Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Ivanhoe Mines Kamoa-Kakula technical report webinar. At this time, you are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer period. This call is being recorded on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. I would now like to turn the call over to Tommy Horton, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development.
Thank you very much, operator, and good evening, everyone. First and foremost, thank you for joining us today and welcome to the Ivanhoe Mines Kamoa-Kakula 2026 mineral reserve and mineral resource update. As operator mentioned, this is Tommy Horton. I am Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development at Ivanhoe Mines. On the line with me today, we have Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, Robert Friedland, President and Chief Executive Officer, Marna Cloete, Chief Operating Officer, Tom van den Berg, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Alex Pickard, and Executive Vice President of Technical Services, Simon Bottoms. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's event will contain forward-looking statements and will involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.
Details of these forward-looking statements are contained in our March 31 news release, as well as on SEDAR+ and on our website, www.ivanhoemines.com. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Ivanhoe Mines Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, Robert Friedland. Robert, over to you for some opening remarks.
Well, welcome to everybody who is joining this call from all over the world. I happen to be in California, and it is, it's my privilege to talk to you about a very narrow subject today, which is putting a floor underneath all expectations for the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Mine. We have lots of other things that we can talk about in our company in the next month or two, but, as you all know, the stock market has seen a lot of red as a consequence of the war around and with Iran. For most shareholders, it's like trying to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller given what's been happening in the financial markets. All of this selling across the board in mining shares has been done by computers.
We're fortunate that today we have an opportunity to clarify our total situation and have a solid conservative appraisal of our redevelopment plans to restore Kamoa-Kakula to its justified Tier-One and very important high grade status as the highest grade major copper mine in the world, a mine that will be with us for decades and decades to come. On top of that, we have our Western Forelands development with another 10 or 12 million tons of copper right next door, and contained copper. It's fitting that we start this first slide, which has my picture in the lower left with our solar field. This is our first solar field that will generate 60 MW of uninterruptible power backed by batteries 24 hours a day. We plan to build a second one and then a third one.
This is part of what we're hardening Kamoa-Kakula against disruption from the Middle East. We're gonna see, in my opinion, a much higher diesel prices. There's gonna be diesel availability issues in Australia and other Asian parts of the world. We looked at this total situation now, and we're gonna give the markets and our stakeholders and our shareholders a very clear picture of what is the bottom line and all the upside in the next two years as we bring Kamoa-Kakula to all-time new record production. This is the mining business. It's not for intelligent people. We're some 34 years into this business in the Congo. We've seen a lot of ups and downs.
I rarely comment on the share price, but we're basically back to the same price we sold shares to a major North American financial institution and to a major sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East around $12 a share. Here, I think we see extraordinary value, both in what's happening at Kamoa-Kakula in the next two years, what's going to happen in the Western Forelands, a very, very healthy copper price north of $5 a pound. Extraordinary turnaround at our Kipushi Mine and the great news coming at the largest precious metals mine under development at Platreef. With those opening remarks and with great optimism and thanks for the hard work done for our thousands of key people working on this project, I'll turn this over to Marna, our CEO. Marna, please go ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Robert, and good afternoon and good evening, everyone. I would like to open today with welcoming both Simon Bottoms and Mark Sumner to the executive management of Ivanhoe Mines. Simon joined early March as our EVP, Executive Vice President Technical Services, and he underwent a baptism by fire with having to take the lead on pulling together the study result, the results that we are presenting to you today. Simon was previously with Barrick, and he's a geologist and a mining engineer by trade, so I think we are in capable hands. Mark Sumner has been a trusted member of our team, and his promotion is a testament to the exceptional work that he has been doing on all our corporate financing initiatives. If we can move over to the next slide.
When you do these updates, I think it's always imperative to take stock of the journey one has been on, and I want to kick off this webinar by reminding the audience of the salient features that makes Kamoa-Kakula such a remarkable generational mine. To date, we have invested in excess of $7 billion in capital, which was largely funded by project cash flows. We have generated a similar EBITDA over the past five years, since 2021, by producing 1.7 million tons of copper in the first five years of operation at this mine, at the lowest capital cost intensity in the copper industry. 90% of our employees are Congolese, and most of them are trained on-site at our training facilities and our center of excellence.
In addition to this, we operate a fully integrated mine, and we have commissioned Africa's largest and greenest copper smelter. I think that should frame the discussion of today. If we move over into the second slide. In May of 2025, we experienced an event which required us to completely rethink our approach to mining this generational mine. Over the next 12 months since May of last year, we had to embark on a turnaround initiative that was marked by key milestones, and I will mention a few here today. The seismic event happened on the 18th of May, and we managed to extract all our people safely during this event. We also then started on the 7th of June to reenter crews into the western side of Kamoa-Kakula and to restart our underground operations.
In July 2025, we appointed our consultants to start the technical report that we are presenting here to you today, AMC, from Australia and South Africa. We started with the Stage Two dewatering by commissioning four 650 liters per second pumps that we installed at Kakula in September 2025. In October and November, we received preliminary findings from Beck Engineering and Mining3 on the geotechnical incident that occurred at Kamoa-Kakula and the subsequent technical findings. In November and December, we commissioned the smelter successfully and managed to also ramp it up successfully. Towards the end of December and the beginning of January, we completed the Stage Two dewatering, and the first two of the 650 L per second ran dry in January and December.
At the beginning of January, we also started with the development of the new access drives to the northeast and the southeast of Kakula. In March, our own crews started with the development of the box cuts at Kahala and Kansoko Sud. We are currently also in the process of establishing a geotechnical review board that will oversee our operations going forward. A lot has transpired over the past 12 months, and there's still a lot more work to be done that we will discuss with you during this webinar. Today marks the culmination of our initial findings, as I mentioned, and I would like to reiterate from the onset, as Robert also alluded to, that we see multiple areas for refinement and further optimization. Kamoa-Kakula remains a world-class mineral resource.
Even though our mineral reserve has decreased with the new mine design and an exclusion zone that Simon will take you through a bit later during this call, it still supports a multi-generational mine life. We had to rethink 2026 and 2027 production, and we've restated our guidance as well as our cash costs as a result. As we develop the Kakula mine in order to make way for long-term infrastructure to establish future high productivity scoping. Alex will take you through our guidance a bit later, as well as our cash cost impact. Our capital guidance will remain unchanged. I think it's important to note that all of this work that we are doing, we are doing to create a launchpad for us to restart our production in excess of 500,000 tons from 2028 onwards.
With that as an introduction, I would now like to hand over to Simon to take you through the results of the study. Thank you, Simon.
Thanks, Marna. Good afternoon and good evening, everyone. I'd like to start today by stepping you through a summary of reconciliation of the changes to our updated mineral reserves. As you can see on the slide here, we've broken out the key changes against the depletion of our previously reported mineral reserve into five key components. Each of these I will talk you through in more detail in upcoming slides in this presentation. Initially, as you will see, as Marna's mentioned a moment ago, we've removed the old Kakula mine from our mineral reserve statement. This, in the waterfall, you'll see we've broken down into two core components.
The first of which, we've termed the mature extraction zone, which is excluded and removed from both mineral reserves and mineral resources, and I'll show you in more detail in the upcoming slide. The second is shown by 1b on the waterfall. It has been reclassified from measured and indicated to inferred mineral resources, as we still see the potential for reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction. A lot of my focus on the presentation today will be on, with upcoming focused and detailed feasibility studies on the different ore bodies and mining areas within the Kamoa-Kakula complex, we fully anticipate that portions of 1b will be coming back into our mine plan and potentially back into our reserve statement with further detailed study work.
As shown by number two, the most significant change to our reported Mineral Reserve is the change in our overall geotechnical regime and pillar widths applied to our mine designs. These have been extrapolated from the findings of the Kakula seismic zone investigations, and these have resulted in an overall extraction ratio of approximately 60% of the Mineral Resource. I will, again, go into more detail on that in upcoming slides. In three and four, we see these two should be very much viewed together.
The first of which, number three, as part of our mine redesigns, we've incorporated a significant increase in the proportion of high production stoping fronts within the mine, which inevitably has had the impact of increasing dilution and therefore has had a significant impact on our reported reserve grade, as you see in the grade reconciliation on the bottom graph on this slide. However, while this will be shown as a negative on the waterfall change on the waterfall here, we see this as a positive because overall it increases the productivity and ultimately our tonnage production out of the operating mine. The incorporation of these design changes ultimately lowered the grade of various areas of stoping across the mines, which resulted in them falling out of the reported Mineral Reserves.
Which is why this is reflected as a negative metal change on the upper waterfall. However, when we've relooked at our mineral reserve commodity price assumptions, revising to $4.50 a pound, and incorporated the changes in our underlying cost models, particularly around the confidence in our smelter operations, we've been able to reduce our overall operating cutoff and reserve cutoff to 1.5%. This has effectively balanced out the metal changes that you see in change number three. Again, this comes with another reduction in the overall reported reserve grade, as you see in the lower grade reconciliation graph.
Now, again, what I will go into this in a lot more detail coming up, and while this might be seen as a negative with these two changes substantially reducing the reported reserve grade, what it does do is it extends an already long life mine into a multi-decade mine, continuing the Tier-One levels of production well out beyond 20 years. The fifth change here on the waterfall being the conversion of our Kamoa 3, 4, 5, and 6 mineral resources into mineral reserves. These conversions have been done through the application of the same mine design principles that we've extrapolated right across the Kamoa-Kakula complex after the geotechnical investigations within Kakula. Now turning to focus on Kakula, the exclusion zones, as I referred to in change one. You can go to the next slide, please.
As shown in the image on the right-hand side of the slide, the mature extraction zone of Z1a, highlighted by the red outline. This is the zone where the seismic event occurred, and inside this zone, previous extraction ratios have exceeded 70%. This is the zone that we've conservatively removed from both our Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserve statement based upon guidance from the group of geotechnical experts that have been engaged throughout the process. In Z1b, we've reclassified the previously Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources into Inferred Mineral Resources to highlight the fact that we still see reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction within this zone. Zone, particularly once we've reestablished critical mine services and completed the Stage 3 dewatering, such that we are enabled to have physical access across this inferred extraction zone.
Over the course of time, I have no doubt that areas of Mineral Resource within that reported 1B zone will form part of our mine plan and potentially come back into our Mineral Reserve state. Now turning to the second change and the most significant change on our Mineral Reserve statement. This is the application of the new geotechnical parameters that I referred to earlier. Initially designed as a reaction to the Kakula seismic event and extrapolated across all of the ore bodies within the Kamoa-Kakula complex. To illustrate this on the right-hand side of the slide here, I've shown the updated Kamoa 1 mine design. We're applying these principles.
As you will see, the core features of this mine sequences are such that we established the blue peripheral access drives and the red long-term trunk road accesses well ahead of our mining front. The sequence is such that these accesses are designed to be established at least one panel, which is highlighted in orange, which is made up of three active mining blocks by three, a grid of three by three active mining blocks ahead of the current mining front. These long-term accesses provide critical to long-term trunk roads for mine services and material handling routes. By resequencing all of our mines into this manner, of course, it has had a substantial change on our mine sequencing.
We feel that the application of these geotechnical guidelines is a cautious one, and by doing this across all of the ore bodies in the Kamoa-Kakula complex, this has set us on a solid foundation from which we are confident we will be able to build back up upon with future detailed geological, geotechnical, and hydrological studies. These critical studies will ultimately enable us to develop more bespoke mining sequences and designs to each and every domain within each and every ore body, which we believe will ultimately improve upon the assumptions that we've applied to the reserve today.
Now moving on to the third key change, whereby as part of the redesign process, as mentioned by Marna earlier, we've maximized the proportion of the minable reserve that is extracted through low cost, high productivity stoping drifts, as illustrated in the upper graphic on this slide. These design changes inevitably do incur more dilution, as you can see, highlighted in the gray areas outside of the representative ore body on the graphic. Our trade-off studies have shown that even incurring this additional dilution, the impacts of that are more than offset by the increase in productivity of our mining rates.
As illustrated on the earlier waterfall, this design change is further complemented by the revision of our operating cutoff grades, which reflects the confidence in our underlying cost profile, as well as the changes in our commodity price assumptions for the mineral reserves. Ultimately, as you'll see on the lower graphic, what this has done is enabled us to optimize the extraction of our ore bodies, ensuring that we're not leaving behind high-value mineral resource.
The lower cutoff grade stopes you see on the right-hand side of the graphic demonstrate exactly how decreasing the cutoff grade does drop our reserve grade, but ultimately, the incremental costs incurred by mining this additional material are more than paid for by the 1.5%-2% copper that is added through to the production profile as a result of this design change. Now turning, moving on to the fifth change in the waterfall. This has been the inclusion of the additional Mineral Reserves at Kamoa’s 3, 4, 5 and 6, which have been converted from Mineral Resources by again, applying these very cautious geotechnical design criteria across all of these ore bodies. This has resulted in a substantial increase in the overall mine life, albeit again at a lower grade with these ore bodies.
However, when looking at where these ore bodies feature in our mine profile, the majority of them only commence mining some 10 years or more from today. Importantly now turning to our Mineral Resource base. You will see that even with these updates, Kamoa-Kakula is still a standout mineral resource within that stands amongst the giants of the world-class copper deposits today. Our Measured and Indicated mineral resources are still very much intact. We have updated them with the depletion and with the removal of the mature extraction zone from Kakula, as I showed you on the graphic earlier. There is an associated increase in our Inferred mineral resources, which is a direct result of the reclassification of the Measured and Indicated material from Kakula into the Inferred zone.
Importantly, a lot of additional drilling has taken place since our last underlying mineral resource model update, and we have already started the process of incorporating these into an updated mineral resource model. This resource model will not only reflect an updated geological model and grade estimate, but it will incorporate the multidisciplinary aspects that are required to really optimize our mine designs. With obvious focuses on geotechnical modeling and hydrologic modeling, and incorporating those into our mine designs and sequences, such that we can progress from what has currently been a standardized approach across all of the ore bodies, to a bespoke design and sequence, designed to each and every ore body across the complex. Now turning to focus on Kakula. Throughout the course of this year and next year, we're very much focused on resetting the Kakula mine to establish Kakula 2.0.
Very similar to how I described to you with Kamoa earlier, this initially starts with the development of safe, long-term peripheral accesses around the perimeter of the ore body. As you see highlighted by the green dashed outlines on the ore body on the mine design map. As part of this, we're also establishing a stability pillar to separate the historic mining area of the original Kakula mine from the new mine, as shown by the blue line, which separates the new eastern section of Kakula. Critically, these peripheral accesses will be used to locate critical infrastructure and mine services, including ventilation, dewatering, and electrical reticulation, and provide important egress access for all of our personnel.
This will ensure that going forward, as Kakula ramps back up to be the Tier-One ore body that it truly is, we will always be able to rely on consistency of operation of those services and facilities within the mine by establishing them in the safe foundational pillars around the periphery of the ore body. As Kakula progresses and as the development progresses towards 2028, as we progress to the next slide, you will see, particularly in the eastern section of the mine, this becomes a high productivity long haul scoping front for the new Kakula complex. This restores the high grade product production that everyone well knows from the Kakula ore body.
Ultimately, that eastern section of the mine is developing at a faster rate than that of the western section of the mine, because this dip of the ore body is a much shallower dip in the eastern section. The western section, while it may look flat on this diagram, is actually more representative of a bowl shape, and so a large amount of the development, as you will see in the design, runs in perimeter rings, circling around the rim of that bowl, enabling us to then establish scoping drift fronts in between each of those levels. These design improvements not only provide significant improvements in productivity, but also guarantee operational safety and predictability for our operations.
Ultimately, we're confident that this will be the key pin that returns the Kamoa-Kakula complex back to a +500,000 tons per annum steady state producer. In the interim, while we reset Kakula over the next two years, Kamoa is very much gonna become the core backbone of the complex. This is as the development in Kamoa accelerates from the two newly established box cuts and positions the mine for long-term steady state production. To illustrate this, the image on the right shows the position of the Kamoa 1 mine only 10 years from today. While you can see that the key trunk roads and peripheral access development drifts that I mentioned earlier are very well established, far ahead of the stoping fronts, these stoping and mining drifts only cover what is a quarter of the footprint of the overall ore body.
This reflects the truly world-class multi-decade mine life of the Kamoa ore body. As we stand today, Kamoa is currently achieving some of the highest mining production rates of the complex, which solidifies its importance within the complex as one of the longest life and most consistent production profiles. As I mentioned earlier, the key within the next 12 months will be undertaking a set of detailed optimization studies for which we're commencing drilling in the immediate coming months, not just on our geological resources, but also to obtain information well ahead of our development to get our detailed rock mass and geotechnical classifications and hydrological mine designs.
We plan to incorporate all of these detailed drill programs into our data models and through an iterative process over the course of the next 12 months, utilize that upgraded resolution of data to improve our overall ore body knowledge, which ultimately will underpin the success of our ramp up of the mining profile. This will then lead to another round of updates of our mine design and infrastructure, with a more bespoke application to different domains and areas of the ore bodies within the complex as we get that higher resolution information. Overall, we are targeting putting together a detailed feasibility update for the immediate five-year production profile, together with an updated pre-feasibility on the life of mine schedule, with additional long-term trade-offs, particularly as we have now brought in additional mineral resources, as highlighted earlier, through Kamoa 3- 6 into the Mineral Reserve plan.
I'd like to hand over now to Tom, who will take you through the operational update.
Thank you, Simon, and welcome to all the audience. I think it's important just to say thank you to the technical teams. There's been a lot of work, a lot of hours put in over the last month to get to where we are today. It certainly isn't where we are gonna stop. There's further iterations that will take place and further improvements that will take place. We haven't applied some of the new technologies into these ore bodies yet, and as we progress, there will be further optimism, and we'll take on an improvement as we go forward. It is an iterative process, and we do believe that it will be improved as we go along.
Thanks again to the technical teams and the subject matter experts, tech, engineering, AMC, and all of them for the work they're doing. Getting to the next slide, maximizing our concentrator assets. Project 95 is where we've been building on phase I and phase II, and we've been taking that construction up to 87% currently. What that does is it increases the recoveries at the two phase I and phase II concentrators up to 87% and then up to 92%, depending on the feed grade of the ore. That will obviously give us further efficiency improvements at the concentrators. Then alternate operations of phase I and phase II of the concentrators in H1 2026, and that will be processing it through with various processing efficiencies as we don't have a bottleneck at those particular concentrators at this stage.
Maximizing our recoveries in that particular area. As you see here in the slide on the right, the capacity is 17 million tons. We have spare capacity available in 2026. We will be looking for opportunities, and we are looking for those opportunities, as you heard, with respect to filling it with further areas that we're opening up, like the Kahala stocktake that we obviously are actively busy working on that and opening up more mining sites in that area to fill that spare capacity where as far as possible. You'll see the run of mine Kakula and the run of mine Kamoa with the various grades as well. Then it goes into 2027, you see it goes up and we've still got a bit of spare capacity.
In 2028, we should be having the mills becoming nameplate and milling at nameplate capacity. Thank you. Next slide. Our smelter, which we started. You'll see the first pour that took place here in December 2025. 99% pure copper anodes coming out of the Kakula smelter and the green ones at that, from a point of view generated to a large extent by hydropower. The ramp-up continues to exceed expectations. We are 60% above capacity at the moment. At the smelter, it's progressed well. There's always learnings, and we applying those learnings as we go into the operation of the smelter. Our first shipments are also taking place on the Lobito rail corridor, and that gives you those ultra-low carbon anodes, that are completed and then heading to the international markets.
Realized price for acid sales is currently at $500 a ton. That's obviously due to supply constraints in the various areas across the mine. Not in the mine, sorry, across the supply chain disruptions that we've seen, and continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which also made our prices higher. The evaluation of toll treatments, purchase of third-party copper concentrates to further improve the margins in our smelter. Thank you. Last slide you're seeing here that I'll be talking to you is the contingency planning for the current global events. We've gone through scenario planning. We've done quite a bit extensive scenario planning to understand the current global macro events, how it affects our diesel price, and the availability issues of diesel. We have been deprioritizing diesel genset consumptions to cover the DRC grid stability for concentrators.
We've also then got significant on-site stocks of diesel and orders in place. We've got strategic orders that are being held at this stage. Commissioning of a 60 MW solar plant, as Robert referred to earlier. These give us the photovoltaic facilities that are expected mid-2026, and then will further reduce our diesel consumption as well and give us further greener copper as we will be able to take it further forward. Then finalizing the negotiations on the further 60 MW expansion targeting mid-2027 completion. Thank you. I'm gonna hand over to you, Alex.
Thank you, Tom. It's Alex Pickard here. I'm going to close out the presentation today by taking you through our updated production and cash cost guidance. Give a little bit more context on the plan going forward, and then we will have time for Q&A. What you can see here in the photo is one of the very large thickeners for Project 95, which is very close to construction completion. Thanks, Tommy.
Firstly, looking at the production forecast, what we are showing here is the historical performance of Kamoa-Kakula in the gray. That's around 1.7 million tons of copper in concentrate produced in the last five years or, you know, four years and change, really. Going forward, we've changed the methodology slightly. We are going to be reporting copper production in anodes, which is basically going to be the main form of production that we expect at least until our smelter is exceeding its capacity of 500,000 tons per annum from 2028. But even in the eventuality that the smelter exceeds capacity, we see toll treatment capacity to basically continue to produce and sell blister above 500,000 tons per annum going forward.
Zooming in on the guidance, I mean, I think, you know, in short, we think of the guidance more as a one-year deferral on our previous ramp-up forecast. This year is moving to 290,000-330,000 tons of copper anodes. Then next year, looking at increasing that up to 380,000-420,000 tons, before ramping back up to 500,000 tons and above, over a long mine life from 2028 onwards. If you look at this overall, it's around a 20% decrease across those two years, 2026 and 2027. Approximately 70% of that decrease is coming from the reestablishment and the work that we will be doing to redevelop the Kakula mine that Simon took you through.
Then the remaining decrease is coming from increased development at the Kamoa mines. As Simon mentioned, we are moving immediately into a phase of optimization, so I think there is some opportunity within these numbers, and particularly as we are completing the dewatering and reaccessing the full extent of the old Kakula mine. In terms of what 2028 looks like, you know, moving into the long term, next year, we will come back with a much more detailed plan on that life of mine that will have a much higher degree of definition. Moving to the cash cost guidance for 2026 and 2027. This is really taking into consideration all of the factors that we've described.
Really the biggest driver here is the lower production forecast and the lower grade through this redevelopment period. The cash cost in round numbers it has increased from the previous range by 10%-20%. The updated guidance is around $2.60-$3 per pound for 2026. Then we expect a material decline to $2.10-$2.50 for 2027. Taking a more long-term view for 2028 and beyond, I think we're targeting a cash cost of $2 per pound. That's once we've reached the steady-state production rate again. I think, you know, hopefully we are targeting below that target, and there are a number of cost optimization initiatives that we are also looking into as part of the study process.
The other thing that we've taken into consideration here is an updated view of the diesel pricing for 2026 and, to an extent, 2027, given the disruptive global environment that we are currently facing. The good news is that I think the diesel price is well offset by the higher sulfuric acid prices that we will be receiving from the smelter. Then looking at the pie chart on the right-hand side, what we want to highlight is the breakdown of C1 cash costs over the next two years. Really where you see the impact of the lower tons and the lower grade is on the mine site cash costs.
That's the categories of mining, processing, and G&A, because we're effectively spreading our fixed costs over only 60%-80% of our true capacity. This is where we are really targeting the 25% reduction in costs on a per pound basis, once we get past 2027. What is also interesting to see here is if you look at the little sliver in the pie, which is the C1 cash cost of the smelter, where we are deducting from that C1 cash cost, the byproducts from the acid credit. What you can see effectively is that the acid credits basically pay for the operating cost of the smelter.
The other benefit of the smelter is those logistics and TC/RCs are now a much smaller part of the pie chart than they were previously, where they were up to sort of 30%-40% of the overall pie. Thanks, Tommy. Finally, this slide is really just to take you through some of the upcoming delivery milestones, so that investors can expect what to see as we continue this journey over the next two years. We're sitting here today with the updated reserve and resource on the tape. You know, I think as Simon and Marna alluded to, we really see this as more an interim update and a new baseline to build from.
I think as evidence of that, and we're not sitting back after this new study, we actually have a kickoff meeting in two weeks' time, which is basically going to kick off the much more detailed feasibility study and PFS process. The beginning of that process will trigger a lot of additional drilling work and information gathering to improve the definition of the geology, geotechnical, and hydrological bases. Looking more from an operations side, you know, I think we've done a lot of great detail from Simon in terms of the ramp-up plan, but some of the key things that we will see is the imminent completion and ramp-up of Project 95 to boost the recovery, as Tom mentioned. That's coming from next month.
This quarter, we will also complete the new box cuts, which we call Kahala. Kahala is actually already in the ore body and Kansoko Sud, so those are the new accesses into the Kamoa mining areas. The completion of the phase I and II solar project by mid-year, as Tom mentioned, for 60 MW of uninterruptible clean power, which is a great de-risking event in an environment with a global fuel shortage. Finally, towards the end of this year or early next year, we will be completing the five-year detailed feasibility study in the life of mine PFS. I think it's safe to say, we see a very big opportunity to crystallize significant upside from the results that we've presented today.
We will move into 2027, which will really be a breakout year, where we will start to commence the higher productivity, low cost, stoping at Kakula, for sort of Kakula 2.0, as we call it. That will support increasing the mining rates to reach our full milling capacity at 17 million tons per annum by year-end, and ultimately move into 500,000 tons or more of production over a very long life. Finally, maybe just to conclude and closing on how Robert opened the call, we do have very exciting upcoming news to report on the other projects.
The Western Forelands next door to Kamoa-Kakula, we will be announcing a significantly enlarged updated mineral resource estimate during what is now the coming quarter or this quarter, starting tomorrow. At Platreef, we will very soon be commissioning a major shaft expansion, which quadruples the hoisting capacity and prepares the road for the phase II expansion. The phase II expansion will actually be completed on basically the same timeline as what we see here for Kakula, by the end of 2027. That will be in the commissioning phase. A lot of exciting milestones to come. I think with that, I'll pass back to Tommy to chair the Q&A.
Thank you, Alex. As mentioned, we will be doing a question and answer session. We will first go to the phone lines. Covering analysts, you are able to submit your questions via the operator on the phone lines. If anyone has any questions that are not addressed during the call, please do reach out to our IR team, and we can get back to you and answer those. We are also running Q&A sessions after the end of this webinar. Please do reach out to us directly for those. With that, I'll hand over to the operator. Do we have anyone on the phone lines?
Thank you. If you're on the phone and wish to ask a question, please press star one. Your first question comes from Andrew Mikitchook with BMO. Your line is now open.
Good afternoon, team. I know you touched on it already, but maybe Tom or someone else would be giving us a little bit more sense of how this dewatering and rehabilitation is going. You know, specifically, I guess a lot of large portions of this area you're working in have been, you know, removed from the near-term mine plan. When your teams are in there, what are they seeing? Or are you seeing areas of material disruption or non-rehabilitable? Any color would be helpful, I think, so people could understand what your guys are dealing with, please.
Sure. Tommy, should I go ahead and talk through it?
Go for it, Tom.
What we're seeing at the moment is we're 72% dewatered. The pumps are currently running in a maintenance mode where we're maintaining the levels. We're seeing the inflow is the same as what it's always been. That's being maintained currently. In the bottom southeast portion, we've entered that area. We're busy building new pump stations for the stage three pumping at this stage. There appears to be scaling that's taken place, but we haven't got massive collapses. When I say scaling, you're talking about it's onion scale coming off the pillars on the side. That's been loaded out and we're using remote operated LHDs, so load haul dumps to go and load it out so people aren't put at risk. We are able to access certain areas.
There is access that's taking place. We are being able to rehabilitate the areas and we are being able to access them. What we haven't been able to do at this stage, because it's still, backing with water on the northeast side and backing with water in the southeast side. When I say backing with water, is there's groundwater as you develop and it is holding us up, as we're trying to get through that groundwater. But it's not to say we can't get through. We should be in the next month, we should be through in the northeast, the same as we are in the southeast. We haven't been able to get into the top of the northeast portion of the mine, and that would then give us a view as to what the top of the northeast looks like.
The southeast, I've told you what it looks like, what we currently are achieving. We are busy rehabilitating, and we have rehabilitated all the areas that we've gone into, busy reestablishing the pump stations and then starting the development around the front. The rehabilitation is taking place. That is successful at this stage, and we are making progress in terms of getting to the Stage 3 dewatering. We've got a Stage 4 dewatering that we're busy looking at and planning at the moment as well. We'll talk to that in the next call or if and whenever we get to update again. Tommy, back to you.
Thanks, operator. Thanks, Tom. Operator, any further people on the line?
No, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Horton.
Okay. Thank you, operator. If there are no other questions on the line, we will conclude the call. As mentioned, if you do have questions and you wish to follow up with the company, then please contact the IR team at Ivanhoe Mines. With that, I will now end the meeting. Thank you everyone for attending our webinar. Thank you, everyone at the company and we wish you a lovely evening. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.