Carbon Neutrality at Turnagain

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to Giga Metals live investment summit today hosted by 6. Today we're joined by Martin Vydra, Giga Metals president, Mark Jarvis, the company's CEO, Lyle Triton, their manager of development. Today the team is going to walk us through their company presentation and after we're going to move to a live Q&A session where we'll be accepting questions. You can submit your questions at any time during the presentation to the Q&A panel found on the right-hand side of your screen. As always, this summit is being recorded and is going to be available to watch afterwards on six.com. And so without further ado, Mark, I'm going

0:38 to hand it over to you to kick things off. Okay, well, thank you very much, Cam. And welcome everyone to here. I'm going to be going through the basic presentation very quickly because I'm assuming a lot of people in the audience have seen this once, but I'll just be quickly for those that haven't already seen our story And then I'm going to be passing the presentation off to Lyle Tritton once we get to the part where we're discussing our recent news about CO2 sequestration in our tailings. So Here is the standard disclaimer. We are a TSX listed company. We've got a very large deposit, very large and low grade open pittable deposit of nickel and cobalt and sulfides in north central British Columbia.

1:35 Our plan as modeled in our recent PEA would be to build a plant with a 37,000 ton per year capacity to produce nickel in a very clean concentrate. And it models a 37 year mine life. So this is a very large deposit.

2:00 And the reason Martin Vydra is here is that we are seeking strategic partners to advance the project. And that's Martin's brief. Martin Vydra spent a 31 year career with Sherratt, which produces a nickel and cobalt. And a large part of his career was spent selling nickel and cobalt in all the various formats to the end-users so they know him and he knows them very well. We're in a great jurisdiction. You know, Canada is a mining country and BC is a mining province. It's got very high environmental standards, but you can get a large project off the ground. You just have to make sure that you're conforming to the best environmental practices.

3:00 So very large resource, as I said. The concentrate is very high grade. One of the strengths of this project is that the flow sheet is so simple. Dig the rock up, crush it, grind it, froth flotation. It produces a beautiful, clean concentrate, 18% nickel, 1% cobalt. And it's all old tech, reliable tech. It's not complicated. Some of our peers that are large, low-grade, open-pitable, sulfide, nickel and cobalt deposits, have much more complex flow sheets. They've got de-sliming steps that are necessary due to the nature of the rock, magnetic separation oftentimes. So All these steps work. It's just that the more steps you've got on your flow sheet, the more risk you've got.

3:51 And finally, this carbon sequestration in our tailings is something that we've been doing research on. We've now got empirical data to support what we've been saying. So nickel prices historically are quite volatile, but what I find interesting about this particular graph is this is the last 40 years of nickel prices corrected to or inflated to 2020 dollars. And if you do that, what I found quite interesting about this is the average price of nickel over the last 40 years has been $11 a pound. We're currently right around $8 a pound. So we are at the low end of the range.

4:41 That I find quite interesting. And we're at a point in time where demand for nickel is soaring because of electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are being accepted more and more as part of the world fleet. Every year, the uptake of electric vehicles seems to be larger than anybody expected. And it just seems to happen year after year. On current projections, the nickel market, which is currently about 2.5 million tons of nickel per year, only half of which, by the way, is suitable for batteries. But that market for batteries alone is going to require an additional 1.5 to 2.5 million tons a year of battery grade nickel, which is 40 to 70 new large mines.

5:40 In other words, of the similar scale to Ternaghan.

5:46 And this slide shows, based on our PEA, our nickel price sensitivity, and we're looking at our depreciated net present value at a discount rate of 8%. At current prices and at the base case price for nickel, we've got a negative depreciated net present value. But if you start increasing the price of nickel, that expands rapidly. At $12 nickel, for example, our depreciated net present value after tax is 1 billion US dollars. We currently have a market cap of around 30 million Canadian dollars. So what this shows is that unlike most mining plays that you're looking at where you're exploring for something, you hope you find something, we've already found it, we understand it extremely well.

6:42 What you're really looking at here is do you believe that nickel prices are going higher? And if nickel prices do go higher, this is probably one of the most leveraged

6:54 ways to play that that you can find. Now, again, at our base case price of 750 nickel our economics are not stellar However, when we compare ourselves to the main competition that's out there for battery grade nickel They're called H Pell projects high pressure high temperature acid leach And And Lyle Tritton actually took 4 greenfields projects that are in development, you know, where he had the data and made a composite of them. And if you look at the cumulative cash flow, you know, so in the early years, you've got negative cash flow as you build the facility, and then you start getting positive cash flow as you start producing nickel.

7:48 We are superior to HPEL projects. Even though our economics are marginal at today's prices, they're still better than the HPEL projects that we're competing with. And also because we build in 2 stages, you've never got as much capital at risk as you do with an HPEL project. And with that I'm going to pass the presentation on to Lyle Tritton. Excellent, thank you Mark. So you know overall we compare ourselves to laterite projects fairly frequently because with the big nickel gap that we see coming in the marketplace, there aren't a lot of other places to turn to get nickel. There's these large low-grade nickel projects like ours, and there's laterite projects to either use high-pressure acid leaching or direct smelting of the ore. And they're very different types of projects.

8:45 I've spent my career working in the nickel business, mostly with laterites, and I understand these differences. So, you know, these hard rock projects we have, like Turnagain, from a mining point of view, they tend to have a lower impact. You're digging a deeper mine, you're not strip mining across a very wide area, which leads to lower environmental impacts. Because you're using hard rock, it doesn't tend to erode and cause problems in the rivers, whereas laterite mines, they're like soils. So there's a high potential for erosion. And typically in a laterite area, you'll see red mud running in the rivers and in high rainfall periods eroding off the soil as that happens. And one of the other things we've looked at recently is further into the environmental impact, the biodiversity impacts.

9:37 With a northern location in northern BC, the boreal forest that we're in is an important location for sure. But As locations around the world go, it's a relatively low biodiversity area compared to the tropical locations that host the laterite deposits. We all know that tropical locations are home to many of the world's most iconic and most threatened species, which often occur over fairly small ranges, which means that a large mining operation could potentially threaten individual species as well as just causing more general impacts.

10:16 Moving ahead with the, we believe we have a great environmental theme with our project. You know, the International Energy Agency recently published some information on the carbon intensity of nickel processing. People are very concerned about the growth of electric vehicle battery usage and the impact that's going to have. Is it really better than fossil fuels if you're using really high carbon metals in producing these batteries? And what we see when we look at the nickel business is there's an average carbon intensity of somewhere around 25 kilograms of... Or tons of CO2 per ton of nickel produced, but it really depends to a great degree on what your feed is. So the sulfide projects like we have tend to be well below 15.

11:06 The high pressure acid leach projects that Mark referred to tend to be between 15 and 30 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel, depending on what they're using for power and their source of acid for it. And then the direct smelting laterite projects tend to be much higher, well over 50 at times. So that's perhaps not a favored material to be using in trying to promote what we believe is a cleaner technology. And the reason is that these sulfide ores really have an energy advantage. The sulfur that's embedded in them is actually a fuel. So not only can you upgrade the ore through grinding, crushing, and froth flotation like we have, which allows you to treat only a small amount of that material through the high-intensity processes of refining, but you've got built-in fuel inside it, which is great.

12:04 Smelting the entire ore body, such as you have to do to make ferronickel or nickel pig iron, is a very energy-intensive process. And where that energy is coming from coal-fired power is a very carbon-intensive process.

12:20 We've done some work recently through the PEA looking at our carbon intensity of our production, and then we've moved ahead and looked further at the carbon sequestration aspects of our project, which is really exciting for us. The tailings that we have, the host minerals that we're not recovering to our concentrate are actually reactive with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and will sequester CO2. In this reaction, it's not like sequestering it in agricultural or carbon in soils or in trees where you're always wondering how long that's going to be sequestered. We're creating new minerals, magnesium carbonates, that lock it away for millennia. And the testing we've recently completed and got the report on, it's the first part of our testing, there's lots more to do, but it demonstrated some very stable sequestration rates over a month of 27 to 34 tons of CO2 per hectare of tailings. It's a rate measurement per year, which gives us the potential that we could actually sequester all the CO2 that would be generated in our project. And I'll talk about how we do that in math in a minute.

13:36 Over the life of our project, we could sequester almost 1 million tons of carbon dioxide at these rates, which is really a very significant undertaking for us to be able to not only make the nickel that's needed for the energy transition, but to remove 1 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere while we're doing it, is would be a great accomplishment. You know, as we said, you know, in general, you know, the average for the nickel industry is about 25. You can see here from some data from Wood Mackenzie, all the projects at the right-hand side of the curve, the very high carbon intensity projects are direct smelting of laterite ores. And At the low end of the curve, we tend to see all the sulfide projects placed.

14:22 For us to produce nickel and concentrate, when we're looking at about 2 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel to get there, you would then have to add on to that the CO2 burden in refining that nickel. But to smelt and refine sulfide nickel is only going to add in the range of a few to perhaps as much as 10 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel, depending on where that's smelted and what their energy grid makeup is.

14:55 So how do we do this? Well, what we've demonstrated here and put together on this chart is a little bit of an explanation of our pathway to 0. So through our mining and processing, as we mine the host minerals, process them to make the nickel concentrate that then gets further treated to make the final nickel products, We have scope 1 emissions that come from what we're doing in our processing, the fossil fuels that we burn, diesel in mine trucks predominantly. And so we account for those scope 1 emissions, and that's the largest part of our emissions footprint. We also have scope 2 emissions from the imported power that we use being that we're operating in BC and we're we've allowed for a connection to the BC hydroelectric grid.

15:41 Although we consume quite a lot of electrical power, the actual CO2 footprint of that is quite low. So we add the scope 1 and scope 2 emissions together. And for our base case in the PEA, that's 2.24 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel produced in concentrate. In the processing, we produce tailings, which go to our tailings management facility.

16:04 And because we have these reactive minerals, as we deposit these tailings in the facility, they will start to suck CO2 directly out of the atmosphere. It's what we call passive sequestration and lock it away, stored in those carbonate minerals. And by ensuring that we take the best practices in how we manage the tailings, we're going to be able to maximize that amount of CO2 sequestration so that we can capture that million tons. And if we are able to, as the industry evolves, move to an electric haul fleet, the equipment doesn't exist today, but our equipment manufacturers believe that in 5 years it may well exist, we could reduce our direct carbon footprint dramatically so that we will actually have a carbon neutral or carbon negative operation.

16:56 So we're really looking forward to being able to incorporate both those technological evolution in the mining equipment and our ability to sequester CO2 to become that carbon neutral nickel mine.

17:11 So just for those of you who aren't aware of the work we're doing this summer, Just a quick outline of the work we're planning for the summer to move us further towards our pre-feasibility study. We had planned some work for 2020, but with the pandemic concerns we delayed that work until this year. We're going into the field shortly. Our geologist is just finalizing all the details on that now. We're going to be doing a bunch of drilling for both resource and geotechnical work on site through the summer into the early fall, analyzing that data and then moving ahead with further metallurgy and engineering resulting in a PFS, subject of course to financing and making those arrangements.

17:58 The work we're planning on doing, it's about 8,000 meters of additional resource drilling to upgrade our inferred resources and improve our understanding of the deposit. We need to head into a geometallurgy program, which will really demonstrate what recoveries we can expect from different parts of the deposit and build that into our overall economic modeling. We certainly have some encouraging results when we look at the test work that there's a small set of samples that perform worse than most of the samples and which tend to, on a bulk mining analysis, tend to weigh down your projected recoveries. And as we understand more about where that material is, there's the opportunity to perhaps improve our stated recoveries and economics.

18:47 We'll also be doing a bunch of geotechnical drilling and other geotechnical work at the mine site in order to better understand the mine pit area and define those safe slopes and pit water inflow considerations, but also to understand the conditions in our selected tailings area and make sure that we have the most appropriate tailings dam design.

19:14 So Mark, I'll turn it back to you here to close us out before we head to the Q&A. Unmute yourself. Okay, well, thank you very much, Lyle. So, again, just in summary, the nickel market or nickel demand is growing extremely quickly and many, many new large projects are needed. This is one of them. And we've got a lot of flexibility in how we can process our concentrate. Our concentrate is 18% nickel, 1% cobalt, but it's also very clean. There's very little in terms of deleterious elements. So we modeled selling it to a smelter, but you could put it through a pressure oxidation circuit, for instance, and make mixed hydroxides or any really any chemical form of nickel that you would like.

20:22 And again, on our board, Anthony Miloski has a ton of access to capital, and he has been helping us to finance this company for the last few years and has been, you know, one of the reasons that we don't seem to run out of money. I myself have been with this project for, well, since 2004, so I'm definitely committed to this project I love this project Martin Biedrig joined us he told me because of the quality of concentrate that we can produce and as someone that knows how to market nickel in as many forms that was what sold him on the project. Same comment from Bob Morris.

21:10 Bob was in charge of marketing base metals for Bali worldwide until he retired. And that was a portfolio that depending on commodity prices range between $5 billion and $8 billion a year. So, you know, copper, nickel, cobalt, you know, and precious metals were part of his portfolio. He's another guy that knows all of the strategics very well and they know him. And so we've got, you know, you know, a bit of a, a bit of a head start in terms of credibility, you know, dealing with the strategics and, you know, Lyle Davis, like me has been with this company since 2004.

21:57 And there's a breakdown of our capital structure. And thank you very much. We're open for questions. Wonderful. Well, thank you guys for the great presentation. And with that, I'd like to pass along a message to the audience members that at any time you can submit your Q&A using the Q&A tab on the right hand side of your screen. And with that, I'd like to introduce Holly Miller, the company's Director of Corporate Communications. Holly will be fielding all the questions during the session. So, Holly, over to you.

22:31 Thanks, Cam. Thanks, guys. All right, I'll start going through some questions. And yeah, here we go. So can you tell us more about the test work at UBC and how do they assess the amount of CO2 reacted? I think this is a question for Lyle. Yeah, for sure. So the test work that we've done to date has been relatively small scale, where they take our host rocks, our minerals, tailings, place it in a vessel and get it to the appropriate conditions, a little bit of moisture is all that's required, expose it to atmosphere and let it react. And they measure the CO2 uptake in 2 ways. One is they use what they call a CO2 flux chamber, where they actually put a small cover with a CO2 sensor on top of the mineral and measure the decrease in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over time. And it happens quite quickly with a small contained air pocket. It sucks the CO2 out of that quite quickly. And so they can measure actually directly from the air how much CO2 is reacted.

23:35 And then periodically, and at the end of the project, they actually take samples of the material and measure the inorganic carbon content in it to assess how much carbonate mineral was in there at the beginning of the experiment, and how much is there through or at the end. And then, you know, those should line up, but you have to look at both of them to make sure that not only are you consuming the CO2 out of the air, but you're actually making mineral out of it. It's not disappearing somewhere. So those 2 measures allow them to assess that rate and it's a very

24:09 robust work in that fashion. Wow, okay, thank you. And So you say that Turnagain could be a carbon neutral nickel mine, but what about downstream processing? I think maybe this is also for Lyle. Yeah, I'm probably in the best position to answer this, although I'm sure Martin knows it pretty well too. The downstream processing for sulfide concentrates typically is through a sulfide smelter where you'll make a nickel mat and then that goes to a nickel refining operation. And in that smelting operation, you're effectively melting the concentrate using energy.

24:49 That energy partly comes from the sulfur that's inside the concentrate. The sulfur burns to make SO2, which is captured to make acid, and partly from electricity that's added. So that carbon footprint really depends on where that facility is and its access to clean electricity or not. So I've looked at a range of options, from clean grids to coal-fired grids. And it will run between, say, 3 and 8 or 10 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel to get it all the way to class 1 metal. Of course, today, that might not actually be the choice you make in refining this material. You could directly oxidize and treat this hydrometallurgically, such as is being done at Long Harbor in Newfoundland, the Valet project that treats the Boise Bay concentrate.

25:43 You could go all the way to class 1 metal, or you might just go to an intermediate that can be converted directly into the battery chemicals. And those would have different levels of carbon footprints. OK, thank you. What is the timeline to nickel production and most current CAPEX requirement? I will pass this one to Mark. I'm going to pass it to Lyle. Tag, no problem. So, you know, timeline is really a financing dependent question. There's a bunch of work to get through pre feasibility study, feasibility study, environmental approval That could conceivably happen in

26:23 maybe 3 to 4 years. And then building the project will take 2 or 3 years, including the power line. So we could be in production in 7 or 8 years, which is really ideal for the timing of when we expect the large gaps in the nickel market to really be appearing. There are some opportunities to speed up some of those steps, but the environmental approval has to be done according to regulatory requirements in a very thorough fashion. This is Canada, and we do these things right, and we're happy to take the time to do that. The current CAPEX requirement, the PEA that was issued recently, has $1.3 billion for phase 1 construction, which is 0.5 size of another 500 million dollars for phase 2. That includes the infrastructure requirement for extending the BC hydro power line up to our site. That's about $300 million of that. So, you know, that may or may not be fully funded by us, but we've included that entirely within our estimates at this point.

27:28 Okay, thank you. What does Gigametals think about the risk of battery composition changing in the next decade to exclude nickel? Maybe Martin could take this one? I can take that one actually. You know, I've got friends that are in the battery business and that understand the technology extremely well. In terms of the types of batteries that will give an electric vehicle the maximum range, there really is no competition on the horizon for nickel-based cathodes. Nickel has excellent electron density. And if you want more range, you need to up the percentage of nickel in your cathode.

28:13 And that's what all the big battery companies are spending huge research budgets doing. The only real competition for electric vehicles is from, you know, iron phosphate or lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are heavier, they've got less range, but they're adequate for, say, a city car. I mean, if you're satisfied with less than 200 kilometers of range, lithium-iron phosphate batteries will do it. And in fact, they're already part of the mix. And I believe that lithium iron phosphate batteries will continue to grow for short range purposes and for things like municipal buses and so forth.

29:04 However, when it comes to wanting range, nickel is the way to go and you're still going to need lots and lots of new nickel. Thank you. Okay, so I have a question directly for Martin. Since you invited Martin and he didn't get a question yet, can you discuss how discussions with strategic partners are going? Well, I can't really get into specifics. I can say that strategic partners are very interested on a couple of fronts. Number 1, they love the location of the Turnagain deposit giga metals being a North America location because a lot of strategic partners are looking for security of supply outside of Southeast Asia. And the other thing that a lot of strategic partners are looking for is ESG credentials, especially a low GHG footprint.

30:01 So with our recent announcement the other week

30:03 about our path to carbon neutrality, that is really revised or shall I say accelerated discussions with a lot of strategic partners and even companies that are not looking to deal with mines directly, like some of the OEMs who have intermediaries. They're very interested in understanding our carbon neutrality pathway because that's very important to them going forward. They operate in the court of public opinion and having a carbon neutral nickel and cobalt available for batteries is very appealing to them. So I think the answer to that is the discussions with strategic partners are very good, very strong, and like anything else, they ask some of the same questions the investors do. How close can we be to production and what is the quality of our material? And I think as our project progresses, those discussions with the strategics will accelerate and we hope in the next time, next months or year, or it might take a few years to announce some sort of partnership.

31:06 Great, thank you. So next question, becoming a carbon sink, what advantages does this give Giga compared to other projects that produce carbon? Will Giga become a partner in this technology? Lyle or Mark?

31:23 Why don't I take this from, maybe Mark will take part of it as well. Do we see becoming a partner in these technologies? What we're envisaging today is what we call passive sequestration. So we will sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere by exposing our tailings to it and maximizing that exposure. There's every possibility that, you know, we could partner with somebody who wanted to run a direct air capture facility to make a more pure stream of CO2 and utilize our tailings as the material that sequesters that for them. The problem with

32:26 a large direct air capture facility in the area. Mark, do you have anything to add? You know, not really. I mean, just based on what we're planning to do with the CO2 sequestration, if we could in fact get below carbon neutral so that we're an actual carbon sink, we would then have carbon credits to sell which would add to the economics of the project. But we're not there yet. I just want to emphasize that we are doing the test work to see if we can get there. Great. Okay, What role does nickel play in solid-state batteries or other known future battery technologies? I think I can take that.

33:11 You know, the disruptive technology that people in the battery business actually believe in going forward is solid state batteries, which would have even more energy density and yet be more stable than the current nickel-based batteries. And in those solid state batteries, the cathode materials would remain the same. And nickel would still be the primary metal for the cathode. What would change would be the anode would change from graphite to lithium metal. And so really, as far as we're concerned, it's all good news. Martin, do you want to add to that?

34:01 Well, Mark summed it up. The actual big change in a solid state is the electrolyte, which allows a conversion of the anode, as Mark said properly, to lithium, which lithium in current lithium ion batteries as an anode reduces the life. But Mark summed it up. Great. Okay, well, now I have one for you.

34:24 Would a strategic partner ideally be a trading house, battery maker, or OEM? What is your thinking around that? Yes, all of the above. A strategic partner is somebody who wants to secure the supply of, in this case, nickel and cobalt for their own consumption. So it could be a trading house, it could be a battery maker, it could be an OEM or it could be all 3. Okay, great. Now I've got one for Lyle. How do you deal with wastewater? So for a project like ours, where we are in the process we have, we actually have very little wastewater. We're able to manage our water by managing how much water comes into the tailings pond from precipitation and diverting most of that around the tailing spawn. So it's just the natural water flow in the environment there and recycling water within the facility. We don't have a big need for effluent, but for any effluent that we do have, we will have to have a water treatment system in place that deals with the contaminants of concern.

35:34 We don't have... From what we've looked at to date, we've done some work on acid rock drainage and mineral leaching to look at what might happen with water coming off the tailings facility or out of the waste rock storage or pit water. There aren't a lot of contaminants of concern in that, but there's no question there's further work to do to define what all that wastewater treatment facility would look like. But our advisors, you know, our engineers tell us that we can expect to be carbon neutral for most of the mine life. Sorry, water neutral for most of the mine life. Great. Okay. Do you prefer a singular lease or multiple leases from end user investors?

36:21 Mark or Martin? I don't understand the question, so maybe Martin does. No, I don't understand either singular lease or multiple leases. If the question is, do we prefer a variety of end consumers or contracts from different investors, I think that would depend on the quality of the investor. If there were 2 competing OEMs that wanted to invest in the project, we would try to accommodate probably both of them. But I'm not sure of the use, lease here, or if I'm answering a proper question.

37:07 So if the person answering the question could perhaps expand or clarify, I'd be happy to answer it or clarify my answer. All right, yeah. Brett, you can answer in the chat or we can follow up in the chat there. Okay, so moving on, where are you at with First Nations discussions and which groups are in the area? Mark, do you wanna take that? Sure. Well, we've got, you know, as I say, I've been involved with this project since 2004, and I've been dealing with the 2 First Nations of interest since then. They're the Tall Tan and the Cascadeena. Both claim the Turnagain project as being within their traditional territories.

37:57 There's no doubt that the Tall Tan control access to our project, And there's also no doubt that the Cascadena are downstream of the project. So I regard both of them as completely legitimate players. And we've had good relationships with both since I started with this project. We have a communications agreement in place with the Tall Town and we've got excellent communications with them. They are mining friendly and they're making a lot of money from mining. They've got a lot of mineral resource in their territory. And these are the kinds of jobs where, they're high paid jobs, in the dead of winter, you can get away to Hawaii.

38:45 I mean, once the COVID passes, of course, but you can take vacations with these kind of salaries. The other thing is, in talking to the elders with the Talltown and the Kaskadena, they like having economic activity in their territory because then the young people can stay in their territory and raise families. They can afford to do that. They don't have to move away to get jobs. And most of the elders regard this as a big positive. You never have unanimity. I mean, I've met people that are opposed to mining in both the Tall Tan and the Kaskadenna, but they are in the minority, I can tell you that. The Kaskadenna are also starting to do very well out of the mining business in their territory.

39:36 And then, as I say, we are in an overlap part of their territories. Okay, next question. My understanding is that most of the nickel final processing is in Asia. What if any processing is currently done in North America and is Giga aware of plans to further build out final processing facilities in North America? Martin? Yeah, so depends what you consider final processing. There's 3 nickel refineries that make class 1 nickel in North America, 2 run by Valet and 1 run by Sherrod International. The processing of nickel to nickel sulfate, which is the building block for rechargeable batteries, the majority of that, yes, is done in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

40:31 However, there are companies that are looking at building out that capability in North America. That is driven by battery manufacturing. Right now, the lithium-ion industry in North America is in its infancy, So there's not a lot of manufacturing aside from Panasonic which does their final assembly of their lithium-ion batteries for Tesla in Nevada or California. There is no major lithium-ion battery manufacturing yet. There's assembly of battery packs. So as as the world turns to electrification and adopts more EVs, you'll see more and more manufacturing plants for batteries be built in North America and in Europe, which is the case. Now we're seeing announcements all the time.

41:17 And you will see much more capacity being installed in North America. Okay, great. Next question I have, Is there any opportunity to sell magnesium? I'll take that, Holly. The way our project is currently configured, no. The magnesium is a part of the minerals that we're not recovering that are going to tailings. These are magnesium silicate minerals like olivine and serpentine. They're not particularly valuable, although they could be used for things like carbon sequestration and field amendments. We're not really in an agricultural area where Turnagain is, so they wouldn't be worth trucking them for that. If we were to implement additional processing steps, such as including a hydrometallurgical refinery, then there would be some magnesium by-product from that facility that could conceivably be produced in a saleable format, but that would really depend on the economics of doing so versus producing it as a waste, because most of the magnesium is captured into the tailings. We try to keep as little as possible going to our product concentrate, because it's a contaminant as far as any downstream processing is concerned.

42:34 But any that we had, you know, that is conceivable, but it would be a very minor output of the project. Got it. Okay, great. Next question. What role does nickel play in the various battery solutions, cars, battery storage, long range, semi trucks, etc? Martin? Sure, As Mark indicated earlier, nickel is part of the cathode which accepts the electron from the discharge of the anode.

43:21 And when you talk about the cathode, you talk about energy density and capacity, so how quickly the electrons can transfer, which is your power and your capacity, how many electrons it can accept, which ultimately is your range. So nickel provides power and range to electrified transportation, and that's why it's so important in the lithium-ion industry because when you have, we all have range anxiety, you read about an electric vehicle having a 100 kilometer range to a 400 kilometer range, the high nickel cathodes are the ones that provide the range of 3,400 kilometers for the same density of battery pack. And also nickel is what allows Tesla to have their ludicrous mode, I guess, where they're advertising a car that can go from 0 to 62 seconds. That's based on the ability to discharge and capture electrons very rapidly for a high current. So that's the role of nickel.

44:22 Ludicrous mode. Okay, I've got another question. Is it possible that Giga could be generating carbon credits? Lyle or Martin? Sure, I'll take that one. Being a veteran of a number of consultations with government on regulatory systems and having looked at the voluntary markets, It's certainly possible that we could do that. Today, there is no approved protocol for quantifying the carbon capture in mineral carbonation, which is the first step to being able to sell carbon credits. If we invested in developing such a protocol or partnered with others in doing it, then that's possible. Then you would then require verification and validation activities to certify that the amount of carbon captured is real, and then those credits could go on to either a voluntary or perhaps a regulated market.

45:27 There's a lot of work going on right now to internationalize the carbon markets, but to date they're very regional. So within British Columbia, if you produce carbon credits, the only regulated market you can sell them into is BC, which is a very small market. Alberta is a much bigger market. California is a bigger market. As those become internationalized, it may become more valuable. But today, we have not yet developed that protocol. Okay, great. And I have another one. Why can't other nickel mines take advantage of this type of mineral carbonation? So it's really a factor of the geology of the nickel mine.

46:16 Nickel mines like ours, there's some others in Canada and Mount Keith in Australia is a similar geology. The minerals that make up the host rock where we find the nickel sulfide are reactive with the CO2. Most of the nickel mines in the world today don't have this mineralogy. That's not the right geology. If you think about the nickel deposits in Sudbury or in Nurilsk in Russia or at Jinshuan in China, these are mostly formed differently than ours, And so the geology is just wrong, and they don't have those appropriate minerals. Interestingly, a deposit like ours, if you stick it in the tropics and give it a couple hundred million years to weather, it could turn into a nickel laterite. But in that process of weathering, we call it the laterization process, you tend to get rid of the minerals that are actually able to sequester carbon through that process. So most of the nickel laterite mines today would have originally had some of the right mineralogy, but the process of forming them has eliminated that. So it's really only the large, low-grade, ultramafic nickel deposits that have this potential.

47:31 OK, great. Here's kind of a combination of questions. What is the technology that Giga is using to sequester carbon? And for sequestration to continue, would you have to stir the tailings? So the technology that we use, I almost don't qualify it as a technology. There are lots of things that we can do, but what we've chosen to do is what we call passive carbonation, which is a very straightforward process of simply ensuring that we get the best exposure of the tailings to the atmosphere with the appropriate conditions, appropriate level of moisture really is the key one. We can go more aggressive than that. If we had a pure CO2 stream, you can go into more aggressive ways of contacting those.

48:22 You can kiln the materials and make them more active and stuff. Those are all technologies that we're not looking at incorporating at this point in time because they don't help out the economics a lot. But they're viable. It's simply maximize that exposure. And that really comes down to the configuration of your tailings facility. How much area do you want to take up with tailings? The smaller and deeper your tailings facility, the less surface you have to expose them, and therefore the less CO2 you sequester. And the more of it that you cover with water, the less you expose it and the less you sequester. So we're designing our tailings facility to have a reasonable size. We don't want to cover half the continent in tailings to maximize the CO2. We want to minimize that ecological footprint, But to also minimize the water pond on it. The nature of the minerals means we don't need to worry about acid rock drainage the same way many sulfide mines do. So we can have a small water pond and a large area exposed to maximize that. But the rate at which we process means that you build layers of tailings as you go, and so it's only sequestered for, it's only exposed for a relatively short period of time before you add more tailings on top and get that fresh layer that's reactive again.

49:47 Do we need to stir it? We can. That's shown to improve the rate at which you sequester CO2. But actually doing that in practice on a large tailings facility presents a lot of challenges such that we may not choose to do that. So the work that we pulled together to demonstrate our pathway to 0 didn't include that. That's just simply the natural sequestration rate of material exposed to the atmosphere with the time that we believe it will be exposed over the tailings pond size that we have. So all those factors have been taken into account. And it doesn't require that level of stirring or churning of the tailings. But that would certainly improve the rate of sequestration for sure. Wonderful.

50:33 Thank you, everyone. I think that is, unfortunately, all the time and questions that we have for today, so I'd like to thank everyone that's been in attendance and as well as the whole team from Giga Metals. This has been a great presentation and a great questions period. To the audience, if you didn't get a chance to have your question answered or if you think of 1 after the summit is completed, we'll be sending out a short survey where you can leave your contact information and the GigaMetals team will reach out to you directly. You can also find more information of course at gigamedals.com. And with that I'm going to hand it back to Mark for the final words before we sign off. Well, thanks very much, Cam. Mostly, I just want to thank everybody for attending and thank you for your interest. And I would like to thank Martin, Lyle and Holly for attending this. It's been very useful.

51:21 Thank you