Cleantech Lithium (LSE:CTL) — DLE Pilot Plant Results

0:00 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CLEANTECH LITHIUM PLC DLE Pilot Plant Results Presentation. Thank

0:39 Thank I'm sorry, guys. I am you. Down in Perth and we have a few technical issues. So I'm afraid my video is gonna be off for today. But obviously, we weren't able to do a call last week, Steve, because you were out and about at the Canaccord Genuity Conference in The States. I think it was in Palm Beach, I believe, but we'll we'll go through that in a second. But obviously, we've had a great r and s out earlier this week, and we have a very strong volume and increasing in the pricing today.

1:18 I think 1,600,000 1,650,000 has gone through. We did have to touch a high of 26. We're back at 24 and three quarters, but that's really, really solid. But I thought it be great to just have an update, Steve, maybe to take through the pilot results in a bit more detail. And obviously, I'd I'd spoken to a couple of people saying how this was a much better result than the company was initially expecting. So it'd be great if you could take us through it and in a bit more detail to help explain it to the layman like myself and the rest of our shareholders, and then we can talk a little bit about more about what else has been happening. Okay. Well, let's let's do that. We'll we'll we'll cover the this slide. As people know, we plan to put in place a pilot plant to have production capacity of of one ton a month of lithium chloride as a a solution, which we will then ship off to an existing plant in Chicago to have that converted to battery grade lithium carbonate. Now to make battery grade lithium carbonate, you need to have a very pure lithium chloride solution coming out of the DLE plant first of no. First of all. So we got the plant commissioned, earlier this year. It's been running for, for a couple of months. Now we're getting the first results, after the first two cycles, you know, of

2:49 that, of that plant. And what we're seeing are very, very good results. In fact, better than the manufacturers of the resin land chain were were expecting. And first things first is the plant in terms of its capacity, in terms of producing lithium carbonate equivalent. It's exceeded the the one ton a month. I I think on if it was running twenty four hours a day for a month, it'll be more like 1.8 tons a month. So we've got plenty of of capacity to produce material there. And if you look at those little slides at at the bottom, now what we're doing there is we are pumping brine from the aquifer, putting it into road tankers, and bringing it down to our facility in Kopiapo.

3:42 That's the center slide. Now this is pilot plant that was designed by by Sun Resin and manufactured in their facilities in in Belgium. The company there is called Puritech. We had that fully commissioned. I think we talked in the past about the the selection of the the absorbent to go into those columns. Now we had worked with SunResin over the last few years, but there's a lot of competition now. There's many companies working at trying to improve, the performance of these, absorbents. And each of the absorbents perform differently on on different brines. Depends on the solution chemistry. And what we found was that at the laboratory scale, the resin from Lan Chen performed the best in terms of absorption capacity.

4:36 So we went ahead and bought resin from from Lan Chen and filled the columns with with the Lanshan resin. And those columns, there there are 30 of them. There there are 16 which are in the absorption cycle. There's displacement wash in one column, then there's nine columns to dissolve the lithium, and then four more for a displacement wash. So all in all, there's 30 columns, and it goes through in a cycle. There's this big valve you can see in the front with all of those tubes that rotates and sends the solution to the different columns where it needs to go. And what we found when when we put the brine from Laguna Verde, which is about a 196 PPM lithium through that through those those columns, we're getting very good absorption. 94% of the lithium is, is absorbed, from the brine onto onto the, absorbent, these beads, these resin beads.

5:45 And then we pass water, through those, columns to desorb the the lithium, you from those beads, and it comes out at a a concentration of, 710, parts per million. So that's a a good concentration factor of about three three and a half times. And, I'll show in the next slide, that the the purpose of the the DLE is twofold. One is to, concentrate, the the lithium from the brine to the Eliwood, but more than that is to purify. It is to, extract the the lithium from the brine and leave all the other impurities behind so that we, create, just about a pure lithium chloride solution.

6:35 And the the plant has shown that we we have done that. We then concentrate that lithium chloride eluate further using reverse osmosis, a very common process, to just over 2,000 per liter milligrams per liter of lithium as lithium chloride. Then we put that into a container. We have a very large, like a plastic bag in in a normal shipping container. 24 meters cubed of the of the solution goes goes into that. We then are shipping each batch of 24 cubic meters as it's prepared down to the down to the port, and then it's shipped to Los Angeles, put on a on a truck, taken to the plant in Chicago.

7:31 The plant belongs to a company called Conductive Energy. They're out of Calgary. They've done a lot of DLE development work for lithium from the from the brine fields in in Alberta in in in in Canada using exactly the same, you downstream processes we've put forward in in our scoping study. And they're working with another company called Forward Water Technology that we've been working with over the course of the last year. And ForwardWater are putting in additional concentration steps to take this two thousand milligrams per liter lithium solution up to twelve to twenty thousand milligrams per liter, so much more, concentrated.

8:23 And then the conductive energy, plant, comes in. There's various stages of polishing, to take the final traces of impurities of things like calcium and magnesium, out of the, out of the solution. There's one element, some of the boron that goes through the, the adsorbent into the the eluate, and then that's removed by ion exchange. So then we have a very pure lithium chloride solution. We then add sodium carbonate, precipitate the lithium carbonate, then dry it,

9:01 mill it, package it as as battery grade lithium carbonate. We'll be doing analysis of the the lithium carbonate both by conductive energy and a third party laboratory to demonstrate it's of battery quality, and that means greater than 99.5% lithium carbonate. When we were working at the laboratory scale, we demonstrated that from the brine, we can make 99.9% plus lithium carbonate with no impurities of any concern to any battery manufacturer. So we wanna demonstrate this at much larger at much larger scale.

9:47 And then we will have significant quantities. The first four batches that we'll send to to Chicago will give us just under a ton of material, and that will be, you know, plenty to start off the process of introducing our material to potential offtakers and and strategic partners. This is what I I was talking about earlier, about the the DLE process being a purification process. If you think that the the the brine

10:24 has about a 140,000 parts per million of total dissolved solids, of which out of that 142,000, only is 200 is lithium. You know, the the rest are these impurities of of calcium, magnesium, etcetera. And you can see from this how effective the resin is at rejecting the impurities. Pretty much all sodium and potassium is is stays behind in the brine.

10:55 Close to 100% of magnesium. Calcium, 99.7%. Sulfates, 98.8%. The only one which gets significantly absorbed is is is boron. About 38% is rejected, 60 odd percent goes through into the the Eliwood. And that's why the the design in the scoping study and the plant in Chicago has an ion exchange process specifically designed to remove boron, from that solution and bring that down, to down to zero. So so what we've demonstrated here is the DLE plant very effective at purifying the, solution. We've demonstrated we can, get our one ton a month, capacity, to give to, potential off takers, and this puts us in in a very, very good position to advance those discussions. Now I've always said that the best position to be in when you start to negotiate with the potential off takers and people who want to come and invest in in the project is have a complete PFS where we can show robust economics.

12:09 We can demonstrate the size of the resource and also can demonstrate with a DLE plant of scale, which is up and running and performing, very, very effectively. Because there's still, you people out in the market who are a little bit skeptical about the DLE. And they're saying, look. There there there are no commercial plants, running using DLE. There's dozens of different projects around the world looking to use DLE and are at various stages, in in development. But there are six or seven plants up and running in China of Sun Resin and Lanshan as well. I've said Liven have been using it in Argentina for for twenty years, but we're now coming to the stage of commercial plants in the in the West. The French company, Eramet, are in the final stages of construction of their DLE plant, in in Argentina.

13:10 I think it's about a 13 and a half thousand ton a year, lithium carbonate plant that's, supposed to be going into operation

13:19 in the second half of of this year. So there'll be further demonstration that DLE is a viable technology for lithium, recovery. And what we've shown here with with our pilot plant, it shows that our brine at Laguna Verde is eminently suitable, to make battery grade, lithium carbonate.

13:43 So this is the next stage, I say, in in in Chicago. There is an existing plant there that's part of the process equipment. There's a reactor in the middle and the milling equipment on the left. And that's what the final product will look like. It's just a a very fine white powder that's been micronized to make it very, very small. At the stage which the the potential offtakers

14:13 want, they'll they'll want few kilos. No. First of all, they will start to do the chemical analysis. Does it meet their specification? Because it's not just having the the 99.5% plus of of lithium carbonate. They want to know what the minor impurities are. And every battery manufacturer has slightly different specifications for the impurity content. So they want to check that we meet their specification. Then they'll say, okay. It looks good. Now send us, you know, ten, twenty kilos, and they can start to look at the physical characteristics of how it fits into their process. And if the physical characteristics are fine, they'll say, okay. We have a test battery line.

14:59 Now please send us 100,200 kilos of of material, and we will actually put it into our test battery line and see if we can make good batteries from your material. So it's a qualification process, you know, which takes a bit of time. But at least we'll be in in the position to start start doing that.

15:24 So that basically covers the the technology of the direct lithium extraction and and where we are. It puts us in a very good position in Chile. We are by far the most advanced lithium development company in Chile. We certainly have the first sizable pilot plant operating in in Chile. And this will be very useful as we're going into this next stage of of applying for our sales, the operating contract, in this new administrative process, which I've talked about on on a previous webinar. And, clearly, we'll be able to to point to government. We have been working. We've demonstrated the resource.

16:13 We've spent money on developing the technology. You can come along to our pilot plant and and actually see it

16:21 operating and producing good quality material. And then within a month or so, you'll be able to see that we've produced battery grade lithium carbonate at this plant, in, in Chicago. We've been, inviting people now to, look at the the pilot plant, both indigenous communities, local people in in Kopiopo. And next week on Thursday, we have the official inauguration of of the plant where we'll have a number of government figures, local and national, coming to to join us now for the inauguration of the plant. So I think it puts us in a very good position to be in the forefront of those companies getting the the sales from the government.

17:09 So just to clarify that on Steve then. So when when are you hoping to be able to announce we have produced a ton of lithium carbonate?

17:19 And then when do you hope to be able to start actually sending samples to the various interested parties? Each one of these the first four batches, each of them are 24 cubic meters, will produce just about just just under a ton. So you're probably looking at each 24 cubic meters producing 200 to 250 kilos. And, obviously, we we are producing the Eliot, making up our 24 cubic meter batch when it's ready, and one is is ready now. It might even have been shipped this week, or it's just about to be shipped this week. It'll take a few weeks to get to to Long Beach, a couple of days by truck to to to Chicago, and then we'll start to process through the through through the plant. We have already sent a a sample of 200 liters air freight to Chicago for conductive energy to set up their pilot plant to make sure they understand the chemistry, and we have all the the purification steps in place ready and waiting for the first 24 cubic meters to arrive.

18:39 Once they start to to process, it'll probably be within days to a week to produce the lithium carbonate. Then the analysis will probably take about another one to two weeks because we need to analyze all the the minor impurities, not just the lithium carbonate content.

19:00 So we're probably a month or so away from making lithium carbonate and a couple of weeks from being able to declare it battery grade. So we're now middle of May, so you're looking towards the end of, no, end of June time. And then we'll have the next batch of 24 cubic meters, then the next one. So there'll be a new batch each month for the next four months. And when you send that usually, with the one of the partners that interested, how much how much would you usually send to them as a sample? So if we're doing a ton a month, I mean, how many how many parties can we send the samples to? We can we can send if if we have the, you the the first batch that that that comes back, which is $202,200 to 250 kilos, and people want a couple of kilos, you can send up to a 100 a 100 parties.

19:55 But, clearly, we won't. We'll we'll be probably talking to about 10 or or so potential strongly interested parties who want to test the product. It's when we start to to get to the position they like the product, both chemically and physically, and say, no. We want 200 kilos to do our battery scale testing. And, clearly, we will be able to make as much material as people want. So if there are 10 of them, you know, wanting 200,300 kilos, then we'll just run the plant for many more months until we make it.

20:40 Okay. Fantastic. Okay. So that's what was there. And then we have a couple of other slides here, I think you've got on some of the marketing we're doing. But first of all, how was how was the conference in in The States then?

20:57 It was very interesting. So there there there's a lot of companies that are interested in the in in the metals and mining sector, and it's really divided into three sections. One, you know, was gold. You one is is base metals, largely copper, and the other is lithium and and rare earths. So we had a quite a number of one on one, you know, meetings, you with companies to, again, talk through what we're doing at at CLEANTECH LITHIUM. A lot of interest. A lot of the potential investors and I keep going going back. They like the story, but it's still too early for for them. They they really are only interested in making serious investments once you have a prefeasibility study in in place.

21:51 Now that's the first time that you've really got confident information on your resources, your reserves, your CapEx, OpEx, economic value of the of of the project. And and most of the people, you who are at the these conferences, you know, they're they're the CEOs and business development people, but they need to take projects to their investment committees. And the investment committees are saying, okay. What's the due diligence, you know, on on the company? And most people don't really want to make investment until after the prefeasibility study stage. And that's why that's the most important thing for us is to get the PFS finished.

22:32 We demonstrate the techno the technology of the DLE, so we take those doubters away. We'll keep running the plant, producing more and more results, and also using that design data for the engineering of the of the PFS. But, basically, lots of interest in CLEANTECH LITHIUM, many things which they like. They know there's a structural shortage of of lithium. The pricing's now dipped, obviously, in the last six to nine months, but everybody expects it to come back towards the second half of of this year and gradually move back to its a long term price in that $2,025,000 dollars a ton compared to the 15 where it is now because that's where, you know, financiers and banks, you are looking at the price needs to be there to incentivize

23:30 the, you know, the capital to go and construct more lithium production facilities. So that's where people think the long term price is going to be. They like this particular project because of the jurisdiction. No. It's in Chile. It's an established country, strong mining culture, all the technical operational consulting support for mining operations, good infrastructure in Chile. And the third thing which they really like is, what we call our sustainable green lithium, where we, are planning to produce our our lithium using renewable energy, so close to zero carbon footprint, and using DLE with the the brine being reinjected back into the aquifer, that means

24:23 no water depletion from the the aquifer, so very, very low water consumption. And this is unlike our our major competitors, you know, which are the hard rock mines in Australia, which are now the largest producers, and in Africa, which have high carbon footprint using conventional mining and then shipping the stuff to to China for conversion into carbonate and, hydroxide, or the traditional methods in, Chile and Argentina, which are use of evaporation pumps, and you pump the brine to the surface and evaporate the water away, which is not

25:00 considered acceptable environmentally or sustainably nowadays, which is why the government expects the government of Chile expects all future projects to be using sustainable technologies like DLE in the future. So I think we had a a a very good reception, but most of these companies, they're on the watch list. They keep watching us and waiting for the PFS to be complete, and then say, come and talk to us when you've got your PFS complete.

25:34 Brilliant. Okay. Well, that all sounds extremely positive. It's great results on the pilot plant. There's some questions at end. Obviously, we can try and keep this a little bit shorter there. Just wanna touch do Nick's kindly put these slides together, but I just wanna touch on the interview that you did with Rockstar? Yeah. Yeah. That that that that's a very interesting one. There there's a group in The United States called RK Equity. They they only follow lithium projects. You know, they they started a number of years ago when there were 20 or 30 lithium companies developing projects in the world. They're now following about a a 150 lithium companies.

26:22 They've started a a a new video series called getting to know you. And for the the the first edition of getting to know you, they invited CLEANTECH LITHIUM and and me to come and talk about CLEANTECH LITHIUM and what we are doing. And they their viewership, I think they have about seven and a half thousand subscribers to to their podcast and their monthly magazine, and that's split between 40% North America and 60% Australia. So the timing is it was very, very good to get more of the story out just prior to going ahead with our ASX listing, which is getting much closer. As I we keep saying, we we are preparing the the prospectus current timing of that. We're looking at at filing that the end of end of May, early June.

27:27 We'll touch onto that in a second. Okay. We have our last couple of ones there. Right? So we've got lots of questions. But on that note of the ASX, I'm fine. I so I am down here in Perth. I'm gonna be here in Australia for the next three to four weeks. I was in with Alan, who's the company lawyers today, just going through updating where we are on the prospectus

27:51 and some of the just the technical and and regulatory issues that we need to go through. I have a full day of meetings with various other brokers here in Perth tomorrow, Friday, and early next week. And I'm gonna be up in Sydney talking to some of the company's key shareholders, and updating them, and then also seeing a number of institutions that we've spoken to in the past, but would only be able to invest if the company was on the AFX because that is their mandate. But it's progressing well. The there does seem to be a more positive interest. And certainly, on a relative basis, we're still extremely cheap compared to a number of what will be our peer group comparisons on the ASX in terms of the in situ value of the resource that we have.

28:38 So that's progressing, and that that's now, my 100% focus for the foreseeable future until we get that done. So we're hoping that's gonna be in a number of weeks. So, Steve, we do have some questions in the q and a, but obviously, it'd be easier if I if I read them on the demand, so I know you can see them there. But ENG was asking the extracted lithium chloride is being converted to lithium carbonate. Can the company claim any credit for absorbing carbon dioxide, and what happens to the chlorine? Well, the the the the chemical process is is you've got lithium chloride lithium attached to to chloride. You're adding sodium attached to carbonate. The lithium precipitates as carbonate, and the chlorine attaches to the the sodium. So that is sodium chloride, which is common salt.

29:33 And we have two options now in that because we will be doing the DLE at the project site.

29:41 The the chlorine the chloride comes from the brine, so we have the option of reinjecting the sodium chloride back underground, know where the chloride came from. Or if there is a market for sodium chloride, we could sell that into into industry in in Chile as as well. So two options there, sell those sodium chloride or put it back into the aquifer where it came from. As far as absorption of carbon dioxide, we will have to do a little bit of work on on that. I I can't, at this stage, claim that that we're absorbing carbon dioxide on that. Okay. Great.

30:26 JC was asking, do we have any further update on when the on the PFS completion date? Obviously, we previously indicated that around about September this year. But are you happy that everything is progressing and we're we're this is for JJ. We had previously had a long presentation, and you can find it here on Meet the Company's website. You'll see we did a very long one about the PFS and the differences between the PFS and the DFS and the fact that not all PFSs are the same, and we're doing a very robust one, which would allow us to move to the DFS quite quickly. And in that, Steve had indicated September. But, Steve, you're you're happy that that guidance is still accurate? Well, we we've said sort of third quarter in the in in also, I I was down in Chile a few weeks ago, and and I'll be back in in Chile next week, spending time with our engineering company, Wally, and our own people.

31:22 And we'll see exactly where we are on that on that schedule. Now, clearly, there there there there's a number of things

31:31 which are are in play here. One one is getting the design data now from the from the pilot plant and making sure that's fed into the the the engineering. But one of the really critical areas where we we've been working on, we really have to make sure it's very robust in the prefeasibility study, is our understanding of the hydrogeology, you know, of the of the brine

31:58 aquifer. As you know, we've been doing, you know, drilling both to increase the the measured and indicated resource, but also doing pumping tests to really look at the at at the porosity and the permeability of the of the aquifer. And we've completed those those pumping tests, also looking at at reinjection. We had planned to, you to put in reinjection wells in the in the course of of the next weeks. We've had very heavy snow in the, you know, in the past couple of weeks, which is impacting work.

32:45 So I will look at at that and see when we'll be able to put those reinjection wells in there. Because what we need to be able to to demonstrate is we can extract at what rate can we extract from the

32:58 aquifer? At what rate can we reinject back into the aquifer where those reinjection wells need to be to ensure that we don't dilute where we are extracting from, and to demonstrate that in the extraction or reinjection, we're not impacting any surface water features. So so we need to have a very good understanding of that hydrogeological model, and that goes into the the PFS. And we use that PFS to start work on our environmental impact assessment so that we will eventually be submitting that EIA to the government authorities.

33:45 So they need to be absolutely sure that what we are what we are doing has no environmental impact on those surface features. So that's what I'll be looking at, you with our engineering company and our Montgomery and associates and our geological and operational team to get comfort on on what is the out of this what is the schedule to complete all of that work to the stage where we and I are absolutely happy that it can go forward into the EIA process and the permitting process. So that's that's where we're still looking at will we meet that schedule, and I'll be working on that schedule with our group next week.

34:36 Okay. Great. So we can probably have a an update towards the end of the second quarter as to where we are. We have a question from Kevin. Kevin's asking about how we intend to raise funds for a large scale, DLE plant. Kevin, we did do a webinar, a few weeks back, about project finance. And Steve also mentioned about how we'd had an indicative offer from KFW on the debt side. And we talked about how we're structuring. One of the reasons, of course, for also going on to the ASX is that, you know, when people invest money money sits in in in buckets. Just because something is a good idea, there are funds that do small cap. There are funds that do large cap. There are funds that will do development plays. There are funds that will purely do companies when they're at the DFS stage.

35:25 So Regal has been a phenomenally supportive shareholder. They came in at 9.9 at the pre IPO. They held their corner in each round. On the third round, they increased from 9.9 to just over 15. And we sit in within one of their funds. And they've always said that when it came around to the the larger scale financing, there'll be a combination of debt and equity, but they would be very interested. They're running about 5,000,000,000 now in being there to take a significant stake in the company at the equity level. But in order to qualify for that, we'd have to be on to the ASX. So part of coming on to the ASX is positioning ourselves so that in a couple of years' time, when we move into production, we have the broadest base possible for a combination of appealing to both debt providers, project financiers.

36:16 You've got some very large project finance banks here as well as the European ones that already been Steve's been talking to and The US ones that we've been talking to. But could I suggest, Kevin, that you on the website again, you'll you'll see the webinar then, and we we spend a good forty minutes going through in detail about how we would intend to raise funds and how Steve had worked with projects previously in Chile. Let's go through, a couple of other questions here, Steve. I'm not sure whether it's fully you'll be able to answer all of them just from public information. But let's just do the first one here. Are there any concerns about the Chilean government intervening in the road to production or the path to production from here that you're presently on?

37:02 I know you and I were having a chat about the government just yesterday. Well, I I I hope the government does interfere on on that road. While I was in Chile last last a couple of weeks ago, I gave an interview to the the paper La Laguna, which made the the front page, where where I was making the point that the the government, wants to see three or four new lithium projects in production, by 2026. And I say, we would like to also be in production by 2026, but it means the government have to do two things. There is one, get on and award the sale, the operating, no permit, because that gives us a greater ability to secure finance for the project.

37:55 And two, needs to work on streamlining the the permitting process because once we file our our EIA, we're then in the hands of the permitting authorities. So they need to get on and and work quickly on that. So that's an area where I want to see government interference is moving quickly on the permitting side. As far as the the project and ownership of of the project, the government's made it absolutely clear, you in the the process which they announced at the beginning of of April. The two strategic Salars, Atacama and Marikunga, the government through Codelco will have majority control. The six projects, which are Anami and Codelco, have one Codelco and five Anami, they're inviting the private sector to participate under whatever joint venture terms makes the most sense for the incoming private investor for each particular project.

39:00 No necessity to have majority government control. And then the 26 other Salars in which our two projects, Laguna Verde and Francisco Basin, are are included. The government is quite happy for companies to go ahead on a 100% private basis, and that's the basis that we are submitting our applications in this sale process. And once you once you have the operating contract, that is the contract with the government. You know, the government is saying, we give you the right to to exploit the resource, produce lithium from it, and sell it. And what we want from you is for you to pay us royalties and taxes, and those royalties and taxes are defined in the sale contract.

39:53 And once that contract is signed, it's fixed. It can't be changed. Chile is is one of those, countries that, believe contracts are sacrosanct. The the the the government do not change the terms of, of contracts. Once it's signed for the life of the contract, it is there. So once that operating contract is awarded to us, there'll be no change. Excellent. Actually, funny enough, I there was a survey recently that looked at all the countries that had sort of changed and reneged on fiscal terms and royalties and things. And the the country that's most messed around and things in the natural resource, actually, British government in terms of the North Sea, was sort of bottom of the list in terms of honoring agreements. Excellent. So, okay, that's progressing. We're very happy with the application that's gonna go on the CLEALS. We have a couple of questions related to Aldo. And again, I there may be some things that we can and can't do. But Mark, he was asking about what about the cost structure and changes.

40:51 Mark, could you just update that and clarify just a little bit what you're exactly referring to there, please, on the cost structure and changes? I wasn't quite sure. We've, again, on a previous webinar, talked about where we are in the cost curve. And more of that will come out in the PFS and as we move into the DFS. So Steve, the couple of questions we have is there was a question about the update for a permanent CEO. Again, Steve, we did touch on that the other week. Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand you've engaged some headhunting firms. We're looking at, obviously, the focus has been to get the pilot plant and now on the ASX. But I understand is that we're out looking and discussing with various potential CEOs, but it'll probably be a couple of months.

41:36 And then the people that are being considered obviously are are in roles, and there's usually a a notice period that they would need to leave. But would it be fair to say that it's just it's ongoing? Yeah. Yeah. As quickly as we can find the right person. Yeah. We have engaged a search company on an exclusive basis, and they have very good networks both in Australia and Latin America and and elsewhere. And they will be providing us who they think are potential candidates in in a couple of weeks. Now as we all know, it takes time to identify who we believe is gonna be the right person that can straddle both managing the, you know, the projects in Chile and government relations and also be forward facing to the markets in the ASX and and and AIM.

42:35 And with a demonstrated experience at bringing projects all the way through, it's a financing off take and into production. So we're gonna take our time in doing that, whether it takes two months or four months. And the notice period doesn't really matter. I I I've I've agreed to to stay in the position as interim CEO until we make sure that we find the right person to take the company successfully forward. Excellent. Then the last question that we have up is regarding, obviously, there's been a lot of shareholder interest discussion around the loan agreement that Aldo went into.

43:23 We've established that we think that most of those were transferred and then probably sold down by the lending party. And obviously, we, to a degree, are limited because there are some sort of regulatory issues and stuff that will be going on and being looked at. But the question is, so going to some of the status of the former CEO shares. We put out an announcement just earlier on, but that's saying, Steve, that we we've identified, I think, about three and a bit million that we still think are in a nominee account. Yeah. I I we're I I working on a Yeah. I I I I I think we we regard this this whole investigation, as far as we're concerned, is is closed. We put out an an r and s.

44:09 We've had responses from various parties where shares were were transferred to, and and it's very clear that shares were transferred out from this custodian account, which Aldo put his shares in on the instructions of the lender, and those were almost certainly sold out into the market and have gone. There was still about 2,400,000 shares sitting in the custodian account, and we are told the beneficial owner of those shares is the lender. Now Aldo doesn't agree with that. He believes he put his shares in there as collateral. The lender had no right to sell the shares.

44:56 Basically, that is an issue now between Aldo and his lawyers and the lender. And as far as we're concerned, the matter is now closed. Those shares, as far as we're concerned, have gone. If I can, just from a broker perspective. So again, as I mentioned, know, Ala worked for several years without being paid, and then he's going to divorce. And at the time of the IPO, he'd said that he he needed to free up some capital. And we said, okay. If we raise more than the minimum, we've spoken with the Nomad and the rest of the board, and Aldo was gonna sell down some with the Ukraine thing. Got to the minimum. He said, no. No. I'll I'll wait. And then at the next round, if we got more than 12,500,000, he was gonna do about 500,000. They said, no. No. We'll wait. We're do something on the ASX. And then, foolishly, he met these guys. And and I know from his point of view, he didn't really have any desire to sell.

45:46 We're in the low fifties, and he was seeing the price of 90 and the targets to go up to £2. So he actually thought he was doing something in the company's interest, but he should have taken advice. But from our side, it's between the company sorry, it's between Aldo and the lender and his lawyers. This working assumption that we've got is that those shares are gone. I know there's been some speculation about whether they have to cover them back. But when we announced Aldo's leaving, I mean, were 6,500,000. His total share base was 9,000,000 a bit million. We've had 20,000,000 or 30,000,000. We've got another 1,700,000 shares today. If they had shortage, I think they may well have covered them back by now. But our working assumption is that they are now distributed out. The terms are between Aldo. Aldo may look to try and repay the loan and then fight to get his shares back, and at which point, they will be But it's I think everybody should just say that it was very foolish endeavor on his part. It's extremely sad, that he's had to leave after all the work he's got. But we're now focused on driving the story, driving in new investors and focusing on getting onto the ASX and broadening out the shareholder base.

46:59 So Sean, that I hope that answers your question there. With Kevin on the listed on the ASX, we are hoping that we get the prospectus by the end of May, early June, and we're hopefully targeting at some point in June, I think, is a is a reasonable working assumption. And certainly, I'm I'm down here for the next three, four weeks. So we'll be doing it as quickly as we can. There are just various final bits of paperwork and things, and there's always things take a little bit longer, but it's it's progressing well, and there are no there are no impediments. So it's just as as quickly as we can get it all together and organized. Kevin, I hope that again answers your question.

47:48 So Steve, finally, again, well done on the pilot plant. I think that's brilliant. I think it's fair to say so that you're the only company now with a sort of industrial sized pilot plant certainly in Chile, if not across Latin America that's still got those kind of recoveries. And the other one, actually, of our conversations, you mentioned how the guys in Chicago are quite keen to invite all the car manufacturers up to site, up to their factory when you do the first ton as an example of what they can do. Do mind if touch on that for a second? Just so Yeah. No. No. We we we we have you know, the the main car manufacturing center in The US, Detroit, is right next door to to Chicago.

48:33 So our our group up there is is very keen to invite the the purchasing people for the motor manufacturers to to come and have a look at how DLE works and look at the the lithium carbonate and the quality of the lithium carbonate that's being made from this project in Chile, which is IRA compliant. And all those modem manufacturers, they will need to have lithium going to those batteries, which either come from The US or from a free trade agreement country. And as of as of today, there is only one FTA country that's making lithium carbonate, which is which is Chile. There will be others in the in the future. Australia is battling to try and get their first plant with making lithium hydroxide up and running, but they don't have the same experience level that we have in Chile of of people.

49:33 So they're struggling a bit. There will be production coming out of Canada in in the future, but it's not there it's not there yet. And, you know, Chile can be a very much a favored supplier to the motor industry in The USA. I think I've got to be very, very interesting. And and, again, because once we start to get a ton a month, we can really there's there's so many people that have expressed interest over the last two years, and they're like, it's great. It sounds interesting. We really want to get a hold of a a lithium supply, but come back to us when you've got a product that you can show us. Because up until then, it's all, you know, speculation. So the fact now that we know the pilot plant works, not only works, but works as far ahead of where our expectations are, the fact that we can move towards getting a ton a month and we can start selling it out to a whole range of potential industrial partners and offtake partners and battery manufacturers and automotive manufacturers is extremely positive.

50:28 On the marketing side, say, we've got a number of events now that we're coming up to. We've got the shares investor evening on the May 21. Steve was saying at the UK Investor Magazine Conference on the twenty second. Steve's down for the export of Chile, and then we're doing a lithium summit. They're actually we might also be doing something around the middle of June here in Perth as a mining summit that would make sense. And we'll be doing a number of marketing initiatives here. I'm hoping that Steve and Tom will be able to get down in about two weeks' time. So again, you know, we have a great story. It is partly the company, but also partly on me to get out and tell that story and introduce a new bench of people. So I'm very much excited. I'm really happy that we're back up in the mid twenties. Obviously, we came off in '26 back to 2475 today. But I I mean, 1,700,000 shares is fantastic volume, you know, for our market cap. And given that we had a lot of people buying shares down at eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, 15, You know, these guys are up over a 100% in the last six weeks. So I think it's very natural that some people will be coming along. But fundamentally, we've got 1,700,000 shares going into new hands today.

51:40 And I think it's extremely, extremely strong here. If you look at the momentum charts as well, we're definitely back into positive territory. And I'm really looking forward for us getting back up to hopefully the high 20s, back into the 30s above the IPO price as we start to get more RNSs. But really, the main thing now is just it's very hard to go out and get new people when you've got a sort of downward trend. Now that we have a positive upward trend, I think positive news and positive momentum begets positive momentum. And so we're very, very keen for what we've got to do over the next sort of four to eight weeks. Steve, is there anything else you wanna add before we log off? No. No. I think we're we're in in a very, very good position, both in Chile to demonstrate that DLE works, and that's a good basis to go ahead with the with the ASX because, again, there's potential investors who always ask, does DLE work?

52:39 We can say, come and have a look. Perfect. Steve? As always, I on behalf half of of all of the shareholders and myself wearing my shareholder hat, we very much appreciate these regular updates. I think it's great. It it's really useful for the company, for for shareholders to get some of these smaller details. It's very difficult for you as a management team to put into an RNS, which needs to be fairly succinct, obviously. So again, thank you for your time, and we'll hopefully have another one, guys, in in two or three weeks' time. Yep. That's a pleasure. Thanks, Welcome back to you. That's great. Daniel, Steve, thank you very much indeed for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide a feedback in order that the Board can better understand your views and expectations?

53:29 This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of CLEANTECH LITHIUM PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.