Hello and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Roberta Varella. I am the Head of Investor Relations of Nexa Resources. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I also would like to thank you for the people that are joining us from our webcast. Welcome to our first Nexa Day. We are also here to celebrate our 50th anniversary as a listed company on the New York Stock Exchange. It's now my pleasure to introduce to you part of our top management team. We have here Ignacio Rosado, our CEO, Jones Belther, our Senior Vice President of Mining, Exploration and Business Development, and Marcio Godoy, Senior Vice President of Technical Services and Projects. José Carlos del Valle, our new CFO, who joined Nexa last week, he's also here with us.
We will update you on our operations and strategy, our purpose, and how we are planning for the future and positioning ourselves in a greener economy. Following the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. If time allows, we're also having some questions from the audience. For the live audience, please send your questions to ir@nexaresources.com. Ignacio, please, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. We wanted to be the whole team here, but Leo, our VP of Operations, and Mauro Boletta, the VP of Smelting, are working on the budget. These are volatile times, so next time we will try to bring them here. Well, this is a disclaimer, as always. The presentation that we have covers six sections. The first one is the overview that I will go through to explain in a general way our company. Second, the mining. I will also explain that our mining business, all our units and the operations. Jones Belther, our Senior VP of Exploration, is gonna present the growth, the results on exploration and business development.
Marcio is gonna present the smelting business and ESG. Lastly, my closing remarks, we can open up the floor for questions. To give an overview, as you can see in this chart, we are the top five zinc producer in the world, below Glencore, Hindustan Zinc, Teck, and Trafigura. This is 320,000 tons of zinc. This year, to give you an idea, with Aripuanã, we're gonna be above 350, so we might be the fourth. In the case of smelting, we are the number five as well, below Korea Zinc, Trafigura, Glencore, and also Hindustan Zinc. It is worth mentioning that, in zinc and concentrate in our mines, we also produce lead, 50,000 tons.
We produce copper, 30,000 tons, in Cerro Lindo especially, and silver, 10 million tons, which is, we consider these by-products very valuable, and we will see the breakdown of them going forward. In the case of the smelting business, we also produce sulfuric acid, especially in Cajamarquilla, 500,000 tons. Also today, this is a very attractive market, this year and we believe next year as well. Finally, in this slide, all our mines are located in Peru.
Yes.
I don't wanna change. I wanna point out the points. Okay. All of our mines are located in Peru and in Brazil. In Peru, we have the Cerro de Pasco Complex, El Porvenir and Atacocha. Cerro Lindo is south of Lima, and Cajamarquilla is our smelter. In the middle of Brazil, we have Aripuanã, our new project; Morro Agudo, a small mine; and Vazante, a very good mine as well. Smelters, Três Marias and Juiz de Fora in Brazil as well. We have a very senior group of people. You can see the years of experience that we all have. As Roberta was saying, José Carlos joined last week from Antamina.
He was the CFO of Antamina for eight years, so we are very glad that he's here. A lot of things to do with him, we believe that going forward, he's gonna adapt fast to the company. One comment that I would like to make here is that we went through a restructuring process of the corporate center. This happened in June. We started in February. We started in June. We needed to let go 35% of our workforce and some overhead, so that account for $35 million, and that's something that the savings are gonna be in next year. We didn't do this not only for the savings, but also we wanna make sure that the corporate team focus on operations. We focus on sustainable cash flow.
The mines need to know that cash flow is the measure that we pursue. Has to be a low risk cash flow, but has to be. Because we wanna make sure that we make agile decision process on a day to day. If we go to the financial track, you see the revenues. Last two years, $2.6 billion-$3 billion, but before, we were below or approx $2 billion. Our adjusted EBITDA went up to $700 million last year and half of this year is almost $500 million. This was a combination of two things. One is prices. We were exposed to good prices, especially this year, but also we launched a program called Nexa Way.
Nexa Way is a program that transforms the company because we created a lot of initiatives that were in the order of $200 million, and most of them have been implemented. Some of them are still in our numbers. This created a way of looking for always for profitability alternatives, for productivity initiatives, and this is why the EBITDA also is high in 2021. In terms of net income, you will see that we had a negative net income in 2019 and 2020, and this was mainly impairments. You know, at COVID prices, the zinc prices went down. You needed to run tests, impairment tests, and this happened. However, it reverted in 2021 and the first half of this year.
Going to the next slide, I would like to explain the capital allocation of the company. This is very important. The first, the upper left chart has two components. One is the sustaining CapEx, the gray, that if you see is more or less $250 million. This is the CapEx we need to sustain the operations, to buy equipment, to develop the mines, to develop the tailings dams. It's the sustaining in all of our operations and smelters. The orange area is Aripuanã. Aripuanã, if you add up the four years, has been $625 million that we invest in Aripuanã. As I was saying before, Aripuanã is in the ramp-up phase. We will explain that later on, but it's going very well right now.
Below, you will see that there is a lot of expenditures in exploration and project evaluation, especially in exploration. We have been very successful extending life of mines and identifying new targets. Jones is gonna go through that in his part of the presentation. Finally, in this slide, I would like to mention that our dividend policy is 2% of market cap. Last five years, last four years were $50 million on average. We have been speaking to some of our to some people in the community and we believe that we need to have more clarity around probably these dividends in a formula that is more clear in terms of our performance. C1 cash costs, we in the mining are in the third quartile. This is something that we are working out.
We are implementing, and we are looking for initiatives to reduce the cash cost per ton in the mines. I think there we have still room to reduce that and to evolve to the second quarter in the mining. In the smelting, we are top quartile. We are very low cost in terms of the conversion cost. With the byproducts, we are in the first quartile. Here, it is worth mentioning that the access to power in Peru and in Brazil is very reliable and the tariffs that we get are very competitive. We're not exposed to any Russia or Ukraine crisis. We believe that that's why also we are very competitive.
Finally here, in terms of our balance sheet, you can see that our cash and revolving credit facilities are above $1 billion or almost $1 billion. We have liquidity. Leverage is still low. Yeah. It was 1.3x last year, and this year is the same. You can see that the net debt is going up. It's $1 billion in this half. This is because Aripuanã. We spent $625 million in Aripuanã, and we needed to raise some debt because of this. Having said that, we believe that Aripuanã that is full production next year is gonna bring us good cash flow in the coming years. We will be able to reduce this net debt in the next two, three, four years.
In any case, we have high liquidity and low leverage. Regarding our business strengths, this is very important. We have a very unique position in Latin America, that combines with the leadership in our markets. What I'm trying to say here is that three of our mines, polymetallic mines, Cerro Lindo, Vazante, and now Aripuanã, are world-class mines. No? We own those concentrates. Some of them go to our smelters, yeah. We also have access to different concentrates for our smelters because we are located in good jurisdictions. The metal that we get from our smelters, 50% are sold in Latin America. We own 80% of the Brazilian market and 100% of the Peruvian market. What does this mean?
mean that our premiums are more competitive because the clients that we have in Latin America are not exposed to logistic costs. They don't need to import metal. They don't need to pay import costs. They don't need to pay tariffs. We are able to raise our premiums and be more competitive, and they can take advantage of that as well. That's very important. In terms of cost competitiveness, already talk about that, especially in the first quartile of the smelting. We're very good at that. I would like to talk to business resilience. I was not in the company at that time, but I was close to the company because in Peru, everybody knows each other. This company managed COVID in a very good way. We have a resilient business.
We stopped mines a few weeks and production with the right measures and very good standards and taking care of the people were very successful. The continuity of the business was guaranteed, and I think this is something that proves that we are good operators. Number five, very important, environmental management and community relations. You need to know when I came here as CEO, one of the questions that I had was, "Okay, what's going on with our tailings?" You know, tailings is always an issue. Here we have higher standards. Most of them are dry stacking. The ones that are not dry stacking are very high standard. We can sleep overnight because the standards are good in terms of tailings dump.
In terms of communities, in Brazil, we have fantastic relations with communities. In Peru it's different. It's challenging, but still we do a very good job, and we have minor stoppages. Finally, I already talk about our strong balance sheet and operating cash flow. I will put a video now on our purpose. This is important for us because we went through a process here in the company that we understand that it's not about the market and then the understanding Nexa. It's about Nexa understanding the market. Nexa going with the market in the right direction. You will see the video, and then we can comment later on.
Humanity has always been in transformation, but we have never witnessed such rapid changes as in recent times. Cities are closer to heaven. The virtual world is more integrated into the real one. The urgency for innovation in the face of global challenges gets bigger and bigger. Attentive to society, we reinvent ourselves, integrating our way of doing mining to the demands of the present with an eye toward the future. Because we can, and we should, make real a sustainable development with environmental responsibility, quality of life, and plurality. We will keep on adapting ourselves. After all, mining cannot be stuck in the past or stopped in the present. For that, we will continue to count on rhythm for our greatest wealth. People. Engaged, inspired people. Dedicated to providing resources and solutions to a world in constant motion.
Because if there is something that does not change for Nexa, it is our commitment with change. Our purpose is integrating mining to an ever-changing world as an opportunity for a sustainable development. Nexa, mining that changes with the world.
Thank you. In that regard, following our purpose, we put together our ESG strategy. Yeah. This is also that we are very proud of because it has been a very thorough analysis of what is best for the company and what we can achieve between 2030, 2040 and 2050. We evaluated nine fronts or nine themes. Themes here environmental is climate change, natural capital and responsible production. In social, you can read there social legacy, health, safety and well-being, people and culture of work. In governance is integrity and ESG responsibility. These nine dimensions were the ones that we evaluated. Marcio is gonna explain those, our commitments, that are in the market now. Last week, we issue a press release, so we will go in that detail in Marcio's section.
Finally, in this section, I would like to tell the strategy of the company. We have three flagship mines. We have Cerro Lindo, we have Vazante, and we have now Aripuanã with a lot of potential of increasing reserves. This is very important for us because we want a profitable business that stays over time. We have Cerro de Pasco. We wanna convert Cerro de Pasco. This is still early days. We believe Cerro de Pasco that has these two mines could be converted into the fourth flagship mine. I will explain more later on in the presentation. Our pipeline of exploration is very important. Jones will talk about that in the next section. We are working on improving our operational performance in the mines. We wanna make sure that with fewer people, we can get more ore from the mines.
We are active and selective in inorganic growth in zinc and copper. We are looking for opportunities to bring a mine similar to Cerro Lindo, to Vazante, to Aripuanã, in the coming two to three years. Close to production, could be close to production or could be in production. Jones is very active on that. In the case of the smelting business, maintaining higher premiums in local markets, as I was saying, that's our competitive advantage and we want to make sure that this is still the case for the next years. Also improve operational performance. The conversion costs are exposed to FX and to inflation, so we have to be innovative in this front. I mentioned that the energy cost as an advantage. We are a regular dividend payer, and we will continue to be.
Very important for us, we follow our best ESG practices going forward, that Marcio is going to present. Going to the second section, that is the mining section. You can see here where our mines are located. We have in Peru, in Cerro de Pasco, two mines, El Porvenir and Atacocha, that have been operating 69 years and have a life of mine of 8 years today, but with this transformation, we will increase the life of the mine considerably. Cerro Lindo, the most profitable mine, has been in operation 15 years. Today, the life of mine is 8. We are replacing life of mine year on year, so this is gonna go up. We are also drilling in the surroundings of the main areas, and we are optimistic on that.
Vazante, almost 50 years operating, 11 years of life of mine. It's a fantastic mine, very stable. I will talk about that later on. Aripuanã, our new project, is also important. 11 years today of life of mine, but we are aiming to hopefully double that in the coming two or three years. Morro Agudo is a very small mine that provides concentrate to our Três Marias and Juiz de Fora smelters as well. The production profile that you see there is very important because you can see that in zinc, we will be above 350,000 tons. Here in copper is almost 30, in lead between 50 and 60, and in silver is 10 million ounces. The production profile of the company for the next eight years is very stable.
What I'm trying to say here is that with this production profile and profitability measures, we have to focus on cash flow. The cash flow is gonna give us the capital we need to continue growing. This is a commitment that we have with our board and with the market. Going to Cerro Lindo. Cerro Lindo, as I was saying, eight years life of mine, you can see the average grades there. Production in Cerro Lindo has been going down a little bit because of the zinc grade. It's almost 100,000 tons of zinc. It's like 30,000 tons of copper, 12,000 tons of lead, and four million ounces of silver. Cash cost between $35-$40 per ton. This is the cost that we control.
If you see the C1 cash cost, it's negative because of the by-products, and this is because Cerro Lindo is in the first quartile. The CapEx is low. We have a very low sustaining CapEx, and is related also to mine development and to equipment and some infrastructure underground. As I was saying, the strategy here is that in the surroundings of Cerro Lindo, especially in Pucasalla, that is an area that is four km away, we are drilling heavily these two years, so we find a new area that could potentially bring more years of a life of mine going forward. Jones also is gonna talk about that in his presentation. We go to Cerro de Pasco, two mines, as I was saying.
Atacocha, that is an open pit today, but has a lot of mineral underground that could not be extracted today because Atacocha itself will not pay. What I'm trying to say is that is below, it's 500 m below, so if we develop the mine or a ramp or a infrastructure, the cost of development that is not gonna pay. We have the infrastructure of El Porvenir. We have a shaft, we have all developments. The idea is that we use the infrastructure of El Porvenir to connect the two mines and to get to the ore of Atacocha. We will have sources of income, the pit of Atacocha underground that is gonna be accessible through Porvenir and Porvenir as well. This is the project that we call the bottleneck. This is something that we are assessing.
It has to be approved by our board in the next two to three months. We will communicate to the market in the right way. More or less, it's an investment of $150 million. This production that we have here, 60,000-70,000 tons of zinc is gonna go up for at least 20,000 more. Copper and lead and silver as well. We will give you more details when we are finished with the studies that we are putting together. As you can see also, sustaining CapEx today is not that high. In 2021 was higher because we were investing in tailings dam, especially in El Porvenir. Going to Vazante. Vazante is a fantastic mine. Look at the grades.
8.77% of our zinc grade. That's why with the capacity that it has, Vazante produces 140,000 tons of zinc. Not that much of lead and silver. It helps and has a low cost of $45 per ton. But because of the byproducts that are small, we don't have the C1 cash costs that low. However, Vazante has a low sustaining CapEx as well. The good thing to mention here is that it's dry stacking, the same as Cerro Lindo. I forgot to tell you that. It's very safe, and we are reprocessing also some tailings that is helping us clean these environmental liabilities that we have. The exploration in Vazante is very straightforward.
We have to increase the life of the mine. We just bought an area called BDMG, that is an area between two developments that we have. That could give us, hopefully next year, towards the end of next year, three years more of life of mine. Jones is also gonna talk about that in the following section. Finally, Aripuanã. This is the third flagship mine. It's a world-class asset. We built this from greenfield, you know. Contains zinc, lead, copper, silver, and gold. As I was saying, $625 million is in the ramp-up phase. Today, we are 40% of capacity. A stable capacity right now. We are aiming to declare commercial production in the fourth quarter.
I mean, we are already in the fourth quarter, so in the coming weeks, once we are a little bit above 50% or 60% and we have a concentrate that is commercial and is clean to take it to our smelters or to sell it in the market at the beginning. You can see the production there is gonna be 70,000 tons of zinc, 24,000 tons of lead, 4,000 tons of copper, 1.8 million ounces of silver, and 14,000 ounces of gold. Worth mentioning that today we have 11 years, but we have been aggressive drilling these areas like Ambrex and Babaçu valleys. We believe that the continuity is there. It's open. We are getting good grades. Hopefully in the next two years, we will increase the life of the mine significantly.
If that is the case, we can always find alternatives to, with technology, bring more mineral in this plant that we have that is a new plant. Worth mentioning, Aripuanã that is new, has started with very high standards in terms of ESG. 100% of water is recirculated, very important. We use the water and we recirculate all the water, and we don't use the water of all the areas, the green areas that are in the surroundings. This is also dry stacking and backfill. Some of the tailings goes back to the mine, but the other one is dry stacking, very safe. We are very conscious of the socioeconomic development of the area and the preservation of the environment.
One thing that is important here is that we have 30% of women in our workforce. This is something that we are very proud of. It was 40. Because of the location and some aspects. I mean, it's not easy to be in mining. Now we have 30, but we believe that we can increase that number later on. The other part is that the good thing is that these women are not in the office. These women are managing equipment. These women are managing technical areas. That for us is very important because we wanna make sure that diversity and the role of women in mining increases over time.
This is part of our strategy, part of our goals that we wanna pursue in the next years. I will finish this Aripuanã section and the mining section with a video of Aripuanã. This is a recent video that we produced. Let me go through this.
Aripuanã, our third flagship mine. World-class underground polymetallic mine containing zinc, lead, and copper. One of the largest zinc projects in the world. Currently in the ramp up phase. Nexa's largest investment globally. Life of mine, 11 years, plus potential 20 years of mineable resources. Commercial production to be started in the fourth quarter of 2022. Innovative environmental practices and treatment systems. Maintains a close and ongoing dialogue with the community, with a focus on building a positive legacy for the region. Focus on the plurality, diversity, equity, and inclusion of the workforce. Drives a new socioeconomic development axis allied to the preservation of the environment in the Amazon region. Nexa, mining that changes with the world.
Okay. Now we go to Jones' section. He's gonna explain about our exploration programs and business development. Please, Jones.
Thank you, Ignacio. I'm gonna continue with the growth section here. Good afternoon to everybody, and thank you for coming. Now we're gonna talk about mineral exploration and business development. Talking a little bit of our strategy in terms of mineral exploration, we have projects in all phases, from very early stage to brownfield. The size of the circles that we see there is the amount of investment that we put in each stage. In early stage, our great priority is copper projects. We are also establishing the company in new geographies like Ecuador, and we are also drilling in Namibia for copper. In geoscience, we use the best technologies in geophysics, machine learning for processing our information and nanogeochemistry.
We have our greenfield projects mainly represented by Hilarion and Florida Canyon that I'm gonna touch later on. In the brownfield, we dedicated the majority of exploration investment in the short term to replenish the resource and reserves that we mine, but also to extend the life of mine in the long term, and also to evaluate the entire endowment of the districts where our mines are located. In terms of mineral properties, we are always working on recycling and evaluating our mineral properties in terms of keeping an active portfolio without spending much money in maintaining properties for a long time.
The model that we worked in exploration, we work in two fronts that we call an organic pipeline, where we put our own investment in developing our own projects. We also work in inorganic front, where we look for mergers, acquisitions, JVs, partnerships, and external funding for our mineral exploration projects. This what we call a blended model is supports the buildup of our growth pipeline and sustain it for the future. In business development, as Ignacio said, we are looking for advanced stage projects or operating assets, but also looking at JVs and other partnerships. In exploration, we have an optimized investment looking at brownfield, greenfield, zinc, and copper. Now going to slide 25.
In terms of our goals is always to replenish our reserves and resources in our mines, and in identifying newer bodies, either in our mines or in the projects that we have in the pipeline, and always increase resources, extend life of mine and make the business sustainable for the long term. In terms of investment, this year we are investing $43 million. 51% goes to brownfield and 21% goes to greenfield from early to advanced stage projects. We have that very much balanced in zinc and copper pipeline. I would say the early stage projects are great majority on copper. We have optimized investments looking at brownfield, greenfield. We are in three countries. We are in Peru, Brazil, and Namibia.
This year we are doing 130,000 m of drilling. In terms of replenishing reserves, in the last ten years, we increased our reserves by 40%. If you look back in 2011, we have almost 3.7 million tons of contained zinc equivalent in our reserves. In this period, we mined out 6 million tons, and we replenished 7.5 million tons. We still have 5.14 million tons of contained zinc equivalent in our reserves in our operating mines. I would say exploration is a long-term business. If we don't replace what we mine this year, but you can replace twice what we mine next year.
When you look in a longer period, we are always maintaining a good pace in terms of replenishing reserves, and that's what we want to maintain for the future in the long term. This replenishing of reserves maintained Cerro Lindo with eight years of mine life and the Pasco complex. That's the Atacocha and the El Porvenir mine with seven years. Vazante with 11 years, and Aripuanã, that is just ramping up with 11 years. Important to say that we have resources in our operations that has to be converted to reserves in the near future, and that mine life will be kept as the numbers we have, or it's gonna be even larger in the future.
In terms of exploration pipeline, we have projects in all phases of exploration, starting at the early stages in potential area definitions and then initial exploration, exploratory drilling, mineral potential definition, and resource definition in addition to our brownfield projects. Now, going a little bit in detail in all the operations that we have in the operating mines, we are gonna start in slide 29, if I'm not wrong, with a video of Cerro Lindo. In this video, we are gonna have the location of Cerro Lindo with the dry stack tailings in the center of the image there. Then we are gonna be looking at the mine camp that we have in the area.
Going from here to our mill, we have 600 m of elevation difference just to have an idea of topography there. In the back, we have the dry stack tailings that you can see in detail here. Four and a half km north of this area, we found the Pucasaia target. It's a new mineralized body. Now looking at the, I would say, doing a zoom in the district there, we see the geology, where we have this area with tones of greens there that host the VMS mineralization in Cerro Lindo, but we also have several other targets around the mine and around Pucasaia.
Now going into the underground, we can see all the drilling that we have done, all the intersections of zinc in Cerro Lindo and also Pucasaia, 4.5 km north, lead and copper intersections. We can also see a section in Pucasaia with very interesting intersections with almost 25 m at 2.90% zinc, and interesting copper intersections like 2.16% copper in almost 19 m. Looking at a section from Pucasaia to Cerro Lindo, we can see that there's a huge area in between them, where we are still exploring and we are gonna find other ore bodies and extend the life of mine of Cerro Lindo in the future.
Going underground again, we can see the mineralization in Cerro Lindo and Pucasaia 4.5 km north, and then our reserves and the remaining resources that we have in the mine and all the developments that we have done in the mine and the ones that we have for the future and for the eight years that we still have of life of mine. Looking this last one here, we have the Cerro Lindo mineralization, the Pucasaia 4.5 km northwest and all the targets that we're gonna be exploring in the next four years. Looking a bit more in detail in those targets, we have a table with a list there, and they are plotted in the map.
We are putting almost 177,000 m of drilling there in the coming four years. This year, we did 28 lines of TITAN IP that goes down to one km depth. That totals 84 km of geophysics. We are collecting 1,230 MMI and nanogeochemistry samples, and we are putting almost 26,000 m of drilling. The geophysics reviewed very good anomalies, giving continuity to Pucasaia mineralization in the north and also continuity to mineralization south of Cerro Lindo. We are putting a bunch of drill holes from surface that are marked in red there, and several of them from underground that's marked in blue.
As I said before, intersections, we have very good ones in Pucasaia for copper, 2.16% over 19 m and 2.9% zinc in almost 25 m. Important to say those grades are much higher than we are mining nowadays in Cerro Lindo mine. That's a very good sign for the future. In Cerro Lindo, we were very successful in replenishing reserves along the years. If you look at this mine when we did the IPO back in 2017, we have nine years of mine life. We mined from then to today 33 million tons, and we replenished 21 million tons of reserves. Nowadays, we still have 44 million tons of mineral reserves, what give us eight years of mine life.
We can see that zinc grades are dropping a little bit, but copper, lead and silver grades are pretty much maintaining along for the future. Well, we did lots of things there. We found newer bodies like OB9 and OB13 and now Pucasaia. We included the disseminated mineralization around the ore bodies in the reserves. We changed the stope designs. We are mining narrower stopes. We are increasing mine development and increasing the heap leach rehab of some areas with geotechnical constraints, and we are putting much more geotechnical studies to guarantee stability for the future. Now changing to Pasco in slide 33. Here we have the two mines, El Porvenir and Atacocha, and as we can see in the red stars, we have lots of exploration targets around the two mines.
We are putting in the next eight years 377,000 m of drilling there. This year, we are putting 20,000 m of drilling. We discovered a new ore body this year there in the integration zone between El Porvenir and Atacocha. These ore bodies marked in yellow in the left-hand side of the slide. We can see that we have very good intersections, wide intersections for Pasco Complex, with very good silver and gold grades in addition to zinc and lead. Now going to Aripuanã, the mine that we recently built and we are ramping up. We're gonna also start with a video in slide 35.
Just looking at some snapshots of the plant under construction and also a snapshot of the plant and the facilities around it, ready to operate in this picture. We are also gonna see the mineralized trends that we have in this area, that it's 22 km long. We explored intensively only seven km of it. The mineralized bars are hosted in the interface of sedimentary and volcanic rocks. Looking at underground, we have lots of drilling there and all the intersections of zinc, lead, copper, and gold. We can see Massaranduba on the right, that is another mineralized body for developing in the future. Let's go here. Okay, let's go back to the video here.
After looking at the copper and gold intersections, now we're gonna see a section of Ambrex on top and Babaçu at the bottom there, with very large and high-grade intersections like the one that we can see here with 231 m at 9.5% zinc. That's one of the best intersections in the market. That's the infill in Ambrex with large and high-grade intersections also. Here we can see the copper mineralization in purple and the zinc mineralization in red. The Babaçu mineralized body in front is still open at depth. We can see our reserves here surrounded by the resources that will support a longer life of mine for this operation.
The mine is completely developed in gray there, and we are still developing more drifts in this mine. Here we can see that we still have several other targets besides the mineralized bodies that we have to be developed and explored in the future. Again, this is a map of Aripuanã where we see the reserves in red, the measured and indicated resources in green, and the inferred resources in blue. It's easy to say that these resources will convert to reserves and will extend the life of mine of Aripuanã much longer than the 11 years that we have nowadays. This year we put 32,000 m of infill drilling in Ambrex, and that will increase substantially the reserves of the project.
We are doing right now 11,500 m of exploration in Babaçu to extend the resources there. Well, geological model is under construction. Results are very good. We're gonna see in 2023, the focus will be Babaçu to make it bigger and to put measured and indicated resource in that mineralized body. This slide in the left-hand side, you see Ambrex and Babaçu are mineralized bodies, and in the bottom we see three sections. We can see in pale red the ore body prior to the infill, and in dark red is the ore body after the infilling. Clear to see that the ore body is becoming bigger after infill and increasing resources and the reserves.
The section on the right side shows Ambrex and Babaçu and large and high-grade intersections. Now, changing to our Vazante mine in slide 38. In the left-hand side, we have a map with the projection of the mineralized bodies at surface and all the drill holes that we have for the next four years in terms of exploration that will sum up 60,000 m of drilling. Important to say that there's a gap in the map in the left-hand side there, and there's an area in the section on the right-hand side where it's reaching their BDMG. This area we recently acquired, and this area has a mineral resource that is we will extend at least two years of mine life in Vazante.
We are very confident that drilling, we are gonna add much more there. In addition to the exploration that we are doing in Vazante, we are also doing a large infill program in the north portion of the mine to infill the BDMG, Extremo Norte, and Sucuri Norte areas, putting 86,000 m of drilling, and that will convert inferred resources into reserves for extra or additional six to seven years of life of mine. Now going to Hilarion, our main greenfield project for zinc. We are gonna see a video in slide 40 showing the location of Hilarion, that it's in the high Andes of Peru. You can see our core shed there.
We can see these rusty areas where we have mineralization outcrops, like the ones that we have our geologists mapping there with outcropping mineralization and several other areas with this rusty pattern in the picture. Several outcrops, new ones that we have mapped, and we are drilling right now. This is the properties that we have there that cover extensive areas with Hilarion and several exploration targets around it. In terms of geology, we have the intrusives in orange and the skarns in green that host the mineralization. There again, Hilarion and all the exploration targets we have around. Looking at underground, you see all the drilling done in Hilarion North and El Padrino, and the intersections for zinc and lead.
We have a section here where we have mineralized bodies of 38 m at 7.5% zinc, and other ore bodies of up to 101 m width with 10% zinc. It's very good grade, vertical ore bodies that's suitable for productive mining. Here is the modeled mineralization with measured and indicated the resource and inferred resources. That project, you can go under it, develop a mine, and mine it from bottom to top, what makes it very productive in mining terms. There again, there's lots of additional targets to explore and make this resource much bigger. In terms of additional areas to explore, we have the Hilarion North, and El Padrino mineralization project there in the left-hand side.
To the west, we have these hatched areas in red, where we have new outcrops that we have mapped. Now we are putting these blue lines that are the long drill holes crossing Hilarion mineralization and the west trends that we are calling, where we have outcrops with mineralization with 12 m width outcropping for 150 m with 5% zinc, 1% lead, and 43 grams per ton silver. The first drill holes we did there, we are defining mineralization. As we can see in the map in the left-hand side, we have the Hilarion mineralization in magenta or purple there. In dark red, you have the drill intersections, and the pale red is the interpretation connecting the drill intersections in different sections.
It's clear to see with the infill drilling there, we can double the resource of Hilarion with this new west trend and make it a really big zinc resource. Just to wrap up, I think we are very successful in expanding resources in our operations and projects. We increased our reserves 40% in the last 10 years. We were successful in discovering new ore bodies like Babaçu in Aripuanã, that is the largest ore body of the mine. We discovered Pucasaia, north of Cerro Lindo, and we are still drilling there. We discovered Ore Body 9 in Cerro Lindo that also increased the reserves. We are drilling all our mines and around our mines to define the endowment of the districts, and we see open potential trends that merit additional exploration and drilling.
Hilarion is for sure the largest mineral resources undeveloped in Latin America. Now we'll call Marcio for continuing the presentation. Thank you.
Thank you, Jones. Good afternoon, everybody. I'll cover the smelting and the ESG innovation topics today. Starting with the smelters. We have our Peruvian smelter, the Cajamarquilla smelter, that most of you are familiar with. It's the largest smelter, zinc smelter in Americas and also one of the largest zinc smelters in the world. Cajamarquilla is very well located, huh? It's near the Callao Port in the Lima neighborhood, Lima region. It's also just beside the rail line that links the Callao Port to the mines in the inland. We are very well-positioned to receive the domestic concentrate from Peru, which is the second largest zinc producer in the world. Cajamarquilla is in a very good spot.
Also, our products from Cajamarquilla have a very good platform to go overseas and to supply the global market. In terms of strategy that applies for all our smelting units, we work permanently to improve their recoveries, their metal recoveries, and their cost efficiency as well. In order to do that, we apply innovation and that comes together with what Ignacio just mentioned. We launched our ESG goals for long-term, and we are matching these objectives and they really come together. In Cajamarquilla, we would like to highlight some examples on the ESG aspect of the operation. We replaced the oil that was used in some of our equipment by natural gas that improved our energy efficiency in the unit and also decreased our CO2 emission footprint.
This comes together better costs, you know, better energy efficiency. We are going in the right direction in Cajamarquilla. With the communities, we have this reading program that is quite interesting where we, you know, provided libraries to the communities in the surroundings. Eight schools over 800 students are benefited for this, but not only for the libraries but, you know, to help them in the reading process to encourage them in the reading process. Talking about sales overall, if you think of the smelting units as a whole, we are in a trend where we are going to achieve the upper limit. We will end the year in the upper limit of our production guidance, which is around 590,000 tons of zinc.
We are moving on in a good trend at this point. We basically have in Cajamarquilla a good trending production. This sustaining CapEx, also we are investing in our smelters to keep their reliability, okay. That has been going on for a while, and our smelters have a very good production reliability overall. Talking about costs, we are being impacted this year because in our cash costs by the higher zinc prices that you are aware of. You know, the concentrates we buy, they make like 70%-80% of our cash costs depending on the zinc price. They are really important in our C1 cash cost.
Moreover, the conversion cost overall, you know, we've been having these inflationary pressures that we are handling well, but you know, they are somehow impacting us in the power prices and things like that in Cajamarquilla. Well, for Três Marias, moving on to Três Marias in Brazil, is one of the two smelters we have in Brazil. We have Três Marias nearby power dam, hydropower dam with the same name. Very good roads, very good infrastructure around Três Marias. Três Marias is close to Vazante mine that was presented by Ignacio and Jones before, and also close to our Morro Agudo mine, and soon we will start to receive Aripuanã concentrate, okay?
Três Marias receives concentrate from our mines in Brazil, some from Cerro Lindo, and also some other sources of sulfide concentrate. It processes the Vazante concentrate, which is a silicate type of concentrate. Três Marias has also a unique point that is the production of zinc oxide, okay? Zinc oxide has a very good market for you know, consumer goods and for agribusiness. We will see that later on when we summarize our sales portfolio. In terms of cost, the same, or well, sustaining the investments we are doing there are to maintain the asset integrity and the reliability of the assets as a whole.
We are moving forward with a very good maintenance plan for Três Marias, and there are some investments that are also meant to improve its efficiency, energy efficiency, same as Cajamarquilla, because of course, power is crucial for the smelters. We have a very interesting initiative there, which is to replace the fuel, the oil that we use in our furnaces, and we are already testing this in some of our furnaces. We are replacing the oil by bio-oil. The bio-oil interesting point about this is that comes from the Três Marias region, because we have some suppliers that we are developing there that are already producing bio-oil that we are using in our test, but can expand their production to supply oil for bio-oil for all our furnaces.
That will also decrease our carbon footprint and improve our costs. It's a very interesting initiative that comes from the innovation we are applying to our business. Moving to Juiz de Fora. Juiz de Fora is a smelter in Brazil as well. It has a very specific DNA, which is we developed a process where Juiz de Fora can take the EAF, the electric arc furnace dust from the steel mills in the region and process them to produce zinc. In Juiz de Fora, we have a significant part of our sources of zinc coming from this EAF dust. Okay?
That also integrates us with the other companies in the region and provides us a good source in terms of cost benefit for zinc in Juiz de Fora. We are also looking in Juiz de Fora for ways to improve even further our carbon footprint by using bio pellets. Today, we use coke to process, you know, this EAF dust and we are studying and developing ways to use a bio pellet that would have the same energetic power as the coke and therefore we could reduce our emissions.
There's a very interesting initiative in Juiz de Fora that considers you know collecting residues in the surrounding communities. We are building a steam plant that uses residues, industrial residues, and we are integrating that with a selective recycling from the residues in the communities to feed our furnace in Juiz de Fora. This is a project we are developing with an external party as part of an open innovation project that we have. Here we basically show you the big picture for the integration we have amongst our smelters and mines. Basically, around 50% of our inputs in the smelters come from our own mines.
With Aripuanã, we are expecting to have even more concentrate, reaching 60%-70% in the future with the plans that we have to increase production in Aripuanã. That is still to be evaluated. We are still studying this, so we can reach a very good level of integration between our mines and our smelters. We have that 5% there, in terms of secondary sources, mainly the EAF dust that I mentioned.
Here as well, we give you an idea, and then Ignacio already mentioned that 60% of our sales go for the Latin America region, and the remaining 40% goes to the other regions of the world. Basically 560,000 tons of zinc metal and 42,000 tons of zinc oxide. This is pretty much a summary of our commercial profile, which basically re-emphasizes what we've been saying. Our biggest market is Latin America. We also have a good basis to supply the world, depending on the, you know, market conditions. We can choose where to direct our production as we move on.
Here, it's quite interesting, showing that Latin America is one of the regions where the zinc consumption growth is higher compared to other regions. We are very well-positioned in terms of having zinc metal, zinc oxide, close to good markets. This puts Nexa in a special place. In the left-hand side here on slide 50, we can see that, you know, the world consumption by applications, let's put it this way, and Nexa sales by application. When you look at the bottom in consumer goods and agribusiness, obviously we are in Brazil, Argentina. Argentina doesn't use a lot of fertilizers because it has a very good soil.
In Brazil, we do use mainly in the savannas and so on. Then, you can see that Nexa sales profile has a significant amount in consumer goods. Roberta, I think, will have an example of that for you later on. It's quite interesting. Tires, you know, rubber-related items, they use zinc oxide and also in agribusiness for fertilizers. Nexa is well positioned again in terms of its product portfolio and in terms of its location. Moving on to ESG.
In order to cope with the challenges we have ahead of us in terms of, you know, engaging with communities, in terms of having a sustainability agenda and improving our business as a whole, not only the production side, not only the operation side, we launched last week, one week ago, our ESG goals, public goals. Basically, we are concentrating our efforts in terms of sustainability in some pillars or some paths. You know, basically, we are concentrating in the green CO2 emissions, in the water usage, and well-being of our team and community, and also in terms of plurality that you saw in our purpose.
We wanna be a more diverse, open company, and we've been walking that for a while. This is important. The sustainability journey in Nexa, and we will see the innovation journey in Nexa, didn't start last week or this year. It has been going on for a while. Ignacio mentioned the Nexa Way. It's part of this journey. I mean, it's a continuous improvement program that engaged all the organization, all Nexa. We've been moving towards a more sustainable, more diverse and more efficient company since even before Nexa Way. These initiatives that we are seeing today, as Jones mentioned, we have to drill every year to find an intersection.
We have to work permanently in terms of continuous improvement so that we really improve and sustain these improvements in all aspects. This is a journey that began a while ago, and now we are very happy that we can make these public commitments. Our team is really engaged on this, as Ignacio mentioned. Just to give you a flavor of where we are, at this point, we have a good CO2. We are going to improve it. We plan to reduce 20% of our CO2 emissions. We are with the things that we've been doing, we already have a lot to show. Like I mentioned, replacement of oil by a natural gas, the bio-oil in Três Marias.
We have a lot of good things that we've been doing, and we are planning to continue this path so that we can achieve our goal. In our Scope 2, our power matrix, our energy matrix is 99.4% renewable. We have a reliable source of power and most of it is renewable power. We are putting a lot of efforts to find the best way, the best techniques to deposit the tailings that we generate, the waste that we generate. We've been in this path for a while now, and we can say in Cerro Lindo, you saw the dry stacking of our tailings in Cerro Lindo. Vazante the same, it started last year.
Aripuanã already starts with dry stacking and biofuel. We've been working a lot to bring in the most up-to-date technology into our operations that will make them profitable and sustainable in all aspects. The other thing that we are very proud is that today we have almost 17% of women in our team. In some operations like Aripuanã, this number is even higher. We put a goal to achieve 30% in the future. We will see that later. Moving on. I mentioned already some examples, but you know, in terms of water, Cerro Lindo doesn't use the water from the Cerro Lindo, the mine area. It brings water from the sea.
We have a desalination plant there that brings water to our operations. In Vazante as well, we have a program to protect the springs in the region, okay? Because it's a farming area, mainly cattle farming, so people, they cut off the trees, and we are with a program explaining the farmers that it's important to keep the trees in the springs and so on. It's a very interesting program. We have some biodiversity initiatives in terms of you know revegetation. In Vazante it's still active, okay? Joens has just mentioned that we got a new chunk of mineral deposit at this point from BDMG.
We are thinking of how we are going to revegetate the area that we hold in the surroundings of the mine, and how we can make this something that the community, that Vazante, will use in the future to have some income as well. If you think of this revegetation program in Peru, in Cerro de Pasco, we are together. This comes also from an innovation initiative together with a third party. For this program, we can even think in the future and gain carbon credit. We are really moving forward with this sustainable initiatives.
The least one that I would like to show you is this preserved forest, Atlantic Forest that we participate in together with other companies from the Votorantim group. Other Votorantim investees, as we mentioned here, that protects you know 31,000 ha of native Atlantic Forest in Brazil. It's one of our initiatives in terms of biodiversity. You know, I've been talking about innovation from the smelters up to the ESG because we need to bring new things, new business models into Nexa in order to cope with the challenges we have ahead of us. We are doing that. We've been doing that and these initiatives and projects, they take some time to mature.
They sometimes need special regulation. Sometimes they need special business conditions. You know, we've been, as I mentioned, in a journey from a while, and this continuity in pursuing new business models, new techniques, bringing them into the company, it brings fruits as the time comes. We are very active in trying to use our tailings for other applications. We already have some examples of that. Part of our tailings in Morro Agudo, they go as a limestone for agriculture. Okay. We have two initiatives that can use the tailings of two of our mines, one from our smelter, one from one of our mines, to produce cement.
These circular economy issues are very present in our day-to-day discussions in terms of innovation, water efficiency, you know, renewable energy. We have several initiatives as well that will contribute with our goal that I'll show later on. Social technologies, I just mentioned the Pasco revegetation program where we bring in the community, we bring in third parties, and this can open even this carbon credit market to, you know, support the community in the future. We've been putting a lot of effort on these initiatives and also, of course, in machine learning, artificial intelligence, sorry, automation, and, you know, digitalization of our process as a whole. In order to do that, I think it's important to mention that we don't do that only by ourselves.
We are very keen in having partners in things that we can and partners that we can learn from. We have this open innovation approach with several partners. Here we made a summary on you know some of our big numbers. In our innovation sections we've had over 15 people and organizations from over 15 countries participating. More than 1,300 solutions were presented to challenges we've put on for discussions. You know we call finalist projects. We picked up you know 51 initiatives to support those initiatives. This is not only in one year of course it's a long series of years.
basically this open innovation has brought into Nexa lots of solutions that we are applying now and using to improve our business and our sustainability. Finally, I would like to go over a little bit our long-term commitments in terms of ESG. As I mentioned, we are going to concentrate efforts in the climate change in terms of natural capital, well-being of our people and diversity, the plurality in our company as well. I've already mentioned a lot of examples on how we are handling to achieve the climate change goal, which is to reduce 20% in our Scope 1 emissions. We are replacing you know, fossil fuels by natural gas and by biofuels. This is a trend that we have.
We are studying, you know, how we can decrease the emissions in our mines as well by, you know, considering using electric vehicles, electric equipment in our mines. In terms of natural capital, we are concentrating on improving the usage of water in our operations, the smelters and mines. We wanna increase the recirculation of water in our operations to use less makeup water in our process. We have several initiatives. For instance, in Cajamarquilla, we are building a treatment plant. In Vazante, we have a clarification module that will settle the sediments that come from the pumping of the mine, and we can reuse that water in our process without needing water from the river. We have a series of initiatives to recirculate water.
Regarding the well-being, our top priority is safety. We are putting a lot of effort in a program that is very well-known in the mining industry, which is the Global Minerals Industry Risk Management program from the University of Queensland. It's designed by the University of Queensland. We have a three-year program that we started this year and will go next year in 2024 to train all our team and align you know risk perception the risk management concepts and to produce risk maps for each of our units. Of course, we will treat them. We already have that, obviously. This program will really standardize our perceptions and align our concepts, and will leverage our path towards zero fatality.
You know, the other aspect that we are very excited about in this journey is to really increase the number of women in our operations. I think Aripuanã is a very good example on how that can be done. We are learning a lot with this process, you know, in order to attract. The main thing is not to attract, but is to make sure that, you know, people like to work for Nexa and have the right conditions to stay in Nexa. Okay. For instance, in terms of maternity leave, we've standardized the time that women can take, because there was a difference in Brazil and Peru. Now it's six months for both countries. Obviously, there are legal things and.
you know, we were able to take this step, and these are actions that will allow women to come to work for Nexa and stay working in Nexa. This is one of our main points. Besides having women, increase the percentage of women in our operations, we want increase the percentage of women in our leadership positions. As you can see here, we aim to reach, like, at least 10% of women in leadership positions by 2030. With that, I'll close my presentation and pass on the floor to Ignacio to make his final remarks.
Okay. Thank you very much for coming. This is our last slide. I would like to wrap up the strategy of the company and why we believe that we are a very promising company. As you know, one of the largest zinc players in the world with a lot of potential, not only in copper, I would say in zinc as well. As Jones presented, mines with high potential of extension, we believe that we are being aggressive on this, so we believe that in the coming years you will see this extension. Our smelters, and this is something that we never conveyed this message in the past. The smelters are in a very well position. They are profitable, and they are in good markets with good premiums.
As Jones mentioned, we have a very active exploration strategy, a very robust portfolio of potential projects. You know, we are being effective and assertive in ESG. ESG is not easy. This has been a journey of two years, and all these comments that Marcio mentioned have been evaluated and assessed in many meetings. We are very proud of our ESG strategy. Low leverage, we discussed that. I think with this low leverage, the cash flow and the ability to raise some debt could be something that we could acquire a new mine similar to what we have in Cerro Lindo or Santiago or Aripuanã. This is something that, at the end of the day, is the most important part, is commitment to capital allocation and disciplining cash flow.
Cash flow is the metric that we really follow. Has to be cash flow that is low risk. We won't expose people or expose environment or expose communities because of cash flow. But at the end of the day, it's the one that is gonna give us the growth. Thank you very much. We can open for questions if you have or comments, and we will be very happy to answer them, the four of us. There are two questions here.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I'm not sure this is working. Oh, there it is.
No, no.
Thank you very much for the presentation, Ignacio and all the rest of you. I wanted to ask about your acquisition strategy. It seems to me that you're highlighting zinc assets as potential acquisition targets, which to me sounds a little bit new. I think previously the focus was on copper. The question would be what maybe has changed that zinc mines have become more of a focus? Then if you could just update us on your latest thinking on your M&A strategy, that would be fantastic.
Sure. No, it's part of the strategy. I mean, most of the, let's say, evaluations that we have done in the past six months are copper mines, but with a lot of content on zinc. No? We believe that near to production brownfield projects or new mines operating, if they have both zinc and copper, it's good for us, you know? The size, as I said, is similar to the size of Cerro Lindo, of Aripuanã and Vazante. It's the same strategy. I guess, probably here, the positioning was not well communicated, but still copper is important for us. Sometimes copper comes with zinc, and in some of the projects that we evaluated, it comes with zinc.
That's why this message was here. But it's not confusing. It's copper and zinc in the same area. Okay?
Gotcha.
Carlos, go.
No. Go ahead, please.
You can go, Carlos. I don't mind.
There you go.
Okay. You know, Thiago Lofiego from Bradesco BBI. Two questions. The first one on capital allocation and along the same lines, what is the timing for you guys to deliver something more transformational on the M&A front? What is the controlling shareholder's view of the company, especially considering the current valuation and you know, everything you guys still have to do in terms of you know, delivering the solid ramp up on Aripuanã, operating efficiency, et cetera. How does all of that you know, getting to you know, the strategy when we think about the next three years? The second question is about just more shorter term costs. What have you guys been seeing in terms of cost pressures?
When do you think that we might see an easing of costs? How do you see that evolving? Thank you.
Perfect. No, very good questions. I'm gonna go back to the slide on capital allocation. Yeah. The money we spend in Aripuanã, even if the CapEx has been. Yeah, I know. It's coming, it's coming. The money we spend in Aripuanã is $625 million in CapEx. But actually from a cash flow point of view, it's a little bit more because in this ramp up process, we don't get income. You have all these expenses, pre-operating expenses. You accumulate ore, no? We have 600,000 tons of stockpiles. From a pre-operating mode, we have more than $625 million. Yeah? We have been very active on looking for opportunities since Jones was appointed.
We changed his strategy and say, "Okay, before it was with the CFO. Okay, that's part of the process." Again, the technical people are the ones that need to bring the projects because they know if they are good assets, and the technical people know if they can operate. Okay? Jones was in charge. Right away, we put together a list of projects and we put together what is the purchasing power that we have and what is the mines that we want in terms of, let's say, close to production and production. Yeah? We identify some targets we discussed with our board. In our board, the board of VSA is present.
The board, I guess, in a cautious way, it said, "Guys, we are gonna go there in the right direction, but you need to..." There are many things that we have to do now in the short term. We recommend that in the next six, 12, 18 months, we deliver on that. We deliver on Aripuanã. It's been a project that has been very costly. We deliver on all these initiatives that we have in the mines regarding costs, regarding CapEx, regarding reducing the size of the corporate center. You guys are in the right track. Yeah? Then once we are out of that, and we prove that we have the cash flow, we are building the cash flow. Because the way we see the financing is our cash flow plus some debt. Yeah?
The debt could be paid by the new project or the new mine. Okay? We are being cautious on that, but that doesn't mean that Jones is not looking for opportunities. I would say next year, mid next year, towards the end of next year, we will start looking more actively or engaging more in some opportunities. But it's gonna take at least that time. Because we have to make sure that the cash flow is coming, especially from Aripuanã. It's normal that, I mean, your shareholders will tell you that, no? We are aware of that, and we agree on that. That's the case in this particular question. Second one, I guess that there are two things here that are different.
In Peru, the inflation is related to mostly energy and derivatives, no? Oil, something like that. The FX in Peru, the exchange rate is not that different. Peruvian mines are used to offset all of these cost pressures with initiatives, and this has been the case. You will see that our cost per ton, which is the one that we control, you will see that flat or lower. Yeah? In the case of Brazil, it's more challenging because Brazil is exposed to inflation, and inflation in Brazil is inflation. On top of that, you have the FX, no? It was 5.5 a year ago. It went down to five. Went down to 4.5. It today is 5.2.
There is a volatility in FX that affects us because all of our costs in Brazil are in reais, yeah? Our revenues are in dollars. That's probably more challenging. However, we believe that with productivity measures, especially around same people delivering more growth, more production, no? Or less people delivering the same production is the focus today, yeah? We know that in a shift of 10 hours, we have probably three for hours that are lost in the process. We need to increase that to make sure that we offset all of these measures. We are committed on doing that in costs. Having said that, CapEx as well.
Because in CapEx, even if the sustaining CapEx of the mines are not that high, if you add them up and you put together Jones Belther growth, you put together all these new projects that we have to evaluate, the number could be high, yeah? With José Carlos del Valle and the team, we said, "Okay, we have to put priorities, and we have to be more diligent on those priorities." This also means that if we have to build something that is gonna cost us $10 million, why don't we build it with $7 million? This has been the case in Cerro de Pasco. The investment in Cerro de Pasco was much higher. We brought people, experts that were in charge of the detail and found alternatives to reduce the investment.
We reduced the investment by 25%. That is something we are doing. That is something we are also doing. You will see part of that in 2023. Our strategic plan, which is the one that we follow very closely, need to have all of those going forward. One thing that is also worth mentioning is concentrates. We believe that the mix of concentrates that we buy can give us some benefits because we are very close to, for example, bringing concentrates with high content of copper, high content of zinc. The copper is not paid. But we need a little bit more grade on copper on the concentrate to recover more copper and to have a higher by-product. This we are working on this.
We are working on this, and this is something that is also gonna help with the cash flow. No? That's mainly it. Carlos.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Carlos. Carlos de Alba with Morgan Stanley. Just a couple of questions. One of the most promising messages I heard today was the potential to increase life of mine and expand reserves. To the extent that you can comment, how confident are you on that growth, you know, two years or doubling Vazante, expanding two years in other mines? It will be very interesting to hear that. Maybe how much these efforts and what you just mentioning as how can we translate this into the CapEx for the future?
What is the range that you expect to have in maybe exploration expenses and/or CapEx or sustaining CapEx or just for us to have to tie the good news with the cost and the cash outflows linked to that. Finally, is there any opportunity to maybe change the dividend policy or align a little bit the cash flow generation of the company with the money that will be returned to shareholders in the sense that there is less uncertainty that it's gonna be going just one direction, growth perhaps, and not necessarily as much to shareholders?
Okay. Yeah. You wanna start?
Can you hear?
Yes.
Well, in terms of extending mine life, I think, well, Vazante we have a very good life of mine there for a mine that has 53 years operating, and we still have 11 years, and we have possibilities of extending much more with the inferred resources that we have there. Pasco, we are pretty much putting resources there every year, and that's very. It's been very, I would say, fertile in terms of finding additional resources. Well, Aripuanã, it's this year, well, it's not public yet, but we are gonna put 10 million tons of additional reserves there or close to that. The following year, pretty much the same number, because we are only converting further resources into reserves. Cerro Lindo, well, we've been very successful along the last five years and prior to that also.
We had a gap in terms of putting some additional resources in, I would say, the very recent years, like last year, something like that. With the discovery of Pucasaia, that's 4.5 km northwest, that opened up a new ground. We are still drilling there. We are still expanding. I would say results so far are very good. We are confident that we are gonna keep up, I would say in a longer period with the same pace of replacing the resource and reserves.
Cerro de Pasco.
Yes, Cerro de Pasco, I said that we've been very successful there every year in putting new resources.
Okay. Regarding cost and CapEx guidance, we are in that process now. We are in the budget process. I would say that once we announce that guidance for next year, something of that should be reflected. Having said that, this is a process, no? I mean, it's not that in one month you reduce your costing 10% because some of the initiatives need time, yeah? You will see that. I mean, that's the objective, no? We will be very clear with the market as we have been with the projects and the CapEx that is coming and the costs that are coming. You might see a tendency that is gonna evolve in a positive way. That's coming. Okay?
In terms of the dividend, we discussed that with you, the other day. I mean, we are open to speak to our board around a metric that could show more a dividend linked to performance, no. That is more transparent. No problem with that. We are committed to dividends. Dividends for us is important that we, as the capital allocation strategy, has to consider dividends because this is the ability of the company to produce cash and give back some of the share to the shareholders. That is also we are gonna assess. If this is the case, we can get back to you and to the market and announce. Okay. Over here.
Hi. Thank you. Alex Hacking from Citi. Thank you for the presentation. I guess my first question is on Cerro de Pasco. What additional infrastructure investments would you need to make at El Porvenir in order to accommodate, you know, additional material coming from Atacocha? Is it just a matter of driving declines to the ore body?
No. It's a. I would say there are four investments in different areas. One is, El Porvenir has a shaft.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. This shaft has a capacity, and is a very old shaft, so we need to upgrade the shaft to make it more reliable. All this metal from Atacocha goes into the shaft as well, and we have reliability on the metal that we take. That's one thing. The second one is, okay, you develop the ramp. It's a two-km ramp to Atacocha. You have to develop Atacocha underground, you know? That's another, I would say, could be between $10 million, $15 million, and $20 million. This is gonna take one or two years to develop and beginning to extract the mineral from Atacocha. The mineral from Atacocha is 50% higher in value than the mineral of El Porvenir, so it's gonna help.
The characteristics of the mineral are similar, so the plant can accommodate both. If we believe that we have more capacity, we can expand the plant of El Porvenir. That's the third investment. The fourth one is the tailings. El Porvenir is getting towards the end of the life of mine in terms of today is costly to put some tails in our tailings dam. We want to make sure that we build a pipeline to send the tailings of El Porvenir to Atacocha. We already have some infrastructure, but we have to make sure that that is reliable and that is expanded, et cetera.
With these four investments that are $145 million, more or less, with that you get more mineral from underground, you get a pit, you get the mineral from El Porvenir and the underground. This, all of this, production profile and profitability is very similar to Vazante and Aripuanã. No? This is gonna take us three to four years. This is still in our plan. Our board is expecting us to do a very detailed job and to do a de-risk analysis to approve it. Once we do that, we will announce. Yeah, but that is something that is very, very advanced, I would say.
How much of the budget is allocated to the refurbishing of the shaft?
This could be $25 million.
Okay.
You don't have to refurbish all the 1,200 m. There are some areas that could account for 200 m that are the ones that really need to be reforged. Yeah.
It sounds low, that's all. Sorry, just to come back to M&A. I guess I struggle a little bit conceptually, given where your current market cap is, right? The value that the market puts on your stock. I look at some of the valuations I see in M&A, particularly with regards to copper. You know, you look at the recent transaction on San Nicolás, right? It's a pre-production asset, and Agnico Eagle's paying, I forget, $500 million or something just to participate, right? Never mind all the CapEx that's gonna come down the line.
you know, I mean, how realistic is it that you know, in your view that, given where your stock trades and given where, you know, valuations are, especially in copper, that you could find attractive opportunities that sort of make sense for Nexa shareholders?
It's a very good question. I guess going to the San Nicolas case that we studied in great detail. San Nicolas is providing 100,000 tons of zinc life of mine. It could be higher at the beginning and like 70,000 tons of copper. This project will cost. It's in phase two, but it's very straightforward, will cost $1 billion. Teck is paying some money to Teck. Agnico Eagle is paying some money to Teck, so the rest of the money has to be shared. It's $1 billion, okay?
If we were to do half of that, it's like paying some money to Teck, the rest of the money will be around $700 million-$800 million, and we have 50-60 of zinc and 30 of copper in a country that we know and in a country that we could operate. That's a good example of what we are saying. We need $100 million-$1 billion. Okay, how do you finance that? Okay. You see, Aripuanã in the last four years, we CapEx was $625 million, but it was like $800 million, a little bit more that we put in cash. Okay. If you take out those $800 million, the cash flow from the operations is around $300 million-$400 million.
With Aripuanã, we should be able to replicate that. Once our shareholders and our board looks at, okay, this is happening again, raising $400 million-$500 million of debt shouldn't be that difficult for us because we have the capacity. That's the way to go. That's the way to go, and that's the way we are thinking of it. Okay?
Okay. I actually wasn't specifically referring to San Nicolas.
I know, I know.
It's a very good.
I used that as an example.
Yeah, yeah. No, it's a very good project. Would you be interested in a partnership type opportunity?
Yes. The idea is because, I mean, the mid-size projects, I mean, you don't have a lot of projects overall, so you have to be creative enough, and that's why Jones is saying JVs are welcome. Okay, you have to do a JV with a good company that will bring you expertise in technical, in developing projects, that has the capacity to develop the project, that has the same, I would say, corporate governance than us. No? If the project is bigger, we can share, no problem. We can do that. We are active on assessing that. The best way to grow for us is by bringing this type of San Nicolas close to production. San Nicolas is like three years from now, you know? It's very close.
An operating mine that could be expensive, but I mean, it's a different number, but could be more expensive, but it's in the range of what we believe we can pay. Yeah.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hi, I'm Alejandra Andrade from JP Morgan. Staying on the M&A theme, but looking at it from a particularly different angle, thinking about raising debt and kind of leverage and where you feel comfortable. You're talking about potentially raising $500 million. That's pretty significant. In terms of leverage looking forward, is there a threshold that you feel comfortable in, even when you're investing? Or are you willing to temporarily go way above, let's say, a standard level?
No, we are 1.3 today. I guess 2.5 is something that we will be comfortable if we have the right project and we know that this project is bringing cash flow right away, that is gonna turn this number down. Yeah. We did some analysis. We have this five-year plan, and we put some stress or options in those analyses of different projects and way to finance. I guess you are right. The right number is $400-$500 in debt, but the asset need to have certain characteristics that the asset will also pay for some of the debt. No? That is something that has to be into the equation.
Just, I guess, because the focus is M&A down the line and replenishing or building even more liquidity, I'm assuming you wouldn't consider buying back bonds right now at this stage?
The maturity of the bonds are like five years. It's very low cost in this market, 5%. I mean, you never know. I guess our aim is net debt going down. Either we build the cash flow and we pay the bonds at the end, or we create opportunities to pay the bonds before. I mean, we are open to different alternatives. You know, we have been discussing. The aiming is, okay, net debt has to go down. This is what we are trying to do in the following years. Okay?
Great. Thanks.
Okay. There are questions you need? No. Okay, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you for this. We are committed to do this every year, hopefully next year we will bring you good news, good performance. Thank you for the time, and we'll speak soon whenever we are in the market and you guys want to talk to us. Okay. Thank you very much.