Giga Metals 2022 Outlook

0:08 Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Giga Metals Live Summit today, hosted by 6. We are joined today by the company's CEO, Mark Jarvis. Mark's going to walk us through a company presentation and after we will move on to a live Q&A. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions at any time on the Q&A panel on the right-hand side of your screen. We'll get to them after the presentation. And as always, the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on SIX.com. But without any further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Mark, to kick us off.

0:37 Thank you very much, Dasha, and welcome to this presentation. I'm assuming that most of you know at least a little bit about our company. So this is not the regular presentation. This is something we've put together specifically for this webinar. We're gonna be discussing our plans for 2022, but also I've got a section, we're gonna be discussing what's going on in the nickel market right now, because it's really quite remarkable. And hopefully we'll be able to provide some insight about that. Here's a standard disclaimer. And this is who we are.

1:25 So what we modeled in our PEA was a 37-year mine life. And we average 33,000 tons a year of nickel, but that includes the first 5 years where we're operating at 0.5 speed, and then we ramp up production. Some years we produce up to 45,000 tons of nickel, it varies, but that's the average over a 37-year mine life.

1:57 And we are planning to advance that engineering to the pre-feasibility level. Very good mining jurisdiction. British Columbia and Canada have very strong environmental practices. It does make it challenging to get a large project through an environmental assessment. However, it can be done, it's done all the time, and you know, and then you know that if you're getting nickel or copper or any other metal from a Canadian jurisdiction that the highest possible environmental standards have been imposed.

2:41 So there are 4 large known deposits of low-grade nickel in Canada. 3 of them are nickel in sulfides, well they're actually mixed. Turnagain is a pure sulfide deposit. Demont and crawford Are a mixture of various types of nickel and various types of sulfides and a mixture of a where you write which is a nickel iron alloy. It's sort of like stainless steel just right in the rock And then Baptiste is almost purely an aware you're right deposit.

3:25 So they're quite different. Ours is the simplest. And one thing that people have focused on is the in situ grade. And Of the 3 deposits that contain sulfides, we've got the lowest in-situ grade, but we've got the highest recovery. When you work out the recovered nickel, which is in-situ grade times recovery over the life of mine, we're right in the mix. We don't have as high a recovered grade as DeMont, but it's higher than Crawford. Now everybody's working to improve their recoveries, including us. And we think that we will get some improvements with our next levels of engineering.

4:13 And the other thing that's interesting when you compare us to the other projects, we are the only one that is modeling production of class 1 nickel. We're very focused on delivering our nickel to the cathode, Whereas both DeMont, Crawford, and Baptiste, their engineering reports model selling ultimately to the stainless steel business. They're modeled as ferronickel projects and not as battery cathode projects. And they're modeled with much higher payabilities than us. So I think I'll just leave it at that.

5:07 So there's been a lot of announcements in North America about gigafactories being built or being planned. And if they're all built, if the ones that have been announced so far are all built, you're going to need an incremental 150 to 250,000 tons per year of nickel just for these North American projects. So, it's interesting, where's that gonna come from? I believe it's gonna come from us. And I believe that the other, certainly the sulfide-based Canadian projects will at the end of the day not be ferronickel projects. I believe at the end of the day that they will adapt to supplying cathode materials to gigafactories because that's where the demand is.

6:02 And I think that the 3 projects, ours, Demont's and Canada Nickels project, are all going to look quite similar at the end of the day. But we'll see. I'm just making a prediction. Nothing's harder to predict than the future, as they say. So here's the projects that can supply that need. And even if they're all developed, it's not enough. Very interesting times right now. So this is a summary of our PEA. And as you can see, it's a large project, 1.4 billion US in capex initially, and then in year 5 or 6, we'll spend another 500 million dollars to double our production.

6:52 Very low CO2 intensity, and a very nice clean concentrate. Now, the nice thing about our project and really one of the strengths of it is its utter simplicity, which translates into very low technical risk. So our recovery circuit has to do one thing and one thing only and that is recover pentlandite 99% of the nickel and cobalt in our project are contained in the mineral pentlandite And so the flotation circuit doesn't have to deal with nickel in different forms It has to deal with 1 form and 1 form only. And so, and we don't have problems with, you know, having a where you write mixed in and having to be removed by magnetic separation, which is another circuit.

7:46 We don't have the kind of alteration materials in our deposit that mean you need to use a de-sliming circuit. We don't need to do that. So it's just really crush it, grind it, float it, float the Pentlandite, suppress everything else. It is simplicity itself. And that, again, translates into low technical risk. You want low technical risk if you're spending more than 1 billion dollars to build a mine. Now one of the things we're going to do this year, one of the part of the study, well, not actually part of the pre-feasibility, we're going to model our pre-feasibility the same way we did our PEA, where we produce a concentrate to sell to smelters and using known smelter terms for that.

8:38 But we're also planning to do a bolt-on study where we will add a pressure oxidation circuit at the end, which will be capable of taking our concentrate

8:55 and changing it into either mixed hydroxide precipitous, which is the chemical form of nickel that all of the battery makers want right now. They can't get enough of it. Or we could take it to a sulfate form, which is another chemical form of nickel that the battery makers want. So this will add capital costs. It'll add operating costs to what we've already got. So it'll push the whole project to slightly over $2 billion. But MHP currently has payables, and this is a real market that's going on every day.

9:41 It's got payables of over 90% for both nickel and for cobalt. And in our modeling of selling to a smelter, we use payabilities of 78% for nickel and 35% for cobalt. So those extra payabilities will pay for, and we think more than pay for the extra capex and opex. And then plus the kicker is that if we are going to put our concentrate through a pressure oxidation circuit, we can go for more recovery. We don't have to go for the high grade concentrate. We think we'll end up going somewhere around 14% and that will increase our recoveries. So we're gonna be doing a lot of test work around that.

10:33 Here's our plans. Well, for this year and for the future. Updating the resource model after doing mostly infill drilling last year. So we're going to have more indicator resources. You need indicator resources, indicated and measured resources to underpin a pre-feasibility study. Whereas in a PEA, you can use inferred resources. We're going to continue doing metallurgical test work, optimization studies. We are going to the property this year to get geotechnical data largely around our planned tailing management facility. So just to get our confidence in that facility up to pre-feasibility levels.

11:19 And our goal is to complete a pre-feas by the end of this year. So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about The fundamental shifts in the nickel market is quite interesting I looked at nickel just this morning and it was up a little over 4% on the day

11:39 it's up over $11 a pound again and Just you know, this is something that you know, you've been able to see it coming for about the last 3 or 4 years, just as the electric vehicle revolution took off. You know, it just, you need a lot of nickel for those lithium ion batteries for the electric vehicles. And it was going to happen. It was always going to happen. Now it's happening. And it's quite interesting to see. Nickel has gotten very tight, not only because of electric vehicles, but also the traditional largest use for it, stainless steel, has been very robust as well.

12:24 So if you look at this historical chart, this is the last 40 years of nickel. The nominal prices are the brown line. The black line is prices converted to 2021 dollars, so accounting for inflation. And look at how volatile nickel gets every once in a while. And it can really go crazy when things get a little bit tight. And my guess is that we're coming into a period right now where nickel is going to be very volatile. It will be up and down and up and down, but largely, the trend is higher. And the fundamental reason underpinning this is that deposits like ours, all of the large undeveloped nickel projects in the world are undeveloped because they don't make money at the low end of nickel prices. They need higher prices to incentivize getting these mines built.

13:26 And so finally, We're in a time where the market is delivering those higher prices. I don't expect anything to go straight up, but I think it's going to be volatile, and the tendency is to the upside. So you can see where nickel's getting tight. Now I've got some information that, well, there's a rumor that certain traders have been buying nickel briquettes off of the London Metals Exchange and just hoarding them just as a trading move. So that's a rumor. If that's true, then when nickel goes up a little more, they'll sell it back into the market, and there'll be a new supply, maybe cause a dip again. It's just all sorts of fun and games go on in any market when the market gets tight.

14:20 And yeah, this is a chart. This is in nominal terms. This is not adjusted for inflation. It's just another chart. So the last time we were here was back in 2011.

14:37 But I think we've got lots more in store. And here's the story. I mean, people talking about the electric vehicle revolution, all of the guessing about what that market's going to look like in the future, even the most bullish prognosticators have turned out to be wrong. The actuality is going much faster than anybody anticipated. So, and battery usage is driven by 2 things, cost and a range. And nickel is the part of the battery that holds the electric part of the cathode.

15:23 It's got excellent energy density. And so it will be a part of this whole thing going forward. There's also a battery called LFP, which is lithium iron phosphate. And they're good batteries too, but they don't have the range that you can get when you get nickel in the chemistry. So I think that LFP going forward is going to be part of the picture, but it's going to be part of the picture for sort of cheap little commuter cars that you go back and forth to downtown from the suburb. You won't go on a road trip. For that, you need nickel. It's interesting how the markets have evolved just since 2017.

16:12 We were about 3% of the market for nickel was for batteries. It's now 13% of the market, and it's just growing every year. It's quite a phenomenal thing to witness.

16:26 So this is from Macquarie, and it's the nickel expected to be used in electric vehicles. And as you can see, it just rolls up. So by 2000 or by 2030, expecting more than 1 million tons per nickel to be going into electric vehicles. So it's crunched right now. I mean, if you're going to keep producing electric vehicles, you have to find some nickel. You have to get a long-term supply. And this kind of shows LFP and where LFP fits in. So this is the projections, again, by Macquarie of the mix of batteries types going forward. And LFP is part of the mix, but it's only part of the mix.

17:27 Now, here's an interesting topic. Xingshan, about a year ago, announced that, well, we're going to take our nickel pig iron, this is the big Chinese company, Xingshan is a big producer of nickel pig iron. They said, well, we can take our nickel pig iron, turn it into matte, and then supply the cathode market that way. And so they made that announcement. The nickel price got crushed for a little while and then it resumed its uptrend Now again rumors we hear rumors that Ching Shan is actively trading in the nickel market. We've got a trading arm. And so they'll amass a short position and then make an announcement like that and crush the market, cover their shorts. Just a rumor, but that's a common rumor that's out there in the market right now.

18:17 The reality is that it costs money to convert NPI to MAP, and then it costs money to further refine it into something suitable for battery cathodes. And the reality is, as long as they're getting good prices for the NPI, for the nickel pig iron, there doesn't seem to be any sense to paying more to get essentially the same price for the MAP. For the MAP. So MPI to MAP will have the ability to be a swing producer when prices get really spiky and when the payabilities for class 1 nickel are much higher than for a ferronickel.

19:10 So you know, technically can be done, but I think the worries about that have been overblown.

19:18 And so this is our board. And I just want to point out a couple of people, Martin Vydra in particular. He's given me a lot of this information I'm sharing with you now about the nickel market. He had a career at Sherratt. He's an engineer. He's run mines. He's run refineries. But he's also sold a lot of nickel and cobalt in various forms to end users. And so he knows that end user market very well. His main brief is to try and find us a strategic investor to put money in at the project level rather than at the equity level. And then also Bob Morris is another marketing guru.

20:08 He ran worldwide sales for base metals for Vale, which was, depending on commodity prices, a $5 to $8 billion a year portfolio, copper, nickel, cobalt, but also gold and silver. So we've got a board that's very well connected with the market. We've got a good understanding of the market. And here's our capitalization.

20:41 So something interesting is we did, So the total warrants are 28 million or so, of which 13 million are actually free trading. These were warrants that we issued as part of a financing we did almost a year ago, And we put them up for trading. The most recent financing that we did, we had the same plan. We will list, I think it's about 11 million warrants that will be listed for trading as well. They'll have a different symbol because they've got a different strike price and expiry date than the warrants that are trading. It just makes it kind of interesting, I think. There's so many ways to play this.

21:31 And that's the end of my presentation. Great. Thank you so much, Mark. There's a bunch of questions here. So I think we just jump right into attendee Q&A. But if you do have a question, feel free to submit them now. Michelle's asking, Say you get all your ducks in a row. How soon could you begin production?

21:51 Well Probably about 4 years would you know, like if everything went perfectly and we had the money and I say that because to start the environmental assessment process, we have to submit a project description. And so we have to have a high degree of confidence in the project that we're describing before we can start to assess the environmental impact of it. And we're still going through trade-off studies as part of the process of putting together the pre-feasibility. Once the pre-feasibility is done, and we're hoping to have it done by the end of this year, then we can submit the project description and that kicks off an environmental assessment process that will take probably about 3 years. It could take less, it could also take more, but I think 3 years is a pretty good guess for that.

22:47 The other parts of getting ready, getting shovel ready, which would be advancing the engineering to full feasibility, won't take as long as the environmental assessment will take. All right. Thank you. Bruce is wondering, why is Canada Nickel at a 213 million market cap and Giga is at 21 million? He says he just can't figure it out. That is a really good question. And I don't know the answer. I think, again, there is a perception out there that of the large low-grade sulfide deposits in Canada, that we have the lowest in situ grade. And that's true. But if you factor in our recoveries, which I think the market is not doing, we actually have a higher recovered grade.

23:37 And so there's a lot of things that flow from that. And then plus our processing route to get to that recovered grade is much simpler and shorter. So look, I think all of these projects are going to get built this market cycle. This is a once in 100 year type of phenomenon that we're seeing happen in nickel, where there's a new source of demand that's just so fast growing and so fundamental. But I don't think we should be trading at such a discount. Certainly not. I think if you modeled both projects the same, like if you were to model them both as making concentrate and then say converting that concentrate to MHP,

24:35 I suspect that the economics would be fairly similar. I don't know exactly, but that's just my sense of it. However, it's not modeled that way. It's modeled as we'll make concentrate, we'll sell it to a roaster, and they'll pay us 91% payabilities for our nickel.

24:58 And the economics look great when you model it that way. And so the economics in their PEA look better than the economics in our PEA. I just feel that our PEA, by sticking to the cathode, aiming at the cathode, aiming for class 1 nickel. We think strongly that that's the route to go because that's where the demand is. And that's what the strategic investors are looking for. They're not looking for new sources of ferro nickel. Thank you. Jason's asking, can you elaborate on the value of having a class 1 nickel mine in North America in terms of the cost mitigation for battery manufacturing?

25:50 Well, for one thing, you've got a transportation cost advantage. You also, you know, here's the thing about North America is this, this thing of having high environmental standards and process that you have to go through isn't competitive with the projects in say Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, you can get your permits very quickly there. However, those projects in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, some of them are environmentally atrocious. And the carbon footprint's incredibly high.

26:38 And they're mowing down tropical rainforests. And in many cases, they're dumping their tailings into the ocean with kind of unknown consequences. So again, if you think you're saving the world by buying an electric vehicle, well, if the batteries are from China, you're participating in a lot of environmental degradation. And so one of the advantages that the North American deposits will have is that although it's longer, because you have to go through this process, it takes longer to get your permits to build, you can be satisfied that you're not wrecking the planet by buying batteries with nickel source from North America. Absolutely.

27:24 Alice asking, why do you think a nickel demand will come to Giga versus others?

27:32 Well, I think again the strength project as compared to the undeveloped large project world is its simplicity. Again, It's an extremely simple processing circuit, and that means low risk. You want the simplest, lowest technical risk project can spend on the order of $2 billion to build a mine. Now, By the way, that $2 billion is a large number, but a Summerside HPEL operating costs of $3 billion. Again, we're competitive with the HPEL deposits and much more environmentally friendly. Oliver is asking, is the pressure mounting for battery car manufacturers to make investments in long-term pricing for nickel?

28:26 If so, is it headed towards a fever pitch? You know, the pressure is going, I mean, my feeling is that if you're in the battery business, if you don't have your long-term nickel supply figured out, you might not be around in 10 years. So, you know, I very much sense that the pressure is mounting. People have to figure out their supply chains and they have to think long term.

28:56 You know, there's been some short-term moves recently. BASF did a deal with Nornickel to supply nickel for Gigafactory Finland. Panasonic did a deal with BHP to get nickel sulfate out of Australia for a gigafactory that they're building as a joint venture with Toyota in Japan. And, you know, those are obvious first moves. I mean, you go to the producer, you know, you line up a supply, But it's not enough nickel and it's not long enough term. They really have to do something to figure this out. And so yeah, I'm pretty sure it's going up.

29:44 Richard is asking, Can the nickel in batteries be recycled, which could alleviate the shortage? Yes, it can. And there's going to be a whole industry build up around that. And that is part of the supply picture going forward, it's really gonna cut, we don't think, to any serious degree until about 2030, as some of the older batteries recycle. So, you know, a lot of the batteries that will be used for electric vehicles, you can see a second use is battery storage or simply power storage, stationary storage, before they then go on to be recycled. That's an industry, it's not trivial to recycle lithium ion battery.

30:36 It's a very big challenge. But you know, people are rising to that challenge. There's going to be a lot of money in it someday. And that's going to be part of it going forward. It's just as it is with steel. Zayer is asking, has there been any advances in finding strategics since December 2021? Well, we haven't closed a deal, but it's just a lot of work is continuing. And again, without naming names, but the companies that we're talking to are huge companies. I mean, with massive bureaucracies, a couple that we're talking to went through corporate reorganizations as we were talking about. But the corporate reorganizations were interesting. They created battery metals divisions.

31:29 And so as you're talking to these really big companies, you kind of find your champion within the company that really loves your project. And they keep trying to sell it up, up the ladder. And we've been moving progressively up the ladder. We think we're getting close. We hope we're getting close. But it's not done until it's done. I can just tell you that the temperature is up. And we've been getting phone calls from people that are just starting the process now. So very, very interesting times, I think, strategically important for us to advance the project to pre-build it. Strategic's up there that are kind of ready for that. But I think they're the ones that are going to end up winning the prize. I think the ones that are a little bolder and willing to step in a bit earlier and win the prize.

32:26 Thank you. Jason's asking, can you speak to the ESG advantages of the Turnagain deposit and how it differentiates giga metals from other North American mining companies? Well, you know, part of the ESG is carbon separation. We know that our tailings can sequester a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere by absorbing it. It's basically a silicate mineral will absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and convert to a carbonate mineral. And so the CO2 becomes part of a mineral. And it's gone basically forever. So it's not storing CO2 someplace that could rupture or something like that. It's actually securing it.

33:15 It's changing the CO2 into a mineral form. And we've been funding quite a bit of research at UBC to study this. You know, this is real data, you know, done by an independent institution and we're able to design our tailings management facility around maximizing how much CO2 we'll sequester. And you can measure it. So ultimately, could it turn into carbon credits? Very possibly, although we've got a long ways to go yet. Also, we've got good relations with the nations in the area who are very business friendly.

34:04 We're lucky in that regard. Mining, big part of the economy up in that part of the world. And just generally, we're gonna have to go through this environmental assessment process, which I think is going to go quite well for us, partly because, again, we will never—an engineer might wag his finger at me for saying this, but I'm not an engineer, so I'll go ahead and say it. We'll never see acid rock finish from this deposit. You just can't. You've got, you know, the tailings are rocks.

34:50 And so any sulfides that are left in the tailings we fail to recover, they're surrounded by basic rock, and it just neutralizes. So that problem will not be a problem with this deposit. Yeah, and very low carbon. We get to carbon neutrality with various measures. We're already low carbon, just the way it's designed using a diesel fleet. But if we replace that fleet with an electric fleet, which will probably be available in about 5 years, and we factor in our CO2 sequestration, we can get to carbon neutral. Great. Thank you. Jacques is asking how much of your 33,000 tons per year production will be payable?

35:39 He's trying to understand what is meant by payable. Okay. When you sell to a smelter, you know, the payable is the amount of the nickel that they'll pay you for because the rest is tolling fees. And so if we sell 33,000 tons a year to a smelter, we'll only get paid 78% of that. That's real smelter terms. And we modeled a 35% payability for our cobalt, which is terrible. That's one of the reasons we're looking at adding the pressure oxidation circuit to produce MHP or whatever. With the pressure oxidation circuit, you've got quite a bit of flexibility.

36:25 You can produce whatever the market wants. This MHP market is real. It's about 100,000 tons a year growing. Payables are over 90%. We don't think that'll last as more HP comes on the market. We think it'll settle around 85%, 10% payables. So it's just simply better than selling to a smelter. Now, by the way, payables, when you sell to a smelter, as the price of nickel goes up, the payables go up. Because really what the payables are doing is reflecting the cost of the smelter to convert to matte and to further refine the product. And so as the price of nickel goes up, Those costs don't change much.

37:16 And you tend to get higher payables at higher nickel prices. I hope that made it clear. If there's any other questions about that, I'd be happy to answer them. Great. Zer is asking, Can nickel be supplied directly to battery manufacturers? Is there any conversations between these manufacturers for industry level power producing batteries? I'm not sure I understand the question. He's saying that he works for a large-scale manufacturer of solar farms, BESS, and they're growing a form of controlling energy. Okay. Well, nickel could be sold directly to manufacturers, particularly if they owned a piece of the mine.

38:07 They would own a piece of the production from that mine. And then the only question is, what form does that take? And what form does the nickel take? And again, right now, MHP is the hot commodity. Briquettes, people really like briquettes because they're relatively easy to convert into cathode materials. But there's quite a lot of processing from the nickel in concentrate to the cathode. So MHP and even sulfate, they're just intermediate forms on the way to the cathode. You know, they need incredibly high purity for the cathode. Joseph is wondering, are you still in talks with Tesla?

38:58 We don't discuss anything about who specifically we're talking to. All right, thank you. Al wants to know, can you discuss why Martin Biedra invested in Giga Metals? I find that so interesting. Martin, who's become a very good friend of mine, he was at Sherrod. They're a producer. They've got an HPAL operation in Cuba. They've got a refinery in Alberta at a place called Fort Saskatchewan. And when he was leaving Sherwood, he was looking around for a project. Out of all of the projects in the world that he could have associated himself with, he chose us.

39:45 And I find that a great vote of confidence. And the reason he tells me he chose this is because we can make such a very clean concentrate. If you can do that, it's a desirable commodity. The concentrate alone is, because it's so clean, because there's so few deleterious elements in it, it's a premium product to sell to a smelter. But it also makes it easier to process if you want to put it through a pressure oxidation circuit and convert it to MHP or other chemical forms. That was it. He just looked at it and he looked at the simplicity of it and he just went, this is it. This is, in his view, it's the premier project if you supply a nickel to the cathode. Great.

40:34 Thank you. Jason's asking, what are some of the indicators investors should look for to better understand the pressure nickel demand is putting on manufacturers? For example, battery factory announcements or EV sales? Well, I guess at the base of it, it's driven by EV sales, but also don't forget stainless steel. Stainless steel has been on a real tear, But batteries are the real astral story here. And I think you're starting to see signals in the price of nickel. It's starting to get volatile. It's starting to get pushed higher. Again, it's over $11 a pound today. It hasn't been there since 2011.

41:30 So just extremely interesting times. It's the price of nickel itself that'll give signals but then also mainly in mentals watch the rate of electric vehicle sales because They keep beating everybody's estimates It's it's it's truly Past the tipping point and the electric vehicle revolution is going just straight up right now. It's quite amazing. Again, we're in a once in 100 years phenomenon where a technology shift is creating a complete shift in the supply chain. And it's really interesting. Our stock is way too cheap, in our view. I'm not an investment advisor. But I just look around. I go, my God, I can't believe that it's sitting there.

42:22 And it's kind of one of those obvious times in the market. You don't get things in the market very often that are obvious. To me, what's going to happen to nickel is obvious. It has to happen because people need lots of it, lots more than it's currently being produced. Okay, thank you. Bruce is asking, what would be the best scenario for Gigamedals to finance this mine? Is it equity, debt, GB partner, or a streaming deal? Well, what we would like is to get a strategic, like a battery manufacturer involved as to about 20% of the project. And that's what we're offering. We're offering that for enough money to get us all the way to shovel ready.

43:16 That's the deal that we're offering to people. And if we get that first, for one thing, it's a better deal for our shareholders because we can, this is a project that we can value the project more highly than the market cap of the company. And so if we can do anything like the deal that we want, it's gonna lead to, I think, a re-rating in the stock. People will just be able to pull up their calculators and go, okay, if the project's worth this much and Gigas still has 80% of the project, you can just do the math and figure out a value. That is the next step in my view. We're not actively pursuing mining companies at this point.

44:09 I think it's premature for that, but it's not premature to get a strategic involved and to help us fund this towards shovel-ready status. Thank you. What can you do to lower the capital intensity of the project and what is being done to turn this into a positive NPV project, Jonathan's asking. Well, the positive NPV is being driven by the nickel price. We started our PEA, I mean, anybody can say this, but in our case, this is true. Our PEA is extremely conservative. If you start comparing, if you look at sort of the sustaining capital, for example, we've got far more sustaining capital built into our engineering report than theirs.

45:08 And that's just simply a very conservative move. It's realistic. When you're running a big mine, When you're running a circuit, things need to be maintained and occasionally need to be replaced. So that's what the sustaining capital is about. Your tires on your big trucks wear out. Those things are expensive. And so on. So We think starting from a very conservative base has not rewarded us in the stock market. But I think it's rewarding us in terms of going through the due diligence process with the strategic investors, because they're not finding stuff and going, well, that's way too cheap, and you should have added more in there. Also we think that fundamentally we will improve the economics of this with our geometallurgical work by producing a lower-grade concentrate to feed to a pressure oxidation circuit, and so forth. We're looking to increase our payables into a real market, a real market that exists today.

46:23 So those will be fundamental improvements. But again, this project is so sensitive to the price of nickel. If you crash nickel down to 6 or 7 bucks again, you know, we're on the shelf. But I believe that this time nickel is gonna have to, it'll ramp up and it's gonna have to settle at a price That will get the large known deposits built deposits like ours built You know, it'll have to or or they just simply won't get built and the electric car revolution will die in its infancy Thank you, bruce is asking where are you at with your road access and will it be built soon one way or another? Well, we've, you know, it's interesting, we're leading the Boulder Access road committee.

47:19 A bunch of users, there's us, there's, you know, the other user would be Cucho Creek, which is a copper deposit. But there's jade miners up that area. There's placer gold miners and so forth. And so that road has been unregulated. But now it's starting to get regulated. The province asked us to put together this user group. And so we're doing that. The road, that's a very good question because no road, no mind. You have to have a road. And so, but the good news is, is that this is fairly flat to undulating terrain. There's nothing really challenging about building a road here. The road will have to be vastly improved to support a fleet of trucks coming in and out.

48:15 And, you know, there's going to be 2 mines sort of at the ends of it, us and a copper mine that's under development. Thank you. So Jack's asking, if you have a simpler processing or process, Why is your payable less than others? Because we're modeling selling it to a smelter. I mean, we could do the same thing that Demont and Canada Nickel did, which is we could make our concentrate and then we could just say, okay, we're going to sell it to a roaster and they're going to pay us 91% And economics would look pretty snappy.

49:06 But we're not doing that, we're focused on the cathode. We don't know which roaster you'd sell it to. Thank you. So Steve's just wondering, is getting power to the project something that could be a problem that is holding the bigger companies back from investing in Giga at the moment? No, I don't think it is. I mean, it's certainly an important cost. It's our biggest infrastructure challenge. But things seem to be moving our way. Like, for example, they used to have BC Hydro, which beefed up the transmission up Highway 37, was seeking to recover some of its cap ex. And so if you wanted to tie into the line, you had to pay a hookup fee, depending on the amount that you used. In our case, that hookup fee was about $100 million, US.

50:13 And we had that in sustaining capital in our PEA, because you can make installment payments on it. That's now gone. The provincial government decided to do away with that. So there's 100 million US in savings right there in our sustaining capital. And there's a case to be made that BC Hydro could build the line and maybe just charge us a little more, something like that. If BC Hydro extended that line further up Highway 37, just the amount of industry it would kick off is phenomenal. And other jurisdictions that own public power utilities, such as Quebec, are very aggressive in kind of using that to advance their economic agenda.

51:06 And so, you know, I mean, I'm not going to guarantee that the province is going to build the line, but I can guarantee that that's what we want. And the conversation is ongoing. And the alternative, I mean, some of these big companies, they don't mind infrastructure because their cost of capital is so low. So if they can build the infrastructure and the infrastructure is going to be used and they can charge just a little bit more for the power, you know, that's a pretty good model to them. So the short answer is no, it's not an impediment. It is a challenge, but it's not an impediment to getting this thing done.

51:52 And all these costs are built into our engineering anyways. Thank you. David's wondering, do you have a bear and bull case dollar in mind for giga metals? I'm very bullish. So, you know, But I'm hesitant to answer that because that can be seen as giving financial advice, and I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not licensed to give financial advice. But just rest assured, I would be very upset if all we got was 2 or 3 times our money from here. Great, thank you. We have a question here from Bruce. He's asking, what is the nickel price estimate do you think makes sense to move Giga forward?

52:46 Is it at $11, $15, $20? I think $11 makes us makes us a good project. And, you know, I think, you know, other projects out there to really make economic sense in Western terms need 12, 13, 14 dollars. I think we're kind of at the low end. I mean, you know, again, these H-PAL projects get built, you know, 3 billion dollars a crack to have a similar rate of production to what we're modeling here. And, you know, I mean, I think of Ramu, the most successful HPL project, That's what most people think in the last 20 years.

53:33 It's great for 12 or 13 years now. It still hasn't paid back its CapEx. So I think they're getting close now, but the internal rate of return on that project, again, a successful HPL project has been about something on the order of 3% IRR. So, but they get built because they don't have to go through a big environmental assessment process. And, And it's just, again, the Chinese have got the battery supply chain figured out, and the Western world does not have this battery supply chain figured out yet. All right. I'm going to finish off here with not a question, but a few comments. Ron says, Mark, you're doing an awesome job. God bless you and your efforts in doing this the right way.

54:21 And Jason says, I guess it's a question, is that the beauty of British Columbia, what we are seeing on full display in your view from your home? Yeah, this is, I'm up at Refuge Cove, which is where we've, I've had, I've been coming here since I was a baby. My great aunt and uncle used to run the store and gas stock here for, you know, for a long time. So you can only get here by boat or float plane, off grid. But yes, one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. So yeah, it looks beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for taking us through the presentation and all of these great questions. Thank you to everyone who joined us today and asked them.

55:07 I know there are still a bunch more questions. We'll make sure that we get them to you to answer them directly. And Also, if you do think of another question after the summit, feel free to reach out directly to Giga Metals. Holly's email is there on the slide. And also, of course, you can find more information on their website, gigamedals.com. And again, this has been recorded, so you could rewatch it on SIX.com afterwards. But before we close out, I'll pass it back to you, Mark, if you have any last remarks. No, I just want to thank you very much once again, Dasha, for putting on a great event and got some great questions today. Unbelievable. It just makes it more interesting for me when we get good questions. So thank you very much, everybody.