CHANGES at the top continue for prospective Sulphate of Potash (SoP) fertiliser producer Kalium Lakes Ltd (KLL) following a delay and raising additional funds to get into production.
Last week KLL announced inaugural chairman Malcolm Randall, who has led the company since it floated on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) five years ago, will step down immediately as chairman.
Mr Randall has advised he will remain a non-executive director of the company, but will retire as a director at or before the next annual general meeting in November, KLL said.
It said non-executive director and a representative of KLL's major institutional shareholder appointed to the board in April last year, Stephen Dennis, will be the new chairman.
Mr Dennis is an experienced and well-regarded company director, with a successful career in the Australian and international resources sector spanning more than 35 years, KLL said.
He has served as chairman on several senior resource company boards, it said.
Mr Dennis had been Greenstone Resources' nominee on the KLL board but that role will now pass to Mark Sawyer, a senior partner of Greenstone who was appointed a non-executive director of KLL in May.
"I look forward to working with the Kalium Lakes' team, led by newly appointed chief executive officer Mr Rudolph van Niekerk, to ensure the success of the Beyondie SoP project as we move towards operational start-up next year," Mr Dennis said.
"On behalf of the board, I would also like to thank Mal as the founding chairman for his valuable contribution to Kalium Lakes.
"Mal has led the company as chairman for the past five years and has guided its growth from a small private company to an ASX-listed business with more than 5000 shareholders."
Mr Dennis said the changes at board level follow an internal review of the board composition and structure over the past two months.
In preparation for Mr Randall's retirement as a director, the KLL board has commenced a process to identify an additional, suitably qualified, independent non-executive director to join the board, he said.
As previously reported in Farm Weekly, last month one of KLL's co-founders and its former managing director and chief executive officer Brett Hazelden resigned.
Another co-founder, Mr van Niekerk, who had stepped down as an executive director and left the board at the beginning of May but remained KLL's chief development officer, was appointed chief executive officer.
Chief financial officer Chris Achurch, who joined KLL in 2018, also left earlier this year.
In April former corporate banker and agri-banking specialist Dale Champion was appointed to the KLL board as a non-executive director.
Along with Mr Sawyer, a co-founder of Greenstone Resources, in May third KLL co-founder and its largest private shareholder, enigmatic Pilbara cattleman and helicopter pilot Brent Smoothy, was also appointed a non-executive director.
Mr Smoothy learned of the potential to produce SoP fertiliser from hypersaline brine beneath outback salt lakes while flying geologists out to Gina Reinhart's Roy Hill mine site.
From their descriptions he recognised the potential of a string of salt lakes on Kumarina pastoral lease 160 kilometres south east of Newman - one of a number of pastoral leases he held at the time - which became the Beyondie SoP project.
KLL shares were voluntarily suspended from trading at the end of February through to the start of June while the company investigated and reacted to a $61 million shortfall in funding to get the Beyondie SoP project into production.
A successful $19m institutional share placement and $42m entitlement issue covered the shortfall, but saw KLL's share price plummet from trading above 0.50 cents in February to 14c currently.
However, a production start up schedule had to be revised to allow for previously unforeseen logistics difficulties in getting German-built processing equipment into and assembled in the Little Sandy Desert during a COVID-19 pandemic and a gas pipeline finished to provide fuel for processing SoP fertiliser.
The first commercial production of Beyondie SoP fertiliser is now scheduled for the third quarter next year.
It had previously been optimistically forecast for the end of this year.
The delay means KLL may have handed potential market and publicity benefits of being the first Australian company to produce and export SoP fertiliser, to its competitor Salt Lake Potash (SO4).
SO4 is preparing to produce a water-soluble SoP fertiliser for general agriculture and a fertigation grade SoP fertiliser for horticulture at its Lake Way project, 15 kilometres south of Wiluna.
It plans to start commercial production and export in the first quarter next year but is still awaiting expected final environmental approvals.
At least two other Perth-based companies are looking to produce and export premium SoP fertiliser products, made from remote salt lake brine, within the next two to three years and there are several others investigating the SoP potential of various salt lakes.
KLL recently said installation of the processing equipment at Beyondie was about 50 per cent completed and laying 70km of gas pipeline from beside the Great Northern Highway to the project was progressing well.
