Fireside Chat With Mark Jarvis & Robert Morris

0:08 Welcome everyone to today's fireside chat with Giga Metal. With us today is Mark Jarvis, CEO and Robert Morris, Director, who will share their insights on the company's vision, strategic initiatives, and latest developments in the mining sector. Please feel free to submit your questions through the chat feature, which can be found in the bottom right corner of your screen. And for those of you who might miss portions of today's session, We are recording the event and we'll make it available for replay shortly after we conclude. Now I'll step aside and jump off the floor here and hand it over to Mark.

0:41 Mark, please take it away. Well, thanks very much, Kyle. So really what this event is about today is, a lot of you know me already, but you don't necessarily know my board. We've got a small but very strong board. Bob Morris joined our board, oh, a few years ago, I guess now Bob, just not long after you retired from Valley. And I was frankly quite honored to have you join our board. You could have gone anywhere at that point in your career. So, but for those of you that don't know you, I'm just wondering if you could go over some of the, you know, what your career was before you retired from Bali. Yeah, sure. Sure, Mark. Hi, everybody.

1:29 So, yeah, I mean, I was absolutely delighted to join the board. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later, but my history, I've been involved in metals and mining and the battery material space for almost 30 years. For almost 30 years.

1:48 Started my career with with Sherit back in the mid-90s and that took me along a ride where I moved from Sherit to UmiCorp. I spent 13 years at UmiCorp in various posts, in various places across the globe, mostly in a commercial capacity and focusing on battery materials at the time, which was unlike today, where you have NMC and NCA, it was all lithium cobalt oxide, so LCO back then, but I was involved with the marketing of that, spent some time in Shanghai, spent some time in Europe.

2:40 And then I think it was 2005, I moved to Valley, which was Inco at the time, where I held various positions for nickel, copper, cobalt,

2:59 both on the trading side as well as on the operational end of the business. Did 6 years in Japan where I was the country manager for Valley Base metals and then I ended up in Toronto

3:20 in 2013 as the EVP for sales and marketing for the base metals division of Valley where I was accountable for the marketing of all of the base metal products, including nickel, cobalt, PGMs, precious metals, and copper. So after that,

3:47 I took a retirement at 55, was the earliest time that I could retire. Now I'm actively involved with commodities trading, mainly on the battery metal side for a Swiss trading house called Tecmet Mercuria.

4:07 Well, it's quite a resume. And for those of those in our audience that don't know, Valais is the giant mining company out of Brazil, primarily iron ore, but they're the company that bought nickel. And for a while at least was the largest single company producer of nickel in the world. I don't know if that's still true. Perhaps Narelska is ahead now. Yeah, actually,

4:42 before I retired in 2019, Valley was the largest. But since then, I think many people would be surprised that, you know, the largest nickel producer in the world when it comes to when it comes to

5:04 from a non-mine perspective is actually Xing Shan from China with their activities they have going in Indonesia. When you look at it from a mine basis, it's still

5:20 probably between Nurelsk and Valia. I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty close. It was always pretty close between those 2. So then you took retirement from Bali and I think you joined our board like like 2 weeks later Now, I know that one of the connections was Martin Vydra who I guess you knew ever since share it days but you also were sort of friendly competitors when you're marketing base metals, he would go to Tokyo, I understand, and you would

5:50 compete with each other selling nickel and cobalt to end users, but then you'd go and have dinner. So, exactly, in a long time, that was kind of the introduction. But what, you know, you could have gone to any junior on the board and it came here. So what was your thinking at the time? Well I can tell you, working at Valet, although I was mainly working on a commercial function, I was part of the management team at Valet Canada. And we tracked a lot of the assets globally and in Canada. So, you know, I knew about the Turning It Asset, but only very superficially.

6:42 And then it was Martin, as you said, where Martin and I are very close. He called me, I think it was, you know, on some afternoon during the work week, about 2 weeks after I left Valley. And he was pretty passionate about the asset. And as you know, I don't know, maybe I can just mention to everybody on the line here that Martin is not only a commercial guy, he's an engineer, He's done projects across the world with Dynatech and with Sherrod. So I respect his opinion a lot. And, you know, his excitement around the asset was very clear to me because we've known each other for so long.

7:38 You know, I did a bit of research on my own and

7:42 I concurred with Martin and his opinion and I was very happy to be able to join. Yeah, no, I know that what attracted Martin was the quality of the concentrate and the nature of the concentrate. It's just, you just look at the concentrate and say, I can sell this to anybody. I mean, you can process it any way you want. It's a primo product for a smelter, but it's also an ideal product for pressure oxidation. Right. It's exceptionally clean. And I think that's what a lot of

8:19 investors or other people in industry overlook when they compare it with other sulfide ore bodies

8:30 in North America or where else, that because of the geological formation or whatever it was, the concentrates are very clean and would yield

8:47 very high nickel content. So from that perspective, that's something I think it's overlooked, Mark. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a perception thing that I'm dealing with all the time. It's just There is nothing else quite like this. We get compared to other projects but as far as I'm concerned there is only one turn again.

9:10 Nothing else can produce exactly what we produce and what we produce is ideal for any processing route that you'd like. So just to talk about the elephant in the room here is nickel prices have been in the tank for more than a year now. I remember we put out our PFS in October of 23 and nickel prices were around 11 or $12 a pound and they promptly started to collapse. And I also understand that at current prices, which is plus or minus $16,000 a ton, around $7 a pound, more than 40% of producers are losing money.

9:55 So I mean, I know it's a bottom.

9:58 Just for that, you can't have a market where almost half of the producers are losing money, not for long. But in your view, as a long-term observer of the nickel market, what caused this price dive And what do you think will cause the market to tighten up again?

10:21 Well, yeah, it's, you know, I've been following this for a long time and in my current activities outside of the board at Giga with TechMemEcuria, We follow this very, very closely because we continue to trade in the nickel space. And what we can say is that, you know, The good news is that at current pricing,

10:51 we are most likely, if not, at a bottom or at a floor. Because at 16,000 or 15,500

11:03 per metric ton, not only are 40% of the producing parties underwater, the other 60%, or let's say the middle of 30% are not making money at all and as a result it really points to the points to you know where we believe the the floor is

11:34 and we're there I think it's pretty clear if it does dip below 16 or 15.5 for any period of time it will definitely be a catalyst to have things move up. Now, if we look at the causality of the whole thing, what may surprise people is that nickel demand has been very good. Nickel demand over the past 10 years has been fantastic. It's been growing at anywhere from 4 to 8%, driven mainly by stainless steel, but as we know, that's changing as battery applications start to gain a lot more of the demand part of the pie.

12:22 So demand's good, and we expect demand to actually accelerate. Historical nickel and stainless steel demand runs just shy of 5%, and

12:37 nickel for use in EVs are growing at north of 18 to 25%. And even at a conservative rate where we see some I would say some some of the bears out there are saying that you know that the whole EV proliferation is slowing down it's gonna go away Well we know that's not not the case and we can maybe talk about that later. It's there and EVs will be, EVs are the future and there's no there's really no doubt about it. We can debate that a bit later. But coming back to the, you know, where the prices are, it's a supply story. So typically, supply grew in tandem with with demand, give or take a bit.

13:32 But what we've seen over the past I would say 10 years is the proliferation of Indonesian sourced nickel and Indonesian sourced nickel is primarily

13:49 stems from Chinese investment in Indonesia to produce nickel matte or MHP that's primarily used in the Chinese supply chain. Now the level of investment

14:05 and build out of the nickel industry in Indonesia is unprecedented. Like I said, demand has been strong, but we've seen this being outstripped by this massive supply. Now,

14:23 if we look at where we are today in that scenario, there's a ton of stressors on that supply, whether it would be EHS or whether it would be, you know, sustainability, whether it be biodiversity in the Indonesian forests that are starting to cause concern of a lot of the citizens and a lot of the NGOs that are out there, you know, securing enough sulfur to provide for acid plants on the HPALs. This growth rate cannot continue. I think it's pretty clear because as you grow, if you're going to grow 10% a year, that 10% becomes a lot bigger every year.

15:10 So I think that we are reaching a plateau and with current prices the way they are, the incentive to make these investments, even for the Chinese that are not typically sometimes not so sensitive to initial IRR, they're much longer term thinkers when it comes to this investment, that it's really starting to slow down and it will probably plateau

15:41 in the next year. So just, you know, I think that how we've gotten here was pretty clear. It's not a demand thing. It's a proliferation of supply coming out of 1 country in 1 region in the globe. And 2 things about that, Bob. One is that they're not all making money either. There's Indonesian producers that are losing money at current prices. I understand. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, each pal ain't cheap. I don't care who you are. It's not cheap. No. And there's inflation. Yeah. And the inflation, you're right. So I'm saying that at least half of those guys in Indonesia are struggling at this point. They can cover, maybe cover their cash costs, maybe they cover their fixed costs, but it's not a long-term business. There's no long-term business case there at current prices.

16:36 And then not only that, but I was reading quite a good in-depth UBS report, in fact, that you sent me, that The grades are dropping in Indonesia and also the grades are dropping even faster in the Philippines, which has become quite a large source of supply of ore for the Indonesian industry. So, Grade drops, prices go up, you know, so it's like it's already tough. They've overshot in terms of building supply.

17:11 And then the other thing is this UBS report talked about, well, you know, they're going to have to do more exploration. Well, the problem with that, and as a guy that's been in the exploration business most of my career, the stuff in Indonesia ain't that hard to find. It's Basically, you've got a lot of nickel in the soil, at surface. Most plants don't like nickel. And so the vegetation that grows on these nickel deposits is unique.

17:44 And all you have to do is fly around and look for certain types of vegetation and you find it. So it's not like it's hard to find, it's not like there's any mystery about where it is. It's been found. And that's part of the current problem that we're in is that They have found so much of it, so quickly. But then again, as with every single mining camp in history, you take the easy stuff first, you take the highest grade first. And then so The longer you mine, the more marginal your resource becomes. And they're going through that cycle just like everyone else. Yeah. I mean, and even the Indonesian authorities understand that. I mean, they've started to clamp down on their mining permits because, you know, depending on which grades you're talking about and what type of laterite you're speaking about, the depletion rates are tremendous. I mean, if you're looking at the laterites that are used for NPI, for example, some people are saying, I think in the UBS report it may have mentioned, but you've got no more than 10 or 15 years of mine life there.

18:59 And that's a disaster because it won't be able to support the current run rate of the plants that are already in operation. So I think they're starting to realize that the other thing besides ore grades is just inflation, inflation around building these plants, inflation around the inputs, whether it be coal. And then also, yeah, sulfur and also inflation around emissions. I mean, Indonesia is starting, they must do something about the fact that, you know, what they're producing is very, very CO2 intensive and it's destroying, you know, a swath of the land in terms of we spoke about biodiversity and things like that. I mean, they understand that and the only way that they can mitigate that is put in enforced rules around, you know, emissions. Emissions control is tremendously expensive.

20:09 We did it in the valley, I think, in Sudbury for the sulfur gases. It was a $2 billion endeavor. So inflation around the whole complex and the future growth in Indonesia is going to bring it up to more or less a level playing field with jurisdictions around the world that need to do this, whether it be Australia or Canada, you name it. So the playing field will level and faster than we think. Yeah, I agree with that. You know, the only question, I guess, is timing. Are you going to take a shot at giving me, like, when do things start to tighten up?

20:55 Well, I think we're seeing a lot of the signs right now. It's clear. A lot of the, you know, the information that we get out when we reference that UBS report, which I think is really good because if people haven't read it, they should read it. UBS is one of the only banks that have feet on the ground in all of these jurisdictions. So they're there. They're not reading this from the news. They're not taking a second of information. These guys actually went and visited every single nickel mine that's operational in the country. It's hundreds. So what they're saying is that we are reaching that inflection point.

21:45 Now when will it actually start to show up in terms of prices? Because there's always this lag effect, right? You know, it could be 25, it could be 26. Certainly by 27, we will be in a deficit. We'll be in a deficit for nickel regardless of

22:10 any changes in Indonesia. Because even when you look at conservative demand forecasts, and if that growth is, you know, 5 or 8 percent, it doesn't take much to see that the deficits will start to perform in 27 and be very critical in, I would say, by 30 would be very critical. We need it. Like, we won't be begging for it, actually, because it's going to be part of the, you know, it's going to crimp the energy transition if it doesn't. Yeah, I've had people that are quite knowledgeable think that, or tell me that things are already starting to tighten up and you can see it in the price sometime in 2025, but who knows, timing is the toughest thing of all to call.

23:01 But Martin points out one interesting thing, you know, there's always Mother Nature. And so you've got all of this, more than half of world nickel production sitting in Indonesia in the ring of fire. And As he points out, 1 well-placed earthquake could wipe out 500,000 tons of uranic for a long time. Now, you don't like to think about natural disasters, but the fact is, they're in the ring of fire. And that's an earthquake-prone region. So there's that. Yeah. It's not only earthquakes. It could be disruptions. It could be geopolitical events. And when we trade this stuff, the company that I work for now, we look to see if anything is asymmetrical in nature.

23:53 And what we do see is that there is so much more upside than downside, because there is not much downside to current prices today. There may be 5 percent, 10 percent downside from here, but even that's hard to fathom. The upside is massive because you have so many catalysts that can contribute to the upside that it makes it asymmetrical if you're looking at a long-term nickel trade. So you know, and one of those, like you said, it could be an earthquake, It could be new regulations around mining. It could be a number of different things. They're all there, and each one of those can be a catalyst for a 10, 15 to 20 percent increase in price.

24:47 So we see that as very, very positive. Let me give you a potential demand side catalyst. This is a quiet little story that I read about a month ago. I don't know if you've seen this, but LG, the giant South Korean company,

25:05 They have an article in one of the Nature magazine, so highly respected publication, peer reviewed. And they've come up with a membrane that they can put in a nickel-based chemistry battery that goes between the cathode and the collector. And this membrane is like a nanometer thick, and it lets through all of the electrons

25:33 until the temperature starts to rise. And then as the temperature goes up, this membrane stops letting the electrons through until it stops completely. So basically, the conundrum in the battery business has always been you want range, or range, you want energy density for energy density, you want to pack as much nickel as you can into the cathode because nickel has excellent energy density. But the more energy dense you get, yeah, your range goes up, but the more unstable it tends to be. And so you end up with thermal runaway. And so LFP has been really advancing quickly. And really advancing quickly.

26:20 And part of the sales of LFP batteries,

26:28 lithium iron phosphate batteries, is that they're safer than nickel-based chemistry. But they'll never have the range of a nickel-based chemistry. So this development by LG

26:45 takes care of thermal runaway. And they're saying it's scalable, and scalable rapidly. Like, they could be introducing this into batteries, like, soon, in a year or so. They did some tests where they had battery packs and they dropped 20 kilogram weights onto them, and with the battery packs without membranes, 100% of them burst into flames and experienced thermal runaway. The ones with membranes, 70% of them didn't burst into flames. And the 30% that did burst into flames, the flames got extinguished very quickly. And then this membrane, if the temperature comes down, it reverts to its original state, it starts to let the electrons through again. So it's not a one way street for that. And I read this quiet little story. And I was Bob, I don't know about you, but I was electrified.

27:44 I just went, well, if you solve thermal runaway, now you can really pack the nickel into the cathode. Now you can have 1000 mile cars easy. And and you know, there goes your range anxiety and there goes your anxiety about thermal runaway. So there's something that could reignite, you know, it's already a strong demand. You could put that demand into overdrive. Anyways, there's all this stuff brewing. We're definitely in a lull right now. Yeah, You know, when you speak about LFP, it's interesting because LFP was actually invented, I think, in North America.

28:30 I know that Hydro-Quebec had several patents on this material and it ended up that it was basically thrown aside and left the Chinese to further develop. And look, I think that if it wasn't for LFP, we would be in big trouble right now because there just wouldn't be enough nickel or cobalt in the world to be able to supply the current amount of vehicles that are out there. It's great. However, I think that the nickel-based chemistries, whether it be NCM or NCA, are by far and away a better chemistry when you talk about, like you said, when you talk about energy density, you do have issues around instability of it as you pack in more and more nickel, which you want because nickel has the highest energy density of any base metal that is in abundance.

29:38 And what we think, or what I think, and maybe we've spoken about this before, Mark, is that There is still a lot more, and you bring this to point, there's a lot more room for improvement getting it to its theoretical energy density in a safe way. What happened with LFP, which is interesting, was there was a massive improvement at the pack level. And this was BYD and I think CATL, I think the Razor, they were able to get more were able to get more active material into a pack through innovation.

30:26 And I believe that there is more upside to nickel-based chemistries in terms of innovation, whether it may be the membrane, whether it may be cell to pack, all of these things, there's upside there, which not only will improve the energy density, but it will reduce the cost and bring it more in line with LFP. So I think that there's still more upside in optimization and innovation for the nickel-based cells than there is for the LFP-based cells. Yeah, so there's, you know, one other thing on the demand side I want to mention, Bob, and this is a friend of mine mentioned this to me, something I hadn't thought about is, you know, there's more uses, especially for energy-dense batteries.

31:22 And the big one that he sees coming on over the next 10 years is robotics. I mean, it's already starting. I mean, a drone is a robot. A car can be a robot. I mean, but he just thinks there's going to be, if you look at what's happening with artificial intelligence, you've heard to pour that into various forms of robot, we're going to have a lot of robots. You know, it's a good, you know, I never thought of that, but you're right. I mean, energy density becomes even more crucial than in a car. Yeah. It's all about real estate and how much that real estate is actually, how much energy it needs. And if you're looking at a robot, whether it's like a humanoid thing or whether it would be on wheels or anything, it's, it's, you cannot use LFB based chemistries or probably any, any other ones that are, that are robust enough to, to, to power those. It's good point. I never thought of that, actually.

32:20 Yeah, I was like, oh my god, I mean, if you start factoring that in 10 years from now, it's just crazy. Yeah, well, look at a drone. I mean, how many drones are out there? You need to have the maximum energy density because you need to keep it as light as possible. So yeah, I totally get that. Actually, I'd like to look into that a little bit more now that you mentioned that. Yeah, that's quite interesting. So, just one other thing that I was thinking of before we get to questions from the audience. You spent a lot of time living in Tokyo, in fact, You're married to a Japanese woman. I know you just got back. Your son just got married in Tokyo. Yeah, right. So you're quite familiar with the culture.

33:09 And, you know, as you know, we've got Mitsubishi on as a partner. How important do you think that is to have a major Japanese company as a partner? Yeah, I think if you're looking at the big guys, whether it be Mitsubishi or Mitsui, Sumitomo Corporation, these guys, when they make investments, they're very methodical. They're not venture funds. They're not speculators. Typically, when they invest, they do it, A, for the long term. It's not just a situation where they invest short term. Hopefully, the price goes up and they'll get out. One thing that I've always remembered is that, and I think somebody told me about this when we were selling, we sold a lot in Japan, we made big relationships and one of the things that was always said to me was that, you know, Japanese companies at the time were the toughest ones to break into to sell things.

34:19 But they were also the toughest to kick you out. And what I mean by that was that they will give you every chance to to redeem yourself, to prove yourself, because they view it as a long-term relationship. So you can use that on the investment side, that when they invest in a company, whether it be mining or anything else, They view it as a partnership and they really want it to be successful. Sometimes they wait too long. I mean, let's face it. Let's face it. Sumitomo and Batavi, you know, They're still there. 4 billion dollars later, or 6, or whatever it is, and $300 million a year they're losing.

35:13 It's just something that Once they're in, they'll do everything that they can to make sure it's successful. And I would say there's a level of honesty around what they tell you once you're in. So it's great to have somebody like Mitsubishi showing in the conference. I've noticed just in my short time, Bob, dealing with the Japanese is basically it's an old-fashioned concept called honor. Yeah. You know, like their word is their bond. Yeah. And if you sign a contract, the contract says what the contract says and they will honor that contract.

35:59 So, you know, it's, it's, it's, they're, no, no, no, the same token is they're very careful what they get into. No, exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So, so once they're in there and it's, it's, it's great. And I've, you know, I found, I found Mitsubishi to be just an excellent partner. They're really, it's not just money. They put in time and effort and really helping us. We're currently talking to a few different companies about how to advance this project. They really, really want us to succeed. And they're really helping us with introductions at certain companies at the highest level. So we can get in to a discussion at a level that we couldn't get into as a junior miner, that's for sure. Anyway, so I'm going to stop there for now and take a few questions that I'm seeing in the chat. And if there's anyone else, I can see only 3 questions in the chat right now.

36:59 So If there's anybody listening that's got a question, feel free to add something to the chat. The first one's a bit provocative. Will the third dictator, Donald Trump, have any negative influence on your company? I don't know. Do you want to take that one, Thomas? Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, look, I mean, so Mr. Trump or President Trump or President-elect Trump, he talks a lot about duties. He talks a lot about this new green scam, he's calling it. But at the end of the day, the US needs to have either a self-efficiency when it comes to when it comes to electrification, when it comes to critical minerals.

37:57 And if they can't do it themselves, they're going to rely on their allies. So if you look at something like Turnagain, for example, this is a non-Chinese, Western-based, ally-based, I mean, between Canada and the US, It's even take it 1 step further. So actually, I would view Trump as even better than the current administration because Trump is pro-minor. And he will be able to try to, you know, and, and arguably he doesn't, he likes China even less than the current administration.

38:42 So all you have to do is look across the, look across the ocean and see the level of dominance that the Chinese have in the critical mineral space. And it doesn't take much to figure out that he's going to double down on that. Yeah, it's hard to imagine a 25% tariff on Canadian nickel because they're literally shooting themselves in the foot. And also... And it won't be on oil either. Right. Of course not. Of course not. So In those terms, it's all talk. But the other aspect I think of is that a lot of the investment in sort of the energy transition, whether it's gigafactories or other things, a lot of it's in Republican states.

39:36 Exactly. So, you're not gonna shut down money being spent in Republican states. No. So, I think overall, when Trump gets in, it's either going to be business as usual or even better. So, there may be some changes like with the rebate under the IRA. He may not elect to continue with that. But the issue is that it'll just be funneled into other areas that are going to promote self-sufficiency and to ensure that they're not relying on China for these raw materials.

40:24 So it's I think it'll be better. It may be it may be the money may be spent in a little bit of a different way, But it's still going to be supporting critical mineral development for sure. Here's question number 2. And we're trying to get a few more questions. That's good. So the question is Tesla will produce the $25,000 car within 12 to 18 months. And this changes everything with regard to affordability to the masses. And this person is worried about the bottleneck of our battery grade nickel discovery and how we get it to market, knowing where we're located. And then they also want to, you know, so somewhat infrastructure and transportation, but also how much financial support is the federal provincial government providing to expand this road railway to the north.

41:15 So I'll deal with that because I happen to be quite involved with all of those discussions. One is, it's more about time than location. Our location ain't bad. We do have a highway within 70 kilometers. And the big, frankly, the big infrastructure challenge to us, the expensive infrastructure challenge, is getting the power line into the site. And there is lots of evidence. I believe, although I can't prove it as I sit here today, But I believe at the end of the day, that the funding for the power line and for the road, just from the highway to our mine site, will come from the government ultimately. Now, we don't model it that way in our engineering studies and in our financial models, we model it like we're paying 100% of those costs.

42:09 And it's substantial. It's a quarter of a billion dollars US, a little more than that, just for infrastructure. But once it's built, we modeled a 30-year mine life, you want more, just keep stepping up drilling. I mean, we think if once this gets built, it's going to go for a long, long time. It'll be a multi-generational mine. So it's getting that infrastructure, getting over that infrastructure hump is the big deal. And I think there's been a lot of interest from the government in that. A lot of the right kind of conversations are going on, we just have to get the project a little more advanced before we can actually start to access those kind of commitments and that kind of capital.

42:57 Okay, so, okay, well, here's 1, I'll take this too. What's the future of Gigametals? I'm a shareholder and wish to know your plans forward. When will the share prices start to pick up? Well, I'll take that one too. Right now we're in what's known as tax loss selling season. Anybody that's got a portfolio and they got capital gains on one side of the portfolio, any stocks that are down are candidates for tax loss selling because only by selling your position can you crystallize your tax loss and book it against your tax gain in a different part of your portfolio, perhaps your bank stocks or whatever. And so we are going through a brutal December right now, just seems to be endless supply and we're working with people, I know who a lot of the buyers are, we're just soaking it up, we're soaking it up cheap. I think once it's over, in the last week of December and January, you're going to see, you usually do see, I'm not going to make a hard prediction about anything, because I don't know the future anymore than anyone else, but usually in January, in this sort of situation, you do see a pop.

44:12 And then, future of the company, Well, we, I just looked at the situation with the price of nickel and I thought, you know, do I feel like sitting around doing nothing until the price of nickel goes up? And I thought, no, there's something we can do, something affordable that we can do. And that is to have a second look at all of our data. We've got this enormous mineralized complex. We feel like we've explored maybe 20% of it. And we found a lot of low-grade nickel, this cloud of low-grade nickel that is our deposit that's subject to the PFS.

45:02 We've had hints of high grade here and there. But if you could ever, and this has always been the case, if you could ever find a high grade deposit somewhere within this ultramafic system, well, you could build a smaller mine that would be profitable at any nickel price, you could make a lot of money with a high-grade mine, and that could lever a larger project. That's always been the case, but it's easier said than done. So I hired a world-renowned nickel exploration expert, a guy named Dr. Stephen Beresford. He's out of Perth, Australia. He's originally from New Zealand. And I said, could you put fresh eyes on our data? And he was quite excited to take this on actually. He says I've been intrigued by the Ternagan Ultramafic system for years and he welcomed the chance to take a look at it. So he has done that and he has identified several different potential targets.

46:02 We're actually reprocessing our MAG data, our historic MAG data, his suggestion. We should have something in a week or so on that. But, you know, it's about a $10,000 bill to reprocess it, but it really will help to clarify the targets. And it includes one of them that's interesting is a Volkovsky style. Volkovsky has a Russian copper mine, massive copper sulfide and iron mine. And he thinks there's a real possibility that we could have one of those underneath what we call the Attics and where we've got low-grade copper, platinum and palladium everywhere, very little nickel. But he thinks it's a system that's trying to make a Volkovsky-style target.

46:52 And anyways, so that's what we're doing. We're talking to mining companies about, you know, working with us to do some exploration. And that could be exciting. If we could take what we've got already and then add a high grade mine, nickel, copper, anything on that site, then everything just explodes. So it's, I just love the upside, I just love the optionality. So, okay, next question. Is Mr. Dixie just a passive partner or will they have participation in management? They're not a passive partner. We have meetings all the time and they are on the board of Heart Creek Nickel.

47:40 So right now the structure is Heart Creek Nickel owns Turnagain. We own 85%, they own 15%. We've got 2 board seats, they've got one. But we always want to proceed by consensus. So if there's any difference of opinion about how to proceed, NAC can talk it out when we come to a consensus. And that's very participatory. I've got a question. How did Mr. Beresford, it's actually Dr. Beresford, determine that more drilling is worthwhile on your property, what is it expect that it will discover? Well, there's this Volkovsky style mouth of copper target. There's also some pressure pipes that he thinks will be semi-massive nickel.

48:34 And he would be surprised not to see them in this system. It's sort of like Agua Blanca. And, you know, they might only be 50 meters apart, he thinks, would be vertical. But if you find something that's 0.81% nickel, you know, it changes the economics in a huge way on the rest of the deposit. But he also has, in addition to those 2, he's got other massive sulfide type of targets that he's developed. And it's going to take some work, you're going to continue to improve the targeting before you actually spend the money by drilling. And then the last question, And I'm sorry, they seem to all be for me, Bob, but what are the relations of Gig and Metal to the First Nations in the project area? They're very good. We have been dealing with the Talltown and the Kaskadenna since I got involved with this project in 04.

49:28 And some of the current leadership, I first knew them, they were kids. So, you know, it's a long term relationship. Both nations and they have agreed that it's kind of a 50-50, they both claim traditional territory where our project is and they, you know, the understanding is it's a 50-50 deal. And they're both mining friendly as long as it's done responsibly and with respect. And that's how we intend to operate. So those, it's actually, it's a matter of luck where you are, it's like, where's your deposit? It's a matter of luck where you are. It's like, where's your deposit? It's a matter of luck where the deposit is. There are First Nations in Canada that are active development but we're not dealing with any of those.

50:15 It's not a free pass, nothing like that, but we understand the system, we understand the people we're dealing with up in that area and relations are good. So that's it for the questions that I can see. Sorry, I kind of dominated the back half of that because they're all cheap to me. No, it's good. You know, those definitely were a better place for you to answer. OK. Bob, do you have any closing thoughts? No, I mean, not still. I mean, still a big believer. And I think if I can leave any final thoughts that prices are going to recover probably sooner than people expect. That's something I believe pretty strongly.

51:05 Yeah, I think so too. So we'll see. But in the meantime, I'm not going to sit around waiting for it to happen. Good. Yeah. Yeah. It's good to hear that. Yeah. OK, Well, Bob, thank you so much for doing this. I know that you look very busy, and it's just, I think, very helpful for potential investors and current shareholders out there to kind of know who's on this board. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, we don't just have placeholders on our board. There's 4 of us, and I think there's a lot of experience and talent in that board, and you're a part of that. So thank you