Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Kenmare's 2023 Capital Markets Day. It actually seems only a short while ago that we had our last Capital Markets Day in 2018. You know, time flies, and here we are again, five years later. I'm delighted to welcome many old friends and to see lots of new faces here. I hope that the morning is a worthwhile investment for you, and it's not too boring, and we have an interesting time. We'll be delighted to answer questions at various points through the presentation. Just turning to the agenda, I am gonna give a short overview.
Then Ben Baxter is going to address the meat of our presentation this morning, which is our plans for the transition of Wet Concentrator Plant A, which is the largest mining operation in our portfolio of concentrator plants and mining operations through from its existing location in the Namalope ore zone to the new location in Nataka. Nataka is the largest ore zone in our portfolio. That project is both how we're gonna move that plant to Nataka, but even more importantly, how we're going to mine in Nataka and how we will address the various issues that arise from the different conditions that we faceCillian there.
CillianBen will provide us with an update on the experience Kenmare is having in the market today, what we're seeing, what trends are developing in the market, and how we see it developing into the future. Ben will give us some discussion and some insight into one of the growth options that Kenmare is working to provide for the company. Tom Hickey will give us a review of the shareholder returns and capital allocations. I'll provide a final summary. I'd also like to say that we have our chairman here, Andrew Webb, and delighted to welcome our former chairman, Steven McTiernan , here with us today, and also Jeremy Dibb, who is our corporate development manager and investor relations manager is here also to help answer questions.
If I just move into a bit of an overview. What Kenmare does is it mines the Moma deposit, which is located in northern Mozambique in Nampula province. The principal product that we produce is ilmenite. Ilmenite is a naturally occurring mineral, which is the main source of titanium element, titanium dioxide in the world. Titanium dioxide is used to produce titanium pigment, which imparts brightness and opacity to everything. Pretty well every industrial product in the world which has either brightness or opacity in its surface uses titanium dioxide pigment. Consequently, as we get more wealthy, we use more stuff, and therefore we consume more titanium pigment, and its growth is closely correlated with world GDP growth. It's also used to produce titanium metal.
Titanium metal, while a small, much smaller segment of the market, is rapidly growing. The ore body is huge. I think under present mining conditions or present mining rate, our resource base will last for somewhere around 134 years, and we also believe that we will be able to extend that resource base beyond that. It's a very large project. We mine it in a way which puts us in the first quartile of the revenue to cost curve for the industry. It's a good position. We're the largest supplier of that principal mineral, which is used to create pigment and titanium metal, ilmenite. We're the largest supplier into the world market.
There are other companies that mine ilmenite but don't supply it into the world market, that they have internally got upgrading our beneficiation capacity, and they upgrade a value-added product and sell that. In terms of actual TiO2 units into the world market, we are not the first, we're the third. But still a significant position in the market. The capital investment so far has been somewhere around $1.4 billion. We started operations in 2007, but the company has been in Mozambique for significantly longer than that because it took a long time to develop the project, to get it financed, and get it built and ready to go.
We make a meaningful contribution to the economy of the country with a local procurement spend in 2022 of $116 million, which is significantly up, 12% up from 2021. That's as a result of a focused goal and activities, focused activities to increase that internal spend in Mozambique. You can see the graph on the right-hand side of the page. Makes that correlation between our, sort of, demonstrates that correlation between world GDP growth and the consumption of titanium pigment.
As we can assume that the world will continue to develop in terms of GDP, which it has consistently done except for some very few exceptions, exceptional years, we can assume that consumption of titanium pigment will continue as well and at a roughly the same pace. However, there are segments of the market that are growing much more rapidly, and Cillian will give us some feeling of those particular segments. And there are segments which Kenmare is particularly targeting. Titanium metal, like I mentioned earlier, it's a smaller section of the market, but it is growing. It is the fastest-growing element of the fastest growing segment of the market. It's a critical metal, defined as critical by both the European and the American governments.
It's a light, strong metal with the same strength as steel, but 4x times as light. Therefore, it's particularly useful in aviation in terms of reducing the consumption of fuel. We have co-products, rutile, zircon, and mineral sands concentrate. Rutile is another titanium minerals metal, titanium mineral, titanium dioxide mineral, but we don't have very much of it, so it's a small component of our revenues. Zircon is used in ceramics and for zirconium chemicals. It's a mineral which has a very interesting supply dynamic, which again, Cillian will talk about later. Our mineral sands concentrate contains monazite.
Monazite is the naturally occurring mineral, which is a precursor for rare earth elements, which are in turn used in the manufacture of magnets for electric cars and things like that. Just to continue. We see that the operation of this project in a sustainable and transparent way and with good governance is an important guarantor of this asset into the future for our stakeholders. Therefore, we do that. We try our very best to comply rigorously with every agreement we've made with the government to operate as a responsible citizen in the area that we operate. So far, we have paid $200 million in taxes and royalties. We're the largest employer in the Nampula region. 97% of the people who are employed in the project are Mozambican.
Many of those people are at graduate level. We have been voted for several years as the most transparent company in Mozambique. Consequently, you can see on the table on the right-hand side that under the agreements that we have with the government, we have been gradually increasing our direct payments to government. Those direct payments are defined by a set of foundation agreements that we negotiated in the early 2000s and signed 2002, 2003, 2004. The project is actually operated by two companies, one which is a mining company, which performs the mining concentration activities, and the second company, it performs processing and export activities.
The mining and concentration stuff is governed by the Mineral Licensing Contract that governs all our mining, defines the taxation and royalty that is levied on the company as it transfers to the other company, and also defines the transfer price. The mineral processing company is located within an Industrial Free Zone in Mozambique. We have a separate agreement which covers the operation of that Industrial Free Zone. The Mineral Licensing Contract was issued for a 25-year term. It completes in January 2027, and has explicit renewal terms in the agreement. The Implementation Agreement is effective until November 2024, and again, has specific renewal clauses within the agreement.
The final agreement is the Power Supply Agreement, which is between ourselves and the state-owned electricity supply company, EDM. It runs until 2029. There have been two amendments to this agreement in 2013 and 2020, both at the initiation of Kenmare. We wanted those amendments, and EDM compliant. Now while we have had significant issues with the delivery of power and the stability of power supplied by EDM, we have had no issues whatsoever with them, with the agreement and the operation of the agreement and EDM's operation of the agreement. We actually work very closely together.
I would say that EDM is at present making a very significant investment in a 400-kilovolt line, which will to Nampula which will both increase the stability and the quantity of power available to the project. That should be complete. That's underway at the moment and should be complete at the end of the year. Again, I sort of repeating what I've said previously. We feel that the operation of this mine in a harmonious fashion with the other people who live in this area as being a critical guarantor of the future success of this business, and therefore the value of the asset. You know, our principal mechanism for this is a not-for-profit development association called KMAD.
We founded KMAD in 2004, before we commenced construction and before sustainability was a fashionable thing. The objective of KMAD is to ensure that any particular person, he or she, in that local area feels that the presence of the mine in their area is a good in their own lived life. Not simply in the balance of payments of the company or tax to government, but in their, in their lived experience. We believe that it has been reasonably successful in doing so. It focuses on four particular planks, one of them being livelihoods and economic development. In this area, local people get together and propose businesses. We then work with them to develop that business proposal.
We provide financing. We have 75 successful small businesses in operation at the moment. We've actually funded many more than 75 businesses, we do allow a business that's not functioning well, where the business premise wasn't correct, or where the people aren't putting sufficient energy or focus into it. We do allow them fail, we think that that failure is a learning process for the local community. We're also involved in healthcare. We built two healthcare centers. They provide healthcare for about 45,000 people. We have built 83 classrooms, we have transformed the educational infrastructure in this particular area in Mozambique. We've also built the first secondary school in the area, that's a vocational secondary school and again, that's working successfully. We have provided bursaries both to other secondary schools before ours was built.
Not ours, but before the one in location was built. we also provide bursaries to university. Public health information would. It tells us that the best way to affect the lifespan, to improve the lifespan of people and their general health is not through medication, but it's through the provision of potable water. consequently, we have drilled and equipped 30 boreholes in all of the villages around. that's providing, again, potable water to about 45,000 people. that's what KMAD does. the objective is to ensure that the people think it's a good thing to have this mine here. in general, we believe never is a case where you have unanimous consensus with everyone. in general, we believe that it's working well.
Since then, since we established KMAD, sustainability has become a much broader, a broader agenda. Consequently, we are now focusing on carbon dioxide emission, and we implemented a project called RUPS last year, which was a value-accretive project, but resulted in a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and will result in a bigger reduction of carbon dioxide emissions this year. Ben will talk about how our plans for mining in Nataka will allow us decommission a very significant mobile equipment mining fleet, which is powered by diesel, obviously. We will transfer that energy from the burning of diesel and internal combustion engines into hydro-generated electric power, which has no carbon emission.
In 2016, there were 4% of the workforce was women. It's now 15% and growing. As I mentioned, we are very focused objective of increasing the percentage and the extent of local procurement. That's going very well with $116 million spent in Mozambique in 2022. The sustainability of our board is very focused on biodiversity, and we have lots of different biodiversity projects underway and having a significant, hopefully, going to have a significant effect on biodiversity in the future. How do we do this mining? It's in concept, very simple when you get down to the volumes. The actual operation of it can be a little bit more complex.
What we do is we create a pond, we float dredges in that pond and concentrator plants, an ape concentrator plant in each pond. The dredges mine from the front, pump sand and water slurry back into the concentrator plants, which uses spiral technology to separate the valuable heavy minerals from the gangue material. The gangue material is pumped out and replaced at the back of the pond, creating a beach and building a beach. Since you're mining from the front and building at the back, gradually the whole pond takes a slow walk through the deposit. Since the concentrator plant is floating in it goes too. Therefore, you're bringing the factory to the ore, rather than in conventional mining, where you bring the ore to the factory, and consequently, the costs are lower. That's the reason you do it.
The benefit of this type of mining is you replace the area you've mined as you go along, so you can then rehabilitate the ground where you have been previously and hand it back to the local community for farming. Between we compensate farmers for the crops and take the land, and it is then back in active farming activity, it's probably about two years. As I mentioned, most of the power that's supplied, it comes from hydro-generated electric power. This is just a location on the east coast of Africa. Mozambique is a very long country with the capital right down at the southern end. We're quite far from Maputo. At the last CMD, we talked about the projects that we envisaged to implement during the next five years.
The first of those was an upgrade of Wet Concentrator Plant B from 2,000 tons per hour to 2,400 tons per hour. That was implemented. It works, it worked very well. Project was delivered on time and on budget. Then we built Wet Concentrator Plant C, which is a new, smaller wet concentrator plant and associated dredging operation, which has the... Because it's smaller, it can get to areas in the ore body that the larger wet concentrator plants can't get to. C is now working very effectively and has been producing for the last couple of years.
Finally, we had to move Wet Concentrator Plant B, which at that stage was 2,400 tons, and with somewhere around 7,000 tons in mass, from its area where it was mining in Namalope to a new mining area, Pilivili. That was done during COVID, and it was successfully implemented. I think the distance is 23 km. We picked the plant up and drove it down the road on trailers. Our understanding is that that was the largest mass ever moved by that distance on road, on Earth, ever. It was put in place in Pilivili and has been operating successfully and contributing ever since then. Those are the projects that we did at the last CMD, and we will that we mentioned at the last CMD.
We're going to discuss a couple of projects at this one. One is, as I mentioned, the transition of Wet Concentrator Plant A. We're also going to talk about an upgrade to Wet Concentrator Plant B. The move of Wet Concentrator Plant A is going to be very different to B. Where B, we lifted it up, moved it down a road we built. In with regard to A, the area between where A finishes in Namalope and where it starts in the new mining zone at Nataka is mineralized. It's just not mineralized as highly as either of the other specific mining zones. Therefore, we're going to mine our way from Namalope to Nataka. It will take two years.
During that period, because the ore is less highly mineralized, A will produce less heavy mineral concentrate, and there will be a dip in production. We signaled that dip at the last CMD and said then that we would spend some time in the intervening period scratching our head, trying to figure out how we would resolve that particular dip in production in 2025 and 2026. We've looked at a whole bunch of different alternatives, and by far and away, the best of those alternatives is to upgrade Wet Concentrator Plant B. We've looked at that. Pre-feasibility study's been done on that. It looks like a great project, great financial metrics, and fills in the gap and then provides additional HMC in the coming years.
We think it's a, it's a really exciting project and one that will provide benefit both in filling the gap and good financial returns and good supply of heavy mineral concentrate in the, in future years as well. Excuse me. The objective of those projects was to move Kenmare from its position in the middle of the cost curve for the industry into the first quartile, and that was successfully achieved. Kenmare now operates in the first quartile of the revenue to cost curve for this titanium feedstock industry. A huge focus of the pre-feasibility study that we have been doing on the A transition to Nataka has been to ensure that we retain that first quartile position as we roll into the future.
Most of the money that's been spent has been spent on new capacity, new equipment, new capability, which will ensure both the volume and the cost-effective mining of Nataka well into the future and guarantee our future. Those are the things that we mentioned that we've accomplished. One area where we haven't quite achieved as much as we thought is with regard to slimes management. In 2018, I don't think we fully internalized or fully understood the comprehensive nature of the negative effect of slimes in the ore body as those slimes percentages climbed and remained at a consistently higher level. We had mined at those consistently higher levels previously. Slimes are some very small particles. There's it's not some guck from Ghostbusters or anything.
It's just small particles in the ore body, smaller than 45 microns. When those particles go into water, because they're so small, gravitational forces are not very high on them, and they are balanced by intermolecular forces in the suspension. Therefore, it doesn't settle very quickly. If you keep on mining more stuff and there's a lot of it in your ore body, the pond that you're floating in gets to be a sort of, a bit of a soup of this material. It changes the viscosity of the liquid that you're floating in from water, which is a viscosity of one to a higher viscosity. How does it affect us? Firstly, when we dig the stuff in the first place, it's harder to dig. Therefore, the mining capacity of the dredges reduces.
A dredge that can do 1,500 tons an hour in relatively free flowing material and material of 5% slimes, if you put it into material of 15% slimes, it probably does 500 tons an hour. How we balance that is we balance that by supplementary dry mining. That's effective method of balancing the reduction in throughput of the dredges. It's more expensive because you have to operate a dry mining fleet, and you're burning diesel, which is more expensive way of delivering energy. It affects our processing in a whole bunch of ways. It reduces our recovery, it reduces our throughput, it reduces the utilization of our equipment.
The management of our products behind becomes much more complex and much more expensive. As we face into the coming couple of years, as we complete in Namalope, and then we move to Nataka, we have to decide how we're going to deal with these slimes. We did a lot of test work and a lot of analysis during the pre-feasibility study, and we believe we've come up with a solution which effectively deals with it. It really is a good solution. Basically it means that we're going to invest in significant new capacity on Wet Concentrator Plant A, which will, as those slimes come onto Wet Concentrator Plant A, will separate them and then take them away entirely and place them in a tailings storage facility.
Therefore, while we are presently facing a situation where our rougher spiral circuits, so the start of our separation circuits are having to deal with material which is 16% slimes as it enters the circuit, that will be backed down to 5% slimes, and 5% is way within, you know, normal operating levels and is actually a very good level. We're excited. We think it's gonna be a great day when that circuit gets implemented and the slimes are gone. With that, I would like to ask Ben to come along and talk a little bit about, in more detail about that move. Thanks.
Thanks, Michael, and good morning to you all. I'd like to walk through a bit more of the detail of how we're going to get successful mining in Nataka and how we're gonna bring WCPA up to capacity so that we deliver long life and low cost production. Our aim is to get Nataka and use the Nataka ore body, which is 75% of our ore, and match that to our largest dredging and processing operation, WCPA. WCPA completes its life in the Namalope deposit in 2025. As you can see from this chart that Nataka represents 75% of our ore body.
It makes sense to put our largest piece of equipment into that ore body and make a success of this 6 billion ton deposit. The plant is immediately adjacent, as Michael was explaining. We have to transition into the heart of the high grade part of Nataka, but it's a direct transition, so we don't have to pick up WCPA and move it on the trailers as we did in the past with WCPB. Nataka, though, is a different type of ore body. First of all, it's a good thing. It's got big dunes. Big dunes mean that your advance rates, you get more tons for every meter that you advance through the ore body. That means higher utilizations and lower costs. That's a good thing. We also see that the grades are different.
In Nataka, the grades will be 3.1% total heavy minerals. This is slightly down on the overall grades that we've been seeing in Namalope recently. It's significantly more than the dredge grades that we've been seeing in recent times. You can see we're rising up front from 2.7%-3.1% in that future. Probably the largest difference, though, that has concerned us and has taken us through most of our challenges of this PFS has been how to overcome the increase in slimes that will come in the future. As Michael explained, we've had increasing challenges with slimes in the last couple of years, and we knew that we're going to have more slimes in the future.
The goals of our pre-feasibility study has been really to make sure that we can bring WCPA to its maximum capacity, make sure we restore the recoveries that WCPA experiences in high slimes, bring them back to their design recovery. We do that by having to overcome all of the components that slimes brings to the operation, whether it be in mining, in processing, or in the tailings management side. Do all of this at the same time, whilst retaining our first quartile revenue to cost position. Excuse me. Improving the delivery of WCPA, it starts with the mining side of things. To bring the feed to the mining feed of ore to the right tonnages, we need to invest, and we need to invest in two large new dredges. These will replace the existing equipment.
Our studies have shown that dredging is by far and away the best way to mine Nataka. We've done studies in all sorts of different mining methods but we can't get away from the fact that dredging is high productivity and low cost, and that is Kenmare's competitive advantage. We've looked at new dredges. They've been scoped to deliver in the hardest conditions that we will encounter in Nataka. We knew that dredging was a good way to mine, but our existing fleet is underpowered to deliver to the tonnages that we'll require to fill WCPA in the future. This graph on the right-hand side shows the existing throughputs that we're getting from our dredges, supplemented with the dry mining, and we're not able to achieve the capacity of WCPA.
By increasing the cutting power on the new dredges that we're gonna buy, they're gonna go from 800 kilowatts of power to 2,700 kilowatts of installed power. It's a huge jump in cutting capability and productivity. That will cause our operating window to move above the concentrator capacity, and that will happen in all conditions. The hardest conditions, which are relatively rare, will still have 10% capacity, over capacity available. In normal conditions, we'll have about 50% over capacity. That gives us the ability to keep the concentrator full, and therefore, that gives us consistency of the HMC production that will come from WCPA in the future. We've also looked at a system called hydromining. Hydromining is the commonly used mining method in the industry for mining high slimes deposits. We've tested it in Nataka.
It's been a very successful test. Some clear advantages to hydromining have come through. What we recognize, though, is that the right way to use hydromining is to marry it to the high productivity, low cost dredging system. On the next slide, I'll be able to show you some stuff. We saw that the tonnages improved as we brought in hydromining. This is high... I'm sorry, I haven't explained that. Hydromining is the use of high pressure water through a water monitor gun, where you blast that water onto the mining face, and it brings steady collapse. You can see the photograph there on the right of us testing it in Namalope, in Nataka.
That advantage is, first of all, it brings consistent throughput. It also delivers higher throughput and safe face angles, which mean that the dredges will operate safely and productively in the future. With us therefore focusing all of our production into dredging, we see some excellent simplification of the WCPA operating footprint. We will be eliminating the dry mining that we currently do, and that brings significant cost reductions. Michael explained how the dry mining that we've been using in the past is a high-cost form of mining, but was needed to supplement in order to make sufficient heavy mineral concentrate. That heavy mineral concentrate will now come from dredging only. I'd like to give you a little bit more confidence of how we're going to achieve these improved metrics.
The mining method that we're going to be operating with, as I said, will always deliver to the nameplate. We're confident in dredging, and we're confident in dredging in Nataka because we've looked at many different types of mining method. We've studied dredging, dry mining with front-end loaders, bulldozers, bucket wheel excavators. We kept coming back to dredging being the right way to mine this deposit. What we really needed to do was match the dredging process to the hardness of the ore that we encounter in Nataka. That has been done, firstly, by extensively drilling across the Nataka ore body using a hardness drill method. We came out with a map of where the hard areas are in three dimensions, and we understand the hardness of that ore body.
We verified what the drill holes were telling us by digging a geotechnical test pit into the ore body, 25 meters down, 100 meters across. We exposed the ground and gained an understanding, got our geotechnical engineers to actually touch it, feel it, make sure that they were comfortable that what the drill holes were saying was how that ore would behave, when it was exposed by a mining method. That hardness information has been taken and put into the design of the new dredges. In bringing that design in, we've sized that cutting capacity so that we always exceed the, the plant concentrator capacity, so feed will always be available to WCPA. We took that geotechnical pit, and we converted it into a mine.
We did the hydromining testing in the pit, in Nataka, and verified the way the mine will behave when we get to mining in Nataka. I'd like to just show you a little video which shows you how the hydromining assists in delivering feed and how it will work with the dredger. You can see the hydromining operating here, and he's cut a slot, 2 vertical lines and a horizontal line, and he's busy undermining that piece of ore. The idea is that the dredge will be underneath this area. Now you see the collapse coming down in a controlled fashion, a constant fashion, and the dredge cutter will be at the base waiting to take that sand that has been deposited in front of it.
By mining in that fashion, in a swinging way, which is how a dredge works, you will find that the feed comes in a consistent and safe way to the dredge cutter. We took that, learnings from that test pit, and then we took the hydro gun and put it on the dredger at WCPA. The photograph there you see at the bottom is us testing how that method would work when you integrate the dredging and the hydromining together. I'm happy to say that whilst those dredges are undersized to deliver the capacity and why we need new dredges, the principle of the integration worked very well, and we saw increases in throughput coming through when we integrated relative to the normal mining conditions that we currently receive.
When I wrap all of that up, gives us a lot of confidence around the future mining capacity. We've got tested methods. We will have a safe and productive method. Slimes is mitigated. Because we're removing that, supplementary high-cost, mining component, we remain in the first quartile costs. After we've done the mining, we've got to now process this ore. The intention of our changes at WCPA are to remove the slimes at the very beginning of the processing stage, so that downstream from there we have cleaned heavy mineral feed, and we can return to the throughputs that the concentrator spirals can achieve and the recoveries on those spirals.
It's a pretty fundamental change to WCPA. What we're going to be doing is replacing this current screening and feed preparation area, which is the surge bin and those screens, and incorporating screening, a surge bin and upfront desliming into one new plant. This is a picture of the plant on the left-hand side there. The reason we're doing that is it's easier to build a plant to the side and then float it in ready to go, uncouple the old plant, reattach and go. You keep your downtime low, and you create a lot less risk, project risk in terms of delivery times. The aim of this is to be able to get the spirals to receive slimes grades of less than 5%.
The upfront desliming has been sized to be able to take ore from an average 16%, but as high as more than 20%, and bring it down to the 5% level. That will allow us to get clean tonnage, full tonnage onto every spiral, and to be able to get those spirals to separate light minerals from heavy minerals in a less viscous fluid, which creates the recoveries that we need to get back to. There is early benefits in this. You've seen that recoveries at in recent times are not achieving the 90% level, which is what we expect. Early implementation of this project will deliver a return to those levels of 90% heavy mineral recovery on the spirals.
We'll be looking to implement this project in early 2025 when after the construction period. Okay. I've talked through the mining side and how we're gonna get the capacity up. Talked through the processing, how we convert it into heavy mineral concentrate. The slimes that we generate still has to be disposed. This is a little bit of a talk through how we're going to ensure that the settling process doesn't interfere with the production of heavy minerals as has been the trend in the last couple of years. We're approaching our operating limit with the trailing paddock system that we currently use at WCPA.
This is a system of a hierarchy of paddocks that carefully and slowly settle out the slimes and release clean water back to the mining process. Excuse me. In the future, we're going to eliminate that process because the slimes will be removed up front and sent to an external facility called a tailings storage facility. That tailings storage facility will be decoupled from the production process. What happens when you do that is you get higher utilizations in your production plant, and you get the recoveries, and the failures of the paddock system, which drop recoveries, is no longer there and able to impact on the production process. The tailings storage facility, it's designed, or it's in design, but it certainly has gone into definitive feasibility design right now. It's designed to last for seven years.
That seven-year period is to deal with the early years of mining into Nataka. Thereafter, we move the tailings storage facility to an in-path storage facility further to the west in the ore body so that we can keep the pumping distances low and therefore, keep our costs down as we move slimes from the wet plant to that fixed tailings storage facility. You can see the design on the top right there. It's actually in a valley. It's quite a simple process to place the berm across the front of that valley and store the slimes behind that berm. We have the drainage, the civil engineering required in creating the drainage facilities so that we can recover water from that tailings storage facility and bring clean water back to the mining operation.
Slowly but surely, we fill that over that seven-year period. With the move of slimes to 1 external facility, we create a lot of simplification behind the wet plant. Right now, those who've seen our, the way our tailings works, it's quite a complicated and expensive method of emplacing tailings and a lot of infrastructure is required for it, a lot of bulldozer hours to create those paddocks. We will not, no longer need that. We will have clean tailings, coarse tails, which we can bulk stack immediately behind the mining plant, and that brings down the costs, but it also reduces geotechnical risk significantly, and that brings a lot more assurance for the business. Again, there's benefits in doing this early. We're already experiencing that the paddock system is a challenging thing to manage.
We would like to get this implemented as soon as possible as well. I'm going to move on to the capital. The costs of these various components of the project are phased over a three-year period and amount to $247 million. We can see on the right-hand chart that the dredging, the upfront desliming, and the tailings storage facility are all scheduled to be delivered in the first part of 2025. That's prior to moving into Nataka. We can get early benefits of about a year by pursuing these projects sooner and get real benefits in Namalope as well as when we get to Nataka. There's the infrastructure for Nataka obviously comes a bit later as we move into the Nataka area. As Michael said earlier, this is not capital that's for the move itself.
It's a, it's whilst it's an appreciable amount of money, it's money that actually delivers tons. We see that the new dredges, they deliver the first quartile production because of the excess capacity. We have further work to do in our DFS phase to get the tailings storage facility to a better price. We think there's opportunity there. And one last point to mention is that further down the line, in around 2028, as the distances of mining in Nataka start to increase, our power consumption starts to reach the limits of our current infrastructure.
We expect that there could be about $25 million of additional power, voltage support, infrastructure that could come in at that later date. OpEx, this is a very pleasing chart for me, in that we remain broadly flat on OpEx going into the future. That's how we remain first quartile on the revenue to cost curve. This has been a key consideration of the pre-feasibility study. We offsetting the additional distances and the lower grades that come in time by having savings, by removing the high-cost mining method of supplementary mining. We're doing that by having greater pumping efficiency, by reducing the diesel consumption that we have, and converting to the hydroelectric power that we have available to us.
You can see that in the graph on the right, that currently our diesel costs relative to electricity costs are, the ratio changes quite significantly as you move from today through to 2027. We also see the elimination of the trailing paddock system as removing diesel, maintenance costs on mobile fleet and production overheads as well. That is essentially how we balance the OpEx for the future. In summary, for Nataka, the long-term plan is to have this plant running at capacity, and that's what we believe we've achieved with this plan. There is an enabling nature here where consistent operations at concentrator design capacity gives assurance to HMC production and removes the risks and the outcomes that higher slimes has delivered to us in the past.
The mining feed constraint is gone. We see that it's gone in all mining conditions. There's 10% overcapacity in the hardest conditions. In normal conditions, that 50% overcapacity is what we expect to be able to give us consistent delivery. We've dealt with slimes in the process. We've dealt with slimes in the tailings storage and kept our first quartile position. The picture on the right, we can just walk through what actually this mine plan now looks like. You see where we are in April 2023 today. As we move through to, from the right side to the left on the gray path, we go past where our new tailings storage facility will be.
Before the dredge reaches the transition channel in Q4 2025, we will have sited our location for bringing in the new dredges, for bringing in the new plant that will do the upfront desliming, and we will have got the tailings storage facility commissioned. We get to the beginning of the transition path, Q4 2025. That takes us 18 months to two years to get through. By Q2 2026, we're starting to mine what we call the high-grade 20-year path. That will then open up ground for the in-path storage facility to come at that later date. The part where we still have a challenge, and which I'll move on to talk more about in a moment, is getting through the low-grade transition period, and that's going to be the focus of my next slide.
You'll see, if we remind ourselves of what we said in the Capital Markets Day of 2018, that we would have an ilmenite shortfall as we crossed that transition. We already had a view of this dredge path or something similar to it back in 2018. We also said that there would need to be additional capacity post 2027 to maintain the business as a 1.2 million ton ilmenite production rate. Those two situations haven't really changed very much. We've been spending time over the last few years, three years probably, looking at different options of how to close the gap and bring in that additional capacity for the future.
Today, what we really want to explain is that we believe that the expansion of WCPB is the right way to deliver those two on those two gaps. We believe that because the grades in Pilivili are the best grades that we currently mine. Whilst the gap is in place, it makes sense to close the gap with the highest grades you can so that you need the lowest capacity increase. Also the fact that there's a contiguous dredge path that goes all the way through to 2050 means that the increasing the size of this plant to 3,400 tons an hour doesn't bring big move costs or relocation costs forward in the future. We're moving directly into the next ore body.
We see that there are not the issues of bringing forward capital in the future to concern ourselves with. What we will be doing, we are going to add 1,000 tons an hour of additional capacity to WCPB, and that is sufficient capacity to close the gap and also bring additional HMC on future years after the gap is closed, so that we always have sufficient HMC in front of the mineral separation plant and can deliver the 1.2 million tons level. We do that firstly with mining. The mining process is currently a single dredge feeding that plant. We will bring one of the dredges from WCPA that has been replaced and take that to WCPB as a very capital efficient way of bringing 1,000 tons an hour of additional of additional capacity into the operation.
We will also upgrade the existing dredger to get some incremental benefits from the dredge that we already have. That will deliver the 3,400 tons an hour that we're looking for on average. The processing side is an upgrade really that just deals with having more of the equipment that we already have. There are no changes in the process, so to speak. It's just capacity upgrades. We need more screening, we need more spirals, and we need more tailings management in order to cope with the additional material that we're going to be mining. On the graph, on the picture at the bottom right there, you can see the bright colors are the things which are new.
It's really screens at the back, spirals, and a little bit of extra buoyancy to cope with the additional mass that will be on the plant. This plant is not a new plant. It's the existing plant, and it's retrofitting equipment to that existing footprint. Onto the returns that the project gives, and I'm really very happy with the way this project has come out because we see first of all that we do the physical things. We close the ilmenite gap, and we deliver good HMC production thereafter, about 250,000 tons per annum thereafter. It's front-weighted because of those high grades in Pilivili. The gap is closed by producing 430,000 tons of additional final products in the first three years.
Thereafter, steady quantities of heavy mineral concentrate so that we can deliver the 1.2 million tons. This is for a capital cost of $41 million. If you think, well, firstly, $41 million for those additional products, it's a two-year payback, which is very compelling, but it's delivered in the gap years. That gives additional benefit, immediate benefit. Maybe just to give you a sense of the value of this project, we built to, in 2019, the WCPC project for about the same money, for 500 tons per hour. This project, we're now going to deliver double that amount of capacity for in the ballpark same amount of money. The maximum benefit, obviously, the benefit of this project lies in closing the gap early.
Moving forwards, into the definitive feasibility stage is imminent. We will be moving through to get as an earlier commissioning date as possible to maximize those benefits. To pull this together and look at what does our longer term mine plan really look like once we've delivered both these two projects? You can see that we've well, from what I've described, we eliminate the bottleneck of the traditional bottleneck that we've had at Kenmare, which is that the mining fell short. We have the processing capacity in the mineral separation plant, but we couldn't fill it. We now will have sufficient HMC in all years going forwards. That allows us to be happy to deliver the 1.2 million ton production level.
The combined capital for the next three years to deliver that is $288 million. We're doing that whilst now mitigating the slimes that we have. We have an ilmenite gap that's closed. You can see there that in some years, we hope that we will have excess HMC production. Primarily, our goal is to have a healthy HMC stockpile in front of the mineral separation plant that gives us consistency of delivery because the feed is there to treat through the mineral separation plant. There is potential, if that becomes excess, that we can then start to look at future optionalities, such as further debottlenecking of the MSP and to convert more material into final product. I'm happy with the first quartile position that we're retaining.
It's, it's a great place to be, and it will help us through the commodity cycle to always be producing profitably. Maybe my last point is just to say that this process of the feasibility studies has been very thorough. It provides a lot of confidence in the plan, and that's what we really want to express today, is that we really think that we have found a mine plan here that can deliver with confidence going forwards. With that, Michael, I'm going to pass back to you to open the floor for questions.
Thanks, Ben. Remarkably, we're ahead of time, which hasn't happened, I don't think, before. Anyway, we'd love to sort of discuss this with anyone who has some questions and to answer those. Richard Hatch. Guys, this is being filmed, I think. Is it filmed or filmed? Yeah. As so, if we could use the mic for the questions, I think it'd be great. It'll go on the website afterwards?
Hi, Richard. Morning. Richard Hatc h, Berenberg. Two questions. First one, just on power, seems like you're gonna be using a lot more power, you know, A, and then upgrading, B. The big challenge with this mine over the, you know, the last 10 years has been supply of power into the mine and the variability of that. Are you comfortable with the grid actually coming into the mine, that you've got what you need to hit that 1.2 million ton per annum level? Or is that just something which the market's just gonna have to continue to factor in as a, as a risk factor? Secondly, just on the tailings storage, do you need to permit that? Is that anything that worries you, or are you comfortable with, with the timing of that on the critical path?
Do you want to...
No.
Okay.
I'll take those questions. The power situation at Moma has not really been ever about capacity of delivery of power. As the power, we believe that we have the power available. There may be a shortfall, as I explained, later, in 2028, and we'll need some minor upgrades there. On the reliability side, EDM have put a lot of effort into power resilience, reliability, through Dip Doctor, through the recent RUPS implementation. EDM have also been working on power reliability and are busy putting in a double line to eventually feed through to Nampula. We expect good reliability or improving reliability going forward.
We can't obviously say it's going to be perfect because, you know, it's not all a double line all the way to Moma. We do believe that, we will be in a better place going forward. The second question was.
On TSF.
On the Tail Storage Facility permitting. Yes is the answer. We do need a permit. The environmental impact assessment is currently started. We have looked and we are designing that tailings storage facility according to what's called the GISTM, which is the world standard on how to develop tailings storage facilities, bringing in all the knowledge that's been learned over the last five years since the Brazilian events. We believe that we have the right design process going on, and the permitting process follows with that. Yes, there will be a permit, but we believe that with our design location, which doesn't have communities downstream, doesn't have community resettlement in the footprint of the TSF, means that the permitting process will be more easier than it could've otherwise been.
If I could-
Do you wanna-
Just make a few complimentary remarks. Richard, in the early part of this year, there was a lightning strike on the line, and I think that's a risk that we're just gonna have to, that was very proximate to the project. You know, things like that happen, and that will be an ongoing risk that electrical storm activity can damage the transmission lines and stuff.
Unfortunately, I think we will still have to live with that. However, we have a good confidence that the combination of our Dip Doctor, the RUPS facilities which ensure that the mineral separation plant can continue to work, come what may, and the increase in capacity in mining, which will allow us build a larger inventory of HMC, will all in all ensure that the situation is better than it presently is, for sure.
Thanks.
Hi everybody, it's Colin Grant from Davy. Thanks very much for doing this. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, you mentioned at the start, you've invested about $1.4 billion to date in terms of development of the, of the mine. I'm just wondering what you think the replacement cost would be if you were to start from scratch today, or somebody was, and to build what you have, what that cost would have increased to. Presumably, it's moved higher with inflation over time, and, I'm just trying to get a sense of replacement cost within the industry today.
More, I suppose. What I would say is that in the development of the project, the original Wet Concentrator Plant A was bought secondhand in Australia and transported to the coast of Mozambique and landed on the beach and then reassembled, as was the Mineral Separation Plant. Within that $1.4 billion, there is significant saving from the very low cost secondhand purchase of that plant. There is, you know, all a significant increase in capital associated with doing anything these days. Well, certainly more than two, I would've thought.
Okay. Yeah, thanks. That's helpful. Just in terms of the cash operating cost point then, just from the graph you gave, it looked like there might be a slight reduction in cash operating costs per ton for the next few years out to 2026 on a small basis. It seems to be coming from labor costs. You've got an increase in your power share and a slight reduction in the labor share of those costs. Just wondering if you could just give us a comment just on the next few years in terms of the outlook for that, please.
I think what we would say is that we wouldn't like to commit to them going down at this point in time. It's nice to see that a model at this point in time is predicting them, maybe a little bit of potential there. I think to say that it will happen at this point in time, there are many variables out there. I would like to rather say that we expect that the costs will be flat.
Okay. Thank you.
That's probably a function of increase in production because a lot of the costs are fixed costs. If the production goes up, your cost per ton goes down.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Mart Byrne from JBM. Michael, you said that the Mineral Licensing and the Implementation Agreements are both renewable in 2027 or thereabouts. What sort of terms are they on? Are they on the same terms as the original ones, or are we going to spend this capital and then find that we're getting new governmental terms?
Our expectation is that they will be renewed on roughly the same terms. There might be some minor adjustments. Our expectation is that they'll be renewed on roughly the same terms.
Can we bring that forward before we spend the money, or are they just set in dates of, you know, the dates are set?
Well, the Implementation Agreement, which is due in November 2024, we have already initiated the process, and we're in process with government on that. There's nothing untoward has occurred in that process, Mart. It would be an interesting decision to say, "Okay, well, we're not going to move ahead with all of this stuff, just in case the government might behave erratically." So far, the government has behaved responsibly, and we don't believe that there should be any change in that. Accelerating them is not something you're considering or at the moment?
No, not really. No, not really.
Thanks.
Andrew Chubb, H&P. It's a question for Ben. Could you give a little bit more color on the technology or the sort of how you're gonna manage the slimes up front before they go to the TSF? How do you separate them?
Yeah, thanks for that, Andrew. The process is a conventional process. We already do it at WCPB. The plant receives the feed over screens, and the underflow of those screens, which contains heavy minerals and slimes, goes to a set of cyclone separators. Centrifugal force separates the sand from the water in a cyclone. Because of the fine nature of the slimes, the slimes goes with the water. That's a process which we currently use. It's currently at WCPB. It's not in the design of WCPA currently, but honestly, this is the way that we will deslime in the future. We've sized the cyclones to be able to cope with slime conditions up to 25%. We're taking that quite well beyond the average that we expect to see over the future.
That's great. Thanks. One for you, Michael. Has there been an impact by the issues in northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania with ISIS or derivative thereof?
None. None. We have no experience of any issues that have occurred near us or anywhere in the vicinity or even in some significant distance away. It's just not an issue for us, Andy, at all.
Hi, [Inaudible] from Liberum. A few questions, if I may. First of all, is there more clarity yet on the OpEx and CapEx cost of the lightning strike?
No, I don't think so.
We haven't yet concluded the analysis. It's quite a lengthy process of understanding the root cause of that lightning strike. We haven't completed that yet. We are incurring some additional costs. It's not material to the business to get those spares restocked. I don't have a cost to yet give you that would say how much that will exactly be.
We did give some guidance around the time of results. It hasn't really changed, which was high single digit millions. It falls into three categories: physical damage, effectively increased cost of working as a consequence of responding to it, and then the production loss during the period. We're going through the process with our insurers and the loss adjuster who visited site in March just to wrap all those up and effectively get them into the process. It does take time.
That's great, thank you. Given how well hydromining seems to be working, seem to work at Nataka, do you think you might also integrate that with the other WCPs? I can't remember whether they have them. I don't think they do.
In WCP at Namalope, you said?
No. I mean, what about B and C?
Presently, WCPB has very low mining phases. There's really nothing to, you know, to aim your hydro gun at. WCPC, potentially. The other thing about WCPC is that what we did was when we developed WCPC, we said, "Okay, we never want this Wet Concentrator Plant to suffer from not having enough ore supply." We sized the dredge in such a fashion to ensure that that was never the case. WCPC always has enough supply. We are thinking about putting those hydro guns onto the existing dredges at Wet Concentrator Plant A while it's active in Namalope. We're saying, look, if it does give a good effect, why not get that early and get the benefit of it?
The photograph you saw was in fact of a hydro gun on our existing dredges in Namalope, and it was very effective. Yeah, that is an operating plan.
Very good. Is this on? In terms of the storage of the slimes in the TSF, would the concept be that you let water evaporate or drain from, and therefore let the slime settle? If that's the case, then what happens if you have an extreme rainfall event? Will you get liquefaction? Is that going to be an issue?
The process by which the design is taking place is that when we take slimes to the tailings storage facility, the intention is to create a beach. As that slimes hits the floor, it creates a trailing beach, and that allows for water to drain downwards into the drains that we've designed to recover clean water back. Also there'll be some evaporative drying. To deal with extreme events, such as a big rainfall event or something like that, the walls all the way around the tailings storage facility are significantly high, and it's a natural valley with very steep sides. We don't foresee that extreme events would become a risk to the plant.
Rain that collects in there will be part of that, will land onto those beaches, and clean water will emanate to the sump or to the, or be drained through the tailings storage facility and collected in the, from those drains.
To say, Ewan, that particular valley was chosen because there's no habitation down valley of the tailings storage facility. People are not in the way.
Okay.
In harm's way.
That's wonderful. Thank you very much.
Well, at which point I think, we have some teas and coffees available for everyone to resuscitate themselves for the next part of this meeting. Thanks very much.
I'm actually, ...
Good morning, everybody. Today I'm gonna talk through our markets and really first give a brief overview of titanium feedstock market as that's our primary market. Around 75%-80% of our revenue comes from that part. Gonna talk to the current market dynamics and a bit of an outlook, and then talk about the trends we're seeing within that. Finally, look at our position in the market and how we're acting as a supplier to it, and then look at our co-product revenues as well, because that's been growing quite rapidly in recent years and have a nice picture to start on there is the zircon product and that is being, I think, emptied as we speak today. Starting off with the market and the titanium feedstock uses.
Titanium pigment is the biggest use for our products, ilmenite and rutile, and it's about 90% of the market. That's things like paint, plastics, paper, anything that needs really opacity and brightness. Titanium pigment is used as the preferred pigment, and really nothing of sub-substitutable quality has been discovered as of yet. We don't see anything coming. It's very important, really to everyday items, and that's why we've seen and continue to see a strong link between the demand for TiO2 pigment and the demand for... and global economic growth. Welding and other is 5% of the market, but another growing part, at the moment it says 5%, is titanium metal.
Michael touched on it, but we'll show later in the presentation what reasons why we think that's gonna grow and take up a greater part of the market in the coming years. In terms of the producers, I think there's, you can see us there. We're about 7% of the market through our ilmenite and rutile supply. And we are the largest supplier of ilmenite to the market. Others tend to upgrade it themselves, that'd be Rio Tinto and Tronox who are above us there. An important one to look at there is Chinese ilmenite as well. So it's 35% of global supply now, so very significant, but it does have quality issues, which we will talk to later as well.
Looking at the sources, I think, you know, everybody talks about chloride slags, synthetic rutile as potential other sources of feedstock, but really they are just upgraded ilmenite products. When we look at ilmenite or feedstock produced today, 93% of it is ilmenite, and the rest is rutile and leucoxene, so natural high-grade feedstocks. Both of those have a depleting profile. Ilmenite is becoming a more and more important factor in the market, growing to, I think, above 95% by 2026. It is the key player. The graph on the right is a simple value chain of how ilmenite can be consumed and is consumed. Sulfate ilmenite can be consumed directly in the sulfate pigment process. That is really historical way that a lot of pigment has been produced.
Chloride ilmenite can be directly in the chloride pigment process, that's only by 1 major producer. Chloride pigment, the most common route for chloride pigment production is taking ilmenite such as Kenmare's or integrated ilmenite and upgrading it to a chloride slag or a synthetic rutile. Ilmenite is about 50%, chloride slag is about 86% TiO2, and synthetic rutile is about 94% and 95%. Most chloride pigment plants need higher TiO2 products for the process, and that's why there's this intermediary part that has really a growing segment that we'll talk about. It's the same for titanium metal. They can't consume ilmenite directly, so they consume beneficiated ilmenite products. It's important at the top to think, you know, there's two ways that's done at the moment.
There is integrated producers, that is a mine that's beside a chloride slag smelter or a synthetic rutile kiln. There's also people like Kenmare who don't have a smelter beside it, so we would sell into that. We will talk a little bit about that later. What are we seeing at the moment in the market? You know, this comes from our internally developed supply demand model. To start with, we've got the existing supply is the green block. What we do is we look at all the production that we can see out there. We think we have them all in there, and we see what the forecast is for them using lots of different sources. We can see there's a generally declining profile.
We take our look on demand, look at GDP, urbanization, and we come up with a demand growth forecast, and this is how they match. Importantly, here is the gap on the right-hand side that it's around 1.5 million TiO2 units per annum is needed to be developed by 2027, and that's the equivalent of around 3 million tons of ilmenite. Significant investment needs to come into this market to fill that gap. We do look at new projects, potential new projects, and this is our estimation of what could come online in the intervening period. You can see there is still a deficit of supply. Not as big, that deficit still exists.
I think it's important to remember that there is a lot of uncertainty around new projects as well, and we've seen even in recent years, community issues, sovereign issues coming in the way of projects. To a point that Ben was speaking of earlier, filling that gap, you know, I think this is the reason why we're so keen on doing that. We believe that the demand is there. Our customers will need it. You can see 2024, that gap starts to emerge again, 2025. If we can't deliver that, our customers will be forced to look elsewhere or not produce. Coming from the same analysis is our estimation of inventories of titanium feedstock in supply chain, kind of in and around normal levels.
Really what we wanna show here is that the feedstock supply is not sufficient that we can see to build inventories anywhere near to the previous levels when there was a huge supply got from China, from Kenmare came, expanded. We saw other suppliers come into the market at the same time, and that led to a large inventory buildup. As that's been coming down, prices have gone up with that and we're struggling to see how enough new supply comes into the market to really build stocks again. To be honest, we see them really becoming short. That all takes into account the new supply we showed in the last graph as well.
Taking a look just at the key economic drivers that we're seeing at the moment, the graph on the left tries to compare TiO2 consumption per capita with GDP per capita. On the y-axis, you've got TiO2 consumption, on the x-axis, you have GDP per capita. The size of the bubble represents the population size. Over time, really what we've seen is as countries develop, become wealthier, they are consuming more pigment per person. People buying bigger houses, buying a car, buying a second car, more clothes, they're all consuming more and more TiO2. That's a trend that we expect to continue, and what's important here is we've got India and China mapped down, but you can look at Indonesia as well, Malaysia. These huge populations are the next ones to really go up that development curve.
As they do, we expect each of those people to be consuming more and more TiO2. We are already seeing it. You know, when we look at a country like India, it does not have a lot of pigment capacity itself. We've seen huge growth in pigment imports into India in the last 12, 13 years at 8%. On the right-hand side, construction spending is viewed as one of the key leading indicators for pigment demand. It's, you know, consumes paints, plastics, and we're seeing quite strong forecasts being put out on the construction side. That's countries investing in infrastructure, in housing. That's another reason why we see that as a positive development for demand for our markets. I will talk to you one more in a couple of slides, and that's titanium metal.
That's another growth sector that we're seeing. It's important now to look, if demand is going to grow and there's a need for more and more pigment, where is it going to come from? What we have seen really over the last 10 years is that it's all been China. The green columns here show pigment production outside China, and then the yellow is China. You can see since 2010 through to 2022, China has really been all of that growth. We expect that to continue, and that is forecast to continue. We do see a change. The orange line there is the percentage of that pigment production that is the chloride process. The chloride process tends to be more environmentally friendly. There's less waste associated with it.
The Chinese government have been really encouraging more and more of the chloride pigment process rather than the sulfate pigment process in China, and we can see the results of that. Why that's particularly important to us is that the domestic Chinese ilmenite, which we saw was a big part of the market, it is unsuitable for, it's unsuitable quality for the chloride pigment process. They're gonna need to import ilmenite or use high-grade feedstocks. It's gonna be positive for either beneficiated ilmenite or natural high-grade feedstocks. We're seeing similar on titanium metal. Titanium metal is probably the fastest growing market for us and for the market and is considered a critical mineral by E.U., the U.S., and in China as well.
you know, one of the large-- we're seeing many kind of growth markets for it, but one of the largest is the aerospace. both in the aircraft structure and in the engines, more and more titanium is being consumed per plane. In the engines, I think it's anticorrosive, and it can operate at high temperatures, so it allows the engine to run more fuel efficiently. again, comparing it to other alternatives, it is much lighter, so therefore, needs less fuel. it's a key part to what you see Airbus, Boeing, talking about, that they need to consume more titanium in their planes in order to make them more fuel efficient. thankfully, you know, there's been large backlogs in aircraft production for quite some time.
We are seeing increasing production from the major producers there, which will kind of continue to increase the consumption of titanium metal. We are seeing China lead that production. We've seen 25% pigment growth last year, or sorry, metal growth last year in terms of production in China alone, and that's a market we're quite exposed to. We were in China maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and met one of the major producers there. Again, we're seeing them build further capacity. I think this year alone, the current producers of titanium metal in China are adding another 20% capacity, so we don't see that slowing down. March was another record quarter in China, or record month in China for metal production. It's a strong market.
Again, same as chloride pigment, that domestic ilmenite cannot be used for this process. They need to use the upgraded chloride slag or synthetic rutile, and they cannot use domestic sulfate ilmenite for that process. Imported ilmenite is being used, and we expect that to continue. What does that all mean for us? I think it paints quite a good picture that with chloride pigment production growth and titanium metal production growth leading the way, you know, there's gonna be a need for either rutile or upgraded ilmenite feedstocks. Our analysis here on the top right shows that both... Well, rutile in particular is decreasing. Rutile is the green, and leucoxene is the yellow. We expect the supply of those to shrink. The orange is the ilmenite added by integrated producers of chloride slag and synthetic rutile.
They are the guys who can take it themselves, produce those high-grade products, and then sell them to chloride pigment or to titanium metal. Their supply of ilmenite is also decreasing, that is not the new source of supply for these markets. When we look at the graph on the right bottom, that's us taking into account, okay, feedstock demand is going to grow. Taking into account the supply shrinking from other sources, other feedstocks, what does that mean for non-integrated ilmenite producers such as Kenmare? Really, it shows much stronger growth, and it's double growth. It's been happening since 2010. That's indexed to 2010, we expect it to continue to grow at twice the rate of the general market. That's a market we're quite strong in.
Moving to the next slide, kind of thinking about how does Kenmare fit into this market, and how do we act with our customers? Really, how do we capitalize on those trends? We are seeing similar to, I think, the whole world at the moment, that the supply chain is becoming more complex and what customers require of their suppliers is becoming more complex. The green is kind of what has always been expected of us. We are seeing more requirements come on suppliers, and we think we're in a good position because of that. They've always needed security of supply, but what we've seen over the last three, four years in our industry is quite a lot of disruption to oil supply. They've needed us to be flexible to say, "Okay, well, we can't get supply here.
We've been a long-term customer of yours. Can we get it from you?" We've been able to do that with recent expansions. They're quite focused on sustainability. They continue to push us, which is great. We think we're leading on that side. They always need competitive pricing because otherwise they can't be competitive in their markets. They need quality, and they need quality over time, and that's a key thing that Kenmare can offer that others can't. You know, we have high-quality products, which we'll talk about in a minute, and we have the ability to tell them we're gonna be here for years to come, so we can grow with you, work with you. The quality point I think is important. I'm gonna take a minute to just talk through what we're trying to show here.
On the y-axis is the market broken down into different segments we sell into. Direct chloride pigment is taking ilmenite and producing chloride pigment straight away. Beneficiation, again, is producing chloride slag or synthetic rutile out of ilmenite, and we've split that between China and ex-China because they have slightly different requirements. The same on sulfate pigment, we've split that between China and ex-China. The column or the bars represent the TiO2 content they require for their production process. Finally, the lines are then our products. IP2, IP1, and IP3 are Kenmare's three ilmenite products. What this shows is that all of our products can be sold into at least 3 different markets. We can be quite flexible in who we want to sell to, and we cover all 5 of the markets.
We have exposure to it all, and we can really decide who's the fastest-growing, who do we wanna partner with, and most importantly, where is our product most valued? That's a trend that we've been following the last few years. When we talk about the beneficiation, that's the market that we saw as potential for high growth, one that valued our product, and this is the result really in the last, what, seven years of our sales into that beneficiation market. It used to be quite a small part of Kenmare sales. I think it was less than 100,000 tons in 2016. In 2021, it was over 500,000 tons of ilmenite sold into those beneficiators in China, in the rest of the world.
2022 was a little bit less because of the dry dock of our primary barge, it's an increasing trend, and we're already seeing strong demand in 2023 as well. That's again, the chloride pigment driving that, titanium metal driving that is increasing that. They are quite specific in their quality needs. They need relatively high TiO2, they need low calcium, they need low magnesium, and they need a relatively coarse grain size as well. That's something that Kenmare can offer really with all its products where others would struggle. We've become really a favorite and a key supplier to that market. Turning to co-products, the graph on the left really shows how important co-products are to Kenmare.
When we talk about co-products, we're saying zircon, our rutile, and our rare earths that are contained in the monazite product. The growth there is partly price, partly volumes, due to, I think, better recoveries at the mine of the zircon and the rutile products, and also the added margin of adding a new product of the mineral sands concentrate in 2019 to the market. Just to talk through zircon. While it's a smaller part of our revenue, we are a large player in the zircon market, and we're actually the fourth as of last year, the fourth largest. We see it having very similar dynamics to the titanium pigment market. You know, it's used in ceramics for factory, foundry applications, and all these are generally linked to construction, to development.
A positive development we're seeing on the zircon, particularly on the ceramic side, is you always would have associated zircon or ceramic tiles with your bathroom and small tiles. Recent technologies are allowing them to produce much bigger tiles, and that's increasing the amount of places ceramics can be used. It can be used in panels like walls, tables, everywhere, surfaces, furniture. They're being used in increasing the amount of spaces instead of marble, wood, which we think is going to be a big growth driver for the ceramics market going forward. In terms of our market or our customers, you know, we supply four different products that contain zircon, and we supply about three different regions with that zircon.
Importantly, it's the same with our ilmenite side, where we like to keep our long-term customers and, again, we're quite proud that we've had customers there buying our zircon since day one, since the mine started. The zircon market is quite interesting and different to the titanium feedstock market that's quite consolidated, and three producers are around 50% of the market. It used to be even higher, and they exhibit quite a lot of control over the market as a result. Then to touch on our newest product. In 2018, we started to produce a mineral sands concentrate, which contains monazite, and we started selling it in 2019.
The mineral sands concentrate contains monazite, which contains a lot of very important rare earth elements, and they're gonna be vital to the energy transition because of their use in permanent magnets. Permanent magnets are used in lots of different things, but their major use at the moment is electric vehicles and wind turbines. The key rare earth elements for that are neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium, all of which are contained in our monazite product. When we look at the potential growth in those industries, I think we are quite positive towards our sales of this product. Electric vehicles, you can see the graph on the right bottom there, expecting to see very strong growth in production. The permanent magnet used in the motor for those uses about half a kg to 1 kg of rare earth elements.
We don't see, because when you talk of substitutable goods, we don't see that as a likely advantage because those other permanent magnets are much heavier and require, so it's a lot more maintenance, frequently changing them. The same on wind energy. I think they're consumed, but these permanent magnets are consumed in the wind turbines, the generators for the wind turbines. Again, the thing that the neodymium in particular adds compared to other potential magnets is longevity. If you have an offshore wind in particular, which is the fastest-growing part of the market, you don't wanna be changing those magnets frequently because it'll be expensive and challenging. It is the preferred magnet to use there, that's another strong growth sector.
Just to finish, before I hand over, what are we seeing at the moment is we think we've got positive demand dynamics coming through for our markets. We spoke about that in the titanium feedstock. With that, we do think that there's insufficient supply being incentivized at the moment to meet that. When we look at how that demand is gonna be met on the pigment side, we think it suits our products. It's gonna be chloride pigment, and it's gonna need the type of ilmenite we produce to produce that beneficiated product, to produce that pigment. It's all growing in the places where Kenmare is strongest. You know, we work closely with those customers. We've partnered with them, we've supported them to grow. Now they are consuming a, like a significant part of our production each year.
We think we're well positioned for the areas the market is gonna grow as well. We think generally that we have very supportive conditions for our ilmenite and our zircon and rare earth products. With that, I think I'm back to Ben.
Thanks.
Thanks.
You've got me back for a couple of moments. I'm going to just walk you through some of the optionality work that we've been looking at how we might take the Moma Mine forwards, with future potential. As we saw from Cillian's last slide there, we're seeing more and more markets, more supportive market conditions. Our job as the executive running this company is to look for opportunities for this business to take advantage of those conditions ahead in the future. We're looking to be ready to grow should the opportunity arise and should the timing and the conditions be correct. How are we going to do that? Well, we have this enormous resource base.
It's on us to make the maximum value of that 100-year life of mine plus. Leverage the options of bringing forward some of that long life into earlier periods. We've been looking at one of our lease areas called Congolone, and as a preferred option for growth in the future. We've been conducting a pre-feasibility study now for about six months, and we're getting into the advanced stages of that pre-feasibility study. Before I walk you through what we've been finding, let me just give you a few of the ore body characteristics that we have in the Congolone ore body. First of all, Congolone is situated not immediately adjacent to our Moma operations.
It's about 90 km away. We have a significant river and town between us and the Congolone area, which means that transportation of products, if coming back to Moma, would need to be done by sea. In the work we've been doing, there is an adjacent area that's also described in our resource reserve table called Marrua. We've seen that we can actually link the Congolone resource up with the Marrua resource. That makes this piece of ground significantly more attractive because it brings quite a lot of tons. The combined tonnage there is 338 million tons, grading at 3.5% total heavy minerals content. On the right, you can see the grade distribution of that.
The areas which are largely reds and oranges there are the more well-defined areas by drilling. The reds and oranges signify mineralization that's above 3% in that graph. Thereafter, we have quite sparse drilling after about 12 years of mining, we think. Right now, at this point in time and through to the end of this year, we're actually drilling out the areas in the southern area of that graph to try and build up greater knowledge. We see there is potential to expand that 300+ million tons level even more. As I said, sufficient. If we take a conservative view on throughputs, we think a 2,000 ton an hour operation would deliver about 20 years of operations at those current levels.
One of the nice things that we've found with Congolone is that the quality of the mineralization is extremely good. Nearly all of the ilmenite produced here falls into the categories of IP1 and IP3, the high-grade feedstocks that are preferred in the market and feed not only direct chlorinatable ilmenite but also the beneficiation, whether to make slag or synthetic rutile. Over and above that, the ore body is quite strong on zircon content in the first 12 years comparable to the Pilivili deposit. In general, what we see with this deposit is that it's a really quite a strong value creative, accretive, should I say, deposit, and brings the potential for future value. Let's have a quick look at what it looks like. Congolone is really...
Maybe I'll go straight to the photograph. Congolone is typically made up of two distinct types of geology. In the background of that picture, you have what we call the Congolone main dune. It's a high dune. It's got good free-flowing sand content and also then some red sands as a core inside of it. You see that that is suitable for dredging and for dry mining, and we believe that quite good low-cost mining can be done with a large mining face there. Lots of opportunities to leverage what we've learned in the recent past with hydro guns as well, and that's being incorporated into this plan.
In the foreground, we have significant quantities of clean, white sand, good grades, and suitable entirely for dredging, very similar to what we currently do in Pilivili and what we previously did in Namalope as well. We see that that is really makes this quite an attractive ore body. The drilling, as I was saying, is very much focused through the first 12 years at this point in time. We believe that once we've completed this PFS and gone through that economic analysis, we'll have sufficient drilling there to transfer from out of resource categories and declare a Probable Reserve on the first 12 years of mining. As we go through beyond that 12-year period of mining, we'll be filling in the resourcing and getting more clarity on the years thereafter.
As I said before, 2,000 tons an hour seems to be the right size at this point in time. It delivers a 20-year life of mine. We think that that would be delivered through a combination of dredge mining and dry mining. Now, as we've talked earlier, we're replacing two dredges at WCPA. One of those dredges is going to go to WCPB, but that leaves another dredge essentially as free issue to a future growth option should we decide to do it. That means that we've got quite capitally friendly way of getting capacity again into a future, into a future deposit. The dry mining, well, we don't expect that that dredge would be able to deliver the full 2,000 tons an hour.
We would have fairly simple dry mining to support that, and may even be able to use some of the equipment that we already have from our existing operations that goes out of service once WCP A moves into Nataka. The development of a integrated dredge path is quite well advanced now, and we're moving into the next stages on that of how to cost the future mining of that deposit. On the processing side, the deposit is very much dredgeable. Therefore, we would operate in the similar ways that we currently do, where we have a dredger within a mining pond with a floating concentrator following it, giving us the advantage that we currently enjoy of those short distances of pumping run-of-mine feed from a mining device to the concentrator for...
We expect that what would happen in that first 12 years, we'd deliver around 400,000 tons of heavy mineral concentrate per annum. That's about, roughly speaking, equivalent to 300,000 tons of ilmenite. You know, that's a pretty healthy addition to the current expectation of 1.2 million tons. You know, that is the potential of this Congolone ore body over at least the first 12-year period. As I said before, we've got drilling underway to expand that resource base and hopefully take it beyond that timing. In terms of the progress of the project, as I said before, this is a development of an option. We don't know when the right time will exactly be at this point in time.
We haven't made any decisions on that front. What we've come to realize is that there are two distinct ways to take this project forwards. The first is to make that heavy mineral concentrate in Congolone and then ship it down to Moma and process it to final products at the Moma existing MSP. That way, you keep full control of your marketing and your product mix. That's maybe the more conventional way to do it. It does add some complexity, though, because we would need resources to do the shipping of that intermediate HMC down to the existing mineral separation plant. We'd need to expand the existing mineral separation plant and then have additional products, so more shipping capacity of our existing transshipment fleet to put it onto customer vessels.
We have also been lookingAnother option, and no decisions are made, but a simpler way of doing this would be to perhaps sell the HMC directly from Congolone. There is downstream capability to do that. You obviously lose some... potentially some of the control on the products that you're making and the, and you're selling on a concentrate rather than final products. We have existing customers who have capacity to do that, and we're further exploring that right now. There'll be a cost analysis done, and we will decide which of those is the preferred way forward. The PFS, pre-feasibility study, is underway and is due for completion by the end of the year. We've already also scoped out how to do an environmental impact assessment on this area.
The main mining dunes are not covered with housing. In fact, as you saw from the photograph, much of it is bare dunes, not even with agriculture taking place on it. We do have some housing on the inland side and require servitudes to keep a safe distance away from those areas. That will be the main focus of our environmental impact assessment on that area. Should the PFS be finished by the end of this year to give you a sense of our timings and potential, we think that it would take us about a year to deliver a definitive feasibility study and about 18 months or so to bring this mine into a reality, should that decision be taken.
It's important to say we're developing optionality here. We want to be agile. We want to be in a position to be ready should the time be right. We're not presenting a plan today to execute on. The future direction of the business is really dependent on the returns that come from this project when we've done the costings and the capital allocation process that we will go through. That's really what I wanted to talk about on this. I think it's the words capital allocation are a good segue for Tom to come forward and take us through shareholder returns.
Thanks, Ben. Good afternoon. What I'd like to do is just take you through, you know, all of the sequence of planned activities that you've heard, the CapEx schedules that Ben has outlined, and the opportunities that gives us, how that flows through into our thinking about capital allocation and shareholder return. I suppose, as we do that, it's probably important to think about the context which Ben and Michael have outlined. You know, we're moving into an area that represents 77% of our reserves. We're hoping to do it in a way that keeps us in the first quartile.
The investments we make, in contrast perhaps to the B move a couple years ago, are predominantly in equipment that will support the operation, enable us to enhance and maintain our output, and enable us to kind of build on or continue to retain the reliability, flexibility that Cillian was talking about in terms of how we engage with our customers, many of who have been with us for a long, long time. I suppose the first place that our investments will go is into that capital. You know, the transition to Nataka is nondiscretionary.
It's something we need to do to perpetuate and sustain the business, we want to do it in a way that's very carefully planned, very technically assured, and effectively cements our ability to operate there for the decades that we will be there. To do that, we will have resource to our existing resources, our production, our revenues, you know, which have grown significantly in recent years. I mean, the financial performance of the business has accelerated over the last number of years, we're now in a very comfortable position of being net cash, and that net cash position is growing throughout this year as we advance into the capital process. We've had debt facilities, and I'll talk about what our plans for those might be.
Obviously, we all need to do all of this in the context of maintaining a level of return to shareholders that matches their expectations with our abilities. I think that's something that we're planning to do as well. They're the things we have to do. Ben outlined some of the things we might also want to do. Incremental growth should the opportunity arise, should the market dictate it, should we have the resources to pursue it. Additional capital returns, many of you will recall the share buyback we undertook back in 2021. Considering additional capital returns in the form of special dividends or share buybacks is something we'll always look at.
M&A, I mean, we have many resources to pursue within the business, but equally, it's important, you know, certainly when we think about the gaps that are there that Cillian spoke about in terms of supply and the uncertainty that attends some of the projects that may fill that supply, that if opportunities come our way that are accretive, that we are flexible enough or opportunistic enough to pursue them. Just to kind of flick forward and just look at some of the building blocks of that. Prior to our last significant capital investment phase, we renegotiated our debt facilities in 2019. At that point, we negotiated a term loan and a revolving credit facility totaling $150 million. That amount is roughly 0.5x our 2022 EBITDA.
In itself would be a comparatively conservative gearing level for a business with our revenue generation capability. Over the last number of years, we've been paying that down. We're paying it down in seven h half yearly repayments. We've already made one of the repayments for 2023, excuse me. We're also talking to our existing lenders who've been with us since 2019, about what the options might be for the future to more closely match our debt availability and our debt servicing profile with our potential cash needs over the next number of years as we invest.
We will certainly investigate the option to refinance our facilities during the course of this year to more closely match the maturity profile with the investments that we're making, and potentially to change the mix between term loan and a revolving credit facility to maximize our flexibility. I think it's important obviously, to emphasize the fact that the credit metrics of Kenmare have improved significantly since 2019. You know, we're in the fortunate position of being able to negotiate our facilities while we're net cash. As they used to say in Ireland about thatched roofs, we can fix it while the sun is shining. I think that puts us in a good position for, to execute on the plans that my colleagues have spoken about.
That's kinda thinking about the CapEx, thinking about the debt facilities. Thinking about the dividends. you know, we first announced our intention to pay dividends in 2018, made the first payment in 2019. The initial policy was 20% of profit after tax. Obviously, we managed to continue to grow both the absolute amount and the proportion of profit after tax that we pay out, and indeed, to look through individual years like 2020 to maintain payouts as well. In parallel with that, we've managed to undertake a share buyback, in 2021, which reduced the number of shares in issue by 15.6% and obviously enhances the dividend on a per share basis.
You know, the performance in 2022 enabled us to increase the absolute level of dividends by 66% to just over $50 million. We're conscious though, for all the positive trends and themes that we see, pricing is still a shade down in 2023 on what it was in 2022. We're moving into a capital investment phase, so it's important to provide some guidance on how we'll think about dividends, how we'll provide for them, and what we feel about their current level as we move forward into that investment phase.
What we're doing is, or proposing to do is we're proposing to modify our dividend policy to provide stability, to enable us to look through an individual year or an exceptional event, to adjust to market conditions and to reflect the fact that, you know, having paid out or preparing to pay out just over $50 million in respect to 2022, we're comfortable that that level is sustainable at that absolute level for the medium term. You know, clearly the world changes, that may change, but based on what we see today, based on what we believe about the business and how we feel about our plans, we're comfortable with that.
Similarly, in recognition of the fact that, as I just said, market performance may move around, that policy or that commitment will be within a range of 20%-40% of our profit after tax. We will always look at what our financial resources are, what our investment is, how what our absolute levels of gearing are, and make sure that we maintain conservative gearing, but we believe we should be able to maintain our dividends at around the current level while we do that. We'll also look at additional capital returns should cash build on the balance sheet or other opportunities arise. You know, we may not necessarily repeat the 2021 tender offer, but there are a number of other ways to pursue that sort of an objective.
Finally, if we look at how the group is configured at the moment, and in particular, how cash flows up to fund, create the distributable reserves to fund those dividends, there is likely to be a tax exposure on the subsidiary dividends remitted from Mozambique to Kenmare Resources PLC. Prior to 22, we had utilized the trading profits that sit within the top company or the proceeds of capital reconstructions of some of the subsidiaries to create the distributable reserves. The primary route for creating those reserves as we move forward is trading dividends up from the subsidiaries based on our operational performance. Those dividends, under current Irish tax law, are likely to attract tax at the differential between the effective rate in Mozambique and the Irish tax on investment income of 25%.
You think Ireland is a low tax environment, not in all cases, and certainly for investment income for mining companies, it's a 25% rate. The effective tax rate in Mozambique does move around from year- to-y ear, depending on performance, depending on where we are in the investment phase of capital allowances. In general, the effective tax rate has been of the order of 15%. As we bring up funds to fund dividends, assuming that they were equivalent, for example, to the $50 million in respect to 2022, approximately a 10% tax charge would be levied on that, and that impact, if we do nothing, will continue.
We are looking at how we may mitigate that. That would be, you know, solutions would include or would be likely to include restructure of the Kenmare Resources PLC group. Clearly, that's quite a significant activity, and we need to take a lot of advice, and ensure that we're properly positioned before doing it, but we are making those preparations or investigating the options. It may have additional benefits in that it may enable more efficient dividend withholding tax and stamp duty arrangements. The primary objective is to avoid that incremental tax take on our dividend flow, if we can. In summary, I think the business is in good shape.
The financial performance of the last number of years has enabled us to make plans in a very orderly manner and the significant pre-preparation, pre-testing and technical investigation enables us to believe we can make the investments that we've talked about today in a confident manner. We're structuring our finances to enable us to do that and to do it with a margin of safety, and to do it at conservative levels of gearing, and to do it in a way that enables us to maintain shareholder return in a range that people have become accustomed to. You know, we're looking to make sure that we structure the group in the right way for the decades that lie ahead. With that, I'll hand back to Michael to sum up.
Thanks, Tom. Okay. I thought I'd just sum up a little bit. I think, firstly, thanks everybody for listening so attentively through, you know, a long set of presentations. I hope it was helpful. For us, we think that, the plans for Wet Concentrator Plant A and Wet Concentrator Plant A's mining capacity is transformative for this company. We really look forward to the point where we will have that very significant additional dredging capacity, and that the combination of that dredging capacity with high pressure monitors, water monitors, gives us the opportunity to take full advantage of those fine high mining phases that we will be presented with in Nataka.
It will be a, you know, a much different mining operating model that we adopt when we are there. With the inclusion of the desliming circuit on the concentrator plant itself, we will no longer have the utilization issues, the recovery issues, the product management issues that we presently have with Wet Concentrator Plant A as well. The combination of all of that, we believe we will have more consistent, more predictable, and higher volume mining operation than we presently have. It's that lack of predictability with associated with the slimes has caused issues in ourselves be able to know exactly what we're gonna produce over the next quarters.
We're delighted that the outcome is an outcome where we are able to say with good confidence that we will be able to maintain our first quartile position in the industry cost curve. That was critically important. It was a central objective of the long, expensive pre-feasibility study that we did. There are inevitable additional costs that arise when we move to Nataka. It's further away, and therefore, we have to pump the stuff, the heavy mineral concentrate further to get back to our mineral separation plant, water supply, et cetera, et cetera. It's all a little bit more expensive.
We were conscious that these would be increased costs, but then we're delighted to be able to say that we're going to be able to decommission, you know, a very expensive heavy mobile equipment fleet and not use that in Nataka at all. That's a very positive counterbalancing situation and it allows us to be confident that those costs will stay low and keep us in the first quartile. The ancillary benefit of that, of course, is that we change from burning diesel to using hydro-generated electric power, and consequently our carbon dioxide emissions go down. That's a great start. We're delighted by that.
The feasibility study was long, the pre-feasibility study was long. We believe it's come to, you know, a positive outcome. With Wet Concentrator Plant B, we believe that this is, you know, a project with really great financial metrics. It has a very rapid payback, but then continues to deliver HMC, which will allow us to create a significant inventory of HMC sitting in front of the mineral separation plant. Which will address the point that Richard raised, which is we can never be completely confident that the situation from any particular day will be absolutely stable. Now, we put a lot of equipment into the project, which means that we can absorb some instability, but it's a great comfort to have a large inventory of HMC sitting there.
With our UPS, the mineral separation plant will continue to operate whatever happens in terms of the incoming bar. WCPB upgrade also is a very serendipitous usage of the dredge that is becoming free from WCPA. Again, that affects the financial metrics because we don't have to buy a new dredge. That dredge goes down and provides additional supply into WCPB. That's again, a very useful additional situation. Cillian mentioned when we went to China last about three weeks ago, that we encountered a very vigorous industry in China, where everybody is busy building new capacity in the titanium metal area, new capacity in the ilmenite beneficiation area, and new chloride pigment capacity.
It's really quite fascinating Vigorously and aggressively, this is all being pursued there. They all need imported ilmenite. In fact, it's very interesting there. You know, they was providing them with quite a quandary as to why the mining industry was not also building at the rate that they were. They just really struggled to understand why we're not. Anyway, we'll see as things move along. We see the value chain as not having excess inventory right through the value chain. We feel that supply growth is not sufficient to build up that inventory unless there's a significant downturn in demand, and those don't happen normally. Look, I mean, it's always possible, but it's not really likely without some exceptional event.
That being the case, we see the environment as relatively supportive of the prices of the products that we're producing as we're looking forward through the period of this review. we're confident that we will continue to operate in a supportive environment for the next period. With regard to shareholder returns, Tom said that we were comfortable with the absolute level of shareholder payout in 2022 as a number that we can seek to continue to pay as we move forward. Even though we are in a period of significant Capital expenditure, and that's something that we'll hope that the board agrees with us. You know, it's. We feel that that's a reasonable level of payout.
If things go better, there's always the opportunity for some form of share buyback, which was very successful the last time, and which would have the, you know, if we have the opportunity, we would very much like to pursue again. Finally, the presentation from Ben on the growth opportunity of Congolone is, for us, quite exciting. The project looks great. It's expanding all the time. We feel that there is good potential that the resource base will expand with the drilling program that we envisage during the year, and we look forward to giving you guys an update on this as an option, just an option for the growth of the company as time goes on.
Thanks everyone very much for your kind attention, this morning, and we're ready to take questions on the everything that we've discussed so far.
Thanks very much. Colin Grant again from Davy. A couple of questions just following on from the presentation you've given. Firstly, just on the titanium metal market, you mentioned 12% of revenues coming from that. Could you talk a little bit about whether that's above or below group margins coming from that? Also where that 12% has come from. Presumably it's grown as a share of revenues within the group over time. Just gives a sense as to the trajectory of that within the overall group. Just start with that, please.
Yeah. Thanks, Colin. It would be above group margins. I think we have always sold to that market. It's mostly our sales there are through the beneficiation. The titanium metal producers wouldn't be our direct customers, they'd be customers of our customers. We have always sold to them in Japan, in particular, has historically been the biggest region, growing in Saudi Arabia and in China. We've been growing as the production in Saudi Arabia and China, in particular in the last five years, has really come on with that. Yeah, I think most of the sales into that market would be currently on spot basis. You know, spot prices have been probably above average levels in the last few years, we have been doing well off that part of the market.
Great. Thanks. Just a second question then to do with supply. There's been a limited amount of new supply that's come in this cycle relative to past cycles, and we've seen quite a strong increase in underlying prices for ilmenite and others. Where do you see the kind of the price level has been critical in terms of new supply coming on stream in the market? Is it somewhere around $300 a ton, or is it higher, or how do you see that at the moment?
Yeah, I think it's like, it's always a difficult one to try and estimate because it depends on so many other factors and products as well. I think what we have seen in the last probably few years now is that at the current levels and the recent levels of prices, we haven't seen enough supply coming online. Even now, when we look out and there are projects starting to move, we still don't see them, the ones that are starting to move, as sufficient to meet that demand. I don't think it doesn't look to us like prices have gone way above incentive level because we haven't seen it incentivizing enough supply. What that level is difficult to say. I don't think we're seeing those levels really consistently reached yet.
Okay. Thank you.
Morning. Thank you, gentlemen. It's Peter Mallin-Jones from Peel Hunt. Two questions around one M&A and one the potential longer term growth options. Looking at the growth option to start with, it seems a trade-off almost as more CapEx going into the MSP to expand that to give you more control over the product you sell and therefore the prices you're getting versus lower CapEx and less control because you're selling HMC for a lower $ per ton value. Are you able to give an indication of where you're leaning on that sort of trade-off, or is it far too early to start going one way or the other?
I think it's far too early to start going one way or the other, Pete. I think you've encapsulated that trade-off very, very succinctly.
Okay. Understood. Then on the M&A front, again, you know, thinking slightly longer term, the obvious operational expertise is in the mineral sands industry. You've also been in country in Mozambique for 30 odd years operating pretty successfully, therefore you have good intercountry relations with government officials, so on and so forth. Are you wanting to stay in the mineral sands but maybe think about other countries, or use the Mozambique experience and look at other commodities within the country you know very well and are well-known in?
That's a very interesting question. I think that with the program projects that we have outlined, there, Pete, that we will be very busy for the next few years just delivering what we have outlined. Nonetheless, we review every single titanium minerals project anywhere that we see. Jeremy's department reviews them all, compares them with what we believe are the financial metrics of Moma before we would ever make any investment decision, either at Moma or anywhere else. We run an ongoing review of the situation with all those other projects. As yet, we have not encountered any that provide us with a better, the better return than the ones that we're looking at Moma.
Yes, we've been in Mozambique for a long time. We have reasonably good government relations because we operate as a, you know, a successful producer there and operate our agreements carefully. You know, we don't have a relationship where we go to dinner with the minister and he says, "Oh, by the way, I've got this other project down the road." We have a normal functioning relationship between a regulator and, you know, an operating mining company within that country. As yet, we're not aware of any particular project that is available in the country that has got the characteristics that would suit us as a developer.
Thank you.
Morning, Richard Hatch, RBC. Not RBC anymore, Berenberg. Jeez, it's only been five years. First question is, just on the BD in Congolone, I'm just interested, are you gonna factor in considerations such as Scope 3 emissions if you produce an HMC versus upgrading the MSP? Is that sort of forming part of your thinking? Obviously, if you produce something that is slightly less beneficiated, that's got some Scope 3 emissions down the line. Can you just recap us, if you aren't in a position to give us kinda CapEx and such like, on your hurdle rates, IRRs and such like, and how much you're spending on the moment on that project?
Firstly, you know, at this stage, we haven't brought in that thinking of Scope 3 emissions into our evaluation. Our evaluation is at an early stage. Did you ask for financial metrics on the Moma project, Richard?
just kinda like, you know, can you just give us an update on, you know, where your head's at on, you know, if you bring this project to the board, you know, what kind of IRR hurdle rates are you kind of thinking about that it would need to get to get progressed?
No. I can't really, I can't really share that with you. What I would say is that we have not brought a project to board as yet. I think the lowest IRR of any project that we've brought to board has been 36%.
Okay. Thank you. Cillian, just a question, a couple of questions on the market. Firstly, on slide 35, you've got this global construction spending going up 7.1% compound over the next sort of eight years. If we flatlined that, which perhaps might be bearish, but if we did, what would that do to the demand profile that you show in your slides? Secondly, the recovery in China at the moment seems to be very consumer-led rather than sort of construction-led or industrial production-led to the, you know, bay of the iron ore price. What does that sort of mean for, you know, market dynamics at the moment for TiO2? How do you see that playing out over the next sort of couple of years?
Yeah. To the first question, I think, trying to do some quick math in my head, but, look, I think construction we do see as a key driver for architectural coatings, industrial coatings, plastics. They're huge markets for titanium pigments. If you did flatline that, of course, there's no development in those things, that's gonna be a large part of the demand flatlined. Now we see titanium metal outside of that. We see inks, fabrics outside of that, they're smaller parts. We do need growth in construction and housing, really to feed into the demand for titanium feedstocks. I think that would be, yeah, no growth in construction, no growth in industrial activities are gonna be negative to demand for our products. Second question on China.
I think yes, most of it has been consumer-led, but I think you have to look as well. You know, titanium pigment is the, like, the largest part of it is produced in China, but a lot of that is then exported or the products produced in China are then exported. It is a large export market as well, and we are seeing them take an increasing portion of that, and I think last month was again a record for chloride pigment. Last month was a record for titanium metal. We are seeing our markets rebound quite strongly at the moment. We're seeing that demand for our products as well. Downstream, like we do expect that the government is trying to encourage development there.
We do expect to see housing not return to the old boom, but we do expect it to improve on what we're seeing now, and they are investing in infrastructure as well. All that will boost demand in country as well, but it's the combination of both, which is making us confident towards that market at the moment.
Your recent trip to China gave you confidence in the housing market and a rebound there.
That it will recover. It will start to improve. Not, I think... Look, we will see, but it is gonna be challenging for it to take the same proportion of the GDP growth as in the past, but they do expect it to steadily improve now. The worst seems to be past.
Thanks.
Jeremy, just behind you. Justin.
Hi, Justin Baring, JBM. Just a couple of questions. The first sort of maybe on that is long-term prices. I mean, you might not want to give us the long-term price that we're using for all these studies and what have you, but can you just talk us through how you think about where prices might be long term relative to where they are now and how you come to those sort of levels? Secondly, offtake agreements. Is that something that we might consider at all with our customers if they wanted to lock in offtake or are we happy with the spot relationship or a contract relationship? What's the thought on that?
Yeah. I'll take the second question first. We have a mix. You know, we sell primarily to China on spot, the rest of it would be offtake agreements and periodic price agreements, but volume fixed. China, to me, we talk about spot. We kinda say it and it sounds uncertain. You know, when we talk about our spot market to China, it's long-term customers who have been the leading the growth and we've been growing with them. We have strong relationships. It's not that we go to the market and say, "Okay, who can take material this time?" It's, we're trying to work with these customers to sell to them. There is quite a lot of certainty behind their requirements and really a shipping schedule with them through the year. I think I answered the second one.
The first one, I think it's a similar answer. There's lots of other factors that come into play and other projects. I think an important factor that we haven't talked about is, you know, when we look at other projects that have the potential to be developed and probably the better projects in the market, you know, there are other factors that are out there that are stopping them being developed. That again, means the hurdle rate has to be higher for other projects because the quality of them is not as good. We're seeing sovereign risk, community risk, environmental risk, really in the last two, three years, having an impact on some of the better projects out there not being developed, which I think is a positive for us.
Where that level is, I think look, we have internal views, but I don't think we can really share them where we think long-term prices will be at.
Just to do the FD bit, Justin, where we think prices might go is not how we assess the price we use to assess projects. You know, our internal investments, obviously we're significantly more conservative in trying to develop the IRR projections that underpin the investments we wanna make.
Ewan?
Hi, [Inaudible] from Liberum again. I was interested to see that you mentioned dysprosium as being among one of the valuable minerals in your rare earth suite. Are you able to provide us with a breakdown of the split of the various rare earth elements for SAT?
For our product?
Yeah.
Yeah. It's on my last slide. Do I know them off by heart? No, you can see dysprosium is, I think it's small content, but high value.
Sorry, which slide are we looking at?
44. Sorry, slide 44. That graph on the right top is the breakdown of the rare earth elements in our monazite.
Okay. Do you have the grade of the total rare earth oxide grade in there?
Yeah. Our mineral sands have about 20% monazite, and of that, 60% of it is roughly rare earths, and then that's the breakdown of the rare earths contained.
Very good. Have you ever considered possibly going downstream in terms of beneficiation, whether for ilmenite or whether for the monazite? Not necessarily in Mozambique, given the power challenges.
With ilmenite, we have thought about beneficiation from time to time and had discussions with some of our customers from time to time. We have never decided to move ahead with a beneficiation project for ilmenite. As far as rare earth elements are concerned. We do not have sufficient supply from our own operations at the present moment to justify, you know, a significant investment in downstream processing capacity that's necessary to create the rare earth elements that we could then sell on, or rare earth oxides. Consequently, we would then be in the market buying them.
Since the problem in the market is that they're rare and they're expensive to buy and difficult to get, you know, we're just creating a problem, while it seems to us that it's a better thing to sell.
As an alternative to investing in downstream facilities of your own, is there the possibility of perhaps some sort of profit participation downstream? Some of the other commodity segments, like lithium, people have been starting to do that, where they sell concentrate but they participate in the profit downstream.
Yeah. I think that you would consider that in a circumstance where if you didn't feel that there was an effective market for the material. If there is an effective market, surely that market will find the true value of that material in its further use. Consequently, you'll get your value. We believe that the market is effective, and that we do get a reasonable representation for the contained minerals within the mineral sands concentrate.
Thanks.
Hi. Just a couple of general questions. Firstly, in the annual report, there was, like, some mentioning about, like, shortage of inventories. I just want to know, like, what's the current inventory health, and what is the healthy level of inventory perceived by the company?
Are you referring to final product inventories?
Yes.
I think we started the year with slightly higher final product inventories than we'd previously expected, as really it was a feature of the dry docking of the Bronagh J at the end of last year. As we have gone through Q1 and our production was shorter than we'd expected, we saw that and we saw that those inventories were drawn down. I think, you know, current inventories are probably a little bit lower than we expected at that time, but they've still got healthy inventories on site. I don't know whether you want to talk any more on that.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think when we look to, like, quarter two, you know, we're partway through it now in our order outlook, like, I think our inventories are probably on the low side rather than the high side we started on now. Two healthy inventories, I think, like, somewhere around a month.
It turned out that having those very healthy inventories at the start of the year was very helpful because we got hit by a lightning strike, which knocked our production for about 10 days. Even after that, it was a little bit weak. We were able to continue to supply the market with that inventory and draw it down.
That's very helpful insight. Thank you. Just one more question. Also in the annual report, you did mention, like, some new balance sheet strategy to keep, like, a positive net capital. Would you mind elaborating on that?
Well, I think Obviously, we've talked about the fact that we're moving into a capital investment phase, and it's very normal to match that sort of capital investment phase with, you know, financial capacity in the form of debt or potential debt. All of our debt, current debt rolls off between now and the end of 2025. We're just gonna likely amend that, extend it, and match it more closely to the investment cycle that we're going into over 2023 to 2026. Effectively, you know, you invest, effectively you pay down the debt that has funded those investments.
The extent to which we need to draw all of that debt obviously depends on performance, you know, and pricing between now and then. We've built in quite a significant margin of safety, and obviously, our objective is to maintain conservative overall gearing. We're starting from a position of strength. We're net cash. We'll be, you know, higher net cash than we were at year-end by the time we begin these significant investments. I think, you know, I suppose the comment we made in the annual report is the balance sheet of the company is in very good shape. It leaves us well placed to enter this phase of investment.
We're kind of putting the various supports and enablers into that to match the fact that there may be peaks and troughs in terms of the CapEx over that phase.
Thank you.
Well, if that's the last question, I'd again like to thank everybody for allocating the time to come and listen to us this morning. Thanks, everyone. That wrap it up at that. Thank you very much.