Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Oliver Turner, EVP Corporate Development, another stock that people will no doubt know, Americas Gold and Silver. Oliver.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Tony, and good to be back in Zurich. Thanks everyone for sitting in on the presentation. I'll try to skip through the forward-looking slides here fairly quickly and get into the meat of things here. This is really a snapshot of who we are at Americas Gold and Silver and what we've been working on over the course of the last year. For those of you not familiar, a new management team took over Americas Gold and Silver in late 2024, early 2025, and we've been very busy in basically diagnosing and fixing some of the challenges that were at the assets, injecting capital into them, and bringing our operational expertise into driving a significant turnaround and eventually a scaling of these assets so that they can realize their full potential. We are located in Idaho.
We'll look at a more detailed map a little bit later on in the Silver Valley, a silver-focused producer there with some pretty significant byproduct credits we'll also touch on a little bit later. We've spent a significant portion of the last year that we've been at the helm of this business strengthening the balance sheet through multiple financings in debt and equity that have really laid the foundation for the work that we have in front of us. We're fully financed and sitting here with a very strong cash balance of $130 million today. We are very well exposed to silver. We'll compare that to some of the peer group a little bit later on. Of course, as always, it's all about execution and operational delivery, and that's really what we're focused on as a team.
With respect to operational delivery, what we're highlighting on this slide here is that you're investing in a team that's done this twice before. What we've kind of become known for is a group that can come into struggling assets that have a lot of potential and really complete a turnaround by injecting our operational expertise as well as the support of our shareholders and the capital that we're able to attract. The first success story that we had was Klondex Mines. It was a misunderstood actually open-pit asset in Nevada that we turned into one of the highest-grade underground gold mines in the world. Strong outperformance. We acquired three mines, two mills, and grew that from almost no production to 200,000 ounces a year of gold, and sold that in 2018. Strong outperformance versus the GDXJ.
We went into a company then called RNC Minerals, changed the name to Karora Resources, a misunderstood asset in Western Australia, actually a 40-year-old nickel mine with some interesting gold occurrences, scaled that with the addition of three mines, two mills to 200,000 ounces a year of gold in annual production, sold that to Westgold for $1.3 billion towards the end of 2024. We joined into Americas Gold and Silver, and took over the company in January 2025. The deal was done in late 2024, consolidated our primary asset, which I'm going to spend the majority of time talking about today, which is called Galena in Idaho. About 40% of that asset was owned by a gentleman called Eric Sprott. We consolidated that, recapitalized the business, and obviously have been off to the races here in executing our turnaround strategy.
As I mentioned before, our primary asset's located in Idaho in the United States, the Galena Complex. We also added our first mine to that complex in late 2025, just last year, called the Crescent Mine, that's located just nine miles down the road. You can see it in the graphic at the top there. Let's see if we get the laser working. Laser's not working. Okay, you can see it at the top there, labeled in red, nine miles down the road. We also have the operating Cosalá Complex down in Mexico that had a record production year last year. Two non-core assets in San Felipe, an exploration property, and Relief Canyon, a former gold development project. We put out our 2026 consolidated production and cost guidance two weeks ago.
This is seeing us in our first year of executing this turnaround strategy growing by about 30% from last year, a strong year-over-year growth. We're starting to see costs come down on an all-in sustaining cost basis. One of the numbers on this page that I'd like to highlight is the very bottom row right there. This is the largest exploration budget these assets have seen in their history. We're going to be spending $20 million over the course of this year, 64,000 m, which may not sound like a lot for some companies, but these are all underground drilling targets, very short drill holes, so we're going to get a lot of data points for that drilling. I'll talk about some of the exploration success we've already had and why we're excited to get churning with the drill bit with a large exploration budget.
Zooming into Idaho, we're going to talk about the Galena Complex first. That's where the focus of the majority of this presentation will be. As I mentioned here, the Crescent Mine, which was acquired adjacent to the Sunshine Mine to the west there. Looking at this page from the left to the right is about 20 mi from Bunker Hill on the west there. Everybody will be familiar with Hecla's Lucky Friday operation to the east here. A great place to be mining silver. Something that a lot of people don't realize about the Silver Valley, but mining has been going on there since the 1800s. In fact, at Galena, mining began in 1893. This is an extremely storied mining district, and Galena has had a lot of production come out of it over the last 130+ years.
Zooming into the last 25 years of production history at Galena shows us the record number that this mine produced. If you look on the left-hand side of this page right there, in 2002, Galena produced 5.2 million ounces at an eye-watering silver grade of over 700 g/ ton. Now, one of the things I want to emphasize in this presentation, we only talk about silver grade, we're not talking about silver equivalent byproducts we'll discuss later. These are silver-only grades that you're seeing on this page here. A remarkable number. In our first year of starting to execute some of the turnaround that we have rolling out over the next several years here at Galena, you see a little green arrow here to help you identify it. We brought silver grades back up to the highest grade that this mine has seen in 20 years.
473 grams is what we produced last year, and that is incorporating five of the long hole stopes that I'll talk about a little bit later on as we transition the mining method. It was a very, very strong first year, and if you look at us ranked to some of the other silver-producing mines in the world, we're one of the highest-grade underground silver mines and highest-grade silver mines, period, globally speaking. It is a very high-grade operation. Simply put, our strategy on a page is to get Galena back to that record level of 5 million ounces per year, and I'm going to explain to you how we're going to do it. This is probably the most important slide you'll see today. This is a cross-section of all the infrastructure that we have in place at Galena. Galena has a phenomenal amount of infrastructure in place.
We've got two mills up on surface there, the [Core Mill] and the Galena Mill. We've got four shafts in place. Starting from left to right, you've got the Coeur Shaft, the Number 3 Shaft, which is the primary hoisting shaft, the Galena Shaft, and the Caladay Shaft, 120 mi of underground development. To put that development in place today would cost you over $2.1 billion, a significant amount of infrastructure in place and a very large silver resource, which I'll talk about a little bit later on. We had a positive update on that as well, really a great starting point for us to have an impact on operations and execute our strategy. During our due diligence in 2024, and then during our first year at the helm in 2025, we diagnosed and determined that there really were two bottlenecks in the mine.
The first bottleneck was the hoisting through the Number 3 Shaft. That shaft was struggling to get 300 tons per day out of this mine. When you look at the milling on surface, we were only filling that Galena Mill by about less than 50%, and the Coeur Mill wasn't being filled at all. The second bottleneck that we identified was the mining method underground, not being able to get enough tons to the bottom of that shaft. We've been very busy over the course of the last year, not only diagnosing, but also purchasing equipment and starting to implement our strategy to turn this mine around. Starting with hoisting. Late last year, we upgraded the Number 3 Hoist Shaft. We replaced an old 1,750 horsepower motor with a brand new 2,250 horsepower motor.
What that allows us to do is now go from 40 tons per hour to 80 tons per hour, or a doubling of hoisting capacity with that new hoist motor. A big impact on that mine. We also injected 10 new pieces of equipment underground. In fact, none of this equipment existed underground previously. These are modern mine trucks, remote operated front-end loaders that we'll talk about using for long hole stoping. Underground long hole drills. We also upgraded the Coeur Shaft, which has a significant impact on the mine because the Coeur Shaft is now operational at 500 tons per day. What does two times hoisting capacity boost get you? It gets you to about 600 ore tons per day. What are we working on this year? We're doing the second phases of upgrades to the Number 3 Shaft.
That'll actually start in the next couple of weeks here. A modern braking system, communication system, upgrading the lilies. That'll get us to over 100 tons per hour or approximately 900 ore tons per day. So for about $8 million in total, we will have tripled capacity of the primary hoisting shaft at Galena. We're also busy underway putting in a paste fill plant . Construction of that is starting as we speak. That is going to be critical for our transition to long hole stoping that I'll talk about shortly here. We have long hole drill underground, busy drilling off the stopes that we've been very successful with so far. So a lot of projects going on this year and next year at Galena that we established during our first year there in 2025. This is a great slide to talk about some of the improvements we're seeing already.
One of the transitions that we are making at Galena is taking Galena from a mine that was using 100% underhand cut and fill, which you see on the left-hand side there. You get about 40 tons-50 tons per cut there to a long hole stoping dominant mine, which you see on the right-hand side there. That graphic on the right-hand side is actually a photo taken from last July. It was our first panel taking in our long hole stopes. We took a 60 ft high stope, 120 ft long, three feet wide. It was 7,000 tons. We mined that out in 28 days. To mine 7,000 tons using underhand cut and fill would have taken us approximately a year. A very significant productivity boost. We've now taken nine panels out of the mine. All of them about 3.3 ft wide, 3 ft-4 ft wide.
Our minimum mining width has not changed going from underhand cut and fill to long hole stoping. This is something we've done at five other mines previously and is being implemented very successfully here as well. As I mentioned at the beginning, with those long hole stopes, we've seen grades continue to come up at Galena. This is how we're going to get more tons to the bottom of those newly upgraded shafts to fill those mills on surface and really bring this mine back to that 5 million ounces a year+ . We've also had a lot of success with the drill bit. We've been busy over the course of 2025, and as I mentioned, we're going to have an extremely large budget here for drilling in 2026. Three of the areas I'd like to highlight here. This is the same long section you saw earlier.
Everything you see on this page, we own 100% of, and it's all connected underground. The first major discovery was the 34 vein shown in the middle there. We also have the 149 vein and then the 520 vein, which we recently discovered. I'm going to talk about the 34 vein first. Our headline hole was 983 g, 3.4 m. That is over triple our minimum mining width at double the grade that we're currently mining. Certainly, a good hole to start off with. When we put out these results midway through last year, we had a target of about 1 million-2 million ounces for this vein system. Now we think this vein system is in excess of 7 million ounces and growing. This is an in-mine discovery. You see the 5,500 level and the 5,200 level right there, an in-mine discovery. We are actively mining around this vein.
This is what Galena has been doing for over 100 years. This mine has been going for an extremely long period of time and will extend for decades into the future, if not more than that. Very happy with the 34 vein. We also have the 520 vein, which is a recent discovery. We put out those results a couple of weeks ago. We really were drilling around historical high-grade intercepts that were in the Coeur Mine . Mining shut down in the core area when silver was less than $10 an ounce. What we're doing is following up on a historical multi-kilo drill holes and drilling around it to infill those areas, and we have a brand-new discovery. Last but certainly not least, yet another example of the grade potential of Galena, you see a 25 kg intercept.
A lot of people might say, "Okay, Oliver, that's only 21 cm." Remember, at a minimum mining width of one meter, you're diluting 21 cm 5x . You still have a 5 kg/ ton cut out of that operation. That's a phenomenal result for us. Again, discovered around existing mining workings. On the left-hand side there, that's a plan view of the existing 4,900 level. You see the vein cross-cutting existing development. Lots more of that to come over the next several years, and that's why we're excited about the drill bit. All of these exploration results came to the conclusion, or it came to the result rather, of a very positive inaugural resource update for this management team. This is our first resource update that we've done since we've taken over, and we saw some pretty strong numbers.
At Galena, you've seen a 19% increase in M&I ounces and a 20% increase in grade. If you look at the left-hand side here, Measured, Indicated, and Inferred, you've got 190 million ounces at 500 g/ ton. That 473 that we mined, we're not even at resource grade. We've also got 16.3 million ounces at about 500 g/ ton in reserve. This mine has had a rolling reserve of 5 million-20 million ounces per year for the last 100 years. Etienne was just up here talking about Orla's rolling reserve life at Musselwhite. Galena's been doing this for a long period of time, too, and will in the future, and has a strong history of converting Inferred to M&I to Proven and, of course, being mined. We're very happy with that.
Getting a little bit more granular on that resource update shows the real potential of Galena. If you look at the bold line along the bottom here in the bottom table, there are two types of ore at Galena. There's silver-copper, that's actually where antimony is as well, as well as silver-lead ore. That silver-copper resource at Galena between M&I plus inferred is now over 90 million ounces. Look at the grades, over 700 g/ ton silver. You remember in 2002, this mine produced 5.2 million ounces at 729 g/ ton. That was the record for this operation. We've now got 90 million ounces of that material and growing at 700 grams+.
One of our focuses over the course of the next several years is not just going from underhand cut and fill to long hole stope mining, but also transitioning into more of these high-grade silver-copper veins, just a phenomenally high-grade operation that we're excited to be operating. What I talked about in terms of those exploration targets is not the total potential of Galena. In the Silver Valley, we are all mining part of the same geological system. You see Lucky Friday over to the east of us, 2x the current depth of Galena. All of these mines have down-plunge and depth potential for them. When we talk about exploration targets and we talk about the resource that we currently have, over 200 million ounces and at-depth potential, there's actually up-depth potential as well.
These mines will be going for a very long period of time to come, and we have the Crescent Mine there as well with the same potential. Talking about some of the byproduct credits that we produce, at Americas Gold and Silver, with the silver-copper-antimony ore, which is also known as tetrahedrite ore, every ton we mine brings silver, antimony, and copper out of it. Every ton of the silver-lead that we mine brings the silver and lead. What we've done over the course of the last year is take what was a penalty element under a previous contract with Teck Resources into a payable byproduct credit for Galena and for Americas Gold and Silver. We're taking it a step further. In order to maximize byproduct revenue, we've announced a joint venture with U.S. Antimony.
We are going to be building a antimony leaching facility on our site. This has been done before in the Silver Valley at Sunshine, just a few kilometers down the road. Galena's ore has been going there since 1942. This mine has been producing antimony since the Second World War continuously. In fact, 80 years of production history shows you that for every copper pound, 0.7 pounds of antimony come out of this operation. What we're going to be doing is leaching the antimony out on our site in our own facility operated by US Antimony. That will produce a flake metal. For those of you not aware what a hydromet facility like this looks like, it's very simple, a few leach tanks, some electrowinning cells, and then you produce your metal. We're excited to maximize those payabilities as well.
The recent addition of the Crescent Mine in the Silver Valley, nine miles down the road, it's a mine that's very similar to Galena, the same type of silver-copper-antimony ore, over 600 g/ ton in resource. You see a long section in the top right-hand side of this slide, three adits accessing it. We're putting in a decline as we speak today. That'll give us our secondary egress to commence long hole stope mining later this year. Ore from this mine will be heading into the Galena Mill this year. This is one of those acquisitions that makes your existing operation more valuable. You can see right now we're currently up to 410 tons per day coming through the Galena Mill. We're going to maximize that with Crescent coming in and the growth at Galena.
Stepping down quickly to Mexico, and then we'll wrap up corporately here. The Mexican operations reported a record 1.2 million ounces of production last year. We're heading into a new high-grade mine called EC120. Expect more of the same this year. A very strong team down there, long tenured. Average tenure of that operation is 12 years, executing the strategy down there and adding ounces to our profile. Some strong exploration updates there as well. We've discovered a new area called El Alacrán, which we believe has the potential to be the next mine down in Mexico. As I mentioned earlier, in terms of exposure to silver, we're one of the best in the business if you want exposure to the silver metal, second only currently to Aya Gold & Silver. A good place to park your dollars if you're looking for exposure to this metal.
Everybody's seen a valuation slide, but what I'll do is I'll end up here. Over the course of the last year, we've had a huge transformation in the shareholder register and in our analyst coverage. We were about 60% institutionally owned when we first walked through the door. You can read the numbers on this page, well over that now, and have some of the largest names in the business owning us. We've also added seven new analysts covering us over the course of the last 12 months, so lots of places to go to get a second opinion on what we're doing here. Last but not least, as a management team and director team, we own 7% of the business ourselves personally, so we're extremely well-aligned with shareholders and want to make sure that we deliver for everyone. That's it.
Oliver, thank you. Unfortunately, out of time. Fascinating, though, what you're doing with antimony. When I was a boy, it was only a penalty element. Now you can make real money.
Absolutely.
It's wonderful to see.
Thanks.
Please join with me in thanking Oliver. Thank you.