American Critical Minerals

0:05 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this panel discussing America's critical minerals. Now more than ever, the West is focused on securing domestic supply chains and reducing foreign dependence on essential resources for our technological future and national security. Today, we have Stephen Renschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium and Kit Mars, CEO of Alaska Silver to discuss this important topic. As a reminder, this event is being recorded and will be made available shortly after we conclude. Now, this is a live event, so please feel free to submit any topic related questions in the chat. Company specific questions if time allows will be addressed at the end. Regardless our team will share them with the respective companies post event. Gentlemen thank you for joining us today. Okay well thank you Kyle. Yep Thank you. Why don't we begin by telling us which critical minerals your companies have exposure to and why you've chosen to focus on these particular resources and perhaps we'll kick it off with you Kit.

1:00 Okay, well thanks. So the 2 critical minerals that are most important to Alaska silver would be gallium, which is number 1 on the list, and zinc, which has been on the list, both of these, since 2022. So, chose to focus, it's a little bit of serendipity, we are focused on our high-grade silver deposit, which is called Water Pump Creek, and it's a silver polymetallic deposit. So, number 2 behind silver from an economic standpoint is zinc, And the primary zinc mineral is sphalerite, which most all geologists know that's where most zinc comes from. And the sphalerite at Waterpump Creek contains gallium. So not all zinc contains gallium.

1:46 Found in high temperature zinc deposits like ours in Alaska, carbonate replacement, as opposed to the more typical Mississippi Valley deposits which contain germanium. So that's how we ended up with a focus on gallium via zinc.

2:04 Thank you. And Stephen, the name kind of is a clue, but go ahead. Yeah, the name sort of suggests what we're looking for and have found. So Nevada lithium, The original intent was to find lithium, which we found. Subsequent to that, however, what we found is significant concentrations of boron. And though boron is not on the critical minerals list, I would say it's not on the critical minerals list yet. Because it continues to be a topic of discussion has been for at least 2 years for the U. S. Government. So the way I look at it is we're probably going to be going after to not one of the elements on that list and- as so many of these other deposits have, you know, we have various other things that we ask, say, for, we have lower concentrations of, but right at the second, I should say, really the focus will remain on lithium and boron and in prices of anything else, make additional surplus through the metallurgical design make sense, we will certainly take a look at those as well.

3:11 And sticking with you, Steve, we will start at a broader level here, but how can the US effectively reduce its dependence on foreign critical minerals, while balancing economic and strategic priorities?

3:23 You know, it's a holistic approach. And in my opinion, we're starting to see evidence of sort of the deployment of that holistic approach right now coming from the current administration. It's been very interesting over the course of the past few years as I've talked to local and state government. You know, the focus has been very much what's the near-term result? You know, How quickly can I get benefits basically for my stakeholders? And I think we happen to work in the state of Nevada, obviously is very pro-mining, but there's been quite an emphasis, essentially the Inflation Reduction Act was put into place under the previous administration, there was quite an emphasis to sort of work on manufacturing, work on recycling, working on things that will, again, give value back in exchange for taxpayers' money as quickly as possible.

4:18 My argument is that you really need to go farther back. You need to be vertically integrated all the way through to, of course, your mineral in the ground. And these are, I think, sort of the targets of the executive orders that you're starting to come through from the Trump administration. It makes perfect sense in my opinion. It wasn't all that long ago where the US actually had a stocked, you know, stockpile of critical materials and they were sold off, I can't remember how many years ago it was, if it was over 7 or 8 years ago now, never really made any sense. And of course, now we see, you know, the fruit of that exercise. To me, it makes sense to get the economy going, the U.S. Economy going in all its different areas, not just the manufacturing, but if you think about what goes into the development of a project, particularly a green fields project, you'll see that the impact of the economy is just widespread. And if you take into account economic multipliers, the amount of money that gets spent and then basically, you know, we circulate in the economy is phenomenal.

5:22 So it's a perfect hand in glove kind of a thing to get away from basically U.S. Dependence on all these materials by bringing everything onshore, just bringing it all back from the beginning of the process to the end. And that's what I think we're starting to see. So to me, it's a perfectly logical and I think we're going to see it happen relatively soon. Thank you. Kit, do you have any further commentary on this? Yeah, I think Stephen really hit the nail on the head. The past effort has all been in the manufacturing, different things higher up in the supply chain. Somehow the government and its wisdom forgot that you have to start with the material in the first place. So there had been very little support for mining and the processing side. And as an example is gallium. So gallium is mentioned as part of our zinc.

6:16 Luckily, the economics of our Waterpump Creek deposit depend on first silver, second zinc, and third lead. But once we started doing research in the gallium, which by the way went to the forefront of the news about a year ago when China cut off 100% of the licensed export of gallium. So the US does not mine or process any gallium. Small supply comes out of a company in Canada. Very interesting. It's 100% dependent on recycling Apple iWatches. So that's not exactly a real strong source that you want to depend on in the future. So when we started doing our research, we realized we do have gallium in our zinc, did a metallurgy on our zinc composites to confirm that, and then started talking to the DOD and the US government and realized that there is no known technology

7:13 in North America on how do you extract gallium from zinc. Zinc and bauxite are the 2 main sources of gallium, and no known processing. That's how far behind the US is from a technological base. Research is starting at the Missouri School of Science and Technology, but we're at day 1 and learning how to process things like gallium. Rare earths are a little further along the way, but it's a very similar story.

7:43 So, with President Trump's administration, they are now focusing on domestic resource development. What specific policy changes do you anticipate for the critical minerals sector specifically? Well, it depends on the mineral, but I think number 1, it's support of grants for research. Things like Rare Earths have been classic. I visited Mountain Pass when I was in graduate school 40 years ago when it started to process Rare Earths. The Chinese flooded the market, dropped the price. There were no US price supports. Molly Corp that owned it, the company went into bankruptcy. And guess who bought up some of the pieces? Well, it's the Chinese. So that project is coming back. They still have a, I believe they have a pretty large shareholder component from the Chinese. But that's an example where price supports a guaranteed minimum price. You don't have to single out individual companies.

8:40 But there needs to be a floor price that sets the economic for many of these different minerals.

8:49 Yeah, if you don't mind, let me add on to that, because that's a really interesting story. And it's precisely what you're seeing today in, I would argue, the lithium world, where you have price dumping, you have basically the Chinese coming in and understand that in lithium's case, you know, prices are below the incentive price needed to bring on new projects. And of course, what is that? What does that do? Well, it just delays the time for everything and makes it impossible to get yourself out of that non-virtuous circle, so to speak. And that's not just me talking. That's the Secretary of the Interior talking a month ago. I think everybody acknowledges that when you have an over-reliance or basically when you have supplier that achieves critical mass, it's a very, very dangerous situation, not only in the present, but also going forward. And you know, just to sort of go from there, I would say this is why I talk about a holistic approach.

9:48 And I think you're starting to see specific things taking place to address not only the short-term needs, as an example, you're seeing talks of the administration conversing with the Congo, with Greenland, obviously with Ukraine. But everybody who's involved in development in any way knows that the last places you would necessarily want to start to do that in comparison into the US,

10:15 you know, would be places like that because of the timelines, the uncertainty, mining jurisdictional, you know, jurisdictional risk is all sorts of problems. But it's a concerted effort to try to say, hey, what can we get now versus, you know, what we can also get later. I think the absolute most important thing when this all shakes out is going to be the development of some sort of a sovereign wealth fund for the US. And we started to see the first thoughts of that, the first beginnings of how it could be developed a few months ago in one of the executive orders. And the reason I think it's so important is when we talk about the timelines for developing these projects, I think the focus gets almost, it's put too much on the permitting, not saying that that's not important because clearly it's important. And there are ways to mitigate that of course if your project happens to be on federal land versus state land, those sorts of things.

11:08 But it's almost as if to me, those projects, when you talk about the permitting risk, it's a survivorship bias. You've got to get there first. And when you get there, it means you've already spent a boatload of money and you've had the geology go in your favor and you've had the metallurgy go in your favor and things like that. A sovereign wealth fund, which is there for the long-term benefits for the U.S. Taxpayer, I would argue, would be really the way to address this. Because if I just take what we did at Bonnie and Claire, say, with our last drilling program, and we managed to put in a couple of holes for a million dollars. Well, say there was, you know, just make it up. Say that we could get a 3 for 1 or 4 for 1 type

11:48 of a grant or something like that. You could accelerate all this early stage development to where you could get to a decision point you know whether or not then you're gonna need loan guarantees or whether or not this is gonna be a viable project. Things change in this industry. It's such a dynamic industry. And I would argue that financing continues to be the most important part because let's face it, the equity markets are not very good. U.S. Investors for decades have not been interested in natural resources to the extent that our Northern Canadian neighbors have been. So to me, that's what I hope to hear coming out relatively soon from the administration is some way to not have the focus be on the loan guarantees and all the later stage types of financial instruments and get this up front, hey, we understand we may lose our money, not every one of these projects is going to make it, but that's okay, because what this is really about is securing a supply chain of critical minerals for the US.

12:45 So those are sort of my thoughts on that. Well said, Kit, anything further to add before I move on?

12:52 Well, it's very true that Canada is much more advanced on how they support mining, But it's a strong mining economy. The US does have some large copper mines and others, but it's really not a mining-based economy. It's a lot of IT, all kinds of different things that are more technology driven. So it's interesting when we, as a company, compete with the investor money. We are currently listed in Canada, but we'll be advancing and listing in the US, hopefully in the next few months. The Canadians, especially in Quebec, which is very, very pro-mining, they have a sort of a pass-through type of investment, certain kinds of things, it's called flow-through financing, where somebody puts money into, buys shares in a financing for mining company, as long as that money is 100% used in exploration development in the ground type uses, not overhead and things like that, then they receive a tax deduction for it.

14:03 The US doesn't have anything like that. Now, if that started, I'm sure every industry in the US would want to have a similar thing, so you have to pick and choose. But it's just an example of how other countries

14:16 understand the importance of mining, focus on it. The US, I think, with the new administration and all the discussion of mining, is certainly starting to turn the table and the country and the public is realizing mining isn't bad, it's good, It provides a lot of elements that are critical for the modern world. And I think that's a very important part of it. It's just public education that really has to come first in many of these areas. But it does seem interesting, sorry again, Kyle. No, no. The only reason I just wanted to mention is it seems like the administration is really turning the circle, I think, fairly quickly. You know, and the latest news that I point to is sort of this seabed mining, where the executive order was signed to basically look into that. And that's an older idea that, you know, has had tremendous political opposition for a long time.

15:11 But the technology, I would argue, has also been there for a long time. So you're starting to see these ideas revisited, I would argue, fairly very quickly, which to me indicates that there is really quite a bit of importance being attached to this in this particular area, which I think behooves us all very well going forward. And I think, you know, Kit, obviously what you just spoke about with the flow through financing, that's just exactly, that's the most obvious difference, you know, between the Canadian and the US markets. And it would be an easy place, I would think, to start in the US, except of course, it requires change in legislation and has to be enacted by By Congress, so we'll see we'll see how that goes forward. But all these are all kinds of ideas that need to be explored No Kit mentioned Investors have many different industries to choose from and it helps that gold is hitting all time highs.

16:06 It's around 3300 an ounce US right now. But Steve, what do you tell investors about investing or potential investors about investing in lithium projects while lithium prices are so low? Yeah, it's sort of hard to describe that people have never been exposed to these parts of the investment, I don't want to say dynamic, but these sorts of investments. And again, that's because, you know, in the US, there's just been a tremendous move towards indexation. Of course, we had, you know, the weed stocks, the biotech, the technology for all these years. And, you know, if the growth is there, obviously, because it's spectacular canes in a couple of individual stocks.

16:52 But when you're when you're investing in junior resource stocks, right, what I always tell people is, you're not investing for S&P 500 returns, You know, the actual percentages of deposits making it all the way through to production is very, very low. That, however, does not mean that you can't make tremendous amounts of monies by investing in it. Now, obviously, when investor sentiment

17:18 is at its lows, valuations are almost always at their lows, which means that the opportunity is the highest. So you need to be able to look through the short term, right? The market is always looking ahead. Spot prices, at least for I'll just speak for lithium right now today, will not bring on any new supply. Supply and demand for lithium over the next few years, those forecasts remain as robust as they were 3 or 4 years ago. Whether or not something rolls out in at a compounded annual growth rate of 20%, 22% growth or whatever on the demand side, I would argue is just, it really doesn't matter. Because to grow supplies from not 0, but from a very, very low starting point to 3 million tons a year kind of stuff has never been done before. I always point to copper. Copper every time copper gets above basically demand, that's GDP plus 1 or 2 percent and supply tries to keep up, everything starts to fall apart because of the stresses on the system. I would argue in the case of lithium, if it weren't for Chinese who had stockpiled, who know how to manipulate certain things, you know, to basically keep sentiment down. We would be at a better place than we are right now. However, that can't continue. That can't continue. And you've already seen lithium mines shut down in China.

18:45 You've seen processors shut down overseas, et cetera, because we're just too far down in pricing. And so nobody's going to make money. And that has its own set of inherent problems for current producers. But we don't get involved with these types of projects, again, for S&P 500 returns. I mean, our market capitalization right now is, I don't know, somewhere between 30 and 40 million Canadian. But you know we have arguably the second largest resource you know in America lithium resource.

19:12 We're going to be coming out with a P.A. Fairly soon which I think is going to demonstrate very, very robust economics. And it's not going to be anywhere near $30 million in market capitalization. So when you look at these types of investments, you want to be secure, in my opinion, in the long-term outlook for whatever commodity that you're talking about. And you want to look at the merits of the project, the management, the jurisdiction, all this kind of stuff. And then accordingly, you make your bets. But that's why you're in the middle of this kind of investment for those sorts of returns. And Kyle, I just wanna make a comment on the stockpiles that Stephen mentioned. So, 30, 40 years ago, the US had very adequate stockpiles across a whole range of critical minerals.

19:58 When I worked for Anaconda 40 years ago, Anaconda was one of the leading companies that studied the whole thought of critical minerals, wrote a whole memoir on it, delivered that to Congress, US government. I'm sure it's on a shelf somewhere that maybe somebody should pull it off and read it. But the simplest thing, we have a National Reserve for petroleum. Why don't we have one for the list of critical minerals? You can't run some of these refineries without some of the critical minerals that go in the technology that run the refinery. It'd be the simplest thing to do is just to make small investment relative to other industries, other costs of government. It's really silly to think that we're worried about supply chain in the US doesn't have a stockpile of, I think of almost any of the critical minerals. I haven't looked at the numbers lately, but I think it's pretty well down to 0.

20:56 I want to narrow down to the state level. America's vast. Let's talk about the states you're operating in. First, Steve, how supportive is the state of Nevada for critical minerals projects and what does it mean for projects in the state? The short answer is Nevada is very, very supportive. Nevada has a very rich history, obviously, of gold and silver and also copper mining and going back 150 years. I think right now Nevada is the fourth largest gold producing country in the world. They produce so much of it. So they're welcoming lithium with open arms. The current governor was up, I guess it was over 2 years ago, in Toronto with the Canadian premier at that time when things were, I would say it was probably right before lithium prices started to fall, talking about how to extract all the value that was possible from the entire lithium chain.

21:56 So in this case, not talking just about mines, but how can we recycle? How can we potentially upgrade?

22:04 Because with lithium, there are different forms that are used in the end for batteries, some are hydroxides, some are carbonates. A lot of the mines are going to produce less than battery grade technical, I would say they would be technical grade carbon. This is an example that will require a little bit more of refining. So all of these sorts of things. However, what I would also mention is that not long ago when I was at the Nevada's sort of inaugural lithium conference, let's call it that, 6 or 7 months ago in Reno. You know, the focus that I heard was really, really balanced on swiping all the advanced manufacturing they could out of companies that were fleeing California. Again, more focused, I think, on, oh, where are we going to get all these people that we need for the mines?

22:56 Or how's the grid going to, you know, hold up all these sorts of things? All of which, quite honestly, are necessary. I'm not decrying the need for all of those. However, at the very beginning, right, again, for those of the companies that are trying to develop lithium in Nevada, and I don't know, maybe there are 50 or 60 of them, they're all over the place coming in. It's really about the access to capital. And again, most if not all of us are non-producing, so therefore we're not generating any taxes, therefore not paying taxes is really not a big deal right now. It's anything that Nevada could do to basically interface with the federal government to help, in my opinion, get that access to the money that has already been allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act and try to repurpose it. Again, to come back to something so that dollars can be put into developers' hands as quickly as possible and spread around,

23:54 again, through that economic multiplier effect. If I drill for a million dollars and my multiplier is 8, there's $8 million that are going into state and local communities. And that's the message that I continue to try to espouse. Nevada is like any other state. They've got a boatload of things going on and they're trying to get to everything that they can. But everyone, everyone to whom I've spoken has been tremendously supportive. Even local communities who have a rich history, again, in mining understand gold and silver. In the case of lithium, all they don't want is to just not have, you know, these big salars developed with evaporation ponds like you see in South America, to which I tell them, of course, that's nothing like we're doing at Bonny Clare. And I don't think any of those are gonna be permitted, in my opinion, anywhere in the world again, just because of the mining industry's consciousness towards keeping water resources in good shape.

24:49 So, Nevada's always got one of the best, one of the top 3 mining jurisdiction ratings in the world. I don't think it's gonna change anytime soon. And I'm very, very happy that our project is in Nevada. And Kit, Trump has talked extensively about Alaska and his executive orders. What does it mean for mining in the state and what does it mean for Alaska silver specifically?

25:12 Well, Alaska is a natural resources state. Most people know Prudhoe Bay as what was the largest oil reserve in the US. So that's really the current basis, the largest basis for the Alaska economy. But originally, Alaska was really a mining state, it still is, going back to the gold rush days, the Klondike, Fairbanks, Nome. But from a hard rock standpoint, a lot of people have forgotten, it's been a long time ago, one of the first major mines in Alaska was Kennecott. That was the namesake of what became Kennecott Copper. And that was built in the pre-World War I, financed by J.P. Morgan, the first railroad in the state. So Alaska is a mining state. So I think evidence of how the state supports that is, number 1, I should have mentioned earlier, our project and access is on 100% state land.

26:07 So unlike Stephen and others in Nevada, we don't have the, one of our jobs is not to spend a lot of time talking to the federal regulators. You know, The BLM and Forest Service are not located in our part of the state. The state of Alaska issues a five-year exploration permit at one time, and then we can pick our drill holes as we go through that five-year program, and each year at the end of the year, design and report back on the reclamation work that we're doing. The other thing the governor's office created a number of years ago, 20 years ago, what's called the large mine permit team. Every mining project in the state has been part of that. And it's a very interesting scope of government where the governor's office brings in all the agencies that will deal with a particular project. So we list the things we're going to do, whether it's pit slope stability, water, fish and wildlife, you name it. And then brings in the different agencies to work on that. And then we actually have a contract with those agencies on what we'll do and help fund their overhead.

27:17 And then lastly, President Trump has come out with a number of executive orders about Alaska. And the state is organizing, in fact, they'll be going next week, June 2nd through the 5th, an Alaska Energy Conference, and that'll be attended by the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Energy, and some senior officials from the U.S. Geological Survey. So that's an example of bringing in government officials, industry, to meet and talk to each other and

27:49 figure out how to move things ahead quicker. Thank you. I'm going to bring it back to Steve here because I know he's excited to talk about this topic. What technological innovations are most promising for improving extraction efficiency and reducing environmental impact? Well, it's interesting. If anybody's familiar with our Bonnie Clare project, The obvious example would be our currently proposed mining method, which is called borehole mining, large diameter borehole mining, which is not a new technique. It's just something that certainly has never been used in lithium. Not to say that there's been much that's ever been used in lithium because really until a few years ago with the hard rock coming in it was always about the salars right the South American salars.

28:40 So you know we're always looking for ways to reduce the economic impact. I mean not only just because it's obviously what you wanna do with regards to public relations, because people get scared by a lot of things, particularly when they're not the simplest of things to explain.

29:00 But from, you know, frankly, most of the time, it turns out that there's a relationship between doing stuff well and more efficiently, as well as in an economically sensitive way that ties through again to the economics. And so here's as an example with Bonnie Clare our mineralization is at depth all of the other lithium projects that you see in Nevada are basically open pits you know certainly all of the more famous ones that you see that are going to be coming on stream or whether it's going to be Rhyolite Ridge or whatever and the the basically the evolution of the Bonnie Claire stories that originally- you know what it was a prospecting for lithium brines. Which in those particular couple of holes didn't hit but found these tremendous intercepts of very very high grade lithium rich sediments.

29:54 And subsequently years of drilling we found even more and more of those that were thicker and of higher grade and now have boron with them at even deeper depths. Now if you think about constructing an open pit, it's the way I always tell people to do it, is you know if you think about you're trying to dig a hole you know say on the beach and you're trying to dig down deeper what happens the sand keeps falling in on the side. Right? You've got to keep laying back the sides, keep digging out on the perimeter so you can go deeper. That's what happens when you don't have a very hard or competent rock. We've all seen probably pictures of like, you know, kimberlite pipes. You see them in Russia in particular where they go straight down It looks like somebody just drill put a drill and it goes down for you know, whatever thousands of feet But that's not the kind of stuff that we're talking about in Nevada So the point in all of this is this very rich thick blanket of lithium and boron that we have It would would really not be available to us if we were just going with an open pit. So we're adapting a mining technique that's very, very similar to what Cameco uses to get uranium out of the ground, but Cigar Lake, This has been used in much harder material.

31:04 They talked about using it to explore for diamonds in kimberlite, things like that. And so for us, you know, our metallurgy is going to be very, very similar, in my opinion, to other companies that are working with the sediments in Nevada. But the mining method is something right now that really sets us apart. And that's just the example of the technology that's being adapted. And I do think it's going to continue to change whether or not

31:30 it's going to be AI or things like that, I really don't know. But the reality is that as more and more people at least are starting to get to know our project, we're hearing more and more from those people about, hey, you know what, we think we could do this, or have you thought about that? Very, very, very interesting for us at Nevada Lithium.

31:52 Kit, I'll start this question off with you here. How can mining companies in the United States effectively engage with local communities while addressing concerns about resource development? Well, it's a very important question and it's something that we've really done from day 1 with our project in western Alaska. So we're about 28 miles from the Yukon River, ultimately that'll be our transportation corridor. It's a fairly large river and that's how barge traffic serves all the villages up and down from Tidewater all the way back to Neenana, probably a distance of about 500 miles. So what we've done starting in 2016 and 17 is we actively every season go out and meet with the tribal leaders, the tribal councils in each of the individual Alaska Native villages in our area. They're Galena, Nevado, and Caltech.

32:48 And then we started a local hire program. So it's gone on every year since 2017, I believe, when we started. We're a small company, but it shows how underdeveloped this part of Alaska is. We're one of the largest private employers in the area. When the Illinois Creek Mine, which is on our property, principally gold and silver, that was in production in 1997-98 for a very short period of time. Gold prices were unlike today, they were right around $300 an ounce and a little less and silver was about $3. It was the largest employer in the area and It's still a lot of people come to us and say, when are you going to reopen that project? But I think the key is not just going to the villages, which is what we do and explain what we're doing, is that we provide transportation and bring out really anybody that wants to come to visit our site, stay for the day, see firsthand exactly what we're doing.

33:52 It's a lot easier to have somebody come and see and touch and talk to the people there than to hear about it thirdhand. And the other thing is with our local hire program, it allows the tribal leaders to actually see their friends and neighbors on the job that they've been hired to do, receive the training that we're giving them. And it's been a very successful program and we're very proud of it. Thank you. And Steven, do you have anything to add for this one? I would agree with Kit wholeheartedly. The key is you have to get out there and you have to keep getting out there. In our particular case, again, we are on federal land, the BLM, and our nearest neighbor is 20, 30 miles away, the town of Beatty. But since the beginning, you know, representatives of, you know, of our companies have been out there speaking to them. I'll be going out probably less than a month now to engage in another town hall with inhabitants of there. And, you know, it's a very, it's really, it's easy to understand, right, both sides of the argument. If something potentially major is going to come into your neighborhood you want to understand what it's going to do what the impact is going to be et cetera- the- the reality is that there's tremendous benefits.

35:07 That are offered by having projects like this coming into the area. But if something goes wrong there's potential for you know obviously negative impact so. It's all turn it's all very understandable. I think the one thing that is sometimes misunderstood by the communities is just again, I go back to the word dynamic, which is that things change and a lot of it just has to do with the nature of the industry. It's not as if people are saying one thing and doing another. It's just, just take an example. You're drilling a hole and you're, and you're finding one thing, you're finding chocolate cake, you're going down a little deeper, now you got vanilla cake, and now you got to start talking about doing something else. Well, you never knew that you had vanilla cake at the bottom. I mean, that's just the reality of doing stuff in the unknown You know, I find that people are really by and large. They're very very reasonable if we take Impact pardon me if we take precautions not to impact them and these are things just again remembering that we're 30 miles away really from any population center, but trying to make sure that we don't have lights on when we're drilling, you know, that are somehow making their way to the highway or obviously keeping things with the drillers so that we know we're not having trash dumps or anything like that. All of these sorts of things. I would say they're relatively little, but they go a very, very long way.

36:25 The bigger types, I think, of discussions that you try to steer people towards are like, you know, what about the future? Because the way I look at these big projects, at least in the case of Bonnie Claire, is this is something that you're talking about for generations, right? So it's not really about what I'm going to be doing in 20 years, obviously. It's what the kids and the grandkids potentially could be doing out there. And I think that's what excites the communities when they understand that you are looking ahead and that you're doing what you can do now. But in the end, the idea is that you have something that's, again, it's not at odds with what surrounds us, It's in harmony with what's out there. And I think as long as you're honest with people and you stay and keep them up to date with it, you have a very good chance of just basically not garnering any bad attention. And that's the way we look at it.

37:16 I wrote down a question here. We might have covered it throughout our whole 37 minutes so far, but looking ahead, how might geopolitical tensions affect global critical mineral markets and how should U.S. Companies prepare? And I'll pass it to you, Kit. Well, I think the supply chain risk, most people didn't talk about it 2 years ago, and that has become very, very clear, starting with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and how that reverberated, and that's translated into license and export restrictions, whether it's from China and other countries. So I think the realization that the supply chain has to be figured out, otherwise many of our industries are at risk.

38:03 I think that's where the critical mineral list really brings things into focus. We've mentioned zinc, which is our largest component of both economically and as a critical mineral. The gallium that comes with that. 2 years ago, nobody really, other than people in the electronics business and the military, really knew what the word gallium meant. Research and things we found out is gallium is critical for what are called active radar displays. Primary use of those is in the F-35 fighter plane that ensures the US dominance from a combat standpoint. And then it's also used in all the active radar displays and just about all missiles and guided missile systems. So things like that don't really have a price to the DoD.

38:53 If you don't have them, you're really on a hard time. So it's a realization that critical things like that have to be protected from the supply chain standpoint. I'm going to take this opportunity because I have 2 questions lined up here. One is from the chat, this is just a reminder, we'll be closing off here shortly, so if you have any questions please feel free to submit them. But an individual in the chat has a question for Steve here. The McDermott-Caldera, sorry, I have poor eyesight here, lithium deposit is often cited as the world's largest known lithium deposit, with estimates of 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium. Will this affect Nevada lithium outlook or the price of lithium in the future?

39:39 No, I don't think so. You know, there are other big deposits out in the world too, like, and some of them aren't quantified, like some of those big salars and things like that. The thing that you have to remember, you can have a resource delineated. That doesn't necessarily mean that's all going to get mined, you know, they, you know, up there, so that stacker where you're talking about up in that caldera, You know, or Jindalee, I think is also a part of it. You can, you know, you, it depends on where the resource is, as an example, too. Is it at the surface? Is it, you know, how much overburden do you have to remove? Is there faulty and things like that? At Nevada Lithium, we have a tremendous resource already. And in my opinion, we've got a lot more that we can show with some additional drilling. But would we ever necessarily get to mine it? Probably not, quite honestly. And I think it's the same way with Thacker. It would be a small percentage of the overall resource that they have delineated.

40:37 Part of the issue, though, I think is that what you see is it shows the geological endowment. It's sort of like, okay, let's just pretend for example, that maybe FACRC itself wasn't going to get to basically go and mine that. Well, theoretically, could other companies come in and if they had to, you know, buy some property away from other companies or stake new land or whatever, and start development projects, all this sort of stuff. The reality is again when you go from start to finish you're not talking 2 years or 4 or 6. You know you're talking 15. That kind of a thing. A lot happens in 15 years. I mean we're already seeing things going on. An example of lithium like energy densities in the EV batteries that are skyrocketing, right? That's what's making these EVs more palatable, frankly, to investors, you don't necessarily want to have something shoved down your throat. But if the range is going up by, you know, 30%, every year, and the costs are coming down, etc. People are going to be more prone to buying EVs for those for whom it's suitable.

41:39 So you know, I don't get I don't think that there's like a kill shot out there. Like there's this one big place where all of it's going to come from. The other thing is, is that you wouldn't want to develop everything from one place just because of risk mitigation. As an example, what happens if there's seismic events up there, you know, and then everybody's open pit is thrown into question, those kinds of things. So, you know, we're at the very beginning with lithium. There's a lot of different potential sources. The caldera is certainly one of them. I would look at it as more encompassing and saying the US is a better way to look because we just don't have the history of certain things that have happened, as an example, South America, maybe even problems in the Congo, things like that, not necessarily for lithium, but nickel and cobalt, those sorts of things.

42:29 And In my opinion, you just sort of discount a little bit. You know, what's the reality that those sorts of sources are gonna make it into the US supply chain? Because it's contradictory to what everybody's trying to do right now. So long-winded way of saying, nah, I'm not worried about it. I think there's more than enough room for everybody in lithium in Nevada right now and for the foreseeable future. Thank you. And we just got a question in for Kit here. Kit mentioned gallium. Do you have an estimate of how much gallium you have and when it may come to market? Sure. We're just starting that. We had some metallurgical sample composites to look at the metallurgy for the silver zinc and the lead, and so we're able to look at those, assay them.

43:15 The zinc composites, once they're concentrated, usually are in the 100 and 120 parts per million range. So with the size of the deposit we have, I don't have the number in front of me, it's about 28,000 kilos of gallium. It's about A22 and a half year domestic consumption. So it's fairly significant from that standpoint. Project, we're now looking at preliminary economics, then we'll go into pre-feasibility. So we're approaching that level, but then it'll probably be another 3 years after that, and all that depends on how fast permitting goes, and whether we'll receive some government grant support for research into the extraction, and also to speed up some of the metallurgical testing. So that's a very important component in all mineral deposits in mining.

44:17 Thank you. OK, I have a final question here. Which specific critical minerals represent the greatest opportunity for domestic development in the next 5 years? And since I figured you're going to be talking your book Anyway, let's just add on to that and talk about what investors can look forward to with your company specifically for the rest of 2025. Steve, I'll let you kick it off. Well, I think lithium is an obvious one. I think copper is another obvious one, quite honestly. You know, with regards, we have boron coming on. I think it's going to be added. But I think copper and lithium, frankly, are 2 big dogs. I'm not quite sure what to make about silver. I think that there's quite a bit of military use in there. But I just I haven't been able to get my own head around it here, a lot of different things, but I think clearly that it's gonna be on there as well.

45:10 But with regards to Nevada lithium, our timeline right now is we are finally getting through an updated PEA that reflects essentially all that high-grade mineralization that I mentioned earlier in the webinar that we found over the last couple of years. This is the extremely high-grade boron-lithium mineralization that we sort of have as a carpet at the- bottom of our holes right along where. The sediments meet the basement. So that she is on track to be done very shortly- and that will give us- essentially a refreshed- look at the economics of our project. I maintain that what we really have is, it's a totally separate project than what we had before because the metallurgy changed, the grades changed, et cetera.

46:00 Once we basically see what the determination of that is and what is recommended for the work plan, we're certainly going to take a look going into PFS. I would hope to do that as quickly as possible, even though I would say that right now, offtakers, right, so particularly the car companies, are certainly more gun-shy than they were before, meaning a couple of years ago before lithium prices came down. And also before all the, you know, all of the car sales started having problems as the economy, at least in the US, started to weaken, I think it's very, very important to maintain as quick a track towards production as possible. And so that's something that we don't wanna do. There's still a lot of science involved. I know we still have a lot of drilling to do. These are all just part of the normal progression through PEA and then PFS, then ultimately, feasibility study.

46:54 But essentially, what we're doing is we're looking to optimize all of those different actions, so that we can minimize the overall timeline and have this prepared, you know, to go into feasibility. I personally think that we're going to see a rebound in lithium prices sooner rather than later. I'm hoping by the end of the year, I think a lot of it is obviously predicated upon what goes on with all these tariffs and trade talks and basically we just need time for the dust to settle. But once it does, I think the importance of lithium to the US economy is definitely going to become very apparent and we'll see the resurgence in prices and then hopefully we'll finally get that sentiment start to swing and we'll be reflected in the price of our shares. That's the way I'm thinking about it. Thank you for sharing, Steve. And Kit, favorite critical minerals and what to expect for Alaska Silver for 2025?

47:45 Well, our main components of that, I've mentioned the zinc and of course the gallium that comes with that, but our number 1 economic driver at our Waterfront Creek deposit is the very high grade of silver. Our resources from a silver equivalent standpoint is 980 grams per tonne silver equivalent. The highest of any of our peers in the pre-development, post-discovery exploration space. Zinc deposits south of Tucson, where I'm talking from, is South 32 is in development now with their Mosa deposit. That will go into production in the next few years. I think that'll be the new, The only new zinc mine in the US in, I don't know how long, probably multiple decades.

48:36 Most of the zinc mining is 50, 60, 80 years ago in the Mississippi Valley and Tennessee Valley area. So I think zinc is more of a household name, but the importance of zinc, both in industrial uses and military, is very important. Silver, the use of silver and solar is just phenomenal. Just listened to a report by Jeff Christian, CPN Group, actually this morning. Since 2020, I think it was 100 million ounces used in solar. In 2024, that doubled to well over 200 million ounces, and that'll be going up. So silver is not on the critical mineral list, but it's very important in a number of things such as the growth of solar.

49:26 Excellent. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. And Thank you everyone in attendance. If you came in a little late, our team will have up the recording within the next couple of hours here. So keep an eye out on our website or on our YouTube channel. But gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. It was a great discussion. Thanks Kyle. Thanks, Kit. Thank you Kyle. Appreciate it.