Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for hosting us, and it's good to see everybody here. For those of you who don't know IAMGOLD, we have three operating mines. Two of them are in Canada, and one of them is in West Africa, in Burkina Faso. We also have one of the largest undeveloped gold projects in Canada, the Nelligan project. Starting at Côté Gold, our newest mine, over the last four years, we went through the journey of building and then ramping up Côté Gold, and last year was the first full year of operations. Côté got up to 400,000 ounces in that first year of operations. It's an open-pit mine. This year we expect to produce between 390,000-400,000 ounces at all-in sustaining cost of $1,775- $1,925. What's important to note is that Côté has a royalty on it.
In this high gold price environment, we of course, are seeing much higher margins, but that also increases the royalty. That is included in our cost at Côté, and that's about $300 per ounce that you see in that project. For Côté this year, the plan is to give the teams a chance to breathe after we went through the ramp-up, and look at how are we going to make this operation more efficient and get into a routine of operating the mine really well, as we also need to look at our cost structure. Because during the ramp-up, we made some decisions that added some cost, and now this year it is implementing measures to remove those costs from the cost structure. Also, at the end of the year, we plan to release an expansion study that I'll discuss a bit more later.
Staying in Canada, looking at Westwood is producing about 110,000-130,000 ounces a year. It's got a reserve of 1.1 million ounces, but its resource is close to 4 million ounces. For Westwood, we have an underground mine at 1,000 tons a day, and then we supplement the feed with an additional 200,000 tons a day with a small satellite open pit. That satellite open pit is expected to be there for the next two to three years. Looking at what's next for Westwood, the next big catalyst is when we move into the eastern side of the deposit. At the moment, we're mining the central zone and the western part, which is where the reserve mostly is. There's a great opportunity on the eastern side of the deposit where it's more amenable to bulk mining.
We see in the future that could then replace that additional supplement feed to keep the mill full. We are excited to working on that study, and we will be issuing that next year. Staying in Canada, also in Quebec, is the Nelligan project. Nelligan started off as an exploration project for IAMGOLD, and over the years we've been drilling it out. End of last year, we announced an acquisition where we merged or brought two companies into the family, and that is now a large area, with lots of potential, where there's almost 12 million ounces of resource available. We are planning to issue a PEA next year for Nelligan to illustrate what that area can do. Last but not least is Essakane. Essakane has been producing more than 400,000 ounces for over 12 years now.
It's in Burkina Faso, so there is some other challenges that the mine has to deal with. Our team has been very resilient to continue to predictably produce ounces from that area. Essakane's mine life, 1.2 million ounces reserve, takes it to 2028. What we are working on now is converting some of that resource that's almost 5 million ounces into extending that mine life. We plan to also issue a study next year for Essakane to illustrate how we believe we can add another five years to the mine life, taking us to 2033. Essakane's cost structure also includes a royalty that's $400 an ounce.
If you look at the cost structure, although it is on the higher end of the scale, it does include that royalty, but it also includes other costs that we need to incur to ensure that we can continue to operate that mine safely and continue to have a predictable operation. Our team has been very successful in doing that. With Côté now in operation and adding Nelligan, the end of our journey is where we've now landed with a company where 87% of our resource is situated in Canada. Although from a production perspective, it's just over 50%, we do have that resource because of the life of mine that Côté brings, as well as the potential expansion of Westwood and Nelligan. From a net asset perspective, you can also see that the value is really concentrated in Canada.
With those three mines, our attributable production for the year is going to be about 800,000 ounces. That, in this gold price environment, allows us to generate significant cash flow, and the reason for that is, if you look at the EBITDA margin, we've really ramped up EBITDA. As the mine ramped up and the gold price increased at the same time, it really helped us to get to the end of Q4 last year, where we generated a record EBITDA in that quarter of $710 million. For the year, it was $1.55 billion. What's also important is our conversion of EBITDA into free cash flow is really good, where our EBITDA of $710 million converted into $700 million of operating cash flow.
The mine site cash flow, which is all of the operating cash flows from the mine site, less their CapEx, was $600 million in Q4 and $1.2 billion for last year. There's a significant amount of cash flow coming out of the mine now with the margins. Part of the reason is, as we were ramping up Côté and as we were transforming the company, we were also fixing our balance sheet and we were removing a lot of the structures in our balance sheet that sometimes use some of your cash, including completing the delivery of the prepay. We finished that in the middle of last year, and that's why you see the cash flow generation really ramping up, because now all of those ounces are truly generated or exposed to the higher gold price and the higher margin.
With that cash flow in Q4 that we generated, we paid down $468 million of debt. We completely removed the second lien notes that we put in place to fund Côté Gold. $400 million paid down in four months. We also started our share buyback program. That was started in December, and we bought back our first $50 million of shares in that month. Looking at this year, and specifically at Essakane, we are generating a lot of free cash flow in Burkina Faso, and we put a structure in place that allows us to move cash out of the country every month. All the cash that's being generated in excess of working capital requirements are being repatriated. By the middle of February, we already repatriated $170 million from Burkina Faso into Canada.
Now, in our share buyback program, we are mainly using the funds coming from Essakane to fund that program almost on a one-to-one dollar basis. So this year alone, starting in January, we've already purchased $260 million worth of shares up to the end of March. And we'll continue to use the cash flow from Burkina Faso to fund our share buyback program. We're also going to then, when we look at our Canadian operations, the free cash flow that's coming from there, we're going to repay the remaining drawn amount on our credit facility, and we will be done with that by Q2 as well. And then looking forward, we still have $450 million of high-yield notes.
We are seeing that as part of our permanent capital structure at this point, that only matures in the end of 2028, and we don't intend to use any of our capital allocation for that for this year. This year, the focus for capital allocation really is using Essakane funds for share buybacks and then continuing to build our financial capacity using funds in Canada and building that in Canada. A bit more about Côté Gold and the plans for this year. As I mentioned earlier, we have now ramped up the mine. It did 36,000 tons a day, nameplate capacity last year. Our intent this year is not to increase that. Our intent is to run at that level.
To do that really well, you can see in the bottom right corner, the ramp-up that the mine has occurred, and now the idea is to keep that stable. To achieve that production levels, there was a couple of bottlenecks that we needed to deal with. One of that was on our secondary crushing. We identified that quite early in the process. During the course of last year, we doubled our secondary crushing capacity by installing an additional cone crusher. That was installed and implemented by December. To achieve our throughput, we had to supplement that throughput with contractor crushing on site. We had a contractor bringing equipment, and we did that during the course of last year.
Now that we are busy commissioning that additional crushing capacity that's installed, we will be phasing out this contractor crushing, and that's really important because that is actually the main driver of our unit costs being higher than expected. If we look at our cost at Côté Gold, the areas of focus for us really is our per ton metrics, because we see that as one of the biggest value drivers for this mine. At the moment, the mine is operating above $4 a ton. We believe that there's a clear path to get the mine in the low to mid $3 a ton. Why is that important? As I'll show you in a bit, there's a huge deposit now at Côté Gold, which means we have to move over 2 billion tons of material.
Really over the life of mine, one of the biggest value drivers is getting that cost per ton as low as we can, because moving that amount of tons really then reduces the cost of doing that. How are we going to get the cost down? Well, at the moment, there's a lot of rehandling that we have to do because the mine needs to feed the additional contractor crushing, so there's a lot of input rehandling. We also need to open up the pit, so we're going to continue working on that. This year we actually have some expansion capital where we're going to really enlarge the size of the pit. That allows us to have more mining faces then to move more into bulk mining, and that will then really help us drive that cost down.
During ramp-up, there's still some other areas where we need to focus on. Increasing the lifespan of the tires is one of them, and we see a clear path to get that down to the mid to low $3 a ton. On the mill, our cost is more than $20 a ton, which our target is closer to $12 a ton, and a good $4-$5 of that is because of this additional crushing and all the work that's going along with that. By just phasing that out, we already get those costs down. We also have some additional CapEx this year of about $50 million that we are improving infrastructure. Although it doesn't increase capacity, what's important about that, it will reduce the cost of operations.
So again, if you look at the amount of tons that need to be processed over the life of mine, getting that cost down is really important, and that is continuing to be the focus for us this year. Why such a big focus on those two cost metrics? It's because the second and even more valuable driver for Côté is the expansion potential and incorporating Gosselin into the deposit. So by the end of this year, we will be issuing a new study or an updated study, and in that study, we will be showing how we are planning to take the mine from 36,000 tons a day to 50,000 or 55,000 tons a day. So increasing throughput. But also there's the Gosselin zone, but also now an expanded Côté that will be included in that study. So at the moment, Côté has seven million ounces in reserve.
If you look on the Côté pit shell, that yellow line, that's basically the pit shell for the 7 million ounces of reserve. If we then go and we start and we look at the larger Côté and we incorporate Gosselin, that brings our total Measured, Indicated, and Inferred Resource to over 20 million ounces. Once we put that in our plan, we expect to double at least our reserve to 14 million ounces or more. This then allows us, with that increased capacity, to have an operation of 450,000-500,000 ounces a year. With this magnitude, you can see that it's showing a mine life of more than 35 years, which for a mine of this size in this region is really a unique opportunity for us, and we see this as a significant catalyst for our company.
Included in that study is going to be those unit costs, and we want to prove this year that we can do that so that the cost is believable, and that will then be included in there as well as we show this expansion study. From a phasing perspective, we'll continue to mine Côté first, so that's for more than 10 years, and then only then do we need to bring in Gosselin. As part of that project, we do have to do a lot of stripping and water management at Gosselin, which includes capital or is capital, and we also need to install our tailings capacity. The way that this project is phased, it means a lot of that capital is only really far out in the future once you have actually mined out a lot of Côté. We are expanding the mill.
From 2028-2030 is when we will be expanding the mill to get to that higher throughput capacity. Nelligan, which is now our new consolidated map, you can see IAMGOLD previously owned the Nelligan project and Monster Lake. Nelligan is an open pit, kind of seeing that as the standard these days for Canadian projects at that grade profile. Monster Lake is an underground mine, potentially, that would then supplement the mill feed with higher-grade material. With the acquisitions we did end of last year, we've included Philibert and Chevrier, but also we've consolidated that whole land package. Now that allows us to go and look at what is the future at these projects.
We are looking this as having a central processing facility and then trucking the different ore sources to the mine, and this could be a large-scale mine as well, and we own 100% of it after the acquisitions we did. We've also eliminated most of the royalties on this property. If you look at this project and the potential that's coming out, owning 100% of it, we are quite excited to see this. Now, next year we'll be issuing a PEA, and then that will show early in the next decade when we will start developing this project. That is the future of Quebec and how we're going to continue to grow and invest in Canada and create a center of gravity for our company. We are quite excited.
There's quite a few catalysts this year coming up, the Côté study at the end of the year, and then next year we've got the Essakane expansion, adding five years to the mine life, adding in the bulk mining at Westwood in that eastern zone, and then also the PEA for Nelligan all coming next year. Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks, Maarten. Any questions coming from the audience? Over there.
Excuse me a minute. Thank you, Maarten. Just a quick question on the Côté expansion. Are you still looking at 50,000 tons per day, or is it potentially higher?
When we look at the expansion and what is the most effective level of capital and also the least disruptive for the project, we are still believing that it's going to be 50,000 -55,000 tons a day to kind of hit that sweet spot on capital, but also, from a value perspective, yes.
In terms of the CapEx spend, I think you mentioned that a lot of it would be far out with the tailings management and the water, bringing Gosselin in later once most of Côté is mined out. How much of it would be upfront, let's say, as a %, if we were looking at whatever CapEx?
It's mostly around the mill, and looking at preliminary numbers, we see about $400 million-$500 million of capital that needs to be spent in that 2028-2030 period to get the mill up to that level. We are also spending some capital upfront for the mine, $85 million this year to do the additional pioneering for that pushback, remove and change out infrastructure so that we are effectively de-risking the project by moving some of the work earlier and that we don't try to do everything at once when we are upgrading the mill.
Okay. Thank you.
We have one other quick question. Got to talk fast, Maarten.
Sorry. Thank you. Maybe just coming back on your costs, do you think, Maarten, that we will get that mining cost and processing cost at Côté down to those levels by the time you do your study, because that's going to be by year-end?
That's a great question, and we've been getting some external views on our costs as well, and we do believe there's a clear path to get down to those costs, but it won't be completely done by the end of this year. We do see mining costs reducing, but probably be below $4, but not in that mid-$3 range yet by the end of the year. The milling cost is probably, we expect that to exit still about $14-$15 a ton. Not getting there yet this year, but when we get there, we will have a clear path and be able to illustrate what will reduce the cost to the levels we expect it to be.
If I can just add a little question on just the oil sensitivity, if you can remind us your oil sensitivity on your fuel and power costs? Just if you are able to get all supplies to your mine sites and no shortage there? Thank you.
I'll answer that very summarized. At Essakane, $30 per barrel is about $55 in all-in sustaining cost. It's a much lesser impact at Côté because only the trucks use that. Yes, we are not seeing any issues in bringing up supplies to Essakane at this point.
Thanks, Maarten.
Thank you.