Thanks for sharing the AGM video link.
I have done a transcription of the first part of the presentation as I like to be able to read what was said. If I get a chance I will look at the next part of the presentation particularly the funding of Dubbo.
(12:01)…Thank you Ian and good afternoon to everyone in attendance today, both those who have joined us in the room and those who are joining us virtually. I really thank you for taking the time to attend our 2022 Annual General Meeting. It is a real pleasure for me to be here, this is my first opportunity as CEO to provide you with a company update. I am going to start with the standard disclaimer, which I will just encourage you to have a look at it later on.
I do want to start today with a review of the fundamentals of ASM, there have been a number of things that have been changed since I came into the role as CEO but our purpose, our vision and our mine to metals approach have not changed. So you know, we are building a rare earths and critical minerals business, to provide the high tech metals that are used to solve that challenges of both today and the future. And that mines to metals approach is core to our strategy, it start with our Dubbo mine in NSW where we will be mining and also separating and refining resource into a number of high purity oxide products. And then we take it to the first of our metal plants in Korea where we will then metalise that oxide into purity metals and then alloy them into alloy products, that are the feed products into the high performance magnets that are then used for a number of advanced applications, electric vehicles, the wind turbines, the solar power etc. Our customers are global customers, and we envisage in time that we will replicate the plant that we are developing currently in Korea so that they are co located with our customers, as we establish our customers as offtake for Dubbo in time. But our focus to start with is really on delivering these two key projects. Our Dubbo project where we do have a suite of products that come through the processing facility that we have designed there, we have our light rare product which is our neodymium and Praseodymium oxide. But we also importantly at Dubbo have our heavy rare earths, the terbium and dysprosium, and while they are in small volumes, they are very high value products and they are something that is very special about the Dubbo project because not all rare earth projects contain those heavy rare earths. But another advantage that the Dubbo project has is that we also have other critical minerals, the Zirconia, Hafnia and the Ferroniobium. So that gives us a diversity of revenue streams for the project that will strengthen the economics of this project through the cycles.
I will take in a bit more detail about the progress we have made with the Dubbo project over the last 12 months, but I think the key here is that we did significant work on updating the flow sheet, simplifying it, improving it for improved ESG performance as well as to reduce the operating costs of the project, and we released that optimisation study in Dec 2021. And then since that time we have awarded the ECP definition contract to Hyundai Engineering and we are currently working through talking with strategic investors and potential offtake partners, and we are at that point now where we are securing the financing to be able to start construction.
One of the things that is quite unique about ASM, is that in parallel with doing work of getting the Dubbo project up, we have committed to building our first metals plant in Korea. And we have got three areas of focus for that metals plant in Korea. The first and the one that we have really prioritised to get constructed and commissioned initially is the metalisation of the light rare earths, so the neodymium and praseodymium metal. And that work we are using an enhanced established technology to metalise that product. We have installed the first of those furnaces, we have commissioned them and we have successfully delivered our first product to our customers in Sept of this year. Which was a point of great pride for our Korean team. We also have being constructing and commissioning the first of our strip casters, and this is the equipment that takes that metal that we have made the neodymium praseodymium and adds alloy to it to customer specification as a feedstock into the magnet producers and we are just in the final phases of commissioning that equipment at the moment, with the expectation that we will have saleable production ready by Christmas. So that is the first piece that we have been focused on. But the other area that is really exciting that we are doing there in the Korean Metals plant is developing our own inhouse innovated metal technology which we call the LK process. And this in time will be the process we use to metalise that heavy rare earths from Dubbo, the Terbium and Dysprosium and also what we will use to metalise the Zirconia and Hafnia. But to start with we are commissioning this technology with Titanium. We have chosen Titanium for two reasons; one is it is a cost effective and ready accessible third-party feed for us to be using prior to Dubbo coming on line but also because we really see an opportunity to be a disrupter for the established process that is used for the metalising Titanium. The Kroll process is the traditional process for Titanium metalisation, it is a very old process, many decades old and quite out of date. It is environmentally impactful, it has high levels of chlorine that are used in the process and is also very energy intensive, so it has high levels of emissions. And what we have got with the LK process is we have a process that is low capital, it is low footprint, it is extremely low emissions, less than 20% emissions compared to the Kroll process, does not use chlorine at all and we this as a real opportunity to, as I said before to disrupt the established way that Titanium is produced. So, we are working on all of those things in our Korean Metals Plant.
Despite the massive rise and fall of the ASM price over the last year, I still see the massive potential and will continue to buy with the price around or below the current levels.
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