Good afternoon, everyone, for our guests here in London. Welcome. For those of you online, good morning and good afternoon. My name is Peter Brady. I'm the General Counsel at Lundin Mining. We're looking forward to a great afternoon here together today. I just want to go over a few housekeeping and safety rules for all of us here in the building. In London, there are washrooms, of course. You may have seen them just out the door to the left. There are no fire alarm tests today in the building, so if there is an alarm condition, it will be a real one, so please take that into account. For fire exits, there are two. The first one out the door to the left the way you came in and up the stairs to the lobby.
The second one is just here to my right, behind this door, exit left, and then up to the lobby to the street. The Q&A session for today's session will be at the end for those of you in London. For those of you online, please use the function on the platform to email in your questions, and we'll curate those and answer them in due course during the Q&A period. At this point, I'd like to introduce the Chairman of our Board, Adam Lundin, as well as our CEO and President, Jack Lundin, to come to the stage to lead you through today's presentation.
Thanks, Peter. I'll hand it off to Jack quite quickly here, but just wanted to, you know, big thanks for everyone showing up today in person and online. We're very excited about the business and where it's going. It's been a lot of hard work the last three years to put us in the position we're in today. I think, you know, it's been intense, but it's been good conditioning because, you know, pretty shortly here we'll be heading into a live project, which is, you know, going to keep that intensity up. I think we're well conditioned to do that and look forward to pulling it off successfully. Without that, we've got a lot of great slides here, and I'll hand it over to Jack.
Thanks. I got the mic, so. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Hopefully, everybody can hear me well. And for those of you dialing in online and everybody that's here today, I just want to say thanks for making the time to be here today with us and to listen to the presentation that we're about to give on really a comprehensive overview of Lundin Mining and really to highlight all the changes and the adjustments to the portfolio that we've made, but really use this opportunity to project forward-looking what we're, you know, looking to achieve and the value that we're hoping to create here at Lundin Mining. So, as Peter was saying, we're going to do Q&A at the end. You know, a lot of information to go through, and so hopefully your answers or your questions will be answered throughout the presentation.
Do not worry because there'll be time at the end to get into Q&A. The agenda today is as follows, and this presentation has been uploaded to the website for those that want to download it or look at it after today. You know, we've got a comprehensive overview. I'm going to start with an introduction and just kind of summarize the outlook for the company and some recent highlights and some, you know, positive messages that we hope to convey throughout the day. We're going to spend an hour with our Chief Operating Officer, Juan Andrés Morel, to go through the operations and really highlight some, you know, key improvements we've been making over the last period and really to show the, you know, exciting opportunities that we have going forward.
We've got two breaks, you know, for bathroom, water, refreshments, whatever you need, so do not worry about that. Then we'll get into an update on the Vicuña District where myself and Tim will talk about the next steps for the district and what we've been able to achieve to date. Tim will then continue on with an exploration overview, and then we'll get into the financial overview that Teitur is going to walk us through, and we'll finish up with a sustainability overview that our VP of Sustainability, Nathan Monash, will walk us through, and as mentioned, closing remarks and Q&A. Today's speakers, you know, pleasingly, we've got a large portion of our senior leadership team here today. The speakers today are here, as I've mentioned.
Adam gave the opening kind of statement, myself, Jack Lundin, President and CEO, Juan Andrés Morel, Teitur Poulsen, Nathan Monash, and Tim Walmsley. Also in the audience, we've brought in some key members of our leadership team. For those that are coming to dinner this evening, we've, you know, tried to space out the seating arrangement so that you could really get an opportunity to see the great people within our organization and have more fulsome discussions after this afternoon session. We look forward to kind of presenting and then getting into an enjoyable evening after today. As mentioned, I'm going to give an overview of, you know, what we've been able to achieve in the, you know, recent 24 months, really. Last year, we really had a strong year at Lundin Mining. We were very, very busy.
We called it a record-breaking year because on many fronts it was a record-breaking year in terms of copper and zinc production. We produced more copper tons than in the history of the company at 369,000 tons. That translated into very strong cash flow generation, which was also a record. What you're seeing on the middle of the screen there is free cash flow from operations in 2024 was just over $870 million. We continued to deliver returns to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, to the tune of $227 million, mainly through dividends, but we initiated towards the end of last year buybacks and bought back 3.2 million shares in December last year. On the transaction front, on the M&A front, extremely busy with the three major transactions, which I'll highlight on a later slide.
You know, these three transactions totaled $5.6 billion in value. A very busy year, a lot of value creation, and a lot of exciting transformational steps were taken in 2024. From a sustainability perspective, we actually were able to achieve our 2030 carbon reduction goal. Nathan's going to walk us through that, but, you know, really rapidly advanced our initiatives on the sustainability front, and our three LATAM sites are actually all running from renewable energy today. Pleasingly, we're in a position now to reset a new achievable target from that perspective. It was our 30-year history. Thirty years in the business Lundin Mining has been, and, you know, following up a milestone year with record-breaking results, we've really positioned ourselves well in 2025. That's what I'll talk to here on this slide. In 2025, we've started the year strong.
Pleasingly to say, Q1 performance was on track. We produced 77,000 tons of copper, 32,000 ounces of gold at the lower end of our C1 cash range. Cost guidance is actually now reduced, which you can see at the bottom of this slide to $1.95-$2.15 a pound. Performing well at our operations. As mentioned, with the unrivaled growth profile that we have at Vicuña, looking forward to walking through the details of the project where we're at today, and I'm sure at the end having questions about the progress being made. We streamlined our portfolio, a key theme you'll see in this presentation. We exited Europe and sold both Neves-Corvo and Zinkgruvan for a combined sale price of $1.4 billion.
You know, that really puts us in a strong financial position in terms of our overall net debt, you know, reduced it down to less than $150 million as of last week, you know, continuing to provide shareholder distributions through the form of buybacks and dividends. We reframed our overall shareholder distribution policy. So far this year, we've spent about $100 million U.S. on buybacks. We maintained our copper production guidance around 300,000-330,000 tons coming from our operations, which you can see on the map on the right-hand side of the screen. A little bit on the last four years or three years of the company's existence here. We've had, you know, key strategic acquisitions that have positioned us in a very unique footing as we go forward with Lundin Mining.
In 2022, we were able to acquire José María, which is a further advanced project in the Argentina side of the Vicuña District. Overall consideration for that acquisition was just under $500 million U.S. dollars. We did issue about 40 million shares from Lundin Mining as part of that acquisition. In 2023, we followed up with an acquisition on the Chilean side of the Vicuña District, where we bought 51% of Caserones for an overall asset value of $1.3 billion. In 2024, after having strong performance the year prior and really understanding that asset, we exercised our call option early to increase our overall ownership of Caserones to 70%. Last year, we were able to also execute on a, you know, very important transaction for the company, which was the Vicuña Corp transaction with BHP.
We issued about 94 million shares in addition to the CAD 890 million consideration for buying 50% of Filo Corp. Now we've got a strong toehold in an emerging district and, you know, a great vision to grow the copper production and gold production profile for Lundin Mining. Keeping on our theme of streamlining our portfolio and really trying to position ourselves where we think we can grow the most value going forward, we were able to also announce and conclude the sale in 2025 of our European assets. When you look at the last three years of free cash flow generated from both Neves-Corvo and Zinkgruvan, we basically pulled forward 20 years of free cash flow by bringing in $1.4 billion into the company's portfolio for the divestiture of these two assets.
Very strategic acquisitions and divestitures and, you know, very pleased with what we were able to achieve from that front. For us, you know, it's not just about growing our portfolio. We look at the performance per share. When you look at this slide here, you see that from a resource perspective, both for gold and for copper, we've significantly increased our resource base. Even with the acquisition of two large-scale greenfield projects, the divestiture of our European assets, and so a slight reduction in our overall copper production profile, we're still actually increasing on a per-share basis our copper production per share. That's extremely important for us. What we're wanting to do is drive value per share, not just grow for the sake of growing. You can see what that looks like over the last five years from 2021 to 2025.
From a mineral resource perspective, what we're calculating here is 100% of our resource base from our four existing operations + 50% of Vicuña. You can see the, you know, sizable increase from 2021 up until 2025, 150% overall growth in terms of our measured indicated category of copper resources. What that's translated to as well with the acquisition of Caserones and the production, excuse me, profile since 2021 has steadily increased about 20%. You know, accretive growth is what we're classifying that as. We've got, you know, opportunity that we executed on to, you know, we hear a lot of times the narrative on the buy versus the build. I think Lundin Mining, because of the strong financial standing that we're in, we're able to achieve both. You know, we look forward to advancing with the profile that we have today.
All of that is going to be anchored to the results that we're driving from our existing operations. As I mentioned, in a short period of time here, Juan Andrés is going to come and walk through in detail our existing operations. Everything for us is focused on our underlying producing assets today. That starts with a strong safety performance. In Q1, we were able to, you know, pleasingly come out with a very, very strong safety record. I think in Q1, from a total recordable incident frequency rate, the best quarter in the history of Lundin Mining in terms of lost time incidents, the lowest rate in five years. You see a direct translation in performance when you have, you know, a strong safety record. Each quarter, each day, we look to follow up with a best-in-class safety performance.
As I mentioned, our copper production guidance, we've kept that steady. We're looking coming in kind of today at the mid-range of that guidance. You know, because of really operational improvements, strong gold environment, and good performance at our Chapada operation, we've narrowed and reduced our overall C1 cash cost guidance. You know, importantly for us, as we look at our capital allocation going forward, we're in a position to continue to distribute returns to our shareholders. We went and rebalanced our shareholder distribution plan, and now we're looking at, you know, still staying in line with our peers in terms of our overall dividend, but initiated more of a buyback policy to really take advantage of the discount that we're trading at today to our underlying value.
Still keeping consistent year- over- year, looking at, you know, an absolute quantum of around $220 million U.S. dollars to be distributed through buybacks and dividends per year. With our existing operation base, so not baking in any of the growth that I'm going to talk to on the next couple of slides here, but our base case here, which we came out with the press release yesterday evening, is showing that over the next five years, significant cash flow, operating cash flow forecast of $6.5 billion, or free cash flow from operations at just under $5 billion over the next five years, and just over $8 billion over the next five years in Adjusted EBITDA, which puts us in a very strong position as we look to finance and grow our portfolio.
When we look at copper, as I mentioned, and as you would have seen for those of you that were able to read the press release that we came out with yesterday, we've got near-term opportunities and we've got longer-term, very unique opportunities. That really has the, you know, has the line of sight for us to go from being a top 25 copper producer in the world today up to a top 10. That near-term target of, you know, adding about 10% to our production portfolio, we've really been looking at, you know, stabilizing our operations. Now with a couple of our MDs in the crowd today, you know, we feel very confident that we can now continue to perform at the best of our abilities with our existing operations, but also now pursue brownfield growth.
We will look to kind of fill that gap between when we go into the development phase of Vicuña and get to that really large-scale production portfolio with adding some mid-term growth. To the tune of 30,000-40,000 tons of copper over the next three to five years, Juan Andrés will walk through kind of what that looks like and how we hope to achieve that. What we are targeting is a company that has line of sight to producing over 500,000 tons of copper per annum. It is not only copper that makes us, you know, unique.
The growth that we have in gold as well, taking advantage of the recent gold price environment and seeing that we've got line of sight with both brownfield and greenfield projects to really juice our gold production profile, I think as well, it really is a, you know, a unique investment opportunity for Lundin Mining. In that interim phase, looking at, you know, a potential 40% increase in overall gold production. Then again, once we step up with Vicuña and adding together with our existing operations base, we see line of sight to getting to over 550,000 ounces of gold per annum. You know, and that large growth is really anchored to this right here, the Vicuña District. It's a giant mining district in the making.
I've got a section to kind of go through where we're at in terms of now that we've formed Vicuña Corp, we've got the cadence of meetings, we've got the board set up with our partners BHP. We see a very unique opportunity to advance a world-class district. We'll walk you through later on in the presentation on what that means. I think also importantly, we put this map here in the top right to show, you know, the uniqueness not just of the district itself, but of it in relation to our existing largest mining operations and the fact that we have infrastructure that could support really untapping this mining district and this giant deposit here. That translates into a resource estimate that we came out with in May, or sorry, forgive me, in March.
We just published the technical report for this resource estimate on Monday here to provide more detail. What you're seeing here: measured, indicated, and inferred of 38 million tons of contained copper, just over 80 million ounces of gold, and just under 1.5 billion ounces of silver. We've got some comparatives later on to show you kind of how that stacks up against the existing giant mining operations. Copper, gold, and silver really makes, you know, these combined projects quite unique in nature. It's not just the size, it's also the fact that they've got near-surface high-grade mineralization that really help with how we want to untap these deposits and strategically build them out in sequence.
For us, you know, all of our success hinges on making sure that we've got strong safety performance, as I was touching on, and then, you know, the best responsible mining practice in the industry. With Nathan here, we're going to walk through our sustainability metrics. As I mentioned, you know, being able to reach our 2030 carbon reduction target six years early, you know, it really shows that, you know, there's more opportunity to continue to drive that initiative and those initiatives forward. Copper Mark designation that we have at our Chilean operations shows the commitment of the teams in Chile that we want to go above and beyond the call to ensure that we've got the accreditation from internationally recognized groups like Copper Mark to show that we have, you know, best practices being implemented at our operations.
The support of the Lundin Foundation, I think that's a key differentiator for Lundin Mining being a Lundin Group company. We have the Lundin Foundation that comes alongside the mining companies to ensure that we've got, you know, a really good understanding of how we can make sure we're maximizing the benefit from the local stakeholders as well as the investment community here. You know, very pleased with the safety performance year to date, very excited about the sustainability practices that we have within the company. I think it really anchors us to a solid profile going forward. Just to summarize my section, as I was mentioning, you know, we feel like we've really improved the business model at Lundin Mining.
have got a path to becoming a global top 10 copper producer underpinned by a best-in-class team, which you will meet many of them here today. All of this here, we have streamlined our portfolio. We make sure that we are focused on our performance. Juan Andrés will really walk you through the exciting enhancements we have made at all of our operations. We have got unrivaled growth, not just with Vicuña, but I think with the near-term targets that we are looking to execute on. It is a great, great platform for Lundin Mining to continue driving value on. With that, I would like to hand it over to our Chief Operating Officer, Juan Andrés.
Thank you. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Jack. I think Jack in his intro was able to set the framework of what the rest of the presentation is going to be about, the strategy of Lundin Mining with the anchor on the operations and the Vicuña District. From an operational perspective, I'm going to walk you through safety, some asset overview of our four assets, and some growth opportunities for the near term. Along my presentation, I will be referring to three key pillars, which we think are the foundation of the strategy from an operational perspective, which are operational discipline, full potential, and low capital intensity growth. Starting here, you can see that in the last three years, we have significantly improved our operational discipline. We have established a new planning cycle, which we have together with Eduardo and his team.
We have set new standards, quality, QA/QC processes, and toll gates in our planning cycle to make sure that our LOMs, our five-year plans, and our budget meet the highest standards in the industry. We have added new routines in our monitoring process of performance to follow up the performance of our operations. We have added data through Power BI tools that we use regularly to track the performance of our assets. With that, we have been able to achieve guidance in the last two years, and we're tracking well to achieve guidance in 2025. We had a good first quarter, and the second quarter is aiming to meet our internal goals as well. Health and safety go hand in hand with production. There's no single operation where you have good production performance and not a good safety performance.
In our case, the enhanced operational discipline has led us to achieve, as Jack mentioned before, one of the best safety records in the history of the company. In Q1 of 2025, we achieved the record in terms of performance across all our operations, the lower LTIFR in the last five years, and the best ever quarterly TRIF in the history of the company as well. Now let's get into each of our assets. Starting with Candelaria, I'm sorry, before we jump into Candelaria, let me give you a framework of what our operational strategy is all about. We did not take an off-the-shelf full potential approach. We basically customized this approach to our own needs. We looked at each asset and the context of each asset with intrinsic characteristics, the externalities, positive and negative, and comparative advantages.
Based on that, we crafted a fit-for-purpose full potential program for each of our assets. Together with that, we picked the peer group for each of our assets based on their intrinsic characteristics, and we established what is the full potential. How can we extract more value from the ore body that each asset has? From that, we split it in two, operational excellence and asset strategy, which means how can we maximize the use of our install base and how can we increase the value from our assets by including or adding some low capital intensity project. The operational excellence is normally reflected in our budgets and in our loans, and the asset strategy is normally reflected in our growth loans. What has been the focus of our full potential program? We have focused on some key areas.
First, we went to the basics. We think that mine planning presented some interesting opportunities in Lundin Mining. We took some modern tools and technologies and applied to the mine plan that we had in some of our operations, and we were able to see some extraordinary outcomes. I will walk you through that during the presentation. We looked at process improvements. We produced a significant amount of data on a daily basis from each of our assets. We applied some data analytics to improve our processes, and we were able to standardize processes that finally impacted recoveries, tons per hour, the pay factor of our trucks, average speeds, and other KPIs. We looked at cost reduction. We went and looked at the areas where we could reduce spending. We optimized the way we are spending sustaining CapEx.
We renegotiated some contracts, and also we have been insourcing some key processes in our operations. With the establishment of the regional office in Chile, we were able to start some joint bidding processes between Candelaria and Caserones and capture some significant synergies between those two operations. All this makes sense if we can make this change remain sustainable along the mine life. We have put a significant effort in training our operational excellence team in order to give sustainability to this new philosophy in our company. Now let's get into our first asset. Candelaria is one of our two Chilean operations. It was acquired in 2014 and became the flagship operation since day one. Today, it represents 43% of our revenue contribution, and this year, as Jack mentioned, they celebrated their 30th anniversary.
As you can see on the center of the slide, it's 80% owned by Lundin Mining. It has an open pit and an underground. It has a throughput capacity of 75,000 tons per day in the mill and 3,800 tons per day for the underground. Our average grade is in the order of 0.43% for copper and 0.8% in the underground. As you can see, there has been a significant downward trend in our C1 while maintaining steady production in the order of 150,000 tons of copper per year. Through full potential, we have been able to keep reducing our C1, and I'll walk you through some details on that in a minute. This is Candelaria. For those that have not been in Candelaria, you can see the open pit. We have the underground. This is the Candelaria North, Candelaria South.
The portals are on this wall of the pit. We have the old tailings. The new tailings will be in this area, and the processing facilities are here. The primary crusher is in this area. That is the mill, the thickeners, and again, the operating TSF will be down here. We have done some significant optimizations of the open pit mine plan, and I am going to walk you through that. We are working in optimizing the underground operation as well, and full potential has continued giving very good results since the beginning of this program. We have in the near term stepped down of the streaming that we have with Franco-Nevada. They will step down from 68%- 40% of our gold production. I am going to refer to that also in a minute.
Our long-term mine plan, as I mentioned before, we applied some new tools, new technologies to maximize the value creation from our mine plan. As you can see there in the graph, in gray, we have the LOM 2024. In the bluish color, we have the LOM 2025. You see a significant reduction in mine movement, especially in waste, in the first seven years of the 10-year plan that we have on the screen. This was achieved by maximizing the extraction of value and postponing some high strip ratio phases in the mine plan, one of them being La Española. We were able to defer La Española to later years and bring another pushback that had higher grade. By doing that, we were able to increase the grade profile in the early years of the mine plan.
We also did some changes in the design of the pushbacks at the mine, so that all allowed to a much more optimized mine plan, long-term mine plan. Here you can see some very good results that we have obtained from the full potential program that we launched in Candelaria in 2024. Significant reduction in our open pit mining cost in dollars per ton move, which has gone down from $4.7- $3.6 per ton. As I mentioned before, with the optimization of the mine plan, we were able to reduce significantly the strip ratio, which has gone down from, let's say, 3- 1 to almost 1- 1, which is a significant contribution to also the sustaining capital expenditure that we see on the right graph.
We have taken sustaining capital from close to $400 million per year to $200 million per year, which is the guidance for 2025. The first quarter, we are on track to meet that guidance in terms of sustaining CapEx. One key component of Candelaria is the underground mine. The underground is able to produce a higher grade than the open pit, and of course, that drives significantly the results in Candelaria. You have been hearing from us about the CUJE project, which is the expansion of the underground mine. We looked at the underground operation, and we saw an opportunity to insource the projects or the contracts that we have in the mine. Historically, the underground has been operated by contractors in Candelaria. We see this as a first step in the process of increasing the production from the underground mine.
We have established a two-year process to insource all the contracts, and we're aiming to reduce the mining cost between 15%-20%. That is a very attractive value increase in the contribution from the underground mine. What happened with the underground expansion? As I mentioned before, you may recall that we have been referring to the CUJE project, which was initially a project based on a significant investment to build an underground material handling process. That entitled the construction of an underground primary crusher and some conveyors to bring the ore to the surface. Looking at opportunities to be more capital efficient, we found an alternative, which is based on trucking the ore from the underground to the surface, and by doing that, reducing significantly the risk exposure and the initial capital cost.
As you can see there, the capital intensity went down from $20,000 per ton to less than $5,000 per ton just by switching to this new approach. Copper contribution will be in the order of 12,000-14,000 tons of copper per year, and we're aiming at a gradual increase of our throughput from the underground as we implement this new approach. As I mentioned before, we have also in Candelaria this opportunity that will add value to the company. We have right now a streaming with Franco-Nevada, and that streaming will step down from 68%- 40% once we reach 720,000 ounces produced. Since that is based on production, we don't have a specific date, but we think that this will happen by the end of 2026 or early 2027.
That will contribute with $40 million-$70 million per year free cash flow at the current gold prices. In summary, Candelaria has a great future ahead, and this graph represents the 10-year outlook of production with Candelaria, with the addition of the contribution that this new underground project will give to the Candelaria copper profile. Now I am going to switch to our second operation in Chile. This is our newest asset in our portfolio. As Jack mentioned, it was acquired, the first 51% in 2023, and then in 2024, the company exercised the 19% co-option to account for 70% ownership in the asset. It is, of course, an open pit mine. Caserones does not have underground. It has a mill throughput capacity of 100,000 tons per day.
We also have a cathode plant, which has a nominal capacity of 35,000 tons of copper per year. The average head grade for copper is 0.29. We took operatorship in the second quarter of 2023, and since day one, we focused on de-bottlenecking the throughput of the mill, and later we launched the full potential as well that I am going to refer to in a minute. Caserones accounts for 40% of the revenue contribution, and with the proximity to Candelaria, we have seen also a lot of opportunities to capture further synergies between these two companies.
As I mentioned before, after we took operatorship, we created this regional office where we have centralized all the support functions, and by doing that, we were able to capture synergies, and we continue to do all the big bidding processes that are being done in a jointly manner between Caserones and Candelaria. For those that have not had the chance to visit Caserones, we have here the open pit. We are currently mining phase six, phase seven, which is up at the top here. We have the primary crusher, the conveyor that takes the ore to the ore stockpile, then the mill and the thickeners and the moly plant down here.
The tailings are split in two in the coarse fraction and the fine fraction, and the coarse fraction is deposited in El Tambo TSF, and the fine fraction is transported to La Brea, which is a few kilometers away from the site here. This area is the dump leach, so all the leachable material is dumped directly on a ROM manner, so run of mine, directly on the pile, and it is leached, and the solutions are captured here at the bottom of the pad and then transported to the SX or solvent extraction electro-winning plant for the production of the cathodes in Caserones. In Caserones, as I said before, the first focus was the de-bottlenecking of the mill. We made some improvements to the supply of water from the well field that allowed us to basically maximize or reach the nameplate capacity of our SAG mill.
Right after that, we started the full potential, which was launched in mid-2024. Since the beginning, we have also focused on increasing the utilization of the nominal capacity of the cathode plant, and I'll refer to that in a minute. We continue seeing some interesting opportunities which are related with continuing utilizing the cathode plant, but also looking at bringing some leachable ore from a nearby exploration target called Angelica, and we're going to refer to that in a minute. We have made significant progress also in the full potential program in Caserones. As I said before, we launched it in mid-2024, and since day one, we have seen an immediate impact on the total cost divided by tons mill.
If we compare to the full year 2022, where we see a $20 per ton mill, we have been able to bring that down by 10% so far to close to $18 per ton mill. With that, increasing the EBITDA margin from 34%- 36%. The full potential has also included some significant renegotiations. We have renegotiated the MARC contract, which is the fleet maintenance contract, and we went from a full MARC to an LPP, which has translated into significant savings for the company. We are looking at insourcing some processes also at the mine and in the maintenance of the mill, and by doing that, we are lowering our cost and bringing our productivity up in Caserones.
Another way to see the impact of the full potential program, as you can see there, in the mine operation, we have achieved some record mine movement per day, reaching up to 236,000 tons per day in the Q1 of this year, which means basically a 21% increase from the historical average. To achieve that, we have increased the payloads of the trucks from 295- 310 tons per truck. We have reduced the cycle time by 20% and increased significantly the availability of the fleet, also through this renegotiation of the MARC contract or the maintenance contract. In the case of the mill, also a significant improvement. You can see there on the graph, the first impulse of increasing productivity since we took operatorship in the second half of 2023, where some de-bottlenecking or some restriction on the water supplies were released.
We were able to reach 4,270 tons per hour, and then later through the full potential, we have been able to even increase that by 15% to somewhere close to 4,300 tons per hour in the last two quarters. This has been achieved by, among other things, securing the stockpile levels above 75%, improving the blast fragmentation at the mine, and also some blending strategies that have been applied at the mill. As I mentioned before, the cathode plant has a nominal capacity of approximately 35,000 tons of cathodes per year. Historically, the utilization of that capacity has been in the order of 50%. The team in the last two, three years, or in the last two years, have focused on implementing a different irrigation strategy by basically irrigating some areas that represent the slope of the dump leach.
They have also increased the placement of dump leach material by adjusting the cut-off grade at the mine. In the most recent month, we have identified that there is an opportunity to bring more oxide ore that is showing up in the phase seven of the pit. By doing that, in 2024, we were able to reach 24,000 tons of cathodes per year. This year, we're aiming to something of that same order, and we think that with this short-term opportunity, we can increase or maximize the utilization of the cathode plant and add another 7,000-10,000 tons of copper per year at a very low cost, basically at a marginal operating cost. As I mentioned before, there is a nearby exploration target called Angelica, and Tim Walmsley will refer to that in more detail in his section.
Basically, Caserones holds a land package of 60,000 hectares. Inside that land package, there are several exploration opportunities, and the most attractive right now for the proximity to the existing processing facilities is the Angelica deposit. Angelica was originally only explored for the leachable reserves up on top, but later exploration conducted by the exploration team has identified some interesting sulfide potential at the bottom. We think that with the oxide that sits on top, which is very close, it will be also a low capital intensity opportunity to keep the cathode plant at its maximum capacity. Probably not at the nameplate capacity, but in the order of 7,000-10,000 tons of copper additionally in the near term.
Finally, Caserones, as I said before, is very steady and has been doing some significant improvement with the full potential program and is projecting the 10-year outlook at an order of 130,000 tons of copper per year, as you can see on the graph. We see the addition of those 7,000 to 10,000 tons of copper through the utilization of the nominal capacity of the cathode plant, which, by the way, the cathodes, of course, have a lower C1 cost and have, of course, a very high margin that contributes to the cash flow of the company. Let's now switch to Chapada. Chapada is our operation in Brazil, in the state of Goiás. It was acquired by Lundin Mining in 2019.
It represents 12% of the revenue contribution, and as you can see on the graph, it has had a very steady performance in terms of copper production and gold production in the last four years. However, since Chapada was the early adopter of the full potential, we can see a very interesting downward trend of the C1 cost, and I'm going to refer to that in the next slides. For those that have not had the chance to visit Chapada, we have a series of open pits. We have the north pit up here. That's the central pit, southwest, and south pit with all the different waste dumps. What you see here on the left of the screen is the current tailings facility, and the processing plant is located right here.
As I said before, Chapada was our first operation where we launched the full potential in late 2023, and since day one, we have been able also to see some significant results. Chapada was also subject to the optimization of the long-term mine plan. We saw some significant opportunities by applying these new tools that I mentioned before. Given the importance that gold plays not only in the cash flow generation, but also as a credit to the C1, we have been also looking at opportunities to improve the recovery from the gold production. Chapada also holds probably the most attractive near-term growth opportunity, which is the Saúva project, and I am going to refer to that also in the next couple of slides.
Looking at the results achieved in the full potential in Chapada, you can see a significant decrease in the total spending in the open pit mine that went from $170 million per year to close to $120 million per year in 2024. The strip ratio, which was already an advantage of Chapada, went down from 1.5 to less than 1- 1 waste to ore. That is a significant contribution to a reduction in the sustaining CapEx and also in the C1 of the company as a whole. As you can see also on the last chart, the all-in sustaining cost has dropped significantly from 3.36- 3.07 in 2024. All these are the reflection of the work that the team has done in the implementation of the full potential in Chapada. I think these graphs show clearly the impact of the new long-term mine plan.
We were able to reduce close to 30 million tons of waste per year. When we did that, we first were able to reduce our dependency on a mining contractor. By doing that, we basically reduced the amount of the contract by half, and that had a significant impact on the mining cost. We also added the inclusion of stockpile material, which now we are feeding to the mill between 6 million-8 million tons of stockpile material per year. All these while maintaining basically intact the copper and gold production in the long term. This was a significant change in the long-term plan for Chapada that has been contributing to a significant increase in the productivity and cash flow generation from the site.
As I mentioned before, Saúva is the most attractive near-term low capital intensity growth opportunity for Lundin Mining, and it's based on the exploitation of a satellite deposit that sits 15 km north of the Chapada mine. We have a pre-feasibility underway for the phase one, and I'm going to explain what phase one means, and we plan to finish this study by the end of 2025. We're also looking in parallel at what is the best permitting path because there are several options, and we recently were granted the second. What is the expansion? For the first expansion with the integrated license, which gives an umbrella for the permitting process in Chapada. This can become, as I said before, a very low capital intensity growth opportunity at approximately $8,000 per ton of copper, which puts Saúva as a very attractive opportunity for us.
We are, of course, studying in parallel the phase two expansion that I'm going to also explain in a minute. If we take, this is a plan view of the Saúva deposit, and if we take a cross-section from A to B looking to the northwest, it is what we see here on the screen. As you can see, Saúva is a tabular deposit that outcrops the surface with some very interesting grades. The phase one is basically extracting the outcropping mineral to the surface with a smaller pit and tracking that ore directly to the mill in Chapada. Later, we will be studying the phase two, which will extract all the open pit open pitable reserves, and then later we'll be also studying the potential for an underground operation here.
The ore body continues dipping, and all the drill holes are continually demonstrating that this is a very robust, and the grades are really interesting compared to what we are processing now in Chapada. In summary, the Saúva phase one will be an open pit, as I mentioned before. The initial capital is in the order of $155 million, which encompasses all the acquisition of a mine fleet. Basically, there is no pre-stripping required since the ore is outcropping to the surface, and we are considering here the addition of a second bowl mill. Given the grades that you can see here, 0.5% for copper and 0.45 grams per ton in gold, it is basically double of what we have today at Chapada.
In order to maximize the extraction of metal from these high-grade ore, we need additional milling capacity to reduce the grind size and increase the recovery. There is an addition of a second bowl mill considered in the $150 million initial capital. With this, we're aiming to increase between 15,000-20,000 tons of copper per year and 50,000-60,000 ounces of gold per year for the four years that the phase one will last, and then will come the phase two. This is how Chapada looks in the 10-year outlook, and you can clearly see the impact that the Saúva phase one and phase two will produce in the overall copper production, and the same impact will be on the gold production in this timeframe of 10 years.
We're working on the phase one that should be completed by the end of the year, and at that point, we'll have more detailed information on initial capital and the grade profile and metal contribution for the next 10 years. Let's now switch to Eagle. Eagle is our operation in the Upper Peninsula in the Michigan State in the U.S. It was acquired by Lundin Mining in 2013 and has been since the first day a steady cash generation for the company. We are now approaching what is probably the last five years in the life of Eagle, and we are seeing, of course, the grades tapering down for both nickel and copper. 2024 was an odd year for Eagle.
Some of you may recall that we had an incident in the main ramp, a fall of ground that did not result in any injuries, but we had to stop the access to the Eagle East deposit and work on the rehabilitation of that ramp to ensure a safe workplace, and that is why there was an impact on the production in 2024 compared to the previous year and 2025. Now that work is basically complete, and now we're back into nominal capacity in Eagle. For those that have not visited Eagle, we have the mine that is several kilometers away from the mill.
The mill is basically a rehabbed old iron ore mill that was transformed to process the copper and the nickel ore, and the ore is transported from the Eagle mine along a state road that is approximately 100 km long, so the ore is hauled to the Humboldt Mill to be processed. We have the processing facilities and the Humboldt TSF, which is a sub-aqueous TSF, a very unique way of depositing the tailings. The team has been doing remarkable work in keeping the costs down, and in 2024, we insourced the underground contract that we had with Cementation in order also to reduce the mining cost, and by doing that, we were able to lower our cut-off grades and include and add some additional reserves into the mine plan.
The team continued to look at several opportunities to insource some contracts and continue to keep the costs down to keep the operation positive cash flow in the last five years of the life of mine. However, in 2025, we saw an opportunity that emerged with Talon Metals to explore an adjacent property that is called the Boulder-Dash. As I said before, Tim Walmsley, in his presentation, is going to provide more details about Boulder-Dash, but in general, it's a mining property that sits 12 km from the Eagle mine. It has the same type of mineralogy as the Eagle and the Eagle East deposit, same type of nickel and copper grades. Any discovery of resources that then can be transformed in reserves will allow us to extend the life of Eagle.
We are currently conducting a drilling program, and again, Tim will refer to that in his section. With that, I'm going to finish my section by reinforcing that operational excellence sits in the center of our strategy. We're trying to drive our assets to their full potential, and we have established this program that is not an isolated initiative. It's connected with all the other management systems that we have in the company, like the operational excellence, the planning cycle, the asset strategy, and of course, all the people strategies that are related with performance incentives and creating organizational capabilities. This has proven to be a very good tool to keep driving performance and increasing the cash flow from the current operations that are needed for the consolidation of our growth, long-term growth strategy in Lundin Mining.
This is driving also the transformation of our culture, and we're consolidating what we call our Lundin Way. The results, I think, are very tangible and visible. We have been able to bring down the cost in dollars per ton mill in all our three operations. You can see Candelaria, 30% reduction, Chapada, another 30% reduction, and a 10% reduction in Caserones, which started the full potential in mid-2024. In our near-term low capital intensity organic growth, we have some very interesting opportunities. As I said before, the Saúva project is probably the most appealing opportunity, but we have, in the case of copper, the opportunity to increase by 10% our copper production with very low capital intensity alternatives based on our Candelaria underground expansion and the Saúva expansion.
We also see some opportunity beyond that 10% related to the utilization of our installed capacity in the cathode plant in Caserones by bringing some of the Angelica oxide material into the plant. In the case of gold, we see an opportunity to increase by 40% the production compared to the actual guidance of 2025, and that is based on the Candelaria, the contribution from the Candelaria underground, and especially from the Chapada Saúva project, which has a very high gold content. Finally, again, the three main pillars that represent our strategy from an operation perspective: operational discipline with a strong focus on safety performance, our full potential, which is helping us optimize and deliver results from our four operations, and our effort to bring all the opportunities of low capital intensity in the near term through these growth projects. That is my presentation. Thank you, and of course, I'll be available for questions at the end of the session. Thank you. We now go to a break. Thank you. Fifteen minutes?
Yeah, we'll do a fifteen-minute break if you want to go next door.
Yeah, district overview, and an update on the, you know, formation of Vicuña Corp and the progress that we've been making to date. We'll talk about the exploration potential, the resource, and then we'll segue into Tim Walmsley's section where he'll go with more of a comprehensive overview on all the exploration updates that we have for the whole portfolio. So starting off, actually, we're going to show a brief video that ties the district to the, you know, the region and the assets that we have within it.
Starting here from the port and desalination facility that we have in Caldera in the Atacama region in Chile. This infrastructure came with the acquisition of Candelaria back in 2014, 1,000 ton per hour loading capacity at the port. I think we've got four loadings per month, and a desalination facility with 500 L per second capacity, underutilized at the moment, and right now just serving Candelaria. About 110 km by road, as you can see, we get to the Candelaria operation. We just did a comprehensive overview with Juan Andrés, so most of you would be familiar with the layout here. Processing facility producing 100% concentrate, and Tim will also talk about, you know, the 20-year life of mine. We've basically been able to double the life of mine since acquisition, so a foundational asset for the portfolio.
If you follow the corridor into the Andes, about 155 km by road, you'll get yourself to Caserones up in the Andean region. Juan Andrés walked us through, but what you can see is the Caserones open pit is at an elevation of 4,300 meters above sea level, and using gravity, going down to the processing facility at about 4,000 meters in elevation. You can see a very tightly held layout, so the processing facility is right next to the open pit. If you continue to the southeast, we get into the Argentinian side of the Vicuña District, and starting here, you can see the José María surface outlay. Came out with our updated resource. This is an image of the block model. You can see the grades on the top left.
you know, we want to identify that while it's a sizable resource, we also have a unique high-grade core, 1 million tons at 0.5% copper and, near surface. This is a rendering of the infrastructure at the feasibility study, so obviously subject to change, but just to kind of get an image of what it will look like once we're in operations from likely phase one of the development. Just over the hill, about 10-15 km away, you'll see the Filo del Sol surface. You can see the Miocene belt, and as we've demonstrated, world-class in nature when you also include the José María resource, 38 million tons of contained copper and over 80 million ounces of gold. Going beneath the surface here, you can see this truly gigantic deposit, 6.5 km in strike. You can see the grades again.
Here we've been, you know, targeting to try and find the ends of this deposit. It's open in all directions, but now we're also tightening up and looking at that high-grade core, 600 million tons of 1.14% copper equivalent, you know, really gives us a lot to work with when we look at the studies that we're implementing at the moment. As I mentioned, open in basically every direction. Mineralization continues to extend in all directions for Filo del Sol. Here you can see the block model. We came out with the technical report on Monday, and it does outline one of the world's largest copper, gold, silver resources and the largest discovery in the last 30 years. Okay, getting back to the presentation now.
I think, as you've seen, I mean, the location of the Vicuña District and proximity to our existing operations is what makes it unique, but giant metal deposits are unique in themselves. This is giant by definition. It's not a promotional description. The size of districts are formally classified and quantified by industry academia, so calling something a giant metal deposit, that actually comes from the Society of Economic Geologists. The characteristics of deposits like this, you know, it shows scale, it shows clusters, and it shows, you know, combining multiple ore structures together. This is a new district in the making. You look at the largest mining operations in the world. They're all along this Andean corridor. Starting from southern Peru, you can see the likes of Cuajone, Chuquicamata, Escondida, and further south you get to Andina and El Teniente.
40% of the world's copper comes from the Central Andes when you include both Chile and Peru. What we are on here is a new cluster. We classify it as productive and efficient because you can tap in and produce a large amount and tap into economies of scale, and of course, extremely rare. As I mentioned, this is the largest discovery in the last 30 years in the copper sector. For us to have this district, to have a partnership with BHP, and for it to be in such close proximity to our two largest operating mines really presents a very, very unique opportunity for us, which we look to kind of continue pursuing. This is a closer image.
I mean, again, it's not just because of its merits that make José María and Filo unique together, but also the fact that it's close enough to our existing operations that we can share infrastructure and look at, you know, tapping into even further economies of scale. We saw in the beginning of the video where the port and desalination facility are, so we've got spare capacity, we've got real estate to look at expanding. We are also studying other locations for what would eventually become a key infrastructure region for the Vicuña District on the Argentina side and Vicuña Corp more specifically. The nature of these deposits and its proximity of where it's located is a, you know, very strategic advantage for the company. We call this kind of a giant journey. I mean, this isn't something that happened overnight.
We're just going back to October 2020 here on this page, but, you know, these discoveries were made in the early 2000s. And so a lot of work, a lot of study, a lot of field campaigns have culminated into where we are today. José María, it came out with the latest technical report, feasibility study that came out in 2020. At that time, the district was really maturing. In May 2021, Filo del Sol discovered the high-grade Aurora zone with hole 41, and that really kind of, I think, demonstrated the unique nature of this region and really put the district on the map. Lundin Mining came in and entered the district. We announced in 2021 and closed in 2022 with the acquisition of José María. Around the same time, our now partners, BHP, made an incremental investment into Filo in February 2022.
As we continued to progress, José María, we got an Environmental Impact Assessment approved in 2022 as we continued to refine and look at bringing that towards pre-development activities. In March of 2023, we announced the acquisition of Caserones, you know, further strengthening our toehold in this area. In July, and I'll talk to it in a little bit, in Argentina, you know, in 2024, there was an investment framework that came out, approved through Congress, which really provides clarity on how we're going to form fiscal stability for a project of our size. That's a, you know, a key requirement for us to understand the overall tax requirements and really the partnership that we'd be forming with Argentina. That was a key trigger event for us.
In that same month, we announced the joint acquisition of Filo Corp with BHP and really put the wheels in motion to form Vicuña Corp. Then, in May, we came out and announced the resource that really, I think, validated the district last or this week on Monday, coming out with that technical report, and we continue to move forward. It has been a busy five years, it has been a busy 20 years, and it is going to be an even busier five years ahead. Most of you would have seen this slide. Vicuña Corp was formed and the transaction was completed in January, Lundin Mining and BHP both owning 50%, and then for us integrating both José María and Filo to look at one unified project.
Both of these assets very much complement each other as we look to execute on a phased development scenario, and I'll get into that in a little bit. However, prior to getting into that, I think we're going to invite Tim here to just talk briefly about the geology of Filo and José María.
Thanks, Jack. Yeah, it's quite a special and unique system, the Filo system. It's a privilege to be able to be a part of it. Obviously, as Jack said, this project was developed over multiple decades. It's 25 years in the making. This is a perspective view, which I guess has been superseded by the video, but it gives you a good view. We're looking west from Argentina into Chile, and you can appreciate the full scale of the mineralized system and the cluster of porphyries in this area.
Caserones is 30 km due north of José María, and then, as Jack mentioned, José María is only about 10 km or 12 km away from the Filo pit. It's hard to believe. I still remember the day the news release came out on hole 41 and how that's changed the world. When you go back five years, this was a Filo project, and this was 20 years in the making. All of this drilling was really focused on what was at the time an attractive high-grade, shallow oxide-dominated system. All of those 20 years were focused on developing and understanding this system. It's more or less located in the southern part of the greater system, and it is quite shallow, starting with oxides and sulfates and sulfides right from surface.
The world completely changed for Filo in May of 2021 with the release of hole 41, over 850 meters of 1.8% copper equivalent at a time when most mines are just happy to keep producing 0.5% copper at their large pits. This was a really significant hole. After this hole, for the next two years, really, the focus of the drilling of the Filo team was really to flesh out and build out the size of the rich Aurora zone that this hole had proved up. You can see some of the other holes. This hole was not alone. Obviously, there is quite a large area, and you have to keep in mind scale here. I think these are 1 km grid blocks that you are looking at. The Aurora zone was well over a striking 1 km north-south and over a kilometer in vertical depth. It is quite exceptional.
Two years after, two years after the, you know, the next two years, they were fleshing out the size of Bonita or sort of Aurora. For the last two years, the exploration work there is focused on expanding this high grade northwards into the Bonita zone. Originally, Bonita started with a single hole. It looked like it might be another porphyry system. Since this is such a long-lived multi-phase porphyry system, it's hard to know whether Bonita is a separate porphyry system within a long corridor of mineralization or whether it's just part of the entire system. Now, stepping forward five years from, or four years from that key drill hole, this is what the first initial sulfide resource looks like today.
You can appreciate, I think, by the amount of high-grade material on the edge, on the surface of the resource, that we still have not closed this system. There is high grade sticking out from all directions in this deposit, as Jack said. I mean, you can see it is open east where we are seeing the eastern flank of it. It is also open to the north. It is open south at depth. It is open really in every single direction. That is something you hear a lot in exploration. It is always open, but this is one of those cases where it really is. This first sulfide resource was the product of 20-25 years of drilling. There are 400 drill holes that comprise this resource. Over half of those drill holes are diamond, and three quarters of the drill meters are diamond drill meters.
Within this significant resource, there's an even more impressive high-grade core, as Jack alluded to. This high-grade core starts from surface on the south end of the system in the original oxide discovery. It moves towards, and it's centered really around the Aurora zone at the center of your screen. It continues moving into the Bonita zone. This high-grade core is comprised of over 600 million tons of over 1.1% copper equivalent in the indicated category, but it also contains another 800+ million tons of 0.9% copper equivalent. Together, it's a really significant tonnage of material that averages towards 1% copper. This next slide gives some better indication into just how open the system is.
In the resource slide previously, you saw the amount of high grade on the surface of the model, but here you can see a number of holes surrounding the resource that are showing significant grades. They're sort of sitting out by themselves. There's not enough drill density between those holes and the resource to stretch the resource to encompass those outlying holes. That can give you some indication as to future resource growth to come. As the resource, as the drilling gets infilled and we better understand the edges of the system, you're going to see the envelope of the resource start to grow in many directions and encompass some of these higher grade holes on the edge of the system. The drilling program for 2025 at Vicuña and at Filo will really be focused this year with between 50 km-60 km of drilling meters.
It'll be focused on finding these eastern and western edges of the system. The eastern edge here, you can see that has sparse drilling, and the resource will grow here. There's a similar drilling perspective that's behind the resource you can't see on the other side, but you could replicate what you see on the east, on the western side. The drilling that they'll be doing will be largely focused in these two directions to try and better understand the edges of the system and to better understand the stripping ratio on the eastern and western flanks of this body. Right now, anything outside of this resource is considered waste, and obviously, so that increases the stripping costs. You can see from these holes that everything on the eastern side of the pit that's not in the resource is not going to be waste.
As you start to fill in that gap between these high grade holes and the resource, you're going to start to fill in this blank space with interesting grades that will reduce the stripping ratio significantly. As big deposits get bigger, this is obviously the case in Filo. Big systems bring big surprises, and they keep coming in all sorts of ways. Hole 141 here is an example of the sort of surprise that comes. This is only a few weeks old or a few months old, one of the last holes to be drilled. This had intercepts of over 20 meters of 8% copper equivalent, including over 4 meters of 40% copper equivalent. That's a sort of surprise and shows you the sorts of grades that this large system can provide.
I don't think it'll be the last of this sort of surprise that Filo will contribute. Not to be left out, José María also has its high grade core. As you can see here, it's extremely shallow. It's really near surface. The grades are very attractive. At 200 million tons of 0.73 equivalent starting from surface, those are extremely attractive grades for an open pit today.
Thank you, Tim. These next three images just kind of show how Vicuña, with its maiden resource estimate, stack up against the largest operating mines today for copper, gold, and silver. Here, starting with copper resources of the largest copper mine. Measured and indicated 13 million tons of contained copper, and then another 25 million tons of inferred. Of course, still a lot of drilling to be done to move that into the measured and indicated category.
Just kind of, again, further demonstrating the uniqueness and the scale of this project. What's amazing is that you can see as well the gold contained within this deposit and how it stacks up with the largest operating gold mine. You know, top three here with our maiden resource. If you see kind of indications, as Tim was saying on hole 141, you know, this is still subject to grow significantly. We believe that we're going to continue to find continuous mineralization. I think we've validated that now. Tim was talking a little bit about it, about the drilling campaign that we have.
is a lot of competing interests for that drilling campaign, but we now need to really further demonstrate the grade and really hone in on the areas that are going to serve as the earlier mine plan and really focus on a rapid payback. We know that both from a copper, gold, and silver perspective, this deposit will continue to grow. What is unique here is when you look at silver, it stands out as the second largest silver resource when comparing to the largest operating silver mines. Vicuña would be the only mine that you would see actually across all three of these mineral trends. For copper, gold, and silver, Vicuña is the only project that is on all three. Let's talk briefly about the budget. You would have seen that we have increased our budget.
This is for the 50% portion that Lundin Mining is responsible for contributing. We went from $155 million to $215 million. Really, that's a result of the fact that once Vicuña Corp was formally established and the transaction was completed in January, we were able to consolidate both the Filo and the José budget and start looking at this as a unified project. We set up the policies within the company. We set up the board and the committees and the regular cadence of the meetings that were going to be had. We were there asking the project team to really come up with a budget that they saw could advance at a reasonable pace if we were going to be looking at kind of moving things forward now that everything is looked at as one project.
The team identified areas to advance and accelerate the work plan. The main increases are coming from, of course, engineering with all the study work that we have got ongoing. I will talk to that on the next slide. Camp costs, so supporting the field works. We have got nine rigs turning in the Filo area, both on the Argentinian and Chilean side of the district. Supporting that is off-site infrastructure, so building roads and access to get to this site. I mean, as we look to kind of increase the cadence of teams coming to site, we want to make sure that we have got a significant amount of infrastructure invested in there to ensure safe passage going up into the district. Tim mentioned, I think we have doubled or more than doubled the drilling meters that we have applied to this field season.
With that, an increased staffing requirement. Those are the main increases, and that's kind of what comprises the Vicuña budget for 2025. We often get questions about how we're going to build Vicuña. I mentioned, and we all know we're working towards an integrated technical report that will identify a full-scale project, which will really look at doing a phased development. You've seen that José María is well identified, and then there's still continuous drilling at the Filo del Sol deposit. José María in 2020 had a feasibility study released on the project, and it is the most studied and most advanced project. Also, in relation to where it's located, where we would be putting fixed infrastructure, José María really does provide an opportunity to get into an early cash flow scenario where we could use future cash flows to really fund the expansion.
Filo oxides, Filo Corp had actually had an updated pre-feasibility study on the oxide project. Of course, we continue to advance. We're looking at a multi-stage leaching circuit that will capture as much of all the metals that are presented, mainly copper, gold, and silver. That would be the second most advanced level of definition in the district, and we continue to mature that opportunity. What's great about the Filo oxides is that this is mineralization overlaid on top of the sulfide deposit. It is essentially a cash flowing or NPV positive pre-stripping opportunity for us. Getting this project into full-scale operation will require a significant amount of infrastructure investment.
What we've looked at and what you've seen, talking about the desalination facility, talking about the fact that we've got a port with spare capacity, I mean, we really need to study that a lot further. Looking at also when you get to full-scale, wanting to avoid having to truck all of the material, looking at things like concentrate slurry line, rail line, and really looking at that off-site infrastructure. I mean, that's work that's ongoing right now, but it will take time to study and further refine that. All of that will then support the globally ranked kind of target that we're hoping to achieve here, which is the Filo sulfides. Tim, he was able to kind of demonstrate and show the unique nature and the size and scale of this deposit.
Everything kind of builds on itself to get into that full-scale scenario with the Filo sulfides. We're working on an integrated study that will combine all of these studies that will really reveal an integrated approach at how to build this. Working with the Vicuña Corp project team with our partners, BHP, and in Q1 of 2026, we'll be able to come out and add much more clarity on what we envision and how to get to that global rank production operation. A little bit more on José María here. As I mentioned, the latest study that's in the public domain was a feasibility study that came out in 2020. We also had an EIA approved in 2022. We've got a lot of understanding on how to build this. It's much more well-defined, but also it's a conventional large-scale open pit mining operation.
We have mill equipment already stored in San Juan. We've got a construction camp outfitted with capacity for 2,500 personnel that would eventually be up in the district to build phase one. Because of this not being full-scale, we envision a solution where we could start with trucking the produced concentrate and therefore not requiring a significant amount of off-site infrastructure investment upfront. It is an advanced stage development asset, and we really see this as the asset that will unlock us to grow substantially higher in the region. A little bit on the investment environment in Argentina. Most of the audience and those following the story would know that there is a new president in Argentina. Javier Milei took office in December 2023. He was able to rapidly make some pretty drastic reforms in the country.
One that is very significant for foreign investment is this large-scale investment regime called the REGI bill, which was approved through Congress in July 2024. For us, looking at putting together an application so that we could adhere to this regime, we've got a window between July 2024 last year and July 2026 to apply for this to get a long-term strategic export status, which will basically give us a clear stability framework for up to 40 years. The requirement there, as you can see on the screen here, is you'd look to put 20% of the initial $2 billion threshold over two years to secure this. We would definitely be able to classify and hit that requirement to be classified as a long-term strategic export partner with Argentina.
Therefore, as we continue to mature our definition around the integrated study, we'll be in a position to look at applying for this REGI incentive regime. The macroeconomic conditions in Argentina have been improving. Monthly May inflation rate is at 1.5%. We're seeing that there's been some steady improvements in the investment opportunity and the investment climate in Argentina. The IMF right now is forecasting 5.5% growth in 2025, following what had been years of a pretty significant recession. In April 2025, Milei removed fixed exchange rate to the U.S. dollar as part of this $20 billion loan from the IMF. I think what we're seeing is that there's an appetite to incentivize foreign investment in Argentina.
The economic environment in Argentina is improving, and that's giving us further confidence that a project like ours is going to be able to get into this next phase. We continue to see progress being made. There are midterm elections coming up in October, and we'll continue to monitor the environment in Argentina. We see this significant window of opportunity being open right now. Of course, we'll continue to approach it with a pragmatic lens, but we remain encouraged. In summary, I mean, putting all of these together, what I was showing in the previous comparables was the mineral resource. This is actually the production profile of the 10 largest copper, gold, and silver operations. As I mentioned, Vicuña has the potential to be in all three of these.
is no other mining operation right now that exists in all three of these categories with copper, gold, and silver production. It is a very exciting, unique opportunity for Lundin Mining, for BHP, and for Vicuña Corp. As I mentioned, our focus now for the project is to combine all of the studies that we have got underway right now, culminate this in an integrated technical report, and that will really form the basis of the next decision for us to move the project into construction. We are targeting the integrated technical report to come out in Q1 of 2026. I will hand it back over to Tim for an overview of exploration.
Thanks. Even though the biggest jump in resources that Lundin will see has come through the acquisition of Vicuña, there are still incredible growth opportunities at all our sites in Lundin. Lundin's had a pretty impressive, I would say, track record of exploration and resource growth. The majority of sites within the Lundin holdings over the last 30 years have seen at least twofold growth in their resources from the time of acquisition. Here's a few examples of the growth: threefold growth in Candelaria, doubling in resources in Neves and just a huge growth in Zinkgruvan. It was also accompanied by production increases. Obviously, Eagle, we didn't quite double the resource, but the discovery of Eagle East was a really, really critical discovery to extend the mine life at Eagle. Hopefully, we can do more of that. Clearly, the star in terms of organic resource growth has been the Candelaria example. Candelaria was acquired just over 10 years ago now. At the time of purchase, the mine had a 14-year mine life.
That mine life has been more than doubled today. That mine life of 14 years would have ended in 2028. Today, you can see that the mine life at Candelaria is currently scheduled to go out well beyond 2040. This is the benefit of significant exploration and resource growth in the brownfield sites. It gives you that base upon which you have different organic growth opportunities in terms of production and scaling up. The MIRA process is a process that we started applying. We started with Candelaria in 2015. It is basically an organized process by which we take a very structured and serious look at all the different growth opportunities within the land holdings of the mine. That way, we get an early indication of the opportunities for growing.
Rather than waiting until the stage where resources are defined and drilled off, we try and get ahead of that game and get a quicker indication of where we may have growth within our sites by looking at categorizing all these growth opportunities before they're at the resource stage. We can go through a very rigorous process in reviewing these opportunities, prioritizing them. It helps us define our five-year exploration plan and can allow us to make better and more strategic exploration decisions. Eventually, by increasing the resource base, that allows increases in production rates and ultimately in value. Things like the underground expansion project at Candelaria is an example of the opportunity you have to increase production when you increase your resource base, similar to Saúva. Without a large brownfield land holding, none of this strategy would be effective.
Thankfully, all of our largest assets have a very extensive land holding associated with them. Each one of our mine sites still contains a large number of exploration targets and attractive targets. One of the largest land holdings, as Jack mentioned, is over 60,000 hectares in Caserones. This is just a different perspective to just show how close the targets are within the Caserones land holding to the various targets that also exist still to be found within the Vicuña District or within the Vicuña Mining Corp property. At the time of acquisition, Caserones had approximately eight targets that were known but not well worked. Over the last year, in 2024, was our first full year of exploration at Caserones, having acquired the asset in mid-2023.
We have gone and aggressively attacked the land holding by flying airborne geophysics and expansive ground geophysical programs so that we can scan as quickly as possible the large land holding and figure out which one of these various targets offers the best chance for success. When we started, we had eight targets. Now we have over 12 targets, but only two of these 12 targets have really been drilled today. Even that drill testing is quite limited. We have a lot of work to do and a short time to do it. While we were scanning the rest of the property at Caserones, we did not want to wait until we knew which was the best target. We still had to start advancing our best opportunities while we were scanning the rest of the property.
We started focusing our original exploration plan in 2024 on two areas: Caserones, the main deposit itself, and the Angelica satellite deposit. The focus of the exploration within Caserones was really to look for potential high-grade breccias within or just below the resource. The focus of the exploration historically at Caserones was really looking at extending out the supergene and the rich blanket that the mining programs commenced with, the very shallow high-grade. Not a lot of deeper drilling looking for more important hypogene grades was carried out in those campaigns. The other area was Angelica that Juan Andrés mentioned.
There's some known oxides that were defined in previous years at Caserones, but not a lot of drilling went any deeper than the oxides or the small supergene that's associated with the oxides to understand what sort of sulfide system underlay that oxide blanket and produced that oxides in the first place. This was quite an opportunity, I think. A lot of our initial drilling was focused in these two areas. This is a section running sort of northwest to the southwest portion of the pit. Just to give you some idea of what we mean when we're targeting high-grade breccias, you can see the higher grade at the top of the system in Caserones, and that's related to the supergene and enriched blanket.
A lot of the historic drilling that was the focus of early mining has now been exploited, and this is the current pit that we see with the current resource pit in black. You can see there's a lot of high-grade material that is hinted at in very sparse drilling in the lower part of the resource. Unfortunately, because the historic drill pattern was really focused on a horizontal blanket, a lot of that drilling was vertical. Vertical drilling is not ideal when you're trying to target vertical high-grade breccias. You can put breccias in between the drill pattern and not find them.
Recognizing this, when we started exploring within Caserones, we wanted to drill only large angled holes to see if we could find some of these blind breccia bodies that might be hiding in between some of these very sparse deep drill holes that were in the inherited resource. This is one example of what we've been able to do. This is a hole from last year where we drilled looking for the opportunity that some of this higher grade could be related to a breccia that would continue at depth. We did confirm that there is, in fact, a significant breccia at depth that will hopefully be able, if we find more of these, to drag down the future pit of the deposit. We didn't expect that we would actually find at the same time some high-grade enrichment that wasn't in the model.
This just shows there's still all sorts of upside surprises yet to be had within this deposit. This high-grade enrichment here is likely related to an upgrading of a potential another breccia pipe. There are multiple opportunities to find more of these hidden breccias within the system, and that will be the focus of the remainder of this year's drilling campaign. Jumping over to Angelica, this is a section running through the Angelica system. You can see a large number of shallow holes that were really focused on the upper part, the oxide part of the system, and the supergene part in beige here. There are a number of intercepts of interesting grade of oxides and supergene sulfides in the upper part of the system.
For some reason, none of the historic holes ever decided to venture deeper and find out what was producing this accumulation at surface. You can see some of the holes ended in copper from the historic drilling. When we started this campaign last year, this was one of our first holes that hit mineralization, showing that there are copper, salt, copper, moly, sulfides underlying the system. This is a hole from our first drill campaign hole from this season. We've hit really, really exciting results here. The results that we're getting, this hole is just only recently finished, and we're still waiting QA/QC on some of the assays, and we still haven't got gold assays. The copper and moly intercepts we're hitting here are very favorably comparable with the very best hypogene sulfide holes anywhere within Caserones.
That's a very, very good sign that there is another sulfide system here at Angelica. The focus of the drilling for the rest of the year will be to flesh out and find the limits and the size of this system. Moving over to Candelaria. Even though Candelaria has seen this incredible growth over 10 years, tripling resources in a decade, you would think that it's probably approaching its natural entitlement for resource growth, but there's still room to continue growing. I think you'll see continued resource growth here for the next decade as well at Candelaria. In the center of the screen is the main open pit at Candelaria. The mineralization extends beyond the pit and into the underground sector to the north and to the south.
There is opportunity to continue growing the underground resource in both those directions, north and south of Candelaria. Here towards the bottom of the screen, you can see the Española resource pit with the mineralization associated here. This starts right at surface, Española. The grade is not quite as high as Candelaria, but it is very, very shallow, and it is only about 2 km from the plant. It has all sorts of benefits as well. There is an area to the southwest of Española called Portuguesa where we have intercepted a number of similar intercepts to the Española mineralization. We think there is good opportunity to continue growing and expanding that style of mineralization to the southwest from Española.
This is a long section through both deposits, the main Candelaria deposit to the right-hand side of the screen to the north of the system, and the Española deposit to the left-hand side of the screen and the southern part of the system. You can see here how the pit extracted the main part of the Candelaria deposit, but then this mantle horizon at this lithologic contact continued going further, further north, and there's still room to grow that further north yet. To the south side, there's been less exploration than to the north side, mainly because it's getting a little bit deeper, and it doesn't have the same expanse of consistent blanket of mineralization that Candelaria north does. What we do have in the south are extremely high-grade breccias and veins.
When you get into them, you get very, very, very high-grade copper and can produce very attractive mining, economic mining. There is a lot of room to continue chasing this to the south. At Española, obviously, there is some mineral inventory and probably close to having inferred opportunity here. At Portuguesa, there is a gap between these two areas, and we have recently acquired some mineral rights earlier in January of this year. Now we can start to fill in this gap and see if we can join together the success we had in Portuguesa with the deposit at Española. As a good exploration geologist, there is always the dream that we have not really chased yet that above Candelaria, historically, were smaller deposits similar in nature to Española. Actually, Candelaria was found by looking for these smaller deposits along strike by Phelps Dodge.
Little did they know they were finding a much more important deposit at depth at this horizon. If you extrapolated this horizon south of Española, one could wave your arms and make the case that you could have something similar going on here. We have not explored for this. Obviously, it is deeper, and we are focused on shallow mineralization, but this is something we will start to look at in the future to see if there are any additional Candelarias hiding along this horizon at greater depths. Moving over to Chapada in Brazil, Juan Andrés touched on the importance of the Saúva deposit. This deposit was found within two years of Lundin's acquisition of the mine. We acquired the mine in June 2019, and the discovery drill hole in the center here of Saúva was made in August 2021.
Since that time, we've been trying to expand and grow this resource. Today, the last published resource sits at just shy of 250 million tons of grades that are generally 20%-30% better than the head grade at Chapada. As Juan Andrés mentioned, some of these grades start right at surface. It is quite an attractive material. Within the 250 million tons, there is a higher grade, 100 million tons, and then there is an even higher grade core of 50 million tons where the grades get to the range of two to three times the head grade at Chapada. That makes this material extremely attractive. Beneath the pit, the mineralization continues extending at depth. Currently, there is a small resource, but this has not been upgraded since we have not done any drilling that has been added to this resource since September 2023.
Since September 2023, there has been drilling going on. We just haven't upgraded the resource, and we've been hitting mineralization with similar grades as the high-grade core and similar grades to the underground resources, but even getting better at depth. We've extended the mineralization that we see in the underground resource by at least 600 meters, and this continues wide open at depth. All of the holes in this direction are hitting attractive copper grades. Gold, I should say the gold is much more attractive here than in Chapada. Lastly, moving on to Eagle.
As Juan Andrés mentioned, in the last couple of months, Lundin has entered into exclusivity to negotiate an earning agreement with Talon Metals that would give us the opportunity to earn into 70% if we fully complete a phased drilling campaign summing to 30,000 meters, and then following that up with a feasibility study, and that would give us 70%. The initial drill hole by Talon was drilled in October of last year. The mineralization starts just below the surface, which is quite impressive. I don't know if you recall, Eagle and Eagle East are quite deep deposits, so you have to work your way to get down to them. The mineralization at Boulder-Dash is very similar in nature and aspect and tenor and grades to the Eagle and Eagle East deposits, but this discovery hole started hitting mineralization at nine meters. It is very shallow.
Right now, as part of the early conversations, even though the earning agreement has yet to be completely finalized, we're in the last stages here. We have started an agreement where we funded their drilling campaign so they can accelerate the exploration of this target. They started drilling about three weeks ago. They now have two drill rigs on the project. The idea is to try and extend this mineralization on geologic strike and see if they can chase this mineralization at depth, looking for the grades and tenors to increase. Very similar, you can think of it as the Eagle East deposit has this sort of tenor and material at surface, but as you go deeper into Eagle East, the grades get much higher in 3% and 4% copper and nickel.
We'll be doing the same sort of thing here, trying to extend the deposit and follow the intrusive conduit that holds the mineralization to depth and along strike, hoping that we get into accumulation of higher grades and tenors. A discovery of the nature of Eagle or Eagle East here would be extremely, extremely beneficial and economic for Eagle, given the 12 km proximity to the plant. It would have really, really attractive economics. Proximity to the mine. To the mine, yeah. Yeah. That's exploration.
Great. We'll do a quick 10-minute break and then come back and do financial review and see if this is a good session.
Yep. Yeah. Okay. 10-minute.
Okay. Good afternoon again, everybody. My name is Teitur Poulsen. I'm CFO of the company. Logically, I will take you through the financials. We are now on the home stretch of the presentation. Following my section, Nathan will go through the sustainability. Jack will come back with some concluding remarks. After that, we get to the really exciting bits with the Q&A. We hope for many good questions. Going on to my first slide here, I thought it was good just to outline big picture, the financial framework of the company. Really, it is a framework which is centered on three key pillars, as you can see here. We call it operational excellence. What that is all about is to make sure that we optimize our producing assets the best we can so that we generate maximum free cash flow for minimum input, minimum sustaining CapEx, etc. As you have seen with the portfolio mix that has been presented today, we are very copper-geared.
Over 80% of our metal mix is now copper, 84% actually in Q1 this year. That scenario is likely to remain at least up to Vicuña coming on stream. You should have seen there is quite a bit of both gold and silver in Vicuña. The copper to gold ratio might change somewhat post-Vicuña startup. We will go into more detail on C1 cost and EBITDA margin. What we are outlining here is a projection of five years out in time. What we see is that we will have a fairly stable C1 cost of around about $2 a pound copper, or actually slightly below. What you will also see here is, for the first time, the company is guiding a five-year outlook on cash generation and EBITDA. On our base case scenario here, we will come back to what that will consist of.
We are generating close to $5 billion of free cash flow from our producing assets. That is the first key pillar of the financial framework. The second pillar is to have a robust balance sheet, which we indeed have today. With the sale of the European asset, we are essentially debt-free, less than $150 million of net debt where we stand today. That equates to a leverage ratio of less than 0.2 times EBITDA, actually closer to 0.1 time EBITDA. What we will also outline in the presentation here today is that we have significant funding capacity available to us. We are not guiding on Vicuña CapEx just yet. That will come in the technical report Q1 next year.
The idea here is to show you what sort of funding capacity we have from a clean balance sheet and from very strong free cash flowing assets. Again, we will show various scenarios. Big picture, we have well in excess of $6 billion in funding capacity as we enter into this growth phase ahead of us. The third pillar of the financial framework is all about growth and shareholder distribution. For us, it is important we have this Goldilocks position, if you like, where we can both grow the resource base and production base, and at the same time also distribute value back to shareholders. That is the framework we managed to set up. That is the framework we foresee being there consistently through the build phase of Vicuña and obviously even more so post-going into production on Vicuña.
As I said, we will be outlining various scenarios here. It is important that we sort of calibrate all of you on what key assumptions we are making here for the projections we are going to show you. On the left-hand side of this slide, you see the base case scenarios. These are essentially our board budgeted copper prices, $4.40 real term 2025 copper this year. That gradually increases to $4.50 by 2027, and then it stays flat from there on out. That is actually very close to where the forward curve sits on copper at the moment. It is around about $4.50 long term. Gold prices we have tweaked up as we have gone through the year. We budgeted originally at $2,500 gold for the year. We are now assuming $3,000 an ounce gold for this year and next.
I guess we've been somewhat conservative and on the side of caution. Having a long-term price of $2,500 per ounce gold is the long term. You'll see the moly prices here and silver as well. Nickel we haven't put on here, but we are assuming $7.50 per pound nickel flat for this period. The key currencies we deal with are obviously where we have our operations in Chile and Brazil. We are doing CLP 950 to the dollar this year. We are assuming with an increase in copper price, the peso somewhat strengthened to CLP 900 flat long term. The Brazilian real we keep at BRL 5.50 flat.
We are also going to present to you in less detail, but we will show you the bookends of a low and high case copper price scenario where we're assuming $4 per pound flat copper price in real terms through the five-year period we project. On the upside, we assume $5.50 copper price flat. Again, on currencies, you can see that with a lower copper price, we also assume a weaker Chilean pesos. There's somewhat of a correlation there, we believe. With a higher copper price, we assume a stronger Chilean pesos, meaning that our C1 costs in dollar terms are going to go up somewhat. Those are the key macro assumptions sitting behind the projections we're showing. Before we go into the five-year scenario that we will show, we thought it was just good to calibrate everybody back on 2025 guidance.
You'll recognize the production guidance range here, 300,000-330,000 tons copper for the full year and 135,000-150,000 ounces of gold for the full year. As you have seen during the presentation, we are more or less tracking to the midpoint of these two ranges in terms of the first five months of production year to date. Assuming that we will achieve the midpoint of these guidance ranges for the full year and with the $4.40 copper price that I showed on the previous page, we project to generate around about $3.7 billion of top-line revenue for the year. That compares to around about $960 million achieved in Q1 alone. If you extrapolate Q1 revenue, we should come in slightly higher than this. With mark-to-market changes in copper price, we had a higher realized copper price than $4.40 in Q1.
We feel with $4.40, that should be the revenue we are able to generate. With the C1 costs we have shown you, $1.95-$2.50 per pound is the guidance range we have revised to. We should generate around about $1.7 billion of EBITDA for the full year. Again, calibrating that to Q1 actuals, we did $390 million in Q1. We are sort of on track to achieve the EBITDA number. Adjusted operating cash flow, which is essentially EBITDA less cash taxes and some other items, we are projecting, excluding any working capital movement, $1.3 billion for the full year. In the first quarter, we did $340 million. We are tracking very closely to what the full-year guidance is on adjusted operating cash flow.
Then we get to adjusted free cash flow from operation, which is essentially operating cash flow minus the sustaining CapEx that we incur. You can see here, we retain guidance of that of $530 million. We are projecting $800 million of free cash flow from our producing assets for the full year, excluding any impact from working capital. This metric also excludes exploration expenditure, which we are guiding to be around about $50 million for the full year. The expansionary CapEx, we have increased that guidance somewhat to $265 million with the higher Vicuña spend for the year that Jack took you through. Post-expansionary CapEx, we now project $535 million of free cash flow for the group. This is pre-finance cost and pre-distribution to minority shareholders from Candelaria and Caserones.
With these numbers and the dividend assumption or shareholder distribution assumptions of $220 million for the full year, we project to be in a net cash position at year-end of around about $150 million, assuming we achieve the midpoint of production guidance and assuming $4.40 copper price for the full year. If we now look a bit further ahead, and we're going to go into the five-year projection in a minute, the production volume is sitting behind the five-year projection you see on this graph. For the average for the next three years from 2025 to 2027, we are guiding 320,000 tons copper per year on average. That number is essentially just the average or the midpoint of the three-year guidance outlook that we provided at the beginning of the year. That guidance remains unchanged.
What is new on this slide, of course, is the second phase of the five-year outlook from 2028 to 2030, where if we include the brownfield growth projects that Juan Andrés took you through, we are averaging 350,000 tons copper per year over that three-year period. Our financials are not including those growth projects at the moment. We are essentially back to the base loan that Juan Andrés took you through, which over this period would equate to 310,000 tons copper on average per year over that period. What we then show here is obviously the uplift that would occur as and when we go into the next decade and we are ramping up Vicuña. At that point, we project to be a 500,000 tons copper per year company and also very meaningful gold production of 550,000 ounces of gold per year.
What does that then mean? Here we are showing for the five-year outlook from 2025 to 2029 how our unit costs and EBITDA margins are trending over these five years. On the right-hand side of this slide, you see the cumulative EBITDA generation over these five years on the base case of $8.1 billion cumulative, which equates to around about $1.6 billion average per year. You also see what the EBITDA generation would be if the $5.50 high-case copper price came in. We would be close to $11 billion in EBITDA generation. Similarly, on the downside, if we assume $4 per pound copper flat for this period, we would be at $6.6 billion in cumulative EBITDA generation. Very strong EBITDA generation. You can see the margins we project here.
We are doing on average around about 46% EBITDA margin over the five years on average. You can see it fluctuates a little bit in tandem with the C1 cost on the left, also because we have a bit varying production numbers from one year to the next. Essentially, it will hover around 45%-46% EBITDA margin. Obviously, with a higher copper price, the EBITDA margin will go up. Remember, now we are assuming a somewhat stronger Chilean pesos, but nevertheless, around about 54% EBITDA margin in the higher copper price environment on average over the four years. On the left, you see the C1 trend over the next five years.
In 2026, which is a slightly stronger production year, you can see that the C1 costs are actually trending down to a low point, whereas in 2027, despite the fact that in that year we are stepping down the stream at Candelaria, which releases more gold and therefore reduces. We have more byproduct credit coming in on C1 and therefore should reduce C1 cost for us. That is more than offset here with we are assuming a higher TCRCs from 2027 onward. We are back up to $80 per ton TCRC from 2027, and we are actually assuming $90 per ton TCRCs from 2028 onward here. There are a few interchanging factors impacting the C1 outlook in general.
If you take the average C1 over this period on the base case that we are showing, then we average actually below $2 per pound, around about $1.95 is the average C1 cost over this period. If you then look further on the free cash flow generation from our producing assets, and again, this excludes any brownfield upside. This is just on the base case loan scenario. We anticipate to generate on the left here adjusted operating cash flow at the base case of $6.5 billion. We also have guided long-term here as a total sustaining CapEx number for the five year of just below $2 billion, $1.9 billion in sustaining CapEx. You will note that this year we are guiding $530 million in sustaining CapEx.
This number on an annual basis is clearly stepping down as we have lower strip ratios, less capitalized stripping going forward. On average over this period, we are guiding $375 million of sustaining CapEx for the five years. That $6.5 billion generation in operating cash flow becomes just below $5 billion in free cash flow post-sustaining CapEx. You see here also the high and the low cases with the high and low copper price, where we are projecting $8.6 billion in operating cash flow and close to $7 billion in free cash flow after sustaining CapEx in the high case. In the low case, we project $5.4 billion in operating cash flow and then $3.7 billion in free cash flow from operations.
Even in the low copper price scenario, we are still very, very cash generative from the base case loan that we project here. In terms of the split of sustaining CapEx, as I said, roughly one quarter, $475 million goes into capitalized stripping and underground development, mostly relates to Candelaria, around about $145 million, whereas the delta here is obviously allocated to Eagle. Otherwise, you have sustaining CapEx, which includes tailings and equipment renewal, water management, etc., which makes up the balance. One other feature which ranks us very favorably in our opinion is the tax profile that we have on the portfolio on a consolidated basis. You can see on the chart here to the left the tax regimes we operate under.
In Chile, we actually have two different regimes in that Caserones is still surviving on the old tax royalty regime and will do so until the end of 2027, which means that there's no top-line royalty, whereas with the new regime, there's a 1% royalty. On the mining royalty income, there's only a 5% tax for Caserones, whereas with the new regime, there's been this sliding scale regime or scale introduced ranging from 8%-26%. In Chile, the corporation tax is 27% corporation tax. One of the key benefits we got with the acquisition of Caserones was a significant tax loss position. As of end of last year, that tax loss amounted to $4 billion. It's only a very small fraction of that has actually been recognized on our balance sheet.
When you model out the loan for Caserones, we are actually projecting not to, depending on what copper price you're on, but generally speaking, not to pay any corporation tax on Caserones for the life of a mine. When you blend all this together and you simply take a current tax charge to the P&L as a percentage of the EBITDA generation that we showed in the previous slide, you can see here that we are running at a very low effective current tax rate, even though technically speaking, you can get up to 46% tax take in Chile and close to 40% in Brazil.
With the tax losses that we have and also the grandfather provisions on Caserones for the next three years, we are having a cash tax rate of somewhere between 15%-20%, depending on whether you look at the high or low case copper price outlook. That is a key advantage. With the base case EBITDA, we projected $1.6 billion a year. This means that we should be paying cash taxes in the region of around about $300 million or maybe slightly below that. That is one aspect which makes our portfolio very cash generative because we have fairly low cash taxes to pay out of the pre-tax cash flow that we generate. In terms of liquidity position, we've managed the balance sheet, and the company has always done this historically as well, very, very conservatively. We've always had good liquidity headroom.
You see the red line there is the credit lines we've had in place with the banks over time. You can see at the moment, the only credit line we have in place really is our revolving credit facility of $1.75 billion. We canceled $1.15 billion of term loans earlier this year when the sale of Europe completed, when we received proceeds of $1.4 billion. We felt it was prudent to simply pay off the term loans at that point. With the net debt now of less than $150 million, it essentially means we have a liquidity headroom of around $1.6 billion. You can also see here the debt profile we built up with the acquisition of Caserones in two tranches, first 51%, and then the remaining 49% that we locked in with the call option on the original purchase.
You can also see that the sale of Europe more than paid for the buy-in cost of Caserones, which is what Jack showed earlier, represents a great value creative sort of trade for us in terms of leveraging off more copper in Chile versus selling down zinc in Europe. In terms of forward-facing liquidity lines for the company, it is clear that as and when we embark on the Vicuña development, we will need to expand our credit lines. That is something we already are working on with the banks. There are a number of options on the table in terms of how we structure this, but we believe the most cost-efficient way of doing it is simply to upscale our revolving credit facility.
We have very strong support from 13 banks in the facility at the moment, and we anticipate to probably invite another three to five further banks in when we do the upscaling. The good news is that there is very, very good appetite for this, and it is a very cost-efficient way of doing it because we want to secure full funding of phase one of Vicuña prior to officially sanctioning the project. If we can lock in an upscaled RCF, you simply pay relatively low commitment fees upfront until you start to draw on the facility, and then you only pay, obviously, interest on the debt that you draw over time. That to us would be the most optimal way of funding our share of Vicuña, but obviously, it needs to be aligned with BHP, how we fund the joint venture company.
Our vision on this is that we do it from our parent company balance sheets and put in equity and shareholder loans to fund the development of Vicuña. This is now circling back on the original statement I made in terms of our funding capacity as a company with a clean balance sheet and strong free cash flowing assets, where we said we have over $6 billion of funding capacity for our growth projects as we look forward for the next five years and beyond. If you read this slide from left to right, you will recognize the green bar there, which is the free cash flow, adjusted free cash flow, so no working capital impact here from our producing assets over the next five years, where we see that being roughly $5 billion in the base case of free cash flow generation.
The shareholder policy, as Jack outlined in the beginning, is committed to be $220 million per year. Over this five-year period, that equates to being $1.1 billion of dividends paid and share buybacks. That comes off the $5 billion of cash generation that we have. The non-controlling interest in Candelaria and Caserones, 20% is held by Sumitomo in Candelaria and 30% is held by JX Nippon in Caserones. Obviously, as and when we pay dividends out of those subsidiaries up to the parent company, part of that dividend goes to either Sumitomo or JX. In our base case, over the next five years, we are assuming $800 million of dividend goes to non-controlling interest. We have expansionary CapEx here, which is around about $700 million over the next five years.
This includes the expansionary CapEx on Vicuña this year only, so no further Vicuña spend is included here other than 2025 budget of $215 million. The rest of around about $500 million is attached to the EIA 2040, which we categorize as expansionary capital investment at Candelaria. The last flying brick you see here, which relates to leases, and we have also some deferred consideration payments to pay for our Caserones acquisition, $10 million a year + $100 million in 2029. That then gets us to, in the base case, $1.7 billion of available free cash flow to allocate into growth project. That is from the producing assets that we can allocate into growth. As I said in the beginning, we have a clean balance sheet, essentially zero net debt.
If you then assume the normal covenants within our revolving credit facility, indeed, the facility we have at the moment allows three and a half times leverage net debt to EBITDA. If you run the, and in this scenario, it needs to be attributable EBITDA net to the company. This excludes 20% that goes to Sumitomo and 30% that goes to JX Nippon. If you take attributable EBITDA net to the company over the next five years or the average per year, and then you multiply that simply by three and a half times, which is the ceiling leverage that you are allowed within RCF, that in the base case gives us a total funding capacity of $6.2 billion for growth. This already reflects shareholder distribution of $220 million per year.
In the low price scenario, we project that to be $4.5 billion, and in the high price scenario, we should have funding capacity of $9.3 billion. Exceptionally strong platform for us to grow from with a clean balance sheet and strong free cash flowing assets. Just some housekeeping around the shareholder distribution policy that we announced earlier in the year, where we pivoted from being a clean dividend story only to now being dividend plus share buybacks. We essentially recommitted to distributing $220 million U.S. per year. We are saying a minimum of dividend is CAD 1.10 per share annually, which on the share count we have outstanding today amounts to roughly $70 million U.S. in dividends. What we are saying is that we are buying back stock up to $150 million U.S. per year.
That share buyback will always be predicated on where our share price trades relative to what we see as being our underlying asset values. That is why we say up to, so this is not just a mechanical sort of share buyback where we do so much every month. We will remain opportunistic around this. When we feel like we are traded at a discounted value, as we believe we are at the moment, we will do more share buybacks. Whereas if we feel we re-rated properly and traded more fairly, then the likely scenario is we will do less share buybacks and then instead pay out a special dividend so that we still fulfill the $220 million annual distribution per year.
If you then look at the table below here, the way we will do that is obviously we will need to translate the Canadian dividends because we pay them out in Canadian dollars at every payment date, which you see here, 25th of June and 24th of September, etc. It will be the FX rate cut to U.S. dollar on those payment days that will translate into the cumulative $220 million full year distribution. The Q4 dividend, which will be paid out around about April time next year, the date there has not yet been set, which is why we say is still to be decided. Essentially, if we pay out $70 million in base dividend and buyback share of $150 million, then there will be no special dividend paid.
For argument's sake, if you say we do no more share buybacks for the rest of this year, so we've done around about $100 million share buyback to date, that would then mean we will pay out a $15 million special dividend together with our Q4 dividend declaration in April next year. That takes me to the summary slide and just to recap on the financial framework we outlined in the beginning. Operational excellence, we have a very solid production base, two large producing assets in Chile, and then we have Chapada and then Eagle in the U.S. We believe that will generate strong cash flow with a low cash tax burden. Almost in any price scenario, those assets will be very cash generative. The balance sheet is in great shape.
We essentially have zero net debt, which gives us a fantastic platform to launch this growth initiative that we are about to embark on. Strong balance sheet with ample borrowing capacity available to us. As I said, the blend of shareholder returns and growth at the same time, it's not every company that can say they can deliver on that, but we are ideally positioned to do that. We're committed to do that, and we project to do that over the next five years together with building out Vicuña. Just a quick recap before Nathan comes here on sustainability, on the three-year guidance outlook. There are no changes here to what we presented in January this year. Here you can see that next year we do project to have somewhat higher production volume compared to this year or in 2027.
This is a long-term investment thesis. What we showed earlier was simply just an average over these three years. Similarly, on gold and nickel, we are not changing any of those three-year guidance outlooks. In terms of detail per asset, you have the 2025 production guidance here. Again, we are not changing any of these guidance ranges. You can see here that Candelaria and Caserones indeed are the biggest assets in the portfolio in terms of the copper production. You can also see here the meaningful gold production in Candelaria, which is why it is so meaningful for us when that stream on Candelaria steps down from 68% to 40% towards the end of next year, towards the end of 2026 or early 2027. That will release a lot more gold for us.
As we have been guiding today, we project that to be somewhere between $40 million-$70 million per year in added gold revenue, depending on gold price, of course. In terms of cash cost guidance, as alluded to by Jack earlier, the only change here is a positive change in terms of reducing costs at Chapada to $1.30-$1.50. Most of that is driven by the fact that we are assuming a higher gold price of $3,000 per ounce for the full year now versus the original guidance being based on $2,500 per ounce. It is also being helped by the weaker Brazilian real we had in Q1 of around $4.84, which was the actual FX rate for Q1.
Whereas for the rest of the year, we assume BRL 5.50 as an FX rate, which is roughly where the spot rate is trading at the moment. My last slide is on the capital expenditure here. You see the sustaining capital at the top of this table is retained on a consolidated basis for the group of $530 million. You see there are a few moving parts within that where in Caserones, we are assuming a $15 million. It's not a saving, it's the furlough of projects, a similar trend to what we saw last year with some of the scope of work being somewhat delayed. On Chapada, with a higher tailing cost, we are increasing by a similar amount, $15 million from $85 million- $100 million. Still amounting to $530 million for the full year.
On Vicuña, Jack took you through the details of the increase from $155 million to $215 million, essentially accelerating work programs, more drilling, which is leading to this increase. All in, in terms of capital expenditure, we will be just below $800 million of expenditure this year. That concludes my section. I will now ask Nathan to come up and present on sustainability. Thank you.
Thanks, Dan.
All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Nathan Monash. I'm the Vice President of Sustainability. Pleasure to be with you here this afternoon. I think it's a nice way to conclude the day to talk about sustainability because it is something that brings together everything you've seen so far in the day. Our job in sustainability is to facilitate all the work my colleagues have presented over the past couple of hours. A little bit about myself, I haven't had the opportunity to meet many of you just quite yet. We'll get on to that later this evening. I've been with the Lundin Group a little bit more than 10 years now, but I've been with Lundin Mining for about a year and a half, coming up on two in a couple more months.
The balance of the time with the group was in Ecuador with Lundin Gold, where I was leading the sustainability work for the construction and then going into operations at Fruta del Norte. A lot of experience within the group and really happy to be joining Jack over the past couple of years here with Lundin Mining. Many of you who follow sustainability will know that it's a pretty dynamic space right now. Lots of acronyms can get thrown around, lots of changing terminologies. For Lundin Mining, it is something that is core to what we do. We're not chasing any specific trend. It is what we represent as a company to be focused on sustainability. When I arrived at Lundin Mining, there was already a well-developed sustainability strategy.
One of the things that we noticed was that it was difficult to explain how our sustainability strategy was directly linked to operations, to the strategy that you've seen laid out here today. That is what we're trying to work on now. I hope it comes through in the presentation that I go through with you here. We are trying to very explicitly link our sustainability performance to facilitating everything that's been presented so far. Before I go any further, I do want to talk just briefly about the Lundin Foundation. Jack already mentioned it. It is a key differentiator for the Lundin Group and for Lundin Mining specifically. I'm not going to walk you through each one of these things. We'll get into many of these in my brief presentation. We work with the Lundin Foundation across all of the aspects of sustainability with Lundin Mining.
They have deep expertise across a range of issues. They're working with us at our operational sites. They're working with us at corporate on strategy and a number of other areas. Just another very quick one here. Those of you who are following us closely will know that we've issued our 15th sustainability report recently. This is a demonstration of our commitment to transparency, to discussing with you the relevant issues that impact our operations. Few things have changed this year. We are following the ESRS. This is the European Standards for Sustainability that is changing how sustainability reporting is managed within companies. You'll also have noticed that we issued it several months before we have in the past. We will continue to accelerate that process next year. Let me start by talking about our approach to environmental stewardship.
If you have looked at the sustainability report, you will see that this presentation follows the structure of the report itself. The first topic that I want to just touch on briefly is climate action. We know that we are operating in a changing climate, and that means that we have specific actions that we need to be taking. One is that we need to be making a good faith effort to be reducing our direct scope one and scope two emissions. I'll get into specifically what that means in a moment. It also means we need to be speaking and thinking about how our sites adapt to climate. What can we do to ensure the resiliency of our operations, and how can we understand future climate scenarios and how that will impact operations?
We also need to be thinking about scope three emissions, indirect emissions with our suppliers and working directly with them on opportunities to reduce emissions together. Air quality at many of our operations is focused on dust and how we can mitigate dust in the Atacama region during the dry season in Brazil, and what we can do to work with communities to ensure that we are addressing an issue that they tell us is a priority for them. Water stewardship is a key part of our operations, each one of our mines. Jack mentioned it will be key in Vicuña as well. Throughout all of our mines, we seek to minimize our freshwater consumption, and we are always looking to maximize efficiency. As I will come back to in a moment, when we talk about water, we are often talking about climate and climate modeling.
Finally, biodiversity has become a more material issue for us over the past years. Each one of our operations undertakes baseline studies. They seek to understand their impacts through ongoing monitoring and surveys, and we undertake biodiversity offsets at several of our operations. A key headline here, and Jack already mentioned it, is that we have achieved our 2030 carbon reduction target six years early. That is due to a couple of factors. One was the acquisition of Caserones and the rebaselining that we undertook to integrate that operation into our target. It is also due to the direct scope one and scope two emission reductions that we have undertaken at each one of our operations.
Jack already mentioned it, but our Latin American operations as of this year are 100% renewable energy powered, and there are no scope two emissions at those operations. As we continue to think about what we've achieved in 2024, we have completed scenario analyses in the Atacama and in Brazil. Again, it's an effort to understand the types of risks that we will be facing driven by changing climate over time. We started a pilot initiative at Caserones to identify, hopefully, MPV positive. We found a few MPV positive scope one emission reduction opportunities. We also have started to really get a better understanding of our scope three emissions. Those of you who follow the industry in this space will know that scope three emissions can be something of a black box for many companies. They are estimated in a fairly imprecise way.
We are working very closely with our operations to get much better understanding of where our scope three emissions reside, and then working with those upstream and downstream companies together to reduce our emissions. Finally, it is worth mentioning that we really are trying to integrate sustainability with some of the operational challenges that we face. One of those is Candelaria and dust. We were hearing from communities that dust was an issue, and we have worked with the site to modify our blasting regime in order to mitigate that impact. On the environmental side, when we think about our 2025 priorities, it is to complete that pilot that we started at Caserones. We are already working at Chapada and Candelaria to identify scope one emission reductions there. I already mentioned that we are 100% renewable powered. We are developing a climate offset strategy as well.
This is really part of an all of the above approach that we know that we really can't leave any rock unturned. We need to be looking at all options when we think about emission reductions. We continue with the construction of water infrastructure at Chapada. This is a good example when we talk about changing climate. Chapada has had a changing climate since its construction under Yamana. Given that, we do need to be building new infrastructure. Some of that will be coming online soon with a water treatment facility. Finally, we need to continue to think about how we can become more efficient with water. For example, at Caserones, that has been an ongoing initiative working closely with Juan Andrés and the team with Marcelo.
If I change gears here a little bit, I want to focus also a little bit on social performance. For Lundin Mining, we always want to be focusing on meaningful stakeholder engagement. When I say meaningful, what I mean by that is that we are engaging with stakeholders in a transparent manner, that we are seeking true dialogue with local communities. We have viable and effective grievance mechanisms at each of our operations, which serves as an early warning radar for us at each operation. We also make use of an innovative tool called the Social License Index. This is something that we work on at each one of our operations. It also serves to highlight emerging social risk. We hear from communities well before something turns into something more serious, and we're able to address those issues proactively.
Again, the issue of dust at Candelaria is just one example. Where our sites interact with indigenous communities, we have a clear commitment to respect their rights. That is part of a larger commitment to respect human rights across the board. We engage with indigenous communities at each of the sites where that is a relevant stakeholder. We seek to strengthen their communities. We seek to invest with them jointly on areas that are a priority both for them and for us. More broadly, when we invest in local communities, we are looking to develop and provide shared value. I think that the way mining companies engage with communities has changed over time. It is not so much anymore a philanthropic approach.
It is much more focused on local content, how we can jointly develop local workforce, how we can jointly develop local suppliers, and create common interest in seeing the ongoing development of the mine. Finally, we need to be tracking impacts. That's something we're working on quite intensely within Lundin Mining, is to move beyond understanding only dollars spent, but also understand the impacts that we are creating, the positive impacts. A few highlights from 2024. We have seen a significant decrease in community grievances year- over- year. We believe this is driven by changes we have made to our engagement with key stakeholders. I mentioned the SLO index. One of the things we measure through that is trust and acceptance at each one of our operations. We've seen that improve over time as well. That SLO index was integrated into the sustainability-linked loan that we have.
It was one of the two KPIs, the other being linked to climate. In 2024, we have several new agreements with indigenous communities around our Caserones operation. We have a new focus on how the governance of the investment we undertake with those indigenous communities will be undertaken. We continue to focus on local investments, local community investments. You see here that we have an impressive number, the $6.7 million of local investments into community projects. Again, that's just a top-line number. Hopefully, the next time we have this meeting, I'll be discussing other metrics about impacts. Finally, I think it is important to note that the biggest impact that we have on local communities is our presence there. Being a large mining company in some of these rural areas, that's our biggest impact.
When we think about the procurement that we undertake at the local level and at the national level, we are having very significant impacts on local and national economies. When we think about our social performance objectives for 2025, just a few up here, we know that there is an overlap in terms of stakeholders between our Caserones operation, our work on the Chilean side, and Vicuña. We will be working on a district-wide external engagement strategy to ensure that we are aligned in our approach with these key stakeholders. We will continue with a strong commitment to human rights, ongoing due diligence at our operations, and training for staff to ensure that human rights is well understood, that we are respecting the rights of stakeholders, and that we are integrating human rights aspects into our enterprise risk management systems.
We will be developing local content plans at each of our operations this year. Local content being local employment, local procurement, that will be a key focus for us. Again, ensuring that we continue to further the integration of sustainability into operational and corporate strategy. This is my last slide. Just to close out my presentation, I did want to spend a moment just talking about how we approach governance of sustainability within Lundin Mining. We will be updating our internal sustainability management system this year, aligning it with enterprise risk and with our double materiality. In other words, we want to ensure that our governance system is addressing the key issues that we face as a business. The Sustainability Linked Loan, I mentioned that.
That's been an effective tool internally for us to be linking sustainability performance and finance activities that Teitur has mentioned. I'd like to also just mention that Sustainability Linked Loan has received an award this year for the innovative use of the KPIs that we have, especially around our SLO index. Internally, we've ensured that sustainability forms part of both our corporate and site-level scorecards. All of us within Lundin Mining are being evaluated in part on our sustainability performance. Our role at corporate is really one of strategic oversight. That's the model that we have, where we are working directly with sites to help them to meet the standards that we have internally, to comply with the policies, but it is an approach where we are working very collaboratively with our sites.
One tangible outcome of that work is the fact that our two Chilean operations have been certified under Copper Mark, and that will continue. I mentioned that our enterprise risk management system, I think that that is an important part of the governance framework that we have, in the sense that we are now working to ensure that our system effectively addresses sustainability and the key risks and opportunities that we are facing as a business. I think that that is just one example of when I say that our objective is to integrate sustainability into the corporate strategy. That is just one tangible way that we are doing so. With that, I'll bring my presentation to a close. I think that now we move on to the Q&A, and certainly if there are any questions about what I've just presented, happy to address them over this evening as well. Appreciate your attention.
Thanks, Nathan. Okay, everybody can hear me? Getting to the conclusion of a pretty comprehensive overview of Lundin Mining, I just want to thank everyone again for being in attendance and for those online. It's been a pleasure for us to be able to come and present the great things that we're working on. I think to try and summarize all that we've presented today, we've talked about kind of pillars that we rely on at Lundin Mining and in the Lundin Group. I think with the strong asset base that we have, our four existing operations delivering on our strategy, operational excellence is paramount for our success going forward.
We've talked about safety being the underlying component to really drive our consistent execution, making sure that we set achievable targets, and we always focus on cost control and cost management and optimizations really puts us in a position of strength going forward. Capital allocation is what makes a company successful. We've got key levers of adding value through our capital allocation strategy. We've talked about shareholder returns. We've shown the exciting brownfield expansion opportunities that will continue to mature in the near term. We've talked about Vicuña, a transformational opportunity that we look to advance forward with a pragmatic lens and very excited about the progress that we've made to date.
Being a long-life business, we look at our operations and we try and look decades out in time and seeing to be successful through the drill bit and looking at exploration and always looking at trying to extend mine life. That gives you opportunities when you have a 10-20 year horizon on how you want to strategically approach your operations. Very exciting exploration portfolio that Tim was able to walk us through. All of that leads us to the financial strength that we have. Strong cash flow, clean balance sheet gives us significant funding capacity as we look to tap into this ambitious growth profile that we have. Underlying it all, as Nathan was saying, a strong stability framework that we have embedded in the overall corporate strategy. It does not sit outside of our corporate strategy. It is embedded in everything that we do.
We really look to uphold that reputation that we have at the group at Lundin Mining and will continue to drive that forward with the initiatives that we have on the horizon. With that, I'll invite some of the team here to come up front, and we have some microphones that we can hand out and start answering some questions before we conclude this portion of the CMD. Once again, thank you, everybody, for being here. Appreciate it.
Should I take this one? Yeah. Already got some. I do, yeah. We'll kick off Q&A session right here. Just as a reminder, ask your question to the mic so that the people online can hear you. Just flag down either me or Robert, and we'll kind of start here. Dalton, here you go.
Thank you. First one. Hey, Jack, thanks for hosting this. Lundin team, thanks for hosting this. Very informative. We've spent so much time over the last couple of years talking about Vicuña. We sometimes forget what's happening in the rest of the business there. It was really nice to see today. I'm just wondering, do you have any plans at this time to sort of formalize everything you said today into a set of new tech reports so that the market could sort of see how this plays out over the next little while?
Is this mic on? Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Dalton. Thanks for the words. Absolutely. I mean, I think the focus for us, as we had a very busy couple of years on the transaction front, I mean, we were kind of restructuring the portfolio, and we were also looking internally at our operations and really focusing on stabilizing our existing operations.
We were maturing in the background some growth opportunities. Now, seeing that we have a solid performing asset base, we are with our MDs that are here today and a future MD that is coming in at Candelaria, who unfortunately cannot be here today. We are looking at pursuing those. Of course, they have to be anchored to a technical report so that we can then speak more openly about the details of those. Juan Andrés, I do not know if you had anything else to add there.
Yeah, I think, for example, Saúva, we are progressing the PFS, and the outcome of that will be at some point a technical report. We need to finish some studies, some engineering in order to be able to issue a technical report on the brownfield expansions that we discussed today.
Perfect. Just maybe as a quick follow-up, Jack, you kicked off the presentation talking about streamlining the portfolio. I am just wondering where Eagle sort of sits now.
Yeah, Eagle has been one of our actually best performing mines in recent years. We see that there is an excellent team. It is ran very well. We have got this exciting exploration opportunity with Boulder-Dash that Tim walked us through and Juan Andrés touched on. We really want to continue seeing if there are opportunities to extend mine life. We have got Darby Stacey, our Managing Director, in the audience with us today. I think that for us, being able to continue advancing, we have to drill out this opportunity and hopefully it becomes an economic discovery. Of course, the larger scale projects in South America are kind of where we are going to drive the most significant value. We very much see that this is still an asset that we want to continue to try and find opportunities on.
Orest Wowkodaw out of Scotia. Question for Juan Andrés around Candelaria. You showed us the mine plan for the next five years and longer term. It is currently scheduled to decline around end of decade, I think, from around 150,000 tons of copper closer to, I do not know, 100, 110 or so. Are there opportunities to smooth that out? Because obviously it improves again longer term. I am just wondering if you can improve that outlook.
Yeah, it is probably more a question to exploration because the natural decline of the grades is driven by the mine plan. With the interesting exploration potential that we have in that district, I'm sure they will be able at some point to replace some of the low-grade material that is at the end of the mine plan to keep that production more steady. At the moment, that is the long-term mine plan that we have.
You talked about the strip ratio coming down to, I think, almost less than one to one. Is that sustainable for the next couple of years?
Yes. Yeah, the new mine plan that we put together, it shows that it's completely sustainable.
Okay. Thank you.
Hello, Lawson Winder from Bank of America. Guys, thank you very much for this update. I think this event was fantastic, very informative for myself and I suspect everybody else here. I wanted to ask about two things. One on CapEx intensity.
You guys highlighted some great work that you did with the Candelaria Underground project, reducing that CapEx intensity to just $5,000 per ton. That is well below benchmarking that we do. Could you maybe walk through some of the details there and then perhaps connect that to Vicuña and ways that we could think about how the CapEx intensity at Vicuña could be managed down?
You want to start with Candelaria?
Yeah, in the case of Candelaria, so originally we were thinking in building some infrastructure underground to take the ore from the stopes to the primary crusher. And the original idea was to build a primary crusher, which means that you need to excavate a big cave underground and then install some, forgot the length, Eduardo, you can help me the length of the conveyor belt?
Yeah, like a 5 km long conveyor belt to take the ore from the stopes again to the surface to the primary crusher. The value engineering showed that at a very significantly lower CapEx, we could achieve basically similar copper production results. That is when we decided to eliminate that infrastructure and truck the ore from the underground to the surface. By doing that, it's basically where we reduce the exposure to project construction and we significantly reduce the risk. We are able to anticipate the implementation of that because we do not need to go through a long construction phase for that infrastructure. That is basically how we came up with this low capital intensity alternative for the underground ex pansion.
Yeah, I think with Vicuña capital intensity, of course, it's greenfield. The first phase getting cash flowing is going to be very important for us. Then when we look at future expansion opportunities, that's where the capital intensity we look to kind of optimize. On a whole, because we've got kind of three forms of production that we're going after, José María sulfides, Filo oxides, and Filo sulfides, I mean, building this out in sequence will help us manage that capital intensity as well.
Okay, fantastic. I wanted to follow up on Candelaria just to get a sense of a timeline to when you might start exploring some of those horizons below Española. I mean, that's actually with this asset, that's absolutely where you guys have added a tremendous amount of value since you've owned it in 2014. What is the timeline to that? What is the depth of that horizon that you showed on the chart below Española?
That would be significantly deeper, which is why we have not driven that sort of exploration yet. It would be in the range of 1 km depth. If you look at the core history of Candelaria, the first decade of production, the head grade was over 1% copper and 0.2 grams gold. Those sorts of grades in a similar deposit could certainly support an underground operation, but obviously it would be smaller in scale. With deeper drilling, it is more labor and more cost-intensive to test those opportunities. We have been focusing for the last decade on the obvious sort of step-out extension of the underground and the quick wins at surface.
We have always had the idea of drilling some of these wildcat 1 km holes in the district to test that opportunity. We will start to accelerate that as we run out of other quick wins.
Hi, Ioannis Masvoulas from Morgan Stanley. Thank you indeed for the presentation. It is refreshing to see the focus on operational excellence. A couple of questions from my side. The first one on just the production targets. Medium-term, 350,000 tons of copper, long-term, 500,000 tons, simplistically, or at least more than 500,000 tons. That would simplistically suggest that from Vicuña, you expect a lower bound of 300,000-350,000 tons on a 100% basis. Clearly, there are quite a few moving parts with Eagle potentially offline and some grade profile changes across the other assets.
Could you talk perhaps about the lower bound that you see at Vicuña and even some comments on the upper bound? What would be the upside opportunity once phase one to phase three with Filo sulfides is up and running?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. We're working through all of that now. I mean, we have internally what we expect we'll be able to achieve, but all of that's going to come through with the technical studies, the field work that we've got ongoing, the engineering, that work that I was talking about now. Unfortunately, it's a bit premature to be able to talk about the lower and upper bound. It should give you a good sense of what that target is that we've set.
We think that we could comfortably hit that in the future term once we get Vicuña up and full scale running. You will just have to wait. Ioannis, I am sorry. We are all eagerly awaiting, but for Q1 for that technical report to come out.
That is absolutely fine. Thank you for that. The second question just on the maybe for Teitur on the leverage ceiling. I think in the past, the company talked about two and a half times net debt to EBITDA being the ceiling. Today, you are talking about three and a half times on copper prices that are potentially close to spot. Clearly, on a more adverse macro environment, that gearing ratio should up quite a bit. How are you thinking about your appetite from to really go up to three and a half times? How should we think about other funding options as part of the mix, including potentially streaming, which is something you've done successfully at Candelaria in the past?
Yeah, of course. All this depends on ultimately what the CapEx quantity and also the phasing of that CapEx will look like for phase one and beyond on Vicuña. When I say three and a half time, I'm not necessarily saying we are gearing up to that level. All I'm saying is that typically within a traditional revolving credit facility, you are allowed to leverage up to that level. I've been involved in oil and gas projects in the past where you have a very similar phase where you ramp up CapEx quite aggressively. Just before you get into production, which is normally when you peak your net debt, and then you delever very quickly thereafter.
To me, having a sustainable sort of one and a half to two times leverage is actually good capital allocation in my book because that's the cheapest capital you can get. If you then peak at 2.5 or maybe even slightly above that, I don't see that as an issue. Clearly, lenders don't see that as an issue since they allow up to 3.5 times net debt EBITDA. The message today was just to tell the market we still don't have the CapEx number for Vicuña, but just to indicatively show what the funding capacity with the most conservative debt instrument and therefore the most cheap debt instrument is with RCF is up to over $6 billion. As you say, there are other avenues of funding available, of course, which I believe would be more expensive and therefore not optimal.
Those additional funding avenues are there also to tap into. I think with the size of company we are today, with the cash generation we get from our producing assets and with a clean balance sheet, I think the objective for us should be to minimize cost of borrowing. As I see it, through an RCF, that's how we would achieve that.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thanks for the presentation. This is Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs. Teitur, you highlighted the expansionary CapEx, $700 million, of which $200 million is Vicuña, $500 million at Candelaria on the 2040 plan, I think you said. You have highlighted an underground expansion, which is just under $100 million, no upfront infrastructure. I presume you are going to need some ventilation and sort of CapEx down the line. How should we think about that $500 million CapEx, expansionary CapEx at Candelaria? Does that number potentially fall with the new underground?
Yeah, I mean, maybe we can start with the big picture. When we guide $1.9 billion sustaining capital for five years, that suggests that the average run rate will be below what we spend this year of $530 million. There are many reasons for that. One is in Caserones, we know we have some catch-up work to do on camps and communication and some other items, which is why sustaining CapEx on Caserones is a bit elevated at the moment. At Candelaria, as you say, the strip ratio is coming down. Capitalized stripping is definitely coming down. When we talk about expansionary CapEx, it is everything relating to EIA 2040.
There are, and maybe you can comment as well, Juan Andrés, but there are other benches we are now mining that we were given access to through the EIA 2040, which we classify as expansionary over that period. I do not know whether you have.
Yeah, in considering that expansionary CapEx in Candelaria related to the EIA 2040, there are some commitments related with the community that fall in that category. The relocation of power lines also falls in that category. There are projects or expenses related to the extension of the mine life after we approve or we receive the approval of the EIA 2040.
Okay, we should be thinking about, despite the underground CapEx coming down, total expansionary CapEx over the medium term at $500 million is unchanged.
Yes. Yeah. Okay.
If I could just ask on Caserones, sort of the quest for more rock side on the dump leaching. A lot of your peers out there are looking at dynamic heap leaching and new leaching technologies for secondary sulfides. Is this something you're looking at?
Secondary sulfides?
Yeah. And/or potentially primary sulfides in the future. I guess just to try to fully utilize your cathode production.
Currently, we are leaching oxides and secondary sulfides. We are investigating for the future the potential application of some primary sulfide leaching. There are several options in the market, and we're testing a few of them to see if one of them can be applied in Caserones.
Hi, I'm Matt Murphy at BMO. Sorry if I missed it. Juan Andrés, did you say when Saúva likely happens at Chapada?
I don't think we have put a date yet.
Yeah, I mean, we're working through the PFS. The date for the technical report, the PFS to be completed for phase one is Q4 of this year.
Yeah, the key issue to define the potential start date for Saúva, it depends on the permitting strategy. There are different paths right now that we have available since we received the integrated license that give us an umbrella to potentially expedite the permitting of Saúva. The base case or the worst case will be to go through a full EIA. We're in between those two bookends, and we're trying to determine which is the optimum path to permit Saúva.
Okay, what I'm getting at is the $700 million expansionary CapEx. Even though it excludes growth projects, it's probably the growth number and Saúva comes beyond that time frame. Could we potentially see projects getting added on to that $700 million?
No, I think, as I said, in the financial guidance we gave, none of these brownfield expansion projects are included, either in the cash generation or in the CapEx associated with that generation. What we tried to illustrate here is the CapEx intensity is very low. Over a five-year period, you're likely to have even more accretion on free cash flow because payback on those projects is very fast. I think we're taking the conservative approach here by not including it, also because we need more maturity on some of the timelines associated with some of these projects.
Okay, and then just one more on the different mining outlooks where you've managed to reduce material movement. How should we think about that? Are we likely to see a bigger stripping campaign at some of these assets once you have built Vicuña? Or is it real sort of changes to the mine plan to not have to do it at all?
Yeah, it is a real change to the mine plan, and it is totally sustainable. We will probably continue seeing that in the long term, year after year, independently of Vicuña.
Yeah, sure. Hey, guys. I have a couple on Vicuña, if I may. Number one, as you guys move forward towards sort of crystallizing the tech report in Q1 2026, have you settled on an approach to handling the arsenic yet?
I mean, yeah, of course, for the campaign that will support the technical report that we would be coming out with, we have got a lot of geometallurgical work that is being undertaken. Part of that is in areas of the Filo deposit where there is high arsenic content. We're looking at what the treatment solution could be for that. That would be lower definition of study because it comes later in the mine life, but it would be identified.
Right, but I guess what I'm suggesting is you're still looking at different options. Have you settled on something already?
We have not settled on something yet, but we are looking at various options, and we're narrowing it down, yeah.
Got it. Okay, and then just as a follow-up, you guys and BHP, 50/50 partners, what's the dispute resolution mechanism on a go-forward basis?
Yeah, it's clearly stated for once we get into project sanction and once we've agreed on what the budget will be for phase one and future phases.
Right now, the merit of the agreement is for us to both align on what the work plan can be, which is why I talked about the budget going from $155 million to $210 million, I think it is, for our portion, because we align with BHP based on the Vicuña project team coming out with a work plan to get us ready to sanction. When we're talking about the investment making that we're making until that sanction point, it's not a significant investment compared to what it will be once we get to that phase. Right now, it's an agreement that we have to align on the work plan prior to getting into a position to sanction.
Okay, and then after sanction?
After sanction, it would be traditionally, we'll have 50% of our requirement to pay our share. If you're not able to pay your share, then there's dilution mechanisms and what you would standard see in an agreement.
Okay, all the sort of other decisions would be made at the asset level, at the JV level in terms of.
Yeah, there's thresholds of an approval, like delegation of authority for the project team to approve a budget to a certain amount.
Yeah. Got it. Okay.
Orest Wowkodaw of Scotia. Historically, I would say Lundin Mining has probably been one of the most successful companies I've ever seen bolting on producing assets built by others. I'm just wondering, I know you've got the massive growth coming with Vicuña, but is there any appetite to add more existing copper assets in the interim given how strong your financial capacity is right now?
What I would say to that, Orest, is we remain opportunistic. If we see that there's an opportunity to add more near-term production through an acquisition to our portfolio, we would entertain it. I mean, we've been very busy over the last three years, as we've identified. I think we've got a great portfolio with near-term opportunities that we've identified. We really want to pursue and see how real those can become and how we can mature them to actually sanctioning these brownfield expansions. That being said, you talked about it, strength in our balance sheet gives us the opportunity to be quite flexible and seek new opportunities. I would say for us, with the portfolio that we have, I think we're happy to mature the opportunities in this existing portfolio.
Okay, thank you.
Hi there, Ioannis Masvoulas again, just a couple of follow-ups. I think in the past, when you bought Caserones, you talked about the first phase of synergies with Candelaria, the $30 million-$40 million, which you have pretty much executed. You also talked about longer-dated synergies around bringing some of the water, desalinated water into Caserones because you're paying for water now and optimizing the concentrate logistics for Caserones. Is that something? I guess there was not a big focus on that, but how should we think about this? Is this work being done in the background, or is that part of what you're doing around Vicuña? Because clearly, if you bring water from Candelaria to Caserones, the obvious step would be to bring it over the border. Quite intrigued to hear what your thought process is there.
Thank you, Ioannis. You're right. We're working on that in the background. We are doing some studies to understand the benefit of bringing Caserones concentrate into the Candelaria port and potentially switching to provide water from the desal plant of Candelaria to fulfill the requirement that Caserones has. That takes some time because there are some permitting strategies also involved in this. Of course, there are third parties involved in that contract that we have right now. It is something that we have in the backburner for now, and we're studying those opportunities.
Maybe I could add also, there's also a contractual aspect to take into account here because we can't just terminate contracts at will. You've got to wait until they run their natural course unless you want to pay termination fees, which are sub-optimal.
What we're trying to do is whenever one contract comes up for renewal at one site, to make sure we put a tenure on that contract, which aligns to when a similar contract on the other side naturally expires. At that point in time, you can go out with a joint tender for that service. That will take probably several years before you roll through the whole procurement of contract that you need. There is for sure value to capture, but that will come over several years, I would say.
Okay, okay, no, that makes sense. Maybe just a second question on ESG. Nathan, you talked about NPV-positive opportunities to bring down scope one emissions. I would be quite interested to hear what you guys see there because you've done a lot of progress on scope two, like a lot of companies in the space in Latam. What's really the opportunity in scope one, especially when it comes to NPV-positive projects?
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, as I mentioned, we started that at Caserones. We've completed that work. There are some NPV-positive projects we've identified, so things we should be doing. If you think about that cost abatement curve for Caserones, these are pretty narrow bars. Things we should be doing, but those, if we talk only about Caserones, are not opportunities that are going to materially change the scope one emissions at Caserones.
That being said, we are continuing that same work now at Chapada and at Candelaria. When we have those three assets have completed that work, we will be able to develop a carbon cost abatement curve across all of our Latin American operations. There we will see. We hope that we will be able to identify some additional and wider bars on that cost abatement curve that will be NPV-positive. That is still work that needs to be completed.
Great, thank you.
We have also got a couple of questions online as well. One of the first questions was if you could discuss water availability in the district and if we think there is enough water to support our expansion plans at José María and Filo.
Yeah, great question. That is part of the expanded work plan that we have. I mean, we have been looking at water source availability for a number of years as we have been maturing José María. Now, as we look at the phase one opportunity of bringing José María online first, the approach that we're taking is likely looking to pull water from the continental watershed prior to getting into that full scale where we would be looking at bringing in a desalinated water line. That work is complementing everything else that we're doing in anticipation of getting that integrated study completed.
Great. Maybe, Nathan, if you could elaborate a little bit more on our 2030 carbon reduction targets and how we were able to achieve those earlier than anticipated.
Yeah, sure. The integration of Caserones was a big piece of that. We originally set up our 2030 target based on the 2019 asset base. The integration of Caserones is, if we think about 2024, we will rebaseline for the European divestiture this year.
Thinking only to the end of 2024, the integration of Caserones was key. I think it demonstrates one of the attributes that we look at when we think about the types of mines that we want to be developing. Caserones made a decision between 2019 and 2024 to move to 100% renewable energy. Their 2019 baseline was significant. Over that period of time, they went to 100% renewable. All of their scope three, sorry, scope two emissions went to zero. That was a significant component allowing us to meet our target. If you look at our 2023 report, you will see that we were already making very tangible progress towards the 2030 target. That continued as well. The scope one emission reductions that you asked about, those continued. We can look at those. Some of those have been implemented, and that also was a contributor to reading the target.
Great, thank you. Maybe another one here, Jack, just talking a little bit more about the REGI bill and the threshold limits there and what is required to meet that level of threshold to qualify for the large-term incentive project there.
Yeah, so as stated in my section in the presentation, the requirement to get to the long-term strategic project or strategic export project would be 20% of a $2 billion threshold over two years.
Good. And then, Tim, with some of the exploration that has been ongoing, have you seen or do you want to elaborate a little bit more on Cumbre Verde and drill results from Cumbre Verde?
Yeah, Cumbre Verde is a deeper target. It was the western part of the José María property. After the amalgamation of José María and Vicuña, it is now part of Vicuña Corp's landholding. The exploration would now be driven by Vicuña. Given the richness of the deposit with half a century plus of copper production from pits, chasing a deeper target that could be at depths that might require block cave consideration, that is way out in the next half century. Obviously, because Filo is so rich, some of these other exploration targets that would be exciting to other groups dropped down the priority list. There was exciting mineralization there, but we only had a couple of holes just clipped the edge of it. It is still very unknown. If that was not a Lundin project instead of a Vicuña project, I would still be very excited about it. Filo has so many more attractive resources to flesh out that it will drop in priority for them.
Juan Andrés, maybe this last question here, if there's a plan to leverage procurement opportunities implemented in Chile and also incorporating maybe Chapada or Vicuña into that, potentially into the regional office structure?
Vicuña is probably a little bit more challenging. It's an independent company, and they're building their own capabilities to handle procurement, especially in the project phase. It's a completely different discipline than procurement for operating assets. Probably I would say no to that for now. We have also BHP that also have capabilities in Chile to also provide that same service.
In the case of extending the regional office beyond Chile and maybe including Chapada, it's something that is an idea that has been since the beginning of the implementation of the regional office. As of now, we have decided to let the regional office reach maturity before we assess that opportunity. We are capturing procurement synergies between Caserones and Candelaria today. That was one of the biggest synergies that we captured.
Any final questions from the audience?
Okay, I guess that concludes this part of the Capital Markets Day. For those online, thank you very much for being in attendance. We look forward to hosting everybody at the Sparrow Restaurant at 6:30 P.M. this evening. Thank you very much, everyone.