Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Freeport-McMoRan third quarter conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question during the Q&A session, press star one on your touch-tone phone. If you require assistance during the conference, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Kathleen Quirk, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Freeport-McMoRan third quarter conference call. Earlier this morning, we reported our third quarter 2020 operating and financial results. A copy of today's press release and slides are available on our website at fcx.com. Our call today is being broadcast live on the Internet. Anyone may listen to the call by accessing our website homepage and clicking on the webcast link for the conference call. In addition to analysts and investors, the financial press has been invited to listen to today's call. A replay of the webcast will be available on our website later today. Before we begin our comments, we'd like to remind everyone that today's press release and certain of our comments on the call include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially.
We'd like to refer everyone to the cautionary language included in our press release and presentation materials, and to the risk factors described in our Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, each filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. On the call today is Richard Adkerson. Mark Johnson is also on the call, Josh Olmsted, Mike Kendrick, Steve Higgins, and Rick Coleman. I'll start by briefly summarizing the quarter financial results, and then we'll turn the call over to Richard, who will review the slide materials, and we'll then open up the call for questions. Today, FCX reported net income attributable to common stock of $329 million or $0.22 per share for the third quarter of 2020.
After taking into account debt extinguishing costs associated with our refinancings during the quarter and other non-recurring net charges totaling $101 million or $0.07 per share, adjusted net income attributable to common stock totaled $430 million or $0.29 per share. The special items can be reviewed on page Roman numeral seven of our press release. Our adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation, amortization, or EBITDA, totaled $1.4 billion for the third quarter of 2020. A reconciliation of the EBITDA calculation is available on page 32 of our slide deck. Our third quarter results benefited from improved pricing for both copper and gold, strong copper and gold sales volumes that were above the prior estimates, and solid cost performance. The average realized price during the quarter for copper was $3.01 per pound. That was 15% above the year-ago average.
The third quarter realized gold price of just over $1,900 per ounce was 28% above the year-ago quarterly average. We generated strong cash flows in the quarter. Operating cash flows totaled $1.2 billion and exceeded roughly $400 million of capital expenditures during the quarter. We ended the quarter with $10 billion of total debt, and our consolidated cash position grew during the quarter from $1.5 billion at the start of the period to a total of $2.4 billion at the end of the quarter. I'd now like to turn the call over to Richard, who will be referring to our slide materials.
Thanks, Kathleen. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's call. I hope you and your families and your colleagues are all staying well and safe. This coronavirus situation is not ended. We at Freeport are not letting up our guard in any fashion. We remain focused on protecting the health and safety of our people and the communities where we work, and we're all looking forward to a medical solution, which will come in time. In the meantime, though, we are staying vigilant with our health protocols, and we're also being conservative in the way we continue to run our business. This has proved to serve us well over the last six months. I'm really proud of our Freeport team for the aggressive response we developed as an organization and how we've executed the plans that we announced just six months ago.
It seems like a decade ago, but it was at the end of April when we announced plans that were well received by our company and the market to take steps to reduce costs, capital costs, operating costs, and G&A costs, suspend some low-margin production. We put those plans in place, and we really went after them in an aggressive way, and it served us well. Starting with slide three, we present the highlights for the quarter, and it's notable just how much cash flow we're generating. We've been talking about this for a long time. Tomorrow has finally arrived for Freeport. This is the quarter where all this work that we've been doing for years and years is beginning to show. It's beginning to show its presence. This free cash flow generation will actually accelerate as we go forward into the fourth quarter, into 2021.
By the end of 2021, we'll reach a relatively steady state of volumes, and that extends for the 20 years beyond that our current contract rights extend to. As you see clearly, our sales volumes, our cost and capital performance were favorable to the estimates we provided the market three months ago. Our Grasberg team achieved its quarterly sales targets and continue to make excellent progress with the ramp-up of our large underground mines, the Grasberg Block Cave and the Deep MLZ mine. In Arizona, we completed the Lone Star project during the quarter. It was completed on time and below budget. Bottom line, we generated substantial cash flows in the quarter, reduced our net debt in this quarter by $800 million. This was all achieved operating safely in a challenging environment because of the pandemic.
Our team maintained its focus on the health of our workers and our protocols and showed real drive and commitment in executing our plans while managing this health issue. As an organization, we're all stepping up to meet this challenge. We've met challenges effectively in the past. Turning to slide four, this is LME Week, and it's a strange deal not being in London. Last night would've been the night of our Freeport reception. That's such a fun event, and it's disappointing not to be there. We distributed a video to people, and if you didn't get it, contact David, and we'll get it to you, but it's a lot of fun looking at the video and thinking about all the good times we've had in London and looking forward to coming back next year.
Thinking about LME Week and the times we're facing right now really makes us all very pleased to be a company that's a leading producer of copper. Copper is critical to the economy of the world, has been, but even more so as we look to the future. Copper is absolutely essential and strategic to the technologies that the world is moving to transition to a global clean energy future. More and more, we're seeing the adoption of policies, both in community governments, but by companies to reduce carbon emissions. This initiative no longer is being debated as to whether it's needed or not, but there's a real commitment now to accelerate. As a result of the steps that will be required to reduce carbon, the intensity of use of copper in those application is really significant.
Copper utilization in electric vehicles and the generation of renewable power requires four times more copper per unit than traditional internal combustion vehicles require and traditional power generation requires. The coming transition to 5G technology will be positive from copper with the required data centers, to supporting infrastructure with lots of new copper wiring required to support 5G. These major trends, which are in place and irreversible, will bring significant new sources of demand for copper. That will supplement the already significant requirements for copper to fund global growth in the developing world. We're committed at Freeport to being a responsible producer of copper, which is a very favorable metal in terms of these positive ESG factors going forward.
In addition to Freeport's commitment to the International Council on Mining and Metals, where I just returned as chairman after serving 10 years ago, during the third quarter, we committed to The Copper Mark, which is a new assurance framework developed by the International Copper Association that's specific to the copper industry that demonstrates responsible production practices and how operations for copper can contribute to the UN's sustainable development goals. We're fully committed to these things. Currently in the market conditions, thinking back to six months ago, none of us would have anticipated that we would be today, just six months later, after facing the industrial downturn that was accelerating at that time, and all of the uncertainties from a health and economic standpoints, to think that here we would be at the end of our third quarter in such a favorable market condition.
This has been led by the really dramatic recovery of the Chinese economy and demand that that's generated for copper. Economic conditions in other parts of the world continue to face uncertainties, and we are certainly sensitive to those uncertainties. As I said, we're not letting our guard down. We're encouraged by these demand trends in China. We look at global stimulus measures and decarbonization initiatives, which are also supportive of copper demand. At a time when supplies of copper remain limited, and this supply effect has been really emphasized by what we've gone on with the COVID situation. Prices have recovered from the lows earlier this year. You may recall that we were preparing for a scenario of $2 copper, and here today we have copper at $3.15. That's pretty remarkable. The fundamentals of the copper market are increasingly attractive.
We put together a slide on five to give a historical perspective on these copper markets. Thinking back, there are really strong similarities and parallels to what we've seen earlier. In the early 2000s, when the world was coming out of global recession, there was policy-driven demand, particularly in copper, combined with limited new supplies, which was a new factor in the market at that time. That drove a major repricing of copper to kick off the commodity super cycle. Again in 2009, following the global financial crisis that emerged in 2008, China again led a significant and unexpected recovery in copper prices, when prices increased over three times from the lows over that 24-month period. In each of these times, FCX share price performed strongly.
On the right side of the chart, which shows what's happened since March, copper, it's notable, and this is something that I think is striking and is different, that copper inventories have declined even with the major downturn in the global economy. Who could have ever thought that the U.S. GNP would drop by a third in the second quarter, and copper inventories would not have risen? The global pandemic resulted in disruption of supply as well as demand, of course. With low inventories and limited new supply, the market is positioned for additional gains as we look forward to a medical solution to COVID-19 and for our economies to recover with major copper-intensive infrastructure spending on the horizon. Again, in the past, when the downturn occurred, inventories built, the inventories had to be run off. We don't have that this time.
We have low inventories. With recovery, we're better positioned to see copper perform strongly. Turning to our company, the challenge for us in 2020, unlike these earlier times when we faced downturns, was along with the lower prices driven by COVID-19, we were at a time of trough production at Grasberg. We completed mining the Grasberg open pit at the end of 2019. We couldn't even begin to ramp up in any significant way of the Grasberg block cave ore body, which is our largest underground ore body, until we were complete mining in the pit. All this started and production dropped from the pit. It was at low levels from the underground, and then we get hit with low copper prices from COVID and operational challenges in the Americas because of the El situation.
That makes what's happened for our company over the last six months really, really special. Our team in the Americas continues to do great work executing our plans. The plans were aggressive and challenging. You can see the results of the execution in our financial results. We made the decision to complete the initial Lone Star development project, which is located right in the heart of our operations in Eastern Arizona. This is a relatively small but very positive returns initial project. It opens the opportunity for a very large future significant project. The team at Cerro Verde in Peru has done exceptional work in restoring our large-scale operations there. They were really challenged by COVID. Our people at Cerro Verde lived in the town of Arequipa, which was facing a challenging community situation with COVID.
We had to work with the local community and with the government to restore operations. We've done that largely. We've had to keep a sharp focus on cost and capital management. We had one mine, an older mine in New Mexico that we shut down operations because of COVID situation. We're now taking actions to restart that mine next year at a much reduced rate. A smaller footprint will allow us to achieve cost and capital benefits as compared with prior operations. On the call today is Josh Olmsted, and I want to recognize him and congratulate him on his expanded new role in managing our operations in the Americas. Josh was named Chief Operating Officer for the Americas in August following Red Conger's departure. Red was a great friend and a longtime employee who decided to move for family reasons, and we congratulate him and wish him well.
Josh was Red's right-hand guy for, along with the rest of our team for recent years. He's an experienced operator, a really good, strong, inspirational leader. He's been with our company 28 years. He has worked in leadership roles at a number of our operations across our Americas assets. Josh is really highly qualified and well prepared for success in this new role. He's off to a great start. He's been a key driver of our innovation initiatives, which all of our team is committed to, and is committed to having a high-performance culture. The really good thing is Josh has a terrific team around him. We have really significant technical depth, world-class in every respect. We all look forward to working together with him and his team to accomplish what we have before us, opportunities going forward.
At Grasberg, our third quarter annual sale volumes on an annualized basis reached 58% of the targeted annual run rate post ramp-up. I want you to focus on this. We generated all these cash flows by being at less than 60% of our targets of where we're going to, and we're making progress on reaching those targets. For so long, I've been talking at these calls about looking at this ramp-up. It's not like starting a new operation with a one-point-in-time start-up, but it was a process. A process of increasing volumes. We're at 58% of the target, and we saw we generated this level of cash flows. As we increase that ramp-up, volumes grow, cash flows will grow as well. It wasn't without its challenges this past quarter. We had a COVID-related labor disruption that we had to deal with.
We were actually shut down for four or five days as we worked with a group of indigenous workers in our workforce who wanted to be able to return to the lowlands where many of their families lived. We had restricted travel. We had to negotiate a resolution with that. We also had some maintenance issues with material handling. It's notable, and we're going to have situations that are an inherent part of mining as we go forward, but here's a quarter where we had to deal with a temporary shutdown, some unscheduled maintenance issues, and yet we were able to meet our metals target. By the end of the quarter, the mining rates at the Grasberg Block Cave and the Deep MLZ had reached targeted levels.
We continue to target metal production that will approach 90% of the ramp-up targets by the middle of next year, middle of 2021. Note that the unit costs for Grasberg in the third quarter averaged $0.13 a pound. Grasberg, of course, has this really significant gold component in its ore, which, at full production rates, makes it the largest gold mine in the world, even though it's a by-product production. Using current gold prices, looking forward, if prices stay at this level, gold revenues will fund all of the costs of operations for Grasberg and will be producing over 1.5 billion pounds of copper a year with full ramp-up that we'll reach at the end of 2021 at a zero or negative unit cost. In Indonesia, I'll mention that the discussions about the new smelter are ongoing.
They're being led by our partner, MIND ID, inalum PTFI has requested a 12-month delay in construction of the new smelter that we had committed to because of COVID issues, which affects international contractors and local workers. The government is in the process of assessing alternatives to building a new smelter. No decision has been reached. The discussions are going, being led by MIND ID and the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises. The alternatives that are under consideration will be mutually beneficial to the government, first of all, and to PTFI. We will keep you informed as developments occur going forward. I will note that our partnership that we established with the government of Indonesia and the structure for governance and operating management that we established in December 2018 is really going well. The partnership is strong, mutually supported.
We and the government, through this state-owned enterprise and the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises, the Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Finance, we're all fully aligned now on our objectives of creating value for all stakeholders. We're working together, and that's a huge positive development for Freeport and for the asset itself. Slide seven. We're focused on execution. That's what we've been saying for so long, and that's what the results show that we have been successful in doing. With a focus on execution, continued success will drive strong and improving results. We're now on a path to double EBITDA from 2020 levels as we go forward. Execution of these plans are all well underway. Biggest risks are behind us.
There will always be risks, but the biggest risks are behind us, will allow us to grow our copper volumes by 20% in 2021, gold volumes by 70%. That would result in a reduction in net unit cost by 20% for the company and significantly expand margins and cash flows. You see this in our third quarter results. Our financial performance will improve throughout 2021. Our current operating lives, as I mentioned earlier, extend to 2041 with fixed fiscal terms. This will allow PTFI to generate massive future cash flows from this set of remarkable copper and gold resources. Our company's going to stay focused on execution as we complete this transition at Grasberg. We are deferring any decisions about major new investments. As we go forward with the higher cash flows that'll be generated, we'll be able to reduce our debt and further improve our balance sheet.
You see what we've done this quarter. I'm confident that in 2021, we'll be in a position to recommend to our board a resumption of our dividend for the board to consider, and that as we go forward, we will be able to generate increasing returns to shareholders from higher cash flows. In addition, we'll have opportunities to consider significant growth from large-scale, organic, low-cost, low-risk, high-return, disciplined brownfield investments in our large portfolio of undeveloped reserves and resources. Freeport can maintain its production, grow its production without having success and refilled exploration, which we hope we do, or without having to do any M&A deals. Slide eight shows this. We have a long-life portfolio of mineral reserves. Recoverable reserves extends beyond 30 years with substantial options to expand these reserves in the future, considering our large inventory of mineralized material with our resources beyond current proved and probable reserves.
For now, however, I want to emphasize again, we're focused on executing our plans efficiently, delivering on our targets. As we go forward, we'll be assessing growth options in a measured and disciplined way. I'll close with slide nine with what we adopted internally as the Freeport Edge. Our management team has had extensive experience in managing this business responsibly. We've been together a long time now. Leadership teams across the company are seasoned, battle-hardened, value-oriented. That's one thing I keep talking about our work during 2020. It has been really intense. Our people are energetic, highly motivated. We have an action-oriented management structure. We work together collaboratively. We're experienced, decisive. We never cut corners on important issues like worker safety, community responsibilities, environmental obligations. We keep a long-term focus on our license to operate around the world.
We work hard to earn this and to keep it. We know, we've got a long history of operating on the premise that our shareholders cannot succeed unless all stakeholders in our businesses succeed. Freeport is clearly on a global basis, foremost in copper. Our portfolio of assets are large, high quality. We're an established industry leader, great track record, operate mines, develop mines among the largest in the world. Our assets are long-lived, durable with embedded options for reserve and resource growth. Strong franchises in the U.S., South America, and Indonesia. Industry-leading technical capabilities with a strong track record of project execution around the world over many years. We've earned the trust and respect of our partners, our customers, our suppliers, the financial markets, most importantly, our workers, communities in host countries.
Notably, our block caving experience is, if not the most, one of the most extensive and long-standing in the history of the global mining industry. That's so critically important for success, both in the ramp-up at Grasberg and being able to continue to execute our plans over the next 20 years. This is not for the faint of heart. We've been operating Block Cave Mines in Indonesia since the early 1980s, and we have an important molybdenum block caving operation at our Henderson mine in Colorado. This is critically important as we transfer Grasberg from this enormous surface mine that we completed at the end of 2018 to the largest block caving operation in the history of the mining industry.
Our team has demonstrated its capabilities in good times and bad, and I want to close by thanking our people, recognizing their strength and resiliency, their dedication, and now this performance that's evidenced in today's report. I'm personally proud to be part of this team. I look forward to the success we're going to have before us in the future. We're all motivated and committed to persevere and to achieve this success for the benefit of all of our stakeholders. Thank you for that, and now I will turn the presentation over to Kathleen to talk about some financial matters.
Okay, great. Thanks, Richard. I'll just make some brief comments on financial matters so we can take your questions. As you'll see in the materials, our guidance is very similar to our prior guidance. We have incorporated the planned restart of Chino that Richard mentioned, and that's reflected in the guidance. I just really wanted to make three points. The first one is, as Richard has said, we're continuing to focus on execution of this plan, which will generate growing cash flows and margins. Clearly, the Grasberg underground ramp-up is making great progress, and we're building on that momentum each quarter. I wanted to mention the cost benefits that we're seeing in the ongoing capital management programs. We now feel that we successfully implemented the plan that we laid out in April.
I think when you look at the cash costs in the quarter of $1.32 per pound and compare that to where we were in the first quarter of this year, you see a 30% reduction in net unit cash costs. Also a 30% reduction in capital spending levels. With the increased volumes that we have coming in in 2021 at very low incremental cost, we expect our unit net cash costs will decline below $1.20 per pound next year. We're remaining focused on sustaining all of these costs and capital management programs. We've also implemented savings in a number of other areas, including in general administrative costs, which, as you see in the third quarter, were over 30% below the first quarter 2020 levels.
Second point is, Richard made this point as well, is that the third quarter really demonstrates the growing cash flow generating capacity of the business. We had $1.4 billion in EBITDA during the quarter and $1.2 billion in operating cash flow. Our volumes are continuing to grow. We expect to continue building volumes during 2021 and using $3-$3.50 copper, we would average between $7.4 billion-$9.4 billion per annum in EBITDA for 2021 and 2022 and generate nearly $5 billion to over $6 billion in operating cash flow with $2 billion of capital expenditures. Very focused on free cash flow generation as we look forward. The third point is that our balance sheet and financial position are very strong.
As you'll see in the slide materials, the net debt is expected to decline rapidly and continued execution and performance will allow our board to consider a resumption of dividends in 2021 and increasing shareholder returns over time. As Richard mentioned, we're also continuing to assess the sequence of our future organic growth projects. We expect to be in a great position, really, to maintain a strong balance sheet, provide returns to shareholders, and invest in value-enhancing projects that are embedded in our portfolio as market conditions warrant. That concludes our prepared remarks, and operator, we'll now take questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, press star one on your touchtone phone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the number. We ask that you limit your question to one. If you have additional question, please return to the queue. One moment, please, for our first question. Our first question comes from the line of Alex Hacking with Citi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, Richard and Kathleen. Thanks for the presentation. I'll ask two questions if it's okay. The first question on the dividend. Richard, you mentioned restarting the dividend next year. Any thoughts on how that would be structured? A percentage payout, a net debt target, something like that? Just a second quick one, if I may. Just the copper grade at Grasberg was very strong during the quarter. Should we read anything into this? Are grades coming in ahead of your geological models? This was just some variance that we shouldn't read much into? Thank you.
On the dividend, it's really going to be something that we haven't teed up for the board yet. We're really focused on getting through this year and going forward. We are giving thought to this idea as we make further progress on getting to our targets as to how to establish a policy for the dividend. As I mentioned, we want to reduce debt. We're on track to doing that.
We will likely take a first step of restoring the dividend, but then we'll have the opportunity of doing, as you said, of establishing a financial policy and looking to further shareholder returns, growing shareholder returns in the future. That could be in the form of dividends, and depending on how the equity market reacts, we would have the option of looking at stock buybacks. At this point, we have not really engaged with the board to establish a specific policy. Mark, do you want to comment on the grade situation?
Sure, Alex. Where we're at right now in the Deep MLZ, we're mining some of the highest-grade sections of the skarn sections of the ore body. Estimation of these very high-grade zones is always a challenge for our modelers. The concern is always that we take high-grade intercepts and smear them over too broad of an area and cause overestimation. We've taken a conservative but appropriate modeling approach. The grades that you've seen are a bit of a positive variance that we've had really for the last six months. We believe our overall global estimate is appropriate.
We didn't do anything with our sequencing of the cave. We followed our cave management plan, and really the grades just came to us more or less as a bit of a positive surprise. If you look at the grades individually, Deep MLZ is very high grade. It's close to 1.9%, and gold grades are about 1.8%. What we saw was the bit higher than expected grades in that very high-grade portion of the mine.
One of the things that Mark is doing and the team out there is doing is really focused on the long-term plan. So, as Mark said, we're following the sequencing to maximize the long-term values and not try to look for short-term wins. They're really doing a good job of staying disciplined on that program.
Great. Thank you so much. I should say congratulations on the very strong cash flow in the quarter. Thanks.
Thanks, Alex.
Your next question comes from the line of Timna Tanners with Bank of America.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for the update.
Good morning. Thanks, Timna.
I wanted to ask two questions also. I suppose I'm really curious about the Gresik smelter alternatives and the update there. I know you alluded to some ongoing negotiations. I'm just wondering if it's more than just a delay, if you could give us any color on what that might look like. Then I'll follow up with a second question.
An alternative would be, rather than building a new smelter, to expanding the existing Gresik smelter and adding a precious metals refinery to it. That could not be expanded to a size to take all of our future concentrate production, so there would have to be an agreement allowing us to export the excess. We're proposing, if that's allowed, when I say if we, it's PTFI, and this is being led by the state-owned ministries in the internal discussions within the government, that would involve paying an export fee on that. The benefits would be it would avoid having to undertake this major new construction project, and the financial benefits are really positive for the government. With the government, like all other countries around the world, seeing its financial situation being challenged by COVID, this has some fundamental attractions to the government.
As you know, when we reached our agreement in 2018, a feature of that agreement was a commitment by PTFI to build a new smelter. We had years of discussions about that because it is uneconomic to everyone. To get the deal accomplished in 2018, we had to commit to do that, and that commitment's in place. It's really in the government's hands about what they decide to do. This issue of the financial benefits to the government is a significant one.
Okay. That's super helpful. Thank you. I don't want to take away from all the Grasberg progress and success, but starting to think actually about the next generation of projects and initiatives for the company. I know you've alluded to other projects. Can you kind of run through with us where you prioritize the different options and alternatives out there so we can start thinking about what's around the corner?
I can point to them. We haven't prioritized them yet. We've done some initial pre-feasibility, feasibility type work. We actually suspended some of that as part of our cost reduction efforts in April. We have a significant opportunity in Chile with our El Abra project, where we're essentially 50/50 partners with Codelco. It has a significant sulfide deposit. It would be a major development project involving a water desalination plant, a project on the order of our Cerro Verde expansion. It has an attractive ore body to consider. In the U.S., we have a series of brownfield expansions at mines ranging from our Bagdad mine in northwest Arizona. There's, in the future, a very large sulfide opportunity at Morenci, this Lone Star property, as we mine the oxide cap, we're exposing what looks to be a very significant sulfide resource, which I believe will be developed.
The U.S. opportunities have some economic advantages. We own all of our lands in the U.S., essentially all of our lands in fee. There's no royalties. The tax situation is very favorable, and we have a big NOL carry-forward. When you have the ability to develop resources with no taxes and no royalties, that's a big fundamental economic advantage. As we go forward, we will be doing trade-off studies and making decisions about where and when to invest. That's in the future. We have a long line of potential partners who are interested in working with us. That'd be something we could consider. For right now, we're going to continue to focus and achieve the kind of success for the next few quarters like you saw in this third quarter.
Okay, super. Thanks for all the detail.
Thank you, Timna.
Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Chris Terry with Deutsche Bank.
Hi, Richard and Kathleen. A couple of questions from me. First on Grasberg, just on the development rates for the quarter, I think you said you try to be at 90% by the middle of next year. Just wondering if the third quarter exit rate, that was just looking at the chart from last quarter's slide pack, I think that 94,000 tons is back on track. I just wondered if you could give some details a bit more specifically on, during the quarter, some of those hiccups. You said COVID, four to five days. Was there anything else in there? Basically what the message is sending, I think is at the end of the quarter, you're back onto the chart, the progress chart. That's my first question. I'll start with that.
That's right, Chris. We did have the five-day outage for the work stoppage, and then we had some overflow maintenance that was unplanned during the period, and by the end of the quarter, we had gotten back to the rates and Mark and his team do an update every quarter and went through the five-year forecast and essentially there was very little change in our ramp-up. We're still on track with getting to 90% of the run rate by mid-next year.
Okay.
Yeah. Chris, I think on every one of these calls, we noted that there will be things we'll have to deal with from time to time, just inherent in the nature of mining. What I see is the fact that we had these and we're still able to have this kind of quarter. As we go forward and as we open up more access to these ore bodies, that gives us more flexibility if we do have some issues to deal with of offsetting those by adjusting our operations because of this greater access that continues to emerge.
Okay. Thanks, Richard and Kathleen. The follow-up question I had is just around the dividend. I know you commented before that it's early days. I just wanted to get an update on the target net debt level. I think you previously talked about $5 billion as being around that level that you would think about the dividend. Is that still the thinking on, or $5 billion more correctly is about the level of net debt that you're targeting so then you can explore other options? You're obviously at $7.6 billion now, is that still how we should think about the timing of the dividend when you've reached about that level?
Back five years ago, we set a target of reducing what was then $20 billion of debt by reducing $20 billion by $5 billion- $10 billion. That's the $5 billion, nothing magic about it. In fact, in those earlier years that I referred to when we started generating so much cash, in both of those cases, we totally paid off our debt. We were debt-free 2005, I believe. We were debt-free in 2010, 2011. That's just because these cash flows, when the market is really good, really come at you really strong. In both those cases, we were able to pay big dividends. We're comfortable with the debt level we have now. Kathleen and her team have done a great job of structuring our maturity schedules. We got really strong liquidity.
Certainly $5 billion would be a level of debt that we'd be comfortable with living with in the long run. We'll manage our business on the basis of the cash that comes to us and our expectations about cash flows. I think you could be comfortable in saying that a $5 billion target is something that would be acceptable to us. Cash may come to us that we have paid down more than that. As we did that, we'd clearly be returning cash to shareholders and looking at these opportunities for future investments.
Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Kathleen, and well done on a great quarter. Thanks.
Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of David Gagliano with BMO Capital Markets.
All right, great. Thanks for taking my questions, and as always, thank you for the detailed update. You covered a lot of the things that I was hoping to ask about already, but I do have a bit of a follow-up on the capital allocation question. On the brownfield opportunities, I was wondering if you can just talk about the timing of investing in those opportunities relative to the 2021 dividend recommendations for the board.
This is a feature of the industry, David. Even with all of these projects and their brownfield expansions, execution of those will take a long period of time, even if we were to start today, and we're not starting today. Each of these projects, that would be significant projects. Now, we're going to do things to make incremental improvements through the efficiency programs and so forth. We have an initiative to actually increase volumes without making a capital investment.
We call it the Americas Concentrator Project. For a major brownfield investment project, from the time we make the decision to start, and that's not likely to occur until 2022, 2023, you're still looking at six or seven years at a minimum of execution on it. With positive cash flows, those won't stand in the way of really having significant increases in returns to shareholders.
Dave, we'll have some incremental projects that we can look at that would be quicker than that. Richard's talking about a major investment, but we'll have some incremental opportunities that we can evaluate as well during that period.
Okay, great. That's helpful. Thank you.
David, I think the way to think about it is we have a fully developed set of assets essentially now, and with the kind of positive markets that we have now that we appear to be moving more towards in the future, we're really going to be in a harvesting set of years for the near term. I think that's great to be a natural resource company and being able to look at the benefit of the decisions you made over many years and see that you made the right ones and you generate cash and you return it to shareholders.
Perfect. Thank you.
By the way, Dave, we thought about you on Monday at lunch. We miss being in London.
No comment. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Chris LaFemina with Jefferies.
Hey, good morning, Richard, Kathleen. Thanks for taking my question. It's really a strategic question about Grasberg. Richard, it's something I know you've addressed at times in the past, but obviously the world is changing and things at Grasberg are changing pretty quickly. The question relates to the potential rationale of selling a portion of the gold production from Grasberg as a gold stream. Presumably, you would get a premium multiple. The ability to do so, I would think, has increased now that Grasberg is ramping up and being de-risked. This would accelerate your ability to return capital, potentially even via buyback, which would be pretty compelling, I think, right now. Probably be a very significant positive for your shares.
Would not greatly reduce the competitiveness of the mine and would probably reduce the perceived risk around Freeport as it would reduce your exposure to Indonesia a little bit in the market. I understand in the past, Grasberg was such a critically important asset to Freeport. You obviously owned more than 90% of the mine for a long time. Now that you've done this transition, ownership is transitioning as well with the operational transition to the underground. Again, the fact that arguably the value of the gold from the asset has not been reflected in your shares. What is your argument to not sell a portion of that gold as a stream? Thank you.
All right. Well, Chris, one bit of correction there about the ownership. Since the mid-'90s, Rio Tinto had a joint venture ownership in this interest. While the government's interest was roughly 10%. FCX's interest was net of the Rio Tinto joint venture interest. What we own in Grasberg today is essentially the same that we've owned since the mid-1990s. It's just that the Rio Tinto interest was transferred from a joint venture interest of Rio Tinto to shares owned by the government. Our fundamental interest has not changed. Did you follow that, Chris?
Yes, that's right. Basically, my point is that Indonesia will be the majority owner of the mine, whereas historically, they own less than 10%.
Well, they own 51% of the shares.
Right.
In the past, with that ownership interest is their 10%, they acquired about five from us, but they acquired the Rio Tinto interest. When you look at FCX's ownership interest, it really hasn't changed from what we've had for over the years, and that was one of the really good things about the deal that we cut in 2018, is we were able to hold on to the interest that we had, even though the government had these ownership objectives, which they reached by acquiring the Rio Tinto interest. That's just an aside.
The structure changed, but our economic interest did not.
That's right. Our economic interest has not changed.
Yeah.
That's just a clarification. Yes, we're fully aware of the opportunity that we have to look at a gold streaming opportunity. As you know, we've assessed those over the years in various forms. With the spike in gold prices currently, it makes that a new opportunity for us. We need to get ramped up. You don't want to sell a stream before you have the stream in place. We are studying various alternatives for doing that, and we recognize the opportunity to generate cash and restructure our balance sheet and our ability to deal with returns to shareholders and so forth. That's on our plate. You can rest assured that bankers are visiting us regularly and talking about that opportunity, and it's something we'll be considering. Our first order of business, though, is to get it ramped up.
Yeah, sorry. Second question along those lines, in terms of the operational performance at Grasberg, can you just give us an update? I'm sorry if you mentioned this earlier, I might have missed it on the call before, but can you give us an update in terms of number of COVID cases at Grasberg between your employees and between contractors, if things are getting better or worse regarding COVID at the mine? Just an update there. Thank you.
Yeah. When COVID broke out, Grasberg was a huge concern. I think most of you know we have an enormous workforce there. It was on the order approaching 30,000 people, roughly 20,000 at any point in time, were living in close proximity to each other in the highlands area of New Guinea, where it's damp and cool, and people live and work together. We really recognized that as a problem and made major investments in medical facilities, in protocols for managing it, testing equipment, PCR labs, both in the highlands and the lowlands. We did all the things that the health standards say that you should do in terms of finding infected people, tracing, isolating, and treating. Over time, we've had it. Indonesia, as a country, is a country that's challenged with COVID. We've had a number of cases.
Fortunately, the huge majority of those have recovered or were non-symptomatic. Our process of isolation and restricting travel and testing has worked. The serious cases we have had have been few, and the most serious ones were ones where people had previous health conditions. It's consistent with what people are faced with around the world. We've really done well in the highlands. We had an outbreak of cases in the lowlands, where our ship terminal is and where people there have more of an interaction with the community of Timika, which is less of a controlled situation.
We've instituted new protocols there, and have made a great progress. We've had to deal with it. We've had a number of cases. Almost all have now recovered, and we continue to have very strict protocols on travel interactions and people there. The government and with helping them with health issues, new equipment, and testing procedures. It's been an issue, but it's been managed.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Orest Wowkodaw with Scotiabank.
Hi, good morning. There was, I guess, a bit of a setback there in the third quarter, but you recovered really well with that exit rate of 90,000 tons a day. Can you give us a sense of how that's continued through October? If I'm not mistaken, looking at your slides, wasn't your planned exit rate for the year at 95,000? Doesn't that mean you're essentially already there at the end of September?
Yep, you're right. It's going well. You got to look at where I am. I'm real sensitive about where I wouldn't call it what we faced was a setback. It was just a situation we had to face. We managed it. Man, you look back over the years, that's always the case. It's always the case with complicated mines. It certainly wouldn't be, I wouldn't characterize it as a setback. Yeah, we're on track. We're on track in October. If we had had any 2020, completing mining the pit and really taking the ramp up over the hump to the point of where it was ramping up and generating cash flows, this was a quarter that we always knew was going to be the quarter where cash flows were going to start coming in. They did.
We had to do that in managing the COVID situation, and we just talked about. It's a remarkable accomplishment that we've been able to do that, and we feel very good. We feel like we've avoided the major risk of COVID. We've now avoided the major risk of the ramp up. Mark and his team will face issues every day. We're communicating about how things are going with the various aspects of our operations, how we're doing with our maintenance programs. We've had lots of excess capacity in the mill. We're going to start filling the mill up. We've got to be prepared for that. We're on track to 200,000 tons a day plus of ore from these underground ore bodies to the mill, and everything's on track. It's really gratifying to see.
We haven't had geologic or geotechnical type things, the kind of things that we ran into in the third quarter other than the labor issue, was just more mechanical type things, maintenance type items and ore getting hung up in passes and that sort of thing. That's going to happen from time to time, but those things are more easily dealt with than geologic or geotechnical issues. We're pleased to report it's been going very well on the geologic and geotechnical front.
Yeah, this fracking approach that Mark and his team came up with. The Deep MLZ mine was delayed on the order of two years as we dealt with the seismicity issues, which is not a factor in the Grasberg Block Cave because of the geological setting that it's in. Physical setting, I should say. That was an issue in the Deep MLZ. They came up with a solution and it's working. We still have seismic events from time to time, but the fracking is helping us manage those, and we're being able to achieve the results that you see . It's straightforward fracking. It's not as complicated as what's going on in the oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin. This is a really straightforward type of operation.
Is it possible that you may actually exit this year ahead of plan, given you're already at 94,000 tons a day?
It's certainly possible. Our guys are going to do the best they can do. We set our plans as being aspirational plans, but achievable. The guys work every day to try to do better than plans. The smiles on our faces when we have these days, when we go over plans, it's felt all the way from Papua to wherever we are here in the U.S. Everybody's oriented to try to beat the plans. In the Americas, too. Josh's guys have done a great job. Our safety statistics are great. We did have an unfortunate fatality at Grasberg, where a worker took a really unfathomable action. We work hard, our safety statistics are good. Our people are focused.
One thing I think that this COVID thing has done for all of us, it's really made us focus on our work even more intently than we ever had. I keep talking about work is intense. Now, with having restricted travel, making sacrifices in your personal life, everybody is really focused on work, and we can see the results of that globally.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Carlos de Alba with Morgan Stanley.
Hey. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the question. First, maybe Richard, if you could elaborate, and you maybe early on to provide this number, but what sort of estimate CapEx would you envision for the alternative to a brand new copper smelter in Indonesia? In the expansion of the current smelter and the adding the precious metal refinery, how much would that cost relative to the $3 billion I think that Kathleen had mentioned for potentially CapEx of a new smelter?
Rick Coleman's on the line, and he manages our capital projects globally and is involved in the smelter. Rick, is there any way we can give an order of magnitude number on the Gresik smelter?
Yeah, and I'll jump in here, Richard. The prior estimate for the new greenfield smelter was $3 billion. The estimate for the expansion of Gresik for a 30% expansion is roughly $250 million, and a similar amount for the PMR. We were going to do a PMR anyway in the original configuration.
Yeah.
All right. Thanks, guys.
It's an economic project at current TC/RC rates, which the new smelter would not be.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Good luck.
Your next question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B. Riley. Please go ahead.
Hey, Lucas. Hang on just one second. I just want to say, just to emphasize, we've got financing available to us. We're ready to go. If we do have to build a new smelter, it would be debt financed, no capital required by shareholders in PTFI. FCX would not have to put capital into this. The losses that the smelter would generate would be tax deductible. When you look at the current situation out there with the government owning 50% of the equity, with having taxes and royalties, the government's share of the economics of the project, including the smelter, is in excess of 70%. We do consolidate this, and I'm glad we do. Even though we own 49%, we at FCX control operations at PTFI. It would be consolidated debt, but it would not require capital to be put into PTFI for the smelter from FCX.
Good morning, Richard and team. This is Lucas.
Sure.
Great job on the quarter. My first question, I just wanted to explore another angle of this what's next theme that's been a part of this call here. Would there be any interest to supplement your development pipeline with an acquisition of pre-production copper gold projects? There'd be a couple of candidates in North America, and curious how you think about that opportunity set. Thank you.
Yeah, we look at all of those. We're approached with opportunities. We have a long-term history in the marketplace, we are, as a company, familiar with all of these projects and mineral opportunities in North America and so forth. We'll continue to do that, the challenge we have found to date is we have these internal resources that have currently no value in our share price, and if we're successful in creating value, 100% of that value comes to our shareholders. If we were to acquire properties from someone else, we'd have to pay to their shareholders the current value of that. It's hard to make the numbers work, quite frankly.
Very helpful. I appreciate that. As a follow-up question, I wanted to follow up on your CapEx guidance. You maintained prior guidance and any risk to that number, any sort of cash up CapEx risk that we should be thinking about given the plans you put in place earlier this year, and obviously that's been very successful, but would appreciate your thoughts on that and how we think about CapEx and long-term CapEx over the coming years? Thank you.
Lucas, we're in the next couple of years, really we hit the peak in 2021 at Grasberg. It will be declining after that. As we look out, absent other projects, our capital expenditures will decline significantly from the 2022 levels. We're talking about something on the order of $1 billion-$1.2 billion in sustaining capital. We've got some ongoing development at Grasberg. It won't be anything like what we've got in these next few years. We do have rising cash flows, declining CapEx. We'll be evaluating whether there's opportunities to have some incremental expansions. As Richard said, we're really looking forward to harvesting cash flows for a period of time.
Very helpful. I appreciate that, and continued best of luck. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Andreas Bokkenheuser with UBS.
Thank you very much. Just a quick production question from me, or two part one. Can you just give us a quick update in terms of what the current situation is, especially in South America where you operate? Are you able to fully return to kind of pre-COVID levels production-wise at this point in time? Are you still seeing any kind of lingering pressure from local communities, local governments, in terms of workers returning to the site and this sort of thing? I'm not just talking about your mine, just talking about what you're kind of hearing and seeing in the industry.
Related to that question, when we kind of think about 2021, presumably, I would think that a lot of the growth that you're going to see in copper production and sales in 2021, some of that would be kind of weighted onto the back half of the year. Is that a fair way to look at it, like back half ends up a little bit stronger than the first half of the year, production-wise? Those are my two questions. Thank you very much.
At Cerro Verde in Peru, we've done really well. As Richard said, the team has done a really great job getting back to, we're roughly 350,000 tons a day. Prior to the COVID, we were close to 400,000 tons and looking to grow. We still think that we can do that over time, but for the foreseeable future, until there's a complete return to normal in terms of people going back and forth to work and it's normal, we're going to operate at this lower rate. That's all reflected in our plans. We do expect Cerro Verde at some point, next year, into 2021, to begin ramping up again.
I think the situation in Peru is, and then Josh who's on the line here , can comment, but we're continuing to be very vigilant with our protocols that have been effective. Same in Chile. Chile did have some escalating cases earlier, but that seems to have abated some with the actions that the industry has taken. Still very much like it is around the world. No one has really let up their guard, and we're continuing to be very careful about how we're operating in the COVID environment.
Yeah. One thing I would say, and this is true for us in managing the COVID situation, and it would apply to different operations. It is site-specific challenges, so you can't really generalize about what happens with us versus what would happen with other companies. We had a totally different situation at Cerro Verde than we did in Morenci or Grasberg, and so I'd just caution you about trying to generalize when you hear something about one company's situation, applying it to other sites of other companies.
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't do that. I think there was a couple of Bloomberg headlines out suggesting that Peruvian mine workers were a little bit slow returning to mine sites. I kind of figured that that was industry-wise, just Peru alone. It wasn't something we were trying to extrapolate to Grasberg or Morenci for that matter.
Right. Well, even within Peru, in the second quarter, the government in Peru, on a very sudden basis, shut down mining. We had a different situation because most of our workers lived in Arequipa. We had to then go to work with the local community and the government, and we had to construct some temporary living facilities on site for people to live in and demonstrate to people that we could manage the health situation. That would be a different situation than other operations where they have their workforce already living on their site. Anyway, we've had to manage it, and our guys down there have just done a tremendous job. We're not at full production, but we're at original nameplate production, and we're making a lot of money out of Cerro Verde now, and we have the opportunity to increase it.
To your second question, the volumes we expect will increase quarter by quarter through 2021, and that's mainly because of the Grasberg ramp up. As we said, we expect to get to about 90% of the run rate by middle of next year. The back half will be bigger than the front half, but the front half will still be significant and growing from where we were in the third quarter.
That's very clear. Thank you very much for answering my questions.
Thank you for your question.
Your next question comes from the line of John Tumazos with John Tumazos Very Independent Research.
Thank you very much, and congratulations on so much progress. For the six sulfide concentrators that you've talked about for a couple of years, are any of them even 10% engineered? With the six to seven-year time horizon you're talking about, you're saying that none of them would arrive earlier than 2027?
Rick, I think that's a fair statement, right?
Yes, that's right, Richard. With permitting and with the balance of the engineering is definitely not more than 10% on the larger concentrator designs.
All right.
Again, John, that's what he's referring to is major new projects like the El Abra project would be like another Cerro Verde. As we said, we also have incremental type expansions within the portfolio that don't require permitting or don't require major multi-year planning. We've got a combination of both, but the major projects like the one at El Abra is multi-years because of the permitting that has to be done and all the infrastructure. We do have other options within the portfolio that wouldn't be as long lead.
At Lone Star, are the oxides so vast that the sulfides wouldn't be exposed, or you wouldn't need the sulfides even till 2027?
Right. Lone Star, what's made it so attractive initially is it dovetails in with the depletion of the Safford reserves, which was part of the mine plan there. We had existing processing facilities, and Lone Star is so close to Safford that we're able to truck the ore to the Safford facilities and not to build new facilities. The oxide resource is growing, and we may have an opportunity to invest in incremental processing facilities to take advantage of that. This Lone Star sulfide is longer term even than the opportunities that we have at the other projects because we can make so much money off of the oxides before we develop it.
We've done a lot of work on drilling over the past several years on Lone Star, and we'll be incorporating those drilling results into our longer-range plans. A lot of our exploration budget over the last few years has been on Lone Star, so we're really prioritizing that opportunity.
If I could ask one more. If we just take, for example, the El Abra sulfide mill. If you're largely copying the 240,000 metric ton a day most recent module at Cerro Verde, and the desal plant pump and pipeline is sort of an off-the-shelf, third-party design, and the pit's pre-stripped. Why would the engineering and planning take a long time at El Abra?
It's not just the engineering and planning, it's the permitting. As Rick was saying, we'd have to do an EIS, and you've got a baseline that you have to provide in terms of data going back on it. Then it's a new mill, new desal. We don't have a mill there now. It's an attractive project. It's a very attractive project, but we may have more attractive projects that are less capital intensive.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Mike Dudas with Vertical Research Partners.
Good morning, everybody. Richard, I'm not going to ask you what you think is going to happen in the U.S. elections next month. That's okay. Well, if you want to opine, go right ahead, but I wanted to see what your thoughts are on, say, this month's in Chile with the constitutional vote and looking into next year presidential elections in Peru and in Chile. Any sense of how that could impact positively, negatively tenure or support for mining in overall, maybe some of the labor issues situations that could pop up?
Well, thank you for not putting me so much on the spot. It's not just next month, it's almost next week now that we've got the election here in the U.S. It goes beyond the presidential election. We got complicated political situations everywhere. Latin America is always a complicated area. The thing, though, that underlies this is that with the COVID challenges that the economies around the world are facing, particularly in Chile and Peru, I think that however the political situation unravels, there's going to be a need for those countries and an objective of those countries to provide a favorable environment for mining investments.
In Chile, which has had such long-term success from that, there's a growing recognition of the need for Chile to not lose its competitive edge that it's had. Some of that's been eroded with some recent legislative regulatory actions. I'm confident that those countries will see the benefits of mining investment. In Peru, the bigger challenge is, which we fortunately found a way to manage effectively, is how do mining investments interact with local communities? That's what's really been the barrier there as opposed to central government barriers.
I appreciate that. Thanks, Richard.
Your next question comes from the line of Jatinder Goel with Exane BNP Paribas.
Hi, good morning. A quick one on your 2021 unit cost guidance. You have left it unchanged at below $1.20, there can be a lot of wiggle room based on where prices are. Are you able to indicate if you used spot gold, moly, and currencies with your production outlook, what would net unit cost look like for next year?
We will update our guidance for 2021 next quarter. Our plan right now is below $1.20, and we haven't gotten more specific than that. We'll certainly update that when we come out with our updated guidance. We're trending well below $1.20 at this point on our current plan at $1,900 gold and $8 molybdenum.
Just to confirm, you're using $1,800 in that $1.20, or is it lower than that?
Our current plan that we're using, and we run scenarios, but our current plan with the guidance in the deck is $3 copper, $1,900 gold, and $8 molybdenum.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Chris Mancini with Gabelli Funds.
Hi, everybody. Thanks a lot and congratulations on Grasberg. It really is, as you've been saying, Richard, all along, having followed the company for a long time. Just the amount of tons that you're moving there every day, along with building a mine, along with dealing with COVID and everything, it's really fantastic what you've done there. You have a ways to go, but congratulations. It really is a great job.
Yeah, Chris, we've been talking about it for a long, long time, haven't we?
Yeah. You have, and like you say, you're starting to inflect here, and it's impressive what you've been able to do. I just wanted to say that quickly. Just another quick question. Don't want to put you too much on the spot, but relative to Lucas's question about acquisitions, and you're saying that you're not really seeing a lot of value in potentially buying something. How would you feel about, conceptually, a merger of equals with another mining company? Just given what we've seen in the space about, like you say, kind of value destruction in the natural resources space in terms of deals that have been done at premiums. What do you think conceptually about potential merger of equals, or just conceptually in the space?
Well, conceptually, you can identify circumstances where mergers of equals make sense because of the ability to reduce costs and operate more efficiently through asset management and so forth. In our case, while we've made great progress now, we're less than 60% there in terms of the volumes that we'll achieve at Grasberg. I also believe we have the potential, even though copper markets are strong now, one of the reasons we showed that chart with the earlier years is I believe there are factors working today that could well make copper much more valuable as we go forward.
They're having all these polls in connection with the virtual meetings with LME Week going on. When you look at all the polls that people are taking, copper is far outstripping other metals. I just don't believe, and I'm a shareholder as you know.
Right.
I don't believe as a shareholder that there's any way that we would want to consider a merger of equals right now where we would dilute the opportunity that we have as a standalone company that's so attractive. We've worked for it for a long time, and the reason I'm working and everything else is I believe we're on the verge of really good things happening with Freeport. I just made a brief reference to what happened to us in earlier years. We've had ups and downs with the company for various reasons since then. This time, we're committed to sticking to our guns. Our board has made a firm commitment five years ago to focus on what the real value opportunity for Freeport is, and that's in the copper business with this set of assets.
We've shown in the past what we could do with essentially this set of assets and how we could build real value. I'm getting to the age of where I tell too many war stories, according to some of my friends, including our CFO. 2011, we had a company with a $60 billion market cap and no debt. I think we're on the verge of rebuilding that. We've taken steps, but this is not what this company can be and what we're on the track to being.
I firmly believe, and as I talk to our shareholders, I get nothing but some support about it, that the best opportunity for our shareholders with this set of assets is to stick with the strategy that we're on right now. It's not a short-term strategy, as we've talked about. We got short-term positives going for us, but there's a longer term set of opportunities that's really attractive.
Right. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Given where you are now. Do you think that once Grasberg is fully ramped, you would have a different view potentially?
We'll always view the opportunities as they come about. Chris raised earlier the opportunity for this gold streaming deal, and that's certainly something we'll consider. Yeah, opportunities emerge on an opportunistic basis. That's using the same word twice, but Phelps Dodge emerged for us without having a long-term strategy of doing it, but it was an opportunity that came up because of circumstances, and we took advantage of it. If opportunities come to us in the future that make sense for our shareholders, we will act on it. For right now, it's not the time to do that.
Okay. Well, great. Thanks a lot. Again, congrats to the team for doing a great job at Grasberg so far and the rest of the operations. Thanks. Congrats to you, Richard. Thanks.
Well, we appreciate your kind comments and your support for all of these years.
Now we'll turn the call over to management for any closing remarks.
Well, thanks, everyone. Appreciate your interest. Obviously a great quarter for us, and we look forward to reporting continued progress. It's been a tough world we live in, lots of personal sacrifices. It's gratifying, though, to see within our company, to see the success that we're all sharing together. I think we've made clear today our commitment to continue to move forward with progress and success for the future. Thanks for being on our call today.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.