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PRESENTATION BY MIKE JONES, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF IMPACT MINERALS LIMITED (IPT)

“Impact Minerals talk about Uranium Projects”

http://www.brr.com.au/event/52317

 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2008, 12:00 PM.

 

            BRR    Good morning and welcome to Boardroom Radio’s Uranium eConference. Joining us today is Mike Jones, Managing Director at Impact Minerals. Today,

10                    Mike will be presenting on the uranium mining activities and future prospects at Impact. Mike, thanks for joining our eConference today.

 

            IPT       Hi, this is Mike Jones. I’m the Managing Director of Impact Minerals and I’m going to talk to you briefly about our two uranium projects, one here in

15                    Western Australia, and the second one in Botswana in Southern Africa.

 

                        We’re very keen on uranium. It’s one of our three core commodities that Impact is exploring for, that’s uranium, gold, and nickel. With our uranium projects, we see the great future is still for uranium the forecast significant

20                    increase in requirements for uranium, probably in the years 2012 through the 2015. That’s a production gap in the year’s supply/demand equation comes from very poor investment and exploration during the 90’s and early 2000’s for uranium. Part of that is obviously been driven by the development of nuclear power plants around the world and in particular in the developing

25                    countries such as India and China, where there’s a forecast dramatic increase over the next 20 to 30 years in the supply of electricity from nuclear power plants, and that together with a general push towards a carbon-free emission sources of energy should see a continuing increase of demand for uranium in that timeframe. We can see from this slide here that there are

30                    currently well over 100 nuclear power plants under construction on order and we see no reason for that to decrease in the next 5 to 10 years.

 

                        Our first project is located in Western Australia in near the town called Meekatharra, which is about 800 km northeast of Perth. Up until recently, the

35                    state government policy was to not allow uranium mining but that has now changed with the recent election of the liberal national party in WA and I’ve seen now a resurgence of interest in uranium exploration in the state. Impact was fortunate that when it listed it had already obtained part of one of the known uranium deposits in Western Australia. Most of the known deposits

40                    were all discovered back in the 70’s and a few in the 90’s and have been well documented in the literature.

 

                        The deposit that Impact has a portion of is the Nowthanna deposit and there’s a map here showing known uranium deposits in the Northern Yilgarn area

45                    and it shows the location of a style of deposit called the calcrete-hosted deposits and there’s a number of well-known ones of which the largest is the Yeelirrie deposit which is owned by BHP. There’s a Lake Way and Centipede deposit owned by Toro Energy and that’s been the focus of a pre-feasibility study that was announced the market relatively recently. There’s Lake Maitland owned by Canadian company, Mega Uranium, and there’s Nowthanna, partly owned by Impact. The Nowthanna deposit is the fourth largest calcrete-hosted deposit in the Yilgarn and is characterised by good grade, which we’ll talk about shortly.

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                        The deposit is hosted in a salt lake and the uranium is drained from a rich granite source that has been deposited in particular chemical conditions on the lake hedge. Impact share of the deposit is about 40%, that amounts to 1,800 tonnes of U3O8 and there’s a table here showing the grade tonnage

10                    figures for the deposit. We can see that a cut-off of 200 ppm is about 10 million tonnes with an average grade of 450 parts per million or kilograms per tonne for total contained U3O8 of about 4,600 tonnes in the entire deposit.

 

                        Now, one of those interesting things that often come up in geology is that the

15                    deposit straddles a tenement boundary or two, and so Impact’s beneficial ownership of that deposit is about 40%. We’re in partnership of another part of the deposit with a large Chinese group, the CITIC Corporation, and they’ve been very active supporters with us in the exploration for uranium on this project and we will continue to do so moving forward. I will point on the grade

20                    tonnage figures that an average grade of 450 parts per million is quite significant and there are number of deposits around the world being looked at, that have got that sort of average grade, and a cut-off at also 200 ppm is also what we consider a realistic mining grade as well.

 

25                    So the geology or the geometry of the deposit lends itself to an easy mining. These styles of deposit tend to occur in the top 10 m or so of the inner surface and they’re very large and tend to be made up of quite friable material, so the mining costs are low but the significant feature to look at is the cost of the processing. That will be a significant focus for us over the next

30                    6 to 12 months in association with our joint venture partners is to get a handle on the potential economic recovery of the uranium in this deposit.

 

                        The upside as well the known deposit, we do see significant upside in the area to increase both the tonnage and the contained UeO3. There’s a map

35                    here showing a way from the deposit, it’s actually a very large area of calcrete that hasn’t been drilled significantly and there’s plenty of scope to add to the resources based on the known drilling. So, we would see that as well as the deposit itself which as we see currently contains about 10 million pounds of U3O8 that the exploration target is possibly 15 to 20 million pounds. We are

40                    going to be looking and try to increase that by both infill and step-out drilling from the resource. We’re going to look at the current ownership of the deposit and see if there’s something we can do about consolidating that ownership. We’ll also see significant upside away from the deposit from perhaps another 5 or 10 million pounds in various other prospects that have been known about

45                    over the 70’s, since the 70’s. We’ve also, with the work we’ve done over the last 18 months, discovered two new buried paleochannels which have never been drilled. That will be the significant focus of work for us in Australia.

 

                        Our second project is in Botswana where we announced early on this year that we’d pegged a very large amount of ground prospective, various styles of uranium deposit in Eastern Botswana. In essence, we’ve got a lot of the ground that surrounds and there’s a long strike from the very large deposit

5                      discovered by Falcon Bridge originally back in the 70’s but now worked up by ACAP Resources where they’ve recently announced the resource of 98 million pounds of U¬3O8. It’s a very large but low grade deposit and it’s hosted by Karoo sandstones. So we have most of the rocks of similar age along strike. We’ve also pegged large areas of salt pan and also large areas

10                    prospective calcrete-hosted deposits similar to the one that we have at Nowthanna and we’ve already completed initial interpretation of radiometric data provided by the government. We found 20 significant field anomalies. We found at least 10 of those that had very significant uranium responses up to sort of 100 ppm uranium in them and the initial field checking indicates that

15                    there’s at least four high-priority targets there for drilling. So we’re doing the preparation work now to design individual drill targets and probably doing some preparatory trenching and fields mapping and soil geochemistry as well, so we’re very active on both of those fronts.

 

20                    Few quick words about Botswana, Botswana is a very stable place, has  ranked of 51 over the 155 countries for survey of doing business by the World Bank and it’s very stable. There are no significant sovereign risk issues.

 

                        So in summary, those are our two key projects. We have a resource in

25                    Western Australia and we have a lot of large exploration grant in Botswana. We see a great future for uranium and we’re pushing forward to the exploration program on the two continents.

 

                        Thank you for your time.

30

            BRR    Mike, thanks for sharing your insights about your company.

 

                        Listeners that was Mike Jones, Managing Director at Impact Minerals presenting as part of Boardroom Radio’s Uranium eConference.

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                        Thank you for your time.

 

PRESENTATION CONCLUDED

 

 

 

 

Contact brr@brr.com.au for more information

 

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