All right. Thanks, everybody, for attending, this session. This is gonna be a highlight for me because I am a big fan of Freeport, and it's great to have Kathleen Quirk, who is the relatively new CEO of Freeport, to be with us today. And, you know, maybe Kathleen, just to start off, how has life changed for you as CEO? Is your day-to-day any different than what it was before? And what are the new challenges or the new stresses?
Thanks, Chris, and thank you all for having Freeport here. It's a great honor to be here at the conference, and you know, I'm celebrating my thirty-fifth year this year at Freeport. So, I've been with the company a very long time. I was CFO before this for twenty years. And so in some ways, it's different, in some ways it's not. You know, the work is very similar to what I've been doing. It's a great time to take the lead at Freeport. We're in a great position. We've got a great balance sheet, a very significant resource position in copper, you know, where we're focused, geographically diverse.
We've got challenges, of course, and we always will in this industry, but we have a fantastic team that is working to make our operations and make the value for our shareholders and stakeholders better and continuous improvement, so we're gonna have challenges, but we've got the team that knows how to roll up their sleeves and solve them, but we've got a great outlook. You know, we're in an environment now where copper really is a commodity that is a commodity of the future. It is a commodity that is very closely tied to electrification, and we're hearing more and more and more about how the world is becoming electrified.
So we, as an organization, are challenged to figure out how we're gonna continue to supply more and more copper to a world that needs it and do it responsibly and do it at a low cost. So it's a great time to be taking the position. I'm excited about it. I know we'll have great challenges, but the hallmark of Freeport really has been one about execution and really focusing on what we can do right and doing it with a lot of diligence around it. So we're looking forward to creating a lot of value in the future for shareholders. We've done well in the past, but a lot more to come, so I'm excited about it.
Thanks. And so you've had, I mean, you know, obviously, you've operated, Freeport has operated very consistently, generally hitting your quarterly production targets, but you still have experienced cost inflation across the business. There are some things that are happening, like, for example, in Indonesia with the smelter, which is gonna lead to lower costs as you're not paying the export duties and, but there are other regions, like in the U.S., where, you know, low grade is an issue, hard to get around that. Labor costs are high, hard to get around that. Can you kind of walk through each region and tell us what you're doing operationally? And maybe start with the U.S., where we can see costs potentially coming down and some of the inflation that we've seen might reverse a bit for Freeport-
Yeah
... specifically.
I think the biggest increase we've seen in costs over the last few years have, has been in the U.S. In Indonesia, we've done really, really well because we've been ramping up our underground operation, and we're now producing, you know, very high quantities of both copper and gold, and so our costs in Indonesia are actually a net credit. So we're all of our operating costs are being covered by our gold revenues. But in the U.S. is where we've been most challenged from a cost standpoint, because in part, because of inflation, but in part because we're now mining in areas where the grades are lower. And so what that means is you have to mine more to get the same amount of metal than you were getting before, which raises your unit costs. And so what we're focused on...
In the U.S., you know, we've had inflationary pressures, but we haven't had the benefit like we have in South America of the strong dollar, which helps us from a currency, foreign currency standpoint, offset some of the labor costs. So in the U.S. is where you really see the cost inflation manifest itself, and what that means for us is we've got to find ways to be more productive and to find ways to get more out of, produce more out of what we already have, so we've been embarking on this new innovative leach program, where we are going back into existing stockpiles of ore that, where we have previously mined material and placed it on the stockpiles, going back into those stockpiles to recover more copper.
And we can do that on a basis where we're getting very low incremental cost. So our average cost right now in the U.S., we estimate for this year, are somewhere a little bit north of $3 a pound. I think $3.10 a pound on average for our U.S. operations. And this leach initiative, which we're in the early stages of, but we've already achieved our initial target. We can produce copper at $1 per pound incrementally. So we have the opportunity, Chris, to bring down our costs because we're ramping up our leach production. We're ramping up our leach production. We've hit the initial target, which was 200 million pounds per annum.
We're looking to go to 300-400 million pounds per annum by 2026, and then within two years after that, double that again to 800 million pounds per annum. And that is an enormous catalyst for us, an enormous value. When you think about an incremental 200 million pounds at $1 per pound cost with no capital to speak of, you're talking about significant amount of EBITDA. Today's copper prices, that incremental 200 works out to, like, $600 million. That goes right to the bottom line, because in the U.S., much of our income is sheltered. We have net operating losses, so we don't have tax obligations. We don't have significant royalties.
So that is a, you know, outside of the copper price, that is a big catalyst for us to be able to not only bring down our costs, but increase our revenues, at a you know very low incremental cost. So that is a big initiative of ours. We're really leaning into technology in the U.S. In addition to this innovative leach initiative, we're also looking at automation across our U.S. operations. We're starting with our Bagdad operation, which is a mine that we have in northwestern Arizona, and we're looking to convert our existing haul truck fleet to completely autonomous. Some of you might know about the labor tightness in Arizona specifically.
There are a lot of projects ongoing, dealing with semiconductor projects or data centers, which, you know, copper is a big beneficiary from data centers, but the labor market's tight there, and so we're looking for ways to automate, looking for ways to raise our productivity and bring down our costs, because while we have great assets in Indonesia, great assets in South America, we have a real opportunity in the U.S., particularly in our established areas in Arizona, to build our production and build productivity over time and bring down costs. And that goes right to the bottom line, so we're very focused on it.
I mean, what's encouraging is that we can see the progress already. It's like each quarter, you're leaching more and more, and you obviously have an enormous stockpile. So this is sort of a unique opportunity for Freeport. Other companies have leaching opportunity, but not like what you have. Right, you could do 800 million pounds a year for many years because of the scale of the stockpiles that you have.
Yeah, that's a good point, so when we talk about these stockpiles, it's miles of material that has been mined in the past, that has been stacked, that, you know, some people might call waste, but inside of these stockpiles, there's 40 billion pounds of copper that still remain in these stockpiles that previously we thought we couldn't recover, so now with new tools, and a lot of this has come about in recent years because we're able to put sensors within the stockpile to know what's going on, so now we know where within the stockpile there still is ore left to be recovered, and so we're using different techniques.
We're using data analytics to identify where there are areas within these stockpiles that still have ore that can be recovered, and we're going after it with things like directional drilling, where rather than, you know, where we have areas that are dry, that don't have the benefit of having the solution going over the rocks, we're able to drill and target injections into the stockpile in a very directed manner and recover more copper. We're retaining more heat into the stockpile, which is proven to improve recoveries. We're using things like drones to get to areas of these stockpiles that couldn't be accessed physically by humans, you know, in the past.
We're using new technologies to apply to an old business, and it's coming about with digitalization, sensors, data analytics, and old-fashioned ways of doing things, but we're combining those two to get more out of what we already have. Beyond that, we're looking at more innovation. We're looking at ways to get direct heat into the stockpiles, either through using geothermal heat or steam that might be in the areas of our mines, or looking at different ore types which might release heat within the stockpiles. We're looking at recipes for different types of additives that we can use to modify our technology application. So we've got...
To us, you know, we don't have to run all over the world and do greenfield exploration when right in our backyard in Arizona, we've got, you know, like I said, forty billion pounds of copper sitting there. We've just got to figure out how to get it, how to get it out. And we've started on the path. We started to get two hundred million pounds per annum. We wanna double that, and we wanna double it again. But it's the equivalent of a new mine. You know, when you think about eight hundred million pounds of copper, that might cost $10 billion of new investment that we're avoiding.
So it's really a unique opportunity for Freeport because we have all this history of leaching and all these established stockpiles that are there in our backyard, and we've got the talent to be able to go after it. So it's a real exciting initiative, and it's important because in copper, there aren't new discoveries. You really aren't seeing like you have in other commodities like oil and gas, you've seen new discoveries occurring, you know, frequently. In copper, it's rare to have a new discovery. So part of what we're doing at Freeport is we are doing brownfield investments. In addition to this leach opportunity, we have a whole suite of pipeline, of expansion opportunities at existing operations.
Those are lower risk, likely less capital intensity than a greenfield opportunity. But this leach opportunity is very exciting for Freeport. It's not something that every company has, but it's something that we have and something that we're gonna try to take full advantage of to generate value. It's got the highest net present value when you run the numbers on it, of any project that you could do in the mining industry because it's not capital intensive.
Mm-hmm. And then, so thank you for that. And then in Indonesia, obviously, like you said, with the byproduct credit, your net negative cash costs there, but you do have the smelter coming, you know, ramping up, and there's a significant export duty that you're paying until the smelter is at full capacity. So can you talk about, you know, how that's progressing in terms of smelter ramp-up, and then what the risks are around getting there? I mean, that's obviously been a major focus for Freeport, so how is that going?
Yeah. So for those of you who've been following us, in 2018, we reached agreement with the government of Indonesia, to extend our operating rights to 2041. And what we agreed to do in connection with that was to build a smelter, a new greenfield smelter in Indonesia. Freeport already had a smelter since the 1990s, but it only processed about 40% of our production, and so the government wanted to have all of the mine production processed within the country. And so, we agreed to that in connection with the extension, and so since that time, we've been working to develop the smelter. It's a very large project. The...
It's got a smelter and a refinery and a precious metals refinery and investments, you know, in the $4 billion range, $3 billion just for the smelter. But so we've been doing it since that time. We've just now gotten to the point where its construction is substantially complete this year, and we're starting to ramp up production. And so that process is going well. It's not. It's a little bit of white-knuckle time because it's not very often that you see smelter startups. There's been a lot started up in China over the last decade or more, but really in the Western world, there really hasn't been copper smelters that have been developed like this one.
This is a very large one, and so we're ramping up that smelter now. It's in commissioning. We're excited that the president of Indonesia plans to come and inaugurate the smelter, hopefully this month, and so it's a big source of pride for the country. It's a source of pride for Freeport in that we developed it very efficiently. We didn't have a big cost overrun or big-time schedule blowouts, so it was something that we're all proud of.
But we've got to get it ramped up, like Chris was saying, because after this year, the government doesn't want to export, doesn't want us to export concentrates any longer, once the. They want to see all of the copper production in country being refined. And so that's what we're focused on. And so month by month, as we go through this year, we're hoping to make good progress to get to that point. But right now, we pay a duty on copper concentrates of 7.5% of that revenue value of concentrate. So that will go away after we're fully operationally.
That ends up being, like, $0.25 a pound on our Indonesian per pound of copper on our Indonesian production, and something on the order of $0.10 or something that we're estimating for this year, $0.10 a pound this year on a consolidated basis. That'll help bring down our costs after we get it fully ramped up.
Yeah. I mean, so when you think about the benefit of leaching on unit costs in the U.S., the benefit of ramping up the smelter in Indonesia, you have very substantial unit cost reductions that could come through that are specific to Freeport. It's not about industry-wide inflation reversing, right? And then when we look at Grasberg, I mean, obviously, it was an open pit, now you're mining the block caves. There's another big block cave project beneath the Grasberg Block Cave, like Kucing Liar, which I believe is even higher gold grade than the block cave itself. So is this a kind of unusual dynamic, where as you get deeper, you actually get potentially lower cost because you're gonna have more gold and just as much copper in the ore that you're mining?
Yeah.
Also, sorry, the timing of when that's gonna come online and the investments you're making to get that going.
Yeah. So at Grasberg, this is the mine in Indonesia that Freeport's been operating for many years. We've been there for 57 years in Indonesia, in this location. And it's the world's second-largest copper mine, but in terms of gold mines, it's among even though gold's a by-product, it's among the largest gold mines in the world. So it's very rich in both copper and gold. And we were previously mining here from the surface. Through 2019, we were mining from the surface, and beginning in 2020, we transitioned to mining underground all underground. So now all of our production in Indonesia is mined underground. We've been making investments in the underground since it really started in earnest in 2004.
So it's a long lead time when you have to make these investments, but once the investments are made, you have a very efficient operation. And we're doing a lot. Underground in Indonesia, we're doing a lot of great things from a technology standpoint. A lot of the operation there underground is being operated remotely. You know, we've got remote loaders, where we have employees that are operating these loaders from the surface, which makes it more automated, makes it more safe. So it's a very high-tech. It's all. We've got electric rail underground there. It's a very modern operation. But, we're in. What Chris was talking about is we're making an investment, an additional investment in a newer deposit. We discovered it some time ago, but we're now developing it, called Kucing Liar.
This is a deposit that has both copper and gold in the same ore, like the rest of the district, and it actually does have higher grades, but it does. One of the things that we need to work through is it's got some pyrite in the ore that affects recovery. So right now, in our long-range plans that you'll see published in our 10-K, we're assuming lower recoveries than what we're recovering with Grasberg, but that's something that we're working on. So that's actually an opportunity that in the future, if we're able to improve the recoveries, we'll have even higher grades than we're mining today. So great opportunities there.
We're producing about a million and a half ounces of gold, 1.6 million ounces of gold there, some years even higher than that. So it's a lot of gold. We've got a lot of exposure to copper, but also to gold in a great development outlook for Indonesia. I'm gonna answer this before Chris asks, because we talked earlier about extending our rights from originally 2021 to 2041, and now we're in talks with the government about extending our rights beyond 2041, and the smelter was a big part of that, and we're also having some discussions about some additional investments to make in Indonesia to secure an extension.
But we see opportunities within this district to continue for a very long period of time and continue providing benefits to the people of Indonesia, all the stakeholders there, and also Freeport shareholders, but it's a great asset, one that is a big legacy asset of Freeport. We've, like I said, been there for fifty-seven years, and we've been a proud partner, one of the largest investors, longest-tenured investors in Indonesia, and so we hope to continue to be there for the long term.
Thanks. So, next, I wanted to get onto capital allocation, which obviously mining is a huge factor. And you've gone from having kind of a stretched balance sheet ten years ago to having basically no net debt today. You've been. You know, the ownership transition in Grasberg happened, right? You seem to be on good terms with the government now. You're in a position to start generating very good cash flow again. And the question then is, what do you do with the money? I mean, it seems like based on recent earnings presentations, you're pivoting a little bit more to growth. I mean, you have a lot of growth options, but should we? Is there gonna be a balancing act between capital returns and growth, or how do we think about that?
Yeah. So you're right about the balance sheet, and that's the cornerstone of our financial policy, is to make sure we have a bulletproof balance sheet. Because we all know commodities can be volatile, and we wanna be in a position where we can be strong through any cycle imaginable. So we've gotten to that place. It was hard work, but we've gotten to the place with the balance sheet, which is very strong, and we wanna maintain that. But beyond that, you know, we are generating cash flow above our capital requirements.
Our board has looked at putting in a strategy, and we've had it in place for a couple of years or more now, where to the extent we generate cash flow above our required capital spending, we split returns. We split the difference, 50% to shareholder returns and the other half to investments in future growth. You know, because in our industry, the growth plans are long dated. You know, take El Abra in Chile, you know, we've got a project there, but we probably won't spend much money on it because of permitting and everything else, you know, until five years from now.
Our project in Arizona that I was talking about at Bagdad, we probably won't start spending any money, you know, for probably a year or two from now. So what we've been doing is half of the money that is generated, we've been putting on our balance sheet, and that'll be able to be deployed in the future as these projects require capital. And then the other half, we've been returning to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. So that's...
Those are the priorities, you know, the balance sheet, keep the fortress balance sheet to generate, you know, cash and invest in the business for the long term, but return cash to shareholders because, you know, we do believe that particularly at times when commodity prices are high, a lot of cash should go back to shareholders. And to the extent that we don't have investments to make that generate returns for shareholders, we ought to return it to shareholders. So we, you know, we've had a long-standing philosophy at Freeport, where we're here to manage the business for shareholders, and we wanna be, you know, good stewards of the capital and return cash to shareholders when it makes sense.
But we've got a long-term business as well, and we wanna, you know, keep to the extent we're generating returns, we wanna keep those investments going.
There's been a lot of deals in mining in the last couple of years. How do you think about M&A? I mean, is it the fact that you have organic growth options mean that you don't have to be looking for deals and maybe be more opportunistic? Or, or is M&A one of the kinda bullet points that you think about a lot as assets may become available in the market?
Yeah. We're not. Our strategy is centered around our organic growth. And so M&A, we don't have to do M&A. Of course, we monitor everything that's available in the marketplace, and if there are opportunities that come about that fit our strategy in copper, that fit our ability to generate synergies or allow us to, you know, put our know-how and create value, certainly that'd be something we'd be interested in. But, it's not something we have to do. It's not a high priority. You know, we'll be opportunistic, but because we don't have to do an M&A deal, means we might not be, probably won't be the most aggressive buyer.
You know, when it comes to, you know, other companies that really have as a mandate to do something in copper, we may not be the best competitor for someone that has a strategic objective to do M&A. So we think we can create a lot of value with our own set of assets, and that's what our number one focus is, and we'll continue to monitor M&A to see if there's anything that would make sense for us. But anybody that has a good copper asset doesn't wanna sell it.
Mm.
Yeah, so there's not a lot that comes to the market.
We have a couple of minutes left. Anybody in the room have any questions?
Talk a little bit about your offtake agreement with LSB.
With?
LSB Industries.
Okay. I'm not sure. With respect to what? I'm not sure I've-
You announced last two weeks ago, three weeks ago, that you guys had a they're supplying you ammonia for your Arizona
Okay. Yeah, I don't know the details of that particular agreement, but we do have... We use in our operations ammonium nitrate that we use for explosives, for our blasting activities. And we have a strategic deal in Arizona with Apache, where we're operating a facility. And so we may have been-
I'm not familiar.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with the details. We can follow up with it, but it's part of our supply chain, so it's not something that is strategic from a big picture standpoint, but it's very strategic at an operating level. So I don't have the details of that agreement that you referenced.
We probably have time for-
I have a question.
... one more? Yep.
One over here. Just two quick ones relevant to the leaching program. If you get to the 800 million pounds, how many years of duration would you have, you know, based on known technology today? And then secondly, do others in the industry have similar stockpiles? And if others, you know, copied what you guys are doing, what % increase in supply could that amount to over time? Thanks.
No one has the degree of inventory that we have in terms of the stockpiles. I mean, there are companies out there that do have some stockpiles, but as a company, I don't think anybody has forty billion pounds of copper in stockpile. So, if we get to the eight hundred million pounds, or when we get to the eight hundred million pounds, we would be looking at something that could be sustained, because we've got, as I said, the forty billion pounds of material currently in stockpiles, and we're continuing to mine and to place new material on those stockpiles. So, it would be something that we would work to sustain over, you know, more than a ten-year period, and even go longer than that.
So it's a tremendous value. You run the NPVs, and it's really strong values for Freeport.
All right, with that, thank you all. Kathleen, thank you so much.