2 Impact Minerals Ltd Annual Report 2023 Chairman’s Letter Dear Shareholder, This year was a transformational year for your Company as we announced a major change in strategy with an agreement to acquire an 80% interest in the Lake Hope Project, an advanced High Purity Alumina (HPA) project located 500 km east of Perth in the Tier 1 jurisdiction of Western Australia. Lake Hope is a dry playa lake containing a unique deposit of fine-grained, high-grade aluminous clays in the top few metres of the lake bed that offers many natural advantages for both mining and processing and which Impact believes will lead to it being one of the lowest cost producers of HPA globally. The deposit will allow a shallow, very low-cost, free-digging mining operation that will have a minimal environmental footprint, with the material to be trucked offsite to an existing industrial yard for processing. This should allow for a relatively straight forward approvals process. Previous bench-scale metallurgical test work has produced HPA via a disruptive sulphuric acid hydrometallurgical process that is more than cost-competitive with other producers both in Australia and globally. In addition, a maiden mineral resource of 3.5 million tonnes at 25.1% alumina for a contained 880,000 tonnes of alumina has now been defined, and this is enough to support a multi-decade operation at a benchmark production rate of 10,000 tonnes per year. The HPA chemical market is a very high-margin market that is forecast to grow strongly over the next decade with increasing demand in particular coming from the LED and lithium-ion battery sectors. Impact is now undertaking a Pre-Feasibility Study to earn its 80% interest in the project, and the Company is aiming to bring Lake Hope into production over the next few years to deliver high-margin end products with current prices for benchmark 4N HPA (>99.99% purity) of about US$20,000 per tonne. Your Directors are very excited about the potential of Lake Hope to deliver a very profitable mining operation we are looking forward to an exciting few years ahead of us as we push forward with the development of this unique resource. The year has also been rewarding with exciting early-stage exploration results for a range of battery and strategic minerals across a number of Impact’s other projects, in particular at the greater Arkun-BeauJumbo project area centred about 150 km east of Perth. Targets for Ni-Cu-PGM, lithium pegmatites and Rare Earths have all been revealed and we look forward to extensive drill programmes in 2024. A further highlight of the year was the selection of Impact to be one of the inaugural participants in the BHP Xplor programme, principally to fund exploration for copper at the company’s Broken Hill project. Under this prestigious programme, Impact received US$500,000 to accelerate exploration at Broken Hill, and a significant amount of new data has been acquired. This has given us new insights into this historic region, and we will push ahead with further exploration there once all the data has been compiled. Impact’s selection for the Xplor programme is a testament to the skill, commitment and hard work that Managing Director Dr Mike Jones and his dedicated geological team continue to devote to the company and its projects. This commitment will come even more to the fore as Impact is now firmly on the road to development at Lake Hope and we look forward to more good news from across the portfolio in 2024. Peter Unsworth Chairman
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