All right, great. Let's make a start. Thanks everyone for being here today to listen to the updated and new Impact story. For those of you who've been Impact followers for some time or shareholders and investors, you'll remember that two years ago we got into a Lake Hope project here in Western Australia, and we believed at the time that it was going to be a transformational acquisition for us. Just to remind you, this beautiful lake here in the top two meters, there are many billions of dollars' worth of HPA, high purity alumina. That's what we're after. We have the right to acquire an 80% interest in this project by completing a pre-feasibility study, which will be due out very shortly.
I know they've been saying that for a while, but we're getting all the consults together, final report's almost done, final economic modeling. It looks very exciting. The main reason for this talk today, as well as just updating you on Lake Hope, if you don't know much about it, is also about our second transformational acquisition, which we announced last week. That is where Impact has acquired a 50% interest in a company called Alluminous, which now owns Hipura Proprietary Limited, which was a subsidiary of one of our competitors in the HPA space, ChemX Materials, which unfortunately went into administration in January. Once we looked under the hood, we saw something very exciting. It was a natural bolt-on for Lake Hope.
We have now acquired the intellectual property assets, including this beautiful pilot plant that is almost ready to go for a sum total of AUD 1.1 million of Impact money. The total acquisition was AUD 2.2 million, and we believe that it is absolutely going to change our business dramatically in the next 12- 24 -onths. That is what I want to get across to you today. You will know, of course, we are going to take that mud from Lake Hope. We are going to bring some of it here to our pilot plant, which is basically a shed at the back of Fremantle full of pipes and tanks and reagents. We are going to turn it into this. This, of course, is the Las Vegas Dome, and it is covered in 1.8 million light-emitting diodes or LEDs.
Every light that you see in that picture there is an LED. In every piece of LED, there is a thin sapphire wafer, and that sapphire is aluminum oxide or alumina, and it needs to be high purity. We believe that these two acquisitions that we made in two years, two very short years, are going to allow us to head towards transformational production of high purity alumina. It is a very exciting time to be looking at Impact and thinking about coming on board. You have probably seen some of these slides before. As well as LEDs, the other big uses for high purity alumina are in the semiconductor industry. Funnily enough, they are actually used to help in the slurries that are used to polish wafers that go into semiconductors.
There is also a big market now for aluminum nitrates and aluminum sulfates, which with this new process under the high purity process, we'll actually be able to look at producing. That is a rapidly expanding market, of course, with AI and the magnificent demand that we're seeing for semiconductors. Of course, the ongoing use in electric vehicles and in batteries in general, and they're used as separators between the anode and cathode. That is because alumina in its natural form is actually called corundum, and it is one of the hardest substances known to humanity, and it's also thermally inert and chemically inert. It has a burgeoning use in a wide range of industries globally as we become more high tech. It is a great space to be.
That's reflected in this classic sort of supply and demand curve that comes from Commodity Research Unit and courtesy of Alpha HPA Limited, who are the leaders in this space on the ASX. We can see that at the moment, there's about a 20% compound annual growth. That's been fairly accurate over the last decade, and it appears to be climbing in the same rates going forward. At the moment, producing high purity alumina, which we'll talk about, is not the easiest thing, but as a result of that, there's emerging, we think, a demand deficit or, sorry, supply deficit in the next couple of years. That's about the time now with our acceleration by the HiPurA acquisition that we should be able to now start filling that demand and hitting the market at just the right time. What is high purity alumina worth?
We talk in this business about different purities. The benchmark is four nines or 99.99% pure. There is a bigger market in 3N and also smelter-grade alumina, but there are increasing demands for ultra-pure material in 5N and even 6N. That is 99.9999% pure aluminum, so it has virtually nothing in it. These can command rarefied prices per ton. It is worth pointing out that the bulk of the volume and the bulk of the business is in the 3N and particularly the 4N space. That is where you start to build the business, and then you can add on the cream on top, which is obviously 5N and 6N going forward. It is very much a high margin, high demand, modern technology business. It is a great place to be. How much alumina have we got?
At Lake Hope, we declared last year we have a measured resource now, which means that we're very confident of the amount of alumina that's in there. In the measured resource, we've got 189,000 tons of alumina, but in total, there's 700,000 tons. That's more than enough for at least a 50-year mine life. No shortage of alumina there. If you do the maths there, call it 500,000 tons of alumina times an average price of $20,000 or $25,000 a ton, then you can work out there's many billions of dollars of potential wealth in the top two meters of Lake Hope. This is Roland Goedhart.
He discovered the Lake Hope deposit a few years ago now and came up with some of the methods that we're using to produce HPA, which are now under our own patents or, sorry, under the Player One patents, which we will own 80% of post the PFS. We can see here, this is how we drilled out billions of dollars of wealth, and that's with a push tube and a rubber mallet. I think the whole drill out costs about AUD 150,000. As I've said a few times before, this is about the best return on a drill investment that you've ever seen. Comes out looking like this. It is clay. It is extremely fine grained, microns and nanometer sized particles. As a result, on site, we do not need any beneficiation. There is no crushing or grinding. There is no blasting.
We basically dig this material up and try and get to Perth. The plan will be very simple. We're going to drive in off the side of the lake. This is a map of West Lake. It's one of the two lakes that we have at Lake Hope. The scale there from left to right is about just over 1 kilometer. You can see in the purple colors there, high grade core. We look at it basically, simply drive in off the side of the lake for, say, three to four months of each year, stockpile material, and then truck it year round into Perth. We've already lodged the mining lease. That was last year. We've also had extensive discussions with the Ngadju people who are based in Norseman.
We've completed a heritage survey over the surface of the lake, and there are certainly no impediments to mining. We are in a position now to negotiate a mining agreement with the Ngadju, who are generally very pro-business, very pro-mining. They've signed a number of deals in the last year. Our discussions with them are more about the benefits to the Ngadju as opposed to can we mine there or not. We look forward to continuing our relationship with them over the next 12 months and push towards getting the mining lease granted as quickly as we can. We also completed environmental surveys and nothing untoward on the surface of the lake. There are both heritage surveys and environmental surveys still required on the access track to get to the stockpile.
Those will come also in the next 12 months, and we're not anticipating any issues there. As I mentioned, the plan then is to truck the material from Lake Hope into Perth. It's a much easier way of doing things. We're leaving a very small footprint on site. Basically, it's a small quarry. There will be a hole left in the lake that's only 1 meter, 2 meters deep. Basically, from some of the test work we've done already, that fills in and collapses in a very short period of time with virtually no effect on the environment. All the chemicals and reagents that we need are going to be in Perth, in Kwinana. That's the plan, to truck it in.
All in all, because of that, the particular nature of the material at Lake Hope, we believe that we're going to be one of, if not the lowest cost producers of HPA. This is a cost curve analysis that we put out a number of times since the scoping study in November 2023. The incumbents are producing, we believe, 4N from various processes, but their input costs are in the order of $15,000 to maybe $20,000 per ton. We believe that we're going to be down in the lowest cost quartile, certainly below Alpha, who are looking at $7,000-$8,000 per ton. That's just US, by the way, in terms of the operating cost. The NPV was north of $1 billion in the scoping study and at an 8% discount rate.
I can't say too much, but the PFS certainly supports these figures and is better in some instances. We can look forward to that in the next few weeks. That pre-feasibility study has been put together by our A team, our HPA team, as I like to call them here. Paul Hennaran is a very experienced study manager. He's put together and coordinated all the work that we've been doing. The two key areas in terms of the actual process and the test work are run by our husband and wife team, Scott Fegan and Eugenia Fegan. They have 50 years of alumina experience between them at Alcoa. They've built plants. They have their own methods for high purity materials, and they've contributed significantly. Eugenia, through CPC Engineering, has done all the engineering studies on our plant.
Scott, he's in-house here at Impact, and he's controlling and in charge of all of the test work and how that feeds through to the scale-up that's going to be required in that plant. Late last year, we announced that we've employed Joseph Casella as our consultant for marketing and offtake. Joseph was one of the lead people and the commercial managers in Tianchi Lithium here in Perth. They have been the key people putting the pre-fees together and making our plans for the next steps. The mining, as I mentioned, is going to be straightforward. It's just going to be a digger and a truck and then stockpile and then into Perth, retreat mining, very straightforward. This is just a quick view of the process plant that's been designed by CPC Engineering.
There's a plan view, a bit of a 3D view there in a cross section. That's from left to right, we're looking at probably 600-700 meter strip of land in Kwinana, very elegantly put together. The trucks will come in here on the right-hand side, undergo the first stage leaching, second stage leaching with the acid in the middle, and then final product production at the left-hand side. It all fits very nicely on a small and available piece of land in Kwinana. The next steps then, we're going to be very much underpinned by the federal grant that we received in October last year, AUD 2.87 million towards basically a AUD 6 million project. It's a three-way collaboration between ourselves, Edith Cowan University and their membrane technology division, and CPC Engineering.
The idea is to collaborate in this three-way project with the principal aim of constructing a pilot plant. As we'll talk about, we've just bought a pilot plant, so how that integrates, that remains to be seen. We'll be certainly doing a lot of test work on our own process going forward. The principal use of this money will be to work with Edith Cowan University. Professor Amir Razmjou is a world expert in membrane technology. We believe that these membranes are going to be helpful to us in numerous places in our process flowsheet, including the initial leach, the acid regeneration, which I'll come back to, and in particular, also wastewater and waste effluent treatment. There are many places in the process flowsheet where we believe this technology will lead to significant cost savings. It is really all built around a theme of sustainable HPA production.
We're trying to produce a method that has zero discharge except for fresh water. We believe that the membranes will be a significant part of that. All of that work is really going to answer many of the questions that have been raised in the PFS, and they'll be answered as part of a definitive feasibility study, which we'll initiate sometime going forward. It has been an interesting journey so far for us in the high purity alumina business. We've discovered that there are actually very high barriers to entry to getting into that business. I think that's certainly reflected in the number of companies that have tried to produce HPA, have gone along that journey. Most of them have failed with the exception of Alpha HPA. We've actually worked out at least a number of reasons for that.
First of all, it is actually just, it's just difficult to make high purity material. You've got to be careful about the materials that you make the pilot plant or the plant out of. You've got to have the right chemicals and the right feedstock. Just in general, there are challenges there. The second thing that we learned along the way is that it's very important that at a certain stage that you get your own laboratory. If you're waiting three to four weeks between each assay, which is what the commercial laboratory's turnaround time is, then you end up extending the timeframe for your project by many months, if not years, over a, say, two to three-year period. Very significant to acquire a lab or put one together. That was part of the use of the funding that we had proposed for our federal grant.
The third discovery, and this was a very big one, is actually unless you can regenerate the acids that you're using in your leaching process, then no project is likely to be economic. The amount of acid that's needed is actually significant. Unless you can regenerate it, then you're struggling against the money at that point. In our case, with the process that we're using for the pre-feasibility study, the first part of the process is actually an alkaline leach. It's not acid. We produce potash as a valuable byproduct from that. Immediately we need half as much acid as other clay-based projects. That was a significant advantage to Lake Hope. As a result, we've got at the back end, we do have standard acid regeneration, but we believe the membrane technology is actually going to revolutionize that going forward.
The fourth thing that we've learned is that clients really won't take you seriously until you've got at least a pilot plant. You can imagine that certainly in a high-tech era, there are some very specific product requirements that are needed by those clients. They're not going to change supplier unless they know that you've got A, good material, and B, you're going to be there in the long term. The acquisition of a pilot plant through HiPurA has accelerated that client engagement process very significantly.
Finally, and this is actually the big one that's brought, this is what brought Altech undone for those of you who know the Altech story, is that at the end, when you're scaling up, you need to be able to borrow a lot of money, obviously, debt finance to help build the plant and balance that against offtake of significant size is a very tricky thing to do. We've been very aware of that since day one. We were in our minds looking to modularize our own process going forward to help reduce that requirement for scale-up. That is what you need to form a successful HPA business. Our HiPurA acquisition, just a reminder, HiPurA Proprietary Limited was a 100% owned subsidiary of ChemX. ChemX got themselves into debt, and that was actually what brought them undone.
The reason they got into debt is actually shown here on the left-hand side here, which is all of these little vials of alumina of varying qualities, high purity alumina going from top left to bottom right. That's their journey. If you can imagine that every assay, that is every little vial there, there's a two to four or five-week wait for an assay result between each of those vials. You can imagine how much time it took to get to HPA. As a result, they were too in debt by the time they got to it, and as a result, went under. We've purchased a fully functional high purity laboratory. There's probably only two, maybe three laboratories actually in the whole of Western Australia that can produce the low levels of detection across 66 elements that this equipment can do. There's a microwave digest.
There is an ICP machine, and there's an AAS. It is a fantastic thing that's been put together and is sitting there waiting to be used. As a result, we'll be able to get basically almost instant turnaround on our assays from the pilot plant. Oh, sorry, look at that. That's the last sample of HPA that'll be produced. The other big thing, of course, is that we've actually purchased a pilot plant. Here are a few photographs of it. The thing is literally 90% complete. The front end has been basically commissioned. Back end still to be commissioned and cabled. There's a bit of work, a bit of capital expenditure to go there. The calcining oven is there. In particular, I always want to point out the pie warmer. The pie warmer was on the asset list.
I just thought, oh, it's just what they use for the lunch. In fact, they use it as a pre-drying treatment before putting the HPA into the oven there. Yeah, it's the most expensive pie warmer ever bought. It's on a fantastic facility in the back end of O'Connor. Plenty of room to expand. We could probably double or triple the expansion in that facility. It is a great place to start commercial production. Not only have we bought the assets, this is the biggest thing we've bought. We've actually bought at least two years in time and operating costs. That is a saving of millions of dollars and a saving of a lot of the gray hair that I have left as we push forward with this business.
This is just a very quick summary of the key players that have been or were in the HPA space. Starting at the test work or conceptual level, which is where Impact was, there's a few players in the space there. There's a number of companies, in particular, Vanadium, one of these in Queensland, and a Resource Development Group with the solvent extraction thing here in Perth. At Cadoux, sort of in front, if you like, doing engineering studies on a 1,000 ton per annum modular plant. They've been going some time on that. We have Alpha HPA, who are at the moment scaling from a few hundred tons per annum up to 10,000 tons per annum, which is the benchmark. That's going very well for them.
The key thing here is that Impact has now jumped right behind Alpha in terms of its ability to produce HPA. We are actually the only other company on the ASX now capable of producing anything like commercial quantities of HPA. It is a fantastic, fantastic opportunity for us. The other great thing about the whole HiPurA model is that it is actually modular. We strongly believe that the process can actually be scaled up in terms of a few thousand tons at a time in an economic way. This removes that huge burden of getting debt financing versus balancing against your offtake agreement. You can imagine that we are looking for now smaller contracts in order to be able to fund a scale-up of the plant.
That's a massive breakthrough, which allows a business plan to scale into the key areas around the world, Southeast Asia, Europe, and in particular, North America. Our co-investors in Alluminous, which include the original Managing Director and the actual inventor of the HiPurA technology, come on board together with two North American investment groups. We have a strong business plan to establish a production base in North America. As soon as we can confirm that the pilot plant is up and operating and it's working, we'll work out the next stage of scaling and then look to build something in North America with a view to raising money on a stock exchange over there. Very exciting forward plans over the next 12-24 months. We've already got patents granted in a number of countries with more to come.
To quickly summarize and look at our forward plan going forward, we've now got a direct pathway to HPA production. It's a solvent extraction process. It allows us to produce other products that we couldn't easily produce, if at all, from the current process with our acid leaching, biomides, nitrates, and sulfates. Our plan is to get the plant up and running and commissioned over the next three to six months. It'll take some time to get it going and then settle it down and get to improve that it can produce the 4N. These products and the fact that we've got material to show to clients is actually going to open up big market entry for us, a whole lot of commercial opportunities. That's going to be the plan from the end of 2025 through into 2026.
It's just speeding up our whole entry into the marketplace by several years. We hope that by 2027, we've got this start thinking, if not establishing our commercial production base in North America and look to raise funds on an exchange over there. We've got in for a very exciting couple of years. Impact, just to finish now, obviously, we've been listed since 2006, just on a fantastic renowned rights issue. We raised AUD 3.6 million out of a total of AUD 5.2 million that we're trying to get to. That's a 70% uptake. We're thrilled with that, strongly supported by a major German shareholder. It's a family office out of Dusseldorf. They've been very supportive since we got into Lake Hope. Market cap currently sitting around AUD 22 million. Post-paying for the acquisition, which is AUD 1.1 million, that's Impact's 50% share to purchase.
We need to put another $500,000 in in the next two weeks for the working capital to get the plant up and running. Cash sitting at AUD 2 million. We can see, like a lot of the junior resources space, we were hit pretty badly. At late last year, we had a very good run up to sort of market cap of AUD 60 million, nearly AUD 70 million in May last year. Very strongly believe we're going to get there again very, very soon. We're looking, and you can see the volume that's gone through in the last month. A lot of buying going on at this stage at these prices. I encourage you to put us on your watch list if we're not already there and look to entry. Where are we going to go?
I always talk about Alpha HPA. They've done a fantastic job. They have fantastic technology. They've been able to access low-interest loans from the government to get over their debt financing hurdle. It's a great outcome for them. Started off a few years ago. That's 2017. Market cap AUD 20 million. Now sitting at AUD 1 billion. I would say that where we are now took Alpha probably four years to get to, if not five. We are certainly accelerating. I always said when we got this project, we were going to do our best to accelerate getting into HPA production and commercialization as quickly as we can. This second acquisition is definitely going to do that for us. I won't be resting there for other things as we other potential acquisitions as we move forward.
Alpha just recently announced they had a letter of intent for 4,000 tons per annum of HPA in the semiconductor space. I mentioned that right at the start is that there's a huge demand emerging in that semiconductor industry. They're building a 10,000-ton per annum plant. That's the benchmark that most of us in the HPA space have used for comparison. The scoping study I showed you for Lake Hope is built on 10,000-ton per annum potential production. The PFS is the same. Our numbers, as I say, are looking very encouraging. They've had indicative demand for at least 30,000 tons. The demand is definitely there. You just need to have a pilot plant that shows you that you're a long-term player and get some offtake. That's, as I said, our key aim over the next 12-24 months.
They've also used a basket price for all of their modeling of $30,000 a ton. I can say that in the PFS, we're using the same number that we use in the scoping study, which is $22,000 a ton. Otherwise, the numbers do get a little silly. Just to finish with, two acquisitions in the last two years, Lake Hope, and now 50% of HiPurA. It's going to be a fantastic journey with us. We're going to be one of the lowest, if not the lowest cost producer globally. We've got a unique deposit here. We've now got an industry-disruptive metallurgical process. As a result, we're now rapidly building our capabilities in metallurgy. The next step will be final product specification. A lot of work to do there. We think our timing is going to be perfect.
2027, we're looking at that supply deficit. We will hopefully deliver into this beautiful high-margin growth market with significant upside potential. Now is the time to come on the journey with us. That is the overview. I hope you found that useful. I'm just going to get out of the presentation now and come back to the webinar. There we go. A couple of questions. A good friend, Marcus, has asked, we've got four projects on the go. Which one is the highest priority? Obviously, it's the HPA. Will you monetize some of the others? We're certainly looking at doing that. We've been trying to monetize our Commonwealth project for some time. Unfortunately, the IPO fell over with the group that was trying to list. They have been talking with a number of other companies basically to put that project into another company.
We have our Broken Hill project. We're talking to a number of major companies for a potential joint venture, which would be very exciting for us. We will be drilling our Arkhm project, hopefully within the next month, as we have exploration incentive scheme funding from the West Australian government. We're going flat out to get all the permissions in place to get that done. We will assess the whole Arkhm project on the back of that drill program. We're certainly getting more and more focused, obviously, on the HPA. Question about Lake Hope. When do you think the pre-feasibility study will be out? As I say, we're waiting for all the final reports and final economic modeling. We have seen those. The scoping study still applies. That's one of the ASX rules. We're still well within the bounds of the scoping study.
That's a huge outcome for us. Another question here. Can you explain about what you mean by modular? Certainly. The trick in HPA is to scale up. Okay? It's obviously a very valuable product, $25,000 a ton for 4N. The question is, what's the economics of building a larger plant to scale up? That's something that everyone faces, whether it's copper or nickel or whatever. What's the appropriate size of plant? Over the years, the last decade, people have generally used a benchmark of 10,000 tons per annum as a key number to try and get to because the economics of 10,000 tons per annum look very, very attractive. The challenge is, though, how do you scale up because you have to borrow money to build that plant?
If you're doing acid work, acid regeneration, then that's a big challenge to scale up, but not insurmountable. With the HiPurA process, we believe that we can build a plant that can produce, I'm picking a figure here, say 2,000 tons per annum, maybe 3,000, that we can build for tens of million dollars, not hundreds of millions of dollars. That is much easier to fund. We build small modular plants that we can perhaps add on to and scale up from there progressively as offtake comes. Hopefully, that has explained that. Any other questions coming through? What's the value of IPT shares today, please? How would you envision the shares will go to with the HPA? Not sure I'm allowed to answer the second part of that question. Look, we're trading at, I think, 0.6%, which is the value of our rights issue.
If there are any professional investors, sophisticated investors, high nets listening, you can get in touch with me as there is some shortfall available. Look, you can imagine if we went to, say, half the value of Alpha, and we're trading at 0.6% for 20, call it 0.5, made a maths easy, 20 million market cap, then we're looking going from 20 million to, say, 500. That would be an ideal place for us to get to. So get in now. All right. I think we're about there then. Okay, everyone, thank you very much for listening. You're always welcome to email me, contact us at the office. If you're not already a member of Investor Hub, then please take this opportunity to register, get on our mailing list. There should be a link maybe somewhere, or just certainly send us an email.
We are very happy to have you on that list and look forward to speaking to many of you as we go forward. Thanks very much.