All right, our next speaker is Coeur Mining. Coeur is a diversified precious metal producer with assets located in North America, and currently the company operates mines located in the United States and within Mexico. The flagship Rochester expansion in Nevada achieved first production in September and is expected to reach full capacity by the end of the first half of this year. Today we're joined by President and CEO Mitchell Krebs.
Okay, thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for making some time to hear an update. It's, wow, what a great time, an exciting time to be here with you, to be working at this company. We have been putting in a lot of hard yards over the last three years on the expansion project out in Nevada that Kevin mentioned, and we're just now kind of on the verge of seeing a whole series of catalysts unfold here during this year. So it's an awesome time to be at conferences like this, telling our story and giving everybody an update. Just by way of background quick, we're a U.S.-incorporated, U.S.-headquartered, U.S.-centric silver and gold mining company. Go back to the 1920s when the company was first incorporated out in Idaho, so it's a long history.
We have a nice balanced portfolio of four operating mines, three in the U.S., one in Northern Mexico. I'm really proud of the reserve base that we have. It says here 3.2 million ounces of gold, 244 million ounces of silver. We have done a lot there over the last five years or so to extend and add to the reserve and resource inventory of the company. In fact, on top of those reserves, we have another five—what is the number?—5.2 million ounces of gold and another 300 million ounces of silver in the resource categories. So we now have a huge mineral inventory supporting those four operating assets. Gold and silver production, you can see our guidance here this year in 2024.
Those are pretty significant step-ups over where we were in 2023, largely driven by the expansion out in Nevada that I'll talk more about in a few minutes. That growth will continue into 2025 then as we see the first full year of the benefits of the expansion out in Nevada. So it's a growth-oriented business with a U.S.-centric footprint. I mentioned the catalysts, and clearly Rochester is the key driver to these catalysts unfolding. It's great to have that complete. That was a $730 million project, which for a company our size is a very large project. So it's nice to have that all in the rearview mirror. And now we're into the commissioning and the ramp-up that we should have completed by the middle part of this year. More on that in a few minutes, but clearly that's the driver to this U.S.
silver production growth here in the very near term. I mentioned the reserve and resource growth already, but just to give you a sense, on the gold side, over the last five years, we've mined 1.7 million ounces of gold. We've replaced all of that, plus added another 400,000 ounces of gold. On the silver side, we've mined 73 million ounces of silver, and then we've added an additional 51 million ounces of silver. So we've been very busy investing and exploring and adding to the silver and gold inventory of the company, and that's going to start really paying dividends now as we go forward. In fact, between the expansion at Rochester and our investment in exploration over the last five years, it's over $1 billion of investment that we've made.
So it's so great to now be at a point where we can start to show some of the payoff and the benefits from all that investment. I mentioned the U.S.-centric footprint. About 2/3 of our revenue comes from the United States. And in terms of gold and silver mix, we're just shy of about a third coming from silver. That will increase as the Rochester production, which is a primary silver mine, increases in 2024 and in 2025. And then longer term, we have a very interesting, growing, evolving, high-grade polymetallic exploration project in northern British Columbia called Silvertip. That's starting to gain a lot of traction and a lot of attention. We've been putting out some results and some news. Aoife McGrath, our head of exploration, is at the back there eating her breakfast.
We will be showing off some core from Silvertip tonight at the Core Shack. So if you want to stop by and learn more about Silvertip, it would be great to have you. I think Phil and Keith covered silver and gold both really well, so I won't pretend to educate anybody in this room on the silver and gold themes. I would point out one thing, maybe on the silver supply side that doesn't get as much mention. I mean, there's so much to talk about on the demand side for silver, but because there hasn't been a lot of investment in exploration and in silver new projects, the supply outlook is pretty constructive in terms of growing demand and kind of flattish to maybe even generally declining silver supply. Mexican production overall of silver has really started to fall off a cliff.
Peruvian silver production declined. There's just not a lot of new production growth coming in silver. So I think that's just going to compound these structural deficits that we've seen now for the last few years. And silver is really kind of overlooked versus other metals, and I think set up really, really well. And it's great in a company like Core Mining in terms of the exposure and the leverage that we provide investors who are looking for a way to expose themselves to that supply and demand profile. So just a little bit deeper in terms of a Rochester update.
In all of our one-on-one meetings, that's the, I think, without exception maybe, the first question and sometimes the only question we're asked is, "How's it going at Rochester?" Just to give you just a backdrop, this is a silver and gold open-pit heap leach, low-grade, high-tonnage operation that's been there in northern Nevada since the mid-1980s. So we've now invested this $730 million to increase the throughput there from what has been historically 10-15 million tons per year to now over 32 million tons per year. This thing's a beast. I mean, the crusher that we've just completed from the primary to the truck loadout is over a mile. Some of this infrastructure goes up into the sky as high as the Statue of Liberty. So it's an awesome engineering feat out there, and it's one of the largest of its kind now by throughput going forward.
So it's an exciting time, and it's going really well in terms of the construction completion, which was in 2023, late 2023. We're now in the process of commissioning and ramping up the three big elements that we built, which is the new three-stage crusher, a new leach pad, and a new Merrill-Crowe facility. The crusher is the last thing to go through commissioning, and then the plan is to have that ramped up to that 32 million-ton-a-year run rate by the middle of this year. So in the back half of the year then, you can imagine we'll start to see a lot of production growth, costs come down, and the company will flip to positive free cash flow, and we'll use that free cash flow to really aggressively pay down debt that we've had to incur to help fund this expansion project.
You can see here what the costs are expected to do in 2024 in the second half once we've completed this ramp-up, close to a 40% drop compared to last year. The mine has been running. The legacy operation has continued to run up until this point now where we're making this transition over to the new infrastructure. Annual production, full-year run rate production will go from what's historically been kind of a 3-million-ounce silver mine to more like 7-8 million ounces of silver. On the gold side, from kind of that 30,000-40,000 ounces a year, it'll go up to more like 70,000-75,000 ounces a year. This will actually be the largest primary silver mine in the U.S. where the metal is mined and processed here in the U.S.
It has a 16-year mine life currently based on proven and probable reserves. Which brings me to the exploration side. As we've prioritized the expansion, we really haven't done a lot on exploration. Eva and her team now have a robust budget starting this year to really go after some higher-grade targets that will have a meaningful impact, hopefully, in the next few years of the mine plan. We're not really interested in adding beyond year 16 right now. What we're really focusing on is bringing in higher grade into the mine plan. And so that work will start in earnest this year. Overall, like I said, we've been very committed to drilling and exploration. It's been paying off remarkably well. We'll sustain a pretty aggressive level for a company our size again here this year.
I mentioned the kind of growth that we've seen in reserves and resources over the last five years, and I think this kind of stands out in our industry as far as the commitment to exploration that we've had and will continue to have at a time when a lot of companies have been prioritizing debt service and return of capital to shareholders. We've been plugging away pretty aggressively here on the exploration front with great success. Our Kensington mine up in southeast Alaska is a great example of why these exploration dollars are so important. And Kensington kind of gets overlooked because of everything going on out at Rochester in Nevada, but we've been investing pretty heavily at Kensington the last 2.5 years in an elevated level of underground development and drilling, and we're really starting to see the payoff from those investments.
This year, we expect to see a pretty significant increase in the mine life. This is our shortest mine life right now, and that program of elevated investment should wrap up early next year. And then Kensington will be a nice kind of second act on the back of Rochester to add additional production and cash flow. I mentioned Silvertip. There's a few slides in here. Maybe in the interest of time, I could leave that to this evening at the Core Shack if you want to stop by and go deeper into this project, this opportunity. The highlight is it's a super high-grade polymetallic deposit. If you think about it in gold equivalent terms, just because a lot of us do that, it's like a 4 million ounce resource at about 12 grams right now and growing and evolving.
We'll continue to invest in exploration to keep growing it and keep better understanding exactly what we have here before we move to the next step of trying to figure out how to develop it and have it become a new operation. I'll skip over all of these. These are probably more for tonight. Wharf, we've got a lot of growth and a lot of moving parts in the company. It's great to have an asset like Wharf that's just steady-eddy, throws off a ton of cash flow. Last year was a record year of over $80 million of free cash flow out of 90,000 or so ounces of gold. We bought that 9 years ago for $99 million. We've now gotten over $400 million out of it. It had a five-year mine life when we bought it.
It has about a six-year mine life now with some additional opportunities to extend. Inflation headline is starting to ease a little bit here in the U.S. Mexico is still, I think, experiencing kind of a wave of inflation that's following the U.S., but overall, we are starting to see a little bit of moderation on the inflation front. I'm out of time here, but the balance sheet issues, I think, now are behind us because of that project in Nevada being behind us. The next big thing on the balance sheet is to start reducing debt with the free cash flow that we'll be generating.
I'll go past the ESG for now, and just, it's really all about Rochester and consistency hitting the timeline there on the ramp-up and seeing then all those key catalysts fall out from that ramp-up in terms of the flip to free cash flow, lower costs, and debt reduction. And those are the big priorities for us. So I'm out of time, so that's the update. Thank you for your time.