We're going to stay in WA, the WA project?
Absolutely.
All right, we're going to stay in WA, because this project is one that if you're a regular here at RIU, you've been following with interest. It's shallow, it's easy, it's low cost, it's next to lots of great infrastructure. But if you haven't heard the story before, I know it's something that you want to put on your radar for future. Would you please welcome Impact and Dr. Mike Jones?
Thanks so much, everyone, and after some drinks last night, I'm not too sure any of us know where we are this morning, but thanks for turning up. Beautiful picture here of the salt lakes of Western Australia. They're an amazing chemical laboratory, and every one of them is very different in terms of its composition, even though when you drive over them, they look very similar. They're very rich sources of a wide variety of industrial minerals like salt, dolomite, potash, but in particular, what we're interested in is high-purity alumina. And this is our Lake Hope project, about 500 km east of Perth. We completed a pre-feasibility study, and so we can talk about in-ground value.
There's about $15 billion worth of high-purity alumina hidden in the top 2 m of that lake, which is dry for most of the year, as you can see. We own about 80% of that project now, looking to move further into ownership of that. A significant development since we last spoke here last year was that we took a 50% share in a company that purchased the assets of ChemX Materials, who were one of our competitors in the space, had a very elegant technology for the production, the back end to produce HPA, and we think it's a very natural bolt-on to our Lake Hope project.
That acquisition came through with a pilot plant that was about 80% commissioned and a fully functional analytical laboratory, and we've had possession now for about eight months, and I'm proud to say that we're now actually in a position of producing significant quantities of HPA, bags of it to hand out to potential customers.
That's a elegant way of saying, "Well, look, we're going to dig up some clay about 500 km east of Perth, to take it to a shed in Fremantle, and we're going to convert it into this." This is actually the Las Vegas Sphere, and behind that Sphere, something like 1.8 million light-emitting diodes, and behind every LED that's going in around the world is a wafer-thin piece of artificial sapphire, and that's a very form of high-purity alumina. We believe that the combination of these two projects, our lake and our new acquisition, we're going to be able to transform the cost of production of high-purity alumina and become one of, if not the lowest cost supplier globally. There's an emerging supply problem for HPA.
They're finding more and more uses for it in a wide variety of industries, which I'll talk about. But really, in the next couple of years, by 2028, 2029, we're going to see an emerging supply deficit unless people can come to the market, and that's the area shown in gray there. It's growing, the market's growing at about fifteen to twenty percent per annum at the moment. And we believe that we can revolutionize HPA production and become a dominant global supplier in a very short period of time, and that's because with the acquisition of this pilot plant, we're going to be able to scale, we think, very, very quickly to a first commercial plant.
We have a government grant to look at membrane technology to routinely deliver us 4N or 99.99% pure alumina. We believe that we're going to become one of the lowest cost suppliers of HPA, and that's partly because we can build low-cost, small modular plants to allow this rapid global commercialization. So we're at a very exciting stage of the project development. So we've talked about some of the markets. It's a very critical mineral. It's on the Australian Critical Minerals list, probably approaching that in the USA, as well as LEDs. It's used in artificial sapphires, it's used on missile tips, Air Force jet windows, on your watches and your smartphones, all the glass there.
Advanced ceramics, and for an audience that probably needs artificial hips and knees like myself, that's, it's biocompatible and is a very significant market. Direct lithium extraction is also becoming an area for precursors to HPA. But the two big ones are in the semiconductor industry, where HPA, being a very hard substance, is used to polish the particles, silicon carbide and gallium arsenide and nitride semiconductor particles, a very important part, and it's also helped to dissipate the heat buildup in semiconductors. And so with the build-out of the data centers, in particular in North America, we're seeing a burgeoning use for HPA in that field. And it's been well known, it's been used in the battery market for many years as a separator, and this stops thermal runaway.
We're seeing a significant growth in the storage battery area, where the requirements to prevent thermal runaway are significantly greater than in car batteries. So that's certainly in North America a big growing area. What's it worth? It's all about how pure your high-purity alumina is actually going to be. The bulk of the market is in the 3N and 4N space, as shown here in my pyramid of purity, as I like to call it. This is where the bulk of the volume is in the market. This is where you need to build your business.
You can get incredible margins in the 5N and 6N ultrapure materials, no significant volume there, so you really need a combination of the two, but it's the volume in the 3N and 4N space. We believe that we can be competitive in the 3N space because of our low cost of production. So this is Lake Hope. This is how we drilled out our $15 billion worth of HPA. That's Roland Gotthard, who discovered the project, and that's with a rubber mallet and a plastic push tube. The hardest part was getting the material out of the tube, and the whole drill program cost us about AUD 250,000.
This is where we're located, about 500 km east of Perth. We're just gonna dig it up on-site and truck it into Perth for processing. We've got a mineral reserve around there. We've got enough mine life for 30-40 years at least, so a multi-decade mine. This is a cost curve analysis. We've kind of jumped into the future a little bit and looked at the scale of the market as it's going ahead, and we're probably looking at the current market being dominated by the Japanese. There's some European production, and the Chinese, relatively high-cost producers.
We know about Alpha HPA and also AEM, who listed relatively recently as producers, and they've got a much lower cost of production, but we believe that we're going to be significantly lower here on the left-hand side of that diagram, in particular, because there's an offset from a by-product, which I'll talk about. The NPV of the project's about AUD 1.2 billion and a CapEx AUD 250 million, but we think that we're gonna improve on those significantly. But to make HPA, and many people have tried and also tried to make other high-purity minerals, there are high barriers to entry. You've got to have the right process for your purity. It's all about the feedstock and reagents, being able to reuse those.
You need your own operating facility as quickly as possible, and then you need to, obviously, accelerate your client engagement. But the biggest one of all is actually financing the scale-up, and we've seen that happening with some of our peers in the business. It's a difficult thing to do. But if you can get over those barriers, then you've actually got a very wide moat around your business, and we believe that the combination of our two projects gives us solutions to all five of those challenges. I won't dwell on this. We're working very hard with Edith Cowan University under a federal government grant to implement membrane technology into our flow sheets. We produce potash as a valuable by-product.
We're starting to crystallize beautiful potash, a quite pure material, widely sought, and we believe that we'll be able to use a membrane crystallizer and significantly drop our CapEx, as part of that. We've just recently announced, I won't dwell on this today, but as a result of all of our work in potash, we've discovered that these beautiful lakes, there's another method that we can use, another flow sheet to produce potash and hydrochloric acid as a prime product, rather than HPA. And so we're developing another project in parallel now and doing some scoping studies, and we believe that some of the lakes around Salmon Gums are gonna be fantastic for that opportunity, very close to the Wheatb elt for the potash and very close to the mining industry for the hydrochloric acid.
So it's like working on a gold deposit and then discovering that you've got evidence for copper and a copper deposit in the same project. That's exactly what we found here. It's gonna add very significantly to the project. I won't dwell on feedstock and reagents, but there's aluminum sulfate in the lake, and the aluminous process they use is an aluminum sulfate feedstock, and we're looking at integrating those two now. When we acquired the assets of ChemX, it came with an 80% complete pilot plant, it came with its own analytical laboratory, IP, granted patents. It was a fantastic bargain. The whole thing cost AUD 2.2 million.
Our share of that was AUD 1.1 million, and this is the team, and I can proudly say that after eight months, we're now in batch mode production, one of the few companies ever to get to that, and we've got the team here carrying their bags of HPA. That's allowed us to accelerate our client engagement. We've now signed a collaboration agreement with C4V. They're based at the university in Binghamton, the actual home of lithium-ion batteries, a Nobel laureate winner there for inventing the lithium-ion battery. They're taking our HPA and running it through a wide variety of tests that are required by battery manufacturers.
Rather than going to 10 manufacturers, we're going to one area that is, sorry, one group that's gonna do most of that test work for us, and we can pre-qualify and accelerate our entry into the marketplace. But the biggest thing of all is that we believe the technology is modular. Rather than have to build one big 10,000 ton per annum plant, we believe that we can build, say, four or five, 1,000-2,000 ton per annum plants and scale much more rapidly with less CapEx and less requirement for, debt finance. That is actually the key thing for us, looking at our peers. So we're looking to establish a base in, North America.
I won't dwell on this, but, what our competitors in the space, AEM and Alpha, they're running at about $100 million per 1,000 tons per annum of HPA capacity. We believe that we're gonna be at least one third of that. It's an incredible technology. We're on the verge of bringing that to the fore over the next few months, and we've only been in the game just less than three years. Our competitors have been in the space for nearly 10. Forward plan from here then, finish the plant, turn it up, get it running, engage with customers, and looking to establish a base in North America in 2027, and we should have a lot of news flow coming forward, and we're done. 18 seconds over. All right. Thanks very much.