Nevada Lithium Market Update

0:04 Hello everyone and welcome to today's Nevada Lithium Market Update. We're very pleased to have Stephen Rentschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium with us today to share his insights on the current lithium landscape. Now the lithium sector has seen significant political and market developments recently and Steve is eager to share his observations on how these changes are reshaping the industry. He will be providing us with his analysis of the current state of the lithium market, key trends emerging from recent policy shifts and of course the latest developments at Nevada Lithium. Following his presentation, we open the floor for a live Q&A session where you can engage directly with Steve on any questions you might have. Please note that this event is being recorded and will be available for viewing shortly after we conclude on six.com or our YouTube channel. With that said, Steve, the floor is yours.

0:49 I'm just gonna bounce off stage while you update everyone on the latest findings.

0:55 Super, thanks Kyle. Appreciate everybody taking the time to listen this afternoon. So Kyle outlined everything that I hope to get through over the course of the call. I will just take opportunity to sort of rearrange a little bit because I know even though we often have quite a few new people listening to the story, you know there's an elephant in the room with regards to the timing of our PEA. And so I just wanted to address that right off the bat so that hopefully everybody can continue to stay. But if really that's what you want to hear about, you have the opportunity to get out. So to refresh everybody's memory, we're working on our PEA. I had hoped that we would have it done at the end of April, so in a couple of days. And I have to backtrack a little bit and say, let's just call it the end of Q2, so another 2 months. And I'll tell you briefly why we're doing this. Because there were some unavoidable reasons, but there are some reasons that we did this by choice.

1:51 But given the landscape of the lithium industry right now, honestly, I don't think it's really going to matter. But we wanted to make sure that we did get a chance to adequately address some thoughts that were popping up for a number of reasons. So just to briefly go through it with the PEA, when we first got going on with it, we had some very, very severe weather that was impacting floor on the east coast of the US. This is something that really, it was very under reported. And in fact, it still is to this day. There's massive devastation that is still being rebuilt. But basically, the summary of it all is that I thought we could claw back all of the time from a little bit slower start that we wanted, but we couldn't. Again, in the grand scheme of things, don't think that this is going to be anything that's going to amount to anything, but there it is.

2:40 The second thing is obviously we thought it prudent in light of the way all these tariffs and basically economic, let's just call it upheaval for now, are coming through, that we would really want to make sure that we were basically using the PEA to describe the project or pick the project scenario that seemed to make sense in a world of upcoming tariffs of 1 sort or another, or at the very least of a very, very large reallocation of trading partners, all of these kinds of things. So the company thought it was time to basically use all of the resources at our disposal to question things, to look at next steps and how they might actually impact the PEA itself. So sort of trying to get ahead of the curve to put us in good, in basically a good position with the PFS coming in, which is obviously the next 43.1 report after the PEA.

3:39 So there's that. And again, to refresh everybody's memory, we've got floor working on metallurgical side. And these are the pros that have done Lithium Americas, some of their QPs on that, and have done Rhyolite Ridge, which has got similar mineralogy towards this, but basically it's a lithium boron project just as we've become because of the recent drilling. So we wanted to make sure that we could take advantage of all of that. And the other thing I wanted to mention is something that I have been alluding to over the course of the past, let's call it 18 months, which is sort of the understanding, the discovery of Bonnie Clare and all of the lithium sedimentary projects in Nevada. That sort of discovery process is taking place by some of the world's largest companies, in particular the engineering firms.

4:27 And the reason that's important is because, again I've told this anecdotally, is when we go to conferences and when I get to see Jeff Wilson, our VPX holding court with all the technical people from all of these very large and sophisticated companies, to me, it's showing me that we're getting on the radar of more and more companies, and therefore, we're getting more potential input from these from these folks, more advice, more different ways to look at things, and getting the context to do so. It's sort of an evolutionary process, but the point in all of this is, is we hear more and more about different recovery methods, about different mining methods, et cetera. We're just trying to make sure that we're staying ahead of those kinds of things as well.

5:17 Again, we're working on our preliminary economic assessment. There's no reason it's going to stay in its present form all the way to feasibility. These projects often change, but we're just trying to take a little extra time to see what makes sense in this. Sort of a don't cut off your nose despite your face kind of a thing. So all that combined has given us, you know, a little bit of a delay here. Obviously nobody hates more than me to put out a date and then sort of had to backtrack a little bit, but I think I'm pretty comfortable now that, you know, we're going to fall within this next couple of months. And I see no reason to try to pinpoint it more than that, hopefully earlier than towards the end. So I just wanted to address that and get that out of the way. And now I'll just sort of tell you about the rest of what I'm seeing or the way I'm looking at, you know, the lithium industry and sort of what's going on with, you know, the tariffs and all these kinds of things.

6:11 You know, we've often talked about this, you know, prices are determined by supply and demand in a world that's basically not bifurcated by, you know, things like tariffs, things like trade restrictions, all these sorts of things. And it's magnified, the differences in price are magnified when you have basically a young industry like lithium versus let's just say copper, a mature industry. But you can obviously get very, very wide price swings. And we're still waiting for them with lithium, you know, lithium prices are basically down at the trough where they have been. And they're doing that in the face of what I consider to be very, very strong global demand in the most important sectors of lithium.

6:57 The latest I've seen for Q1 car sales was that globally, they were up over 4 million units, were up 30% year over year, very, very healthy. China leads the way with that and they're the largest car market. And they do have a reason, I think, for doing that in terms of essentially forcing electrification in many ways down the domestic populace. But even in the US, the second largest car market, it was up 16% year over year. And this isn't all the economic mayhem that's been going on. And essentially, I don't think anybody's still really sure about whether or not the tax credits on the Inflation Reduction Act have actually been rescinded yet. So the point is that the sales are continuing, the technology with the batteries continues to get better. This is demonstrated by increased range and shorter recharging times. There's no doubt that most of this is taking place in China.

7:52 And CATL, the world's largest battery, you know, maker is, you know, by the US anyway, has been determined to be affiliated with the Chinese PLA, the People's Liberation Army. So my point is this, that technology has not become widespread, certainly to the Western Hemisphere. As of course, neither have the Chinese car companies. So there's this burgeoning demand that is there that I think is basically going to continue in 1 form or another. I would highlight that in the US, oil prices are definitely having an impact. I think there was a lot of thought that oil prices as the restrictions on drilling became less, prices would continue to go low. This would be reflected at the gas pumps and this would make basically the difference between operating costs with EVs and internal combustion engines even harder for the EVs to overcome.

8:50 But in my opinion, I think we're getting very, very close to the floor with US gas prices. I'm based out in the US East Coast, and I know that that's a bit of an anomaly. We have a wide discrepancy according to different variations of octane levels, etc. And I think we're going to continue to see this. I don't think that we're going to see dollar and a half U.S. Gasoline prices per gallon, perhaps as many had hoped. We got 2 things going on, which is in the US, all additional production is coming from shale drilling. You get anywhere near $60, you're threatening that. Those are the types of wells that have got exponential curves on them. So I should say logarithmic actually, they've got these fat tails, you build them up over decades of drilling.

9:39 And they basically come down for first year decline rates, very, very great rates. And it's somewhere 50, $60 per, depending upon where you are to continue to drill them and continue to build those tails up, which is reflected in the increased supply. So you've got that at the crude level. And then, of course, US refining capacity, nothing's being added here. That's sort of the real choke point, in my opinion. In fact, I think California is going to be taking another one offline fairly soon. So the point is, you know, you can't use crude oil in the cars, you've got the refining bottleneck, if you start to raise the underlying crude price, and the refining bottleneck continues, probably getting close to where gasoline prices are going to go. And I think that's a relative or elimination of a relative headwind for EVs, which again, from what I see with all the latest, most of them coming out of China have got technological increases that are continuing at a very, very fast rate.

10:36 In another sector that is continuing to increase a rapid pace, which is stationary storage, looks like in the US, again, year over year, you know, plus 30% kind of installation rates. These are all very, very healthy numbers. And the one thing I would say to people again, is remember, as your base gets bigger, it gets very, very hard to continue to increase at the same rate of growth, right? So if, if you've got mine production, that's 500,000 tons, and you say, Well, I'm going to double it and go to a million tons, well, okay, maybe you could do that. But when you're at a million tons and you gotta go to 2 million tons, if that's 100% increase, much harder to do. Same going from 2 to 4, if you sort of follow the pattern. And that's the kind of thing that I think we're just starting to enter into in terms of the proposed supply curve going forward.

11:26 And the reason it's taken longer to get there is because, of course, this is a brand new industry. And we've talked about this before, where very slight mismatches in supply and demand can cause massive, massive dislocation in prices. The latest analysis that I'm seeing is that I think last year, they're talking about lithium carbon equivalents, or one of the standard ways that it's used to talk about the entire lithium market. So it takes into account hydroxide and spodumene and all this kind of stuff with somewhere around like 1.2 million tons that was supply. It looks like the deficits we're talking about were maybe 150,000 tons. This coming year they're talking about it going down to somewhere around 25,000 tons.

12:15 The year after maybe a deficit in 10,000 tons. This is a very, very hard thing to do to try to estimate global supply and demand. And this is coming from, you know, some of the experts. My point is, is that you can see that things are starting to tighten and we've already seen global supplies start to be taken offline because of the low prices. We talked about that a few months ago. We saw in Australia, we saw with the Chinese taking out their big Lepidite mine or Lepidolite mine, sorry. You know, all of these are the kinds of things that you would expect to see at what I would consider to be unsustainable prices. Now, on top of all of that, you've obviously got the trade war, and we just restricted to sort of the metals with what's going on right now. The most recent volley that I can see in terms of critical minerals was China putting export restrictions specifically on the, not just the US, but around the world on all of the stuff that let's just say goes into missiles and into super, you know, chips. So this is the antimony, the germanium, all of this kind of stuff, not on lithium yet, though, and there has been again, discussed, basically, the talks of restricting the lithium technology, you know, in the battery technology that is reflected in again, in the Chinese car companies with the battery performance that they're getting.

13:35 I think that what people, there's 2 ways I see obviously this continuing. If you were to have an outright lithium ban by the Chinese as sort of a next step, I think that we would of course get the price response that we're talking about seeing or have seen in copper. You looked at what the tariffs did and you got these massive differences between LME and COMEX prices as an example. And that's in a mature industry. So in lithium, if this restriction should come to fruition, and again, remembering, if you think about China, China is basically dominates over 50% of copper refining globally, but it's got over 80% in critical metals, including lithium, then you know, the response could be massive.

14:21 Whether they do that, whether they prefer to let lithium continue to sort of be oversupplied, I don't think anybody knows exactly where all of this extra lithium is in fact coming from. But it would in fact be a pretty good strategy because of course, what it does is just delays development of alternative sources of the lithium. So perhaps that's in the playbook. But when you wrap all this stuff up, I can tell you at least for US lithium production going forward prices these prices like 10,000 tons LCE kind of stuff etc just certainly not gonna is not going to make the grade you'll get no new mine development and when you go back to what I was saying about the difficulty in trying to raise production levels is that base number gets larger and you start going from a million to 2 million or 2 million to 3 million and in fact that sort of 2 and a half 3 million by 2030 kind of a of a lithium projected demand need That kind of stuff is going to be made up by projects like Thacker Pass, Bonnie Clare, Eye and Ears Rhyolite Ridge, others, et cetera.

15:30 But the point is that the size of these projects, typically 40, 50,000 tons a year. So you see you need 20 of them to again make up a million ton deficit, that kind of a thing. So this is a very, very big wall that needs to be climbed.

15:46 This is... Okay, so let's just start talking about where we are in terms of, you know, I guess all of the of all of the restrictions that look to be coming to play in terms of international trade and this has to be a political. And I understand the tensions are running high. So I just want to look at it from the standpoint of Nevada lithium and the standpoint of Nevada lithium shareholders. You know, this is what appears to be shaking out so far in the U S. You've had a bunch of executive orders that have come out in basically the last 6 weeks from the Trump administration. And remembering again the executive orders, these get thrown around by presidents because to get legislation taken care of to get it through you know both houses in the US, much harder thing to do. But these are the opening salvos.

16:34 We've already seen something come through about the immediate need to basically increase the American mineral production. There's a lot of emphasis, from what I can see, on the Department of Defense. It talks about everything from, you know, establishing contacts with potential domestic production, about trying to arrange financing, about trying to find off takers, all this stuff. Again, this is all just in an executive order this is sort of like a wish list these things will take time to manifest themselves but we're already starting to go through this and see which avenues make sense for us to try to you know find the people who are obviously intended to be on on the opposite side of this and see if basically we can have the US government help with us as more of an interface to these kinds of these kinds of folks, because all of this is going to be very important, in my opinion.

17:30 We also saw another EEO that started basically, they call it a permitting council, federal permitting and steering committee kinds of things. How are we gonna basically try to minimize the amount of permitting that goes on BLM land, this is Bureau of Land Management, or federal land, this is where a lot of the US mineral wealth is tied up. Not so enthusiastic about whether or not we're gonna be getting massive decreases in permitting time. I'm not sure how we get around that, but I'll definitely be a believer. But a lot of the first steps appear to be transparency. And we are looking into that right now in terms of contacting the federal government. How do we get into certain databases? There's 1 called the Fast Track 41 that they announced not long ago.

18:16 Basically it was 10 largest projects, big or considered to be significant by the US government. And what I think the big thing is going to be is that's going to be sort of a repository that in particular, different parts of the US government will be able to look at and have sort of a minimized disturbance in terms of finding who we should be talking to because I can tell you this is the difficulty, not only because there's a new administration and so right the faces are all new, but there's obviously just always an issue in terms of trying to weave your way through the labyrinth in particular of government to try to find the correct people to talk to. And I think this is going to be important and we're already are on the books to talk about how we could potentially be included in that and I can't tell you much more about that because you know you would think that perhaps up on the websites or whatever they would say hey we're looking for these kinds of projects but it's not. It's sort of like hey we'd love to have a discussion. So we'll have the discussion we'll see where that takes us.

19:15 And then we've also talked about the potential establishment of a sovereign US wealth fund for basically direct investment into mineral projects in the US. That was a couple of months ago, and that was followed up only a few days ago by actually the US Secretary of the interior, which is telling me that that's getting more and more traction inside the US. So these are a lot of things that are just going on sort of, you know, emanating from within the US. And again, I know there are a lot of unpopular stuff has gone on. But from, from the perspective of Nevada Lithium, I've got to tell you that I'm starting to think that the opportunities for strategic partnership, offtakers, government involvement are now starting to be considerably larger than they may have been before.

20:01 And I sort of frame it like this, you know, the way we were thinking before, under the the auspices of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was we're going to have a separation, and basically China, non China, you know, critical minerals being input into batteries and the rest of the cars, etc, the magnets, and that we would have, you know, ultimately the the bifurcation as well of the pricing. So you'd have a China price, and a non China price. But in retrospect, the number of potential participants that we could we could address, it's relatively limited, right? So if you think about obviously domestic US automakers, there's not a tremendous amount of those. You do have some industrial companies in the US, etc.

20:47 But basically if you look for other friendly countries, quote unquote, friendly countries, let's just say European car companies, the fact is that the European car companies seem to really put a lot of emphasis on developing their own lithium with the direct lithium extraction projects, you know, from geothermal, other types of things, and not necessarily looking too much to the US to develop those supplies. Now, I think that, you know, when you look at sort of the grand scheme of things, we say, well, obviously, we still have, you know, with the US car companies, It looks to me like the European car companies that believe I had seen that there had been the Chinese may have been partnering with the Germans for production inside of Europe. It has been the other way around. I know that they've been having horrible sales in China for the European car companies, a lot of them, so that may be a switch.

21:38 I continue to think that ultimately when this all shakes out, the Chinese will in 1 form or another want access to the second largest global car market, that's the US. Chinese do about 31 million units a year. I think the US is about 40% of that, something like that 14, 15 million. And the way that they're going to get access to these markets without the tariffs is if they JV with the US companies in a minority percentage shift. Now, a lot of stuff has got to clearly be worked out. But I do not think that is, by any stretch of the imagination, something that we should throw out. So let's just say maybe another 6, 7 car companies that we could potentially talk with. And then we have all the same sorts of strategic partners that you would think about, the bigger mining houses, the trading houses, all these kinds of folks who would clearly still want access to what's still considered to be the number 1 mining jurisdiction in the world, which is Nevada, you know, no threats of expropriation, all this sort of stuff, the mining laws well understood, but but but but, and then finally, you have all this new investment that is being directed into the US, which is predicated on the avoidance of tariffs.

22:53 So these are, you know, the big companies that you that you've seen, and it's very interesting, because many of them are reflected in, or I should say, are working in AI, these big computer stations, what do they call them? The server complexes, all this stuff, where you gotta have the uninterruptible energy. And this list is already in trillions of dollars. And I understand that it's going to take, you know, I don't know, maybe a decade to get all this in. But when you think about the capital investment that would be required for a mine of our size, which would be measured in, you know, billions of dollars, somewhere in there, depending upon what we want to do. It's very small compared to what these other companies are taking on. And I think that the timing, if you think about what we're up against, where we don't need construction, we're still going to be every bit of, you know, 3 and a half, 4 years away, if everything else continues on schedule.

23:53 This is literally a drop in the bucket for the companies that have just been identified so far. And these are again, like, you know, Stargate out of Japan, 500 billion, Apple 500 billion, even though it looks like they're gonna, might be producing some stuff in other countries. But, you know, NVIDIA 500 billion, IBM 150 billion, Taiwan semi, on and on and on. In my opinion, these are all potential partners right now, because even if their primary focus is not to put a battery into a car, at the very least, this is the kind of thing that I think will gather goodwill from the US, because obviously the US is trying to increase its supply of these strategic metals. So I think that the shooting gallery just got bigger and we're doing everything we can to address this as quickly as possible.

24:47 Finally, I would say let me just give you the recap of where we are with the project, because it has been a couple of months. And here I hope that this will be helpful for people who really don't know the entire story. As a consequence of just saying new drilling that occurred 18 to 24 months ago, we found that we had a different project that we had before. We have a massive lithium and now boron project in Nevada, again, best mining jurisdiction in the world, that has got not only high tonnage, the best of our knowledge, second only to Thacker Pass. But ostensibly the highest grades. That are that are out there I mean on and this was reflected in an updated resource report that we did it towards the end of last year.

25:32 Where we you know I think our overall tonnage went up by 2 thirds, we tripled the grade, you know, all of this sort of stuff. We just became a massive high grade project that had a different mineralization that needed to be addressed. Previously, we were talking about a calcination approach, which meant no acid needed. Now we have an approach that has been developed by floor. It is basically very very similar to everything else that's going on in Nevada. It's particularly similar to what's going on at Eye Nears Rhyolite Ridge because we have co-product called Boron, which may have military applications, well it does, we just don't know the extent of it, as well as others, to provide us with a little other revenue. And by the way, that boron has still not been included, to the best of my knowledge, on the U.S. Critical materials list, though for at least 2 years people have been getting very, very vocal about putting it on.

26:26 So that could be another real tailwind for us going forward. On top of the attributes of the actual project, so we have the size, we have the grade, we have the infrastructure. 50 yards, the gate is right off of State Route 95. We've got high power lines. 1 set right now, looks like there'll be another set going right over top of this. You know, that go basically from the north to the south. It looks like there's going to be a rail extension at some point going from the Union Pacific lines down south of, going through, I should say, Vegas, and then at the northern part of the state. So a north-south type of a thing. There is a partial one right now, goes down in Winnemucca.

27:12 So to connect it seems like something that looks like it could be something that the Nevada state is gonna take on in terms of infrastructure would make a lot of sense because all of these projects are going to require reagents and they're all going to be very similar reagents and particularly I call reagents sulfuric acid they may not be technically correct But it looks like that's what's going to be used to unlock a tremendous amount of the lithium that's in Nevada. So we have all of that going for us. What we also have going for us is 3 very strong sets of shareholders who have come into the company over the course of the past 2 years. Some of these shareholders have extensive winning track records with developing lithium projects. These folks understand the long game, they understand that we're not playing in this area of the market for S&P 500 returns.

28:02 You know, and despite obviously, our lithium prices has suffered with everybody else's over the course of the past couple of months, the reality is is that these folks you know are standing there discussing with us all sorts of things about the best ways to progress going forward. And that is something that we're very, very happy to be able to have. And it's a luxury that many other companies do not have. We will continue after the PEA comes out to use the PEA as a determination for what the next steps are. Obviously we have a number of different things that we could do. Some of them are just simply extensions of drilling going forward in terms of the PFS. You know, typically when you go from PEA to PFS, you have to upgrade the geostatistical confidence in what you have.

28:51 But please remember that even though we only have 4 holes into our very, very high-grade material, and let's just say it basically starts at 2,500 feet and extends down to 3,000 feet plus, we're very confident about the lateral, basically, homogeneity of this. This is just laid down like a layer cake. So with minimal drilling, we could upgrade that to a higher level, perhaps take it to an even higher grade we could differentiate higher levels. If there's more drilling. Perhaps just add to that. So we have those different types of options. We also have other option now the again on this project that we have talked about in the past. And Brian is one of them. You know, we have a structure there, you know, we've talked about in the past whether or not it was worth taking a look at, you know, it looks like if the probability is there and the financing is there, we might take a look at that given, you know, that everything else going on with lithium prices, which aren't I don't think they're going to, they're not going to turn around overnight.

29:54 But it would be something that we would like to find out. And frankly, it's very much similar to the discussion that I've often had with everybody about why do you drill deeper which is that you don't want to sterilize your project you know because people often end up building buildings right on top of their best part of the deposit because they never went deep enough to sterilize it well it's sort of the same sort of concept. So that's another potential thing that we could do. Obviously, going forward, we're going to have to increase the metallurgical work to take it off of the bench scale. That's something that's important, you know, as you get to PFS level. And the other thing that we're also going to do concerning PFS is select who we want to have on that as an author on the PFS. And the reason that is also very important to us.

30:41 This is another allusion back to what I've often told you, again, over the past 18 months is more and more people find out about our sedimentary type deposits in Nevada, and Bonnie Clare in particular, they do want to work with us. And therefore, you find individuals who have experience in different things. And for our immediate purposes, that would be experience with borehole mining. That is the proposed mining method that is still in place, which again requires the use of drilling down and then getting into the horizontal, using a vertical hole. And in a simple way, basically just putting it in high pressure water, rotating that drill string, and bringing everything up as a slurry. So again, we're not trying to dissolve the lithium down hole with acid. We're not trying to even turn it into some sort of a brine and pump it up. We're talking about bringing up mud. You know, we're using water to bring up dirt.

31:33 And the question is going to be whether or not do we need to test that for pre-feasibility, which case be a significant cost. If we don't need to, then obviously we are getting rid of potential for a lot of dilution given the state of the market. So that's to be determined. However, we're finding more and more people who have experience with it and look like they could potentially help us with that part of the pre-feasibility study. We're also looking, frankly, at alternative mining methods. This is again a consequence of talking to more and more people coming out. Just different underground mining methods that people are telling us they think might be applicable. So no change in stores certainly that we know of, but remembering again what we're doing is a PEA. And so almost anything could be changed as you progress to PFS and feasibility study.

32:23 You know, one thing that does not look like it's going to change right now is the metallurgical flow sheet that's put together by floor. But I will tell you, there are different interesting technologies and their derivatives of direct lithium extraction that may yield some incremental way at some sort of intermediate step. And again, this goes back to sort of why I was telling you about we're taking a little bit extra time in this PEA just to see where things may fit conceptually as we progress into the future. So I would like everybody to please keep the faith. Remember that we have a massive asset whose value is clearly not being reflected in our market capitalization. I often see the days with very little volume. I know that it's very, very disheartening, but I do have great faith that when these things get sorted out, the noise sort of abates, the value becomes apparent to more people. I do not believe that natural resources in general are being appreciated anywhere near where they should be. I simply look to say what's going on with gold and where that's gone. And I can't tell you for how long I've heard when gold got to $1,500

33:36 then there would be a massive increase in investment and the deals would be coming and I heard it 2,000, 2,500 and of course we're over 3,000 US in gold And I still it's not clear to me that we have the interest from, you know, basically retail investors out there. It will come. You will not be able to ignore the cash flows that will be generated by those types of projects. And by the same way, you will not be able to basically ignore the net present values that are going to be generated by higher, more realistic lithium prices. As this whole mismatch between supply and demand gets sorted out, again, in a very, very immature industry. However, it will be sorted out. I think that's pretty much all I had for prepared remarks. I hope I haven't missed anything terribly obvious. It's probably a good time to just open it up, Kyle, to see if we have any questions.

34:28 No, definitely. Thank you for the thorough update, Steve. There are a few questions in the chat, so we'll get right to them. Two-part question here from an individual. What lithium pricing levels do you need to see before you generate interest from partners? Follow-up is, what are you thinking prices get to by end of 2025?

34:50 I think the realistic price that's gonna be, and I'm gonna divide this into people, or I should say into firms, like strategic miners, let's just say those who understand what all is involved, basically build a mine and everything like that, I think they need to have over $20,000 a ton to get high internal rates of return, and let's say high teens kind of thing. I don't think that that's gonna generate anything terribly eye-opening in terms, frankly. Like, you really won't see 50% IRs, these kinds of things at $25,000 lithium You can see that what everybody sort of has done at least in Nevada with these kinds of projects You know, there looks like they're centering around 20 to 24,000 dollars a ton and I think you get adequate economics to get that kind of involvement by folks that who know the business.

35:52 I think for, let's just say off takers, let's just say car companies as an example, the most obvious off takers, I think they need to see higher prices than that just because they aren't. I've told everybody here before the discussions I've had with car companies, you know, they don't understand why they have to invest in mines, right? Just imagine you're the you're the guys who are women who've been always, you know, purchasing aluminum or steel or whatever. And you know, hey, what are the specs?

36:18 What are the tonnages? You know, you get that everybody knows what the price here I am saying, Hey, you know, I know the price might be x, but I need to x new to purchase offtake or it's never going to appear right. This is a totally new concept to these folks. So I think you need higher lithium prices. But I think what you really need more from that, let's just say again, for car companies, is they needed to be commenced to the own demand their own demand for the for the EVs. And this now comes back to the tariffs, where are they going to make this stuff? What's the battery maker they're going to use? Right? I mean, let's face it. I mean, BYD, CATL, these guys, they're the ones who basically, you know, they build all of the batteries, that technology has got to make it into, into Western hands. And quite honestly, I believe it. I believe it will, I believe, you know, Ford and GM already said they said this a couple years ago, we were buying the Chinese stuff. And we were basically reengineering it because it's pretty widely understood that the US car companies are 5 to 10 years behind the Chinese car companies in this technology.

37:19 My, you know, I think that are, you know, the US, the Western companies are just simply going to steal it if they're, if it's possible. And that's just the reality of it. So I think make up the difference sooner, which means I think they'll be able to establish their new, their new products sooner. But the way I look at in terms of tiers, I'd say, you know, 20,000 kind of stuff for the big miners.

37:41 25,000 for, you know, car companies, I think for tail investors, you're going to need to see a spurt a bit higher. I really do. You know, everybody saw 18 months ago, whatever, everything went up to 80 90,000. Very, very brief response, I think from, you know, from investors. And I think they're going to be a little bit shy again, having ridden that over again, people say, Well, why did it go to $9,090 a tonne lithium and I said, Well, it really shouldn't have again back to a very, very immature industry. But my gut tells me is that lithium probably won't lead the way in this, I think you're going to see gold, people finally start to understand it, finally start to see cash flows reflected in bigger companies. And again, remember, the bigger companies is where institutional investors go first, because they can handle the liquidity, right? You got a billion dollar fund, you want to put a 1% into something, you go into a to a large cap producer, you can't do that with a junior because you don't too much of the company.

38:39 But as basically the way I see it, gold and copper start to go lithium will get the wood, they will get the attention that it needs. But I think that's the way it's gonna be. That's gonna be the sequence. In terms of what I think lithium prices are gonna be by the end of the year, I tell you what, I think it's a total crap shoot right now. But I think if the right moves are made in terms of these tariffs or any of these types of JVs that I potentially described to you earlier, I see no reason why it doesn't get back to $25,000, $30,000 a ton fairly quickly, because I think it will be an acknowledgment that there is a bifurcated market and people say, hey, we get it. Does it really matter what the Chinese spot prices, you know, in Shanghai, because you're not going to be using that you're not going to be using that lithium source.

39:31 You know, if we have prolonged trade, you know, problems, these things don't get sorted out. I mean, we're already, what, we're at the beginning of May, you know, then I think, unfortunately, you can see it languish right here. I do think that it's sort of a binomial type of an outcome right now. If things get handled, say, within the next 90 days, I think we got a good shot at seeing substantial increase in lithium prices by the end of the year. If it takes more than that, then I don't see the demand side right now, even though in absolute terms it's very good, I don't see it being able to pick up lithium prices by itself. I think we need to have basically a resolution in 1 form or another on the supply side. So long-winded way of saying, I hope in one hand, that we're double where we are now at least but you know if we don't get this resolution with the trade promise we could very easily stay down here around 10 12,000 dollars.

40:27 Thank you for that thorough response. For individuals that came in a little late, just a reminder that this is being recorded and you can view this within a couple of hours after the event, but an individual just said that I was a couple of minutes late for the event. What did you say regarding the bad weather in Nevada? No, it was bad weather on the East Coast of the US. If you go back a few months, at the beginning of the year, tremendous flooding in the Carolinas. It's actually still being rebuilt. It's a very bad piece in my opinion of US history when the federal government's emergency management, FEMA, is what we call it in the US, did not get over there to help these people. There were widespread power outages, something that disruptive, it just takes time for folks to get going again. And Flora was affected. And in no way am I trying to say that they did anything wrong, and they moved as quickly as they could.

41:24 My point was that the impact was that I'd hoped that we could claw a little bit back sort of at the time of our getting really going full steam. And we didn't call it all back, but quite honestly, the way I look at it in terms of, again, the reasons for delay, that is, you know, that would not be the number 1. It is more sort of what we've been seeing over the course of the past couple of months and are just wanting to thoroughly think about this, you know, internally, you know, about what's the best way to present the PEA. Because remember, you know, you can only pick one, you know, you can pick 1 scenario and say, okay, look, this is the scenario. You can obviously and you will present variance analysis, you know, plus or minus 10, 15%. But the headline numbers are the headline numbers, right? What's your tonnage? What's your grade?

42:12 You know, how long is the mine life that kind of thing? You know, how are investors going to think about this in terms of capex, all this sort of stuff. And again, the luxury that we have with this very high grade material is that we can think about it in different ways. The luxury, in my opinion, that we have because the borehole mining method is, we can think about it in different ways, because we can high grade right away, right? If you're at an open pit, and you have high grade material at surface, that's great, but that's often not the case. And then the reality is, an example of an open pit is that you have to start from the surface. And often you have to remove overburden, which is cost, it's time, it's all this stuff. So there are pros and cons to everything. But again, given sort of where lithium prices were thinking about sort of the we'll just call it craziness in the world right now.

43:00 And the obvious attempts to domestically onshore manufacturing, mining in the US, etc. And what might evolve over the course of the past, over the next, sorry, 6, 9 months. You know, what do we think collectively inside the company is the best way to present the PEA and it just requires a little bit more thought you just don't Want to shoot ourselves in our foot if possible You mentioned something that ties into another question here in regards to open pit mining An individual is wondering are you considering strip mining the shallow deposits while you use borehole on the deep deposits? No, no we're not. There's really no reason to be trying to do that And I think some of that there may have been, you know, in the last PEA, a little bit of open pitch just to get going at the very beginning with borehole mining.

43:54 But it's the, at anywhere near these lithium prices, I would say, first of all, there's no way that our material is not high grade enough to go after. So let's put it that way at surface. The optionality that I have talked about before again, so we've talked about obviously borehole mining at depth. We've talked about the brine as a secondary. If lithium prices are high enough, then our material as an open pit would become viable. However, at this point in time, I wouldn't look at it that way. This would be just getting right into the borehole mining and starting to extract the very high-grade material. Understood. There are a couple of questions regarding Nevada lithium compared to its peers, so I'll get into those here. Some of your peers in the Clayton Valley are concerned about water being locked up. Are you still confident in Bonnie Clare's ability to obtain the necessary water rights?

44:45 Yeah, I'm confident and not necessarily because we've got an inside scoop and I will just tell you that, you know, as a junior with no revenue, you know, buying water rights is just really something that's not viable. And that's something that every junior, I shouldn't say that, almost every junior is going to face. But this is the reality of the situation. The governor's office is aware that these water rights have to be allocated in a certain way, and there are methods to basically using either inter-basin transfers, all sorts of different things. And I am certainly not a hydrological permitter and it is a very, very Byzantine type of a thing, let me tell you. However, we've been told through our water consultants that, you know, there are methods for the state engineer to address this, it is, frankly, it's quite a political issue, because the governor can do certain things, however, remember even though there's a Republican pro-mining governor, it's not as if, at the state level, that the, let's just call it the state Senate, Congress, whatever, the representatives are entirely on board.

45:55 However, if basically the state of Nevada wants any of this to happen in terms of all these new lithium mines. This is something that is going to have to be addressed- it's can be temporary uses of water we've heard all sorts of things and I think that there- I'm generally amenable to it quite honestly. I've had talks with the- quite honestly very nice talks with the Department of Natural Resources Conservation describing the project. I mean they understand it etc. All of these methods are going to are going to use a lot of water at the very least in their processing. So the question is you know to me if the politics have to be overcome, it's sort of like, well, what are the economics? And are they high, you know, are they good enough to get the state to do it? You know, the first thing I would say is that if you've got the federal government sort of in the back nudging you to do something. That's entirely different than the federal government being agnostic about what's going on. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, I know I mentioned this when I had come back from basically the Nevada governor's inaugural conference on lithium. I don't know. Let's just call it towards the end of last year Where when I noticed about everything that they're doing In terms of Nevada and trying to eat to grab basically this is the way I described it They're trying to steal all the high-tech manufacturing that they can out of companies in California, those that are fleeing and those that aren't.

47:22 But they're looking more at the technology around lithium, right? So these are the, you know, the giga plants, the redwood recycling, all this sort of thing. They acknowledge that the minds are there, but I don't think that the actual minds themselves have risen high enough in priority for the state of Nevada, and that may be because of the political problems. My reason for telling you all of this is that I think that there will be that, that sort of moment where they understand this is now this is the, the crippling stopgap that we have to basically come up with, like an understandable workaround. Because at the federal level, this kind of stuff is being done with them trying to streamline the mining practices, all these kinds of things. But I'm confident that it's going to get resolved at the state level, because I think that the potential economic impact to Nevada is just too great to ignore. I don't think I don't think they're trying to ignore it. I think that you're just looking at what they see is low-hanging fruit, what they can grab immediately as they said from say California or what they can attract from other areas and obviously the mines are the longer development mines but we continue to reach out and talk to them about resolving this. So I do not believe it's a kill shot. I just think it hasn't been resolved yet. That's the way I look at it. Thank you.

48:43 One of your peers just announced receiving an LOI from Ex-Im for 900 million. Have you considered that route as a financing option? Yeah, Ex-Im, you know, that's the export import bank is something that is again, relatively new in terms of them coming into the, I don't want to say into the fray, into the mix, let's put it that way. But what a lot of these things that are appearing as they, it looks like a panacea, right? Again, we still have the US government backing, you know, the 2 loans for GM and Ford at up at Thacker and Rhyolite Ridge. Of course you saw that GM, Orion Resource got involved there, I think for that last slug of financing.

49:30 A lot of these things that are government related are actually for more late stage. As the way I've yet to find anything that is earlier stage impact. This is what I have written to the state of Nevada asking them to try to advance this kind of legislation, not only in Nevada, but Arizona, other mining states, because, you know, it's hard, it's probably not hard to believe, you know, the US doesn't have anything like Canada does with say, flow throats, that kind of thing, anything to give them an incentive to make it easier for companies to at the earlier stage to basically increase financing, you know, to get these these earlier necessary things like the drilling, like the studies, et cetera. That's the kind of thing though, like the Ex-Im Bank that I'm hoping that we can make the government entities understand. I think again, to a certain extent, there just isn't the knowledge base in a lot of these places. Frankly, when I was at PEDAC, I met with an XM representative, you know, and again, this is later stage stuff. Now this may start to change, But we're starting, what I can tell you is that at least these entities are reaching out. Let's say they're reaching out in the most effective way and it's still hard to get ahold of them, but they're reaching out. So from my perspective, this is all good news.

50:48 So yes, I will be going again, following circling back with Ex-Im to see if there is the potential to see with the again, the money, the different entities that were handing out the late stage loan guarantees to see if they've been able to adjust, you know, and coming in earlier stages. I do think also, we shouldn't forget about what I talked about earlier, with these executive orders, I see a lot of emphasis, a lot of direction towards, hey, get the DOD, Department of Defense, involved. And my gut feeling is, is that that's the kind of thing that could move faster than say, through the Department of Energy. Because of course, it's just the whole security wrapper, right? That would surround the projects.

51:35 And therefore, if there's an element of time involved, it would make sense. And I think even though some of the DoD stuff was there before, this, from what I can see, is a whole new level of emphasis. So ExSim is one of what I would say would be many that we're going to clearly continue to reach out. Great. Last question we have in the chat here and then we can wrap things up. I'm an RE developer in Southern Nevada with a site that has significant rail infrastructure and I'd like to learn more about the proposed new rail infrastructure you mentioned. Any studies you can refer me to? Yeah, that's, you know, it's Googling stuff And I have not seen, I've not seen like an engineering study of what would be proposed, but I have been told multiple times and pretty sure I've seen a couple of headlines about basically making that connection. The obvious one would be, I think, from Winnemucca.

52:30 And the details of which in terms of, is that a private line down there? I'm not sure. I mean, the old arsenal was there, et cetera, things like that. But I think you can find that fairly easily. I can't point you to anything definitive because I don't think anything definitive has been made publicly, but there's just too much noise around it. I've been told too many times that that they're, at least at the state level, they're seriously looking at this. So I mean, that's the best that I could really offer on that. No, that's fine. Excellent. Thank you, Steve, for this great update. I'll pass back to you for any closing remarks before we wrap things up here. Okay, that's great. Look, if there are any other questions, obviously, please reach out to Kyle, reach out to us at Nevada Lithium, and we'll do our best to tell you what we can. Keep the faith. This is very cyclical value investing right now that is predicated upon basically a new technology which is EVs and battery technology.

53:26 I for 1 think that those long-term supply-demand fundamentals remain in place. I think that the fact that we're working with such a nascent industry, the lithium industry, is something that's making the highs higher and the lows lower. And on top of that, I think that we have at the macro economic level, basically a level of disturbance, chaos, unsure outlook, however you want to phrase it, predicated upon what I think are fundamental changes in global trade, things like that. I don't think we've really ever seen this. And I would argue that it's probably going to have more of an impact than what we saw in 2008, where we just had, you know, financial crisis, you know, and hopefully, with regards to a lot of the financing that's going on, because the US budget's been determined right now, that that won't add even another level that will want people to come and look for liquidity.

54:23 All of that to say is we're living through about as crazy a time as you could want. But what you have in your hand is an asset of just massive value. If you believe that lithium is going to make up part of the technological future of the world, you've got a massive project that's not only high grade, high tonnage with the ability probably to increase both, but it's in the best basically mining jurisdiction in the world. You've got very sophisticated sets of shareholders who have worked their way through situations like this. They understand you need to plant seeds. It takes time for this to evolve and we're trying to be as transparent about everything that we can with you without giving away competitive secrets. But stick with us. This is the kind of thing that I believe is going to pay massive dividends going forward.

55:14 So if we all keep the faith, we'll be all right. And I appreciate your time. And we appreciate the update. Always great chatting Steve. Until next time. Thank you so much.