Thanks. Okay. Righto. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for having me. My name's Campbell Baird, and I'm the CEO of Asante Gold. My job today is to present to you the opportunity that is Asante. First, just want to tell you a bit about myself and just ease into the story with us. I'm a mining engineer. I've had over 36 years of experience in an industry that's been incredibly good to me. I'm just going to jump ahead, and we'll come back to a few things. I actually started there on this map in St. Ives back in 1993. Since then, I've been able to work all around the world in plenty of commodities, seen plenty of things, worked with plenty of people. Gold always very much pulls you back.
I think that's why it's important because I want to explain to you today why myself and a number of the team or all of this new team in Asante is here. Because of the opportunities that we see in the Bibiani and Chirano system and corridor, if you will. If we go back but start talking about Asante. It's two operating gold mines, the Chirano Gold Mine and the Bibiani Gold Mine. It's in a contiguous 83 km of strike . It's the first time in over 100 years that that tenement package has been brought back together. It's only just been brought back together in the past three years. Chirano, great bones, a 3.6 million ton per annum milling capacity. Five underground mines, a number of open pits. Bibiani, one large open pit, a large processing facility.
It's just spent the past 10 years on care and maintenance. Bringing something up out of care and maintenance is not really easy. This asset base, which is really only just starting to come into production from Asante's perspective, is why we're all here. It's not often that you are given the opportunity to walk into an asset base of over 6.5 million ounces, reserves of 2.8 million ounces, mine life of 7 years . Then, with a package of land that really everybody is saying is super underexplored. So who is the new team? Myself, mining engineer. Glenn Baldwin, joined three months ago, has moved himself to Accra. Fred Attakumah, Dindiok Chialin, Juliet O. Manteaw-Kutin, stalwarts of Asante. I have to call out Dindiok Chialin in particular.
Has absolutely stepped up over the past couple of months as Interim Chief Financial Officer and is doing a marvelous job in that role at the moment. Also want to say we've got really great supporters in our senior lenders. Rand Merchant Bank, GCB Bank Limited, Fidelity Bank, Ecobank, our three local Ghana banks, and Appian Capital Advisory, one of our financiers. Also, Helikon Investments as part of the mezzanine finance. There's also a number of our board, Malik Easah, Executive Chairman, and then board advisors, Kevin Tomlinson, Michele Muscillo. Look, it's a pretty big team, but it's a very, very experienced team. Those guys, we're all ladies and gentlemen, are all here because of the opportunity that we see here in the Chirano-Bibiani corridor. A little bit about Ghana. We're located in Ghana. Gold is Ghana's largest production source, 17% of its GDP. It's Africa's largest producer of gold.
It's a really sort of great and easy place to get to. You land in Accra and then our mine is about a 30-minute flight from Accra up to Kumasi and then a 2-hour drive. So, like most assets these days, the world is getting smaller and smaller. But why am I here? And why are we here? I think this is my favorite map picture. When I sort of wandered down to Ghana to have a look at Asante in February, was asked to go and have a look. This is, I guess, what kept drawing my attention. The guys have actually got a couple of these up on the big wall in one of the best mine planning offices I've ever seen down at Chirano. Five underground mines, plus an older underground mine. Akwaaba was their first mine, started in 2005.
Today we're mining in Suraw, Paboase, Mamnao, and also across there at Akoti, south and north. We just released a new PEA or National Instrument 43-101 a couple of months ago. Added about 3 years of mine life to it. That 3 years of mine life was generated from an exploration program just on 6 months at the end of 2025. We continue to explore. We continue to explore on the surface. We continue to explore underground. One of the sort of, I guess, just to zoom in, is this area between Mamnao and Sariehu. While I won't say that it's going to join, you can see that as we start to drill in between these two structures, you really are starting to see some really quite interesting mineralization coming together. Also, if I come back to that one, we're not down there into these high-grade zones yet.
We're still up quite high. We see Chirano as a real productivity opportunity as well. We have a lot of equipment. We're not as productive or as efficient as we would like. One of the things that myself and Glenn Baldwin would like to think that we're going to be bringing to this business is the ability to really lift the productivity of our underground workforce and really start driving these declines down as quickly as we can down into these higher-grade areas and really start to develop some pretty interesting production flows over the next couple of years. You can also see at Sariehu there and Mamnao, open pits. It's a very interesting dynamic at Chirano. Chirano is an underground operation. It started as an underground place. But the open pits, as we've seen the gold price increase, the open pit production becomes something that's really quite desirable.
From a production profile point of view, you always want to have that sustaining level of open pit production to supplement your hard rock underground production. A great example is Kolua over here. You can see it's quite a small little pimple, if you will, in this 15 kilometers of strike. We opened that up in March this year with about a 3-month mine life, just a little bit of an oxide base, just a feed of 10,000-15,000 tons a month. 3 months later, we drilled it out again, did further grade control. There's another 3 months. So we keep on going. One of the things we've started to ask the team is not just look there on that little pimple, but what can you do stepping out to the left, to the north, and the south?
We're now starting to, a couple of hundred meters of step out, we're starting to take that from 300 meters worth of mineralized zone out to about 1,000 meters worth of a mineralized zone. The same is going on in Mamnao. Some of these pronunciations are quite challenging for us Australians. But Mamnao is quite a shallow open pit resource at the moment. It's being mined with very small equipment. We've been asking the team to just start stepping out. Don't just step out 15 meters or 25 meters. Step out 200 meters. What do you know? 200 meters, 200 meters. There's extensions going on and going on. Our challenge, as engineers and professionals, is to start looking at this from the perspective of we've got a USD 4,000 gold price, we've got this massive resource base.
We are not mining it as efficiently as we can be with the right size gear. Our challenge over the next 6-12 months is to be pulling back and starting to work out how we get into this from an underground and an open pit point of view with more efficient gear, with more efficient size mining, and what's that going to do from our production profile and our cost base. That's sort of Chirano. Bibiani. Bibiani's been around for a long, long time. Its short life history has been with a group called Noble Group at the end of the last gold boom, so around 2010, 2011. Then acquired with Resolute Mining, who always wanted to bring it into production, but were never able to because they were distracted with a number of other operations.
Then Asante Gold in January, we had quite a large pit wall failure coming down into the south of the pit, covering over all of the ore that they'd been working on their production profile for 2026. I have to say to the team that while all of 2026's ore pretty much was covered by waste, and we're still working through that and trying to remove all of that'll finally, we think, be cleared around November. The team has always actually met their ore delivery schedule all through this year. Not obviously in the spatial compliance that we'd actually like it to have been met, but they have been able to deliver their ore schedule. Before I move to the next slide, you'll also see there a lot of underground development there set out.
Both you can see the voids, the old historical voids, and a current plan for a future underground mine. One of the things we had been working towards starting that underground mine right now. Three portals going in, one at the north, one at the south, and then this Greg Hunter Decline coming in at the center. Some of the work that we're starting to do, and I guess I've had my feet under the desk now for about 5 months . Glenn's had his feet under the desk now for about three months. Then with the support with some of the board advisors, we've been getting the time and the airspace now to start thinking about the bigger picture at Bibiani, but also at Chirano. But I think this is a really, really interesting big picture thinking page for us.
We can go underground, and there will be an underground there one day. Three declines going down is $90 million, $100 million, $150 million next year of capital that we probably don't need to spend. As we start to look further to the north, through cut 5 into that area there, then out into cut 6. Rather than being down in the bottom of a pit or trying to go underground, we're actually finding a significant amount of oxide resources there. Yeah, it's all at about 1 gram, but oxide resources have a much better recovery profile through our Bibiani mill. It starts to de-risk us coming down into the bottom of the main pit where, yes, there is much higher grade.
If we're making that 70%-80% of our production profile, trying to do a rapid increase, rapid vertical rate of advance downwards through a lot of these underground voids, that's going to be challenging for us. If we can just move that to being about 30% of our production profile going forward, start to bring our operations back out of the bottom of the pit up onto the surface, I think you're going to see a much, much longer open pit life, and we can defer the underground for a number of years to come. There will be an underground mine there, and this operation will be mining at the Bibiani main zone for many decades to come. I'm very confident of that. The team's been doing quite a significant amount of drilling at depth, and they're getting great results as they go deeper and deeper.
There is continuity of that ore body. These gray zones that you can see right up at the top, they're a lack of drilling. They're not, we didn't think there was anything there. They're just a lack of drilling. Just 5 days ago, once we started to work these things out, there's now two RC rigs sitting there in cut 5 and in and around and starting to move. Starting to drill that and starting to try and fill in some of those gaps. Russell Pit was one of the reasons we were able to meet our ore delivery schedule this year. That's now finished. There is some good underground potential there. We don't have a great picture to show them together, but it's actually just a little bit over off the page to the south. It's probably about 300 meters.
There's a road, and then you have Russell Pit . When we do go underground, it's probably something that, as well as going down for main pit, you might also go out to the Russell Pit . Again, that's something for the future and the opportunities that are here. The last thing, we don't make enough noise about one of the most amazing things that this company has pulled off over the past 12 months. This is the resettlement, the Bibiani Resettlement Action Plan. In the past 12 months, we've spent $50 million U.S. We've built 325 houses, 34 schools, electricity, water. We've put in all of those roads. We've put in the sewerage. The school's up and functioning. We're driving people to and from schools.
We've started to move people away from where they're all coming from is there's an old historical town wrapped around the southern end of Bibiani pit. We're moving all of those people so we can do that final pit wall cutback at Bibiani. This is an absolutely extraordinary story. 325 houses in 12 months, and that's just stage 1. We still have stage 2 and stage 3 to go. It's quite a undersold sort of development by us here at Bibiani. We're moving several thousand people right now into this township as we speak. Something that Asante is super proud of and we've achieved, not just been digging a hole. We've been building a few houses at the same time. Look, that's us. That's Asante. Happy you got a couple of minutes, happy to take questions.
There's a number of us here, very happy to meet you. I'm here all day tomorrow, as is Glenn and a couple of others. Thank you.
Campbell, thank you very much. I think we've got a question down there.
Campbell, thank you for the presentation. Could you comment on Ghana's regulations about using local contractors? There's been a lot of noise in the investment community.
Yes. I'm not 100% expert on that, but open-pit mining must be done by local contractors in Ghana, and that's just the law. We work actively with that. We have about four open-pit mining contractors spread across our organization. If you, as a contractor, want to come into Ghana from an underground mining point of view, you have to enter into a 50/50 joint venture. Hence, we don't have the western mining contractors in there as much anymore. But we are working with a very experienced local underground mining contractor as well. We've just started to give them an opportunity, but we also have a very large owner/operator workforce for our underground operations at Chirano.
Any other questions from the room?
Yes. Could you just address your balance sheet cash position, please?
Look, one of the opportunities that comes with working at Asante is, it's been an extraordinary balance sheet that we've been presented with. Look, why I called out, we've got some pretty supportive bankers, and they've been working really well with us over the past couple of months. We're working through our current balance sheet challenges with them. That balance sheet was set up for a 400,000-500,000 ounce per annum production profile. You will have seen about three months ago when I got my feet under the desk, that was one of the first things we stood up, put our heads up, and said, "That's not a production profile that we support." We immediately been engaging with our bankers and our financiers to work through what that looks like.
That's going to be an ongoing process over the next 6-12 months to work through how we make that better. I was just going to ask as a follow-up to that, what's the current level of production? How do you see that evolving in the next year or so? Current level, we're working towards our current guidance is around 275,000 to 300,000 ounces for 2026. That's where we're sort of aiming to maintain that at the moment. I think we'll start to build that into 2027, particularly as you start to see some of the things that we're seeing. One of the things I'll flag is we're all pretty new there. We've walked into, it's been very much a stabilize and then thrive operation.
We're still very much in that stabilization phase of just trying to wrap our arms around the whole business and trying to just work out what are the levers that we need to pull in order to sort of really actually get it to start thriving.
Okay. That's great. Thank you very much, Campbell.
You're welcome.