Welcome to a new opportunity to produce low cost fertiliser to enhance crop yields for farmers. And at the same time, reduce costs for food supply for our communities. Liberty Resources
(ASX:LBY) is applying modern techniques in energy production and transforming those into low cost urea fertiliser. Urea is an essential ingredient for our crops, utilising the vast untapped deep coal resources of Queensland in a new and environmentally sound way. Queensland presents a unique opportunity in the development of smart energy and food resources projects.
Drivers: Why is this project happening? It’s fairly simple; it’s a combination of things including global population growth. Australia is a large importer of fertiliser. We are totally dependent on world importation of fertiliser. Gas and coal prices are rising and the advantage this project has it will be the lowest port haul cost in the world. We’re basing it on proven technology and it’s all about location, location.
Our strategic location is Gladstone Port which is our opportunity to get tonnage out through an existing well established port. We have many other coal permits to the south and another group to the north, so we’re in good shape from an asset base and project development point of view. We’re sitting on top of a big piece of Australia’s farmland from a fertiliser supplier logistics point of view. And on the other side of the equation, the coal mining industry is adjacent too. Also Gladstone is currently one of the major import locations to bring ammonia into Australia, for the production of urea ammonium nitrate.
Small company: About $17 million market cap at this stage and clearly we present a huge opportunity with such substantial leverage to a large project. Myself and Liberty management have been funding this company along with other shareholders for the last three years, pretty much ever since the GFC. And Dundee Corporation more recently stepped onto our register as the second largest shareholder in Toronto last year.
The Liberty team: I am very happy to have Justyn Peters here with me today; Karl Cahill looks after investor relations in the US and Canada. Lance Harcourt is projects delivery manager, Jake De Boer has just come off a coal/urea project in WA and Claus Wohlert-Jensen is senior mechanical engineer. All are highly experienced and relevant people to this sort of project moving forward.
What it’s all about: Very low cost fertiliser and basically what the cost of urea production will look like towards 2020, as gas prices rise and the availability of low cost gas around the world diminishes. So on our total project scaled up to full production capacity at over 6mtpa of urea, we’re looking at something like $88 a tonne, as against everyone else sitting at $200 and going over $400/$500 a tonne.
How’s this possible? It’s a process of gasification of coal in situ where you actually convert the coal into gas and this is based on government findings. So these are not just numbers we’ve made up to present to you today. In situ gasification gives a very large energy yield, over more than double what you do if you actually went underground and mined coal. And coal bed methane, a more recently and better known technique, only gets about five per cent of the energy available from the ground. So Liberty is highly leveraged to global trends.
