We're going to kick it off with Agnico Eagle and Ion Hann, the Vice President of the Australian Operations. Ion is Vice President of the Australian Operations of Agnico Eagle, which is the second-largest gold mining company in the world. A mining engineer with more than three decades of industry experience, he's held senior operational and executive leadership roles across the Australian gold sector. Prior to joining Agnico, he served as Vice President of the Australian Operations of Kirkland Lake and was instrumental in the growth and success of the Fosterville Gold Mine. Ion holds a Bachelor of Engineering, Mining from WASM and is a fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Ion, floor is yours.
Thanks, everyone. Appreciate you coming in to have a listen. I was given some advice yesterday by a Gold Fields luminary, who shall remain nameless, to not be boring. That was the best he could give us. I got some advice from our CEO and the IR team a few days ago before that to stick to my lines, don't say anything outrageous, be boring. I'm going to try and strike a balance for everyone. You'll see how I go. There's some cautionary notes here. I do advise people to read all these. I may make forward-looking statements regularly throughout this entire presentation. What I really want to talk about Oh, and I'll get to this first. I'll let everyone read the land acknowledgement. What I do want to do is say we're very proud of our indigenous relationships throughout the globe.
We work with a lot of traditional owner groups through Canada and everywhere else. Particularly in Australia, we work very well with the Dja Dja Wurrung in Victoria, the Taungurung in Victoria, and the Jawoyn in the Northern Territory. Shout-out to all the people there and their families. What I really want to talk about today is what we believe is one of the great growth stories in the current gold market today. Agnico Eagle is nearly 70 years old. I think it's 70 next year. We've been growing continuously, and we believe the next 5-10 years will be another part of that growth story, significant part of that growth story. We are as well-positioned today as we ever have been. This eagle is flying, and we think the next 5-10 years is going to be really exciting.
This presentation today, I'll step through where we think this growth's going to come from, and it's very exciting times, and it's off the back of organic growth. You can see where we operate in the world. We've got a pretty simple philosophy with pretty simple business. Our proven strategy has stood the test of time. We operate in jurisdictions with the rule of law, safety of tenure, first-world jurisdictions. The second part of our strategy is that you've got to have the rocks. We want rocks that'll hold multiple mines for multiple decades. We embed ourselves in these regional areas. We become part of the community, and it's where we get our strategic advantage from. It's worked very well and continues to work. I'll start by saying we've been extraordinarily successful with our exploration.
Our Executive Vice President of Global Exploration, Guy Gosselin, is in town. Anyone who wants to come and have a talk about all things geology, I recommend you get along to our booth. In the last 5 - 10 years, Guy and his global team have added millions of ounces to our resources, and it's through the drill bit. It's the best way to grow your company. Organic growth, key assets, it's a pathway to increasing our annual production. We believe, even though we're doing around that 3.4 million ounces or so this year, we believe we can grow another 20%-30% over the next 5-10 years. It's huge growth, all right. It's going to come off the back of the drill bit and internal expertise.
I will go into a little bit more detail on three of these assets you see before you, the Detour Lake, the Canadian Malartic, and Hope Bay. We'll sort of move on to probably some growth assets a little more closer to home in Australia and where we see the growth coming beyond that. Detour Lake. It is a monster. There's no doubt about it. This is a world-class tier 1 asset. For those of you who don't know much about the Detour Lake, if you think of the super pit next door, if you make it the same size and add about another 2 km in length, that's Detour Lake pit, okay? It is big. The really exciting part of it is that Guy and his team have added the best part of 25 million ounces to that in the last 5-10 years.
It is unbelievable growth. You'll see in the diagram there, we're now looking at underground potential, and we've already started an underground decline to that extent. Our growth at Detour really will be displacing some of the lower grade tonnage from the open pit with higher grade tonnage from the underground. We see a pretty clear pathway there. A little bit of mill optimization still, but a pretty clear pathway to getting to a million ounces a year production and sustaining that for decades. Right. This is a generational mine, and it is one of the backbones of our company going forward. A tremendous asset, and it's a little bit scary for the rest of us because some of the best exploration results we've had in the company have actually come from Detour itself with the underground. Exciting times.
Canadian Malartic, another great success story with the drill bit. This asset has been going for the best part of 100 years, on and off. Again, Guy and the team managed to add about another 25 million ounces here over the last 5-10 years. Unbelievable result with the drill bit. The growth here is slightly different to Detour Lake. Instead of offsetting tonnage with some higher grade, we're transitioning at the moment from a big open pit to a big underground mine. The underground mine will really only produce about one third of the tons at three times the grade. We're talking about sort of an even production profile from an ounces point of view. What it does is it frees up somewhere close to 40,000 tons a day capacity in our processing plant. Now, that's an enormous potential.
There are satellite operations in the area, and for those that know the Agnico Eagle story, you know we made a small purchase about a year or so ago with Marban. It's only about 13 km away. We'll look to develop that, bring it into the mix. There are other satellite operations in the area. This plays to our strategy. We concentrate in a region, we focus in a region, we bet ourselves in there, and then we look to see how we can maximize the assets in that region, and we're the best place to do it. Mill capacity here, lots of it. The Odyssey underground itself is growing as we speak. Shaft number one is pretty well complete down to the final depth as we speak. We're still drilling the hell out of this.
We're doing studies now to even see whether there needs to be a second shaft. So between possibly a second shaft at this asset and the satellite operations in the area, again, it's been going for 100 years. We think we're going to be here for decades more to come, and as part of our big growth story going forward. Hope Bay. For those of you that don't know, hard to see in that diagram possibly, but it's right up the top of Nunavut, basically on the northern passage. We are uniquely placed to build and operate assets in Nunavut. We run Meliadine operations at the moment and the Meadowbank complex already. Again, heavily embedded into the Nunavut province. And I think we represent something like 30% of the GDP of Nunavut.
For those of you that sort of trying to get the scale of this, Nunavut's about three times the size of France, and there's somewhere between 40,000 - 50,000 people that inhabit the place. Right? We're a major part of what Nunavut looks to become. You'll see where Hope Bay is. That greenstone belt there, that represents, it's about 80 km of strike. So imagine owning the entire greenstone belt from Kalgoorlie south of Kambalda. That's what we've got. Okay? Totally underexplored. We moved in here only about 5 to 6 years ago through a deal. There had been a small operation there. But Nunavut's one of those places where you need scale. It's just the logistics of operating in the Arctic are tough. We understand what we're doing. We've been doing it for years. But you need scale.
We're looking, and we've just hit the go button here in May, to really kickstart this operation. You can see it's a tiny footprint as we speak at the moment. But again, Guy and the team drilling up there, enormously successful. The Patch 7 area really, really changed the game for us up at Hope Bay. We've started construction earlier this year. We will be here again for decades. And the prospectivity of that greenstone belt, I wouldn't be surprised if we're here much longer than that again. So, a significant part of our growth story going forward. Organic. It doesn't need any other sort of outside. It's in our control. I'll move now to Finland. Recently in the news, in a recent deal and it plays to our strategy, get into a region, understand what's going on, consolidate, look to stay there. Finland's a classic.
This is the strategy in action. We've had a mine at Kittilä for several decades. It is going very well. Okay. It's a great operation. The team there, excellent, embedded into Finland, embedded into the regulators, the politics of the place. Many of you in the audience may know the local boy, Graham Crew. Him and his team at Rupert did a great job at bringing up a resource at Ikkari. We've been keeping an eye on that. We've been leaning in, looking under the hood at various juniors. It got to the stage where that resource needed to be developed. We are the logical choice to develop that resource now. We've done a deal earlier this year. We've moved in. We've now consolidated, effectively, this belt in Finland.
Again, we'll look to leverage our expertise at operating in this area, our expertise in operating in the communities, and our expertise at making the most out of these deposits in Finland. Again, we've been here for 20+ years now. We're going to be here for decades again. This is the strategy that we work to at work. I'll move now to a little bit more Australian. Fosterville. Most people in the audience and anyone who's sort of known around Australia for a while now, Fosterville made its name in the late teens, like 2015, 2016, 2017. We found a super high-grade gold ore zone. That's not the whole story of Fosterville. If I take a slightly wider lens here, what you see in this picture here is the Central Victorian Goldfields.
I personally believe the Central Victorian Goldfields are one of the great goldfields on the planet. They are still the site and the scene of the world's greatest ever gold rush ever. This goldfield's basically been ignored for 100 years. Okay. Fosterville has been part of the story of the resurgence. What you see on the map there is all the gold occurrences in Victoria to date. Then where the green line comes over, that's the Murray Basin sands coming over the rocks. You'll see that all the gold occurrences in Victoria to date stop where the sand starts. The rocks don't stop. The rocks keep going all the way to the Murray and into New South Wales. It's beggars' belief that the gold mined to date is the only gold in Central Victoria. It's just not possible.
We've got the only modern processing plant of any size in the Central Victorian Goldfields at Fosterville. We genuinely believe that there's as much gold yet to be discovered in Victoria to the north and northwest of Bendigo as what there has been mined in Bendigo to date. Right. We think we're going to be in a really good position to maximize the value out of all of those ore bodies that are yet to be found. All right. Again, this is a strategy. It's earlier in the piece. This is a strategy in action. This will be growth. All right. In the meantime, Fosterville continues to churn out significant cash flow in a pretty small footprint. You can see our tenure. You can see where the gold sits. We're encouraging all the genies in Victoria to continue drilling. Right.
We think we can be part of a really good story and a resurgence of one of the world's great goldfields. Northern Territory. The Northern Territory is a uniquely successful rehabilitation success story. It's also a developing exploration project. Okay? We've done some enormous work in there in the last five to six years, rehabilitating some legacy issues, to everyone's credit. We do believe the Pine Creek area is a gold region. All right? 8 million- 9 million ounces or so has come out of that over the journey. There's more there. For us, it's all about drilling. Okay? We're drilling as we speak. We're looking to define and maintain a 10+ year- operation up there before we can start to restart operations. In the meantime, there's plenty of juniors in the area, and we're encouraging all them to continue drilling as well. All right?
We do have the only processing plant in the entire region. 2-plus million tons capacity. We've got a licensed tailings dam there, all ready to go. This represents a really low CapEx entry point for an operation. We've just got to get something to the size and scale that we need to be able to hit the go button on this one. We are enthusiastic and encouraged by some of the results that we see up there at the moment, and we're looking forward to see what might come. I'll finish up. We are a simple business. We like it that way. We have a proven strategy. It works. We demonstrate it time and again. We believe we have one of the most compelling growth stories in the global gold industry today. All right? It's going to come from organic growth.
We've got the best pipeline of projects in the industry, we believe. We're reliable and consistent. We do as we say, and we do it at industry-leading cost metrics. We always focus on per-share metrics. In the original slide right at the start, you can see our performance over the last 20 years. We stack it against anyone else's. It is a focus for the entire company. All right? Shareholder return value. We have extremely robust balance sheet at the moment, and we are returning value to the shareholders through dividends and share buyback schemes. We are very proud of our past, and we are focused on our future growth. Thanks very much