Ioneer MD speaks with Proactive at the ASX SMIDcaps Conference

With me now live from the ASX Small Mid Caps conference is Ioneer MD, Bernard Roe. The company is an emerging lithium boron producer with a construction ready greenfield project in Nevada.

Bernard, nice to meet you.

Yeah, likewise. Thank you very much Lauren, pleasure to be with you.

The company's Rhyolite Ridge lithium boron project is key to US critical mineral onshoring. Can you tell us more about this?

Yeah, happy to. So, Rhyolite Ridge is a lithium and boron deposit. In fact, it's the only lithium and boron, large lithium and boron deposit in the world that's at an advanced stage and ready for construction.

So it's going to produce two critical materials, both lithium and boron are both listed on the critical minerals list for the United States. and to put it in sort of context what this project means, the US currently consumes about 200,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent per year, lithium chemicals, 200,000.

It produces domestically about 5,000 tons. So very, very little domestic production.

And of course, lithium is super important for many different applications, but particularly batteries, both in static storage and energy backup and electric vehicles.

So the US desperately needs additional lithium production to make sure it's got a secure and stable supply as a national matter of national security and energy security.

For the Boron, the US consumes around about 3 to 400,000 tons of Boron material a year as a raw material. It consumes more than that when you take into account, you know, refined and end products that are imported into the United States uh from that are manufactured outside. Um so 3 to 400,000 tons a year, and the United States has only one producing boron mine in the country.

And that mine in California is 100 years old. and so at you know, as it enters its final chapters of its life, there has to be some additional supply come online for again, supporting domestic stable long-term um production. Uh and that's where Rhyolite Ridge project comes in.

So it can it can be a like a a lynch pin supplier of both of those critical minerals for the United States domestically for a very, very long time, multiple generations, because it's a large deposit.

And investors are familiar with lithium, but how essential is Boron to modern life and why is it so critical?

Yeah you can argue it's actually more important than lithium uh you know, depending on how you want to uh analyze, but just on some simple fundamentals, well, it's used in about 300 different applications. So it is truly used in everyday life. It's used in so many applications and most people would never have even heard of it. So it's it's use just to give an idea of the the broad range of uses. It's a micronutrient in agriculture.

It's used in fiber glass, including insulation for in housing. It's used in glass, glass cook tops, solar panels. Um it's used in military applications, armor plating, is used in shielding on rockets. It's used uh in nuclear reactors. Uh it's used to stop termites eating timber on railway sleepers. So it's a very, very uh broadly used material. It has very, very few um replacements.

So it can't be easily substituted and the US consumes a lot of it. So uh and now you add to that the limited global supply because 73 or 4% of the world's reserves of Boron are found in Turkey.

So most of the global production of Boron outside of one mine in California comes from Turkey. So again, it's uh in terms of a diversified, stable, long-term supply, it doesn't exist today in the Boron world. and that's why again Rhyolite Ridge development is so critical to the United States government and the United States people.

Now, can you talk us through the project economics, NPV, IR, that sort of thing?

Yeah, sure. So the numbers I'm going to mention here quickly are based on mining around about 3.4 million tons of ore a year, which is not a big mine. You know, big mines these days are 10 or 20 million tons of ore a year as a sizable mine. We're talking about 3.4, 3.5 million tons. So it's a it's a small mine uh by world standards, but it's got a very long life. 77 years is the initial mine life and it's easily going to extend beyond that.

So it can be scaled up. Um but the the deposit itself, the economics are based on 3.4 million tons. So the the the NPV of the project, supported by a very comprehensive feasibility study, I I might I must say, that was refreshed last year. The NPV is $2.2 billion, US dollars. The IRR unlevered is 18%. When you include the loan that we have from the US government, which is a closed loan for 20 years at 10-year treasury rates, that IRR goes up to 23%.

So, by mining 3.4 million tons of ore a year, we'll produce around about 24,000 tons of lithium carbonate as a chemical, a high purity chemical at the mine site. We don't have to ship it anywhere to refine it. Uh we'll also produce 135,000 tons, so six times the amount of as boric acid, and which makes up for about 20 to 25% of the revenue.

So, you know, 75 to 80% of the revenue from the lithium, 20 to 25% from the boron. So it's a co-product, not a byproduct. Um that generates around about $600 million a year of revenue and equating to about $420 million a year of EBITDA.

and and for 77 years. So, you know, it's very, very impressive economics based on a modest startup which can be easily scaled up in the future.

You have executed non-binding MOUs with the Korea Investment Development Fund and Hyundai engineering. How significant is that partnering process?

Uh it's very significant and you know, we've had a long-term relationship with multiple Korean and Japanese parties, companies, uh going back five or six years when we struck our first off-take agreement with Eco Pro, who is the largest high nickel cathode manufacturer of um high nickel cathode manufacturer for batteries in the world. Uh and so we've always had a strong relationship, but these recent deals we've done are just solidifying that and you know, it's we it's no secret that we're working closely with the US government with Japan and Korea

under these trade uh agreements that have been struck over the last 12 months. We're in those conversations and we're partnering with parties, government and non-government parties like the Korean companies that you've uh just mentioned, uh to be part of the equity solution, the strategic partner solution to this project going forward. and we're almost at the end of that process and we'll be updating the market very shortly on that.

And lastly, what are the next steps for Ioneer and what should investors look out for?

So, we've had the loan approved from the US government, I've mentioned that already. We're putting in place this equity and I've sort of pointed towards the direction that that's likely to go and that we're going to have some updates on that very soon. So it's finishing the financing which which we expect will happen in the in the very near future. Then we will move into an FID decision, final investment decision, which we intend to make before the end of the year. and we're already starting to plan for ramping up some road building and engineering works out at the site before the end of the year.

So really you're going to see a lot of activity, partnering, FID decision and you're going to see us out on the ground doing work drilling, road building in preparation for full-blown construction which we expect will start next year, early next year.

Bernard, thank you for your time.

Pleasure, thank you Lauren.