Some in person and hopefully some online. Welcome to Wheaton's 2021 Investor Day. While we'd hoped that we'd be able to see all of you in person, due to this pandemic, we had to shift to a hybrid-style event. Not anything new. I'm sure everyone's having to work around this. We do have a small group of our sell-side analysts joining us here in person in Toronto, and then a majority of viewers, I guess, are tuning in via the webinar. To keep the pace of this event, there's going to be two designated Q&A sessions for Wheaton management, and the first is going to follow the presentations from our executive team here at the start of the morning. It'll focus on areas of sustainability, corporate development, and finance.
The second and final Q&A session will follow the presentations that we have from our partners later on in the event, with a specific focus on the assets themselves. Time permitting, there should be a little bit of Q&A behind each one of our partner presentations. If you're with us here in Toronto, please use the microphone, there's two mics in the middle, to ask a question so that we can share that question with the audience that's watching it virtually. For those that are attending remotely, there is a question box available through the webcast link where you can type and submit your questions. Time permitting, hopefully, we can get those questions answered live as well. I'm going to start off. There will be some forward-looking statements made throughout the course of the day.
This is a blanket forward-looking statement that covers everyone's presentation, so you don't have to listen to this every time. Anyways, I urge everyone to understand the cautions associated with such forward-looking statements buried in the fine print in there. Today's agenda, as you can see, it's been distributed around. We've got management presentations at the start, followed by our partner presentations. Wow, I've already used half my time. I better hurry up. My name, Randy Smallwood. We're here to talk about streaming and Wheaton Precious Metals. The streaming business model is a unique model that we created back in 2004 when I was at Goldcorp at the time. It's designed to provide capital to the mining industry by selling off, ideally, a non-core portion of the production.
You can see the structure is very simple: upfront cash payment made to the operating partner, and for that, we get a percentage of whatever metal is delivered at a fixed cost on a per-ounce basis as that metal is delivered to us. No, it's not advancing. There we go. Our vision to be the world's premier precious metals investment vehicle, and we're going to deliver that to our partners and to our stakeholders through that streaming business model, deliver that value through the streaming business model. As you can see, to our shareholders by delivering low-risk, high-quality, diversified exposure. To our partners by crystallizing the value for these precious metals that have yet to be produced.
Of course, to our neighbors, all important stakeholders at lower cost, but to our neighbors by promoting responsible mining practices, by providing support in terms of building proper mines, and providing that support to our communities around the mine sites itself. We have a really strong ESG program in our company. The real key benefits of the streaming model are sort of really highlighted here. What you've got is real high-quality assets in our portfolio. We really do put extra focus. In fact, it's the first criteria that any investment has to satisfy is really high operating margins, good, strong operating margins, good long-life assets. Of course, what that delivers is good exploration and expansion potential. These are the assets that our partners want to invest into first because they deliver high margins to our operating partners. Of course, predictable costs.
The costs themselves are fixed to the capital cost up front, the operating cost as that metal is delivered to us. All of that, of course, because we do have that operating cost on a per-ounce basis, does give us commodity price leverage. We will perform better than, say, a comparable royalty, which doesn't have that operating cost base itself going forward. It does give us better leverage on commodity prices. A very strong, innovative dividend, and of course, great optionality with a number of assets that aren't even part of our production portfolio yet. We have had a pretty successful pandemic, transitioning into a hybrid world. We've had a number of projects move forward into next stages and a number of acquisitions. Santo Domingo, the Cozamin stream, the Phoenix with Rio2. Voisey's Bay has now started delivering cobalt to us early in January.
We've made some significant advances in sustainability. Patrick will talk about that in a bit. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, hoping to get over to London to do some marketing there sometime soon. Good, strong dividend growth that we've seen, with that dividend being tied directly to commodity prices and our growing production. Of course, leadership in precious metals themselves. Year-to-date production, you can see we're well advanced in terms of making our objectives for the year. I'm getting red lights flashing at me here, I'm going to speed up through this. You can see our production. We've got good, strong growth over the next five years, and in fact, 10 years. We came up with 10-year guidance for one of the first times that anyone in this space has, just to highlight the longevity of our asset base.
Good, strong production growth should see us all the way up to about 830,000 gold equivalent ounces per year averaging over the next 10 years, which implies 850,000 for the last five years of that to push it up to those levels. We've added a few assets since we came up with this guidance, and so it's good strong production growth over the course of the next 10 years. Cumulative value of upfront payments to date. We've delivered over 40% of all streaming contributions into the mining space, and a good strong list of partners, all the way from Glencore and Vale, Newmont, all the way down to some of the small little single asset producers, smaller copper producers like Capstone and such, and then single asset companies. This streaming model was very effective as a source of capital in the mining industry itself.
You can see we have been active over the last five years. We've got three of the top five precious metal streaming deals completed over the last five years. We continue to be very active on that front. I know Haytham will have a bit to say about that. With my last slide, our capital allocation, it is our most pressing issue. This year, we should see relatively close to $1 billion in free cash flow. Our focus is to try and, in fact, all of us, what we're paid to do is put that into accretive, responsible transactions that continue to grow our company. If we can't put that back into our company, back into the ground by making good acquisitions, then we continue to grow our dividend. It's really our biggest pressing issue in this company.
It's pretty exciting times for Wheaton. With that, I'll hand the slide over to Patrick.
Can't see that through here
Thank you, Randy. As mentioned, my name is Patrick Drouin. I'm the Senior Vice President for Investor Relations. Part of my responsibility at Wheaton is to oversee our sustainability program. Green button? Green button? I don't know if we can advance the slides to It would speed things along a little bit .
All right. Now that you've seen my presentation. At Wheaton, sustainability is a core value. It's something that I may oversee, but everyone on this stage and throughout the company is focused on sustainability. When we talk about sustainability as an organization, we tend to look at it in four different areas. The first off is due diligence. We do very thorough due diligence inclusive of ESG. Secondly, we believe in giving back to the communities from which we operate, as Randy already alluded to. Thirdly, we need a strong foundation based on formalized ESG policies and practices. Our foundation is overseen at the board level through our governance and sustainability committee. Lastly, we need to hold ourselves accountable, and we've committed to a number of external frameworks to make sure that we are accountable to best practices within the industry.
On the due diligence, Haytham will go into much more detail on our due diligence program. It is very thorough, looking at technical, financial, legal, environmental, and ESG. On the ESG, that's where I'm going to focus. The ESG due diligence, we have 10 principles, 10 investment ESG principles that we look at when we're evaluating risk related to an opportunity and doing due diligence. I'm not going to go through all of 10 of these, but I will highlight a few of them. Number four, I think, is important, and this is maintaining regular and ongoing dialogue with our mining partners. The key thing for us is partnerships. That's what you see throughout my presentation, what Randy's already talked about, and what the rest of the team will be discussing. We really do believe forging strong partnerships is crucial.
That plays into numbers six and seven here, which outlines our community reinvestment program. Giving back to the communities from which we get metal is paramount to us, and it goes back to, again, forging strong partnerships, both with the mining operator as well as the local communities around the mine sites. Lastly, number 10, I quite like, and that's being agents of change. If we see ways to make something better, be it from a technical perspective, a community perspective, we're not afraid to speak up and make that happen. With those 10 principles, we've come up with an ESG checklist. This ESG checklist helps us to screen for potential risks and issues. We evaluate the partner's potential policies and practices around these material topics that can potentially impact the future of the mines.
As Haytham will show you in his presentation, through this exercise, we're able to assign quantitative rankings for the various ESG factors, which are then consolidated into a weighted contribution that goes into our determination of the discount rate that we apply to a new opportunity. We do quantify this, and this does have financial impacts for a potential opportunity down the road. As I've mentioned a few times, giving back to the community is something very much a part of Wheaton. We've got a formalized policy where we dedicate 1.5% of our net income to charities and to the communities. Two-thirds of that goes to those communities around the mines from which we get metal. The remnining 1/3 goes to the local communities around our corporate offices. As you can see from our partner program, this is something we're very proud of.
This lists some of the initiatives we've done. Since 2009, when we initiated this program, we've contributed more than $20 million to various charities throughout Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Montana, pretty much all over. It is something that we're very proud of. Last year we saw that there was more that we could do. With the pandemic raging, the rural communities, especially those rural communities around our mine sites that don't have the resources, needed more help. We put in a $5 million additional fund focused on combating COVID-19. As of the end of the second quarter, we deployed $4 million of that, and we fully anticipate the remaining $1 million going out hopefully by the year-end. As you can see, a number of initiatives. It's neat to see an ambulance down in Tayoltita with our name on it, and that's just one example of the many things that we've done.
We also recognize that we need to, again, hold ourselves accountable. To that end, we've signed on with a number of external frameworks. We've been carbon neutral for the past six years, since 2015. We were founding signatories to the World Gold Council's RGMPs, and we were the first streaming company to sign on to the UN Global Compact, the largest sustainability initiative in the world. As part of that commitment to the UNGC, we have published sustainability reports. We put our second one out just in May. It is aligned with SASB, with TCFD and select GRI disclosures. I would urge you to take a look at this. There are copies of that sustainability report on everybody's desk here in the room, as well as on our website. It really is a comprehensive look at our sustainability program.
It's nice to know that our hard work hasn't gone unnoticed. We are consistently top-ranked among the ESG rating agencies. We're a AA with MSCI. Sustainalytics has us number number for precious metals, and perhaps more importantly, Sustainalytics also has us ranked in the Global Top 50. That's out of over 12,000 companies cross-sector that they've screened us as being in the Global Top 50, the only mining company in that index. I can assure you, we won't rest on our laurels. We're very proud of what we've accomplished and what we've done to date, but we still see lots of opportunities for us to do more. Even to that end, I recently hired a full-time sustainability manager to both complement the existing team, but really to give us more capacity to take this ESG program to the next level.
We're looking forward to doing this in a few more years and showing you how much further we progress. With that, I'll turn the floor over to Haytham Hodaly to talk about corporate development.
Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Haytham Hodaly. I'm the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. I'll be here to talk to you a little bit today just about the process we undertake when we're looking at new streaming opportunities, as well as what we look for in those streaming opportunities. The first thing we do is we actually identify a potential opportunity and ensure it meets our sustainability criteria. That's one of the most important things. We generate, as you see from this flowchart here, a production profile.
We arrive at a discount rate, and I'm going to go through all these in a little bit more detail in my presentation to map out some future cash flows, and then we analyze the impact on Wheaton's portfolio, but not just on Wheaton's portfolio, but also on our partner's portfolio and see how it impacts them. The reason streaming works is there's a number of benefits to our partners. Otherwise, our partners would never look and consider streaming. It provides attractive, flexible funding, and I'm not going to go through the list. I will go through some of these points in my presentation. It's viewed as portfolio optimization. In other words, you're unlocking value from the partner company.
It creates sustainable value. We look at ourselves as a proponent for change going forward, not just looking for things that are already established, but ways we can continue to move things forward. It also mitigates risk. It reduces their risk by diversifying their development risk. How is streaming better than traditional funding? There's several ways that streaming is advantageous. One of the most important ways is that a stream always improves the internal rate of return of a project. It creates value for both parties, we'll talk about how that takes place here shortly. It's an expedited due diligence process, whereas it may take debt or other forms of capital six months to a year, we can do it in a matter of weeks. It's non-dilutive. It crystallizes future production of the mining partner and endorses the technical merits of the miner.
One of the reasons that we've been successful is we have an internal technical team that consists of mining engineers, processing engineers, geological engineers, et cetera, and all that is done internally, which gives us the ability to do things or expedite the overall process. When we're evaluating opportunities, we start with the due diligence. Due diligence is pretty important. We've got financial due diligence, we've got technical due diligence, we've got ESG due diligence, we've got legal due diligence, which isn't on here. There's a number of things we go through to make sure that the project is suitable for Wheaton and for our investors. The next step would be financial modeling. We take into account all kinds of discounting and all kinds of factors that determine what that discount rate will be. After that, we analyze that value.
We look and say, "Okay, how does this contribute to Wheaton and how does it contribute to our partners?" One of the most important things, we will not do a transaction if it's not accretive and if we can't see a path to accretiveness going forward. Something to keep in mind as we're going through the presentation. In terms of due diligence, the way we start, we start with a desktop study. It's almost as simple as someone gives us a production profile. We map out to see where it falls on the cost curve. We arrive at basically a preliminary, what we call indication of value. We socialize that with the counterparty. The counterparty says yes or no, we're interested, or we're not interested.
If they're interested, we'll sign a CA, we'll move into a data room, and the data room is where we will actually take the entire drill hole database, rebuild the block model, rebuild and vet the existing economics to make sure everything makes sense. If we get to that final stage where we actually like what we see after we've gone through the desktop due diligence, we'll actually schedule a site visit and head to site. Just about every single site visit we've done, except during pandemic, where about half of them we were not able to get to, where we actually hired external consultants that we can rely on. We've actually gone to most of these sites ourselves. That's one of the reasons why we've been able to differentiate ourselves.
When you send consultants to sites, quite often, you get a consultant that's typically looking for problems. What we're looking for is opportunities in these mines. That's something to point out. Patrick has gone through the ESG evaluation. As you can see, every time we look at an opportunity, there's a checklist of at least, I'll call it eight to 10 items here that we will look at. I won't go through all these items, but I will say, our objective is not necessarily to find a project that has all these items. It'd be great if it had all these items. What our objective is to ensure that these projects transition. We want to be a proponent of change. We make sure that the companies that we're dealing with, if they don't meet some of these criteria, that we write it into our contracts.
We contribute additional capital towards them on an annual basis to try to get them to that stage. That, I think is the important difference, I guess, between us and some of the others. In terms of looking at the appropriate discount rate, one of the first things we'll do is we'll look at the asset quality. As you can see from this pie chart on the left, 90% of our production profile comes from assets that fall in the lowest half of the cost curve. Optimally, we'd love to have every single asset fall in that lowest half of the cost curve. Sometimes it will fall in the upper half of the cost curve, but what we look for is a way or a reason why there's going to be improvements in efficiencies, improvements in recoveries. We want to see a transition to that lower half if possible.
If we can't see it, but it's still a high-quality asset and the margins are great, then we will still discount it higher to reflect the fact that it's higher risk than the rest of our portfolio. We look at the life cycle of the mine. As you can see, we've got 24 operating mines and eight development projects. Of those 24 operating mines, those 24 operating mines alone will generate more than the 150-250 operating mines that each of our largest competitors have in terms of cash flow. We do focus on asset quality. That is one of our key focuses. We look at political risk and adjust for political risk. It's all relative to which country and et cetera. Counterparty risk, 65% of the current production comes from investment-grade counterparties.
If it's not investment-grade, that warrants a higher discount rate, which we also factor in. Lastly, we look at geological confidence. Over 50% of our R&R falls into the reserve category. How do we establish a price that benefits both our partners? The reason that streaming actually works is that initially we started to take byproduct precious metals production from base metal mines. Since then, we've warranted a premium valuation. That also allows us to take precious metals from underperforming precious metals counterparties. What we do is we actually take the valuation that they're getting for their ounces, we look at the valuation we're getting for our ounces, we're able to actually share that value spread to ensure that there's a win-win opportunity out there.
Doing that makes both partners happy and allows us to not just succeed on one transaction, but to build a relationship so that we can continue to help that partner grow. This is one of the reasons we don't do royalties. We don't look at this as a one-shot deal. We look at this as, this is Wheaton forming a joint venture partnership with this company to help it grow to the next stage, and every one of our assets we approach that way. That's why three out of the last five streams we've done have been with existing or previous counterparties. We do take that very, very seriously. This slide also shows that what streaming does is it provides a significant amount of the capital. Salobo, for an example, we provided 78% of the upfront capital. It was almost $3.9 billion.
We provided 78% of that capital and only ended up taking 20% of the revenues. That required Vale to only put up less than $900 million of the capital, which they can, as you can see from their 2020 EBITDA, they recouped easily in one year's time. Streaming definitely does work to improve the overall internal rate of return of the project and reduce the risk of other financing methods. In addition to looking at accretiveness, the typical accretiveness, earnings per share, cash flow per share, net asset value per share, we also look at various other things now from a technical side, such as accretiveness to reserves, reserve and resource accretiveness. We look at Macaulay duration, which measures the average life of the stream and how quickly we get those ounces back.
We also look at the production profile and how the stream that we're considering actually contributes on a per-ounce basis to the existing profile we have. We try to ensure that just about in all these cases, that the stream we're looking at is accretive on those bases. The illustrative timeline of a typical transaction, we like to say that it takes 8-12 weeks to do a transaction, whereby we start with a desktop study. We go over to the indication of value that I actually outlined earlier. We do the data room review, the site visit, we submit the final IOV, and in theory, we close the deal at 8-12 weeks.
I can tell you, the largest deal we've ever done, which was a $1.9 billion Vale deal, took less than five weeks to do, and we've done transactions that have even been quicker. We let the counterparty drive the timing of the transaction, but they don't drive the timing of the technical due diligence. Usually, it's two to three to four weeks maximum to do technical due diligence, and then the other four to eight weeks end up being legal, et cetera, and checking the boxes, making sure everything's appropriate. Streaming has been used for a wide range of funding needs in the past. We've seen balance sheet strengthening has been pretty critical. We've seen project financing. A lot of the opportunities we're seeing now have been M&A opportunities, whereby people are looking at streaming as a source of funding for acquisitions.
In terms of the type of the assets that are streamed, historically and optimally what we like to see is we like to have a stream on a producing asset that generates cash flow right away. Unfortunately, that also tends to reflect a higher valuation we have to put up front because we're getting those cash flows right away. We've also got a few different structures where we enter into early deposit structures, et cetera. I'll go through some of those here going forward. Development stage opportunities are probably the largest number of opportunities we're looking at these days in this environment. As I said, the traditional ones, the operating mine and where we actually put up our capital, we pay every production ounce that's out there, and we get our cash flow right away.
The second opportunity is a development stage opportunity whereby we put up, once permitting and financing is in place, we do have completion tests that protect us in case the project doesn't operate at the expectations that it's supposed to. The last one, which seems to suit a lot of the junior companies and development stage opportunities, because dilution is such an important factor for them and they try not to dilute, obviously, as they're trying to grow their company. We come up with an early deposit structure where we'll put up 5%-10% of the value of the stream up front at no dilution, which allows them to advance the project from, let's say, PFS to FS, and then we'll put up the remainder pro rata with the rest of the capital required going forward.
What that does is it reduces our risk because we're staging our payments and every time they de-risk by getting a permit or financing in place, that actually makes our life a lot easier and improves our returns. What it does is if you look at our existing production profile, we have a production profile that's trending upwards. This allows us with these development stage projects to continue to add to these three or five- year profiles so that we don't have that big drop-off as some others may. Why is Wheaton the premier streaming company? As I've said, we focus on sustainable relationships. We're not just there for one transaction. We're there to continue to help the company grow and build its portfolio. Quality is the utmost importance.
That's why we only have 24 assets. Those 24 assets I mentioned are some of the highest quality and largest cash flow generating assets in the streaming industry. We've got a strong reputation for excellence. We've got a strong internal technical team that I'm very proud to say has done a phenomenal job. We probably look at 60 different opportunities a year. Maybe we'll do one to three opportunities a year, and we're very ecstatic about those. It's the ones that we don't do that we're actually more proud of because we've seen some big disasters out there in the industry. Thankfully, we haven't been involved in those. We've got a proven track record. That helps the counterparty because when we enter in a streaming transaction, that tells the market that this has been vetted by Wheaton's thorough technical team.
A healthy balance sheet, which Gary will talk to you a lot more about here going forward, but we're very comfortable doing any size transaction. Not every transaction has to move the needle, but it has to be a high-quality transaction, and that's really what we focus on. We're flexible. We recognize that as mines mature, there has to be changes to these things, and we've made several changes to our existing streams to benefit our partners, but also we've found ways to help it benefit us and our shareholders. Anyway, thank you very much. I'd be happy to take questions right after Gary has gone through. At this point, I'll introduce Gary Brown, our CFO. Thank you.
Thanks, Haytham. For those of you who do not know me, I'm Gary Brown. I'm the CFO of Wheaton Precious Metals. I'm gonna start by...I s the presentation on the main screen supposed to. There we go. Taking you through a little bit of a history lesson, and you have to remember that we've been around for over 17 years, so this will be just a refresh of where we've been. First, I would point to the growth rate that we've achieved. If you look at from 2004 to 2020, that translates into a compound annual growth rate of about 24%, which is quite stunning. It may look like we've flat-lined since about 2016, but it's really important to understand that we were countering the impacts of the maturity of the Cozamin stream, which matured in 2017.
A stream that we paid $40 million for, but which contributed $200 million of cash flow to us over an eight-year period. As well, the maturity of the flows from three of Barrick's assets that were put in place in order to protect us against delays related to Pascua-Lama getting up and running. I would remind you that we recovered 60% of our investment relative to Pascua-Lama, and we still feel that that's a very promising project, which will contribute significantly to us. As well, we restructured the San Dimas stream in 2018 and took the amount of metal that we're receiving from San Dimas down by 50%. For that, we received First Majestic shares that we ultimately sold for $275 million of value.
On top of that, during that period since 2016, we've really planted the seeds for future growth in the consummation of a raft of transactions, including the Marmato transaction. We did the Voisey's Bay deal, which didn't start contributing until this year. All of those add to the already very strong organic growth profile that comes from our streams relative to Rosemont, Pascua-Lama, Toroparu, Cotabambas. All of those together, once they're up and running, will take our gold equivalent ounce production profile up over 1 million gold equivalent ounces. There's a lot of kinetic energy in our portfolio, not to mention the inorganic growth that Haytham alluded to with the opportunity set that we're currently looking at. I wanted to take you through a little bit of how that production and sales profile translated into cash flow.
I've divided our history into certain segments. The first takes us from 2004 to 2012. You can see from this graph that we had sales volumes increase by almost 1,800%, coupled with over a 300% increase in commodity prices. That resulted in over a 9,000% increase in our operating cash flows. That really highlights the power of this business model and the leverage to price increases that you get. I would look at the period 2012 to 2014. We weathered a 35% drop in commodity prices and still generated well over $400 million of operating cash flows, highlighting the resiliency of this business model. The increase in sales volumes between 2014 and 2016 was really due to the consummation of Salobo, the second and third legs of Salobo, where we took the attributable gold production that we're entitled to from 25% to 75%, and also Antamina.
We've talked about the drop in sales volumes between 2016 and 2018 due to Cozamin and the cessation of flows from the three assets relative to Barrick. Our sales volumes between 2018 and 2020 are pretty much flat, but our operating cash flows increased by about 50%, which is significantly more than the increase in the commodity price. Again, about a 1.3x multiple there. Again, highlighting the leverage that this business model provides to increase commodity prices. This slide really just highlights the power of fixing your cost base for every ounce of silver and gold that gets delivered to us. This really just highlights that our business model provides very good exposure for investors to increases in commodity prices.
We know with virtual certainty what we'll be paying for every ounce of silver and gold that gets delivered to us into the future. The only real variable there is the contracts that are tied to the price of the underlying commodity that we're receiving, and right now, that comprises less than 20% of our portfolio. I love this slide. It shows you the gray line, which equates to what we thought our cash flows would be when we entered into the transactions that comprise our current portfolio, and the green line reflects the cash flows that we've actually generated. This is really important to understand as an investor in Wheaton. What we do is provide long-term exposure to precious metals where we provide exposure to the cycles that the mining industry inevitably goes through.
You can see that at virtually every point along that curve, the green line, so our actual cash flows, have been above where we had expected our cash flows to be. In fact, between 2010 and 2014, we generated over $2 billion more cash flow than we had anticipated when we entered into those transactions. You can also see that right now, it looks like we're at the start of another rally in precious metal prices, and the portfolio is extremely well-positioned to reap the benefits of that. We turn to the dividend policy, and our dividend policy is relatively unique. In fact, I don't really know of any other company in the world that ties their dividend directly to their operating cash flow. I really like that as a CFO because that's a very sustainable dividend policy.
I think our investors like it because it really provides them with direct participation in our production growth as well as the growth in commodity prices. As you can see from this chart, our dividend has increased 50% over the last year. We've had four consecutive quarterly increases in that dividend. We expect that just to go up from here. This slide, we put this together after the last Investor Day because I think there was a little bit of confusion as to how I was calculating the returns that we've generated on the dollars we've invested into the streaming space. It shows you that we've invested about $9 billion into the streaming space. This is as at December 31st, 2020. We've recovered most of that already.
Over $7 billion has been recovered through the cash flows that's been generated from the metal that's been delivered to us under those contracts. That portfolio of contracts, as at December 31st, was worth almost $19 billion. If you run a simple IRR on that profile, it will result in about a 20% average return that we've generated on every dollar that we've invested into the streaming space. Again, that's over a 17-year period. I would challenge you to find a portfolio manager that can put those types of stats in front of you. This slide really just shows you that we rely very little on equity to fund our growth. Since inception, we have used operating cash flow and debt, primarily to fund our growth, about 80% of our growth.
We haven't issued equity since 2016, and our current portfolio is generating about $1 billion of operating cash flow a year. We're debt-free, so we don't anticipate requiring equity to fuel our growth in the future. This really just gives you a snapshot of what our balance sheet looks like as at June 30th. We're debt-free. We had over $200 million of cash on our balance sheet. We've got a $2 billion revolving credit facility that's in place, which is completely undrawn. We've got over $2 billion or had over $2 billion of firepower at the end of June. I would turn your attention to the cash flows that we're generating. On average, over the next five years, we're expecting to generate about $1 billion of operating cash flow annually.
You can see the leverage that we provide to increases in commodity prices. Basically, as I had previously explained based upon our historical results, but this holds true for the future as well. For every $1 or percent increase in commodity prices, you get a 1.3x multiple in our operating cash flow, which should translate into increases in the share price as well. Now, I just want to highlight how we use debt. In my opinion, we have been very conservative with the use of our debt. This slide shows you that between 2009 and 2012, we really built up a war chest. We didn't have any debt, and then we deployed that war chest and borrowed. We reached a maximum borrowing of about $1.4 billion in 2015. Again, the peak related to the Antamina and latter two Salobo transactions.
We repaid that debt, and we're currently in a position where we're building that war chest again, getting ready to consummate all the deals that Haytham's talked about. I would also highlight the leverage ratio that we've had. We've always had a leverage ratio of below 3x . Leverage ratio, for those who may not know, is your net debt to EBITDA. It's very important to understand that our EBITDA is effectively our free cash flow. We don't have any sustaining CapEx, so you can't really compare our leverage ratio to that of a mining company that has a significant amount of sustaining CapEx. I think the other point would be that you have to remember that we've got over 30 years of reserve life in our portfolio currently.
If you account for resources and the conversion of those resources, that more than doubles our mine life. You've got 60 years of potential mine life here. For me to only have debt outstanding that's less than three years' worth of cash flow is a very conservative use of the balance sheet. This is an interesting slide, I think. This is a new one. What we're showing here is that of our resources, just up to M&I, doesn't include inferred. We have 20% of our resource base relates to our development stage assets. For those development stage assets, we only have to make less than $1 billion of payments, which equates to about 5% of the value of our existing portfolio. I don't think we're getting much value for development stage assets in our portfolio right now.
You can see the catalyst for shareholder value that the seeds of growth that we've planted will provide. This really just drives home what we've been saying, which is if you're looking to get exposure to precious metal, there's really no better way than investing in a streaming company like Wheaton Precious Metals. We have beaten the movement in the commodity price significantly, and the precious metal mining indices for mining companies for every time horizon that you want to look at. In conclusion, we put $9 billion of money to work in the streaming space. We're the guys who invented this business model, I'll remind you. We've recovered to June 30th about $8 billion of that $9 billion already. We've paid about $1.3 billion in dividends, which equates to about 50% of the equity capital that we've raised to date.
We've returned about 50% of that. We are currently generating $1 billion of operating cash flow per year. We have over 40 years of mine life, if you just look at reserves and M&I. We are focused and have been leaders in the sustainability side of things. We've been very disciplined in the way that we've approached growth, achieving about a 20% IRR on our investments in the streaming space. I would finish off by just reminding you that the team that's responsible for the growth to date is still the team that's in place today. I've been with the company for over 13 years. Randy's a founder, and most of the executive team have been here for over 10 years. You've still got that team that is refining the way that we approach growth, and can execute on that very efficiently.
With that, I will conclude.
Thank you, Gary, and thanks team. As you can see, we're a bit behind on schedule, and so we'll open up for Q&A, but I'm just going to encourage if anyone wants to refresh with water or coffee, we are going to work our way right through the coffee break. Feel free to go back and recharge. Any questions for the management team here? Please.
Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah?
Yep.
Haytham, thanks for the discussion on setting the discount rate. I'm just wondering, in this market environment, how you factor in Wheaton's cost of capital, and when some of your peers talk about what a tough deal environment it is, if that makes you have to push it a bit on the discount rate?
Thank you for the question. Is this on?
Yes.
We're really somewhat indifferent as to what some of our competitors are doing. We're not looking to compete with 1%- 3% IRRs. That's not our strategy. The way we differentiate ourselves is when we're actually putting an indication of value in front of somebody, we don't actually just factor in the existing reserves, the existing mine plan. We take a look at the resources. We basically take the entire geological model and figure out where it's trending into and factor in those reserves and resources. The Capstone, the Cozamin was a perfect example. It looked like we were probably low single-digit IRR on that transaction, but we'd already had access to a lot of the information, which came out a couple of weeks after we actually announced the transaction. You saw that there was a significant increase in reserves and resources at that point.
We do take our technical due diligence and try to improve on that. We can't control what some of our competitors do. We think the market is quite efficient, and the market will end up translating into either increases in share prices or decreases in share price for these low cost of capital transactions that are happening. You're never going to see us do a negative IRR or a very low single digits unless we see significant upside, whether that upside comes through expansion or increases in efficiency or improvements, et cetera.
We really strive to be a partner of choice. I think that's a differentiator. There's so many other things that we add as part of the package. First, reputation in terms of strong technical due diligence, but also we have an overlying belief that the stronger our partners are, the stronger we are. We continually work well past the upfront payment to help our partners be stronger.
Good morning. Haytham, you said something intriguing about looking at opportunities where the ESG score wasn't quite there, and that you're willing to contribute capital to your counterparty. I'm just wondering, can you talk a little bit about when and if that's ever happened in a certain transaction, and could that take the form of, say, an equity investment, or is that taken into account in the upfront consideration and the transaction valuation itself?
Sure. No, it's a good question. I can tell you that there's a lot of opportunities that we see out there that currently aren't up to the ESG standards we would love to have them at. What we do as part of the existing precious metals purchase agreement we enter into is we actually write into certain contracts. I don't want to name names because everyone's actually a various project because the companies, the counterparties have been improving. I can tell you, just in the last year alone, on some of the opportunities we've looked at, there has been instances where we've said, "Listen, we need to see improvements in tailings. This needs to happen for us to get there." They would commit to doing that within the actual precious metals purchase agreement that we signed. It has happened.
They don't always meet those standards. This whole ESG push has been the last, call it two to four years, where everybody's been pushing to get there. We've been there for a long time. We've been trying to add to our counterparties to try and help them improve the communities, the environmental, the social, everything for the last decade since I've been there. Only recently has that been a big push in the industry. Definitely, we're going to continue to do that. We contribute a certain amount, even after the original upfront payment, on an annual basis to help them get there.
Cosmos.
Hi. Thanks, Randy, Gary, Haytham, and Patrick. First off, good to see everyone in person. You're looking good. Maybe my question is on M&A. As you talked about, Haytham, a lot of these new opportunities are in funding M&A. You also talked about the importance of due diligence in your process. M&A transactions, does that complicate how you do your due diligence? Maybe can you quickly talk about that?
It depends on what stage we get involved in the M&A transaction. If we're brought in right from the beginning, we basically do our entire desktop due diligence at the same time that the actual potential acquirer is actually doing their due diligence. We actually participate in the site visit along with them. Typically, we've got a team of three to five people that goes in and addresses mining, geology, processing, ESG. Generally speaking, if we're involved right from the beginning, it makes it seamless. There's no change to our existing profile. Often what will happen is some companies will come in and say, "Listen, we'd like to acquire this. We've already gone through our due diligence process." That complicates things.
What we'll do at that point is we'll enter into a conditional indication of value that's subject to due diligence as they're going through their final due diligence. Usually, while they're finalizing their legal, we'll be going through our final technical and legal at the same time.
Yeah. It does not compromise our own due diligence. We own our decisions, and in order to own them, we need to complete a full suite of analysis.
I think we're just about out of time for questions. There is one coming in from the web. I think it's pretty much to the group. How do you see the type of streams evolving, and that you will do over the next five years, given the strength of your balance sheet and that of the sector? More smaller, earlier stage? Does this open you up for more dividends?
I'll take that one. As Haytham highlighted in his presentation, what we're seeing is a lot of development-type projects right now, which is very similar to what we saw from 2004 through to 2010, where we're actually funding growth, whether it's through expansions or greenfields development or even sometimes acquisitions. We're seeing more of that versus balance sheet repair or the third season that we call harvest. I fully expect to see that. Balance sheets are strong in the industry, where most of the need for outside capital comes from is the smaller companies, the companies that have one or two assets or even single asset companies trying to move these things forward.
As Haytham highlighted, a stream is an incredibly attractive way to help build your company when you're a single asset developer going forward, because the amount of dilution when you sit and look at what these companies are trading at to issue shares to fund that growth in these assets is very expensive to the existing shareholders, which is who we all work for, is our existing shareholders. We see lots of activity, not big in scale. We haven't seen a lot of billion-dollar sized opportunities out there. There's a lot of smaller opportunities out there that cumulatively will make a difference.
Yeah, I just addressed the last part of that question with respect to increasing dividends. We are currently paying out 30% of our operating cash flow in the form of dividends. We've got a really significant number of opportunities that we're looking at. We think we'll find a home for the 70% that we're retaining. If we're not as successful on the growth front as we think we can be, we're definitely going to have to look at that payout ratio, because we'd rather ratchet up the quarterly dividend than return excess cash to shareholders through share buybacks or special distributions.
With that, I think we're going to, as I said, anyone needs refreshments or additional coffee, feel free to get up during this, but we are going to sort of skip through this coffee break because we're a bit behind schedule. Much to share. I believe we're going to try a virtual presentation here right now. Capstone is our first partner presenter, Brad Mercer, who's the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Capstone. Of course, we've just recently completed streams on Cozamin and Santo Domingo. This is a relationship that goes back to, in fact, my relationship with Capstone goes way back to actually optioning them their first-ever mining property way back in the early 2000s while I was at Wheaton River.
Helping Darren Pylot and that team morph into Capstone, I've known this company for a long time, and so very, very happy to be working with them again. We had a term stream on the Cozamin mine and on Minto that went very well for us. Cozamin is a mine that we know well, and so I'm going to let Brad take over. Brad, good to see you.
Thank you, Randy. It's good to be here. Good morning, everybody. Again, thanks to Wheaton for allowing us to present. I don't see the slides, but I take it you can see the presentation.
We can see them on this side, but hopefully you can see it.
Okay.
What we're talking about this morning is largely driven by exploration and innovation. We are big believers in drill bit and big believers in optimizing and using technology and best ESG practices. Next slide. These, I think there's two cautionary slides, and then on slide four, we'll start again. As Randy mentioned, we have two streams with Wheaton. Recently with Cozamin, there's a 50% stream on the silver up to 10 million ounces, thereafter dropping to 33% of production life of mine. We are actively exploring and expanding resources and reserves. Santo Domingo, just after Cozamin, we signed another stream, 100% of the gold production up to 285,000 ounces to be delivered, thereafter dropping to 67% of the production. The payments are listed there to read. Next slide. I love this slide. I'm a big believer in exploration. I started out my career in exploration.
This basically shows the progression of the mine plan, the reserves over the last three years. In March, we filed the strongest mine plan ever in Cozamin's history. As Randy said, Wheaton's been involved way back since 2005. It's remarkable that we have the best plan ever 16 years later. We talk about a project called Impact 23 that aims to optimize the mine plan and extend the mine life, both through drilling and through using technology and better extraction ratios using paste fill. This year, we started on some cross-cuts to allow us to more efficiently drill off the Mala Noche West area and the Mala Noche Footwall Zone West area. You'll see some diagrams in a minute. We've got another cross-cut plan for 2023 to go to the east to look at that extension.
We are just embarked two weeks ago on phase III of our ore sorting technology. For those of you out there that have been to Cozamin and seen the mineralization, it is a poster child for sorting, because it is very coarse chalcopyrite. That is coming along good. I will speak about that in a minute. Next slide. This Impact 23, basically, there are five pillars here.
There is the exploration, which we have been very good at, and we will continue exploring. In addition to these east and west targets, we have also started developing some near to mine other veins. This is a world-class historic district. There is a lot of old mines here. Enhanced pillar recovery, that is really code for paste fill. I can tell you that the paste fill project is on time, on track, on schedule, on budget. We are dead on the money here, and advancing very quickly. Stope dilution.
This mostly is long hole drill control. This mine, as it advances here, will become more and more dependent on long hole drilling, and less on the development, because we've kind of overdeveloped the mine a little ahead of schedule. Improved engineering planning and drill control. More recently, we've started looking at explosive design to put less energy into the rock, but get the right fracture. Truckless headings, I'm really excited about this one. This is an unusual discovery that the Mala Noche Footwall Zone upper area. Instead of mining down and discovering it downward, we basically discovered it laterally from the workings and then up. We can use gravity. Basically everything above level 10, the ore will pass through ore passes, which has a big efficiency improvement, a big ESG improvement, on air quality, lower greenhouse gas emissions.
More importantly too, I think safety, because it de-bottlenecks the traffic. Now I want to turn your attention to the table on the bottom. There's 9.5 million tons of 1.56% copper, 35 g/ ton silver, another 4 million tons of low copper, but good lead zinc and decent silver. These are resources that are not in reserves, and this is what we are targeting primarily with ore sorting. We'll talk about that, I think, on the next slide. There's a huge opportunity here. Sorry, I'll talk about it in a few slides. I want to explain the mine a little bit. Unfortunately, we don't have a pointer on the screen here, so you'll have to bear with me. You're looking into the page north, so west is on the left, east is on the right.
The blue ramp you see, this was the one-way loop that we've connected on time and, well, actually a little ahead of schedule and on budget. This was a $4.7 million project that unlocks about 50% more metal per year for $4.7 million. This is a transformative project for us. It's in operation. In the past, we were bottleneck getting the ore up the shaft and a little bit out of the ramp because of the two-way traffic. Now we've de-bottlenecked that, and the ramp has a 4,000 ton per day capacity, and the shaft is 1,800 to 2,000. Right now our haulage capacity exceeds our ability to break the rock, which is one of the things we're looking at is upping the output. We are above plan, at the 3,780 ton per day mark, and that's going very well. Next slide. Oh, sorry.
Just go back one second. You can see a faint black line in the upper part of the ore body. That is level 10, and so everything above that will be dropped through ore passes. The ramps that you see going up are just to get the mining equipment up to those levels, but there'll be no haulage on those levels. We'll just drop it down. The next slide gives you a schematic overview of the two biggest targets. As I mentioned, we are developing other veins outside of this system, but for now, the principal target is on the left, what we call the west crosscut. That's being developed right now, and on schedule to be finished in the winter of 2022, so January, February, hopefully.
The idea is if you go out to the end of those crosscuts and you drill back towards you out of the page where you see the oval, that's called Mala Noche West Target Zone. In these drill holes, which we're now drilling from surface in 2021, we're going to go underground in 2022 to make it more efficient. We're actually drilling two veins. We're drilling the extension of that purple to the left, and we're drilling that kind of beige mauve color. That's the main vein. We're actually testing two veins with one drill hole every time. There's a design you see on the right, another blue crosscut where it says east exploration drift. This is more in the area where we have referred to in the table as well, some of the more copper poor, but zinc, lead, silver rich veins.
We will be mining that in 2023 and then drilling from there on to increase exploration in that direction. Remarkably after 16 years, we've still got exploration targets in the mine, as well as adjacent to the mine. Next, please. I'm not sure what your color resolution is like in the room, but the picture on the left is the very high grade material that's been sorted, and the picture on the right is the waste. I think that speaks for itself. We did a bench scale test, which was very optimistic. We went to an 8-ton sample, and this is the residual of that 8-ton sample. We tested two different technologies, which at this point I won't name because we're still in negotiations, and we haven't chosen a vendor yet.
The best test was we rejected 31% of the mass, so that's your waste on the far right, and we only lost 1% to 2% of the contained metal. That's pretty remarkable. Obviously, there's a lot of upside here. Less energy, which is a big ESG benefit. The other thing is, if you can sort and put higher grade material to the mill, you don't need to increase the mill capacity to increase your metal output. That sample, it went from 1.7% copper and 42 g/ ton silver, and that bumped it up to 2.25% copper and 57 g/ ton silver. That was on run-of-mine ore that's not overly diluted. There's a lot of internal dilution in this ore body with the rhyolite dikes, but there's not a lot of dilution on the sides where we got this because it was a fairly wide zone.
The next obvious step is to do a real-life test on these narrow veins. Those samples, I'm glad to announce, have been collected and shipped. We've started phase III. We've opened up a couple of narrow veins that, for all intents and purposes, would be 1.5 m- 2 m wide, and we developed it out to 4.5 m so that you're taking in 66% dilution. It'll be interesting to see what the results are on those tests. We have every reason to believe that they're going to be optimistic. Again, I'll draw your attention to the table. This opens up a big resource to reserve potential conversion should we be successful. Next slide. Want to segue a little bit to Santo Domingo.
Something we haven't talked about a lot is we've started exploration there as well, with some interesting results. We're pretty excited about that. Next slide. I know many of you are familiar with this, I just want to remind you, in the case of Wheaton here, it's 18-year mine life, 285,000 ounces of gold. The project has a $1 billion NPV at 8% post-tax, and an IRR of 33.3%. Payback is very short at 1.9 years. The first five years C1 cost are $0.76 per pound of copper, and life of mine is $0.62. You see the line there, that's cumulative free cash flow under our assumptions, which was at lower metal prices than today, it's still $2.8 billion worth of free cash flow. Of course, if we had to redo it at spot prices, it would be even better. Next slide.
I think this is one of the most exciting slides in this presentation, and I think you'll see why when I do go to the next slide. The gray here is the ore body that's in the feasibility study. We did a VTEM survey a long time ago, I think it was in 2012, 2011 or 2012, and we knew we had a target that speaks to the extension of that ore body. You'll see it a little better in cross-section. You're looking at two stacked saucers, basically, shaped units that dip off to the northwest. If you keep that in your mind when we flip to the cross-section. We had to bring a drill in here to drill on the right side.
The drill holes are not shown, but it's basically where that red line is, to do condemnation drilling before we put the mill foundations in. We got a few hits on the right there. Visually, there was a few small hits, but it did confirm that the mill was in the right location. We're not going to sterilize anything. We moved the drill over to drill this target here in the middle, and we're pretty excited about the results. We've got almost 8,500 m of drilling in 19 holes. The assays have been slow to come in due to COVID, but we expect to be probably fully in hand by September. We're updating a model using the new geology information. We've refined the resource. There'll be a new model, and an estimate coming out in Q4.
One of the other big pluses here is we took the opportunity to get a lot more information on the iron, on the magnetite, and we have a more robust, I think, magnetite estimation. Let's go to the next slide, please, and you'll see why we're excited about this. You can see the ore body on the left, right above where it says Resource. There's two gray bodies, and they're split by a wedge of waste. The VTEM anomaly goes right down dip from that where you see VTEM, so you're coming from the north to the south down dip, and then it goes back up again to the right. We could put eight wide-spaced holes in here. I think you can see the scale.
These holes are 400 m apart, and they all hit the mineralized horizon, with various visual grades, which obviously I can't comment on visual grades, but we're very close to getting the assays. It has the potential to expand the resource down dip, and then basically as you go to the north, back up dip again. We're excited about this. We've let this target lie for quite a while while we were concentrating on the feasibility work. Next slide, please. I won't present the appendix slides, but if anybody wants to see the resource tabulation, that's what's there. I think right now we'll just Randy, I think we could skip to questions.
Yeah, if there's any questions.
Yeah, any questions?
I can speak for the fact that Santo Domingo was a project that we went in a little bit skeptical and came back very impressed with its potential. We're really excited to have it in our portfolio. Is there any questions for Brad on either Cozamin or Santo Domingo? Looks like you did a great job, Brad. We definitely look forward to seeing that growth. This is going to be a project that I think will add a lot to Capstone. Obviously, it'll also add a lot to Wheaton in terms of moving forward, both the Santo Domingo Cozamin. Again, a mine that I've known for a very long time, and really happy to have it back in our portfolio and working with the Capstone team. Thank you for coming out and joining us today, Brad. Really appreciate that.
Wish you could've been here in person, but perhaps next time.
I'm actually in Arizona right now, just at the Pinto Valley mine.
Yeah. Okay. Go
Well, it's definitely warmer and drier than it is here.
Yes. Thank you, everyone.
Great. Thanks, Brad Mercer. Next up, we've got a presentation from Hudbay. Cashel Meagher is here, the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Hudbay. We've got a long history with Hudbay. Funny enough, I was pretty heavily recruited to become the CEO of Hudbay at one point, and fortunately, they chose Mr. David Garofalo instead of me. It wasn't something that. Anyway, I've got a long history with Hudbay, and the initial stream was 777. We went on to expand that onto the Constancia project, which is a project we'd followed for quite a while, and so helping Hudbay build that.
Of course, they acquired the Rosemont project, which we already had a stream on, so we're really excited just based on the performance that they had at Constancia, which I still go back to meeting with the Peruvian mine minister back shortly after the completion of Constancia and describing it as the best mine build ever in that country from the Peruvian mine minister at that time. Really happy to have Cashel here sporting his pandemic beard. Come on up, Cashel. Thanks. I'm cleaning off everything.
Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for the invite. It's an annual thing. We might have skipped it last year. Yeah. Yeah, it's always nice to come. It's always nice to talk about your assets with your partners, and as Randy said, we go back with the team a long way, and certainly, the financing at Constancia and the delivery was very successful with the help of Wheaton. The normal slides here. We'll start with Constancia. Many of you are familiar, obviously, with the asset. Some of you aren't. I'll just point out a few things that are maybe interesting about it. We are bookended in what's called the Andahuaylas-Yauri copper belt, and one end is Las Bambas. It's the super deposit that the MMG Chinese own now, and to the southeast, we have Glencore that own the Tintaya Antamina complex.
These are massive mines, massive copper systems, and if you actually put a ruler down on these, Constancia lies on a break and perfectly in between. Even at a micro scale, if you lie on that exact same ruler, Pampacancha lies right on that line, and so does some of our targets I'll talk about later, Maria Reyna and Caballito to the northwest. Certainly, a lot of copper's coming out of there now. All those mines got built at the same time. BHP started with Tintaya, but Antamina, Las Bambas, and Constancia all came on producing within a year of each other. It was a tremendous amount of activity within that copper belt, and now a tremendous amount of copper and very critical to the GDP of Peru. It gets a lot of attention.
It gets a lot of attention from the locals, gets a lot of attention from NGOs, and it gets a lot of attention in the political realm also. Peru, second largest producer of copper in the world, as we all know, very important for their economy. Certainly on this, you can see that our route of travel is very important. It's like a 10-hour drive with the concentrate truck down to the port, obviously there are lots of interruptions that have been reported in the past. One of the unique things about Constancia I'll talk about is we've yet to be interrupted for production in the years we've operated there. I would say a neighbor like Las Bambas would be stopped for several days every single month.
It's a credit to the team there on the way they manage social problems and their interaction and those relationships that they have. We purchased it in 2011. It was to be a $1.5 billion project, turned out to be $1.7. In hindsight, that capital cost increase in that type of inflationary environment was good, actually, just a 10% overrun. I think actually we're kind of in that same sort of scenario now with a lot of the construction that's going on in the world, this sort of elevated inflationary environment with the rising metal prices. It seems to parallel quite often. One of the things we did is we helped move the project from originally being permitted at 56,000 tons a day. Now we're permitted, and we run at 31 million tons a year, which is 90,000 tons a day.
That was one of the things we did to improve the project over time, and we've also had the ability to improve the recoveries. We were optimistic of the recoveries to begin with. Our run rate recoveries were a little low, but now we're achieving those other recoveries, and so there's this sort of sense of continuous optimization. I think one of the other things is the safety results we've had at Constancia really are second to none. We've had a few lost time injuries year-over-year, but during the construction period, we had a period there where we had 8,000 people on site, and we ran 19 million hours lost time injury-free, and recently we also had a run or a stretch over 20 million man-hours lost time injury-free.
They take a lot of pride in the way they do things and to ensure no one gets hurt. You can see here on these couple of slides our copper production profile going forward and the throughput profile looking backwards, and obviously the benefit of the copper increase profile going forward is the mining of our satellite pit, Pampacancha. Just to introduce the site itself, the pit is in the north, in the middle. It's actually the east in the middle, but we'll say the top of the page in the middle. We've got the mill location, waste rock facility, and then across the way is the big tailings facility. It's a very tight footprint. The mill itself, it doesn't take up a lot of room. It was the first open or large facility. It's wide open to the elements.
It helped reduce, obviously, the capital cost, the amount of steel employed, the amount of cement, so it was a very efficient capital build. Our Pampacancha deposit to the right of that slide, that's where we're mining now. That'll deliver some of the higher grade copper, some of the higher grade gold. We hope to be able to expand in the future. Just up to the very top left-hand corner of this slide, you can see what we call our deposit, Caballito. It used to be the Mitsui mine. There's actually a small open pit there, quite an active crew of informal miners in that area. That's one of the communities that we made the original negotiation for about a third of the Constancia surface rights originally.
This slide shows that production profile going forward, so substantially contributing to the EBITDA over the next three years. We hope to be able to expand that. Recently, I was told by the geologists on site that they seem to have found an extension, something else to drill northeast of Pampacancha, where we thought it was pretty sterile before. That's encouraging. That's something new, and that's something they'll get to hopefully to drill in 2022. That's within the footprint of the mine itself. It was a long time coming. I used to field questions all the time, when are we going to negotiate? How are we going to get this deposit into the mine plan? When is the community going to sell us the surface rights? I always joke that we bought Constancia at $4.27 copper, and we commissioned it at $2.40.
At least with Pampacancha, I think we're getting right with the metal cycle right now. I'm glad serendipitously we delayed it a little. I mentioned this sort of social interaction and the way I see ourselves measuring ourselves with ESG, and the easiest way to do it in Peru is if they stop your operation, they don't like you, and there's something wrong, and they want to do something. We rarely get stopped, and it's this route of travel that's so important. There's some 14 major communities we need to work with. We have 70, 80 trucks on the road a day. Las Bambas would have 300 trucks on the road, and Antamina would have about 100 trucks on the road.
There's a lot of traffic along this road, and there's been times we've been stopped, and they've been stopped, and then they've let our trucks go through, and they've stopped theirs. They distinguish which is which. One of the important things we were able to do is we were able to introduce our communities, make partnerships, and they're actually part owners of some of these concentrate trucks, and they sit in them themselves. When they pull up and their cousin's telling them to stop and they shut it down, they say, "No, you're hurting me, my family. We're going through," and they let them through. It's a pretty impressive process, and with the success we've had at that, we think we can increase that ownership of that sort of service relationship with our local communities, and this is one of the examples.
There's also been a lot of innovation here. Our team put together a ways for all the truckers and all the mines so that they report incidents, bad weather, all these things online right away, and then the whole trucking system's all done by GPS with a dispatcher monitoring and watching everything that's going on. It's quite a sophisticated process that has been developed over time, and it has really worked well for us. I mentioned some of this culture of continuous improvement since 2016 when I came on as a COO here at Hudbay, and this is just one example to show that we continue to do it. We actually believe, much like Brad talked about the ore sorting, this is just at a larger scale within the pit, but it seems our ores are amenable to this.
We were hoping to have this installed already this year for the ore sorting, which obviously gives the benefit of higher grades in the throughput and then also a lower strip ratio. We're seeing the benefits in all our testing and our bulk testing and our evaluation phase, but we're actually slowed up a bit with some of the installation on the large shovels, because just getting through right now, getting through customs and through Peru right now is difficult with the change in the government. It's just everybody sort of knowing what I's to dot, what T's to cross. We hope to be talking a bit more about this next year, the results of it, and we're very encouraged by it. The same thing, we have another program coming ahead to improve our recovery by 2%.
This is to unlock some of the bottlenecks that we see within the plant itself. We have a corporate metallurgical team that has done great things both in Lalor, New Britannia, and also in Constancia. We see that we're able to probably increase the copper and the associated pay metals by a couple of % by this debottlenecking. The idea is our roughers, the velocity that we're passing the roughers through, the residency time is a little too high. For a very cheap amount, I think it's between $8 million-$10 million, we can increase the size of the pumps, diameters of pipes, and various things.
We're working towards that to be able to utilize those float cells in a more efficient manner and of that mass pull, get a lot more of the copper right away so we don't get rejects to the tails. Yeah. Reconciliation-wise, look, we've been working back and forth. When we first started Constancia, the grades were a lot higher. We were dealing with lower recoveries because of mixed transition zones, mixed with oxide, different things. We really have a hold of, excuse me, what the grade is now. We've been able to optimize the mine. We've been able to resequence the mine, learning about it, we've been able to reinterpret the mine. These guys re-block model and reinterpret the mine every single year. Our reserve gradually changes, and with that, we've been able to incorporate what we call Constancia Norte.
We did that last year. It adds a year of higher grade than reserve. What's exciting about it is it'll offer some other opportunities in the future. I said to you, there might be something coming off of Pampacancha. The geologists are now looking for these sorts of offshoots that might be able to fit within the pit shells. We added this in. It's going to contribute to the back end of overlap a bit with Pampacancha and also contribute thereafter and extend, give us a little more breathing room with some of the high grade before we have to hit the residual reserve of 0.3 or below. Again, when we were drilling this, we believe there might be some underground sweeteners. This is something we've always looked towards. The actual or mineralized shell itself disseminates some grades out to almost nothing.
There's these offshoots, these feeder zones, these high-grade areas that we feel might be able to give us opportunity as sweeteners, and one of them is off to the Constancia Norte, a little deeper. There might be an opportunity there for an underground heading to be able to offer us a little higher grade, a little more selective mining that we can include in it. I think that's something we'll be able to talk more about probably with our reserve statement back in 2022 coming ahead, and we'll be able to talk about what we think this is and how that might contribute to the mine plan in the future and understand what that might be. We think that there might be this opportunity.
This opportunity might actually be bigger than what we currently got drilled. We think that's another way to perpetuate some of the higher grade and bring it earlier into the mine plan. It sort of behooves me to talk about Constancia without talking a bit about the immediate region. When I first went there for due diligence in 2009, I actually stayed in the community of Uchucarcco. That's where Norsemont had their exploration camp. You wake up in the morning, you look out, and there's this big pit, and there's 400 or 500 informal miners, and that's marked on this map here as Caballito. In 2014, I managed to convince some people to give me some money to fly some geophysics, some VTEM, ZTEM, I think it was at the time.
Anyway, this is a potassium-thorium output, and what it shows you is it shows you the radioactivity of what you might have with a batholith or with a sort of a porphyry system. I think what's unique about it is. It's not unique that we can find granite batholiths in the Andes. What's unique about it is we could fly it over Tintaya, Antapaccay, and it clearly outlines, we did that as a baseline, where those deposits were, and then some other sort of systems and dikes. You can see how they're very isolated. Obviously, those two are copper-bearing. The idea was, "Oh, look, well, we can pick out Constancia and Pampacancha perfectly, too." Those are copper-bearing also. We're mining them, so we know that for sure.
I also know Caballito is copper-bearing because there are people mining there, and Mitsui's grade was 4.5% oxide when they were mining there in the early 1990s. We know we're working with the communities to get access to this, we know there's ore there, and those systems look bigger. If we go further, where we own 100% of the mineral rights also to Maria Reyna Valley back in 2011, drilled 11 holes there, and one of which was about 160 m, 1% copper equivalent. We know that's cupriferous. That's got copper in it, too. We know these things have copper, right? There's no question. This potassium thorium sort of outlines the range of the resource as we can validate with Antapaccay Tintaya, Constancia, and Pampacancha . Really excited, of course, about this.
One of the things is we've always been patient negotiators with our communities. They change their leadership frequently. It's one of the things that you have to do to operate uninterrupted in Peru. It's some things our peers don't have the patience for. We've reaped the rewards for it, while frustratingly, maybe Pampacancha took longer, maybe this negotiation took longer. We hope next year to be in the position where we've negotiated those agreements to put these drill holes on and validate the copper tenor within these batholiths. I would say these would be scale and size of Antapaccay, Tintaya, and Las Bambas. That's sort of the upside we see coming. I'm running short on time here. I talked a lot about Constancia. I talked about the social. The other project Randy mentioned, of course, was Arizona.
I think the story there is well known. It's a robust project, would be the third largest mine. It's something we put a lot of work into. We re-optimized the mine, and then we got our permit, and in July of 2019, we got interrupted by what I would call a very unusual interpretation of an 1872 mining law that has obviously been upheld for a very long time. We sat there. We could have cried in our milk. We can be waiting for the Ninth Circuit, which will be coming, we hope early, soon, maybe before the end of this year. A decision by the Ninth Circuit to overturn that crazy ruling, and then we'll be back on with Rosemont. In the meantime, instead of doing that, what we said was is, "Well, what else is there?
If they don't want us to mine that, what is on our own private land? What is there? If you walk up along the ridge there, this place called Gunsight Pass, and you walk 100 m off of it, well, you can see on this slide there's a big green patch. That's copper oxide. In some of the drill holes we drilled and we have released, and I think this week we'll release some more of them, there's up to 400 ft of continuous oxide along that ridge in depth. We're onto a world-class copper system here that already has the underpinnings of a 600-million-ton deposit in Rosemont. Now, 2/3 of Rosemont of that 600 million tons is already on private land and is available for us to permit differently than how we permitted the original Rosemont project.
It's only going to be enhanced by this very low strip, near-surface mineralization that runs over a 7 km stretch from the top left-hand corner down to the Rosemont projected pit on this slide, called Peach-Elgin. There's been some terrific intersections there. We're not getting value for Rosemont. It's not appearing in our share price, and we believe, with us and our partners, that this ticket to be able to develop a mine on private land is the way forward, and we're going to pursue that while still pursuing our rights to Rosemont to mine it on the federal lands. We believe we've got enough private land purchased now that we can develop the similar site or an operation about two-thirds the size of what was originally there. Probably we'll come out with a resource on the Copper World by the end of this year.
The middle of next year, we'll probably come out with a PEA of what Copper World will look like. We're pretty excited about that. I think that's where I'll end it because I've run out of time. I don't know. I guess we've run over the Q&A session, too. Have we?
Oh. You've come so far. We're not going to let you off that easy.
Four blocks for me.
Jackie, if you could take the mic, please. Is the mic working?
Thanks much. Thanks, Cashel. I just wanted to ask about the exploration properties that you have in Peru, the Caballito, Maria Reyna, those ones. I guess my first question would be, are those subject to the stream agreement that you currently have under Wheaton? Does it matter if you process it through the Constancia mill or if you build a separate mill?
What I would say is, no, it's not under that agreement. What I would say is we had to work because the Pampacancha agreement is slightly different than the Constancia agreement. The partnership with Wheaton was that we came to a mutual arrangement to change those agreements to facilitate the ore going through the current infrastructure. If that ore or those starter pits are there, the most elegant way to not get into processes, and if there is capital required, as they elegantly put it, that their capital is much cheaper than others, I think there would be an elegant way to be able to negotiate how we can bring in those deposits and still participate with our partner, Wheaton Precious Metals, on.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would just add that we're always working with our partners. I truly do believe that that's one of the things that differentiates Wheaton from its peers in this space, is that we're always in strong communication with our partners. We have an overlying mantra, the stronger our partners are, the stronger we are. Everything from our ESG to technical ambassadors, to sitting down and reviewing projects on a regular basis, we never want to stand in the way of common sense in terms of how these projects move forward, right? That's the last thing that we want. We're always working strongly with our partners to try and find ways to move forward. That wouldn't be any different.
There were two questions, Cashel, coming in from the web. The first one, I think you've already somewhat alluded to it, but how is the Pampacancha ramp-up going, and are grades reconciling to plan?
I would say the Pampacancha is going great. We're up in the top of the system, again, that sort of area of mixed transition. We're not down where the drill holes in Peru-- I'm trying to be short with this answer. In Peru, you permit drill stations, and that's a GPS location and coordinate, and you have to starburst from them. Your idealized drill spacing is down further in the deposit and not near the top. The constraints are there. What I would say is we're not reconciling well, but we're getting more ore than we thought, but that initial ore is a little lower grade than what the ore we'll be getting. That was exactly what we experienced at Constancia also.
Perfect. The other question was, could you clarify whether Wheaton would benefit from any other mines exploited on private land at Rosemont, i.e., Copper World?
My understanding is their agreement is for all those mineral claims that we currently have. They will benefit from Copperworld. Obviously the agreement would have to be written differently if it's a different mine plan. As Randy pointed out, we've done this a number of times with Wheaton, worked through variations of what was thought to be the truth, and we've come to easy agreements. Yeah.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Next up, we have obviously a very important partner of ours is Vale. We have Juan Merlini here, who is the head of sales and marketing for the base metals division here in Toronto. A little Vale story that I will share. We started off investing into our communities, around the mine sites and stuff like that. Within Vale, they have an organization called the Vale Foundation that oversees their sustainability initiatives with respect to communities and such around the mine sites that Vale operates around the world. Vale Foundation, it is actually a real model, and we have looked at it, and we were, I think, the first partner of theirs at any of their sites in terms of contractors or anything.
First partner to actually contribute into that Vale Foundation, and it's kickstarted something where now just about every company that works with Vale has contributed to that. Trust it's the right thing to do. We, as an industry, have to continue to strengthen the benefits that we deliver to these communities, and I've always been sort of proud about the fact that we kind of kickstarted even more capacity within the Vale Foundation to provide benefits to the communities that are most impacted or most benefited from these mines, but particularly most impacted from these mines and deliver that back and forth. Vale, of course, the Salobo stream, a very important stream for us, Sudbury and Voisey's Bay here in Canada. Juan, if you want to come on up to the stage, I'd appreciate it. Thank you.
Well, good morning. It is a pleasure. Thanks for the invite. It is a pleasure to be here. My name is Juan Merlini. I am the head of sales and marketing, and I am going to talk a little bit about Vale, about our operations, about our partnership, and about our future. Basically, Vale is one of the largest mining companies in the world. Vale currently is one of the main producers of iron ore, nickel. We are present in more than 20 countries. We have our market cap around $80 billion-$90 billion and a very strong financial positions. This is an important framework here that I want to highlight. Since the Brumadinho accident in 2019 and our CEO, Eduardo, stepped in, Vale went through very deep changes, and these changes are ongoing.
This is just the framework of how the company is positioning, but there are very deep changes in terms of people, committees, governance, at all levels. It's not only the software, but the hardware as well. This is part of a big cultural transformation going on at Vale, and we believe the company's really focused on three, on the safety, on people, and on the reparation of the accident. This led to a broader roadmap and where we are progressing in order to de-risk, reshape, and re-rate the company. We are really focusing on all the reparation and the compensation on Brumadinho. We settled a very large agreement this year. We reviewed completely and improving our tailings management model. This is something that is critical for Vale.
We put in place, and I'm going to talk, a very strong ESG practices in terms of what we call our new pact with the society, and also to resume our production, particularly in iron ore that was deeply impacted by the accident, but also in base metals as well, as we have been focusing in terms of stability and growth for our assets. That will lead to reshape the company. We have been focusing on core business, iron ore, base metals. We have been selling a lot of non-core assets. We recently saw our operation in New Caledonia, in nickel. We announced the divestment of our coal asset. It's something that it's really focused in order to control the cash drains and also to allow us to focus in the growth.
We believe this will lead to a re-rating of the company, where we will be a benchmarking safety, where we are going to really become a talent-driven organization, a best in class in terms of reliable operations, low carbon mining, I'm going to talk about it, and reference in terms of creating shareholder value. All of these based on a foundation of a strong cash flow generation and also a discipline in capital allocation. Very quickly touching on our ESG front. Vale is really leading the transition towards a carbon mining base into a net zero strategy. We have four big commitments the company did, and these are not only statements, there are a lot of investments, a lot of efforts being done in order to achieve that. We plan to reduce scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 33% in 2030.
We have several initiatives in terms of electrification of our fleet, in terms of bringing new projects to reduce that. We are working in terms to become 100% self-sufficient with renewable energy. We have a target in Brazil for 2025 and 2030 for the global. We want to reduce the scope 3 emissions by 15% 2025, and also to reach scope 1 and scope 2 net zero by 2050. It's a very ambitious goal that the company has announced to the market and is committed on that. Base metals play a key role in that. We probably have one of the largest base metals portfolio into the large mining companies. We produce copper, we want to grow in copper. We produce nickel, cobalt, and we see a lot of opportunities coming, not only in terms of demand, but application for these metals.
This is something we are part of our core strategy into the base metals business. We have done a lot into the base metals. Here's some examples of what we have done and how we plan to evolve. Just as an example, in Sudbury, we invested more than $1.5 billion in reducing our emissions, GHG and particulates and so forth. We are evolving into the electrification of our underground fleet. We have a target to more than 40 equipments by the end of this year with not only to reduce the emissions, but also the quality of the environment and the underground operations. Also we plan to invest more and to work in our low carbon agenda through the decarbonization of our rotary kilns, through the use of clean energy, biofuels, and helping us to achieve the targets I mentioned.
As you know, we have I would say probably it's one of the strongest partnership Vale has with Wheaton and for base metals, it has been a very unique position. We did four deals since 2013, very important for the company and very important for the future as well. Talking a little bit about the assets first starting with Salobo. It has been a tough year for Salobo. By the end of last year and beginning of this year, we had two fatalities, and this led to a completely review of our safety and operational model there in Salobo. As you can see, our production until the end of the year has been lower than compared to the last year. The good news is that all these big intervention, all these review, it's already bringing results.
We are seeing the volume increasing, so the volume for the second half will be higher than what we have seen. We have been focusing also on the mine movement. We've been using a third party to help us to increase the production levels there on top of all these changes on the mine maintenance. We will see an upward trend in terms of our production for the second half. I think it's just to reinforce, Salobo is our main asset into the base metals portfolio. It's a very low cost, very competitive, long lifespan, and still offers significant opportunities for expansion. One of these expansions is Salobo III. As you know, these are some pictures recently taken from our concentration plant there. It is a significant investment.
We plan to increase our current processing capacity from 24 million tons to 36, so it's an incremental 12 million tons. There are a lot of synergies that have been explored with our current base there in terms of infrastructure, equipment, process. The project is around $1 billion and the current stage is 77% physical progress. We are targeting to initiate this project by the second half of next year, and this will bring us about 30,000 tons- 40,000 tons of copper on average throughout the life of mine, even though in the beginning there is a much higher production increase and that goes down as the grades of the mine evolves. We are studying, it's still a very early stage, but we are studying even a potential fourth expansion of Salobo. We call this Salobo IV. That could add another 30,000 tons- 40,000 tons.
Very early stage, still under analysis. This shows how this asset can still add value into the portfolio. Shifting to North Atlantic. I'm going to focus on Sudbury, just to give a highlight. North Atlantic, let's say our main focus is the stability. It's part of our turnaround into the base metals to turn the North Atlantic a more stable, reliable, and efficient business, also to prepare this business for the growth. We have important initiatives going on there on top of the projects. I'm going to talk about Voisey's Bay. That's part of our cobalt stream with Wheaton.
We also have an important project coming to production this year in Copper Cliff in Sudbury, which is the Copper Cliff Mine One, which is a project that we plan to ramp up now by the end of this year with additional 10,000 tons of nickel into our portfolio. Also Manitoba, which is outside the Sudbury complex, as you know, but it is important for the whole flow sheet where we recently approved an investment for the extension of the Manitoba. It's the Manitoba phase I, we still have another phase to expand where we are investing around $100 million and this will give us more than 10 years of production for Manitoba. The challenges on Sudbury, as you know, this year we had a strike. It was a two-month strike where we had to stop our operations there.
I think after a strong effort from the team and from the union, we managed to reach an agreement. This agreement is in place, and now it's a five-year agreement. This give us also a good visibility for the future. Looking backwards since 2017, we had a change on our production flow sheet and a movement to a single furnace. That reduced a little bit the production levels. More recently in 2020 with COVID and 2021 with the strike, our production was impacted, but we are already ramping up. Since the end of the strike, we managed to complete some of our regular maintenance, and now we are ramping up in September and be in full production by October.
Again, the number for the first half is in nickel terms, cannot be necessarily, let's say, extrapolated, but we are seeing a production increase on the following months. CCM is coming online by the end of the year. Important to highlight that, I mean Sudbury, as all our North Atlantic assets, they have a very, very unique position in terms of carbon emissions. It's one of the world's lowest carbon emission in the nickel industry, which is something that will be very important in order to promote our ESG agenda. Moving to Voisey's Bay. Voisey's Bay has been more stable and growing. Last year due to the COVID, we had to stop the mine and the project for some months. It's a remote region.
We had a quite large number of employees on a fly in, fly out, so there were a lot of concern about the COVID spread that in the region. We took the right decision. We stopped, and after two, three months, we went back. The operation is very stable. We actually produced more cobalt in the first half of this year than last year. We had about 940,000 tons of cobalt produced in this year, and very solid. As you know, we are transitioning from our current open-pit mine to the underground, and I'm going to give some highlights about the project. Again, Voisey's Bay is also a very important asset into our ESG strategy. Probably one of the lowest carbon intensity in the copper industry. Just a highlight into the underground project. This year we achieved the first ore.
This was a very important milestone into our development of this project. We basically have two underground mines there, Reid Brook and Eastern Deep. We achieved the first ore for Reid Brook by June. It's 60%-70% of the physical progress. We are already mining one of the mines, and we will achieve the full start-up of the Eastern Deep by the second half of next year. This will allow us to operate Voisey's Bay and the refinery where we process the feed from Voisey's Bay in Long Harbour until 2033 or 2024. It's a very important asset into our North Atlantic flow sheet and very critical to support us into the growth for our business. As a summary, I think base metals, it is a core business for Vale. It is strategic. It's actually where the growth is coming for Vale.
If you look, iron ore is a much more stable profile. It's core for the broader strategy of the company. We are going through deep transformations, and these transformations are also impacting our business in terms of how we need to manage safety, how we manage people, how we manage our process. We started this journey on the turnaround of the base metals in 2018, and I think we are starting to see the results and to prepare this business for the big opportunity that is coming with electrification, with the need of a decarbonization in the economies. We see a big opportunity for nickel, copper, cobalt, and we will continue investing and increasing the value of this business as we go through. Wheaton has been strategic for us since the beginning, helping us to fund this growth.
We have, I think, a unique opportunity in the future that will be explored. I'll be pleased to take questions. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Juan. Is there any questions for Juan on.
Maybe if I could. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yes.
Just maybe a couple of questions. First of all, I have to ask this since you put it out there. Salobo IV, when do you think that could be in production? Secondly on that, does Wheaton still get a piece of that? Then switching to Voisey's Bay, as you go through Eastern Deeps and Reid Brook, is the cobalt grade fairly consistent or does it move around a fair bit over those years through 2033 or 2035? Thank you.
No, thank you for the questions. Regarding Salobo IV, it's still very early stage, right? For sure that's a part of the mining rights and for the stream as well in the future. We still don't want to commit with any date, but we are studying and looking very carefully as copper continue to improve and Vale is very committed to grow into copper. That's definitely an opportunity. I won't put a date here, but it is something the company is studying. It's still on a very early stage. Regarding the grade of cobalt, we don't foresee any major change on our production profile going forward. For sure, there is a transition now from the open pit to the underground that this is, let's say, not exactly a linear extrapolation of our production profile, but it's pretty constant over time.
Just to expand on the Salobo IV. The way the expansion payment is structured there is that it's a one-time option for Vale to exercise and all of our discussions have been to date that they would exercise that upon completing Salobo III. They don't have to. They could easily hold back and do that at the end of Salobo IV. Of the time value in terms of it all depends when Salobo IV comes into play. You could capture that expansion payment, you could capture the extra capacity of Salobo IV into that, but it would definitely depending on timing in terms of when Salobo IV was completed.
It's a one-time option is the key aspect to sort of recognize is that. All of our discussions to date have been that they'll exercise that option at the end of Salobo III once they've satisfied a completion test. Please.
Just wondering if you can give any color on the start of Salobo III, if you have an idea. I think there was some debate about grade, whether you'd be able to stockpile some of the lower grade and go high grade to the mill right away when you started up or any guidance around that?
Yeah, I think the startup is still, let's say, we had a little bit of a delay due to COVID. We are shifted from first half to the second half of 2022. As far as I know, the whole strategy in terms of the ramp-up still, we have been trying to optimize as much as possible and to increase our, let's say, ore production in order to also maximize the credit that we have. I can check if there is any specific changes into that, let's say, feed between the stockpile and the mine plan. On overall, we don't see any big change in that.
I think it's become clear through our discussions that their intent is to find a way to satisfy the higher grade option of the expansion payment. With all the exploration work and the updated mine plans and stuff like this, that's what we're working our way towards is just ensuring that they will be able to satisfy that commitment to. Basically, it comes down to balancing between stockpiling lower grade material versus what goes through the mill. We know that the operating cutoff grades are going to drop just by virtue of scale. It just makes sense that you're going to do that as you ramp up capacity. Yeah, it's a matter of finalizing those discussions, which are still in process. Any other questions from the-
Nope. All good.
Juan, thank you very much. You were the only person that did it in the allocated time, so that represents our experience as a partner with Vale. They deliver.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Mike. Thank you.
Yes, thank you. Next up, we're going to have some of the members, some of the leaders of our technical team come up and present on some of the other areas that we're excited about within the Wheaton portfolio. Neil Burns and Wes Carson. Wes is the Vice President of Operations, and Neil is Vice President of Technical Services. They're going to talk about I've got a list here, but actually I'll just let them work their way through the list. The floor is theirs.
Perfect. Thanks, Randy. I'll start off by just saying thank you to Brad and Cashel and Juan for their presentations there. Very much appreciated. You guys do a much cleaner and better job than we can of presenting your operations. That being said, our next bit here, we're going to go through really a short introduction on our operating portfolio, and then we'll talk a little bit about some of our core assets being Antamina, Peñasquito, San Dimas, and Stillwater. On the map here, you can see the 24 operating mines that we've got marked with the blue markers, and then we've also got eight development projects that are marked in green on there. Really showing that diversity both in jurisdiction and across the lower political risk areas of the world.
We really pride ourselves in having a diversity of partner companies as well, and really that shows how that streaming model really can work for anyone. Everyone from really the large diversified companies such as Vale, Newmont, and Glencore, down to small single-asset companies. Also like to highlight here really the fact that, over the past year here, or 18 months, I guess, has been a bit of a strange time. Our technical team has had to transition to this sort of virtual model for a lot of our site visits. Generally, Neil and I are the ones who are going out and visiting all these sites every year. We certainly miss having to do that. It's a great part of the job and moving to that virtual side has been difficult, but at the same time really has highlighted the value in the partnerships that we've got.
We've got really that same value out of those virtual visits, look very forward to getting back out on the road and getting back to these operations in the time moving forward here. Next, we've got these two graphs, which really show two of the key attributes that we use to define the quality of our assets. First, really on the left-hand side there is the low cost. Really on that pie chart, you can see that 90% of our production comes from the lower half of the cost curve. These are really mines that can not only withstand the price in any commodity cycle, but they're also the ones that our partners are really looking to continually invest back into.
Secondly, the bar chart on the right, and you heard the other guys highlight this, particularly Gary earlier, really just the value of these long-life assets. Just in the reserve side, we've got 33 years in those assets. Then if you consider the resources, that's an additional really 28 years on top of that. Over 60 years that we've got in that life of mine across the different assets. We really feel that these two attributes are really the key difference between us and our competitors, and I challenge you really to find any other precious metal company that has assets of this quality. Overall, what does this portfolio really deliver to us? The diversity of that current asset base, combined with the continued addition of high-quality assets over the last year, we've added to Marmato, Cozamin, Santo Domingo, and Phoenix.
They really give the company a strong, consistent growth portfolio over the next 10 years and beyond. You can see that in 2021, we're forecasting production of 720,000- 780,000 ounces of gold, and then the next 5 years moves that up to 810,000 average, and then the 10 year up to 830,000. You're seeing that growth of those high-quality assets as we move forward. With that, I'll hand it over to Neil for the next couple.
Sure. Thanks, Wes. When you look at our average revenue from 2021 to 2025, you can see the metal split is 51% gold, 41% silver, 5% palladium from the Stillwater Mine in Montana, and 3% cobalt from Voisey's Bay in Labrador. On the pie chart on the right, you can see that split in revenue by country, with the largest contributors being Mexico, Brazil, and Peru. This waterfall shows our strong track record of R&R growth and exploration success. During our 17-year history, our partners have mined 12.8 million gold equivalent ounces, which they've amazingly almost completely replaced with exploration success. During our due diligence review of new opportunities, we put a lot of time and effort into understanding the exploration and resource conversion potential with the goal of investing into mines that will operate much, much longer than originally projected.
When you look at the company growth on a per share basis, you can see we've done an exceptional job with growing. Originally, we had about a half an ounce of gold equivalent per 100 shares. You can see we've grown that amount to over seven, which does not include the 3.5 ounces that have been mined over that same period. This slide and the previous one really speak to our track record of accretive transactions.
Now we'll move on to the assets themselves. Starting with Antamina. Antamina is one of the largest base metal mines in the world, as I'm sure you're all aware, located high in the Peruvian Andes, currently operated by a joint venture of BHP, Glencore, Teck, and Mitsubishi. The mine's large open pit feeds an average of 145,000 tons a day of ore, to a conventional crushing, milling, and flotation plant, which produces copper, zinc, lead, and molybdenum concentrates. Despite the impacts of COVID, Antamina produced 5.4 million ounces of attributable silver in 2020 and is on track for a strong performance in 2021.
On the top right there, you can see that there is a map of the infrastructure. That shows that all of the concentrate, actually, the copper and zinc concentrate are actually sent from the mine out to the port facility via pipeline. The smaller amounts of lead and molybdenum concentrate go out by truck. That's a real major advantage for Antamina. They don't have to worry about having all those trucks on the road down from that upper section. Mining is currently focused on copper ore in the pit. However, as that pit expands over the next couple of years, we will see a transition to the copper zinc ore, which does have higher silver grades in it.
Additionally, the silver production is anticipated to increase further in 2025 as a result of commissioning of new infrastructure, which includes a new primary crusher and several different belt systems that they're putting in to handle waste, and that will allow access to higher grade material as well. One of the aspects of Antamina that we're really most proud of is the community investment program, and we support a program that's called Enseña Perú, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the improvement of academic performance in the region. Similar to, as Randy mentioned with Vale earlier, with Glencore in this program, we were the original investor in this program. Antamina has then been able to leverage that to get multiple other of their suppliers and other partners in on this Enseña Perú program as well and really grown.
We've had the opportunity to go and see some of the schools they've impacted on several trips there, and it is really quite incredible to see the difference that bringing these teachers into these communities makes. In 2021, Wheaton has committed to a further two-year term, which is really six years of continuous support to this fantastic program.
This is a plan view. The giant Antamina mine is the world's largest copper zinc skarn deposit. This plan view is a slice through the deposit, and it shows the central intrusive body in red and the surrounding endoskarn in orange and exoskarn in green. The endoskarn hosts the majority of the copper ore, which also contains moly and lesser amounts of silver and zinc. The exoskarn hosts the copper zinc ore, which is very rich in silver. The mine is currently 100% from open pit, but they are looking at evaluating the potential for an underground mine, which is still at the conceptual stage. There's currently about 400 million tons of underground resources in the inferred category. The land package, which our area of influence for our stream covers, is very large at over 700 sq km and hosts multiple geological targets.
The exploration focus remains on the resource definition and conversion at Antamina. The mine is using directional drilling with their deep exploration programs. The rigs can be situated outside of the pit, away from the mining equipment, holes can be guided to intersect the ore body at the desired location and angle. Drilling in 2020 continued to extend the ore body definition below the resource pit. This map on the left is a plan view, which shows the drill hole traces and the location of the section line, which is shown on the right. The section map highlights a number of spectacular 2020 drill intersections. I'll just highlight a couple. A3243 hit 327 m, grading 1.32% copper and 10 g/ ton silver, A3158 hit an amazing 1,025 m, grading 1.76% copper and 13 g/ ton silver.
As you can see, these intersections are all located below the current resource pit, where they could eventually be mined, potentially in a larger open pit or potentially from underground.
Perfect. We'll move on to the Peñasquito Mine. Newmont's Peñasquito Operations, located in Mexico, hosts a gold, silver, lead, zinc porphyry skarn deposit and is Mexico's largest open-pit mine. The Peñasquito mill consists of two sulfide processing lines and a high-pressure grinding roll circuit with a combined capacity of up to 130,000 tons a day. The ore is processed through a conventional crushing, milling, and flotation circuit that produces zinc and lead concentrates. The addition in 2019 of the large pyrite leach circuit has now allowed for the production of gold and silver Doré on site as well. Over the past 12 months, Newmont has successfully implemented their Full Potential program at Peñasquito, delivering over $200 million in value. Included in this program was a focus on back-to-basics mining practices, which helped drive cost efficiencies and capital discipline across the operation.
As the mine transitioned into harder material over the last several years, the process plant has not only succeeded in maintaining throughput, but is working to increase it by up to an additional 20% by 2024. Additionally, the process plant has identified and is implementing a number of incremental improvements, which are expected to deliver over $150 million in value over the next several years.
On the plan map here in the bottom right, you can see the outline of Peñasquito and the Chile Colorado pits, and the section line, which is shown above. The section above shows the resources and reserves currently and the exploration targets which Newmont are currently exploring. It also shows the two breccia pipes, which are the focus of mineralization which deposited the two deposits seen there. The section also shows targets which Newmont are exploring for extensions to the ore bodies and mineralization at depth.
Perfect. We'll continue our tour here. On to San Dimas. The San Dimas deposit is located on the border of the Durango and Sinaloa states, and is considered one of the most significant precious metal deposits in Mexico. It's been in continuous operation for over 100 years. The mine is owned and operated by First Majestic Silver and consists of five primary ore zones, which are mined using long-hole open stoping and mechanized cut and fill mining methods. The ore is processed through the 2,500-ton a day mill in Tayoltita, which uses a conventional crushing and grinding coupled with cyanidation and zinc precipitation to produce gold and silver Doré. Since acquiring the mine in 2018, First Majestic has been developing a long-term mine and mill automation plan for the future of the operation at San Dimas.
This plan includes numerous projects that will be implemented over the next 12-18 months to improve production costs at the mine and processing plant, including upgrading the grinding circuit, including the addition of fine grinding technology, improvements to the tailings filtration, and overall construction of the tailings storage facility, significant advances in the reduction of mining dilution and overall mining costs, and a focus on recovering the high-grade pillars from the Tayoltita, Santa Rita, and Noche Buena mines.
On the bottom map here, you can see the surface geology in relation to the concession areas. The lower volcanics are shown in green, and those are the primary host of mineralization at San Dimas. You can see the San Dimas area covers the majority of those exposed lower volcanics. The Ventanas area to the south is named after the Spanish word for window, where the area is interpreted to be a localized window into those lower volcanics. The top map shows the various mining blocks, and the traces of the drilling. Historically, the mining has developed from south to the north, and veins have been discovered as they've progressed to the north. Significant exploration potential still exists within all of these mining blocks.
Last, but certainly not least, Stillwater is the only U.S.-based Platinum Group Metals mine. It is also the largest primary producer of PGMs outside of South Africa and the Russian Federation. It's located in Montana. Stillwater consists of two underground mines, the Stillwater Mine and the East Boulder Mine, and the Columbus Metallurgical Complex. Stillwater and East Boulder mines have been in operation since 1986 and 2002 respectively. Stillwater Mine currently has a mine life, as of the end of last year, of 25 years, and the East Boulder Mine is up to 38 years. There's a lot more in that J-M Reef, which is really the world's highest grade PGM deposit. Each mine has its own mill and concentrator on site. The Columbus Metallurgical Complex is a state-of-the-art facility, which is capable of providing smelting and refining processes for the mine concentrates.
The complex produces a PGM-rich filter cake, which is shipped off to a third-party precious metal refinery. In 2020, the East Boulder operation completed the Fill the Mill project, which really focused on a modular expansion at the mine, which managed to improve the efficiencies, both at the plant and the mine itself, by approximately 15%. The Blitz Project is another major expansion project, which is currently under development and is focused on building up to steady state in 2024. The ramp-up is expected to nearly double the production at the Stillwater Mine complex.
The top map here shows the location of the East Boulder and Stillwater mines with the world-class J-M Reef shown in green. Mineralization of that reef has been traced over a 32 km strike length. Also shown on the map is the Metallurgical Complex in Columbus. On the mine life, these operations are expected to be extended as drilling expands the reserves and the resources at the Lower East Boulder, Lower Stillwater East, and Blitz. On top of that, you can see there is this 12.2 km undeveloped gap between Stillwater and East Boulder, where continuation, I should say, of the J-M Reef has been confirmed through drilling. Lots of potential left at Stillwater. That's the last of our slides, and I believe we do have some time for Q&A for the group.
If anyone's got any questions about any of the other assets in our portfolio or even the rest of the senior management team, Haytham and Gary are still in the back there, so happy to answer any questions. Trevor?
Yeah. Maybe Neil or you guys, you just talked about some of the potential at Antamina, but it seems like that's always been tied also to the ability to find extra space for tailings, and I was just wondering if there's any update on that.
Sure. Thanks, Trevor. They are continually working on expanding that facility, obviously. I think it's this year they're supposed to be announcing the new permitting on it, so they're well on the way with that permitting for the expansion of the current facility. They were looking at other facilities potentially in the area, but with the change in the construction of the dam, they've actually managed to get it to the point now where they can just continue raising in the current facility. Those concerns really will keep getting pushed out as that permitting moves along. Really, that's what constrains the mine life for them. Certainly, the potential is massive there, and they are able to contain that within that current facility, which is great to see.
Thank you.
Yeah, one of the things that I remember from the due diligence at Antamina was the fact that that tailings capacity is what limits their reserve statement and the technical information, the confidence that you have for the rest of the resources or a large portion of the resources is the same as the reserves. The only reason they're not classed reserves is because there's no tailings capacity that's permitted. It's an approach that they take at Antamina, and so it has obviously huge potential. As they get through the permitting process, the reserves will kick up. As they get through the next phase, the reserves will kick up. It's an incredible asset. Any other questions?
We did have a couple of questions coming in from the web. The first one was related to Antamina, if we could give any color as far as can you give a steer on how much you expect Antamina silver production to increase by?
The technical term steer. Yeah, it varies definitely as you go through the deposit because the deposit, as you move through those skarns, you're moving through from the copper-rich to the zinc, and it's all accounted for in our current profile that you see. I would struggle to give a number to what that increase is, but you will continue to see that cycle over the mine life certainly. It's a very complex orebody that's got very different grades with respect to copper-rich versus zinc-rich ores and how much silver is going to come out of that. It's going to fluctuate back and forth. There's no expansions in throughput capacity. It's all a matter of variance with respect to the mix of ores that actually feed through that mill.
It's already an incredible asset at I think 160,000 tons per day with a 6: 1 strip ratio. I know a bunch of you were there for a tour about three, four years ago when we went down. It's an asset that still boggles our minds, especially in the gold industry. That's one of the interesting aspects of what we as a streaming company deliver to precious metals investors is access to these large scale, long life, high margin base metal assets. Antamina, Salobo are excellent examples of that. Being able to deliver that to precious metals investors, which you don't normally get in the precious metals industry. The capital intensity is much lower. They don't need as much reserve and resource definition and such. Antamina is an excellent example of that.
From the floor?
Thanks, Randy.
Yeah.
The global minimum corporate tax made somewhat of a splash, but it hasn't been really reflected in sort of stock prices and market reaction, and do you think perhaps the dismissal of it as a meaningful risk is the right reaction for the market?
Yeah, I think there's 139 members of the OECD trying to get alignment. I know a large portion of those members keep themselves competitive on the worldwide economic stage by having varying tax rates. That's what sovereign nations do to try and maintain standards of living. The vision from the G7, which of course has the benefit of resources and populations and capacity to build high standards of livings for their own populations to arbitrarily hope for higher tax rates for other areas that have to maintain competitive and attractive jurisdictions, I have a hard time envisioning that being successful. It would be a challenge. To take that right away from sovereign nations would have to have some type of compensation, and so are you really gaining anything there?
I think the other side of it is that the application, of course, would be uniform across, and those costs have to be borne by someone, right? Those costs, in a domino kind of effect, would actually probably lead towards higher inflation rates around the world, which may even be supportive for precious metal pricing and stuff like that. There's just so many things that would have to fall into place for us to see that as being number one of which sovereign nations giving up control in terms of how they maintain competitive characteristics to maintain their own standards of living within their countries. That's probably the biggest hurdle that I see, and I think as people look at that and realize that that's a big ask.
It is tough enough just getting the United Nations as that group to come together on a number of different initiatives. To have something like this come forward, it would be a very unlikely event.
Randy, we do have one other question from the webcast, and I know the answer to this one, but I'll let you answer it nonetheless.
Okay.
Cobalt was a new type of investment for you, but you argue that the counterparty and the commodity were interesting. Sibanye-Stillwater is expanding more into green commodities, lithium, et cetera. Is this a consideration for Wheaton, or will you stick with precious metals?
Yeah, we just spent, it was what, five, six years ago, rebranding ourselves as Wheaton Precious Metals from the old Silver Wheaton, which we hear quite a bit. We are focused on precious metals. The cobalt at Voisey's Bay, a very strong and important partner of ours, Vale, an incredible asset, Voisey's Bay, along with a dedicated smelting facility. It produces a very unique product within the cobalt world. So it has a lot of appeal to it that attracted us in terms of making that investment. We just don't see anything comparable in the space. We're not looking in that space. We are focused on precious metals. So our objective is to be the choice as a precious metal investment for anyone that wants precious metals exposure in their portfolio. Wheaton should be their first choice. Any other questions? Nothing from the web?
I've got a few closing slides, I think, if you could please bring those up. Next slide. I hope through the course of today, and by all means, we're going to have a lunch afterwards, and I encourage, especially the ability to meet face-to-face and talk face-to-face, everyone to dive deeper into what we have at Wheaton and what we present. I'm hoping that through the course of this, you understand a bit more about why we're so bullish about our company and the growth and the asset base and the opportunities that we have to continue delivering. Our objective is to be the choice for precious metals investing. When you look at the assets that we've brought into our portfolio, we've talked obviously about Salobo and Santo Domingo, Marmato, Copper World, Constancia. Marmato, it's another asset that has incredible upside potential.
There was a question earlier on about ESG in terms of things. We are not scared of being change agents, and I think Marmato was a good example of where we saw an opportunity to help the company, through our own experiences, improve their own performance and commit to doing some upgrades to some of their own water treatment facilities in the area and such. It is an exciting portfolio of assets that has all sorts of upside potential, especially in today's world, as we talk about the need for the green metals. Our company is here to help finance that growth into the green metals. Lots of exciting opportunities for us going forward. Next slide. Just I think this is the last slide. It deserves to be the last slide. Wheaton has been the largest single contributor to precious metal streaming over the last five years.
We have been active, and we are still very active. The scale of the deals isn't as big as it has been in times past, but I think that's a reflection of the fact that now most of what we're doing is not so much balance sheet repair, it's more focused on development and helping companies grow their own portfolios and help fund expansions and stuff like that. The difference between now and back in 2004 to 2010, which was the last time we saw such a heavy focus on development, is that there's not a single CFO in the entire mining industry that doesn't understand what a stream can deliver in terms of improving the internal rate of return for their shareholders.
The amount of capital that we invest into any project, that percentage of the overall capital required is always going to be higher than the percentage of revenue we take away. That automatically means an increase in the internal rate of return or the return on invested capital, whichever phrase you want to use, for the operator shareholders. That's why there's not a single CFO in the entire mining industry who doesn't understand what streaming can deliver to projects, and that's why we're so busy on this front, and we expect to be successful in terms of delivering some more opportunities. The sustainability initiative, it's just common sense. Any good business, sustainability's been around forever.
We're getting a lot better about talking about it and presenting it. You needed to have strong social license to be successful, especially in a resource industry where you can't pick it up and move it. You have to have these strong community relations. I inherited that from my own time in the operations space, that need, that recognizing the fact that it has to be recognized. I'm incredibly proud of what our team has done in terms of kick-starting the entire streaming and royalty space into taking this seriously. It never happened before. Traditional royalty companies never contributed towards that. They just collected the check and ran away. It's something that we as a society have to do, and I'm proud of what we at Wheaton have accomplished on that front, and we're continuing to it.
It is a journey as we move forward, it's incredibly important. It's just the right thing to do. If we're getting benefits from this, we deserve to share some of those benefits, some of that good fortune back with the communities around there to make sure that we leave good, strong, sustainable benefits in the community. The dividend policy, Gary talked a lot about that. We've now had increases in the last four quarters. It reflects a direct connection to the commodity prices and to our organic growth profile. We still have good, strong growth coming over the next Well, going out. That's going to continue to grow that dividend on a per share basis.
I can tell you that it's going to even get stronger as our cash flows get higher because our biggest challenge in this company right now is how to effectively put the cash flow back to work. If we can't put it back into the ground on accretive acquisitions, high-quality acquisitions, then ultimately it will be returned to the shareholders one form or another. All of that to date has delivered about a 20% average annualized after-tax return from our portfolio. We have delivered, and we will continue delivering. The last one, I think after some of the discussion today, we've got a number of near-term catalysts that continue to support growth and strengthen our company. I don't think we've ever been stronger than we are right now, but that doesn't mean we're relaxing. I would hazard a guess that we are probably as busy.
You can go and talk to Haytham. Well, it's the entire team, it's not just Haytham, but the number of opportunities we're reviewing now, the quantum or the quantity is higher than we've ever seen. We continue to expect to deliver on the precious metal streaming front. Wheaton Precious Metals is the sustainable option. Yes, it is. Thank you. With that, I think we're going to slide over to lunch in the backside. We're in the end, about three minutes behind schedule.
There we go.
Sorry about losing the coffee break.
Lunch will be back towards the main hallway. We are outside under a tent, we hope everybody can join us. You hopefully won't get wet. We should be well covered, it's not the best weather out there.
I think everyone understands the mask protocols within the building. Someone should have reminded me when I went back to get a coffee, but anyways, yeah, masks on the inside when you're moving around, but when you're sitting down at your table, obviously you're good to go. Thank you very much for everyone online that's been joining us. Thank you for joining us for this. By all means, let's dig a little bit deeper into any questions that anyone might have, and happy to talk about what we've done. Thank you, everyone.