Investor update

Mar 19, 2024

Slides

Good afternoon and welcome to the Empire Metals Limited Pitfield Titanium Project update. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Shaun Bunn, Managing Director. Good afternoon to you, sir. Yeah. No, thank you very much and welcome all. It's been a while since we've done an investor meets company conference call like this one. I'm really looking forward to just quickly running through our most recent corporate deck, and in particular, I'll be able to introduce Dr. Neil O'Brien, our Chairman. Very pleased and important time for him to come onto this call because I think we're going to cover a lot of very important points this afternoon. Without further ado, I'll start. Importantly, just a quick reminder of the fact that we're making forward-looking statements and not trying to raise money with this presentation. Looking at a snapshot of the company at present. We've changed a lot in the last 12 months, and particularly focusing on our project at Pitfield. Pitfield is just north of Perth in Western Australia, and Pitfield represents a giant mineral system. It's 40 km long, 8 km wide, and we've mapped it to about 5 km deep. This is a big hydrothermal system that we've drilled. Drilling results confirm that this system is full of titanium mineralization. Importantly, and we'll go into this in a bit of the discussion coming up, the type of mineralization that we've been discovering. Titanium, as we all know, is a critical element. It's a critical mineral. Very important in many of the major economies around the world. I think one of the most remarkable things about Pitfield, apart from the giant mineral system full of this magic titanium titanite mineral is its location. It's in an absolutely world-class location. Western Australia, it's constantly ranked in the top one or two jurisdictions, mining jurisdictions around the world. We are very close to major infrastructure. We've got a great board. You'll talk to some of them tonight. You'll get some chance for Q&A. We've got a wonderful team. We've been building a technical team to support that we're really proud of. Importantly, next steps. Well, the next steps we're going to be talking about in this presentation in a bit more detail. We are moving very quickly. This discovery was made only about 10 months ago. For us to be sitting here talking about minerals, metallurgical process, potential to move to a demonstration plant, that's quite an extraordinary achievement for any company to make in such a short period of time. We'll expand on why that's happening. I'm pleased to pass on to Neil and look forward to talking further in the presentation. Yeah. Hi, everybody. It's good to be here. I just want to leave you with some key messages, I think. The first, you can read through this slide. It's more on the titanium market and the uses of titanium. I just want to focus on the critical part of it. Everybody's getting bombarded with this word now, critical elements, critical minerals, et cetera. I think what's important at least for us is critical just means must have, of course, right? The world must have these sort of elements and metals and minerals on the list. I think titanium perhaps provides one of the best, if not the best example of what this whole critical thing means. In part, that has a lot to do with, you can replace critical with geopolitical risk and secure supply chains. Titanium is something that is used for different things. As you see here, it's mostly pigments because of its optical qualities. There's an element of that that I think you've all been reading about that's very important in terms of this must-have, right? That goes to the metal as well. You're seeing this very rapidly shifting realignments and trading blocks and things like that. I think this is an almost ideal time for a project like Pitfield to come along because what do the countries want? What do the manufacturers of the metal and the pigments want? They want security. Security of a product, security of a supply line, long-term. It's all about risk, right? It really comes back, I think, a lot of it to geopolitical risk. We're very fortunate, as Sean has said, to be in the top mining jurisdiction of the world that is a great trading partner for a lot of countries out there. I'll leave you with that message. I'm a geologist by background. I think what I learned early on in my career is, as a geologist, you can spend your time looking at all sorts of things, but your best chance of success is when you focus on giant mineral systems. Right? Everybody wants a giant mining district. Right? It sounds obvious, but you know what? You will never get a giant mining district unless you start with a giant mineral system. It's that simple. In fact, in my career, I've seen the vast majority, and I think it's probably over 90%, 95% of the exploration dollars are spent exploring things that are not giant mineral systems. Think about that. Right? I think it's very important early on, and perhaps the most important decision an exploration company can make is that initial where do we look? One of the things that we looked for when we came into W.A., or into Australia, was the opportunity to get into areas that we saw fundamental characteristics, enough data to suggest that we were into a giant mineral system. There's lots of good public databases. We have a good partner who came in there, did some good initial groundwork. As you can see here in this colorful map here, there was databases, some of which we collected as well. The gray background is magnetics, and although you can't see it because of the airborne gravity that we threw on top of it, the colorful map there, but it's coincident. The reds there mean you have a very dense set of rocks there that essentially follow an old sedimentary basin. One of the things you can see there is there's no huge disruptions of it. Right? One of the things I think is absolutely remarkable about, and why we're able to move this project along very, very quickly, is the simplicity of the geology here. Those dots that you can see there are the holes that we've drilled across over 30 kilometers so far. Right? As the text says, 60 RC holes, three core holes so that we got some actual core to collect different types of samples, look at the mineralogy, et cetera. Right? What is remarkable across over this 30 is just the consistency of this sediment-hosted titanium deposit, which is frankly remarkable. In most deposits I've dealt with, and particularly with giant mineral systems, the geology is very often complicated. One of the things that disrupts and can be fatal to any potential ore body is intrusives that come in later on and cut the ore body in two or consume part of it and things like that. In all those holes, RC or diamond drills so far, we have not intersected one post-mineral intrusive. That's remarkable. I've never worked on a project that I can say that. Right? Across 30 km. Right? It's things like that that make this so simple, that we're able to de-risk a project, move it along very, very quickly. The other thing that we got into here very clearly is what controls the grades. Right? And the mineralogy. Very quickly we saw that the higher grades were coming out of sandstone beds. That's great, right? It's like, okay, well, that's the control. Let's focus on the sandstone part of the basin here. This is a simplification, a bit of a cartoon, but it's quite accurate. The basin that you see there between those brown blocks of older basement rock is this old compressed, tilted sedimentary basin. The lighter colors in brown there, as you see, are the coarser grain sediments, the darker brown being the conglomerates. They're still all mineralized, but it's really the porous sandstone. It's a bit like if you think like a petroleum geologist, right? You have these aquifer rocks that allow fluids to pass through more easily, and those are the sandstones in this case. You can see on the west side of the basin, there's more sandstones. They're more porous, and they soaked up more of the fluids. If I just go back to this one, you can see it in the red. That's the denser rock. This is not difficult stuff. The scale is quite incredible. This is why we've been able to move this along and have such confidence about what we're dealing with here. Right? Now, one of the things, obviously, with any mineral deposit is the elements aren't there typically as native metals. The metals are within minerals. It's very important because you have to be able to liberate and make a product at the end of the day. As you can see, I think the bottom two there are very important because what we've found, and this is so far, but we've got over 10,000 meters of drilling in there. I think we can start seeing that at least where we've been focusing on, we can see results that are perhaps representative in terms of mineralogy so far. Titanite is a calcium titanium silicate. So far it accounts for about two-thirds of the total contained TiO2. You see as well in that last bullet point there are other titanium-bearing minerals in there, including Ilmenite, which is where most of the world's titanium comes from. Also Rutile group minerals in there as well. However, two-thirds so far is what we're looking at comes from Titanite. I'll let Shaun talk about that more specifically from a processing perspective. From an exploration perspective, and I'm an exploration geologist by background, one of the things we want to do with our exploration now is we want to find the highest grades. We're exploring for grades here now, and very quickly we figured out what's controlling the grades in terms of the sandstones. We're also seeing that some of the sandstone beds are higher grade than others. There's still a lot of potential here. You can take those numbers. Those are the numbers that we know right now. However, if we continue exploring some of these sandstone beds, there is every conceivable possibility that we can come up with, find even higher grade sandstone beds within this overall mineralized part of the basin. That's what our exploration is really focused on here. Obviously, you want to get the best grades with the most consistent mineralogy to work with here. This is just one section of what we're dealing with here. Now, I just want to point out that the deeper hole there is one of the core holes that we've sampled there. We got core four we're using for some of our early testing, put a composite sample together. I think the thing you want to notice in there is that's just one big sandstone-rich succession of beds in there. Yeah, we just drilled to a certain depth there. The darker brown are conglomerates. They're still mineralized, but the grades aren't as great. You see there, and we just shut the hole down at a predetermined depth, more or less. There's about 300 meters there of little over 6% TiO2. Up dip from that is an RC hole that has very similar grades to it. Now, both down dip in the bed, but also across the beds, is more mineralization. There could be just west of there or east of there in the sandstone beds, even higher grades of sandstone. That's what our exploration is looking for. We're finding very consistent mineralization, and I guess part of the message here is our exploration will be very focused on finding even higher grade beds than that. We know that's there as well. One of the things that you want out of any of this is consistency. Consistency of the beds that you're mining, consistency of the feed that you're designing your plant around. It's really all about risk in the rocks. This is one of the lowest risk deposits geologically that I've ever come across. I'll hand it back to Sean now. He can talk a bit more from the downstream side of things. Yeah. Thanks, Neil. I'll start with an overview of the ilmenite industry or the titanium industry as it revolves around ilmenite as the mineral. 95% of the world's titanium is sourced from the mineral ilmenite. Effectively, if you looked at this, it's quite different in terms of there's either hard rock deposits, which are igneous deposits. They are something like a titanohematite mix, where the ilmenite and the hematite or the iron or the magnetites that are formed by these igneous deposits. They are so interlinked physically that they can't be beneficiated. They can't simply separate ilmenite from that. Basically, those hard rock deposits require smelting. The classic example, the obvious example of that is Rio's project in Québec at Lake Tio. They've been around for a very long time, but they basically have to mine through a lot of hard rock, separate out the ore, put it through a smelting process, and they end up with titania slag. The titanium reports to the slag, the iron reports to the mat. The other side, if you like, of the equation, where a large part of the Ilmenite is sourced is beach sands. We'll call it heavy mineral sands to be clearer. Heavy mineral sands are basically still an igneous rock. It's still sourced from arguably the same sort of ilmenite-type rocks that are hard rock mines. They've been destroyed over millennia and glacial actions, weathering actions of rivers and streams, so fluvial upgrading and then into the oceans. Basically, you end up with a concentrate of ilmenite black sands on the beaches or on old beaches. Simply put, that's the major sources of titanium. Yes, rutile is another source, but it makes up a very small component of the industry. Largely rutile forms much in the same way as the sand deposits. They're concentrated up as a mineral sand. Now, what's important about this particular slide is pretty well everything in the industry has to go through some form of either acid digestion or smelting or roasting under high energy, under a carbonizing sort of system to make, say, synthetic rutile. Even rutile itself has to be processed at some stage in the process. It has to be digested or taken through to a system where it can be made into a metal. It's a complex industry. There's no cheap source of titanium. Now, where does that put Pitfield? I think this is one of the things that we're slowly coming to grips with because titanite, to start with, we talked about titanite very briefly. Titanite is our dominant mineral. It's normally an accessory mineral in rocks and in ore bodies. I say accessory in the terms that it normally only ever appears to be 1% or 2% of the mineral, the titanium-bearing minerals. It's not rare, but it's not very common to find titanite, and it's certainly not found in concentrations anywhere near what we're seeing. We've got up to 20% of the ore mass. The rock is titanite. 67%, as Neil mentioned, of our titanium mineralization is attributable to titanite. We've taken a step back now and said, "Okay, well, this is what we've found in the Earth. This is what we have to deal with. Yes, there's some rutile. “Yes, there’s some Ilmenite. We can deal with that. That’s conventional.” This Titanite, is that a problem or is it an opportunity? What we’ve done with our own research, and I think those who are familiar with some of the papers that have been published, there’s quite a lot of them out there now that people bother to search will see that firstly, Titanite is not a refractory mineral, and it does dissolve readily in fairly low temperature acid conditions. Once you dissolve titanium into solution, then the world’s your oyster. I mean, basically we can make from extracting that titanium out of that solution, we can produce a very high-grade titanium product. It’s not Synthetic Rutile. It’s a different material. We are making what is, call it a Rutile equivalent. It's basically a feed material that could go to any one of those end users that I showed you in the previous slide. We have multiple optionality once we get to that stage. We don't require an intensive energy-consuming smelting process. The other incredible benefit that I can point to at this particular stage is we've got up to 10%, up to 20% we've measured at surface, TiO2, titanium dioxide in the ground. Where the average mineral sands producer is dealing with 1% Ti. 1%. We've already got a massive advantage over the mineral sands producers. We have a big advantage over the hard rock producers. What we don't yet have, and we're being very honest and open about that, is we don't yet have all the answers about how we can beneficiate, concentrate up titanite, and then apply these low-cost acidic leaching processes. Clearly that's why we're working through and focusing now on our processing and metallurgical design. I just wanted to raise a few more points while we're on what separates Pitfield from the rest of the pack. We're not in some third-world country. We're not 1,000 kilometers away from a port. We are operating in an absolutely amazing location. I raised this right at the start. If you actually go and research and look at where we are, 60 kilometers inland from a coast of several ports. The major port of Geraldton is 150 kilometers away connected by rail. There's a gas pipeline running right down, which comes from our North-West Shelf, all the way down within a few kilometers of our project. There's high-voltage infrastructure already established. One of the other mineral sands players, Iluka, are actually building AUD 1.25 billion rare earth cracking plant. They're cracking their monazite, which was a waste mineral that they were generating from some of their mineral sands near a place called Eneabba. That's 30-odd km away from us. You got this massive industrial hub forming. We're not the first to come into this area. We're not explorers here in that sense. We are going to be going into an area that is well-supported, well-funded, and has all the infrastructure that you can possibly imagine. What are we working on? Now, Neil touched upon this, and it very much comes back to his point, I think, that why have we been able to move so far so quickly in less than 12 months? How can we be sitting here saying we've defined not only what the key minerals are and what the processes might be that we can test, but we're now also saying, "Well, we can now zoom in on aspects of our license area, of this big mineral system, and start to infill drill this." Not randomly, but these are areas that we've identified from our surface sampling. These are high-grade sandstone areas that are close to surface, and each of these areas in their own right, 7 km by 2-km areas, 14 sq km, are massive. These are massive potential for a resource that we will be moving towards. What do we have to do? What are we planning to do? Clearly, we're working on understanding better this mineralogy and getting better understanding of how this thing actually formed. I also think what's important is that we are able to quickly now get representative samples. We can get 80 meters, 160 meters, if you like, of these high-grade sandstones from our core and test them in the metallurgical laboratories. Here in Perth, there are multiple of them. We don't have to ship this thing overseas to get an assay, for instance. It's right on our doorstep. We're advancing that quickly. What we're able to say is that with our exploration program, we're now able to confine our drilling programs to these discrete areas with the confidence that this is where the mines will probably most likely develop and the likelihood that we'll be able to put grade and tonnage around these targets after this particular drilling program. We will come back and for once be able to say, "We've got X billion tons at this grade." Now, that's a very important breakthrough that we are very excited that we look to make if not quite at the end of this quarter, we'll certainly be making it before the mid of this year. Where does that lead us? Looking even further ahead, and I think this is where we've really started to understand where the potential of Pitfield can go. We're not just an explorer anymore. We have to understand that this is evolving for us. We don't want to be reactive. We want to be proactive. We're building a team. We've already taken on some very talented individuals. We have a Process Development Manager we announced recently, Narelle Marriott. We've got two of the greatest titanium guys I know in this particular part of the world. Each of them have nearly four decades each of experience in the industry. We're taking on environmental scientists. We're bringing in researchers from the university. There's a lot of talent coming to bear on this particular project in the next few months. What's going to be important in the second half of this year is that we consolidate all that effort, arrive at a basic flow sheet, a design, if you like, for how the processing plant might work and what it might look like, and also advance ready to go so that we can start to drill out the resources and move into a measured and indicated resources here at Pitfield. Coming out of this year and into next is a really important period for us. The ultimate goal at the moment is to get to a stage where we can actually build this demonstration plant, not rely on metallurgical test work in laboratories to do all the answers for the process design. We have to take it one step further forward. One of the great benefits of that is that we're going to actually make product. We're not going to make a test tube of product. We're not going to make a beaker of product. We're going to make drums. 44-gallon drums or 20-liter drums, wherever you come from. We're going to be making multiple of these. Those are the things that we're going to be relying on when we go out at the end of that particular period to say, "Look, we've proven the process, but look what we've made." This is high-quality TiO2 product. This is the sort of stuff that we can be taking to. Well, I'm not going to mention countries at this point in time, but we're going to be taking these to metal producers. Why stop at pigment? Or we're going to try and approach pigment quality. There's lots of upside here, lots of optionality. I'm just going to. Sorry, I jumped once too far. I'm just going to pass back to Neil. And Neil, over to you, mate. Yeah, just quick comments. Here you see the board and management. There's the four of us. We've run a very cost-efficient, tight ship for a long time. We're focused, as Shaun will point out, on building the technical team. I think you can see here that there's room here to expand upon when necessary and appropriate. As the project goes along and we need to bring in more titanium experience, one of the things we'll very likely be looking at doing is adding that experience as well in senior management and on the board. I think it's probably all I need to say there this time, but we're very fortunate to have Shaun in Perth and to have a processing background as well, and with his contacts there to very quickly attract and secure some exceptionally talented people. I'll pass it back to you, Shaun, and you can talk about the technical team. Yeah. Thanks, Neil. Look, we've broadcast this recently in one of our announcements. I guess without going into each of these individuals in great detail, Andrew, the exploration manager, joined us just on 12 months ago. This guy's on site right now. We're drilling. We've got a diamond rig, 2 RC rigs. He's up there 24/7. This is not some guy that has his butt sitting in some office in Perth looking at screens and wondering what he has to do. This is a guy hands-on marking up the core personally. We've got a fantastic exploration leader. Narelle, as I mentioned, is an amazing, talented metallurgist. She has done an amazing job on very complex, very technically very difficult metallurgical processing. I deliberately sought her out. I knew of her ability. I knew her capability in terms of being able to tackle these difficult targets. Titanite is difficult, not because the metallurgy of it is difficult, it's just that nobody's ever done it before. I'm really pleased that she's joined us. Trevor Nicholson and Eugene Dardengo are absolutely industry icons here and come from completely opposite sides of the titanium industry. Trevor's a downstream guy, really understands the pyro and the hydro routes that we're going to need to look at. Eugene has spent his entire life beneficiation. He's done gravity, magnetics, worked for the major mineral sands guys here. Fundamentally, regardless of the fact that our ore body is not a mineral sand, titanium minerals are heavy and the rest of our sediments are not. The answer processing-wise is a combination of these two guys' expertise. How do we separate, get the effective liberation, get the beneficiation of a high-grade product, and then apply the hydrometallurgical, the atmospheric low-temperature routes that we need to make an incredibly valuable titanium dioxide pigment-type material? We're going to add to this list, by the way. This is not the full team. We are looking to diversify the team, bring in other specialists in different areas, and continue to build up an extremely talented technical team to take this through to commercialization. I'm just going to talk briefly to this slide. Not that I necessarily need to flag exactly what's been happening over, well, not just the last few months, but over the last 12 months. We've got a broad mix of retail-type investment at the moment. Not a lot of big funds have come in yet. We've got some great cornerstone investors who've been with us a very long time, and look, without mentioning their names directly, they know who I'm talking about, and I sincerely thank them for their loyalty and support over this long journey. What excites me, I think most of all, is the opportunity that this represents. It was described to me in a way that I sort of thought was. I'm not a gambling person per se, but people are sitting there saying, "Right, so we're not quite sure what the value of Pitfield is at the moment, but it's huge, it's high-grade, it's soft rock, great location. There's lots of positives. You haven't got the key yet, if you like, to opening up this big treasure chest. What's that going to cost to get to?" We can't put numbers on the table just yet. Once the demonstration plant is built and operating and we're making and proving that we can make a high-grade titanium dioxide product, well, hell, we've opened up the treasure chest. People will believe that this thing is going to be a complete game-changer. This is a disrupter for the entire industry. What value do you put on that then? For a very small investment over this particular period in time relative to the value that you can create, that's what Empire represents, that's what Pitfield represents. A relatively modest amount of CapEx is going to get us to an awful lot of value if all that technical issues that we are working our way through all fall into place, which is what we expect. I'll leave you on that note. I'm going to pass back to Neil. Yeah. Thanks, Sean. Just to, I'll leave you with some of the messages I think are probably most important. On value, when you're dealing with something as special as a situation like this and what is the value of scarcity, right? I don't like to use the word unique because at various scale, all deposits are unique, right? I think the way to look at it is in the titanium space, yeah, it's special for sure, right? You can compare it in a different way. If you look at some of the commodities that I've explored for and been involved with in significant discoveries over my career, but when you look at sediment-hosted systems, right, well, the largest gold deposit or district, if you will, giant mineral system in Nevada is a sediment-hosted one. I mean, MVT is also sediment-hosted. Zinc. You've got Mount Isa, Red Dog, right? They're sediment-hosted zinc. They're the world's largest. They're giant mineral systems, right? Uranium, the Athabasca Basin. There's nothing like it. Sediment-hosted systems, right? Of course, copper, right? Kupferschiefer. It covers a large part of Central Europe. One mineral system, right? Of course, Central Africa. This is what these basinal sediment-hosted systems do, right? It's not necessarily they're large, but they're robust. These are really strong mineral systems that do very special things. It's kind of like Olympic athletes, right? There's athletes, there's super athletes, and then there's the exceptional ones, right, that just do absolutely amazing things. That's really what we feel about Pitfield is it's the titanium member of this very special class of giant ore deposit, giant mineral systems. I'll say one more aspect of that. As we see this world become more risky and people know that we still need metals to make the tools of civilization and all of that, right? I think the world is well down the path of demanding more metals come from fewer places. What does that mean? Giant mining districts have always been important, but I think the importance of them is going to be increasing dramatically. I think all of this critical minerals and the geopolitical risk and the realignments of trade is really the catalyst behind where metals are going to come from, right? We need them. We need secure. If you found a giant mineral system, which we have, right, that has potential to become a giant mining district in a number one mining jurisdiction, that's the value of scarcity. That's why we're so happy to have found Pitfield and move it along. Nothing is without risk, but I think we've plotted out. I first identified where are the risks that we need to focus on and quickly move along it. My experience with giant mineral systems is that there's always more good surprises than bad. That's just the way they are, right? I'll leave you on that note there. Thank you very much for all attending. I hope you share our enthusiasm and excitement for what is a phenomenal discovery and the ability to move it along very quickly to create value for all of you out there. Thank you so much. Perfect. Sean, Neil, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab, which is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Sean, if I could just hand over to you just to chair the Q&A, that'd be great, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Yeah, nice. My pleasure. What I'll do is I'll just simply read out the question that we've been given, and either myself or Neil will answer, or both of us will answer, and we'll sort it out as we go. Which is generally how the board works on any given day of the week. The first question that we've got here is how does Pitfield compare to other global titanium mining projects in terms of size and quality? I think, look, the presentations and I think the discussions and everything we've discussed up to this point absolutely indicates that the size of this thing, it's a giant titanium-rich mineral system. We believe, once we get the exploration numbers out there and we'll be able to see the numbers, but this is running into billions of tons. Billions and billions of tons. It's the biggest thing ever discovered in terms of titanium content. The reality is what we should be talking about is quality of the find. It's high grade in situ. As I said, it's up to 10%, up to 20% TiO2 in situ. Yes, the mineral that is dominating the mix at the moment is titanite. We'll talk a bit further, no doubt we've talked a bit about titanite during the presentation. Titanite is not necessarily a bad thing. We believe that given the location, soft rock, no strip ratios, relatively low processing costs once we get the beneficiation sorted and a high-quality product just completely sets Pitfield apart from the rest of the mining industry. It is going to be the outlier, the disruptor. I can go into a little bit more detail about that. We're happy to publish more about that as we go further forward. Second question was: "Is the mix of minerals compatible with the general process?" I'm not quite sure what that refers to, but question is, "Can you grind, separate, and beneficiate various minerals such as copper, nickel, zinc, and silver, or any other mineral in commercially economic concentrations in the same truckload?" It's an interesting question, but if I understand what they're driving at. Look, all of our titanium-bearing minerals in this big system, including titanite, have a particular high SG. So specific gravity. They are heavy minerals. They are sitting in a sandstone sediment sort of bed that's full of felsic light rock. They're silicates, they're quartz-like minerals. They have a low SG. It gets down. Once we can establish liberation size, then a gravity separation process will be a very effective way of concentrating up our titanium-bearing minerals. There are other techniques that we're going to look to apply, but in a nutshell, it's not going to be that difficult to separate out titanium minerals from the rest of the pack. Once we've separated out the titanium minerals, what we're saying, and I'll repeat this, is that all the evidence, all the research suggests that Titanite is non-refractory and will be quite easily dissolved in a low-temperature atmospheric acid process. That's important, I think, to say right up front that, yes, it all looks very positive at the moment in terms of how we might go about processing our Titanite discovery. "Can you validate the commercial viability of turning Titanite mineral into a valuable end product? Is a demonstration plant really necessary?" Well, and Neil can jump in here as well, I think, because of his vast experience in these sorts of getting giant mining systems up. There's certain elements about Pitfield, as we said, that make it different from all that's gone before. We can't sit here and take you people, we can't put up a picture of a titanite processing plant somewhere in the world. They don't exist. That's because nobody's ever found a titanite ore body as high grade, as concentrated as ours. Why would we go to a demonstration plant? Well, multiple reasons. One, it gives us and the rest of the world watching on, the confidence that we have a process, an efficacious process that can be used to extract titanium. Most importantly, we have product. We're going to make something that we can take to the industry and say, "Hey, would you buy this?" That's a fantastic advantage coming out of this exploration early development phase. It also, very quickly just to point out, that a demonstration plant generates an awful lot of technical information about design, circulating loads, flow sheets, contaminants, power consumption, how hard is it to crush, how easy is it. There's so much information that the demonstration plant can provide. That it does provide us a very secure, very high-confidence fast track method of getting into final detailed design of an actual commercial plant. I think it's a very important step for the company to go through. Actually, if I can jump in there, I just want to make maybe a parallel example. If you go back 150 years ago to Nevada, it was originally a silver mining district, right? At a certain point, people knew that there was very low-grade gold there, but it wasn't winnable, and it was like, "So what? Who cares?" Right. Then the world's gold basically had to come from so-called free milling gold. They used to use mercury to soak it all up and then burn the mercury off, et cetera. Right? In the last century, cyanide leach, a low-temperature atmospheric leach, came in. It was found that it worked on certain types of low-grade gold deposits. Well, Nevada is the world's greatest gold district, using a low-temperature atmospheric leach on low-grade gold ore. You can look at it from the perspective that there was nothing new about that leach. It was known. It was just looking for a giant mineral system. Think about that in this regard from titanium. It's not that we're creating some new processing technology. No, it's already there. Perhaps it's just been looking for a giant mineral system to apply it to. That's all. Yeah. No, I agree. Just advancing a little bit further, get through these questions as succinctly as we can. Can you explain the timeline for making the pilot plant operational? How confident are you of accomplishing this within an 18-24-month time frame? Well, it's a challenge and we're not saying that this is our objective. Just randomly putting out a time frame. What we do believe, however, and from experience, is that putting together the units, the processing steps that we need. There are a number of fundamental steps in terms of getting the beneficiation, applying some leach tests to get the right chemical mixes, the right choices. Which acids are we going to go? What do you do next? The demonstration plant can evolve. It doesn't have to be completely locked down in 6 months or 12 months' time. We'll get the front end, we'll get the beneficiation side, and we'll get into the leaching very quickly. We can start that process and build ourselves the infrastructure, the permitting, getting the mining permits to get up a small-scale pit. All of that can be easily, I think, done within this time frame. As we go running in parallel, we'll continue to work on optimizing the process. Once the demonstration plant is up and running, we might change as we go. We might add a unit to it. We take a unit out and start to utilize this to sort of fine-tune how to make the best type of product. Getting to the demonstration plants as fast as possible is our objective. What it does and how long we run it for and what we achieve from it, that thing is going to evolve as well. Yes, I think it's quite possible to have this designed and up and running within the 18 months, 24 months. I think it's going to have an incredible benefit to the company's ability to come back to the market and say, "This is the value of Pitfield." Next questions come up. There are dissenting voices saying that the composition of Titanite makes it difficult to get the titanium synthetic rutile. Can you clarify? Look, composition of Titanite. Let's just get one thing sorted really up front. I think it's really important. Ilmenite, which is an iron titanium oxide, and Titanite, which is a calcium titanium silicate. Based on their makeup, if you actually sat down and looked at the chemical equations to the stoichiometry, if you like, breakdown of those two products in acid. They actually consume exactly the same amount of acid. It's bizarre. They both require 2 moles of sulfuric acid. In actual fact, ilmenite requires 1.3 ton of acid for a ton of ilmenite versus only one ton of acid for a ton of titanite. Where it sort of reverses is titanite's about 40% TiO2, where ilmenite in theory is closer to 50, maybe a bit more. When you actually work it all back, it actually comes out exactly the same ratio. It's a complete fallacy if anyone's walking around saying that titanite consumes more acid, because it doesn't. What we have to get to the bottom of, I think, is what else is in there next? What else is part of this ore body, and how does this all work? Beneficiation is important, but the other thing I want to mention is we're starting with a 10% better grade. We've got up to 10% TiO2 to start with, where our mineral sand competitors, the industry is starting with 1%. They've got to dig up and mine and shift. For every 1 ton of ilmenite, they're moving 99 tons of other stuff that they've got to dump somewhere. I don't think titanite is the problem. Certainly we can make a high-grade TiO2 product once it gets into solution. That's, again, just basic chemistry. No challenge there, I don't believe. Next question: Do ilmenite and titanohematite minerals necessitate elevated temperatures during the acid leaching process? Well, simply the answer is yes. They're different things, so let's be clear on that. Start with titanohematite. Titanohematite minerals is what we call the hard rock. Basically, that's what Rio, I mentioned earlier, were mining. You can't physically separate, in most cases, the ilmenite from the hematite, so you roast it. You basically smelt it, to be honest. You melt it down and produce a titania slag. The titania slag then has to go into one of the routes. We had a slide earlier showing how the titanium dioxide pigments are made. It's either the sulfate route or the chloride route. Yeah, those things all have to be hit with an intensive, excessive sulfuric acid at very high temperature. Same for ilmenite. If you have a low-grade ilmenite material that goes into the sulfate pigment industry, it generally is leached or smashed, if you like, at somewhere between anywhere over 100 degrees, but quite closely somewhere around about 140-190 degrees Celsius and in excess sulfuric acid to dissolve ilmenite. Rutile, by the way, gets the same sort of treatment. Regardless of what people say. Rutile is a mineral. It's not a powder, so it requires to be dissolved as well. It is not a particularly straightforward process either. Quite often has to go into the chloride route, which is a very high temperature process where they pump in chloride gas. None of these minerals are easy to get from the mineral phase into titanium dioxide. That's just fact. How confident are you in obtaining government support for the project? Well, we already are getting some government support. We've had funding for some of our core drilling. We are working closely with various agencies now to identify what sort of support there is for the critical, titanium being a critical metal or critical element here in, particularly in Australia. Probably the best example of real government funding that's happened in the recent times is the Iluka project, this rare earth project down the road where they're cracking monazite. The federal government and other government support combined put in AUD 1.25 billion to build the plant as a very low cost, hardly any interest on that to Iluka. All because rare earths are classified as critical. We've already identified the agencies that we need to talk to. I'm highly confident as we advance the project that we will see further government support for a critical metal industry to be created here in Western Australia. That was the key questions that I had popped up. Neil, is any of those others, if you're able to jump in, feel free. Well, maybe just a comment. You've been talking about the different feedstocks, if you will, that there are. I was talking to a titanium marketing expert yesterday and he had recently been over to visit one of the big Japanese titanium producers. He mentioned to me about the feedstock and he showed you two different kind of stockpiles that they had. By the way, the Japanese have been taking advantage of trying to fill the gap, if you will, with some of these supply disruptions, particularly from Russia, that's going on here. It's a great opportunity for the Japanese. They don't have their own titanium mine production, so they have to import these feedstocks. The two that he was basically shown, one was a titania slag coming from one part of the world, and the other was a rutile mineral sand concentrate coming from, kind of guess where, right? Two completely different feedstocks. I was thinking about this and I've got a lot of background in mine operations as well and particularly in camps where you've got different types of ore deposits and there's one plant. What does a plant always want? It wants consistency. What do you have to do when you have different supplies? You have to have big stockpiles and you got to blend them and try to homogenize it. If you got two completely different things, man, it's not what you want. Ideally, what do you want? You want one supply. That's consistent, that you know is going to work, and it's going to go on for a long time. I think that's in part the opportunity at Pitfield here is to provide that and coming again from the world's best mining jurisdiction where the rules are known, it's stable, the rules aren't going to change, right? There's nobody that's going to disrupt it all. I think to me, the more I learn about the titanium industry here, the more I see the role and the place for a deposit and a stable supply of a high-quality product for some of these major players in the industry. Yeah, no, thanks, Neil. Look, the majority of the questions I think we've either answered during the presentation or there are other questions that we'll respond to outside of this particular conference call. We'll be publishing Q&A sessions in the near future, and we'll certainly circle back to the group that have asked particular questions that probably we're not quite in the position to answer at this point in time. We will certainly come back to those and follow up with more advice. I'm just mindful of the time. We've just ticked over the hour. Yes, Sean, Neil, thank you very much for your time, and thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Empire Metals Limited, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Thank you. Good afternoon to you all.