a lot of information to share with you today. We're going to try and keep it moving along, and hopefully you'll find it interesting and informative. This is a cautionary statement. You've seen these before, and it's in your presentation if you'd actually care to read it. There's the second half. Today, you're going to hear from several of our executive team and some of our mine managers and country managers. We have the whole group here together. I just want to start off a little bit with a bit of an overview, and many of you are quite familiar with B2Gold.
Just by way of introduction, in summary, of course, as most of you know, B2Gold was created by a lot of the former management and some directors of Bema Gold, which was a highly successful company that transitioned from exploration to mine construction and production very successfully in various locations in the world. Bema was victims of their own success in that Kinross offered to exchange their shares for ours in 2007 for CAD 3.5 billion. At the end of the day, we were not going to be entrenched management, we took that deal to our shareholders. We got a chance to start again, called B2Gold. Just 11 years ago, we started B2Gold, and it's been quite a remarkable journey.
We find ourselves obviously taking that tremendous experience together from Bema to B2Gold, and I think that's one of the key driving forces in our success. We've taken that same model that we learned, and for me, it was over 30 years, and we applied that to B2Gold. In just 11 short years, we took the company from zero production to very close to 1 million ounces a year now of profitable gold production. I think most people are familiar with where we are and the various properties. This map shows the locations of where we are and our head office in Vancouver. You're going to hear about most of these projects. One of them that I will highlight today that seems to be potentially in transition is the Gramalote project in Colombia. Kelvin Dushnisky recently left Barrick to join AngloGold Ashanti as CEO.
They've been doing some interesting work on Gramalote with some remodeling over this year. Recently, they got together with our technical group and presented some new models for Gramalote that suddenly show the potential for a much more robust project than they had shown before. We always felt that the grade was getting beaten up on the low side, and there seems to be some new modeling, which we're looking into, and we're running our own geological model as we speak. We'll have that done by the end of the year. Just a heads-up that if the new models from AGA stand up, we suddenly may have another significant asset in Colombia with Gramalote. We'll keep you posted on that. I had breakfast with Kelvin a couple of weeks ago, so it's definitely on his radar as well.
This is some of the executives you're going to see today. Everyone on this page's picture is here, except for Ed Bartz, VP Taxation and External Reporting. Ed was kind enough to go to Mali and spell off Randy Reichert, so Ed's been running operations down there. It's not really true, but at the end of the day. One thing that I do want to talk briefly about is political risk. It's obviously a major topic, understandably, in our industry and has been for some time, maybe more so now than ever. This slide, I think it's very indicative of what we've been able to do between Bema and B2Gold. If you look at all these countries, Chile, United States, Russia, South Africa, Nicaragua, Namibia, Philippines, and Mali, what they have in common is that we've succeeded in all of these countries quite remarkably.
I do think that it's very important to underline what I think is the key to successful management of political risk, and it's the first point here, which is always delivering on your promises that you make. It sounds really simple, but at the end of the day, I would suggest to you that a lot of the political risk that's been realized and some issues in taxation and others are often because companies didn't deliver on the promises they make.
If you promise the president of Nicaragua or Mali or Namibia or others, as I've done, and you establish a personal relationship of mutual trust, and you promise them that you're going to build a mine in, let's say, two and a half or three years, and you tell them they're going to get all these taxes, you're going to train all these people, it's going to be wonderful, and they're going to look good as the leader of their country because they did a smart deal with a Western company. That's all great. They are not like us. When you mention you're going to build a mine in two and a half or three years, they think because you're a Western company, they actually believe you're going to do it. Whereas most of us, especially in our space today, we're one of the few exceptions.
Most people are very skeptical about schedules for building mines. What happens if you don't deliver on the promises you make to these leaders? Well, it's about accountability at the end of the day. All of a sudden, you've caused a real problem for a leader of a country and his government if you don't deliver on the promises you made that the government promised its people. At the end of the day, we've seen this time and time again. I don't know about you, but if I was the president of a country and the company came in and promised me lots of things and didn't deliver on most of them, I would lose trust in them and lose respect. I might consider actually trying to get more tax dollars out of a company that doesn't perform.
At the end of the day, the real little secret of political risk is delivering your promises. We've succeeded in every one of these countries with excellent relationships with government. The main driving force is we did exactly what we said we would do time and time again. That's the key to managing and understanding political risk. It's about fairness, respect, transparency, and ultimately, accountability. Sadly, we haven't seen enough of that in the gold mining sector, as you all know too well. This is just a reminder. You've seen this slide many times. It's quite remarkable, really. We shouldn't forget what a remarkable accomplishment this is, over just 10 short years from no gold production to just under 1 million ounces a year. Perhaps more importantly, profitable gold production.
Success after success of making accretive acquisitions, not paying for ounces that might be there, not acquiring anything that needs a higher gold price and/or exploration success to justify the purchase price. That's one of the key disciplines that we've had for years. A few other companies have had that discipline. Sadly, many have not. At the end of the day, one of the key drivers of this remarkable production growth, which will continue, the key driver is the people. If you look at the group that you're going to hear from today, we have a combined 250 years of experience, not just in the mining industry, but experience in working together at Bema and B2Gold. I don't think there's another team like it in the world. We also have a very strong board of directors that are very supportive of our company's initiatives.
They know that we're aggressive. There's a big difference between being aggressive and reckless, and I think we've found the balance there. I'm going to pass it on in a few moments to Mike, who will talk a little bit about corporate strategy. In the meantime, we're basically going to stay the course, and the course is to continue to grow organically by developing our assets. You're going to hear quite a bit today about Fekola. We did something unusual there. We actually were drilling the northern extension while we were building the mine. That's not common in our industry. Because of that, we're in a position now by the end of the year with a much larger resource, soon to be reserves.
We will be announcing in the first quarter of next year the completed expansion study that we're pretty excited about to expand Fekola. You'll hear about that. Stay the course. At the end of the day, we're still not in a particularly M&A frame of mind. The reason for that is because we have a pipeline of great projects, but also we did the heavy lifting and grew the company and built mines when really very few were doing that. At the end of the day, we find ourselves in a very strong position going forward. Also, I'm quite alarmed by the lack of quality projects out there today. Given that there's been very little exploration done in the world in the last 15 years, there's not a lot of good gold projects out there today.
I think the competition's going to pick up because there's many companies out there today that need to grow, that didn't grow when we were growing. I think we're going to get into a competitive situation, especially for acquiring ounces in the ground. We're not going to break our history. We don't overpay. We're not going to pay for ounces that might be there. We're not going to buy anything that needs a higher gold price to justify the purchase price. We will look. We always look. We might find the rare gem that fits our space. At the end of the day, if you look at our acquisition and exploration success, it speaks for itself and the best way to grow a gold producer.
We will continue with exploration on our own, grassroots exploration, but also joint ventures with other junior exploration companies as a way to try and find additional ounces of gold. The cheapest ounces are always the ones you find. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Mike Cinnamond, who's going to talk to us about the financial state of the company. We're in great shape financially and looking forward to 2019 continuing that great financial strength. I'll pass it over to Mike now.
Well, thanks a lot, Clive. I think as Clive said, we're in great financial shape, this is an easy part of the presentation to do. I thought we'd just take a look at where we've come this year up to the end of Q3, then I'll have a few comments about how we see the year out turning for the balance to the end of December. Firstly, just comment on production. We've had record quarterly production, 242,000 ounces for Q3, then year to date it's also a record, 722,000 ounces. Obviously, mainly that reflects the inclusion of Fekola in there operating at full capacity and in fact beyond what we originally thought it would do for the nine months so far, but also very strong performances at Masbate and Otjikoto. So record production at the end of Q3.
We think we're well on track to hit the upper end of our guidance range, our annual guidance range of 920,000-960,000 ounces. If you look at that range, it has changed. The mix of it's changed slightly through the year. We uplifted Fekola by 20,000 ounces, now guiding between 420 and 430. In fact, when we get to the Fekola section later, you might hear that we might even do slightly better than that. Masbate enjoyed all of the perfect operating conditions this year and beat grade throughput recovery. We upgraded that to between 200,000-210,000 ounces for the year, an uplift of 20. Offsetting that, we downgraded Nicaragua.
The combination of the two mines there, we took down by 30 the guidance. That really reflects almost entirely the social unrest that they were experiencing in the country throughout majority of this year and the impact that it had certainly on some things like supplies and access to some parts of the site. Overall, we think we're doing right on track to hit the high end of this guidance range. We're currently finalizing our budgets for 2019, and we expect we'll put something out on that probably by mid-January next year. Looking at the cost performance for the quarter, cash costs, we're right on consolidated basis, right on track, $504 an ounce. Year to date, we're actually ahead. We're $51 below budget for the year.
Again, if you look at the mix there, Fekola's just had a spectacular start in this first nine months of through the year at $321 an ounce. We think it's well on track to hit at least the low end of its guidance range of $340-$390 for the year. Masbate, $534 an ounce. That is significantly below its original range of $675-$720. At the end of Q3, we re-guided down to between $545-$595 an ounce. Otjikoto, very strong performance. It continues to perform very well, $514 an ounce. That was offset, again, the Nicaraguan assets, the operations there, the production was a little lower than we forecasted at higher cost.
Overall, $486 year to date, cash cost per ounce. We think for the year we're going to come in at the low end of the guidance range of $505-$550. Same story on the all-in sustaining costs, $749 per ounce for the quarter are almost exactly budget. Year to date, we're almost $100 ahead of where we thought we'd be. We're $740 an ounce. Again, led by Fekola, $511 an ounce. All-in sustaining cost, Masbate, $717. We re-guided those costs down in Q3. Otjikoto, $747 an ounce. Overall, I think we think we're going to come in, certainly Fekola, most likely at or below the low end of our guidance range. Overall consolidated basis, we think we're going to come in right at the low end of our consolidated guidance range of $780-$830.
Cost performance like that translates, and production performance like that, records, translates into record revenues. We've basically doubled our revenues from sales of gold in Q3 2018 compared to the prior year quarter and year to date. We're almost at $953 million of revenue for the first nine months. That reflects a significant increase in production. Also, that we managed inventory through the year this year. When Fekola started up at the end of 2017, we were carrying some additional inventory ounces, but we've managed to sell those down through the course of the year. As well as the excellent producing output from the mines, we also managed inventory and ended up with record sales year to date of $953 million.
Obviously, that translated into excellent cash flow from operating activities as well, $143 million for the quarter and $377 million or $0.38 a share year to date. If you put all those things together, what do we look like? We've seen through Q3. Where we see ourselves going for the year, like I said, we think we'll come in at the upper end of that consolidated production range, closer to that 960,000 ounce number. We think we'll be at the low end of both those cash costs and all-in sustaining cost guidance ranges that you see there. Also on a revenue and cash flow basis, revenues we think will be about $1.2 billion for the year. On the cash flow side, almost tripling the cash flow from operating activities that we saw last year.
We're going to jump from $155 million to somewhere likely a little bit north of $450 million on the operating cash flow side. Just give you a couple comments on that as well. We've said in our disclosures that if you assume this $1,200 gold price for the next, just for the balance of Q 2018 and through 2019 and 2020, we think we're going to average somewhere around $400 million per annum from operating cash flows over that three-year period. A couple things to bear in mind. This year, we're higher. Like I said, we're going to be $450 million plus. When we get into 2019, like I mentioned, the budgets are still being prepped, a couple of things you should bear in mind. One is there are always some timing issues and things like mine sequencing and stripping.
More significantly, I think for 2019, there are differences in the timing of Fekola tax payments. Fekola, unlike a lot of operations when they start up, they didn't benefit from a lot of accelerated tax deductions. You're basically taxable right out of the gates in Mali. We've been accruing those taxes, and you'll see them. If you look at the MD&A, you'll see them accrued and reported in the earnings statement. On a cash basis, most of those won't get paid until just after the first quarter next year, just because of the way the timing of the installments works. You're going to see for Mali, we'll pay most of this year's taxes next year, and that'll impact operating cash flows. Then you'll also see next year, we'll be paying installments for the full year in Mali for 2019 based on this year.
It's almost like there's double cash tax payments in Mali for 2019, and that's a one-off situation just because the mine just started up. Bearing that in mind, we're likely going to be closer to the $300 million mark on the operating cash flow side for 2019, then 2020, we'll jump back up again so that overall, we'll average about $400 million cash flow from operations. Final comments I'd make just on where we are today in terms of financial liquidity and strength. We had at the end of Q3, we had $353 million, we unburdened ourselves of $258 million of that cash on October 1st. That was part of our strategy when we repaid our convertible note in cash. It matured October 1st. When we built Fekola, the strategy was to build it without using equity.
It was built using a combination of operating cash flow from other sites. Our various debt facilities, including a revolving credit facility and this convertible note, and also some prepaid gold sales. The strategy was to build it without using equity and using some debt. Now that Fekola is up and running, and most of the operations are running very nicely and generating strong operating cash flow, then the second part of the strategy is now to start repaying some of the debt that we incurred. Overall, if you look at our debt position, we started 2017 with total debt, which combines the convert, the revolving credit facility, and equipment loans and leases of approximately $700 million. We're forecasting we'll be down to at least $500 million by year-end.
We'll have repaid net $200 million in the year, and that's us executing the second part of that strategy. As we said at the end of Q3, we've drawn $400 million on the revolver, so we got $100 million left. Plus, there's an additional $100 million accordion facility there, if we so wish, we can go out and offer that to other parties without having to go back and ask the lending banks again. I mentioned we did fund Fekola with some gold prepayments. They originally were $120 million. We got $45 million of those left at Q3. There'll be $30 million left by year-end, and we'll deliver to the final ounces in that by the middle of 2019. We'll have no prepayments left. We also funded Fekola.
We had a significant fleet and loan facility with CAT, EUR 71 million, which we've drawn almost all of to date. As we look forward, you'll hear some discussion about Fekola expansion later, and that may necessitate bigger fleet, more fleet. Again, I think likely that we'll work closely with CAT as we go forward to help finance those as well. That's an overview of where we've come this year, a record year, great results, and a little bit of a sort of taste of where we're going to end up for the year. With that, I think I'll pass you over to Bill Lytle, our Senior VP, Operations, who will give you a sort of overview of the ops for the year. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike. This is going to be an interesting presentation by me. Normally, when I'm up here, I'm talking in detail about the operations, and I spend a lot of time going over the numbers. Clive allowed us to bring the general managers here today and the country managers, so you're going to hear directly from the guys on the ground and the women that are doing the work. For me today, this is more of like a victory lap. Certainly, I'm going to go through very quickly some of our development projects, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on operations. I wanted to start with this slide right here. This is in the deck that we put out. I just wanted to remind everybody that we do have five mines. Everyone always talks about B2Gold and Fekola.
The reality is that in my opinion, in 2018, all five mines did an outstanding job, and we should be very proud of everything that they did. If you look at even the Nicaraguan assets under a very difficult situation, they continued to perform and they continued to operate, and they continued to do as we requested and as best as they could. Before I get into the slide, I know that you're going to see all of the speakers come up here, but maybe I just talk briefly about who they are and what their background is, and I'll do it based on the order I know you've got a pamphlet in front of you identifying who they are. Starting with Fekola, I've got Mohamed Diarra. Mohamed's the country manager. Mohamed, maybe stand up. Mohamed came to us during construction.
He came from us from the Ministry of Mines in Mali. He was working within the government and we're lucky to have him. Thanks, Mohamed. Randy Reichert is the GM for Fekola. Randy's been mining for more than 30 years. He's obviously very strong technical background with a degree in mining and rock mechanics and an MBA. Randy was with us for a long time. He actually started out with us at the Julietta project back when we were Bema. If you move on to the Philippines, you got Cris Acosta. Cris Acosta is the President of Filminera, our subsidiary there. Cris has been with us for, I think, since 2009, and basically, highly educated and a graduate of MIT, and a graduate of West Point. Sitting to his left is actually Gloria Tan-Climaco. Gloria is on our board in the Philippines.
Gloria has also been with us for a long time, and Gloria has worked both in and out of the private sector and is very influential as far as helping us with government relations. The last one in the Philippines, Ray Mead. Ray Mead is also a 30-plus-year miner, been with us since the beginning, actually before B2, and just continues to perform day in and day out in the Philippines. Moving on to Otjikoto, we got Mark Dawe. Mark Dawe, another 30-plus-year mining engineer, or a miner. He's got a degree in metallurgy and geohydrology. Mark has been inside of Namibia for 30 years, so he certainly knows the culture there. Mark was previously the Chamber of Mines President and worked for Solvay Industries. Moving to Nicaragua, both of our Nicaraguan general managers are here, but I'll let Dale introduce those.
Because they don't speak English as well as Dale does, we're going to have Dale do the presentation. Dale came with us when we took over the Nicaraguan assets. Dale's a mining engineer by background, 30-plus years experience again. Dale's currently working in the corporate office as the Vice President, Operations. Last but not least, Tom Lee. Tom Lee's the corporate affairs manager. Tom's been in Nicaragua for 30 years, knows the political situation there, and is a graduate of Stanford. One of the questions that always comes up when we're talking to people is B2 seems to do quite well on the design and construction side. How does that happen? What's the secret sauce? Is what is always asked.
The reality is, because, as Clive said, of the accountability inside of B2 and the fact that we have this long-standing team that has been together for 20 years, we are able to make it work. Behind that is a lot of due diligence and a lot of science. I just wanted to recognize, and it does not happen very often that we do this, but I wanted to recognize some of the guys from the development side. We have our Senior Vice President of Development and Engineering, that is Dennis Stansbury here in the back. He is currently leading the two studies I am getting ready to talk about. You have John Rajala here today, who is our VP of metallurgy. John has been with us since the Kupol days. Then you have Peter Montano. Peter Montano is our Director of Mining.
All these people will be around during the breaks if you have any questions from a purely highly technical side, if you would like to talk to them. The first project I want to talk about is the Fekola expansion study. I am not going to go through all the numbers on the slides. This is basically out of our press release. I am just going to give you an update, maybe steal a little bit of Randy's thunder on what is happening there. If you remember, we started out at Fekola. We built a 4 million tons per year. We designed a 4 million tons per year plant. During construction, because it was going so well and because we were having such love on the resource side or on the exploration side, we decided to expand, and we went to 5 million tons.
That project was built through 30 months and finished up. We went to cold commissioning in September of 2017. We actually achieved commercial production by the end of November that same year, so less than 60 days. We started out at 5 million tons per annum. I think Mike already pointed out, or someone already pointed out, we had a record year already this year. In 2017, the first year we were producing, instead of 55,000 ounces, we produced more than 110,000 ounces. The ramp-up has been extremely good. Maybe unlike some other companies, Clive started asking questions immediately when he heard about the potential upgrade of the resource, started asking us to look at what would it take to expand.
Here we were announcing commercial production in December, and in January, Clive challenged us as an engineering group to start looking at what would this thing look like if it could be expanded. What we did is we took a look, and because we had ordered an oversized SAG mill, we decided we would start out with a grinding study and look at the metallurgy of the north. Those studies are now complete, and I think we actually put out in a press release that basically what we are looking at now is not 5 million as the base case, but we think the mill with a grinding circuit can do 6 million as the base case.
We're actually going to announce, and once again, stealing a little bit of Randy's thunder, in the second half of next year, we're going to run that mill at 6 million tons per annum as the base case. The first six months at 5.5, and then we're going to ramp up to 6 million. The study's really looking at between 6 million and 7.5 million tons. That's what we think the grinding circuit can do. That's without adding an additional ball mill. We do have a case where we're looking at adding an additional ball mill, which would bring us up to 10 million, but that's not the base case, really. In addition to that, during the year, we also looked at what would happen with the low-grade component of that.
We did a five-day test on low grade. I think the grade was about 1.11 grams per ton. Ran that for five days at a very high throughput and found out the recoveries actually beat what was in the feasibility study. We're very confident that as we expand this thing up, that it's going to work as designed. Outside of the mill, of course, we've got the mining side. The mining fleet right now is absolutely maxed out at 6 million tons per annum. We're doing as much as we can on the mining side. The resource is now done. We're doing a reserve on it. We're looking at do we go to bigger trucks if we're going to expand? Do we increase the fleet size? We're working with Cat.
By the end of the year, we'll know the answers to that internally. By the end of the year, the plan is to present to our board a case, and then over Q1 2019 to optimize that, and then announce it at the end of Q1 2019. I just talked about those.
Maybe you should touch on the cost of that a little bit.
Okay, the first question or first comment from the gallery was maybe I should touch on the cost of that a little bit. We're looking at it internally, and we don't know the exact number because that's what's going to come out of the study. What we've been telling everybody, and I think we're fairly confident, is that this number is going to be south of $50 million. We don't know exactly what the number is, but that's where we think we're at. Anything else? The other study that we're working on is the Limon expansion study. I'm not going to go into great detail on what the expansion study looks like. I'm going to save that for Dale Craig.
I can just tell you with the new resource, we do have the Limon pit and the Limon resource in a reserve in our 2019 budget starting in July. We're currently pre-stripping there. In addition to that, we've got about $2 million of capital that we've put in basically to handle the different ore that's coming out of Limon. At this point, we have not committed to going for the full expansion, Dale will talk more about that. We have committed $2 million in the 2019 budget plus the pre-stripping required. Masbate, this is a slide that you always see in our deck, the Masbate expansion. I'll just say it's on time or ahead of time, actually, on budget. Ray will talk about the details of that and where it's at.
What I want to drive home basically is that we will be operating at Masbate in the budget at 8 million tons per annum next year. We're assuming the whole year at 8 million. Kiaka, which is one that doesn't get a lot of attention these days, what we've done is we've now gone back to have a look at that and see if there's a higher grade case that we can grade. We're trying to optimize it again. We've got some people in looking at the various parameters, the various costs to see if there's a way that we can make a lower throughput, higher grade case. That we'll be working on that through Q1 and Q2 next year, probably in the middle of the year, we'll be able to tell you what's going on with that.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to Tom Garagan, the Senior Vice President of Exploration.
Thanks, Bill. Before I get going, I just want to do like Bill did, introduce a couple of people who are here from the exploration team and are a big part of the reason we've been successful in exploration. Brian Scott is a Senior VP of Geology and Technical Services. He's here. Brian and I have been working together since well, it's been a long time. Hugh MacKinnon is VP of Geology, Hugh joined our team with Julieta in Russia way back in the day. Then Andy Brown, who's going to be talking about West Africa, is Exploration Manager for West Africa.
Looking at the first slide here, you can see that we've had exploration activities in a number of different jurisdictions, we've been asked over the years, certainly Clive has been asked over the years, why we're spread out, it's been a discussion that Clive has had for years, the main reason behind that is if we limit ourselves to a certain jurisdiction, we're limiting ourselves to what we could find. We took a decision jointly a long time ago to say we're going to look for projects where the good projects are. Bearing in mind that we don't want to get anybody killed, we don't want to get into a jurisdiction where it's unsafe, or we can't get our money out, generally speaking, we keep a pretty open mind in where we look for projects.
Hence, we have widespread exploration projects around the world. We have good people who are working on them, we have good communication. With those in hand, we feel this is the best way to look for new mines. Drilling summary for this year, we've drilled over 250,000 meters in all the different projects that we're working on. Projects, I won't go through them in detail here, Burkina Faso, we continue to follow up on Toega and look for Toega down plunge. We're looking at Toega and areas around Toega, we've been doing some drilling around Kiaka. There's some other targets nearby Kiaka that have some promise. In Mali, Andy's going to go through Mali in detail, I won't talk about it much here. We do have, as you can see, it's our largest exploration project.
In Namibia, we continue to do work in a number of or three different targets. We have exploration going around Otjikoto and Wolfshag, looking for the down plunge of Wolfshag, also looking for down plunge of Otjikoto recently. We've been having some success on that. In addition to that, we have a project called Ondundu, which is just outside of trucking distance for Otjikoto, represents a pretty solid exploration target for us, we feel we have potential to locate at least a small open pit there and potentially something larger. Then a project called Ongana, which is nearby. Nicaragua, we all talk about Nicaragua. We've been successful in Nicaragua with Limon, we've also been successful doing exploration in and around Libertad, finding small pits to feed the mine and continue the mine life.
When Dale comes up and talks, he'll say that Limon has had a 2-year mine life forever. It's true now with exploration, that's been expanded, but the same applies to Libertad. Libertad is somewhere in that range now in terms of a mine life, but we continue to do exploration with the belief that we can be successful there and extend the mine life. Last, in the Philippines, Masbate, exploration has continued around the mine site. We're looking at problem-solving, not as a geological problem-solving, not problem-solving for the mine and helping to extend mineralization in and around the current pits and also looking at potential other targets. Masbate remains an excellent ground for finding more ore for the mine. Exploration summary, the original budget we had for this year was $52 million.
We now have a budget of $56 million for it, largely due to the expanded exploration of Fekola, which Andy will talk about in much more detail. Some of the successes this year, again, I don't want to rob other people's talk, but obviously, the biggest success for us and the biggest focus for us this year was doing exploration drilling down plunge on Fekola, looking at expanding that resource. As Andy will show you, that resource remains open, and we're continuing exploration along it. One of the other recent successes that exploration is still continuing on is the Limon. These are long sections, by the way, excuse me for not saying that. These are long sections down the long end of the zones. We continue exploration at Limon.
Limon remains open, not only as an open pit to the north but also with potential underground targets, and I'll talk about those in more detail later. Last, as we were talking about, there's strong support from Clive and the board to continue exploration. We've been given the go-ahead to do exploration on these projects, whether it was Otjikoto, Masbate or Fekola during construction phases or during acquisition phases. With that strong support from Clive and the board, there's been benefits of that. There's a very strong support to exploration, and hopefully that continues as we go forward. In 2019, in Mali, we put a budget forward to the management team and to the board. Those budgets haven't been approved, but at this point, I don't have too much concern. We think it'll be in the same order of magnitude as we had this year.
Exploration in Mali will continue to expand Fekola going north. There's targets around Fekola that Andy will tell you about, and certainly, the Anaconda area will start to put more of attention on that now that we've got the down plunge open pit portion of Fekola, we think drilled off at least to inferred category. Burkina Faso will continue what we're doing around the Kiaka target and Toega. That area has 10 million ounces between our projects and other projects in the area, and we feel that the area has excellent potential to find something new or to continue with the targets we have got. Namibia will continue going down plunge on Wolfshag, and I'll talk about that a little bit more later. Nicaragua, the same thing, I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
We do plan to have continued exploration in those projects, looking to extend the mine life and certainly at El Limon, looking for advancing those projects further. Masbate will continue to do what we've done in 2018, near mine extensions, and then some new targets that we're looking at around the mine or near the mine that haven't been drilled before. Lastly, one of my favorites is, it's almost a pet peeve of mine, and Clive has talked about it a lot. There aren't that many new discoveries around the world these days, and a lot of it has to do with the junior mining game has had the you know what kicked out of it recently, and there has not been a lot of new discoveries.
We took a decision jointly again recently to commence exploration on things that we're generating ourselves, much more grassroots projects, and also joint venturing with some companies who have managed to find things. That's going to continue on in 2019, and we'll probably be more aggressive. As time goes on, you'll start to hear about us signing exploration deals in a number of jurisdictions as we continue with that philosophy. With that being said, I'd like to open up for questions for everybody from the first session here, and thank you very much.
Once again, please raise your hand if you have a question, and wait for the microphone to be passed over to you.
We have a schedule. There will be more Q&A time later.
Well, there's Q&A sessions throughout the day. If there are no questions at this time Oh, Steven Butler.
Yeah, Tom, just you haven't had exploration budgets like this for a while, maybe this year and last year. Maybe you can comment on some of the firepower you have now, not only at the assets, but to spread your wings, as you say, to tackle some of these greenfield opportunities. Maybe you can give us a little bit more color on that expanded approach globally.
You mean in terms of team or in terms of just the projects we're looking at?
Probably the projects you're looking at, also $56 million potentially again next year, 250 km, whether they have the same scope of drilling. That's a big change to me from what you've done in the previous years.
Yeah, that's a positive, that certainly shows with the cash flows of Fekola, the support that, again, the management team, Clive, and the board have towards exploration and believing in us to be able to find things. As far as the firepower to look at other projects, we have a number of people that have joined us, either through acquiring companies or have joined us recently as exploration geologists. Then we have a group of young people that we constantly train through the years, and we feel that these people are ready to start taking on some of these projects. The idea behind the grassroots is to take some shots looking for big deposits.
Unfortunately, our business has seen a downturn in exploration, we don't have the investment in the junior companies anymore that we used to have, who would go around the world finding things. It's going to have to be like when you and I started back in the old days, where the larger companies did all the grassroots exploration. I think that's where we need to go.
Bill, question for you. Steven Butler, GMP. You talked about 6 million tons per year run rate around sometime next year. Is there much capital or not? Maybe Randy may elaborate, but is there much capital to get to 6 million tons per year?
Much additional CapEx?
Yeah.
No. That's under current configuration.
Between the mining rate or I mean, you're almost there effectively, right?
Yeah. Basically, it's increasing the availability, if you really want to know the truth. We can run at 6 million right now. We're still working out the availability.
Sorry, just a quick question from me. You've mentioned joint venturing with juniors. Does that include strategic investments as well in more developed orientated stories rather than just grassroots exploration?
Well, we've talked about that internally quite a bit.
Frankly, I mean, it's obviously a strategy that's been used by other companies, Kinross, Meiko, Goldcorp, et cetera. I think it's probably a good strategy for them, which is putting investing money in juniors, a number of them, and hoping that someone finds something. We have a little bit of a different approach. We may look at that a bit, the bottom line is, and it's not out of arrogance, but at the end of the day, with Tom and his team, we have one of the best exploration gold teams in the world, as demonstrated over the last 30 years. We want to be the operator in exploration, and I want Tom and his group to pick the drill holes. It's not to say there aren't good juniors out there. We may consider some investments as part of the process.
The bottom line is we'd never pay for ounces that might be there. I think that when you've got a team like ours, with the remarkable experience they've had and success worldwide, I want our guys to be the ones directing exploration. We're much more likely to want to put money in the ground and earn a majority interest in a project by spending the high-risk dollars. For a lot of juniors, I think that's attractive. I think we're popular with the juniors. We were a junior exploration companies twice with Bema and B2. We understand, and I think we've always treated them with a lot of respect.
For the long-suffering junior companies, if they have good targets and we come in and earn a majority interest by spending the risk dollars, they could end up owning a significant portion of a world-class deposit, and all we got to really do is keep the lights on. I think that's quite an attractive proposition, and as Tom said, we'll be exploring that more and more. I just want to make one comment, perhaps, about the value out of exploration. Fekola is a great example. We did something, as Tom mentioned, that's unusual, which we like to do, which is a little outside the box, which was to drill the northern extension of Fekola all the time while we were building it. I don't know of any other company that really does that at the end of the day. It's not common.
We don't believe in keeping the silos of exploration and engineering and metallurgy and all those things as separate. We like to really work closely together, as Bill mentioned, in terms of looking at the expansion. If you include the half a billion U.S. dollars worth of our shares that we paid to take over Papillon in the friendly takeover, then you add the $50 million of exploration we've spent on the northern extension over the last three years, $550 million total. If you divide that by the resources as we see them to date, the vast majority of which we're sure are going to turn into reserves and perhaps more, you end up at around $75 an ounce between the acquisition cost and the exploration cost. Don't forget, 70% of that resource is actually in the indicated category.
We expect the inferred to quickly move into that next year as we infill drill. That is one of the reasons why we're not that excited to go out and bid with other people to buy ounces in the ground. It's pretty hard to beat $75 an ounce, even though we acquired a significant amount of them. I just wanted to highlight that as what I Well, frankly, one of the reasons I still do this is because of the way we do it and thinking outside the box and challenging ourselves to do things a little bit differently. We're aggressive, but we're never reckless, and I think it really shows in the way we run this company from exploration through permitting, construction, and running our mines extremely well all over the world. Now, to give you a perspective, we had 32 employees 10 years ago.
We have 6,000 employees around the world today. We run some of the safest mines in the world and really take care of all those people. We're very proud of that.
If I may continue in that direction, if you could give us a better sense of what is that pipeline of exploration targets that you're going to be prioritizing, and what is now the mandate of prioritization? Is it close to current infrastructure on your tenements? Is it on the same belt? Is it different belts? Can you give us a sense as to how does the exploration pipeline look like, and how are you prioritizing your attention?
I've got to resist being a little flippant. We don't have anything we say, "Okay, it's got to be this kind of deposit. It's got to be in this belt. It's got to be in this country. It's got to be nearby." We have exploration in and around the mine sites for sure, and we certainly have exploration continuing in all the different countries that we have mines. When we look on beyond where we're actually mining and looking for exploration projects anywhere, the sole goal is to find really good deposits. At a grassroots level, we don't want to be wasting money, and Wasting is not the right word. We don't want to be spending money on things that are not going to be really good mines. So the early-stage exploration projects that we're looking at, they're all what we talk as big ass shots.
The things that have real size potential. Then the next ones up are things that we can see as near development projects. We do look at those. We do have a couple in the belt or in our pockets we think have potential for development, Toega, Kiaka. Then we have projects that are even more advanced, such as Gramalote and Fekola extension. So our exploration is divided in very early stage, looking in for really big deposits or really good deposits, and then things that we have that we think we can get developed sooner. Then we have ones that we think are on the verge of being developing. I don't know if that answers your question.
Clive, earlier this year, you commented that Nicaragua would be potentially a non-core asset and that 2019 would be a year in which B2Gold would learn a lot about those assets. By the end of 2019, you might have a better idea of where they fit in the portfolio, whether or not they're core or non-core. I'm just curious if, as we approach the end of 2019, if you have any updated views on that. Thank you.
Well, we've had a lot of questions over the last year or so with our rapid growth, and especially with Fekola coming online about assets being core or non-core. What I said earlier this year was that if we felt that the Nicaraguan mines were destined to perform in the future as poorly, frankly, as they did in 2017, then we likely may have considered
Divestiture of those assets or vending them into another company and letting another company run with those assets. The fact is that both projects were in transition, and we believe they would both get better. The Limon Central Zone that you'll hear more about today is a major new discovery, very close to the mill, that allows us to not only have a long and mine life, but significantly better economics. It also gives us the potential if and when we decide to expand Limon. That's what I wanted to see very much, if that was going to be reality. The studies shows that it is. Limon is a much better asset now than it was a year ago. The Libertad, you'll hear about it, a bit more about it, but the issue of Libertad has sometimes been getting permits.
It hasn't been delays for the sake of delays or any other reason, and sometimes government bureaucracy. At the end of the day, despite the difficulties and the tragic social unrest and political unrest we've seen in Nicaragua lately, as Bill alluded to, these mines have continued to operate, including La Libertad. We are still functioning well. We're working well with the government in terms of the same ministers we've dealt with for a long time, and we are getting the permits we require. The next big one we're looking for is Jabali Antenna. Libertad's got a limited mine life as we see it today, barring exploration success, which we're hopeful of. It's something around two to three years, we would think, and maybe that'll get longer. At the end of the day, there's a couple of good years in there as we move forward.
We will look at, we'll continue to monitor the projects as we get into next year, and we're very hopeful of a peaceful resolution to the current political situation and unrest that we see in Nicaragua. We love the country, love the people. It's been a very good success story over many years, and it's really tragic to see recent developments. At the end of the day, we're not looking at any sort of rush to sell Nicaraguan assets at all. I'm not sure if the smart time to sell anything would be if there's a cloud of political risk hanging over your head at the end of the day.
I just want to echo what Bill said, that this remarkable job that our guys have done in Nicaragua, all the people there, they all want to work, and they found ways to get supplies to the site and to keep the mines running during a very tense situation. Really kudos to those guys. We're committed to Nicaragua and making those mines as the best that we can, and we'll look at that situation as we go through 2019 and see where it fits in our portfolio.
A question from Mobis.
Hey, Tom. Just a quick question on Gramalote. Clive mentioned that Gramalote might be back on the table. Do you see additional opportunity exploration-wise, obviously, in terms of looking at spending more in Colombia going into 2019?
Well, let's resolve Gramalote first. Certainly, Colombia, as we all know, has great potential. There are some security issues, as we know in Colombia, that we're not convinced that they're completely addressed yet. In around Gramalote, that's not an issue, but some of the areas where there's great potential, that is an issue. As far as Gramalote goes, there's two other targets around Gramalote that need more drilling to get into a resource or reserve class, being Trinidad and Monjas. I'm sure if indeed Gramalote is now a project going forward, we'll be involved in doing a lot more exploration there.
If, in fact, we end up agreeing a new model with AGA, If it looks attractive, we would be recommending moving rapidly to feasibility, I've informed their CEO that we have a crew ready to go and build that mine if that's appropriate. Kelvin did tell me that he met recently with the government of Colombia, the president and the entire cabinet, he came away from that meeting very encouraged about the government's support for responsible mining. I think some of you know that if you flew over Colombia and someone said to you, "Pick a spot, the best spot in the country for the first large open-pit gold mine," you'd pick Gramalote because of its low altitude. There's not a lot of sensitive crops around. There has been a history of small mining.
It's a great area, it's relatively underpopulated for Colombia, and it has a river nearby and then power. It's got a lot of great things going for it. We're hoping that these new models and concepts that are being thrown around, we hope they're real. If they are, we're going to have another significant asset all of a sudden.
Okay. Well, we're right on schedule, thank you, gentlemen. Now we'll move on to our Fekola section of the day, and I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Mohamed Diarra, who is the country manager in Mali.
Hey, good afternoon. I'd like to talk about Mali. I will give you a few points about Mali first to give you a general idea of where Mali is, give you an idea of what we do in Mali, let's say a country overview about the Mali government and what's going on in Mali, and basically what's the position in Mali. I guess on the first slide, just like to say that Mali is in the heart of West Africa. You'll see that Mali has seven borders. It's a landlocked country. Which actually has access through. To get items in Mali for Fekola project, we had to use Senegal because we don't have any port in Mali. The preferred port was Senegal because the Fekola project is situated at the west border of Mali, next to the Faleme River.
You can see that we have also been able to bring in a lot of different, let's say all of our items came through Senegal, we have a local office in Senegal, through the port, which was able to bring all the items in Bamako, I mean, in Fekola, I'm sorry. Going over the mining in Mali. Mali has the longest history of mining, back in the 1300s with different artisanal mining. In the past 20 years, we've seen a big evolution on the mining, on the gold production, especially in Mali. We have had a couple of mining codes, 1991 mining codes and 1999 mining code and 2012 mining code. They're all active in Mali at the moment, but B2Gold is into the 2012 mining code.
Just one point that I wanted to make is that, because of the different mining codes in place in Mali at the moment, people have a tendency of thinking that there's a risk in signing up to a mining code and the government might change, or maybe probably enforce different taxes, which is actually not true because this is what's creating a problem today for the government, because they actually respecting the tax stabilization clauses. Each company is under different mining codes are being left alone because of the tax stabilization clauses. As of B2Gold, we are under the 2012 mining code, and I think the government is praising us because we actually decided to move up to the latest code. I just wanted to make that very clear. At the moment, we got nine different mines in Mali.
A big Canadian investment in Mali, which B2Gold, Randgold or Barrick, if you want, Endeavour, which are all doing very well in Mali. Just to let you know that the Fekola project has 80% B2Gold ownership and 20% for government. The government is a stakeholder in the Fekola mine. Just to give you a quick timeline on the project. Being able to complete the project on time and on budget, three months before the initial timeline. In 2014, B2Gold came into Mali and did the acquisition of Papillon. In 2015, we see on the timeline that we've been able to start construction to complete the camp. By October and November, we had the groundbreaking ceremony. In 2016, we commenced the structural steel project. In 2017, the commissioning, and by November, we had achieved commercial production. We've been producing, this is the fourth quarter now.
Can say that in February 3rd, we had the grand opening of the mine. The president of Mali came and was greeted by our management team and also the executive Clive was there. It was a very good ceremony. The president was very impressed with what we've done. Just to give you, I'm not going to go to all these points on this slide, but just to let you know that the president just been reelected for the next five years in Mali. It's his second term, the risk of any changes in the next term, because a lot of people talk about Africa being always changing the constitution to go to a third mandate. This is not going to be the case. As far as security goes, I'd just like to make a point that we've been asked a lot of question about security.
We've been very, let's say, to limit the risk as much as possible because we know about what it means for people. Lots of expatriates and we've been very careful about security issue. Just to let you know that the mining region where we have Fekola and other region in the west and south Mali are not at risk because all the problem with security are most likely in the northeast Mali. We've never had any problems in any mining district for security. This is just a list of the key Ministers of Mali that we work with. I think when Bill introduced me, he said that I used to work for the Minister of Mines, who is today is the Minister of Finance, Mr. Cissé. He's our Minister of Finance.
We have a very good relationship with him, so far there's no problem as far as like anything with tax and mining codes and those type of things. The current Minister of Mines is Mrs. Lelenta. She used to be the former Director of Mine and Geology in Mali. She actually went to Namibia, and she came to Fekola. There too, we have a very good relationship with her. And the third minister that you see is Mr. Sangaré, who was the ex-Minister of Mines, and he's actually the Minister of Defense, who actually knows about our project, so it's a very good relationship we have with him as well.
This is just a couple of pictures with the grand opening, with the president and Clive in front of the gold room. Just to reiterate that the president was very happy with what we've done in Fekola, and he's actually welcomed B2Gold and any investment like B2Gold in Mali. Saying that Clive and the whole team was welcome there because of the delivery they've done and also the timing, what we've said we will do, and what we actually done. The president is a good example of a responsible company in Mali. Just to let you know, B2Gold in Mali, to give you a couple of numbers here. I mean, we got about 2,000 employee in Mali now. We've reduced a lot the number of expats, so a lot more Malian at the moment working.
Like I said, we have an excellent relationship with the stakeholders, which is the ministries. If you go more on, like, a local level in the communities, with the villages around the mine and also the decentralized authorities, which the governors and the prefect's office. We've been able to achieve all of our, let's say, agreements with the government, which is the shareholder agreement, the share purchase agreement. So far, we've done everything on time, and like I said, we don't have any outstanding agreement that we need to sign. At the moment, Fekola, the numbers that we're producing at 400,000 ounces per year, represents approximately about 25% of the production in Mali, which actually the gold production in Mali is about 8% of the GDP and is the first export in Mali for gold. Gold is first export in Mali.
You need to know that Mali is the third producing country in gold in Africa after South Africa and Ghana. The country has the first place of gold exporter in the region. I'd just like to talk about a few projects that we have in community development. A couple of CSR project that we started early on before the production. We have had a project called AFACE. It's something done with the Canadian governmental training. In that regard, we've been training a lot of people in the region, I mean, in the community, to get more, let's say, skills into building and also, let's say, steel, masonry, and those type of things. We have a biodiversity program. I'm not going to touch on it, just to mention that.
We have the FAR project will be the Fadiougou project, and we'll have Ken Jones talk about it later on. I am not going to really discuss this now, but I just wanted to say something about a scholarship program that we have going in Mali. What we have done is we took 10 students in Mali, based on gender, also on the need basis. Like, they do not have it. They were very good students, but they did not have any means to go to school. We decided to open up a scholarship program. We got about 2,000 applications, and then we took 10 students, five women and five men, and we put them into private school in Mali. The program runs about $800,000 for the next seven years. Actually it is a good program. Everybody is really happy with that in Mali. Okay. On that, let us see.
Those are just a few pictures of the CSR initiatives we have there. This is the Fadiougou village that will be presented by Ken Jones. Those are some of those, the donation we give to the villagers, tractors and those, the farming and those type of things. Okay, on that, I will hand it over to Randy Reichert.
Okay. Thank you, Mo. Just want to start out Sorry, Clive. A few photos just to start, show you the general part of the operations, if anybody has not been there. Starting the top left row, just a picture of the grinding circuit. In the center is our power plant, and then our SAG mill on the right. Just going over, Bill, I think, went over some of this already. General parameters on feasibility and when the project was started. 9.5-year mine life, 32 million tons per year total ore and waste mining rate that we are supposed to do. Initial 6 stages, 350,000 ounces a year approximately. Started out with a 4 million tons per annum, but as Bill alluded to, it was increased to 5 million during the construction. Since that, we have been doing that and more now.
Based on that 5 million tons plan, was basically based on a 400,000 ounce per year rate. The construction, this is another project, the same team that had built Julieta, Kupol, all the other mines, as well, had now built this, another one for B2Gold. The construction was done 3 months ahead of schedule. It was on budget. It was done primarily in-house. Only the power plant was built using a contractor. Everything else we did ourselves. Commercial production was declared a year ago tomorrow, and that was more than 4 months ahead of plan. The cost to complete, $462 million. Another couple photos just of the construction. On the left is our first phase of our TSF facility. We have since done a raise on that and got us ready through into 2021. On the right, just the feed conveyor going into the SAG mill.
Going over, the table on the left, just under 3 million ounces of reserves at the beginning of this year. Almost 4 million of resources. Gold production so far in the first 3 quarters of this year, 333,000 ounces. That's 8% above budget. We plan on continuing to be at least that above budget. You show the quarterly breakdown, Q1, Q2, and Q3, 114,000 ounces in the first quarter down to 107, the operation's still going very well and going strong. Mike really alluded to some of the cost, overall, our cash operating cost, $321 an ounce, that's definitely below budget and below the guidance given. The same, $511 an ounce, all-in sustaining cost versus the guidance of $575-$625, I expect that to remain.
Looking at the production a little bit more overall and probably a bit more detail than has been given out in the past. For our ore tons and mill processed, through each quarter. What I'd first of all like to point out is in the first real 4 quarters of operation through Q4 of last year through Q3 of this year, over 438,000 ounces of gold produced so far. 95,000-105,000 is what we're really estimating in this quarter right now, bringing us, Mike again alluded to this a little bit before, really we expect to be now in the 430,000-440,000 ounce range this year. We're also expecting the overall milling tons to be somewhere right around in the 5.5 million tons per annum. This figure just shows you what we've really mined in the year.
In the orange sections is what we were mining in the last quarter in Q3. The focus really in this year was in phase 3 and getting phase 4 down. We had finished off phase 1 and phase 2. Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 really provided the high grade overall that we've built up the stockpiles to really allow then the mill to produce the amount of gold that we have and be well above budget. Moving on now to 2019 and our plan. Guidance for next year, 415,000-425,000 ounces.
Milling will average, Bill was saying, we'll continue on about the same rate as we are right now, 5.5 million ton per annum run rate through the first half of the year, moving on to a 6 million ton per annum run rate in the second half, leaving us our estimate is about 5.75 million tons for next year. Mining is going to be primarily now in phase 4. Phase 3 is just finishing up in the next month. We'll continue on phase 4, we'll start phase 5 stripping early in the year. We'll do 32 million tons of waste and 8 million tons of ore, pretty good strip ratio next year. The capital, no tailings expansion expected until at least 2021, maybe late 2020 start on that, we actually have already made a bit of a start in the TSF construction.
Capital expenditures for next year, the big ones, rebuilding some of our mine fleet. It is already coming up for some rebuilds, and 6 new trucks that were ordered last year that will be coming in shortly, and the final payments of those. Major capital projects, finishing off the New Fadiougou construction and relocation of the village then potential expansion of the mill. Finally, just a few more photos showing some of the site in case anybody hasn't been there. On the left, a couple of our drills running in phase 4. We are a bit deeper than that now. Then the haul road going to the east from phase 4. On the processing side, we have got the SAG mill and the grinding circuit on the left, then the leach circuit on the right and looking ahead at the stockpile and the reclaim.
I would like to now hand it over to Andrew Brown, the exploration manager for West Africa.
Good afternoon. All right. Today, we will walk you through our efforts for 2018 and give you a bit of an idea of where we are going in the coming year. Starting off with our map showing our main exploration targets, areas of exploration in West Africa, primarily the Fekola deposits and its attendant regional exploration program, which includes our discovery of Anaconda in recent years. In Burkina Faso, the Kiaka deposit and regional exploration program. Shown there in the pale gold color is the distribution of Birimian greenstones throughout West Africa, an integral part of the gold mineralizing event in West Africa and our primary reason for being there.
Breakdown of our budget for 2018 and our main objectives for the year, which was the delivery of the initial resource for the Toega project in Burkina Faso, increasing our resources at Fekola in Mali, and continuing on with our regional programs through both Mali and Burkina Faso. Significant budget for 2018, almost $19 million spent in Mali and just over $9 million spent in Burkina Faso, for just over $28 million total. A significant part of our global efforts in exploration this year. As I show in the pie charts at the right side there, the majority of our spending this year is directed at drilling. We like to keep our budgets drilling-focused and intend to do so for the coming year. Look at the regional geology in and around the Fekola District.
The gold endowment of West Africa, at just over 10,000 metric tons, is the primary reason for our focus in West Africa. It is truly one of the great gold provinces in the world. Zooming into the regional geology here. Fekola sits along the Senegal-Mali Shear Zone, along with a number of other world-class deposits. The structure itself has a recognized endowment, something in the order of 40 million ounces. The geology of the region in the colored geological map there is an erosional window through the younger sediments in the area, shown in gray. What we're looking at here is an exposure of the Proterozoic Birimian greenstones in western Mali. Recap of our exploration program at Fekola. Primarily the expansion of our resources and upgrading of our resources previously defined. Just over 42,000 meters of drilling completed this year, mostly in and around the Fekola deposit itself.
The green drill collars indicate our area of focus this year. You can see we're at the northern end of the pit. The current reserve pit, the magenta line, you can see some of the drilling at the north end of the pit itself, then obviously with resource expansion stepping northward along strike and down plunge on the deposit. Majority of the meters were put towards expansion of the resources and about half that amount as infill on our inferred resources to upgrade those to indicated. As part of our regional exploration in and around the deposit itself, some newly discovered mineralization in an area called Cardinal. This was a structure that was known to us. Previous operators Papillon had done some limited drilling on the structure.
We had went back, revisited it, and are seeing new mineralization in that structure and an adjoining new area, which was previously unknown to us. The key point here is that it's well within 500 meters of the existing pit boundary. This is something we continue to drill at the moment and will be part of our exploration focus for next year. Fairly high-level view of our geology here. The geology of the deposit at Fekola Deposit is complex. What we're showing here on the left side are the complexly folded metasedimentary host rocks. You can see at drill scale, there's an example of the drill core in the lower right corner there. You can see how the geology at the drill core scale translates to the greater geometry of the deposit at large. It's this interplay of stratigraphy and structure that localizes.
You see on the right side, the grade shells, the high-grade shoot you've heard us refer to, is strongly controlled by this interplay of stratigraphy and structure. Keeping in mind that sort of magenta-colored high-grade shoot, as we move on to this long section through the deposit, this is the northerly plunging high-grade shoot that we showed in the previous section. This is a longitudinal view looking to the west. Our main focus of exploration this year at Fekola was to grow the resources, and that drilling was focused just to the north side of, or to the right side of, the purple boundary there, which shows our 1,400 resource pit as it was previously defined.
The majority of the ounces were intersected to the north of that, as well as the infill drilling we did between the initial reserve pit and that 1,400 resource pit to upgrade our inferred resources to indicated. The deposit with this year's drilling now extends some 700 meters north of our pit boundary and is over 2 kilometers now overall from end to end. Drilling is underway on a step out to the north as we continue to see mineralization north of our defined resources. A recap of our success with the growing and redefining our resources this year. Indicated resources grown by about 790,000 ounces, and inferred resources increased by just over 1 million, tabulated on the right side there at 1,400 gold. You can see we have about 92.8 million tons at 1.92 grams for a total of 5.7 million ounces. That is inclusive of reserves.
We're reporting these numbers on a 100% basis. 2019, we will hope to address the inferred resources found this year and upgrade those to indicated so they can make their way into our reserve base. This year's increase in resources open the door to our mill expansion study. The deposit remains open down plunge to the north. Part of our regional exploration program at Anaconda, our initial resource at Anaconda was announced middle of last year, 767,000 ounces of inferred gold, and it's been a big part of our program this year. Largely a reconnaissance level. It's a big property. You can see again, the green collars are highlighting our areas of interest this year. Very sort of cursory, a lot of air core meters.
We're moving away from the defined Anaconda deposit itself, which you can see outlined on the left side of the map there, and we're moving out into new areas. We're seeing some increase of saprolite resources in the Boomslang area. You can see from our select highlights there, we still continue to get really interesting intersections in both the saprolite and in the sulfide zones immediately underlying the saprolite. Looking forward to 2019, we're going to table another fairly aggressive budget for continued exploration of the Anaconda area. To recap, we've recently submitted our budget proposals for 2019. As Tom had said, we are anticipating to have a healthy budget this year, something on the order of what we spent in 2018. A big chunk of that will go towards drilling at Fekola North Extension. We want to upgrade those inferred resources.
We want to continue to grow the deposit to the north. We want to continue our regional exploration program at Anaconda. We will continue, as I said, to follow up this newly encountered mineralization of the Cardinal Zone, just west of the Fekola pit. The search for the Fekola-like mineralization at Anaconda continues in the year ahead. Shots on the left there of some of the early exposures of geology in the pit in the early days, obviously one of our rigs in progress. Some of the interesting sulfide mineralization we're seeing in the Anaconda region. Last but not least, our ongoing programs in Burkina Faso. We currently have 2 rigs in progress. We launched about 6,000 meters of drilling just following the rainy season in mid-September. That drilling will continue through to year-end.
Focus there is in and around the 4.86-million-ounce Kiaka deposit and its satellite discovery, the Toega deposit, which we announced just over a million ounces last year, inferred. Regional exploration well underway there and will continue at similar scales into the new year. At this point, we'll move on to questions.
Thanks, Andy. Is there any question for the group on the Fekola mine?
Randy, you spoke about mining rates at Fekola, 6 million tons of ore. What you've been doing so far is, you've been mining quicker than you've been processing. You've been able to build up that stockpile, the high-grade stockpile. When you expand the mill to 6 million tons, do you expect to continue to grow the stockpile, or do you expect I'm particularly talking about the high-grade stockpile.
Yes. The low-grade stockpiles will actually continue on, regardless at the 6 million run rate. We will build those up over the next 5 to 7 years, continue.
What about the high-grade stockpile?
The high-grade stockpile is definitely coming down. Okay? It's currently about 800,000, but it's high grade. It's about 4.35 average grade right now. It's a little bit smaller, of course, than when you were there.
Just to follow up on something that Bill mentioned, when you look at resizing your equipment and looking at expanding mine rates beyond where they are, would you like to maintain that flexibility to continue to build the high-grade stockpile as you go along?
Yeah. The answer is we don't know at this point, right? We're just putting a reserve on the mine right now. The studies haven't been done, so maybe we could defer that till the end of Q1 next year.
A question from Bryce Adams.
Thanks. Randy, in the 2019 CapEx numbers, I think you included an allowance for rebuilding of the fleet. Is that right?
That's correct.
Does that seem a bit early to be rebuilding the fleet after one year or a year and a bit of operation?
Well, yeah.
Were there no years there I'm missing?
Remember, our first equipment came in in April of 2017. We did get a good early start on the mining. Once you get well into 2019, the hours are starting to add up on them. We've made very, very good use of the equipment and put a record number of hours. To give you an idea, we didn't get the first 6020B Cat excavators in the world, we're at the leading edge now of the hours anywhere in the world. We're just making good use of the equipment.
Thanks. One question that comes up a lot is what's the upside to the recoveries that you've been achieving to date and how sustainable they are? It does come up the last few quarters. Just be interested to get your take on that.
John, do you want to talk about recoveries or?
Yes. We've actually been exceeding feasibility recovery, averaging close to 95%. I think it's 94.9% year-to-date. Feasibility was 92.7%. We're still a little early in the operation, and we expect that recoveries will settle in around 94% for the sulfide ore over time.
I've just got a question here on Anaconda. How should we be looking at Anaconda, related to the expansion scenario envisaged for Fekola?
Sorry, is that an exploration or an operations question?
A bit of both, I guess.
There you are. Okay. Sorry. Couldn't see. Would you mind repeating that?
I'm just looking at Anaconda and obviously, great success there in adding resources. I'm just trying to understand in time how that would translate or play a part in the expansion scenario envisaged for Fekola.
Well, that's a study that's currently underway.
Maybe Bill
Yeah. Certainly, at this point, we're not looking at them as the projects together, right? We are doing some additional testing and some studies on Anaconda to see if we can unlock the saprolite layer as a smaller project versus, if you remember the last time we were talking about it, we were looking at it as a saprolite/bigger project. Certainly, as we continue to get into the bedrock, that's future exploration. In the short term, we're looking at it from a standalone saprolite project.
Question for Mohamed. Just on security, understand that most of the issues are in the north, and you guys are tucked down to the south. At Bamako, are you worried about any headline risk in the near term, or has security really been beefed up by the government and any other entities?
Well, there's always a risk for security. I guess you can never say that something's going to happen, it's not going to happen. We've been victim of security risk in Mali, in Bamako, Mali in general, in Bamako in particular. The government is really trying to help on different issues. I can probably detail something, like as far as what we do in Bamako. I'll just give you an idea of the operation. Once people travel in Mali, if they have to stay in Bamako for one or two days, they'd stay in Bamako. We have two planes, so if they need to go to site, and a couple of you went to site before, and you probably see now this operation was run. It's not essential people will stay in the hotel.
I think we have our own guest house. We travel through planes to go to site, come back. We have people escorted back and forth to the meetings and to the guest house and different things like that. At the moment, Bamako has been safe for the past, I would say, two and a half years. We didn't have any problem, per se, but we're still being careful on that. If I can add something, too, at the moment, there's a discussion to get possibly like a mining, if you want, police force around the mine site.
Just to expand a little bit on what you're saying now, that saying is the government is very aware of what's going on at the moment and is trying to see how can we prevent and respond to any threats coming on the mine areas for anything that has to do with small-scale mining, anything that has to do with anything around the investment that we have in Mali. I don't know if that answers your question a bit.
Yeah. No, thank you. Maybe a brief question for Andy. The sulfides you showed in and around Fekola, the new target, I think that might have been from Anaconda area. Could you expand on that? Is that a little bit different from what you're seeing? Is there arsenopyrite there?
If you've seen the core at Fekola, you can tell just by looking at that, slightly different than what we see. It's a different style of mineralization than the main Fekola deposit. Not necessarily a bad thing. Look at the variety of deposit types in the region. Certainly, Randgold's Loulo operations are characterized by several deposit styles of mineralization. If anything, I think variety is a good thing. That's a fairly recent hole that photo was taken from, and that's the target. This is one of the areas around Anaconda that we'll be revisiting in 2019. Yes, slightly different, but it ran quite nicely.
I'll just expand a little bit on what Mo said about security. Gold mining is a huge part of the economy and extremely important to the government of Mali.
We work very closely with all the other mining companies and the government around security. It is interesting to note, I think as Bill Lytle pointed out, or Mo pointed out, that Minister Tiémoko Sangaré, who is the Minister of Defense now, was the Minister of Mines through the process of Fekola Construction. We had an excellent relationship with him, and we were pleased, disappointed to see him go from Minister of Mines. At the end of the day, he's got a good replacement who's very familiar with us, and I'm sure she'll be very good to work with. He went to defense, which we were pleased to see because he understands mining very well, he understands the importance of security in the country generally, and also around the whole aspect of gold mining and expats.
I think, we feel very comfortable with that relationship, and the government really is supportive of securing not only their people and our people, but the mines as well.
Okay, if there are no further questions for the Mali panel, thanks, gentlemen. If you do have questions, please feel free to contact me afterwards if you have any follow-up questions. Moving on to the Masbate section of the presentation. I'd like to welcome to the stage Cris Acosta, who is the country manager in the Philippines.
I'll be providing an overview of the Masbate Gold Project in the Philippines. The Philippines is located in Southeast Asia. It is an archipelago. It consists of more than 7,100 islands. It has a population of over 106 million. The population density is around 350 persons per square kilometer. The Masbate Island, which is also a province, the Masbate Province, where the Masbate Gold Project is located, geographically is centrally located in the archipelago. Masbate Gold Project is the largest operating gold mine in the Philippines. It is located in the town of Aroroy, which is a historic mining area. The Chinese, the Spaniards, the Americans had mined in that area. The project was operated by a Filipino company, Atlas Mining, from 1980 until 1994. After that, there were several companies that owned the project, one after the other.
In 2007, CGA Mining acquired the property, successfully it was able to develop the project, and in less than two years, in May 2009, the first gold was poured. In 2013, with the merger of CGA and B2Gold acquired ownership of the property. Since then, B2Gold developed itself, established itself as a premier operator in the Philippines. The entry of B2Gold complemented the strong operating team that Masbate had. This allowed B2Gold and the Masbate group to monetize the resources of the project. At the national level, we also have a strong team that has very good working and professional relationship with national government agencies, with the legislature, that's the Congress and the Senate, and even with the powerful Catholic Church.
This team, which is led by former Secretary Gloria Tan-Climaco, who is also the chairperson of Philex Minera, coordinates closely with the Philippine Chamber of Mines and the other mining companies to promote responsible mining and the mining industry in the Philippines. When the environment and natural resources visited the mine site, we were very proud of his observations. He said that Masbate was the best mine that he had seen. We are really proud of that one. On the regional and local government, we also have very good relations with them. We have been dealing with practically the same key leaders in the local government for over 10 years now. Effectively, what I'm trying to say is that we do have a very good team in the Philippines. We have a very good support from B2Gold.
We have support from the government as well, we do have good relations with both the national and the local governments. This slide is to some extent related to what Clive mentioned, that when we start a project, there are expectations that we have to deliver on. In 2007, when we were just starting the project, we were helped by the Philippine government. Actually, not just the Philippine government. We were actually helped by the Philippine president at that time. Of course, she was an economist. She had expectations that we will bring progress to Masbate. I believe we have been delivering on that. The contributions that we're providing to the municipality and the province, I think, is very considerable. We're the largest investment. We are the number one employer. We are the number one taxpayer.
In the town where we operate, that's Aroroy, we provide more than 50% of their annual budget, and that's just the direct contribution that we make. We have not included the indirect ones through the increased economic activities in the municipality. Because of that, the municipality of Aroroy, from a class 4 municipality is now a class 1 municipality. Excluding the capital city, Aroroy is the only class 1 municipality in the province. Masbate project employs close to 2,000 direct and contractual employees. Of these, more than 70% come from the island of Masbate or the province of Masbate, and Filipinos constitute more than 98% of the total workforce. This shows that the project really tries to optimize, to maximize what they can use locally, even in manpower. Masbate is not unionized. This is something that quite unusual, especially in a country where organizing a union is very easy.
This is a testament to how well the mine site management have been able to engage, to deal with, and to satisfy the concerns of the workforce. We maintain a mentorship system. This is good in making sure that the talents, the skill sets of the more senior employees are passed on to the younger ones. At the same time, Masbate is one of the few mining companies that have established government-accredited training facilities. This is also a legacy project that we will have for the community, because they will be trained regardless where they work. They don't have to work for us, but they will be provided with skills that they can bring maybe overseas in other companies and other islands.
We have a social development management program, and even this social development management program has a focus on creating jobs for the community, because it's really one of the expectation from us, especially when the time comes when the mine has to close. We have to make sure that the community more or less has something to do, has something to keep them going. The budget that we have for the social development management program is around $2.8 million a year. That's dollars. This last slide is just an illustration or a description of one of the successful projects that we have. It's under the PAMANA program. PAMANA is a Filipino word. It is translated as legacy. So this is a legacy program. This specific program is a small scale egg-laying business through cooperatives. We have been quite successful in this one. We have now 14 cooperatives.
On top of that, we did backward integration. We also have, they call it poulet, I hope that's the right pronunciation, or hen raising. Then we also did forward integration by getting into broiler production or broiler operation for meat production. I think we even did sideward integration because some cooperatives are into duck raising and also into pig raising. The concept of this program is the company provides the capital, but over time, the cooperatives have to pay them back, and whatever we recover will be used for future cooperatives. Lastly, I'd like to announce that last week, during the Annual Mine Safety and Environment Conference in the Philippines, Masbate Gold Project received six awards for its environmentally and socially responsible mining operations. I will now be followed by Ray, who will provide an update on the mine.
I'll provide you with a production update through to the end of the third quarter for 2018 to start with. As Cris touched upon, we employ about 1,900 people at the mine site. Roughly half contractors, half direct workforce working for us. With such a large workforce, we're proud to say that in October this year, we clocked up three years LTI-free. I think anywhere around the world, that's quite a considerable achievement from a safety perspective. On the environmental side of things, we continue to update our certification for ISO. We're now 14001:2015 certified. A fair bit of significance placed on this certification with the local regulators. It gives them confidence that we are a responsible mining operation and that we do things the right way. We operated through to the end of the third quarter on two principal ore sources.
Anyone familiar with the project understands we typically have a main vein ore deposit and Colorado. By the end of quarter 3, we had completed Colorado pit to final design. We accelerated the mining of that pit basically to avoid any wet season issues, being in a narrow pit during the typhoon season in the Philippines. We were able to accelerate operations in the pit. We did that partially by mine scheduling. We managed to mine out the northern end of the pit, which offered up some in-pit dumping opportunities. We benefited from short hauls, quicker turnarounds. Overall, on the main vein side of the operation, the floor areas are a lot bigger than what we've worked through in Colorado. We were able to improve on excavator productivities. We're getting good fragmentation from our blasting, continue to improve our blasting processes.
Through main vein, we're operating on stage 3 and stage 4 of that pit. It's also now offered us up an opportunity for pre-development of Montana. Montana becomes one of our primary ore sources into 2019, we've been able to get a head start on that. From a cost perspective, our costs are pretty well on budget, but obviously we've had quite a benefit on additional production ounces through the year. Our unit costs have been considerably lower, as touched upon by Bill earlier. From a process plant point of view, similarly exceeding its budget predictions. Recovery currently 7% ahead of budget. Some of that is Colorado pit just keeps on giving. It maintained its designation as oxide ore right through to the end. We benefited from 62% oxide versus a budget prediction of 35% oxide material.
The recovery block model that we operate by that does our recovery predictions is from wide-space drilling. What we've seen certainly in the four or five years that we've been running it is that it tends to predict slightly conservatively. We've done updates again for next year's budget predictions to try and get the recovery predictions closer through our block model predictions and what we actually see through the process plant. Similarly, grade to the mill, 6% higher than budget. Some of that's come about Colorado pit. As we've mined it to final design, we home in on the main ore body which was mined by previous operations by underground methods. All of the major stopes have been backfilled with what is ore grade material for us. We get a benefit of additional high-grade ore out of those previously mined underground operations.
What it's done to quarter 3 to date is displaced some low grade that we'd scheduled to feed through the mill. We haven't had to feed any low grade so far this year. Throughput, again, 4% up on budget. That's largely because of the higher oxide content and the better fragmentation. Overall, we're at 22% on production ounces ahead of our budget. Which, as said, lends itself to the positive impact on our cost profile. Year-to-date, we're about 165,000 ounces. We had a revised guidance put out with the third quarter results, we're now targeting 200,000-210,000 ounces. We believe we'll be at the upper end of that guidance range. Our production is fairly evenly spread quarter-on-quarter. As you can see, the cost profile is 25% below budget predictions. We expected to come in with cash costs around $700.
We're sitting just over $500, around the $540 mark, with estimates for full year between $545 and $595 an ounce. All-in sustaining costs, again, we're a busy year doing an expansion on the process plant. We've managed to control all-in sustaining costs. They're a similar margin below budget, 26% for the quarter, 23% year-on-year. We expect somewhere between $780 and $830 as we finalize all our capital for the year. Quarter 4 predictions, as said, we expect to mine 8,500 tons of ore, thereabouts, for the year. Grade somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 overall. Total movement will be about 37,500 tons. The process plant will put through between 6.9 and 7 million tons this year based on the favorable ore conditions that we've seen through to the end of the third quarter.
We expect recoveries to sit somewhere around the 74%-77% mark through the year and 200,000-210,000 ounces. For 2019, we're expecting a similar sort of year to this year from an ounce production profile. However, one significant change for us is that our mill expansion will come online, and we expect to achieve 8 million tons through next year. The expansion, generally the production equipment will come online right at the end of 2018 or certainly in the first month of 2019. We do have a couple of tidy-up jobs and non-production components that will continue on through the first couple of quarters of next year. Mining for next year focuses on Main Vein Stage 3, which we're currently in now, Main Vein Stage 4, which we've opened up. We'll move back into the HMB East section of the Main Vein pit.
We also start ore production from Montana through next year. We'll move about 33,000 tons all up, 27 million tons of waste, 6 million tons of ore, leaving a shortfall of 2 million tons of ore, which we'll source from stockpiles. For those familiar with our project, we tend to have tailings development ongoing year-on-year based on heavy rainfalls through the Philippines. We will finish Stage 11 by the end of this year. What we have been able to do is tune up our water treatment plant, which now defers Stage 12. It was originally scheduled to commence next year, but it now can be pushed out to 2022, obviously offering some capital benefit to the project. We will continue with our permitting, road rerouting, and everything for the next stage, just to be prepared for when that comes up.
Most of our capital expenditure for next year focuses on land acquisition for the expansion of the tailings facility. Also, we'll be doing some rebuilds of mining fleet. The two major production excavators are due to be rebuilt next year. We have the benefit of an additional digger in the fleet that's due to be phased out that we'll continue to utilize through the year whilst those rebuilds are ongoing. There'll be no impact to mining rates. Montana South is the new area for us next year. Comes into production. It's a higher grade, better recovery material than what we get from Main Vein, so positive impact to our processing budget for next year. The expansion, it's a marginal expansion in the scheme of things from a capital perspective, about $26 million. The major component of that is a six-megawatt ball mill.
That ball mill is slightly oversized for what we need. We have got a bit of capacity up our sleeve for later in life. The pebble crusher gets upgraded with the expectation that we do get into harder ore conditions into the future. We put in another stage of tailings pumps. We put in water transfer and slurry transfer pumps, additional cyclones, conveyor upgrades, and we are splitting the elution circuit to be able to turn our carbon around quicker. We expect, as mentioned earlier, to commission certainly within January. We've allowed a couple of months ramp up in our budget predictions. At present, with that startup date in mind, we'll be ahead of schedule, and we do expect to come in marginally under budget as well. Open you up to Q&A.
Thanks, Ray. Are there any questions for the Masbate panel?
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Just a quick one from me on the 2 million tons of stockpiled ore that you intend to process in 2019. Could you share with us the average grade of that and whether or not there's an oxide component to that as well?
Grade of the low-grade stockpile sits around 0.55 to 0.6. It's been one of the major drivers behind doing the 8 million tons upgrade, was to be able to successfully and economically treat that material. What the upgrade does for us now, bringing it online now, is it stops us growing those stockpiles, and we can start drawing from them. Positive impact overall on your life of mine.
Just a question on 2019, related to the oxide sulfide ore mix. Obviously, a blending of three components there. What should we be looking at from a model's perspective?
From a?
Oxide and then sulfide % ore mix.
Oxide, most of the low grade we feed will be oxide. At least 2 million tons of oxide plus what we get out of the pits. Main vein, stage 4 in Montana both contain oxide components as well as HMB East. We probably run about 35% oxide through the year.
Okay, thanks.
Okay. If there are no further questions, we'll move on to environmental and social governance. Our presenter is Ken Jones. Ken?
Okay. I'm pleased to go share with you our HSE performance and how we manage risk here at B2Gold. The health, safety, and wellbeing of our workers, of our contractors, of the visitors to our operations, and to the communities is a core value for B2Gold. We believe that all accidents are preventable, and it is our responsibility to provide a safe workplace to our workers so that they can report home every single day. With that, we are currently in our third consecutive year without a fatality at any of our operations. We've been able to achieve that with the construction and commissioning of our Fekola mine, currently in a significant mill expansion at our Masbate operation. Other high-risk activities.
We have a long track record of being able to accomplish and manage our workforce to achieve these outcomes. Very often in areas and with workforces that have little or no training and little experience, able to provide them with the training and supervision so they can perform their job safely and report home every day. Our goal ultimately is zero harm to our people. Over the last five years, we have an excellent trend and have been able to reduce our lost time injury frequency rate over 70% from 2014 to this year. Throughout that period, we have significant stretches. Ray touched on just last month, hit three years without a lost time injury at the Masbate operation. Earlier this year, we hit over two years, the same performance at our Fekola operation.
We regularly hit five, six, seven months, approach a year at all of our operations without a lost time injury. That downward trend also applies to all injuries at our mine sites. This year, in 2018, our total recordable injury frequency rate is also seeing a significant reduction. One question that we always get is, how does this compare to our peers in the industry? Agnico Eagle reported in 2017 that their LTI frequency rate was 0.9. IAMGOLD reported theirs at 0.5. I'm proud to say that B2Gold outperforms some of our peers in the industry and even with some of the best operators in the mining industry. How do we accomplish this? It, of course, starts at the top.
We have in place a set of HSE policies. These are approved by the CEO of our company, and they dictate the commitment to the protection of our people and to the environment in the places where we operate. Our executives ensure that we have the resources available so that our mine sites can meet those commitments. We also have then an internal set of HSE standards and guidelines that outlines the requirements that we want our mines to meet to be able to meet our commitments. These standards and guidelines are based on international best practice. They're based on ISO standards. They're based on the Cyanide Code, based on IFC standards. We go out and we externally audit all of our operations every single year with independent experts. The final piece of that is to report.
To report to you, to report in our annual reports and other disclosures, what our risks are within the company and how we're managing those to bring them down to an acceptable level. A little bit about our environmental performance. Happy to report that we do not have any trend of significant environmental incidents at our operations, both this year and last year, no significant environmental incidents to report. This picture on the right is a picture of a waste rock dump at our Masbate mine and showing the progressive rehabilitation that we perform at this mine. We immediately revegetate and stabilize the slopes of our facilities, so that when we are done with this waste rock dump, it's physically and chemically stable. This reduces our costs, reduces our long-term environmental liabilities, and ultimately produces a facility and a mine that we can walk away from without any long-term commitment.
We're currently expanding our third-party review of our tailings management facilities. Over the last couple of years, some of the disasters in other parts of the world, in Brazil or even in British Columbia, where we're based, has led to increases in third-party review of tailings management operations. We're currently incorporating that into our practices. A couple of other environmental initiatives as we mature our programs and our systems. We're increasing our water accounting frameworks for external reporting so we can better manage our water use and understand our water consumption intensities at our operations. Currently right now, we're actually completing our first greenhouse gas emissions estimate at our Otjikoto operation that will allow us to understand how much emissions we are putting into the atmosphere and how we can work to reduce that in the future.
I'd like to share with you these last couple of slides. I just want to share some of the highlights of some of the specific initiatives that we have at B2Gold in HSE and CSR. This is the area where I think that B2Gold really can go above and beyond just our minimum commitments and protection of the environment. One project that's been touched on is the relocation of the Fadougou village at the Fekola mine. One key item for this was when we acquired Papillon Resources, the Fekola project was already permitted. It was permitted without the requirement to resettle the Fadougou village. We immediately recognized that there would be negative impacts to the people if they remained next to the mine. The executives and the board of directors approved a $23 million project to resettle these people.
Over 900 houses, 3,300 people in total, have been a part of this relocation, it's been done to international best practice. What that means is it's done in a transparent and participatory manner with the people that are being moved. There's multi-stakeholder engagement teams and committees that ensure that everybody has representation and that the people, when they do move into a better quality of life. The Fadougou village is actually being completed just now, I believe the first people will move in April of next year. Another key thing about the project is the workforce that is building the Fadougou village is actually a local workforce that has been trained to not only build in the skills and the trades to carry that into other parts of their lives, but to give them ownership in the village that they're moving into.
Another key component at the Fekola project is biodiversity. Again, when we acquired the project fully permitted, there were not many commitments to biodiversity conservation. We recognized this as a potential gap. We did some investigation, did some additional studies, did find that there are some priority species near the project. Over the last two years, we've been conducting additional studies, right now we are developing and implementing conservation measures aimed at those priority species around our project. Our Masbate gold project. As Cris Acosta mentioned, the Philippines is a heavily populated area. Our mine site is a heavily populated area within the Philippines. That high population density has led to impacts to the environment around our mine site. Two projects that we have are there to restore the ecosystems and some of the livelihoods to the people in the area.
We have two projects in the marine environment. The first is a mangrove rehabilitation project. Over the last six years, we've rehabilitated and planted over 200 hectares of mangroves and over 900,000 plants with a success rate of survival of those plants between 80%-85%, which is much better actually than other programs in the Philippines. What that does is it improves water quality in the bay. It reduces the loss of sediment to erosion, and it mainly improves fishing habitat and fishing for the livelihood of the people in the area. The other project in the bay is the installation of a coral reef propagation. We've developed a protected area under local ordinance, working in conjunction with the local communities. Within that marine protected area, we've installed over 1,200 reef balls.
What these are, these are concrete domes that we place on the bottom of the ocean floor. Then on those domes, we install over 4,500, so far to date, coral reef installations. That, along with the patrolling of these waters to reduce fishing, has led to an influx of marine life again that hasn't been seen in the area in years. At Otjikoto Mine, in 2018, we've earlier this year commissioned a 7 MW solar power plant. I won't touch much on this. The country manager of Namibia, Mark Dawe, will provide a little bit more detail later. Basically, it allows us to reduce our fuel consumption, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, and reduce costs. We will continue to look at renewable energy resources or installations such as this in the future, potentially at other operations.
On the CSR front in Namibia, we've worked with a group called the Development Workshop. Very interesting group. It's an NGO, and they work in the realm of informal housing settlements. It's a severe issue affecting Namibia, affecting our workers, affecting our communities. What this group does is it works with municipalities to provide land, then the Development Workshop surveys, installs roads, installs services such as water points, and then sells titled lots to low-income Namibians. They've received a lot of funding from B2Gold, from the Namibian Chamber of Environment. It's been an excellent partnership for us to be able to improve the livelihoods and lives of the people in the areas where we operate. The last mine I'll touch on is our La Libertad Mine. Over the last three years, we've had a significant water distribution project with the people in the Santo Domingo community.
We've supported the National Water Company in all phases to improve and expand their potable water treatment system through everything from design, water treatment plant construction and installation, piping, and distribution. To date, we've helped improve the sanitation and health over 7,000 individuals in the Santo Domingo community. In closing, I'm pleased to be able to share this HSE performance with you. B2Gold is proud as we have transformed into a world-class company and mining company in the aspect of course, production ounces and costs. We've also been able to become a leading HSE performer and CSR performing at the same time. With that, any questions or.
Ken, can you just touch on the solar power for Fadougou and the fact we've trained the people to put those solar panels on?
Solar power at Fadougou?
Solar, yeah, the solar panels at the houses in Fadougou.
I'm not certain if I'm as familiar with that, Bill.
Yeah. Maybe I'll take it.
Yep.
As we developed New Fadougou, one of the concepts that was asked for actually by the community and we agreed with was that each individual house is going to have a solar panel on the roof. Each individual house will have lighting, and the municipal buildings also will have solar panels. Basically, across the entire facility, and this was mentioned during the grand opening by the Minister of Mines, it's probably the first, or we were sure it's the first fully electrified village in Mali will be New Fadougou. That was all done by local workers that have gone through our training program with AFECC to learn solar installation. It's local workforce installing electrical solar panels on their houses in New Fadougou.
That can be a bit of a game changer in Africa. If you've ever seen a satellite photograph of Africa at night, you'll see the lack of lighting in villages. This is a really cool project that I think could really grow into something, not just in Mali, but elsewhere.
Okay. To the audience, is there any questions for Ken on our social programs and health and safety? Okay. Well, thanks very much, Ken. Unlike a lot of events, we're running ahead of schedule. We're going to take a bit of a break now, about 15-20 minutes. There's some refreshments across the hall where you had the buffet. You're welcome to do that, and then we'll signal you when it's time to come back in.
Ladies and gentlemen, I know we're running a little bit ahead of schedule here.
Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to start back with the presentations and the webcast in about 60 seconds, so if you could take your seats, we'd appreciate it. Again, we are running a bit ahead of schedule, so if this persists, we will simply start the cocktail reception a little bit early. We encourage you to stick around and you can interact with all the people from B2Gold, the managers, and other executives. Probably around 45 seconds, and we'll start the webcast. Okay. On to the second half of our investor day. We're going to start off with the Otjikoto mine, and presenting today will be Mark Dawe, the Country Manager and Managing Director.
Right. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to talk to you about Namibia. Get this thing to work. All right. We know Namibia as Africa for sissies. It's a really easy country to live in, a pretty easy country to operate in. One of the lowest population densities in the world. In fact, it's got the second lowest population density in the world in terms of countries. As far as territories are concerned, if you include Greenland, it's the third lowest population density. Greenland has, out of interest, one person per square kilometer, Mongolia has two, and Namibia has three. A bit of useless information for you, Canada has four, and it's in the ninth position. We've had a strong history of mining in Namibia. It's a primary industry-based economy.
Of course, it's geographically very close to South Africa, which has been one of the strongest mining countries in the world. A lot of mining technology, a lot of mining equipment comes from South Africa, which makes it very easy to operate there. Mining plays a really important part in the economy. It's the largest sector of the GDP by far. The great thing about Namibia is the stability of the government, fiscal stability, sovereign stability. Everything about it is first world, and it happens to be a really good country to live in as well. Namibia also encourages foreign investment. The government rolls out the red carpet to investors.
I think when B2 came to Namibia in 2013, as I'll show you in one of the next slides, they were really impressed by the reception they received from the government as well as the local mining community and the Chamber of Mines. It really is a great place to operate. Mining corporate tax is sitting at 37.5%. The royalties on gross sales at 3% with an extra 1% export levy, a total of 4% taxes on gross sales. The tax regime encourages investment because the government tries to allow for the repayment of capital expenditures as quickly as possible. It's in the process of actually reviewing that right now. While it reviews the repayment on capital or the recoupment of capital from the investment, it has been engaging very well with the private sector through the Chamber of Mines and other private sector representative bodies.
It's a very consultative government. We have good national infrastructure. Railway line doesn't work as well as it could, but it's in the process of being revamped as well. Tar road very close to our operation, three kilometers away. As far as our mine is concerned, we have extensive groundwater reserves. The country is typified by having a lot of dry rivers. There are a couple of rivers right on the northern border and one on the southern border, the Orange River, but all the other rivers are ephemeral, which means that they only flow during heavy rains. Despite that, a lot of the water over the past millions of years has gone underground, we have massive underground reserves of water.
In fact, we have an excess of water on the mine site. At Otjikoto Mine, we generate our own power, 24 MW HFO plant, which you'll hear shortly we've augmented with a solar plant, seven MW of solar. It's quite a well-known plant because of some of the technology we're using. I'll discuss that a little bit later. As far as infrastructure is concerned, we also have a deep water port. It's considered to be one of the most efficient ports in Africa, the Walvis Bay port. As far as the mine is concerned, 2011, B2 became interested in Otjikoto Mine. They did a deal with Orex Gold Corporation. By 2013, in April, we had the official groundbreaking ceremony, and a mere 18 months later, the mine was commissioned in November 2014, and the first gold pour was in December 2014, which is an incredible story.
The first commercial production was achieved two months after that in February. In September 2015, correction 2017 that was, we expanded to 3 million tons per annum, and we now have a capacity of around 3.4 million tons per annum as of 2018, we should be achieving that. Namibia was ranked as the best country in Africa as far as mining investment, that should read, is concerned. Several rating organizations looked at Namibia and decided that it was the most attractive country in Africa to invest. B2 had certainly made the right decision by coming to Namibia. As I said, extremely stable government. The Chamber of Mines of Namibia is actually heading up the Chambers of Mines of Africa, right throughout Africa. It plays a pivotal role, the Mining Industry Association of Southern Africa, MIASA, is actually headed up by the CEO of the Chamber of Mines.
I've personally been very involved in the Chamber of Mines of Namibia since its inception, I think it's a very effective advocacy body, both towards the government as well as towards other sectors of the economy, making sure that any policy promulgation is sensible and we don't run into any trouble with government ministers that decide to change the regulations and the rules, certainly pertaining to mining. The government works very closely with the mining sector. As far as the construction of Otjikoto is concerned, as B2Gold always does, we used our own construction team. Over 130 expatriates were employed to build Otjikoto. A great success story. As I said, within 18 months it was commissioned. The idea of the team was to transfer as many skills as they possibly could to the local Namibians, and this they indeed did.
At this stage, if you look a little bit further down the slide, we have 1.7% of our employees are only 16 are non-Namibians, but of those, there are many people on domicile or permanent residence. We only have nine people on work permits, which is less than 1% of our total workforce. The skills at Otjikoto Mine are, I think, world-class. That's the reason that Randy and the construction team wanted to get Namibians to go and build the mine in Mali. We had, at one stage, over 120 Namibians building the mine in Mali, and they are mainly artisans from the Namibian Institute of Mining and Technology. I've been told not to call them artisans here. It's apparently they're tradesmen in the Canadian North American lingo.
We actually support the Namibian Institute of Mining and Technology more than any other operation, any other business in Namibia. We have over 60 tradesmen employed at our mine on both in job shedding and permanent positions, and we provide a lot of financial support towards the Namibian Institute of Mining and Technology. We also concentrate a lot on tertiary education. We have seven full-time bursars through universities in South Africa and Namibia. We have a pretty advanced leadership development program. We call it the HiPo program, the high potentials, where every head of department has been tasked to seek out individuals of high potential, mainly Black Namibians that would otherwise fall through the cracks and not be able to be developed. We're really accelerating the advancement of these guys. We're very proud of what we're doing in terms of training and development.
As far as our CSR work, or we call it CSI, corporate social investment, it's a better name for corporate social responsibility because we believe that we are investing in the country. If you invest in something, what you're implying by that is that you're getting something back. You're getting an improved country and improved productivity of the workforce. One of the greatest projects that we've managed to achieve is the creation, that's a B2Gold initiative, of the Namibian Chamber of Environment. Namibian Chamber of Environment in the last two years since its inception, has become the one-stop shop for the government to talk to all of the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations in the business of conservation and environmental protection. Not only that, they also do, because Namibia is such a wild country, pretty much like Canada, actually, where the environment and livelihoods are intertwined.
You can't talk about one without also talking about the other. The Namibian Chamber of Environment also supports a lot of social projects, livelihoods projects, and whatever we put into the Namibian Chamber of Environment in terms of our support for the fixed costs of the organization is not just about the green environment. It's also about developing people, life skills, and that sort of thing. Bill always says that I can go on forever about the Namibian Chamber of Environment. It's literally become the single stopping point for the government to talk to the environmental sector and the environmental sector to talk to the government. As an example, a lot of the conservation initiatives in Namibia, which are world-class, such as the conservation of the black rhino, the pangolins, cheetah, leopard, lion, and all that sort of thing that are generally in great abundance in Namibia.
A lot of the groups are competing for the same funding from various supporters and donors, and because they're competing for that same funding, they never spoke to each other about the projects that they're working on, and a lot of the scientific work that was being done was never shared. As a result of that, the projects weren't as efficient as they could have been. What the Namibian Chamber of Environment has done is it's brought them all under one umbrella, and it's got them all talking to each other. Actually, pretty much all of the groups meet at our education center. We have a very large education center at the mine at our Otjikoto Nature Reserve.
On a regular basis, we support these organizations with accommodation, with food, with whatever is required in order to make their organizations run that much more effectively and more efficiently. A great achievement of the Namibian Chamber of Environment is its seed funding for a lot of the major projects, whether it's a Development Workshop, Ken mentioned that briefly, looking at low-cost housing, or it's conservation of the rhino, for instance. We often provide through industry the seed funding, and then the banks come in and all the other sectors of society chip in, and we find that we can very easily fund a lot of these very large projects. A bit more about the operation itself. The design grade is 1.42 grams a tonne and design recovery 95.6 grams a tonne.
Perhaps one of the most defining features of Otjikoto Mine is our actual recovery sitting at 98.6%. I've just checked that figure. It's still sitting at 98.6% actual recovery. As a metallurgist, that's a figure that's unheard of in mining, as you would know. The gold production split between gravity and leach. The gravity section takes out 40% and more often of the gold. As I mentioned before, the plant is upgraded to 3.5 million tonnes per annum. We have an availability of around 94%, which is really good. We're usually exceeding our targeted availability. I'm not going to get into the metallurgical work indices there. This is a graph of the production statistics in terms of mining production. You can see as our metallurgical production throughput has increased from 2.5 million to 3.4 million, we've also had to increase our mining production.
From 150,000 tonnes per quarter, which is around 45,000 tonnes a day, we've ramped up to over 100,000 tonnes a day. You can see there 300,000 tonnes per quarter. That's quite a good story. In terms of gold production, you're all aware of the fact that our targeted ounces are between 160,000-170,000 ounces. You can see they're around 40,000 ounces per quarter this year. Generally above budget since the start of the operation. Recovery is above budget, the gold production above budget, tonnage milled and availability is above budget. Just drilling into the figures here. For 2018, we're looking at production of 122,000 so far, which is 3% above budget. That's up to Q3. The annual guidance, as I said, was between 160,000-170,000 ounces.
The cash costs below budget by 3% for Q3 and for the year to date, we're looking at below budget by 4%, well within our guidance. All in sustaining costs for Q3 at $650 odd. For the entire year, 2018 or year to date, it's sitting at $747, which is also below budget by 2%. In terms of Q1 production, Q1 and Q4 production, I'll just look at the 2018 estimate without running through the different quarters. About 8 million tons mined. I beg your pardon. 8 million tons of ore mined, 37 million tons total mined including waste. That's with 29 million tons of waste. Processed tons, 3.4-3.45 million tons, which is above our target. Grade of around 1.5-1.6. As I said, recovery 98%-99%, currently 98.6% recovery. Well on target to achieve our guidance.
It's pretty much the same thing. Just interestingly, we're now looking at 2019 production pretty much the same as it was for 2018, between 160-170, with again, tonnage milled of 3.4 million tons at a 98% recovery, which we hope to beat again of around 98.5%. 39.5 million tons of waste to be mined and 3.4 million tons of high and medium grade ore. It might look like a high strip ratio, but we also, as with Masbate, we have a lot of low-grade ore that we're stockpiling for future years as well. The strip ratio is not as bad as it looks there.
In 2019, an interesting feature will be that we will be looking at bringing contract miners to extend the mining production on a day-by-day basis. I'm taking it from around 106,000, which we believe is our capacity with our current equipment, to 125,000 tons a day. That is to accelerate the removal of waste so that we can get into the ore at, especially at the Wolfshag Zone. Capital expenditure for 2019 is mainly going to be rebuilds of the mining fleets. We've obviously been operating now for four years, and a lot of the mining fleet is coming up for major component interventions. We'll also be getting three trucks and an excavator. We're looking at a fleet management system. We currently already have a fatigue management system that's working very well for us. Briefly on the solar project, this has attracted a lot of attention internationally.
I spoke last year at the Mines and Energy Conference about this particular project. It's a 7-megawatt plant using thin-film Caterpillar, thin-film technology, which is First Solar. We chose thin-film because we'd evaluated all the other types of panels, the polycrystalline, monocrystalline, and First Solar claimed to have had a breakthrough in terms of technology as far as the longevity of the thin-film technology is concerned. They gave us 20 years guarantee. The plant is performing, it's exceeding the targeted performance according to our feasibility study. 62,400 panels. It's a huge plant.
What's interesting about it and quite unique in the world, we don't believe there's any other plant in the world at this stage that's running a fully autonomous, synchronized, hybrid system whereby the engines, the big HFO engines, there are 12 CM32s, 1-megawatt, sorry, 5-megawatt engines will be stopping and starting according to the solar irradiation. As a cloud comes along and we find that the power generated by the solar plant is not sufficient, the engines will start up automatically. Initially the high-speed engines and then the larger engines will be started. We initially had some teething problems getting that fully autonomous synchronization sorted out. That's obviously groundbreaking. It's cutting edge, one would expect to have some teething problems. It has exceeded our expectations. It's doing extremely well as far as that's concerned.
Interestingly, we have saved, it's not on the slide, but I was asked to actually mention it. We saved 2.1 million liters of HFO fuel since we started the plant, and that's only in May we started. It wasn't fully commissioned in May. That means that it's exceeded the target, the feasibility fuel savings significantly. We also have produced 9.5 million kilowatt hours since commissioning, and the target was 8.8 by the end of November. We should have achieved 8.8 million tons. On the whole, a highly successful project. Thanks for listening. I'm going to hand over to Tom on the exploration side.
Thank you, Mark. Next slide. As I said earlier, I'm going to talk briefly about the exploration that we're doing in Namibia. We're focusing on three different targets in Namibia, two around Otjikoto and then a target called Ondundu, which is about 100 km to the west of Otjikoto. Ondundu is still an early-stage project from our perspective. It's fold nose hosted coarse gold mineralization, very much like you see in other parts of the world, related to shales, cut by shear zone. Mineralization we've had to date is, we're starting to define a body that has continuity, but at this point it's not big enough to turn into a project. We're fairly optimistic that at one point it's going to become a project for us. Certainly, the fellows in Mali are very excited about it.
The main thing I would like to talk about, though, sorry, just before I switch slides. You can see on this map, there's a project to the south of Otjikoto called Antelope. It's a project joint venture we've just recently signed. We expect to start exploration on that next year. We haven't done any work of any majority yet there. The one I'd really like to talk about for Namibia is Otjikoto and Wolfshag. Exploration we did this year at Otjikoto, down plunge, we did some infill drilling on some of the edge drilling or the edge previous drilling that was done at Otjikoto. We found with infill, we started to get a better definition of high-grade shoots. Now you see this in this map.
There's a hole, 492 had almost 7 grams over 22 meters in between two holes that had very little mineralization in them. We're now seeing that Otjikoto also has a potential like Wolfshag for underground potential, we will focus some of our exploration in 2019 trying to follow that up. You look at the Wolfshag part of this map also, there's a long section and there's the plan map. If you look at the long section below, you can see that Wolfshag mineralization just keeps on going below the planned pits. We don't know where the final pits are going to go. They constantly change depending on economics.
You can see below the $1,400 pit for Wolfshag, we still have, I think it's, excuse me, almost 200,000 ounces at close to 5.5 grams that we feel has underground potential beyond the open pit life of Wolfshag. Exploration in 2019 is going to focus on trying to expand that and get a better definition of it. You can see the 2018 exploration on that. Down fairly deep, we had the best hole was almost 7 grams over 8 meters, certainly within underground mining potential. I think the future for Wolfshag from the exploration side is to continue to follow it down plunge, get a better idea.
What can be mined underground, look at turning that over to Peter and his crew to see what we can mine open pit and what we can mine underground. That's all I really have to say for Otjikoto, questions for Namibia?
Thank you. A question on the recovery rates for Q4 on page 109. I see that the recovery is a little bit lower than the run rate for Q1 to Q3, and that's despite the grade being a bit higher in Q4, the mill grade. What's the reason for that lower recovery?
Sorry, could you repeat the question about the recovery?
Recovery? I'm just looking at page 109.
109.
Slide 109, the recoveries for Q4, it says 94 to 95. I see grade, the mill grade's a little bit higher. What's the reason for that being lower than the Q1 to Q3 levels?
Yeah. Okay. That's actually wrong. It should be 98.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks.
It's wrong. Well pointed out.
Excellent.
We're sticking to pretty consistently 98.5% recovery. It does get affected by the sulfide ores. If we have very high sulfides, very rich ore, we find that we have to blend out the ore with oxides and get the recovery back up again, but we're expecting the same sort of recoveries in the final quarter.
Thanks.
Good catch. We always put one or two mistakes in to see if you guys are paying attention. Still one more.
On the recoveries exceeding expectations towards 98% versus the feasibility at 95, anything special you guys did in the gravity circuit in terms of the design or was that just conventional?
I'm going to pass that over to either Eric or John. I'm a metallurgist, I spend too much time with politicians these days.
Yeah, Mike, on the gravity circuit, we process 100% of the ball mill circulating load. It maximizes the gravity recovery, which runs around 65% of the mill feed gold. That's the reason for the high recovery, and then the remainder is recovered through the leach circuit.
Okay, a quick question for Tom. Is there potential for another parallel panel below Wolfshag in your view? Also, do you see any intrusive activity that might point you towards the source of everything?
Well, we certainly believe there's potential. We have tried and will continue to try. We have a zone that's called WH41 and WH41 extension that's a bit smaller, but it does show that there's other mineralization parallel to Wolfshag and Otjikoto. Sorry, Mike, what was your second question?
Just any evidence of an intrusion that might be driving the system and getting a bit closer to the source?
Well, not right on the property. There are intrusions in the area that have the same age as Otjikoto, certainly the sulfide oxide zonation that you see suggests there's an intrusion to the south of it.
Okay. If that's all we have for the Otjikoto panel, we're going to move on. I just wanted to point out, though, you've heard a gentleman named John answer a couple of questions. That's John Rajala, B2Gold's VP of Metallurgy. Now we'll call up Thomas Lee, who is the Corporate Affairs Manager for Nicaragua.
Thank you, Ian. Good afternoon. B2Gold acquired La Libertad Mine and El Limon mines in 2009. We're coming up now on 10 years of successful and responsible mining operations in Nicaragua. The original investment for both mines was $53 million. Since then, we have now exported well more than $1.5 billion in gold. Our mines in Nicaragua have paid for themselves many times over and have been very significant to B2Gold. B2Gold has also been very significant to Nicaragua, and that's what I'd like to focus on in this presentation, our importance to Nicaragua, and in particular, to our workers and to our communities. Then we'll ask Dale Craig to come up and talk about the operations and why B2Gold will continue to be important to Nicaragua and Nicaragua to B2Gold for the next decade.
As you see on the map, Nicaragua is an easily accessible country. It's a very quick flight down from Canada or the U.S. La Libertad Mine is due east of the capital city of Managua, about 170 km. El Limon is about 120 km to the northwest. The highways and roads in Nicaragua are very good. It's a very easy ride or drive out to both mines. Mining in Nicaragua goes far back before B2Gold's operations. In fact, both areas of La Libertad and El Limon have seen mining for hundreds of years, and industrial gold mining for over 70 years now. Nicaragua is a mining country. Our communities are gold mining communities, and many of our employees come from mining families that date back for generations. One of those, in fact, is our Country Manager, Omar Vega, whose grandfather worked as a miner as well in Nicaragua.
I should mention that in addition to our Country Manager, the General Managers at both La Libertad and El Limon mines are also Nicaraguans. In fact, most of our top managers in Nicaragua are Nicaraguans, and that means quite a bit to our employees and to the country itself. It's been one of the major factors behind our good reputation. B2Gold has developed a very strong, a very solid reputation in Nicaragua. We're recognized for our commitment to the health and safety of our employees, for our environmental stewardship, and for our respect for and investment in our communities. B2Gold has really been a pioneer in Nicaragua in terms of setting very high standards, and not only in the mining industry, but in all sectors of the economy. B2Gold is very important to the Nicaraguan economy, and that we can clearly see in these two graphs.
The first graph shows the value of gold exports in recent years and B2Gold's contribution to those exports. Here we can clearly see the importance of B2Gold's arrival and the restart of Libertad Mine in 2010. The second graph shows Nicaragua's top exports. Gold is consistently one of the top three exports from the country, and on average, B2Gold produces over 60% of that gold. B2Gold is not only the largest exporter of gold from Nicaragua, but in terms of export value, we are the largest export company of any product from Nicaragua. The gold mining industry, clearly, and B2Gold in particular as the major player in this industry, are of strategic interest to the Nicaraguan economy. We bring in direct foreign investment, hard currency, we provide significant national and municipal-level tax revenue, and we provide safe, stable, and well-paying jobs.
Let's take a look at those jobs. B2Gold employs over 2,600 direct and contract workers. This is a very significant number in a population of just over 6 million people. As in our other operations, in Nicaragua, we also focus on local hiring. Fewer than 1% of our direct employees are expats. As I mentioned before, most of our senior managers in Nicaragua are Nicaraguans, and at the mines, over 90% of our employees are from the communities directly around the mine sites. Because so many of our employees are locals, I believe they recognize not only the benefits that B2Gold brings to them and their families, but also the benefits to their communities. A study in 2006 showed that salaries in the mining sector are among the very best salaries in Nicaragua.
That led to the headline that you see on the screen there from one of Nicaragua's major newspapers, which reads, "Mining families with greater well-being. Employment generation has been key to the social development of several municipalities." According to another study in January of this year, which we see in the graph on the right, the municipality of La Libertad was number 1 in the country in terms of tax revenue per capita over the prior five years. That is a direct result of B2Gold's presence in that municipality. Santo Domingo, which is the municipality right next to La Libertad and where our mining operations are also the major source of tax revenues, that municipality was number 3 in the country in terms of tax revenue. The impact is quite clear.
This is a positive and tangible sign of our impact in the community where we're bringing in better roads and highways. We're bringing in better schools, resulting in better livelihoods and better opportunities in general for the population. Tax revenues are just one part of our positive impact. We also invest directly in our communities. Year after year, we're recognized on a national level for our responsible mining, for our achievements in CSR and our social investment, which focuses on education, health, the environment, and livelihoods. This slide just shows one specific example. This was a project where we helped to create alternative and sustainable livelihoods in a sector that's completely independent of the mining industry. In 2013, we recognized the importance and the potential of dairy farming in the municipalities of La Libertad and Santo Domingo.
However, we also saw that the area, the whole region, lacked the infrastructure and the facilities to be able to store the milk being produced by local dairy farmers in a safe way and with a quality that is required to be able then to sell that milk to the national dairy industry. We financed the construction and the equipping of a dairy chilling center. We also provided training to local dairy farmers, small farmers, and put them in contact as well with representatives from the national dairy industry. The chilling center is doing remarkably well. It's been very successful. Since initiating operations in early 2014, it has sold over 8.5 million liters of milk, and this at higher prices and stabler prices throughout the year. Through this one project, we've improved the lives of many local farmers and their families, increasing their incomes and their opportunities.
We have stimulated the local economy and helped generate employment, and all this by strengthening an existing traditional and sustainable livelihood, again, in an industry that's completely independent of mining. This is just one example, again, of what is now a decade of social investment in Nicaragua. B2Gold has implemented over 100 social investment projects and invested over $30 million since 2009. That's about $10 million in each of the communities in which we operate, La Libertad, Santo Domingo, and El Limon. This is something that we can all be very proud about. It's one of the factors in our successful and responsible mining over the past decade. With that, I'll say thank you, and I'll ask Dale to come up to talk about our operations and our next 10 years in Nicaragua.
Thank you, Thomas, and welcome all. With almost a decade of experience in Nicaragua, we know the country well, and we want to say we're comfortable operating there too. In addition to Thomas, we have two other senior management staff here in Toronto. [Foreign language] That's my heads-up to our Spanish speakers. First of all, Omar Vega, our country manager, Nicaraguan mining engineer. He's been with B2Gold and formerly Central Sun for a number of years, manager at El Limon, then Desmoinque eventually, and he moved up to country manager a number of years ago. We also have new here, Jorge Marin, new to Toronto, not new to us. Jorge started with the operations way back in Bella Vista in Costa Rica and moved to Triton the same year that I arrived on the scene, 2008, as maintenance manager.
He's an electrical engineer with a master's in maintenance. From maintenance manager in La Libertad or in El Limon, I convinced him to move to La Libertad. I was mine manager there at the time. Since then, he's grown his role, eventually becoming mine manager in La Libertad. Recently, we moved him up to a more senior role in which he's able to share his expertise across both operations. He's operations manager in Nicaragua, and not only will he share his expertise, but he'll provide us support as we look to a potential plant expansion at El Limon. Congratulations, Jorge. At the outset, I'd like to comment and echo Clive's comments about the work for our management in Nicaragua through this past year.
It's been an unusual and a very challenging year for us, and the staff there has done an extremely good job in ensuring or doing their best to ensure continuous operations in Nicaragua as we've dealt with social and political issues. Our workforce stands by us as well, both in Limon, in La Libertad. Our workforce tells us they want stability, they want peace, and they want to work. Our communities, La Libertad and El Limon, likewise stand with us. They recognize that they have a history of mining. Mining forms a significant part of the economy in the local areas, and their future lies with mining as well. I'm glad to see the button goes back also. In La Libertad, we have more than 1,500 employees, and that's a combination of direct employees and contractors. Our direct employees manage the mine services operations and operate the process plant.
Our contractors work for our mine surface contractor and are responsible for earth-moving operations. It's a unionized operation. We have a history of excellent labor relations. We have never lost a day in almost 10 years to a labor dispute, and we're recognized and awarded in Nicaragua for our leadership in industrial safety. Way back in 2009, B2Gold recognized the potential of the La Libertad concession. It's well mineralized, and with the addition of a conventional processing plant, we could increase the recovery and look towards a successful mine. Since the start of the operation of that process plant in 2010, we've produced more than 960,000 ounces. Really wants to run away on me. In the center of the screen, I recall a question, fielding a question in the second quarter about our production forecast for the year.
At that time, we recognized the potential for Jabali Antena moving back as we saw a delay in our permit for Jabali Antena . At that time, we thought that we could drive our other pits faster, eliminate or reduce the component of spent ore, and still achieve guidance for the year. By the third quarter, we recognized the impact of the social disruption on our production, our productivity, and our scheduling of pits. With that, we re-guided to between 90,000-95,000 ounces. At the bottom of the screen, we see the impact on our cash operating cost increasing. What isn't shown on the graph are the efforts on the cost control side that have been done by the staff at La Libertad. Mining costs have been reduced a whopping 25%, and our processing costs have been reduced 9%.
All-in sustaining pretty much tracks as forecast, we get there a little different way. Less gold produced, offset by reduced investment in Jabali Antena development. Exploration continues in La Libertad with a budget of about $5 million this year. Our proven reserves and our resources total right now 290,000 ounces, and that's the biggest single challenge ahead of La Libertad in its future. Perhaps Thomas will have some comments about that for us. This is a synopsis for 2018 showing our guidance, 90,000-100,000 ounces. To shortcut one question, first quarter, 92.2% related to lower grade and some carbon issues. Plant's running very well. We're averaging over 94.5% recovery in these recent months, this shows pretty well typical throughput at 2.2 million tons per year, just over that.
Grade, as a result of the changes forced in our pit sequences, is low at 1.3 against a budget of 1.67. Looking forward to 2019, my first note is that 125,000 to 135,000 ounces is the guidance that comes from our life of mine. We are currently working the budget scenarios. We do not anticipate to achieve that life of mine guidance. We instead state that our guidance will be in the range of 105,000 to 115,000 ounces for the year. Throughput remains unchanged, 2.2 million tons per year, and we will be operating from 5 material sources throughout the year. That includes San Diego pit, which we will finish off midway through the year, San Juan, Jabali underground, spent ore, and spent ore will average about 0.7 grams per ton.
For those of you unfamiliar with the operation, that is a remnant of a prior heap leach operation, and we use it to complement our mill feed from other sources. Finally, midway through the year, we are anticipating that Jabali Antena will come on stream. We continue to invest carefully in La Libertad and judiciously. This year, we will do a raise on our tailings structure. That will provide capacity for just over two years. We point out here that given our resource and reserve statement, if we use that material only, we will exhaust that supply early in 2020. Other capital expenditures for the year include dewatering and ventilation for Jabali underground and development for Jabali Antena pit.
That would be land and development costs. I wanted to talk a bit about operations, and I also wanted to talk briefly about the social disruption that we experienced in Nicaragua, the problems that occurred, and how we resolved those issues as well. The first 3 bullets really speak to supply chain interruption. Most particularly on diesel, but other consumables as well, such as lime, that require a constant flow to the mine. Customs shut down, and that impeded importation of our spare parts for our mobile fleet, and that impeded the mechanical availability, in turn, generating a downstream effect on our maintenance, which affected our mechanical availability throughout the remaining three-quarters of the year. Manning issues, again, related to blockades that were posted throughout the country, impeded movement for our mine contractor as well. Access to Santo Domingo township was impeded. As a consequence, the underground mine flooded.
Since the lifting of the blockades, we have been focused on dewatering and now rehabilitating that mine. We anticipate the rehabilitation will be complete in early December, and we are anticipating development and production in the final month of this year. Other delay, with the impediment of accessing Santo Domingo, we were unable to continue our dialogue with the miners who are part of the relocation package that is at Jabali Antenna. That fell by the wayside and clearly MARENA, which is the Ministry of Environment, was focused on other political issues through that period as well. That activity got deferred. We have recently reinitiated our dialogue with the small miners, and that is advancing very well. We have garnered support of the town, and they will declare their support.
The local municipality will declare their support for the project at Jabali Antenna, we've had good indications in our recent conversations with MARENA that they will support going to a public consult once we demonstrate significant conclusion of the relocation agreements with the small miners. Lifting of the blockade obviously solved our supply issue, but there were some downstream effects, of course, related to that. Maintenance issues and the mechanical availability issues that sprung from that were addressed with our contractor by adding to his fleet and improving the supply chain and warehousing of spare parts. As I said, we've reinitiated communication with Santo Domingo, and we look to move forward with the permitting of Jabali Antenna. Finally, as I indicated, we've resolved the issues of water control in Jabali underground, and we're looking forward to producing there shortly.
It forms part of our 2009 production portfolio. Limon Mine. This is a really interesting story. This is a mine that since 1941 has existed on two to three years of reserves, it wasn't until the announcement of Limon Central that we had a good, healthy, long life ahead of this operation. Really out of that, we gained the opportunity to justify some investments and some optimization of the process plant in El Limon. This really affords us an opportunity to improve performance in El Limon and to enjoy the benefits of a longer mine life. I probably called it Havili, didn't I? Thanks. Okay. Just over 1,100 employees, unionized. Direct employees operate the underground mine and run the process plant. Our contractors, similar to La Libertad, are responsible for earthmoving. Unionized operation. Similar in case in El Limon, we had some challenges in 2018.
I'll talk about those in a minute. That resulted in a change of guidance in the third quarter to 50,000-55,000 ounces, and we can see the impact in the cash operating costs increasing and, likewise, the all-in sustaining cost increasing with the smaller divisor for gold. In addition to that, of course, we started looking for additional capital and applying additional capital, looking to develop Limon Central, so land purchase, development of infrastructure, and development of the pit area in 2019. Exploration continues, of course, in El Limon. This has been a good project for us and for exploration. We currently carry reserve and resource 490,000 ounces. That, of course, is increasing, and with the model update, we'll see those numbers improve. 2018 completion. We see the effects of impediment of about 33 days in our operations resulting from the barricades.
449,000 tons processed, typically, we would accept 500,000 for the year. Without those impediments, we clearly would have been on track to complete the year at or ahead of budget. 3.6 grams. We see there a range of 3.5-4 grams typically year by year. Again, our guidance, 50,000-55,000 ounces. Looking into 2019, again, this is the guidance from the life of mine. We expect our production in 2019, as we bring Limon Central into production, to come just under that 60,000-ounce mark. Throughput will remain at 500,000 tons per year, in the first quarter of this year, we'll finalize our optimization study and look at scenarios that can increase that plant capacity. We've looked at a number of scenarios. The most attractive one that we see right now is 600,000 tons per year.
Sourcing for ore at El Limon will include the remains of the Mercedes pit that will finish early in 2019, by the second quarter, we'll be bringing Limón Central on stream. All our operations there, all our pits are permitted, the other activity that we'll see through 2019 is the development of Veta Nueva, anticipating that production will come in 2020 from that operation. We do have a high strip ratio next year as we break open Limón Central pit, 10.5 million tons. That commences with phase 1 through to the mid-year, that provides a good source of ore. Beyond that, we move to phase 2 for the remainder of the year. Our tailings expansion was completed last year, no major investment there. The major capital expense, of course, will be on pre-stripping.
We also have in place a $2 million program to improve some of the processes in our process plant. Bill referred to that briefly. Those have initiated now, they'll continue through to the second quarter of next year. 2018, again, some of the same or similar issues that we faced in La Libertad with some local twists. We had two series of roadblocks. One was locally instituted, the second was at the national level. The one at the local level actually paralyzed our operation for 33 days. At the national level, that eventually was disbanded through the third quarter of the year. That affected our ability to plan and develop as we intended. In addition, stoppage of the issuance of explosive permits caused us to focus on production only rather than development in our underground operation.
We're through that, as of last month, we're basically on track and on budget, as we would expect. We plan on fulfilling our commitment of 50,000 to 55,000 ounces. For Jabali, for Limón Central, one of the challenges in the year was that with the social disturbance, the process of pit permit was delayed. Now, two reasons for that. One, we're not going to hold a public consultation in the middle of a social conflict. For that reason, was delayed. Of course, MARENA was focused on other issues. We do have that permit at hand. It was delivered in October of this year. I don't know if there are any social scientists here. I have a really interesting story about how we resolved the issue of the local roadblocks. After our meeting, I'm happy to go over that with anybody.
It's quite an interesting story how we involved shareholders and empowered the community to help us resolve this issue. Roadblocks at the national level resolved themselves eventually through July. I would say, and it did impact our costs, that we continued to support our workers through that 33 days of production interruption. That had a positive side effect, though. It created a very positive work ambient in the operation. In that atmosphere, we were able to complete the negotiations of our collective agreement, which extends out to 2020. As we waited for our permit for Limón Central, we fast-tracked some of the development for dump areas and for roadwork. We continue to work on track, we've adjusted our pit development sequence in 2019 to accommodate those delays.
Here quickly is a summary of where we got to with the improvements in the future of El Limon. In the upper row is Limon Central. Numbers are slightly different in our press release, 512,000 ounces. Really what we see here is the extension of our production out another 10 years and the opportunity to optimize our facilities. Below that, we've completed a study for reprocessing historic tailings. Mines historically in this area, Talavera, were producing at 14 or 15 grams per ton. Their leftovers are certainly adequate for us to process 7.3 million tons, 1.12 grams per ton. These will be processed at the end of our operating life at a rate of about 18,000 ounces per year. Out of that, we look at two of those, and we've extended our operations out one more generation in Limon.
Just quickly, the yellow line outlines the Limon Central area, and the blue line inside the large yellow circle basically delineates our phase 1 and phase 2 operations to the northeast, our existing tailings facility, and to the east are our future dump areas. When we understood the impact of Limon Central, we went out and proactively secured land for dump area. We also secured land for an additional tailings pond. We're well-organized in our future purchases for land, and those are already in place. For that blue circle, if you look at the lower left corner, you can see the line makes a jog. That jog cuts directly through our ROM stockpile, we could not have found anything closer to our process facilities to process. It's a great game changer for us at Limon. No drilling closer to the crusher, please, Tom.
Just off-site, on this plan view to the northeast is Santa Pancha, to the southwest, Veta Nueva, and directly to the south would be the location of our future tailings pond. We talked about 2019 and looking through the results of our study. This graphic shows the scenario for 600,000 tons per year fine grind. One of the things that we observe when we look at the metallurgy for Limon Central, recovery is a little lower by grinding to 35 microns. We improve our grind, and we can get these back up into the 91%-94% level where we're accustomed. That includes revamping our crusher, adding a pebble crusher, adding cyclone pack, adding a Vertimill, and adding a pre-leach thickener in this scenario. As I said, we've run through a number of scenarios. This is the 600,000 ton.
This one would involve an investment of $35 million, about 16 months to implement, and we're looking to finalize the study and then make the decision. That's it for the update for Nicaragua, and I would call on Tom Garagan.
Thanks, Dale. Just a map of Nicaragua showing La Libertad and El Limon. I'm sure you all have seen this map already. I just wanted to put this map up. This is the location of the Central discovery, and it just goes to prove the old adage, the best place to find a mine is between two tailings deposits and next to the mill. This is not something I recommend for the future. Certainly not something we teach young geologists. This long section, I wanted to show this and talk about it a little bit more. This is the long section through Central and the extensions of Central to the north. You can see when you look at this long section, the red line's a $1,400 pit.
When you look at the drilling that we've done this year within this area, you can see that there are several holes near the bottom of the pit or well below the proposed pits with really good grades. You look below Tigre, Chaparral, you've got six meters of 16 grams. You look to the north, you've got almost 14 meters of 6.7 grams, three meters of 35 grams. What this is meant to show is the resources that we've shown so far within a pit at El Limon Central are, in my view, a starting point for this project. It looks like it's got pretty good legs for a future underground mine, and certainly exploration drilling that we've done to the north has picked up some more mineralization. I think the current resources for Central will grow. Not under the mill, though.
It does dip away from the mill, just so you're aware. We look at just a slide for La Libertad. As Dale says, we're down to not a lot of time left in our current resources and reserves for La Libertad. However, we've been fairly successful with exploration this year. You look at the bottom left-hand side of this map, you can see several areas. Rosario, Cosmotil, San Antonio have all had significantly good intersections over good widths, things that we think are going to be open pitable. We don't know the size of them yet, but they are of the grade and widths that can support an open pit. Exploration is going to continue on these next year, but I'm pretty sure that Dale and I will be talking in the next three or four months about possibly getting some of these permitted into the mine plan.
There is potential to still extend the current mine life of La Libertad. We haven't made another major discovery as the size of Jabali Antenna, but something like Rosario and west of Rosario does have that potential. With that's just a short summary of exploration for Nicaragua. I thank you very much, and we'll open up, I guess, for questions on Nicaragua.
Thanks, Tom. Are there any questions for the Nicaragua panel?
Well, as I said, we're well ahead of schedule. I just wanted to point out to the people on the webcast, if you have a question, there's many people on the webcast. If they have questions, please contact me in the Investor Day section of our site. My contact information is there. I'm going to now pass it over back to Clive Johnson for some closing remarks.
Thanks, Ian, Thanks everyone. I'd like to thank all the guys for the great presentations. I also wanted to recognize a few other people, then maybe I'll make a few remarks about just summarizing on what we've talked about a little bit and looking forward. I want to introduce you to Dana Rogers. Where's Dana? Dana's just recently been promoted to Vice President of Finance with B2Gold. She's been with us for over four years, and her previous title, she was the group financial controller. So welcome, Dana. We're excited to have her in this new position. I'd also like to introduce to Robin Weisman. Where's Robin? There's Robin over there. Robin has just recently joined us. Most recent addition as a director of the company. We go way back with Robin.
Robin had a very successful long career at the IFC, was responsible for helping to finance mines around the world, including the Julietta mine that Bema built in the far east of Russia, 1998, 1999. Robin was very instrumental in helping us getting that financed and also the Kupol mine in Russia. That's how long ago we met Robin, We were thrilled to have her as she took retirement from the IFC to agree to join our board, a tremendous experience, She's a great addition to the board. I'll remind you that in 1998, 1999, when we built the Julietta mine, gold was $260 an ounce, not $1,260 an ounce. It was quite a challenge. Thanks, Robin, and welcome. I also want to get Roger Richer to stand up. Roger? Roger's our in-house counsel and policy wonk and Vice President and a longtime colleague of mine.
Actually, Roger and Tom and I go back to the early 1980s in the Yukon. I know what you're thinking, I must have been 13. I was actually 16. Roger was 20, I think. We go way back for a long time. Roger's been with me and with Roger and Tom and I and others for many adventures all around the world. He's our policy expert, so if you have questions over a glass of wine, I'm sure Roger would love to answer your policy questions. Also, Neil Reeder. Where's Neil? There is Neil on the right. Neil, some of you probably heard from Neil or about Neil. Neil has recently joined us a couple of years ago as the Vice President of Government Relations. Neil, we go quite a ways back with Neil as well.
Neil worked as a Canadian ambassador in many countries around the world. In fact, he was the ambassador in Nicaragua when we first went to Nicaragua. Then we went to the Philippines, and guess who was the Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines was Neil. I asked him if he was following us around the world or if we were following him. He retired, and I was thrilled to have Neil agree to join us. He's been an excellent addition to our executive team and is just a wealth of knowledge in all these countries around the world and has access to tremendous data from his contacts, not just with Canadian ambassadors, but other ambassadors in all these countries around the world. When you are dealing with political risks as we are, it's wonderful to have Neil there and give us some great input.
He's a great diplomat, and he's making me a bit more of a diplomat over time. Just to wrap it all up, I guess, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it's come across what a remarkably experienced team we have. I mentioned the 250 years before, listening to all this today, I'm extremely proud of what we've been able to accomplish, and all of you should be as well. It has been quite remarkable, and it's not, as I said earlier, not just what we've done, it's the way we've done it, putting people first. We're very proud of that. Years ago, it was Bill Lytle who came up with the expression, "This is not your grandfather's mining company." It's clearly not. It's a lot better than that.
One thing I realized we didn't really mention or didn't highlight was the mine life of these projects. With Fekola, even in expanded form, it's going to be 10 years, we expect, plus. The Masbate mine has eight-year mine life at around 200,000 ounces a year in hard rock mining, and then another nine years of mining tailings Sorry, low-grade stockpiles, which would mean another nine years at about 100,000 ounces a year. That's barring any exploration success, we might see the eight years increase as well. At Otjikoto, we have a nine-year mine life there as well, and as Tom pointed out, it's open to potentially expansion and going underground as well in the future. Solid mine lives, and Limon is smaller, but Limon, as you just heard, has a new 10-year mine life.
The La Libertad remains one of our mines that is sort of life-challenged at the moment, but hopefully we will see exploration success there. Looking forward, we are going to continue to do, as I said earlier, what we have done very well, to grow and focus growth organically whilst always keeping an eye out for opportunities that make sense to add to our portfolio or things that we can work on and build. I am pretty excited about the potential. It is early and there is more work to be done, but what we are seeing and hearing about the potential of Gramalote becoming potentially a good project for AngloGold Ashanti and ourselves. I would say one of the things we aspire to in the future is to continue, of course, to be a growth company, but also be a growth company that pays a dividend. It is really one of our goals.
I think that can be done, and that is something we will aspire to and continue to aspire to. You are not going to see it next year unless gold makes a dramatic move. I think over the next 2 or 3 years, that is where we would like to see ourselves, taking some of the hard-earned cash flow and using some of it for expanding mines or building mines, but also using some of it as a way to reward our shareholders and give back by way of a dividend. We are not going to pay some marginal dividend just so we say that we are paying a dividend. We will not do that. When we can pay a reasonable dividend but still allow the ability to keep growing this company, we will be looking hard at that. With that, I will wrap it up and thank you all very much.
You can probably tell we are pretty excited about where we sit in the world. Obviously, it has been a really tough time and another really tough year for the sector. We refuse to be victims, even though the market struggles to reflect the value of what we built. At the end of the day, we understand it is not because of what we have done, it is sadly because of the failing of others. At the end of the day, I really hope this industry gets its act together and continues to improve. We do not take any satisfaction in the failing of others, but we do believe in accountability. If half the gold companies had performed as well as us, the market would not be treating us the way the market is today. At the end of the day, value will be rewarded. We firmly believe that.
We have taken to telling ourselves recently that flat is the new up for gold equities. I am still confident that the market is going to reflect the value of what we have built, but also the value of what we bring in the very near term when you look at exciting things like the Fekola expansion and potential on all the various exciting projects we have that we are working on. Thank you all very much for your time. Across the hall here, we are going to have beverages served. If you would care to join us for that on the webcast, head to your fridge, grab a beverage, and thank you very much for joining us. Cheers.
Yeah, as Clive said, we are ahead of schedule, but we've accelerated the cocktail reception time, so it's just across the hall again in the refreshments section. Please join us. Everybody from our staff will be around if you weren't able to ask a question or had something you wanted to elaborate on. We look forward to that. Thank you very much for coming, and thank you everyone on the webcast for participating in our Investor Day today.
I just want to say thanks to Ian for a great job and the other people who organized this. Thank you very much.