Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Bob Cross, and it's my pleasure to welcome you and to call to order the 2018 Annual General and Special Meeting of the shareholders of B2Gold Corp. I will act as Chairman of this meeting, and I appoint Roger Richer to my left, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of the company, to act as recording secretary of this meeting, and Anita Basi of Computershare Investor Services Inc. to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are my fellow Directors, Clive Johnson, President, CEO of B2Gold, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, and Robin Weisman.
The other officers of the company with us today include Mike Cinnamond, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer, Roger Richer, which I've introduced, Tom Garagan, Senior VP of Exploration, Dennis Stansbury, Senior VP of Engineering and Project Evaluations, William Lytle, Senior VP Operations, Ian MacLean, VP of Investor Relations, Dale Craig, VP Operations, Ed Bartz, VP Taxation and External Reporting, Brian Scott, VP Geology and Technical Services, Hugh McKinnon, VP Geology, and John Rajala, VP Metallurgy. Now for the business of the meeting. Notice of this meeting was filed, a notice calling this meeting of shareholders, together with the management information circular and proxy form, was mailed to the shareholders on May 18th, 2018. I have received a declaration attesting to the publication and mailing, and the recording secretary will annex the declaration to the minutes of this meeting.
These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder. I propose that we waive reading the notice of meeting unless anyone specifically requests that it be read at this time. The recording secretary has notified me that the scrutineer's report is complete and that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting to be properly constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. Before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I would like to remind everyone that only registered shareholders or proxy holders can move motions, ask questions, make comments, or vote. I propose that we deal first with all of the routine business requirements of this meeting and then terminate the formal meeting.
After the formal meeting, there'll be a full presentation by the senior executives of the company, and I would ask that any questions pertaining to operations or financials wait until that time. Also, the execs will be available after, during the social time for questions and discussion. I propose to conduct a vote on the resolution setting the number of Directors and appointing and fixing the remuneration of the auditor by show of hands, unless a ballot is demanded or directed on a particular item of business. On a vote by a show of hands, please hold up your card. A ballot will be taken on the resolutions to elect Directors to approve the company's incentive stock option plan and to approve the restricted share unit plan.
I understand that each registered shareholder and proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting received a ballot at the time of registration. The first item of business is a presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31st, 2017, and the auditor's report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Business Corporations Act. The financial statements were mailed to the shareholders on May 2nd, 2018, and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. A representative of the auditor is here today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for the auditor, Ken Scott of PricewaterhouseCoopers Chartered Accountants is available to respond. The next item of business is to set the number of directors of the company. Is there any discussion on the motion?
May I have a vote on the matter by a show of hands? All those in favor? Any against? Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the election of directors for the ensuing year. The persons who are proposed by management for election are listed in the management information circular. All of them have indicated their willingness to serve as directors for the ensuing year. In accordance with the company's advance notice policy, nominations for directors other than those proposed by management must have been given to the secretary of the company by May 8th, 2018. As no such nominations were received, management's nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have the nominations for management's proposed directors?
I would ask for a motion that the eight persons nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next annual general meeting of shareholders, or until their successors are elected or appointed. In accordance with the company's majority voting policy, I direct that a poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in writing. Ballots were handed out to registered shareholders and proxy holders when they registered for the meeting. If you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, it is not necessary to complete a ballot. Registered shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make an X or other mark in a square associated with the word "for" or the word "withhold" and sign the ballot.
Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated, and record the number of shares that you are entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more ballots to be collected? I declare the balloting closed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. The scrutineer has advised the recording secretary that a majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated. Therefore, I declare that the eight persons nominated have been elected as directors of the company. The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers Chartered Accountants. Management proposes that it be reappointed until the next annual general meeting.
May I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and that the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor? Is there any discussion on the motion? May I have a vote on the matter by a show of hands, please? All those in favor? Any opposed? Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution approving certain matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan, including the grant of stock options. A summary of the amended incentive stock option plan, including the grant of stock options and the proposed form of resolution, are set out on pages seven through 10 of the management information circular. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving matters relating to the company's stock option plan and the grant of stock options.
To take effect, the resolution approving the matters relating to the company's stock option plan must be approved by a majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy. May I have a motion to approve the matters relating to the company's stock option plan and grant of stock options in the form of the resolution set out on page 10 of the management information circular? Is there any discussion with respect to this resolution? If there is no further discussion, I direct that a poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in writing. Ballot papers were handed out to registered shareholders and proxy nominees when you registered for the meeting. If you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, it is not necessary to complete a ballot.
As mentioned, shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make a check mark in the square associated with the word "for" or the word "against" and sign the ballot. Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated, and record the number of shares that you are entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more ballots to be collected? I declare the balloting closed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. While we wait for the scrutineer's report, we will proceed to the next item of business. The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution approving certain amendments to the restricted share unit plan of the company.
A summary of the amended restricted share unit plan and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 10 through 12 of the management information circular. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving the amended restricted share unit plan. To take effect, the resolution approving the amended restricted share unit plan must be approved by a majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy. May I have a motion to approve the amended restricted share unit plan in the form of the resolution set out on page 12 of the management information circular? Is there any discussion with respect to this resolution?
If there's no further discussion, I direct that a poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in writing. Ballot papers were handed out to registered shareholders and proxy nominees when you registered for the meeting. As stated previously, if you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, it is not necessary to complete a ballot. Once again, shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make a check mark in the square associated with the word "for" or the word "against," and sign the ballot. Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated, and record the number of shares that you are entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any more ballots to be collected?
I declare the balloting closed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they're ready to report. I now have the report of the scrutineer on the ballots taken on the resolution to approve matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan, and the grant of stock options, and the resolution to approve amendments to the restricted share unit plan. I declare that the resolution to approve certain matters relating to the company's incentive stock option plan and the grant of stock options has been carried, and the resolution to approve amendments to the restricted share unit plan has also been carried. I direct the recording secretary to attach the report of the scrutineer to the minutes of the meeting. I'd like to note that we had 80% of our shareholders engaged in the voting process, which is terrific.
All of the business for which this meeting was called have been completed. Following the termination of this formal part of the meeting, registered shareholders and proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments will be invited to do so. I would just suggest we wait till the corporate presentations occur and then feel free to ask questions to the executives. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting? May I have a vote on the matter by a show of hands? All those in favor? Against? Thank you. I declare that motion carried and the formal part of this meeting is now terminated. I'd like to introduce Clive Johnson at this moment, CEO, to begin the presentation. Bob.
I'd like to start by thanking you all for coming out today and also welcoming people that are listening and watching on the webcast. This presentation you're about to see is going to be shown. It'll be on our website early next week. First of all, I'd like to thank our Board of Directors, our chairman, Bob Cross, and our Board of Directors for their tremendous support of the vision of the company. They're a very experienced, diverse board and they lend a lot of guidance to us, but they've been very supportive when there's certain times we've done a few things that some might have considered a little contrarian. Appreciate their support. To our shareholders, Bob mentioned 80% of the shares were voted. That's quite a remarkable number. That's very unusual.
We very much believe in accountability, and it's nice to see that response from our shareholders having their voice and also so supportive. We do, as a public company, work for our shareholders. Bob introduced, I mentioned the executive group that you see up here. Earlier today, I was thinking about, is there a secret sauce given our rather remarkable success? I'm sorry, this is a cautionary statement. This is the legal cover your ass slide. What this means in great detail is that if certain things are going to be said here are going to be forward-looking and therefore may be subject to change. Good read if you're an insomniac every day. When you look up here and look at this group of distinguished gentlemen, I decided to think about what is the secret sauce.
Is there a secret sauce that has made B2Gold the fastest growing gold producer in the world over the last 10 years and got us to where we are today? It's about a couple of things. I think it's about culture. We're very proud of our culture of fairness, respect, transparency, and accountability. Big words, we try to live them every day everywhere around the world. This group is quite remarkably experienced. Just to give you some indication. This is between B2 and Bema Gold, predecessor company, some of the years of experience working together. Roger Richer, 32. Bill Lytle, 17. Tom Garagan, 32. Clive, 40. Dennis Stansbury, 24. Ian MacLean, 18. Dale Craig, 10. Hugh McKinnon, 20. Brian Scott, 25. Neil Reeder, a newbie at 1.5. Mike Cinnamond, relative newbie at five years. Ed Bartz, 22. John Rajala, 11.
For a total experience time of working together of 258.5 years. Some of them are actually older than they look. A few the other way. Maybe not so much. If you add to that the people at the B2Gold office here in Vancouver that have been with B2, and many of them with Bema back in the day, you can add probably, I would say, another 80 years of experience of working together. If you look around the world at the mine sites and offices around the world and our construction team, long-term site management and staff, you can add another 100 years to that. At the end of the day, it's about experience, it's about people, and it's about the culture, we try to extend that culture to our over 5,000 employees around the world.
This slide, some of you have seen before, it's really rather remarkable in terms of the pace of growth we've seen over 10 years, dramatic growth. To me, this is pretty remarkable in what we've been able to do in four different countries and five different mines around the world. To me, when I stop and think about it, one of the remarkable things is, in addition to this rapid growth rate, is the way we've done it. I believe we've done this setting the highest standards for ourselves of safety, corporate social responsibility, and treating our employees, as I mentioned in our culture, about with fairness, respect, and transparency. You're going to hear today from, in addition to myself, Bill Lytle is going to get up, our Senior VP, Operations, and talk about an overview of our operations.
You're going to hear from some of our country managers about the remarkable CSR programs, corporate social responsibility programs, that we do around the world. This slide, pretty self-evident, but at the end of the day, we now see ourselves at approaching 1 million ounces of gold production a year from the various mines. This has, as I said, been a period of rapid growth, but this year, the challenge I've made to all of our employees is let's make sure we're the best we can be. Let's continue to improve on these very high standards we've set in terms of safety, corporate social responsibility, and the way we treat people around the world. When I stop and think about it, there are areas we can improve, but we're pretty damn good at everything we've done.
To me, to be able to keep those standards at this rapid growth rate is quite remarkable, because some would think that when you're in a growth period, you might think, well, there's certain things we'll catch up on later because we're so busy growing. We've always maintained the standards, which I'm extremely proud of. Bill's going to talk more in detail about this, but what you've seen is a drop in operating costs and all sustaining costs as we've gone through, especially over the last few years as we brought on the Otjikoto mine and then the Fekola mine most recently. Just a few highlights from 2017. We did have record annual gold production for the ninth year in a row. That's 630,000 ounces of gold, well above the upper end of our original guidance of 545,000-595,000 ounces for the year.
Annual consolidated revenue of $638 million, which is another record. Obviously a major event this year was the commencement of production, completion of construction at the Fekola mine in Mali, and Bill will talk about that. That's an unusual, unfortunately, occurrence in the industry lately, a gold mine coming on not only on schedule, but actually 3 months ahead of schedule. One of the things about accountability is that we build our own mines. In fact, we do as much as we can ourselves. That is part of our drive and continued belief in accountability. Bill will talk in a little more detail about this remarkable construction accomplishment in Fekola. It's a great project. You're going to hear from Tom Garagan, who's going to talk about some of the exploration upside potential that we see. The operating costs at Fekola are very low as well.
They were $277 an ounce in the fourth quarter of 2017 operating costs, and $419 all-in sustaining costs. That's well below what we'd expected. When you start up a mine, as we did here September of last year, you normally anticipate at least 3 months to ramp up the mine to full capacity as you adjust the mills, the conveyors and all the other things. We projected about 55,000 ounces of gold production from Fekola in the fourth quarter of 2017. In fact, we produced 113,000 ounces in that startup ramp-up quarter. Our costs, we'd projected them to be around $550 an ounce because it was the ramp-up. In fact, as I said, they came in about half of that.
A rather remarkable job done by our construction team, which you'll hear more about, and this is the fifth mine they've built between the mines they built for Bema Gold and for B2Gold. Our full year consolidated production, as I mentioned, of 630,000 ounces, and that came with consolidated operating costs of $542 an ounce. All-in-sustaining costs, that was well below our guidance of 610-650 ounces. We also maintained a very strong financial position in the company, and I think one of the great accomplishments over the last few years was the ability to finance the Fekola mine without issuing any more shares of the company.
We did that with a combination of our cash flow from operations, and the success of Fekola is a direct result of the success of our other mines providing cash from operations that we could use to build Fekola and combining that with a $250 million revolving credit facility from a great group of international banks that became a $350 million revolving credit facility. It became a $500 million revolving credit facility. Tremendous support from the banks, which we really appreciate, and all of the players that enable us to get to the point and to fund with no equity issuance, which is quite something. The reason for that support is because we went through some pretty tough markets over the last few years when we were doing something that was really uncommon and contrarian. We were growing.
Most other mining companies, unfortunately, weren't growing during the time, partly because of such an unfortunately poor job of, in many cases of construction. Investors lost faith in the ability of gold mining companies to grow. We're one of the exceptions to the rule. In addition to that, we continued to advance our exploration and development projects. You're going to hear more about that as well. The focus for this year, as I said, is to be the best we can be. Now we are not building another mine at the moment. We're not going to be in the game of mergers and acquisitions for a while. We did the heavy lifting and acquired the mines accretively when very few were acquiring projects.
This is hard to believe, the Fekola mine, we acquired it for half a billion dollars worth of our shares as an accretive deal for what was in the ground. There was no competition in one of the well-known gold belts in the world, in southwest Mali. It was very important to be able to do that and not to dilute our shareholders in the process. For now, the continued growth of the company is going to be based on what's in our pipeline. Why go out and acquire another mine to build when we believe within the pipeline of projects we have, we have tremendous potential to expand our mines, to increase them with exploration success, and ultimately expansion and also making additional new discoveries? Let's find out what's in the pipeline.
We're not going to play the M&A game, as I mentioned, partly because it's gotten more competitive. Many analysts, and I think they're right, think that if the Fekola mine, it was owned by Papillon Resources out of Australia when we did a friendly takeover, a lot of people believe that if that mine was as it was three years ago, with a great feasibility study, great economics, a mining permit in hand, in a very good part of the world to be in gold mining, with a belt of eight gold mines, a lot of people believe, as I do, that the bidding today would probably start at $1 billion. We wouldn't be competing at that level. We were able to acquire Fekola and the other projects, and the rules are very strict and very strong about what we do.
We will not acquire any project that needs a higher gold price and/or exploration success to justify the purchase price. When I say that, I always expect some of you to say, "Well, duh, doesn't everybody do that?" Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, that hasn't been a case. We don't want to be relying on gold going up or finding more gold to justify the purchase price. We don't want people to feel they buy our shares because they think gold might go up or we're going to make a major new discovery. We are one of the few gold mining companies that can appeal to generalist funds, growth funds, not just to gold investment funds. At the end of the day, we are a cash flow machine now, and we've demonstrated the ability to grow irrespective of the gold price.
That's an area that for us will be a focus to tell our story, not just to investors who believe that gold's going higher or want gold exposure, but actually people that just want to buy a very well-run company with great cash flow and the ability to continue to grow. 2018, let's talk about some of the highlights so far. We've had record quarterly production of 239,000 ounces for the quarter, an 81% increase over the same period of 2017. This is due to the strong performance, of course, of the new Fekola mine and also, very importantly, the Masbate mine in the Philippines and the Otjikoto mine in Namibia. Record quarterly consolidated gold revenue of $344 million, 135% increase over the same period last year. The Fekola mine continued to operate above plan since achieving commercial production in November 30th, 2017.
We produced in the first quarter 114,000 ounces of gold, 11% above our budget. Consolidated Q1 cash operating costs of $481 an ounce, well below budget by $67 an ounce and $83 an ounce lower than the prior year quarter. Consolidated all-in sustaining costs of $750 an ounce, significantly below our budget of $147, 16%. Lower and $139 an ounce lower than the prior year quarter. Consolidated cash flows from operating activities. This is a very dramatic increase from about $147 million last year, cash flow from operations being the mines. To this year and looking at averaging over the next three years, $500 million of cash from operations. As I mentioned, in 2017, we continued to advance our pipeline of development exploration projects.
That continues in 2018 with expansion coming on the Masbate mine, also we've had a dramatic new discovery at the El Limon mine in Nicaragua, which we're going to hear about as well. We ended Q1 with a very strong cash position in 2018 of $168 million. We have paid down a substantial amount of our revolving corporate facility. We now have $200 million drawn on the facility with $500 million available in that facility. We're well on track to achieve transformational growth in 2018 and meet our guidance of 910,000 to 950,000 ounces of production this year. Our projected operating costs are $505 an ounce or between $505 and $550 an ounce. This is the range. All-in sustaining costs to range between $780 and $830 an ounce. That's about a 35% increase in our annual production over last year.
The elephant in the room, what the hell is going on with the share price? When you have this kind of a dramatic increase in production and cash flow and a reduction in cost, all of it without issuing major equity financing, you would expect a re-rating in the share price. It's not the gold price, isn't the problem. The gold price has been quite stable. This graph shows you the relative performance of our shares in gold, the GDX Gold Index, and the gold price. The GDX Gold Index is the gray line represented on the slide, and the blue line is the gold price. You can see the gold price and the index have pretty much tracked.
There's been a recent disconnect in most gold producers and the current gold price, for us, it's been very dramatic in the sense of our outperformance, even though we're trading at much lower levels than many mining analysts believe we should be based on our transformation over the last several months. We still have great performance, relatively speaking. At the end of the day, there's 17 mining analysts that have an average target price for B2Gold for this year of $5.40 a share. About 15 of them have a buy or a strong buy on our shares. Why isn't the shares moving? Because there's not a lot of new money coming into gold funds. Gold is a bit out of favor at the moment, even though the price is okay.
At the end of the day, unfortunately, it's been the performance of others, sadly, that has really hurt us in the sense that we've all been in the penalty box together and we don't belong and haven't belonged in the penalty box. I believe that if we keep doing what we're doing and generate the kind of cash flow we're seeing, we'll see a re-rating. Either a lot of other gold company shares are going to come down quite a bit and we're going to go up, or maybe it's somewhere in the middle. This is a bit of an indication when I talked earlier about being contrarian. This slide here shows you the performance of B2Gold versus our peers in terms of growing production.
It's obviously a bit of a sad story on the left-hand half of the slide because many gold producers have seen their production levels drop. Rather than growing, they've actually been reducing in annual production. Of the few that have actually shown some growth, we've outpaced everyone. This is all, as I mentioned, part of being contrarian, and that is part of believing in your long-term strategy. I mentioned our long-term strategy and our focus on acquisitions and our discipline around that. This remarkable performance has clearly exceeded the rest of the industry. Despite the perception of me being direct, I must tell you that I don't take any pleasure in the failings of others. Life is not easy, and the gold mining industry definitely is not easy.
We wish everyone had similar success to us, not just because that way we'd probably be trading closer to the target price the analysts have. The industry, unfortunately, has over the last 10 or 15 years, for the most part, had two well-deserved self-afflicted black eyes, and the industry has to regain the credibility of investors. One of the reasons for our poor performance is because people stopped believing in the ability of gold mining companies to grow. I think our ability to find it, acquire it accretively, build it, operate mines extremely well, and do all of that with our responsible approach to our employees, to safety and corporate social responsibilities is one of the keys. We talked a bit about the experience of this group and of the board of directors.
The secret sauce, it's about the people, it's about experience, and it's about the culture. This is another one that's quite interesting if you look at a total shareholder return since 2010. Once again, a little depressing, because if you look from the left-hand side, I won't read out the names of the companies, but at the end of the day, if you look at, unfortunately, there's been this very negative trend. This is if you invested in any of these companies, the return you would have gotten since 2010. Once again, we don't think we're reflecting the current value of the company as many mining analysts feel as well. Even with our performance to date, we have outperformed so many companies up 134% on an investment in 2010. It's a long-term game for us.
We're clearly based on the years I read out about our executives. We're obviously in it for the long game, and we will continue to be very focused on the long term of building this company. Where do we go? I mentioned the fact that we're going to continue to look to grow, first of all, we're going to continue to optimize our gold production and therefore our cash flow from operations. I mentioned the challenge of being the best B2 we can be. That is ongoing. In addition, as part of that, we'll maintain our outstanding safety track record, which you'll hear a bit of from Bill, and our commitment to corporate social responsibility.
Our focus on growth will be by advancing, as I mentioned, our pipeline of existing projects through exploration with our remarkable team that's made a number of world-class discoveries and continues to get exploration success or have exploration success on each of the properties we've acquired. We don't pay for ounces that might be there, but in every acquisition we've done, we have found more gold, adding value to the acquisition and adding mine life and in some cases, expansion. Continued exploration of our pipeline development while developing the assets that we have and also looking to expand our projects, and you're going to hear a bit more about that as well.
In addition to that, with our tremendous exploration team, led by Tom Garagan and Hugh and Brian, we will continue to evaluate other exploration opportunities through joint ventures with high-quality exploration junior companies who unfortunately are struggling to finance because they're competing with Bitcoin and marijuana stocks. At the end of the day, though, there's some quality projects out there, and there's not a lot of exploration really going on in the world, which speaks to the lack of good projects out there today and also speaks to eventually, probably a reduction in gold being produced. A lot of people think we've seen peak gold production in the world. In addition, we'll maintain a strong cash position. We will reduce our debt. We have a convertible venture for $258 million that comes due on October 1st of this year.
It's convertible at $393, unless we see a surge in the re-rating of the company, it is likely that will not get converted. Our intention is to pay it back. We can pay back that $258 million of convertible debt through cash from operations and using part of our line, our revolving credit facility. In addition to that, we are going to be looking in the near term at starting to discuss a dividend policy. We aspire to be a company that will always continue to grow and use a portion of our cash from operations to grow the company.
We believe that we will look at a dividend policy, I'm not saying in the very near term, but over the next few months, we'll be looking at it, and then maybe in 2019 or perhaps at the end of 2019, we may be in a position to start paying a dividend to our shareholders as well. I'm going to pass it on to Bill. Before I do that, though, a few other people I would like to thank. Obviously, our 5,000 employees around the world. I do want to make a special recognition to our Nicaraguan employees. We love Nicaragua. We love the people, and unfortunately, Nicaragua has been going through quite a turbulent political time right now with, unfortunately, quite a lot of violence associated with that.
As a Canadian company, we certainly believe in and promote constructive dialogue for a peaceful resolution of the situation in Nicaragua. Our focus is to support our 3,000 direct and indirect employees and their families. They have expressed to us that they want to continue to work and maintain stability within our communities as much as possible. Our communities remain peaceful, our mines continue to operate, and our thoughts and prayers go out to all of our friends and colleagues and all the people of Nicaragua. In addition, I'd like to thank the other people that help us do what we do, the consultants, the lawyers, the auditors, insurance providers, bankers and brokers, stockbrokers that help us accomplish our goals. We couldn't do it without the support of great professional groups in those areas. With that, I think I'm going to pass it on to Bill Lytle.
Bill is our Senior VP, Operations. Bill, as I mentioned, has been with us for a long time. He was involved in both the projects for Bema in Russia, the Julietta mine, and the Kupol mine, and Bill has been rising up through the ranks. He was the country manager in Namibia during the successful construction of the Otjikoto mine, and then he moved on to be, and was promoted to Senior VP, Operations, but responsible overall for the construction of the Fekola mine and also responsible for all of our operations. George was mentored by George Johnson, who is a Director today and was a long-time Senior VP, Operations, both at Bema and B2Gold, and a lot of the engineering technical team was put together by George and Bill has done an admirable job of continuing to support the team and also grow the team as well.
I'll pass it on to Bill. You're going to hear from Tom, and I think I mentioned Tom's 32 years that we've been working together. We started working together in Yukon 32 years ago. I know what you're thinking, we were 12 and 13. Just a remarkable accomplished exploration geologist that has a phenomenal team, and their successes go way back, and they continue. Now I'll pass it on to Bill.
Bring the mic down a little. Obviously, following Clive is never an easy task. The way it normally works is it goes Clive and then Mike and then Bill and then Tom if there's something exciting. When you follow Mike, it's just a bunch of garbled numbers and record, it makes it easy to follow. Obviously, Clive's a hell of a speaker, and Tom is speaking today, that also means there's exciting stuff on the exploration side. Clive asked me to speak on behalf of the operations, and in particular Fekola. As he put it, he'd like the operations group to take a little victory lap. Certainly, my thesis today is that we have delivered time and again on every commitment that operations has made, and that we will continue to optimize and maximize what we do.
We're going to start, as I said, with Fekola. We're going to spend a little bit of extra time on Fekola than the other projects. If everyone remembers, we acquired the Fekola project in 2014. It had a permit in hand to construct. Once we had that permit, we immediately sent our construction team in to do some of the early works, to cut the road and to make an airstrip to get the camp going. At the same time, we optimized the feasibility, which was done in June of 2015. For everyone's recollection, that was at 4 million tons per annum. We started construction immediately upon approval in June 2015, with a construction period of 27 months. 27 months start to end. During that time, we actually expanded it from 4 million tons per annum to 5 million tons per annum.
During that time, we had more than 1,300 construction workers on site, moved more than 5 million cubic meters of material, fully lined a 670,000 square meter tailings facility, brought in more than 43,000 tons of material through two borders. Poured more than 35,000 cubic meters of concrete, 2,600 tons of steel, more than 58 kilometers of piping, and more than 573 tons of plate work. A major construction project. Obviously, as you can see from the slide, we ended up being three months ahead of schedule. We got to commercial production in November 2017, one month ahead of the revised schedule. Remember, we were originally talking about Q1. We actually ended up doing it in the fourth quarter of 2017.
As Clive already mentioned, coming out of the gate, an amazing 111,450 ounces of gold, which was more than double what we had predicted into the market, more than at $55,000. He already talked about the cash costs, with operating costs with something with a 2 in front of it. Pretty amazing. How did we do it? This is always asked when we go to these conferences and we talk to analysts. The question's always, "What makes you guys different?" Certainly it's the in-house team really, that is the secret. Kieran Loughran is here. He's been with us for all five of our construction projects. Richard Matson, another guy that's been with us since the early Bema days. These guys take it personally.
If you ever talk to either one of them out on a construction site, they treat it like it's their own project and their own money. Every day is fought and won, every day. They also take accountability for what they're doing. We actually had just come off of the Otjikoto project when we went to Fekola, so we literally went right from Otjikoto commissioning into Fekola construction. Before we did that, we got the whole team together, that being John Rajala, the commissioning team at Otjikoto, the engineering team, the construction team, the operating team. We actually talked about how do we make things better? The reality is visually, Otjikoto was a roaring success. Of course, there's always the little things you want to do better. Schedules you can tweak, equipment that you think you can organize better.
When we got to Fekola, we had just an amazing chance to come out of the gate and right from the start, it was amazing. John and the Lycopodium team designed a mill which was expandable right from the beginning. That's kind of a B2 trademark. Clive often talks about how maybe we're a little bit different in the sense that we're always doing exploration during construction. Of course, that was the case at Fekola. We found out early on and the construction team said, "Let's not wait until we're finished to expand. Let's go ahead and do it now." We got that approval, we did it. We've developed long-standing relationships with the government. When we come into a country, of course, we make sure that we hire professionals that have the local expertise, that are respected in country.
In this case, Mohamed Diarra, who you'll hear from in just a little bit, was brought onto the team. Early on when we met with the regulators, we explained our concepts and we gave promises, we kept those promises. I guess I'd also like to talk about very quickly before I move on, something that's not really talked about a lot in B2, but really, he deserves a lot of credit, that's how we develop and acquire properties. Certainly, you've got the exploration group that goes out, but you've also got Dennis Stansbury and his team. Dennis is really the key person that goes out and looks at these things early on and puts together the preliminary model, which makes it possible for us to actually acquire a project.
He's obviously very much integrated during the design and all the way up into construction. A very critical part of our team. The next couple slides, there's not a lot of text on that you haven't seen, that aren't in the press releases for sure. I'm going to put up the numbers, and you can look at them while I'm talking. I wanted to talk a little bit about Fekola and the operations. Obviously, it's come out of the gates like a house on fire, and that really relates to the team that we have on site and of course what we built. We hired Randy Reichert. Randy Reichert is the general manager at Fekola. We hired him way back in August 2016, a year before we were commissioning.
We felt this was going to be a good project and we want to get the right person. It actually worked out that both Kieran and Richard Matson named Randy Reichert as the only person that they wanted to work with through construction, it actually worked out very well. I don't know if you know Randy. Randy is a 30-plus year guy in the mining industry. He spent the first 10 years working with another company, Cominco, he actually came to us when we were working in Russia. He was the general manager at Julietta, and he was the general manager also at Kupol.
he went off and did some other stuff we don't want to talk about, in the end, in August 2016, he came back into the fold, he's been with us ever since, absolutely a critical aspect of our success. He brought with him his operational team, by Q1 2017, they were already up and mining. We had a great jump on the mining. As I said, I think I already said, we got commercial production on November 30th, 2017, doubling our projections for 2017. Obviously, a very strong ramp up. I do want to remind people what we are projecting out of this. Sometimes it's lost in this amazing ramp up, what this thing's going to do.
We actually created a new life of mine last year, where we had 400,000 ounces per year for the first three years with an operating cost of about $360 an ounce. Our seven-year projection, 374,000 ounces per year at $391. Of course, the 10-year life of mine, 345,000 ounces at $428. This thing is absolutely a beast. The other thing I'd like to recognize to everybody, is that we had these internal meetings this week, these engineering meetings, we asked all of the GMs to come in and present. Remember, this thing, first gold poured in September 2017. We're over 300,000 ounces already. We're halfway through 2018. We're talking about 300,000 ounces already.
Another fascinating or wonderful statistic, 80% of the people that we hired for construction, that's 80% of the people that were hired in Mali, local people that had never worked in an industrial environment, they've now been transferred across into operations. People that have never worked with mechanized equipment are now running our mine in Mali. With that being said, we've gone more than two years without an LTI there. A phenomenal statistic and a true credit to the team that's on site. The last thing on Fekola, a spoiler alert, I know Tom's going to talk about Fekola. Clive's already been asking us, how would we expand this? How would we make it bigger? We've got the group, John Rajala and Peter Montano, already looking at what if scenarios. Can this thing get bigger? Can we do more with it?
Tom's going to talk about if there's the potential to actually do that. Masbate. In Masbate, I'm going to start just by introducing a couple people that aren't going to speak today, but obviously critical to our operations there. I'm going to start with Cris Acosta. Cris Acosta is the President in the Makati office. He's the Country Manager and President of Filminera Resources Corporation, which is a subsidiary of B2. He actually has been with the company and the project for over 10 years. Cris, in case you didn't guess, have never talked to Cris, extremely bright guy, graduate of the U.S. West Point Academy, Fulbright Scholar to Cornell and MIT. Be careful when you're around him. Then you've got Gloria Climaco. Gloria is the Chairman of our board. Gloria joined us last year. She's been working with us for a while on government relations.
She's been on some very important boards inside of Philippines and is highly respected within the country. B2 took over operations in the Philippines in 2013. We ended up going owner mining in 2014. We upgraded the plant in 2016, and then in 2017, that being last year, we actually exceeded our production guidelines by more than 9%. That, obviously, if you remember the story, we benefited from some stockpiles that we'd accumulated in 2016, but we also benefited from some higher oxide in the Colorado pit, which basically gave us this holy trinity of milling. We had better grade, better recovery, better throughput. We also commissioned a new fleet and worked on continuous improvement. All these things have really come together, and that place is absolutely firing on all cylinders. With that, we've decided to expand that plant to 8 million tons per annum.
We believe that we will continue to see great recoveries or great ounce production there at Masbate. Once again, coming back to lost time accidents, the leader in our group is actually Masbate, more than 960 days without an LTI. I don't think there's a Tim Hortons here in Vancouver that's got those statistics. Otjikoto. Otjikoto was purchased from Auryx Gold in 2011. We completed a definitive feasibility at the end of 2012 and immediately began construction in 2013, once again, led by Kieran and Richard. We commissioned in 2015, late 2014, early 2015, basically 24 months after starting construction. If you remember, if you think back to the Fekola project, the group was already leaving at that time, and I was with that group, so we had to hire Mark Dawe. Mark Dawe is the country manager and managing director for Otjikoto.
In 2016, we had a great year. We met and exceeded our ounce profile, 2017 was even better. We had a record year. 9% above the original budget forecast. That was related a lot to Wolfshag, the zone that was defined and delineated by the exploration group in 2014-2015, and also the continuous improvements in the controls that were put on the operations. For example, I don't know if any of you know, recoveries at Otjikoto, budgeted recoveries, are 98%. We exceed that on a regular basis. We're up above 98.5%. Throughput. The throughput at Otjikoto this year by budget is 3.3 million tons, which is above what we designed, by the way. We exceed that as well. The cost consistently beat budget. We also this year commissioned a solar power plant.
Mark's going to talk a little bit about that, I'm not going to steal his thunder, but obviously it was a resounding success there at Otjikoto. I was just down there for that. Now, Libertad. Kind of echoing Clive's statement, as a Canadian company, we believe and promote the dialogue for peaceful resolutions of the situation in Nicaragua. We are, in fact, concerned and supportive of our 3,000 direct and indirect employees and their families there in Nicaragua. They have expressed to us through the managers there that they would like to continue to work and maintain stability within our communities, and they want, obviously, the communities to remain peaceful. Just so you know, our mines do continue to operate there. That's the reason. Now is when I would normally introduce the country managers and the general managers there, but they're actually not here today.
That would be Omar Vega, Andrés González, and Jorge Marin. They're dealing with the situation in Nicaragua. I'm sure everyone's aware, 2017, we did not meet budget at Libertad, and that was really a direct result of not getting some permits. We in the fourth quarter of last year rectified that after Clive and some of the management team went down and talked with some senior personnel there. They made a plan, and two of the three permits came out, that being San Juan and San Diego. As of Q1, we had opened up and those two pits were operating fully, and things are definitely moving in the right direction. The Jabali Antena permit, the one we're missing, is currently scheduled for Q3 of this year. We don't know how that's going to work out, obviously, with the situation going on in Nicaragua.
What we've done, and we actually put it out in the last press release, was we made adjustments, and certainly we do not need that permit to maintain guidance for this year. Also, I'd like to point out a positive for last year. Certainly, although we didn't make our ounces, our mining costs, our processing costs, and our G&A costs all were below budget. The only reason the costs were so high is the ounce profile versus what we had budgeted was much lower. We also at the beginning of this year signed a new union agreement, a two-year agreement, that went very peacefully and was very positive. The plant continues to operate amazingly. I'm skipping slides here. Limon. If you follow B2, we had some issues with some water and some maintenance of our underground equipment. In the middle of last year, we made some decisions.
We changed some management there. We changed the way we do maintenance there. We worked on that, and I'm happy to tell you that both of those issues have been resolved for 2018, and the underground is back on track with water controls in place. The Mercedes open pit permit was received at the end of last year, and production is ongoing there. This provides us some flexibility of ore sources in 2018. We've also commenced the development of the Veta Nueva Underground project, and that will come on stream in 2019. Labor relations remain stable there. The plant continues, once again, there's a theme here, John. The plant continues to operate well. The big news, I suppose, once again, a bit of a spoiler alert, is that Limon Central that everybody's talking about. I know that Tom's going to talk about it.
Limon Central, we have an initial inferred resource of 5.1 million tons at 4.92 grams per ton, and the drilling continues there. A real game changer there. On that area, the permitting is ongoing. The EIA has been submitted. All of the land required to build all the infrastructure that would go around that facility has been purchased. Metallurgical and engineering studies to evaluate processing expansion options are in progress. There's a very real chance that we could expand Limon. In general, I said a bunch of maybe things which you already read all about, and certainly in any press release you can find out about it, but I want you to think about really the schedule that we've done, and I just wrote it down here because for me, it's amazing. Let's jump back to 2009 when we acquired Nicaragua. Right?
In 2010, we built the Libertad, reaching commercial production. 2011, we acquire Otjikoto. 2012, we complete the feasibility. Start construction 2013. Acquire Papillon in 2013. Complete construction at the end of 2014. That's Otjikoto now. Achieve commercial production in 2015. Acquire Fekola in 2014. Complete the feasibility in June 2015. Commence construction. Complete construction in 2017. Initiate record production in 2017, and now increase that to a target range of 910,000-950,000 ounces in 2018. I would say that we have done everything that we said we'd do and then some. Looking quickly, it's easy to talk about statistical numbers as far as operations and stuff, but really, I always have confidence that the guys are going to deliver on the process side.
That's not the stuff that keeps me up at night. It's probably not the stuff that keeps the GMs up at night as well. If you look at our health and safety record, we have basically halved our Lost Time Incident Frequency Rate. We are now right there with kind of industry best, and what I'm really proud of is that we brought it down, and we're able to maintain it so far this year. On environment, we've got initiatives at every one of our operations, what I would say is best in class. I would argue that we're doing some of the best biodiversity and conservation work in the industry. Certainly, all of the GMs and country managers will talk a little bit about some of the biodiversity initiatives we have ongoing at each operation.
On the Corporate Social Responsibility side, I'll tell you this morning, I actually had an interview on the solar plant. Somebody called up and was asking about the solar plant, we were talking to him, myself and Mark Dawe. The journalist said to me, "Hey, it's really strange that mining companies are thinking about sustainability because it's a finite resource. Finite means that, obviously, it's not sustainable." I said, "We would argue with you, hopefully over a couple of beers, but we would argue with you that sustainability is not really the resource in the ground. Sustainability is what you do while you have that resource. What kind of things can you promote that makes a legacy for you?" From our side, as a company, we really focus on livelihood and public health, education, and conservation.
These are things that we do at all of our sites. Once again, the managers are going to talk a little bit about it, but it's just part of our DNA. As part of that, we've actually started, if you ever go to any of these projects and talk to the regulators, they'll start talking to you about, "That's well and good. You've got however many thousands of jobs, you're paying all your taxes, but that doesn't necessarily help us long term. We'd really like you to develop some of the spinoff economy and work with local procurement." We started an initiative in 2018 where we're going to work with all of our mines to try and identify areas where we can improve upon local procurement.
I have to say, I was actually very pleased and proud when the consultant came through and told us that, quite frankly, we're doing very well, and the mere fact that the management itself supports this and drives this is an indicator that it's important to us and that it'll succeed. This is an interesting initiative that we started actually last year. This is our sustainability report. In 2017, we decided that we were going to try and summarize all of the indicators that we do and try and show you in report format, that's in the same format as many of our peers report, just how good we are. The good thing about this report is it's not actually a rah-rah brochure. This is an actual report which talks about not only all the positive things we do, it certainly talks about areas where we can improve.
It's a single body of vetted information, and it can be used as due diligence for some of the investors and analysts, and it's a transparent look at who we are as a company. It'll be used to dialogue with all of our stakeholders, NGOs, government authorities, shareholders, and I would encourage you, I think there's actually some copies outside, so when you finish, grab a copy if you'd like. If you don't want to carry the paper home, I think we're launching it on our website either today or Monday. 2017, the report, actually, when it came to me, was a real tome of a document, a heavy document, and there's so much information in there. I asked, "Why is it so much different than 2017? Why did you guys do so much more?" The answer was simple.
As you become a million-ounce producer, you're in a different group, and in order to be in that group, you're going to have to provide more information. The report illustrates our management approach towards economics, environment, social, and human rights. The report demonstrates our performance and identifies gaps and how we actually will manage those gaps. As I said, we now have five mines, so it's important for us to get this right. Also, as part of this report, there's some human interest stories. Throughout the report, there's several very unique stories, things that are unique to B2 that we do, and we talk about how we've done them and really how we manage them. I guess with that, maybe I'll stop there.
What I want to do now is some of the key people that are on site, I'd like to bring them up here and have them tell you a little bit about CSR, and I'm going to start, as I did with the presentation with Fekola, Mohamed Diarra. Mohamed Diarra is the Country Manager of B2Gold. He's been with us since 2015. I first met him when he worked for the Ministry of Mines. He holds a Master of Science in Minerals and Energy Economics from Curtin Graduate School of Business in Perth, Australia. He also has a Bachelor of Finance from the (Florida State University in Tallahassee). From 2013 to 2015, he was a technical advisor at the Ministry of Mines, and he's obviously fluent in both English and French. With that, Mo, I'll turn it over to you for a couple of slides.
Good afternoon. Thank you, Bill, for letting me speak today. I just wanted to come in and probably complete some of the things that Bill said, just on various issues, especially when it comes to community social relations in Mali. I'd just like to start by saying that in 2015 when the project was started, B2Gold had already a license to operate in a way that we didn't have to do anything with the village. As Clive mentioned, and the view of the company of respect, fairness, and transparency, which I'll just repeat what he's saying, is actually showed his will with government of promoting the welfare of the villagers next to the mine. As a proof of a will to enhance the quality of life of the village, the board actually voted a $20 million fund to relocate the village.
It wasn't mandatory, but it was more like it was the right thing to do. $20 million was voted, and we actually started building the new village next to the mine. It's a little bit further down, so the villagers don't have to suffer from any dust, any explosions around the pit, and it's already 50% complete. We're expecting to have, on the first quarter of next year, the first villagers moving to that village. In addition to that, we can say that we actually contribute to actions around the village. You'll have different villages like Tintiva, Malinandi, Musala, which are benefiting from B2Gold, different donations from B2Gold. As far as farming, we get some tractors that we give to villagers, some education donations. Like if you see schools, we do things with various mosques, and we're actually promoting B2Gold's presence in that region.
The relationship is growing. We have a good CSR team on site, which is doing a very good job with that. In addition to what Bill was saying for local content, actually, we are actually making an effort to promote local content in the region, which we have hired just now a new local content superintendent who will be in charge of promoting the view of B2Gold on what's necessary in the region to actually promote entrepreneurship. Also the way we work in training the villagers and try to get them more involved with B2Gold in the region. As far as the transition to local content, we have had a new project in coordination with the government of Canada called AFACT. It's a training adaptation program which will help the people around the mine to actually be more ready when we have entrepreneurship opportunities.
The Canadian government is actually bringing about $5.5 million and B2Gold is bringing about $1.8 million. We've already completed year one and it's a four-year program. We're thinking that within the next three years we will complete a pilot project already and also create a training center in the Kenieba region. Lastly, we would like just to remind everybody that Clive and the whole executive team were in Mali in the beginning of February 2018. The president of Mali came to site and inaugurated the mine. It was a very big event, so he brought a couple of ministers with him. All the local government and decentralized authorities were there. It was a very big event, so he was very well received by the authorities.
The president came and actually said in his speech that it was a win-win operation for Mali, was very happy with what he saw, and actually congratulated Clive and said that he was very welcome in Mali. I think some of those initiatives that we've done and also the way we prepared for this event actually also increased our social license to operate in country. Just to add two things to that. We have a very good relationship with the two ministries that we're working with that are key to us, which is the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Mines. See on the picture that the guy with the hat is the Minister of Mines, with whom we have a very good relationship. Clive met him several times.
He visited our mine in Namibia, and he came to Vancouver here to meet with Clive and the Minister of Finance, who I used to work for when I was in Ministry of Mines, who is now Minister of Finance and is actually having a very good relationship with us as well. Those are the few points that I wanted to mention, and thank you for listening.
background. Shortest speaker today. Just out of interest, I had actually also taken a couple of quotes from that grand opening we had in February. When the president spoke, if you were there, for those who were there, he spoke really from the heart. First of all, he spoke in English, which apparently is his first time he's really publicly spoke in English. He also spoke about things which were near and dear to him. He talked about the fact that we had created an asset for all Malians, and he praised the company's commitment to the environment and the education programs that we had. It was actually very moving. Well, I actually probably should've done it the other way around, because Clive actually spoke first.
Clive got up and everyone knows Clive's a decent speaker for sure, Clive got up and spoke really directly from the heart and was talking, because he also was very moved by what he saw. I'll just use his quotes. This is directly from Clive. "The construction of this mine would not have been possible without the sustained and ongoing support of the government and the support of the local and regional governments and local communities." It really was this very moving situation, and if you get a chance to talk to Mo or Abraham, who's here, about how it was received in Mali and how it played over and over. It was obviously recorded and played over and over again on TV in the time after that. Really quite moving. Moving on maybe to the Philippines.
I'm going to have Ray Mead stand up and talk about some of the CSR initiatives. Ray's got 35 years of mining under his belt. He commenced at Masbate during the construction phase, and he's been there 10 years, so he definitely knows the Philippines. He's been the GM since 2012. He also has experience throughout Africa, Australia, and the Philippines. Ray?
Thanks, Bill. Taking off from, I guess, Clive's mandate of being the best that we can be, I think this slide sort of illustrates to us that one of the things that hasn't been touched on a lot is the environment. As miners, we don't often give it the respect it deserves, but what we've moved to in the Philippines is using our environmental programs to really show the government of the Philippines, other operators in the Philippines, just how good we can be, and how well we can present a mine site. What you can see up there is waste dumps, rehabilitated waste dumps. The main photo, that waste dump is less than two years old.
Right from the very beginning, we've started revegetation, shaping, putting water runoff controls, and the like to really prove to ourselves, and the government that what we do at Masbate is best in class. Some of the smaller photos, the little one down the bottom, is a revegetated dump. That's where we can get to given a little bit of time. That's five years of vegetation growing on a waste dump. The importance of all of this, I guess, is particularly in an environment like the Philippines, where there's an active anti-mining lobby. The government reacts very much to what this lobby has to say, is always looking for ways to combat what they come up with.
Here, a couple of tabloid snapshots where we've had high-level visits of government ministers to our site and through our environmental programs, what we've been able to show them, we've won their respect. In fact, they've gone to press to indicate that we are the best mine that they've seen in the Philippines. They believe that we are a responsible miner, that we can be a model for the industry and our peers, certainly within the Philippines. It also gives them ammunition to fight back against an anti-mining lobby, to really show that we're not all tarred with the same brush. Again, to what Clive says, we are the best that we can be in the Philippines, and that's starting to show out. Masbate operation is in a fairly unique setting.
I guess some of our CSR programs are interesting in themselves, sort of veer away from the norm of what you would see at a typical mining operation. What we've come up with, and it's a livelihood initiative, is to restore a coral reef. You're probably thinking to yourself, "Well, what's coral and what's a reef got to do with a mine site?" Our location is on the coast of the Masbate Island. We are also surrounded by coastal communities. The communities that are close to us are coastal communities. One of the big problems within the Philippines is the Philippines is an area of rapid population growth, very difficult to feed that rapidly growing population. The fishermen, coastal people, to really subsist, have gone to more and more aggressive lengths to feed themselves.
Unfortunately, that's had major impacts to the environment that they live in and that we work in. We did baseline studies back in 2008 before the operation kicked off. There was coral cover at about 46% of what we would expect for a healthy reef in the area. By 2016, that had dropped to between 12% and 20%. In 2017, a further reduction down to a less than 12% coral cover in the coastal community near the mine. Nothing to do with the mine site from a damage perspective. What's happened is that the community trying to feed themselves have seen dwindling fish stocks. They've resorted to more and more aggressive fishing methods.
They've started with finer mesh nets, moved on to using cyanide to stun and capture fish, finally to dynamite fishing, which has really then destroyed their coral habitat, breeding areas for fish. Therefore, the fish stocks continue to dwindle off, therefore, feeding that population becomes extremely difficult. Our environmental group, coupled with our community relations group, had a look at this problem, worked on a CSR initiative where we could do something about restoring the reef, firstly and foremost, ultimately restore the fish life in the area to allow the community to feed themselves. We paired with a group called the Reef Ball Foundation. They're a renowned group based in Florida in the United States who have got a technology for enhancing reef life. At the same time, we worked with the local government to establish a marine protected area.
We've got 129 hectares of water that's now protected. It's a no-fish, no-stop zone. We provide wardens for the area to make sure people abide by the protection of the area. We work with the community to start construction of an engineered reef to improve what's already there. We believe the natural corals will regenerate, but it'll take time, we believe that by putting in reef balls, we can speed up the whole process for them. Some photos there. Certainly on the left is the current state of the reef, which is fairly decimated. The below picture is some of the local community. We now employ them to make their own reefs. There's the livelihood that they've been lacking from the loss of the fishing capability.
We then deploy these reef balls into a planned area, and then we plant them out with corals that we pick up that have just fragments of coral and the like that are laying on the sea floor from the dynamite fishing exercises. So far, we've put in 125 reef balls. There's another 500 going in this weekend coming. We've planted over 2,000 corals on those. The right-hand side at the bottom, what you can see is not what we've got, but what we expect to have within four or five years. That'll be a healthy coral habitat. We have noticed already a return of fish life to the area. If we can provide further habitat for them, we expect that there will actually be quite a rapid improvement in the area. What we hope is that other coastal communities adopt the same sort of process.
We'll work with them to help them along, and hopefully get to the point where we have several more marine protected areas and the like, and really we reestablish the fish life in the area and therefore the livelihood and the subsistence for all the groups that are around. Something unusual, something unique for a mining operation, something we're quite proud of, and it's certainly in its early stages, but we're expecting big things from it. That's Masbate. Thank you.
Thanks, Ray. I'm gonna ask Mark Dawe to come up and talk about Otjikoto. I actually met Mark. He was the first person I met when I went to Namibia to build a project there. At the time, he was a vice president of Solvay, which is a big European mining house, and also the managing director of a fluorspar mine there. Probably more importantly, he was the president of the Chamber of Mines of Namibia. Highly respected, very well-connected, and we share the same passion for conservation and sustainability. Mark will come up. I've limited him to three slides. This guy could literally talk for three hours. We've given him 10 minutes, so it's going to be quick.
Where is the microphone here? I was going to decline when Bill only gave me 10 minutes to talk on CSR. I guess I better seeing he's my boss. The first slide we have here is the new solar plant. Why is this about CSR? I'll tell you a bit about the plant and then about how it relates to CSR. There are 63,000 panels there. We just commissioned the plant. It took us nine months to build on time, on budget, as with everything in B2. It's a plant that consists of thin-film solar panels, the Caterpillar thin-film. It's basically produced in the United States, or the panels are produced in the United States by a company called First Solar.
It's a full tracking plant, which means that it follows the sun from east to west as it goes down. As you probably know, in Namibia, we have a lot of sun, probably one of the most highly solar-effective countries with the highest irradiations in the world. It was kind of a no-brainer for us. What this plant is currently doing, and we've proven the numbers that were integrated by our finance team here at corporate, we are generating about 13% of our power from solar at the moment. It's the first fully autonomous hybridized plant, we believe, in the world. In other words, the engines are stopping and starting themselves as the sun comes up, as cars come along. We have high-speed engines and lower-speed engines. The big engines, 5 MW, 12 CM, 32 Caterpillar MaK engines.
They do not start autonomously, but the high-speed engines do, which gives us the time to start up the lower-speed engines, the bigger ones. We're finding that it's exceeding our expectations in terms of solar production. Just operational as of the 18th of May, it's hot off the press. Bill, as he just said, has been to Namibia to preside at the commissioning of the plant. We're really excited about it. Why is this relevant to our CSR programs? I presented this to the board just a year ago in June last year. Taken us, as I say, less than a year and nine months we've had it producing.
One of the things I very cheekily suggested to the board is that when we finish mining, when our mine is depleted and we walk away from Otjikoto, we'll have a big solar plant there, and if we link into the grid, which we aren't at the moment, actually, we're an island producer. Do we really want to make money out of energy produced by the sun? Because we make our money from gold. The senior vice president said, "Great idea. We could start or continue to support our CSR programs," which are huge. We're putting so much into CSR. As Bill said, I could bore you for hours about that. What we're looking at, and it is a very strong possibility, is after mine closure, we'll be pumping all of this energy back into the national grid.
The solar plant will be earning millions of Namibian dollars, hundreds of thousands of US dollars a year, that we could then put into our CSR programs to literally make them truly sustainable, as Bill was saying when we had that discussion with the journalists this morning, he said, "Come on, mining is not really sustainable. You're in the business of depleting a non-renewable resource." Bill kind of argued with him and said, "We can. What we do today can be sustainable forever." This is a very exciting project for us, and it is fully operational now. There's a possibility we can expand it, too. The other thing that I'll talk about very briefly, the education center. What do we do there? We've had thousands of children pass through there. At this stage, I think we're over 5,000 children.
We teach them all about beauty of science, mathematics, physics. We've got a program running there, actually started through one of our American colleagues who came across this program called the Little Shop of Physics at Colorado State University. A couple of years ago in 2016, we brought the profs and teachers out from CSU, and they introduced the program to us and also to the Ministry of Education. What we found is that the Namibians in general are actually quite well-educated. The programs, the curriculum, the schools are pretty comprehensive. The practical application of their learnings, of what they learn in school is almost missing. Not only missing with the pupils, but also the teachers. We started off by teaching the teachers, and they just loved this program so much.
We brought in the National Institute for Educational Development, that's the presiding body over education in the country. They loved it, too. We expanded it, and it's now become part of the national curriculum in Namibia. Every school in the country will be learning about math and physics and chemistry experiments through the Little Shop of Physics, which is actually based out of Otjikoto mine, but it will be in each of the universities and each of the schools as well. We're very proud of that. At the education center, by the way, we also teach about the environment. Very passionate about conservation, as Bill mentioned. We have a number of programs where we support a whole lot of different environmental groups.
As some of you might know, Namibia is very famous for the pristine wilderness, both in terms of the countryside as well as the animals, the fauna, and the flora. We're very passionate about supporting that. One of the few places on Earth we have a lot of wild roaming endangered species. We actually have a 20,000 hectares piece of land there, of which about 12,000 hectares is under conservation. This next slide shows a project that we're really passionate about, and we're calling it Rewilding the Future. It's a wordplay on rewinding the future. Our intention is to join one of the national parks that's called the Waterberg Plateau Park up to our nature reserve, the Otjikoto Nature Reserve. It's going to be a park of about 400,000 hectares.
It's a multi-use park to support the people, the owners of the land, the communities in the area that hadn't previously been supported by nature conservation or the national park that's there. The tribe folks there are actually called Hereros in that area, they had never received any benefit from wildlife or nature in that area at all. When we floated this project to the corporate board, as always, they said, "Well, go for it. How much money do you want?" I said, "Nothing at this stage, thank you very much." That was a mere six months ago that I was here, and we're almost at the final stages of floating this new national park, which we're going to be calling the Greater Waterberg Partnership Park.
The idea is that each of the landowners, with their communities or their individual farmers, or they could even be NGOs such as CCF, Cheetah Conservation Fund, they would own a portion of this park and become a shareholder of the park and derive benefits from it that are way in excess of the benefits they'd receive from owning the land themselves. A very exciting initiative. Watch that space. It's going to be one of the largest parks in Namibia and very exciting. Thank you.
As I said, Mark can wax poetically for hours on that. He's actually created a CSR video, which I think is running outside. It'll also be running, if you're coming to the party tonight, it'll also be running there, I believe. The last person is actually a stand-in because Nicaragua's not here. Also another guy that can talk a long time about CSR for sure. Dale Craig, he's the VP of Operations. He's in charge of both the Philippines and Nicaragua. He's been with the team since 2009. He actually came to us via Nicaragua, where he was actually the GM at Libertad and then moved across as country manager and eventually was elevated up to VP of Operations, and he'll be talking about the CSR in Nicaragua. Dale?
Thank you, Bill. I anticipate, as indicated, I will be the shortest speaker here. In fact, I already am. I have to move the microphone down about two or three inches here. Today, I'll talk a little bit about our CSR programs in Nicaragua. I'll also talk about our water management programs in Nicaragua. We've been operating almost 10 years there. We have a well-developed and mature CSR program in all the aspects that you would come to expect from a well-developed CSR program. This slide here simply focuses on our community investment aspects, which are health, livelihood, education, and infrastructure. Early on in the mine development, we focused largely on infrastructure. We've tried to derate that in favor of sustainable programs that will live long past the development of the mines. We still see infrastructure returning. The truth is, the term in Nicaragua, scarce resources.
From time to time, communities needed assistance with finance, expertise, and construction techniques for roads, bridges, and walkways in the community. It's no coincidence that two of the projects or two of the areas discussed today have to do with water. The truth is, in every community and every country, water is at the top of the list of concerns for stakeholders. We owe it to ourselves to be responsible and show good development of water practices within the communities. In Nicaragua, we have a well-developed program that starts with control and prevention. That really means what is our impact and how do we mitigate that? Source water protection, which really means looking after existing sources to ensure that they stay clean and are monitored. Environmental education, both for our employees and for the communities. Finally, water for the community. The first slide is actually interesting.
It's in Spanish, which would serve perhaps to reduce the number of questions here. It also is something that we show in the communities where we visit. What it does is it takes a local example with local locations and explains how we implement water control measures and how we monitor in the field. It's very easy to show in a simple manner what we're doing, and then demonstrate in the field what we're doing so that it's simply understood by everybody, and it demystifies the processes that we're undertaking and allows people to understand when we talk about monitoring results and what they do and where they are. Makes it very simple to understand. For us, our responsibility, have first-class control measures in place, monitor those participatively, and share those monitoring results. Practice conservation and practice education.
This provides education both for our employees, who can be good spokespersons for us, and for the local population. Second aspect of water management practice is source water control. Since 2010, we've planted more than a million trees in Nicaragua. We work with INAFOR, which is the national forestry agency in Nicaragua, and we target mostly runoff control areas, so areas adjacent to rivers that typically have been clear-cut by ranchers. That controls runoff and ensures good quality of water in the streams. Also, we target source water areas, headwaters for reforestation. To date, we've populated with reforestation more than 272 hectares. Also, in Santo Domingo, we've targeted an area of headwater and declared it a national reserve for wildlife, and that in turn has sequestered that area as a protected source for water.
I've mentioned education all through this brief, short presentation. Finally, let's talk about water for the communities. Always a concern. Perla Libertad and Santo Domingo, we have constructed potable water systems for both populations. We do that in conjunction with ENACAL, that's the Nicaraguan water and sewer utility. With them, we design these plants, we construct them, and then we turn them over to ENACAL and to the local community so that they can be operated sustainably. To date, we've constructed plants and provided delivery services that give water to more than 13,000 inhabitants in the local area. That's a very effective way of democratically distributing benefits that arrive to the communities through our work. It also provides a good example for the communities about what kind of benefits can be accrued when miners are in the neighborhood.
I'll summarize there, and in leaving, I would say we owe it to ourselves to institute these kind of programs. It clearly demonstrates benefits that accrue to the local communities. It serves as an excellent example so that in our next project, people can see these projects being undertaken and allay their concerns about what will happen when B2Gold shows up in the neighborhood. Thank you very much.
All right. That's it for the CSR section. There's only one more speaker. Quite frankly, I'm sure that's what most of you probably come here to hear. Tom Garagan, the Senior Vice President Exploration. I love hearing him speak because quite frankly, first of all, he's a professional amongst professionals for sure. He always brings something very exciting and new.
Bill. It's only appropriate that Bill steals the thunder because really he's the guy who's going to have to mine the stuff we will find. Our exploration budget for this year is $52 million. We're going to be drilling over 230,000 meters. Most of this work is being done brownfields exploration around the mine sites. I'm only going to talk about a couple of projects because as I said last year, if I started going on everything, I'd be here all night and you'd be sleeping, which may not be a bad thing. You may already be there. One of the most exciting things we're working on right now is Fekola, the extension to Fekola. We're drilling well north of the pit. You can see in this diagram up here is a long section through Fekola. The green line is the reserve pit.
The purplish blue line is the resource outline. Then on the right-hand side of that, which is to the north, is where all our drilling is going on. We've just recently finished a good portion of this drilling. Some pretty significant results in the area that's outlined by a blue circle or a blue egg shape circle is an area where we've seen that the mineralization is actually coming closer to surface than previously thought with some pretty good results. As a result of that, we started to look at what if scenarios about whether this area could be mined at one point. Certainly as a result of these studies, we're of the opinion now that this pit can get bigger. Obviously, we got a lot more work to do and a lot more drilling to do.
In the goal of this drilling is to have later on in the year, sometime in October probably, is to have a brand-new resource. That'll give the chance for the engineers to start looking at, with some real numbers, to look at the ability to expand Fekola. In addition to the Fekola itself, we're doing a lot of work in what we call the Snakes or the Anaconda project. We had a large satellite resource of almost 1 million ounces at close to a gram. We are now drilling in the bedrock areas underneath this satellite resource. You can see some of these numbers there, 24 meters of four grams, obviously a good one, 20 meters at two, 46 meters at 1.6.
These are all intersections in the sulfides below the satellite, which suggests that there is very good potential to look for or find another Fekola-style deposit underneath the satellite. Just by scale, this area in pink is the area of the satellite resource, which in my view just represents a geochem anomaly, and that's over 4 km long. We have a 4-km long, potentially mineable satellite resource sitting on top of sulfide-style mineralization. I'm not saying it's all mineralized for 4 km, but it certainly indicates the potential to find something new. That's West Africa. I'll just go quickly to Limon. We've just finished a resource just recently and already are starting to get into the mine plan. Current resource is about 800,000 ounces.
We're drilling in within the resource area, and certainly within the open pit area, to get it to a point where we can declare reserves and do much more detailed mine planning. In addition to that, if you look at the bottom part of this slide, this is a long section through the whole Limon vein system, and you can see that we're doing drilling well away from the current model off to the right-hand side in an area called Cacao. We're also drilling below the current resource pits because we think there's very good potential to have a future underground mine beyond this resource. As I said, it's already getting into the mine plan, and I think the plan was to start stripping later this year. Is that correct? That's pretty rewarding to find something, and all of a sudden, it's in the mine plan.
Your baby's gone right away. This is just a view of the planned view of the Limon vein. You can see it's a north-south vein, and the area that's marked central is the area that we're going to start mining. If you look at off to the north is Cacao and Tigra, areas that we still think it's open and there's potential to expand it. Clive asked me to just say a little bit about our philosophy and how we look at exploration. We divide exploration into three portions. The area around the mine, brownfields, typical or standard brownfields exploration. Anything that we can do to help the mine extend mineralization, maybe extend mine life. We certainly had success with that last year at Colorado, where we probably added close to a year to the Colorado mine life, which is near mine exploration.
Second stage that we look at is midterm replacement of resources and potential expansion. In this case, Fekola extension, Anaconda, Limon, that style of exploration. Now what's coming into the third stage, long-term, is we spend a lot of time looking at projects, and that's where we based our acquisitions on is identifying projects that have value. On current market, there's a couple of things that have happened. There's not a whole lot of new discoveries out there, and even more so, what has been found, it's really hard to find value from a market point of view, something that we can see value in. That's because a lot of the analysts are really too good at their job, I guess.
Not only are we not looking at acquisitions, we've got to see value in our company, but we're not looking at acquisitions because it's hard to find value. We've changed our exploration philosophy a little bit long term. We're still looking at doing joint ventures with companies, but we've now set up, I put $2 million in the budget this year to look at early stage or grassroots projects back to what it was like in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when I started, is to look at early stage projects of other places in the world to start identifying what I call big ass deposits at a much earlier stage, and that's how we've changed our exploration going forward. We also have had some discussions about potentially doing financings in junior companies, but we're not there yet.
With that, I'll pass it back to the boss.
Almost done. Thank you, guys. As much as I do like to talk, it's sure nice to not do all the talking and to be able to share it with some of the team. Unfortunately, I can't get all the team up here. We'd be here for a very long time. Just in my thanks, I didn't read all my notes and neglected to mention just a couple of people, very important, I wanted to acknowledge Mike Cinnamond, our CFO, and yes, he's a relative newbie, five years, but he's done an awesome job as our Chief Financial Officer and leads an incredible team in accounting and done a great job working with our banks and our investors. Roger Richer, our in-house counsel and Senior VP Admin. Roger and Tom and I were actually in Yukon in the early 1980s working together.
Roger was in law school. He inherited my trailer in the small town of Mayo in the central Yukon to do some expediting there between years of law school. I got promoted to the big smoke, to Whitehorse in the Yukon. Roger does an incredible job and has an amazing team of admin and legal people. I just want to mention Ian MacLean's outstanding job in investor relations. Yes, he's the youngest one of the group, but he's been around for an awfully long time as well. We begrudge him his youth sometimes. At the end of the day, also, I really want to recognize at the far end, Neil Reeder. Neil is another newbie, a year and a half, but Neil joined us as the Vice President of Government Relations. Neil has an interesting background.
Neil was the Canadian ambassador to Nicaragua when we first went to Nicaragua, then we went to the Philippines, and guess who was the Canadian ambassador to the Philippines? It was Neil. I asked Neil, "Are you following us around the world, or are we following you?" Neil retired a year and a half ago, and we started talking, and I thought, well, Neil would be a great addition to our board of directors or our group. Neil said he's very keen to work and travel around the world representing us in government relations. He's been excellent addition to our group, and I think you can take it from that, the seriousness we place on government relations. With that, I'll just suggest that there are a couple of videos that are going to be showing in the back, two new videos.
One of them is an outstanding video of the story of Fekola, and the other one is a new CSR video on Mali. I will just quickly ask if there's any questions. I know it's been quite a long time. I appreciate your patience and your focus and time. If anyone wants to ask a question right now, we will attempt to answer it, or we will be in the back, inviting you to join us for a beverage over which we can answer questions as well. Is there anything, any questions we can answer at this point? I guess that's a complete presentation. Thank you very much, and I appreciate your time and patience and all of you for your support and your hard work. Thank you.