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Welcome to the Resolute Mining Conference Call for the period ended 31 December 2021. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Stuart Gale, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Ali, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Resolute's December quarterly production call, which also contains our 2022 guidance update. I'm joined on the call today by our COO, Terry Holohan, who will run us through some details on the December quarterly operational performance; and also joined by our CFO, Doug Warden, who will provide us with an update from a financial perspective and also run through the detail of the 2022 guidance. Just a few opening remarks from me prior to handing over. I think from a health and safety perspective, I would really just like to call out and congratulate the team on their performance in the health and safety area for 2021. It's been a really challenging year, and a year where we're seeing a lot of movement, a lot of new people come into the organization and of course, all of that through the challenges, which COVID has presented us. Very pleasingly, we've been able to maintain our safety performance throughout that year. And that's something that, of course, we will remain very focused on. Interestingly, we have seen an uptick in the number of COVID cases at our operations over the last, I guess, since the start of new year. We have, obviously, multiple protocols and procedures in place to ensure that the well-being of our workforce is managed and to also ensure that whilst we're looking after our people, we're also keeping our operations going. So we are watching it. We are ensuring that we're doing everything that we possibly can, such as the vaccination programs that we've put almost 2,000 people through now that have been double vaccinated. There's another couple of hundred people who are on a single vax dose, but will be double vaccinated shortly. But all of those initiatives go towards ensuring that we've got a workforce we can keep our operations moving forward. As we look at the performance from a production perspective in the quarter, I think it would be fair to say it was really a little bit of a mixed bag. We had a tough start to the quarter, as we previously alluded to. It was a much later wet season. October and November were significantly affected, particularly October, by a wetter-than-usual period that had obvious impacts on our oxide operations but also sulfide operations to a degree as well. Unfortunately, we're also plagued by multiple power outages and a number of unscheduled maintenance downtime events, which had a particular impact on the sulfide operations. So that's one of the reasons when you look at the sulfide numbers, you'll see that the mining and the processing numbers were down a bit. And I think that's coupled with a 7-day shutdown that we also previously signaled to the market. Looking at the individual operations, though, Mako had a really, really very good year. It delivered on its targets, delivered ahead of its targets and it continues into January as well. So really pleased with the performance of the team at Mako. As alluded to, Syama oxide during the quarter was significantly impacted by wet weather in October and into the early part of November, but really came home very strongly in that sort of second part of November and into December. So there's operations were at the Taba Splay pit, and we also commenced operations at Beta, which is back into the north. So some good results from the Beta pit, which saw production there, particularly in December, very good. And Syama sulfide, as I said, was a real struggle during October and November. But as with all operations, December was the best month of the year for the sulfide operations. That was pretty much the case across all of our businesses. So everyone came home with a wet sail which was obviously, are very important, it takes momentum into 2022. So as we sit here on the 20th of January, the performance of the operations has continued in the same vein as it finished 2021. And look, just touching briefly on calendar year 2021 as, obviously, as I've alluded to, a strong finish to the year, which ultimately enabled us to deliver a smidge under 320,000 ounces for the year, which was within our guidance range, and that was at an all-in sustaining cost of $1,370 an ounce on a consolidated basis. That was broadly in line with our guidance range as well, so broadly there from a guidance perspective. From a balance sheet perspective, Doug will go into a bit more detail on that. But I guess, a remark from me on that is we're not where we want to be from a balance sheet perspective. Clearly, our leverage is pretty high, and that's largely a function of the last couple of years' worth of production. So we need, as we've been speaking about for a while, to hit those production targets and hit the upper end of those production targets, and we put ourselves in a much better position from the balance sheet perspective. The other thing that, I guess, sticks out from the balance sheet discussion is a couple of tax payments that occurred through the course of the December quarter. These are pretty old historical payments that we've been pushing and negotiating the tax authorities on in both Senegal and Mali. We just needed to get those things resolved. So not much more we can really say about them. But obviously, it was a bit of a drain on our free cash flow that was unexpected. 2022 guidance is set out. Doug will go through the detail on it. But really, as we look at that 2022 guidance, what we see is based on the, I guess, the new people that we've brought into our business and improved understanding of our business from those folks. Terry is obviously one of them, and there's a number of other support functions that have come in more recently. And we've really had a good look at our base assumptions, particularly around the throughput and recoveries. And they're key to the change, I guess, that we've made in our 2022 production outlook and cost outlook relative to what was previously released back in April 2021. Of course, we've also deferred the roaster or the sulfide plant shutdown from 2021 into 2022, and that also has a reasonably significant impact on the 2022 guidance. Importantly for us, though, the focus really is leading into the shutdown at Syama. We're in a good place, and Terry will go into that in terms of everything that we need to have on the ground being ready to go for the shutdown work to commence in the middle of February at Syama. That's a 35-day shutdown and key to having the opportunity to give the whole of the plant a clean and tidy up, which is which is really required. The other really key thing, and I guess it is particularly related to Syama, is going to be our focus on maintenance. We're very much in an unplanned maintenance regime at this point in time. And for everyone who's operated in mining organizations and on plants, everyone knows it's just so important to get ourselves into a planned position, and then hopefully, into a reactive maintenance position at some point in time later on down the track. Exploration. We have -- our exploration guidance is obviously incorporated in there. But again, at a high level, and this is nothing new. We are very focused on our near mine exploration activities around Syama and also at Mako. Syama is pretty clear. We've got 80-odd kilometers worth of greenstone built to explore and we will continue to do that. Mako is a little more challenging, and we have a number of different opportunities that we're assessing at this point in time, which are near mine to extend that infrastructure at Mako. Obviously, the Mali political situation continues to present us with some interesting situations. You will be aware that there's been sanctions that have recently been applied to Mali by ECOWAS, and those sanctions arose as a result of the current Malian administration deferring the elections for quite a lengthy period of time. We've not experienced any impacts of those sanctions thus far. The key for us is to maintain consumable stock levels for things like fuel, explosives, reagents, those sorts of things. We're in a pretty good position with all of that at the moment. So we've got a reasonable period of time before we have concerns. We've rolled back out our business continuity plans. They've had a pretty reasonable going over, over the last 12 months, and we've got a number of different solutions should the sanctions extend beyond sort of a 30-day-type period. It's not our expectation that, that will occur. However, we prepared for that eventuality. And therefore, not expecting any significant impacts on our operations should sanctions extend. So I think with that overview, I would just hand over to Terry to run us through a little bit more detail on the operations. Thanks, Terry.
Thank you, Stuart, and welcome. Good morning, everybody. I'll go through the 3 mining operations in the same order that Stuart went through them, give you a brief overview of where we are. If we start at Mako. As Stuart said, we had an encouraging quarter now in this last quarter to get us back on track. The last year has been all about mining the cutback that we identified a few years ago when we reengineered our prices, gold prices from $1,200 to $1,500. That cutback was completed virtually last year, just a little bit of tidying up this year. And by the end of January, we'll be on the same bench level as the main ore body. The Splay off to the west will be taken as part of that. We've been able to access ore in that area from November last year, and that has given us the ability to access 2-gram a ton material. You'll see that on our quarterlies, we're managing to process back over 2 grams a tonne, and we see that, in the foreseeable future, staying there. The material has got some harder vessels in it, which traditionally would have given us a lot of issues in the mill. However, with the mill slicer being operated, even though it's still in manual at this stage, we're putting in the algorithms to automate it in this quarter. That has allowed us to be far more efficient in our power inside the mill, and we've maintained the grind even though the materials got harder. And in December, we even pushed the tonnage up to 190,000 tonnes for that month, which annualizes about 2.2 million tonnes a year. So that encourages us a lot. That's shown us, as confirmed now, the next bottleneck in the processing circuit is these cyclones, and we're working on that to debottleneck that. So I think it's been a big step forward for us. The cutback was operated well, and we're back online where we should be. The mill is performing exceptionally well and improving as we speak. The one big advantage also the mill slicer has given us, is it tells us exactly when our liners in the mill need to be replaced. And so we don't have to stop the mill early, and we -- we've just recently opened up the mill in January, and the mill liner condition is exactly as we'd -- as the information had told us. So if you look at our all-in costs. You see we're starting to come back to where we should be, $1,000 or something. Obviously, what we're going to be chasing over this next year is get that close to that $1,000 in the second quartile is our big target there. So we're looking forward with Mako. We've predicted the same sort of throughput this next year, 125,000 ounces. And obviously, what we are trying to do on the ground is squeeze more material through that. We do have a lot of stocks, and it's easy to get more material from the cutback area as well. So we're going to continue with our debottlenecking, and we're confident and comfortable where Mako is at this point in time. The Syama oxide -- well, I'll talk about Syama first. Syama for the year had a record mill tonnes at 3.6 million tonnes. That's an all-time record there. And obviously, we're all about here trying to break these records continuously. From the oxide point of view, it was not a record, but it was close, and we do see, over the next few months, to be able to get back up to the higher levels. We've -- as Stuart mentioned, we had the extended wet season, which caused us a lot of problems while we are trying to strip back on Beta. And all that stripping was done in October and November, and it's given us the ability to access higher-grade materials. And last quarter was the first time in the year from the oxide point of view that we've been able to mine more than we actually can process. So that has given us the ability to raise the grade in the mill. And in fact, the December grade was at 1.98 grams a tonne. So going forward, we think we'll be far stronger now on the grade position, and therefore, with grade comes recoveries because we've got a fixed tail. And we think the performance of that operation now will go forward with steady improvements. On the oxide circuit, the bottlenecks or the crushing circuit. So we're actually in the position right now of replacing gearboxes and motors to actually improve the throughput on the oxide. So that's going well now. I think we're in a far stronger position than when we last talked and looking forward to a good year on the oxide circuit. In terms of the sulfide, say, on the sulfide circuit, the mining and processing, again, we've had a 5% increase on tonnage there from both mining and processing of underground materials. It was a record 136,000 ounces produced. The original design was 161,000. And we're going to be at that throughput rate for 11 months of this next year, 161,000. However, because it's a shut, we're going to take off 16,000 but will be on design tonnages for the rest of the year. So we're looking at about 145,000 ounces coming out of that circuit this next year, mainly because of the shut that we've got scheduled for February. What is really encouraging is that we've managed to get the [indiscernible] model now calibrated. It's starting to give us some good information. And as we speak, our 2 mining fundies are on-site, internal mining fundies, Scott and [ Gito ] are actually on site taking the team on-site through that, so we can use that as a tool on-site to be able to optimize the mining more efficiently. So we're expecting some good things from that. In terms of the plant, as Stuart mentioned, maintenance is the issue. First of all, we did a lot of work on the roaster. As Stuart said, we had a 7-day shut in October just to check out everything was okay, ready for our February shut and to fix a few bits and pieces of equipment around the roaster and also around the milling circuit. The roaster traditionally has given us an availability of 94%. And after that shut in October, in December, we recorded a 98% availability. It's not perfect yet. I think as far as the roaster is concerned, when we take it off-line this year in February, I think that 94%-plus availability is going to be what we're going to be expecting use to. However, the -- if you look at the plant itself, 84%, 85% overall availability, the crushing and milling is now the areas of concern. Those are the areas that we've geared up for to focus on in the February shut to actually improve those because these sorts of plants should be operating more at the 92%, 93% availability. We're at 85%. So we certainly see a big opportunity there. However, if we focus on the December month, we had a run-of-mine head grade at 2.71 grams a tonne, which is the -- back to where the design should be. And if you look at the head grade going through the plant, it was 2.77 grams a tonne because, again, we had more material available to process than we have done previously. And in that month, we produced nearly 15,000 ounces just out of the sulfide circuit. Not yet sustainable. I think both from the underground perspective, I've always said that March is going to be the time when we managed to get the correct ratio of longitudinal and transverse mining of our stopes. So I expect that to be more sustainable from March onwards. And obviously, from the processing plant point of view, it's all about getting that availability of that plant up to the 92%, 93%. And that's where all of our effort is focused at the moment over the next couple of months. The disappointing issues here was the enhancement projects, the OSA and cleaners. We did tie them in, in October. Everything was lined up. We, however, found some faults in our equipment that has been delivered on the on-stream analysis system, the X-ray tubes and some of the sample pumps. We had to call for spares. Those arrived early January, and we're going to be commissioning those plants over this next quarter. A bit of frustration there. We were hoping to get a bit of an uptick on recovery, take it up to about 80%, but we still, at this point, in 78% I would suggest that after the shut, we'll be up at the 80% recoveries. So all our effort right now is on the smelter shut. As Stuart mentioned, that's going to take off 16,000 ounces from the design levels that we're going to be operating this year on the sulfide circuit. It's going to knock off 16,000 ounces. But after that, we believe we're going to be able to push the circuit a little bit harder. If you remember me saying that the expansions that we're putting in on the site cleaning system on the top of the fluid bed will give us 18% extra throughput capacity. And with these higher levels of availability, we expect to be able to squeeze out circuit level a little bit harder. The question is kind of the mills and crushing sections keep up with that, and that's where we're focused on right now looking at debottling those areas. And with the shut coming up, we started to mobilize people into site. 90% of our labor is coming from within Mali; 10%, obviously, outside. They're starting to arrive now. It looks like people's first reaction with the sanctions was, oh, maybe we should delay, et cetera. But now we've realized there's no major issues going forward on the ground. We're getting people in and out comfortably. People are booking their flights and they're ready to go out there. All equipment is on-site. If you remember, we did originally schedule this shut for March '21. However, with all the condition monitoring that we put in, in early 2020 and the inspections that we've done on that plant, I would suggest that the reliability of that plant and the condition of that plant is a lot better than we actually expected at this point in time. And that has allowed us to stretch this shut down to February. And funny enough, the -- we know that we want to replace the refractory inside the shut, which is 28 days out of the 35. But the bigger opportunity now there is actually to focus and fix up our crushing and our milling circuits on the sulfides. So that's where a lot of the effort is going to be. And as Stuart mentioned with the sanctions, we always carry now 30 days' plus of raw materials. We're less than 30 days to the shut, which is a major consumer of our materials, but we don't see any issues at this point in time with the sanctions. So as far as we're concerned, it's business as usual. With that, I'll pass back to Stuart, and obviously, will be available for any queries at the end.
Great. Thanks, Terry. Thanks for that detailed update. And with that, we'll hand over to Doug to run through some financials and repeat our guidance.
Thanks, Stuart, and good morning, everyone. I'll just take a few minutes to take you through the cash flow for the quarter, the net debt position and an update on the hedge book together with the 2022 guidance. So as you can see in the quarterly document, we've got the waterfall chart there. Operating cash flow for the quarter was $34.9 million. It's worth noting that whilst this was lower than $43 million in September quarter, we did experience an $8 million build in bullion in the December quarter, whereas the September quarter had the benefit of a $23 million drawdown in bullion. So a few swings and roundabouts there around bullion balances. Royalties of $4 million were marginally lower than September due to the lower sales in -- sorry, in the December quarter. VAT and tax, Stuart has already talked about the $12.5 million of legacy tax payments that made up the bulk of that amount of $17 million, and the reason why it's higher than in previous quarters. CapEx of $12.7 million was split approximately 50-50 between sustaining and nonsustaining capital. Exploration of $4.4 million reflects our brownfields exploration drilling programs at Syama and Mako and some greenfields work in Guinea. Working capital. We had a slightly bigger amount in the quarter, which reflects a reduction in creditors, $15.6 million. The debt drawdown of $62.8 million, we drew down the revolver during the quarter and some in-country overdrafts make up the rest of that. And that really reflects the slow start to the quarter we had in October and November, which went with the production performance at Syama. Interest in government dividends and withholding tax are fairly self-explanatory. Net debt increased by $15.9 million during the quarter, bearing in mind the working capital balances I've talked about. So we finished at $228.8 million at 31 December. The increase that was reflected here is largely due to the Syama production performance. But I would note the improvement that we saw in December. The legacy tax payments, together with the purchase of some underground equipment and consumables from the former underground contractor at Syama totaled another $9 million. So there's about $22 million with the legacy tax payments and the underground purchases, which are, if you like, one-offs. A bit of an update on the hedge book. A reminder that we're required under our banking facility still to have a minimum of 30% of the next 18 months forecast production hedged. At 31 December, we had a total of 168,000 ounces hedged at an average price of just under $1,800 an ounce, plus a small amount of euro hedging 10,000 ounces at EUR 15.30. Turning now to the guidance. Gold production for 2022 is guided at 345,000 ounces at an all-in sustaining cost of $1,425 an ounce. We've included a reasonably detailed explanation for each operation in the quarterly, but I'd just draw your attention to a few points that are relevant to this guidance. Obviously, negatively impacted by the February roaster chart. If we were to normalize for that, you'd be looking at 161,000 ounces roughly for the sulfide component of the business at an all-in sustaining cost of $1,280 versus the $1,345 guided for sulfide. And from a group perspective, the impact of that roaster shut would bring the all-in sustaining cost down from $1,425 to $1,400. We've made some revisions to the mine plan since the release that we made in April last year for the life of mine and that's reflected in this guidance as well versus the 2022 year within that life of mine guidance that was released back in April. And there's been some inflationary effect on -- impact on costs as well since we released that guidance previously. I would note that it's -- overall, the gold production guidance for '22 is about 15% lower than the April 2021 one, and largely due to that denominator effect, there's a 23% increase in the all-in sustaining cost. We will be releasing an updated life of mine plan together with our reserve resource statement at the end of February. But importantly, we should note that over the life of mine, production and all-in sustaining costs are expected to be broadly similar to the April 2021 update. And just a couple of points in relation to the Mako guidance that I think are worthy of note. We've guided at 125,000 ounces at an all-in sustaining cost of $1,325. So the increase is from 2021, where we've achieved $1,139, is primarily due to CapEx on a tailings dam lift and some process plant enhancements, together with some noncash drawdown of high-cost stockpiles. So in relation to the sustaining capital items around the tailings dam and process plant enhancements, under the World Gold Council guidelines for all-in sustaining costs, we have to include the full cash spend on those items in the year of the all-in sustaining cost that we're reporting here or guiding, I should say. Notwithstanding the fact that their capital in nature for accounting purposes, capitalized and amortized over the life, the impact of that hits us in 2022 and explains a reasonable amount of the increase there for Mako. If you take these items out, the $1,325 an ounce for Mako guided for 2022 would be $1,219, which is still above the 2021 number, but the difference is largely around those inflationary pressures that I talked about earlier. Look, with that, that's all I wanted to say on the guidance and the other matters. So I'll hand back to Stuart to wrap up the call.
Yes. Thanks, Doug, and thank you, Terry. I think just a couple of little things just to reiterate before we get into a couple of questions. One thing I think is really important to understand is that as we sit here and we look at our operations at Syama and the sulfide circuit, the roaster is actually performing really well. So some of the challenges we've had from a maintenance perspective are on the pre-roaster component. So whether it's at the crushers or the mills or the concentrate or whatever it might be, that's where we've been a bit challenged. So bringing that roaster down and putting the refractory into it gives us an opportunity to have a bit of a tidy up through those areas, which I think is important. And the other thing that I did want to mention is that we did come out and publish the life of mine in April '21 that Doug just spoke about. The 2022 numbers based on that old release are obviously a little different to what we put to you today, put out in guidance today, and really reflect the shutdown that's been deferred and the assumptions that we now have around the way that our plant can operate in its current state. So that ultimately brings us back to some of the initiatives that we need to put in place and some of the maintenance programs that we need to be really focused on as we move forward. But look, with that, we do have a couple of questions that have been posted online. So as is usual procedure, I'll briefly summarize the questions, and we will answer those.
So questions. Is an 80% recovery on the sulfide circuit still a fair target? And if so, when do we expect to get there? So I'll just -- a couple of observations. Probably a number of quarters ago, we had 85% recovery on that sulfide circuit. That was to do with the processing of -- reprocessing of waste material. I can't think what it's called now. But anyway, we haven't actually run that, so we dropped our recoveries down to 80%. As we look at our performance through the year, I think we ended up at 78%. 80% is still pretty fair, but I'll let Terry tell you why it's pretty fair. Terry?
Yes. If you look at the recovery across the sulfide circuit, there's 2 recoveries and 1 is the recovery to the roaster, which is 90% target. And recovery of the roaster calcine leaching, which is 90%. So the argument being, we think both we can get at 90% through 2 stages. So multiplier effect, that gives us 81%. In the laboratory, we can get about 83%, just a little bit a smidgen above that, and that's obviously our target. That, we believe -- I'm talking to go from 78% to 80%. I think the cleaners are going to give us that because we will be able to recycle some of the non-liberated material back to the mill to give it a second go to -- actually a third go to clean it up a little bit. I believe the 80% to 81% combined recovery is certainly on. And in the laboratory, we're looking at what we can do -- or let's say, confirm what we think we can do. I think longer term, 83% is probably our long-term target. And when I say long term, we sort of look at sort of 12 months, 18 months away.
Okay. Thanks Terry. Another part of that question, costs have come down with regards to the transfer to owner operator development. Is it sustainable? And what does it mean for our sustaining CapEx? First of all, there's actually a number of components to the rationale for converting to owner operator. One, we think we can do it as cheaply in terms of our overall operating cost, and that's proven to be the case as we do an analysis of the before and after. Two, we did have to acquire the capital, which Doug spoke about, together with some consumables that was a bit over $9 million. We obviously have to maintain that. But very clearly, the maintenance of that would have been done by the previous contractor and that would have been built into their rates. So again, I still think from a sustaining capital perspective, which does get incorporated into the all-in sustaining cost base, we still should be cheaper in terms of the management of the underground equipment and mobile equipment. And I think the other really important point is that VAT. As we all know, there's constant VAT challenges throughout West Africa. Whenever we pay an invoice, we have to pay VAT on that invoice of 18%. If we're doing it ourselves, that VAT cost goes away. So from a cost savings perspective, it's important to look at the benefits that we're getting on that just from straight out from an operational perspective where we're not paying for higher cost expats and things like that. It's our own employees, we're not paying margins on that. We are maintaining the equipment ourselves and that's going pretty well. We're also saving on VAT. And I think the rationale is that we're going to be at Syama for a long time. So therefore, we should be building up our own capacity to develop underground operations, be that the current Syama operation or potentially Tabakoroni later on down the track. So another part of that question. Can we elaborate on power issues at Syama as a hybrid power plant coming along? And can we do anything to improve the power reliability? Yes. So look, obviously, the power plant was commissioned and has been operating through most of 2021. Look, the plant, I think, is running reasonably well. But unfortunately, we've had a number of troops particularly associated with the interface of 10-megawatt battery power supply that's there. That has created -- whilst it might create a short-term power outage, by the time that short-term power outage multiplies itself throughout the system, often a short-term power outage has longer-term implications for our overall operations. So perhaps Terry can jump in and provide a bit more scientific analysis. But if we're down for an hour, then potentially we lose 7 hours by the time we bring everything back up again. And that's one of the problems that we've seen there. We should not be having those trips. We should not be having any interface which is not interfacing very well. but we're working with our suppliers to resolve those issues at the moment. It hasn't happened that many times, but it did -- we did go through a sequence of these issues, which did cause us some grief in the December quarter. But Terry?
Yes. I think as you remember, we commissioned this plant in Q3 and it did have a lot of issues in -- on the Aggreko plant itself. There's a lot of issues initially on the PLC system, a lot of go signals coming through and erroneously tripping the circuit. The other issue was that when the 10-megawatt battery was taking more than 1.5 seconds to actually click in. And that's a critical number. If it's less than 1.5, it doesn't trip the mills. If it's greater than 1.5, it did trip the mills. And as Stuart mentioned, specifically on the sulfide circuit, if the mills go down for 10 minutes, it was taking through -- up to 3 hours to stabilize the system again. So it's a two-pronged type there. Obviously, we've worked with Aggreko to get that -- sorry, the battery to kick in a lot faster. That is now working. We've managed to get all the go signals out of the PLC. That took a lot longer than we thought it would take. That was a lot of work over the Q4. I'll say the battery is kicking in now a lot faster because, essentially, that's the idea of the battery there is you can switch the power plant off for half an hour and swing to battery and it should be smooth and you shouldn't even notice it. That is not yet happening, although let's say I'm saying for the last 3 weeks, we haven't had a trip there. I am touching wood here because we're still working with a punch list of items there. But also, we're looking that, our plant situation, because the sulfide plant, if you do have a trip, in most plants, what you'd normally do, it will take you 40 minutes to start it up. It's taking us a couple of hours. So again, part of our strategy over this February shut is to tidy up that circuit quite a bit so we can stop and start it a lot easier. So I would say we've got through the worst of it in the December quarter. We're starting to get through that now. But after this quarter with the fixes we plan to do in February, I think we'll be in a far better position.
Thanks, Terry. Another question here with regards to the LOM, which we've spoken will come out next month, broadly in line with the April '21 LOM. Whilst it's a work in progress, one of the key things that we can expect in that update. Well, look, we're really -- the update is going to incorporate the updated reserve and resource statement that we are currently working on at the moment. So you will have appreciated from some of the announcements that we've had around drill results at Tabakoroni and in the northern areas, Beta A21, BA01, those areas need to have themselves updated into our reserve and resource. So they're probably the key things that you should expect to see flow through in that life of mine update. So it's just a matter of bringing those things in. Key as we're sitting here now talking about 2022 and without wanting to belabor the fact, 2022 looks different relative to April 2021 because of the things that we've just been discussing: the roaster shutdown, some key assumptions around throughput and recoveries in those particular years. So those key assumptions will also be tested in our revised life of mine. So potentially, you might see some more modest throughput assumptions in the earlier years. But obviously, you need to take into account the discussion that Terry has just been through in terms of the things that are going on at Syama at this point in time. Next question is on the balance sheet. Do we have flexibility with repayments of debt, particularly the lumpy calendar year '23? And how we're thinking about that? Doug?
Sure. Thanks, Stuart. Yes, good question. I mean the lumpy one in '23 is the $150 million associated with the revolver, 2 lots of $25 million in this year and next -- every 6 months relates to the term loan. Yes, look, it is a revolver. It's quite common for revolvers to be extended. As you would be aware, that's something that we continually monitor and discuss with our banking group, as you would expect, and that's how we're thinking about it. Revolvers are there to be extended, generally speaking. So that's what we'll probably be looking to do.
Okay. Look, that's it for the questions. So I think we can probably wrap things up with that. But I guess in that wrap-up, it's fair to say that over the last 12 months or so, we've spoken consistently about people, systems and process. It is important to note that we now have a good team of people who are in place and have been in place for -- most of them between 3 and 6 months now. So they're getting a handle on our operations, and we're starting to see some of the benefits of that understanding and knowledge flow through. 2022 is going to be key for really being focused on that systems and process side of the business. The onstream analyzer, the cleaner cells, mill slicer management operating systems are all things that we've been working really hard on through the course of 2021, but I'd say we haven't really seen much benefit on. And together with that, the process around the shutdown, we're in good space for that, and we need to get better at maintenance. I think that's really clear. So we've got some initiatives that are underway in terms of resolving some of our maintenance challenges in a plant at Syama that needs a lot of TLC. Let's be honest, it's been there for a long time. So we're working through a number of those issues, and we should expect to see some improvement during the course of 2022 on all of that. And finally, I would just like to shout out to the teams. It's been a challenging period of time. Whether we've been dealing with global pandemics, coups or sanctions, the team have really stood up to the challenge and have worked really hard to try to bring things back on track. We still have a long way to go. There's absolutely no doubt about that, but I'm really confident with the team that we have onboard, and I'm looking forward to a really positive 2022. So with that, I guess we can all hang up. But if you have any further questions, please feel very free to reach out to James Virgo, Doug or myself, if you'd like to speak more on Resolute. So thank you all very much for your time today. Cheers.