Ivanhoe Mines Executive Co-Chair Robert Friedland and President Marna Cloete recently announced that an agreement has been reached to replace the outstanding convertible loan balance owed to Ivanhoe Mines by High Power Exploration (HPX) into an equity investment in I-Pulse Inc (I-Pulse), HPX’s parent company.
Founded by Robert Friedland and Laurent Frescaline in 2005, I-Pulse Inc is a private US company headquartered in Toulouse, France, which uses its unique expertise in electrical energy to power disruptive industrial solutions. Frescaline is a plasma physicist and an electrical engineer who founded a successful high-technology company specialising in pulsed-power applications with domestic and international governmental agencies.
The I-Pulse suite of technologies utilises proprietary capacitors that safely and repeatedly compress and release stored electricity in billionths of a second. The extremely high-powered discharges, which utilise extremely small amounts of energy, generate precise shockwaves directed to shape and assemble metals to previously unachievable degrees of precision; generate electrical fields that reveal chargeable or resistive mineral deposits, or water, at depth; and crush rock containing minerals or gemstones.
Ivanhoe extended a $50 million convertible loan to HPX on April 25, 2019. As at May 31, 2023, the loan balance including accrued interest totaled approximately $76 million. Under the new agreement, Ivanhoe will transfer all convertible loan obligations from HPX to I-Pulse, in exchange for the issuance of common shares in I-Pulse to Ivanhoe.
Ivanhoe will also receive certain investor rights, including a pre-emptive right to maintain its percentage ownership in I-Pulse in the event of an equity financing, which ceases upon an initial public offering of I-Pulse securities.
I-ROX SAS (I-ROX), a subsidiary of I-Pulse, is focused on the deployment of I-Pulse technology to transform the processes of crushing and grinding mineral ores in the mining industry. I-ROX was established in November 2022 by I-Pulse and Breakthrough Energy Ventures-Europe (BEV-E), in conjunction with €12 million in funding from BEV-E.
In December 2022, I-Pulse and I-ROX also entered into collaboration arrangements with world-leading resources company, BHP, which included an equity investment in both I-Pulse and I-ROX.
Ivanhoe Mines and I-ROX are working together to also form a collaboration agreement to investigate ways of deploying I-Pulse technology across Ivanhoe’s operations. The collaboration arrangement aims to link the mining and processing expertise of Ivanhoe Mines with the pulsed-power technology and expertise of I-Pulse and I-ROX, to transform the economic and environmental impact of mining.
I-ROX has demonstrated that short, high-intensity bursts of electrical energy, delivered using pulsed-power technology, can quickly and efficiently shatter rocks and mineral ores. This process, which targets tensile weakness in rocks, could substantially reduce the time, energy usage and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions currently generated by the planet’s mining activities, especially by lowering energy costs through reduced requirement for downstream comminution.
Samples of both copper ore and tailings from the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Complex in DRC have been sent to I-Pulse’s headquarters in Toulouse, France, for test work. The purpose of the test work is to evaluate opportunities to increase life-of-mine copper recoveries, by either improving recoveries through the milling and flotation process, or by recovering additional copper from the tailings stream.
During 2022, Kamoa-Kakula achieved an average copper feed grade of 5.5% and recoveries of approximately 86%, meaning that the grade of Kamoa-Kakula’s tailings was approximately 0.8% copper, significantly higher than the average head grade of the copper mines globally The recoveries achieved in 2022 were in line with design parameters, and more recently have been above design parameters and periodically achieving 88%. Any further improvement in copper recoveries presents a significant opportunity to generate additional revenue at Kamoa-Kakula.
