Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure for me to host Kathleen Quirk, President and CEO of Freeport-McMoRan. Thanks for being here. It's probably the fifth year that at least I do it with you, maybe fourth, but it's always great to have you, Kathleen.
Yeah. Thank you, Carlos. We love coming here to Laguna. Beautiful setting and very close to Phoenix, so it makes it an easy.
Convenient.
An easy trip for us. Very convenient.
All right, great. Look, why don't we just get into it? I don't know how familiar some of these folks that are joining us today are with the company, so maybe a little bit of a quick overview of the company, and more importantly, how these first months of CEO transition? Congratulations! How's it going? What are the high-level views that you have for the company? Where are you going to take it forward?
Great. Well, good to see all of you, and many of you are probably familiar with Freeport. We are a leading producer of copper, very large-scale producer with operations that span the globe. Our key areas of concentration are in the U.S., where we operate a number of copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, and we also have some operations for molybdenum in Colorado. We operate in Chile, and we have a big operation, successful operation in Peru, and our largest single asset is located in Papua, Indonesia, where we've operated successfully for 57 years.
Our strategy is focused on copper, and the reason why, and we made this decision many years ago, and the reason why is because as we look around the world at different commodities, see the structure of the copper industry being one that's very attractive. There are limitations on new supply development, and in terms of the demand characteristics, copper is essential in the global economies. What we didn't know, you know, 15 years ago, when we combined with Phelps Dodge, a big, big copper company, was that there would be a new era for copper demand, which we're currently in right now, in the early stages.
And everywhere you turn, it seems copper and some other metals are really, really critical in the global economies as we transition to greener energy, cleaner energy, and connectivity and need to build new infrastructure and power generation. All this is really, really positive for copper demand. And Freeport, as you know, Carlos, is very well situated because we have big assets. We have current large-scale production, but within our portfolio, we also have a pipeline for future growth. And our projects are brownfield in nature. It's very, very challenging to develop a greenfield mine today. And so Freeport's strength is that we have opportunities within our existing portfolio to expand.
The vision going forward is to continue to be foremost in copper, and, that is, we've got the assets, we've got the, the balance sheet, we've got the experienced team, and that's, that's real important. Freeport's if you go back in Freeport's history and what we've been able to accomplish and develop as a team, we've done, big, major developments around the world that, that have been enormously successful. So I think the strategy is clear. We want to continue to be a leader in copper. We need to continue to focus on how we can reduce costs, particularly in the U.S. We've had challenges, you know, with inflationary pressures and some lower grades in the U.S., so we need to continue to drive that, initiative.
We've got a really important and exciting initiative, innovative initiative around leaching that's going to help our U.S. operations immensely, but we're going to just continue to do what we do, is manage costs aggressively, be good capital allocators, be disciplined, return cash to shareholders, and maintain our strong balance sheet, and we've got a really, really positive outlook, you know, supported by this favorable outlook for copper.
Great, a lot to unpack really. And I would like to maybe focus, before we go into the details of Freeport, on the supply side for copper. I mean, clearly demand is going to benefit a lot, multiple commodities. Copper has these specific demand drivers, but I think that what really differentiates copper is the supply side. And in our model, commodity team is forecasting deficits every single year throughout to 2030 , and actually increasing supply deficits. Can you maybe talk about, from an industry perspective, why is it so challenging for companies to develop projects?
When I looked and see some of the incentive price for projects like yours or others, it doesn't seem to be such a-.. Huge threshold, you know, maybe five, six or so, maybe around five or four and a half, a lot of them would go. But why is it the industry taking so long to respond to this signal from the market that the world needs copper?
Yeah. And this was one of the things that I was touching on before, is why we are so attracted to this industry from a structural standpoint, is it's copper resources are scarce. If you go back and look at the world's largest discoveries and the world's largest operations, many of those have been discovered decades ago. And so in recent times, even though a lot of companies have put in a lot of capital and have tried really hard to discover new copper deposits, they haven't been successful. We haven't been successful in greenfield exploration, to the extent that we need to.
And so, what t he other factor, the other problem is that some of the known copper deposits that are out there that maybe could be developed, some of them are in places, as you know, where communities don't necessarily want them there, or they have, you know, big technical challenges. T he easy things for the industry to develop have been developed, and what's happened is the things that are available to be developed now are much more complex and take many more years to get from, you know, nothing to a new mine. It used to be you could develop a new mine within three or four years, and that has extended to 10 years or more, and so that's why Freeport's focused on the brownfield opportunities, because generally, those are more certain in terms of the timetable.
But there's just been an absence of new discoveries in the copper industry. And so one of the things that we're doing as Freeport is, we do want to continue to be a leader in supplying copper to this world that's becoming more copper intensive. We want to be the leading supplier, we want to be the leading responsible supplier of copper. And so one of the things that we're doing is because there hasn't been a lot of new discoveries from a Greenfield perspective, we're going back into our existing resources and assets and say: How do we get more out of what we already have? And so we're using new technologies to do that, and I know we're going to talk more about that. But it hasn't been a function, Carlos, to your point, of just price alone.
So if the price went from $4 today, roughly, to $6, you know, a month from now, there's not a lot that the industry can do, very little that the industry can do in any, you know, short period of time to respond to that. And so you might see some things that occur, like maybe more scrap coming to the market, more recycling, or you may see some, at the margin, some substitution. But the reason, one of the favorable factors of the copper market is that the supply development, new supply is challenged.
So we, as a company, are really focused on, you know, how we can get more out of the resources we already have, both from an economic standpoint and just in terms of the overall scarcity of resources and water and everything else around the world. How can we do it in a way that's better? And there's new technologies now and emerging, that that's going to help us in that area.
And you touched upon the leaching technology that you are developing, and I want to explore that a little bit more. So you already are at 200 million pounds, the ultimate goal, at least that you have, on site, is 100 million pounds per year. Can you talk a little bit more about A, what those leaching technologies mean for the audience, the attractiveness that it has, and what are the benefits that is those projects or developments are doing to Freeport to offset a little bit of the cost pressures and the lower ore grades that you mentioned?
Yeah. Well, I keep jumping the gun on this leaching conversation because I'm so excited about the opportunity for it. This is, there's different ways to produce copper. One of the ways is through a concentrator process, and is a flotation process, and then ultimately, that product, the concentrate, gets smelted to produce copper metal. The other method, which we've been doing for decades now, is called leaching, which involves irrigating a copper ore stockpile with solution, and the copper gets released at the bottom of the stockpile and goes to a tank house, and you produce metal. So we do both at Freeport, and we have for a very long period of time.
The difficulty around leaching is that when you concentrate ores, you can get recoveries in the 85% to 90% range. Leaching, while you avoid a lot of the costs of concentrating and smelting, leaching, you might only recover in some cases 40% of the copper from the ore. So over the years, as we've mined material and placed it into these stockpiles, we have in our inventory at Freeport 40 billion pounds of copper estimated in these leach stockpiles that we don't have. We've assumed we couldn't recover. Now, with new technologies that have come about in recent years, we're able to understand better the conditions within these stockpiles, and we've actually been successful in recovering copper from these stockpiles that we never thought imaginable in the years past.
And so we've been on this journey for a couple of years now, and we have been successful in getting to a run rate of 200 million pounds per year from these leach initiatives. The leach initiatives are where we've got sensors now. We've got a lot of data about what's going on in these stockpiles that we didn't have before. We're able to use technologies to allow us to access parts of these stockpiles that physically, humanly couldn't be accessed before. We're able to understand now where the solution is getting blocked when you're irrigating the solution down into the stockpiles. They're enormous, and you have some places that didn't get the benefit, that there was a blockage for some reason within the stockpile.
So now, with where we're able to have eyes within the stockpile to see what's going on, and we're able to do some drilling to target areas that didn't have the benefit of this solution, which has been proven to boost recoveries. We've added heat. Heat is a big catalyst when it comes to recovering copper from the stockpiles. So we've added insulation, essentially, on top of the stockpiles to retain heat. Now, we've got some more innovation that we're thinking through as to how we actually inject heat into the stockpiles, and we've got some ideas about using geothermal energy and different kinds of techniques to add heat to the stockpiles. We're even looking at the recipe of the solution.
Historically, we've used a sulfuric acid-based solution that goes through the stockpile. Now, there's some different recipes that maybe could yield more copper production. So it's a huge opportunity for us. And the reason why we're so excited about it is this is product that's already been mined. So when you look at the cost of production, it's very low incrementally because we've already incurred the mining cost. And so the incremental cost of these extra pounds is, like, $1 a pound. And today, our average production in the U.S. is like $3 a pound. So, you know, of course, we're producing in Indonesia, very, very low, essentially zero in Indonesia because we've got gold that offsets the cost of all of our production costs. But that's a needle mover in the U.S.
It's got a very high NPV, because it's not capital intensive. You know, when you look at. You talked about $5 and $6 of incentive price, and you look at, you know, different projects recently that have cost upwards of $10 billion, we don't have that with this project. It's not capital intensive because it's basically using new data, new operating tactics that we didn't have before. So you're not having to build a new concentrator. You're not having to build a new tank house. It's very low in terms of capital intensity, very low in terms of carbon footprint because it's already been mined. So it checks all the boxes, and it's economically attractive. It's attractive from a world needs the copper.
So we're very excited about it. It's not done yet because we're just starting. We've got 200 million pounds a year that we're trying to grow over the next couple of years to 400 million pounds, and then beyond that, to get it to 800 million pounds. But just to for you to picture, 800 million pounds at $1 a pound, what's the margin on that? You know, that's over $2 billion of EBITDA. So it really has the ability to make a difference for Freeport. We know we've got to bring down our costs in the U.S. We struggle with low grades in the U.S. We know we've got to bring the costs down, and we're working on that.
But this is also a big initiative that's going to bring down the average cost of our production in the U.S. So we're very, very excited about it. Freeport's in a unique position to take advantage of this innovation. Because we have a long history, we have the inventory of stockpiles that because of our long history of mining, particularly in the U.S. Most of this inventory is in the United States. And so this benefit drops right to our bottom line. You know, we don't have big tax obligations. We do have some net operating loss carryforwards that shelter our U.S. income currently. So all this really drops to our bottom line, and that's why we're so focused on going after it.
Moving to Indonesia, which is, as you mentioned, your single largest asset and lowest cost operation. I wanted to ask you a couple of things. One is, you had a little bit of delay in getting the export license for concentrate this year. That accumulated inventories of concentrate, where are we now in terms of selling those? That would be the first part of the question. And the second is a little bit more longer term. Where are the discussions? Where are you in the discussions to extend your permit to operate, your license to operate, the agreement to work in Indonesia, given how relevant towards that asset is for the firm?
Right. I mentioned we've been operating in Indonesia for 57 years, and it's a fabulous operation, v ery significant in terms of the overall global production of both copper and gold. We successfully transitioned the operation from a surface mine to 100% underground, very modern mining, underground mining at this location. We've been investing in that underground transition for 20 years, so it was a big accomplishment in 2020 during the pandemic to start ramping up the underground so we're doing really well from a mine production standpoint. The government asked us to build a smelter, and it has been a big policy objective of the government in Indonesia to use its natural resources in its economy.
Previously we were exporting concentrates from our operation there, and they asked us to build a smelter. Smelters are complex, and we agreed to it. We're just now finishing the construction, and we are starting the ramp up. It's not every day that a new smelter gets started, so we're putting a lot of resources. Freeport operates smelters. We have one in the U.S. W e have one in Spain. W e have another one that we have through a joint venture in Indonesia. But we do have some experience globally in this, and so we've got a team there now that's working on the startup, and it's going well.
We expect to ramp up to full production by the end of this year, which will be a major, major accomplishment for us. Generally, the project came in within our budget. You know, we had some areas where we had some budget issues, but for the most part, the project came in on budget, which we're very proud of in the context of the world that we're in today with supply chain issues and thinking about when we were developing this smelter over the last few years. So the team has done a great job in that regard. We've got to ramp it up safely, and that's a big, big priority of ours as we look through the end of this year.
But what you're talking about is in Indonesia. They have asked not to export concentrates. They'd rather produce the refined metal and use some of that in their economy and export refined metal instead of the concentrates. We had some delays in getting our export license in June to be able to continue to export concentrates. We got that resolved. We're exporting again as we ramp up the smelter, so we won't need to export concentrates in any significant way next year. During that June period where we were delayed, we built a lot of concentrates. We've been working those off, and we'll be working those off as the year goes. We're also producing a lot of copper.
So, things are going well there. We're very excited about the future. This is an asset that provides great benefit to the community, the local community, and to the people of Indonesia. The state-owned company in Indonesia actually owns 51% of this operation. And with taxes, we're a big taxpayer and royalties that we pay, the government and people of Indonesia actually realize about 70%, 7-0 percent of the cash flows from this operation. So it's successful for Freeport. So it's been a win-win, and we currently have rights to 2041 for this operation, but there's much more beyond 2041. We want to continue to do some more exploration drilling.
We think that there are additional opportunities in the area where we're mining to add to our resource position, and so we've been talking with the government about extending our rights beyond 2041. The government just passed a new regulation in the second quarter of this year that lays out all the conditions that you need to meet in order to apply for extension, and so now we're going through the conditions. The first big condition is you have to have the smelter operational, but we've got a list of conditions that we're going through and preparing to make the application. We'd like to make the application and get approval for the extension this year, so we can start planning more for the future.
Because this business in copper is a very long-term business. You can't wait until 2035 and decide, "Oh, what am I going to do in five years?" You know, you really have to start planning now to develop plans that will allow us to continue to provide, you know, big copper production and gold production from this asset well into the future. So, we're hopeful that we'll be able to get that done this year. It's an election. The government just had an election, and the transition occurs in October. So we're in that transition period, which adds some complexity.
It's in everyone's best interest that investment continue in this operation and that the benefits continue f or both the people of Indonesia and for Freeport. One of the conditions of the extension is to reach agreement for us to sell an additional 10% to the state-owned company in Indonesia, and so that's part of what needs to get resolved as well. We've conceptually agreed to transfer 10% of our interest to the state-owned company in 2041 as a way to provide more benefits to the country after 2041 in exchange for getting the rights. We've conceptually agreed to that. We've got to work through the documentation on it, but it again, it'll be a win-win, and that's the thing about our business.
You have to really think about these assets over the long term and find a balance in what makes sense as investors, investing in these big projects and making sure that we can get returns on those investments. But also being mindful of the political realities, that these assets also have to benefit communities. The resources are owned by these host countries, and so you have to work out an arrangement that satisfies and finds a balance for both parties. Freeport's been really successful in doing that, wherever it's operated, and we've been successful in Indonesia. We've got, as I mentioned, operations in South America. But at one point, we operated, as you probably remember, in the DRC.
We had to do the same thing in thinking about what's the right balance between making the investments and the benefits to the community, so that's a big part of what we do.
Great. In the time that we have left, there's a couple of questions that I would like to squeeze in. One is on the capital allocation. What is the priority between debt reduction, dividend, share buybacks, and your maybe acquisitions? You have a lot to do organically, but you pull the trigger in a transformational acquisition with Phelps Dodge, so you know how to do this. You were in the middle, right in the team that did this. So how can you summarize the capital allocation approach?
Okay. The first thing is the balance sheet, and that box has been checked. We and we're going to continue to maintain a strong balance sheet. Got very little debt at the company, and we're investment grade-rated by all the rating agencies. So we're in good shape from a balance sheet standpoint, but it's very important. We can't lose sight of the fact that we need to maintain a strong balance sheet. Beyond that, we've got a policy where half of our available cash flow is earmarked for future investments, the other half in shareholder returns, both in dividends and share buybacks. So to the extent cash flows go up, there's more cash available for reinvestment and more cash available for returns to shareholders.
That's a policy that a financial policy that our board reviews regularly, but one that's been in place for several years now, and we've been implementing it. In terms of M&A, you know, Freeport is in a good position because everybody wants to be in copper, you know, for the reasons we talked about earlier. But Freeport's in a great position because not only do we have current large-scale production, but we also have options for growth in the future. So we don't have to do it, but we always keep our eyes and ears and do our work, because sometimes when opportunities come, you've got to be prepared to do that.
We don't think at this point, as we look at the world, that Freeport's going to be the most competitive or aggressive in an acquisition, because we don't have to do it. There are some companies out in our industry that are trying to reallocate their commodities exposure and want more exposure to things like copper. And so they may have a more aggressive look at M&A than we would at Freeport. But there are some assets out there that, under the right structure, that maybe there could be a lot of synergies.
You know, maybe our know-how that we just talked about with respect to how we approach project development, how we approach innovation, maybe there's value that we can add to other assets, and we'll have our eyes open for that. But the base case strategy is solid, and so any M&A would have to be incrementally a lot more positive.
We ran out of time, but I just, i n one sentence, how would you describe the current state of demand for copper?
Really good. I mean, and China, China's uncertain. I mean, you got to acknowledge that. There's a lot of uncertainty in China. It looks like the grid spending was back-end loaded this year, and we'll see what happens over the next few months with respect to China. The property sector has been well-publicized as weak. But, you know, people say that the economies are turning down, but we continue to see really good demand in the U.S. There's a number of sectors that are continuing to accelerate, b uilding wire, all the work that's being done with data centers and new power generation is offsetting some of the more traditional uses. So, demand's been good. Business conditions have been good for us.
The China, with the exception, which is a big, a big question mark and continues to be, probably always will be, right?
Thank you very much, Kathleen.
Thank you.
It was great.
Thank you.