Thank you for coming, everyone. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Mick Wilkes. I'm the new Chair of Andromeda, and it's great to see so many of you here today. It's really fantastic. Patrick, could I just get the script, please? No, the script. That's not Chair's address. No, it's not. Just a second. Bit of a hiccup. No, I came down from Brisbane last night. Thank you. It was windy and teeming with rain. I thought, "Oh, my God." Pretty cold place. I used to live here in Adelaide back in 2006-2010 when we were building the Prominent Hill project. It's a lovely city, and it's great to be back.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Mick Wilkes. I'm the Chair of Andromeda Metals, and I'll be chairing today's meeting. I wish to welcome everybody to the 2022 Annual General Meeting of the company. On behalf of the Board, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional landowners of land on which we operate and pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. Today's meeting is being held in person and online via the Computershare Virtual Meeting Platform. This allows shareholders, proxies, and guests to attend the meeting in person and virtually, with attendees able to watch a live webcast of the meeting. In addition, shareholders and proxies can ask questions and submit votes during the course of the meeting.
I've been advised by the Company Secretary that we have a quorum present, and as it is now past the appointed hour of 1:00 P.M. Adelaide time, I declare the meeting properly constituted and open. I'd like to introduce you to my fellow directors. Our Managing Director, James Marsh, who I'm sure needs no introduction, as with Joe Ranford, our Operations Director. Non-Executive Director Austen Perrin, who joined us recently, and also Non-Executive Director Melissa Holzberger. Also here today, our Chief Financial Officer, Michael Zanis. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Tim Anderson. Where's Tim? Down the back there. Company Secretary, Andrea Betti. There's Andrea. Andrew Corletto, our lawyer from MinterEllison up the front, and also David Newman from Deloitte, our auditors. Thanks, David.
I'd also like to introduce you to Sarah Clarke, who's been appointed to the role of General Counsel, and she commences in January. There's Sarah. Got a lot of experience and well-known here in Adelaide. I invite those present to make yourselves known to us at the conclusion of this meeting. If any shareholder here today in person has not already registered, please do so with Computershare now so that you may vote during today's proceedings. Could everyone in the room please also ensure that mobile phones are switched to silent during the meeting? Please also note that any unauthorized recording or photography during the meeting is prohibited. The notice of meeting and explanatory memorandum was made available to shareholders on 20th of October, 2022 within the time provided for in the Corporations Act and was lodged with the Australian Securities Exchange.
Consequently, unless there are any objections, I propose that the notice be taken as read. The minutes of the last meeting of shareholders, which was the Annual General Meeting held on the 25th of November, 2021, were approved by the Board and are available for inspection from the Company Secretary. Okay, asking questions. Now, please bear with me. This is a fairly detailed process that I'll run through because we do have many shareholders here today. For shareholders and proxy holders attending the meeting virtually, you can submit questions at any time during today's meeting. To ask a question, please press on the Q&A icon in the top right-hand corner of the virtual meeting platform. Please select or type in the resolution number or topic your question relates to before entering the text of the question.
Type your question into the text box at the bottom of the screen, and when you have finished typing, please press the Send button. Please note that while you can submit questions from now on, I will not address them until the relevant time in the meeting. Also note that your questions may be moderated or if there are multiple questions on one topic, amalgamated together. Whilst we may not be able to deal with all your questions, I will ensure that members have reasonable opportunity to ask questions.
I encourage shareholders attending the meeting virtually to submit questions as early as possible, and we will attempt to address the questions at the appropriate time during the meeting. I will check after all resolutions have been put to the meeting, and before I close the poll to see if there are any questions that have not been addressed, time permitting. For those shareholders attending virtually who wish to ask a verbal question, please follow the instructions below the online broadcast. Our Manager for Investor Relations, Patrick Sinclair, raise your hand Patrick, will act as our moderator for the meeting, and as such will receive any questions raised by shareholders via the virtual meeting platform. Patrick will read out questions received during today's meeting, and I will hand over to him at the appropriate times.
For shareholders and proxy holders attending the meeting in person, you should have been provided with a blue or pink card at registration. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions and make comments with respect to each of the resolutions when they are put to the meeting. For each resolution, I will invite questions from you at the appropriate time, and those wishing to ask a question can do so by raising your card. Please wait until I acknowledge you before asking your question, and a microphone will be made available to you for your question to be heard by those in the room and the virtual attendees.
There will also be an opportunity to ask questions or make comments on a more general nature regarding the company's performance following the Managing Director's presentation with James, which will be at the completion of the formal proceedings. For those attendees issued with a white visitor's admission card, you will be unable to speak or vote at today's meeting. I told you it was long. Before moving on to the various motions, I would like to briefly run through the voting procedure. Voting today will be conducted by way of a poll on each item of business. To provide you with enough time to vote, I will shortly open voting for all resolutions.
If you are eligible to vote at this meeting, once the poll has been opened, press the Vote icon at the top of your screen and all resolutions will be activated with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There is no need to hit a Submit or Enter button as your vote is automatically recorded. You will receive a vote confirmation on your screen. You can change your vote up until the time I declare voting is closed. To change your vote, select Click Here to Change Your Vote and press the different option to override your previous selection. I now declare voting open on all items of business. The Vote icon will soon be updated. Please submit your votes at any time. I'll provide ample notice prior to the close of voting.
I remind attendees that your Board strongly recommends that you vote for resolutions one to four and against resolution five. All undirected proxies that have been nominated the Chairman of the meeting as their proxy will be voted for all resolutions except for resolution five, which will be voted against. I appoint Nigel Bulling of Computershare Investor Services to be Returning Officer and to conduct the poll. Mr. Bulling has power to co-opt, as do his agents, members of his staff and staff of the Company. For those shareholders and proxy holders who are attending the meeting in person and were provided with a blue attendee card but are not able to vote utilizing the virtual meeting platform, I now provide instructions on how to vote. For those shareholders or proxy holders, on the reverse of your blue attendee card is your voting paper and instructions.
I'll now go through procedure for filling out the voting papers. Proxy holders have attached to their sub-admission card a summary of proxy votes, which details the voting instructions for business items on the appointment documents in your favor. By completing the voting paper when instructed to vote on a particular manner, you are deemed to have voted in accordance with those instructions. In respect of any open votes a proxy holder may be entitled to cast, you need to mark a box beside the motion to indicate how you wish to cast your open votes. Proxy holders should refer to the summary of proxy notes form attached to your voting paper for further information. Shareholders also need to mark a box beside the motion to indicate how you wish to cast your votes. Please ensure you print your name where indicated and sign the voting paper.
When you have finished filling in your voting paper, please lodge it in the ballot box. Where's the ballot box?
It's there by the microphone.
Thank you, Nigel. Sign the voting paper. When you're finished filling in your voting paper, please lodge it in the ballot box, which will be circulated after all resolutions have been put to the meeting to ensure your votes are counted. If you require any assistance, please raise your hand. Okay, that's the voting stuff out of the way. I'll now move to my address to the meeting as the Chair of Andromeda. 2022 financial year was pivotal for Andromeda as we transition from explorer to developer of halloysite-kaolin. This is marked by the strong economics of the definitive feasibility study, which underpins the value of the Great White Project development. Further, progress has been made on the research into new products from our halloysite-kaolin resource. Some of which, in time, we hope will become commercial and add substantially to the value of the company.
As you're aware, this is my first annual general meeting as Chair after being appointed in April of this year. Upon my joining the board, the immediate tasks were to focus on a strong governance approach and enable a path forward to development of the Great White Project to get us into production and cash flow. On governance, we have taken the following steps. Renewal of the board with the skill set required to become a producer. In particular, I would like to welcome Austen Perrin to the board. Austen brings a wealth of experience in finance and logistics for the mining industry. I would also like to acknowledge the significant contribution that Joe Ranford has made to the board over the past few years.
Joe will be stepping down from the Board following this meeting to focus on the important role of COO, or Chief Operating Officer, and help us ensure we deliver the Great White Project as planned. The other step we've taken on governance is revisiting remuneration policies and structures for the Board and executive management that align with the company strategy. Thirdly, improving our corporate policies and systems in line with contemporary mining producers. Despite the ongoing disruptions due to COVID-19 pandemic, significant progress has been made on the development of our flagship Great White Project. Since the DFS was completed in April this year, we continued moving forward towards a final investment decision, de-risking the project and evaluating funding arrangements that best suit the long-term interests of the company and you, our shareholders.
This was particularly important given the significant risks associated with COVID-related global supply chain disruptions, rapidly rising inflation, and evolving geopolitical issues. The progressive steps we have taken are part of the invigorated long-term strategy to bring our halloysite-kaolin products to the broader global market and entrench the premium positioning of the Great White brand. Accordingly, the refinement of the stage scalable approach to developing the Great White Project was deemed prudent through the initial construction of a processing plant with a capacity of 50,000 ton per annum, which closely aligns production in the first year to signed offtake volumes currently in place and being negotiated. Once in production, the intention is to quickly expand the process plant to match production volumes in the DFS of Stage one, of 150,000 ton per annum.
In addition to aligning our processing capacity with offtake commitments, this plan has the benefit of reducing the initial capital requirement to AUD 50 million-AUD 60 million prior to achieving first production and cash flow. Importantly, it remains the firm intention of the Andromeda Board and management to deliver the project's full production and financial outcomes as outlined in the DFS. We remain very confident in the significant value that can be generated for shareholders through developing the Great White Project safely, responsibly, and efficiently, and the significant benefits for the South Australian economy and the community of the Eyre Peninsula. The Company continues progressing towards a final investment decision, otherwise known as an FID, which of course is dependent on the approval of the Program for Environment Protection and Rehabilitation, or PEPR, currently lodged with the South Australian Government.
Further binding offtake agreements for the remaining uncommitted volume of planned production and finalization of funding structures. In addition to progressing the project, we continue to pursue a range of other potential new product and nanotechnology opportunities. The strategic objective for these is to create new products and markets using our unique halloysite-kaolin resources to increase the weighted average margins of our products. The first of these is the exciting new product for the concrete industry in Australasia, which we are planning to include in the initial process plant design. Pleasingly, the offtake for these was recently signed as announced this morning. Could I please ask that you turn your phones off? Thank you.
Apart from the higher margin expected from this product, compared to our more traditional kaolin products, this product is expected to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of standard concrete, primarily by reducing the cement content. Not included in the current development plans for the Great White Project is high-purity alumina, which is now designated as a critical mineral, otherwise known as HPA, and widely used in modern technology devices such as batteries, tablets, and phones. Our studies are progressing on the production of HPA from our high-quality halloysite-kaolin in a more efficient and environmentally safe manner than current methods. If these studies prove successful, we hope to move into pilot testing of the flow sheet in the near term.
Further, through our collaboration with the University of Newcastle, we continue to research the use of halloysite-kaolin to develop new products in the form of nanotechnologies for carbon dioxide capture and conversion, water treatment to remove microplastics, antimicrobial paint, and soil improvement for large-scale agriculture. What provides the foundations for all the aspects of our business model is the size and quality of our halloysite-kaolin resource here in South Australia. We continue to expand these resources through exploration to further secure our long-term position and create a new significant industry for the state. We also acknowledge the importance of committing to sustainable extraction and supply of superior quality industrial minerals. As the company moves towards production, our aspiration is to adopt, monitor, and report on relevant frameworks and metrics that emerge from the developing consensus and convergence of environmental, social, and governance frameworks and standards.
In summary, the board believes Andromeda is well-positioned for the future with globally significant high-quality resources and the right team in place to progress development of our flagship project and the other significant new product and nanotechnology opportunities. I'd like to thank my fellow directors and talented, hardworking Andromeda team. We remain focused and committed to delivering on the full potential we have before us, which in turn will deliver long-term value for you, our shareholders. We'd like to thank you and all our shareholders for your continued loyalty and support for Andromeda. That concludes my Chair's address. I might just have a quick drink of water. Okay. We'll now move to the formal business of the meeting. We have received 602 valid proxies, representing 928 million shares approximately.
Which is approximately 29.8% of the Company's issued capital. 577 of the proxies representing 908 million shares are held by me as Chair. The wording of each resolution will be displayed on the screen for virtual attendees and on the screen for those attending in person to view as we deal with that resolution. Proxy results relevant to that resolution will also be displayed. First order of business is the financial report. The first item on the agenda is to receive and consider the financial report of, and the reports of the Directors and Auditors for the year ended 30th of June 2022.
Are there any questions or comments that relate specifically to these documents that any shareholder would like to ask of the directors or the Audit Partner, David Newman from Deloitte? If there are any physical attendees with a question or comment, please raise your blue or pink card. I'll now ask Patrick Sinclair to read out any questions we have received online or via phone.
We currently have 123 attending online. At this point in time, no questions.
Thanks, Patrick. Thank you. We'll now move on to Resolution one. Resolution one deals with my election as a Director. Given this resolution deals with my election, I will pass the chair to Melissa Holzberger.
Good afternoon, everyone. As Mick mentioned, resolution one relates to his election as a director, and that resolution is displayed on the screen together with the relevant proxy votes. The whole board, except for Mick, who recused himself during deliberations on this resolution, unanimously recommends Mick's reappointment to the board. Appearing on the screen is a summary of Mick's experience. The board were very pleased to be able to secure such an experienced mining executive and director for Andromeda's future. Are there any questions or comments on this resolution? If there are any physical attendees with a question or comment, please raise your blue or pink card. I'll now ask Patrick Sinclair to read out any questions we've received online.
Again, at this point in time, no questions.
Thank you. You're invited to lodge your vote for resolution one by using the Vote icon for online attendees. For those attending the meeting in person, you've been issued a voting paper, and please mark a box beside the resolution to vote. Thank you. I'll now hand over to Mick Wilkes again.
Thanks, Melissa. It is a privilege to be the Chair of this company, and thank you for your support. I do feel there is enormous potential with this company, which is why I joined. I'm a gold and copper miner. I'm learning about kaolin and all the industrial minerals. This is indeed a great opportunity to create a new industry for not just South Australia, but the country, with arguably the best halloysite-kaolin resource on the planet and growing all the time. Thank you. It's quite an honor to be here. Resolution two. The election of Austen Perrin as a Director. The resolution is displayed on the screen for you, as are the proxy results. The whole Board, except for Austen, who has recused himself during deliberations of this resolution, unanimously recommends Austen's reappointment to the Board.
Appearing on the screen is a summary of Austen's experience. I've previously worked with Austen, and I can vouch for his great experience in financial matters and logistics and his business acumen, particularly as a director of a public company. Are there any questions or comments on this resolution?
I'll break the ice.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Do you want the name or what?
Please, yes, state your name. Thank you.
My name is Des.
Just wait for the microphone. Thank you.
Two quick points. First of all, thank you, Chairman, for standing and being here. Can we hear what was your previous relationship with Austen? In what company and in what capacity? Also, could Austen address us briefly about how he feels about Andromeda and the future?
Thanks very much for that question, Des. My association with Austen was started late last year with a company called Round Oak Minerals, privately owned by Washington H. Soul Pattinson. I was asked to be the Chairman, and through a search process, Austen was identified as a very good candidate for that board. The intention of Round Oak Minerals was to float and do an IPO. It didn't go ahead, not because of us, but because the owners didn't get the price they wanted. The board stayed in place up until June of this year to provide proper governance for that company which was subsequently sold to another public company called Aeris. I worked with Austen on that board
Austen, would you like to say a few words?
Yeah, Round Oak experience was brief. I'd never met Mick before that appointment. I'd had experience with some of the directors and management at Soul Pattinson when I was at Whitehaven, and they had a pretty big interest in New Hope. Many years ago, those two organizations were talking about doing a transaction but never happened. That's how I got to know some of them. I also had worked with a number of advisors over the years, of course, and one of the advisors to Soul Pattinson had put my name forward to go into consideration for a Non-Executive Director role and then subsequent Chair of their Audit Risk Committee.
We worked on trying to get that IPO of that internal business unit within Soul Pattinson, but, unfortunately, the market wasn't avail of itself to be able to do it, and subsequently, they sold it. We had a brief relationship. I'd worked with Mick in a short period of time. We seemed to gel together quite well. I think our experience and our knowledge within mining and bringing projects to the market, we had a similar ideology and approach to that. My background has been, if you look at it, predominantly transport and logistics in the early days with Toll. Of course, that dirty word, coal, at Whitehaven.
More recently, mining services company to, again, the coal industry, but gas exploration up in England. I've, you know, been involved as a CFO in the listed space for quite a long time. Had a lot of experience dealing with a lot of different boards, different chairs. Previously, I also did the investor relations for the AJ Lucas. Mick spoke to me about coming on to Andromeda, and I've gotta say, I saw the opportunity, really liked the space because it wasn't coal, it wasn't oil and gas. It was something new for me and exciting. I looked at the array and application of this product into various markets and yeah, it's pretty exciting.
We had a quick chat about it. I obviously did my due diligence and homework as you do, and saw the Board had changed. Melissa was here, there's a number of others. The executive team, I had the opportunity to talk to them. Ultimately from that, I jumped at the opportunity 'cause I just thought this was an organization that was, you know, really there to be able to take something on paper and bring it to market and, you know, make a real stance of itself. With that experience, I thought I'd take the opportunity to accept the role and put myself forward here today to the shareholders.
Thanks, Austen. Are there any other questions? I'll ask Patrick to read out any questions received online or by phone.
There are now 205 attendees online. Again, no questions.
Thank you, Patrick. You're invited to lodge your vote for resolution two by using the Vote icon for online attendees. For those attending the meeting in person who have been issued a voting paper, please mark a box beside this resolution to vote. Thank you. I'll now move to resolution three. Resolution three deals with the reelection of Melissa Holzberger as a director. The resolution is displayed on the screen for you as are the proxy results. The whole board, except for Melissa, who recused herself during deliberations on the resolution, unanimously recommends Melissa's reappointment to the board. Appearing on the screen is a summary of Melissa's experience. Melissa, would you like to say a few words?
I can.
Please.
Yes. Is it on?
Yep.
Good. No, thank you. As shareholders are aware, I joined the Board of Andromeda in September last year, 2021. Since then, I was initially the Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee until I handed over when Austen joined us in July this year. I'm also a Member of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee. Recently, we've established a Sustainability and Governance Board Committee to guide our progress in that area. I've been chairing that committee. What do I bring to Andromeda? I've got over 20 years experience as a mining lawyer working in the international energy and resources sector, both minerals and oil and gas. I'm very experienced in mining operations and projects and all aspects of that, including international trade and marketing contracts.
Adelaide is my hometown. I'm born and bred here. Last time I moved back here was after moving around different places in the mining sector, was to work on when WMC acquired Olympic Dam, and was to work as an in-house lawyer on the Olympic Dam expansion. I've got a lot of experience in private practice here, but also working in-house and working with regulators on approvals and getting mines up and running and producing and trading the commodity around the world. I'm also concurrently an experienced Non-Executive Director. I've been an NED for 10 years now, and I'm also on Paladin Energy's board as an NED. They're a uranium producer. We're going back into production in Namibia shortly.
I was on Silex Systems board that's up there and a member of a federal government advisory board. Yeah, I'm very appreciative of the support from shareholders. You know, I'd really welcome the opportunity to be able to continue to lead and deliver value for our shareholders and stakeholders with this Great White Project and continue on the journey into the future as building us into a company where we are in production and growing and developing. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to speak, Mick.
Are there any questions or comments? If so, please raise your blue or pink card. Thank you. Sir, please state your name.
Yeah. Sorry, my name is Michael Ferdinand. Thanks for the opportunity to speak. Yeah, I'm addressing you, Melissa, as the experienced lawyer on the Board, and I'm hoping that you act in the best interest of all shareholders being a lawyer on the Board. I wanna talk about the carbon capture pilot plant.
Back on the 30th of March, there was a video webinar available to the general public. There were two comments that were made in that presentation. One was that the carbon capture pilot plant will definitely but land in Australia on the 8th of May. It was on the ship, and it was guaranteed it was landing on the 8th of May. The second, and I quote, the pilot plant is already assembled and will be a very quick process to get it up and commissioned and running. My first question is, when did the carbon capture pilot plant land in Australia?
I can speak loudly if I need to.
Perhaps, Melissa, I'll.
I'll hand over to James.
If you say a few words first, and then hand over to James.
James is the best person to answer that, I think, yes. Certainly, I'm an independent Non-Executive Director. By virtue of that, and I, you know, my role is I'm coming in here into the board with my independence and my objectivity and to act in the best interest of the company and the shareholders. Yeah, and also, Austen's an independent NED and Mick as well. Yes, yeah, I can proudly say our board does always act in your best interest. With the detail of your question, thank you for asking that. I'll probably hand over to our Managing Director, James Marsh. He'll be best placed to answer that. Thank you.
Sorry, Mick, did you want to say something first?
No, no, you go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for your questions there, Michael. The carbon capture plant has been quite topical. The current status is that it is here in Australia. We announced it arrived. Exact date eludes me now. Tim, what's the exact date it arrived? Do you remember?
June.
Yeah, I can't remember. It was in June, but I can't remember which date it was. It arrived in June. It was delayed. It was a victim of the shipping dramas around COVID. I made the mistake of saying it was on a ship, which it was, and then it was off a ship again. After that, didn't say much, too much more after that. It arrived in June. Individual components were preassembled. That's correct. They're now being certified. That's in the hands of the university. They are contracted to do that for us, so they are under legal obligation to get that certified and running for us.
We're keeping maximum pressure on them to do that, and we're monitoring it almost on a daily basis, but it is currently being certified at the moment. It was manufactured to Australian standards, but manufactured in India, and that's caused some delay in getting it certified. That process is underway, and be assured that we are applying maximum pressure to that to get it done as quickly as possible.
Thanks, James. Now in relation to the second part, in relation to the stating that it was already assembled. On page 16 of the annual report, it states the technical specifications of its various components are being assessed for verification to confirm the equipment meets the Australian Standards prior to the plant being assembled. Why was it said back in March that it was assembled? Why did you say in the annual report that it was not assembled?
I think maybe some confusion between assembled and non-assembled. I don't remember saying assembled. It was manufactured, so the components were manufactured. We showed pictures of the chambers and the other individual components there. It was shipped over in a number of containers which had to be reassembled.
Yeah, I believe there were five containers. I've got he shipping documents here.
Five containers. You know more me about that. When it was over here, it couldn't be assembled until it had been certified. That is being done right now. As we found out, when you're getting pressure chambers certified in Australia, there's very, very strict regulation around that. Tim and the business development team are fully across that. They're putting, say, it was maximum pressure on that process. It is taking a frustratingly long time. We have been doing work behind the scenes. We produced a ton and a half of material of halloysite in our pilot plant to go into that as soon as it's operating. We've played our part, but we just need the university to come through with the certification now.
Thanks again, James. Melissa, I was only able to direct those questions to you. Being a lawyer, I realize you're like an independent, but if you came across information that needed to be rectified, wouldn't you address the board to that effect? Like, specifically in relation.
Yeah, just to say.
To the two points that I made.
No, thank you for your question, Michael. My role as an Independent Non-Executive Director is not to advise on the day-to-day detail of the legal areas, but certainly I do have oversight in that area, in the area as a corporate governance, legal, risk, compliance, and corporate ethics as well. You know, James has answered the question, I think, and advised where we're at with the status. I can assure you that the whole Board and the Executive are always acting in the best interest of the shareholders, and we're progressing the carbon capture pilot plant as quickly as we can.
If I could just add something there. I mean, the Board is relatively new, and our job, as I said at the outset, is to improve governance, which includes, by inference, the way we communicate. It's important that we make our messages clearer and more simple and not make too many predictions about the future. The role of the Board is really to improve those things, and we are working on that all the time. In relation to the carbon capture plant, yes, COVID did have an impact that was out of our control in terms of the delivery time. Secondly, I think that one of the things that's misunderstood is that we're not actually managing that process.
Now, I'm not pointing the finger, but in terms of communications, but it's the university who designed the plant and manufactured and oversaw the manufacture of the plant, the shipping of the plant, and now the installation, certification and installation of it. It is something that is out of our control. We work closely with the university. Tim's job is new products and business development, and we're doing what we can to move that along.
One last thing.
Sorry, can you just use the microphone?
Shareholders make their investment decisions based on what is told to them by the company. Those two comments, I believe, run through. Under Section 674 of the Corporations Act and ASX Listing Rule 3.1 about continuous disclosure, when the company realized that, "Well, maybe these two comments were misleading," why wasn't there an announcement made to say, "Well, it didn't arrive on the eighth of May, and it's not fully assembled"? Because we're now in November, and there's still no news about the status of it.
Well, I'll take your comments on board, Michael, and you know, we, as I said, we're always working to meet the compliance with the regulations. We don't believe we've misinformed the market, and we do believe we have been disclosing all the information that we have. Sometimes it's interpreted differently by different people, so our job is to improve the communications. Thank you. Any other questions on the resolution for Melissa? Okay. I'll ask Patrick to read out any questions we have received online or via the phone.
Again, there are 205 attendees online, but no questions.
Thanks, Patrick. You're invited to lodge your vote for Resolution three by using the Vote icon for online attendees. For those attending the meeting in person, you have been issued a voting paper. Please mark a box beside this resolution to vote. Thank you. I'll now move to Resolution four. The company offers shareholders an opportunity to vote on the remuneration report for the year ended 30th of June 2022. The directors advise that a vote on this term is advisory only and does not bind the directors of the company. However, the directors will take the outcome of the vote into consideration when reviewing the remuneration practices and policies. The remuneration report for the period ended 30th of June 2022 has undergone significant changes from the previous year, particularly in light of the first strike received at the company's 2021 AGM.
The company now provides enhanced disclosures regarding remuneration strategy, policies, frameworks, and practices and outcomes. Following the 2021 AGM, the board undertook a comprehensive review of the company's remuneration framework, the way we communicate our remuneration, and how we reward our non-executive directors and executives. The review found that shareholder concerns were centered around remuneration being elevated, not sufficiently aligned to company performance, and communications needed to be more transparent.
The company reflected on the concerns raised by shareholders in relation to the approach to remuneration communication and acknowledges that how the company measured and communicated the link between remuneration outcomes and performance could be improved. The company has therefore included additional disclosures within the remuneration report to provide greater transparency on how the remuneration framework operates, introduce links between performance and remuneration outcomes, and enhance communications to more clearly communicate the board's decision-making process in determining reward outcomes.
The company is also committed to increasing engagement with shareholders as a key priority for 2023 and beyond. This will be particularly important as the company manages the transition to becoming a mining producer. If the votes cast against this year's resolution to adopt the 2020 remuneration report are again 25% or greater of the total votes cast, the company will receive a second strike. If this occurs, it is required that a spill resolution be put to the meeting to determine whether the company directors will need to stand for re-election at a special meeting. The resolution is displayed on the screen together with the relevant proxy results. Are there any questions or comments to this resolution? I'll now ask Patrick to read out any questions we have received online or on the phone.
They continue to be none.
Voting exclusions apply for this resolution, and these are outlined in the notice of meeting. You are invited to lodge your vote for Resolution four by using the vote icon for online attendees. For those attending in person, you have been issued your voting paper. Please mark a box beside the resolution to vote. We as a board have put a lot of work into the remuneration framework for executives this year and for the board. Now I can confidently say that it is meeting best practice or near best practice in terms of the framework for performance, KPIs for short-term incentives and long-term incentives, which are properly benchmarked. Okay, now move on to Resolution five, the spill resolution.
Resolution five is a conditional resolution and is being put to this meeting irrespective of whether the company receives a second strike. The result of the vote will be of no force or effect and will not be disclosed if the company does not receive a second strike on its remuneration report. That's Resolution four. If the spill resolution is passed, a further special meeting of shareholders must be held within 90 days, that being the spill meeting. If the spill resolution of 90 days from the spill resolution being passed, immediately before the end of the spill meeting.
With the exception of the Managing Director of the company, all the directors who were directors when the resolution to approve the remuneration report for the year ended 30th of June 2022 was put to the meeting, including myself, Mr. Perrin, Ms. Holzberger, if they are reelected under resolutions one, two, and three, will cease to hold office immediately before the end of the spill meeting. The resolution is displayed on the screen for you, as are the proxy results. Pleasingly, there's a 82% for in the proxy results. Are there any questions or comments to this resolution? Are there any comments online or on the phone, Patrick?
No questions from online.
Thank you. You're invited to lodge your vote in Resolution five by using the vote icon for online attendees. For those attending the meeting in person who have been issued a voting paper, please mark a box beside this resolution to vote. Thank you. Patrick, can you please advise if there's any further questions or comments on Resolution five? No?
No, none.
That just concludes the discussion on the resolutions to be voted upon. I will shortly be declaring the voting closed. Please ensure that you have cast your vote on all five resolutions. Shareholders are reminded that your board recommends that you vote for resolutions one to four and against resolution five. For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person who have completed the voting, please ensure you have placed a mark beside all five resolutions to indicate how you wish to vote. Please ensure you print your name where indicated and sign the voting paper. Lodge it in the ballot box, which is being circulated to ensure your votes are counted. Has everyone submitted their vote? Just raise your hand if you need some more time, please. Okay. Thank you very much for that.
At this point, I now declare the poll closed and formally charge Mr. Nigel Bulling of Computershare as Returning Officer to count the votes. After the votes have been counted, the results of today's poll will be released to ASX and displayed on the company's website. I now close the formal part of the meeting and move on to any other additional questions and answers. You could ask any questions of a general nature to which I shall direct each one of to the relevant director to respond. The way I'll do this is if it's remuneration related, as Chair of the Remuneration Committee, then I will field that question.
Anything to do with finance and audit and risk is to the Chair of that Audit and Risk Committee, which is Austen. Anything to do with sustainability and governance will be directed towards Melissa as Chair of that committee. I should note the subcommittees of the board now make up entirely of non-executive directors. Any questions of a general nature that people would like to ask, including those people online? I should remind you that James will be providing an operational update in his CEO's presentation, and that questions of that nature be asked following his presentation. Okay. Well, thank you. I now ask Patrick, any online questions?
There are no online questions.
Previous boss of mine used to say, any questions, comments, or rude remarks? Okay. If there's no other items of general business, are there no other items of general business lodged with the Company Secretary, Andrea? No. If there's no further questions, I wish to thank you for your attendance, and I now declare the meeting closed. At this point, I'll hand over to James, who could go through the CEO presentation. Thank you, James.
All right. Who's got the control? Oh, Patrick. Right. Now is the time for any rude remarks. Great. Thank you for that, Mick, and thank you to everyone who's made the effort to come here today. I know a lot of people have come from a long way. It's good to see you showing such an interest in the company. Now is my chance to tell you a lot more about what we're doing and what we hope to be doing and give you some more detail 'cause I don't normally get this much chance to talk. Hopefully it won't bore you too much and you'll hear lots of new exciting things. It's been a tough year for us in lots of ways this year.
We've had 12 months of a lot of things happening. Things haven't always gone the right way for us and that's just life sometimes. We didn't factor in the pandemic, like a lot of things, and all the knock-on effects from that. What we have done is, I can assure you that we've always tried to make the right decisions for the long-term future of the business and for all the shareholders. Everything we've done, we believe in the best interest of our long-term future. I know that's not easy to see sometimes when you're looking in from the outside and it's hard to understand why we do make such decisions.
I can assure you that they have been done in your best interests, and I hope to expand on that right now. I've gone a long way already. That's a good start, isn't it? Let's try. Don't wanna go backwards. Okay, going forwards. Here we are. Market cap is a bit higher today thanks to some good news coming out, but it's a long way off where we were, and it's a long way off where we should be and where we are, hopefully where we are going. We're sitting on about AUD 170 million at the moment, which is when you look at our NPV of our leading project there, which still stands at over AUD 600 million, and that was a fairly conservative number at the time.
You can see that we are undervalued. We have got a long way to go there, and we are working very hard to recover that position. It's just not very easy in the current market and what's going on around the world at the moment. We're sitting on about AUD 170 million at the moment. We've got a lot of shares out on issue. You probably all know that. Quite a large number of unlisted options there, but a lot of those will be disappearing very soon because they're out of the money and expiring. That situation will change, as with the performance rights, they'll also be lost. We've got a very large number of shareholders. That's gone up. With the acquisition of Minotaur, that jumped up quite a large amount. We are around about 14,000 now.
That is virtually all retail shareholders though, so that's a situation that we are looking at addressing. Something we feel we need to do, we need to get to the large institutional involved in the company to give us some stability, and we're working hard on that at the moment. We've still got about AUD 27 million in the bank. We are well funded at the moment and with zero debt. What have we got in our favor underneath there? Looking at some real positives underneath that. We are in a tier one mining jurisdiction. South Australia is actually top 10 in the world now. When people are looking at us as an investment proposition, that is very attractive.
We've got very large exploration endowment, well over 8,000 sq km and some very interesting ground there, which I'll be telling you about shortly. We've got, as Mick said, we've got probably what is the world's biggest resource of its type. Halloysite-kaolin is quite a rare form of kaolin, very high purity. We have over 110, about 113 million tons at the moment. We believe that'll be expanded greatly in the future. It is very high quality. We've got a very large reserve, 15 million tons. Over 15 million ton reserve of that. The highest JORC category. That means we've got a very consistent product for a very long time. That makes us very attractive.
We have got a very experienced team, and we are growing that team. The team itself is getting more experienced as we go along. We're learning a lot. As you heard, introduced to the new board members. That also is a very important aspect of what we're doing and what we need going forward. Some pictures here to show you, those pictures are genuine. They have been doctored. Our new execs. The executive team sits down in the operational side of the company, what we're doing. We have got myself there. For some reason, I'm a bit taller in that picture than Joe. I'm not sure why. Joe, Operations Director, very experienced mining engineer. We've got Tim sitting in the back row there.
Extremely experienced in commercializing new technologies, which is crucial for our nanotechnology and other activities in that area. We've got Michael Zanis, again, a very experienced CFO in the mining sector, and that's just what we need going to operations. Andrea at the end there is our Company Secretary. As you heard, we have Sarah sitting in the audience. She'll be taking over in January as our in-house Company Secretary and General Counsel. Now, as we're getting busier, team's growing, that's becoming more and more of a demanding job. As much as Andrea likes working with us, she says we're the best company she's ever worked with. She probably tells that to all the companies. Anyway, she admits that we need Sarah coming in now to take that role over, and that's gonna certainly help the General Counsel in-house.
Although we have Andrew Corletto here, who's give us tremendous support from MinterEllison over the years and will continue to advise us when required. That's the team, and the team is driving this business forward now. As an industry, the kaolin industry is quite an interesting stage at the moment. It's always been an industry that has grown year-on-year for decades, ever since it was discovered and used in porcelain over 1,000 years ago. It's been used, gradually increasing, and it grows year-on-year. Never dramatic growth, but steady growth, not just in volumes used, but also in the price. It's one of those commodities that goes up in price every year by about somewhere in the region about 3%-6%-7% every year. Very steady, very little volatility.
It's still doing that despite the disruption with COVID. It's still doing that. In fact, prices recently have jumped up even more dramatically because of a situation in Europe. Europe was one of the biggest producers of kaolin. Ukraine was producing 4 million tons. 10% of the world's production was coming from Ukraine. That's now been lost. A number of factors are causing an increase in price. The price out of Europe has gone up. In Germany, their production costs have gone up. Energy costs alone have gone up 11 times since the war started there. There's a few factors moving in the right direction for us.
As you see there, the estimated growth in global kaolin, we're talking about in our region, Asia-Pacific, we're talking over 10%, which is a very large figure in the current economic situation. Now, the good thing for us is that we are situated in just the right spot for that. You see, if you look at the pie charts at the bottom there, the global demand. I mentioned before that the Ukraine was about 10% of the world's production. If we talk about purely refined kaolin, so this is processed kaolin, there's about 40 million tons a year produced and sold. If you slice that up, you see down there on the left, there's a big chunk goes into Asia-Pacific. China, Asia region, we're talking about more than half of the world's consumption.
At the moment, all the premium quality kaolins for that large sector, they predominantly come from USA and from Europe. We've got a major advantage. We're just in the right spot to take that over, and we've got the right products to do that as well. That's the immediate target. We're in the right spot. Also, if you look at the markets next to pie chart along, it shows you the different sectors where kaolin is used right now. The biggest one there interesting now is actually ceramics. That's become the biggest in the world. Paper was the biggest for decades. It was always a difficult one to get involved with. It's quite low margin, and it's very hard, quite demanding specifications, but it was big, so it was attractive due to volumes. Well, now ceramics has taken that over.
That is now the number one. The good thing for us is that the big consumer of that ceramic kaolin material is also in Asia. It's not Europe, it's in our part of the world. Some of you may know that our halloysite-kaolin, which is the rarer form, is the perfect form for porcelain. There's very little of that material around now in very large amounts that are. The biggest ones were probably in China, and they have now run out of supply. They've either run out or been shut down by the government. That makes it even more interesting for us at the moment. Summary of this is that we're in the right place for growth, we're in the right place for supply, and we're in the right place for application.
Looking a bit more at our vision and our strategy and purpose. This is a bit of a reconstruct of a previous slide you may have seen. This demonstrates that our vision is to, as Mick said earlier, is to become a world leader in the supply of sustainable, superior quality industrial minerals and also the downstream nanotechnology applications for them. We have a growth line there. Growth is industrial minerals. As you know, we've got one of the world's largest high-quality, consistent resources of that. We intend to grow that, and then we intend to use growth from that, cash flow from that, to put into our nanotechnology and our R&D efforts to grow the nanotechnology business and any new applications that we're talking about. We do have a harvest section, which is our legacy projects.
This is previous projects that were Adelaide Resources, and I've got a slide on that to tell you more about that. That is harvest. We intend to leverage that value and use that value to assist in our primary vision in the top line. This is a new slide that we developed. Thanks to Patrick for helping on this. We wanted to try and capture what we've got and what the value of that was. It's very hard for the market in general to understand our mineral because it's not priced. There's no index pricing. There's no benchmark pricing. Contracts with customers are individual basis, so it's very hard to understand where the value is for our mineral.
We tried to show you here what the products are in sequence and how the value increases as you go along that sequence. We said before that our aim is to maximize the value of every ton that comes out of the ground. We talked a while back, quite a long time ago now, we talked about direct shipping ore, DSO. That was attractive at the time. There's a margin for that, but it's a very small margin. There are people still chasing us for that right now in quite large amounts, but the margins for that are very, very small. When we were a very small company, that looked like it was attractive option, but now it's not. You're talking about a margin of maybe AUD 10 a ton there.
For that, you have to spend AUD 10s of millions shipping that around the world, shipping sand, shipping moisture just to get a AUD 10 margin return. That's right down the end. In fact, that's off the end of this chart. We've dismissed DSO as giving the value away to someone else, and we don't want to do that. We've got such valuable material. We want to keep that for the shareholders. If you look at the sequence there, paper's right down the bottom there. Now paper, as mentioned before, is traditionally, that's the big user of kaolin, but they don't pay much money for that. The paper companies take large amounts, but they won't pay you much. They want the highest brightness, they want the finest particle size, but they won't pay you much for it.
If you get one delivery wrong, then you have big penalties. It's not a good one for us. It's not a good one for any company, basically, in Australia with a fairly small output of kaolin. You've got low-end ceramics. No names mentioned, there are some other companies around, especially in Australia that are looking at that low-end ceramics market. It is very large. There, we're talking like things like sanitary ware, basins, toilets. That's where there's very large amounts of material used, kaolin material, but it's low quality and it gets a low price. Our material is too good for that. That's why we are targeting the high-end ceramics. We have a product that is very well suited for porcelain.
Gives beautiful whiteness, beautiful translucency, high strength, good firing properties. Knowing that, we already locked in binding offtakes for the porcelain high-value side of the business. That does take a bit more processing than the previous grade, which is our concentrate we've got in there. We made that strategic decision that we wanted to reduce the capital requirements, so reduce any money, any funding we need to get into operation. The best way to do that was to start with a semi-refined product. Now, the good thing is our semi-refined product is actually equivalent to most people's fully refined product. We can still get a very good price for that. It'll give us a great start in the industry.
Once people start using that, they get used to it, they appreciate its performance, its quality and its consistency, then that'll just grow and keep growing. That news will spread around the world. That's how this industry works. It's very hard to get a start, but once you've got a start, then the customers come chasing you. They're too used to being supplied by people who just cannot produce consistent material. Changes shipment to shipment, it changes all the time. Quite often it's coming from different mines, and they won't even tell you that. They don't trust us at this stage, a lot of them. Once we start supplying a couple of major customers, then they will trust us fully, and that's when they come chasing us. We'll start with a concentrate product.
This is what we call our KCM 90. The great thing for us is this is a product that is, compared to normal kaolin, is very easy to manufacture. It's got very wide specifications. It doesn't take a lot of refining, and yet we're still delivering a very high quality, consistent product. We start with a concentrate or semi-refined, then we move on to the high-end ceramics. We go on the value increases there for the concentrate. Now we're talking somewhere in the region of $300-$400 a ton. Jump up to the high ceramics, then we're talking about $400-$500 a ton. We've got coatings and polymers. We have got an offtake agreement signed already for a coating grade. Coating grade is more valuable.
We're talking about $500-$600 a ton jumping up to that value. It does take a lot more refining to get to that grade, which is very, very fine. You're talking there something that's about 90% less than 2 microns compared to the ceramics one, which is about 60% less than 2 microns. It takes a lot more refining to get there, and it takes a lot more capital. We didn't want to try and make that too soon and to have too much capital intensity, so we've put that in the latter stages of the project. What we have proven is that we've got a very good quality and probably what I've seen is the best quality paint grade in the world as a kaolin product.
That's what next up, next on the stage, going up in the value chain. We've got the concrete additive, and that is interesting enough. I'll tell you a bit more about that in another slide, but that is high value again. The great thing about that is that all you do to produce that is take some sand out. You don't need to take all the sand out. You can leave sand in there because concrete already uses sand. There we've got a product that has got very high recoveries, it's got very little processing, and yet is very high value. Even better, the agreement we have is Ex Works. That is sold from the mine site. They'll just come and pick it up with their own trucks.
That makes the business even more attractive. There you're talking about somewhere in Australian dollar terms, about AUD 1,000-AUD 1,500 a ton in that region. As a kaolin product in my experience, I've never seen anything with such a high margin as that product. That is unique to Andromeda. That's a very exciting development. Cosmetics, this is a high value again. This is Melissa's favorite product, and she can't wait to sample it, but we haven't got any ready yet. We have got approvals for that. We've had preliminary customer approvals for that. It works. The reason that people like our material is that halloysite is viewed as something that is desirable for cosmetics. That's probably a psychological thing more than a practical thing.
Halloysite is very pure, so it means that it's got very, very low impurities, which makes it more suitable for cosmetics. There, that's something that jumps up to somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 per ton for cosmetics. We have that in the pipeline. Pure halloysite. I've talked for many years about halloysite. Probably haven't talked enough about it recently, in recent years, recent months, I should say. Because it's something that we are working very hard to get a pure halloysite. When you get that material, that will sell for about AUD 5,000 per ton. Extremely high industrial mineral price and value.
We have got a lot of halloysite, and we are working very hard at either finding a resource of pure halloysite with current exploration and testing, and also at purifying our current material that we have to remove the kaolin, so we just have the halloysite left. If you go up again to the research and development. These are areas that we're developing as future products, and we have the high purity alumina. This depends on what purity you're talking about, but the typical grade, most prominent grade is a four. It is called a 4N. That's 99.99% pure material. That sells for about $25 thousand per ton.
Now, the reason we mentioned it, increasing the halloysite value, is that when halloysite is formed, the formation process involves the leaching of the impurities out of the halloysite to give the tubular shape. That leaching makes it much higher purity. It makes it a great feed for things like cosmetics, but it also makes it a very good feed for high purity alumina. Because the worst poisons for that process have been removed naturally over millions of years. We're working very hard on high purity alumina, and that's something I'll present later. A very exciting development is happening in that space. The ultimate value is in nanotechnologies. Yeah, these are research development areas that involves the carbon capture that I'll expand on.
Here, value is a bit of a question mark on value because a lot of it has to be quantified. There's no doubt that there are some extremely high value materials there. Probably the most valuable we can make at all of anything out of our halloysite material. That's a bit more about the value. Our question here is why would you invest in Andromeda, and you as shareholders, why would you stay in Andromeda? Over the last 12 months, even though it hasn't been reflected in the share price, unfortunately, we have de-risked the Great White Project. It seems that de-risking has been gone through. As we de-risk it, the share price declines, which is probably a situation we're in. Pre-development, that tends to be a bit of a feature, unfortunately.
We have achieved a lot. We de-risked greatly. The first thing there is on the list, we had the mining approval. That was a massive piece of work. Until you've been through that approval process, you know, you don't know how difficult that is. If you've got a couple of spare days to talk about it, I'm sure Joe will talk you through the process. The acquisition of Minotaur, that was also actually quite painful, but we got there. A whole year of constant negotiations, but it was very important. We had to get 100% ownership, not just of the Great White Project, but also of Natural Nanotech, because that was an integral part of the value. We successfully achieved that.
We also released our DFS, another huge piece of work going to that one. We started locking in binding offtakes. Now we've got five binding offtakes as of today. We're still working on some more just to close out the rest of what's required. We've got the high value ones in place right now, just need to fill the rest up there. The team's been growing and we're now up to about 35 full-time staff, which is what's required to go into operations, and that's still growing. The PEPR, next one on the list. This is the environmental sign-off for the mining plan. That was submitted in August to the government, and they are working through that process before it's signed off. Now, we still don't know when that's gonna come in.
We were advised it could be before Christmas. I'm an optimist, as you probably know, so I still think there's a chance, but Joe might tell you different. The good thing about that is it's not on our critical timeline. Even if it doesn't come in before Christmas, if it comes in January, February, then it won't affect our project timeline. It's independent. It is a government process though, so we just don't know when that will happen. The good thing is that we have got probably one of the easiest PEPRs they've ever had to look at, being a very low impact mine in an area that doesn't really affect very much. That's in progress at the moment. We also acquired the land. That was also three years of constant negotiations.
A huge amount of work goes into these things and they always take longer than you hope, longer than anyone would hope. We've got there in the end, but it did take a massive amount of work to get there. Look at the right-hand side there. Just summarize why Andromeda. I said before that we have a world-class resource of a rare and valuable industrial mineral. Halloysite is the highest form of kaolin, highest value form of kaolin around. We have developed some very significant in-house knowledge. We don't say much about what we're doing on things like measurement, detection, analysis of halloysite because we've got some IP there in the company that we have now some valuable IP in its own right, so we don't want that escaping.
We can identify, analyze halloysite way cheaper and way more quickly than anyone else right now. We also have these, on top of the Great White, which has got those very positive financial numbers. We have got some very high growth areas coming through. We're pushing those very hard. Tim and his team are working hard to get these through to commercialization. Mentioned there, we got the HPA. That is one that's looking more and more attractive with the increase in attention from the government at the moment and also nanotechnology. The strategic alliance with Newcastle, there's a lot going on there. They've got six projects going on there, which take a lot of managing. We're building up our IP portfolio.
We now have a suite of I.P. and we've got four there that we feel are very value and that they do add value to the company. It's not reflected in the share price yet, but we are making sure that in the future that will happen. We got carbon capture international patent filed. We've now more recently got the conversion patent filed. That is to take that carbon dioxide and convert it to methane. Rather than most people are trying to do, they're trying to store it away, sequester it away, just kick the can down the road. We've got a way of converting that to something that's worth money. That's the second part of the carbon technology. We've got the HPA, high purity alumina.
We filed a patent for a new process to make HPA from kaolin, which we feel has got some very significant advantages over what other people are trying to do in that space. Finally, we got an application in for the concrete additive, which we call our HRM. Moving on to our resources, we have at the moment, you see there over 110 million tons. It's actually 130 and a half million tons to be precise in South Australia. We've got whole large areas, new areas there that we are looking at now and doing exploration on. We've got some results coming out soon in that, on that subject. If you look at the chart on the right there, we've got almost 5,000 square kilometers of tenements for kaolin and halloysite-kaolin.
We've got a very large area there. That means that we have a multi-generational business here. Once we start making money, it'll go on for generations. Exploration. Again, another area that's taken a lot longer than we would've hoped, and this has been due to all sorts of issues with COVID and with labs and with resources, testing resources. We've drilled at one of our newer projects, the Eyre Kaolin Project. Results are coming in. We've still got to finalize a few of those, but they're getting close now to being finalized. What you can see in the map in the middle, the gray areas are the Eyre Kaolin tenements. We've been drilling at a couple of major ones we've drilled out, Chairlift and Halfpipe, showing some very interesting results.
You see on the right-hand side there, we've got the purple outline is the size of Great White. Bear in mind, that is a 34.5 million ton resource. Now, the red outline is what we're looking at for Chairlift, and this is what's been identified by our experienced kaolin geologists as the potential area as exploration for resource. You see how much bigger it is. It's a huge area there and it looks like it's very interesting quality material. Can't give you numbers on that yet because it's not been officially released. The picture on the left, someone said it looks like a picture from a fertility clinic. It's not. It's actually a halloysite.
What we got here is I'll let you make your own mind up what proportion is, 'cause I can't give you numbers, but that is what comes from our HPA. All we can say is there we've got a very large amount of something there, and we've got a very large proportion of halloysite. We've got some exciting news ahead from that project. The pilot plant, this is an area that we've been putting a massive amount of work into recently because the pilot plant has been providing all the metallurgical process data we need for Great White. It's also been producing samples for existing products and for new development grades. We spent a lot of money on the pilot plant. We've had some upgraded equipment.
You see there, I think it's a pointer. There it is. This is a new drum washer at the front end. Now, that is what we're putting in the main plant. That is just a scaled-down replica of the main plant. The key thing here is that all the components in the pilot plant are scaled-down versions of what we'll have in the main plant when it's built. These piece of equipment are very scalable. We know what we get through the pilot plant is what we're gonna get in practice. The cyclones we use, and the hydrocyclones, they are German hydrocyclones, and they are the ones that we're ordering for the main plant. The drum washer also, that's the same as we order for the main plant. We've got a new filter press in there.
That filter press has been included in the pilot plant so we can push out more samples, get bigger samples out. One important aspect of this business that we're in is that customers do lots of testing. In the scheme of things, it's for them, it's a low-value product, but high-volume product. They still need to lots of testing because they don't change very easily. If they change the kaolin raw material, it usually means they've got to change formulations, they've got to change processes, and it takes a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of effort. They need lots of samples, and quite often they need very big samples.
Now, at the moment, we can put out tens of kilos, even hundreds of kilos of samples, and that's been enough to get to where we are with offtakes. If we could produce tens of tons, then we could get offtakes more easily, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. At the moment, we are able to produce hundreds of kilos, and that's doing the job. We're getting the offtakes we need, we're getting the results we need for the process design, and we're also developing the new grades. The HRM for concrete was developed through this and the SRM developed through this pilot plant. We've now got a centrifuge there. You see the centrifuge down the bottom. That's not everyone's idea of what a centrifuge looks like, but that is actually a kaolin centrifuge.
It spins at huge velocities inside there, and it separates out the particle size, so it can cut particle size distributions for kaolin very accurately. We're now using that to develop a high purity halloysite. All halloysite is not equal. It behaves differently. As we found over the years, halloysite from Great White behaves differently from Hammerhead, behaves differently from Mount Hope, not just in the way it processes, but the way it analyzes. If you use a commercial halloysite test on a material from one of these deposits, you can get a completely false result. It's a bit of a painstaking process to get this developed right, get the right results, have results we're confident with.
We go to the processing stage, how it behaves and how it responds to processing. That centrifuge is gonna be very important on doing that. That centrifuge came from my old company, Imerys in France, so the biggest kaolin company in the world. We managed to ship it over and get it going. Now we're quite excited by what that can produce for us. That's the pilot plant. We are currently producing, as I mentioned in the questions earlier, we've just produced a ton and a half of high purity halloysite for the carbon capture project as a high priority. We've been knocking out tens of kilos of the concrete additive, which has been going out for commercial trials.
We've got requests for that around the whole world for commercial trials at the moment. Now's a chance to talk a bit more about the products. This is where there is a lot of confusion in this area because it's hard to understand the issue from the industry. It's very hard to understand why people will buy these materials, what they value and why they're worth what they're worth. We've picked these products specifically because they are the best products we can make value-wise from our feed material. If we look along the row there, now the Great White KCM 90, this is the most recent addition to the range, which is a bit ironic because it's gonna be the first product out of the plant.
It was done for the reason that we wanted to get this starter plant going. We wanted to get material out in the market. We wanted to establish our branding and our reputation. We wanted a product that was easy to make with a high recovery and that would give us a good margin. KCM fitted that bill. It is a highly consistent grade, and that's because we have such a large, consistent resource. It's a premium grade, so it's not fully refined. As I mentioned before, some people would sell that as a fully refined product, and it is capable of knocking out fully refined products. We've had testing done in Asia with a major porcelain producer, and they said that material is already equivalent to the highest quality grade that comes out of France into Asia.
Even though it's only processed, it's a very high-quality material. It's also a very versatile material, and that was also part of our strategy. We wanted something that could be used as a product in its own right. It could be used to process another material. It could be added in as a blended material into existing kaolin resource, which would upgrade that resource. The Vietnamese company that we're talking to then they want to add that in 50/50 to their existing resource. That will give them a world-leading product, and it'll double their resources they have at the moment.
So they're prepared to pay a very high price for it to be able to use it as a blended material, um, which makes for us it's easy, even easier 'cause they'll, they're gonna process it again. Uh, and also the other opportunity, third opportunity with that material is it can be processed a bit more. So anyone with a kaolin plant at the moment underutilized, they can put that through, and they can take out a bit more sand. Um, by taking out a bit more sand and making it a bit finer, then that will make it worth a bit more money again, upgrade it yet again. So that's our first product, and we've got two binding off takes in place. And we're talking with our potential customers now to get the best deal on the remaining KCM ninety out of the starter plant.
The Great White HRM is our concrete product. This is the one we have a patent application in. It's unique to Andromeda. It's unique in the world. The good news is that we have got now about 1 million tons of that in our Great White mine design. We've got plenty of material to last for a very long time there. It did take a long time to get there because we found out that this material wasn't just talc-like kaolin, it was talc-like kaolin with a very special surface chemistry.
We had to go back through all of our drill samples for, in fact, decades of drill samples, retest them using a special test that we developed to work out what that material was, how to measure it, how to quantify it, and then go back to our model and block model and work out how much we had. That's the HRM. It's very interesting because it's got some unique properties in that you can add it at a very low dosage to concrete. There we're talking about one kilo in a cube of concrete. Cube of concrete is about three tons, 2.7 metric tons-3 metric tons. If you look at that at PPM, we're talking about maybe 750 PPM, which is a very, very low addition rate.
Yet at that addition rate, you can get some dramatic improvement in the rheology, which is the way it flows and behaves, performs. That means you can optimize the mix design. You can do clever things to it to decarbonize. One of the main things you can do is you can use lots of more waste in the concrete that you can't normally use. You put more waste in, you make it coarser, you then reduce the water. If you reduce the water, you reduce the cement, and then you reduce the carbon footprint. It's quite a complicated area, and we've spent years now developing this behind the scenes with various application testing, all sorts of concrete applications. We've passed the concrete standards for Australia to be used, so there's no barriers to being used now.
That's why we've now got this offtake signed up as of this morning with IMCD. IMCD supply additives to the concrete industry around the world. They're happy to sign up what is a relatively large amount just for Australia. You think Australia is less than 1% of the world's opportunity for this product. We signed up a very large offtake with them at a very attractive price. What they like is the fact that we have the opportunity here to decarbonize the concrete industry. It's no secret now that the concrete industry has to make itself cleaner. Carbon footprint is terrible for concrete, mainly because the cement is so bad. We have a way of doing it here.
We can help them do it, but it's not like most solutions, it's gonna cost them to do it. This will actually save them money as well. If they can put just 1 kilo of our material into 1 cube of concrete, it might cost them AUD 1 or AUD 2. For that, they can reduce the cement significantly. They can reduce water, reduce chemicals, reduce carbon footprint, use more waste. Plus they get better handling, better flow, better pumping, all sorts of advantages. This is why this is such an attractive material. This is why we think it's gonna have a global interest. Once it gets into that industry, which is a very conservative industry, the concrete people don't change very easily, and it will start off gradually. Once it starts off, it should just grow year on year.
If it grows in Australia, where the concrete standards are very high in the world, very highly respected, then there's no reason why it won't grow worldwide. We're focused on that now. We want to now work very hard with IMCD to get more commercial trials over the line. It has been commercially approved by some very large companies already, and that's one thing they wanted done before they signed the agreement. That's progressing very well. We think that's got a great future. One more thing to add there is that we just commissioned a piece of work with a company which works on sustainable solutions for concrete. The person who runs this company is a member of a national body that's reducing carbon in concrete industry.
He's gonna run a very detailed study for us. He's gonna make a couple of cubes of concrete, which these cubes of concrete will be standard industry specifications. He's gonna quantify the carbon footprint of those two. Those two will be representative, which means you can extrapolate across the whole industry. He's then gonna replicate that using our HRM and quantify the carbon footprint using HRM. That will give us exact correlation between before and after, how much carbon you can reduce. We take that to a big concrete player, we can say, "How many cubes of concrete do you make? Well, this is how much carbon you can save." We think that's gonna be a very powerful marketing tool when we get that done. That's just been kicked off in the last few days.
What we see is that there's a lot of value to be gained there in HRM. As I mentioned with DSO and even with the KCM 90, we don't want to sell too much of our material at too low a price and too low a margin if we've got these new great products coming through that can give us a lot more return. That's why so much focus is going into these new areas where we can get a lot better return for shareholders. Moving along, the CRM is the premium grade for ceramics. We've got an offtake announced for that a while ago now with a Japanese customer. They are a 3rd-generation Japanese porcelain producer. They really like the CRM. They also like the KCM 90.
They signed up for both of those. We haven't pushed that too much lately because that is the next stage of the project. We want to get the KCM and the HRM signed up first, and then we can move to CRM in the latter stages. Finally, the PRM, the paint grade, where we've got a very large offtake signed up for that one, which is very unusual in the kaolin industry to have such a large high-value contract signed up. That is a truly world-class product. It's made, interesting, from our non-halloysite part of the Great White resource. There's one area that's non-halloysite. It's just kaolin, pure kaolin, but it is super high pure kaolin. That material is best used in things like paint because halloysite doesn't work in paint.
It doesn't work in paper. It doesn't work in areas where you need quite specific rheologies. That's our products. Now, part of the reason that we changed our strategy, or we modified our strategy for the startup to get a safer de-risk startup to the project, but still moving into the DFS. The DFS numbers still hold, but we wanted to get there with lower risk, less exposure to all the current global economic problems. We did this by having a starter plant at 50,000 tons, reduced capital, matched the profile of our offtakes, and then you see we're gradually ramping up. By year three, we intend to be at the 150,000 tons, which is stage one of the DFS. From that point, we can just keep growing.
You see from the colors there that we are trying to maximize the high-value part of that business. The green part is the real high value. Here, sorry, this is IMCD. This is concrete. They signed up the offtake for concrete. They signed up the offtake for ceramics. There's two for both ceramics here. This is Asia Mineral Resources. These are two KCM 90 offtakes, and that's the HRM. What we're trying to do, we're trying to maximize the value there. We have two very good, very highly respected companies who have signed up already for those. They're looking at the capacities. With the current profile, we're looking at that, the capacities fill up there. Here, we're now looking at, well, what do we do about this?
Do we push these out and grow it a bit earlier? Because what we don't want to do is end up having a mismatch of that three-year profile. There's a lot of strategic work going on now on how we match the offtake profile with the production profile. We're convinced that this gives us the lowest risk exposure and the safest way to establishing ourselves in the market with the best reputation possible. As I mentioned, this mountain here is, we're talking about this green bit here, is only Australia and New Zealand is less than 1% of the world's market. There's a huge opportunity there for us in the future. What's happened after DFS?
We have been very busy, and we have here what you see is a conceptual picture of the stage one plant, and emphasize there that what we're talking about here is a desanding plant. It is very similar to what you see in a sand operation. In a sand operation, they keep the sand and throw the fines away. Well, we keep the fines and throw the sand away. In fact, the sand is actually quite a nice construction sand, so we may end up doing something with that as well. We have a desanding plant here. It's very simple. You just slow the material, you screen it, you put it through hydrocyclones, and then you dewater it. Dewatering is the trickiest bit. Kaolin, and especially halloysite-kaolin, doesn't like giving up its water.
That's the slowest part of the process. It's all off-the-shelf equipment, and there's no specialized design required. What we've done is we've worked hard to reduce the upfront capital. You see in the DFS highlights there, we had about a AUD 93.8 million capital requirement if we went straight to stage one. We've reduced that to somewhere in the region of AUD 50-AUD 60 by going to starter plant first, and then using, reinvesting our revenue into upgrading the plant as we go along to reach the final stages of DFS. We've reduced that dramatically. Some people think that's still quite high. Well, a lot of it is common infrastructure that will be used throughout the whole life of the project. There's things like the environmental bond.
We're doing, like, AUD several million of environmental bond there that's included in that. AUD several million for the road to be upgraded, infrastructure. There's a lot of things in there that will be common. The actual plant component of that is fairly small. You see there the picturized mine design. As I mentioned, with the PEPR approval, it's more like a quarry. In fact, some people have called it a sand pit. I think sand pit is a bit basic, but it's more like a quarry. It's very shallow. It's basically a dry mine, so we won't affect anything like groundwater if there's groundwater around. We just use progressive rehabilitation as we go along. That's a bit of an operational summary.
If we look at the high growth area, and this is a business development framework that Tim developed when he joined the company. We realized that we had to have a very structured approach to what we're doing on business development. We need to make sure that every single stage of what we're doing was signed off, agreed, and authorized. What we do is we go through the stage gate system, where we go from stage 1, discover, right through to stage 5, present. It goes through a series of approval gates. First 1 is the business development team, then goes up to the executive team. If they're happy with it goes through to the board level, and the board takes it through the next 3 stages.
It goes from a concept study through to a business model, to a business case, to a business plan, and then a final plan. By having this very structured, controlled approach, it means that everything is highly regulated and highly controlled. All of our research projects are going through this right now. One of the main leaders in that research is the high purity alumina area. This is quite topical now because it became recognized as a critical mineral by the Australian Federal Government. As soon as something becomes a critical mineral, then it means that there's all sorts of opportunities to get funding and assistance. Also attracts more attention as a company by having a pathway to getting to that product. It means we're more attractive.
What we've done is we've been working on HPA for a very long time now, for many years. We haven't said too much about it. Recently we put a patent application in for a new process to make HPA from kaolin. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's been very topical in Australia for many years, but not many other places in the world. It's mainly in Australia that there's several companies who want to or intend to make high purity alumina from kaolin. It's something that's not done in any commercial quantities at the moment. There's a good reason for that, mainly that there's a problem with most people's flowsheet. That to get that scale up to make HPA from kaolin is quite difficult. It's quite problematic. We've been working very hard to find a way around that.
The patent we filed is a way around that, we believe, a way around that problem. We believe we've got a novel process that is far cheaper, far easier, far safer than any else we see around at the moment. That's why we're putting a lot of effort into this. We think we can get from our kaolin, which is naturally the best feed that we found for as a kaolin for HPA, due to natural low impurities. We can get to a 4N product, maybe even 4N product, at much lower cost, much easier. Much lower OpEx and CapEx than anyone else is looking at the moment. We're pushing this hard. We've got engaged some of world-leading consultants in this space. We've got a novel process. It involves using equipment that's being used now.
It's been used for decades in another process, so it's not new. We're not sure why it's never been used for HPA before, but we're glad we're the first ones to try it. We are doing some modeling at the moment. The modeling is just about complete on the operational cost and the capital cost for this. We plan to try and get to our pilot scale proving up stage as quickly as possible. There's a few details there on the market opportunity. It is truly a huge opportunity. We're talking about a very significant growth in relatively short term because it's going into batteries and EV batteries mainly, where it's used as a safety additive. Also smartphone glass, any sort of display glass and LED lights.
There's forecast to be a very large demand increase, but also a big gap in supply. If all the projects that are being talked about now came online, they still wouldn't meet the forecast demand. We're pushing that one very hard. We want to get through to proving it up as quickly as possible. If all goes well, then we should be maybe Q1 next year, we should be getting some interesting results out to the market. Nanotechnology, very topical. There in fact we can see a picture of the carbon capture plant. It was fabricated. Those are the components, some of the components that are being certified at the moment. It's taken months of certification, but we are getting there.
A very frustrating process, and we're pushing as much as we can to get that done because we want that done more than anyone else. I mean, for us, that's a tremendous opportunity. We see that decarbonization, I mentioned with the concrete industry, decarbonization is becoming such an important topic with global warming now, that any opportunity that someone has to make a significant difference to decarbonization, then those projects are attracting lots of attention. Now, we've got the concrete one that we believe that's something that the construction industry can use. This potentially is something that any industry can use that's producing lots of CO2. Because what we can do is we've got international patent application filed for our functionalized halloysite material, which can suck in large amounts of carbon dioxide, and it will suck it in selectively.
You can put a flue gas through it. It'll let everything else go through apart from the carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is captured, and then you can get that released by just heating it with heating filaments through the material. What we have is a polymeric matrix that's produced from the halloysite, functionalized halloysite. There's polymer granules that will go into these units. See those two big units in the middle there. CO2 gas, the concept is gas is pumped through those. The CO2 is absorbed. The chambers will oscillate back and forth. One is absorbing while one is releasing. The ultimate performance of it will be when we attach the conversion unit to the bottom of that. When the carbon dioxide comes out, it can be converted to methane.
The beauty of this is if it's being used for someone like a cement producer that is one of the world's worst polluters, they can capture this, the gas coming out of the kiln. The CO2, they can then convert that to methane, which then goes back in the process to be burned again. That means it goes round and round in a circle. The carbon goes round and round. Every ton they reduce, they can get carbon credits for. Every ton they reduce, they also get that back as a fuel to use in the process. We're working hard on this one as well. Tim and his team are pushing very hard now on the HPA and also carbon capture. We're talking to some partners for this technology.
We realize that if we want to get this funded through to commercialization as quickly as possible, then the more money you have, the quicker it will happen. There's some people out there with very deep pockets in this space. Those people with deep pockets are talking to us at the moment. We are making good progress on those. Now we've got both those patents filed. That means that we have something of great interest. The HPA and the carbon capture, they are the two leading areas that we're working on nanotechnology. Mick mentioned earlier, there are some others we're working on. They're at earlier stage. The removal of microplastics in the ocean, the fertilizer, and herbicide delivery for agriculture. Also the last one was the, what's it? Antimicrobial paint. Sorry. Senior moment there. Sorry.
Too much going on in that space. Antimicrobial paint, yeah. There's a lot going on there, but these, those two are the leading areas. These are our harvest sections. This is the metals. This is our legacy projects. We've got three there. We've got Moonta, which is the Cornish pronunciation. I always get pulled up for that. Which is, historically, a lot of holes there, 4,500 holes. That is a very historic drilling area. That's the part of the area that supported the South Australian Government for many years. We've got some very prospective ground there. Now we've got a joint venture with a company called Enviro Copper Recovery. EnviroCopper they call themselves now. There is a relatively large copper resource there, but it's based on in situ recovery.
It's a new technology. This is what they call a mine without a mine. This is where you just drill a hole, you pump down a predominantly water-based solution that dissolves that type of copper, the copper sulfide, which then gets taken out of another hole and then purified. There's a potentially large resource there, and we are discussing with our joint venture partners about what we do with that going forward. Some interesting opportunities there. It's in a very prospective belt across that area. Through that section, there's a Prominent Hill section. OZ Minerals are working there. There's Thor across the other side, and we have a very large potential ISR resource in there. We've got Wudinna Gold. That's a joint venture with Cobra.
We had a gold resource there, 211,000 ounces. They've done a bit of a pivot there. They've realized that they've got some interesting rare earths there. Rare earths is very topical. They now have a rare earth and a gold project combined. They're only in 75%. We're talking to them about a few options going forward. Drummond is the last one, North Queensland. We've recently signed a term sheet with Rush Resources. They'll give us AUD a quarter million dollars worth of their shares when they IPO later this year. The key there is that we're not putting our own money into those. We're not putting our resources into those, apart from some basic support on geology.
We intend to monetize those and put that money back into Great White and into our new developments. What else has been going on? This is an area where there's been a huge amount of activity, but it's an area that doesn't get much attention in the market because it's stuff that you just have to do. Some boring stuff goes on behind the scenes, but it's stuff you have to get done. It takes a massive amount of our time and effort. We've got operational and corporate readiness sections there. Long lead items. It was very important to make sure we started the procurement process in line with our schedule. That's been going on, with the longest lead items being ordered first. Also setting up relationships with all the local contractors, suppliers. Again, another big job.
Scoping the works for the site establishment and getting all sorts of agreements in place. A lot of admin there and a lot of contracts being done. Logistics, we're still working on optimizing logistics. There are new options coming along all the time. Our DFS is based on using Whyalla Port. There's probably gonna be a new port built within maybe a couple of years. First deep water port in South Australia, closer to us. There's options there coming along, maybe a couple of years out. There's also people are now coming to us and treating us more seriously now we're getting very close to operation. When you go to trucking companies and say, "Oh, we might be producing in two years' time," they don't take you very seriously.
When they can see a timeline, then you start to get much better attention and get better numbers. We're working on that. Organizational capability, building the team. It's not just a team. When you build a team, you have to build the structures behind it. That includes all the policies, procedures, and everything else that goes behind that, which is another big job. Also managing operating systems. We just brought in an operating system, we brought in Pronto as well. All these systems have to be integrated with what we're doing. I mentioned policies and procedures before. A lot of work going on there. It's not very sexy work. It won't do much for anything for our share price, but it's has to be done to get the project going.
Just rounding off now before I send you all to sleep. Next steps. Future catalysts, very important here. Agreements. We want to finalize the agreements that we've got in process right now. Infrastructure and operations, there's a lot going on there, and a lot of detail to be going into those. Pilot plants. We are still looking at upgrading further. We want to make sure that we can produce as much material as we can to get out into the market. The more commercial trials we get over the line before we start, the more seamless the transition into the full-scale business will be. Binding offtakes. We've got to lock in the final binding offtakes. It's just a KCM 90 now. We don't need any more HRM or SRM or anything else. We're gonna be working on those.
The last of the KCM. The PEPR, well, that's just going through the government at the moment. We've had the first set of questions back from them, and we've addressed those. That is ongoing. We have weekly, I think it's Joe, weekly contact with them. Probably a lot more than Joe would like, but we have weekly, at least weekly contact. Logistics, I mentioned we're looking at all sorts of options there. Suppliers, procurement process is a lengthy one because you have to get multiple quotes in for equipment. It's duplicate equipment, so a lot of work has to go into that. Funding, that's a question that comes up quite often. We're looking at all sorts of funding options at the moment. It's not on the critical timeline at the moment.
As you saw, we've got AUD 27 million in the bank, but we want to make sure we have the right option. When we do look at the final funding required, we need to know how much that is, and then we need to know what the balance is, what, how much debt funding can we get, what other options are there. We have got lots of options on the table at the moment. Finally, the high growth. Now, this is a real exciting area. This is where we are pushing that along as quickly as possible. It's not in our market cap at the moment. That's not recognized at all. As we get more news out in those areas, we aim to make sure that that is captured in the value.
There's some people that are watching us very closely as we move along with those technologies. The further we get, the more de-risked we get, the more attractive we'll become as a potential partner. Thank you all for your attention. First, is there any questions from the audience? Have we got one over here?
Don Fairweather is my name, from the Australian Shareholders' Association. With new mines at the moment, we tend to read about what they're doing that's an environmentally friendly way in terms of solar power and so on. Have you factored this in anywhere?
Yeah, we have actually. Yeah. We're lucky that our mine is very low impact to start with. One of our advantages is that we are more of a quarry. We haven't got tailings dam, we haven't got nasty chemicals, we haven't got to deal with any of those issues. We just take the sand out and put it back in the hole and ship the rest of the material off. We are very conscious. ESG is very important now, and Melissa mentioned that. You know, she's driving that part of what the activity's for as a Non-Exec. We're looking at all sorts of options. The plant we designed is designed to minimize water use. We circulate 90% of the water.
We use reverse osmosis so we make sure that we don't waste anything. Power options, we're using gas as the best option because then we can use the waste heat from the gas when we use to dry the product. We don't waste anything there. They can be converted to hydrogen. Once hydrogen becomes a viable option, that's something we're looking at. We've looked very closely at renewables, getting that in there, but it's, at the moment, it's not feasible. It's something that could come along in the future, but it's just not possible at the moment. We are looking at other hydrogen options as well, early hydrogen options. We're meeting with people regularly who are putting proposals to us. Energy cost now is a major factor.
As probably everyone's aware, it's not so bad this part of the world, but the price has gone up about three times since we first started looking at the project. We're very conscious we have to minimize the power. As I said before, we are a low usage in that respect. The plant is quite simple and we are just trying to use as much recycling as we can through the whole circuit. Credential-wise, we think we've got a number of factors there that could be classified as a relatively green type mining industry, and not least the fact that products that are coming out, despite what we produce as in carbon in the process, we could make a huge reduction in carbon if those technologies prove up.
'Cause we've got these 3 areas to start with. Now we've got the decarbonization of construction. It doesn't just work in concrete, it works in all sorts of construction. It'll work in mortars, renders, grouts, any type, any cementitious application. The SRM is the other additive from that. That works in other construction materials, liquid materials that are used in construction to help decarbonize. Plus we've got the carbon capture, and we've got the HPA. All very green projects. We've got a sort of a interesting green angle to our business. We are getting some interest from investment outfits who like those green credentials. They're waiting till there's a bit more progress, but there could be something that happens in the future.
There could be some funding for that direction. Thank you. Next one.
Thanks. Des Moriarty once again. Two questions. The first relates to the share register and mostly retail shareholders.
Mm.
You talked about getting an institution or some institutions on board. Does that automatically mean dilution of retail shareholders' holdings? Could you speak to that?
I wouldn't say it's automatic, but it's something that could happen. You know, it'd be perfect if someone would buy on market. One of the outfits will buy on market. You know, we can push them in that direction, but whether they do or not is, you know, I think that's unlikely. We're looking at potentials, but it's not just necessarily to come into the head company. We've got options there. Michael is setting up a corporate structure at the moment which separates out these businesses. HPA plant separated out, carbon capture separated out, and there are people now who are looking at coming in, potentially investing in those different areas. It's quite likely we could do a deal in one of those and which would be a whole different structure.
Because there could be a deal done there to take, you know, some of the I.P., maybe, for example, sharing or some other option there. If a cornerstone did want to come in at the head company, then there would be some dilution. Yeah.
Can I just say, we don't know yet. Because it's only dilutive if retail doesn't have the opportunity to participate in the sale. The answer is we just don't know.
Sorry, wrong mic. Sorry. I was the wrong mic. Sorry, just to answer the question. The answer is we don't know yet. Michael's still working through a range of options. You know, the high-level answer would be if you had an institution came on board and retail didn't have the opportunity to participate in some sort of raise, it may be. We don't know the answer to that yet. We simply don't know. As far as it looks, we have numerous options on the table. That's the good thing about where we are now. We're not in a panic, not in a rush to do it. People are starting coming to us. After the news conference last week, there's three people came to us with offers straight away.
You know, there's a lot to think about there, and we can take our time and make the right choice. You know, we are conscious that we don't wanna cause any more dilution.
Good. Thank you. Those last words are the critical ones. If there is indeed to be somebody to come on board, if shareholders are able to participate on an equal footing, that'll be what we'd want, I'm sure. The second question goes back to your slides 23 and 28.
Shall I bring them up?
It relates to return on capital employed. My background is in language and linguistics. You talked about value and really value moving from our left.
Yeah.
Too right. In terms of capital employed, looking at that, I don't think it computes.
It's based on margin here, so predominantly based on margin, product margin. It does take in costs. We've got down the right end, you know. Those costs aren't fully quantified 'cause they're early stage. Certainly from the concentrate, high-value ceramics, coatings, and concrete and even through to cosmetics, we know what the costs are. We know what all the sustaining costs are, so we can work out what the margin is.
Could you just talk a little bit to, in terms of the cost, the capital that you need to put into product?
Yeah.
Where is the real gain on that sheet?
The real gain?
Yes.
Well, the-
In terms of capital employed.
As you know, we worked very hard for the starter plant to get the capital intensity down, but to get a decent margin. The margin there is much lower than it would be, than it is as you go through the stages, progressive stages. Capital intensity at the front is as low as we can get it. KCM 90 is about as low as we can go with the best margin possible. Do you want? What's all that? Mick wants to add something there.
Des, these are just operating margins for products. It costs you this much to make and you sell it for this much. The margin between those two. The only ones we have estimates for capital is up to concrete additive. The ones up to that. Beyond that, pure halloysite, high purity alumina, nanotechnologies, we haven't developed. We haven't proven the flow sheet, therefore we haven't designed the plant and capital cost of it. We don't know what that is at this stage. The point of this slide is that the margins at that high end are high enough to pursue it, right? Such that you should expect very good returns, but we don't know what those capital costs are.
We do know what the capital costs are for the concrete additives, and that's a much higher return than the same capital cost intensity than the traditional kaolin products, including the KCM 90. We're getting about roughly approximately 2x the value for our HRM product. We're looking at getting twice the value for that than we're going to get for the KCM, even though they've roughly got the same capital intensity. Yeah.
They're both pretty to make. By taking most of the sand out, there's not much difference. In fact, the HRM is actually easier to make in some ways 'cause you leave a lot more sand in there. It's very important to mention the starter plant has been designed to make HRM and KCM 90. The same plant can do both those products. It can also make the variants of HRM, it can make the SRM, which is for suspension aid, and even the DRM we're working on is a drilling fluid additive. Another question here?
You mentioned that you've got kaolin reserves for a very long time. Can you convert that into years of mining operation?
Well, at the moment, the Great White Project is, we've got 34 million ton resource, which equates to a 15 million ton reserve, and we've got 28-year mine life on the DFS. The reality is that that is probably gonna be a lot longer than that, especially with the startup being a slower startup. You can say a good 30 years+ on that Great White. Right next door to it is Hammerhead, and that's already 51.5 million tons. That's much bigger right next door. As you saw, we've got Eyre Kaolin coming through. That's probably multiple times bigger than that again. As a total resource, now we've got under JORC, we've got 113 million tons on the Eyre Peninsula.
We believe it'll be a lot bigger than that by the time we finish. 30 years for Great White, but that's just from what we've identified right now. You know, we can't be sure what would happen in the future, but chances are you wouldn't then move the plant. You keep the plant where it is and just bring material in from Hammerhead nearby. Now, all the options have to be looked at. If we did that, the Hammerhead material looks very nice, and it's very close. Oh, sorry. Oh, me as well. My children probably.
We do have a question from online. The question is, when do we see Andromeda moving into stage one of the DFS in terms of the timeline?
Well, according to that chart there, it's three years from startup. Once we get going, we're looking at ramping up to match the profile of offtake. That ramp up showed about 50, possibly to 100,000 tons-150,000 tons by year three. Once you're in year three, then it just goes on to DFS. I think Michael's got a question here.
Thank you. Yeah, Michael Ferdinand again. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the bankable feasibility study. There was an announcement on the 10th of October last year, says the timing between the DFS and the BFS is envisaged to be relatively short due to the significant amount of engagement with potential debt providers undertaken. Can you speak to that, please?
That's a great question for our CFO.
Thanks for the question, Michael. Look, the BFS, we're currently working through the machinations of putting together the documentation for the banks. It is taking a little bit longer than we would envisage. A very important part of that is lining up the offtakes so that the banks can be comfortable with their revenue streams. Due to a number of reasons, that is taking longer than expected. We are trying to run some work in parallel to keep that ticking along. Ultimately, we're governed by what the banks require to be put in front of them in terms of organizing the funding structures.
There's another question online.
Oh, it's right there.
What's happening with Camel Lake?
Camel Lake, yeah, that's a bit of a go slow, unfortunately. It's a tricky area with the traditional owners. We are still talking to them about access to the areas we need to get to. That had a huge slowdown due to COVID. They shut down completely for probably a couple of years, where there was no contact with anyone in the outside world, and they've been very slow to reemerge. All I can say there is discussions are ongoing at the moment, but it's slow progress.
We believe our pathway to a higher purity of halloysite is probably gonna be quicker at the moment by either purification of what we've got or by identification of these new areas we're drilling around Half Pipe and Chairlift. Looks like some very high purity halloysite there. That's probably a quicker pathway, but Camel Lake is just ticking on in the background. Another question over there.
Hello. Graeme Newing.
Hello, Graeme.
James.
Mick, we've met before. We've communicated for many years.
We didn't quite meet, but we know we do.
Yeah.
This morning after your announcement, I looked at the previous announcement on the sales contracts for the first starter plant. I think on average, you've got about 30,000 tons a year now out of the 50,000 which are in sales contracts. Is that about right?
Yeah, it's about there.
And I-
That ramp-up chart we showed you was the minimum base case. All the contracts have an extra capacity in there, which we can increase. You know, it's in both parties to increase that to what they think they might get. They've both been conservative to start with. You're right, that's about accurate.
Are you going to go ahead with the plant? You have to wait for further sales contracts to actually go ahead with the plant, I presume.
No. At the moment the plan is we are going ahead with it at the moment. We're confident that we will have enough offtakes to justify going ahead. We are going ahead on that assumption.
You're going ahead on the 30,000 tons a year, not going to wait for the 50,000 to be contracted?
No. It's, again, one of these chicken and egg situations. If you wait till that happens, then, you know, there's no guarantee that's gonna happen anytime quickly. You're forced into getting the wrong sort of contract. Now, we don't wanna do that. We wanna make sure we get the best contracts, you know, the best quality, the best pricing, and the best partners. You know, signing up early to a dubious contract wouldn't be a good approach. We signed up the high-quality ones. That gives us enough confidence to go ahead with the starter plant. Also, we don't want to give anyone we're negotiating with any sort of edge on negotiations. You need to get stuff signed up, contracts signed up, or else you're not gonna proceed. They've got an edge over you.
I understand all that.
Yeah.
If you only have 30,000 tons per year contracted, and you're building a 50,000 ton plant, is that actually bankable?
Well, don't forget, there's some very high-value products in there as well. You're talking about products in there that's got 3x the average margin, maybe 4x the average margin. That compensates a lot. Also, another factor is that there's a lot of customers out there are just waiting for us to start production as well. It's quite common that when people are building kaolin plants, they're not in our situation.. They've already got capital, and they will build the plants without having the contracts in place. Because, you know, once the material is going out into the market, then that's when you get approached by customers. In the kaolin industry, that's very true. You know, we've got customers from five countries now who are chasing us for large amounts as soon as we start production. We want to give it a little bit of safety buffer in there as well. We don't want to be sold out. Once we start producing, we can get much higher value for our product.
Okay.
Good night.
Thanks, James.
All right.
I've got about 2 hours of questions, but I have to leave it at that.
Well, Mick, I think Mick might contribute as well.
Yeah, if I could just add to that. This is what fundamentally the funding exercise is about. The offtakes are a key input into that. The funding will be a combination of debt and equity. The debt part is the part that's dependent on the offtakes, as you've rightly pointed out. Through those discussions with the banks, you will discuss, you know, how much debt is affordable and therefore how much offtake is required. We haven't actually started that formal negotiations yet, so that's the work that's gonna happen over the next three months. When I say formal, you can get indicative, and then you can get the serious stuff. The serious discussions are then. You can land on where, how much equity and how much debt that you have.
Offtakes is a bit like hedging, right? You can hedge your product. You hedge 100% of your product, and you know what you're gonna get for the next few years. The price could go up higher or it could go lower, you know? From an equity perspective, we would like to build it 'cause we think that, you know, the price will get stronger as the demand for the product increases, as the brand improves. As people start to understand how good our product is, there'll be more demand, which of course pushes the price up. It's a bit of a balancing act between how much do you lock in, how much do you not lock in, and how much do we borrow? How much can we get from banks, and how much do we want to get from the banks?
Okay. Just a final question on that, and this will be the last run on it, on that subject. What sort of debt-to-equity ratio would you think is suitable for the project when you go ahead with funding?
Well, I don't think we're ready to make that a definitive assessment right now. There'll be a conservative model put, agreed with any bank that we take on. There will be some debt in stage 1 of the project.
Probably was worth adding there that the prices we locked in for the binding offtakes are above the DFS pricing, and that's just a fact that the prices have been going up. The longer we've been taking, the higher the price goes up. There is some advantage in taking a bit longer, although you've gotta get the balance right.
Question online. Sorry.
Yeah.
Is the Board of Directors considering a share consolidation in the next 12 months?
I think I might know where that's come from. Yes, it's on the agenda. It's one of those things that we realize that we got a lot of paper out there on issue and at some point that has to be rectified. It's just our advisors and our corporate advisors are perfectly aware of that. They're looking at options. It's something that probably needs to be done alongside something else that's going on, some other sort of restructure or some other function, corporate transaction. It's something that is on the agenda. I'm very aware of it and considering it, but it's not immediate.
Tim Stenhouse. In the past, James, I've heard you talk about logistics costs being a significant cost the business will face. One thing that the Ukraine crisis has shown is how quickly logistics prices can go up. There's another point I'd like to ask you on how is the port strategy going?
At the moment, our DFS strategy is based on Whyalla, which is fine, and, in fact, Joe's been there quite recently just to get those pieces all in place, and our logistics manager has been with him as well. That's our base case. That will work very well. The infrastructure there is very solid, very sound. They've got a lot of spare capacity. They do OZ Minerals ore there. It's a bit further away than we'd like. It's 300 km away from the mine is further than we would like to go, but we're lucky that our product has got much higher value than the average kaolin. We can carry that cost, otherwise it wouldn't work. That's our base case.
I mentioned before, there's two ports being looked at, Cape Hardy and Port Spencer. It's likely one of those will get going in the next couple of years. They are quite close to our Mount Hope resource, and also close to the Great White. They will be true deepwater ports, which will be the first deepwater port, one of those, in South Australia. There's an option there, potential option coming on. We don't know if it will happen or not, but there's a chance. We are still looking at all the other options. Joe was checking out rail options this last week. We've considered before, we got Ceduna near to us, we've got Lucky Bay near to us. There are other options there going forward.
Thank you.
If I could just add that our focus has been, since the DFS was completed, is to maximize the refined product that we make on-site before we ship it as a general principle, right? You start with DSO, you make about AUD 10 a ton, and that's with a low cost of shipping. You make about AUD 10 a ton. It's hardly worth sending it overseas. You're sending all the value offshore. The more you refine on-site, the more the value you retain here, because the logistics becomes a much smaller percentage of the operating cost compared to the value you get for the product. That's why we're quite excited about the concrete additive. It's domestic. It's sold at the mine gate. We don't pay for any of the logistics costs. Right? It's taken out of the equation if it's purchased and by Australian consumers or New Zealand consumers.
Any more? Patrick?
Sorry, one more question. What's the application for cosmetics and what traction does the company have in sales of this product?
Yeah, that's an interesting opportunity for kaolin because it's a high-value market. It can be demanding in some aspects. It needs to have certain purities. To make a cosmetic grade, it needs to be chemical-free. Making a chemical-free kaolin grade is not easy. The good news for us is that our HRM is chemical-free, because that would also mess up the concrete properties. We can do it. We sent samples over to China, and they got initial technical approval for cosmetics. It's something that we have in our background as a future product. The material we got tested was from an area of the mine that we don't plan to be accessing in the initial years.
That's not saying that we couldn't make a cosmetics grade from the initial years of production. We will be looking at more options for that. It's if you can find a big customer that takes a large amount, then that's what you need. Otherwise, you're talking about bagging up a few grams in little plastic bags and sending them out, which selling white powder in small plastic bags is risky business. It is actually quite high value. We've passed initial testing. We've had a request for a 25 kg sample, and we'll get to that in due course, but we wanna make sure that that's factored in as a new product at the right time. We don't want to overload Joe and his team on operations with a new product too soon.
We wanna get the HRM going for concrete, get the KCM going, and then we can look at developing new products as we go from that point.
One last question. Are there any future plans to demerge NNT? That's from Andromeda.
Natural Nanotech. That goes back to the corporate structure that Michael's developing. We've got a whole lot of other entities now in the corporate structure where any assets that we have in that space are going to those various entities. That's all part of the corporate readiness. We've got operational readiness, get the Great White going. Corporate readiness is to get the structured business right so that we can get good deals for those. As they come through, now if carbon capture progresses enough and we want to get a partner in, then we can make sure we do a deal in that entity and not affect the rest of the business. Is that it? More?
A couple more have come through.
Yes.
Is there an intention to rework the DFS to account for the current market, i.e., currency, logistics, and so forth?
No. There's not. Well, saying that work is just ongoing all the time. The model that went into DFS is being currently updated all the time. That's an ongoing process, as Michael will tell you. Because we have the bankable feasibility study going on behind that, has to overlay what's happening with the DFS model. Those numbers are being incorporated, but they're not. That's an internal operation at the moment. You wanna say something? Michael might mention a bit more than me there.
Thanks, Patrick. Look, the financial model that we used in the DFS, we still have running. Certainly the foreign exchange numbers and the shipping numbers have changed. We are going through a process at this point of reloading all the offtakes that we have with the new pricing structures, some new timing. We're also revisiting the capital numbers and the operating cost numbers just to make sure that that model is updated. Certainly there's a bit more of that process to continue. There will be an updated version of the model that we eventually take to the financiers for them to have a look at and ultimately start to have a look at what debt funding they might allow us to have.
One more question on slide 13. It appears to show that you're selling in year three more products than you're producing. Can you explain?
That would be a tricky thing to do, yeah.
Oh.
13. Went too fast. Slide. Hang on. Which slide is this one?
A bit further along.
Is this the one with the bars on it?
The stacked chart.
Oh, that one. Yeah.
There.
Yeah, what's the question there again? Can you repeat that just to clarify it?
It appears in year three, you're actually selling more than you're producing and out of the starter plant.
I can see it goes above the 150, yeah. It's a cumulative chart, so what's that showing is that we are at 150,000 tons by year three. I think the green bar has gone above the 150, isn't it? No, we don't plan to do that. There is a ± error in the contracts, so we can control any issues with undersupply or oversupply, we can control that. Is that last one, Patrick?
Another one's come through. Hi, with HRM carbon reduction comparison that has just started, will the results be a price-sensitive announcement?
I think we'll have to consult our lawyers on that one. I'm a bit cautious of what I say nowadays. I've been called out too many times. Whatever happens, I think this would be some very good news to come out. My sense is that it will just be a news about the results and how it could be used to reduce carbon. We may get a different decision on that. We'll have to see. I think regardless of what it is, I think it'll be excellent news, and I think it'll be very well received by not just the industry, but by the market in general.
Because my feedback, I'm talking to people about that is if we can go and show concrete people exactly how much they can save, and we're using very representative mix designs that they can relate to, then we've done a lot of work for them. The materials we're using, you know, it's gonna be probably a couple of tons of raw materials that we're using are standard raw materials used by the industry throughout Australia.
It means that they can relate to that very well. I'm confident that we've picked an expert in this space, and he sits on the national board for decarbonization of concrete. He can give us all of the modern numbers we need on environmental declaration numbers and carbon reduction numbers and all the things they quote nowadays. Whether it's material or not, then we'll have to see. I hope it is, 'cause that means it'll be even more important.
No more questions.
Well, that's it. Thanks for your attention, everyone.
Thank., James. Well, two and a half hours, I'm sure you've heard enough of us. We welcome you to join us for a cup of tea. Unfortunately, we're not selling beers today. That's off the cards. There's a cup of tea and a bicky. We'd love to talk to you. There's plenty of our staff here in the room as well who'll introduce themselves. Please stick around. Thank you.