Empire Metals (LSE:EEE) — Company Update

0:01 Good morning, and welcome to the EMPIRE METALS LIMITED company update. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to managing director, Sean Bunn. Good morning to you, sir.

0:26 Yes. Good morning. And, yeah, just by way of introduction, I'm Sean Bunn, the managing director. And Greg Kunzil, finance director. And it's a pleasure to be here in London this morning and have the opportunity to give this update. So many on the on the the broadcast today and those listening in streaming will no doubt understand the potential of this amazing once in a generation titanium project. So we, we constantly point to the fact that it's a global giant. It, as a resource, a mineral resource statement that was released last year, it is one of the largest and highest grade deposits of titanium reported globally.

1:14 It has a very high purity advantage both in terms of the quality of the ore that we you know, the minerals that we've discovered in this in this sedimentary basin, but it's also in terms of the quality of the products that we are able to make from those minerals. So we've got a a high purity advantage over many of our our peers. And also, you know, the grade is exceptional. However, the continuity of the grade is is also an amazing feature of the ore body. So every meter of every hole we've ever drilled has been in mineralization. Literally no interburden in the ore body and virtually no overburden.

1:59 So ore body, you know, is presenting itself at surface. We released an MRE last year in October. We plan to update that. I'll have more to say about that later in the presentation, but we are targeting a release of an updated MRE in q three. We announced on the June 11 that we had a a flow sheet had been fully developed, tested at bench scale level, and we came up with what I think is an extraordinary and very exciting process flow sheet that will allow us to move rapidly now into further engineering development studies. We constantly point to the fact that we are located in a in a tier one jurisdiction, Western Australia. We're a few hours just located a few hours North of Perth on a on a major highway system, so we we can drive up in the morning, you know, visit the rigs. The rigs running, are you know, generally.

3:05 You know, we campaign the drilling in the

3:09 after the harvest in the in the wheat belt. So the Wheat Belt area that we're operating in this area generally are fully harvested by by November. So most of our drilling, we target, you know, towards the end of each calendar year and into the start of the new one. And many of you will now realize that we've just completed the largest drilling campaign that we've ever undertaken. We we originally had 32,000 meters of drilling. That was what we used as the database to build the MRE at 2,200,000,000. We've drilled another 36,000 meters, and so the the total drilling now is 68,000, and it sets us up for a a very big up if you like to the MRE.

4:02 West Australia, I'll talk a little bit more about the infrastructure location in more detail, but, obviously, government support for mining, a well laid out mining act and regulations that we can work with. It's a it's a very secure location. And finally, just to to remind people of the strength of the of not only the technical strength on the board with with geoscientists, mining engineers, metallurgists making up some of the board members. We also have strong financial executives on the board, but one of the key things that we've developed over the last year or so is a very strong technical operational team, and that's based in Perth right next to the project.

4:49 We're building that team as we develop the project, but we're really well resourced to take the project into the next phase. I'll just hand it over to Greg.

5:02 Thanks, Sean. I'll just give a bit of information on the titanium sector. It is a it's a big industry. Titanium has been around for a very long time. It's established. There's steady growth. The majority of titanium, though, goes into the pigment, plastics, coatings market, and and that's why there's this real established industrial base that's been around for many, many years. There's no replacement for titanium as a pigment. It's valued for its brightness, its durability, its stability. Over the last few years, though, titanium has become more topical as a result of the criticality of particularly the metal.

5:49 So titanium t I o two feedstock goes into produced titanium metal, which over the last few years, particularly as a result of geopolitical challenges, is it it's it's heavily used in aerospace. It's used in defense. As new aircraft are produced, the they're using more and more titanium to try and reduce the weight of these aircraft, obviously bringing down fuel costs and and making them more fuel efficient. The new triple seven x is is forecast to have over 20% titanium content, which is a significant increase from current current aircraft.

6:36 So the fact that it's so heavily needed in defense, aerospace, it's used in medical, for implants, for surgery. It's being more and more used in energy and renewables, particularly solar panels and fuel cells. Demand is is increasing steadily, but at the same time, supply is is reducing. It's becoming more and more difficult to find large, secure suppliers of t I o two, which is which is obviously a great situation for EMPIRE given we've got such a large deposit, such a high grade deposit in a in a secure safe jurisdiction. One of the other factors I think is worth worth pointing out, and Sean will go into this in a bit more detail when we talk about the flow sheet, is 90% of the world's titanium supply comes from ilmenite.

7:32 Now ilmenite comes from beach sands. It's low grade. It's expensive to upgrade, and that, again, is a big big advantage of the pit field deposit. I mentioned the titanium sector. It's large. It's steady. In 2025, the market was $20,000,000,000. Growth is linked to global GDP, and it's forecast to grow at just under three and a half percent between now and 2030. I mentioned that pigment is the majority of that. Pigment pigment or pigment products or coatings, the the more industrial uses make up about 90% of that market, but the metal demand is growing at a higher rate year on year.

8:21 One of the challenges for the industry, particularly over the past ten years, has been dependency on supply from, let's just say, non Western jurisdictions. A lot of the metal supply over the past couple of decades has come from Russia. The Chinese pigmented metal producers have taken a very large proportion of the market over the last ten years. This has been impacted significantly, particularly over the last couple of years by antidumping legislation, tariffs. But as you can see from the the graph, the the green bars down the bottom there, the Chinese sulfate producers are the lowest cost. US and European producers are challenged by the fact that particularly energy costs are higher, labor costs are higher.

9:15 So a lot of the existing industry are struggling with profitability. They're struggling to make a profitable product from a low value ilmenite type product that's expensive to upgrade. So, again, this this sets up EMPIRE perfectly to enter into a market that's established, growing, but is being disrupted. Yeah. No. So one of the things we talked about earlier was the location of the of the pit filled titanium project. Those who've been following our story for some time will recall that it was only three years ago that we put our maiden drill holes into this particular target. One of the things that are really a highlight here is the fact that it's it's a very easy accessible part of Western Australia.

10:04 So you're sitting there just on the edge of a of a major of the major highway to the Northwest. The brand highway runs along the coastline not far from the project. We are lucky to be on what we call the Midlands Highway, which runs right through the tenements, through the towns of Karnima, Three Springs, Minigue up to Geraldton. So Geraldton is the largest port in the Midwest. It's a container port, so we can ship in and out of that quite easily. It's connected to the site by an existing rail line. A lot of the weight belt that's the weight that's generated in this area is shipped to port by rail. The Bunbury to Dampier or the Dampier to Bunbury gas line, the Northwest Shelf gas is piped down past the project. So we have access to natural gas should we wish to use it, but we also have a high voltage distribution system running, and and the substation itself, is located at 33 Springs right in the middle of that 10.

11:14 So, you know, we constantly point to the fact that there is a existing infrastructure here at the at the location of our project, and and, obviously, that means we will be able to reduce the overall development cost. We don't have to invest in any infrastructure for this particular project. We also wanna highlight that, you know, for those who've been to this part of Western Australia, they'd be aware of how windy and and how sunny it can be. Some of the largest wind turbine and solar green energy, you know, facilities are now being built under, you know, private construction by groups like Vestas building the wind turbines.

12:01 You know, this is a a center for for for low carbon green renewable energy. So we're very excited about the opportunity to bring, you know, a low cost, low carbon energy solution to the project.

12:18 So we talked a little bit about our drill campaign. Again, many of the, the viewers today would be familiar with this particular image, this story, but it it continues to to, we continue to show how we're drilling the ore body out. So the the graphic the graphic on the right hand side, the color code system is is a representation of the geophysical surveys, airborne geophysical surveys that we completed just over three years ago. So what you're looking at is a a magnetics grayscale magnetics with a gravity map laid over it. So the anomaly, the pit field mineralization is is depicted by, you know, the pinks and reds and oranges and into the yellows.

13:09 And so that's the highest magnetic response, the highest gravity response. That's now obviously been drill tested. The entire 30 kilometer strike length has been drilled,

13:21 but you can see where the concentration of our drilling has been largely focused. I I just wanna point out that the 32,000 meters that we drilled up to last year at the, at the end of the calendar year last year in 2025, that was the, the drilling database that formed the 2,200,000,000 tons. Majority of that that tonnage in that resource is is within the top 100 meters of of of from surface, so we haven't we haven't measured the resources much below a 100 meters. And it was predominantly in the area of Thomas, the Thomas prospect. The additional 36,000 meters we've drilled is has two well, actually, main focal points.

14:09 One was we went back to Thomas, and we, drilled on a 100 by 100 meter grid. The idea being is to bring that resource base into a higher classification. And and, obviously, moving into our detailed feasibility studies, that's gonna be very important part of the derisking of the project. The other key thing about the drilling is we went back to Cosgrove. It was a very small area originally drilled at Cosgrove, but if you look at the chart there on the right hand side again, you can see the how much we've extended the the drilling target at at the Cosgrove resource. So we anticipate bringing a very large increase into the Cosgrove resource target. And we've also extended the drilling to the north up towards Mount Scratch.

14:59 So a really exciting opportunity here to come back in q three with a much broader, much larger resource base. Many have asked us in the past, why do we wanna keep drilling for resources given we have, you know, hundreds of years of mining already mapped out? The obvious answer well, at least the answer I'll give is that we we needed optionality. We needed to have options around where we might commence mining, and we also need to be able to sterilize some of this giant ore body because we need to put infrastructure, roads, pipelines, put a plant operational planting. So it's really important that we drilled a lot further up and down the strike length and out to the east and west to to map areas that we could safely build infrastructure without sterilizing ore.

15:49 So we've managed to achieve all of those objectives in this particular drill program. We released some of the drill results from Thomas. We we put out an announcement early last week about some high grade intercepts. Now at Thomas, we've been tracking this high grade central core within the MRE. We we first flagged it probably six or so months ago based on some diamond drilling holes that we put into into this particular target. We released some initial results back from our our drilling earlier this year, and we we followed it up with the final database for Thomas on Monday last week.

16:35 What I wanna flag here is that this central core at surface from from from zero to to an average of, say, 47 meters where we've we've identified the majority of this nice weathered high grade zone. That extends over five kilometers in strike length. It's one point just over one kilometer, 1.25 kilometers or so, one and a half kilometers wide. So you've got an area that's six just over 6.25 square kilometers at surface, and, you know, it's an extensive high grade target for us. It's it's averaging well over 7%. We've had holes averaging eight to 9% up to 10%, and we had the highest grade intercept ever identified here where we we hit an intercept at 22% t I o two.

17:30 So there's clearly something happening in this particular area of the ore body that has concentrated up the titanium. It's at surface. It's all friable, free digging, no need to drill and blast. So we're we're really excited about the opportunity. I I don't think it takes much to realize that this is a a really powerful economic driver for our our development plans. Basically, with a with a grade of 8%, we're gonna be seeing, you know, 40 or 50% more output for the same material mine. So it's a really exciting prospect. We released, early in June, June 11, a, an integrated flow sheet. I'll just walk you through this, briefly so people can sort of see where we where we are different, if you like, to the typical ilmenite, the the mineral sands industry, if you like, and where we where we're actually starting to see commonality in our in our final pigment process.

18:36 I think that's important to flag firstly that that all of these steps have now been tested at the laboratory scale. We're still working on the finishing component. That's where we're getting the, the final coatings and tailoring the pigments to match the the end consumer, and I'll talk a bit about that a bit later. But I think what's really important is the flag that, we've taken all, you know, bulk ore testing from our previous drilling campaigns, and we've taken it through the entire flow sheet to the end of the refining stage.

19:10 And, we announced some time that we were quite easily making over 99% pure t o two pigment products from that process. What's, what the flow sheet represents is is is is really three or four fairly basic simple steps to go from ore to product, And all of these are conventional. They're just not typically used in the, in the titanium industry. So we're we are definitely a different a different pathway, if you like, a different we have a different route to get to final product. But, overall, it's simple, it's cost efficient, and and it's it's working very well at a bench scale level. We now need to take this to a continuous piloting stage.

20:03 So just to walk you through it quickly, our test work to date continues to show that that because we don't need to drill and blast, because the ore is free digging, there isn't any real crushing and and very little grinding required to, to ore prep. So it's more like a scrubbing process, a screening process, low energy, really simple. We take the whole of that all and we put it into a flotation circuit. So we're using mineral flotation to separate out the titanium minerals. They, they were produced as a flotation concentrate. What's really important in this particular step is we're able to reject somewhere near the 90% of the gang of the of the waste, if you like, or the non value minerals.

20:52 So that 90%, gain rejection has a has a really important, impact on our ability to recycle the the waste stream, if you like, back into the mine void. So at this particular point in time, we haven't treated the ore with any any digestive chemicals. We haven't put any acid in. We haven't put any oxidating material in that would change the minerals themselves. It's just an organic flotation process. So what I'm getting at here is that over a period of time, not not straight away, but over a period of time, we can just start refilling the void as we mine through the weather cap, and that reduces the amount of area that we need for waste disposal dumps and for our tailings.

21:40 It also allows us to recover a lot of the water. So really a really important point about the the first phase is that it's it's it's a really, ideal situation for us in the way we intend to mine and operate. The acid digestion phase is an interesting one for us in that we are using sulfuric acid much the same as the sulfate ilmenite guys, are using, but we don't do it anywhere near the high temperatures that they need to do. What we found is that the, these highly weathered titanium minerals in our ore body are not refractory. There's unlike ilmenite, which is an iron titanium oxide, and and for for half of the mineral, it's it might be titanium dioxide. The other half of the mineral is iron oxide. Iron. So effectively, when you digest ilmenite, you break down that that iron as well, and that consumes some of the acid, and you have to dispose of that acidic waste. That's very expensive.

22:44 We don't have that problem in our particular ore body. Now titanium minerals, the anatase, the rutile, almost

22:53 pure titanium dioxide minerals. So once we separate them into the concentrate, we're able to, to, bring them out into, into solution and take them further to refining. We don't have the iron waste problem to dispose off, and we don't have that cost. The other really exciting piece of news that we released back in June was that we actually identified that we could bring out some some alumina. So a l two zero three, there is aluminum minerals in the ore body that come through with our concentrate. Initially, we took the view that we we we should try and reject those, but it became very obvious in our testing process that we could successfully remove these, aluminum minerals or the alumina from the process,

23:46 and make a a very important co product. And so we announced that as part of our flow sheet update, and, it's part of our integrated strategy. It's not look. It's it's not driving the process. It's not like this is gonna be a a big alumina producer, but it's certainly producing high quality, high grade alumina co products that go a long way to giving us a, you know, a cost. If you put the co product credit back to the titanium dioxide, it gives us a very nice co product credit. So we are looking at that and how we develop an alumina co product from the flow sheet.

24:31 The final two stages here, the refining stage and the finishing stage, they're effectively, following the pathway that the existing titanium industry currently produces its pigments. So there's nothing unusual in these two steps. There's nothing innovative in terms of or bespoke about it. It's very straightforward. The chemistry is very, very reliable, very low risk to being able to get to high purity products. So, you know, we're taking advantage here of the fact that we don't have any impurities in the ore. We don't have any uranium or thorium, so we don't have to remove radionutides. So we've got a very simple refining phase into the into the finishing.

25:21 And I'll just finish on one note. We're talking about titanium metal earlier and how critical that particular, commodity was. This flow sheet has potential to to provide a a feedstock to to the titanium metal industry. Given its you know, given the high purity of the titanium dioxide we produce, you know, given our location, tier one location, we think we can find strategic partners or or go it ourselves, but we will look at how we can move some of the product into making metal. So I just wanna, flag a few of the, the key, cost advantages that we see as we put this flow sheet together. So we haven't released guidance on our production and capital costs. We will be updating a lot of this these details, a lot of the the flow sheet development now enables us to go out to independent engineering groups and start to pull together the final economics so we can come back to the market with with some more guidance.

26:33 But I do wanna point out a few, I think, really important things that differentiate us. So we talked about the alumina and the byproduct credit. What we've talked about previously is the high purity of our product and the ease of which we can get it into a state where it could go to metal or go to a a coated pigment. But one of the other things that I wanted to to put together in this sort of story is right from the ore, where we're different in those first first three stages, the simplicity of mining. There's no waste ore. There's no overburden on the ore. It's free digging. There's no, big crushing, milling, grinding process, so low energy at the front of the circuit.

27:20 The, the low iron in the mineral, the virtually the fact that it doesn't contain that iron oxide automatically reduces the amount of acid that we need to add to the leach, and we can also operate at lower temperatures. So couple all that with the infrastructure, the location of the project in terms of access to natural gas, in terms of access to rail to port, we have a lot of advantages over our our our current over the current industry, if you like, the 90% of the industry that relies on the ilmenite. What we can do with this particular integrated flow sheet is we can build all of this at one particular location near the mine.

28:07 So we get the advantages of all the integration of recycling acid. We can recycle energy. We can recycle water, and we get the cost advantages of that. We remove the extra cost of transport between, you know, various facilities. If you were mining ilmenite in a beach in Africa and shipping it across the ocean to a, you know, to a synthetic rutile plant and then shipping it to a refinery, you generally have three stages of transport. You have three stages of overheads. So we we're now able to reduce all of those overhead costs as part of this integrated flow sheet. So we really are, I guess, not only is is pit filled from an ore body point of view, you know, a a complete outlier. It's it's just not comparable.

28:56 There's nobody that's been able to produce titanium pigment products, final products from a fully integrated single operation. And I'll leave it on that note. Thanks, Sheila. So, look, we've we've made a lot of progress in the last six months. In fact, if you if you look back to it was only three years ago that we made the first discovery hole at Pitfield. So we've had tremendous progress. We've had really, really positive results with the MRE, with the flow sheet. But these next six months now is is really becoming we've got a lot of very, very value accretive catalysts coming up between now and the end end of the year. Sean spoke about the MRE update. The drilling completed for that a couple of months ago.

29:50 Assays are working their way through the labs, and you would have seen over the last couple of months, there's been a couple announcements as those assays have come back. The MRE update will now be pulled together, and we're looking at releasing that in q three of of this year. Works continuing on the product development, continuous piloting being the next stage, having now completed the bench scale test work and finalized that flow sheet. So, again, as as Sean mentioned, the the next step is upscaling that test work so we're producing larger amounts of product on a continuous piloting basis. And that'll be focused on a number of pigment products, looking at a feedstock to go at the metal route, while we also continue to work on the alumina co product development.

30:44 Another very important stage that's that's gonna be getting underway now is the engineering and economic studies. Now we've got a final flow sheet. Now we've got the updated MRE, which will give us a better idea of where we can look at starting at commencing these mining operations, where we'll look to put the plant, how we're gonna access the various sources of energy. All of that information will go into engineering, economic studies that will then allow us to come out to the market with more information on our expected costs and products and pricing. Another very important item that has been well underway up to this point and and will continue now is the environmental and permitting progress.

31:32 We brought on an environmental manager very early on in this process, so we've already completed two years of our baseline studies. We're doing flora fauna surveys, and all of this work that's required to then move us through to the permitting phase is very much well underway. Again, we're trying to run as much of this process as we can in parallel, wanting to maintain the momentum and continue to move this project along as as quickly as we can. And as I mentioned, we're we're continuing to work on a feedstock for titanium, but we're also looking at alternative routes to actually producing a metal product, and that was something we announced in the flow sheet announcement a few weeks ago as well.

32:20 We have a tie up with Murdoch University at the moment where we're looking at a molten salt process as an alternative to the Kroll process to produce titanium metal cheaper and more cost effectively. And we believe that the t I o two product we produce from Pitfield could could make could work very well in that in that molten salt salts process. From a funding perspective, we raised £8,000,000 back in May from four of our largest shareholders. We have a very strong supportive shareholder base.

33:06 That £8,000,000 added to the 6,500,000 we already had had in cash at that point. So the company is very well funded. That £14,500,000 sees through those those major milestones and catalysts that I just spoke about, getting us through 2026. We have, over the last couple of years, been bringing on more institutional and fund fund shareholders. AIM AIM Asset Management, a Kuala Lumpur based fund is our major shareholder. Overall Investments is a a UK based fund and wealth adviser. Gold Elegant, a Hong Kong based fund, and Claire Barnes, who who rounds out our major shareholders above 3%, had a Kuala Lumpur based fund, which was recently acquired, and she kept her EMPIRE METALS shares out of that fund.

34:08 We have a very large Australian based contingent within the register as well. It's probably between 15 to 20% of our shares are held by shareholders in Australia, including two large family offices and a number of high net worths. That that, I guess, is part of the driver towards the ASX listing that we have planned later this year. We've had a lot of success in The UK. We've had a lot of support from our retail shareholders. In fact, retail shareholders make up over 50% of our shareholder base, And that support has really has has has meant we've had a lot of success as an AIM listed company in a market in The UK that hasn't hasn't hasn't necessarily performed that well over the last couple of years.

35:02 We've had a great steadily increasing share price. We've got good liquidity, which allows new shareholders to come in and out and is particularly attractive as we look at bringing in more institutional shareholders. We've been the best performing stock on AIM for a couple of years now. But as we look to continue to grow the company, particularly as we head into this development phase, we're talking to larger institutional shareholders, larger fund managers, and a lot of them are based in the Australasian region. Despite being a very big Australian based project, the company is still relatively unknown in the region. And so that, we believe, presents us with a very attractive route to bring in new investors to to to buy on market as we look to move this through the development phase.

35:57 So given the operations are based in Australia, large part of the management's there, we already have a large shareholding. We have institutional interest that's really driven this decision to move to a ASX listing, an ASX dual listing, I should point out later this year. The UK, the AIM listing will continue to be our primary listing given the the size of the shareholder base that we still have in The UK. Just quickly on board and senior management, Sean mentioned the the breadth of our board and management, particularly from a technical perspective. Neil O'Brien, nonexecutive chairman, was ex senior vice president for Lundin Mining.

36:45 Neil has a a tremendous amount of experience making giant discoveries around the world. His his career has has in fact been focused on these types of discoveries, and and and his knowledge as a PhD in geology and and with everything he's done with Lundin Group over his career has been tremendous for the company as we move through this this this last three years. Early last year, we brought on Phil Brummett. Phil is a mining engineer. Again, exceptional experience with some very large projects, including Freeport, Lundin, Newmont. So as we move now into mining and engineering studies, Phil Phil's involvement has increased, and, again, we're leveraging off his experience.

37:38 Sean, you know, metallurgist by background. Myself, I'm based here in London. Peter DeMooney, nonexec director, is also here in London, and Arabella, our head of corporate development. So the board and senior management, lots of experience as we as we continue to develop this project. But I guess key to what we've been able to do and been able to do it as quickly as we have is is the the technical team that Sean has established in Perth over the last two years. I think this is a big part of this is as a result of the project itself. We've been able to attract some incredible talent, some very experienced people who've identified the opportunity that we have here at Pitfield, and and they're excited about this opportunity that we have to develop what will likely be the world's largest titanium project.

38:36 So we've got excellent experience in exploration, process development, engineering, environmental, and Mike Tamlin joined us last year as our head of marketing, and he's now moving into a very active phase as we move through this next six months engaging with end users and and really working out where we're going to fit into the titanium supply chain. Yeah. Thanks, Greg. We're gonna wrap up the presentation. Only a couple of slides to go through. It's wanna obviously allow some time for for our q and a processes. So I won't talk too much to to the wrap up, but I I'll finish with a few words on our our overall advantages.

39:24 But I do wanna just flag, and and I guess the the headline on this is is the key point. You look at the industry, 90% of it coming from the mineral ilmenite. Everybody wants high grade pure minerals, you know, like rutile, anatase to to try and avoid having to to do costly downstream processing steps. You know, Rio, who have the the lacteo operation in Canada, had had a smelter that they smelt the the ammonite, the high titanium hematite ores through. Others have to do synthetic retail. They need to add coal and carbon, if you like, as a reductant to break down the iron.

40:13 So all the all the the the classical steps, if you like, that the industry had been going through are high polluting. They're high energy. They have a high carbon footprint. The energy costs are not gonna get any cheaper. Price pressure on energy is is real. The reagents that they're using to digest the ilmenite are very expensive reagents. So there's an underlying cost pressure, if you like, always on the industry. Now those cost pressures in part, you know, apply to us. We're not saying that we, you know, we need energy. We need, you know, access to those reagents, but we're in incredibly good position to take advantage of our our low iron, you know, pure minerals in the ground.

41:02 So I I do think that this project now is looking to come together in part of the flow sheet. It's shown us a pathway to to get to a low cost, very long life, know, sustainable operation. And I think we're gonna be a really important part of the of the market supply chain for many years to come. And so, you know, Pitfield is going to be the next generation for titanium. We are likely to be the disruptor that changes the market. You know, we are a giant, you know, we have a giant deposit, and it's incredibly large titanium deposit.

41:48 So long life mine, multigenerational development. The purity is is is goes without question. I mean, anybody who gets to look at the assays, gets to look at the the processing route, gets to look at the purity of the product. You know? We don't have radionuclides to deal with. You know, we've got a clean, highly attractive titanium dioxide product. We are an incredibly lucky situation being located in in, you know, West Australia, the mining capital of the world, you know, access not only to infrastructure, but the laboratories, the metallurgical facilities that we have access to, the technical expertise that we have around us in in that part of the world is is is second to none.

42:38 So this does represent, I think, you know, the next generation. It's a a massive opportunity. The value proposition here is that we will have, we will change the industry, we will be cost competitive against the overnight type supply chain, and we will attract, you know, quite importantly, we will attract either government support as part of the critical minerals facilities that are available, or we will attract strategic support from, you know, from the final end users. The, you know, the aerospace industry alone is looking for securing long term high value, high purity supply chains, and we are very much clearly moving into that type of position where we can be that particular preferred supplier.

43:31 So I'll finish on that note, and we'll look at the the questions as they come through. Okay. Great. Alright. So we have quite a few questions here. I might read I'll read them out, and then okay. First one is the flow sheet. The flow sheet has only been tested at bench scale so far. What gives you the confidence it will hold up a continuous pilot and then commercial scale, and what are the technical risks? You know, I'll ask I'll I'll go to that one. So we have tested the flow sheet at bench scale. Basically, that's that's fairly typical in terms of developing, you know, the initial flow sheet.

44:19 We haven't integrated each of the steps. So in other words, we haven't set it up so that if we have recycled streams, recovery of certain byproducts, how does that all link together? So that's part of the continuous testing that we plan to do in the back half of this year. So that'll that'll test for impurities or or build up of materials that that we need to reject. As I say, every step of this process that we've tested today is using a conventional technology. There's no, you know, order class. There's no high very high pressure vessels to lift. There's no materials of construction that are, you know, really strange. It's just simple, metal processing, conventional flotation circuits, open tank leaching, moving into some form of titanium recovery process, which the industry, as I said, has been doing for a hundred years. So I I don't see any great risk now in us pulling together a continuous flow sheet.

45:25 K. There's one on the alumina co product as well because that's related. So you're now flagging a high grade alumina co product. Is this a genuine revenue stream or a nice to have, and how committed are you to it? Yeah. Interesting. The alumina sort of was something we were tracking for some time now. So we've always known that we had alumina minerals in the weathered zone up near the surface that were prospective for a byproduct. However, the way that the flow sheet developed as we were looking to recover the titanium, we we we realized very quick in the pace that we needed to to float off and separate a a high value titanium dioxide mineral concentrate.

46:14 And so that meant rejecting in the flotation stage as much of the gain material or the or the acid consumers that we we didn't wanna take through to the next phase. So initially, the the the aluminum in the clays that we were seeing in the ore body, we were we we deliberately set out to reject those. As we got further into the refining side and looking at the at the flotation selective performance, we found that there's always going to be some of this this aluminum material, this kaolin mineral creeping into the concentrate. It it's not that it selectively floats. It's just to get some trend, if you like, in the froth. And to clean that out is is basically a high cost and and would cost us in terms of titanium losses in the flotation circuit.

47:07 So we took a better the different view. We decided to look at whether or not we could convert that material into a valuable co product. And sure enough, it it it it it wasn't that difficult. So we've already, in our very early attempts, made an alumina product that was just under 99% pure alumina. Again, like the titanium, there no, you know, no radionuclides, there are no nasty elements in the ore body that affects purity of our products. So we've already identified that that there's a huge market huge market for smelter grade alumina, and it costs us basically nothing to make it at that point. So it's definitely a value add.

47:53 Do we have to have it in the flow sheet to make the flow sheet work? No. No. We could treat it as you know, we could eliminate it if we if we thought that was economically sensible, but but the numbers are pretty compelling. You know, let's make it, sell it, recover the acid from the process, and it results in a in a much, you know, a much smarter, much better flow sheet. Okay. Thanks. There's one on the ASX here. What is the rationale for the ASX listing, and will the shares be fungible between the exchanges? So that means the shares can move between The UK and the Australian exchange. I think I covered the rationale. Look. The project is is going to be of global significance based in Australia.

48:42 The management teams in the operational team, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say, and and part of the management are in Australia. There's a lot of interest from investors in the region. We already have close to 20% of our register held by Australian shareholders. And and, look, this is a global project. It's a global company. So there's no intention to move from The UK to Australia, but opening up new paths pathways to new investors by by by pursuing this ASX list dual listing, I think it makes a lot of sense for a company. The shares, are they fungible? Yes. The shares can be traded between two exchanges.

49:27 So that often comes up when we're talking about liquidity. If there's demand from Australian shareholders, they can purchase shares, and they'll be transferred from The UK system being Crest into the Australian system being Chess. So if there's more demand on one exchange, the shares can move between the two. There's another question here about the cash balance with 14,500,000. What are the major value creating milestones, and will we need additional funding? I went through those milestones and those catalysts, MRE engineering studies, mining studies, continuous piloting, marketing. That whole work stream that we have planned for the next six months and and on is fully funded from our our existing cash.

50:21 So look. And then there's a lot of value that's gonna be added from from those catalysts. I mean, one of the major ones being once we get through these these studies, it will be it will put the company into a position where we have a much better a better a better grip, a better grasp, a better understanding of the costs, and and then we can come out to the market and start talking about, you know, where we fit on those cost scales and and allowing people to to put more you know, to to to create to to be able to develop more of a model to be able to put a value on the on the company. And there's one here. Well, there's a couple more technical questions, but there's one here I'll answer before handing back to Sean.

51:07 What is the connection between EMPIRE METALS and Lake Chandler HPA? Lake Chandler is a private Australian company that has a high purity alumina project in Western Australia. We became aware of Lake Chandler quite a few years ago, three three, maybe four years ago at at just just after we acquired the Pitfield project. It was of interest to us. It fit the company's strategy on looking at opportunities with with a with, you know, with growth potential. We undertook some third party due diligence and an independent assessment of that project and decided to take a small investment in it. It is just a small investment.

51:58 As a result, we don't have any direct involvement in the operation of the company, but it's something that that we believe is still an interesting opportunity, and and we look forward to seeing how that how that project develops. Okay. Another question on cost. You described the cost advantage over the conventional ilmenite sulfate route. What actually drives that advantage, and how confident are we in that? Yeah. I I did talk about that at some length, but I'll I'll just very quickly re reiterate that that there's fundamental things in chemistry that that you can't alter. One of them is is the amount of acid that needs to be applied or consumed by the mineral itself.

52:48 So no matter how hard you try, you you know, ilmenite's gonna consume roughly twice as much acid as as a titanium dioxide mineral like like like anatase or rutile. The other thing that we we can point to is a huge cost advantage is is that we own the ore body, and we've got a processing rate to get to the final pigment. And we can do that all at one particular location. I mean even the Chinese producers who may have, you know, advantages in terms of energy access to low labor cost. Majority of their titanium production comes from imported western supplied ilmenite mines from, you know, the beach miners, the mineral sands guys in in Australia or Africa.

53:38 So if you know, firstly, they gotta buy that ilmenite. Secondly, they've gotta transport that ilmenite to their to their operations. So there's an inherent feedstock cost that they they can't get over. I mean, they can't, you know, they can't make that number magically lower either. So I I do believe that that once we get the flow sheet derisked, we get the continuous piloting, we take advantage of a of a, you know, much higher head grade in situ that we will demonstrate the, you know, the cost advantages of our particular operation. There's a number of questions in relation to government, strategic investors, export credit agencies.

54:27 Have we had any any interest, or are we speaking to any of these? Yes. We we've been talking to, particularly in Australia, groups like Export Finance Australia, the Critical Metals Fund for a number of years now. We have regular quarterly meetings with a number of these groups. The Critical Metals funding is of interest to us, obviously, and particularly if we can show a pathway to producing feedstock to metal that allows us to access a significant amount of development funding. The critical metals fund is currently $4,500,000,000 looking at at helping companies like us develop these projects. We've also got a lot of engagement with with other government bodies. Earlier this year, the company was a part of a West Australian government critical metals delegation to Toronto, New York, and Washington.

55:24 So we joined 14 other critical metals companies with the government. We had the mines minister from Western Australia in attendance with us, and and that was a a fantastic opportunity. We we had introductions to a number of government institutions in The US and Canada, and we continue to have those those discussions. Trade trade partners, end users, we're constantly engaging with. We've had early stage discussions with a a number of groups. And over this next six six months now, now we have the flow sheet developed. Now we're looking at producing large quantities of product.

56:10 That's where that engagement will become a lot more a lot more active. I think that's it. We're running low on time, I'm afraid, everybody. There's a few little questions. I'll quickly just is the q three MRA still on track? Yes. It's on track. We we released all the assays in for Thomas the other week. We'll we'll have all the Cosgrove assays in very shortly. So I it shouldn't take long to wrap that up. Part scale test work, you're asking when that begins. It'll it'll be towards the the end of q three into q four. We're booking the facilities. We don't have to build a pilot plant.

56:56 We're gonna be using existing metallurgical facilities around the around Perth where we've got at least five international, well renowned independent laboratories that we can utilize. So everything's going on track there. Community engagement, we talked about the fact we've been working on environmental surveying. We are constantly talking to the various stakeholders. We were up there in April presenting to the local councils. We are talking to the aboriginal corporation that has interest in the area. We are doing a lot of work in terms of engagement. So I think that probably very quickly is a wrap up. We're almost on the sixty minute mark. We do have quite a few questions, so we will take them away, and and we'll we'll publish some some answers to to the questions that we weren't able to get to during this presentation.

57:55 So we'll just wrap up there. Perfect. That's great. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to