Talking about why we think this is a really compelling time to own our stock. Before I get going, just a quick note. I will be making some forward-looking statements. I will be talking about our outlook and growth plans. Those obviously involve risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could differ. I will also reference some non-GAAP measures like all-in sustaining costs and free cash flow, and full reconciliations are in the appendix, and I encourage you to have a look in our SEC filings. Why do we call ourselves North America's premium silver producer? It really comes down to these six things. First, 135-year legacy. We are the longest listed mining company on the New York Stock Exchange. As I said, we have been around for 135 years. I think this speaks to our resilience because we are generally thoughtful.
For me personally, being a part of 135-year history, I take that quite seriously because there are generations of miners and people who have held our stock that we are responsible for and accountable to. Second, we operate in the very best jurisdictions. Every one of our operations and all of our projects, they are all in Canada and the United States. And so as someone said last week, we do not have to worry about coups, corruption or cartels. Third, we are silver-focused, peer-leading silver exposure, both in terms of revenue as well as reserves. Fourth is our reserve dominance. In fact, our average reserve mine life is 72% longer than the peer group average. Fifth is the project momentum. We are surfacing some real value through some really robust organic projects, and I will get to those in a moment. And sixth is cost excellence.
We were the lowest cost producer of our peer group in 2025. That is on an all-in sustaining cost basis, and that protects our margins. If you put those six things together, you are really getting a company with scale, with longevity, financial discipline, and sitting in the best jurisdictions in the world for mining. And what that all boils down to is really longest lived, lowest risk, purest silver story in the sector. Our growth is organic by design. Every project and every mine that we sit in, obviously, we already own, we understand it deeply. So there is no new geological risk. There is no integration risk. There is no bidding war on someone else's discovery. We stage the capital for all of our projects and mines as each project earns it, funding the next phase only once it creates our investment criteria.
That does not mean we have closed the door on acquisitions, obviously. If the right opportunity meets our criteria, we will look at it. But our growth, it really just does not depend on it. We have a healthy organic growth business, and I think that is what makes Hecla the premier silver producer in North America. Our three operating mines, they sit in the upper northwest part of our continent. We have Greens Creek in Alaska, Lucky Friday in the Silver Valley in Northern Idaho. That is a tremendous district. That has produced 1.2 billion ounces. I think it is really underappreciated, the silver potential there. And that is not far from our head office in Coeur d'Alene. And our newest mine is Keno Hill, which is up in the Yukon. Around those, we also hold a deep portfolio of exploration projects in Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Washington State.
Together, this makes us the largest silver producer in the United States and Canada. Here's one way of seeing our advantage here. This is perhaps a little bit complicated slide, but let me explain. The key point here is that Hecla's average reserve mine life is 13.3 years. Again, 72% longer than the industry peer year average, which is around about 7.7 years. If you have a look at the chart across the bottom, the solid lines, the solid blue and the solid gray, they're the silver mines, and the ones in white are gold mines. Our reserve base, as you can see, simply runs deeper and longer than any other silver producer, and that means there's a lower replacement risk. It's more predictable long-term production. We can plan long term. We have stability, and we can see over the horizon longer than anyone else.
It gives us more clarity so that we can make capital allocation decisions. This chart plots our mines by jurisdictional risk on the y-axis and the silver equivalent grade on the x-axis across the bottom. Obviously you want to be in the top right-hand corner. The size of the bubble reflects the scale of the asset. So you can see where our three assets sit. Really, I don't think any of our peers can put that combination together across their own portfolio. I think this matters just beyond this chart here. So lower jurisdictional risk, it means security in our future cash flows and our production. I think that's one of the reasons why Hecla deserves a premium valuation. As I said, we don't have to worry about things like coups, corruption and cartels.
In the second quarter of 2026, silver made up about 68% of our Q2 revenue from silver, and that's the highest exposure amongst our peers. In the first quarter, it was above 72%. So if you want silver exposure in your portfolio, this is about as pure as it gets. I think as you can see on the y-axis there, our reserve base tells the same story. It's very, very heavily weighted towards silver. With oil prices obviously being topical and making headlines, it's quite a discussion point. I think it's worth addressing our exposure to it. Fuel really just made up 3% of our consolidated Q2 2026 costs. Swings in oil prices, they barely affect us. Labor is really our largest and probably most predictable cost input, and that's the one that we watch most closely.
On a 2025 all-in sustaining cost basis, Hecla sits at the low end of the silver cost curve. We were the lowest cost producer in our peer group last year, and that's really an advantage that's tied closely to the quality and the grade of our mines. We're guiding to 15.1 million ounces-16.1 million ounces of silver production in 2026. From there, the nearest upside comes from two projects at Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing project. More on that in the next slide. Looking further out, we see a real path to being a +20- million ounce silver producer. The medium-term growth coming from the continued ramp-up at Keno Hill and the potential restart of the historic Midas Mine and any satellite resources in Nevada. Longer term, there's more potential upside from a possible Keno Hill expansion.
We have a permitted mill constraint at 440 tons per day, but the actual mill itself is capable of significantly more than that, probably close to 50% past that. That is longer term. There is also the Aurora deposit. That is one of our VPs' favorite projects. He is very excited about the potential there, as well as Hollister in Nevada. This is basically a multi-year, multi-project pipeline, and every ounce of it is organic. Like I said, we can control it. We can control the investment decisions and it is really meaningful growth potential that is stacked on top of an already long-lived, stable production base and long reserve life. Let me give you a bit more color on our three organic growth projects.
At Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate circuit, that is potentially going to produce something like about 1 million ounces- 1.2 million ounces a year and about 10,000 oz- 15,000 oz of gold once that is fully ramped up. We are targeting first production in the fourth quarter of 2027 and into perhaps the first half of 2028, with about a year to ramp that up. That is really low complexity. It is low CapEx, super high returns. We are very excited about that. Also, Greens Creek, we are evaluating the processing of dry stack tailings. These are not wet tails in a tailings dam. You have seen how they collapse unfortunately. This is basically a pile of dry sand that is sitting on the surface. What we have there is 10.6 million tons holding roughly 51 million ounces of silver, 600,000 oz of gold, plus a bunch of other critical metals.
At mid-year prices this year, that is worth roughly about $6.1 billion in the ground. That is obviously before costs. If you do the math on the tons versus the contained ounces, you can see why we are excited here. That is a lot of metal sitting in a pile on the surface about a mile from our port, that we have already mined once. An update on that. Phase three metallurgical test work, that wrapped up in August, and we are waiting on those results now. At Midas in Nevada, we have a fully permitted mill. It is 1,200 tons per day. We have an empty tailings dam. It has got capacity for around about 15 years. We are planning on doing regular exploration updates through the rest of this year and into 2027 as we evaluate what that is going to look like, what a restart might look like there.
The common thread across all three of these projects here is they are all relatively low capital intensity to execute. Let us just dive into a couple of our operations here. Greens Creek is our cornerstone mine. It has been generating free cash flow for us for multiple decades. In fact, from 2006, you can see in that line chart at the bottom there, it has generated $2.4 billion of free cash flow. It is a phenomenal mine. In the second quarter of 2026, Greens Creek produced 2.1 million ounces of silver and just over 14,000 oz of gold and generated nearly $130 million of free cash flow at an all-in sustaining cost of - $10.71 an ounce, and that is after by-product credits. It sits in the best 15th percentile of the primary silver cost curve, and it carries a 12-year reserve life.
In fact, it's pretty much had a 12-year reserve life for the last 35 years or so. We're also advancing that pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing that I mentioned on the last slide. Lucky Friday is our second cornerstone mine. Our UCB mining technique has this mine positioned really for its best decade in its 80-year history. This has been producing more or less semi-continuously with a few periods of pauses, and really the next decade looks fantastic. We adopted the UCB mining technique primarily because this is a deep and it's a seismic mine, and it was primarily for safety. But it came with a real bonus. Production really increased. It's almost double what it was in previous decades. In Q2, Lucky Friday delivered a record 1.5 million ounces of silver. That was in Q2. That's not an isolated quarter.
If you look back last year, this mine set successive milling records throughout 2025, and it closed the year with a record 5.3 million ounces of production. Lucky Friday generated over $87 million of free cash flow at a little over $17, all-in sustaining costs of $17 an ounce. The surface cooling project, which we've been building out for the last year and a half or two, that's tracking for completion this month. That's going to set up our long-term future. It's going to make conditions working underground more pleasant. It is fairly hot. You can assume that there's probably going to be some productivity gains, but you can't quantify that, because you can imagine working in a hot environment compared to something that's a little bit more pleasant.
It also sets us up for the long-term future, so that as we continue to mine this fabulous ore body at depth, which has not been closed off at all, and in fact, there's been no exploration in the district since about 2011. This is setting us up for future success capacity out to 2044 through a three-phase plan, and the first phase is due in 2028. The reserve mine life here is 15 years. Keno Hill is our newest mine. That's located up in the Yukon. That's still going through a phase of investment and ramp-up. In Q2, it produced about 600,000 oz of silver and generated nearly $15 million of free cash flow. We control a huge land position here, not 88,000 hectares. It's 88 sq mi land package.
There are literally historic mines and mineral occurrences all over this district, and we're really only mining at two of them. Exploration continues to confirm the district scale potential here. I think that we'll probably be producing here for many, many decades. There's that much potential here. I'm very excited about that. But right now, our focus is really on completing the strategic investments, completing the permitting, and making those capital investments towards our permit limit of 440 tons per day. A quick look at exploration, which is really core to how we create value and how I've created value in the past from my previous company. We've really turned exploration from an activity that we fund when we can into really a core business that can potentially transform our company.
We've given the team a license to hunt for value wherever it lives, whether that's in the ground or in a deal, and we're backing that mandate with real capital discipline. That's meant upgrading. We've built our team out. We've added more technical talent. Also commercially, people who know how to structure a deal and not just find a deposit. This year, we're investing a record $55 million in exploration. $24 million of that goes into near mine, so obviously extending the life of mine, that's the bread and butter of exploration. Then we're investing a significant amount into our Nevada growth, $16 million there. Generative and early-stage exploration, $10 million there. Let me close on Nevada, because I think these projects are still underappreciated by the market. At Midas, we have a fully permitted mill, as I said. We've got tailings capacity already in place.
This property has historically produced 2.2 million ounces of gold and 27 million ounces of silver at about 0.5 oz per ton gold. So convert that to metric, that's about 15 g per ton, 16 g per ton gold. So very high-grade historic production. We've already delineated some high-grade resources here. We've had some exploration success, and we continue to build them out. We're also evaluating the potential for residual stope mining back at the Midas Underground, which sits underneath the mill. At Hollister, that's within hauling distance. That's something like about 14 mi away. We're sitting on more high-grade resources. This is also a past producing mine that's delivered the equivalent of around about a 500,000 oz of gold at around about 0.8 oz per ton. At Aurora, which is over in the western side of the state, that holds some of our best exploration targets.
It's got an on-site permitted mill, about 600 tons per day. Historically, it's produced just short of 2 million ounces of gold and 20 million ounces of silver at mill grades averaging over 2 oz per ton. So that's over 60 g per ton historic production. If our 2026 and 2027 drill programs can find more of that, they should really get the market's attention. So stay tuned on all three of those. A quick snapshot for your reference. We trade under the symbol HL on the New York Stock Exchange. Strong balance sheet, zero debt, no long-term debt, and broad institutional ownership and analyst coverages. With that, I think we've left enough time for questions.
Thanks, Rob. I think we have time for one quick question, so I'll ask it. In terms of year-end reserves and resources, any thoughts on what we could expect?
Obviously, we declare our reserves and resources typically in February. We're going through that process right now. I can't really give you guidance, but in terms of reserve pricing, we do what everyone else does. You look at three-year trailing average. You look at analyst forecasts, consensus. You look at the forward curve. You kind of triangulate. There's no real science to it. But I say that we've historically been generally within the goal post, but slightly on the more conservative end. I think we'll be in a pretty healthy position.
I guess we have time for one more. We don't have time. I'll just take you down on the offline. Your balance sheet has transformed over the last year. With no debt and a growing cash balance, what are you planning to do with all that extra cash?
If you look at our peers, most of them have some debt. They've kept debt. We have no debt at all. We're building cash as a percentage of market cap, for example. We don't have as much cash as they do. I want to build up a fortress balance sheet. As I've pointed out, we don't really have a huge wave of CapEx coming in front of us at present. Our organic projects are low capital intensity. At some point, at current prices, we should be bumping up under $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet. Sometime after that, we'd have to start looking seriously about returns to shareholders if we don't have anything material to invest in. But I want to make sure that we stay resilient through the cycles.
Thanks, Rob. I think that gentleman in tan suit will track you down to ask his questions. But thanks for a very good presentation.