Thanks, Steven. Well, thank you very much for taking the time on a beautiful, sunny day here in Stockholm. I see some familiar and new faces, so again, thank you very much for taking the time, and it's very exciting. The Lundin Group overall, you're gonna hear a lot of great stories, but real simply, Lundin Gold, it's a little simpler story. It's one asset in the southeast of Ecuador. We are, though, one of the largest, highest grade gold mines operating in the world today. It's 100% owned. Our reserves currently at 5.5 million ounces at just under 8 grams per tonne. And you can see our production in Q1 of just over 111,000 ounces.
Similar to Lundin Mining, ours is a little bit more weighted into the second half of the year, but we're well on our way to meeting our guidance for 2024 and maybe even being able to maybe increase it as well. We're also a low-cost producer. You can see our all-in sustaining costs of just over $860 an ounce, and well in line with our planned guidance of $820-$890. This puts us as one of the lowest. There are a couple other operations that are lower cost than us. The ones you see on the cost curve there that are well below us are copper- gold operations, so they'll have a large copper by-product credit, which helps bring their gold cost down. We are one of the lowest costs.
We're still not happy with that cost. We constantly are working at site to try to bring that down. Nothing better than to try to get a seven in front of that, especially with what we anticipate to see rising gold prices. With that production you saw and with that, all-in sustaining costs, we are generating a lot of cash flow. Just in the first quarter of 2024, we generated just over $80 million in free cash flow. You can see from the start, we started commercial production, first gold was in November of 2019. The team at site did an amazing job, and we actually hit commercial production in just under three months, and it was at tail end of November, early February, we hit commercial production. Startup went very smooth. Unfortunately, March, COVID. In Ecuador, the country shut down for three months.
We got ourselves up and running again, and since then, it's been positive free cash flow, and you look at the last half, over $260 million in free cash flow from operations. This is the story here. This is a cash flow story and a growth story. What... If you look at what we said we were gonna do in 2023 and what we say we're gonna do in 2024, I'll walk you through that, but we did what we said we were gonna do in 2023. We met all our guidance. We'd actually increased our production, dropped our cost guidance. We were able to achieve, meet on both those fronts. We've been more focusing on cleaning up the balance sheet, and I'll speak a little bit about that more here in a slide or two.
We started paying dividends actually in the late part of 2022, paid a full year last year, $95 million, essentially $0.10 per share, and we've had some really good success with the drill bit. I'm gonna walk through each one of these, and we're continuing to focus on each one of these areas in 2024. This is our three-year guidance, so you can see we're getting close to that 500,000 ounces a year is the projection for 2024. Based on what I'm seeing from operations right now, I think we're gonna be able to beat that and produce over 500,000 ounces, which puts us... A lot of times what you hear people talk about is tier one gold assets, 500,000 ounces per year, low cost, long mine life. I think we check all of those.
You can see actually production increasing in 2025 and 2026. I'll talk a little bit about more about what we're doing this year. We're spending about $36 million to increase throughput and improve our recoveries, and the key is also dropping our costs. Operational excellence is so important to everything we do, even though this is a great mine, and many of us have heard the stories, great mines or great grades make great miners or great grades make lazy miners. That's not part of our culture at Lundin Gold. This is the expansion program that I was telling you about. We're spending $36 million this year to go from 4,500 tonnes per day to 5,000 tonnes per day. We originally started out at 3,500 tonnes per day and had 12-year mine life.
We're now running at close to 50% higher throughput and still have a 12-year mine life. The other key is increasing our recoveries. We're putting in some technology. A lot of our gold that we're losing is very fine-grained gold. There's technology out there called Jameson Cells, which we're putting in, putting in 3 of those. We anticipate that's gonna give us 3% more in recovery. At average grades, each percent is about 5,000 ounces. Those are 3 ounces. All the costs are already covered, so every one of those 5,000 ounces at $2,400 dollar gold is straight into our shareholders' pockets. Cleaning up the balance sheet, this was key. When we came into this, we had to finance... We had roughly a total capital cost of $1 billion. $650 million of that was debt.
There was $300 million, which was $150 million each of a gold prepay and the stream. The gold prepay was essentially just delivering gold at 10,000, roughly 10,000 ounces per quarter to the holders of that debt. We made the decision at the start of last year, January, we're gonna pay that off in full at that time. Remember, gold prices back then were around $1,800 an ounce. That's been a great decision that was made by the team, and the board supported it. For us then, now at $2,400, all those 10,000 ounces are going to the bottom line versus going to a debt holder. Late last year, we had about $72 million left of our senior debt facility. That originally was a six-year facility.
We paid it off in under four years at the end of last year. So that left one piece of the debt, the stream. Now, we had the option, many of you may know, we had the option to buy back half of that stream for $150 million in June of this year. We approached Newmont, who now holds the stream, and talked to them about opportunity, and we announced in April a deal to extinguish the stream for a total payment of $300 million and $30 million for an offtake agreement, which was tied to that. So as of the end of June. The first payment, $180 million, is payable in June, so next month. That's our last payment of the stream. There's a subsequent payment in September, but as of the end of June, we are gonna be debt-free.
So we've paid back $650 million in debt in four years. It just shows how great of an asset this is. And what's that mean for shareholders? Well, this is a graphic. We generated $1.4 billion since we started up, in cash flow from operations. Just about half of that went to the banks and the holders of the gold prepay and the stream. Now, going forward, that piece, at 45% of our cash, now goes... is available for looking at cap, our capital allocation, return, increasing return to shareholders, growth opportunities, and whatever else, other opportunities we may have in front of us. Our dividends right now, our stock has appreciated a little bit, so our dividend is still, relative to the, the precious metal space, is still market leading at 2.8%.
We have publicly said we're gonna review our dividend policy this year. I don't think it takes two... A review doesn't mean we've cleaned up the balance sheet. I've just showed you how much more cash is there. I think you can intuit what's gonna happen to the dividends. Lawyers won't let me say it, but I think you can in, kind of get to that conclusion. What that's gonna mean, increased return on capital for the shareholders and opportunities for the company in exploration, further expansions, and potential M&A opportunities. But this is really the future. This is the exploration. What's really interesting about this land package, it's about 36 square kilometers, and Aurelian, which owned it and put together this land package originally, on hole 51, hit Fruta del Norte.
They really only drilled up in that small part up here in the north, that little postage stamp of this whole area. There's essentially this is considered to be one of the best epithermal gold districts in the world today, and it's seen essentially no drills. This is a tremendous opportunity for us. That said, we still are putting a lot of focus right around Fruta del Norte. We have three programs: our conversion program, which is taking our existing resources, which our resources right now are just under 10 million ounces. Remember, our reserves are 5.5. Our resources are 10, so there's an opportunity to upgrade those resources by drilling more, bringing that into reserves. Near mine, you got a postage stamp, which is arguably one of the best deposits in the world today. Let's look around that.
As we all know, the best place to look for another mine is in the shadow of a headframe in an existing mine. And then regional is, this is a fantastic district. Let's keep looking. There's a lot of opportunities, and we've been drilling now over three years. We've had a lot of holes that Jack and I as CEOs hate, when the VP of exploration comes in and goes, "Ah, it was a fantastic hole. It was geologically very interesting. Well, no gold, but it was geologically very interesting." Well, we're onto something, though. We know we're onto something, and these epithermal districts are challenging, and it just takes patience and perseverance. What we're doing, though, is this year will be the largest drill program, in terms of meters drilled, ever drilled in this district. You can see the conversion drilling, regional, and then the near mine.
The near mine only started in the second half of 2022, and already we're at a point where we anticipate, with a new deposit called Bonza Sur, of having a new resource by either the end of this year or Q1 of next year. This is the future of Lundin Gold, the future for all our shareholders, and where we're truly are generating value for shareholders. Talk about conversion. Jack talked about the percentage increase. This is so important. The original feasibility study done back in 2016 had 4.8 million ounces of reserves. We've mined 1.9 million ounces, but we've added 2.6 million ounces. Again, we're running at a significant increased throughput, we still have a 12-year mine life. This is what, a nd we still see, that's why we're still spending money on conversion.
There's still opportunities here to continue to increase these reserves. Now, let's talk about the near mine. This is a program only three years old. Currently, we have 10 rigs operating on the property, three underground, so two are on that conversion that I talked about. One is on near mine, looking at depth and the other seven rigs are all surface rigs. One is on regional right now, and six are on this program. You can see essentially what we're doing is looking everywhere around Fruta del Norte. We're looking below it. We're looking to the east, to the west, to the north and south, and we're hitting ore grade mineralization on every one of those programs. This is to the south. You can see that it is changing a little bit to the FDN itself is more or less a massive epithermal gold deposit.
There are multiple events that created essentially veins that all came together. Lucas used to call this a buried gold bar, and he wasn't that far off with that depiction. But when we start going south, we're seeing veins of 8-10 meters true thickness and running anywhere from 8-10 grams per ton. This still, when you look at epithermal type deposits, puts this as one of the richest in the world today. So we go to the south. You can see the existing infrastructure. There's the declines down, twin declines into the mine, existing workings. We've already done 2 declines all the way out here to help us explore there.
So that is what's really, you know, exciting, and again, you can see from existing workings, we can attack these new resources. FDN East. Our VP of Exploration happened to look at that one hole that Aurelian had done out to the east, and they hit about a meter of 2-3 grams per ton. He said, "We should just—let's put some holes out there." We drilled four holes, one from underground, three from surface. Andre, our VP of Exploration, has kinda set some high expectations. He hit ore grade mineralization on significant widths on all four, all four holes, 100% success rate. I said, "Andre, that's your bar now. Every hole has to hit something," and he's not too keen on that, but he set the bar, not me. So we're very excited about what we're seeing to the east. Now, look at...
You can see these veins here, a little bit north, north-south, or sorry, sort of north, north, north, northeast-southwest trending. As we get closer to this east fault, they start going north-south. These are on the other side of the fault. Then, what has got us very excited is Bonza Sur. So again, FDNS is right in here, FDN East out here. This is Bonza Sur. This was a large surface anomaly that Kinross had actually identified but never put a drill hole in. We've now been drilling this two years. This is the area of Bonza Sur that we anticipate having resources out by the end of this year, if not early next year. This is from almost surface, 80 meters. It's actually, in some areas, the veins come right to surface.
And so we're on average about 80-meter depth, so it could be a small open pit, down to 600 meters, over 1.3 kilometer strike length. Still open along strike, still open at depth. What we're seeing here as we move up, the veins really don't stop here, and the anomaly was in this area. They're going undercover here. And really, what's interesting is that's one of the things that really helped to generate Fruta del Norte, is you had veins, you had this plumbing system, this pumping system. Think of it like a pot of boiling water, but you keep adding water, and you keep the lid on it. So you continually got this boiling action, and that's where we're heading now. We're heading to the north now on this area to drill out Bonza Sur.
This is some, some of these holes now, just recently, this year, we put about three or four holes right here. Still, what you can see the drill indications here, we're still waiting for results on those. So this is very exciting. Again, all within eye shot. There's our camp right there. Actually, last time I was at camp, was looking at a rig that's sitting right here, right in existing infrastructure. This is what can really generate some value. We're starting to daydream now. What can we take this-- What could we do now to go to possibly 10,000 ton per day? What capacity do we have our tailings? How can we access from our existing workings? We're really starting to daydream of what potentially Fruta del Norte could be.
Early on, when I was in Ecuador, people asked me, "Ron, you know, what's your mine life? How long is this gonna be operating?" I would say, "This is a district. This is not a mine, this is a district." Now what our exploration team is doing is showing that that's come true, that this is a district. We are gonna be operating here for many years to come. At depth, one of the things is everyone used to think epithermal deposits were like a soup bowl. They were cut off at depth. What they've learned now at other deposits is the groundwater levels change. It's that groundwater that's boiling that creates the deposition zone for the gold. Groundwater levels change over time.
Now we're starting to drill below, and you can see some pretty interesting intercepts, 8 meters at 5.6 grams, 20 meters at 8.6 grams per ton. That's what that one underground rig that I mentioned near mine, is drilling along the whole strike length of Fruta del Norte this year. And then the regional program. We are hitting signs of epithermal, the alteration, the, the elements you look for, the arsenic, the antimony, mercury, mercury, copper, the... All things you look for. We just haven't hit the gold yet, but we know it's there, and we just have to keep looking for it. That's why we continue to put some money on this. You may say, "Well, why are you focusing on this still and not focusing on the regional?" We can see we've really upped the regional, but there's still a lot of opportunity here.
None of this could be done without a strong platform of focusing on local hiring, local procurement, community well-being through job creation, through economic diversification, all parts of the Lundin Group that are, that made the Lundin Group so successful over many years. So Zamora-Chinchipe, the province we're in, was subsistence agriculture prior in government. There was no mining. One of the things we had to do, we spent about $8 million initially training people to be underground operators, truck drivers, drill operators, process operators. What's really neat now, when I go to site and see people that originally started maybe on a drill and are now superintendents, these are people that their lives, they looked like were gonna be on the farm, and now they have careers. And we're seeing the change in the towns and everything.
This, this mine really has changed people's lives, and this was the vision Lucas had when we first went to Ecuador 10 years ago. In July, July 1st, 10 years ago, was the first time that we went to site, and this was his vision, and we're seeing that vision come true. So in closing, operational excellence. Gold prices are, are rising and are gonna continue to rise, but there are times when they're gonna fall. We have to focus on operational excellence, focus on cutting our costs so we can survive when gold prices do decline. But we're generating a tremendous amount of cash when gold prices are where they're at, and we anticipate that gold prices are gonna go up. Increasing throughput.
By doing this, by focusing on operational excellence, we're generating significant cash flow, which allows us to return capital to shareholders and look at growth opportunities through increasing our exploration budgets and potentially M&A. M&A, it's tough to beat Fruta, but we have to be patient, persistent, and creative. We have to remember how Fruta del Norte came about was a lunch that Lucas had in May of 2014, talking to another company about an asset they might have, and we were able to pull that asset out from that company and look at what it is today. Those are the things that make the, I think, the Lundin Group very creative and opportunistic. Then we are all constantly, e ven though we've got, w e stay focused, operational excellence, we still are looking for opportunities, and none of it is possible without a strong platform with ESG.
Thank you again.