Hello, everyone. Next up, we have Freeport, and with us today is Kathleen Quirk. Thank you for joining us, and maybe just to kick us off, you want to tell us something quick about Freeport?
Okay. Thank you, Katja. It's so good to be here at the conference this year. We look forward to it every year to see all of you. Freeport, as all of you know, is really focused on being foremost in copper. We've got these wonderful producing assets in copper spanning the globe, with concentration here in the U.S., Indonesia, and South America. In addition to the large-scale production, we've got a number of organic growth opportunities we're pursuing. The nearest term opportunity, and I'm sure I'll get a question on this, we can talk more about it, is our innovative leach initiative, where we're able to produce incremental copper at a very low cost, very low capital intensity. It has tremendous value for Freeport, and we're pursuing that very aggressively. But we're in a really good position financially.
We've got the balance sheet, we've got the right strategy, the right assets to perform, and what we believe will be a very positive marketplace for copper as we go forward.
Maybe I do want to start a little bit to speak about tariffs. So there's this conversation that the U.S. is going to put tariffs on copper. Can you talk about how you think this is going to impact the copper market and how specifically Freeport is prepared for this?
Yeah. Well, I think most people know, with respect to Freeport and our U.S. copper business, essentially, we're integrated in the U.S. We have one of two smelters in the U.S. that's operating now, and we do produce a lot of product using leach technology, where you don't need the smelter. So in terms of supplying our customers, we're essentially fully integrated. We don't have a significant amount of copper that we need to import into the U.S. to meet our obligations or meet our customer requirements. And so actually, while we've been watching the macro space on tariffs, in terms of the micro and what's gone on with respect to the possibility of tariffs on copper, is that there has been a widening gap in the premium of U.S.-priced copper versus the international prices. And quarter to date, that premium has been in the range of $0.25.
I think it was $0.29 per pound last Friday. If that were to continue, actually, that would be a big boost for earnings and cash flow for Freeport. That equates to, with our copper sales totaling about 1.35 billion lbs that are priced on the COMEX, $0.30 a pound would equate to almost $400 million a year of additional boost for our copper sold in the U.S. But from a macro standpoint, we're watching the tariffs. Of course, we're concerned that if a trade war were to, full-out trade war were to unfold, that that could impact global growth, which would concern us. We're also following very closely the potential inflationary pressures that may come from just generally broad-based tariffs in the U.S. But as of right now, this premium of U.S. copper is helping us from that perspective of generating higher revenues for our U.S.-priced copper.
Maybe shifting gears a little bit to Indonesia. You are in discussions with the Indonesian government to get the export license extended. What's the current status of that?
She's asking about our exports of concentrate, which, as of the end of 2024, we were restricted from exporting. Originally, we expected to have our copper smelter up and running now, and of course, we had the issue last October with a fire. But in terms of being able to export in 2025, during the time period of the smelter outage, we're very confident that we will be given the ability to export. There's been a process that the government has been undertaking to look at the cause of the fire, and they have just recently concluded, along with ourselves, that it was, in fact, a force majeure event. And so they are in the process, the government is in the process of amending the regulation to allow exports during a period of a force majeure event.
And so we expect, we continue to expect, to be able to get that approval done in the first quarter, and we expect to export during 2025 as required during our repair period. The repairs are going very well. The team has worked very hard to procure the necessary equipment that we needed to replace. We're conducting some repairs of equipment in place, and we expect to make really good progress and be back up and running by the end of the second quarter for the smelter. As you recall, we estimate the repair costs will be on the order of $100 million and expect that to be covered by our insurance. But we're very happy with what the team has done to recover from this fire, and that is a big priority of ours this year, is to deliver that smelter. It's real important for us long-term in Indonesia.
There were some reports that the Grasberg operations are currently operating at lower utilization rates. Is that true, and how will that impact just overall annual production there?
Yeah. So reflected in our first quarter guidance that we came out with at the end of January with our earnings, we had expected that we would have one of our three concentrators at Grasberg down for some remedial work that we're conducting. We timed it in parallel with this permit approval. So we are operating now at a lower rate than we ordinarily would have, but that's all factored into our guidance. So we do expect that this circuit of our SAG mill will come back online before the end of Q1, and that's consistent with what our outlook was at the start of the year.
If there are any delays in getting the export license post-Q1, how will that impact the operations at Grasberg?
Well, so right now, we ship about 40% or so of our production to the existing smelter, the one that was built in the 1990s in Indonesia. The new smelter will take the balance. So if we're unable to get the permit, we would have to likely curtail some production. That is a, at this point in time, we believe, a very remote situation. The permitting process has advanced to a stage where we believe the drafting has been done, the approvals have been secured, and so now it's more just documentation. So we think that's a very remote situation.
You mentioned the smelter repairs are progressing well. What are some of the major concerns when you get to the point where you're restarting the smelter?
I'll also mention we also have a precious metals refinery that was part of this project. That was not affected, and we started producing gold bars at the end of last year and actually did our first shipments in the first quarter already. So that process has gone relatively well. I think from a starting up a smelter standpoint, there have not been many new smelters in the Western world that have started up in recent decades. And it's a complex system, and thankfully, at Freeport, we operate several smelters. We have a smelter in Arizona that we've operated for decades. We have a smelter in Europe and Spain that's been operating for decades. We have the ownership and the existing smelter in Indonesia that's been operating since the 1990s. So we have a lot of capability within our organization that can bring the right talent to bear in starting up this project.
And so we've got what we call boots on the ground for people all over the world that are supporting this startup, and we feel confident we've got the right structure. Our contractors have been extremely supportive and helpful to us in executing this startup, but it's not something that you just flip a switch. It happens over the course of months, and so we're not expecting to be up at full rates until the end of this year.
We have a question from the app. Can you discuss the gold price and the benefit of production cost on earnings generation in Indonesia?
Sure. So in addition to Grasberg being the world's second-largest copper mine, it is also a very large gold producer and many years produces between 1.5 million-2 million ounces per year. I think this year we're going to produce around 1.6 million ounces. So it's a significant boost to our cash flows, where you see every $50 move or so in gold, you can do the math on how much money that is. Gold has run from the time we did our forecast at $2,700 to $3,000 almost today. So it's a big benefit for us. We report our costs in Indonesia net of byproducts, and gold is a byproduct of the copper mine in Indonesia. And you could see the data from last year.
Actually, we were producing over 1.6 billion lbs of copper at a cash cost of a negative, a net credit of like $0.28 a pound, meaning that the gold revenues offset all of the production costs, the cash production costs at Grasberg. We'll have that situation again this year. So it's a big boost to our cash flows and earnings at Grasberg.
Are you optimistic on copper price as a result of power demand creation from AI?
Thank you for that question. And Richard Adkerson's in the audience, and I know he's smiling big on that question, but we're very bullish on copper prices. When you look at the uses of copper in today's economy, those uses and the intensity of use of copper in today's economy are growing. And when you think about the amount of power that is needed in our economy, not only to rebuild our systems and in some cases to use renewable power, it's also the infrastructure requirements that are necessary for technology and artificial intelligence. And we all know, and you saw some announcements today from Apple about the billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars that are going into AI infrastructure and technology. That requires a lot of power, a lot of energy infrastructure, and very significant amounts of copper in all of those data centers.
And as we talk with customers around the U.S. and internationally, the demand for power cable is very strong. And we see the opportunity here for copper to have a secular lift. People talk about concerns about the cyclicality of copper, but having this foundational secular lift in demand coming from power generation, new power generation investments, multi-billion-dollar investments in infrastructure and energy infrastructure, it's going to be very positive for copper. And at the same time, it's become more and more difficult to develop new supplies of copper. And even though companies around the world have set copper as a key priority for investment, there's really not been the type of investment and projects in the pipeline that we've had historically. And so as a company and as an industry, we're having to be more innovative to bring on new supplies of copper.
That's one thing that Freeport is very focused on, is what can we do in the near term to increase copper units. It's not going to be from, and Gary was talking about these $7 billion projects. Those projects are not going to come on in the next few years. What we're going to be able to do as an industry and what Freeport's really, I think, making good progress on is those incremental pounds that are getting more, squeezing more out of the assets that we already have. We've got technologies now that weren't available years ago that we can deploy in this process, and we're making really good progress. We've gotten to scale in our innovative leach initiative of 200 million lbs per annum at cash cost, and this is principally from the U.S., but at cash cost below $1 per pound.
We're targeting getting to a 300 million lbs run rate by the end of this year, and then scaling that to the 400 million lbs range in 2026. The dream and the target is to get to 800 million lbs per annum from this initiative. Remember, Freeport is so well positioned in this initiative because we've got the inventory. There'll be companies you'll hear from at this conference talking about the leach initiative and the leach technology initiative, but they may not have the inventory in the testing grounds. We've got at Freeport 40 billion lbs of copper in stockpiles already, already been mined, sitting there, and previously we thought it was all waste.
And now we're finding that going after what's in these stockpiles with new technologies, new data analytics that tell us, "Hey, you've got a lot of copper in this area that has never gotten exposed to enough irrigation, enough liquids, enough solution to be able to release copper." And now with the digital technology that we have, we're able to identify within the stockpiles where this copper is. And so now we're going after it. We're able now with drilling to target areas within the stockpile through targeted deep injections through using drill rigs on the stockpiles. We're able now to get areas that we couldn't access under leach because of safety reasons. Now we're able to get to them using helicopters or drone technology.
But it comes with knowledge of those stockpiles, and knowledge is value in this case because now we're able to go in and figure out how to get access to more copper in these stockpiles. We're going to be testing additives in the field this year. We're also going to be testing, actually bringing heat into the stockpiles starting this year, both in the U.S. and in South America and Chile. So an enormous opportunity for value creation for Freeport. Even given the size of Freeport, because of the low cost and low capital intensity associated with this initiative, we believe we can create a lot of value in bringing down costs in the U.S. and incrementally producing copper with a very strong margin.
Leaching is included in your expectations for costs in North America over the next three years to decline?
Yeah. Well, absent the leaching, so right now in our plans, in our guidance that we've given, we've got roughly just over 200 million lbs per annum in our guidance, so targeting the 300 million lbs at the end of this year and 400 million lbs during 2026, that'll add to our volumes and it'll bring down costs, but absent the leach technology, there are other factors which we're focused on in bringing down costs in the U.S. It's really three areas. The first is asset health and efficiency, and during the pandemic, we saw situations where our asset health, where our maintenance practices, both that were performed internally and externally, didn't get the same value that we were used to prior to the pandemic, and so we're getting now back to the point where when we look at our key performance indicators and asset health, we're seeing much, much better reliability.
We're seeing much, much better asset utilization. So that's one factor. The other factor that goes hand in hand with it is labor. And many of you who operate in the U.S. probably had the same experience where there was an enormous amount of turnover and attrition that went on during 2020, 2021, 2022. We started to see a big improvement in that in 2024, and that's continuing, where now we're able to retain workers for longer. And what that does is allow the training to take place because it does take time to get people experienced with using the equipment, experienced with operating the equipment and driving productivity. So that's much improved. And the third outside of the leach innovation is automation. And more and more and more we're using technology in our business to automate. It makes it safer. It makes it more efficient.
We're just now in the process of putting in autonomous trucks at our Bagdad mine in the U.S. We talked a lot about, in the past, having an expansion opportunity there, but having trouble finding enough workforce, trained workforce to come and work there, and the truck driver is always the hardest one to find and retain and keep, and this autonomous truck, and I know it's been done in Australia, but this will be the first, and in Canada, but this will be the first U.S. mine that'll be fully autonomous, and that will allow us, once we get it going at Bagdad, it'll allow us to do it at other sites. We think there's a huge opportunity for us in the U.S., given we operate six mines there, six copper mines there, to bring more centralization and bring more automation to drive costs lower.
We're very optimistic about technology and what it's going to do for our, particularly in the U.S., our U.S. mining. At Grasberg, we're already doing a lot of remote mining. In the underground at Grasberg, very, very highly efficient block cave. A lot of that mining is done remotely and at the surface. So it's very efficient. And with the surface mining we're doing in the U.S., we think that there's opportunity for technology enhancements that'll help us bring down those costs. And as we look forward over the next three years, we see opportunities in the U.S. to both grow production without spending a huge amount of capital in the near term, and then also bring down costs. And that's going to create a lot of value because it drops to the bottom line in the U.S. We don't have significant taxes or royalties.
It's a lot of value creation for us.
M&A is topical in the copper space, but to your point, you have a lot of organic opportunities to grow. But what would make you more excited about potential acquisitions?
At Freeport, we don't have to do a deal. So that's always a good position to be in. You don't have to do it, but we'd love to find another opportunity. Sitting, and many of you will remember, in 2006, we were able to put together a deal with Phelps Dodge and transform Freeport from being a single asset company in Indonesia to now what it is today, a global leader in copper. We'd love to tack on more copper assets to the extent that we can and create value with those. Now, we monitor. Of course, we've got organic opportunities, but we also monitor inorganic opportunities. And for it to make sense for us, it's got to make sense for shareholders. It's got to be a path for value creation for shareholders. We don't want to get bigger just to get bigger.
We want to find the right deal where we can use our capabilities, what we've been able to achieve, combine with companies, other companies potentially that are in copper to be in a better position to grow, to potentially look at reducing cost of capital, re-sequencing growth opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities out there, but it is somewhat of a seller's market because many companies in this room or at this conference want to get bigger in copper. And so I don't see Freeport as being a company that has to do a deal. So we're not going to go sit on every auction process and be the highest bidder. We're going to be very disciplined about how we go about M&A, but we'll continue to monitor it. If there's a deal there that will create value for our shareholders, Freeport is in a position to execute.
We've got the balance sheet. We've got the team to execute. It's just we're going to be selective about what those criteria are and how it fits in with our business.
We're getting towards the end of our time, but maybe one last question. Kathleen, what are you most excited about this year, and is there anything you're concerned about?
I'm really excited about the work that we're doing in the U.S. on the leach initiative. I really think that it's something that can differentiate Freeport competitively. We have not only the know-how, but we also have that inventory of leach stockpiles, so very excited about scaling the opportunity, excited about what I believe technology will bring to our business. We're out talking with other companies, other industries, because when you think about mining and what we've been doing for decades, we've had some incremental technology breakthroughs, but not much, and yet you think about other industries like oil and gas and what they've been able to do with technology and unleash new production and lower-cost production. I'm excited about that opportunity for us. I'm excited about us proving ourselves in Indonesia with delivering the smelter.
That's going to set us up for an extension of our operating rights beyond 2041. So we've got a lot to be excited about for 2025 as we go forward through the next few years. I think you'll see Freeport being able to execute as we have in the past and grow our earnings for shareholders. What I'm worried about, I mean, there's all the macro things we have to worry about, but from our perspective, manage what's within our control and manage it very well and execute well. And that's what we can do. And as Gary said, make money for shareholders.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.