In addition, we’ve got five further projects that are currently under in development, and we are looking forward to reaching financial close on those during the current year. And those should be in operation by 2026. These five projects will deliver a further 365 megawatts of energy, that will ultimately provide about 30% of our total energy requirement from 2027. Not only does this have a significant impact on our Scope 2 and emissions and carbon footprint, but in addition comes in at tariffs that are lower than current Eskom and certainly where we forecast Eskom tariffs to be going over the coming years. This has come at a significant capital investment of between €12 billion and €14 billion largely funded from third-party balance sheets with ourselves providing power purchase agreements to underpin that capital investment.
Moving on to our SA Gold operation, I think 2023, we saw a very pleasing turnaround from 2022 moving from an EBITDA loss of about $3.5 billion in the previous year to an EBITDA profit of about €3.5 billion last year. This came on the back of a 30% higher production output, coupled with a 20% increase in the gold price received over the year. With the increase in output, our all in sustaining costs dropped by just over 10% year-on-year. And I think this output was particularly pleasing given two significant operational disruptions we experienced during the year. One being the curve fore shaft incident where at the end of July, we had steel on the counterweight of a conveyance system that fell down the curve shaft and resulted in the decision to close that shaft, a process that was concluded in December of 2023.
We also had a significant fire at our Driefontein 5 shaft, our largest operation at Driefontein. And that largely resulted in no production for the third quarter of last year and a ramp up during the fourth quarter with more production only normalizing in November and December of 2023. The net impact of that fire was almost a ton of gold that was dropped out of our production. DRD production decreased by about 8% to just under 165,000 ounces, and all in sustaining cost rose by about 10% to just under R900,000 per kilogram. Nevertheless, this did contribute a 13% higher EBITDA to the group of R1.75 billion driven largely by 20% increase in gold price. As was mentioned earlier in the presentation, we have made a decision to defer much of the Burnstone capital over the coming years, and this will be evaluated on an annual basis.
Moving on to our PGM operations, I think production from PGMs was pleasing and consistent year-on-year. In total, we produced just under R1.75 million ounces and that excludes about 21,000 ounces that came from Kroondal towards the end of the year in November and December, where we now account for 100% of production given the transaction with Anglo Platinum, which I’ll talk on in a bit more detail in a second. Very pleasing was the continued and sustained industry leading cost performance. Our total unit costs last year only increased by 4% to just over R20,000 before the ounce, significantly below both inflation and mining PPI experienced across the industry. This of course has given us the benefits of continuing to move down the industry cost curves, and increasing our resilience to the overall PGM environment that we are facing at present.
This cost performance largely comes off the back of two things. The first one is a very tight and stringent cost control, but also through the increased focus we’ve had on delivering additional byproduct benefits, most notably in Chrome, which I’ll expand on, overall creating a credit benefit of about R6,500 before announced to our PGM costs. It was also mentioned that we were very proactive in terms of restructuring our PGM operations, with 4 shafts being impacted last year, a process that was concluded in February of this year. And overall we expect that to deliver about R750 million of annual benefits to the PGM operations. Adjusted EBITDA was down by about just over 50%, and that was largely driven by a 32% decline in the total PGM basket price that we received, largely as a reduction of palladium and rhodium prices.
I think we also highlighted that at the end of 2022, the deferred payment agreement with Anglo Platinum came to an end and that last payment was made in the first half of last year, the benefits of which going forward would accrue to the Sibanye Stillwater Group and of course our empowerment partners at the Rustenburg operation. I do think we’re in quite a unique position in many ways in the industry with our current processing capacity. We do have spare capacity, especially in our base metal and precious metals refinery. And that puts us in quite a unique position to manage load curtailment and ensure we can keep work in progress down to a minimum. But in addition, also the ability to unlock future value. And I’m sure many of you would have seen the announcement by Ivan Platts where we have agreed to purchase a concentrate agreement with them for their future expansion projects due to come online later this decade.
I’ll touch a little bit more just on the focus on byproducts. When we commenced our operations or started the PGM operation some four or five years ago, chrome sales amounted to about a R1 billion per annum. Over the last four to five years, we’ve placed a significant focus on enhancing our chrome production, both on our existing underground operations, as well as looking at ways to optimize a significant surface resource that we have in terms of our tailings. This has seen the production from chrome increase to where it was forecast to be currently. We’ve increased that by more than 25%, which when you combine it with the current chrome prices, means the revenue we received from chrome last year was just over R5 or 10% of our total revenue basket.
This is given that chrome comes at a very small incremental cost. This has had a significant benefit to the overall revenue or credit towards our overall PGM costs. We still see a lot of upside with chrome and look forward in the coming months to share with you some of the plans we’ve got to further increase our overall chrome production and become a significant provider into the global crone markets. Just moving on to the Kroondal transaction, this is a transaction that we’ve shared with the markets before and essentially includes us buying 50% of Anglo American share in what was called the PSA or the Kroondal operations. The consideration for that transaction was a delivery of 1.35 million ounces into the existing PSA structure, and we expect to complete that delivery by the middle of 2024.
In addition, we do pick up the closure liabilities for the infrastructure we have purchased from Anglo. This transaction has added significant value to the overall Kroondal infrastructure. In total, we’ve unlocked almost 1,700,000 ounces of additional reserves that could not have been done outside of this transaction. As we know, we had significant resources at Rustenburg that could not be mined from the existing Rustenburg infrastructure, but can be mined from the low cost Kroondal mechanized infrastructure. This adds about 1.4 million ounces to the overall Kroondal life of mine. In addition, through having this critical mass in terms of production, it also means we can unlock a lot of the Kroondal tail, and that’s about 300,000 ounces that previously would not have had sufficient production capacity or could not have covered its costs as a standalone operation.
