Hello and welcome everyone. For those who are not familiar with Impact Minerals, we're based in Western Australia, and one of the many things it's famous for is its abundance of natural salt lakes, and there's a picture of some of the pretty ones here. As it turns out, these are actually amazing natural laboratories. Each one of those lakes has a different chemistry and different characteristics about it. Over time, they've become very important sources of salt, dolomite, potash, and now high purity alumina. Our lake in particular, at Lake Hope, contains something in the order of about $15 billion worth of high purity alumina in the top 2 m of that lake.
Our plan is very simple, that we're going to dig that material up in a very environmentally friendly way, leave a hole in the ground that's only 1 m deep and transport it to Perth, where we will process it with a groundbreaking technology that we acquired out of administration last year to produce high purity alumina, owned in a subsidiary of ours called Alluminous Pty Ltd. We believe that a combination of this lake with its cheap mining and the revolutionary breakthrough of producing high purity alumina will allow us to become the lowest cost producer of high purity alumina globally by a significant amount. My name is Dr. Mike Jones. I'm the Managing Director of Impact Minerals, and we've been putting these projects into action over the last three years. What is high purity alumina?
It is a critical mineral for the high-tech future that we're all entering. It's used in LEDs, it's used in artificial sapphire on watches. It's used extensively in defense, which is obviously very topical right now. It's used in advanced ceramics. The real big growing areas are for use in semiconductors, where it's used to help with the thermal dissipation away from the semiconductor itself. It's also used to polish the particles that are in semiconductors, in particular silicon carbide and gallium arsenide. Another big growing market, in particular in North America, and one that we intend to really push towards is in the battery market. HPA is used within batteries basically to stop them exploding.
They're used to prevent heat buildup in the battery, but it allows the chemistry to flow through and it prevents thermal runaway. We've all seen videos of lithium-ion batteries catching on fire. That's because the HPA isn't doing its job properly in those materials. Those are really big growth areas, and an emerging new area is in direct lithium extraction, where precursors to HPA, which we can make, are used to extract the lithium, and we believe that's a very big market. What we're seeing is a significant global undersupply of HPA in the next few years. This is a graph that's been put out recently by a research group and another listed company.
We're seeing in the shaded gray area there that within a couple of years, we're gonna see a very tightening of supply. Very importantly, we're seeing a compound annual growth rate of in excess of probably 15% per annum. As we find more uses for this quite incredible material, which is one of the hardest substances known to mankind, it's thermally inert and chemically inert. We believe that we can revolutionize the development of HPA by becoming a dominant global supplier by 2030. That's gonna be driven by us becoming one of the lowest, if not the lowest cost producers of HPA. We're gonna do that by being able to be building low cost, small modular plants that are gonna allow that rapid global commercialization.
We're gonna demonstrate that that's a possibility by scaling production from our pilot plant that we now have in Perth to our first commercial plant, which we believe will be in North America. To help us do that, we're using patented membrane technology, working with the university here in Perth and doing some groundbreaking work to routinely deliver the high purity materials that are required. This is what I call my pyramid of purity, and this is aluminum oxide. We talk about 4N, four nines. It's 99.99% pure. Sitting in the middle of this pyramid here, this is sort of like the benchmark that people want to get to. You can do 3N, and then there's obviously smelter grade alumina that you get from the aluminum refineries.
There's 5N and 6N in through here. The ultra-pure materials, they all command, very good, revenues and very good margins. The purity in the 5N and 6N, there's not a big market there. The volume is all here in the 4N and 3N space, and that is where we intend to enter the marketplace. It's a high margin and high demand business. This is a cost curve analysis that we're looking at, and we believe that we'll be the lowest cost producer once we're in production in a couple of years' time. The drivers of that low cost are our unique deposit at Lake Hope, and this is how we drilled out our $15 billion worth of material.
This is trucking the material into Perth, and we have enough for a multi-decade life. We've recently discovered a breakthrough new process to produce potash and hydrochloric acid. We believe that this is gonna be a second string to our bow. We've identified an area close to markets in Western Australia, both for fertilizer and for mining, and that's a big thing to keep on going forward. We've done a lot of work. Sorry, it seems to be a bit of a hiccup there. I seem to be stuck in a loop. There we go. As part of the Alluminous purchase, we now have a pilot plant that is operating in batch mode, moving towards continuous mode.
With the ability now to produce HPA almost at will at the bench scale, we are one of the very few companies in the world to be able to do that. We've had a breakthrough which indicates that we can take our pilot plant and turn it into our first demonstration plant with a 10x throughput, and we have a CapEx that is extraordinary. It's gonna be at least one-fifth, if not one-tenth less than any of our competitors anywhere in the world. We've started a strategic agreement with C4V, a group out of Binghamton University in New York State. They are taking our material and doing a lot of the test work required by battery manufacturers, and we believe that's gonna be our first breakthrough into the market, in particular, in North America.
Now, as I mentioned, we're gonna be able to build modular small-scale plants around the world. We're getting some interest in that already, and it's gonna change the way HPA is made globally, and we believe that we're gonna be leaders in the space. Currently, there are two other competitors in Australia, Advanced Energy Minerals and Alpha HPA. We're having the same problem. We're currently valued at one-tenth to one-twentieth of those two competitors. We'll be in a position to overtake them in their annual production as soon as 2030. There's a significant uplift there. From here, we've finished the plant, we've turned it on, and we've got it up and running. We're engaging with customers this year, initial qualification offtake, and in 2027, we're looking to establish our first commercial base in North America.
Currently, we've just raised AUD 2 million in capital. We're well-funded to do that. Very well supported by our top 20, which own 45% of the company. That's where we are. It has been a very busy six months. We still aim to be the lowest cost producer globally. We have this unique deposit, unique technologies both in Western Australia. We're now starting our customer outreach, and we hope to deliver into this high-margin growth market with significant upside potential as early as 2027. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me. Thank you.