We will be doing a corporate presentation. Welcome, Michael Steinmann.
Thanks. Hi. Yes, good morning, everyone. A pleasure to be here again in Zurich and give you an update on Pan American. Just see if we can get the presentation going. And a lot has changed with Pan Am over the last 12, 24 months. Of course, last year we did the acquisition of MAG, and would probably call it a very timely acquisition when silver was still somewhere around $30. That worked out very well for us, and now we own 44% of one of the best silver mines in the world, which is Juanicipio. But we also announced an updated PEA for our discovery at La Colorada skarn, which actually will become the largest and lowest-cost silver mine in the world here over the next few years.
I want to spend quite a bit of time with you to explain what has changed there and how we see that project developing and how we're going to add another about 20 million oz of silver production at La Colorada to our portfolio. You see there where we're working, it's all in the Americas. The reason we are there is really a geological reason. When you want to be a silver producer, you have to work in the Cordillera. That's where the silver is. Mexico, the biggest silver producer in the world, of course, closely followed by Peru. Lots of silver production in Bolivia historically, and of course, Argentina even has it in its name. If you want to be a big silver producer, that's where you have to be, that's where we are working, and that's where we are always growing and look at.
I'm not really interested to go to many other different places. That's really where the silver is. That's the places we know and where we're working, and me personally already for over 35 years. Let's spend a little bit more time on La Colorada, because La Colorada, it's with Pan Am for quite a while now. Actually, I joined the company 23 years ago, and the project was already there. I think Ross Beaty at that time bought it about two years before that. It was a small silver mine. The whole system now, obviously, we understand now the geology is in place. You have very narrow veins, high grade on the top, all the way down to a porphyry, which is very deep down and was feeding the whole system. We had the discovery hole in 2018.
Just think about La Colorada, what we are mining right now are narrow structures, high-grade veins that may be two, three meters wide. Our discovery hole hit 372 m as an intercept of high-grade or relatively high-grade zinc, lead, and silver mineralization, and turned out to be one of the biggest base metal discoveries in the world that we drilled out over the years. When we put out the first PEA, it was a very, very large base metal development program. It would have been the biggest zinc mine in the world, still producing a lot of silver at that time, but the idea at that time, what we knew about the project was to build first a sub-level cave, then a block cave later on, 50,000 tons a day, very large zinc production with probably about in the 15 million oz silver range, somewhere around there.
Very large project and a mining method that we are not really familiar with. Now, fast-forward over the years, we kept drilling. We have probably about 18 rigs drilling at La Colorada right now. We probably have all at any time, in all our active sites and projects, about 85-90 drill rigs drilling. We're drilling over 600,000 m a year in exploration. This is obviously one of these results of this exploration effort. You see there just the big numbers where it's going to go. There's La Colorada the vein mine. Over the years, it will become smaller. Right now, we're still producing over 6 million oz there, but it will go down as an average to about 3.3 just from the veins. We're going to add an average of nearly 16 million oz to that from the skarn mineralization.
And then you see there on the zinc, it's still going to be a big zinc producer as well, together about 250,000 ton. And as a result, it's going to be about - $20 for our silver per ounce production cost. But it will be about 52% or 53% of revenue will come from silver. So it's going to be clearly a very, very big silver mine. Just a few numbers there. So it has changed now. So with the exploration over the last few years, we have discovered, and I will show later on this section, we have discovered a lot of more high-grade structures. We have discovered a high-grade core inside the skarn, and that brought us to a place where we can go into, we call it phase I, where we go for the high-grade structures and the high-grade part of the skarn.
That phase I is pretty long. You see there, 37 years. I think there's always the chance to go bigger later on and do that block cave for the big deposit. I think this deposit has a chance to be in production for 50+ years. At the moment, those economics are just for the first 37 years. I think that's long enough to start with. It will be only 15,000 tons a day underground, so similar, a little bit bigger than our Jacobina mine in Brazil, and it's the normal mining method that we apply everywhere else as a longhole open stope mine. You see there the return at two different metal prices. One is analyst consensus, 17% return, $2.6 billion NPV, and then at more current prices, about $5.2 billion and a 25% return. Very strong project.
The capital now has been reduced from the big project, which was close to $3 billion to $1.9 billion that we can fully fund from our cash flow and cash on hand. That's how the production profile looks like. When you look at the top is silver production. You see the red bars there at the each bar, that's the current La Colorada production. It's obviously winding down over the years. We discovered new high-grade structures, which are the green ones, and then the blue is the added production from the skarn. You see there that the core production, just around 20 million oz a year. We, at the moment, have about 60,000 m of new drilling that we did not publish yet. It's not yet in our reserve and resource update. There's continuously data coming in.
We just put the press release out about a month ago with some really stunning high-grade additional veins that we discovered at La Colorada with silver grades around 10 kilos per ton. That's still to come in, and I think will obviously smoothen out the production at the beginning and increase our production faster. We keep finding more skarn mineralization as well, which will continue that big production further into the future. You see there, 37 year, and you see below the zinc production, very strong zinc production as well that comes. By the way, La Colorada is producing one of the world's best zinc concentrate right now. It's running about 61%. It's a very clean concentrate with no iron in it. This will produce a very similar product, very easy metallurgy.
We already produce obviously for decades that concentrate and nothing new to us on the metallurgy, no nasties in the concentrate. Great product. A lot of interest, as you can imagine, from the traders in the world when you can produce about a 1/4 million tons a year of that kind of quality of concentrate. It's getting a bit technical here, but just to show, you see on your left side a map. You see those big red circles, that's the skarn. In a plan view, you see some of the main structures. On this side, you see a cut through the mountain. You see on top, gray is the surface. You see the blue block, which is our current La Colorada vein mine. You see in red the skarn below.
You see here the new discoveries, which are some of these new very high-grade veins that helped us to go into this mix of high-grade structures, high-grade part of the skarn, which will bring us to that first phase 37-year production increase at La Colorada. Pretty straightforward. We're going to run a ramp from the existing mine down to the skarn. We're going to start doing that probably in the next two month. We have to sink two shafts. It's pretty deep there, but there's already two shafts that we built at La Colorada in the past. Two shafts, one for ventilation and one for extraction of the 15,000 tons in the future. Great project that we're going to start here. That's how it's going to look like.
Right now when you look at the silver mines in the world, that's just looking at the resource and reserves. Fresnillo is still a bit bigger, but as I said, we still have a lot of drilling that we are doing and a lot of drilling that will be included here. I think La Colorada will grow bigger and will be one of the biggest silver deposits in the world. When you look at production, it's going to be the biggest silver mine in the world. You have to add, obviously, the two up, La Colorada vein and the skarn, and it will just be closely followed by Juanicipio, which is obviously the addition to our portfolio from last year.
Great place to be and a huge leap that La Colorada is going to make from the current 6 million oz all the way in front of the biggest silver mines in the world. As I said, it's going to be the lowest cost one, and you can see that here. Juanicipio is a very low-cost producer. Very happy to have that in our portfolio. As you know, we own 44%. The mine is run by Fresnillo. La Colorada, with the expansion and then the addition of the high-grade structure, will leapfrog Juanicipio and will be bigger and lower cost producer of all these big names of silver producers there in the world. Great place to be. We have discovered that in our portfolio, brownfield discovery, and a great project for us to build out over the next few years.
Yeah, to that Juanicipio, just a few words. Obviously, I think most of you are familiar with it. We added that last year, the 44%, by buying MAG Silver. That was before La Colorada was out with the study. You see that Juanicipio was the lowest producing silver mine in the world and largest one as well. Now we have the two biggest ones in the world. Great spot to be when you want to be the biggest silver producer in the world. We are definitely on the way and there. There's other projects as well that we're working on, and we're working on expansion and optimization of our biggest gold-producing mine, which is Jacobina. That came to us through the acquisition of Yamana Gold. Actually, up to now, that's still the biggest cash flow we have in the company.
That will be replaced with our big silver production in the future, but a great asset to have. Again, a very long-life asset. At the moment, we have a mine plan until 2053 at Jacobina, and we're looking to increase our production here. We started at 8,000 tons a day when we bought it. We surpassed 9,000 tons a day, and we try to get to 10,000 tons as a first step, and then with the optimization, see how much further we can push that. Get a new permit, because our current permit allows us only to mine 10,000 tons a day. Another multi-decade operation that we have in our portfolio in Brazil, in this case. Just a few words on Escobal. Obviously, there's a few other projects we have on Escobal. We're working quite a while on this, on the consultation.
I think we are at a spot now where we exchanged all the information, everything has passed on and we are obviously very open to discuss any kind of participation on that project, together with the indigenous group and the government. You see this very, very small footprint. That's the entire mine, by the way, and Escobal produced 21 million oz of silver when it was in production. The mine is ready to go. We would need about $80 million-$100 million working capital to start it up, about six months to bring it back into production. Obviously I couldn't think in a better metal price environment, to start up a big silver mine in the world. If you look at having communities and governments participating in a project at this metal price, obviously it will make a lot of sense.
That would be the other 20+ million-oz producing asset for us that is already there. It doesn't need a lot of capital, but it's obviously not under our control right now because the consultation is done between the Indigenous group and the Government of Guatemala. Thanks to the addition of Juanicipio, we see a nice increase in our silver production. We guided 25 million oz-27 million oz and still very strong gold production as well, up to 750,000 oz at very good cost profile.
I just want to show this quickly because a lot of people, especially the generations a bit older, like me, that remember very well earlier runs in metal prices and remember 2010, 2009, where we generated a huge inflation in the mining space, really. The metal prices were running wild, and the cost curve actually crossed over and it ended in a big disappointment. I just want to show you when you look at silver on the left side and gold on the right side. You see here the metal prices for the last eight quarters that we achieved for each of these metals, and in green, our all-in sustaining costs. You see how actually remarkably flat those costs stay, especially on the gold side, because we don't have a lot of by-product credits.
Silver is a bit more variable, but you see actually our costs are coming down, and that is the effect of the addition of Juanicipio, a really low-cost producer. You can imagine when we add La Colorada to that with discount at a negative cost of about $20 and nearly doubling our output of silver is going to look very, very interesting, but obviously very, very large margins that we generated hence in Q4 alone, about $553 million free cash flow generation. Metal prices are way higher in Q1. As you can imagine, we have over $2 billion liquidity. At the moment, we're returning about $100 million a quarter to shareholders between share buybacks and dividend. There's, together with the cash in Juanicipio, over $1.4 billion of cash on our balance sheet at the end of 2025.
There's enough money here to obviously build the big expansion at La Colorada, and there will be more money coming in as we speak to do that. No problem on the financial side. With very little debt, there is a very cheap money that we have. We're paying dividends. Since 2010, we've returned of the free cash flow about 36%, 35% between dividend and share buybacks. We increased the dividend every quarter over the last three quarters. This is not the reason we're not giving more money back to shareholders because we don't have anything else to do with it. I just showed you the big projects we have, but there's just so much excess cash that we are happy giving dividend and share buybacks back to our shareholders as part of this big bull run in metal prices.
When you look at per share, it's really interesting obviously. When you look at earnings, you look at return on invested capital, you look at margins on cash flow. Of course, huge increases over the last, that's I think 10 years, on per share base. Part is obviously metal prices, and the other part is just the increased quality of assets that we purchased, and then we tend to sell off the smaller assets at the end or the other end of our portfolio. Obviously, very strong commitment to sustainable production. It always has been. It was always part of Pan American.
Maybe just to end quickly, because silver is a very complex story, much more complex than gold, because silver has two uses, and the use right now on the industrial side is growing so fast, that we are already at about 65% of the world's silver production that is used up. You can imagine with further electrification, not only with clean energy production alone, but self-driving cars, data centers, AI, the use of silver is increasing very, very fast. We can't really produce much more silver. We have the biggest projects, we have the biggest reserve, the biggest resource in the world of silver already. 75% of the production comes actually as a by-product from copper production.
Copper is already at an all-time high nearly, and so there's not many big copper mines coming on in the next few years, so hence not much more silver production. I really can see only La Colorada and Escobal as kind of meaningful addition to the silver. Until then we see big deficit. You see there in green, production is actually declining, but we see increased demand on the silver side, now from both sides, obviously from the industrial side and from the investment side, hence the silver price where it sits right now. With that, I'm at my end, so open for a question if you have time.
Are there any questions from the audience? Gentleman over here.
That $283 million of debt that's due at the end of next year, will you be paying that off entirely or reprice it?
Yeah. It's one part of the two bonds that came to us from the Yamana acquisition. You see the big one, $500 million, is only due in 2031. That one runs at about 2.6% interest. The one that is due, yeah, I think we're just going to pay that back. At the moment, we don't need additional money. As I said, there's enough cash coming in, so that will be due in a bit less than two years.
If there aren't any questions, maybe Michael, I can ask, and I always ask this. I have to come back to Escobal and what's happening with the indigenous consultations. Maybe just give us an update on where are we exactly with that. Do the indigenous people want something from you? Does it look like we can resolve this this year?
Well, look, I never gave you a timing or whenever that will happen. I always maintained the mine in great shape, so when it comes back, we can restart it quickly. As I said, within six months, we could have production. I think I've made very clearly that we are very open and sharing wealth from that project with communities, but also with the government of Guatemala, which obviously jobs are very important, especially now as a lot of jobs getting brought back from the U.S. to Guatemala. Look, as I said, the transfer of information on the consultation is finalized now, and that decision, how we split this up, will be the next part of it.
Okay. If I could, listening to you talk about La Colorada, you got your $1.9 billion CapEx. You showed us you don't need money to build it. Do you have within your portfolio non-core assets? I thought Timmins might be non-core. You've got a royalty portfolio. Maybe just share your thoughts on that.
Yeah. Look, we sold assets for probably about $1.4 billion cash over the last few years, and I will definitely continue. I like to have, as I said, something big on one side before I sell the other ones. When you look at selling assets right now, because it's such a short time frame that we saw so far with these very high metal prices, there's quite a difference between the buyer's expectation and the seller's expectation on metal prices. I think we have to get a bit closer before we can look at divesting an asset. To get there, I guess, later this year, if we have another 10 months of more stable prices, then I think we will find better a spot that works for both of us.
Okay. Thank you so much. We've run out of time.
Thank you.