maybe just before I get into the feasibility study, one thing we do every quarter, and I have to say, I have the best ELT because they always come in with a lot of enthusiasm, is we review our projects. Every quarter, we have them in and review it, and there's a lot of rigor and a lot of questions and a lot of checking that goes on.
I think that's one of the things that added a lot of value to this project and a lot of the projects that we do at IAMGOLD. One of the things that's changed from the pre-feasibility study is the 10% increase in throughput. We're up to 36,000 tons per day. That's about 13.2 million tons per year. We spent a lot of time making sure that we're trying to add the most value, and our hurdle rates are fairly high to make sure that we brought that. That 36,000 tons per day wasn't just another thought. It was made to improve the value. The other element that we did, in terms of making Côté Gold add a lot of value or increase its NPV, is bringing in automation. It's really the right time to do this.
One of the things that we've done is we have benchmarked with a lot of companies using automation. We've seen Fortescue in Australia. We've seen Gaby mine down in Chile. Again, we're going to see Fort McMurray. We've done a lot of benchmarking on Côté Gold to make sure that the technologies we're putting in are going to work and that are going to unlock the value that we're looking for. We also did a lot of small modifications related to the infrastructure, but some of the things that were more important on the plant is we did a zero-based analysis with Wood. This zero-based analysis is really looking at what is elements that meet the norms, best practice, and then what we call gold-plated. We try to stay away from the gold-plated side.
What we were able to do with this zero-based design, we were able to reduce the footprint of the PFS by about 24%. It's a significant impact on the project from a capital point of view and also from an execution. There's also a lot of other various savings that we're looking at for Côté Gold, which is introducing LNG, again, the automation in this case, and using technologies that are available for us to improve on that side. We've also done a lot of metallurgical work to help improve the project. The study engineer is the same. It's Wood. It's a continuation from the last study. Again, most of the key members are still in play. You can see on this, it's a lot of green dots and a lot of red, and I guess that would be magenta.
I'm not the best with colors, but these are the holes that we've added since this last campaign. What were the objectives of what we were trying to do? We were trying to make sure that we can ensure grade continuity. We wanted to make sure that gold was there, which we're saying is going to be there. That's one of the objectives of that. About 47 km of drilling was done from late 2017 to early of this year. Most of the results are all in now, and we have the geological model being produced. Condemnation drilling was completed as well, good news or bad news, I don't know, but nothing is there that's impeding us to continue with the project. All the infrastructure is in the correct places. Other elements that we wanted to do, again, was the infill drilling.
We actually had some spacings down to 12.5 meters by 12.5 meters on this. Very tight spacings to build, to show, and ensure ourselves that when we're going to get into the mining side of things, that we'll be able to produce what we say we're going to produce. Technology is one of the key elements that we really want to try to unlock in Côté. Again, we want to apply proven technologies. We don't want to be a laboratory or a place to learn things. We want to take from what others have done and really apply it. We're going to be developing the core competencies around Côté Gold, around this technology. That includes people, which is probably one of the most important elements, again, and the systems and the processes.
Again, we have lots of good processes from our mines. We're going to be integrating those processes and making sure that they work with the technology. We're committed towards autonomous haulage and autonomous drilling, both of these technologies, as we mentioned, will be key to making sure that we can drive the price down and keeping our camp size to the smallest size we can. Again, our strongest side on this is having the camp with universities and colleges that are available to us, bringing on the labor and the manpower that's going to be required to maintain and operate these technologies. I'll give you a sneak peek of what Côté could look like in the future. From a plant, again, I talked about the increase in production to 36,000 tons per day. The flow sheet has changed just slightly from the previous pre-feasibility study.
We've gone with the same flow, added tertiary grinding into the back, which is some tower mills that help take some load off of the ball mill. That's the only change that's really gone from that side. The rest of the elements, the crusher, the secondary crushers, the HPGR, and the ball mill, all remain the same. On the back end, again, very much a similar CIL/CIP structure. Again, that'll go well with the past pre-feasibility study. With the power side, Hydro One, again, it's working out very well. We've been engaging them very rigorously to make sure that our T2R line, which is key to getting the power to the site, a total of 72 MW is being applied for with IESO. All those studies are progressing well and should not inhibit us to getting the project done.
Right now, the latest estimate from Pony should be in July of this year for that capital line to go in place. From the infrastructure side, nothing really outstandingly different, but all the elements are there. Garage infrastructure, lube base, explosive facilities. From a construction side, we've done a lot of effort into making sure our construction execution plan is being tried and tested. We are actually involved this for one of the first times on one of our projects, which is early contractor involvements, where we've actually engaged contractors on three separate packages, one which is MPEI, mechanical, piping, electrical, and instrumentation, and having them right into the estimation process rather than letting engineers estimate, which sometimes we know the results can come of that. We're really using contractors to help sharpen our pencils on the price and making sure that the price is right.
Same thing with civil, structural, and concrete. Finally as well for the power line, the same thing, because we have a power line that's connecting the two lines, the Shining Tree to Côté Gold. As well, that is an early contractor involvement. One of the things maybe as well we did in this last campaign is we did a lot of geotech work, which really showed us where we could put our infrastructure, and we were able to put the plant in the right position to benefit from the contact of the rock. So very little excavation, very little engineering fill in what we're trying to do with the plant. So really taking care of the topography that's there and making sure that we use it to our advantage. That's right now, it's integrated into that plant design. A lot of bright faces from Sudbury area.
This is the Côté team, as you can see. In front of the EA side, again, the EA was awarded the federal decision on April 13th of 2016, with 90 conditions that were involved with that. Then later on, the provincial EA was on December 22nd, 2016. The EA process is, again, well engaged for Côté Gold. We are now going through an EER process, an environmental effects and review process within the provincial system and federal system. We actually have started the permitting process for Côté Gold. The next slide shows a bit more of the technical side of the project.
Again, when we took on Côté Gold, when we bought the project back in 2012, we did one and two resource updates, and then a third in 2015, which is the one that was used to publish. Sorry, the one that was used to publish was in 2016 for the PEA. Then the last one on Q2 of last year. We'll be doing another one in 2019 when the feasibility gets completed. Right now, as you can see to the side, feasibility study has started back in about Q3 of 2017. We spent a lot of time making sure that we understood what was the best configuration for Côté Gold. We want to get it right the first time, so we did a lot of trade-offs.
We've involved in the power negotiations, the construction period, as you can see, would be as of Q1 2019 into 2021 for the start of production. I guess at this point, I'm not going to be introducing anyone, but I'll be getting you to take a break because you probably need a break at this point. 10 minutes, I think, right? Is that right?
One, two, three, four. Tell me that you love me more. Sleepless, long nights. As the minutes fall. Old female tropes cry at your door. Left you with nothing, but they want some more. Oh, you're changing your heart. Oh, you know who you are. Bleed heart, pit heart. Now I can't tell you apart. Cozy and cold. Put the horse before the cart. Those female tropes who have tears in their eyes. Too scared to run after one little lie. Oh, you're changing your heart. Oh, you know who you are. One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, ten. Money can't buy you back the love that you've had then. Oh, you're changing your heart. Oh, you know who you are. Oh, you're changing your heart. Oh, you know who you are. Who you are. You're changing your heart. Breaking your heart. You're changing your heart.
Breaking your heart. What gives, what helps? That intuition. I'll know, I'll know. I won't have to be shown. The way. I'll know, I'll know. They can lead you. Break and defeat you. Our destination known, only by the one whose faith is overgrown. Piecemeal can break your home in half. A love is not complete with only heat. They can tease you. Break and complete you. It came a heatwave, a merciful save. You would choose, you would choose a wild tree over prose. Life is more unreal than where you've been or how you feel. Life is more unreal than where you've been or how you feel.
It's impossible to tell how important someone was, what you might have missed out on, how you might have changed it all, how you might have changed it all for him, how you might have changed it all, how you might have changed it all for him. Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I? Did I, did I miss out again? Here we are, on Earth together. It's you and I. God has made us fall in love, it's true. I've really found someone like you. Will it stay? The love you feel for me, will it stay? That you will be by my side to see me through. Until my life is through.
Well, in my mind, we can conquer the world. In love, you and I. You and I. You and I. I am glad. At least in my life, I found someone. That may not be here forever to see me through. But I found my strength in you. Because in my mind. You will stay here always. In love, you and I. You and I. You and I. You and I. In my mind, we can conquer the world. In love, you and I. You and I. You and I.
In a little while from now. If I'm not feeling any less sour. I promise myself to treat myself and visit a nearby town.
Excuse me. On the interest of keeping the timeline, we'd like to start the next session. If everyone could take their seat, that'd be greatly appreciated. Also, just as a reminder, we will be doing a Q&A after each session. This session will end after Craig discusses the Americas exploration, at which time we'll have a 10-minute Q&A. Thanks very much.
Go a little bit over our strategy and what we've accomplished as a general program, then we'll specifically delve into a few of the projects that we're working on here in the Americas. This is not intended to be exhaustive. It's kind of some selected highlights. It's always a bad strategy when you're behind time to hand it over to the geologist, I'm going to try and bring us back a little bit. Okay, I'm going to the middle. By command. Exploration strategy. I guess, overall, in a quick summary, our strategy is working. Steve talked about how when times were tough, we really had to rationalize the program. We took a lot of money out of the spend. When you do something of that kind of scale, by definition, you're going to reduce the size of your team.
We did take that opportunity to strengthen our management, we realigned the entire exploration portfolio. To make it accountable, it's really important not just to spend money and have nothing to show for it. Everybody wants to know, are you finding any ounces? Every program had to be conscious of that. We don't do geology just because we love the science, although some people will. At the end of the day, this is what people are after. We've had a lot of successes with this exploration program, a number of our own discoveries that are listed there. We've done a lot of maiden resource estimates, if you will. We've added a lot to the resource inventory. I think one of the things that I really want to point out is that we've really established an organic pipeline of growth projects that we've developed ourselves.
We don't need to go out and buy a bunch of things. We're not in a panic. We have some very great exploration projects that we can move ahead, and that puts us in an enviable position going forward. I guess in terms of the strategy, what else are we going to do there? My flippant comment on this is we're going to do more of the same. That's what we're delivering. This is just a chart I put together that looks at our resource and reserves over time since 2012. Let's call it post-Côté Gold, okay? Right here, when that came in, what we've been able to do. Reserves are shown in red. You were seeing some declining reserve balances through the years, then the big uptick last year.
It's also important to note that over those years, we did change some of the gold price assumptions lower. That does have an impact on what you're going to be reporting. We did a lot of work moving inferred ounces into indicated, having the studies that go around that with Phil and his group to ultimately bring those into the reserve category. Although we had a big year last year, it's a multi-year effort to get this kind of an outcome, and that's important to know. I've done a little bit of totaling on what has happened over the last five years. We've replaced every ounce that we've mined in the last five years. Over 5 million ounces of mined ounces have been replaced. We added 9.2 million ounces in total resources above that.
We subsequently sold some of them off to Sumitomo as part of the Côté deal, which was really de-risking that project. If you just do some very rough math, our discovery cost based on our exploration budgets and total ounces found is about CAD 18 an ounce. I would challenge anybody to do better than that. Our resource replacement ratio, how many ounces have we added relative to what we've mined, we're running just under 300%. That's a pretty good effort in this day and age when most companies are going the opposite way. Just not to focus on one screen over the other, I'll now look at this one. Here's our strategy. We have a corporate strategy on what the exploration program is to deliver.
Several years ago, we had said that we wanted to increase our reserves to 14 million ounces, have a minimum 12-year reserve base, and have resources at twice that reserve base. At the time we set that looked pretty difficult. As of December of last year, we had achieved that. It looks like we're there. The interesting thing about a mining company is that we continue to mine ounces. When we get to 2022 and we're at a production rate of somewhere around 1.3 million ounces, we will need to have a reserve base of 15 million ounces, and we will have mined 5 million of those ounces already out of that number we have right now. This isn't something that you achieve in 2017 and then park your car. We actually got to keep driving this forward.
This is just some information on where the budget is going in 2018. There's always constant tension on how much brownfield, how much near mine, that kind of stuff. This just gives you a little bit of color on how we're divvying it up. About 70% of our budget is going to the mine sites, the ground surrounding the mine sites, and our current resource stage projects. Of that, 24% of this budget is currently allocated to Saramacca and the Brokolonko Trend. We're taking a big bet this year on that project to move that along and advance the discovery potential of that emerging trend. We're also still putting some money into the early part of this portfolio, and I think that's also a differentiator for us. We've never, ever abandoned the pure green fields.
Some of our recent discovery successes have come because we did commit to that type of work. That can always be difficult to do when times are tough. Anyway, those are the numbers, and you guys can digest them and ask questions later as you see fit. Let's talk about a few of the highlights and put a little color around it. This is Saramacca. These are results that we put out back early in the year. This was the end of our 27 drilling campaign, where we had done another phase of infill drilling. Just some of the takeaways on that. You can read the numbers that are up there. We continued to hit very high grades over wide intersections. There was no bad news in that next phase of drilling. All of that is being incorporated into the current resource models.
Just to put a little color around, well, where were some of those holes? Here's a couple of longitudinal sections. We have a couple of parallel zones at Saramacca, and you can see we are drilling underneath some of the pit shells and still getting some very nice gold grades, expanding the resources with those existing pit shells. You're looking at two parallel sections here, some very nice intersections that came out of that. We also were targeting some of the hanging wall zones here. If you recall, we had a lot of mineralization in the hanging wall that was short strike length, discontinuous. As we infilled the drilling, some of these started to develop. This is one that we call Kolukoo. Finally, they gave something a name I can pronounce. It's not always easy down there in Suriname.
You can see where the pit was on this. We had some not very impressive hits close to surface, and then as we drilled underneath that pit, we started seeing some very nice grades. You can see a 31-meter intersection of just under four grams below the pit. That's going to drive that pit down deeper. We have no doubt about that. It's just an example of some of the results that are being incorporated into the current model. Steve's challenge to me is to find more and increase the grades, and this is the kind of work we hope will do that. Just very quickly on Brokolonko, this is the new shiny toy in the store right now. It sits a long strike from Saramacca here. We've now consolidated a 15-kilometer strike length of the Saramacca trend, if you will.
I just want to show you a little bit about Brokolonko from the historic compilation. Here's what it looks like if you go out there. This was mined extensively by small-scale miners in the '70s and '80s. There's still mining going on there to this day. Initially, coarse nuggets were found in the laterite. If you scrape back the first couple of feet and went out there with a metal detector, you'd be picking up nuggets. Seemed like a pretty good business for these guys. Eventually they broke through the laterite and started mining right into the saprolite, and there's some pretty big excavations there. There is an in-situ source of gold on this property. There's no doubt about that, and we're looking forward to getting some drill holes into it. If you compile some of the data, this is soil geochemistry and deep auger geochemistry.
There's some very large anomalous areas that have been outlined from the historical work. Now we've already been in, we've been mapping on this property. We've done our own sampling to confirm those results, and we're basically duplicating all of those. You can see some of the anomalies are quite large in terms of both their aerial distribution and the kind of grades that we're getting out of it. I will caution, however, that this is a highly disturbed area. There's going to be some work to do to chase that down to the source of it. We're pretty excited that there's probably another discovery here to be made. To contrast this with Saramacca, there's only four holes on that entire property, okay? It's very underexplored from the point of view of modern exploration. Let's switch gears.
We'll come back up to Canada now, talk a little bit about Monster Lake and Nelligan. Monster Lake, we put out a maiden resource earlier this year. It still is small, but very nice grades. Recently, we put out some additional drill results that came out from the drilling we were doing this winter. As you can see, we get some very nice grades over some interesting thicknesses there. This is a nice project for us. One of the things I think that you're going to see developing is that 15 kilometers to the south, we have another project called Nelligan, where we've made a grassroots discovery. It's a totally different thing. It's a bulk tonnage, low-grade deposit, and we've been drilling that through the winter, and we'll be drilling that through the summer as well. Our objective is to bring that to our first resource by year-end.
We're initially targeting somewhere between 1 million-2 million ounces out of that. I think the potential is much larger, but that's realistically what we can probably get done this year. I think this is going to be a developing area play for us between the two of them. That's some projects of the future for us. I have a few slides just to put some color. This is a longitudinal section of Monster Lake that shows the main ore shoot, what we call the Megane 325 zone right here. Some very high-grade hits in that. If you look at that, there's a challenge to this. This is a very short strike length but long plunge style of deposit. It sits within a structure that we can see for over 4 kilometers.
When you're trying to find something only 100 meters long, that's a lot of tight drilling. That's our challenge. How do we find the next 325 zone along that prospective structure? On this compilation, you'll see that there are indications of very high-grade gold mineralization from some of the previous work. There's no doubt that the structure is prospective. It's just a question of can we find another lens? If we're successful with that, we start to flirt with 1 million ounces of high-grade gold here. That's the challenge. Again, just on Nelligan, this is something that we've drilled out on very wide space drilling, somewhere between 150-200-meter spaced holes. It's about 2.5 kilometers long. We've drilled it down to 350 meters vertical, getting very wide intersections in these silicified metasedimentary package.
Those are the kind of gold ranges that we're seeing out of it, and that's our target. This is a watch us news at 11, as Steve would say. By year-end, we're hoping to have the first resource out on this. That's an exciting new discovery for us that we'll have at resource status by the end of the year. Just to wrap up with a couple of other projects that are works in progress for us, our Pitangui project in Brazil. It's an iron formation-hosted deposit in the Iron Quadrangle. Our deposit currently is fairly modest at 820,000 ounces, but these deposits tend to be very large. They go to great depth down plunge. AngloGold are mining these things at Cuiabá. They're very large, and that's why they're compelling targets for us.
We have a very large land package associated with that particular project, and we continue to probe at greater depths to see if we can extend the mineralization deeper. We also put out a maiden resource on the Eastern Borosi project in Nicaragua this quarter. We're sitting with around 800,000 gold equivalent ounces. It's a gold, silver, epithermal vein system. That's our first resource from the work we've done to date. Both of these projects are work in progress. Those are not where we need them to go. We're obviously targeting larger resources than that, and it's just to give you a flavor of some of the projects that we're working on. As a geologist, I have to show you a little bit of core. This is from the Pitangui project showing the sulfide iron formation, and a nice intersection there.
You can see when we're into that sulfide iron formation, the grades can be quite handsome in that. It's a very nice target to be looking for. When you have sulfides of that kind of extent, it does allow us to apply some direct detection geophysics with these things, looking for conductive targets. That's it for a bit of Americas update. I think we're going to have a Q&A session that hopefully somebody else is going to lead. We'll get on to the next session. I'll try and field or redirect questions if you'd like to go, and we'll talk on the Americas. Please. Yeah. Yeah, I was just rewording that. Tanya nicely sort of pointed it out to me, and I apologize.
As I looked through it, the range is probably better described as Okay, the question was, on one of the pages, the Saramacca, page 63, did you say? It says 50,000 ounces a year from Saramacca, and correctly, that one seems certainly at the very low end of the ranges that I was looking at. We're talking 2 million-3 million ounces a year. If you sort of pick a midpoint there, a diluted grade of 1.4-1.6, something in that nature. You're getting, on 100% basis, after recovery is probably around 100,000 ounces a year. Our attributable share of that would be 70,000 ounces, we pay only attributable costs on it as well. It's a strong moving target for us right now because it's in study.
The other challenge with Saramacca is we look at it, and you can sort of see it from the long sections that Craig put up. It is much more variable in grade on average than our Rosebel deposit. We do get into some absolute wonderful grades. You will see variability on a year-by-year basis. I think a better number instead of 50 should have been sort of in the 60,000-80,000 ounces attributable.
Thank you. I guess that leads on to the diluted grade component. Indicated is 2.2, you're saying with mining dilution, that goes down quite a lot?
The planning we've done so far is actually a combined grade of indicated and inferred, and we're now two models beyond what has been released. Grades have been slowly moving up. I'm giving you a conservative end of the number. I do expect the average grades will be higher than I'm stating right now, and certainly the highest grade sections. As I said, when I'm looking at the Saramacca plans right now, I see several years that are very spiky. We're trying to manage that.
If we could ask everyone who has a question to please raise your hand and wait for the mic. Thank you.
Hi. While we're on the subject of Saramacca, could you tell us what the strip ratio is for that deposit?
The strip ratios that we had in the original resource estimate was a little over 7 to 1. As we're currently digging a little bit deeper now, the strip ratio on the last set of pits I was looking at is sort of eight or nine to one. For the purposes of the feasibility and the work we're doing right now, we're assuming all open pit mining. However, in our next stage of analysis starting next year, we do want to look at underground options for the deeper hard rock. With the very solid, wide intersections we see of high-grade hard rock on those high-grade ore shoots, the pit just wants to continue to dig. Every time we add another couple blocks, it just pushes lower and lower. The profitability of those blocks is high, but obviously that's driving some pretty high stripping rates.
As I said, right now, in order to get the project moving forward and understanding we're going to be mining in this for 12-15 years, we want to get the project out the door and understand what it is from a high level. Optimizations are yet to come, optimizations will be coming not only on mining method, but also on recovery method, on metallurgy. If you looked at the recoveries we put in the resource estimate, they were very conservative. They're much lower than Rosebel for both hard rock and transition.
We've continued to do metallurgical tests, as Suresh talked about it earlier. We see those sort of numbers continuing in the later test work, similar to what we had early on. However, that's all based right now on assuming we do absolutely nothing to the Rosebel mill. There are some strong optimization opportunities for transition in hard rock, we don't see any transition or hard rock till 2024, 2025 in our current mine plans, which gives us a little bit of time to understand what's there, obviously gives us a lot of time for the exploration teams to prove up additional ore.
Gord, just continuing on Saramacca. I asked you why the mine plan changed from 4 million tons down to 2 million-3 million tons.
I thought about what you said. We had said we would treat 9 million with about 30% additional from Saramacca, which is about 2.7. That still sort of falls into that The original mine plans we were running were sort of right in that 2.5, 2.6 range.
The rail option.
The rail option? Yes
Cheaper than the haulage?
Yeah. There's a couple reasons we swapped on the rail option. As we did our trade-off study as part of the scoping work in December, January, the capital number for the rail option continued to creep up on us. The other thing that happened in exactly the same timeframe, if you remember, is we announced that we picked up the Brokolonko property some 15-20 km to the west-northwest. In reexamining what we were doing for haulage, we recognized that we might not have the center of gravity for this remote operation. Do you really want to put a fixed infrastructure, high-cost item, when you might be at the far end of the deposit, rather than at the middle of the deposit? As we looked at it, the difference in haulage, we had looked at CAD 125, CAD 150 for rail haulage.
Our truck haulage numbers are coming in sort of in the CAD 325-CAD 350 range on an operating cost, significantly lower capital than the rail option. Also a resalable piece of equipment that if at the end of the day, the overall deposit is larger and significantly different in terms of a center of gravity, we could go to the higher capital option at a later date, and walk away with a capital plan that was just a little more rational.
Thanks, Martin. Gord, Steve Butler, GMP. On slide 45, you guys showed the, of course, 12.8 million tons that Suresh presented for 2017 mill throughput. Obviously the plan goes down, Gord, to about 10 million tons a year. Is that the-
That's Rosebel only.
That's Rosebel only. I get that. That's because the hard rock component goes-
If you look at the full reserve statement we came out with last year for Rosebel, it's 85% hard rock.
Right.
As we head to those numbers, you get down to sort of 8.5 million, 9 million tons a year through the plant.
To which you would supplement this, at least initially, separately, 2.5 million, 2 million-3 million tons.
Yes.
Supplemental.
Supplemental. Incremental, is how I would describe it.
Incremental.
Yes.
Okay. Philip, on slide 75, you talked about the four benchmarking visits within successful AHS operations, automated haulage systems. Can you maybe elaborate on your findings there, which mines you visited, and what you found in terms of mining costs, automated versus non-automated? Thanks.
Yeah. The sites that we actually visited were Fortescue down in Australia, so that's in the Pilbara area. Gaby Mine, which is just near Santiago.
No, it's north.
North. What's the town again?
Sierra Gorda is near.
Near Sierra Gorda, near Centinela.
Centinela, yeah.
There's big ore bodies in that area, that's for sure. There's lots of mining in that area. Those are the two that we visited. There's, as well, Radomiro Tomic was another one that was automated that we visited. The last one, the fourth one, I don't think we visited yet, is the Fort McMurray Suncor. That's on our target. On the slide there it says we visited, but it was supposed to be in April. It's actually been postponed till, it should be early July sometime when we're going to be going out. Those are the four sites. In terms of costs, we didn't get much in terms of cost, but in terms of productivities, they saw net increases. Automated trucks don't stop for lunch. They don't have breaks. Even the refueling time on them are optimized.
What we're seeing from Fortescue is where you have a ratio of about 4.5 operators per truck on a by year basis, they're at about 1.1 operators per truck automated. You can do the math pretty quickly. You're saving about 3.4 operators per truck. When you're dealing with about 25 trucks, just in labor and camp savings, that's aside from the productivity side, which they were seeing there was more productivity just from the fact that they're getting more hours. They actually also cut their fleet size. Because there's more hours of operations, they were able to cut the number of fleet equipment that they're running, both at Fortescue and Gaby Mine.
Fortescue's Caterpillar, they were running 793F series at Gaby, 830E Komatsu. Both companies providing a very similar product and a very robust product as well, Caterpillar and Komatsu.
Power life, maintenance.
Yeah. Power life, fuel, and maintenance. There's lots of articles that you'll see from Fortescue, where they see a 25%-30% savings in terms of cost, and that's public literature. All right. Okay. Oh, sorry. Don?
Yeah, maybe you. This is between you and Craig, I guess. When you're looking at Monster, now you've got two quite different types of deposits.
Yep.
What's this one going to take to be worthy of development? What kind of timeframe might we be looking at?
In my opinion, as I look at the Monster-Nelligan pair, you're right. You're talking about very, very different types of deposits. We've run evaluations on Monster as a standalone. Obviously, the size of it makes it very hard to build a processing facility. I think you'd need to look at a custom milling facility, either locally or given the high grade, perhaps you could haul it down to the Abitibi if you really wanted to do so. It starts to be a little more expensive.
How far away?
Understanding what that looks like, there probably is a standalone mining opportunity for Monster. I doubt at this time it would be something that IAMGOLD would be interested in. It would be a smaller thing unless we can build it up or double or triple the size of it. The target we are talking about for Nelligan is something more along the lines of a larger bulk tonnage operation. You sort of saw the targets that Craig talked about. I think he mentioned we are sort of 1 to 1.5 gram per ton, 1 to 2 million ounces. The 1 to 2 million ounces is his starter target for this year. We have had significant step outs there and continue to see good results. The ending target would be something significantly larger. I do not want to presume.
It is really getting ahead of my skis to talk too much about the size of the operation. If you were to double or a little bit better on that, you could certainly see a line of sight where you might have 2 to 5 years of high-grade sweetener coming in from the underground operation 15 kilometers away and really kicking off the first couple of years without a lot of work. That chute comes pretty close to surface. You might be able to pick a little bit up of it in a pit, but even on an underground operation, it is a fairly tight operation. It is not a lot of development. The widths are actually pretty good. It is a decline down around it and pick it up. Feeding that into a low-grade mill would have a really nice sweetening effect. You are talking 15 times the grade.
You do not need a lot of 15 times material to really sweeten everything up. Okay?
Gordon, I think you might. I am just sensing in the audience on Saramacca. Talking to Suresh and you earlier, I think we need to make sure that the analysts are aware that this is a work in progress.
Yes.
We're going to be releasing a new reserve update in the fall, which I think, as Craig indicated, looks quite good.
It does.
I really think we want to make sure we leave the right impression on Saramacca that we are being very conservative in the initial assessment, but this discovery in future looks quite robust for us. That's, I think I hear a little bit of that.
Yeah. The marginal or the incremental economics for Saramacca and all the studies we've shown significantly improves the valuation of Rosebel, even at relatively modest tonnage assumptions. Obviously, as we expand the size of the resource, the opportunity changes, gets larger. We are going at it very aggressively. Because it's a work in progress with a very tight timeline, we've chosen not to stop it every two months to wrap everything up and bring it to public. I know that may not be completely satisfying to everybody. However, if we're going to meet the deadlines that we've set for ourselves, we need to push it through. We have said in Q3, we'll come out with the feasibility study results and the new resource estimate, reserve estimate, and at that time, we'll be able to much better explain what the combined operation between Rosebel and Saramacca looks like.
We can give you ongoing resource estimates, but I think until we characterize it and actually describe what it means to Rosebel, it's of limited value for us to continue to come out with incremental increases to the size of the resource. Okay? All right. I think Oumar is going to talk a little bit about West Africa and then about Essakane. I know some of you guys were at Essakane a couple of weeks ago. Oumar is going to give you a bit of a flavor for it. If you want more detail, I'd certainly invite you to look at the materials that came out as part of that, and then I'll be back to talk about Saramacca. Heap leach, excuse me.
Can you hear me? Okay. My voice. Hello. Okay. Thank you very much, Gord. I'm going to talk about West Africa. As Steven pointed out earlier during the presentation, this is an area that we've been present since early 1990s. It's almost 30 years that we have been in that part of the world. It accounts for a large part of our assets today. Why West Africa? As you all know, it is an area where there's gold. Gold has been known there for centuries, and we have been among the few companies that restarted the modern gold drive in West Africa with the discovery of Sadiola. Sadiola has been a world-class deposit with millions and millions of ounces that we mine, and we still have quite a bit of ounces on the ground.
It is an area still underdeveloped, and as you follow up the more regular discoveries in most of these countries, it has its own challenges, political, security. If you know how to operate in this part of the world or in many others, you can make a lot of profit, you can operate very well. Ben mentioned how we mitigate political risk. This started from the beginning, and we have proven through the years that we understand, we know how to operate in West Africa. That is how we manage today to have a world-class operation with Essakane. Some of you guys were there a couple of weeks ago. You have seen how Essakane is. Beautiful operation, well-run. We managed to attract a world-class team to operate that mine. We also have Boto Gold that is progressing well in feasibility stage. Hopefully, we'll have some news later this year.
Siribaya advanced project, that also Craig is going to mention to talk about Siribaya down the road. Sadiola you see mentioned where we are, and still hope to get some agreement with the government in order to progress this operation. Pretty solid in West Africa, and more recently, with the move of Bruno to North America as RVP Americas, we welcome Mark Haywood, who is an experienced mining operation guy with over 30 years. He has operated previously in West African, Ghana, Guinea, has experience in other parts of the world, and has joined the team, and is now the GM of Essakane starting June 1st. Move to Essakane operation. This is a beautiful picture of a pit that you have seen last week virtually if you were there. It is located in the Sayah region, about 333 kilometers from the capital city of Burkina Faso.
Mining permit about 100 sq km, but we have an extensive exploration, number of exploration concessions that give us a really high potential. The permit is valid until 2028, and we can renew perpetually in five-year terms. I'll show you later a picture of a mill, of a hybrid thermal plant, 57 MW thermal and 15 MW solar. Today, we are the largest private employer in Burkina Faso. Talk about world-class operation. If you can see our health and safety stats, how we progress from 2012 to where we are today in 2018 and returning in 2019, very consistent and decrease on different rate with death and tier and tier. You see today where we stand. This is world-class. We compare ourselves to peers. We're doing well. We're proud of what we are doing, and we're continuously looking to improve our health and safety through our people.
Employees are first resource. What we want to be, we want to be employers of choice. That we're doing that successfully, not only in Burkina, but we're also attracting the best among the best, among even the expert to come to Burkina Faso to work for us at Essakane. We have about 2,200 employees, 96% nationals that we have been developing progressively, and we're reducing the number of expats. We have about 100 expats. Through the years, we're managing to reduce the numbers. That is sustained by the very strong training program. Training, technical training, but also leadership. We're developing our people, our nationals to raise to a type of standard, type of expertise we need. Because Burkina, up to recently, was not a mining jurisdiction. This is progressing, and we're pretty happy about our people. Solar plant, as I mentioned, beautiful. This is amazing.
Those who were on site, 50 MW solar plant combined with 57 MW. That is reducing our CO2 emissions. We're also saving in energy. That is leveraging us against the increase on oil price. We have a robust life. The life to currently, up to before we announced the heap leach, we're going to 2024, in the middle of 2024. With our growth project, since heap leach, we managed to extend the life of our life to 2026, 2027. With extensive properties that we have around our concession, we're pretty confident we'll go beyond 2030. At a certain stage from 2029, 2020, when heap leach comes on board, we'll get almost close to 400,000, 500,000 ounces per year total gold production. Not attributable, but total. We own 90% of that. Burkina has 10% gold ownership. How do we do that? The key drivers. We have 6 principal key drivers. Operational excellence.
That is based on the program that we call 400,000 ounces at CAD 850. I have a slide later to show you how it's organized, how it's built. Land management plan. If you want to maintain your social license to operate, you want to strive, you have to have a solid land management plan from exploration stage to closure. That also includes our community outreach. That includes our stakeholder relationship. That allow us today, Essakane, to be able to operate without any major hiccups. The country went through some political crisis. Essakane were not impacted compared to other companies in country because of what we do. The National Success Development Plan, that is national succession plan, as I just mentioned. Security. We have a very strong security plan to protect our people and our assets.
That's building on our own internal setup and also strong collaboration with the governments in order to protect our assets. Leveraging geological potential. Craig is going to talk more about that. Capturing growth opportunities like for heap leach and Falagountou and others. These are our key drivers that we're working on, and this is delivering results. Our key focus is to optimize our net asset values through regional exploration, the 400,000 ounces at plus CAD 850 per ounce, all-in sustaining costs, and the growth initiative. I list a few of them. The heap leach, of course. The Falagountou East and West that we brought into production. The last one was last year, Essakane phase 6 and 7. That's eventually pushed back to a 6 and 7 for access to resources at depth. Essakane North and South, I'll show you some pictures. Essakane Deep and eventually underground.
We have seen so far through the drilling for heap leach, the potential that is there eventually to go underground. Gosse, that we'll talk about later this year. The 400,000 ounces at CAD 850 an ounce. This has been a game changer in Essakane culture. It's really culture changing as we start implementing in 2016. It's based on continuous improvement, but training. If you go over virtual circle, it's based on Lean Six Sigma training. What we have done so far, we've trained large number of our people. It's changing the culture inside the operation towards excellence. People are questioning what they do. You can see that.
An anecdote, two weeks ago when we were saying goodbye to Bruno during his farewell party, the union leaders, in their speech to Bruno, they mentioned this as a game changer for them because it allows them to better understand how they can improve a business. For me, that is striking. That tells me it's working. We're training people. We train a lot. 34% of our workforce have been trained to date. With governance, we have quarterly steering committee meetings to review how we're doing and do improvement. Project execution, you can see here we have Green Belt projects. Black Belt four, Black Belt projects have been one completed, one in progress, and two in progress to be closed and two in progress. We have a number of Kaizens delivered by the workers. We celebrate our successes regularly, and then we communicate. It's going continuously.
For me, that is a change in culture, is it's bringing excellence, improving, always thinking how we can do better our business. That goes from top to bottom and bottom to top. The impact is you can see the continuous decrease, the trend, in our all-in sustaining costs. That's combined with a gold sold. You can see the trend here. We came from over CAD 1,000, or even higher. We had very high, but today the trend is going towards CAD 900. This is the impact on what we do. That's part of the program that I just spoke about. I'm pretty confident the next two years, you will see a low all-in sustaining cost. Operational excellence combined with a number of projects that we do to optimize our operation. One of them, oxygen plant.
It has the potential to increase the recovery by 0.5% and also drop our cyanide consumption. These are the type of projects that we're implementing. It should be commissioning this year, later this year. We also have grinding circuit optimization. In order to improve throughput, we have to optimize our grinding circuit. That has been lot of work, lot of work with our people, but also with consultants. Today, we have managed to increase by per line the throughput to 650 tons per hour. As you have seen, you'll see we have increasing hard rock. Essakane was not lucky to have lot of saprolite like other mines. We're a hard rock country. We do have to improve our grinding circuit. This is work in do. Carbon fine recovery and treatment. Few years ago, we start recovering carbon fine.
Mostly in Burkina Faso, most mines today do not recover carbon fine because the law does not, or the government does not allow export of carbon fine. We put the carbon fine recovery screens, and we had about 13,000 ounces accumulated on site. We work with the government to be able to export some of these in order to build our own carbon processing plant, fine incinerator on site. Which is now in operation. We exported about 12,000, and remaining we're processing now what we produce locally. We produce are going to be treated by our incinerator. Another major project that we did was intensive leach reactor. This also is significant project because it improved the recovery from gravity from 70%-80% to 97%, 98% total global recovery. That has an impact on the mill recovery by 0.5%, which is significant in our case.
It also, in term of health and safety, very important because it reduced arsenic level in our gold ore, and also improved the gold bars that we're selling. The mill productivity I was talking about, the increase on hard rock, as you can see, from 2014, our hard rock has been increasing significant. That also led to, as you know, we commissioned the line B in 2014, and since then our hard rock increased almost to 90%. In parallel, through all the improvement we have been doing, the mill availability has increased from 70%-80% to 93%, and our mill cost has been decreasing. This is thanks to all the different initiatives that has been ongoing at the site. I just show you a couple of those, but there are a number of other initiatives that the site team are conducting.
Falagountou East and West, located about 11 kilometers east of the mine, with about 500,000 ounces. High grade for us, 1.46 grams per ton compared to 1.1.2 at Essakane. Lot of sulfurite and transition material that help with the throughput at the plant, and it has extended our mine life. Project was done in-house, delivery on time and on schedule, on time and under budget. We work a lot with the local communities in order to do some of the contract work around the pit. That also help with our community relationship and also developing expertise in the community at Falagountou. I have a couple of pictures. This is the final pit at Essakane at CAD 1,200 per ounce for the reserve. It will give us about 3.9, almost four million ounces. You see this is currently the main zone, but extension towards on both end.
In terms of our reserve waterfall, this is where we were at end of 2016. We had 3.3 million ounces. Despite the depletion, we managed to replace the reserve, and we ended the year in 2017 at 3.4 million ounces. With the depletion, the drilling we have done, you can see we have increased the CIL available reserve by almost 600,000 ounces and remaining with the heap leach. Today, 4.7 million ounces, 1.3 million additional ounces that was added to our reserve. I will leave, I'll give to Gord, talk about the heap leach.
All right. Keep moving here. As we said, a couple of weeks ago, there was a tour of the site, so certainly talked quite a bit about heap leach at that point in time. Just to hit the highlights from those presentations, on the back of a very successful infill drilling program, we were able to increase reserves at Essakane by 39% to 4.7 million ounces. That's an increase of 1.3 million ounces. That is a combination, and Oumar just showed you on the waterfall, a bit of a breakdown there. That 1.3 million ounces, some of it versus our year-end reserve estimate, some of it is attributable directly to CIL. Because of the success we had in the drilling campaign, targeting inferred ounces to convert them to indicated ounces, and getting a grade pickup, that was unanticipated.
As well as the fact that with all of the improvements, again, that Oumar spoke about just a few minutes ago, we've been able to drive the CIL cut-off grade down. For instance, on hard rock, a year ago, we were using 0.62 gram per tonne as the cut-off grade for hard rock at EMZ. We're now using 0.56 on the back of the improvements in both throughput and productivity that we've seen. That cannibalized some material that we had originally modeled as being heap leach ore. You get 530-ounce pickup on CIL by itself. When you add the heap leach project, a couple of things happen. One, you start to create some ounces out of material that was previously categorized as waste within the existing design.
You also get a synergistic effect, that allows you an additional pushback of the whole pit to generate that other 630,000 ounces we described. The benefit is you can't quantify the heap leach in isolation. You need to quantify it with respect to the whole operation. Average annual production under that scenario increases by 16%. That's from where we are now. If you look at what the actual increase is in two years' time and look at the time period, from 2020 to the end of life in 2026, the increase is a little more than that. It extends the mine life versus our prior releases by three years to 2026. I talked earlier about 2030. That comes from additional resources available to us. Peak production over 500,000 ounces. Oumar mentioned that earlier. Consolidated conservative AISC costs going forward, of CAD 946 an ounce.
That's over from today. When you look at from 2020 to 2026, I think the number is around 923, something like that. Again, conservative CapEx, booked in at CAD 155 million. It says excluding fleet because the fleet numbers are included in the AISC sustaining cost numbers. Don't want to double count. We are currently moving to a feasibility study. That feasibility study due to be completed in Q1 of 2019. As we look at the drilling campaigns, the one we ran last year and into early this year, as I said, we had some pickup in ounces. We had targeted inferred areas within a theoretical pushback that was done during the scoping study work when we were looking at heap leach. We expanded those zones and upgraded those zones. We've continued that program because we do see a continuation of ore to depth.
Resources versus what I just talked about, resources being M&I at 5.1 million ounces and 600,000 ounces of inferred. Of that 600,000 ounces of inferred, 350,000 of that sits within the reserve pit. 250,000 additional recoverable ounces between CIL and heap leach is within the existing pit. Obviously, conversion of that material changes the economics on everything I just talked about a few seconds ago, quite nicely. Changes stripping ratios, changes total life, and changes the valuation, most importantly of all. We continue to build on that model, and we continue to collect geometallurgical samples so we truly know what's going on here. Pit optimization, you can see the success of pits, and these are the designs that feed into the waterfall chart that Oumar showed you a few seconds ago. Gold price at $1,200, CIL recovery at 92% on fresh rock, heap leach recovery at 55%.
I'll speak to heap leach recovery at 55% again. Of all of the samples we ran during the scoping and the pre-feasibility study, 55% would be at the bottom end of column recovery. As part of the heap leach, we are looking at agglomeration. We had originally not looked at agglomeration because we felt it was going to create a significant increase in operating costs because of the cost of cement to agglomerate. As we've come to the end of the pre-feasibility study, we've realized there is, in the existing operating cost model, significant amount of lime that is being blended into the heap leach ore in order to keep it basic and not go acid. Lime is quite expensive in this part of the world. When we look at agglomeration, we can substitute cement for lime, the actual incremental operating cost to go to agglomeration is quite small.
The incremental capital cost to go to agglomeration is quite small. Agglomeration is not a complicated procedure. It's a washing machine, if you will. You just run all the crushed rock through it. Our preliminary tests are showing 10%-15% improvement in recovery so far in the agglomerated test. As we go to feasibility, that's obviously something we'll be looking very hard at. You can see the processing cost we've lessed there and mining cost for fresh rock. It's an attractive project, and it will get better as we look at feasibility. Project schedule, tied to what I just said, going into feasibility study now. Feasibility ready in the first part of next year. Perhaps some early long lead items will be looked at towards the end of this year, with completion early in 2020, and production from heap leach starting in 2020.
We are, as part of the feasibility study, also looking at the CIL circuit itself. We are going to examine an option which would look at just a low capital investment in the CIL circuit with no heap leach, to provide us an alternative case with which to judge the overall economics of the project. We'll pick the project that makes the most economic sense for us. Going to hit the home stretch here. Craig is standing between you and beer, so if you want to encourage him to work fast, go ahead.
Okay. It's not just me standing between you and the beer and the wine. Phil's behind me as well, so it's a shared burden. Exploration take two. We'll stay in Burkina for a little bit. Here's just a location map, obviously showing the Essakane operation, which I'm going to go into a couple of things that we're working on there. I did want to point out some of our efforts on the early part of the pipeline. We have a project called Tioun, which is off to the south-southwest. There's not a lot of details on this. What I do want to tell you, though, is we have 1,600 square kilometers of concessions that we've applied for and optioned. There's artisanal workings on the site. There's gold there. This is a project of the future.
You're not going to hear anything about this for the next couple of years. This is the kind of thing that we're looking at in the future to build up that pipeline. This will allow us to lever off our operational teams, our in-country expertise, both with our government relations and with our geologic expertise, to take what we know at Essakane and apply it down there. We already have teams on the ground there now working. Let's get into Essakane itself. As you know, we have a large land position, 1,200 square kilometers around the mine. Our first satellite success was the drill out at Falagountou, which is now in operation. More recently, the Falagountou East, which is being prepared for mining right now. We have a number of other prospects in the land holdings that we are targeting for eventual resources.
This year, we're working on Gosse, which is 14 kilometers to the northwest. You can see just above the Essakane Main Zone. We have a number of other ones that we'll be working on. I'm going to give you just a very brief flavor on what some of these look like. Here's Gosse, the drill out that we've been doing. We've had some successive drill campaigns the last couple of years, tightening up the drilling from 50 by 50s. By the end of this year, we'll be at 50 by 25. That'll support the formal resource estimate that we're doing there. Our geological target, there it is. That's what we're hoping to see, somewhere between 400,000 to 600,000 ounces, between 0.8 to 1 gram.
One of the interesting things we're seeing at Gosse is a deeper than expected oxide profile, deeper than what we've seen at Essakane itself. That might be a nice benefit for us, obviously, if we can confirm a good thickness of oxide. This is just a schematic showing one of our early inventory models, if you will, with the drilling that we've done since. What you'll see is that we did hit some nice grades in areas that the blocks were interpolating at lower grades. Obviously, we're hoping that as we progress with this, that we're going to get a nice confirmation of better grades. You can also see the depth. This isn't a particularly great section for that. This line marks the depth to saprolite and then the depth to transition.
There is some pretty good softer rock, if you will. All the millers that we have in the company are always crying for softer rock. I don't know what it is. We just try and get that for them. Let's move on to another prospect we call Tintéradé. This is located 20 kilometers to the north-northwest, again, of Essakane Main Zone. It's a new prospect. There's a lot of artisanal working shown on this map outlined in red. These are areas of disturbance where the locals are mining. It's basically another anticlinal hinge, if you will, very similar structural position to Essakane. That's what we like about it. In the hinge area, right in the nose, we're getting some gold mineralization over good thicknesses. It's a very early prospect at this point in time.
Given the structural characteristics we're seeing, the potential could be quite large for us. This is another one of our prospects that we're working. It's very close to Essakane. We've done some phases of drilling here, and what we're seeing is a possible target of exploration is somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 ounces above 1 gram. It does have a reasonable oxide profile with it as well. Once we're done with Gosse, this would be something that we'd be looking to bring on. I guess the message we're trying to impart here is that we do have a number of satellite prospects that we will be moving through with our exploration, bringing them to formal resources, and trying to get them into the mine plan.
If we can emulate the success we had at Falagountou, where we started with 200,000 loose inventory ounces and built it up to 1 million by the time we were done with resources, those are some strong successes for Essakane. On top of all the good work that they're doing with heap leach and looking at their final pushbacks on the pits, this is the other stuff that will come in behind that. One slide on Boto, because I know Phil's going to update you on Boto coming up. There is a typo. Yes, there's not 2 Boto West. One of those should say Boto East. Yes, that's the actual Boto project. What I want to talk about here is that as we're advancing the feasibility study at Boto, we've also been out consolidating our land position.
Very much like what we've done at Saramacca, we've now picked up some adjacent concessions. We control just under 800 sq km of concessions in the area. The one I would point to would be this one in yellow, what we call the Dalafin Block. There's some early-stage drilling that's gone on there with a prospect that's only 10 km from our main deposit at Malikoundi, with some very nice grades, high-grade gold in quartz, tourmaline vein systems that have only been tested down around 50 m depth. We're already working on this and hope to be drilling that before the end of the year as a first pass. It's quite a large land position.
It's just to show you the strategic thinking we're putting in around Boto as we bring that through to a viable project to make sure we consolidate all the regional prospects that could also impact that project. Diakha, Sierra Leone. This is a project that's virtually an extension of Boto. It's 10 km to the south. It has an inconvenient truth that it's in another country, unfortunately. The geology, we have a good handle on, but we didn't make the borders. I just want to point out what we've been doing here. Back in 2014 or 2015, we announced a maiden resource on a new discovery called Diakha. The original resource pit at that time had a little over 860,000 ounces in it, a pretty good grade, 1.8 grams.
Since that time, we've consolidated the land position there and done some step-out drilling, and we've now doubled the footprint with the drilling. This is just a schematic showing we've drilled off to the north and we've drilled to the south. We continue to hit mineralization. Earlier this year, we put out some of the numbers, and I have another slide coming that'll show that. We will be updating this resource as part of our year-end resource work. Again, target potential is to bring this main prospect somewhere between 1 million to 2 million ounces at similar grades. That's what we're targeting. The potential for that, we feel, is pretty strong given the step-out drilling we've done. This is a rather busy map. I apologize for it. When geologists put together maps, this is what you get.
Just a few things I want to point out. We were trying to target some high-grade structures within the original resource pit, and I've circled some of the results there. We were able to duplicate those and follow those structures. You're seeing some wide intervals of +5 grams in the pit, which is going to help boost the grade. You're also seeing some of the drilling that we've done along strike to the north. Okay, that's the north arrow. Some very nice intersections, either wide, I think this one says 50 m at 2 grams. We had another one we released that was 18 m at just under 8 grams. All of that is new material that will be coming into the resource pit. As well, we've extended mineralization some 400 m to the south.
This will be brought into a resource by the end of the year. That's what we're targeting. We're completing a 50 by 50-meter drill out on those areas. Just finally, to leave you with just part of our strategy, I did indicate that we are putting part of our exploration budget, and have always done so, into our Greenfields project. This is just a current pipeline. You've heard a lot about these projects up here. These are all the ones with the resources, all the ones that are the subject of current studies that we're advancing through to our next development opportunities. We're also focused on the lower part, and we've done a lot of work to rebuild the lower part of this pipeline so we have projects of the future.
A lot of these names aren't going to be something you're going to be hearing about in the next couple of quarters. Well, maybe Brokolonko you will. They are long lead projects that we will be working on to advance them up to the next opportunities for the company. A little bit of a breakdown on how the budget looks, if you slice and dice the numbers a little bit. I will say that we continue to be underweighted North America. We would like to have more projects in Canada, obviously, but it's a very competitive environment. You're all aware of that. The cost of entry on good quality projects is not cheap, and Canada, quite frankly, is fairly well explored. Finding that opportunity where we think we have a good chance for the next discovery can prove challenging. That's essentially how the budget's breaking down.
I think with that, I'm going to be calling Philip up to talk about Boto, near and dear to my heart.
All right. Gord uses this expression with us. He says some great minds are discovered, and some are made. Boto is a combination of both, but a lot of it is made. We've been working hard on Boto for at least the last two, three years, right from PEA, and we've made it grown every time we've looked at it and touched it, and that's going to continue through the feasibility. In February of this year, we published the National Instrument 43-101 on Boto. This was a pre-feasibility study, which you all saw. The initial CapEx was CAD 249 million to build it, and the IRR of this project was 13.3% rate of return and about CAD 829 per ounce, all in sustaining capital.
Not too long after we published that, we started our feasibility study. We actually I didn't mention earlier for Côté Gold, but for Boto, prior to starting the feasibility study, we hired on a strong project manager, Martin Anto, who has lots of mining experience. In each one of our projects, when we bring them to feasibility, we bring on the project manager that's actually going to be executing it. This is one of the major advantages of getting these projects lined up in this way. Quickly after we started, we did some quick math, and we were able to demonstrate that we would improve the rate of return of this project should we push it to 2.5 million tons per annum. That's what we did. That's the premise of the feasibility going forward.
Maybe just also to note, this is just I think, 7 kilometers south of Fekola. Fekola B2Gold, a very impressive ore body, and it's just, as Craig mentioned, north of Diakha. Again, this is in good mining area. This is why Boto has another motivation bringing it to 2.5. You don't want to build the mill too small if there's potential around that area. The key changes that came from the pre-feasibility study to the feasibility study is we talked about the 25% increase in throughput. That 25% increase in throughput, and as Umar and Gord always challenge us, at the same capital cost. We're driving to get towards that same capital cost that we did in the pre-feasibility study. Not just increasing the capacity, but also getting it at that same capital cost.
We're not there yet, but we're getting close to that number, and that's the objective. Another thing I'll show you in the next slide is we've optimized our TSF. Our TSF was in 2 paddocks originally. I'll show you in a bit. We've tried to optimize that in this feasibility study to improve it to 1 paddock only. Benchmarking. As you saw in Côté Gold, we like to learn from others before we actually leap. Best way of doing things, learn from others and take what they do best. We went to school with Mako. Mako, which is just next door to us in the Kédougou region.
We also went with Teranga and went and looked at the geology and the geotech around that pit because we know that we're going to be in a similar strike as that, we wanted to learn as much as we could from Fekola and Teranga. With Fekola, Teranga, Mako, those are the principal areas that we went and looked at. Again, a lot of learnings in school. In fact, the sizing of this plant and the engineering done on this plant is by the same company, Lycopodium. Lycopodium has both done the engineering on Mako, Fekola, and ourselves. Going to school is pretty easy when you're working with the same engineering firm.
We did continue the metallurgical testing, and we're pretty encouraged that we're going to do better than what we did in the pre-feasibility study, as well as many capital savings and deferments that we're looking at. This is anything ranging from power plants using a build, own, operate sort of scenario to avoid our capital spend on the project and try to push it into some of the sustaining elements. Again, improving the project in terms of an execution side. As well, we're going to be incorporating the 2017 drilling, which hadn't been done. Again, this is areas north of Malikoundi North, trying to bring this into the project. One of the major focuses was the inferred amounts. I mean, we saw about 540,000 ounces of inferred material.
The idea is to try to transfer that to indicated to bring it into the feasibility study. As you see, most of the same engineering group that we did in the pre-feasibility study continued. Lyco, AGP, and KP are still working with us on that and moving forward. Just to get a look at the lay of the land on this, on the plant, again, 2.5 million tons per annum is now the design. We also are going to be looking to see how we can optimize that with soft rock. We know that when we bring soft rock in our operations at Rosebel and Essakane, we get a bump up in throughput because it doesn't take much to grind when it's already saprolite. You do get that saving. We're going to be looking at trying to blend that in and try to improve the production profile.
We want to work into the capacity of staging that soft rock, as I mentioned, and integrating the metallurgical test work for the plan on that side. Here, if you see, this is the one pad up now that we're aiming for the TSF, the Tailings Storage Facility, just north of the plant. Again, not having to spend capital later on. If we have the fortune of finding more ore, we still have the northern part that we can use, as in the pre-feasibility study. Upside capacity can be contained within that same TSF. The plant layout hasn't changed much from the original pre-feasibility study. We have optimized certain elements of it to reduce capital and to reduce the footprint. We are presently developing, and it's almost complete at this point, a project execution plan, which is using EPCM approach.
That is all being developed at this point, same with a logistics plan and contractors in country to do the construction. In terms of timeline, we always like to give challenges to our team to make sure that we're pushing projects as fast as we can, giving them a good problem to work with. The pre-feasibility study report was complete and submitted in February of last year. Right now, we're looking at finishing our feasibility for November. November 2nd is the application for the exploitation permit, and we should have our EA just prior to that. With elements of negotiating the exploitation permit, we could be as early as showing this to the board in March of next year with a potential earliest start of construction in April of 2019. I guess on that, I'll send it to Steve.
Well, thanks, everybody, a lot of material. I guess that always the challenge is, certainly in the business we're in, is everything is a work in progress. What we're particularly excited about are the catalysts that we have in front of us, and there are many. As you know, we had a very strong first quarter, not only operationally, but we had a lot of critical announcements. Everything from the district consolidation that we saw at Saramacca to Falagountou, the solar plant, which I was out there for, that Oumar talked about. We've also had the tour at Essakane that a number of you attended, thank you very much, and the heap leach. What we're looking at in the third quarter is some pretty robust news around Saramacca, Siribaya, and Boto.
I would also tell you that in terms of sequencing, we're never going to get ourselves in a position where we're diluting our management team or our capabilities. We put Côté first in terms of execution. I would tell you that that, by far, is our most important project. It's a large project for us and with Sumitomo. We believe we've got the track record to execute on that, and we will make sure that we prioritize it. The good news is we have some great projects also following that, which includes Boto. Saramacca will be, I guess, the test run for us in many respects. It's not a straightforward project, but certainly a much smaller project that's well on its way now. I think people are going to be very pleased with what they see in the fall. We are having another tour in November, I believe, Ken?
November 12th, of Saramacca. We'll also have probably somewhat of an update on our district consolidation. I think at the end of the day, what I'm most excited about is that the company has taken what I would call a unitization approach to the gold mining industry. What do I mean by that? Well, we have really focused around our current infrastructure, and we've done a lot of good work, I believe, not only around our current mines, but around the land packages that surround it. When I talk about short cycle capacity and optimizing that, I'm not just talking about near mine exploration or brownfield exploration. That obviously is extremely important.
The work that's been done at Rosebel by Suresh and his team around optimizing the mine, the work that's been done by Bruno at Essakane, and Oumar around optimizing Essakane, the work that's been done at Westwood by Martial and his team, and the work that will continue at Côté once it's built is absolutely critical. When I was up at Côté and I looked at our update, we were there on Friday and Saturday, and we were there with the First Nations group and with our Sumitomo partners. One of our directors, Tim Snider, who ran Phelps Dodge, said to me as we went through our update on the exploration package, where we have over 500 sq km of land in Côté, and we take a look at some of the drill results that we're seeing and the updates around that package. He said something quite interesting.
He said, "Steve, what we're finding today is that more and more mines are made." Versus discovered. When I look at mines like Rosebel, Essakane, Côté, Westwood, and I take a look at what's being done to optimize the mines around the infrastructure we have, that is what is generating the kind of returns I think this industry needs to be successful. Rosebel is literally a brand-new mine. What's great about it is that the infrastructure on a replacement basis, which would be over CAD 1 billion, has already been paid for. Essakane, identical. You saw the updates from Craig about what's going on at Essakane with the satellite deposits.
At Côté, I am completely convinced, based on what we're seeing today, that the resource updates at Côté are going to be very robust because surrounding Côté are many small satellite deposits that on their own are not economically feasible. When you have infrastructure in place and can lever off of that, they become very economically attractive. Westwood, very similar. As we extend our reach at Westwood and you look at a mine life of over 20 years, we're going to add significant value. The company, when you look at Rosebel, 2019 was kind of the near-term death of Rosebel. Now, I believe 2035, when you add Saramacca. When you look at Essakane, which was 2022, now 2028. I believe with these Gosse and other discoveries, post-2030. You take Westwood and add 20 years, Côté 20 years, Boto.
You've got a company that has a very long reserve mine life and a cost structure that is getting into an area that one can call competitive, which is what we weren't 3 to 5 years ago. Lots of great catalysts in front of us, some very challenging execution, which I believe we can handle, and we don't have to do anything in the area of M&A to achieve this. Here's the other thing that is very important. Permitting is not an issue. Our permitting at Rosebel and at Saramacca in that gold district is at an accelerated pace. Our permitting at Essakane is at an accelerated pace. Our permitting at Côté is well in hand with the environmental permits we have, our First Nations relationship, which is critical. Westwood has already been permitted and moving ahead. Boto, similar. We're well on our way.
I want to thank everybody for coming today. It's very important that we stay current with you. Here's the other thing I would suggest. If you have a question, please call us. Don't write your report then call us. Please call us then you can write your reports. One of the frustrations that I have is, I'm pointing back at me here, I'm not criticizing anybody here, is that maybe sometimes our information flow isn't the greatest. If you have a question, I know a number of you do, give us a call. If you don't hear from us quickly, call me directly and I'll fix it. It isn't simple. There are a lot of complexities to this. A lot of you have been around a long time, so very respected.
If you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to call us and we'll get the information to you. Are there any questions for me? Yes. Oh, sure.
Sorry. Probably it's obvious from all of us, we've watched poor execution in this industry.
Right.
You have four overlapping projects, 2019. What do you need to do, or do you need to do anything in terms of your management horsepower and your ability to execute, and your thoughts on executing four projects in a row?
Well, I'm not going to look back in my past and sound too much like a braggart, okay? When I was at Enbridge, and projects to me, capital projects are very similar. I managed a CAD 6 billion expansion of the Enbridge system, managed a CAD 2 billion expansion of our Colombian system. I learned, through the school of hard knocks, about project management. Certainly had challenges in my years, but learned a lot. Gord, similar. Gord, maybe you should come up here as well, has had some great project experience. Phil Gauthier, who is up here. I've looked at the project structure that we have for our projects, and I would tell you that it's extremely comprehensive and it's led by some of the best people that we have in the industry. As Phil said, we measure where we are in these projects.
At a minimum, every quarter, we have a very thorough review of our projects in Longueuil by the entire team, and every quarter by our board of directors. We're very cognizant of what missteps mean in the industry. It's unforgiving and rightfully so. We can't afford to have a misstep. I think you'll see it reflected in our conservatism. You saw it a bit with Saramacca. As we get more information, and as we are able to speak more confidently, we will. We don't want to get out in front of our skis. I have every confidence in the world, based on the team that we have in place, that we'll be able to meet those objectives. That's really all I can say. Gord, do you have anything to add?
Sure. You're not asking a question that our own board isn't asking of us, Don. We set up the structure in Longueuil under Phil as a PMO, Project Management Office. They take several of the consolidation and integration functions managed within that group. However, each project, based on its own complexities, is managed. We've got direct control. We've got direct project managers. Right now, as we look at Boto and Côté, most importantly, they're being characterized or they're being set up to be run as an EPCM under control of the project management, and ultimately above that, a steering committee for each of those. Understanding the size and the greenfield's nature of those two projects, we felt that was appropriate. We will staff as required, and obviously each of the RVPs is accountable to put together an operating team to take those as they move forward.
We showed up some optimistic dates, Phil referred to them for Boto. As we're looking at it, Côté is the first project, we will execute that. We'll find the appropriate time to move Boto forward without challenging ourselves too much on the execution side, obviously also looking very strongly at our balance sheet. My partner in crime in the CFO's office wants to make sure that our balance sheet continues to be protected. When I look at both Saramacca and Essakane heap leach, those are somewhat different projects. Saramacca, if you think about it, is much smaller in scope. To us, it's not significantly different than us opening up the Rosebel pit. Rosebel pit was opened up 13 km away from the existing operation. There's no additional camp. There's one small outbuilding there. Saramacca is a little bigger than that.
It's a little bit of an expansion of the fleet. The road is really the only significant piece of that contract, a road is a pretty discreet contract in and of itself. It's not going to draw on the corporation very much in order to execute that project. Essakane, as we're looking at it right now, would be a self-build project. It's relatively similar to other projects we've done in the past. The design, if you're looking at it, is really the same crushing circuit as already exists, other than the addition of an HPGR as sort of the tertiary circuit, then building heap leach pads, which is a lot like lining the tailings pond, which we have a whole crew out there doing as we speak.
We don't want to paint it all with one brush, and we do spend a lot of time thinking about execution, and our board keeps questioning us about execution. We're comfortable. We won't do something if we aren't very comfortable that it can be completed as designed.
There was one other question I think I saw, or maybe not. No? Okay, well, there's the bar here. Please, as they say in Texas, fill your boots. Really, really do appreciate the support and the attendance. Please, thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you at site if you're coming to Rosebel or Saramacca, and certainly at Côté coming up. Thank you.