Thank you, Chrissy. It's all about people, this business. I mean, the rocks are interesting, but without the people, there is no business. So, look, thank you everyone for tuning up today in this early session to hear my story. I mean, today's presentation is a little different. It's about a mining company that drills, a miner that explores. I mean, exploration is the start of the process. And let's get the stats out of the way early here. Westgold, in financial year '24, invested $25 million in exploration, greenfields, and resource development. We drilled 365 km. What does 365 km look like? If you draw a line from where we stand here in Fremantle, Geraldton's 370 km. That's how much drilling this company did in FY '24. What did that drilling generate for the shareholders? It added over 600,000 ounces of resources to the business. That, as a return on investment, looks pretty compelling to me.
To have exploration success, we really need three things, and my presentation won't be very technical. It really is trying to show the philosophy we have as a company in terms of what we do. The three key ingredients to exploration success is really to have tenure, targets, and team. And I'll talk to these three T's briefly. Tenure: Westgold today has now two strategic footprints, both in the Murchison and the Southern Goldfields. That's over 3,200 km of tenements. And historically, we can see from recent work that we've done, both are quite under-drilled. The Murchison had a perception about having a lot of drilling, which is true. Very little of that drilling has been done at under 50 m. The Southern Goldfields package, the Beta Hunt and the Higginsville ground, which we're starting to reacquaint ourselves with outside the historic targets. Currently, the business has 3.3 million ounces of reserve. More importantly, 13 million ounces of resource. This is a target-rich environment.
Second thing we need is targets. And terrible maps, I know, and you can see them better from where you're sitting. On the left-hand side, it's really our asset map in the Murchison. There's a list of names there which won't mean much to many, but it just is a light sprinkling of some of the projects and targets we have in the pipeline. To the right-hand side, you're seeing the Southern Goldfields. And again, what we're seeing there now, and again reacquainting ourselves with the Higginsville package, is how little drilling has been done outside of the known targets. Westgold's now starting to get busy in the Southern Goldfields. All great mines start as greenfield targets, and this really is just trying to show the process of moving targets, starting with target generation, what you have to do and invest to move these things forward to a decision to mine. The image in this pipeline is a pretty standard image. It's really showing our Southern Goldfields priorities and our Murchison priorities, and I'll really touch on two of them as a case study at the back end of this presentation. I'll very much speak to how we've transitioned Bluebird South Junction from a resource program into a decision to mine, and I'll talk to our latest target, which is Fletcher at Beta Hunt three.
And probably the most important part of exploration success is you need a team, a team that's focused. We are a little different at Westgold too, where other than having a great team of focused people, we've actually got an in-house drilling capability. Currently, we own 15 underground drill rigs that we own and operate. We've got over 120 people inside our in-house drilling division, and currently 17 geos. The geoscience numbers are growing fast because our drilling is increasing. We're now supported by a group of independent surface drilling contractors, and we are drilling on the surface both at Peak Hill and in the Higginsville package. So some of those contractors, God bless them, and we won't be doing any open-pit drilling ourselves. We'll be using third parties to do it.
So what does exploration success look like? And it probably depends, backing up that question, it depends on where you are on the journey as a miner. It probably looks different than if you're an explorer. Exploration success for an explorer probably is more about the share price and trying to get yourself to a point of having a revenue. Where for us as a miner, exploration needs to try and deliver these three things: it needs to expand our existing resources, extend our existing mine lives, and identify the next suite of assets which will be turned into mines and revenue. Case in point: last February, I stood up here and I said, look, we've got this thing, Bluebird South Junction at Mikara, and everyone's got a view of Mikara, but Westgold and its team is making Mikara great again. Last year, I stood here and said, look, we don't really know what we've got here. This mine currently is doing half a million tons per annum, but we're going to invest 18 million bucks, and we think we can make it bigger.
February to today, what did that $18 million do? It grew the resource at Bluebird South Junction to 1.4 million ounces. We've now opened up the second side of the mine, which is South Junction. And this mine, last year, half a million tons of production, well, a run rate of half a million tons per annum. This year, rapidly moving to a million tons of production. Why do we love this thing? We keep drilling it. We can't find the edges of it, and it's still open at depth. So we're just going to drill on here because what we see is a much larger operation than the one we're currently operating.
Same strategy. Let's now switch back to Kambalda. We've only owned the Beta Hunt asset since August, and our real attraction to this mine was the Fletcher Zone. This is a 50-year-old nickel mine that's been mined for nominally five or six years for gold. We're mining two zones here currently today. We've got five rigs sitting on a third zone called Fletcher, and we made some announcement today about some of the early-stage numbers that we're seeing out of Fletcher. Five drill rigs sitting on the Fletcher Zone drilling today. It's the same process we took at Mikara. We're just going to drill, drill, drill, add ounces. And this one, Fletcher, could be the third mining zone in this mine this year.
A multitude of organic growth options. And as a miner, I often, every day, I go, wow, we are blessed with resources here and opportunities. Here's two which we've got on the shelf that we started to rework. The Rees-M regions, just south of our Bluebird Mill at Mikara. It was a South Utron mine. We closed this mine in 2022. It was an underground mine. We didn't run out of gold. We ran out of data. We ran out of drilling. This is an opportunity which is sitting on the shelf that we're starting to look at now, but in a different manner. There's a known underground mine there, a multitude of known underground mines, South Utron, Triton, Westgold operated, but we're standing back and looking at the broader opportunity. This is a project which sits, which is bookended by our Bluebird Mill at Mikara and our Tuckanarra Mill on the south. We don't have to look far outside the box for the next projects that are going to start. This is a hot favorite.
Paddy's Flat, another mine. This mine we closed in 2023, and there's a common thread here: we didn't run out of gold at Paddy's Flat, which literally sits on the fringe of Mikara. We ran out of data. When you look at this aerial image, you see a historic goldfield which has been mined since the late 1800s, from a range of small pits, small shafts, and a larger underground operation that Westgold ran. We're standing back now and starting to re-evaluate Paddy's. Let's call it Paddy's 3.0 as a much larger opportunity. Is there a much larger open pit standing there looking at us, screaming at us? Possibly. Time will tell.
Getting close to the end of the presentation now, and from our perspective as a miner, exploration is not a cost, it's an investment. It gives us optionality, and it is delivering value. We saw that in FY '24. We certainly can see it in FY '25, and this is what FY '25 looks like. The business now, with the acquisition of the Cora assets, has doubled in scale. This financial year, we'll spend $50 million on drilling. That drilling is already starting to pay dividends. A lot of that investment will be in the Southern Goldfields, but we've got this fantastic situation now where the Murchison and the Southern Goldfields are competing for the drill dollar. We've got the money to spend, and the best targets get the investment.
Pretty much, I'm at the end of the presentation now, Chrissy. And really for us, unearthing value starts with a drill bit. Westgold is a miner who drills. And I'll only leave you with one thought about what our strategy is for this year: drill on. Thanks, guys.
