I'm really happy to be here up in Denver once again. It's been an exciting 14 days, starting off with a site visit for us. We had a bunch of analysts on our site, so those of you looking for fresh reports, please ask Miranda over here in the audience. There are a bunch of them coming out after this show, was followed by Beaver Creek, and then this wonderful Denver show, so I'm happy to be here. In the middle of this show, we attended something that I've never done before, and I just want to talk about it real quickly. We went to, I know we're at the Denver Gold show, but I got to talk about this AI show that I went to at Reuters in Texas. It was quite astonishing for me because there's trillions of dollars there. We were the only miner in that room.
There had to be an audience of about 8x-1 0x this, 400 people. I watched the CEOs get up one at a time, talk about their AI, how much they're exploding, how much it's growing. One of the things that blew my mind out of every CEO got up front, they were talking about the long lead times, Don, on semiconductors. The one guy said, "You know, it's taking us a year and a half to order a semiconductor, and then we get it, and then finally things have changed." Not one of them spoke about metals. I got up at the very end, the only miner there. There are at least 400. We got bombarded with about 50 people, and one of the things I'd say to other miners is, we should be at these things.
I stood up and I said, the first thing I said, "Look, AI is not in the cloud. It's actually in a mine. Without miners, you don't exist." People in that industry had no idea that silver is at such a shortage. For six years in a row as a planet, we're not producing enough silver. Copper is going to be short in the very near future as well. At the rate that these things are building AI, EVs, anything else, your cell phone, everyone has a cell phone. There's 8 million ounces of silver. These things that we're doing at Americas Gold and Silver, we're producing silver, we're producing copper, we're producing antimony, we have got lead, and we've got gold. But none of those companies, it blew my mind how none of them were really paying attention to it. We had so much inbound calls since that.
It's interesting when we step outside of our own world. I've been doing this 15 years as a CEO of Klondex, CEO of Karora, and now here. But stepping into someone else's world was quite fascinating for me, and I'd encourage others to start looking at it because it is going to impact that industry and there are a lot of dollars in that industry. Let me jump into my company here that I'm very proud of. Obviously, I'm Chairman and CEO. I've been here for around 16 months. Personally, I've been mining 39 years. This is my wife and I, our single largest investment next to Eric Sprott. I think we are the largest shareholder, at least retail, owning 80% of my net worth into one stock. So I'm very much committed into what we're doing and believe in what we're building here at Americas Gold and Silver.
Where are we located? Obviously, we've got assets in Idaho, predominantly in Idaho here. I don't know if this pointer works. Probably not, but you can see up on the screen. I can't get the pointer to work. Idaho and Mexico. We've been very focused in the last year and a half at revitalizing the Galena Complex, and we've consolidated that district. We started off with 60% ownership of it. We bought Eric Sprott's 40%. We consolidated three shafts in a row, which I'll talk about right over here afterwards, and then we bought the Crescent Mine. What's our objective? It's simple. Americas Gold and Silver at Galena in 2002, it produced 5 million ounces of silver. We know it's been done before. It's 20 years ago. We've got to go back to that stage. We just got to build the plan, build the infrastructure.
The thing we're going to do that's very different is sustain it. It can't be a flash in the pan like it was back in 2002. That record in 2002 it's a great objective and goal for us because we know it's been done before. Those of you who followed me at Klondex and Karora know that there's never been a target in an underground mine that someone else has been able to do that my team hasn't been able to repeat or do even better. I was a miner 13 years of my life, a raise miner and a jackleg miner for a better part of my early career.
As we're changing the mining method in this mine, the one question we are asked all the time is, "If you're going to go to long- hole like you did at Klondex and Karora, Paul, what will happen to the grade?" Here's a great example and a good slide here. In 2025, we took out the first six stopes ever long- hole at Galena. It was the first time it was ever done at this mine. We carved those out. That's the best grade. Look at the grade up top. It's circled in red. Best grade this mine has seen in 20 years. As we're making the mine much more efficient, just like we did in the previous companies, we're also seeing a benefit in grade because we're able to carve it out surgically with those long- holes. This is exactly what we're doing.
We inherited a mine that's been here for 100 years. 100% of our mining was all done with air legs, everything jacklegs. Our neighbors are successfully 6 mi down the road, successfully mining 5 million ounces per year, they're 100% long- hole. They're enjoying long- hole and doing it very successfully, I might add, doing a great job. We definitely seen an opportunity here as we started looking at our due diligence and said, "Look, if we could convert 70% of this mine, remove the jackleg, adapt to long- hole, and improve the infrastructure, we're going to be well on our way." In that first year, that's what we were squarely focused on. To date, we've taken out 17 panels. Here's a panel, a picture.
We actually showed this to the analysts who were here two weeks ago at the mine site, which was great to show off. That stope is 1 m wide, 3.3 ft. We couldn't have done any better with jacklegs. Had we been drilling and blasting that with jacklegs, we couldn't have mined that any narrower. What's really impressive is the time. Look at how long we did that in. It took us a month to mine that stope. If we had done that with jacklegs, that's 12-14 months. Drilling and blasting it, resting it down, that's how long it would have taken us. When you start applying 70% of the mining method this way and overcome those challenges that are faced with jacklegs and the injuries and everything else, you start to recognize really quickly that we can cycle these things a lot faster.
That was the whole end game. Just repeat this long- hole, make sure we're doing long- hole, and we're not diluting the grade, but make sure we do it much more efficiently. How do we do it? Well, equipment, obviously. We've had 12 new pieces of equipment. We never even had remote controls in our mine. Those of you who've been mining for a long time understand that if you're going to long- hole in any deposit, you need remote controls. We had to bring them down. We had to buy all long- hole drills. They're on site now. We've taken out 19 stopes so far. One of the things that we don't have at Galena yet, but if you came to site recently or you come at the end of the year, is that paste fill plant.
The other mines that are near us all have paste fill plants. We're the only one who doesn't have it. In order for us to cycle these stopes properly and make sure we fill them and avoid any geotechnical issues, we need a proper paste fill plant. That's being constructed right now. It's around $24 million to get it done. Q4, it'll be done. It's one of the final steps in order for us to make sure we can cycle the long- hole, and then it's going to be about pushing the waste development in front of ourselves. This is a long section of our mine. In the middle of the slide there, you could see the Galena shaft. What's important about this, on that first slide that I showed you where we had 5 million ounces in 2002, that record was done using one shaft.
At the time, that Galena shaft was constrained to about 600 tons-650 tons per day. That's total tons, ore and waste. We have upgraded that shaft and modernized it by putting in new skips, new motors, new communication system. That's all done. We've done it. It's behind us. We spent those dollars. We're able to skip in that shaft today about 1,400 tons a day. We can't consistently do it yet because we're not all long- hole yet. But that was one of the big bottlenecks is the fact that that shaft could only move 600 tons of rock a day was a tremendous bottleneck. We needed to improve that. That is behind us. It's done. We know we can get 1,400 tons a day. But more importantly, what else do we have?
That Coeur shaft, that shaft to the right side of us, that thing hasn't been operational for years. It was moving 700 tons of rock as well. We've recently put two motors on it. In fact, we've just put a scoop down there, avoiding downtime in the main shaft. All these things are helping us to become much more efficient in this mine. The Coeur shaft, we're using it to lower men down. [inaudible] discovery 520 Vein is a discovery made from that Coeur shaft. The fact that we're going to have the Galena shaft up and running double or triple the capacity, the Coeur shaft, and those of you know in January or February, we closed the deal at a mine 6 mi, 7 mi away from us, the Crescent Mine. The Crescent Mine has three adits.
It doesn't have a secondary egress yet, so we're going to put in the secondary egress. For the time being, we're doing a lot of drilling, and I'm going to share with you some of the drill results because all of our mines, our mine at Galena, our mine at Cosalá in Mexico, and the one at Crescent all suffered from lack of money. As a result, there was no drilling done for 10 years. Most of you guys are all miners here. You know that to run a narrow vein underground mine or any mine for that matter, you need to be drilling. There was no drilling for 10 years. That's one of the opportunities I even saw. The reason I put so much money in in the beginning was because I thought, man, there are so many targets here. Nothing's been drilled.
All we got to do is change the management, put in money into the infrastructure, change the mining method, and by the way, that's exactly what we did at Karora. It's exactly what we did at Klondex. It's the same recipe, and it just takes time. You're not going to come into a district that's been here for 100 years and flip a switch and just do it. We've been very diligent about this. Here at Galena with the drill bit, we've had six brand-new discoveries, six new discoveries from beginning to end. We don't have 034 Vein, do we? I just want to talk about one vein, the 034 Vein. You could see it in that circle. The reason I want to bring it up is because that average width is about 3x the average width of our normal veins here.
Usually, our veins are anywhere from 0.8 m - 1.3 m. That 034 Vein was averaging 3.4 m- 3.6 m, but the grade was 938 g/ ton in silver, not silver equivalent. We produce five metals at Galena, silver, copper, antimony, lead, and gold. In fact, before I forget it, I just want to bring this up. One of the things I've been showing around is this bar. A lot of people, if you want to see it at the end, please grab it, feel the density of it. Most people say, "Well, what is it, Paul?" Obviously, it's our ticker, USAS. I may as well brag about American-made and be proud of it. This is 99.98% antimony. Those of you who want to see it, I welcome you to have a look at it. It's sure gotten a lot of attention.
100% of this comes from our mine at Galena. This was smelted at the facility, United States Antimony Corporation's facility in Montana, but the feed all comes from our mine. We are one of the largest suppliers to the U.S. military for antimony, and we're still not getting credit for that. We will in the future as we build a new antimony facility up in Idaho, which we're planning to do with our partners starting next year. In fact, we've got those bids out right now with eight different groups looking at the costing of that. That's going to be a game changer for us once we start getting the right revenue for our antimony. Let me bring it back to the silver story, which is what we are. 85% of our revenue is silver, and we boast some of the best grades in the world here.
I know Benoit was talking about some great grades. He's got great grades. These are even outstanding. You start looking at some of these are 2,500 g/ ton. This stuff here is repeatable. Five new discoveries we've had, and let me show you some of the ones at Crescent. We just bought Crescent. This is some of our drill hole success we've had at Crescent, 1,100 g. They are narrow, but we are mining narrow. What I want to bring your attention to is some of the drilling that we've had more recently in Mexico. We haven't spoke a lot about Mexico in the first year because we were a little concerned about Mexico.
We didn't know what the long-term plan was for us, and we've quickly identified that after being for a little over a year, Mexico is going to become a flagship operation and much more important to our story. Here's why. The average grade that we've had in our Mexican operation was 100 g-110 g. Last year in 2025, we had a record year producing about 1.1 million ounces. We're going to beat that record this year. More importantly, if you start looking at Mexico and what do we have, it was faced with the same problems we had at Galena and Crescent, no drilling. We've had some amazing success all over. Look at the drill results we've got starting at the top, 14 m of 598 g. That's 14 m wide of 600 g, 20 m of 650 g.
I know I'm reading them off, but they're worth talking about. 10 m of 500 g, 16 m of 300 g, 10 m of 560 g. Those are 4x-5x the average grade of what we have been mining for the last 18 months. None of these are in our resource. A lot of this is we're stepping out drilling. Several of them are outside of the entire resource and reserve altogether. We're quite excited about this, and now that we understand Mexico and been working there much longer for the last 18 months, we know the risks, we know the benefits. There are some tremendous benefits. Mexico has always been a good cash generator. It will continue to climb up our portfolio and continue to deliver ounces.
At the end of the day, what we care about is getting to 5 million ounces and a lot more, and getting them as cheap as we can. Our ounces in Mexico have actually been cheaper than the ones we've had otherwise. I've talked really about all the metals we produce. What's important about this slide is understanding where we came from. The silver that we talk about, the antimony. In the past, we were penalized for antimony. Most of you know how important it is. It's such a critical metal. Obviously, we negotiated that with Teck. We're now getting paid for our antimony. Our copper in the past, until we got here a year ago, we weren't paid for our copper. We were sending our concentrate.
We'll mine a ton of ore, we'll turn it into concentrate, we ship it up to Canada, Teck, and we weren't being paid for our copper, we weren't being paid for our gold, and we were penalized for antimony. All that has changed. Since we've taken over, we've renegotiated those contracts. We're being paid for silver. Antimony we're being paid for. There's still a lot of opportunity for us on the antimony, hence why we know it makes sense to build that plant in Idaho with United States Antimony Corporation. The copper we're now getting paid and the gold we're getting paid. That plant for us is going to be something very exciting. It's going to be a big part of our future. It will be open for business, as we say.
What I mean about that is because we own 51%, we're not giving up 51% of our antimony to our partners. We're charging ourselves and the JV a toll milling fee, but we'll keep all our antimony, but there will be other sources coming in. Our partners obviously have a lot of sources. There are a lot of other domestic sources that we will welcome, because in the end of the day, in the U.S. we need 50 million lbs. We'll be producing 4 million lbs-5 million lbs. Others are welcome because we need it in the U.S. It's such a critical element that we all needed here. Along the way, everyone asked, obviously, the balance sheet. Our balance sheet has been transformed. In Q2, we actually eliminated two big debt positions that we had, one with Royal Gold, and the other one with Sprott.
By eliminating that was around $76 million of debt that we eliminated, positioning us in the best financial position we've ever had. We ended Q2 with around $89 million in cash with about $50 million of undrawn. To date, we've paid off about $160 million in debt since we've come here, taken over the company. These debt payments that we were paying, they were about $28 million a year. You think $7 million a quarter, those aren't cheap for a company like us. Getting rid of it is a really important step for us as we continue to unlock the value at all our assets, Galena, Cosalá, and Mexico. I think that's about the end of it, Don. I was opening up for one or two questions with one minute left to go.
Thank you very much, Paul.
No worries.
We do have a little bit of time for questions from the audience. If everyone has a question, raise their hand. Paul, maybe if you could just kind of refresh us on the upcoming catalysts. Certainly with some of those intercepts I've been seeing, maybe talk about also the next MRE update that would incorporate some of those.
Yeah. For us, look, again, those intercepts are so big, and the fact that they're so close to us, what we're going to do is we're going to be shifting our mine plans. Our number one catalyst right now is looking at the mine plan we have at both Cosalá and in Galena, and we're going to be always. We've already got 250 million ounces at Galena. People are like, "Well, why do you want to keep growing?" Well, we don't necessarily want to keep growing it, but what we want to do is understand how much higher grades we've got or how much different widths we got. In our case, Don, what we're looking at is displacing some of the lower grade material, replacing with wider areas and better grades.
For us, the number one catalyst is revitalizing a resource, mine plans, and targeting some of that better grades while sustaining a new. Every year we're going to be breaking records, just like we did at Karora, but we want to sustain it. It can't be something that we do one year where we get to 5 million ounces and then we're down to 3 million ounces. We want to go 5 million ounces to 6 million ounces to 7 million ounces. We want to maintain that level. Revitalizing these mine plans with this new information is going to be key, and a lot more drilling ahead of us.
Thanks, Paul, and thanks again for joining us this afternoon.
Thanks very much, Don.