Welcome back. We have an update from Impact Minerals Ltd., trades on the ASX under the symbol IPT. Driven by a commitment to excellence and a vision to harness Australia's mineral wealth, it' s establishing itself as a key player in the HPA industry through careful project selection, rigorous evaluation, and profitability focus, while aiming to create lasting value for shareholders while contributing to the sustainable growth of the mining sector. Please welcome Managing Director Mike Jones. Welcome back, Mike. We're looking forward to hearing your update today.
Yeah, thanks very much, Anna, and great to be here again on Emerging Growth. Most of this presentation will just be a bit of a review. There might be some new viewers out there, and I'll tell you what we've been up to in the last few weeks, excuse me, and also what our immediate plans are going forward. High Purity Alumina is a little known but very important mineral that's an incredible part of the energy transition and also the emerging AI industry. Not many people know about it, but our intention is to mine our High Purity Alumina from this lake in Western Australia, and this is about 500 kilometers east of Perth. The important thing here is that in the top two meters of that lake is something in the order of about $15 billion worth of High Purity Alumina. Our plan is basically very simple.
We're going to dig that material up, we're going to truck it into Perth here in Western Australia, where I am, and we're going to process it using a technology platform that we have recently acquired a 50% interest in. It's a very simple, straightforward process. Solvent extraction is also located here in Perth. As an example of what HPA is used for, this is the Las Vegas dome that many of you might be familiar with. On that dome is something in the order of about 1.8 million light-emitting diodes. Behind every LED and all the other lights that you can see in that area is a piece of artificial sapphire, and sapphire is a form of High Purity Alumina. That market is growing very dramatically.
We believe that with our lake and this new technology that we have, we can transform the production of High Purity Alumina and be the lowest cost producer of high-grade HPA globally by a significant margin. I've mentioned LEDs. I also mentioned semiconductors. The HPA is used to help polish some of the silicon carbide that is used in semiconductors. It's also used as a cap on each of those little squares, the little semiconductors there, because HPA is also thermally inert, and it also acts as an insulator, and it stops the heat buildup in these large data centers. In electric vehicles, it's used in batteries, lithium-ion batteries, again to prevent heat buildup, excuse me, Sorry about that, and heat buildup and stops the batteries from catching on fire. The market, as I mentioned, is growing at about 20% per annum.
In the blue here on the upper parts of the graph there, we see the projected demand, and we're looking at something that's growing at about 20% per annum. By the end of this decade, the market, which is not very big, but it'll be about 120,000 tonnes, and we aim to be a major supplier of that. There's a tightening of supply because the market's growing so rapidly. High purity materials are difficult to make, and we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of people interested in getting HPA. We're expecting a tightening of supply and an increase in the price that we can charge within the next couple of years when we hope to get into production. Currently, the purity of alumina is what controls its price, and you can get anything from three nines or 99.9% pure right up to six nines, which is ultra-pure material.
The bulk of the demand is in the 3N and the 4N, which is 99.99% pure, and they're selling between sort of $15,000 to $30,000 a ton. You can get better margins on ultra-pure material, 5N and 6N, but those are more limited volume markets. We'll be tackling the 4N market as our first entry point, which is currently selling between sort of $15,000 and $30,000 a ton. This is how much aluminum we have in the lake. We've got at least 450,000 tonnes of aluminum. That's for more than a 40-year mine life at an average benchmark production rate of about 10,000 tonnes per annum. There is no shortage of material. It's all about the method by which we can convert it into the high purity material. This is how we drilled out $15 billion worth of material with a rubber mallet and a plastic push tube.
Sounds very simple, and it is, and that's one of the keys to the low production cost. It comes out very fine-grained, which needs no beneficiation on site. Our plan is very straightforward. We're going to truck the material into Perth. We're going to drive it off the side of the lake, three months of the year, stockpile it, and then truck the material into Perth. We've already got clearance for mining on the lake from the local native title group, the Naju peoples. We've also done baseline environmental surveys, which indicate there are no threatened or priority species there. Lake Hope is, here's a map showing where it is. It's about 500 kilometers east of Perth. It's going to be a very simple operation to get it into the center of town. We've recently completed a pre-feasibility study. We have a very excellent, world-class team.
We've got sort of over 50, 60 years' experience of the luminaire from people who've worked at Alcoa, who are one of the world's largest aluminum and aluminium companies. We've also got experienced offtake people as well who are starting our offtake program. I won't dwell on this, but this is the economics from our pre-feasibility study that we put out in June. Some key numbers there are that for the benchmark of 10,000 tonnes per annum, we're going to be able to, it has a net present value of about $720 million. Very good capital ratio. It's only going to cost us about $160 million to build the plant. The most important number here is our operating costs. We believe that we're going to be able to produce HPA at less than $5,000 a tonne when we take into consideration our by-product.
We're going to be able to produce potash as well as part of our process. Very strong cash flows. As a result, this is an excellent project. Low CapEx, and it going moving into a high margin business. I mentioned that our operating costs, so this is a cost curve analysis. Most of the production at the moment is dominated by the Chinese and the Japanese. There's some new entrants into the marketplace, but Impact has the lowest cost of production down around about sort of $5,000 a tonne. When you consider we're selling it at sort of an average price of say $22,000 a tonne, that's what gives us the very strong net present value and the ongoing cash flows once we get into production. What our work has focused on in the last six weeks, we've been getting over the barriers.
We've learned that there's lots of barriers to getting into high purity minerals, and high purity luminaire is no different. It's all about the purity. You need your own laboratory. You need to be able to regenerate your assets. Really, it's all about client engagement and then financing your scale-up. We did recently announce that we have a project going with one of the universities here in Perth. They have world-class researchers in membrane technology. We've now made a significant start since we last spoke into implementing these membranes into our flow sheet. We believe they're going to have an incredible effect on the nature of our acid recirculation and also our wastewater treatment in particular. The guys at the university have got already some really fantastic patents for lithium and rubidium, and we think we're going to be able to do the same thing very soon with our aluminum.
As I mentioned, we purchased recently a share of a technology in Perth, and we believe that's a very natural bolt-on for our Lake Hope. We have a high-purity laboratory. Since we spoke, we've now got that laboratory up and running. It is now fully functional, and we're getting rapid assay turnaround to work out how pure our materials are as we put material through the second thing that we bought, which was our pilot plant. We took possession in May. We've now basically started to commission this plant. We're taking material through the different parts of the process in batch form, and we should be able to get to high-purity alumina within the next few weeks. That's a very exciting time.
That will actually put us into a unique position where we're actually the only other company, we're only the second company on the entire Australian Stock Exchange that's capable of producing any commercial quantities of HPA . That company is Alpha HPA, pointed out here on the right-hand side. With the acquisition of our pilot plant, we're now in a position to move forward into modest scale production in the next 18 months. The other thing about the technology is that it's modular, and we've now made some first significant inroads into talking to potential North American offtake partners and in America and the U.S.A. in particular, battery technology companies. We believe that we're going to be able to build a small-scale plant there starting probably in something like 2027, which is only two short years away. A lot of growth to come in that time.
We have ourselves protected now by patents, and we're very close to patents in several other countries around the world, the key marketplaces. The big news in the last week is actually we've now appointed a Chairman to the subsidiary company that owns the technology. This is a gentleman by the name of Mr. Tim Netscher. He is extremely well regarded throughout the mining industry, and he's currently the Chairman of Gold Road Limited, which is under a $3.5 billion takeover. He's been on many boards, and he's actually a chemical engineer by trade. He is going to add huge depth and credibility to our process, and he also very much validates our business plan. Our business plan is very straightforward. At the moment, we're commissioning the plant. That should be done within the next month or so.
It'll take a few months to get it up to scratch, producing material of consistent quality. We've already started our customer engagement program. Next year will be the feasibility studies working out where and how and what to build in the U.S. in 2027, where we hope to scale up to production into the many thousands of tonnes per annum. Since we last spoke, we've had a very good response in the share price. We're up about, I think, 40% or 50% since we last spoke. The market is certainly getting out there. The story is starting to be understood. We have very strong support from our German shareholders, and we have just over $2 million in the bank currently. Where are we going to head? I talk about the other company, Alpha HPA, that is the other producer now on the ASX, has $1 billion valuation, U.S., sorry, Australian dollars.
That's about a 25 times uplift from where we are now. They also have a price tag on them of $2 billion over the next couple of years as they bring their big plant into production. There's a lot happening in the background. We're still on track to be one of the lowest cost producers of HPA globally. We have this unique deposit in Western Australia and now a unique technology, which is starting to fire up, which is going to drive our low cost of operation, and that is really going to help our entry into the HPA market space in 2026. We're certainly building out our capabilities and end product specifications as we talk to more customers and find out what it is that they want.
We hope to get our timing right that by 2027, we'll be in modest scale production, which is a time when the supply is tightening. That's the story, and we are very happy to answer questions.
Wonderful. Thank you, Mike. We are out of time. We have to get to our next presenter, but we do have lots of questions for you. We'll send them to you. You can answer them on your own through your email. Thank you for this update. Congratulations on all this progress. We look forward to seeing you again real soon.
Thanks very much, Anna. Bye for now.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.