Perfect. Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be here. See a lot of familiar faces. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to join us here in person, thanks for everyone online. Thanks to the team. The slides are very well done. A lot of hard work has gone into it, and there's a lot to cover today, and the company remains in good shape. I'll leave it to management to tell the story and hand it off to Jack, the CEO of Lundin Mining.
Okay. Well, first off, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you to those that made the trip out here to London for our second annual Capital Markets Day event. It's a pleasure to be here to represent Lundin Mining and to present the very exciting trajectory and history of the company. Over the next few hours, we're going to be walking through a comprehensive overview of the business, and I hope that you get all that you need out of the slides. As Stephen was saying, we'll be open for Q&A in this session and also later at dinner after the event. For those online, thank you so much for your continued interest in Lundin Mining, and we look forward to following up with you after this event.
I will be making cautionary or forward-looking statements, so we always encourage the audience and those that will be looking through this presentation to read the statements, and these will be posted online. Also all of the documents that we'll be presenting that have public information or 43-101 compliant are uploaded on SEDAR. Today's speakers, first with myself doing the introduction, Jack Lundin, President and CEO. We've also got a great cast of characters here in the audience with us. Juan Andrés Morel, our Chief Operating Officer, will walk us through operations. We've got Teitur Poulsen, our CFO. We've got Tim Walmsley, our VP of Exploration, Eduardo Cortés, VP of Mining and Resources as well, and Ron Hochstein from Vicuña Corp. is here to walk through the great Vicuña District and all of the exciting updates that we have there.
Also in the audience and in attendance today that will be here for the presentation and for later on, we've got Vlada, Robert, Leo, Jennifer, Itamar, Marcelo, Nathan, and Stephen. A big group, and we'll be here to enjoy a session and hopefully answer any questions that you may have. As I was mentioning, a comprehensive overview here. We've got introductions followed by operations that will take us into the break, and then we'll get into our growth opportunities really centered in the Vicuña District and Ron will go through Vicuña Corp. and all the exciting updates we have for those of you that have been following the story for a number of years. Teitur will wrap it up with the financial overview.
What is different between last year and this year is last year we were providing five year projections for our financial forecast. This year we are going to have 10-year financial projections to really capture the long-term growth opportunities that we see with all of our mid and longer-term growth through our existing operations, through Vicuña, and through some new opportunities that are presenting themselves to the company. As Stephen was saying, we issued a press release that accompanies this presentation that has all of the key details. We encourage those that have not read that press release to refer to that as well as the presentation that we will be sharing. At the end, there is going to be time for Q&A, so rest assured, if you have a question, write it down and we will be able to answer that at the end.
So It's been an exciting journey for Lundin Mining. I think we classify this company as an organization that has three decades of strategic growth. We have been building a company into what it is today that is really focused on copper. I think what we represent today is a series of deliberate decisions that have reshaped the business over multiple cycles. All of you would be aware we are in a very cyclical business. The commodity prices tend to go up and down. I think Lundin Mining has demonstrated that we have the ability to adapt and reimagine the business and take advantage of opportunities that we see before our competitors. On this slide, we are highlighting most relevant, not all of the historic transactions.
Really, I think ultimately what we want to show here is that Lundin Mining has consistently created value by identifying strategic opportunities and transforming its portfolio ahead of the market. Our journey began in the early 1990s with the entrepreneurial vision of my grandfather, Adolf, and father, Lukas Lundin. Through discoveries such as Storliden in Sweden, the foundation of the Lundin model was established, and that is creating value through exploration, disciplined risk-taking, and execution. The next phase was built through this European operating platform through acquisitions such as Zinkgruvan and Neves-Corvo. These transactions transformed the company from an exploration and small-scale mining business into a growing producer with high-quality operating assets. From there, Lundin Mining expanded globally. We entered the Democratic Republic of the Congo to develop the world-class Tenke Fungurume mine with our then partners, Freeport.
The acquisition as well of the Eagle Mine in Michigan helped build a diversified base metals company with a broader geographic footprint, increasing scale. This period demonstrated the company's ability to allocate capital effectively and grow through both acquisitions and organic development. As the industry landscape evolved, Lundin Mining began an intentional pivot towards copper. The acquisitions of Candelaria, Chapada, and later Josemaria reflected a conviction that copper would become increasingly important in the decades ahead. These were strategic investments, and these were made before the current focus on future copper supply shortages became widely recognized. Now this most recent chapter between 2022 and 2026, it is the bridge of the discussions that we are going to be having today, is the portfolio transformation that has taken place here, really what we are defining as the Vicuña era.
So if we hone into the last three to four years of the company, it's been a very busy and transformational three to four years that we've had, starting with the acquisition of Josemaria Resources in 2022. That really got us interested and into the Vicuña District as Lundin Mining, really showed that there was more potential than just a great development stage project. That was through 2023, when we acquired the first 51% ownership in the Caserones mine. Since then, we've incrementally increased our ownership to now 75% in a mine that we've seen about 60% of return on capital invested since that acquisition in 2023.
This mine continues to generate strong cash flows, continues to demonstrate a lot of upside, gives us that ability to gain institutional knowledge in a district that we've grown our presence and are very excited to continue advancing on both the Chilean and Argentinian side. We'll present a large portion of today will be focused in this area. The partnership that we formed, first announced in 2024, the transaction was closed in January 2025, was the joint acquisition with our partners BHP to acquire Filo Corp for about $3 billion US.
That vending in Josemaria formed a cornerstone growth project for us that sets us apart from our competitors that we're very proud to be able to report that we've had some recent news, we continue to build momentum, we've now got our RIGI application approved on that, which Ron will walk us through in his section. Following these large transactions in the Vicuña District, we divested our non-South American assets. We sold Zinkgruvan and Neves-Corvo in 2025, most recently in Eagle, we divested out of that mine, still retaining a 20% ownership in Talon Metals, where Juan Andrés is chairman and I'm on the board, we're continuing to follow that investment and see exciting opportunities there. It's essentially out of the Lundin Mining portfolio.
Also as part of the incremental 5% increase in Caserones ownership, we were able to acquire 31% of Los Helados, another project in this emerging Vicuña District, which really solidifies our holding in this area, gives us further optionality and opportunity to grow. I think these actions that we took were not isolated. They were part of a deliberate strategy to concentrate capital and focus on long-life, high-quality copper assets. This is really what we can see, the evolution of Lundin Mining and how our business model has changed how we really believe these decisions that we have made have transformed the business and set us up for a remarkable run. What you're seeing here is a comparison between 2022 and 2025. Really when we started to embark on these transformative deals.
You can see in the first pie chart, our copper production for 2022 was 250,000 tons of copper, generated $3 billion in revenue. You can see the weighting of copper, around 63% was weighted to copper production for our revenues. You look at 2025, of course, with the tailwinds of commodity prices going higher, mainly copper and gold, and the copper production that we had growing to 330,000 tons, revenue being generated of $4.1 billion. These longer life assets that also have scale and optionality to look at capitalizing on synergies, particularly between mines like Caserones and Candelaria. Stronger EBITDA margins in the center of the slide here have meant that we're generating, in absolute terms, higher EBITDA and also at a higher margin.
I think that these transformative steps really have set the landscape and the framework for what Lundin Mining is today. The market cap at the end of 2022 was $5.7 billion. We've more than tripled that value as at the end of 2025. What we see, not only commodity price environment, but also the ability to deliver quarter after quarter, year after year in Lundin Mining, and you can see that has been reflected in the market capitalization of our business. You can see in the bottom right Copper price, the rise in copper price over that period. Our peers have had a tremendous run as well. Lundin Mining has had a tremendous run from 2022 to 2025, and we're continuing that trend in 2026.
We have this year nearly added $7 billion in market cap. We're up 40% year-to-date. We continue to hit our operational targets and exceed our financial targets, thanks to the performance of our assets, but really anchored to the great team that we have in the audience and those team members that are currently at site and working in the field. It's not all about absolute numbers. It's about per-share performance, showing that as a shareholder of Lundin Mining, what you're seeing is that the resource is growing, the reserves are growing, and the copper production per share is growing as well. For Josemaria Resources and for Filo Corp, we issued about 140 million shares. Since 2022, we've bought back about 31 million shares. In absolute terms, we've seen our share count go up.
Because the business has grown and because we've added these resources, we've added this production to our portfolio on a per-share basis, we're continuing to demonstrate that Lundin Mining is growing and growing the right way. Copper and gold, these resources are done on an attributable basis, so that would include our 50% ownership in Vicuña Corp. When you look at the most recent PEA or the most recent study that we published on Vicuña, you can see that this is an immense resource, 47 million tons of copper, 96 million ounces of gold, and 1.8 billion ounces of silver. For a company of Lundin Mining size to have 50% ownership in that, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to continue to grow and to continue to demonstrate to our shareholders that we're going to be growing this portfolio.
The team here will be walking us through just how we plan to achieve that. I think it's also important to talk to the audience a little bit about what we're seeing and what we understand in this dynamic environment in the copper sector that we're in. In 2025, we participated in an industry study led by S&P Global examining the global outlook for copper supply and demand through year 2040. The study is projecting that approximately 14 million tons or 50% growth in copper demand will be growing by 2040, highlighting copper's critical role in four key areas, which you can see on the slide here. Economic development, electrification, artificial intelligence infrastructure including data centers, and defense applications. The construction industry will continue.
Construction and industrial machinery expected to remain the largest contributors to underlying economic demand for copper, going from 18 million tons in 2025 to projected 23 million tons in 2040. The adoption of electric vehicles, structural shift in transportation-related copper consumption, and of course, the AI trend that we're seeing taking shape is really contributing to a massive growth in demand for copper. These findings, I think, reinforce copper's position as a strategic material underpinning both global economic growth and the energy transition. This is another slide showing that basically what this study has proven or has shown is that there's going to be about a 10-million-ton shortfall expected in copper. Copper basically today stands at a pivotal moment.
Global demand is accelerating along the four key areas, as I mentioned in the last slide, yet the current supply is on course to actually decline as existing resources and existing mining operations are aging. Those of you in the audience, I'm sure would be well aware that declining ore grades, rising costs, complex extraction conditions are contributing to this. The study projects that under current conditions, primary mine supply is actually set to peak by 2030. There's going to be a potential, as I mentioned, 10-million-ton shortfall in copper by 2040. Increasing secondary supply from recycling scrap copper will only partially close that gap. If you take a look at Vicuña, 800,000 tons of copper equivalent during its peak production years, you're essentially going to need 17 and a half Vicuñas coming online by 2040 to meet this growing gap.
The reality is the reverse is happening. Growth in supply is looking to decline. If we look back in time, 2010 to 2025, global mined copper production increased by roughly seven million tons since 2010, but output from existing operations is expected to decline by a similar amount by 2040 as major mines are depleted. In order to meet this growing demand, the study concluded that the industry must both sustain production from current mines and develop new projects. A process that typically takes 15 to 20 years from discovery to when you're in production. There's going to be a significant requirement for capital to meet this crisis that we're potentially facing. This is why we're focusing our attention on operational performance and the need to grow our production base. Enter Lundin Mining in 2026.
Pleasingly, Q1, we've had a very solid safety performance, first and foremost. I think what we'll see through Juan Andrés' section is industry-leading over the last several quarters, and we continue to see strong safety performance at our operations, which really underpins the overall quality of our operations and how we're able to operate at the standard and at the level we are. It's fundamental to us, and it's very proud to stand here and say that we've got industry-leading safety performance at our operations. Q1, as I mentioned, and as you can see the production numbers here on the screen, we generated nearly $630 million in EBITDA, just shy of $500 million in operating cash flow, and $315 million in free cash flow.
We're forecasting, which you'll see on a later slide, that we should generate around $700 million in free cash flow for the year, which includes our expansionary capital, which includes our 50% capital that we're putting towards the $800 million budget of Vicuña. Significant spending year, but overall still going to be generating a significant amount of free cash flow, which highlights the financial strength of our business. In addition to the financial strength of our business being in a net cash position with a $4.5 billion revolving credit facility to fund our growth ambitions, we couldn't be better suited to capitalize on the opportunities that we have going forward.
Also, Los Helados is an exciting growth opportunity that we're exploring to develop with our partners in NGEx, and Tim and Eduardo will talk about the opportunities later on in the slide. Our existing portfolio gives us the opportunity to grow at a substantial pace, far exceeding any of the competitors in our sector of our size. What you can see on this slide here is line of sight to going from where our production stands today. Midpoint of our guidance, 323,000 tons of copper and 142,000 ounces of gold, up to over 500,000 tons of copper and 550,000 ounces of gold production through our near-term organic growth opportunities, our brownfield expansions at Chapada, Candelaria, and Caserones, and then through the stage development of Vicuña. We basically are demonstrating that we have a decade of growth ahead, and really anchored to a very solid operating base.
And as Ron will get into, as I mentioned, established in 2025, January 2025, significant progress continues to be made in de-risking and advancing this once-in-a-generation project. The project is Vicuña. Multi-staged, so that we can be cash-generating to fund the future expansions. Really an exciting project that we've been working on for a while now, and we've got good line of sight to continuing to unlock value. Just last night, as I mentioned, we were able to announce the receipt of our RIGI application under the long-term strategic export designation. I think this is a significant milestone. It continues to build on the momentum that we've been growing at Vicuña. Compared to the standard RIGI framework, this RIGI PELP application, it offers extended benefits, 40 years versus 30, along with accelerated access to things like revenue repatriation and export duty exemptions.
This further strengthens the project's investment profile. Overall, I think to summarize the introduction here on our business before going into more details, I think what we can classify Lundin Mining is that we've got stability and growth to create lasting value for our organization. We continue to have a relentless focus on cost discipline and a relentless focus on best-in-class safety standards. We continue to have our sustainability focus, and I'm happy to confirm that we source 100% renewable power across all of our three operations. To support the broader sustainability efforts, the Lundin Foundation remains one of our most important partners. We additionally this year, submitted and published our first CSRD compliant report, representing an important step forward in how we're reporting our business. We continue to be performance-focused and show that we're a company that has truly unrivaled growth.
With that, I would now invite Juan Andrés up on stage so that he can walk us through operations. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Jack, for that great introduction and for setting the stage for the rest of the presentation. I will be walking you through the main progress that we have made in our three operations in South America. I want to highlight that we're joined by our three general managers, managing directors, Marcelo from Caserones, Leonardo from Candelaria, and Itamar from Chapada. If you have any questions after the meeting, they're here also to answer some of the toughest questions. I will also be joined by Tim and Eduardo to walk you through some details of each of our operations. Last year, We set the stage of the operational strategy among these three main pillars. The first one being the operational discipline.
That is the center of our strategy. We have been improving our managing systems and all our routines to make sure that the operational discipline keeps improving year after year. We have increased our focus on safety. We have improved our planning cycle system, those are the main drivers for our operational consistency and the discipline that we have been able to reach. Full Potential is something initially that we started in 2023, that has been front and center of our operational strategy to bring the sites to the level of competitiveness and efficiency that we see today. I'm going to walk you through that process as well. Finally, the focus on low capital intensity, near-term opportunities, we're going to speak about Saúva and the Caserones cathodes plant. Let's start with safety. We have seen some incredible results in our safety performance.
What you can see on the screen on the right is the band of the performance of all the companies in the ICMM database. You can see at the bottom of that band, the performance that Lundin Mining has had over the years between 2015 and 2026. In the last three, four years, since we launched what we call the FRM, our Fatal Risk Management system, we have seen an incredible improvement in our performance in safety. We launched the FRM in late 2023, since then, we have seen incredible results. We have industry-record safety performance on our TRIFR that you can see there at point 15. As of now, this system is fully embedded across all our operations. The next steps is continue working on strengthening our critical controls and sustaining stronger safety performance as we move forward.
In terms of our operational performance, we have reached or achieved or beat guidance in the last three consecutive years. As you can see on the screen, 2023, 2024, 2025, we met guidance for both copper and gold. This year, we also aim to meet the guidance for 2026. That is a great demonstration of the consistency and the increased operational discipline that we have achieved in these last few years. Full Potential, as I said before, is front and center in our strategy. What we aim is to unlock the maximum value from our ore body. This is a very rigorous system where we look at opportunities to improve our processes all across our sites, and we take them into a much more rigorous process to come up with a business case, and then we move into implementation. We have separated this approach in two.
First, what you see on the left is what we call the asset operational excellence, which is basically aiming to use the installed capacity and increase our efficiencies based on the capabilities that we have at each site. On the right, you can see the asset strategy. Those are opportunities with marginal investment or low capital intensity opportunities that aim to increase our production levels. On the left, on Full Potential, so far, we have been able to optimize existing processes based on cost optimization and increase in revenue. Now, since we almost finished that first phase, that first wave of projects, we're now moving into Full Potential 2.0. This is going to be a little bit harder. Maybe we picked the low-hanging fruits in that first wave, and now we need to look a little deeper and look at the data to help us identify those opportunities.
That's why we're implementing some digitalization across our processes, adding more data analytics, and of course, looking for opportunities to apply artificial intelligence. On the right side, on the asset strategy, we are moving forward with our Saúva project and the CPU, which is the Chapada plant upgrade that Eduardo will be telling us more details on that, which aims to increase our recoveries through the addition of a second ball mill. Low intensity, again, low capital intensity initiatives to increase production. Also, the Caserones improvement in the utilization of our cathode plant is related to these low capital intensity initiatives. On the next phase, we will be looking at new opportunities. There's an opportunity to continue with the Saúva project to keep adding more efficiencies or some additional equipment to our mill to increase productivity as well.
We're looking at the same opportunities in Caserones, we will continue looking at some low capital intensity near-term growth opportunities. Some results that we have achieved so far, as you can see on the screen, starting with Chapada on the left. These are a very good metric to show the progress that we have made with the Full Potential initiative. Total operating cost divided by tons mill is a good indication of how we've been able to improve the efficiency in all our assets. These are nominal terms, despite the effect of inflationary pressures and cost increase in some of our main cost drivers, we have been able to reduce our cost per tonne mill.
You can see in Chapada, before the implementation of our Full Potential in 2022, the cost was $11.8 per tonne mill, now post Full Potential implementation, we have taken it down to $10.6 per tonne mill, 11% decrease. Once we saw the success of this initiative in Chapada, we quickly moved into Caserones and implemented Full Potential in Caserones as well. If you look at the dollars per tonne mill before the implementation of Full Potential, we took this metric down from $20 per tonne mill down to $17.90 per tonne mill, 10% reduction in this very short period of time. Similarly, we moved into Candelaria and implemented the same initiative.
In this case, we're only considering the open pit to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, we took the total cost divided by tonnes mill from $19.9 to $19.03, 4% reduction, we know that we need to keep working in Candelaria to make further improvements. We are going to go deeper into each of our assets, starting with our Brazilian operation. Chapada, in the state of Goiás, in 2016, in the first quarter, it contributed to 17% of the total revenue, is 100% owned by Lundin Mining, is an open pit, very low grade, 16,000 tonnes per day mill capacity. You can see there the head grade, 0.22% copper, 0.12 g/t gold. More than 25 years of mine life and an incredible history or incredible story of improving the efficiency.
You can see there the drop in the C1 over the last three years. We have been able to maintain almost the same copper production and same with the gold production at the order of 45,000 tonnes of copper per year. This year, we're aiming to meet our guidance, which is between 45,000 and 50,000 tonnes of copper for the year. Gold, 57,000 to 62,000 ounces in the year. We have adjusted our C1 guidance. Previously, our guidance was between $1 and $1.2 per pound. We have reduced the guidance for the year to $0.75 to $0.95 per pound. An incredible C1 for such a low-grade operation. Recognition to the team for all the efforts done around the Full Potential and helping us get to this level of efficiency in Chapada. Some of the examples of Full Potential initiatives you can see there on the screen.
In the case of the mine, we were able to reduce our fuel consumption by 11%. We increased our cycle times by 6%, and that is basically by making all the speeds of our whole fleet much more consistent and much more standardized. We also increased the payload of our trucks by 2%. In the mill, we were able to increase our throughput, meaning our tonnes per hour, by 9%, and the total additional ore mill per year went up by 4%. We have also put a particular focus on our sustaining capital. In the case of Chapada, we were able to reduce our sustaining capital divided by tonnes mill by 40%.
Also a key initiative in the case of the Full Potential in Chapada was look at the long-term mine plan and reduce the strip ratio by postponing some waste movement, and we were able to come up with a much more balanced long-term mine plan. That resulted in a 29% reduction of our strip ratio. I will now hand it over to Eduardo to walk us through the Saúva and CPU project.
Thanks, Juan Andrés. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Perfect. I'll walk you through the Saúva project. This is one of our best growth projects in the company. Saúva is split in two parts. The first part is the construction of a second ball mill, which will help us to reach higher recoveries for both copper and gold. On the right side, you can see the rendering of the second ball mill is in green, close to the actual ball mill. On the left, you can see the CapEx that we're spending this year is $35 million. The total CapEx for this project is $70 million, and this year we're spending half of it. We're accelerating this project, and we're starting next month with earthworks. I'm expecting to finalize the commissioning by end of next year. This project is key.
The CPU, this first part that I was talking about, is key to unlock the Saúva deposit because we don't want to be sending those higher grades from Saúva to recover 5% less. We want to finish this ball mill construction, then we can mine Saúva. Saúva, as you can see there, we're expecting to start production by Q1 2029. So as a quick refresher, Saúva is a deposit that is located 15 km north of Chapada, and we're expecting to increase production by 15,000 tons of copper and 45,000 ounces of gold during four years. In the table, you can see the key highlights of the project. It's a 33 million tons total mine. That's including ore and waste. Average strip ratio of 1.6: 1.
Ore to mill is around 28 million tons, or is under 30 million tons during this initial portion that we're mining from Saúva at a head grade of 0.4% copper and 0.3 g/ t gold. This, for Chapada, is high grade. Ron, maybe it's low grade for you, but for us it's very high grade. The initial capital is $110 million, comparing to what we showed last year, $150 million. We have been able to decrease significantly that initial capital to give us a capital intensity under $7,500 per ton of copper. Yeah, this is a great project for Chapada, increasing 30% copper production and 75% gold production. It's important to mention that we're only mining a small portion of Saúva. The deposit disclosed and published in our website is much larger than that.
It's 250 million tons of ore at a 30% higher copper and gold grade than the Chapada deposit. We're still studying that second portion, and we're doing some engineering studies to try to start production there as well. It's also important to mention that this is not growth anymore for Chapada. This is part of our base case integrating the life of mine plan for long term 2027. Here you can see the schedule. We are starting from the top, expecting to finalize the engineering, permitting, and electrification approval by Q4 this year. Following with the ball mill fabrication that started actually last month, and construction and installation of this ball mill by Q4 2027, and the commissioning couple of quarters there to start increasing the recoveries by Q1 2028.
So after that, we are developing the Saúva deposit and feasibility study, environmental baseline data, and permitting to be finalized by Q4 2028. In parallel, we're developing the early works activities, infrastructure, and water management to start in late 2027 and finalize in Q4 2028. We are expecting to start the pre-stripping by Q4 2028. It's a small volume of pre-stripping. Luckily, it's no more than three months. We're expecting to start production, as I said before, Q1 2029 from Saúva to the expanded ball mill or to the expanded Chapada plant. Okay. Here we have a layout of Chapada on the right side. We're not showing Saúva here. It's only Chapada. But as you can see, we have several pits that we're mining. The most important pits for us for the following years are the South Pit and also Baru and the North Pit.
Those are the areas that we're mining currently. On the left side, you can see our production plan outlook for the 10 years. Orange line, you see what we showed last year in the CMD. The blue solid is the base life of mine, and the light blue is the growth potential that we have. The production profile is very similar from what we showed last year. We're only able to accelerate or move forward this high peak production that it was Saúva. We'll move it forward to 2029 as we accelerated our Saúva project. We're also expecting a mineral resource and mineral reserves update by Q4 2026 or hopefully no more than Q1 2027. I hand it over to you, Tim.
Thanks. Just very briefly here, just looking beyond the initial exploitation option at Saúva, there's much more continued growth to come at Saúva. You can see here the conceptual open pit resource pit in lighter gray above is much larger than the initial phase 1 Saúva pit. Mineralization of a high-grade nature continues beyond that pit for at least a kilometer. This last hole that came in with results today show that that zone maintains open and continues at depth to date. Most of our exploration work since the last time we met a year ago has been focused extending the Saúva at depth to see how far this higher grade core will continue, as well as drilling some additional holes along the Saúva trend looking for another Saúva in the district.
And given the size of the exploration potential, we're quite optimistic there's a huge footprint of under-drilled and under-explored opportunity within the Saúva trend. Hand it back to Juan Andrés
Thank you, Tim. We're now going to fly to Chile to the Atacama region and start with Candelaria. We're going to start moving slowly up into the Vicuña district and starting in the lower part of the Atacama region. Candelaria
The first quarter of 2026 contributed 39% of our revenue. It's 80% owned by Lundin Mining. It's a combination of an open pit and underground operation, 75,000 tons per day in the Candelaria mill, and 3,800 tons per day in the pack plant. The grades, you can see there, 0.44 for the open pit and 0.8 for the underground. More than 20 years of mine life, and we continue to make progress. The production profile, as you can see on the right chart, it varies depending on the mining sequence. We hit some high-grade zones and production, of course, goes up to like 162 in 2024, then it comes down again, and then it goes back again.
This year, we're aiming to meet, of course, our guidance, which is between 135,000-145,000 tons of copper, and meet our C1 guidance as well, which is between $2.05 and $2.25. You have to remember that C1 includes the streaming cost. This is probably if we remove the streaming cost will be, of course, lower than that. In Candelaria, we have also moved forward with the Full Potential, as I explained before, and here are a few examples of initiatives that we have implemented so far. We have seen an incredible improvement in our tire life. We increased that by 27%, which tires are the main cost components or one of the main cost components in the mining cost. We have improved our travel utilization by more than 10%, and we have also increased the payload of our haulage fleet by 6%.
In the case of the mill, we have increased our grinding throughput by 11%, and we have reduced consumable while improving plant availability by more than 1%. We have also looked at reducing the sustaining CapEx divided by tons mill by 65%. We continue to optimize our G&A cost and the non-productive infrastructure, what we call the NPI, by 17%. One of the key initiatives in Candelaria, you have heard us from some time ago that we've been discussing the idea to expand the underground mine. We were ready to do that in 2025, we looked at the way the process was being executed, and we realized that the entire mine was basically outsourced. Given the challenge to take the mine from 14,000-22,000 tons per day is a significant challenge.
We decided that we want to have more control over the operation of the underground. Before expanding the mine, we decided to take a step back and insource all the operation of the underground mine. In 2025, we started that process, and as of now, we're 97% complete. We have insourced drilling and blasting, loading and hauling, and all of the support functions in the underground mine. We only left two-thirds of the underground development in a new contract that we just awarded to a new company, and we're keeping also as part of the insourcing initiative, one-third of the underground development in our hands. In May, we reached already our target of 400 m per month, and we have seen incredibly lower cost than what we expected initially.
We continue moving forward with that, and in the future, we'll probably be analyzing the possibility to fully insource all the underground development. We should reach the full target of the underground development in the second half of this year. The target is 1,200 m per month. We should be in that level in the second half of this year. That will help us to stabilize the underground mine at 14,000 tons per day by the second half of 2027. From that point forward, we should start slowly increasing the extraction of the underground to take it to 22,000 tons per day. As you can see there on the graph on the right, we aim to increase our copper production at about 12,000 to 14,000 tons of copper per year from this expansion of the underground mine in Candelaria.
Another interesting boost to our EBITDA or free cash flow in the case of Candelaria is the step-down of our streaming agreement. As you know, we have a streaming agreement with Franco-Nevada, and this agreement will step down from 68% to 40% once we reach 720,000 tons, sorry, 720,000 ounces produced since the agreement was signed. This will happen sometime in the first half of 2027. From that point forward, an amount in the order of 15,000 to 20,000 ounces will be attributable to Lundin Mining. That will add between $56 million-$90 million per year of free cash flow at current gold prices. Back to Eduardo with the growth opportunities in Candelaria.
All right. Thank you. Similar to the slide I showed before, we have on the right side, the Candelaria main pit. There is also another future pit that is to the south that is not shown here. It's called La Española, but that is part of 2035 production. This pit, we're focusing on phase 11 and phase 12 in red and orange, respectively. That's where is the production coming from for the following couple of years. Also, we're going through pre-stripping of phase 13, which is one of the most important phases from year 2030 onwards. On the left side, you can see The solid area in blue is the LOM base case, life of mine base case, and in light blue is the growth that we have considered for Candelaria.
We have two main growth opportunities here, as Juan Andrés was mentioning, is the expansion of the underground mine from 14,000 to 22,000 tons per day. Also recently this year, we added to the growth opportunities this phase 14 to the north of the pit that we were not considering before, and now we're actually considering it, and it would be becoming online at least in this growth scenario in year 2033 or so. Tim.
Thanks. This slide will be familiar to those who were here a year ago. It's more or less the same slide, but it shows the longevity of this project. Candelaria is now over 30 years producing, and the deposit still remains open in many, many directions. It continues open to the north, as you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. It continues open to the south, where we have very high-grade breccias that we continue to hit without end. There's still a little bit of potential underneath in deeper parts of Candelaria North, where there's still higher-grade veins below original underground mining that we still have room to test for. Further south at surface, we have potential to expand the Espanola deposit on strike to the south.
A year ago, we acquired a neighboring property called Resguardo that had a small or smallish, small compared to Candelaria, but not so small resource potential at surface, very similar in nature to Espanola. During this year, we will be drilling and trying to expand that initial body and join it to Espanola. It looks very promising that we can join those two deposits and thereby continue to increase the size of Espanola. Last but not least, I think you recall last year we mentioned that above Candelaria at the time of the Candelaria discovery, there were smaller deposits in this higher lithologic horizon similar to Espanola. That leaves open the opportunity for testing for larger deposits beneath the Espanola deposit. We will continue to do that in the second half of this year.
At surface to the south, this is just a plan view showing you the Espanola resource in green in Measured and Indicated, and then the growth potential around the margins of this deposit in orange, classified here as mineral inventory. The resource shown there in Measured and Indicated only, there's an additional 44 million tons of inferred on top of that, is now built into the Candelaria LOM. We are currently drilling the edges of Espanola trying to grow it larger. Beyond Espanola, you can see the outline of the Resguardo system that we are now trying to confirm historic drill holes in this area and find the edges and see if we can connect these bodies and eventually connect them to Espanola. Once that's done, of course, there is also good exploration and geophysical evidence that this sort of mineralization will continue further south as well.
Thank you, Tim. We're now going to move east up in the Andes and reach the entrance of the Vicuña District with our Caserones operation. Caserones in the first quarter of 2026 contributed with 44% of our revenue. It's now 75% owned by Lundin Mining. It's also an open pit operation, similarly to Candelaria. Our average throughput is in the order of 100,000 tons per day, 0.3% copper grade, and more than 15 years of mine life. Caserones has shown a very consistent copper production in the last four years. Last year, 133. This year, we're aiming to meet guidance between 130,000 and 140,000 tons per year. Our C1 guidance for this year is between 2.05 and 2.25 similarly to the one we have in Candelaria. Some examples of the Full Potential initiatives that the team has implemented so far. You see a pattern.
We basically take what we have learned in Chapada, transfer that to Candelaria. We are doing similar initiatives in Caserones. We also aim to increase our payload of our haulage fleet. We achieved a 5% increase. We have also looked at reducing our cycle times. We achieved a 24% improvement. We also increased the use of our haulage fleet by 21%. The maintenance contract was optimized and renegotiated. We have also insourced a part of our maintenance contract. In the mill, we have seen improvements by 1.2% improvement in our tons per hour. It may not look that much, but at the end of the year, it translates into a significant improvement.
We have also improved our availability by 5%. In 2025, we achieved a record in terms of material process, reaching 33 million tons of ore per year, which is a 5% increase compared to our baseline that we use for our Full Potential initiatives. One of the most iconic initiatives has been the improvement in the utilization of the installed capacity of our SXEW or our cathode plant in Caserones. We continue testing new technologies to potentially leach our primary sulfides that we have in Caserones. This is a sample of the initiatives that are behind the Full Potential in Caserones. As I mentioned before, the increased utilization in our copper in the cathode plant is one of the most significant initiatives in our Full Potential program. We have been able to increase the utilization from 55% from the previous time before the acquisition to 80% currently.
In the phase 1, what is behind that increase in the utilization is that we added 5 million tons more per year of material that was placed in the dump leach. Together with that, we increased our irrigation area by more than 100,000 sq m. We also increased the dosage of sulfuric acid in the irrigation. With that, we were able to take the cathode production from 15 in 2022, 19 in 2023, roughly 24 in 2024 to almost 26 last year. This year we are aiming to produce 30,000 tons of cathodes. We are moving now into a second phase, also within the scope of the Full Potential. We have identified the opportunity to debottle the electrowinning plant.
In order to do that, we will be repowering the cooling system of our existing rectifiers by 10%-15%, which will allow us to increase the nameplate capacity from 35,000 tons of copper to 40,000 tons of cathodes per year. This is with a very low capital investment, less than $1 million in the year. This will be a very, again, low capital intensity, near-term growth opportunity that we have in Caserones. In Caserones, we have been historically producing gold. Although we have not reported or guided the market on the gold production, there has been some gold production and gold revenues being obtained in Caserones. In 2025, we produced 15,000 ounces of gold, which translated in $46 million of revenue in that year.
Our current block model doesn't have yet the precision to guide on gold. We are working on improving the grade modeling so we can start guiding gold in Caserones in 2027. This is a significant boost on our free cash flow, and we continue monitoring the gold production in Caserones, of course, together with the moly as the other byproduct. Back to you, Eduardo.
Thank you, Juan Andrés. Okay, on the right side, we see the main pit, the only pit. Caserones we have two phases in production, phase 7 and phase 6B. There is another phase that is being in developing pre-stripping. It's not shown here or highlighted here at least. To the bottom of the picture, we see the plant in green, the processing plant, and to the right of the picture, we see the SX/EW plant and the dump leach. As Juan Andrés was mentioning, we have improved significantly our cathodes production. We have worked on ore reclassification that has allow us to increase the feed to the cathode plant. In our base LOM, life of mine, now we're considering up to 35,000 tons of copper coming from cathodes, which is much higher than what we considered last year.
Also we are keeping up to 40,000, so five extra thousand tons of copper as a growth opportunity following what Juan Andrés was mentioning on his slide. As you can see, the dark blue and the light blue are very similar to the profile we show on the previous CMD. We're keeping a steady production for 10 years between 130,000 and 140,000 tons of copper. Anything else? No. Tim.
Thanks. This is just an update to show you what we've been doing in exploration for the last year. When we met last year, we were exploring aggressively, looking for higher-grade breccias underneath the existing, within the lower parts and underneath the existing resource at Caserones. Historically, the sulfide or hypogene part of the Caserones deposit was quite under-drilled. Most of the drilling was focused on the shallower enrichment blanket, and we saw an opportunity to find more of these unrecognized higher-grade breccias within the system itself. That went extremely well towards the end of the year. To date, we've found at least four or five new higher-grade breccia bodies that were unrecognized within the existing resource, and we continue to drill, although we have handed it off this year from exploration to the mine team, the mine resource team.
They continue to drill, looking for more of these, and they continue to find more, which should have a positive impact on the average resource grade in the system. In addition, last year, the Angelica prospect last year. We were starting to drill underneath the known oxide body. There was a small oxide body known previously prior to purchase. No drilling had been done prior to Lundin to look for the sulfide source of that oxide body. A year ago, we were drilling the first one or two holes underneath the oxide body looking for the sulfide body. Since that time, we've completed now 20 km of drilling in 2025, most of which was focused on Angelica. We're about a third of the way through an additional 27 km of drilling planned for this year. We continue to try and define the limits of the sulfide body.
There's still a couple areas where it's growing. We're focusing on looking at the, again, similar high-grade breccias within Angelica similar to Caserones. We're trying to find just how large those could be. If all goes well and we find and can delimit the system, we are hoping to move towards an initial resource early next year. At the same time, within the broader district, you'll recall we have a huge number of targets on the property. This property was never really explored since the early 1990s. There's a lot of work for us to do here. We started by drilling, by exploring aggressively the most obvious targets, the ones closest to the plant that could have the most immediate economic impact at Angelica. In parallel to that, we started testing a nearby target called Centauro, where we saw oxide potential.
We've drilled most of that now. There is a small oxide opportunity there. Also, we started in the later part of Q2 testing the western edge of Caserones, where there's evidence of additional breccias that could extend the footprint of that body and enlarge the future open pit. During all of that period, we've been pushing the road access from the plant area through Centauro and down into the Cordillera target. We won't be able to drill that before the winter season, which just commenced. We have two drill pads all ready and waiting. As soon as the winter stops, we'll be in there as soon as possible to get the first drill holes into Cordillera, which you can see is quite a large target.
In parallel, we'll be hoping in H2 to drill the first couple holes on the northern extension of Los Helados, which spills into the Casei rones property. In parallel, while we're doing this drilling, we're sending out recce teams to start taking first samples and reconnaissance mapping on all these other targets in the district on a priority basis. There's probably at least two or three years of aggressive exploration before we can say how many of these targets represent additional deposit opportunities.
Thank you, Tim and Eduardo. Just to close our section in Operations, I want to emphasize that we keep executing our strategy based on these three main focuses. Safety, putting safety as one priority. Safety performance and operational performance go hand in hand, and they are the good reflection of the discipline of an operation. We're very proud to see the results that we have been able to achieve, and of course, this is the result of strong leadership, and I want to recognize the job that our managing directors do on an everyday basis in our operations. We're changing the culture. We're moving the culture forward with our new values in the company, and we're turning our FRM, our fatal risk management system, and our Full Potential as part of our Lundin Way, the core of our culture.
We will continue delivering results and optimizing our operations, and we will continue looking at opportunities with low capital intensity to improve our copper production in the near term. Thank you for your attention. We're now moving to a break.
No, why don't we just keep going through to Vicuña? If you want to maybe just.
Los Helados?
Yeah. Mention online that we're going to continue on and we'll take a break after Los Helados.
We will continue with the agenda, and what we have next is a presentation from Eduardo and Tim on Los Helados.
Now, after going through operations and the near-term growth that we see there, we move to, I know Adam's favorite part of every presentation, the future growth opportunities in the district. Before going through the district, I just wanted to give credit to the exceptional discovery team at NGEx Minerals, a sister company within the Lundin Group. These next two slides have been borrowed from them, and they summarize really well just how significant Vicuña is as a major porphyry copper district. To produce a major, a giant porphyry copper district, a lot of things have to go right. You have to start with the right rocks. Magma is capable of bringing lots of metal to the surface. Major structures with deep plumbing able to channel and focus those metals into concentrated areas. Multiple events, multiple mineralizing events. Every large district has these.
By pumping the system, pumping the district many times, you end up with clusters of deposits. Even if those first three elements go very well, the fourth of these different elements can make or break a deposit. The preservation, it's really, really key. If the deposit is placed too deep, it's too deep to exploit from surface. If it's placed too shallow, over millions of years, it gets eroded, and what might've been a nice deposit gets washed to the sea. Within the Vicuña district, there's different examples of how important this preservation aspect is. The Los Helados deposit in the center of the district represents a wholly preserved porphyry copper system.
The two older deposits, Caserones and Josemaria, because they're older, they've seen a little bit more erosion, and the top margin or portion of those deposits has been oxidized through thousands of years of interaction with the water table. Some of that copper from the top part of the system gets leached and then reconcentrated in an enriched layer at the top of the system. There's a very, very special example in the district here, and that's Filo. In the Filo example, everything has gone right to produce this super giant of a deposit.
The mountain-forming uplift is perfectly balanced with the erosion of the Andes in such manner that the early stage large tonnage copper and gold porphyry system emplaced in the early formation of the deposit was then overprinted and upgraded by later stage alteration events through high sulfidation and epithermal processes, superimposing higher grade copper, gold, and silver mineralization on the deposit, resulting in the exceptional 1% or +1% copper equivalent high-grade core that we see at Los Helados, which is extremely unique within the district and within the world. Once you have a giant metal district, there are usually four key characteristics that all of them seem to demonstrate. The first being scale. Usually, giant metal districts exhibit deposits that are exceptional in their deposit class.
Here we have a case where all the deposits are either giant, super giant, or in the case of Filo, beyond super giant size. The second aspect is always key is clusters. The system has been pulsed and pumped multiple times, it tends to produce these clusters of deposits. Of course, all large metal districts have important long-lived, deep-rooted structures to channel. Lastly, grade. As the deposits and the metal district that it hosts them get bigger, the grades also get bigger. We see that in most of the deposits here and especially in Filo.
One of the most significant aspects of being part of a giant metal district is that most companies in history that have been able and had the foresight to get aggressively involved in a giant metal district early on have benefited from being catapulted to be one of the largest mining companies in the world. Here at Vicuña, Lundin Mining is hoping and planning to benefit and follow in the footsteps of these large mining companies and hopefully join the ranks of the world's largest copper-producing companies in the world. Rather than me continuing to talk about words here, and I think it's best shown through a video with some pictures. There's a video coming up that's going to give you a bird's eye view of the district and the multiple deposits that this district hosts.
For over 200 million years, an unstoppable force has shaped the spine of South America. The Nazca Plate, a slab of ocean floor, pushes beneath the continent. Where it reaches depth, water is released, triggering magma at the base of the crust. Channels of molten rock rise through the crust, carrying dissolved metals, copper, gold, silver. This subduction zone has produced 40% of the world's known copper deposits. Forming a super giant requires something far more rare, a system that grows undisturbed for millions of years. The Andes stretch 7,000 km. Why here? The answer lies in the architecture of the crust. Deep faults, older than the deposits themselves, act as plumbing through the crust. One corridor, running north-northeast, sits directly above the zone where magma is generated. That corridor is where metal accumulates. Geologists have known these mountains for decades.
Two famous mineral belts running north to south. El Indio to the south, Maricunga to the north. In both belts, the magma blew its top as volcanoes. The system released too early. Between them, a gap, and in that gap, no eruption came. The magma was held in place, concentrating metals for millions of years undisturbed. That gap is Vicuña. Beneath the district, an enormous magma chamber grew. As it cooled, metals separated upward like oil on water, forming a blister of metal-rich fluid at the top. Then the blister was tapped not once, but twice. 22 million years ago, the first pulse formed Josemaria and Caserones. 8 million years later, a second pulse broke through a parallel structure, forming Filo del Sol, Lunahuasi, and Los Helados. Five deposits, lightning striking twice. Five deposits within 30 km.
Two generations of mineralization from the same deep engine, each one its own system, all channeled through the same crustal architecture. Caserones, one of the oldest systems in the corridor. It has had the longest time to be pushed upward by mountain growth and worn down by erosion. The result? The porphyry core sits fully exposed at surface. An operating mine producing over 120,000 tons of copper a year, 1 billion tons of ore. The corridor delivers. 17 km south, Los Helados, a deep, high-grade copper-gold system with over 12 million tons of copper and 14 million ounces of gold, located within reach of Caserones' processing infrastructure. Lunahuasi, found by the same team that discovered Filo, Los Helados, and Josemaria. High-grade copper-gold-silver veins first identified the system, including over 100 meters at nearly 15 grams per ton gold. In early 2026, drilling revealed something much larger beneath.
A large-scale porphyry system with over 1,600 meters of continuous copper mineralization. Still early stage, still growing. Filo del Sol, the youngest system with the least time to erode, still capped. For years, geologists saw only the gold-rich oxide layer near the surface. The drills went deeper. Beneath the cap, one of the largest sulfide discoveries in 30 years. 4 km across, six and a half kilometers in length, still open at depth. The oxide was the signpost. The sulfide is the prize. Josemaria. A classical porphyry copper-gold deposit already on the path to development, permitted and advancing. It will be the central processing facility to unlock the broader district. You put this together, you get scale, grade, and structure, something that is truly extraordinary. The district contains over 60 million tons of copper, 100 million ounces of gold, and 2 billion ounces of silver.
By the formal geological classification used by academia, that places Vicuña beyond even supergiant, into a category reserved for the rarest systems on Earth. Vicuña is a generational asset, the kind the largest mining companies in the world are built from. This is Vicuña. This is Lundin Mining.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that was a good overview of the system. Just coming back to two dimensions here. Just wanted to highlight one of the latest additions to the Lundin portfolio. In Q2, we acquired, as Jack said, 31% of the Los Helados project on the Chilean side of the border. This project is located 17 km due south of the Caserones infrastructure and plant, and offers an opportunity for exceptional synergies with our operation at Caserones as we continue to evaluate these sorts of options with our partner, NGEx. Los Helados is a large porphyry system, and again, it has higher grade cores. You can see here the areas in red, three areas in red. The main Condor zone, which represents the majority of the highest grade in the system.
Over 8% copper equivalent is exceptional grade for porphyries these days. It also in the last few years or half decade, the NGEx team located a couple of additional breccia, higher grade breccia bodies within the system, and the northern one, Alicanto, goes right up to the border with Caserones, and their last high-grade drill hole was only meters from the property boundary of Caserones. As I mentioned in the second half of this year, we hope to be drilling on Caserones land, looking for the extension of the system into our mineral rights as well. By acquiring 31% of Los Helados project, we effectively increased the mineral concession footprint of the Caserones property by 30%. Between our share of the Los Helados project and the Caserones land holdings, we now have over 80,000 hectares in the Chilean side of the district.
I'll pass it on now to Eduardo, who's going to speak more on the resource and development options.
Thanks, Tim. On the right side, as Tim was mentioning, we have the three main domains, Alicanto, Condor, and Fenix. Those are the high-grade zones of Los Helados. Its extension is 1.3 km long and 1.3 km vertical, and it's open at depth still. We don't know the limit of the deposit by now. On the left, you can see the resource, but they indicated only, we're not showing inferred. 8.4 million tons of copper and 10.2 million ounces of gold. In the video, it was mentioned actually 12 million tons of copper, but that is included inferred resources. It has a high-grade core of 2.9 million tons of copper and 3.5 million ounces of gold at a 0.72 copper equivalent, which is a pretty high grade. This adds 12% to total attributable M&I copper resource of Lundin Mining.
One thing to mention here is that this resource is estimated with significantly lower metal prices than we're using today to estimate our resources. This is from 2023, and also is using mining costs associated to block caving because this project has historically been looked as a block caving, and now we are exploring other options, other mining methods, including an open pit, which comes with lower mining costs. You put that into perspective, like higher metal prices and lower mining costs, we see room for growth for this project as well. We are studying three main options. You can see here, starting from the top, extension, and then expansion, and standalone. So on the extension opportunity here, we want to leverage the existing Caserones infrastructure.
You see that this option, we're planning to mine the ore from Los Helados and transfer it to the Caserones plant, leveraging the infrastructure that we have there. This will mostly extend the life of mine for Caserones. However, not only that, because as you saw in the previous slide, Los Helados has significantly higher grades than Caserones. Depending on when we start production, it will likely displace ore from Caserones and therefore increase production. This option, although is a low CapEx opportunity, and then obviously associated to a lower growth opportunity, however, is still worth exploring. The second option we're looking into is expansion. We're thinking to increase the production or the capacity of the current Caserones plant. There is not a lot of room in Caserones to do that, but after carefully looking into this, we actually think we can do it.
We are including this added capacity at Caserones as an option. Similar to the previous scenario, we're going to consider mining ore from Los Helados, transfer it to the expanded Caserones plant, and therefore getting higher throughput. This is obviously requiring more CapEx, but it's giving us more growth and sharing the infrastructure that we currently have. The last option that we are evaluating is the highest requirement for capital, but it's the standalone plant at Los Helados. It wouldn't require any material handling from Los Helados to Caserones. In that regard, CapEx will be lower, and OpEx as well. This definitely we would be able to evaluate bigger plants. This is a three billion tons resource, any plant flow similar to Caserones now, we'll have an 80 years life of mine. We likely explore bigger plants than that.
Therefore, the capital is higher and the growth is higher as well, the upside. All of these scenarios have common enablers, being power, tailings, and water, and we're studying all of these scenarios plus these enablers as part of a scoping study that we're launching this month, and we're hoping to finalize by Q1 next year, or at least internally, we're going to have those results to see and determine where are we moving forward with a pre-feasibility study. With that, we're going to the break right now.
We'll take a 15-minute break. We'll come back here at 3:40 P.M. I'll wrangle you guys up. If you guy want to go and grab.
[Break]
Okay. We had that great video of Tim that talked about what we've got here. It's very exciting for me to be here and really for the first time, other than the analyst trip, to be able to talk to a group of investors about Vicuña. Many of you may know me from Lundin Gold. If I say ounces a few times up here, please forgive me. I still have gold in my veins. When Jack and Adam asked me about this opportunity, it didn't take long for me to say yes. As you've seen, this is a world-class, not project, it's a world-class district. To take the experiences that we, the Lundin Group had from Lundin Gold to Vicuña was an exciting opportunity.
In addition, some people may look at it as an issue, having a 50/50 joint venture with BHP and Lundin. I've really quickly noticed that it's a great opportunity. It's a great opportunity to be able to take the learnings and what we can do best from BHP and the Lundin Group and Lundin Mining. That's something that not a lot of projects have that opportunity. At the same time, what we want to create is Vicuña Corp. Vicuña Corp, with its own culture and its own pride in developing the Vicuña District. I say, it's the next major copper district to be developed.
The best thing we can do, as you've seen that great video that Tim showed, is this is a video that was put together after we published the PEA in March of earlier this year. It gives you a good overview, really the first picture of what, not just Josemaria, but what Josemaria, Filo, and the district will look like. Go ahead.
The Vicuña District in South America is located along the Chilean/Argentinian border in the Andes. It is a highly prospective mining region, hosting five major discoveries and currently one operating mine, Caserones, one of our flagship operations. Caserones is a large-scale open pit copper and molybdenum mine, producing approximately 130,000-140,000 tons of copper per year. Located 30 km away is the Josemaria deposit that forms part of the joint venture with BHP called Vicuña. Vicuña integrates the Josemaria deposit and the Filo del Sol deposit, which we will discuss today. Stage 1 focuses on development of the Josemaria deposit and sulfide mill. Here you can see the initial rendering of the Josemaria pit, high-grade core, and surrounding waste rock. Processing will follow a conventional sulfide flow sheet.
The processing plant is designed with three grinding lines, each consisting of a SAG mill and ball mill, followed by three stage flotation circuit to produce a copper gold concentrate. The majority of site infrastructure, including the processing plant and supporting facilities, will be located at approximately 4,000 m above sea level. Final concentrate will be transported by truck to port for shipment to international smelters. Stage 2 builds on that foundation with development of the leachable oxide resources at Filo del Sol. This stage includes construction of a leach plant to process oxide material and recover copper, along with associated gold and silver. Copper recovery will initially be achieved through on-off heap leaching. Material will be placed on the leach pad for copper extraction, after which it will undergo secondary gold leaching to maximize overall metal recovery.
Stage 3 will incorporate the Filo del Sol sulfides, allowing peak annual production of over 500,000 tons per annum of copper, 800,000 ounces of gold, and 20 million ounces of silver. Stage 3 also incorporates key infrastructure additions, including a desalination plant, associated water pipeline, and a return concentrate slurry pipeline. With the latest mineral resource estimate combined, Vicuña now contains 47 million tons of copper, 97 million ounces of gold, and 1.8 billion ounces of silver. Material is mined, crushed, and transported via a 12 km conveyor to the sulfide mill, which includes two tunnels. The existing three line concentrator will be expanded to five lines, significantly increasing processing capacity. The concentrator will be fed by higher grade Filo del Sol material while maintaining the flexibility to process material from Josemaria as needed.
The Vicuña study results highlight that once in production, it will be a top five copper, gold, and silver mine in the world, which makes it a truly unique asset.
Not quite as dramatic ending, Jack. As was stated, this will be one of the top five producers in the world, not only in terms of copper, but gold and silver. This porphyry district is actually quite unique in terms of the amount of precious metals relative to the copper here. You put that together with current prices and the production levels that we'll be producing at, you'll see here that our projected cash cost, average cash cost in the first 25 years is negative. As a result, again, you combine that low cash cost with that production level, and we're going to be generating significant annual free cash flow in excess of $2.2 billion. That's on prices, again, that were as of a few months ago, not current consensus. The current CapEx is $7.1. That was based on the PEA.
Our team right now is very much focused on a new bottoms-up CapEx estimate. The one thing, though, that I want everyone to remember, we talked about it being a PEA, there was a heck of a lot of work done on Josemaria. I've had the benefit of being on the board of Jose, being on the board of Filo, so being exposed to this, and I saw the amount of work that was put in. The amount of work that Dave Dicaire, when he joined Lundin Mining from Lundin Gold, spent a lot of time to put what is a very solid foundation for Josemaria. When you think of PEA, don't think of Josemaria like a PEA. It's actually much further developed. The other part is we talk about Filo, we talk about the Filo sulfides, which is really the crown jewel, what we're really focused on.
You can see from this graphic, this now has been updated to more current metal prices, that this project can essentially finance all that growth and still be generating excess cash flows. This is what's really unique about Filo. We have to focus, and that's what our team is doing right now, is on building Josemaria, because that's the foundation for the crown jewel of the Filo sulfides. As I think Jack mentioned, this is not an old venture. Yeah, the area's old. I remember when Lukas staked it back 20+ years ago v icuña was only formed just over 18 months ago, January 2025. We got the initial resource estimate out. There was a big push to get the PEA out, because again, it was that first time that there was going to be this vision for investors for both BHP and Lundin Mining.
What did this project look like? We got our amendment to our DIA approved. We're ready to do work. Oh, I see you changed that. We had RIGI expected approval, so Stephen has updated that. If we were to say that was immaculate timing, yes. We did it. I was in Buenos Aires. I hit the button to submit it December 14th. We got it in just a little over six months. This is a huge step forward. What's next? Pathway to sanction. Our whole team right now is focusing on preparing the information that's going to be necessary for the board of Lundin Mining and the board of BHP to make a sanctioning decision before the end of this year. We're progressing engineering. We projected engineering, by the time sanction decision comes around, will be about 50%.
Don't get too concerned that that seems low. The areas where the risk is, such as civils, mechanical, other areas, will be closer to 70%-80% by the time they get done. We're not focusing on instrumentation and bathroom design at this point. We're focusing on the things that are key. We got the RIGI. Point one, check. I was just in San Juan on Friday for meetings. We're moving forward aggressively on the provincial agreements. I've just talked about the detailed engineering and design. What does RIGI mean? It's significant. I can remember very early on in meetings we had where we said Actually, it was a meeting with Jack and Carlos from BHP and myself, my first meeting with Javier Milei. We told them that without RIGI, this project wouldn't be happening. That's how important this is. This gives us the stability, 40+ years of stability.
It's a very solid program. To the point where they're now looking at a Super RIGI for further expansion. The other point, don't forget PELP. This is the first copper project to have applied for and received RIGI PELP. This gives us even further stability. Engineering procurement. We have over 400 suppliers already engaged. Local procurement is underway with high voltage equipment and heavy mining equipment. I'll talk a little bit about that later. These photos here, all our SAG mills and ball mills are bought The shells are sitting in San Juan, as are the motors, all in climate-controlled warehouses ready to be moved up. That's significant. As many of you know are exposed to projects, those are your long lead items that you really got to make sure you get in line for. We've got that.
We're focusing on the other one, high voltage equipment, where you're very close to putting those purchase orders in. The bulk earthworks is not only being engineered, it's also well underway. One of the big successes we had at Fruta del Norte was local hiring and local procurement. We know that's important. We also know San Juan is actually much more of a mining province than they like to give themselves credit for, but there still needs to be a lot of training. We have significant programs underway. A lot of hiring. We hired over60, 70 people last month. We're already at 50 people this month we've hired. We're ramping up in San Juan. The engineering at Fluor Daniel, they have two and a half times more people than they did two months ago, engineers working on this project.
We are ramping up to be able to be ready to make that sanction decision by the end of this year. We're not only focused on project readiness, we're also focused on operational readiness. Earthworks is not only being engineered, it's being done. We have 25 40-ton Scania trucks on site right now with associated excavation equipment. We are already started preparing the earthworks for the process plant. We have seven Komatsu 150-ton trucks coming in, we say October here. Actually, I heard last night that's going to be September. Plus a large excavator. Again, working on earthworks for the process plant, but also starting to start on tailings as well. Don't just think that this is all, we're all sitting at the starting line waiting for the sanction decision. No. Things are already happening on site.
Similarly, major vertical construction packages, the wet and the dry packages for the process plant are being put together right now to be issued early next year. The high voltage power line. Let's talk a little bit I've really focused on stage 1, but let's talk a little bit about stage 2 and 3. The key here, what you saw in the video, there's still lots of room for optimization. I talked about how Josemaria had a very solid foundation. Well, the Filo oxides and the Filo sulfides less so, but that creates opportunities, specifically in the oxides. The process that was there that we walked through that's in the PEA, we know we can improve on that. We have a lot of metallurgical test work underway. Some new mine plans. Similarly, with the stage 3, we actually have drilling still ongoing. Filo's still expanding.
We're also focusing on some of the high-grade core and looking Some of the things that Eduardo talked about, what they've done at Candelaria and Caserones with their mine plans and looking at them differently, we're applying that now on Filo sulfides. Can we look at optimizing, getting more value sooner? As many of you saw, probably if you read the PEA, you saw that it was a short Josemaria, then Filo oxide sulfides. We're looking at opportunities. Can we look at opportunities to maybe blend and share the opportunity to increase the grade and throughput? There's a lot of work underway. The infrastructure is key for stage 3. That's when we make the move to desalinization water, start bringing water up from Chile. We're looking at about a 2,000 L/s plant.
Looking at opportunities there for financing, location, opportunities to maybe work with Lundin Mining in terms of scaling up infrastructure. The concentrate pipeline that was mentioned, that is one area where we're actually stepping back, is on concentrate treatment for Filo. Does a roaster make sense? Does a smelter roaster make sense? Do some other technologies that we're doing the work maybe make more sense? That's one area we are very aggressively stepping back and maybe looking at some future opportunities. The other part of this is the binational treaty. Filo oxides and sulfides sit in Chile. Part of it, sorry, part of it sits in Chile. The oxides, it's actually not a small percentage. There's a binational treaty in place between Chile and Argentina.
We already have an exploration protocol, our strategy is to put together an exploitation protocol phase 1 for Josemaria, which will help us be able to move supplies, materials, et cetera, back and forth between the two countries. It's not needed for concentrate export. It just would help in construction and operations. An exploitation protocol phase 2 for the actual operation, because then we will be mining ore in Chile, bringing it into Argentina to process, and then export. That one will take a little bit more work. The advantage we've got right now, you've got two governments. We've almost got the perfect storm in a great way. You got Kast in Chile, Milei in Argentina. The first meeting Kast had was with Milei. Guess what? Vicuña was brought up. This is a project that these governments are focused on.
I've attended meetings with Jack and the team in Chile. We've attended meetings in Argentina. This project is a focus, that's one of the things that we'll definitely be working on as part of the stage 2 and 3. What to expect next year? Expanding the earthworks. I mentioned the Komatsu fleet that's going to be arriving. Major vertical construction contracts awarded. We're talking a lot with major construction firms in Argentina about these opportunities. We announced an expansion of our camp to an additional 2,500 beds, which will start construction, we'll expand it even further to 4,300 beds and keep moving that engineering, obviously initiate power line construction. We're started. We're waiting for that sanction decision. The team is so focused on putting together all the documents that will help the BHP board and the Lundin Mining board to make that decision to move forward.
It's a very exciting time right now with Vicuña and seeing what the opportunities are. Our team have to stay focused on building that foundation. It's a lot of fun because we've got this group sitting and building this foundation, also get to spend some time looking at the upside and potential what we can see in stage 2 and 3. It's a district. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of people, it takes a lot of focus on it. With the backing of BHP and Lundin Mining, we're able to hire people. It's a challenge in this industry, we're able to hire people because they want to come work with something that's pretty unique and will be world-class. That kind of summarizes what it is. Focus on project operational readiness, build that first stage, look at opportunities, sanction.
With that, I'll turn it over to Teitur.
Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Good. We're coming up here to the final stretch, going through the financials before I hand it back to Jack for some concluding remarks. Just before going into the outlook we're going to give here on the financials, thought it was just good to recap on what we went through last year. As Jack said, last year was the first time we had a capital markets event for the company, also the first time we started to give more longer-term financial projections. What we focused on last year, the narrative last year was all around Vicuña and how on earth this company could afford to fund such a big project as Vicuña. Obviously, back then, we didn't have any CapEx number for Vicuña, and we didn't have our revolving credit facility in place to upscale to fund all that.
What we did outline was that we thought the company had a funding capacity of up to $6 billion in funding. We sort of tried to give the confidence to the market that should be more than sufficient to fully fund Vicuña stage 1 and then beyond. We also outlined a financial framework whereby we committed to shareholder distribution of $220 million per year, we also outlined that we felt we could distribute that amount of money every year, even through the build phase of Vicuña. What we will show today, obviously now with the PEA of Vicuña in place, we now have firm CapEx numbers. We have production profiles embedded in our financial framework.
We will now not only give you a five-year outlook on the projections, but the 10-year outlook to really capture that kick we get in production volume when Vicuña is in production. I think that's what you should expect over the next few slides. There won't be any fancy videos, but there will be some very impressive numbers. Then just on the financial framework, this is something we outlined last year as well, and you'll see the frame here is very similar to what Juan Andrés presented on the operational side. There's no coincidence in that because everything is really fundamentally anchored in on our LOMs. What our producing assets can generate in future cash flows. The guiding principles there are that we are maximizing value on all our LOMs. That is the target of what we're doing here.
It's not volume or growth for the sake of growing, it's maximizing value. That is what we always center back to when we go through this cycle, we go through it once a year in three sort of iterations, doing the block models, then mid-year, we do all the profiles and the physicals, then towards the end of the year, when we do the budget and the new three-year guidance, we update for all the costs and the inflationary environments that we have to embed in our LOMs. That then generates the operating cash flow that you see here, and you will see through our projections that we have a very, very solid cash generative portfolio within the company, both with low taxes and also with low operating costs.
It's that operating cash flow pot of money that we then use to allocate through our financial framework. Obviously, sustaining CapEx, you saw Juan Andrés went through the rigorous process we have there in terms of trimming costs across the board where we can, that's a continuous process that'll never end. Then on the expansionary CapEx, obviously Vicuña is one, but you've seen the more brownfield projects we're embarking on here now with Saúva and more cathodes coming through, the underground expansion on Candelaria as well. All of that goes into the expansionary CapEx pot, again, there we remain very disciplined in terms of where we allocate capital towards growth. We need to hit certain IRRs. We are also not afraid to recircle our decisions.
We were looking a few years back on what we called CUGEP, which was a more fancy way of increasing the throughput of Candelaria underground. Actually, when we had reassessed that, we decided to bin that particular project and do a much more plain vanilla, more gradual expansion in Candelaria underground just by adding more mining fleet to increase the throughput. What you will see in our projection, shareholder distribution is a core pillar to our strategy. In any numbers you see here, we are assuming CAD 220 million a year in shareholder distribution every year, whether we look at it for a five-year outlook or a 10-year outlook, it'll remain unchanged over that period. Then obviously the balance sheet, we always want to keep a conservative leverage on the balance sheet, today we are actually in a net cash position.
Depending on which scenarios we look at here, you'll actually see that we are really on the fringes now of funding this entire growth we have ahead of us, self-funding it without relying on drawing on in debt. Obviously, depending on what commodity prices we assume. There is a real avenue here now for us to actually be able to execute on this growth without drawing too heavily on debt facilities. I think obviously for you guys to navigate through our financial projections, I think it's important that we remain crystal clear here on what is included and what is not included in our projections. Obviously, the three LOMs that you saw Juan Andrés and Eduardo go through is the backbone of our projections. Then on the corporate side, we are including, as I said, the shareholder distribution.
We are also including certain contingent payments that remain to be paid by Boliden in relation to our sale of our European assets. We've banked $5 million on contingent payment from Boliden, but we are projecting more payments this year. The deal is that as long as zinc is over $1.30 at Neves, we get 60% of every increment revenue generated above that, and also $4.50 on copper. Today, spot prices are significantly above that, so that's generating extra cash inflow for us. That deal also remains into all of 2027, whereas on Zinkgruvan, it's a slightly higher zinc price of $1.40 per pound. Even at that threshold, zinc prices spot are higher than that. We are assuming some cash inflow from Boliden within our pr.ojections. We also have some deferred payments still on Caserones to JX.
We acquired the asset from JX. Within our projections, there's still another $130 million worth of deferred payments to make to JX, which is all embedded in our projections. The Candelaria stream, as Juan Andrés explained, we project that to step down first half next year from 68% down to 40%. That should release more gold ounces net into our cash flow stream, which is also reflected here. On the project side, you see on the right-hand side of the slide here, obviously the Vicuña numbers are as disclosed previously and as Ron just explained. There have been no changes made there. Saúva phase one, you saw the production profile and $110 million CapEx for Saúva, including the extra ball mill for higher recoveries. That is included in our profile.
Phase two, which was outlined by Tim and Eduardo, is not currently included, so that could be further upside. On the Caserones side, we are assuming up to 35,000 tons of cathode production. You heard the guys presenting a scenario where we potentially can get up to 40,000 tons, but we have only included 35,000 tons per annum in these projections. Then you have the remaining sort of projects we are currently working on. None of those are currently included in our projections. What's also important to understand our projections is obviously which macro assumptions we are assuming, and you see those here. Last year we started at $4.40, and we were increasing the base case up to $4.50 long-term copper. Obviously, the world has moved on since then, so we are now assuming $5.50 long-term copper and actually keep that flat through all the projection period.
Whereas on the gold, we start off with $4,000 per ounce and stepping down to $3,700 in the long term. You'll also see on the right-hand side the FX assumptions, what we are assuming here is that the Chilean pesos will be somewhat correlated to the strength of the copper price. The higher the copper price, the stronger the Chilean pesos and vice versa. That's what we are assuming in our projections. Then the Brazilian real, which is less impactful on the overall consolidated numbers that we have, but nevertheless, you see which FX rates we are assuming On that front. If we start just on the near term here with our 2026 financial projections, we have already reported Q1 numbers, so those are in the back of this slide deck as well.
You can see the full year numbers here where we are reiterating this morning the copper and gold full year guidance. There's no changes there. 323,000 tons copper is the midpoint of the guidance for the full year, and we did 80,000 tons in Q1. That's smack in the middle of the projected guidance, around about 25% of annual guidance we achieved in Q1. That's then generating at $5.50 copper price for the full year, $4.5 billion in revenue. The correct EBITDA that you see here is $4.3 billion, unlike in the press release this morning where there was a clerical error in the guidance we initially gave in the press release. But $2.3 billion EBITDA is the correct number. You look at what we did in Q1, we did $625 million, so around about 27% achieved in Q1.
We are again tracking to full year guidance on that. We guide the free cash flow from operations adjusted, so this ignores working capital movements of a $1.2 billion for the full year. We did $335 million in Q1 alone. On sustaining CapEx, we are guiding $550 million. There's no change on that. That was the original guidance we had in the beginning of the year. We have increased the expansionary CapEx at today's CMD by $35 million to reflect the extra ball mill at the Chapada that Eduardo Cortés took you through. We are now guiding $480 million in expansionary CapEx this year. Obviously, the majority of that number is still made up of by Vicuña spend $395 million net was. There are some Candelaria expansionary CapEx in here as well.
As I said, $35 million for the CPU plant at Chapada. That leaves us to project an adjusted free cash flow for the full year of $700 million. You see the sensitivities on the right there, plus or minus $1 change in copper price would release between, well, around about $400 million extra free cash flow for the group. In terms of net cash or debt impact, it's slightly lower. A $1 movement in price would translate into $320-$330 million movement in net debt, given that some of the free cash that we generate is being paid out to our non-controlling interest at Candelaria and Caserones. We are now projecting to finish the year within a net cash position of $60 million before changes in working capital.
Here you see the production profile that we are basing our financial projections on, and whether you look near term, medium term, or long term, you will have growth across the board. It doesn't really matter which way you skin this cat, you will conclude that there is growth within the portfolio. Obviously, in the near term, the growth is a bit more moderate, but it's also very low CapEx intensity growth, mainly being the extra cathode at the Caserones in the near term. Saúva is now assumed to come on stream in 2029, so that's contributing quite significantly to the medium-term growth. Obviously with the blue portion of the bar here, you see Vicuña coming on stream and sort of makes that significant step change that we have in the profile.
If you look at from 2026 out to 2035, going from 330,000 tons per year up to 500,000 tons per year, that will translate to close to a 5% CAGR over this period. That I think is a pretty impressive growth profile that we have in the portfolio. On the Vicuña piece, obviously, it's subject to sanctioning happening at the end of this year. All the star signs are that this will be fully sanctioned, and actually both companies are, I would say, behaving as if sanction has happened, and we are allocating significant capital into the project already. If we then look at the first five years here in terms of how our C1 cost is tracking and therefore the EBITDA margin and ultimately on the right here what the absolute cumulative EBITDA numbers will be.
You can see here if we start on the right that we're projecting now to generate over $13 billion cumulative EBITDA at our base price deck of $5.50. That translates to an average EBITDA over the next five years of $2.6 billion. Very significant EBITDA generation. You can also see that it's mainly Candelaria and Caserones that are contributing to the EBITDA generation. Candelaria is projected to do $5.6 billion cumulative over the next five years, and Caserones slightly below at $4.5 billion, then Chapada will be $2.3 billion. Given we project out to 2030, we will have a small sliver of Vicuña also entering the fray here with $1 billion of EBITDA generation. Our net 50% share will come into the picture here.
You can also see on the C1 cost on the left here how Vicuña impacts the C1 cost given the significant byproducts both in gold and silver. Actually, in the very first year, we are projecting that Vicuña will have a negative $2.5 C1 cost, given the significant gold and silver that we have. That's pulling down the average for the group. We will sit at around about $2 C1 cost over the next four years or three years. Then with Saúva coming in, we're dropping down to $1.5 C1 cost roughly. Then when Vicuña comes in in 2030, we're at around about $0.75 C1 costs for the group on a consolidated basis. That's obviously what's helping to elevate our EBITDA margins over this period.
If we then home in a little bit more on the input cost that the company is incurring to generate the production that we have, this is the input cost split for 2026. You can see on the pie chart here on the top, this is making out around about I think 67% or 66% of the total input cost that we have, and a big chunk of that is relating to the labor cost. We have around about 4,000 employees, so that's roughly one-third of the total labor force that we have. The majority of that is obviously sitting with the contractors that we have at each of the three mine sites. It's important therefore that labor productivity is always looked at very closely because it is a big input factor.
In Chile, we obviously have the union's cycle of negotiations, and we just went through that in Candelaria. We have embedded a new three-year union agreement there shouldn't be any renegotiation on that over the next three years. At Caserones, that labor negotiation process is commencing in early 2027, we're going to go through that cycle as well. It's important to say, when we look at all the projection numbers here, that we are presenting everything in real 2026 terms. We are not assuming any inflation either on copper prices, gold prices, or on the input cost. What we are assuming in our long-term projection is one extra cycle of labor negotiation for the Candelaria and Caserones.
Given this, every three years, we will have three cycles of those over the next 10 years, we are only assuming one uplift in union bonuses over those negotiation processes, simply because we present everything in real terms. What you see on the right-hand side here is obviously very topical these days, is the fuel and energy, and in particular the diesel costs. You can see out of the total input cost here, it's not that significant for us. We are consuming around about 180 million liters of diesel per year across the three sites, and that's amounting to around about 7% of the input cost. Actually, electricity cost is the higher proportion of that.
On the electricity front, we have PPAs, as Jack said in the beginning, all the renewable power generation, we have a PPA locked in around producing the electrons that we need. Particularly at Chapada, we have a very competitive price of less than $40 MWh , whereas in Chile, we have $55 MWh at the Candelaria and $73 MWh at Caserones. Relatively competitive PPA contracts I would say that we have locked in. What is a bit of a headwind in Chile is that even though we have PPAs, the electrons are still transported through the public grid, and the grid fees in Chile are relatively high. They vary a bit, but between $30 and $40 MWh is the grid fee.
Our all-in costs are around about $90-$110 MWh in Chile, whereas in Brazil, they're below $40 a megawatt hour. Very competitive. Our C1 guidance for the full year remains unchanged at $1.90-$2.10. We have reduced, as you saw earlier, the Chapada C1 cost by $0.25. On a consolidated basis, given the weighting that Chapada has in our consolidation, we have decided not to change the fully consolidated range, $1.90-$2.10. You also see at the bottom here the sensitivities on both diesel price inputs and also the FX rates that we have. Here it's important also to highlight that we have locked in for this year both some Brazilian Real and some Chilean Pesos hedges.
Any appreciation in the Chilean pesos below 900 pesos to the dollar, our hedges will be in the money, and therefore will somewhat mitigate what otherwise will push up our U.S. dollar-based C1 cost as we report them. If we then move on and look at then the free cash flow generation, still only for the next five years. We project adjusted operating cash flow at our base case of $10.5 billion. Again here, Candelaria is contributing $4.1 billion and even though Caserones has a lower EBITDA number, it has a higher operating cash flow number of $4.3 billion, given that we have significant tax losses at Caserones, whereas we don't have any tax losses at Candelaria.
On our projection, we are assuming that Caserones tax losses will remain available up till the end of 2031. We currently have close to $4 billion of tax losses at Caserones. As I said, over the next five years, we are depleting that tax loss base down to zero, which means that we will only be paying the mining royalty tax in Chile and no corporation tax. Chapada is doing $2 billion of operating cash flow, and Vicuña here is $600 million for the five years, obviously all coming at the end of 2030 when Vicuña starts off. In Vicuña, we are assuming 100% equity funding, which means that we are paying 0.5% equity tax every year as we put more and more money into Vicuña to fund the CapEx.
I think we will optimize that funding structure when we sanction the project, but to be conservative, we have assumed 100% equity funding throughout the project period here of 10 years, which means therefore that there's a lower tax loss position at Vicuña when you start off because you haven't had any interest deduction, plus you're paying the 0.5% tax on the equity that you put into Vicuña. When we net out the sustaining CapEx, we are now projecting $8.1 billion of adjusted free cash flow from our operations compared to $4.9 billion that we had at last year's CMD, albeit at a lower commodity price deck than we currently show. As I said in the beginning, we wanted to stretch our projections more than just the next five years.
Now we are showing you a scenario here where we are projecting over the next 10 years, and we call this a decade of two halves. We have the World Cup going on now, and we all know in various sports events, you can have games of two halves where the first half is terrible, and then the team turns it around and knocks it out of the park on the second half. However, our portfolio is also two halves, but it has an exceptional performance even in the first half and an even better performance in the second half.
With the Vicuña coming on stream in 2030, you can see the uplift here in EBITDA 70% for the following five years, and even more so in free cash flow from operations close to 90%, given that we will have some tax losses again at Vicuña when you start off because you have obviously been through the development phase, therefore you build up a significant tax loss position at Vicuña as start-up. Out of the $15.5 billion in free cash flow from operations that we project from 2031 to 2035, Vicuña accounts for roughly half of that cash generation, 51%. Extremely cash generative portfolio.
Obviously, even though when you look at the average step-up in copper production is around about 30% in the second half of the decade versus the first half, what makes the free cash flow numbers go up this much is obviously with the gold and silver component that's coming through in the portfolio. Combined with that, you actually have a declining expansionary CapEx profile of $4.9 billion in the first five years, falling to $3.9 billion in the second five years. That gives you the full picture of what the company will look like over the next 10 years. Again, we've tried to split this up into the first five years versus the second five years.
If we take this from left to right, as I said earlier, the free cash flow from operation, which is after the sustaining CapEx that we incur, we are modeling here for the next five years, $8.1 billion. With a higher copper price of $6.50, we will be close to $10 billion in free cash flow. At a lower copper price of $4.50, we will be at $6.5 billion. The next bar you have here is distribution to shareholders. As I said, $220 million. Over five years, that's $1.1 billion of returned capital to shareholders, in addition to around about $1.4 billion returned to JX and Sumitomo as the minority shareholders in Caserones and Candelaria, respectively. Before Vicuña CapEx, we have some incremental expansionary CapEx.
This mainly relates to Saúva phase I and also the EIA 2040 program at Candelaria, in addition to some pre-stripping for future phases at Candelaria, around about $600 million for the next five years. We also have some leases and deferred obligations, notably the $130 million payment to Caserones that we have to make over the next few years up to 2029, in addition to the $250 million fee we paid to JX earlier this year when we acquired an incremental 5% stake in Caserones, + 31% in Los Helalos. Pre Vicuña CapEx over the next five years, we are generating over $4 billion in free cash flow for the group. We started 2026 with around about $60 million in net cash. When you then deduct the Vicuña CapEx, which is stage 1, obviously $7.1 billion, we pay 50% of that.
There's also Stage 2 capital spend in these numbers. All in, it's $4.9 billion net our share over the next five years. That then leaves the company with a net debt position of $700 million at the end of 2030. The fun begins with Vicuña ramping up. You can see then in the subsequent five years, we are projecting $15.5 billion in free cash flow from operation. As I said earlier, Vicuña is obviously the main contributor to that, over 50%. At the high and low end of the price deck we have here, we could get over $17 billion or down to $13.5 billion.
We will continue to pay the shareholder distribution, as I said, another $1.1 billion for the next five years from 2031 to 2035, plus we will pay around $1.3 billion of dividends to our non-controlling interests with Sumitomo and JX from Candelaria and Caserones. We have obviously continued expansionary CapEx, mainly again on Vicuña Stage 2 and Stage 3 are in full flow during this period. $3.9 billion of additional CapEx going to Vicuña here, plus some very minor expansionary CapEx still being spent on Candelaria. All in, that then leaves the company in a net cash position of $8.2 billion at the end of 2035.
If you take the high end of the price deck, $6.50 copper right back to 2026 through the next 10 years, we will have accumulated net cash of over $11 billion or $11.6 billion at the end of 2035, or $4.5 billion net cash in the lower price deck. Whichever price scenario you're on here, you can see the company remains very cash generative. What is amazing to think is when you look at 2035 and the 500,000 tonnes copper production we have at that point, we still have a resource to production ratio of 40 years. We could stay at 500,000 tonnes per year for the next 40 years at 2035 as we look forward with the remaining resources we have in the producing assets plus our 31% in Los Helados. A very solid outlook for the company. I talked about funding capacity.
As you saw in the previous slide, we will barely tap into our revolving credit facility to fund this growth. Nevertheless, we have entered into a new credit facility with 17 international banks. Today, we have locked in credit lines of $2.25 billion, we are going through a gap analysis on the ESG front in Vicuña. Once that report is executed and delivered, we will automatically step up to $3.5 billion in commitments from the banks. Once Vicuña Stage 1 is sanctioned, which is planned to happen as early as the end of this year, the banks will release the last $1 billion of liquidity, so we will have full access to $4.5 billion upon sanctioning Vicuña. Plenty of firepower in here. We took out the RCF really to mitigate against any downturn in commodity prices.
You will see here, even at the low price deck of $4.50, our leverage will actually peak at 1.2x net debt to attributable EBITDA. Even at the low price deck, we have plenty of headroom. When we took out the RCF, we always wanted to plan for a rainy day with copper prices being even lower than $4.50 in the long term. We're in a great position to execute on our business plan and actually to do more if the right opportunity comes along. Just a housekeeping slide here on the shareholder distribution policy. You'll be aware that we have a blend of dividends and share buybacks. To date this year, we have acquired $62 million worth of shares bought back. In total, 2.25 million shares at an average USD price per share of $27, roughly.
We are doing our quarterly dividends, which are amounting to CAD 0.11 per share per year. Our commitment is still to distribute $230 million, and we will remain opportunistic around how we do our share buybacks. In the event that we don't fully utilize what we currently allocate to share buyback of $150 million, any shortfall of the $150 million, we will pay out as a special dividend so that the shareholders are always being made whole in that they will receive $230 million with a blend of share buybacks and dividends. Our next dividend payout is happening on the 25th of June.
With that, just to wrap up on the financial outlook side, as you hopefully have gathered from the slides I've shown here today, is that the company is in a fantastic position to embark on this growth profile ahead of us. We're entering this growth profile with having met guidance three years in a row. The operations are running smooth, and we have a net cash position on our balance sheet. Depending on copper price outlook, we could potentially fund the impressive growth we have ahead of us without actually tapping into the RCF. Even if we do, it'll be only marginal draws on the RCF to execute on this program. There's potential to do more growth or more M&A or potentially increase shareholder returns over time. With that, I'll hand back to Jack.
Thank you, Teitur. Thank you team for the great presentation. I'll wrap up the Capital Markets Day in the following few slides here, and then we'll open up for some Q&A. As Teitur kind of elegantly walked us through the profile of Lundin Mining and really the future projections of our organization, what you can see here is we've got growing production, continued significant revenue and really a strong underlying business that underpins the ability to grow at a significant pace and at a remarkable scale. You're seeing a summary of what Teitur was saying in terms of revenue and average production. If you look at 2021 to 2025, our average annual copper production was 306,000 tons per year. You're seeing over the next five years, going up to 340,000 tons, and then really that step change going up to 445,000 tons.
Beyond that, as Teitur was saying, once we get into the next 10 years, we'll be able to sustain likely over 500,000 tons of annual copper production, which firmly puts us into a top 10 copper producer. Also, it's very important to state that we're chasing that scale. We have that growth ambition, but we're doing so in a disciplined manner where our EBITDA margins as well are going to be growing. We're doing this both on a per share basis and then in a value accretive way for the company, not just for the sake of growth itself. When you look at revenue, very impressive revenue growth. We did from 2021 to 2025, $18.3 billion in revenue generation. We'll be scaling up now to $24 over the next five years, and then close to $36 billion from 2031 to 2035.
If we look here at the illustrative EBITDA and cash flow after capital expenditure requirements, Teitur walked us through these details, but I think, again, important to highlight 70% growth in cumulative EBITDA from the 5-10 year outlook, and 90% growth in cumulative adjusted free cash flow from operations. This is going to drive excessive cash generation, gives us the flexibility to continue looking at opportunities to grow our business, to look at potentially scaling up with shareholder distributions, and continue to be in a position of strength as we go into that next level of ranking in the copper sector. Again, this is growing from the last five years of $8.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA and the last five years from 2021 to 2025 of $3.1 billion in adjusted free cash flow from operations.
Continued sustainable growth going into the next decade, and very exciting for position for Lundin Mining. Very exciting for us to be the company that we are today with this trajectory. As a takeaway here, as we look to wrap up, I think it's very clear we've been demonstrating that this is an organization poised for growth. We're underlining our business by strong operational performance, always focused on ensuring that our existing operations are performing to the best of their ability. They're now at a level of maturity where we've tasked our great managing directors that are here today with looking to grow the business in the near term, and we've identified some very exciting opportunities that we're going to be aggressively pursuing over the short term here.
We're going to continue to find near-term catalysts at our existing operations with Vicuña and other opportunities in the Vicuña District, like Los Helados, which we opened up and revealed today to the audience with our partners at NGEx. Financial strength really underlines the business as well, we've got the flexibility, and we've got the financial representation here to be able to grow our portfolio. Really, this Vicuña era, I think Lundin Mining is a history of a series of successful strategic transformative transactions, and the Vicuña era is simply the latest and potentially the largest and greatest one yet. With that, thank you to all of you in the audience. Thank you to those online. We'll now open up for Q&A. Thank you.
If I could ask the presenters to come stand up here, we'll take turns answering some of these questions that may come.
Just a reminder, anybody online, if you have any questions, you can type them into the chat box there on the webinar platform, we'll have them online here, we'll read them out and address them with the appropriate individuals. For now, I'd like to open up the floor to any questions, maybe we'll start over here with Ed.
Thanks very much. It's Daniel Major from UBS, thanks a lot for the presentations. Couple of questions. Maybe first one on Vicuña. You mentioned you're doing a bottom-up review of the CapEx estimate. Most CapEx numbers go up from a PEA to a definitive feasibility study, you obviously highlighted the advanced nature of this. Exactly when should we get that CapEx update? Is it around the time of FID? Directionally, where do you see the risks around the 7.1?
Yeah. It's actually a brand new estimate. We're taking it because that last estimate was done as part of the original study. This is actually a build-up from first principles estimate. We're well on our way through that. Yeah, that will be coming out as part of the FID decision. As with a lot of estimates, my experience over time, you start to see pluses and minuses as you keep working through. The key is our team is we're working very closely with Fluor to not just sort of sit back and wait until they give us the estimate and then sort of say, okay. No. It's a very much an iterative process because also we have a short period of time. Our shareholders, that guy over there and his cohort at BHP, have really given us a short time to get all that done.
Yeah, it'll be part of the FID.
Okay. Sorry, just to push in slightly, there's a balance of positives and negatives. Where would you see the skew of the balance and positive negatives on the CapEx at this point?
I look at myself as our team as tightrope walkers right now. We're not leaning one way or the other. We're staying on the tightrope.
Okay. Thank you. Then just a follow-up question. You talked a lot about the funding options. What's the position on streaming at the JV level, or as the individual shareholders on the Lundin side, how's that discussion as a funding source?
Yeah, maybe I can take that.
Yeah.
That will be a shareholder decision as opposed to a Vicuña Corp. decision whether we do that. We have looked at various funding options over the last year and a half together with the treasury team at BHP. As we are looking at it today, I think entering into any streaming arrangements is extremely unlikely. Not something that neither Lundin Mining nor BHP really needs to enter into. I think the most likely scenario of funding here will be that respective shareholders will put a blend of equity and shareholder loans into Vicuña Corp. and then potentially further down the line, there might be some element of project finance or ECA type of structure in place.
It needs to stack up commercially compared to what Lundin Mining and BHP can borrow at parent company level.
Okay, thanks. Let someone else have a go.
Hello again, it's Ioannis Masvoulas from Morgan Stanley. Thank you very much for the very comprehensive presentation today. Couple of questions from my side. Again, maybe one for Ron. When you look at all the feasibility work that you're doing right now, you said that CapEx is something you're focusing on, but couple of questions. First, looking past phase 1, thinking about the oxides, because I recall from the site tour you did a few months ago-
The flow sheet was a big focus, whether you're finding ways to potentially simplify the flow sheet there. Maybe an update there on how you're thinking about that. B, when it comes to the infrastructure, you made a couple of comments, but just intrigued to hear your latest view around roaster. Is this less and less likely as you do more work? Thinking about the broader infrastructure, Candelaria is sitting on a lot of infrastructure around port and desalinated water and pipelines. Is there a prospect where some of that asset base could potentially be folded into the infrastructure vehicle you're considering for the broader district?
I'll start with the last and work back. Yes, that's one of the things we're really looking at. We had a workshop about a week ago with Lundin Mining, BHP and ourselves, looking at opportunities to share or expand that infrastructure. That's definitely part of what's being taken into account. With regards to concentrate treatment, the initial feedback that we received from the regulators and that is that a roaster, and also on the commercial side, the roaster is, it may be our only opportunity. We keep it there, but we are looking at other ways to maybe do it. One option may be a combined smelter roaster with partners or something like that. It's definitely something that we realized quickly we needed to step back, but some form of treatment's going to be necessary.
With regards to phase 2, stage 2, sorry, stage 2, we definitely looking at simplifying the process. The other part is not only to simplify it because the original process was in the PEA with the on/off and the sequential leach. We all knew that that could be technically challenging. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it could be technically challenging. We see other opportunities. The other aspect is not just looking at stage 2 and then looking at stage 3, but looking at them combined, because really again, you got to remember, the whole thing about the oxides is to get to the sulfides. We think there were some, as part of the PEA, as our work to get there may have been some opportunities overlooked that, again, simplify stage 2 with the focus to get to the sulfide sooner.
Thanks very much. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Orest Wowkodaw, Scotiabank. You did such a good job outlining how strong the balance sheet outlook is, even in the context of a big project build. I'm curious, given that your internal cash needs are quite low, with the brownfield expansions you got ahead and Vicuña, yes, it's big, but you've got cash flow. I'm wondering if you see room to bolt on other assets to grow the portfolio before Vicuña is up and running. The company's got a great history of making astute acquisitions of producing assets over time. I'm wondering if you see opportunities out there.
Thanks, Orest. I can take that. Great question, that's absolutely right. We've got the financial flexibility to do more than what our portfolio shows. I think hopefully what we also portrayed is mining is tough, projects are tough. We need to be able to focus our attention on where we believe we can extract the most value, and I think that's with what's already within our portfolio. That being said, Lundin Mining, Lundin Group company being opportunistic, seeing what's out there in the sector, if we see something that makes sense that could bolt on to our portfolio, that would be something nice in the interim, to complement what we already have, then by all means, we would be interested in looking at that. I would say that we stay opportunistic, but by no means do we have to be executing on another transaction.
I think the team is very much enjoying this period where we've got a smaller asset base, albeit each asset is much bigger, but we can focus our attention on where we think we can drive that value. We'll stay opportunistic.
Okay, thank you. Just as a quick follow-up, this one again for Ron. Can you remind us what was the diesel assumption in the $7.1 billion CapEx, just from a stripping Earth-moving perspective? When you update the study here, given how volatile diesel pricing is and other input pricing, can you give us a sense of just what that impact could be as a standalone?
Yeah, we've looked at it, we actually just completed sort of the summary memo for where we're going to end up on diesel. I'd have to get back to you, Orest. I think one of the things we did a quick sensitivity, I think it was like $0.10, $0.15 a liter differences. It's in the $10 million type range. It is an impact, but with a greenfield construction like this, concrete, steel, all those other things have a bigger impact then. Plus the strip ratio is quite low at Josemaria. It's not as big as what you saw in Teitur's numbers for the operations as it is an impact on us, but I'll get back to you on that.
Okay. Thank you.
We got that question on our Q1 call as well, I think we looked at it straight after.
Yeah.
Diesel prices have fluctuated a lot, so it depends on what point in time you lock in the diesel price. I seem to recall we were looking at maybe $100 million plus or minus increase on the total CapEx.
That was like a $0.50 or something, $0.50 or even bigger.
That was a higher diesel pricing what we're currently trading at.
Yeah.
So.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Teitur.
Okay, maybe we'll do Johannes and then Lawson. Yeah, go ahead.
Yes. It's Johannes Grunselius here, SB1 Capital. Thanks for all the presentations. I have one sort of question on your operating track record, because it's been really, really good for a couple of years. You also showed us the health and safety KPIs, which are also trending well. You mentioned you have a program there, some kind of a Full Potential program or something like that. But the reason why you're doing it great is that sort of, is the answer your culture, monitoring systems, or is it also the answer is that you have very sort of easy assets to operate? If you can give some color on that, please.
I can start and maybe if my colleagues would want to complement or if I'm missing anything, then please chime in. I think really it starts with the team being close to the assets. Having a cohesive team is key. Putting our focus where we believe the attention should be, which is the asset planning cycle. A very robust 12-month rolling period where we constantly are looking from the resource extension that makes its way into the mine plan, that makes its way then into the budget, and how we present to the board and get approval on the one to three-year budget. We're constantly following a very rigorous planning cycle, and we integrate the corporate team with the operations team, and we're always looking together on where we think we can drive value through bringing costs down and driving operational improvements.
Fundamentally, I think for Lundin Mining, the success that we've had in the last three to four years really comes from having a best-in-class team and committed, staying relentlessly focused on driving costs down and looking for operational improvements. I don't know, gents, if I was missing anything there.
I think that was good.
Okay.
Lawson Winder from Bank of America. Gentlemen, thank you very much for today's presentation. You did a really interesting job of discussing some of the projects that were excluded from the financial scenario. Caserones, Sulfides Deep, and Angelica, Candelaria Underground Expansion, Los Pilatos. Saúva Phase 2, though, Juan Andrés, you sort of glossed over that. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more color on what you see with Phase 2 of Saúva and how big that opportunity might be.
I'll just have to grab him a microphone.
I can probably support Juan Andrés while he's getting a microphone and Eduardo as well. I think really the focus, Lawson, on us is seeing how we can fast-track the development of Phase 1 through really unlocking the ability to increase recoveries through the Chapada ball mill addition of that second ball mill, and then also looking at the easier to get to material in Saúva, which forms Saúva Stage or Phase 1. We are very much keen to continue pursuing Phase 2 once we get into Phase 1, but that's a later stage project opportunity. There's a different execution plan on that permitting timeline as well. Still a lot of work to be done, but it very much is something that we are keen to continue pursuing. With Itamar here and Eduardo's team, we're working on developing a plan there.
Yes, just to add to that, as mentioned in the slides, we first were focusing on expanding the capacity of the concentrator plant to increase recoveries, then we are focusing on capturing the highest grade core in the first four or five years. But a s I mentioned, it's only 30 million tons out of 250 million tons of resource, there is a very good potential there that we want to capture, and we are actually studying that. Because it's a larger volume, it requires a more sophisticated material handling system, and we cannot rely on just tracking that material from Saúva to Chapada. That's the work we're performing right now. We're going through a pre-feasibility study for a potential expansion of Saúva.
Thank you very much. If I could ask a follow-up on the more immediate term, your 2026 guidance, really significant reduction in the cash cost guidance for Chapada for 2026, 23%. Nevertheless, consolidated guidance was left unchanged. Are you guys just being conservative here, or are you seeing cost pressures elsewhere in the portfolio that are offsetting that?
I don't think we're being conservative. I think we're being pretty realistic. Obviously, with the drop at Chapada, there are two things there. One is the gold by-product is actually pretty significant. With the higher gold prices now versus what we based our guidance on, that is contributing to the reduction. Also at Chapada, there's been a diesel tax that we historically have paid. Now there's been a court ruling in Brazil whereby mining is deemed to be a processing activity. Any diesel we consume within the periphery of the mining activities, this diesel tax does no longer apply. It does still apply to getting the concentrate from mine site to the port. Within the compound of the mining activity, this diesel tax is not applying. Those two factors have contributed towards that.
Whereas on the other side, with Candelaria, obviously with diesel prices being slightly higher and certain other input factors also being slightly higher, when you blend everything together, we felt it was prudent to keep consolidated guidance unchanged.
Go ahead, Matt, yeah.
Hey, Matt Murphy with BMO. First one, just on the Los Helados development pathways. How should we think about the, you've got the sort of maturation of the Caserones pit and this Los Helados opportunity pretty advanced, but also some very exciting district opportunities. What would you have to see in those district opportunities to prioritize, say, like a Cordillera over Los Helados? Or is it just Los Helados is so much more advanced that it likely comes before whatever else you find?
Do you want to talk to the exploration potential, Tim?
Yeah. I might just start by saying that obviously Cordillera, it's a large target, but it is yet to receive one drill hole compared to Los Helados that has 96,000 meters of drilling, 110 drill holes. They're at very, very different stages. Los Helados is also two-thirds indicated, it's quite advanced. We'll have to wait and see what occurs in Cordillera, but it's very early to judge and speculate, I think.
Yeah, to complement that, I think as well, we're going to continue pursuing these exploration targets that we see. We're clearly in a very highly prospective region, we want to continue to look at those exploration opportunities. Now with Los Helados being so far advanced, that kind of comes into an opportunity that we need to pursue. We'll pursue all of those opportunities in parallel, then we'll stack them up based on what we think we could drive the most value in the near term.
Okay, thanks. Just one on the Vicuña sanctioning decision. Ron, on your slide, the provincial agreements, can you go through what's required there?
One we're focusing on right now is called the DIA Trust, and this was a part of the environmental approvals. What this agreement would be, it'd be something very similar like what we did in Ecuador and we've done before, which is a prepayment, and then we would pay 1.5% of sales. We would get a five-year holiday on that. The DIA has this requirement for us to be putting some money in for infrastructure, et cetera, like that. That's a small part of it. The key part of that agreement, royalty stability for life of mine at 3%. That's the key that's part of that agreement. That's step one. We're also focusing then on a second agreement, get the first one through Congress.
The second will be on infrastructure that we need for the project, and we would get some royalty offsets because that infrastructure benefits not only Vicuña, but the whole province. There's two agreements. The DIA is the one we're really focusing on right now, and we want to have the other one essentially ready to be signed, but it probably won't be signed until sanction.
Thank you.
Hi. Dalila Makris from Berenberg. Thank you very much for the presentation today. Couple of questions. The first one just on the operations broadly. Despite excluding the cost pressures, just generally over the last few months
Is there any availability issues that you're seeing across Chile or Brazil? That's the first one.
You mean availability of?
Sulfuric acid, consumables, regions
No. Actually, we have taken some provisions on fuel availability. We contracted 8,000 cubic meters of fuel storage that we're using to smooth out our supply. We have that insurance, if you want to call it that way. In the case of sulfuric acid, our annual consumption is 40,000 tons per year, so not that significant, and we have long-term contracts with our supplier, and we haven't seen any interruption of our supplies.
The second one would be just on Vicuña again, just on the long-term revenue profile. Just back on the envelope calculation, it looks like, given the 85% copper revenue split in 2025, it looks like long term, that's probably coming down, just given the gold and silver credits of Vicuña. Does that mean, assuming streaming is extremely unlikely at this point, that you're comfortable with that and precious metals getting high proportion in the portfolio long term?
Yeah, absolutely. We're looking at Vicuña and all of the minerals that it has contained in the deposit, both at Josemaria and Filo, and I think it's a blessing that you've got such a strong copper asset that has precious metals like gold and silver that will help as byproduct material. For us, we're a copper-focused company, but with byproducts like gold and silver coming into these assets, I think it, again, underlines the uniqueness of these types of deposits. That doesn't hurt our vision at all.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. Cody Hayden from Deutsche Bank. Just on Vicuña, you talked about it briefly on project readiness and headcount and resource. Looking at the numbers you present on the slides, it's a significant uplift in the amount of people. You mentioned briefly you've encountered some challenges, or how should we think about that over the near term? What challenges might you face? How might you overcome that? Do you see there being more concerns, just given some of the other greenfield copper projects in the region potentially coming online or being started up in the next few years? Thank you.
Great question. It is one of our top risks, the way to handle that risk is get in front of it. I think the advantage we have, as with any Lundin Group project, and BHP certainly are supporting this, is we're going to be first.
We're going to be the first ones out there. We're the first ones that are really hiring. We've already bought simulators, and we're putting some of those in local communities to open up opportunities for training in the communities. We just got to get in front of it, we experienced that at Fruta del Norte. Nathan and I were together there, and we were way in front of the training program before he actually got into operations. That's the key. The other thing, too, is you want to start training on trades and things like that. We're working with local universities, technical schools, because those are people, you get the training in place, they can help you through construction, also you identify the good ones to keep during operations. Look, we realize it's a challenge, it's not only greenfield in there.
We're starting to see the whole industry. One of the advantages we have is we'll be first, that's going to be a big plus.
Understood. Thank you.
Ioannis Masvoulas again. Just a couple of follow-ups. The first on the Los Helados opportunity. One of the options is increasing the throughput at the existing mill. Question here is what sort of increase you are considering? Are we looking at a small incremental throughput increase or something more substantial? Is it just on the concentrator side or also on the cathode side?
Yeah. Thanks for your question. We are keeping that open by now, we're looking to the real state of Caserones, we will need to do some modifications, we're thinking at least one more production line. 100,000 tons per day. We don't want to limit our options only to that. Marcelo also has projects to debottleneck the current capacity of the plant. Maybe we explore that with lower capital intensity. Yeah, we're going to keep the options open. I think the maximum for the real state is another line, 100,000 tons per day.
That's very clear. Thank you. Just a second question on copper price expectations and forecast. We've seen the whole industry moving up, along with the spot copper price. If I look at the PEA in February, you used $4.60 as a sort of central case. Today everything was around $5.50. A 20% increase in four months. Question here is, when you look at all these growth options within the portfolio outside Vicuña, is $5.50 the level you use to evaluate IRRs and whether projects could meet the right hurdles?
Yeah. You want to start?
Yeah. We are an agile, nimble company, we're not going to lock ourselves in on a copper price and a IRR number that come hell or high water, that's what it needs to be. We are much more flexible than that. We'll build up a matrix of copper prices, gold prices, discount rates, technical profiles, and you essentially build up a matrix of NPV and IRRs, and you take a decision on that basis as to whether you want to go ahead or not. Fundamentally, I think we stay conservative. Our budget this year was built on $4.50. When we look at M&I and so on, we're obviously not disclosing which price decks we're running that on, but I think you can rest assured that we are not going to push the copper price to be able to sanction an M&I or some brownfield investment.
We will remain disciplined on that.
Very clear. Thank you.
Hi, just a follow-up as well, please. Orest Wowkodaw from Scotiabank. Teitur, the financial forecast out to 2035, when you went through what's included, what's excluded, I didn't see a box there for the infrastructure CapEx. It wasn't listed as included or excluded. Is that excluded?
It is as presented in the PEA, and what we assumed in the PEA was that it's not part of the CapEx, but it is part of the OpEx. We reverse engineered that, and we had our internal CapEx number for the infrastructure. The way we went about it is say, okay, if a third party owned this infrastructure, they are seeking X IRR on that infrastructure, therefore our tariff needs to be a certain profile to meet that IRR profile that the infrastructure owner owns. Again, commercially sensitive numbers, we're not disclosing what they are, but I think we've been reasonable again in what the typical infrastructure rate of return will be, and we've applied that to the CapEx numbers that we built up.
Okay. Just to follow up to the overall picture on infrastructure, is there any sort of timeline we should think about when some decisions will be made, whether respect in terms of tying in some of the Lundin Mining infrastructure into Vicuña and is that still years away, or is that something that could come sooner in terms of getting a better picture?
I wouldn't say that that's years away, but definitely something into later part of 2027, I would say that we would probably have an update there.
Okay.
We're using this opportunity now while we're really focused on sanctioning stage 1 and getting everything ready from a project readiness and operations readiness standpoint there to really look at the Filo project and what that's going to require in terms of logistics and transport. Then looking at Caserones and Candelaria, and now with potential of Los Helados and adding all of that in. There's a lot of work that is being done right now. It's definitely not sitting idle. I would say towards the end of next year, we'll probably have a more fulsome update for the market on that, Orest.
Great. Thank you.
Hey. Shane Nagle from National Bank. Just a couple questions that we've seen, like the governor in La Rioja come out with some opposition. We've seen, I think there's some discrepancy on the power draw within San Juan. You obviously have very strong federal support for this project. Can you just comment on the materiality of some of these risks to your development timeline? Thanks.
Yeah. La Rioja first. There is one part of the road to site that goes through that province, and they've been sticking their hand up and raising a challenge now going back to the Josemaria days. The interesting part, though, that ended this whole thing was community protests. We had nothing to do with it. The community themselves went out and protested the government for shutting this down because they want their jobs. They want to be able to work at Vicuña. That was a real eye-opening thing, and I think it shows the work that this team has done for the last several years in building up that community support. Now we're working with the government. I think they realize, and we're focusing on building that bypass and working with increasing our opportunities for training.
We had several workshops that were all planned for towns in La Rioja. When they put that in, we shut them all down. I think it's just part of building a project. On the power side, yeah, there was a hearing, and it was held last week now by the national regulator. We and the provincial and some of the stakeholders, the communities and that have agreed that, look, let's see what the issue is. Let's have some discussions about how we can overcome this. NRA is still very supportive of our application and that was three years in the making. There's a lot of work that's been done on that. We're seeing what we can do and listening to, in particular, the communities.
Willem Middelkoop, Commodity Discovery Fund. We could have a scenario that NGEx might be in production before Filo starts production. How would that change the scenario?
Well, I think as you've seen through the Vicuña District video that we showed in the flyover, there's a number of deposits that are all being pursued in parallel. But for us, with Lundin Mining, with Vicuña Corp., and what we have in our portfolio requires a lot of attention and focus. I think NGEx, they have their business strategy very clearly laid out. They're maturing an asset that is still very much in early stages in Lunahuasi. They're going to continue to drill that deposit out, and of course, they've applied, I believe, for a RIGI application. The base RIGI and still a bit of work to be done.
There may be an opportunity down the road to look at some more consolidation in the district in the future, but right now we're very much fully focused on what we have in our portfolio.
Thank you.
Yeah, go ahead.
Hi. Richard Garchitorena from Barclays. One bigger picture question on free cash flow. You show five-year, 10-year very strong free cash flow. I know you have, obviously, a couple more stages beyond stage 1, but in terms of the CAD 220 million capital allocation that you've earmarked, is that a starting point? Can you look at increasing that over time, and how would you allocate versus share repurchases versus dividend increases and special dividends, that type of thing?
I can start, and then Teitur, if you want to complement. What we wanted to do was ensure that we came out with a shareholder distribution framework that could fit in our long-term projections. As Teitur was talking about, when we look at projects and do we stick on a copper price? Absolutely not. We look at flexing the model. We use price sensitivities, various inputs to see what are we comfortable with going forward. During this growth period, it was determined that that absolute return of around CAD 220 million, through reducing our dividends and implementing a stronger buyback protocol, that that was what we wanted to do. Of course, we're going to have a lot more flexibility given the commodity price environment that we're in, given the performance of our existing operations.
I think we've got a minimum shareholder distribution framework that has been established, we do have the flexibility to look at that. That fits into all of our scenario planning for capital allocation. What I think is a key takeaway is that shareholders can rest assured that we can maintain that as our minimum distribution policy.
Hi. Follow-up from Dan at UBS. On the infrastructure discussion, it sounds like you're confident on other parts of the construction piece, how advanced are you in discussions with third parties around the infrastructure? Would the infrastructure be constructed by the joint venture and then farmed out, or would it be built by somebody else? The third question, is there actually any examples in the industry of a roaster or a smelter being acquired by an infrastructure fund?
The answer to the last one, no, not an infrastructure fund, you could look at a smelting company or something like that rather than looking at a traditional infrastructure fund. In terms of how it's built and that's still all early stages.
Yeah.
We're still looking at different opportunities.
Yeah, I think we're-
It's very early stages.
Exactly. We're in early stages, as Ron was saying. We've had a workshop to scenario plan all of the options that exist, and there are many. We're working towards what is the best viable option, and embedded within that is the commercial strategy as well. It's too early for us to come out and say what that is, but we're maturing that with the team, with Vicuña, and with our partners at BHP.
Okay. Just to follow up on you saying it could be a smelting company. The cost of capital for a smelting company, I suspect, is not as low as a water or an electricity solution. Is that something you've also factored into your return assumptions that are embedded in the cost estimates?
Not at this point. We took an approach of just taking that infrastructure for the PEA level.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Well, I think that Oh, sorry, maybe one last question here.
I think it's probably for Juan Andrés. I think it's really neat that you have your mine managers here, and they must be really proud of that safety record and running reliable operations. Can you give us a bit of color, one or two things that each of your mine managers does very well and that you're going to tell Ron you need to take these best practices from them and make sure they get implemented at Vicuña?
Great question. Thank you, Frank. They're all exceptional leaders. I think they do a lot of things extremely well. Their presence at the site. They spend most of the time at the site with their teams, working on safety, cost control, Full Potential initiatives, meeting with the communities. They are our face in front of the communities, meeting with the regulators on a regular basis. The focus on discipline, on operational discipline, is one. We have established several routine and processes to make sure that we are continually monitoring the progress on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis. Producing reliable data that can be analyzed, that we can look at the information and do projection from there and take action on the deviations that we're seeing.
I think very strong technical leadership, presence at the site, being the face of the company out in the community, and leading with the example on safety, cost control, and discipline in general.
I think to add to that, Juan Andrés, is the experience at Caserones working at altitude as well. That they're learning a lot there, and we'll certainly be able to take some of their learnings there to Vicuña.
Lastly, maybe a healthy competition driving what are the best Full Potential initiatives and how can you share those experiences, and then look to even get better from one site to the next. I think sharing ideas and being a cohesive unit is definitely something that we have in our organization, which drives a lot of value.
Great. With all the good questions that came in here, we've covered everything that's online, maybe I'll just hand it back to you, Jack, for one final closing remark, and we'll close out for the day.
Okay. Before I do that, I'm going to hand it back to you just so you can go through the plan for this evening.
After maybe.
After the-
Yeah, after.
Okay.
Yeah.
Never mind. Apologies. For those online, I just want to thank you again on behalf of Lundin Mining for sitting through another Capital Markets Day. We're very excited about the future of Lundin Mining, and hopefully, you've got all the necessary information from this presentation. We look forward to following up with all of our current shareholders, the analysts that are here, our prospective shareholders, and the future couldn't be brighter for Lundin Mining. We're going to continue to pursue all of these options and initiatives with a relentless focus on continuing to drive best-in-class safety, best-in-class Full Potential opportunities, and pursue that growth. Year-over-year, I think you'll see that the business will continue to transform for the better. Thank you everybody again for being here.
Great. Thank you guys. Before we break here, we do have dinner planned, and we'll make our way