Investor update

Feb 28, 2025

Slides

Thank you for the time and having us today. Look, I think what we have to just talk about briefly here is the fact that Pitfield is truly a world-class mineral deposit, a mineral system. It's a giant of its kind. Giants are really important for the mining industry. They are by nature rare but highly prized. I think what's really a critical fact about this is that they are often overlooked. We found the Pitfield deposit a few years ago, drilling in this area, and we've been drilling here for a couple of years now and have identified what is clearly the world's largest titanium mineral system. One of the exciting things about that is that titanium is a very strategic metal. Highly sought after now. It's very important for the aerospace industry, and it's very important for defense. A lot of government interest in these types of developments, these discoveries getting a lot of attention, particularly from the federal government of Australia, who've shown some interest in the fact that we have this unique strategic mineral deposit here in Western Australia. Western Australia, as you probably are well aware of, is a Tier One mining jurisdiction. It's absolutely fantastic place to find an extremely large mine to bring into development. We've got fantastic infrastructure. We're right in the middle of what you call the Midwest development hub of Western Australia, close to port, access to power, existing roads, rail. We really have a lot of things that have all come together to make this project truly an exciting one. When people talk about Pitfield in years to come, I'm sure they're going to start to think about some of the great giant mineral systems around the world. When you think about the uranium industry in the Athabasca Basin in Canada. If you think about gold, you're talking about the Carlin Trend in Nevada. Zinc is Red Dog in Canada. These are giant districts, and they've been developed over many multiple generations. We see Pitfield as being an integrated mine to metal production. We're very excited by the prospect of taking this through to development. I'm just going to go through the slides. What we're talking about here is the world's largest known titanium discovery. What we're saying is that this is a low cost, a conventional flow sheet. We're going to be making very high purity products. As I said, our vision is to take this development all the way through to either titanium metal or to maybe a high-value chloride pigment. Now, why do we call titanium critical? It's really a rapidly growing market for titanium, particularly the titanium dioxide market. It grows steadily with consumer price index. It's a $23 billion market valued in 2022, growing steadily at just under 4% per annum. Strong demand. It's not a bubble. It's not a market that has huge fluctuations over time. The pigments are predominantly used in high-value paints and in domestic consumption. Things like housing and normal population growth is driving demand for these types of pigments. That's always moving forward. What's really interesting, though, is the titanium metal component of the market. The metal is unique in the sense that it's far stronger than steel and much, much lighter in weight. You've got this combination of a non-corrosive, highly strong metal that is valued by the aerospace industry. Most of the undercarriage on Boeing and the Airbus, nearly all of the aircraft undercarriage is predominantly titanium steel. This titanium process has had big penetration into the defense industries. A lot of interest from government in that sense. I think one of the important things here is that not only does the major economies, the Western economies like the U.S., who don't produce any of their own titanium metal, are relying incredibly on imports and recycling. Yet the main growth factor for titanium supply is now coming out of China. There's a lot of geopolitical tension and a lot of interest from the Western world in finding a high-value, giant titanium system in a jurisdiction like ours. Move to the next slide. I just wanted to come back to this giant system and why we call it a giant. Well, we've mapped this over 40 kilometers north and south, over 10 kilometers across east to west. We've measured the anomaly down into the Earth's crust by about five kilometers. We've tracked the magnetics into the ground, and it continues to go down well into the sedimentary basin where we found the deposit. We released an exploration target on Pitfield last year, which ranged from between 26.4 and 32.2 billion tons of ore, and has a grade ranging between 4.5% and 5.5% TiO2. Effectively, that represents over a third of the world's total known resources of titanium. We've drill tested this the entire length, so there's over 117 drill holes in this deposit. We continue to drill. We've got drill rigs up at the site at the moment, continuing to drill the resource out with the objective of producing a JORC compliant mineral resource estimate in the next few months. Location-wise, as we said earlier, could not be better. Close to port, rail lines existing that run between the port and cross our tenements, major power infrastructure. What's really important here is that this Midwest hub that we are located within in Western Australia, this is where WA's largest wind farms, solar farms are located. We've got access to green energy. There's a hydrogen hub being planned in the region. We'll have very cheap power and very clean energy to supply to the mining operation. Recently, we announced a discovery within this big mineral system, this giant, of an unusual but very valuable weathered cap. The natural weathering above the ore body itself has resulted in the upgrading of these titanium minerals. Basically, we have almost pure titanium dioxide minerals, anatase and rutile, within the top 40-60 meters from surface. Every drill hole we've ever put into this ore body, from surface to the end of the hole, has encountered mineralization. There are no waste zones. There is no overburden. Basically, a highly friable, easy digging from surface, and basically we're hitting the high-grade titanium minerals right from the start. Processing-wise, well, we're basically applying conventional technology. There's nothing tremendously stepping outside the norm or outside the box, so to speak here. Basically, we're looking at a simple scrubbing and desliming operation. We are using gravity and flotation steps to beneficiate, in other words, to produce a concentrate, raise the grade of the ore. What we will be doing is looking at direct acid digestion techniques to bring the titanium out of the concentrates and into solutions. From there, it's a simple case of purification to upgrade the titanium products. What we'll be looking at doing is shipping out a very high value, high quality, pure titanium dioxide mix of products. Simply put, if you look at what we've achieved in the last 12 months, we've hit some major milestones. I talked about the Exploration Target being achieved. We've assembled a world-class and absolutely great technical team with lots of experience. We've been recently joined by our new Non-Executive Director, Phillip Brumit, who came from Newmont and Freeport-McMoRan, a guy with a big picture, big mining company background. We're really starting to beef up not only our technical team, the board of directors, but we're also looking to expand over the next 12 months, looking to fill roles within our strategic areas such as marketing and hydrometallurgical development, so we can move into the product side of the project. That's where our whole focus is moving towards. We've sent the drill rigs back up to site at the start of this year. The idea is to get bulk samples with the view that we would be able to upscale our test work. Instead of doing just normal batch scale test work moving forward, we'll be doing bulk test work on industrial size equipment. Now full operational spirals and flotation circuit testing. The idea there is to generate as much as possible, or as much material as possible of concentrates that we can digest, produce titanium products from, and then start to go out, reach out to our potential customers and others in the marketplace to see who would be most interested in securing supply from this type of project. We're very excited by the prospect of being able to move to product development, and that'll be the main focus in the next few months. We'll have a Mineral Resource estimate developed based on the recent drilling campaign that I mentioned. One of the other key things is we'll be able to quickly now move to a process flow sheet development phase, which will allow us to design and cost up a pilot plant. In terms of our structure, the company itself, we're well cashed up. Back in September last year, we were cashed up with AUD 4.8 million still in the bank. We are looking at how that money will continue to last. We've built a runway, if you like, to get us through this critical development phase. The exploration drilling, the development test work we're undergoing now is all fully paid for. We've had strong support from our shareholder base, which we're pleased to say, and we're starting to see some bigger, individual-type shareholders starting to come onto the register. That makes us feel that the recognition that we've been looking for in the market is finally coming our way. I mentioned the buildup of the board and the technical team. I think it's really important that we highlight that our Non-Executive Chairman, Dr. Neil O'Brien, has been guiding the company now for many years. He was the ex-senior vice president for Lundin Mining. Our Financial Director, Gregory Kuenzel, has also been with the company, one of the founding directors of the company for very many years. The company, the board has been not only a strong board, but it's been a stable board now for certainly the last four or five years, since I joined back in 2021. In a nutshell, I think what we have to reflect on is that these giant mineral systems don't suddenly just happen. They don't suddenly come around. As I said, they're rare by nature, they're hard to find, they're easily overlooked. But when you have one, you are truly in a position to take these types of projects all the way through, from discovery into major development. That's our intention. We're looking for a long-life mine here at Pitfield. We're looking to take advantage of the fact that the titanium industry is desperately seeking a stable long-term supplier from a tier one jurisdiction such as WA. We're very confident as we move forward that we will be able to continue to get government support in helping us develop this through these early phases. We're very interested in talking to market off-takers or potential partners as we move forward, once we've been able to produce some product and start to send out product samples for those groups to be testing and having a look at how Pitfield could become an important supplier for their needs. In a nutshell, I think we've come a long way in the last few years, having made the discovery only a couple of years ago, having only taken the resource through its development phase last year. We're now rapidly escalating the test work, upscaling and moving into piloting with the view that we'll start to talk to the market about product in the next few months. That is the rapid growth and exciting story of Pitfield. That's great, Shaun. Thank you very much indeed. That was very, very insightful. Thank you. I guess if I was to ask you 1 question, just to maybe close up this section of the spotlight event, where do you see Empire Metals perhaps in 3-5 years? In your mind, what does success look like? Yeah, look, one of the things that we've said multiple times is that we've never really sat still for very long. The development of Pitfield is going at such a rate. In three years' time, I would imagine that we would be well down the path of negotiating and being in a position to look to develop the mine. There's no really great obstacles here in Western Australia to mine development. We do have to develop the flow sheet. We do have to do some piloting and testing of the flow sheet. There will be hurdles and milestones along the way that we have to achieve. It's not unrealistic to be looking at getting into a development phase on a project like this. Such a strategic, important metal in almost the perfect location. Lots of things in our favor. I think we will be continuing to rapidly move towards the development of this project, subject to us continuing to enjoy success in the test work and in the marketing of our product. That's what I look forward to seeing. If I had a crystal ball, I'd be certainly gazing at that.