Unlocking the Future: Tune in to an exclusive interview with James Whelan and Impact Minerals' Managing Director Mike Jones, as we explore the ground breaking Lake Hope HPA Project.

Discover the pivotal role of High Purity Alumina (HPA) in tech innovation, everyday devices and the sheer global demand.

For further information on this Investment Opportunity, please contact James Whelan.

Read the Conversation:

Hello and welcome to another Barclay Pierce Capital Corporate Showcase Interview. I am James Whelan, Managing Director of the Barclay Pierce Capital's Asset Management Team. I am joined by Mike Jones, Managing Director of Impact Minerals, ASX Listing, Stock Code IPT. Uh, right. We are going to get straight into it.

Mike, uh, great to talk to you. I've known you for a long time and it's really good to get you here on the microphones. Do you want to give us a quick overview of what Impact does and, uh, and who you are?  Yeah, certainly. So I'm the managing director of Impact Minerals, and our key project is the Lake Hope High Purity Alumina project, which is located here in WA, where we're based, about 500 Ks east of Perth.

And it's a deposit of high purity alumina. And that particular material is a niche mineral, but it's a very important part of the energy transition that we're going through at the  Its two main uses are in lithium ion batteries. It acts as a thermal separator between the anode and the cathode, the two ends of the battery.

Batteries heat up when they get the chemicals going, and it basically stops them from burning and catching on fire, as we saw with the Samsung phones, and even nowadays with the Tesla, the Tesla batteries catching on fire. So HPA is very important in the battery architecture. The second big use is in something fairly mundane.

It's LEDs. LEDs. It's in your light bulbs that are all being put in as we get rid of incandescent light bulbs, and it's also in your OLEDs and your ULEDs and your micro LEDs and your smart screens, your TVs, and increasingly in your phones as well and tablets. So those two areas are going to grow massively over the next decade. 

That's right. Now we'll come back around to HPA, uh, in just a moment. Do you, you mentioned Lake Hope? What, what's great about this particular holding? So Lake Hope is the deposit is actually, and we've got about a million tons of alumina that we believe that we can dig up and convert into high margin, uh, High purity Illumina, and that's currently trading at about 20,000 US dollars a ton.

So the in-ground value is somewhere in the order of $20 billion. And amazingly, all of that material lies in the top two meters of a very remote salt lake in central WA. Very easy to access, but very importantly, very easy to dig up. We're going to truck it off site and we're going to process it somewhere close to the coast, probably in Perth.

So I've been around a long time. I've never seen a deposit that's as simple to mine and process as this. And we're hugely excited to try and bring it into production over the next 24 to 36 months.  Okay, brilliant. Now you mentioned that the production of it, do you want to go into any of the specifics of actually how it's produced and how you guys will be producing it?

So look, the benchmark, we're trying to get to a benchmark production rate of about 20, 000, sorry, 10, 000 tonnes per annum of high purity alumina. Uh, that would give us a revenue sort of, you know, somewhere in the, uh, you know, in the, uh,  200 million, you know, dollar mark. And we believe that we can produce the material cheaper than anybody else globally.

That's the big unique thing about this deposit. And so we can potentially have the highest margin and that will be our entry into the marketplace. Basically, we're going to have a digger, we're going to dig up the top two meters of the lake, we're going to stockpile it, and we're going to truck it progressively off site to the processing plant.

And we're a very simple and straightforward process will actually get us to the market.  And so one of the reasons that I got into the project was the ease of mining and the ease of processing. So it is a very exciting and unique deposit.  Perfect. I'm looking forward to what's ahead. Speaking of what's ahead, what are the company's next steps?

So we've just announced that we've actually got, uh, two processing routes to get to high purity lumina, and they're very much the focus of a pre feasibility study. Um, So that study is trying to firm up the economics of a scoping study we released late last year, which showed that the NPV net present value on this project is about 1.

3 billion Australian dollars and also has this unique, very low operating cost. So what we're trying to do in the feasibility studies now, firm that up, decide where we're going to put the plant, work on the processing and, uh, and get towards production. So that feasibility study should be finished by the end of the year and there'll be a significant news flow leading up to the end of that. 

Looking forward to what's ahead. Thank you for joining us. Mike Jones, Managing Director of Impact Minerals, stock code IPT on the ASX. For more information on the investment opportunity, please click the link in the description or reach out to us here at Barclay Pierce Capital. I am James Whelan, Managing Director of Barclay Pierce Capital's Wealth Management Team, and you've been joining us for another Corporate Showcase interview.