Welcome everyone to Pan American Silver's 2024 Investor Day. We are very pleased you could join us. My name is Siren Fisekci. I'm the VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Pan American. We're looking forward to sharing with you today a more in-depth view of our strategy and our business. Before we get started with the formal agenda, I'd like to cover a few items. We would like to acknowledge we are gathered today where we are gathered today. We are hosting this meeting on the traditional treaty territory of many nations, including the Mississauga of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today's meeting is being webcast.
If you are joining by webcast, please type your questions into the Lumi portal. Those guests present in the room may simply use the mic or submit their questions via the messaging tab on the Lumi site. There will be time for questions at the end of each agenda topic, and we will also have some time at the conclusion of the formal presentations for any remaining questions. The link to a recording of the webcast will be posted following the event. We planned a break halfway through the operations section, and feel free to take one as you need, obviously, and there are refreshments just outside the room, and washrooms are located by the elevators. The formal session will end just before 1:00 P.M., when lunch will be served and you'll have the opportunity to visit with members of the Pan American team.
Thanks again for joining us, and let's move on to Pan American's 2024 Investor Day. I will invite our President and CEO, Michael Steinmann, up to the podium. Thanks.
Thanks, Siren, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Good morning to everybody here in the room, and good morning everyone on the call to our 2024 Investor Day. I'm really excited to have the team here and show you for quite a few hours here what our plans are for the next coming years and what and this year, obviously, and so I'm really excited to share that with you. And let's just dive right in. Of course, we'll use forward-looking statement. You have the cautionary note at the beginning of the presentation. So we'll start off here. We'll look a bit about the strategy and overview. Chris has some great videos for us on the exploration side.
I'm sure you saw the press release yesterday with a lot of results. Kind of overwhelming to read it there, but when Chris will show us the video, it will make all sense why we are so excited about those results that he published yesterday. Steve and his team will then go to the operations. We will spend quite some time on ESG, as this is kind of replacing our annual ESG call as well, and you will obviously have chances to ask after each section. We'll then go through the finance part and I will close, and we will have enough time for questions, Q&A, and then have lunch later on.
Just to start with our vision, which actually hasn't changed, we decided actually that we wanted to be the world's premier silver producer, 30 years ago when the company started, with the reputation of excellence, and we put that discovery, engineering, innovation, sustainable development. That's really all. That's what we do, and we will see all these points, and we'll have them explained in more detail to you. I know I get quite often the question, as we produce quite a bit of gold right now, but I will show you, first of all, we're actually trading with the silver price. And, second, this is really just a moment in time as we closed two transactions, which were a bit more gold rich, and the silver is still to come.
But, when you look at our reserve resources, it's, it's very clear that we're holding the biggest reserve and resources in the silver space. Like any meeting that we do at Pan American, also this one, I would like to start with safety. You see there, our statistics for last year or the last three years, already good results the years before, but very, very strong results for 2023 on the safety side. And I think really based on quite, quite a few things that Steve and his team implemented, and one is doing safety differently. So that's not only that we do safety differently, but that's actually, how, how the program is called, and it's really focusing on leading indicators, not lagging indicators, although half the lagging indicators just there in the statistics.
We try to get away from that and really focus much more on leading indicators, focus on behavioral-based safety programs, and has been very successful, I think, so far. It takes a lot of time and effort, obviously, to install it, and you can imagine we are working in a lot of jurisdiction where the safety consciousness is not the same, strong or hasn't been, and so there is a lot of, like, a longer process to go through it, but I think it has been very successful. Steve, I think that's it. It's fair to say, and the results you see there on the slide. So 30 years this year, 30 years Pan American.
We have quite a few people here in the room and myself that followed that journey for over 20 years. So a long time with the company and I'm really proud of what we have achieved in that time and the size and quality of company that we have been able to build. And I think on this slide, it's very clear kind of how we did it. And I won't—I don't want to go and dive into all the detail, as it, this goes way back to the beginning of Pan American. But of course, the two latest and large transaction that we did, first Tahoe and then Yamana, really changed this company and made it bigger, stronger, better with many very strong assets, lots of flexibility, very strong financial.
So that really came out, I would say from those two transactions. You see there on the Tahoe side, we got Timmins, Bell Creek, and Timmins West to our portfolio. We got San Vicente and La Arena, and of course, Escobal, and we will talk about all these assets in way more detail. You probably saw that we announced, when was it? About two-three weeks ago, the divestment of La Arena, which is pretty astonishing that at the end and after, since 2019, this asset was running, we actually assumed that it will run out by 2021 of reserves. We were able to explore, and Chris's team found more reserves until 2026, and with the sale of La Arena, we recovered about a third of the transaction cost of that transaction.
Just when you look at it, obviously, a whole different ballgame, where gold price and silver prices were at that time, and then, of course, the Yamana Gold transaction, with the addition of very important and large assets to our portfolio. And that's how it looks like when you look at the two transactions. Tahoe, potentially adding 20 million oz of silver. I know Escobal is not in production yet, and Sean will give us more details on that. But it also added over 400,000 oz
Strong synergies, but what is really amazing in that transaction, if you look, is the cost of it, $1.1 billion, and again, that's really because you go back, if I remember right, gold was somewhere at $1,180 or so at that time, so quite a different world than now. And then the Yamana transaction, adding immediately 9.2 million oz of silver, 565,000 oz of gold, and very strong synergies. We will see some details on that, way above $60 million. We were guiding $40 million-$60 million, but we are way above $60 million, and that transaction was $2.8 billion, and Sam will give us all the details on the divestments.
But we recovered a large part of that transaction already, and all the transactions that Sam was able to accomplish with the divestments we did over the last, over the last, 14 months. So it's really a combination of what we do and how we grew the company, and you see it there on the silver and gold side. It's a combination of M&A activity, but then, you know, getting strong assets, spending a lot of efforts on brownfield exploration. That's really what we're focusing on our exploration.
replacing reserves, adding reserves, and then, hopefully from there, growing assets and expanding production, and there's many examples there that, that we did so, and, it has been, has been an incredible success story, I think, with this combination of purchasing assets and then expanding them further and replacing reserves and adding mine life to them. And that's how that looks like. If you put it all together, that's back to 2006. You see that we had... And that's only silver, of course. We could do the same with gold. This is not equivalents, by the way. We don't use really equivalents. This is just silver, million ounces. We started with 213 million oz. We acquired 420 million oz, and this is just, reserves, so not resources, again.
We mined contained 463 million oz. Our brownfield exploration teams replaced 316 million oz. This is really big value creation by finding that around our assets and put that immediately into production, and now sitting on the largest silver reserves of, I think, any silver producer in the world, so 486 million oz, just reserves. But it's not only that. When you look on the right-hand side, with that brownfield exploration, we not only discovered all these ounces, that some of them, of course, we mined already since 2006 or they're in the mine plan in the coming years, but that includes, on top of it, the large world-class skarn discovery at La Colorada.
It includes what I just mentioned before, many years of added gold production at La Arena, which allowed us now to divest that asset, and a lot of reserve replacement on the gold side and base metal side as well, so very successful programs at very, very reasonable cost. So it's really the way... We don't do really greenfield exploration, like new project. We leave that really to the junior market, but we are really focused on that immediate value creation on brownfield. I will just pass over this. You have the most people or everybody on this picture is here, so you will have the chance, if you are live here in the room, to mingle and meet with the management team.
As I said, a lot of people here with a bit more gray hair, including myself, and with the company for over 20 years, and then also a very good mix of young people that we added in for our future. So very good depth of management team that we have. We don't have our senior managers or country managers here, but I just wanna show you how we run the company. It's a very decentralized structure. I'm a strong believer that you need to empower the people on site to run the assets. We're running, you know, 11 assets, so you have to do that, and we're strong believer in using local people, and you see it there. We don't put the experts in.
We find everywhere very strong engineers, metallurgists, geologists, very good miners in all the countries who are active. So, this is really the way to do it, to have strong people locally from their countries, who know the country, know the language... and by the way, when we talk about language, this counts for the head office as well. You will - if you come to Vancouver, you will get along very well with Spanish. You don't need to speak English, but you need at least to speak Spanish if you want to talk to everyone. So all these efforts, when you, when you look back, and that goes back to 2014, so the last 10 years, really superior shareholder return when you compare it to the other silver peers and of +65%, while our peer group is, actually negative there.
You see in the small print, too, is included in the peer group. Very strong, very strong result for the last 10 years. One reason for that is really our capital allocation. I think we will hear more about that, but you know, I think most of you know the story. I told it many times. There's really just three buckets for it. Strong balance sheet, absolutely crucial for us. That's the way to react on opportunities, seize opportunities when it comes to M&A and to expansions, to have strong balance sheets. You see, we closed last quarter with just about $1.1 billion of liquidity between the cash, no short-term debt, but just the cash there and our revolving line of credit that is untapped.
And when you look at the debt side, and that really came in from the Yamana transaction, and I'm sure we will get more detail, I think, from Ignacio on the, on the bonds there. The gross leverage 1.2 times at the moment, and of course, a lot of cash coming in this year, and we will continue working on this. I think we paid back around about $400 million last year on that, and we'll continue to do so. The next bucket of capital allocation is really focusing on building strong new projects. I'm sure La Colorada Skarn is one of them. And then return to shareholders, and we'll talk about dividend share buybacks later on.
I love this map because I often get the question: "Why are you, you know, in in Peru? Why are you in Mexico? Would you go somewhere else?" So these are the large silver deposits in the world, and I think it makes very clear why we are in Mexico, why we are in Peru, why we are in Latin America, because about 60% of the silver production comes from there. You see most of the big silver deposits along the Cordilleras from southern Patagonia, where we mine all along this, all the way up to Alaska. We don't have an operation in Alaska, but it's very clear why we are in this, in these countries, and we are very comfortable, and we worked all our careers in those places.
Just quickly, and you know the map, 11 operations. Once La Arena deal close, it will be down to, to 10, and then, Dolores will come to an end of its mining cycle this year, and then we'll go into a long, multi-year leach cycle. Scott will tell us about that. As I said, one of the largest reserves, and I really like when you look at the, at the pie graph, there is, is the diversification by country, and you see there the numbers. This is, Q1, revenue per country, and very difficult, obviously, for us to kind of deal with the different country risks, in the places we are working to be a diversified, geographically diversified mining company. We will hear more about the Skarn. It's just a little teaser there.
You see, I'm holding there a drill core, and that's the amazing part. You can look at drill cores like that for hundreds of meters. Very coarse, very clean sphalerite. Obviously, a lot of zinc in it, a lot of silver as well. A very exciting project, and I don't want to dive really into details here for time reasons. We're gonna see a lot of details with 3D images from Chris, and then we'll connect in Martin Wafforn, our Senior VP of Technical Services, to explain us more in detail about the Skarn. Very, very exciting project, and as I said, fully homegrown, found with brownfield exploration.
I know you all have questions about the Escobal, so I will ask Sean, who is running Guatemala's efforts for us, and just to give a few details on this, and then I will continue or Sean will continue.
Hi, great. Good morning. I'm Sean McAleer, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives. My primary focus is on Escobal activities in Guatemala, so I'm based in Guatemala and, obviously, I've done some other things during the transactions here, but that's where my focus is. I think you're all familiar with, Escobal, the production during, their operations with Tahoe from 2014 to 2017, about 20 million oz a year. Currently, we're in care and maintenance activities, and those activities are outlined pretty well in our sustainability report. There's a two-page summary of our activities that we do there and some of the programs we do to maintain social license and, and some of the activities we do to maintain the mine. So for us, it's, it's important, safety as well.
We've got a small workforce there, lots of equipment and lots of activities in the underground, so it still is a sizable activity and operation for us, and we do focus quite a bit on safety and environment as well. So I think we've got a good team on the ground and a good crew that will help us ramp up when we do conclude the consultation process. The consultation process itself, this is an overview of the court-ordered process. Obviously, the phase one and phase two have been completed. Those are activities that took quite a bit of time during the pandemic.
As you might recall, we had lots of disruptions for the meetings that we were supposed to have, as well as the change of government that we had before in 2020, and now we're in phase two of the consultation process with another change of government in January. So that process so far has only had one meeting this year, that was February 21. And we saw a change initially of the Minister of Mines before she even took over office, they had appointed someone else to that role, so that created some disruption there. And then recently, we've had the removal of the Vice Minister of Sustainable Development, which is the office that has run the consultation process. That role has not been replaced yet, so we're looking forward to the appointment.
We're hoping that that happens by the end of the month, and then we hope that there's some meetings in July, where we'll get some definition about future activities and timelines. So, that's really the next steps for us. The consultation timeline was published on the MEM's website. It was supposed to conclude March 31st this year, and obviously, that timeline wasn't met, so we'll see with the new appointment of the vice minister how that is gonna be resumed, hopefully in July. That's what we were hoping for. And the next thing is on Navidad, and I didn't wanna talk too much on that, but it's obviously a long-term optionality for us. It's a great project in Chubut.
We are all watching very closely the changes in the government in Argentina, and hopefully that we see some favorable conditions for investment decisions or advancing this project in the future. But for now, we're still standing by, and I'm gonna turn it back over to Michael right now, and I think we'll have some question room for - Oh, for Sam. So we'll have some question and answer here later. We can talk a bit more about Escobal.
Thanks, Sean. Good morning, everyone. I'm Sam Drier. I'm SVP for Business Development here at Pan American Silver. In addition to the catalysts that Michael and Sean mentioned, being the Skarn Escobal, we continually search for opportunities that add scale and quality to our portfolio in an accretive fashion. As Michael mentioned, we've had tremendous success in being opportunistic when pursuing M&A transactions. We maintain a strong balance sheet to be able to put us in the position that if an opportunity presents itself, that we can take advantage of it. That being said, when evaluated against the criteria of scale, long life assets with exploration upside, the universe of primary silver-producing assets is somewhat limited.
And when you turn to development assets, you'll notice when you look at the Pan American portfolio, we already hold a number of the best development assets, either directly in our portfolio, you've heard very briefly about the Skarn, and you'll hear more about it. You've heard very briefly about Navidad, but that's a long-term optionality that's in our portfolio, or indirectly, through our investment in New Pacific, and gaining exposure to the Silver Sand at the Carangas projects there. With respect to New Pacific, this is a good example of one of the models that Pan American uses in its approach to gain exposure to development assets. Some companies use a toehold approach, where they take a small stake in an exploration company.
However, when we see a development asset that demonstrates its scale and quality potential, we try and take a meaningful stake in it in these companies and be able to participate in the development opportunity. Our stake in New Pacific at the moment is just under 12%. Another aspect that Pan American has demonstrated its strength in is that of portfolio optimization. As Michael alluded to it earlier, but since we've acquired Yamana in early 2023, we successfully delivered on our stated objective of portfolio optimization to the tune of just shy of $1 billion. That $1 billion assumes that Lorena will close shortly.
So with that being said, the most recent one is the sale of Lorena operating mine and the Lorena-II copper gold development project that we entered into an agreement with Zijin at the beginning of May. This package, we've sold for a total of $245 million of cash up front, a $45 million contingent payment, and a 1.5% gold NSR royalty. And as I mentioned, we hope to close this transaction in Q3 of this year. Just post the closing of the Yamana transaction, we were successful in the sale of the 56.25% stake in the Mara project for $475 million in cash, and there again, we retained a 0.75% copper royalty.
Shortly thereafter, we sold our interest in Agua de la Falda for also a copper gold project for $45.55 million in cash and retained two royalties, one precious metals for 1.25% and a 0.2% base metals royalty. What these three transactions have demonstrated is that we're able to monetize non-core assets for cash at good valuations while retaining upside to projects with high-quality name producers through the retention of the various royalties. And talking about royalties, you'll recall that Pan American, back in 2015, 2016, contributed a package of royalty and streams that led to the creation of Maverix Metals. And in 2023, we sold the remaining portion that we had in Maverix, and this whole transaction, starting from inception-...
was an exceptional transaction for Pan American and led us to realizing just over $150 million for our interest. Lastly, we sold, more, operating, well, it was an operating mine at one point in time, Morococha in Peru, but it had been on care and maintenance for a while, and we sold that for $25 million. And we also sold, a package of non-controlling equity interests for $47 million in cash. So all in all, a really great success, that we've seen on the portfolio optimization front, and we continuously, evaluate, assets in our portfolio. That being said, we do have additional early-stage exploration, projects that have been identified for future development, and we look to continue to evaluate ways to maximize shareholder value and optimize our overall portfolio.
With that, I'm gonna hand back to Michael.
Thank you, Sam, and yeah, great, great results and really just to emphasize again, all these royalties, there are now four, I think four or five royalties with really strong counterparties. It's Rio Tinto, it's Glencore, Zijin, et c. We did not monetize that yet, but I'm sure at the right time it will happen. There's a lot of interest in this kind of royalties, as you can imagine, and there's further cash inflow that will probably come in the future from monetizing those assets too. So I think if you add it all up together, you know, you get pretty, pretty close to about 45% recovery of the Yamana transaction cost with the sale of all these assets. And in a very, very short timeframe.
So really kudos to our team that was able to do that. I talked about that we have the largest reserves in the world on the silver side. You see it there in the silver space, not only reserves, but resources as well. And the production, we are number two, Fresnillo number one, but reserve and resources very, very clearly the leader, the leader in the space. And I think this graph says it all. When you look at market cap and liquidity, as a name, really by itself up there in the upper corner, you see, you know, a lot of smaller silvers. The silver space is pretty small space by itself.
You see a lot of smaller producers there on the left-hand side of the graph, and then really a separation there a bit with Hecla and, of course, Fresnillo. Smaller market cap, way less liquidity. There's not 100% of the shares are afloat, and then Pan American really on its own up there. Very, very liquid, a very, very liquid name, in the silver space. And I mentioned that when we talk about gold versus silver, but when you look at actually last year, we're actually leading the pack there as well, and the correlation of the silver price.
So, which makes a lot of sense, as we are the second-largest producer, as we are the most liquid name, and as we hold the biggest reserve and resources, we should really trade with the silver, with the silver price, and, that's, that's what's happening. And when you look at the 10-year shareholder return, a bit of different graph there, I showed already the 65%. So we surpassed there by two development, single asset, companies earlier on, but a very strong return to our shareholders over, over 10 years. So of course, again, very, very silver-focused. And just a few words to silver. I know at... You know, it was, it took a while for silver to kind of wake up, which is, which is normal. I've seen that many times in my career.
Gold is first come in, and silver, this year, everybody wants to talk about silver. This data is from the Silver Institute. We do every year a large survey. You can download the silver report from the Silver Institute website. And sorry. Very clearly a supply shortfall on the silver side now three years in a row that will probably continue. We see a silver market of about 1 billion oz, give or take, including recycling, and last year, a silver demand of about 1.22 billion oz. The interesting part of the silver story is really that about 70% of silver is produced as a by-product to a large base metal production, right? We're talking about copper production, zinc production, and then also some gold production.
As metal prices are already high, we see a lot of demand on the copper side. You know, all the copper producers are already at full production, so I don't see really a lot of additional copper production coming up, which would mean that will bring some silver in the market as well. So I don't really think that the supply side will change really a lot. The demand side, on the other hand, is really changing strongly, and you see it there. We just put two applications there. In general, it's nearly 60% of the silver market, of the silver supply is used every year for industrial applications, of which the biggest one is for electronics, and you see there a strong growth up to this year's plan, about 486 million oz.
So nearly 50% of all the silver produced goes into the electrical application, and the biggest one there is really photovoltaic included in that, and you see the growth is just astonishing. And it goes from 89 million oz used in 2021 to 194 million oz last year, and prediction of 232 for this year. So very, very strong growth, and this will continue, I think, for a long time and will be together with cars, not only electric cars, but electric cars are using more silver. It's really the electronic components that, that, that drive that, and a really, a really strong story for silver here in the future as a, as a, green metal together with copper and the battery metals. Absolutely needed.
It's the strongest and best electrical conductor in the world, and of course, that's the reason why it's used so widely in electronic applications and not very easy replaceable. We'll talk a bit more during the talk about the strategic priorities, but it's just in one slide there. We said we started with safety. Of course, our operations is the bread and butter of our business, and so never forget that. We're really here to produce the metal that the world needs, and that's what we do, and Steve's team is working every day hard on that. We explore new projects, like La Colorada Skarn is a great product of that. We continue, we heard from Sean, work in Guatemala.
We'll always work with shareholder return. We're paying dividends since 2010, and we have a strong dividend policy in place, and that will continue like that. And we heard from Sam how we have been able to optimize our portfolio. And I think with that, I don't know, do we go straight to production, Sam?
Q&A.
We do some Q&A. Okay, great. Is there... Are there any questions in the room right now, or do you wanna... Or you prefer to wait for later?
I don't know.
Oh, no.
Thank you, Michael. On Escobal, could you explain what that phase two really was supposed to be? I know it hasn't started with the government change, but what is the process that needs to be followed in that-
Yeah
... stage two?
Yeah, so phase two, the first part of phase two was delivering information to the SHINKA from the government institutions and the company. That part was completed last year, and there's additional activities around that with evaluating the information, and those activities have been taking place since October, up until recently. There's still some of that going on right now. What we're expecting in the next few months or is ongoing now, is that the SHINKA will take the information and deliver it to their different groups, so they can evaluate the information.
And hopefully, the next phase will be us returning to the table and hearing which concerns they have, what the different issues are, that need to be addressed by the government through additional mitigations or, you know, other activities to eventually reach an agreement and go forward with the operation.
Thank you.
Thanks, Michael, and team. You know, Sean, to Escobal as well, should we be at all concerned that there's been so many changes, you know, with the new government? We talked about the vice minister, and then you talked about some other minister, she didn't even get to sit down. You know, does that—Should we be at all concerned about, you know, what... Any kind of read-through in terms of the new government that's come in?
Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, there's been, I think three ministers have been replaced so far. The first was the MEM, then after that, there was a switch for the Minister of Environment. That was a few months ago as well, and we just saw a changeover in the Ministry of Communication, and then the Minister of Health resigned. I guess if we look back, you know, in history and saw changes of government in Guatemala, we'd probably see similar types of changes. I'm not really sure, you know, in great detail, but I think there's always that disruption during changeover.
And, you know, maybe it's a bit optimistic to hope that the transitions are smooth and that things are gonna, you know, resume, you know, at day one from a new government. So, you know, I think we're experiencing some of that, certainly in the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and in some of the other ministries as well. So I think that's just something that we should all anticipate, and maybe it is something that, you know, creates a little bit of loss of continuity and takes us a while to get back on track again.
Thank you, Michael and Sean. Continuing with Escobal then, Sean, you mentioned that the vice minister role hasn't been replaced, and yet there will be meetings in July. So just to understand that, is it necessary for that vice minister role to be replaced, or will the process continue with these meetings in July and meetings-
Yeah
... subsequent to that?
Yeah, we, yeah-
Maybe I'll add to that, too.
Okay.
I mean, with this—these delays on Escobal, maybe they're both a blessing and a curse. I mean, look what the silver price has done, right, in the meantime.
Mm-hmm.
But that being said, if you could just give a little bit more color on the path looking forward-
Yeah
... whether or not this role is replaced and what the meetings look like.
Yeah. So we meet regularly with the Minister of Energy and Mines, and we also meet with the Secretary to the President, who's like the president's chief of staff and coordinates all the other ministries. And so in those meetings, what we understand is that the first milestone will be the appointment of the vice minister for sustainable development, and that's expected to be at the end of the month, at least that's what we've been told, and so that's, that... We're, we're watching for that. And then following that, after some time, you know, we would expect a working meeting probably in July. So that's the sequence I'm seeing. And hopefully, in that working meeting, there's some kind of determination on timeline, activities, and more specifics about the process timeline, which we saw expire back in March.
So that's what we're expecting going forward, I would say, you know, into July, August. And hopefully, you know, for our Q2 update call, we'll have a lot of information about that, you know, as a result of these events and these meetings, if they do take place.
... Just a quick question, Marie. This is Ovais from Scotiabank. Just, you've answered some good questions on Escobal, so maybe I'm gonna move on from Escobal right now, but, and maybe we'll come back to that. But in terms of, Sam, in terms of, you know, you and your team have done a great job in terms of divesting non-core assets, you know, you're building up some good cash position on that end. Is there a plan that you have now sold some of your non-core assets to start kind of looking at opportunities on the M&A side?
Is there, you know, opportunities that you're looking at on terms, in terms of the development side or, or more producing, any focus on the commodity itself, you know, more focused on the gold or more, focused on silver? Maybe some color on that.
Do you wanna take it? All right, sure.
I can take that, Ovais. And, yeah, look, I mean, when you saw on the slides how this company grew in 30 years to the size it has now, and it's really this combination of M&A activity, and then once we have the assets, build on them, right? Make them bigger, make them better, or divest them if it's not a great fit, and I don't see any reason why we would change that strategy. It has been incredibly successful and will continue. I think what's really important when you look at the M&A side is really to create creative transactions. I think we have been successful with the last very large two transactions to provide that, and that's really important to me, right?
You have to have strong synergies, you have to be creative when you deliver. If you just do the same, then the former holder of the asset, there's really no point to do that, so you have to create additional value. I think it worked out very well, and if we have the chance to do that, we have to balance it, to react right away, and we will for sure. I think that's really the way to grow the company. I would just like to answer one. I see there is a question from Cosmos Chiu from CIBC, and it's going back to Escobal, but I can take this one, Sean. It's really. He is asking, what how does this outreach look like to the community?
Then he's asking, do you know what they want and what the mechanism is? Can you actually deliver royalties or something like that? I think the problem at Escobal when it started was really the distribution of wealth for that project, which was one issue. I think ILO 169 really as an idea of why ILO 169 consultations are done, is really to identify impacts of a project to a population or an indigenous population in this case, and to identify how to mitigate that and or if you can't mitigate it, how to compensate for it. So that's really the process for it.
So, at the end, really for us, it's yes, royalties can be part of that or other ways of sharing parts of the project, you know, jobs, other projects, you name it, there can be a long list of it, and we are not at that spot yet to kind of negotiate that part. That will come, I guess, somewhere towards the end of the consultation. I think with that, probably to keep on time here, we move forward, and have Steve talking about operation. There will be ample time in between always to ask your questions.
Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. My name is Steve Busby. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the company. Like Michael, I've been with the company now for over 20 years, and very pleased to be here today to present. We're gonna present more details on our four, four of our primary operations, as well as the Skarn project. With help of Chris Emerson's gonna take us through the geology and the locations. We're gonna work together and tag, kind of tag team this presentation on, on a few of these operations. So if we just jump right in, we'll start with La Colorada. A little bit of an overview as we've talked in several of the last quarterly conference calls, we're really working to restore ventilation on this mine. That restoration project is on track.
We will be commissioning the fans on the new Guadalupe shaft during July next month. Everything's on track for that. It's looking good. We successfully excavated the 580 m deep shaft. I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail on the challenges that we had over the years for the ventilation at La Colorada, give you a little bit better impression, and also share with you where we're at in terms of getting this new shaft up and running, which looks very, very good. We're very excited about it, very optimistic. It'll bring us back to be able to ramp this production up, get the advances back on track, get some of the rehabilitation work in the Eastern Candelaria zone done, so that we can get back up to, you know, plus 2,000 tons a day operation by year-end.
That's really what we're focused on. So when you look at La Colorada during this year, it's obviously production back end loaded, and the costs will be lower as that production comes off. You know, it's a large component of fixed costs at La Colorada, a lot of labor costs there. So as tonnage comes up, as the ounces of production comes off or comes up, that AISC cost comes down pretty dramatically. So we've been very challenged without this ventilation shaft, that we committed to 3.5 years ago. It's now coming to fruition. It is going to pay us big dividends in the future. We're quite confident of that. So with that, I think I'm gonna let Chris walk us through a little bit of a video here. Go ahead, Chris. Maybe introduce yourself.
Absolutely. Hi, everyone, Chris Emerson, the VP of Exploration and Geology. We're gonna dive into La Colorada and the vein specifically at, to start with. I've got some technology, so cross fingers it all works. And really, the idea is to give you an overview of where we are, the local geology, and then dive into some of the results that we were happy to release yesterday after market. So with that, we'll get started. And as you know, we're in Mexico, we're gonna zoom into just Zacatecas, and we're sort of on the west side, Durango is sitting over here.
When we look at the regional geology, we're in the Sierra Madre, this is a prolific silver belt, and, you know, we are looking at all of the different deposits sitting around us. You have San Martín, 30 km away, and that's a skarn deposit. Here we're zooming in, we've got these limestones in the green with these lower volcanic complex, which is where all these silver deposits are sitting in the Sierra Madre. Then over to the west, we've got these upper volcanics, which I'll explain in a bit more detail as we go into the local geology. Again, we're looking at a large concession package of around over 8,000 hectares, and in the center, we're sitting there in La Colorada.
We're gonna zoom now into where we are in the mine itself, and overlay some of the local geology, where I'll pause it there. Limestones in the blue, sitting over to the west. The red are the veins, the main veins, we've got Recompensa, Amalio, the HW vein going into the NCs, and really that target zone over to the east, and I'll explain some more when we get to it slightly, in this presentation. And the new Christina vein sitting to the south, and some pleasing results from that as we've started to drill this area. So now we're gonna sort of zoom into the sort of infrastructure, and I'll help Steve out here a little bit in terms of...
Got the Ross Beaty shaft sitting in the center there, where most of the production comes up and down. We've got the tailings down to the south. We have an oxide plant, sulfide plant sits next to it, and the new Guadalupe shaft sitting over to the east there. The access comes in from the side, as we can see. So La Colorada, 86 million oz of reserves at the moment. That was the update over in 2023. And really, we've shown strong growth of this mine as we've drilled. I mean, Mike, prior to me, you know, drilling through the 2010 up until when I came on in 2016, and we continued that 20,000 to 30,000 m drilling a year.
We did have a decrease in the reserves mid-year last year, which we're updating this year, and that was really a combination of we did find stuff, we were drilling, we were finding additional reserves. However, increasing costs, increase in widths, mining widths, et c., dilution, etc. , which all made us and historic reserves, which weren't ever gonna get into the life of mine production, which has always been constantly updated. So there was a decrease. We're still sitting at 86, and it's, you know, hopefully in this presentation, we'll show that we've still got growth opportunities as we move through. So now we're gonna dive into sort of the 3D portion of the videos, and again, those main structures.
The black lines here are the infrastructure that we have, and you've got the shaft in the middle, the Ross Beaty shaft, the Candelaria Estrella mines, which we talk about a lot and Steve will talk about as well. And, you know, all that exploration that we're targeting is now focused over on that east portion of Candelaria and the NC2 extensions. Here we have obviously a lot of the channel sampling and all of that, that silver grade being shown there. So one thing to bear in mind, when you're looking at these 3Ds, 3D images, you are gonna see the veins as looking rather large. However, you have to remember that these veins are sort of 0.5-2 m wide.
As you look at this in three dimensions, you see along the plane, and they look larger than they, they actually are. So just bear that in mind when you look at the skarn, that we're gonna show you where that sits compared to the veins and how the veins look compared to the skarn. The skarn is, you know, a huge deposit, hundreds of meters in drill depth of mineralization. So here we're looking at a cross-section through all of the different structures and the skarn sitting down at depth, 800-1,000 m below depth.
We're gonna spin this round, and the dark drill traces you're seeing is some of the recent drilling that we're doing, and I've just put on there some of the projections of some of these new structures that we're now finding in La Colorada, which we're all very excited about, and the press release highlights. We've just done a 360 around it. Again, we're seeing that skarn, which we're gonna describe in future in a presentation after Steve. So Christina, a new structure that we've defined in recent drilling several years ago. We're looking now at this eastern area, which is really the target area, which is the projection of the NC2.
There's having drilled through, when we're drilling through, we're finding additional splay structures, which is very common in these sort of vein systems. So the NC2 extension, you know, we released some great results this year. We're looking at around 300 m depth profile of this, over 200 m wide extension, and it's still open to the east. These are some of the great results. I mean, 3.6 m over 1,000 with good base metal. 2.2 at 5.9 kg, and again, good base metal. So, yeah, really great results from the NC2 extension, and certainly, this is where the mine will be moving towards.
So while we were drilling that, we hit an additional structure, the Mariana, again, sort of 250 me in vertical, couple hundred meters in extension, and again, all open to the to the east. And again, some really, and what we've, what we've proven here is that these are all very silver-rich silver-rich structures. And again, this was in the press release, and we'll just highlight some of those results: 0.7 at 2.6 kg, two at 689. So again, when you're drilling through it at a specific objective, and then you're starting to hit these splay veins, this just adds additional excitement, certainly for the geology team.
So now what we're gonna do is we stepped out, and some of the drilling. So the 903, which is one of our larger skarn ore body, sits over to the east. We were drilling that with SO5. We knew that we had another set of structures, the San Geronimo's. We hit those, and we also stepped further south and hit the Christina, which is... Again, you'll see these splay structures, the major objective being the Christina. We hit some splays over here, which was the S71 and S20, and the SO5, which I mentioned. We were drilling for the NC, but went through the San Geronimo.
And I think the results speak for themselves, nearly 2 m at 1.7, 2 m at over a kilo, and a really nice surprise, which is why we love geology, 29 m with great base metals and a good silver component. I would love to say that we were really looking for that, but I'll take it if it comes around. But the Christina structure that we were drilling came with up some really, really nice results. So plan for the future, we're definitely gonna be targeting the eastern portion, the Christina system, the San Geronimo system, and the NC2 extensions. And I think there's great upside for La Colorada at the moment.
You know, we continue to work with the tech services and hopefully the future of La Colorada veins.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
So moving on to the operations, I mean, we employ really two types of mining methods at La Colorada, sub-level stoping and depending on the ground conditions, we'll choose between sub-level stoping and the cut and fill. We do backfill as much of the waste rock as we can underground to avoid trying to hoist waste rock and give us more capacity on the hoist for ore. Typically, we run 15 m sub-levels at La Colorada. Again, that can be adjusted depending on ground conditions. We do run into challenging ground. We have pretty strong ground support standards at the mine. Those standards have been upgraded.
With the ventilation challenges we had, we found as we pushed hot air back through the mine workings, the previous ground support standards were inadequate to support that hot air and that moist air, and the effects it has on that volcanic rock. So we changed the ground support standards. It's quite an elaborate standard these days. If you look at the process plant, we actually have two process plants at La Colorada. One's an oxide leach circuit. We're actually not running that this year. We're really not mining much oxide this year. We still have some oxide in the reserves, but it'll be into the future. So that plant's sitting idle. We're really focused on the sulfide plant we built back in 2017. It's a pretty conventional plant, three stages of crushing, one stage of ball milling.
We do a selective flotation, zinc, lead. We float concentrates and ship concentrates out of the site by truck, and we go to a conventional tailings facility. If you look back on historical production and you know, this really shows where we had the ventilation issues. As we continued to develop, and I'm gonna get into this in a little more detail, but as we continued to develop on the Candelaria zone, deep and to the east, we found more and more heat, more and more humidity, and we were unable to put new raise bores, new ventilation infrastructure in on that east side through that volcanic ground. We just couldn't hold the ground despite some elaborate efforts on trying to pre-grout the ground, pre-grout the column of rock with cement before we pulled the raise bore.
Some technologies have been just used all over the world, but it just didn't work here. It's just... There's too much water in this ground, it's too wet, it's too soggy, and we couldn't get the cement to stick. So after years of trying to get raise bores in to the east to support the normal advance we were doing on the mine, we opted to go to this Guadalupe shaft and blind sink the shaft, again, 580 m deep. Allow us to pull, we're gonna put a 2,000 horsepower fan, actually, two of them, one operating, one standby, on the surface of that shaft. That's what's underway now.
That'll start up in July, and that'll bring that hot air directly to the surface right above the Candelaria zone, as opposed to pushing it back through the mine and affecting all the ground support and all the other raise bores that we have on the western side of the mine in the better rock. So this year, as we bring that ventilation circuit online, we'll see a big dramatic change of production. Overall, for the year, we're still on track for the 5.7-5.3 million ounce production this year, $21-$24 an ounce, all-in sustaining. Again, that's back-end loaded. Those costs will come down as that production rate comes up. So once we get this ventilation established, it'll be a whole different mine back to what we're used to at La Colorada.
This year, on sustaining capital, we got about $22 million-$23 million of sustaining capital. Large part of that is on underground mine infrastructure for the ventilation. We got some booster fans underground. We are bringing refrigerated air underground during the summer months, and we like to boost that and get it off to the east, where that heat is. And once again, as that heats up, we'll bring it straight up the Guadalupe shaft when that's operating. Some money spent on the exploration, as Chris displayed the results. We're very excited about the exploration at La Colorada. We're finding lots of potential as we move east. Perfect alignment with the Guadalupe shaft. We didn't know those ore deposits were there, but it's really lining up well.
So again, a big change in the operation as we get this underway and back up operating. We do have our normal equipment replacements and rebuilds, and we do have a tailings dam expansion on tailings dam six this year. This just kind of gives you a bit of a long history of the raiseborers. I don't wanna dwell on the history, but it kind of covers some of the raiseborers that we attempted to do in the normal course of mining along the Candelaria. We failed to get some raiseborers in there. We just couldn't get 'em to stick in the ground. We lost a lot of pilot holes, we lost a lot of steel with the raiseborer contractor.
We absolutely lost some reamer heads even as that ground would, swould come in as we're trying to excavate it with those raiseborers. We did look at Alimak raising, and we brought in some of the experts from North America, and the ground just was not conducive for Alimak raising either. So that's when we opted in 2021 to sink the shaft, the Guadalupe shaft, a fully cement-lined 5.5 m diameter on the east side. You see, we were able to get up to nearly 1 million CFM of airflow into the mine, even before Guadalupe comes online. Most of that air is all on the west side of the mine.
So once again, we're having to pump and boost that air with a lot of horsepower over to the east side, but then all that hot air gets passed back through the mine. So the big advantage of Guadalupe will be reducing the power requirements we need, so that's adding cost today. Once Guadalupe comes on, we can shut down some of those booster fans, and then we'll also be able to bring that hot air out and not destroy our other infrastructure. So that comes online next month. We're really looking forward to it, and you'll see a big change as that comes in. So now we'll move over to the skarn overview, just as an introduction, and I'm gonna turn it over to Chris and to Martin Wafforn back in Vancouver.
He's gonna join us on the, on the webcast here to describe this PEA that we issued early in the year. We're really excited about this. This was our discovery we announced in 2018 with the first drill hole into the skarn, and we produced a PEA in early 2024, describing a 50,000 tons per day sub-level cave mine that'll produce over 17 million oz a year of silver for the first 10 years of production, as well as over 400,000 tons of zinc and 200,000 tons of lead, quite a large mine. We did estimate a capital to build that facility of $2.8 billion, about a six year build.
We described that we're going to be looking for partners, and we've got a lot of interest in this project from the large zinc producers and large zinc smelting houses. So we've been talking to them and exploring how we may set up a relationship, a partnership, in moving this project forward. Meanwhile, I'll turn it over to Chris and to Martin, so please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, everyone. Back with the technology. So we'll dive straight in. Obviously, we know where we're sitting, we know where we've got the veins. Again, we're over on the eastern portion as described. We're gonna now bring in the larger skarn sitting down around 800-1,000 m below. We're looking at... All of the drilling, those drill traces coming down, the drilling was done a lot from surface and using directional technology to drill down a mother hole and then splay off. This was worked out better for us in terms of economics. We've got three ore bodies, the 901 to the 903, 902.
We're gonna spin this round so you get a good idea before really looking at some in more detail, the geology. So one thing worth commenting as we move through into the mid-year is that the resource, the geological modeling was done over a year ago. Obviously, we released the December 2023 PEA with the updated resource, but the model was from 2023, so it's worth mentioning that we've got over 75,000 m of new drilling that's gonna go into an updated geological model for the mid-year, which is coming up, which we'll be releasing in August.
So certainly, work that's gone on, and really a lot of the focus has been on the 902, and the blue traces here is all that new drilling that we've done, which will be coming into the new resource. So really, we've gotta step back into really basic geology. We've got the volcanics, the pink on top, and we've got the blue limestones, the carbonates underneath. So what I wanna do is I want to just dive into a little bit of the basics of how we've built and understand the geological model. So the red is these intrusives, which come up from depth, and when they hit the limestone, the—remember, the blue stuff, it creates alteration, and that garnet... The, the alteration is garnets, the browns and the greens.
Now, when we've done all of this drilling, we've been able to log all of the core and been able to define this geological model. So the mineralization then comes up and actually then feeds into this alteration zone around these intrusives. So as you look through this, I mean, this is detailed geological modeling, which gives us confidence in the current resource that we have. Here you see the two veins that are coming through, potentially post the main source of this skarn mineralization.
Really just giving a very basic cross-section through this is we've got the three ore bodies surrounding these intrusive, which is where you have this alteration, and then you've got these greens and darker greens, browns, which again has been all mapped out to try and control and understand where we see the main sources of the mineralization coming. So that really gives you a very 101 basic idea of the geology and the alteration.
So in April this year, we released some additional drill results from the 902, and, you know, certainly, the U121, I mean, when we're drilling 77 m and nearly 600 grams of silver and +20% lead and zinc, with a 22 at 1.4 kilos, really shows a really high-grade core within the 902, which we've, we've obviously been working to try and define better for the, the resource update. So, you know, big, long intercepts. We know that this is all now gonna come into the, to the new model. So the, the model I'm showing here is, is that 2022 resource or geological model resource. And here we, here we have...
Just to give you an idea of the continuity of this drilling and the values we see. The NSR is inclusive of all the recoveries and the net smelter costs, et c., and this really then defines the geological resource model. And you can see the reds, the darker sort of 902, which shows us that that's higher grade and certainly over $100 a tons. And this now morphs into when we build the actual resource, which you see in the tables, that now starts to include the mining shapes, which Martin's going to talk a bit more.
Now you see it becoming more solid, and because that's what, that's what we're really able to mine, and Martin's gonna go through that in terms of how we build that model to then give you guys the resource, which is eventually economical to mine. So the skarn, you know, it's something we found as Pan American in 2018 and certainly been enjoyable to drill. And with that, I will turn it over to Martin Wafforn.
Martin, are you there?
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Just confirming you can hear me fine?
Yes, we hear you fine, Martin.
Perfect. So as you saw, the three large zones that make up the skarn deposit are very different from the narrow veins in the existing mine. Actually, if you could switch to 44. Perfect. And the geotechnical assessment of mining zones that are hundreds of meters thick and at depth is a key consideration of the mine design. We completed over 6,000 m of geotechnical drilling between 2021 and 2023 and continue today with a drilling and logging program, focusing on the skarn and on the waste in the caving zone directly above it. For mining method selection, we were able to establish design parameters by visiting other large-scale underground operations, reviewing technical reports, attending caving conferences, and working with some consultants who are real experts in the field, including Jarek Jakubec from SRK.
Our optimization methodology has been that with each new version of the resource model, we review options of higher grades with longhole stoping, medium grades with sub-level caving, and lower grades with block caving. Sub-level caving was selected as the mining method for the PEA, as it gave the best economic results. In terms of the ventilation assessment, certainly our experience with high temperatures at La Colorada, that Steve discussed, identified early on that heat removal would be key. We expect in situ rock temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius. Additionally, auto compression in the 1,000 m deep intake air shaft and equipment operation further contribute to heat loading.
The concept that we developed, working with our consultants to maintain workable temperatures, is to use high airflow volumes as the primary means for heat removal, supplemented with surface refrigeration plants to chill the air during daytime when there are high ambient temperatures. The ventilation circuit design is for high-quality, long-term infrastructure, including 10 m diameter, concrete-lined, fresh and exhaust air shafts. In terms of dewatering, the concept is to identify water-bearing structures with diamond drilling and to drill large-diameter wells to intercept these structures and dewater the mine. Initial pumping rates are expected to be high to lower the water level to below the first planned ore level at the 1,200 m elevation before it can be developed. We expect that water pumped from underground will be stored in ponds on surface to allow for cooling prior to discharge to the environment.
For concentrate transport, average daily production will be 2,850 tons. That will be transported to ocean ports by truck, with the possibility of some trucking to the smelter at Torreón. There is a rail right of way about 20 km from the mine that we are currently studying to see if that would be a viable alternative. Metallurgical testing was conducted on samples that were carefully selected and prepared to be representative of the deposit and to match the expected head grades of the mining inventory. We found that we had to repeat some of the test work because the resource model kept expanding, and we changed from an initial longhole stoping method to sub-level caving, which in turn changed the expected head grades. The metallurgical results are detailed in section 24 of the technical report....
The high-grade, high-quality zinc and silver-lead concentrates to be produced will be easily marketable, readily marketable. I'll touch on the filter tailings, power supply, and the process plant in subsequent slides. If you would advance to the next slide, please. Talking about sub-level caving, I like to think of sub-level caving, or SLC, as a step between block caving and longhole stoping with, with backfill. Generally speaking, block caving will have higher initial capital and lower operating costs than SLC. Longhole stoping will have higher operating costs and will not be able to achieve close to the production rates, largely because of the unit operations, including the extended backfilling cycles. In SLC, all of the ore is drilled, blasted, and mucked one ring at a time. We rely on caving of the waste to fill the void left by the extracted ore.
SLC is a top-down method that is conducive to automation and high production rates. The top-down feature takes advantage of the grade profile of the skarn deposit, which has higher value per ton resource at the top, and we can delay the cost of extending the ramps and shafts to the bottom elevations until well into the production period. The PE, PEA design for SLC has sub-levels developed on 25 m vertical intervals from an access ramp. A footwall drift is established, running parallel to the long axis of the ore body, and crosscuts are developed across the ore body to the hanging wall on a spacing of 15 m. To start mining, a slot is reamed and blasted at the hanging wall side, and the rings are retreated in a sequence, with one ring drilled, blasted, and mucked at a time. The rings are drilled all the same.
You can see the shape of the rings in the polygons that are drawn above the production crosscuts on the diagram to the right. The tonnage mucked from each ring is modeled and carefully controlled by a cave flow model. Overall, we think that we can achieve 84% ore body recovery, with 19% dilution at just over 100% of the tonnage drawn. As the ore from each ring is extracted, the cave waste material fills the void and acts as a backing for subsequent ore rings blasted. The caving of the waste is the critical aspect of SLC. We don't cave the ore body, we drill and blast it, but it is critically important for personnel safety that the waste does cave and keep the void filled.
The geotechnical assessment of the cave ability of the waste and the size of the excavation that we will need for the waste rock to start caving is key, as well as the instrumentation required and the options available to get the waste caving if it doesn't start as expected. Our plan is to mine the three zones down at the same vertical rate, using productivity rates that we've benchmarked against other sub-level caving mines. If you move to the next slide, please. This next slide shows a plan view of the initial surface layout. Tailings will be thickened to recycle water, then processed, filtered, and then conveyed to the storage facility, shown as the large brown shape at the bottom of the graphic.
The filtered tailings will then be distributed in the facility by truck, spread in lifts using bulldozers, and tilled with discs to aid with drying and compaction. The outer 100 m rim of the tailings will be compacted for stability. Ultimately, the large filtered tailings storage will completely cover the existing conventional storage facilities. From a long-term storage and stability perspective, this will effectively buttress the existing test tailings dams. The plan also shows the locations of the processing plant, the main ventilation shafts, as well as the portals for the twin declines, one of which will be fitted with a 3,800 m long conveyor way, and the other used for personnel and material movements. Moving to the next slide, the process flow sheet, we have a conventional crushing, grinding, and two-product flotation circuit.
When in operation, the ore will be primary crushed underground and conveyed to a covered coarse ore storage on surface. Ore will be reclaimed from the ore storage to open circuit secondary crushing and closed circuit tertiary crushing, and from there to a fine ore bin. The crushed product will be ground in a conventional ball mill circuit, comprising three large ball mills operating in a closed circuit with hydrocyclones. We have a selective flotation plant, with both the lead and zinc rougher flotation concentrates being reground before two stages of cleaning. Final concentrates will be thickened, filtered, and shipped. Moving to the next slide, and without getting into too much detail, as Steve has already mentioned, the estimated initial capital is $2.8 billion over a six-year construction period, with peak spending in years four and five when the mill is being constructed.
The depth of the deposit and the mine development time drives the construction period, the length of the construction period, with large capital items, like the mill, being scheduled as late as possible. The unit operating costs average just under $41 per tons over the life of the mine, and we think about $38.50 per tons when we're in full production. On the next slide, please. Highlighting the after-tax net present value from the PEA results, all of these are in the technical report. $1.087 billion at an 8% discount rate, with a after-tax IRR of 14%, using average life-of-mine metal prices of $2,800 per tons zinc, $2,200 per tons of lead, and $22 per ounce of silver.
Our average annual production from the first ten years, as Steve mentioned, is 17.2 million oz of silver, 427,000 tons of zinc, and 218,000 tons of lead, so a very significant producer. Note as well, as Chris mentioned, that this PEA is based on the mineral resource estimate at December 15th, 2023, which has 242,000 m of drilling. The geological model was completed in December 2022, and neither the mineral resource estimate nor the PEA include the more than 40,000 m of drilling that was completed during 2023, or the additional drilling, I think another 35,000 m completed during 2024, that is expected to be reflected in our mid-year resource update. Moving to the next slide, please.
The sensitivity analysis were conducted to ±20% of the assumed silver and zinc prices. It turns out that 20% may have been a bit low on the silver sensitivity. We also show sensitivity at 8% and 6.5% discount rates. The six-year investment period, this long construction period is responsible for the sensitivity to the discount rate. In the technical report, we also provide some further information on the sensitivity of the project to a 30,000 tons per day rate versus a 50,000 tons per day base case. And on the next slide, this chart, prepared using data primarily from S&P Global's database, shows that relative to 2023 mine performance, the La Colorada Skarn would rank as the fourth largest producing global silver mine.
The 17.2 million oz from the skarn deposit, 17.2 million oz is the estimated annual production for the first 10 years of the PEA. And finally, moving to the next slide. Like the previous slide, the skarn would rank as the fourth largest global zinc producer. Also, note the bar showing S&P Global's estimated mine life, whereby they project that by the mid-2030s, the world's biggest zinc mines are going into closure, other than the skarn mines. In any event, the skarn is projected to be a very important source of zinc and copper production... zinc and silver production, sorry. And with that, I'll hand it back to Steve.
Thank you, Martin. Yeah, a very exciting project. We're really looking forward to advancing on that, and we continue to advance on that this year. So moving on, I wanna talk about our Jacobina mine, which we acquired with the Yamana transaction in 2023. This mine was really the attraction of what brought us to the Yamana transaction, and we were fortunate to bring many of you that are here in the room today, down on a tour of the mine in January, and you got to see firsthand why we're so excited about this mine. It's really an incredible deposit. It's really a great team that we work with, highly skilled, motivated, local people in the area that run this operation for us, and we couldn't be more pleased with that team and how they're performing.
Currently, we're running the mine at steady state, 8,400 tons per day processing rate. We're producing right in the kinda 200,000, 185,000 to 200,000 oz a year. We're happy with that rate, with all the infrastructure we have in place today. We are conducting an optimization study to help lead us to where—what is the potential, what is the true long-term potential of this operation, given the vast resource potential that you're gonna hear from Chris. And I think we'll just jump right into that, Chris, if you wanna, wanna give us an overview of that.
Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. As many have had the pleasure of being on site, you know, we're sitting in Brazil, Salvador, 340 km over to the east, Jacobina. Sitting here, here's a bit of a regional geology map. It's worth noting the pink on the west side is the basement rock, which is the older rock there, and then we're sandwiched right in between 60,000 hectares of concessions, over a 155 km strike from sort of the base up to the north. We see these conglomerate packages outcropping along the strike of the tenements, which certainly is an exploration target for the future.
You'll see the bedding planes all striking that sort of north-south direction and the basement rocks over to the west here. Here's a bit more of a detailed view of the regional geology, and really, those red conglomerates is what we're looking for, the green being the intrusives. You know, these rocks have been cooked. They're very old, 2.4-3 billion years old, and it's a paleoplacer deposit, so the mineralization is within these quartz conglomerates and within the matrix. Imagine that this was a big stream system and depositing gold way back, billions of years ago. So you know, we're across a 10 km, north being over here, and south, Jabal Sul, and we've got lots of different mining centers along, all connected by underground galleries and development.
Here we've got the resource shapes sitting on top of those, and we're gonna sort of flip and look west. Underneath, you'll see the dark traces, which is the drilling, and that's been happening along the strike of all of these different deposits. Canavieiras, which has been the mainstay and higher grade up to the north. We're gonna fade those out, and we're gonna look at just the infrastructure, and then this is the life of mine stopes, which has created that.
That resource that we're gonna that was released mid-year last year in 2023, and we really like this slide because this shows the development of drilling and each of the different companies from Anglo American and Williams Resources, and then Yamana took it over in 2016 almost. Then they really started to ramp up the drilling, and the drilling is on the left-hand side there, up to sort of 120,000 m a year. And of course, as the production's come up, they've increased the resource base to where we are now at 3 million oz of gold as reserve, with a fairly good measured indicated resource and inferred.
And now if we just look at the additions, and looking down here, so we've got 3 million for reserves. There's been 2.2 million oz from 2020-2027 added, and they've produced 1 million, and hence that constant increase in reserve base over the years with that drilling, which is really, really important. So back to the life of mine. We're now gonna focus in on Jacobina Sul, which has really been was defined early on just with a couple of drill holes, and we're gonna show within the next section of the video is how we increase that confidence and how we've been able to build that reserve resource base. Underground connectivity, Jacobina Sul, we also released in the recent press release last night.
We're gonna zoom into, really, as I mentioned, the development of these, these, these conglomerates and, and the reserve as it builds out. Again, sporadic drilling across this in the south, then 2019, 2020, and it just as we infill and increase the drill confidence here, we get to a point where we, we add resources on around an 80-by-80 m drill spacing. In 2024, we have the current drill program, 13,000 m. Here's some of the highlights through here. You'll see multiple intercepts because we're, we're hitting multiple conglomerates, and we're gonna show you a section in a minute on that.
And so, you know, we're sitting at, as we increase that drill spacing, we increase the resource and the confidence, as it sits in the recent 2023 at over 300,000 indicated and over 700,000 oz in inferred resource. So yeah, as you saw that increase in drilling over the years, and really these packages across this, you know, 10-14 km with these conglomerates, really gives us an idea of the potential that sits here, and this is all open down dip as well.
This is the plan for 2024, and we'll spin it round and really just show the, you know, down dip extensions are all open and a cross-section to finish with, which really shows how these, these red conglomerate packages are all stacked up together. So we're able to go through and multiple hit these, these packages. So João Belo Sul , yeah, really, really great in terms of adding additional reserves and additional resources and reserves, and, you know, that's gonna go into the mine plan, certainly for the future. That's south of the main mine itself, and so the exploration and trying to find new areas like João Belo Su l for the future really started to target the Maracota zone.
Again, these results were released last night, and it's sitting to the west of Canaveris. So sometimes when you see sections and you see all of these stopes here, we're really behind this, and that's certainly been the target of exploration in 2024. So we're now gonna... Again, this is the Maracota sitting over to the west of Canaveris, and this is where the target has been.
You know, we have been building on historic drilling, you know, certainly from additional, you know, drilling's just happened over the years, and really it was taking that drilling, and 2022 just starting to again infill, and then we get to a point where we become confident, and certainly the 2024 have shown us good results, which we released in the press release last night. Nearly 3 m at 5.8. Remember that the reserve grade is 2 g, so anything, you know, excess of 2 g is looking pretty good for us, and some great results. And in gray, you'll see the historic.
So, you know, this is a 2 km length if we're looking west, and, you know, the, there's some historic stuff at, you know, 2.4 at nearly 12 g, and over here, looking at 1.8 at nearly 10 g. You know, that's, for us, is all open, and certainly that infill drilling will start to add resources in the, in this, mid-year update for 2024. And again, just kind of projecting where we see the future. It's open to the north as well, where there is another series of deposits, which as we build out and the mine infrastructure follows this, allows us to get in there and drill.
The 2024 drill program, infill drilling, of course, and we're gonna flip around and, and again, show you one of these sections where we see these reefs stacked up against each other, which is, which is certainly what we, we like to see. So as Steve was mentioning, Jacobina, from an exploration point of view, it's open down dip, it's open along strike, and we, we look forward to continue exploring in the future. Thank you.
... Thank you, Chris. Moving on, I just wanna cover the mining method we employ at Jacobina currently is a sub-level open stope mining method with very limited backfill, that's being utilized. We do see a limitation in how far down dip we can take this mining method. So as we look into the future, a big focus of the optimization program is looking at alternatives to this mining method that would allow us to mine the deposits down dip into the potential that Chris was talking about. But we're also finding some other really exciting potential with the change of mining method that I'll describe here shortly. But for now, we're using the sub-level open stope mining method on all the structures that we mine. We do leave pillars behind.
We do leave some pillars behind within the stacked reefs that Chris described. Processing-wise, it's pretty straightforward. It's a standard crushing, grinding, cyanide leach, and then we do a carbon and pulp, gold recovery and produce gold doré, and then we go to a conventional tailings facility. If you look at the history of production with this, it's been a very strong producer. We see it really at steady state. We had record-breaking production in 2023 for the full year of the mine. Three quarters of that was under Pan American's leadership. One quarter of last year was under Yamana's leadership. 196,000 oz produced. And this year we're forecasting again the 185,000-203,000 ounce production, pretty much steady state.
Cost-wise, we do have a different methodology of cost, so the costs are quite complex when you try to go back in time and compare our costs with what Yamana's accounting systems and methods were. They were doing a gold equivalent accounting basis. We do a byproduct credit. Obviously, at Yamana or at Jacobina, there's very little byproduct credit here. But some of the gross growth capital that was being expended, we viewed as being more operating expense, more sustaining capital. Some of the G&A that was being pushed up to the corporate G&A, we kinda go the opposite way.
We like to push those costs down to the sites, based on the time distribution of our people and how they apply themselves in the corporate groups and in the regional offices to our mine sites, which is really where they're dedicated. It's a decentralized approach, and they get charged out more or less as a consultant. So it's a whole different approach when you look at... You can't really compare directly G&A costs. You can't really compare directly cost per tons or the AISC costs, given the way that the accounting systems are different. But it gives you a feel. We are seeing a bit of a higher sustaining cost this year, and the sustaining projects, we're looking at between $53 million-$55 million this year.
There's a little bit being spent to connect some of the mines that Chris described. We still got some interconnecting galleries that we'll complete on that. Exploration's a big spend there, $16 million this year that we're spending. We're seeing great results, we're seeing great opportunities there, and that's going to only feed our optimization studies that we're working on. We do have some lease payments there, optimizing our abilities to manage the business. We got approximately $12 million in lease payments this year for mobile mining equipment. We do have some replacements and rebuilds on mobile and mining equipment. We have some planned upgrades that were underway, and to bring it up to the standards that we think we need to meet, to run a Pan American Silver operation there, and we have a tailings dam expansion underway this year.
We also have about $14 million-$15.5 million of growth projects, true growth projects. The big focus one is the mine optimization, and I'll talk a little bit more about that shortly. We are part of the optimization of the future. We're looking at a filtration plant there and going to a dry stackable filter cake for our tailings. We do have some power supply upgrades that we're doing, again, focused on the future so that we can secure power for any upgrade that we may need into the future. We're doing some more water treatment coming out of the mine. We're kind of optimizing or enhancing our water treatment from the mine, so we're not putting as much water in the process plant, where it's more expensive to control by building higher tailings facilities.
So that'll save us money into the long term. And then projects-wise, we are completing what Yamana had called the phase three projects, the last three of which are really a tailings line upgrade. We're expanding the diameter of the tailings line that would have capacity for a potential expansion. We're putting some better screening machines in the crusher and some grinding circuit screening that'll help us run higher tonnage through the plant with the CIP circuit and keep it stable. In terms of the optimization study, as I mentioned, we're looking. There's some really exciting work coming out of this, and we're looking at moving towards a paste fill, the open stope mining with a paste backfill. The paste backfill will allow us to manage the seismicity we're seeing.
As we go to depth and we spread laterally, we start to see an increase of seismicity in the region, given the, you know, you're leaving open stopes behind, and those pillars do tend to start to fail over time. So that's what drives that seismicity. So to manage that seismicity and to allow us to mine deeper and allow us to mine at higher rates more laterally, we see a paste backfill plant really providing us significant benefits into the future. It also reduces the amount of tails that we put on the surface, 'cause we can use a lot of our tails as that paste backfill material and send it back underground. So we're studying that. We're doing some test work on paste backfilling right now.
Preliminarily, our concepts look really solid on paper, and it does look like a significant benefit to move that way. And it also allows us to increase the recovery of the reserve overmining. We're leaving behind pillars, as I mentioned, in these reefs, these stacked reefs. With the same development that we're currently doing, we can pull a lot of those pillars back into production and then backfill those stopes with paste so that we get a higher, much higher recovery of the resource than we currently are. So we're pretty excited that this will actually potentially lead to not only increased production opportunities, which we think there are some there, we'll have to see how the study comes out, but also lead to lower cost, because the same development can give us more ore tons. So all that's gonna roll up.
We're doing further work on that. We're doing some testing the paste backfills now with the different tailings materials, and we'll come out with a study during the first half of 2025 that'll start to finally define what is, what is the optimum approach to Jacobina over the long term? What kind of economics can we see here? What kind of production rates? And that's where we'll see the expansion capabilities of this operation. Given the resource growth opportunities we have along this immense, immense deposit, we're, we're very excited about what the options are moving forward there. So with that, before we take a break, we'll just open up for some Q&A. John, go ahead.
Excuse me, I'm used to thinking about ore grades and not rock temperatures.
Yes.
Would 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit be the hottest operating underground mine in the world, or second or third hottest?
No.
Would you walk us through one or two of the hotter mines as an example of the cooling methods they use and their ore grades that are able to afford the cooling methods?
Yeah, great question, John. No, La Colorada is not anywhere near the hottest mine in the world. There's actually some mines or several mines that I'm aware of, that are reaching temperatures of 70 degrees Celsius, which are dangerous temperature. They're actually unlivable temperatures, so they do require cooling. They do require a lot of cooling. So they are higher grade mines, and when you look at the NSR values of what they're mining, they're typically higher grade. So we're dealing with a much lower temperature gradient than what we're seeing in some of those mines. However, the difference is the rock types.
The rock types that we're encountering, even though that's not the hottest temperature of, of what mines have faced, with this kind of rock, this kind of temperature is very detrimental to the conventional way that we were mining, and our inability to get conventional raise bores into this ground is unique compared to some of these mines where you see the 70 degrees Celsius. That is the difference.
Who's 70 degrees?
Celsius, which-
Which mine?
Well, a couple that I'm aware of would be just up the road, the Gatos Silver Mine is seeing temperatures up to that level, and in Arizona, some of those deep copper mines, the Rosemont mine that they're talking about developing is up there.
If I could ask a second question. I was just trying to calculate at today's prices, the La Colorada Skarn output, and I was getting $516 million for silver at $30, $1,127 million for zinc at $1.20, and I was generous and used $1.10 for lead at $520 million. So I'm sort of teasing Michael for not giving us a demand supply on zinc, because the zinc revenue's twice as much. But world steel output is down 1% this year. That's a large use of zinc. If the cars are electric with more aluminum skins, that's less zinc. Recent exchange inventories of zinc are around 390,000 tons. They bottomed in the mid-50s a year ago, so it's up seven-eight-fold. So give us, give us the sales pitch for zinc.
I know you're Pan American Silver, but the mine's really zinc.
I'm gonna let Michael do that one.
Yeah. Yeah, thanks, John. And you're absolutely right. It's 60% in our study, and the prices have changed since then, but 60% of the revenue is zinc. Silver is about 20%, but it's a meaningful number on the silver side. And hence, my announcement from the beginning on that we are looking for partners for that zinc or base metals and really focus on our side on the silver. You know, I was before I joined Pan American, I was working in the zinc business, and I obviously talked to people in the zinc business.
When you look at the graph we showed with the largest zinc mines in the world, you will notice there that from about 2030, 2032 on, most of them will come to an end, or not, maybe Antamina is not coming to an end, but it's going deeper down, and it's mining more copper there than zinc. Well, the big zinc producer is still looking at probably about a 2%-2.5% average growth on the zinc's demand over the next, like, 30-40 years. I'm not the zinc guy anymore. We are focused on the silver, as I said. I talked to a lot of the very, very large zinc producer.
There's a lot of interest on a long life, large project like that, as you can imagine, and, I didn't notice that anybody would be worried about the future zinc demand in the world. I think when you look at long-term infrastructure build, when you look at how much of the carbon footprint is used in the world to produce steel and concrete, and, as an example, when I come in from the airport and I drive under the Gardiner, and I look up on the bridge here, you feel what I mean, right?
I mean, if you would build, for example, infrastructure, long-term infrastructure, with rebar that is protected with zinc, for example, and I think that's probably where it's gonna go, that money is a way better investment than doing what we're doing right now and just rebuilding that infrastructure. Way better use of your infrastructure money and way better use if you look at the carbon footprint in the future. But I really, when I talked to the zinc producer, I did not hear any worries about, you know, the zinc demand here over the next, let's call it, three to four decades. Yes?
Thanks very much. It's Jackie Przybylowski from BMO. I just wanted to ask about that partnership process you're going through at the for the La Colorada Skarn. Can you talk a little bit about how it's going? And maybe with all the exploration and future potential that you maybe are delineating, is there sort of motivation to wait until some of that's more fleshed out before you continue with that partnership, or how can we expect that timeline to go?
I think by now I talked to all the big zinc players in the world, so that was kind of the first step. As I indicated, I would like to focus on the silver, so I don't have the final model yet with me, but when you look at the 20% revenue from the silver, it kind of guides you a little bit in what I'm thinking should be our ownership in this project. Obviously, you need a little bit more buffer there to account for lower and higher silver prices over decades, and that's really what we are moving on. So it's probably not gonna be just one partner. It's probably gonna be, like, you know, three or... I mean, look, look at maybe Antamina kind of style, right?
Where you have several producers and a smelter in there as well, that participate in a project of that size. Not so much on, I mean, on the capital size only, but also on the logistics side. Obviously, when you have to move, what is it? Like, about 1 million tons or more than 1 million tons of concentrate, I think, between the zinc and lead, per year. So I will advance those discussions during the year. It's really a bit too early to talk about that while we continue to update the resource model and drill. You heard that this is about a six year build, so there's still time to adjust for that.
But I think it's the right time to start talking to strong partners how to split this, and, you know, that it will take a while to get the agreements and everything in place. And then, while the... The beauty in La Colorada is, while you go through this construction, we can continue to mine the veins. You saw that the 3D continuation and new discoveries that Chris just talked. And, you know, for a long time I thought, well, once we are—because as we are mining in the eastern side, when you start the caving, if that's the mining method we go, at the end, you have to stop, obviously, mining on top of the vein, so you mine them out over the next six years or whatever it takes for the construction.
But now I think with Chris's results, it goes so far to the east that there's maybe even a way to continue mining high-grade veins as well, just further away from the caving zone. So definitely a kind of a singular situation where you can plan and build a mine while you have a mine still running on the higher levels.
If I could ask a follow-up. Given what you mentioned and what you showed, that a lot of the zinc mines are gonna be decreasing or coming offline in the next decade, are you seeing more interest right now from smelters looking for potential feed or... I mean, I know you mentioned you're looking for maybe a mix, but is your preference to find somebody to operate the mine, or would you look just at smelter partners?
It's all open for us, really. I don't wanna determine that yet. I mean, that's two different stories. I mean, we have to be careful here not to look at too short, too short of a timeframe, right? A lot of the zinc market on the smelting side is pretty hot. I mean, we got very attractive treatment terms for us right now because, you know, there's a shortage of concentrate right now. But this is, you know, when you look at the market, this is not something that's gonna persist for the next decades. It's moving up and down. So when I talk, of course, it's different when I talk to investors. They look at today's market and say, "Well, wait a minute, you know, prices are there," and whatever.
When I talk to the big smelting houses and big producers, they all think in multi-decade, long projects, and that's really the attraction of this one. So they're not really distracted or where the numbers sit right now today. Oh, no.
Thank you. One more on this. You studied longhole stoping, and presumably with a higher cut-off grade, and you showed that high-grade core in 902.
... area, why not cast this mine as a higher grade, lower tonnage, lower CapEx mine that you maybe can do yourself? No need for,
Maybe-
partners, et c.
Mm-hmm. Maybe I start on the, yeah, so and pass it on to Steve. But don't forget that quite a bit of that very high grade drilling that we published and that you saw there is not included yet in the resource update. So I think one-
Never too late to change.
Sorry?
Never too late to change.
No, no, I completely agree. It will be included in the resource update, and I think Steve-
Yeah
... can talk about what he's looking at on the mining method side.
Yeah, I don't know if I could add. We selected the sub-level caving for the PEA because it was the superior economic case for the resource model that we had at the time of the PEA. With this new resource model that's coming out now, we are revisiting the mining methods, the mining shapes, and we're going to reinvestigate that. Keep in mind, to get to this depth, the... You know, somebody asked me earlier today: "Are you still gonna need four entrances? Are you still gonna need twin ramps? Are you still gonna need twin shafts?" The answer is yes. No matter what mining method we need, we've gotta have the proper ventilation, and we've gotta have the proper access to get people and materials and ore in and out of the mine.
There is a capital component to that that's pretty hefty. We are going to revisit that because that 902 core is a lot different than what we modeled in the PEA model. We'll be investigating all three mining methods once again as part of this new resource estimate. Thereafter, we'll look at new mining methods, and we'll decide, are we ready to move to PFS with the current design, or are we gonna back off and redo a new PEA with a different mining method? That'll be yet to be decided.
Thank you.
Yep. There was one question, Michael, on the board-
I saw from-
from Chuck. Yeah, I think it was just the last-
From Chuck.
I think we already answered maybe-
Just a while-
The question is, will a potential partner need to have sub-level cave experience? I think we just Steve just answered that. Nothing is set in stone yet, but of course, one idea, it's not only to help on the capital side, but if that's the mining method that we decide to go with, obviously, it'd be nice to have somebody with experience. As for us, sub-level caving will be a new mining method that we don't have experience in. Ovais?
Just a quick question from me. In, in terms of, you know, exploration, obviously seems to be a big focus for the company. You know, infill results that, you know, Chris showed us, you know, show good continuity, exploration results, show us good mine life extensions. Jacobina as well as La Colorada have kind of, you know, at least a 15-year-plus mine lives. Is there a plan to bring those ounces forward? Is that just to create more flexibility? Obviously, Yamana was looking at, you know, doing expansion at Jacobina. Any thoughts there in terms of what the future possibilities could be?
Yeah. At Jacobina, Ovais, we are as part of this optimization study looking at where that's going to take us in terms of throughput and expandability of that mine. We feel under the open stope mining method, we're really at the limits, unless we find more deposits like Maricota, it might be able to be a supplement to what we have. But we think the real value is changing the mining method, and that's going to open up more tons for the same development. It should move us towards an expansion, but I don't wanna commit to anything there until we get this optimization work done, which will come out in the first part of next year.
Any opportunities at La Colorada?
La Colorada, right now, we just wanna get our feet back on the ground with the ventilation, reestablish this ventilation. Chris is doing the infill drilling on these new zones, and we wanna see how those start to open up. We got some ideas of how we're gonna go after those. That could lead to some interesting opportunities for us between what we're currently mining in the veins and the processing and up to the skarn. So that's open right now. But right now, our focus is just getting this mine back into the ventilation we need to run it properly, and then we'll start looking at potential upside opportunities from there next year.
Thanks.
Yep. Okay, so do we have time for the break?
Right.
Okay, so a quick 10-minute break, and then we'll cover a few more of our operations when you get back. 10 minutes, please. Thanks. Okay, we're back in. Hopefully, everybody's back online on the webcast. So I appreciate everybody's attention. We'll get started. We're going to go through, in more detail, two more operations, El Peñon and Huarón. And I wanna introduce our newest member of the team, which is actually a returning member of the team, and very privileged to have Mr. Scott Campbell. He's our Senior Vice President of Operations and Projects. Just took the assignment here, in early April, and welcome back, Scott. He used to work for us. He came to us with the Tahoe acquisition, worked for doing all our projects in South America.
He left for greener pastures for a while, and has come back, and we're really happy to have you back, Scott. So I'm gonna let him present all the rest of the operations.
Great. Well, thank you. Thanks very much, Steve, for that warm welcome, and yeah, it's a pleasure to be back after a two year hiatus at a peer organization. And one of the main things that really brought me back to Pan American was the growth and the potential and the continued success of this organization, and the quality of the leadership team, and the longevity of continued success, so it's a pleasure to be back. So, like Steve mentioned, I'll give a rundown here about the Huarón and El Peñon operations, and then, together with Chris, we'll tag team a little bit. He'll cover the exploration and geology, and then I'll continue with the other operations. There are six others, and obviously, La Arena has already been discussed, so...
I won't go into Lorena, so let's start off with Huarón. Huarón is a historic mine operating, been operating nearly continuously since the early 1900s. There was a brief time in the 1990s when operations were stopped prior to when we did the acquisition of Huarón. So there's a lot of potential in Huarón. Chris will get into this, the recently discovered Horizonte zone, we're very, very excited about. It's the Horizonte zone is close to surface, and it's providing a favorable mix of ores from what we've seen so far, and we're very encouraged by that. This, the whole Horizonte discovery really emphasizes the importance of brownfield near mine exploration. Let's skip that. The... I think there's one. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Chris, you're up.
Right. Well, we're back, and as Scott mentioned, I mean, we're now shooting to Peru. We're up in the high Andes within the Pasco province close to Cerro de Pasco, Eocene epithermal belt, where we've got lots of different polymetallic deposits. And we're, as mentioned, we're sitting Lima down here. We've got around 48,000 hectares in and around the Huarón mine. We are surrounded by Chungar, which is a Volcan operation, slightly to the south of the operation itself there. You know, really looking at the local geology and we're gonna superimpose the veins, the red veins, which are all striking west to east. We've got an anticline sitting in the middle. I'm gonna pause it there.
So all of these structures are surrounding... we've got an anticline. There's like 120 structures, which makes up the resource and reserve here at Huarón. Historic mine, the anticline, and we've got intrusive sitting below that, potentially the source of these fluids. And so really, when we look at the context, and all I'm showing here is the main sort of eight structures, which makes up around 30% of the current reserve resource. And, you know, the veins, again, as I mentioned, striking east-west, you know, different dips, strikes, and, you know, we have an extensive underground workings. You know, again, this mine's been going for, you know, 100 years.
All of the drilling that's happened, all those drill traces, drilling out all of these different veins, which are polymetallic in nature. And now just superimposing, as mentioned, you know, we're sitting on 50 million oz of silver here, and we're only looking around 30% of those reserve life of mine shapes here at the moment. Really just put it into context, it would be way too crowded if I put them all. And you know, you can see the infrastructure and all these different veins, which are currently being mined. And as Scott mentioned, we're really encouraged about the Horizonte zone, which sits down to the south. A bit of a history, and you know, we're going back to 2009.
You know, we're continuously drilling around 20,000-30,000 m here. We have a good, you know, we, we do find continuously here at Huarón. However, we did see in 2023 a reduction in reserves, from our, from close to about 60 million down to 50 million. 8 million oz of silver came out of reserve, and that was because, you know, we always have these changing parameters from, you know, the 43-101, etc . And, you know, they're constantly updating, you know, how can you put things into reserves? Is it based on historic? Can you back up that historic? Has it got... So, you know, with this sort of historic mine, we're constantly having to review some of the older reserve blocks.
They got moved out, and hence, we had a bit of a, not just depletion, but a reduction as well from the reserve. But we found again in Huarón, and you know, we're sitting at that 51 million oz of silver. The Horizonte zone, which we're gonna focus on today, and that came out in the news release that came out yesterday evening. And as Scott mentioned, this is close to the surface, this is a southern area. I mean, as you can see, there is some historic workings down there already, but really, we've just gone in and followed up some of the historic values, gone in, started to infill drill, and started to pull together and bring in access back into these areas, you know, rehabilitating some of these galleries, et c.
And you can see some of the nice results we're seeing here, 1.68 at over 300 g with, you know, really good base metals. And we and I think this is something that, you know, these sort of old mines can give us when you go back into areas, find projections, and this is what we're looking to drill out in the future. So again, we see some really nice upside in the exploration on these older veins, which were known, just going back in and systematically drilling these structures and getting some nice results. I mean, you know, results at over 300 g a tons, you know, is almost double the reserve grade that we have currently at Huarón.
Another structure, Cometa Ramal, that was being mined to the west. Again, you can see the reserve which came in recently, and it's just really extending these vein structures out four meters at over 300 g, which is excellent, 2.3 at 600. I mean, these are fabulous grades for Huarón for the future, and so we're very excited to be going into these older areas. And as you'll see, you know, the strike out to the southeast is all there, and it's certainly something we're looking forward to drilling in the future as we go into sort of back end of 2024 and then in and into 2025. These will certainly be some of our targets.
That was Cometa Ramal, one of the other structures, and we're just gonna focus on one more structure in this Horizonte zone to really just give you a feel for, you know, the grades that we're getting here. And it's Cuerpo Andres , started drilling in 2020. Again, we defined, got in reserves. We're actually mining here now, and really, that infill drilling and extensional drilling is starting to pay dividends and starting to see some really good results. 0.8 at 756 with really good lead and zinc, which is, as mentioned in Huarón, certainly high grade. And as we can see, everything's still striking off to the southeast.
Some infill drilling for this year, and then we'll be building out those programs in 2025. So just spin around here, and then we're gonna zoom back out, and we're gonna look at the Patrick vein, which again, was in the release yesterday. This again really highlights that historic nature of Huarón and going back into some of these areas and infill drilling. This is still open to the west. You know, certainly 1.66 at 819 g a tons with spectacular lead and zinc numbers. So, you know, this again is within historic workings, and it's certainly open to the west, and that's something we're gonna be following up on as we move into the back end of this year.
And it just keeps giving. You know, it's been mining for 100 years plus. We keep finding additional areas, and we're really looking forward to this Horizonte zone down to the southeast and building that out over the next year. Over to you, Scott.
Great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. You can see a rich past and a bright future at Huarón that we're very, very excited about. Located up at 4,500 m above sea level, about a three-hour, three-hour drive from Lima. It's got a lot of advantages. Anyway, regarding the mining and the processing methods, it's an open stope mining method, Huarón, that we implement. The processing plant is a flotation plant located at site. Regarding costs, with a near surface operation characteristic of Horizonte, as you get deeper and deeper into a mine, of course, costs and maintenance costs, ventilation costs, development costs increase. One more favorable aspect of Horizonte is it's near surface, so we expect. So far, the costs in developing that have been favorable, and they'll continue to do so in the future.
We're pretty excited about the upcoming commissioning in Q3 and then the ramp-up in Q4 of our filtered tailings plant at Huarón. It's a big project. This will give us our tailings facility many advantages. It'll be a dry stack, convert to a dry stack. We'll minimize the footprint of future tailings storage. We'll assure the geotechnical stability of the facility, and this will maximize our water recycling and minimize our net water usage. So that's another benefit of Huarón looking forward. A recently completed state, not federal, state highway has been paved up to Huarón from the coast of Lima, which cuts down on transport time for our concentrate shipments, and it's a safer alternative to the old central highway that runs up... It's much less crowded, too, so it's another advantage.
We source a lot of our skilled labor locally from the areas of direct influence, and the, you know, the longevity of the Huarón operation, we're seeing second, sometimes third-generation miners at our operations, which is really good from the local town of Huayllay. Switch over now to the El Peñon mine, underground gold mine in northern Chile. We acquired El Peñon through the Yamana transaction last year. It's located in the Atacama Desert in Region II of Chile. It's about a two-hour drive from the port city of Antofagasta. Of course, the Escondida operation and Zaldívar operations are big open-pit copper mines are located nearby. Our we faced a lot of challenges last year to meet the production guidance of 160,000 oz of gold. We finished closer to about 130,000 last year.
That shortfall really attributable to the widely spaced infill drilling in the high-grade areas. The guidance for this year is just about 130,000 oz, and we're on track to meet that guidance. All right. You're up, Chris. Go ahead.
All right, so last of the videos, and certainly, I was, I was literally just there in El Peñon, you know, Atacama Desert, as Scott was mentioning. Antofagasta, we got the Paleocene Belt , which does house a lot of low sulfidation, sort of epithermal gold deposits, and certainly, again, south-southeast of Antofagasta. Here's those rocks, and as mentioned, Escondida, just over to the east of El Peñon, Soldado and some of the other deposits of this type within this belt. We've got around 120,000 hectares sitting, you know, right on the center of El Peñon within that, and you can see Escondida over to the east. Here's the access in.
As mentioned, 165 km, and you come in from the north, northeast there. I'm gonna zoom in to a bit more of the deposit itself, and just really a very quick geology. We've got the Cretaceous. It's lined by two faults, and right in the center are the particular rocks that we wanna find, which is tuffs and rhyolites, dacites, which house the low-sulfidation gold system. Escondida sitting over there, pretty close. So the red outlines are the vein structures that we see underground. So core area, where the core mine is, slightly north, runs around 14 km from north to south. We've got two other deposits, which again, was in the release from yesterday, Chiquilla Chica and Tostado Sur, which are relatively high silver grades.
But we'll talk about those in a minute. So now we're gonna zoom in to the core mine. Here you've got the dry stack tailings all the way down there. You see it closer on this more in-depth Google. And now, really, I mean, looking at the extensive underground workings that we have, and we're starting to bring on the resource shapes, I mean, that's over 14 km from north to south. And here's some of the main structures, and when we talk about some of the areas, Pampa Campamento, which was on the release, we're gonna talk about El Valle, which is a splay structure, and Paloma, which is sitting over to the north.
When we look at this in three dimensions, and when you start to see all of the different deposits or ore shoots within these major structures, it's quite remarkable, yeah, the development as well that goes into trying to get to these areas, and develop and mine these. But extensive, I mean, it's a world-class deposit, and the infrastructure alone is quite remarkable. And it's all accessible underground from literally from north to south. Takes a while to get there, but you can drive it. So we're gonna start to focus in on some of the details. And really, the history of El Peñón has really been from 1992, 1993, all the way up until today, where they've been constantly finding additional veins.
Those additional veins, you know, bring on those ounces to 500,000 ounces, you know, through the history, and that's really been supported by the drilling. At the moment, we're drilling around 90,000 m. We've got a 20,000 that's not there, which was additional infill drilling on reserve confirmation, and we're also putting in an additional 30,000 m, probably towards the back end of this year to continue that drilling. And as Scott mentioned, we did suffer a little bit with the reserve reconciliation last year. It's something we're working on. As I mentioned, 20,000 m gone into reconfirmation of those reserve blocks in that high-grade areas, and it's something we're working on for the mid-year update. So can't really tell you much more.
Something we're working on and, and very conscious of, but certainly from the exploration point of view, we'll be looking at seeing that increase in resource this year, certainly to try and show the potential that may exist. And some of that potential certainly sits in Pampa Campamento. It's one of our stayers, main stayers of the, the production. Around 15% of the reserve sits here in Pampa Campamento. It's being mined at the moment, and where we've had a lot of success is towards the sort of northern portion at depth of the structure itself. And I'm just gonna explain a couple of bits here. You've got this pink, which is the, rhyolites, we call them.
It's a volcanic, and they've certainly been the mainstay, the host lithology rock that the mineralization likes to get into, and certainly been the mainstay for the most of the mine. Now, recently, that structure has been broken in terms of finding mineralization in the green dacite volcanics below it, and that's sort of a game changer because it means that the potential in some of these structures now can go deeper, whereas before it was only really focused on just the pink rhyolites. And certainly in Pampa Campamento, we're down to about 750 m, which is really good, and that's certainly the largest vertical extent we see at El Peñón today, and is in an intrusive andesite, which certainly opens up potential for the future.
This was some of the results came in the release recently, and we'll just focus on some of those. You know, from 163, nearly a m at 11 grams and 258, at 1.8 at 12 grams. So certainly showing the potential that still exists in areas of these structures. The future, certainly down dip, and it's open, and we're in this newly defined lower unit, which bodes well for the future. We're now gonna flip out and have a look at another structure, which again, a lot of production comes from El Valle. That sits closer to Pampa Campamento in the southern portion of the mine.
And if we, again, same, same kind of deal, we're gonna look at current infrastructure, where the production is, you've got the resource, reserve shapes, and then the drilling that's. There's certainly within infill drilling and showing us some really nice widths and good grades. Again, it was in the press release, and it—we're really focused up in these rhyolites, and this really, again, shows you that it's still now open at depth, whereas before the idea was, no, it only sits in the rhyolites in the pink. Now we're showing that in other veins, we're seeing it open into the dacites, which is good. And again, 1.5 at 8.2 g gold.
So, you know, we're certainly looking at increased drilling, get the infill done, get some confidence, and then going lower into the, into these dacites. We're gonna shoot very quickly over to Paloma, which has again been one of the mainstays of the production over the past year. I think, you know, within the last 12 months, nearly 30,000 ounces has come from here alone. And this is, this is mainly within the, in the dacite, and certainly a future program of drilling in this particularly high-grade structure is, is programmed. These, these are all intercepts over 3.5 and, and certainly, again, at depth within this, within this structure and in the, in this sort of rock unit, which is, which is planned for the future. Open in, in, in both directions, and it's a cross-section.
And now we're just gonna flip out and really, again, these results were in the release recently. We're gonna focus in on our Pampa Sur target. This is new for us. We're hoping to get some Inferred Resource into the statement mid-year, this year. And I think you're gonna see that this, you know, there's 20,000 m that have already gone in. We've got another 10,000 m planned for here this year. And for us, there was historic drilling here, wasn't a focus. We've now got back in, we started to infill drill. We've now defined an area of 500 m on strike from the previous operations. And as you can see, some great intercepts. We're in those rhyolites.
You know, the extent of this package is around 300 m, and it's all open to the south. And you can see some of the results, 1.2 at 22 g, and 1 kg silver, which was really good. And from the historics, which I mentioned, that's worth noting. I mean, from, you know, way back, there's a 1.2 at over 4.2 g, and all of this is open to the south. So encouraging stuff, a lot of drilling to do, a lot of work to do, and certainly looking forward to getting back down to El Peñon to review that. And I think it's worth mentioning, I mean, you've got all of these structures striking off south. There are future areas which are untouched.
This southern block is certainly a focus of ours now, and I think you'll see from. Indulge me for five seconds to show you a. You, you'll be able to visualize, you know, what's happening at El Peñon today. These are the drills going along to the south, drilling out to Pampa Sur, the dry stacks over to the right, and all of this open and not a lot to see, just the Atacama Desert. So, with that, I'll leave you with the potential that exists.
Thanks, Chris. Plenty of upside to that key asset down in Chile, in El Peñon. So the mining method at El Peñon, bench and fill method, and one of the recovery circuits, got primary crusher, milling, CCD wash, and the Merrill-Crowe plant, and we produce silver-gold doré bars there. It's really a characterized, Steve used the word steady state to describe a couple of our operations, and this is really one of them in El Peñon. It's a reliable production in a really favorable jurisdiction in El Peñon, you know, near Antofagasta. Of course, Antofagasta is a port city, international airport, long history of mining, experienced, skilled workforce, and it's a pretty favorable place to live for the mining community in Chile.
We're leveraging our experience with narrow vein mining in other operations at El Peñon to really optimize and increase productivity there. Things like split blasting that, you know, increased productivity, where we like to try to segregate our waste material during the blasting process, and other improvements that we've learned along the way. You saw a photo there a minute ago, that interesting photo, that bird's-eye view that Chris showed of the... That was a picture of the dry stack facility you can see off to the right. That's a key feature of El Peñon. That's a really stable, thanks to the vacuum filter system that we have there. It's footprints minimized, maximizes the recycling of water. Given the location in the Atacama Desert, that's really, really important.
Yeah, we've got a strong management team there, very low turnover, characteristic of our Chilean operations, and, yeah, you know, they really focus on continuous improvement, business excellence, as we do through all of our operations. So I'll move on now to the Shahuindo mine in north-central Peru. Shahuindo is located just outside the city, about a 2.5-hour drive from the city of Cajamarca. It was acquired from the Tahoe acquisition in 2019. It's an open-pit oxide deposit with a leach pad and really perpetual sort of perpetual expansions to the leach pad into the waste storage facilities, characteristic of an open-pit, you know, leach pad, oxide gold mine, 2,000 m above sea level. It's got a lot of historical mining in and around the area, a lot of gold mining there.
One of the real challenges we face at Shahuindo is sourcing enough coarse material in the pit to ensure a proper blending for the leach pad, to ensure the permeability, recovery, long-term stability of the leach pad, too. So that's something that we're always looking to improve on, is assuring the you know the correct ratio and proportion of coarse material to fine material to guarantee that permeability. Opportunities at Shahuindo include, you know, optimizing the footprints of the leach pad and the waste dump. We're looking at an infill dump option within the pit as the mine becomes more mature.
We're currently commissioning our Marinos water treatment plant that's located at the downstream toe of our waste dump, of our main waste dump, and we're also building another expansion to the lined leach pad facility this year. The agglomeration plant at Shahuindo will be disassembled and removed also. It'll start this year and likely complete in Q1 of next year. Excuse me. Going on to Timmins. The Timmins West operation's been going well, another steady state operation with a long history of gold production in the area. The Bell Creek Paste Plant is scheduled to come online in Q3 of this year, and this will reduce and help mitigate the squeezing phenomenon that we see, especially at depth, you know, associated with local seismicity at depth, where the...
We've got some challenges there, but we're mitigating that through other methods as well. The hoists, both at Timmins West and Bell Creek, are operating well in accordance with their design capacities, and we may even deepen the Bell Creek shaft. There are studies underway to take a look at that, the feasibility of that currently. One of the big challenges we face in the Timmins area is competition for skilled labor. Of course, a lot of competitors. The new Greenstone mine, the new Coté mine, opening up along, sort of, you know, in the area within 100 km or so, so we compete for resources there. However, it is one of our most productive operations there, and again, second-generation miners, third-generation miners, dedicated workforce, and a really cohesive management team up at Timmins.
I'll be going there this afternoon, actually. Moving on back to South America, to Bolivia. The San Vicente Underground Silver Mine, located in the Potosí area of the Altiplano of Bolivia. They've been mining silver up there for centuries, nearly 500 years. It's at about 4,500 m above sea level. It's a consistent producer, outperforming so far this year. Small scale, however, it's really a reliable, steady state operation. We share the operational revenue there with the state mining company, called COMIBOL, and the contract conditions with COMIBOL haven't changed since we made the acquisition, so it's favorable, I think, for both parties. It's a solid cash flow generator for both us and for COMIBOL, the state mining company.
Back over to Minera Florida, underground mine in central Chile, now located about a two-hour drive from the capital city of Santiago, Chile. Also acquired during the Yamana acquisition last year. Got a very good relationship with the local community there. In fact, the community is adjacent to the operation. Challenges at Florida have to do with rain, heavy rains the last couple of years, but we're working around that, and we're well prepared to handle that this year at El Peñón... sorry, at Minera Florida. Yeah, low turnover there, also a solid management team. It's quite easy to attract resources to work there because it's so close to the capital city of Santiago. Of course, exploration potential there, too, to extend the mine life is favorable. Over to Argentina now, the Cerro Moro underground operation.
We're very familiar. It's located in the province of Santa Cruz. We've got operational experience in Santa Cruz at the nearby Manantial Espejo complex, which is currently in closure, so we're leveraging that experience in-country. We recently opened the Natividad open pit, which is about a 30 km drive from Cerro Moro, so that's increasing throughput in the process plant. Cerro Moro's got a short reserve life. The key to ongoing profitable production there has to do with cost savings opportunities, continuous improvement, and its exploration potential, too. Finally, moving on back to Mexico, to the Dolores mine. Dolores operations will cease in July of this year, and we'll continue to drain down the leach pad and recover ounces in inventory for the next several years.
We're gonna leverage the experience that we've gained at the Alamo Dorado closure site, which is a couple hundred kilometers away, as we move into closure here next year at Dolores. One of the challenges that we have in Dolores currently is the water scarcity. It's been a dry year. We're waiting for the onset of the rainy season here in towards the middle or end of July to get back to our programmed irrigation rates on the leach pad. And of course, with the closure of Dolores and the gradual, you know, scaling down of that operation, we'll be able to leverage resources that we have there to further strengthen the staffing that we have at La Colorada and to staff the upcoming Skarn project, too. So there's some favorable sides to that as well. I think, Siren, that's-
Yep.
What have we got?
Thank you. My question's on Huarón. Usually during these investor days, it doesn't get a lot of love. I was actually kind of surprised, you know, the air time it received yesterday and also today in terms of the press release and the investor day today. So, you know, I guess compared to when you first started operating Huarón back in the early 2000s, what has changed? What's getting you excited? Is it really the exploration results that Chris is telling you, or is it the, you know, tailings facilities that you've now put in place to dry stack tailings?
... and ultimately, what's the upside here? You know, if I look at it, production's about flat year-over-year, cost is coming down, and so ultimately, is that what you're looking at?
Yeah, I'll go ahead and field that one. Thanks, Cosmos. We're very excited about what we see at Huarón, to be honest, and Scott mentioned that it's that Horizonte zone. To be able to open up a new zone closer to the surface and supplement it with the deepening of the mine, if you remember over the last five years, we deepened the mine to what we call the 100 level, which was a new level for us. It's producing quite well, but it is costly. It's taking some dewatering, it's taking some ventilation, some additional, you know, haulage costs, things like that. So supplementing that with production from Horizonte, we're seeing some real potential that could lead us to an expansion and an optimization there as we look into the future. We're excited about it.
We haven't defined an expansion there, but given the drilling, and I gotta give our team credit there, they've really stepped up their game in terms of standards that they've applied, and you're seeing some of the continuous improvement programs that Scott touched upon at all of our operations. Huarón has really accelerated, and when you go to Huarón today, the standards are top-notch. It's a first-class mine, and we're opening up a new area, and we're really excited about the potential.
For El Peñón, what is the current reserve life, and how would the profile be? I know that mine has been going and going forever, but under the current reserve plan, how would that production profile look?
Yeah, sure, thanks. I mean, obviously, when we look at the gold reserve, and it's producing around 130 a year now, you know, you're out about five-six years. But as we've shown, there is, there is large potential, and we're really putting a lot of effort now with the drill rigs and the amount of meters we're putting into Pampas Sur and finding additional inferred resource. That will take some time to bring those into indicated, and then the reserve, and then additional production and life of mine. But I think, as you can see, we are really confident that the depth and the strike potential that exists there. I think that's-
Just on one point to that, and that's, you're right, it was always when you look historically at El Peñon, I think mostly had like four or five years reserve life, which I really don't like. I think it's not the right thing to have a relatively short life, to make proper capital allocation decisions. You know, rather have eight, nine years ahead of us, so that's why we increased drilling, that's why looking at all these new areas. You know, it was kind of a bit of a surprise, obviously, on the reconciliation we had last year. I think we are getting there, and now Steve, Chris's team is working on adding more resource and get this longer life.
And then once we have that under the belt, I think Steve can obviously look at throughput numbers. And one more. Development in the sustaining capital is very low. Is most of it expensed, or are you in a low point in the development cycle?
No, it's actually quite an increase in development this year, but it's all mostly being expensed. We capitalize very little normal development in our operations underground. Only if we're trying to develop between structures, you know, a long drift or something, would we capitalize that. So most of that's showing up in the expenses.
Thank you. You're an example for the industry.
Just-
I wish everyone did it.
Yeah, we're unique in that.
Just in general, there's obviously a bit of change on how we account for the cost, when you compare with Yamana, so you will see in many places less, less, less capital, more expenses, on, on development, that we believe, you know, it's the right way. That's how we always did it in the past. So comparing the numbers, they're not really apples to apples, but, but now you can compare them to all the other operations the same way than we do everywhere else. Thank you. Ovais?
Just sticking with El Peñón, in terms of the reconciliation, obviously, that was due to lack of drilling, I would believe. You know, I think it was around 60 m spacing. What level of spacing do you require, Chris, to kind of increase that confidence, you know, to a level where you feel, you know, reconciliation and continuation is it has improved? And secondly, in terms of the infill results that we've seen so far, how has that, you know, come across in terms of your expectations?
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean... Yeah, I mean, when you look at the geostatistics and we look at the resource reserve builds, that's something that we're working on at the moment. We've seen that from a 45, we've got to pull it in probably another 10 m to 30 m, I think it would be a better number. So that's something we're working on in specifically where we believe there's some areas of higher risk, should we say. We're just trying to de-risk this now, which obviously, you know, the infill drilling is doing. And I don't have the numbers at the moment.
It's something our teams are working on, you know, in Peñón with the—with the corporate teams, and certainly in the mid-year, we'll update the market, but I just don't have a number for you at the moment. I'm sorry.
Just, just in general to the drilling there, and it requires a huge amount of drilling, and we are still at—I think you, when you look at the, at the graph there, it looks like a lower number, but it's just a different way we do it. I really like, I think, when we approve drill budgets to first get results. I mean, you know, Chris showed in the press release, we have exceptional results that they achieved, and then we add in, for the second half of the year, more drilling and more money. It's just really a way for us to control it, not to—I'd, I don't like just to approve generally huge exploration programs. It's really result driven.... That's what Steve mentioned later, Chris mentioned later on, right?
There's still a lot of drilling to come in the second half that is not in there. So it's definitely a deposit when I look at the extension, enormous extension, that needs a lot of drilling and a lot of underground development every year. I think, Siren, you had a question?
Yes. As you've gone through mine by mine, your All-in Sustaining Costs have increased a lot over the last five years. Is there any kind of structural impediment to improving your cost profile?
Yeah, I mean, we did, we did experience some pretty extensive inflation and cost escalation coming out of the pandemic, at all of our operations. It was pretty widespread. But I'd say over and above that, we also have seen our, our reserve grades kind of drop off a little bit, and that does affect our, our cost per ounce because our cost per tons hasn't really... It's not really the driver when you look over the last two or three years. It's really the grade that's driving that, that all-in sustaining cost and a bit more sustaining capital that we're spending.
Maybe just add.
Yeah.
Just one addition, and I always tell it when you look at our cost, especially as we are so international in different places, that there are lots of other drivers for those costs. Exchange rates comes to mind that are really, really important. Obviously, it depends on which jurisdiction we are. You can imagine there was a lot of cost pressure in Mexico before the election and last year as a cost driver with a very strong peso. Help on the other side in Timmins, obviously, with the weak Canadian dollar, which is foreign currency for us. So those exchange rates can have a huge impact as well, so you have to look a bit at different things. It's not just on the onside cost, but Steve is absolutely right.
We obviously experienced the inflation that we all experience when we go out there in our lives, worldwide. We experienced that very strongly for a few years, and I think it's really slowing down now on the inflation side, which is a good thing.
Okay, I think we're ready to move on to ESG, and Brent and Chris.
Great. Good morning, everyone. My name is Brent Bergeron. I'm the Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Sustainability. I joined Pan American back in 2019. In charge of the overall sustainability strategy for the company, the ESG reporting side of things. Also another portfolio such as government relations and also security, which, you know, some of you have seen that coming out of the COVID pandemic over the past few years, especially on the security side, we've been very busy with that portfolio. So I'll go into some of the highlights on that during my presentation.
So in terms of the highlights themselves, most of you probably know that we published our sustainability report, our 2023 sustainability report, back in May 23rd. So a lot of the information that I'm gonna be talking about today is actually contained in that report, so I'll just hit on some of the highlights. But over the past year, where our team has actually been concentrating significantly is with the process of integrating some of the assets that we've acquired through the Yamana acquisition.
When we started the process of integration, we did take a look at some of the policies that Yamana had in place, and we compared them, of course, to ours, and there were some differences, but mainly, they weren't that great in terms of the differences that we encountered, so it started making the integration process a lot easier for us. We looked at different ways where we could align and improve some of the stuff that we're doing at Pan American, also based on some of the activity that Yamana was doing with some of their assets.
But what's important is that during that entire process, that we were staying in touch also with our communities and government and our investors, and also making sure that as we move through the sustainability organization and the integration process, that we were listening to our stakeholders in terms of what's actually important to them also. So, we find that the process actually went extremely well during 2023. The engagement with the acquired sites has actually worked quite well. The support that our corporate team is actually giving to the site has been welcomed very well from the Yamana site.
So, that's given us a lot of comfort in terms of trying to work with them and improving in terms of what we can be doing to just continuously improve in terms of what we're doing as a company on the sustainability perspectives. So in terms of the highlights, I won't go through all of them here, but I'll just highlight a few of them, which were really important to us. Of course, health and safety is our number one priority, and in terms of the goals that we set for ourselves last year-...
You know, very important, we didn't have any fatalities last year, which was an important goal for us, in terms of keeping our people safe at our mine sites, but also in terms of some other indicators where we surpassed some of the goals that we actually put in place at the beginning of the year. In terms of, another one that is actually quite important to us is the aspect of water. Water is a very important component of what we do in terms of our overall processes, but also in terms of how this interacts with the communities around us.
So we wanna make sure that we continuously are a great steward in terms of what we're doing, in terms of our intake of water at our sites, but also being able to ensure that we are not having a significant impact on the water balances in the areas. As some of you have seen, we have sites that are very close to our operations, therefore, the water balance in the areas where we operate becomes not only important to us from an operational perspective, and Scott touched on that in terms of scarcity in different places from droughts that we are seeing, but also in terms of what the communities are doing and some of the projects that we're actually working with them.
Important to note, which is, in terms of doing the overall analysis of the Yamana sites and some of the sites that we've actually divested, our 2020, our 2030 goals of actually achieving a 30% reduction in overall the global footprint that we have, we're actually going to be able to reinstate that this year and say that we're going to continuously meet that target in 2023. So, we've done the analysis of the Yamana sites, we've done the analysis of the ones that we divested, and we've confirmed that we're gonna keep going with those types of goals in the future.
In terms of governance and management, of course, the tone from the top is extremely important when we take a look at the company's overall sustainability strategy. So our interaction with the board of directors is extremely important to the management team, but also our sites. We do have different committees at the board level that we report to on an ongoing basis every quarter, of course, with a lot of the information that drives the sustainability strategy of our company. There's what we call the Communities and Sustainable Development Committee, and also the Health, Safety and Environment Committee.
They are two committees that really take a look at what the company is doing from a sustainability perspective, looking at a lot of the indicators and the targets that we're using to continuously monitor on a quarterly basis how we're moving forward with them, and then they... That gets reported to the overall board of directors. They also do quite a bit in terms of looking at some of the policies that we're putting in place and the strategies that we're bringing forward, approving that strategy, and making sure that that gets implemented overall towards all of our operations.
So on the management side, of course, you know, the management team is quite active in terms of looking at sustainability, and I just wanted to caveat that by saying that the aspect of sustainability is not necessarily just a tick-the-box exercise for our company. We do look at it from a strategic perspective, and making sure that what we are doing on the sustainability side is looking at the risk aspect of, you know, what we're encountering at site, looking at the opportunities that we are also encountering at sites, and being able to implement that in terms of our overall strategy to lower the overall risk of what we're doing.
We know that, you know, community risk, water risk, those have become, much more important for us, these days, and we wanna make sure that that gets involved, from the operational side to make sure that we're lowering the overall operational risk of what we're doing in different communities or different countries where we're operating. Important to note also in terms of the overall structure of the compensation of our senior management team, you can see the different categories here in terms of how much, sustainability is actually embedded, in the overall, compensation.
It takes into account the aspect of safety, diversity in terms of hiring practices, the environment, and also the last year we had a significant amount of our compensation linked to different aspects of implementing the Towards Sustainable Mining standard from the Mining Association of Canada, which was done not just at our Canadian operations, but also at the international level.
In terms of the overall ESG strategy, there's different pillars that we take into account, but one of the things that we try and do here is actually align what's important for our stakeholders, what's important for our communities, and align that in terms of our policies and our standards and our guidelines, in terms of what we're doing to make sure that the important aspects of what our stakeholders are seeing, which is important to them, are consistent in terms of what we're doing, in terms of our overall management team.
So important for us to look at some of the guidelines that we're putting in place and providing quite a bit of training to our local staffs, making sure that we're hiring people that are very competent in terms of being able to implement the policies that we want, in terms of the different areas where we're operating. But another thing that we did over the past five years, which I think are really important, is that we implemented a system of what we call sustainability performance indicators. Those indicators are—some of them are actually... Well, the majority of them are actually tied to the objectives that we put in place on a yearly basis for some of the compensation that we have for our senior executives.
So they're very important in terms of not just the reporting aspect, to senior management or the board of directors, but also looking at the overall performance of what we're doing in terms of environment, in terms of community incidents, you know, a very important one is community grievances and how quickly we actually respond to them, how we actually mitigate them in the future. So these are all things that actually get reported on, on a quarterly basis to the board of directors so that they know that we're moving in the right direction.
In 2023, we actually evolved our sustainability performance indicators to include a new one that has to do specifically with measuring the level of investments that we're actually doing in communities, taking a look at how the implementation of these projects are moving forward, and actually trying to understand the positive impact that we're actually having on the community. So what we're doing is implementing them, following the implementation process, but also taking a look specifically on the actual impact and the results of the projects that we're investing in different places. Of course, in terms of our overall compliance, our sustainability report is based on GRI standards, SASB, TCFD, which is information that's included in the sustainability report.
We do have memberships to different organization, which becomes extremely important to us in terms of implementing our strategy. Of course, the Towards Sustainable Mining standard that we use from the Mining Association of Canada. As I mentioned, being a member of the Mining Association of Canada requires us to implement the TSM standard at our Canadian sites, but we're also doing it at all of our international sites, as that standard is actually being accepted by different countries where we do operate right now and expanding even more.
As a member now at the World Gold Council, we are looking at the implementation of the Responsible Gold Mining Practice Standard, which is actually very important to our refiners these days in terms of making sure that the products that we are sending to them is actually complying with that standard. And another one that's very important, and we reached a milestone actually earlier this year, is that we are now a full-fledged member of the Voluntary Principles on Human Rights and Security. We started implementing that approximately five years ago. This was an important milestone for us to reach, as you have to go through training and implementation and an audit process to be an actual member of it.
Given a lot of the security incidents, given a lot of the social incidents that are happening around our mine sites these days, it's extremely important for us to make sure that our people, our security teams, our social teams, are well-trained in terms of security incidents, use of force, or anything having to do with human rights, as any type of those types of incidents can have a significant impact on a company's reputation and its ability to operate in different countries. We also work quite extensively in terms of our ESG ratings. Two of the ratings, the S&P Global and MSCI, are actually tied to our revolver, which gives us a better rate if we actually meet certain targets.
We've met those targets already, so we do get a discount, however small it is, but it's still a discount in terms of, not only, the amount that you're actually taking from your revolver, but also in terms of some of the management fees that are out there. We've worked with Sustainalytics, and I know that some of you sometimes use Sustainalytics in terms of their report. And we've been able to increase our score significantly over the past five years. In terms of the materiality topics, which are very important to our stakeholders, you know, we've seen over the years, especially coming out of COVID, we've seen different topics become more important to them. We do have a survey that goes out to a lot of our stakeholders.
There's over 3,000 respondents that come back to it. Some of the topics that were extremely material and important to them had to do with health and safety, which of course, is extremely consistent with our strategy. The aspect of water, job security, which again, is not a surprise coming out of COVID, the pandemic. But what we try and do is that we also perform a survey inside of our company with our senior management staff, and then with these results, we try and become consistent in terms of where we're going with our strategy. You know, health and safety with respect to our management team was extremely important. The water aspect, tailings, is also extremely important to us.
So this is very consistent in terms of how we're aligning our priorities with those of our stakeholders at the same time. In terms of GHG emissions, you know, as I mentioned before, we are reaffirming our 30% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030, after having analyzed all of our sites and the ones that we've integrated. And we've also surpassed some of the targets that we did put in place for our corporate goals in 2023. So we're moving quite well in those areas. There's still quite a bit of work that we need to do in terms of the aspirational objective of actually becoming net zero by 2050. Some of that has to do with new technologies coming in.
Some of that has to do with some of the strategies and initiatives that are coming directly from our sites, and some of it has to do with the accessibility of different types of energy that we can get from different countries. Over the past year, we've been able to change in Mexico the source of our electricity to renewable sources as opposed to conventional one. So that has actually helped us in terms of being able to achieve our targets during the past year. Tailings also a very important one, and I just wanted to mention here that when we take a look at the management of our tailings, we have significant resources available to us, not only at sites, but also at the corporate office, and there's quite a bit of coordination that's being done in those areas.
We do our audits, we do our management of our tailing sites, in terms of the Mining Association of Canada, the Tailings Guideline, which we've been using across all of our operations and the Canadian Dam Association. Now, we know that over the past years, there's been quite a bit of publicity in terms of the global industry standard for tailings management, which has had been developed by the Church of England and some investors in Europe. We've chosen at this point to be consistent with the two standards that we're using here from the Mining Association of Canada and also the Canadian Dam Association.
In some cases, when we compare it to the GISTM, we surpass some of the standards, but what we're currently doing, as a member of MAC, is working directly with the analysis of both standards and making sure that whatever improvements that we can be doing to the Canadian standard is consistent or surpassing the standard that is coming in at the international level. And I just wanted to mention these, which I think are these examples here, which I think is really important. I know that we've seen it from some of the presentations on the operational side, but we do have quite a bit of monitoring. We do have quite a bit of work that is being done in different places. I use the Jacobina tailings facility, of course.
Over the years, we're seeing an increase in terms of the legal requirements in different countries increasing with respect to how we're managing tailings facilities. But also we're looking at it, as Steve mentioned, from the operational side of things, in terms of we know that sometimes we have situations where increasing the amount of land that we need for these types of facilities can be sometimes difficult, whether it's simply based on the land ownership that we have or the communities around us. So looking at different technologies, such as what we're looking at in Jacobina or at Huarón, in terms of the dry filter plant, to try and make sure that the impact of our facilities in the future is actually being reduced as opposed to actually increasing in size.
In terms of socioeconomic contributions, I mean, there's quite a bit that we do in this area, and we wanted to highlight the economic value distributed in different countries. And over 2023, that value got up to approximately $2.4 billion, which, you know, the different categories are there that you take a look at in terms of what that actually means. But what's important to us is that 87% of that value that is being created is actually staying in the countries where we actually operate. We believe that's extremely important because we wanna make sure that our operations do have a significant impact locally and in the countries. And we're seeing those amounts actually being described, and there's quite a bit of information in our sustainability report on this.
In terms of our actual programs that we do specifically at site, we invest close to $15 million in terms of what we consider to be community investment projects. They look at everything having to do with agricultural projects, health programs, education programs, and really important for us to make sure that we're doing this in collaboration, and they're consistent with some of the priorities that we're getting back from the communities. We know that when we have a mining operation, it's not everybody that can work for the mine site. So it's important for us to take a look at the ecosystem around of our mine site also, in terms of some of the investments that we can be making with them into projects that are going to be sustainable over the longer term.
Mining's projects do have a finite life, so we wanna make sure that we're investing properly into projects that are going to survive the actual mine life in terms of continuing, in terms of economic contribution after we've left those areas. And finally, I'll—I just wanted to mention, on this one here. I know I'm out of time, so I'll just go quickly for this one.
But we're also taking a look at this, and this is part of a process that we have, inside of our area, which is taking a look at some of the, sometimes, some of the projects that we're currently doing from an operational perspective, looking at some of the closures that we're doing at different mine sites, or looking at legacy issues that may have been there in the past, that we want to be able to make sure that when they show up as a risk item for us, whether it's from an operational point of view or from a sustainability point of view, that we are actually actively working on them. A good example of this was the relocation process that we did, with some families that were living, at the La Colorada mine.
You know, it had attracted the attention of an international NGO, but we turned that one around in terms of looking at it from a risk perspective and how we could work in collaboration with the families. We worked in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Human Rights in Mexico, where they participated in the process of relocation with us. They assisted the families, and they were a strong observer of the process, and we were able to get to an agreement with the families, whereby some of them were relocated individually on their own, or some of them actually took housing that we built for them in a different area.
So I think that when we take a look at these types of risks, what we're trying to do is make sure that we are identifying these in terms of what that means for risk for our operations at the present time, but also more importantly, especially when we take a look at the La Colorada project, we have this big expansion project that we're gonna be doing with the skarn. So let's take a look at all the sustainability risks that are around us and make sure that there's a process in place to actually be able to manage or mitigate some of those risks before we start making those significant investments in the future. So that's it for me in terms of the overall sustainability aspect.
As I mentioned, there's quite a bit of information in our sustainability report, if some of you would like to get back to it, and I'd be happy to take any questions or comments if you have some. Thank you.
Hi. Thanks. What kind of programs or initiatives is the company doing to better educate the population around Escobal about the benefits of the mine during the consultation process?
Yeah, maybe Sean has been working on that significantly, so I'll let him take that one. Yeah, go ahead.
That's funny. You called me just when my leg fell asleep. No, we have quite a, actually quite a few programs. The biggest program we have is the visitor program. So I think last year, if I remember correctly, we had 4,300 visitors. It's in the sustainability report. But that process is an open invitation for any of the community members to come to the site. I think about 85% of those visitors were local, and that's from the, the, town of San Rafael, the, the municipality of San Rafael, and, and the, the nearby communities that are there. That process is, is pretty important.
We have social media as well, so our Facebook page has 20,000 followers, and we are pretty active posting videos on the process, mostly on care and maintenance, but providing some information about what it would look like if we were operating as well. So that has quite a bit of impact because that's used a lot there. We also have some other programs that are very specific to some of the local schools, where they visit and do an environmental tour or a biodiversity tour as well. So we're pretty active with that, and I would say that you know, over the last five years since Pan American acquired Escobal, we've had a real impact in shifting that.
We see that in our pulse surveys that we take, and we just ask general questions about what are the concerns if the mine operates? What are the benefits if the mine operating? And then, a one-five score on the level of acceptance. So our acceptance score ranges, you know, somewhere around 4.2-4.4 recently, and the biggest concern that we have for the mine operating is lack of local employment. The biggest benefit they see for the mine operating is local employment itself. But then it cascades down to some other concerns there.
There's water there, there's use of royalties and things like that, but I think those programs are pretty effective, and we're doing some other things as well, but those are the highlights, I think.
Thanks. You know, I'd just like to mention that, you know, I've had the chance to visit, you know, Sean and the team in Guatemala, and it's really interesting because we tend to hear a lot with respect to what's going on with the consultation process and the Xinka parliament and the Xinka community. But even going into the community around the mine site, and one of the things that I really love about Escobal is that it's part of an ecosystem of a mine site that has a very small footprint and is actually surrounded by neighbors. And, you know, talking to some of those neighbors, it's not all in terms of the negative aspect of what we sometimes hear in some of the newspapers.
There are neighbors there that are actually quite positive about the mine site, you know, in terms of what the team is doing with respect to water discharge at the site, and that water discharge is helping in terms of some of the agricultural, the animals that are being raised in the area. So there is some significant positive stuff that is happening also, but we do have to go through this consultation process and complete it. Yes?
Yamana had a very interesting system of polling communities around the mine sites on a proactive basis to get leading indicators on your social license to operate. Did you adapt that system, or is there a similar system in place with Pan American?
Yeah. So we did take a look at that system that they have, and it is a survey-type system that they send out. One of the things that we do, especially with our community teams at different sites, is to actually go into the communities and get the pulse exactly of what is actually going on, looking at the grievance system that is actually in place. And the grievance system is sometimes it's mouth-to-mouth, that we can actually get. And we tend to get two things from that, which is good, from the way that we're currently doing it right now. One is that we do get the complaints anyway.
We do get, you know, information request or, or whatever is coming in, so we do get to understand exactly what's going on at a very specific time. That does get reported to us at the corporate level so that we understand also in terms of the priorities, but it also gives us a chance to work quickly in terms of reacting to, you know, some of the questions that they have, some of the complaints that they may have. What we found with the survey is that it did give them an indication of the level from quarter to quarter, but we didn't find that there was a significant connection to be able to react quickly to some of the issues that may come up.
So we're finding that the system that we have in place right now is working a lot faster and more effective in terms of building that relationship, which is what we're aspiring to do, with all of our communities right now.
Thank you.
Hi, Brent. Nick Clark, TD Securities. If I could just follow up on some of the remarks that Sean just made in terms of the pulse scores at 4.2-4.4. Could you guys share a little bit about maybe where those scores were, maybe-
... three, four, five years ago when you first acquired the asset? Thank you.
Go ahead, Troy.
Yeah, that's a program and a survey we initiated July last year, so I don't have any benchmarking. And again, it was something we, you know, we were actually inspired by what Yamana was doing, but I thought it was a little too complex and a little too obstructive, so we just wanted something much easier to deploy, and so we put together a very simple survey tool that we could use, do in five minutes, and, you know, not scientific. Certainly not as robust as hiring a group like they had at Yamana or hiring a Gallup, which we've done those kinds of perception surveys before. But I, you know, I can't really say.
What I can say is that you've got a population around Escobal which is mostly employed in daily work and agriculture, and so there's obviously a lot of concern, a lot of appetite for employment. That's the biggest request we get at our public detention office as well, which is another outreach we have at all of the operations. But, there's a two-page summary about Escobal in the sustainability report that summarizes all these things, and if I get the numbers wrong, I think the pulse survey results are in there. Certainly, the top concerns and the top benefits are there, but I would refer you to that report to take a look at those two pages.
It'll summarize all these different programs we're talking about at Escobal in particular.
In terms of GHG emissions, can you remind us which of your operations you currently use or potentially testing battery-powered equipment? And overall, as a company, is that an initiative that you're pushing for?
Steve, do you wanna answer? Well, I'll just mention that in terms of what we're looking at, especially on the development side, you know, the Skarn project or some of the other, we are looking at different types of technologies to see how we can actually integrate that in terms of our long-term plans also. We know that there is technology out there. We know that there are other companies that are actually implementing as pilot projects in different places. Some companies have actually moved quite quickly on it, but it's very site-specific sometimes. So what we're looking at the technology right now to see how we can actually implement that in our projects and the ones especially that we're doing on the development phases. Steve?
Yeah, just to, just to add to Brent's point is, in the Skarn design, we're specifically designing that to be conducive for battery equipment. We're looking at... You know, with a sub-level cave, that's one of the big benefits, is everything's done on a level, so battery equipment works very well when you're not hauling material up a hill. So hauling on a level and dumping it down a chute to a crusher and conveying out is very, very electric friendly, if you will. So we're really focused on that design in Skarn. In terms of the other operations in Latin America, what we found is we really need a new mine development to go in and large areas to implement a battery program.
Because just buying a battery piece of equipment and all the infrastructure you have to build around that, and all the support functions you need from the supplier to support those, that just doesn't exist. So we haven't really had an opportunity to go in on a large scale. Perhaps the horizontal zone in Moro is gonna be a good candidate, where we can go in on a much larger scale and look at an area and develop that specifically for battery application. So we are looking at those, but we don't have them deployed at this time.
Okay, if there's no more questions, we'll get to our finance team for their presentation. Thank you.
Thank you, Brent. My name is Ignacio Couturier. I'm Pan American's Chief Financial Officer. I'm joined today with Guido Mastropietro, our VP of Finance and Treasury, and we'll talk a little bit about our strategy, our finance management. So generally, our approach in the management of Pan American's finances is to ensure the stability and growth of our company through its use of its financial resources. So in terms of growth, of course, we wanna make sure that we should move on to the next slide. Oh, sorry. There you go. Sorry about that. Wanna ensure that, you know, we have the financial flexibility to be opportunistic when growth opportunities come up, when M&A opportunities come up, when we have large capital expenditures. So in terms of the main aspects, we look at debt.
Of course, for those who followed the history of Pan American, we've always had very low debt levels. We target a gross debt to, or gross debt to EBITDA ratio of less than one. We've also always been able to repay our debt relatively quickly once we've drawn on it. We have a revolving credit facility, which we've drawn for the two most recent acquisitions, which we repaid in very, very short time. We've always made sure that we borrow within our capacity, that we don't borrow more than we can repay. And currently in our balance sheet, we have two very large - two large bond issuance that we acquired through the Yamana acquisition, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Liquidity, Michael mentioned our total liquidity of over $1 billion.
That's a combination of the undrawn amounts on our line of credit, plus the cash on hand. Capital expenditures, we've always focused on the return on investment on our large capital expenditures. We have focused on being able to do a capital allocation process where we look at all the capital that we have on hand and try to decide what's the most important one and invest in those. As you know, we've mentioned the Skarn project. I think the funding of that will be heavily dependent on ultimately what the partnership structure looks like. As Martin mentioned, his presentation's around $2.8 billion, but obviously, how much we invest in that, how much we fund that, will depend on the ultimate partnership for that.
Asset base, we talked a little bit about our approach to M&A, always looking for opportunistic M&A, looking at the divestment of non-core assets. We focus on synergies and being able to extract value through our acquisitions. Guido will talk a little bit about the synergies achieved in the Yamana acquisition as well as the Tahoe acquisition back in the day. And finally, return to shareholders. We have a long track record since 2010 of returning value to shareholders through dividends, as well as repurchase of shares. On the dividend front, we have a base dividend of $0.10 per share per quarter. We have a policy which is based on our net cash position. The variable portion is based on being in a net cash position.
Currently, with Yamana bonds, we are in a net debt position, so we are paying $0.10 a share. In addition to that, we've had various share purchase programs over the years. Most recently, in March this year, we announced a normal course issuer bid for the repurchase of shares, up to 5% of our issued and outstanding shares. In Q1, taking advantage of a low share price, we repurchased about 1.7 million shares at an average price of $14 a share. Hedging policy, we've had a long-standing and consistent risk management hedging policy. We do not hedge either gold or silver. We focus on our byproducts or some key inputs like diesel, as well as our FX exposure.
FX is really important given that most of our labor costs, which is the largest chunk of our overall operating costs, are based in, in local currency. So Guido will talk a little bit about our hedging policies and how that's worked over the years. Moving on, here we can, this is a bit of a repeat, our total liquidity position of over $1 billion comprised of both the undrawn amounts in our credit facility, plus the cash and short-term investments on hand. Here's a little bit of the details on the Yamana bonds that we hold. As you can see, there's two tranches. The larger one, the $500 million one, due with a maturity of 2031 at a very attractive rate of 2.63%.
Obviously, today, we couldn't issue that at that level, and then with a sooner maturity of 2027, $283 million at 4.63%. For those who look at our financial statements, you'll see that on a quarterly basis, we've been booking around $20 million of interest expense. The reality, though, there's a lot of non-cash items there. It's around only $9 million that's actual cash interest that we pay on a quarterly basis. Moving on to a little bit of a history of our leverage. The bars there represent our adjusted EBITDA, and the lines represent our leverage ratio on a gross basis. This is the way that the credit agencies look at it. So you can see back in 2019, there was an increase.
That's when we drew around $335 million for the acquisition of Tahoe. As you can see, the next year that drops as we fully repaid that amount. And then, once again, in 2023, with the acquisition of Yamana and including those bonds, we can see that the, that the gross leverage ratio increased to 1.72%. It's currently dropped to around 1.2%. That's, that was the use of the funds from the sale of their assets last year, mostly Mara, that we used to repay the, the amount that was drawn under the credit facility. Now, we look at it. Actually, when we look at it internally, we look at it on a net debt basis. That's where we offset the gross amount of debt by the cash on hand.
So you could see after the acquisition of Yamana, our gross debt was around $1.3 billion. On a net basis, around $1 billion offset by the cash. Today, we're at around $900 million, so it's a large decrease. That was the use of the funds from the divestitures to repay some of that debt. Further on, assuming that we close the La Arena transaction later in the year, you'll see that our net balance for debt would drop to just below $400 million. So quite an improvement on our balance sheet. Once again, re-emphasizing our focus on a very strong balance sheet and low debt levels. With that, I'll pass it on to Guido to talk about capital allocation.
... Thank you, Ignacio. Yeah, so as Michael alluded to earlier, we have a very clearly delineated strategy for capital allocation, really underpinned by three pillars, of which, you know, maintaining balance sheet flexibility is really non-negotiable and is at the top of that list. It's what allows us to be flexible and during times of low metal prices and be able to expand countercyclically. It's also what allows us to be able to really jump on opportunities as they come up on the M&A side. So it's been really instrumental through Pan American's history in being able to expand the production profile as well as really executing our growth strategies.
With that, as Ignacio mentioned, you know, we focus on those acquisitions where we identify opportunities to be able to really maintain that flexible balance sheet and that low debt. Number two, invest in high return projects. Again, something that, you know, it's been mentioned throughout the presentation. We do have a couple of exciting catalysts in the portfolio, of which one, on the La Colorada mine, we've invested over the last four or five years since that first drill hole in 2018. We've invested north of $150 million, and we're continuing to invest in that and delineating the resource. And that's something that we strongly believe is how we can add value to our shareholders.
And then when it's when we have the financial flexibility to do so, we're able to focus on shareholder returns, for which we've returned about $854 million since 2010. In terms of 2024, there's not a lot of new information here. You've seen most of this. Really, the only additional information that we're presenting here is the sustaining capital and the reclamation expenditures broken out by quarter. But the production is as we previously guided, there's no update to the guidance at this stage.
Really, it's a very backloaded year, as we had previously mentioned, and this is related to a variety of aspects, but really, La Colorada, expecting, as Steve brought up earlier today, you know, really an improvement in conditions towards the end of the year, or in that east zone of the mine, and then, with that, an increase in production, decrease in costs. At the same time, you know, we are facing some mine sequencing in Cerro Moro and Shahuindo, which improves operations towards the end of the year. So really, 2024, backloaded year, more so maybe than previous times.
And that's seen in the cash costs on AISC, which you see it right there with the really high level of cash costs on AISC towards the first half of the year. We did beat Q1 costs on the silver segment, and we were within at the low end on the gold segment. But really expecting that first half to really shake up as what we had guided. So into Q1 cash flows, which you've seen already, really it's reinforcing what we guided for. We guided that the low point of cash of the year, all else equal, was going to be during the first quarter, and that's reflective of that lower production, higher costs, higher corporate income tax payments.
Just one other item that we wanted to point out here is that net changes in working capital. In terms of working capital, really, about half of that is leach pad inventories, and then the other half is really an AP movement, which happens at the start of the year with all the bonus payments for our operations. As Ignacio mentioned, on the Yamana integration and synergies, you know, we've vastly exceeded what we anticipated. You know, we were able to deliver on that, on those synergies in the, essentially in the first year of post-acquisition. So in terms of G&A, we're north of $60 million, which $40 million-$60 million was our previous guidance.
Then on top of that, we also were able to cut back on spending on some of the greenfield explorations, refocus some of that to the brownfield, but then, as well, rationalize some of the, the hectares that we were carrying, that Yamana was carrying. Then as well as, with the dispositions, reduce the debt load, reduce the, the, the interest component that we were paying, as well as, reduce all that care and maintenance that that really was idle in the portfolio and, and utilizing cash. So there's another $90 million of cash savings. So it again speaks of that, the way that we focus on acquisitions and we focus on our, on our delivering our strategy, we've we're really looking at opportunities where we can deliver this type of, success, out of it.
Ignacio's already presented the dividend and share buyback, so you know, really just to focus on that, it is a net cash position. It does give us that flexibility to pay a higher dividend when the balance sheet is strong, which focuses back to, like, you're really that pillar that underpins our strategy and allows us to keep growing. Currently, we are on a net debt position, about $500 million, but we have made progress towards bringing it back to a net cash position. And then with the La Arena at this position, hopefully we'll get even closer to that and eventually allow our shareholders to participate on the health of the company.
The share buyback, really we've, as previously announced, 1.7 million shares at $14.16 average price, most executed in Q1 with a small amount that was done at the end of Q1 and settled in Q2. And then, yeah, that's the strong history of shareholder returns that I alluded to earlier, and as you can see throughout our history, we've paid strong dividend during high metal price periods, decreased the dividend in 2016 when we approved the La Colorada and Dolores expansion projects. And, you know, we were spending north of $250 million in those two projects at a time of weak metal prices.
So we started reducing the dividend in 2015, and then in 2016 again, and then started increasing it as we started seeing the benefits of those expansions and that investment in the business. Today, we're at that $0.40 baseline, which is that $0.10 per quarter that Ignacio presented. Then lastly, on my side is the hedging strategies. Ignacio has mentioned that we don't hedge gold and silver, but we are very active in our local currencies, some of our FX exposure, as well as some of the diesel exposure and the base metal exposure that we have.
So we are looking to really lock in in those areas, lock in rates that are consistent with our life of mine plans or, you know, better than our life of mine plans, and then being very opportunistic. So that's something that allows us to maintain a bit of flexibility and take the pressure off the silver and gold, which we do want to remain fully unhedged and fully exposed to market prices. And then with that, I'll pass it back to Ignacio.
Thanks, Guido. Just to wrap up the finance section of the presentation today, we are rated investment grade by both S&P and Moody's, so I encourage everyone to look at those reports. They are publicly available. We are large scale. We have a large-scale portfolio of 11 operating mines, moving into 10 operating mines once we sell La Arena, with two very interesting catalysts in our portfolio. We've talked about the skarn plus Escobal today. Highly diversified, seven jurisdictions in Latin America. We have a management team with vast experience in Latin America. We've been working in Latin America for a long time. I'm originally from Peru, Guido's originally from Argentina. As Michael mentioned, there's a lot of us in the Vancouver office that are speak Spanish as a first language.
Yeah, and obviously, the conservative approach to managing our our balance sheet, the finances, has always worked to our, to our advantage in terms of having the flexibility of acting when we need to. That's something we'll continue to do. We'll continue to look at ways to reduce our debt levels, and to optimize our our portfolio. So with that, Michael, I'll hand it over to you for closing remarks. Oh, we do... Might as well do them all together.
Yeah, take the questions after. Well, great. Lots of information, I'm sure, but I really love the videos, Chris. It's very—makes it very easy to understand what we talked about in the press release, because it's often very difficult to explain geology just in a few paragraphs. But just to add to Ignacio's point, and he explained it very well, and our strategy, and I showed you that slide at the beginning, and I think, you know, it really says it all. You run your operations efficiently, safely, strong. You look after the communities around, so you don't have issues there. You make sure you have a strong balance sheet, and you return to shareholders.
You return to shareholders not only when metal prices are high, but you have to be capable to return to shareholders at any place in the metal price cycle. It's obviously not the same amount. You saw there are ups and downs, depending. What else we do with the capital, and we invest it in high-return properties. High-return projects will obviously have a bigger return for shareholders than just returning it in dividend, but I think the dividend for us is always a very central part of the project. You heard a lot about optimization of portfolio, and for me, it was really important to be here today and explain you. Maybe go to the next slide with that.
We only talk about the operations, but, you know, you saw it's a big team here, show you the depth of the management team. I know I have the pleasure to talk to many of you during the year, but you normally don't have the chance to meet so many people of the management team. There's obviously a lot of people behind this, with a lot of really, really high quality experience, in our fields. That's the only way to run a company in that size, and, I just wanted to make sure that you get to meet, part of the management team, that you can ask them questions directly. You don't have to get it always from me. Ask the people directly.
I hope I was able to show that we are the go-to silver name still, even though we produce quite a bit of gold. It's really just a high, you know, a high-quality mining company. I think we did a large transaction. It's only 14 months back. It's a lot of work to do an integration like that. A lot of operations, lots of people, a lot of sale, asset sales and all that in 14 months, I think. I wanted to do that first and get it done, and then we come and show you the result. I think it's hopefully very clear to you now, where it's going, what the idea was behind that transaction, what it is the result of it, as a stronger, bigger, and better Pan American Silver, but also with a lot of upside.
Not only upside on our big catalysts, but upside on the exploration, how important brownfield exploration is to us, how much value we have created over the last few years with brownfield exploration. We'll continue to do that. I'm absolute that this is, you know, the bread and butter of our business, and that's really important to continue. And have the strong catalysts, maybe we'll find more of strong catalysts, if you find a creative ways to do that. You know, if you think back on Escobal, you know, we structured that CVR at that time when we purchased the mine. We really didn't pay for the mine. We will pay for the mine once it's running again, when we exchange those CVRs into Pan Am shares.
Hopefully, after closing of the La Arena transaction, it is clear to everyone, obviously, when you look at the numbers there, that that huge catalyst came to us at the moment as kind of a, you know, a semi-free option. Of course, we have ongoing payments during the year to maintain the care and maintenance status of the asset, but, you know, an incredible option that is out there. And last but not least, you have to have a strong balance sheet to all, to do all that. It's incredibly important for all of us, and especially to me, to run a mining company with low debt. We go through big cycles, big data, mining companies normally doesn't work together. It's great to do.
It's a great tool for us to react quickly on opportunities, react quickly on, not on the M&A, but on new projects as we saw, and do that. But you also saw how quickly we always pay back, and I think the fact that we paid back $400 million last year and, you know, we will, will probably show that we're gonna pay back more this year, is, you know, makes it very clear how important that is for us to run the company with a very strong balance sheet, at all time. So with that, I think I will open it to questions here, and Don?
Thank you, Michael. Don DeMarco, National Bank Financial. So my question is pertains to Q2. Q2 is coming to a close next few weeks. Ignacio provided a little bit of color on the, the share buybacks during the quarter, rather in, in Q1, and, so just wondering on Q2, though, is there-- are you tracking guidance? Is there gonna be any surprises, positive or negative, that you can share with us at this point?
Well, we obviously don't... We didn't release Q2 yet, and, we have to wait. Where, where we going? You know, I would expect, very similar. I mean, that's why we put the, a quarterly guidance out there, so, because this year is such an extreme year of, you know, if you would have just divide the production by four, it would not have worked out as it's so back end loaded. And there's always a, a big back end loading on our production, especially in Peru, which is just related to rainy seasons when you run big heap leaches. But here, there's La Colorada and Cerro Moro, some other operations, responsible for it. We just felt prudent to put out the quarterly guidance, and that's obviously what, what is out there and what, what, what you, what you can follow on it, right?
So I think it's, you know, La Colorada. Steve said the ventilation will be running early July, so that will be a big milestone for the beginning of the change of La Colorada. So until then, I would expect, you know, more of the same. I mean, still the same Q2, still the same ventilation issues that we had in Q1 and before, obviously, until it's fixed, and then the improvements that we guide in our guidance in Q3 and Q4. You know, I see on the cost side, I mean, you saw our cost in Q1. We had a strong beat on the cost side, on the silver side, and on the low end on the gold side.
Just to make clear, to the earlier question from you, Siren, on the cost, when I mentioned that it's exchange rate, but it's also driven by byproduct credits, right? As we don't show equivalencies, but byproduct cost. So the impact of higher metal prices is bigger on our silver operations normally than our gold operations, because we have more byproduct credits on the silver mine, because silver, you can't find silver on its own, right? Jacobina has hardly any byproducts, but when you look at Huarón or San Vicente, et c., La Colorada, you have a lot of byproduct credits. Of course, when the byproduct metal prices are high, which, you know, they have been pretty healthy a while of the quarter now, they gave in a bit.
So I haven't seen the number neither yet, but, you know, I would expect that on the cost side, that should look pretty similar. I wouldn't see really any big reason why that would have changed during the quarter if everything still closes the same. So look, as I said, it's, I mean, we are not at the end of the quarter yet. We don't have numbers out there, but I think when you look through all these themes, you know, you can kind of see where it's going. So I would guess no more of the same and then the improvements are in the second, third, and fourth quarter.
Okay, thank you. And one more quick question on the skarn. If you could just clarify what the, the next catalysts or steps are on the skarn. I think what I heard is that you're gonna have a resource update mid-year, take a look at that, incorporate some of the drilling. There might even be a higher grade zone. You've spoken to all your potential partners, but given that you're still sort of thinking about mining methods and so on, should we not expect any announcement of a deal with a partner in the near term?
No. I mean, we are not there yet. This is quite a complex deal, obviously. And look, for me personally, I think if we have internally some clarity on how the partnership could look like by the end of the year, that would be a big step forward for us. I don't think so that was, like, already pat down legally and with contracts and everything by the end of the year. So I think the next step is really the resource update, then the team going and looking at all the different mining methods again and, you know, clarify which way we wanna go. Do we gonna do something smaller, higher grade? You know, do we stay at the big size and probably have multiple partners? So there's still all these possibilities.
But you know, at the end, a really exciting project. I mean, we found that in our mine. We didn't have to purchase it, we didn't have to buy it. It was done with our own drill program, and you know, for me as a geologist, I can't even recall that anybody found like a world-class deposit under a mine that is in production for probably about 50 years. So that's a really exciting part of it.
Thanks, Michael. Seems like everyone's saying their name, so Cosmos Chiu here from CIBC. Maybe, Michael, you kicked off the presentation earlier today by saying that, as a silver producer, you need to be in Latin America, and a lot of moving parts, most recently, the election in Mexico. So in your opinion, if you can, you know, give us some color in terms of which countries do you believe are trending better?
... Which countries do you believe are not trending as well?
I have, I get quite often this question, you know: "Can we, can you rank the countries for me?" And, it's very hard to do, because what is it that you're looking at trending better, you know, on tax side or trending better on development of projects or infrastructure, et c., et c.? So we're going through... Yeah.
Like, where would you be willing to spend more money?
And again, look, it looks that depends a lot at what, what's the size of the property, how long is the mine life, et c. So there's definitely, look, in the past, Argentina has been quite, quite difficult because it has been difficult to take money out, so, you know, that wouldn't have been my first country to invest money in. But now we have seen quite some changes in Argentina, so I think it's trending in the right direction. It's not, it's not there yet, for sure, but it's definitely trending in the right direction. We had election in Mexico, which, you know, I would expect we're gonna see probably more of the same than what we've seen under AMLO over the last few years. But, you know, the new president did not take office yet, so we'll see where this is going.
But at the end of the day, we are working in so many jurisdictions, and we're looking at such a long mine life in most of our assets and as a company. There's elections every four years actually, there's elections every two years in most places, so there's always a lot of changes, and I think you have to be very careful. You cannot just change all your, all your, plans and programs just because there has been an election or there will be an election coming. That's just, that's just, you know, part, part of life and, I don't really see an issue with that. You notice that obviously, I'm talking around your point because I don't wanna...
I think it's a very hard question to answer in the sense that the countries we are in, it's for several reason. You saw that there are still other places where you can find silver. It's not only Latin America, and I looked at a few of them, and I stayed away from them because it's places that none of us has experience and knows them. None of us would speak the language, or ownership is not that clear, etc. , et c. So we really decided to work in the place not only where the silver is, but in jurisdictions that we know and understand very well, so we feel comfortable in them, and so we already made that decision.
While, you know, maybe you make your investment decisions in Bolivia a little bit different than in Peru, or maybe it turns around again after several years, I think we are comfortably in all the jurisdictions we work because we made that decision already before that, where we wanna be.
Hey, at the back of the room. Matt Murphy from Jefferies. Hi.
Hi.
Thanks, Michael. You haven't used the share buyback tool that much over the last decade, and you made reference to it a couple times. I guess if we look at a good scenario of margin expansion and free cash flow, is that something you'd look to more? Or is it more, you know, continue sort of building up the cash balance?
You, you're right, we haven't used it. We use mostly dividend. I wanted to leave it really in the hands of the shareholders if they wanna use that dividend to buy more shares and get more exposure. With that, everybody has different tax situation, depending if we're talking to people in Europe or in North America, and people prefer one or the other tool, as you know, to increase their return, so I wanted to leave it with shareholders. It's just this time has been so different.
When we issued shares to purchase the Yamana at $18.20 or something like 14 months ago, then we see our share price, not on the highs, but, you know, big disconnect between metal prices and share prices here for a while, and I think it's, it, it's changing now slowly. But we thought it, it was kind of a no-brainer, obviously, for us to go in and buy back shares at $14 when we just issued them at $18.20, not even a year and a half ago. And that was really one of the main reason. You know, I have been, in the precious metal space, not a huge fan of share buybacks in the past, and let me explain.
Normally, especially as a silver producer, in the past, you would trade at, you know, when I started with Panem, I think at that time, we would probably trade two times in a half or something like that, so it just doesn't make any sense to go out and buy back your stock. I think that has changed a lot, and you know, there's maybe still a small premium or not, we can discuss. I think people are not always using the right the right discount rate, I think, and that's kind of creating a a premium that is probably not that real. I don't know. It obviously depends what long-term metal prices you use.
But there has been definitely a window there to buy back shares at a way lower price, and I think there will be probably more. And we have the plan in place, and we will be very opportunistic and react right away if there's, you know, the opportune time to buy back shares. But in general, you saw our policy, we really like dividends as well. Yes.
Hi, Michael. Thanks for the presentation. If I could just follow up on a remark you made earlier about potential sale of some of the royalties that you've generated in the past year or so, post-Yamana. If those do materialize in the next year or so, would you already have something that's internally earmarked for that cash flow, or would that increase your likelihood of doing some kind of silver-focused M&A?
... When you looked at the two bonds we have, and, as we know, there's more cash coming in this year, and obviously, at these prices, we generate healthy cash flows as well. You know, the big bond, the $500 million that is due in 2031 at 2.6% doesn't seem, in my view, to be a big urgency to pay that back. There's the shorter one at, that, I think it matures in mid- or so 2027. But, you know, nearly twice as much on an interest side, and I think that's a more interesting one to pay back and use some of our cash for that.
I think automatically we will be in a net, net cash position with those moves, and our dividends will increase to shareholders, so there will be more return for shareholders, and we will continue to invest money in our assets. So La Colorada comes to mind. Hopefully, you know, a result of the optimization study at Jacobina, hopefully with an expansion there. Maybe Huarón, looking at an expansion there in the future. So I think we have very exciting projects where we can use that cash, so that's not an issue.
Thank you.
Lunch? Well, thanks everyone on the phone. Thank you everyone here to come. I think we have lunch served, and the management team will be here for further questions. It was an absolute pleasure to show you Pan American Silver, how it looks after the transaction, after the integration, after really kind of the hard work is done after the transaction. I think you hopefully agree with me that it's quite a different company, very exciting company with a very exciting future. With that, thank you. Thank you very much for calling in and for coming here. Thanks.