All right, good morning, everyone. My name's Kevin O'Halloran. I'm a research analyst at BMO covering the precious metals sector and based in Toronto. We're going to get started with our presentations, and our first presentation today is Hecla Mining. Hecla is a senior precious metals company with four mines in the U.S. and Canada, and near-term growth is driven by the ramp-up of the Keno Hill mine in the Yukon, which the company acquired in 2022. Here today to provide an update is Phil Baker, Hecla's President and CEO.
Thanks, Kevin. I happened to see in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that you shouldn't have a meeting at 8:00 A.M., and so I guess BMO's solution to that is to have you eating breakfast while I'm presenting. So enjoy your breakfast. Thanks for being here. Very happy to be here. I've been coming to the BMO conference for more years than I will mention, but it is, you know, I'd have to say this year is probably the best year I've seen, certainly the most interest that we've seen in Hecla and in the silver market. I am going to make some forward-looking statements, and they are subject to the cautions found in our 10-K, 10-Q, and other filings.
Before I talk about Hecla, though, what I'd like to talk about is silver, because that's really the foundational reason for investing in Hecla, is the, the silver market. Just a little bit of background as to what the market is: it's a billion-ounce market, 1.2 billion ounces of demand, one billion ounces of supply. That supply is really broken into two major components: recycling, which is a pretty small component, only, only 18%, and then mine supply, which is just a little over 80%. So about 800 million ounces comes from, mine supply, and 23% of the total comes from primary silver producers like, like Hecla. On the demand side, 1.2 million ounces demand, almost half of that is industrial demand, investment demand about a quarter, jewelry and silverware about a quarter.
And when you look at that industrial demand, it's broken into really three major components: electronics, electrical. So all of the, you know, this piece of, of this doodad right here has a little bit of silver in it, certainly in that the screen that you're seeing, there's silver in it. So that's the electronic component, the, brazing alloys, and then, and then photovoltaics. And photovoltaics make up 25%, or now about 14% of the total demand for, for silver. As a result of this industrial demand and this growing industrial demand, what we're seeing is a growing deficit. We saw that in 2021, 50 million ounces deficit; this in 2022, 250 million ounces and Metals Focus is projecting a 140 million ounce deficit this year. I certainly think it could be higher.
And really, in my mind, what's driving this change in the silver market, and it is a fundamental change, is the photovoltaic market. Photovoltaics, you know, they've been around a long time, but they have, with the energy transition, they really have become a key component to causing our economy to go green. When you look at the renewable capacity that was added this past year, about 500 GW was renewable, and of that, 380 GW was solar. Now, it takes 500,000 ounces for 1 GW of solar. So that's where we get about 190 million ounces of silver used for photovoltaics in 2023.
The interesting thing that's happening in the photovoltaic market is that while they've been thrifting over the past, you know, 20 years, over the course of the last couple of years, new technologies have come into play that actually use more silver. So it's starting to move in the opposite direction: 30% more silver in the case of one technology, 120% more in the case of another. And when you look at the facilities that are being built, 80% of those facilities are being built to use one of these two new technologies. So I think what you can expect is a growing use of need for silver per gigawatt. Now, let's talk about Hecla, because Hecla is the premier silver company. We've been around 130 years. We have been producing silver that whole time. But interestingly enough, we've been growing very, very rapidly.
If you go back to 2018, we produced about 10 million ounces of silver. This past year, 14 million ounces. This year, we'll see that grow, and I'll talk when I talk about our guidance where we think we'll be in a couple of years. With that silver production, we are the largest in the United States. We produce almost half the silver that's mined in the U.S. We produce, we've just started production in Canada, and you'll see us in the next two years produce close to 40% of all the silver mined in, in Canada. The mines are located in Alaska, the Yukon, Idaho, and then we have a gold mine in, in Quebec. Very, very low-cost operations, very long-lived operations. Every one of our operations has a mine life in excess of about 14 years, and they're growing.
On this slide, you can see we're going to grow to 20 million ounces by 2026. The other thing just to mention is culture. Our, our culture really encourages innovation, and, you'll see when I talk about the Lucky Friday the changes that we've made at that operation that, has just fundamentally changed it, and it's, it's really about innovation. But let's first talk about Greens Creek. It's the world's 11th largest silver mine. It's been in, it's been around since 1987. We've been involved in it since the beginning. We have been the operator of it since 2008. Over its life, it's generated $2 billion of free cash flow. Two-thirds of that has come since we've been the operator in 2008. We acquired it from the portion we didn't own in 2008 from Rio Tinto.
The last couple of years, we've had $432 million of free cash flow from the operation. This really is the foundational asset of the company, and its expectation is this will continue to operate certainly for another 15-20 years, and I don't see any reason that it won't operate even longer than that. Since we've been the operator, we've been able to make improvements to the operation, increased recoveries to 81%, so a 7% increase, and we've increased the throughput of the mine. So this mine is producing more silver now than it ever has in its history. The Lucky Friday, this mine's been around since 1942, and it's on a different path than it's ever been before because of changes in the way we operate. We've actually patented a new mining method, and this mine will now produce in excess of five million ounces.
Last year, we had a fire at the Lucky Friday, which caused it to be down for five months. We went back into production at the beginning of January. We'll be at full production there by the end of the quarter. We would expect this to generate a significant amount of free cash flow. It was on that path last year, produced three million ounces over the first seven months of the year. So well on its way to producing five last year. We'll do that this year, and five will be the most ounces of production the Lucky Friday has ever produced. If you look at it historically, it's been about a two and a half million ounce producer. So it's doubling its production. It's increasing its cash flow. Its costs are reduced because of the new mining method that we have. Keno Hill. That's this is our newest mine.
It's in the Yukon. This is a mine that we had our eye on since 2007. We made a number of attempts to try to figure out how to acquire it. Finally, in 2022, we made the acquisition of it as well as a stream that had been placed on it with Wheaton Precious Metals. We took the stream out as well as acquiring the company. This is a super high-grade mine. The average grade of the mine is over 26 ounces per ton. It's a mine that we just put out our first technical report on. We have a mine life in excess of 11 years. It'll produce 50 million ounces over those 11 years, so almost five million ounces of production per year, so basically the same level as the Lucky Friday. And it's part of a very large land package.
We have the ATAC property that we also acquired last year. Between those properties, we have almost 700 sq mi of exploration ground where the ATAC property comes quite close to the Snowline property that you've heard probably so much about. The ramp-up at Keno has been slower than we've wanted, and it's been slower because we just have not met our safety standards. So we have slowed it down to make sure that we have people working safe. And then our Casa Berardi mine in Quebec. It's been a very good mine for us, and it's going to be even better in the future. We are transitioning from being both an open pit and underground mine to just the open pit. We'll finish that transition this year. We'll be free cash flow generating over the next three years.
We'll have a couple-year gap where we will do the stripping that we need to do on two new pits. Those pits have a grade that's over 3g per ton, and the cash flow generation over the last seven, eight years of this mine is in excess of about $100 million a year. There's also a new technical report out on Casa Berardi. Just a little bit about our balance sheet and the income statement revenues, almost 40% is silver. You're going to see that continue to increase. I would expect that we'll be over 50% this year. Our margins are very strong, basically 50% margins, and you're going to see the our net debt to EBITDA. You'll, we're targeting 2x. You'll see us get to that level probably end of this year or the end of next.
Then our guidance. This year, we would expect to produce right at 16.5 million ounces. You'll see us go to 20 million ounces by 2026. So interestingly is despite Hecla being such a longstanding company, we are in fact the fastest growing silver producer, established silver producer. Cost quite low and, as a result of that very strong free cash flow. So I have a minute left. I wanted to allow for that and see if there's any questions. You guys appreciate you guys being here. Any questions?
If you do have a question, just raise your hand and we'll get a microphone over to you. Maybe in the interim, Phil, can you tell us a little bit about potential synergies between Greens Creek and Keno Hill given that they're geographically quite close together?
Yeah, so the two mines are close. In fact, interestingly, the barge that brings our material up to Greens Creek actually continues to Skagway and brings the materials for Keno Hill. What we're anticipating doing is trying to operate the two properties as, as much as possible as one, at least with respect to back office.
We've taken our GM from Greens Creek, who's been there 27 years and has done basically every job. He's going to now be the, regional vice president responsible for both of these operations. We're not sure what all the synergies are, but I can tell you that, the guys are excited and gals are excited at, at the opportunity of the two properties working together. Any other questions? All right, well, thanks very much. If you do, I, I will make one last comment. We got Russell Lawlar here, our vice president, chief operating officer, or chief financial officer.
We got Anvita Mishra, our Treasurer and VP of Investor Relations, and Rob Brown, our VP of Corporate Development. So if you have any questions, please feel free to speak to one of us. Thanks very much.