Lithium Outlook 2024

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to our Lithium Outlook panel hosted by 6. The speakers will introduce themselves, then we'll dive into our topic for the day. And afterwards, we'll be accepting questions. As a reminder, you can submit your questions in the chat at any point during the presentation. As always, the summit is being recorded and will be available on six.com to watch afterwards. Without further ado, Steve, I'll kick it over to you for an introduction. All right, super, Max. Thanks very much. Hi, everybody. I'm Steve Rentschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium Resources.

0:37 We're working on a project in Nevada, advanced exploration stage that we think is going to contribute meaningfully to lithium supplies around 2030. Carlos. Thank you very much, Maxim. Pleasure to be here and thank you everybody for participating in the forum. So my name is Carlos Vicenz. I'm the CEO and director of Full Circle Lithium. We are a processing manufacturing company

1:03 that produces lithium products. And we also recycle lithium from solution from all kinds of feedstock. And we're located in Georgia, very close to the border with Florida, about an hour north of Jacksonville. And that's where all our operational headquarters are located. Perfect, JT, over to you. Thanks Max, appreciate the opportunity. JT Starzycki, Chief Marketing Officer here at 5E Advanced Materials.

1:29 We have recently started a small scale production operation in the central Mojave Desert in California, where we are producing a primary product of boron, but a co-product of lithium carbonate. Looking forward to the conversation today. Perfect. So, without further ado, let's get right into the meat of the conversation here. So I'll start over. I'll start with you, JT, for this first question. So looking back at the last 12 months, lithium is one of the worst performing commodities. Now, if you look at a 3 year chart, it was actually one of the best performing commodities for a long time.

2:04 It's been quite a roller coaster, ending right near the starting gate again. So can you please explain the volatility? And we'll go around kind of in a circle here. Well, market volatility is always somewhat difficult to get your arms around, but I guess generally speaking,

2:23 so by way of background, I've been in sort of the junior mining and metal space for the last 18 years. We see a lot of these trends tend to happen. I mean, I think you can correlate sort of the peak of the pricing with the adoption and the en vogue of electric vehicles, but also just the expansion of lithium and battery technology. You could probably also map sort of the spike and potentially even the drop with the number of prospective junior projects that are proposed coming online. There's always a correlation between major producers, major mining operations, and the thought or the prospect of junior companies coming into the market. There is a bit of a control flex when it comes to price, based obviously on very simple supply and demand dynamics.

3:17 I saw something very similar about 15 years ago in the fertilizer space, specifically around potash, where there were a lot of prospective junior potash companies in the market where the economics were favorable. And then as those became more and more of a reality, majors are able to flex their pricing muscle, in essence, make some of the junior players

3:40 economically unviable. And I think some of the volatility is probably due to some of that. If you look back kind of in a three-year window, right, you'll see a lot of prospective projects that were being scoped out, the economics made sense, price starts to level out, and then projects start to have to stand on their own. So I think A lot of that, or at least some of that volatility can probably be associated with current producers versus prospective producers and how all of that shapes out in the junior space.

4:12 Excellent, any additional thoughts?

4:17 Oh, Carlos, you're muted actually. Sure, So I'll give my 2 cents on it. So I think a lot of the volatility and there's a saying, I guess, in so many industries, but in ours, the cure for high prices are high prices. And if we go back to my predecessor company, Neolithium, we were trading, I think as low as $5,000 a ton of lithium carbonate, maybe I would say 6 months, about 12 months before we ended up selling the company. And this was end of 2021, early 2022. So I would say late 20s, late 2020s, early 2021. And by the time we sold and going into 2022, the price was on a spot basis, almost $100,000 a ton. So it went up 20 times.

5:11 And the volatility here is because of the expected demand for different products, right? It's very simple. I mean, if you see and believe that, you know, the 1.5 terawatt hours that would be needed to fill every single battery plant that's gonna be built, and that would include all the EV cars and energy storage systems, then you're gonna have to have, you know,

5:33 10, 8, 10 million tons of lithium carbon equivalent being built around the world, and we're about 1 today. So that's a 10X increase. And that's a problem, a very big problem. However, having said that, when the price is high, all projects are able to be built and financed. And in this specific case, this last volatility case, when we went from $100 a kilo or $100,000 a ton to back to about $12,000, $13,000 a ton, which was the lowest. And now we've kind of leveled off and gone higher bid to 15 is that the Chinese, and these are the CETLs of the world control quite a bit of production in Africa. And the Lepidolite, assets there were. We're built very fast with a very cheap money.

6:21 And that flooded the market significantly, faster than everybody anticipated, but that's a product that cannot operate at current pricing. So all of those aren't shut down. And the cost structure there is 20,000 opex, just opex, let alone the capex to build and so forth. So we're talking about in between 20 and 30 thousand dollars per ton all in, which is where we see now that the market is recuperating. So all those have been shut down. And that's the way I see it. And you're going to see the price kind of building up to, in my mind, in the to the 20s and to the 30s as inventory tends to dwindle down from these mines over time in China and elsewhere. Steve, And I'll throw in my 2 cents. My background is essentially having been on the buy side, right, so the institutional buy side in these commodities for basically the past 25, 30 years. So to me, what occurred in lithium, unfortunately, doesn't make it more palatable, but it's certainly not like it was something out of the ordinary. What's out of the ordinary is that we're just in a fledgling state with this whole industry.

7:26 And so these swings are exacerbated by the fact that supply and demand really haven't established themselves. We're just starting to get out of the gate. It's almost like being in a horse race, the way I think about it. And maybe it's a little bit later, and the gates have opened, and the horses are starting to get out, down sort of that first straightaway, but they're certainly not at the first corner yet. So there's just all this craziness that's sort of going on is the way I think about it. You know, so much of whether something's gone up or down has to do with pick your starting point. And if you pick, you know, $80,000 or $90,000 a ton 9 months ago, and we're at $15,000 or $20,000, yeah, it looks horrendous. If you go back, say, 2 years, 2 and a half years ago when we did our PEA, you know, we were at $13,000

8:09 lithium. Should it have ever gone up to 80,000? Well, I'm not sure. That it's back down to 13 now, is that really where it should be going forward? No. That's a slightly different question. I'm sure we'll get to that going forward. But my point is, is if you simply go back about 2 years ago and you say, okay, if lithium prices were $13,000,

8:28 what's changed? Well, The big thing obviously is electric vehicles. And I always talk to people and say, hey, if you believe in electric vehicles, right, lithium is gonna be an essential part of this whole thing. What wasn't there 2 years ago was the whole Inflation Reduction Act, which obviously gives preferential treatment to lithium that is sourced from, just say, countries that are friendly to the US. So those car companies or battery makers will get the advantages of US taxpayer subsidy. Well, that's a big point of distortion. We now have this entire thing going on, well, where does your lithium come from? Let alone the whole lithium carbonate versus lithium hydroxide, and where's the spot price that's being given today, taking all of these sorts of things. And I bring this all up just to say, and I believe JT said this at the beginning, perhaps, Carlos, but if you think, you know, last year, the way I look at it simply was we produced globally somewhere around 500,000 tons of lithium carbon equivalent.

9:26 The lowest projections that I see out in the 2030, notwithstanding all the craziness that we've seen recently with the car companies, is anywhere from the need for, call it 1 and a half to 3 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. That is a tremendous annual growth rate that is needed in a very, very complex area. To get these mines up from start takes at least 10 years. We've all seen the permitting issues that different people have. We've seen the problems for jurisdictional risk in certain areas of the world.

9:57 I can tell you it's not getting any simpler as time goes by. The point is, every time that a mature commodity needs to basically get going more than GDP plus a couple of percent, the stresses on the system start to break it down and supply cannot keep up with demand. Here you're asking for the development of basically an entire industry, lithium production, to come in orders of magnitude higher to try to fulfill these electric vehicles. So even though we've had this craziness over the course of the past 18 months, year, whatever, pick your starting point, Going forward, I continue to think that we're going to have this effervescence, this bubbling from underneath, because supply is always going to be trying to catch up with demand. So those are sort of my thoughts on what happened last year, and I'm sure we'll want to transition going into the forward outlook?

10:49 Yeah, I guess that's a really great segue into this next question, which is pretty much about that. So with precious metals and copper running hot, is that a good time to start considering lithium, especially based on what you're saying with the requirements that all these companies will have to go fully EV, essentially. So, Steve, I'll start with you. Yeah, I'll tell you, it's interesting. I guess the way I would phrase it is not necessarily because copper is starting to heat up is now a good time for lithium. Yeah, they're all part of the global electrification story, part of EVs, copper, you need a lot of copper in EVs, et cetera. But even though there's been a very, very strong correlation of, let's just say, commodity-related assets, their investment performance has become very correlated over time.

11:36 They all have their very, very different supply demand fundamentals.

11:40 Now, what we've seen, which I think is reflected in the lithium prices, of course, coming down, is the fact that you can get a lot of distortion from certain areas over the short term. And you know perhaps it's all the Chinese material that's been coming on, maybe it's Chinese traders de-stocking, all this kind of thing that's you know I think obviously makes a market. But what you're seeing going forward from some of the other producers in terms of well you know we can bring on all this capacity and then a few months later let the prices as they. You know below below certain areas they start to rescind those statements et cetera. That's all just part of the normal, you know, that's gamesmanship, that's part of does a producer that has existing earnings necessarily wanna jeopardize those future earnings by committing to additional production, you know, in the near term when they don't have to, it's all these things that it's the ebb and flow of something at the very beginning.

12:34 I think, you know, over the short term, is it possible that producers can bring on green, pardon me, brownfields? And for those people, you know, who don't, aren't around this part of the industry all the time, you know, Greenfields is you go out and you're exploring in the green fields and starting something. Brownfields, perhaps it's closer to your operations or you're increasing existing capacities. Those kinds of increases are easier to do. If you think about it, you probably have infrastructure in place, You've had your people working on it, all this sort of stuff, probably have money in the till to help fund it. But by the same token, again, you don't necessarily want to jeopardize the part of the industry that you're in by bringing on too much capacity too quickly. So it's a sort of balancing act. And I think we're going to continue to see that going forward this year. And that's going to be compounded by, I think you're going to see more of the statements coming from the U.S. Government.

13:24 You see that, you know, Thacker just got its commitment from the U.S. Government. More of those kinds of things coming out that show essentially an integral commitment from governments besides the Europeans

13:38 to taking the lithium industry forward. In the U.S. Where our project is I think you're going to start to see essentially a bifurcation of the markets. You're gonna see a US price and a rest of the world price for lithium. That doesn't mean it's gonna happen in the next 2 months, but I think that's gonna be a natural evolution. And as these car companies respond to falling sales now and increasing sales later, I think you're gonna see the establishment of essentially 2 sets of prices. And that's going to make things really crazy. However, I think they're going to both probably continue to go forward because of the overall global supply demand scenario, which is there's just not enough time to bring all these lithium mines wherever they are onto production. Yeah, Carlos. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the lithium industry is a China story currently, and they still control 50 percent of the market. That's how you see, again, the volatility is because they control large portions of the supply and they vertically integrated all the way from mine to building a car, building the battery that goes into the car. So BYD and CATL control, I think, 2 thirds of the Chinese market battery market. So that's 2 thirds. I mean, almost 70 percent of all the China being built in terms of battery manufacturing, they control it so they can control pricing and spot when people see spot, they see spot China. Oh, spot China is down. That doesn't mean anything about a long term contract in Nevada or with

15:10 Tesla in the US. It means something. It is a point of reference in terms of

15:13 what's happening worldwide. But it doesn't really mean what's currently going on in the entire market. And there's, you know, obviously the European side, the North American side, and the Asia side. And you've seen also with the Koreans and the Japanese starting to be a bit more aggressive. And you've seen a couple of deals being announced in the Americas about that because they're, they're becoming a bit, you know, antsy that Chinese companies are controlling absolutely everything. They continue to control and have been more aggressive in controlling supply. And when they control supply and you're vertically integrated, obviously the cost of lithium is going to be a lot lower because it's a pass-through all the way to the battery, right? But at the end, in the grand scheme of things, in my mind, we need to look at this not as a commodity. I still do not believe I would not name lithium carbon or lithium hydroxide or whatever lithium compound you want a commodity.

16:00 It may become 1, you know, in the future, but today it's a lithium chemical, very different. Every client has a different spec on what they need. So in order to make an LCE credit, it's going to be very different to make it for company A to company B or company C. We're seeing in our business where the spec that we need to meet to sell it back to the client are very different from the specs that we need to put it through our lithium carbonate plant to make lithium carbonate that we can sell to whomever. It could either be a final consumer or a trader. So I think that the the market today has become a little bit soft in the sense that the negativity because of pricing going down has not helped, but also because some of the

16:45 North American OEMs such as Ford and GM are just not up to par with the companies such as Tesla and the Chinese competitors. They're just not there yet. Are they going to be there? Yes. So you're seeing a trend of going from a full electrical vehicle, that was not what they wanted to do, to something in between, between the ICE vehicle and the electric, which is a hybrid, or a plug-in hybrid, or whatever type of hybrid. So you're going to see some of those changes evolve over the next few years. You're going to see kind of like a trampoline into the full electrical vehicle. You're gonna still see the electrical vehicles being sold, but it's not gonna go from your regular gasoline to electrical vehicle, all of them in 1 full soup. So you're gonna see some of that happening over time, which is, you know, I think that's par for the course when you're seeing a nascent industry.

17:35 But 1 very, very important thing and nobody talks about, and I think it's a massive, massive industry is the energy storage

17:42 industry, which is it could be as big. And if you listen to Roamotion and some of the other, I would say third party validators on this is that it's growing at dramatic pace, both in China and outside of China. And I can see that market equaling or even being bigger than the EV market by 20, you know, mid 30s or into the 40s. I mean, not in the next 4 or 5 years, but we're looking at a market that is a quarter of the total battery storage market. So there is significant room for growth here. And I expect that it's going to get the market's going to get into a crunch. Is it going to get up to the high? No, I don't think so. I mean, we'll see what that happens, but it's not going to go much lower than it already is. So we basically stable or have stabilized the low end of the market at, let's say, 12 to 15,000.

18:30 That's a very interesting point, because I know that even Tesla has been saying that they expect their energy storage business to be bigger than their east of the business, so That's correct JT Yeah, I guess you know in just thinking about it When a lot of times when we kind of take a step back and we look at sort of what our strategy is, right, because we're not a primary lithium producer, but we tend to take a macro view on things, right. And so, you know, it's really easy when you're looking to build a greenfield or you're looking to expand into to expand

19:03 a brownfield operation to sort of look at what the current price is and try and model your business after that. Look, I mean, the demand for lithium is here, it's here to stay, it will grow. Will it peak and will it valley in the next 5, 10, 20, 50 years? Absolutely. Most battery materials or anything related to the energy transition from a component perspective will. I tend to agree with Carlos that using the term commodity almost minimizes the importance that lithium is going to play not only for us in the United States, but globally. So you do have to kind of take a step back. I know when I speak to investors, I often say, look, we have our business case model. You have to take a view on what you think the medium and long-term price points will look like for lithium

19:53 I tend to agree with fellow panelists that we're probably at what would be sort of the low end of the price points I don't think anybody ever believed that 80,000 was going to be a long-term sustainable price point. It's really easy to model upstart greenfield projects at 80,000 a ton. The robustness in the business model then starts to get tested when you see the price drop as it has in the last last sort of 15-16 months. But I don't think the long-term dynamics and thematics have changed in any way. The need for battery technology across not only the EV chain but across just the global energy transition is going to be there. It is going to grow. You can take a view on at what percentage keg that's going to be, but the long-term view is that it's here to stay. We need more production.

20:43 Stephen rightfully points out whether it's a lithium mine or any, you know, any upstart mine, it takes so long, generally speaking, to get through

20:53 the mining, you know, defining a resource, permitting process. And then, of course, we haven't spent any time talking about how do you finance these big projects, right? Multi hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars that have a long-term multi-billion dollar view, you still have to get over the hump of putting a financing package in place. And can you do that in a way that still makes everything viable. And I think you start to see some of those projects shake themselves out when the price points come back down to earth a little bit. But I still, you know, I'm probably agreeing with my fellow panelists that the long-term price is going to be higher than

21:31 what it is at now. We've probably established where the floor is somewhere around where we are now. But the long term value and the need for lithium, whatever form it comes in, is still there and will still continue to grow pretty dramatically in the next decades. So seeing as they're saying that, you know, it's potentially not even a commodity, right? It's very hard to analyze. There's a lot of things that go into this. What are analysts currently projecting lithium prices to be? And do you agree or disagree with their predictions? And JT, you can kick it off there. So I'll go back and I guess I'll speak from a perspective of how our analysts that cover us, right, and specifically how they model our business case.

22:18 We've got, you know, a handful of analysts that cover 5E. And while we listen, or we list lithium as a co-product, it does play, you know, somewhat significantly into our economics.

22:30 And I guess if you kind of look back at analyst notes and kind of how they're modeling things, you're somewhere in the kind of mid to high 20,000 per ton. I think that at one point there was 1 analyst note that had just north of 30,000, pretty much aligns with what Carlos said in a previous statement. So, you know, I'm not a sell side analyst and any projections I would make on price points, whether it be for lithium or anything else, inevitably is probably going to be wrong. But I can look at what our analysts

23:04 and any of the analysts and investors that I speak to as it relates to 5E. And I think in that high 20s to low 30s is a really good long term settling point. And I think, you know, anybody that is in in sort of the pre development or development phase, if you can model your project based on those price points, and it still works, then you absolutely have a runner.

23:29 Yeah, and if I can add to that, So I think that I mean, I've run my own numbers in some of the mines that I that I kind of follow and and just to break even and depends on the investor base, right. So an equity investor listening to us right now may may want a 30% return, right, or a long term investor, a fund may maybe come through with 20 or 21 or 25 or whatever it is. But I was just recently looking at, I think it was last week that I was looking at the

23:58 one of the largest projects now potentially going to be built over the next few, which is the one from Lithium America's Thacker Pass. And this is a 3 billion dollar capex, you know, 3 billion. All right. We're not talking hundreds of millions. This is an enormous endeavor. They're using 24,000 long term price and they have a 21 percent return to 1 with the current environment that we're in today in the market 21% is essentially it's very low. I mean, I don't know who puts money at 20% on a such a risky. I mean perceived as very risky project on a project that is obviously no other sedimentary or clay deposit has been built yet producing. So it is somewhat risky, even though they've done a ton of work and I believe that they're going to make it work, but you tend to see that there is some risk there. So is 20% enough? Is 24,000 long-term price enough? Because that's how you need to do it. You're going to have to back into what returns. So is, is, is a price 30,000

24:58 being, you know, that we're talking about is that price 30,000 or is it 35? And by the way, all the products that are out there today are not the low-hanging fruit price that have been built over time. And I'm not saying that Steve's project is not low-hanging fruit. I'm just saying that usually, as any industry, copper, gold, silver, as the industry matures a little bit, and as you start building more and more projects, the projects are getting built are the ones that are in the higher end of the curve, not the low end of the curve. And even though Thakur passes, theoretically, one of the best on the clay side of things.

25:35 Their operating cost is 7,000. I think it is around the 7,000 and you had to add that CapEx and all that good stuff. So we're talking about not very low cost projects. So they're going to see, you're going to need significant increase in pricing for any of this new supply to come on board. And like Steve alluded to, we're talking about 5X, 4X, you name it, 7X growth in supply over the next 10 to 15 years, I just do not see price being anywhere where we are today, anywhere. And it's going to be very volatile. So I would tend to think that the volatility and price is going to continue. Maybe the volatility is not going to go from 5 to 80 as we just had over the last, I would say, 3 years. But it's going to be, maybe it's going to, you know, that, that and a low is going to be tighter. Maybe it's going to be between 15 and 50 this time around or something like that. And then it's going to be tighter again and tighter again until we get to one of the ranges between let's say 25 and 35

26:33 or 30 and 40 or whatever that may look like. So that's the way you need to look at it. You need to kind of back into a price where Steve's projects or ThakurPath's project or whatever the other project is, It has a return for shareholders that is enough to take on that risk. And that's the way I tend to see it. Very simplistically, I know there's a lot of other macro and things that are happening and price is not going to be any easier to build. So that's my 2 cents on that.

27:02 Yeah, I mean, I'll add to it just follow on what Carlos said, because I tried as simple it, I don't want to say dumb it down, but I guess I will, just trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean, look, the last couple of bank boots that I saw, I think probably no older than 45 days. They were talking about it anywhere from 22,500 to, as you said, I think Thackeray used 24,000.

27:29 And somewhere in there. The only thing I can tell you about the, you know, the banks, the brokers, whoever it is, is that if you come back in a year, the odds are pretty damn good that those prices are gonna be different. Because, you know, this is the way I think about it anyway. The banks have got their own business, right? They're, you know, They're in it for investment banking. Obviously, they want to pick the winners. And so the portfolio managers come to them. Obviously, the portfolio managers,

27:53 if you're winning by 50 basis points over somebody else, then that could be your marketing hook. You bring in more assets than you're getting, in case of hedge funds, 2 in 20, all this kind of stuff. To a certain extent, I look at it as it's splitting hairs for a lot of people because unless you're a professional money manager, it's really about what you as an individual think your reward should be for basically investing in the junior mining space. All I can say is I'm not convinced that there's really a good cost curve for the lithium industry right now, for a lot of the reasons that my 2 co-panelists brought up. And the first of all being is that, yeah, lithium is a commodity, it's an element, but you need very, very specific combinations and not having certain percentages of deleterious other elements in your lithium compounds in order to get a battery to work.

28:45 That to me, I think, is one of the biggest things that people don't understand about when they see all these projects coming on is, hey, how many of them can actually produce a usable product to go into a battery? But the thing is, if you just pick, say it's 25 or $30,000 and you look at most of the junior mining space if they've got a project that at least has APEANPA. Is again right for those who aren't. Terribly familiar with the way sort of the industry works it's your first stab basically. At assigning economics to to an inferred resource gives you an idea of what's going on. As you progress to more feasibility, and then ultimately to feasibility, get a much better, much, much better handle on your cost parameters, all these sorts of things. However, the entire mining space, and this is not, of course, just in lithium. I mean, this is copper, gold, though they're starting to respond a little bit because what we've seen lately with the precious metals and even copper at 440.

29:39 But by and large there are very few investors left in this area. So that means the market caps of you know companies like buying a lot of the other junior developers is very, very small. So then you say, okay, now this really becomes, does this have to be the best project out of all of them? Not implying that anybody's isn't, but can it handle a 20% IRR? And What's sort of the starting point from there? I mean, I was sort of always taught to the big mining houses, if you could get, you know, 15% after-tax IRR and had longevity in a project to withstand all of the sort of the commodity cycles up and down, that's something that they would be very, very interested in. From an individual perspective, in my opinion, there's lots of money to be made if you can handle the volatility in this area, because that lithium price at 13 or $15,000 is not gonna be enough to bring these projects to fruition. And that's just gonna make that supply gap even worse going forward. And I always go back to this too. What is the opportunity cost for an auto company that is committed to the electric vehicles and whether or not they're backtracking a little bit with plug-ins or going forward. They've been ripping apart their internal combustion engine tooling and all this sort of things.

30:51 They're committed. What's the opportunity cost of not having a battery? And I'd argue it's probably infinite. At the second, it's not like if you're a copper producer and copper prices get too high and all of a sudden transmission lines are going to be aluminum instead of copper. It's just simply not the same right now. So to me, these prices have to be considerably higher. I'm just not, to me, it's not worth worrying too much about if it's 25 or 30. To me, if it's somewhere up in there, the projects that a number of us have are gonna be tremendously valuable and they're gonna have tremendous rates of return for investors who are willing to essentially bite their lips during times like this. I think that's, to me, that's how I would think about it. And you mentioned the supply side. So getting into that supply side a little bit more, does specifically North America need its own supply?

31:43 Australia is obviously the largest producer, but they're closer to the Asian markets to help meet those demands? And regarding America, is there not enough already coming from Chile and Latin America? And I'll pass to you, Carlos. We're going to need everything being thrown at us. I mean, it's not like, oh, let's just pick, I don't know, Argentina, which is doing well recently in comparison. And Argentina was always kind of like the black sheep because of the new president and the way the economy is going. But look, we're going to need every single project that's out there and more. Just on probable and potential projects out there, we're not even going to get to 30% of what we need. Well, let's say not even, forget about 50%, 30% of what we need. So where is that gap of, you know, between, let's say it's 40 to 100% of what we need, where is that coming from? It's gonna have to come from projects like SEAVS, in the North America, it's gonna come from new products in Argentina, new products in Chile, every single project that we can see in Europe potentially, all the ones that are being built in Australia.

32:49 So it's everything. I mean, it's not like, and not only that, remember, there's only 2 major, and for people, I'm assuming that people on the call and on the forum understand this, but I just wanna repeat it very quickly. There are 3 major types of resources, right? I mean, in terms of major, right? You got water base, which is our brine assets. And brine can be, I would say, differentiated in 2 ways. You got the continental brines in South America, And then you got the petrol brines, which are oil style deposits in North America. And you can find them in Canada and the US and I'm assuming other places in the world as well. But those are the 2 major ones. Then you got hard rock. And hard rock is as it as you as it is, I mean, you got to crush the rock and so forth. The majority of that is in Australia. And those, like you said, Maxim, are the ones that get exported to China and then further processed there.

33:40 There are some in other parts of the world, including the US and also in South America, but the majority come from there and in Canada as well. And then you've got something in between which are, I would call for lack of a better word, the clay assets. There's not, there are very few of them that, in fact, there aren't any that are currently in production. There are going to be and we're going to need them to be in production. And that's a line of risk. So that is a problem in terms of, but we need every single project out there to be effective. And I remember back in the days when we started this in the 2008s to 2012s, The way to differentiate yourself from another project is to essentially throw rocks at the other project. You know, we're better because they're bad. And, you know, and that's not, for me now, I'm applauding every single win.

34:29 A bad, I mean, a bad news for 1 project, and I mean, Steve can allude to this, I hope, is that it's bad news for me. If a project fails, if a project has an issue in terms of technology, it's bad news for us because then we will all go into this hole And we really haven't had a win in the industry recently. We had just bad news. There are some, I mean, not all of them have been bad news, but there has been significant bad news on the recycling side of processing. You got bad news, you got, you know, there's just simply not enough good news out there in the industry. And we need some of that. So, you know, I'm rooting for every single project and processing, I would say, company out there, including batteries and OEMs, because we need all of them to be successful.

35:15 Not necessarily be, you know, we're not competing who's better, who's not, it's just a matter of, you know, if we can have one that is successful, then they will be good for all of us, because the entire market is going to turn and said, Okay, this is a real thing, this is going to continue to grow from, you know, X to Y. So that's the way I kind of see it. Yeah, Steve? Steve? Oh, yeah. Sure. No, I mean, I echo Carlos' sentiments. That's exactly how I think about it. I'm rooting for everybody. And I tell people too, in something like this, a portfolio approach is great. I mean, sure, please go out, buy Novato Lithium in the open market. I would love the support. But the point is, the lithium supply gap is so big. All of these projects need to come on. They certainly all need to advance.

36:06 I think, you know, I'll just, let me just add for a second, you know, over the course of the past 3 months, 2 and a half months, you know, I've been out marketing. So I was on the West Coast of Canada, then I was at PDAC, then I was in Switzerland for a little bit. And what I've alluded to with people after having come back is that I'm telling you, people still don't understand the lithium industry, what I consider to be sort of the basic tenets. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that the understanding, the support from the sales side, which is totally different than it was 15 years ago, isn't there. And people really aren't following it. I think for a while when prices spiked to $80,000 or $90,000, a lot of the companies, the share prices responded, people were into it, and then of course people got out just as quickly when it went down.

36:57 And Carlos is wise to talk about the 3 major types of lithium because it literally does come down to telling that story over and over again. I tell people what we're doing in Nevada, and they really think that what we're doing there at first blush is what's going on in Australia. And you know, part of the thing is that in our industry there's never been the need for all these different types of things. I mean you go back in time the salars right the South American salars could take care of global demand. And you see the Australians coming in with a hard rock. Now you see in Quebec you see a lot of hard rock discoveries. You're going to need concentrators to get this stuff up to battery grade material. Again, that's part of what I was alluding to earlier was this is a nascent industry. We're just starting out. So the volatility is going to be there. But as an investor, I think one of the big tailwinds that you have is that that mismatch means that essentially all of these things need to succeed. So depending upon your time horizons, you know, you can make out very, very well within a number of different areas within the lithium industry.

38:01 And, you know, I urge people to reach out to companies like ours. We help you understand what's going on because it is a complex type of a thing, not just with supply demand, but also literally about the commodity slash chemical that lithium is. There's a lot of nuances here that can really, really give people pause. But in the end, when you need 6, 7 times something in a very short period of time from what you had last year, you can pretty well be assured that the price of that material is going to be going up. So that's my thought on that. Thanks, Steve. JT, if you have anything to add? Yeah, just really quickly, and maybe I'll kind of overlay a few different things. But at the end of the day, the US should always have a desire to be material independent. Right. And so when we talk about mining projects, we talk about a couple of different things and there's going to be constant themes not only through all 3 of our projects, but other projects in the US and other projects globally is 1, what is the end market and what does it look like? What are the economics that play into that? I mean, the other, a few other broader thematics that we also, I think, need to encourage each other on, and you're starting to see this change in the US, is the more projects that succeed, it signifies the fact that the US is starting to really understand that we get in our own way in a lot of ways, right? So the permitting process is a big hindrance, right? Because the length

39:31 of time that it takes to get through the permitting process leads to the economics that leads to a company's ability, ability to stay solvent and stay relevant in a particular market. If you're constantly having to raise money just to keep the business moving forward, but you're not actually moving the production and the execution forward, that can be a real challenge. So in any material, regardless on if it's lithium or anything else, the US should do what it can to try and maintain the independence or its independence and shouldn't stop until we theoretically get to a net export position. I think the final piece of it is then the reliance upon other countries for the processing of such materials. We see it in both the materials that we produce, that there's a geopolitical play here or something at stake that, should we get into more difficult times? Where are our products going to come from? Not only that impact everyday lives, but things like our defense and the technology, right? And so, you know, it's, you start at sort of the mind gate and is there a need for the product?

40:40 Can we meet domestic demand? Is there a larger global play? How do we then move through the permitting process? And then ultimately, where's the processing done? Those are all important things. And at the end of the day, we should all be rooting for each other because it does signify sort of a broader acceptance of Extraction isn't bad, extraction is necessary. And jumping back to the demand side, actually a little bit here, the market seems to think that the majority of the demand for lithium is coming from EVs. And because adoption appears to not meet the trajectory that some have predicted, the skyrocketing exponential growth every year, where do you think battery storage and consumer electronics and things like that fit into this?

41:30 And why do you think the market is missing them? And maybe Steve, start us off. I think that to me out to 2030, it's really about the EVs. And that's why I like to sort of talk to people and frame the whole thing. And how much can a commodity, let's just call lithium a commodity here for a second, simplify it. How much can a commodity grow as an industry really? And of course, if you're starting from very small base, Let's just say you're making 100 pounds of something globally. And say that producer has, again, got a brownfields and they can double their capacity, they can get to 200 pounds within a year and a half. Okay, it's 100% increase. As the base number gets bigger, that kind of stuff gets harder and harder to do.

42:17 In the U.S., again, last year, I think Albemarle was 5,000 tons a year at Silver Peak. It's a small brine operation in Nevada. Now, they're going to try to bring on other mines over time, but even something like Thacker, I think it's 50,000 tons phase 1 going to 80,000 tons. By the time it gets there, let's just say they get there in a couple of years, you're still working your way towards, anywhere from what I've seen, a million and a half to 3 million tons of capacity needed. That's only a couple percent of that total needed. And this, again, goes back to the why we need all of these projects to basically come on. I think what's going to happen is that you're going to see, if you don't have sustained bouts of lower prices, which basically starve the juniors, because when we go and raise money, we do things, we drill, we do the scientific studies, we work our ways up from PEA to PFS, et cetera, on and on.

43:16 You start some of the permitting, if you're in Nevada, it's the NEPA process because I think it's 87% of Nevada is federal ground, as a lot of Arizona is. You can't avoid that process. It's a lot of money, but you tend to start it a little later. But the point is, is that as long as we don't have sustained areas or lengths of time of price drops that literally just starve smaller companies out of existence because the dilution would be too bad for them to raise the money, those projects can still sort of stay on track. And they may be a little bit, you know, later than they had originally thought, but they'll get there. And then I think when we get after 2030, Carlos had, to me, hit the nail on the head again. You're starting to hear about all of this stuff, a stationary battery supply hooked up as AI centers and all this stuff. And lithium is going to be a big component of it. You know, the alternative battery structures, I'm sure that they're out there, they're being developed. But you know, that's like anything else, when you try to commercialize it, it doesn't take 2 years. And every time there's a fit and start with mine development, it just makes things worse. So as I said, you know, I think about 10 years from start to finish to get something in production, that's with nothing going wrong.

44:30 So to me, it's about the EVs right now. And I think that the stationary, the big power holding supplies that are gonna be necessary for those big centers, not so much the individual stuff, handheld devices. I think it's big industrial scale stuff, but that to me is gonna come after the EVs. And even though the EVs may not be up to the maximum amount penetration, they're still penetrating pretty damn quick globally. And I think that's what you're going to continue to see. Yeah, JT? Yeah, so the EVs are the en vogue sort of thing for everybody, the broader consumer audience to focus on.

45:17 We haven't spent a whole lot of time in really talking about storage technology and the advancement of that and all the product that's gonna need to go into the testing and the maturation process for storage technologies. There's obviously the consumer side of everything. One of the things I was thinking about as Steve was speaking is, for us, right, or just generally speaking, EVs are what people think of when they think of lithium, but there's so many other components. And then my mind goes to rare earths. And while the rare earths component does play into motors and battery technology, Really the driver for rare earths right now is wind turbines. So we're seeing a lot of the growth for light and heavy rare earths come out of that sector.

46:10 And so it's really easy for people to say, oh, OK, well, the EVs, if the forecast for EVs goes up, so it's going to need the for the need for lithium. If it drops down, then obviously the lithium demand is going to drop. But that really isn't the case. It's the one thing that the broader consumer audience can point to and look at and say, yes, this is why we need it. But in reality, the opportunities to place lithium globally go far beyond that and like Steve we tend to take a view that'll take us through to 2030 and you know we get asked the questions all the time, well, production is down, EV production is down this year, does that mean that your business case is impacted?

46:56 You have to take this thing in 10 and 20 year bites and look at it from that view, because it does take so long to get these productions up and running, but EVs is really the tip of the iceberg, right? There's another cycle coming after that for other products, consumer-based products, and then there's another cycle coming after that. So, look, it's here to stay and will only grow regardless of a year to year fluctuation in EV demand and purchases. Charles? Sure, so I think that by 2030, we're going to have a significant impact on energy storage, tell you the truth. And it's not like I disagree with what Steve said. I think that, look, the lithium story is electrical batteries, period. Where those batteries go, I don't really care, tell you the truth.

47:48 If they all go to the energy storage system and we're at the same amount of supply needed, that's fine by me. But you know, if the more I hear about energy storage and in fact, just this past I think it was this past month, China again, came out and said that their energy storage business doubled in 1 year, doubled, not 30%, 100%. Now granted, it starts from a lower base, right? So the doubling is easier than if you're doubling, I don't know, a million tons of lithium carbonate, right? Production. But in any case, what I'm saying is, the energy storage business is growing and growing significantly. And why that's the case is because and then you know, I don't want to complicate the subject but the battery Technology is also an important fundamental part of the story. You got different types of batteries You got the LFP batteries. You got NCM batteries. You got an NCA battery. So I believe that the future for lithium-ion batteries, and I say this with, I guess, as my opinion, it is an LFP future.

49:00 The LFP is going to be the winner in terms of the different types of batteries. Why? Because they've been demonstrated that they can be done cheaper, safer, faster, and the energy density of these batteries have now become very comparable in terms of pricing with the others. So, and when you want to drive this in mass on the electrical vehicle, for example, you're gonna have to have an LFP battery. There's no ifs, ands, or buts, at least at this moment in terms of technology. So for the 30, $40,000 car that people will buy, I mean, normal people, because $100,000 cars are going to be very expensive, or even $70,000. In fact, in Europe, I was just hearing a podcast yesterday that the average electric vehicle car there is about 45.

49:48 And the average vehicle being bought in Europe is about 30 to 35, which are ICE, you know, internal combustion engines. Now, that's a problem in terms of the cost of people trying to buy these cars. They may want them, but do I want to spend 10 to 15 grand more for a car? Yeah, it's not easy. So all that to say that even though electrical vehicles are what everybody thinks about lithium ion batteries, do not forget about energy storage, which is going to be enormous, and it's going to be very big and growing everywhere around the world. And we're going to see that happening sooner rather than later. Because if you see some of these cars going back a little bit, taking 1 step back to take 2 step forwards, I see that. I'm not saying it's going to go way back. If you see some of these electrical vehicles going into potentially hybrids, and when I say hybrids, it's not that we're going from a battery of 50, 60 kW or kilowatt hours to 2. No, we're going from 50 to 62.

50:49 I think hybrids now I don't think I know, it's going to be between 20 and 25. So we're basically cutting the battery in half in terms of power. But it's still an enormous amount of lithium needed to do that battery going forward. And if you get that going and if you build that market in order to get that, get to the electrical vehicle, that's when you're going to see an enormous amount of batteries being built. And obviously the supply will have to try to meet that demand, which, you know, are going to come from 2 large buckets, I would say, the electrical vehicles and energy storage systems. And now not to get too political here, and feel free to answer like a politician, But do you think the upcoming American election and talking not just the White House, but Congress, will have an impact on the price of lithium vis-a-vis EV pickup?

51:40 So I'll pass it to JT here for that one. Election years are always interesting, right? You know, when you look at the various departments within the U.S. Government, what agendas are likely to come and be center stage into the forefront, it's anybody's guess. I would say that agendas don't dramatically change regardless on who sits within the White House or who dominates Congress. I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say that the energy transition, generally speaking, is here to stay, right? And it's not just a US thing, it's a global thing.

52:28 Now, what degrees the agendas and or the policy, which is ultimately the budget that supports that transition in this country, I think is what is up, you know, is up for the debate. I think it's also when you, when you kind of look at what is the broader use for materials that we're mining? Do you delineate between, does that fall in the energy transition? Does that fall into the bucket of reshoring critical materials as a whole? And how does that impact different agendas? Does it fall into defense spending and or do those materials then play into you know items that are ultimately built and utilized for our national defense? I mean all of that is up for for debate.

53:14 I think it But I go back to my earlier statement that regardless on how any main election shakes out, it's here to stay. Consumers demand, you know, to various levels, they demand products that are going to need an increased amount of lithium. Again, you can have the debate on how much that is going to be, but the EVs are here to stay, right? We also need to make upgrades to our power grid to support that growth. That's certainly going to play into it. But I guess, Generally speaking, I would have a view that regardless on how the elections shake out, it's still part of our national agenda. Reassuring is definitely part of something that any government is going to be focused on. You know, and the only thing that we might see is sort of where does that fall in the priorities? Right. Is the IRA, does that continue?

54:07 Right. Does the Ukraine Supplemental Act get re-upped and is there more budget dollars associated to that? So while there's going to be, I assume, a shift in policy or funding amounts based on who ends up winning that particular election. I don't see the agenda massively shifting in any sort of way that has a deleterious impact on upstart mining companies like you're interviewing here today. Carlos, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I'm not an American, but we do have the plan for the US. I know Steve will have a much better analysis on the political side. It's hard to say. I mean, obviously, Trump is not a favor, well, not a big fan of electrical vehicles in terms of pushing it down the throat of people.

54:59 I think he's in favor of industries that can make money for people, period. I think it's pretty pragmatic on that, which is fine by me. So let the people decide which vehicle is better. But we do need, I mean, The IRA obviously had a benefit for everybody in the industry. And you can see that throughout the, I would say, the results and announcements that you've seen over the past few years or a year and a half, or I can't remember now when it came out. And you're going to see that going forward. And I think that's already out in the public. So that's not gonna change too much. So that's gonna continue to evolve and give a little bit more oomph to the industry. So I don't see it as a major change. I think we do still need help in certain instances from the DOEs of the world, the DOTs, and even the DODs.

55:49 When I say DOEs, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, all those 3 work in tandem for the critical materials. And I don't think the next president, if it's Trump or whomever that may look, may change the tune on that. They may focus on potentially bringing more oil production to the US, which is, again, that's not a bad thing. I mean, that's something that they should work on, but not necessarily kill, that won't kill the lithium industry. I think we have a business that can withstand any changes on that front. So I don't really see the demand for lithium and lithium ion batteries changing that. So I think that that ship has left the shore in my mind. And I think that this is an industry that stands by itself going forward. So no change for me.

56:41 Finally, pass things over to you, Steve. Yeah, I sort of think it's a Goldilocks scenario, surprisingly. Look, I've never seen the money get taken back out. I mean, the budgetary process is a blood sport in the US and all that money that went in a couple of years ago to me is there. Will priorities change if Donald Trump gets in? I think so, but I don't see this as mutually exclusive. I think as a pragmatist, it would be like, okay, it's a done thing. It's more going to be a push versus pull thing. I think a lot of people feel that EVs are getting pushed down people's throats. I think if essentially if Donald Trump gets in, it's going to be more of a, okay, we're going to pull you along. The money's there. We're going to try to make everything work more efficiently.

57:30 The states are going to play a bigger role. You know, if you have a permit, a permit, a project in certain states in the US, I think you've got a natural advantage. I think Nevada is one of them, but that's not the only one. And that's because the governor, some of the governors are very, very forward looking or they have a historical. A precedent from their state to you know to be friendly towards mining. And others don't- but I think that when you look at it you know. It's like moving a battleship. You hit the rudder but that doesn't mean everything turns It takes time. Here the money is already been sunk, but the US administrative state doesn't know how to properly apply it. I can't tell you how many times I continue to look at those DOE tranches of money that are coming out or, you know, whatever, for critical materials and it specifically says, not for developing a mine. That kind of stuff has got to change, right? Not everybody can just build a battery plant. What good is it if you can't put any material through it? I think going forward, people are gonna be scared. What if Trump wins, et cetera?

58:30 That's the end of lithium industry. I don't see it like that. I think, if anything, it's going to make a developer's task easier. And I think that's going to be good for lithium investors going forward. OK, interesting takes. Appreciate it. Let's get into the more company specific questions here. Just before we run out of time. So, Carlos, I'll kind of pose this question to you here first. So Full Circle is working with companies that produce a significant amount of waste containing lithium, which you then recycle. Do you find that the current market is a challenge for finding new customers seeing as the lithium byproduct is not as valuable as it used to be? Or does the market understand everything we've talked about today? No, not really. I mean I think that some of our the customers and the companies that we're working with understand the fact that, you know, maybe they're not losing as much lithium in the waste that in terms of monetary amount, but they understand for a fact that they're inefficient in the process. $15,000 today is not low by any stretch.

59:37 So they would most definitely want to be more efficient in that process. And they also understand that the price is going to go up. They've all said that. I mean, we're lucky to be paying low amounts now, but we don't know where that price is gonna be. So they really don't have a view on terms of pricing. So it is, obviously they may do things a bit slower now than they're not losing as much as when it was 50 or 60 or 70 or 80,000, but they most definitely still see that there is an efficiency in their, I guess, in their systems and in their processing side of things, and they want to fix it as soon as possible. So I don't see a slowdown there at all. One of the things that we have seen a slowdown is just because the way pricing is, is the battery cycle. Battery cycling is and will continue to be to a, I would say, we'll see how long it goes, a problem in terms of making returns there, right? And in terms of how the cost of batteries that you get to recycle and the amount of recovery that you do within the recycling side of things and the processing and so forth. So there's a lot of unknowns there. So we have a different type of process and I'm not going to get into that at this point on that. So that's obviously on the go.

1:00:50 But one of the things that at least for us is that we internally use everything that we recycle within our processes. So we're not, we don't necessarily need to sell anything outside to make money or to make a return because we utilize some of the materials that we recycle within the battery to make other things that, you know, within our processes. And that makes it a lot easier for us in terms of cost structure. So that's an important part of our business model. And I think that's going to do well if the price goes up even better. But even nowadays, I mean, it obviously helps us with with the cost structure. Perfect. Thank you. And JT, lithium carbonate isn't 5E's primary product. It's boron. Can you quickly, for the audience in the room, just give an overview of the boron market and its primary applications in defense? What does the demand look like in the coming 10 years? Absolutely.

1:01:36 As you rightfully point out, Boron is our primary product. Where Boron really has a play in national defence is in what we call derivative products. With general input, you mine the natural borate, much like you would mine hard rocks, Fodgermine, in most cases, our case we're doing in situ leaching. So it comes out as more of a brine. It actually comes out as a pregnant leach solution that we ended up crystallizing that crystalline product becomes boric acid. That boric acid then gets put into things to create an elemental boron, a boron oxide, or a boron carbide, and all of those derivative products have some sort of input into the creation of things like Kevlar vests or body armor, tank armor, things like that.

1:02:24 So really where sort of our play is specifically, we don't, The government is starting to really get behind our project now, especially since we've commenced production as of the first part of this month. But we aren't chasing the typical Department of Energy avenues. We have been focused our strategy on Department of Defense because there is about a hundred different applications in which boric acid, which is our main product, goes into the as an input into these derivative products, which coincidentally the US Department of Defense in some cases is a hundred percent dependent upon China to get these derivative products to go back into national security. Boron carbene, boron carbide being the primary component and really a single point of failure in the supply chain.

1:03:18 And for Steve here, Nevada Lithium looks to have one of the biggest high-grade lithium deposits in the United States, but at lower lithium prices, it's hard to justify work on deposits that aren't hard rock or brine. How do the economics play out at current prices for you and what are your expectations for the economics to change in the coming years? I think, let me just change a couple of things. First of all, we do have one of the largest resources globally, but I wouldn't consider what is it now to be terribly high grade in comparison to other projects that you see out there. And to me that's a consequence or just simply a circumstance of the fact that you've got different kinds. Spodumene is going to be higher grade. Some of the brines tend to be higher grade. But if you were to look at it in a vacuum, that would be one thing. But you look at how this is all wrapped up in terms of the economics and that's where our PEA and then later on we're progressing towards a PFS. That's where sort of you really can tell the whole story.

1:04:14 You know Our PEA was done at very low lithium prices, which are, let's just call them where they are now. And it showed that we had a massive net present value. Now, again, it's been 2 years since we done that. There's been inflation. A PEA is, again, sort of your first swag at getting those economics and the costs are going to get better defined it said are all these kinds of things production techniques. As we go forward but- you know I would say we wouldn't want to go you know down into the single digits- with- with regards to prices. But again I think for all of the reasons that you've heard from from the 3 of us so far we certainly don't think that there's any reason to think that would be possible for the long term because there simply won't be a lithium industry going forward.

1:05:02 We have tremendous sensitivity to to higher lithium prices. You know and the thing I always tell people again as investors is you know your investment or value proposition is you know what's the value of the company now when you buy a share. You know is it very small in comparison to you know what that NPV of the project is and over time would you assume that that essentially the company's overall value is going to accrete towards net present value. Typically that's what you would do. And from there you can start to shave, you can start to say, you know, I don't think this part, maybe this part. You start to put a risk assessment to it. But there's currently such a mismatch between what the lithium prices are now and what they need to be. There's no way we're going to stop work. I mean, you know, again, remembering the way that junior resource development goes, you know, you go through a financing, you do as much as you can, you try to be opportunistic when you finance again to minimize dilution.

1:05:57 It's a very, very dynamic thing. That's the other thing that I just want people to tell you. You know, When you see things that occur, like an announcement, Carlos mentioned some of the more recent announcements from Japanese or Koreans in terms of offtake or getting involved, JVs, et cetera, that probably took years to put together. But I guarantee you that there was a bunch of stuff going on a couple of weeks previous to that announcement, very, very dynamic. So, you know, we're not privy as the CEOs or management of these companies to tell the public everything that's going on. And that can make it very, very difficult to basically show the value proposition at any given point in time. That's just the way it is. And that's where, you know, essentially the value of your trust in management comes in. But with regards to the Nevada Lithium, we're not stopping work, we're moving ahead. And for all the reasons I outlined previously, we see just a tremendous value proposition as we go forward.

1:06:53 Excellent. Thank you, General, for those wonderful responses. This is all the time we have for today. I know we have a couple of questions that remain unanswered in the chat, So we'll make sure that the speakers here respond accordingly after the event. But thank you all for taking us through this wonderful panel discussion. So I wanna thank everyone and just pass it for kind of last closing thoughts, if you have any, take it away from any of you. Okay, I'll start. Well, thank you very much, everybody to participate. Like Maxim said, this is, and Steve said, this is not an easy kind of industry to talk through in just about an hour. There's a lot of, I would say, details that we glanced over, but at the end of the day, I think I kind of, maybe I speak for everybody here, but we do, very bullish. Obviously, we do work in industry, but I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of verifiable proof that with the current demand that we're seeing out there in the market, both on the energy storage and on the EV side, we believe that prices are going to continue to go up over the next, I would say, 12 to 18 months, if not sooner. And you're gonna see a significant re-rating of a lot of the equities along with that as the price goes up.

1:08:08 So, we envisioned that happening sooner rather than later. And just recall that when I was at NIO, where the price went from 5,000 to 80,000 in less than 12 months. So there could be a very change very quickly here, not necessarily that's gonna happen this time, but I can say that in these nascent industries, that's what usually happens. Everything happens quite fast. So I appreciate everybody participating and happy to, if you have any questions, You know where to contact me. Yeah, JT, Steve. Yeah, just again, thank you to 6. You guys always do a fantastic job putting these events on and giving us an opportunity to reach out potentially to a retail audience or investors that haven't heard our story. Great job as always.

1:08:54 And from me at 5E Advanced Materials, I just always appreciate the opportunity. So thank you. And thank you to the audience for tuning in. Yeah, and I'll finish up. JT, Carlos, great comments as always. I love doing these types of things. Max, you guys throw a great seminar. I would just say, again, if you're an investor, you look at these things in one way and you take the longer term approach. I think that we can almost all demonstrate that we have a tremendous amount of value locked up in our shares. It's a trader it's a different kind of thing I forget which fighter said you know everybody's got a plan till they get hit in the face. Well we just got hit in the face over the past 9 months so now what do you do. If you think the value is there, you can increase your positions. I don't think over the long term you're going to be disappointed. There's going to be ebbs and flows as there isn't anything, and we're going to climb a wall of worry. But we don't get involved in this part of the industry for S&P 500 returns.

1:09:46 And I think you're going to be comfortably rewarded over time with a portfolio approach in this area. It's just my 2 cents. Thanks again to everyone for participating and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.