Hello and welcome to today's Investor Webinar with Impact Minerals Limited. I'm Dr. Mike Jones, Managing Director of Impact, and we're going to look today very quickly at the progress the company is making on its pre-feasibility study on our Lake Hope high-purity alumina project here in Western Australia, and also some of the work that we've been doing recently at our Arkun and Broken Hill exploration projects. We're going to fund that work with the renounceable rights issue that is currently underway and which closes on Friday. We have been running the rights issue now since February the 28th, and this is an offer that's open to all shareholders. The deal is this: two new shares for every seven shares owned at a price of AUD 0.006 per share, and you'll also get one free attaching listed option for every two shares that you subscribe for.
They have an exercise price of AUD 0.015 per share that expire in two and a half years. The purpose of those options is to look forward to funding our work as we go forward and looking to obviously get the share price above AUD 0.015 in that timeframe. I think that's very much achievable based on the work that we're doing and the progress that we've made, in particular at Lake Hope. As I mentioned, the offer is closing this Friday, the 21st of March. If you haven't received your forms yet and you're a shareholder, then please contact us urgently by email at rightsissue@impactminerals.com.au. If you're not a shareholder, but you're a sophisticated investor, you can still apply and get in touch with us next week to see what shortfall may be available from the raise. We're looking to raise AUD 5.2 million.
So far, we've had a very strong response from our shareholders. You will have seen that our major shareholder has subscribed for their full 17%. That is a German family office, and we're very pleased with their support. Look, we'll be announcing the results of the offer by next Thursday. We're going to reach settlement, make sure all the money is cleared on the Friday, and then the trading in the new shares is going to commence on Monday, the 31st of March. I will say that the options are going to be listed as well, and there will be a code put forward for that. The use of the funds, we are going to complete the pre-feasibility on Lake Hope. That is looking to be done now in April. Importantly, we're going to commence the construction of our pilot plant project.
For that, we're also going to be using the funds that we got from the CRC-P grant we announced last October, which is in conjunction with CPC Engineering, who are doing the engineering studies on our feasibility study, and also with Edith Cowan University using their world-leading membrane technology to be used in the pilot plant and as we scale up to full-scale production. The second use of the funds is going to be drilling at our Arkun Nickel Copper project here in Western Australia. That's a project that we've had some time. We've identified a very significant coincident geochemical anomaly along with a geophysical anomaly from an airborne mobile magnetotelluric survey that we did a couple of years ago, one of the first times that survey had ever been used in Australia. Very exciting target there. We received EIS funding.
EIS is the Western Australian Government scheme to help fund exploration. We have a total of AUD 180,000 in grant money to put towards our drill program. That program is going to start probably in April or May, not long after the end of this rights issue. We are also going to do some ground geophysics at Broken Hill. We announced that we had increased our ground holding at Broken Hill relatively recently. That is on the back of the BHP Xplor program that we were in a couple of years ago. You may remember that Impact was selected as one of the first seven companies to be on the Xplor program. It is a world-first and innovation venture capital type funding approach to exploration. We are very pleased to be in the inaugural cohort.
Anyway, the work that we did there identified some very significant targets for copper, and we've had our eye on some ground that was not ours for some time, and we were able to acquire that just recently. There will be an update on that very shortly as well. Obviously, we have to cover the cost of the offer. The offer has been run by Mahe Capital, and they are specialists in renounceable rights issues. We have been very pleased with the support we have had so far from all shareholders, and we are looking forward to a successful conclusion to the raise. Moving forward, why are we doing it now? The completion of the pre-feasibility study has been delayed, unfortunately. We have been waiting for quite a bit of work from various contractors to provide us with quotes and cost estimates, etc.
Also, just before Christmas, we did discover we needed to do some more test work just to underpin some of the assumptions that we'd made in the pre-feasibility study, in particular in the process plant. We only received that test work at the end of January and beginning of February, by which time funds were running low, and we needed to launch this rights issue immediately before the end of the PFS. Importantly, this is actually the first time that we've had an offer to all shareholders since we got the rights to enter the Lake Hope project. If you remember, it's going to be a joint venture. We have the right to earn 80% in a company called Playa One Limited, and they are the owners of the project and all the intellectual property that goes along with it.
After the PFS, we have three months then to decide to trigger a joint venture, which will then eventuate us owning 80% of the project. Also, we really want to keep the acceleration foot on the pedal with Lake Hope. We've only had the project two years, and we're coming to the end of a pre-feasibility study. We're going to complete the DFS over the next couple of years, build our pilot plant, get into marketing, and look to get into production, at least in a small scale, towards the end of this decade, which is a very short time away. It's a great time to be investing in Impact. We've got a lot of news coming forward, and we're looking forward to your support.
Just a reminder, Lake Hope, we're looking to take the sediments from the top two meters of this lake, which is about 500 km east of here in Perth. We're going to take that material. This is how we drilled it out. This is Roland Gotthard, who discovered the project. Very naturally, fine-grain material, we're going to take that lake mud and hopefully convert it into something like this, which is the Las Vegas Dome. That dome is covered by at least 1.8 million LEDs, light-emitting diodes. Behind every light-emitting diode is a thin wafer of sapphire, which is a form of aluminum oxide or alumina, and it needs to be very pure, hence high-purity alumina. The LED market is growing almost exponentially. We believe it's a fantastic place to be in the next few years.
HPA is obviously used in many other industries, but the other growth area that we'll be looking at is the semiconductor industry. The wafers of HPA, alumina, sapphire are used both in the semiconductors, but also in slurries to help polish those wafers to get them to the precise characteristics that are required to put into the semiconductors. A huge market is emerging there. Right now, as I mentioned, we're putting together the pre-feasibility study. I do like to call it a jigsaw puzzle. There are four main pieces to it. There is what's happening at the lake itself, where the mine is going to be, what's happening at the process plant, the related test work, and in particular for the offtake and marketing. I've been fortunate enough to be able to assemble a really A-class team to run this pre-feasibility study.
In the top left here, we have Paul Hanrahan. He has decades of experience of putting pre-feasibility and feasibility studies together, and he's been doing a fantastic job of managing the entire process. In the top right and the bottom left, we have a husband and wife team, Scott and Eugenia Fegan. They have almost 50 years of alumina experience between them. Eugenia is one of the lead chemical engineers at CPC Engineering. She has HPA experience, and they have designed the process plant that we are basing our PFS study on. Scott has been running very significantly with the test work and also the mass flow balance and the processes that we're going to use within that plant to make sure that they stack up with the test work that we've done and all the analyses.
The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is obviously offtake and marketing. Last year, we announced that we've employed Joseph Casella, and Joseph is from Tianqi Lithium, and he's come on board to drive our customer engagement process. That will really take precedence towards the end of this year after we built our pilot plant as part of our research project. Just a reminder, the project's 500 km east of Perth, and we're going to truck the material into Kalgoorlie, and that's where we'll build the process plant. It's a very simple mining model. This is one of the two lakes where our resource sits, and we have a very simple operation.
We're going to drive in off the side of the lake, probably three months, four months of the year of mining, and then we're going to stockpile for the rest of the year and then truck the material into Coonana. Straightforward mining, relatively cheap costs. The other big development this year there and recently as part of the PFS is that we have lodged our mining lease application shown here in red. There's the West Lake underneath that red application down in the bottom right, and there are other resources in the East Lake. The plan is to put an access road into the Hyden - Norseman Road and then truck in from there. The other big development is that we've had very successful initial engagements with the First Nations group, which is the Ngadju community. They're based out of Norseman.
We've already got heritage clearance on the lake, which means there's no immediate impediments to mining. They're very pro-mining, pro-agreements, and we will be entering negotiations with them later this year in terms of looking towards getting our mining lease granted. Everything is speeding up at the mine. Very simple mining operation, retreat mining, and we've got schedules sorted and costings all part of the PFS, and that is basically a process ready to go. Secondly, let's take a look at the process plant and the various test work that we're doing run by Scott and Eugenia. This is our initial design for a process plant. It's very small. It's very elegant. We're looking to produce about 10,000 tons per annum of HPA. That means we're going to have to mine and truck about 50,000 tons per annum of material. Now, 50,000 tons is basically next to nothing.
If you imagine some of the idle operations, which are literally moving millions of tons of dirt per year, this really is a very small and elegant operation. The chemicals that we'll be using are widely used in Kalgoorlie, and there should be no issues getting this permitted as we move forward with development. We did announce late last year, and this is an important part of our work this year, a federal government grant, AUD 2.87 million. It is a three-way collaboration between ourselves, CPC Engineering, and Edith Cowan University, as I mentioned. Edith Cowan has this membrane selective technology for reagents and also wastewater.
The professor there, Professor Amir, already has some patents in lithium and in rubidium, and we think that this is going to be another game changer in our processing to get to the purity that we're required to produce high-purity alumina. The funding is predominantly going to go towards building a pilot plant. We'll build a microplant first, and that's already started, that process, and then we'll scale up to a pilot plant this year. We'll fit the membranes in as and when they get designed by ECU. That is going to be a very exciting project, and we think that the outcomes of that, the membranes, will have a much wider use, and we'll have a share of that intellectual property. That is going to form the foundation of our definitive feasibility study, which we're going to push forward through over the next couple of years.
Finally, as I mentioned, offtake and marketing run by Joseph Casella. This is a forecast supply and demand curve. In the blue colors, we're seeing demand and certainly being driven by LED, lithium-ion batteries, but increasingly now, we believe, the semiconductor market. On the bar chart underneath, we can see the forecast supply in there. We can see a deficit emerging around about 2026 or 2027, which is only next year. It is going to be an exciting time. We think the price is going to increase possibly by a reasonable amount per ton of HPA around about that time. Hopefully, we'll be timing our entry into the market to coincide with that price rise. I do talk about Alpha HPA. They are the leaders in this space. They are now building their 10,000-ton per annum plant using government loans to help fund it.
It's a fantastic outcome. Market cap over the last few years has been up to gone from $20 million up to $1 billion, and we're looking to follow in their footsteps. Interestingly, they announced recently that they've received a letter of intent for 4,000 tons per annum in the semiconductor sector. This is a very significant breakthrough for the entire HPA industry. It indicates there's very strong demand there, and that 4,000 will be probably 50%-60% of the HPA capacity in their new plant that they're building, with the balance being made up of other products that Alpha are bringing to the market. Their plant is in progress, and interestingly, they're using a basket price for all of their products of about $30,000 per ton.
If you consider that our scoping study was done at $22,000 US dollars a ton, you can see that there's a considerable margin there to increase the revenue for our project. As I mentioned, it's been a two-year very rapid progress on the project with us coming towards the end of the PFS. We're basically going to launch immediately into the next stage of work. Whether you want to call that DFS or not remains to be seen, but we're going to start the bench pilot plant work, get this material out of that pilot plant into the hands of customers. Building that pilot plant is a crucial target for us this year. We've discovered certainly that clients really won't take you seriously until you've got that pilot plant that you can provide them with HPA at a regular consistency and a regular basis.
That is really our key for this year. Obviously, 2026 then, complete that plant, run hard with the marketing, and then look to scale up, probably building a demonstration plant, engineering studies for that into 2027, and get into some larger scale production from then on. Pretty exciting couple of years. We really want you to come with us on Lake Hope. We are going to be one of the lowest cost producers of HPA globally. The Lake Hope deposit is unique. We believe our metallurgical process is going to be also cost disruptive. With Joseph on board now, building out our capabilities in final products that we are going to be providing to the clients, and hopefully getting our timing right in terms of the market supply tightening towards the end of this decade. A great time to be investing.
Now, we have announced recently that we've done a couple of other things on some of our projects in the background. We've been working on other exploration tenements that we've had for some time. Obviously, as we increase our focus on HPA, we're trying to monetize our other projects as best as possible, although we did set up Impact to hopefully make a major discovery by exploration. We will drill test the odd target here and there as we go through just to keep one foot in our exploration roots. The three main projects we've got at the moment are Commonwealth in the Lachlan Fold Belt, a very interesting project there. That has been tried to be IPO by a private group now for some time. We're in discussions about the next steps.
It's likely that other companies will now come in and look to see if they can perhaps joint venture or buy the project off us. At Arkun, we've announced only last week that we're looking to drill that project. We have a small drill program planned for April and May, and at Broken Hill, New South Wales, very large ground holding there. We are looking for a joint venture partner there, but we will do some ground geophysics going forward. At Arkun, we're in the same belt as the Julimar discovery of Chalice. That's been a great success story. They're now in development. That is a long process. Certainly, their share price has come back a bit. We have certainly found a very compelling target.
It's a very significant nickel, copper, PGE, platinum group metals soil anomaly, and it's coincident with some geophysical conductors identified in our magnetotelluric survey and also airborne EM that we did. We can see here on the right-hand side of this diagram that we've got two drill targets there. We're going to test with RC in the coming month. We've already got permission from the landholders. We're putting in programs of work with the department, and as soon as that's ready, we'll do a small drill program. As I mentioned, we do have EIS funding, exploration incentive scheme funding of up to AUD 180,000. There's a bit of a mistake there. It's not AUD 1.8 million, but it's AUD 180,000, and we can co-contribute to that up to that amount.
There'll be an RC program, and we have identified a few more targets now, which we'll announce shortly, with aircore drilling. They'll be tested as well. At Broken Hill, we've been in Broken Hill a very long time, and as I mentioned, it was the underpinning of our application and acceptance into the Xplor program with BHP. What we had there was a new model for copper mineralization. Now, Broken Hill is one of the world's great mines, nearly 400 million tons of silver-lead zinc mineralization. That's shown there in the thick red line in the center of that diagram. That line itself is about nearly 10 kilometers long. It's an incredible ore body, and you can see in white and green is our ground holding. We are actually one of the largest, if not the largest ground holder in the entire Broken Hill region.
It's emerging from a period of little activity. A company called Coolabah Metals, to be renamed Broken Hill Metals, has now just taken over the mine at Broken Hill and added another project with it, and that's going to be a great fill-up for the entire area. Also, South32 announced recently they're in a major joint venture in the northern part of the Broken Hill region, and you can see we're in the southern part. We believe this is superbly prospective for copper, and we've got some announcements coming out on that as well. It was the results of the BHP Xplor program. We're very excited by what we see there. Obviously, it's a big project. It'd be good to have a joint venture partner in there, and we're certainly working on that as we go forward. Last slide.
Friday the 21st, day after tomorrow, is the closure of the rights issue. As a shareholder, you can apply for shortfall. Whilst you can apply for the rights that you have, you can actually apply for more than that. Just fill in the form correctly. You need to act now, make sure that your monies are in and through the bank by Thursday and Friday, and you can send any questions you have to rightsissue@impactminerals.com.au. Act now. We have a very exciting future ahead of us. The Lake Hope pre-feasibility study, drilling at Arkun, and pushing ahead with some ground geophysics at Broken Hill. There will be a lot of news to come. Any questions, please get in touch with us. Thanks.