Hazer Group Limited

All right. Once again, good morning and thank you for joining Hazel Group's Q2 FY25 shareholder webinar. Presenting on the call today, we are joined by CEO and MD Glenn Corey and CTO Tim Forbes, who will run through the highlights of the recent quarter. Following the presentation, there will be a time for Q&A, which will begin with the pre-submitted questions we've received. Some questions may have been consolidated where they cover the same topic. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please use your Q&A facility at the bottom of your screen at any time during the webinar. The company will endeavor to answer as many questions as possible in the permitted time. Any questions that are not answered on the webinar will be followed up when possible. I will now hand over to Glenn to begin.

Thanks, Hannah. We're going to put the slides up. Perfect. Okay, thanks, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to our webinar. Happy New Year to everybody. As Anna said, joined on the call by Tim Forbes, our Chief Technology Officer. Great to be here. Together, we'll present the highlights of our report, which went out earlier this week. And I also want a little bit of time at the end to sort of talk about the 2025 strategic priorities that we've got ahead of us this year. So next slide, please. Perhaps onto the agenda, yeah. So in terms of the agenda, 2025 highlights, I'll hand over to Tim to talk about the successful test program that we've completed with the commercial demonstration plant. He'll talk a little bit about tech readiness, commercial readiness. We refer to those terms quite a lot recently. Come back and talk about the commercial projects and the partnerships that we've got, a corporate update, into the key priorities and the focus for this year, and then open the call up for Q&A. Next slide, please. So turning to our highlights, solid quarter. And in fact, I'd like to take it a bit further and say we had a solid year, in fact, a very important year for the company. It was a focus on commercialization, about setting that foundation for the next phase of growth for our company. A major milestone during the quarter was the successful completion of the CDP test program. We've provided some information on that in the past, but I want to really ask Tim to provide further details and dive into some of the analysis that we've got. Is materially de-risked our technology now and our commercialization strategy? We've had a lot of data come out of that. At first blush, it validates our scalability and it confirms the economic viability of our firm. So there's no change to the The assumptions that we're making, I think we're seeing some big improvements in the tech and we'll start seeing that floating through to the economics, but a really exciting place to be. We spent a year to a year and a half getting this technology to a place where it's now commercially ready. Of course, we've got loads of other things we've got to do with it, but it's a really important starting point for us as we go into that commercialization phase at the beginning of this year. On our projects, we had a big project milestone achieved in the last quarter with Canada. the successful testing of our reactor pilot rig, which has given us some really important data to inform the design of that larger scale reactor, not forgetting it's a 25 times scale up of our tech to our first commercial project, a very important project, a very important partner, a very big partner, and one that's going to be a real project to leverage for us into the future. Not forgetting graphite, it's a big part of our value proposition. We've got a very important partnership there with Mitsui. We're extending it for the third year. So that should give you some insight into the positive market feedback. We're getting the value of graphite that's emerging. It's a dynamic market that's got a lot of challenges with it from the supply side. And we're coming to the market with a technology that can deliver a critical mineral for industry alongside of our very low cost and affordable hydrogen product stream. Corporately robust and I would say very flexible funding position. We have around $15 million of liquidity. That's cash. That's grant funding. We very successfully received a $5.1 million cash refund during the quarter. We also were very privileged to receive a $6.2 million government grant. So we had actually a net cash position for the quarter. But that's putting us in a very robust funding position. Costs are a bit down at the moment as well. So that gives us an extended runway as we move the company through some very substantive milestones this year. And then finally, on intellectual property, a big part of our company is about intellectual property. We were very fortunate to receive two granted patents, one in Japan, one in the European Union, for very unique and important aspects of our technology, in particular, the catalyst and the graphite. And this just adds to the quiver of IP protection that we currently have, and I'll talk to that very shortly. Next slide, I think this is perhaps where I hand over to you, Tim. Oh, no, sorry, on strategy. I like this slide because it gives you an update on the progress we make. It's great to see that we have now that very strong foundation. CDP performance in the test program has gone very well. Graphite volumes, market development, application development is in flight and that pipeline, that commercial project pipeline is developing. I talk a lot about the size of it. Today I want to give you a bit of insight into what's inside that pipeline in terms of the players, the applications and the industries, but now a very solid foundation, giving us confidence that we can move into the next phase of this company's growth trajectory, which is the scale up, the monetization and the growth. And that is unlocking value for shareholders through signing license agreements with those customers that we have in the portfolio today and locking in more strategic customers as we go forward with the technology in the coming years. Next slide. Tim, I'll hand it over to you to give us some insights on the CDP. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Glenn. Hello, everyone. Great to be here today reporting on the successful completion of the CDP test program. So a year ago, we were talking about getting into this and now we've completed it all. So that's no small feat. Operating any plant is very challenging. Even a plant that you may have run multiple times for many years, let alone a new plant, new technology. So extremely proud of the team to have delivered this year. So as Glenn said, scale up and commercialization has been substantially de-risked. So on the scale up side, the size of the reactor that we're using is at a hydrodynamic scale. that massively reduces the commercial performance predictions. So there's no change to the story and we've taken that leap. That is the biggest step in scale up. The ones going forward will be smaller steps in terms of technical risk. We've made the big leap this year. Continuous reliable operation, 450 hours in our final campaign, which we completed exploring various corners of the operating window, we were very much in control, stable, reliable operations, demonstrating operability of the technology, supporting constructability, design, practicality of implementing this technology, which again is no small feat. During the campaign, operations were reliable, very much straight lines, with a few minor non-technology related hiccups, but very quick to restart, demonstrating a resilient technology, no concerns on solids handling, and then conversion, graphite purity, catalyst addition, et cetera, consistent with the fundamentals of the tech and the large scale commercial design basis. So this really positions us now with the process de-risked, graphite samples in hand to get on with application development and improving out that outlet of our graphite supply. We've got strong interest there. And really that next phase I'm viewing more as securing the large volume outlets and enhancing the economics as we push on to commercialization. Next slide, please. So I thought I'd share a little bit more about large commercial scale performance predictions. So the results from the test plan provide confidence in scalability and indeed commercial readiness. One of the factors here is around when you get data, data is king, but we always need to rely on models to bridge to the next stage and then reduce reduce the risks. So this is a standard industry practice. What we've done over the last year is built a proprietary reactor kinetic model, which takes the chemistry from the lab scale combined with literature to define the rates of equations and predict large commercial scale performance predictions. Now, there are a lot of words there. Importantly, on the graph on the top right, the model response over a range of conditions matches the plant data. So going from bench scale to demonstration scale, we can predict the performance. And then that gives us confidence in our ability to predict performance at the larger commercial scale. Second important point here on the bottom right is that the performance predictions are consistent with the existing large commercial scale design basis. So what does that mean? It means we continue to deliver on what we've said we will. The technology is performing and the economic basis of the commercial project is sound and largely validated here. I will just touch on one other brief subtlety on the shape of the curve on the bottom right. With that being a very flat curve and meeting design basis conversion with a fair amount of bed elevation or reactive volume to go, we're still positioned on a conservative basis and there's potential for upside. So that upside on the economics could come in terms of optimizing reactor design in future for reduced costs. But also importantly, the other aspect that I mentioned is the graphite product application development, which we're really going to get into this year. So big picture, it's been a big year, substantial de-risking. And then in terms of, commercial readiness and technical readiness. Reaction kinetics are understood. We've always been strong on IP. Our scale-up is now de-risked. We've demonstrated operability, constructability, material selection, and the overall design has been validated. So that says we're largely technically ready. On the commercial readiness side, we've largely validated scale-up. That's one of the key measures. and then we see multiple commercial applications there. So we're ready for large commercial scale deployment and we've made a lot of progress this year. So on that, I might pass on to Glenn and get him to talk a little bit more about the economics and how we compare versus competition.