Lithium Pioneers: Discovering Bonnie Claire's Subsurface Secrets

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to the Nevada Lithium live event hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce speaker for today, Stephen Renschelet, the CEO. Steve will walk us through the latest press release and after that we'll be accepting questions. As a reminder you can submit your questions in the chat at any point during the presentation.

0:28 As always the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch on six.com afterwards. Without further ado, I'd like to hand things over to you, Steve, so that we can get started. That's super, thanks, Max. Appreciate everybody taking the time to listen to the presentation today. So we had a news release yesterday talking about a seismic program that has occurred or is starting to occur now at Bonnie Clare. It's a considerably sized one. It's going to take a little bit of time to do, But what I wanted to do was take the opportunity to try to clarify some things that are going on at Bonnyclare, because we have multiple things that are going on. And one of the big things that is important to remember here is that we are on track to do our preliminary feasibility study that is predicated on a sedimentary deposit using a borehole mining method and depending upon weather or additional financing, all the types of things that typically come to play, that's on track basically for completion towards the end of next year and I think it's a good a good way to think about it. However in addition to that we have a brine program that we've just started.

1:45 And part of this comes out of our recent summer financing, where we had set aside some funds. And this builds upon work that had been done, frankly, back 10 years ago at Bonnie Clare, when one of the original intents was to find brine. And Iconic Minerals, our previous JV partners, you know, essentially over time were not able to fund the science that they wanted to do to really look at the brine question, I would say, in the proper way or in the optimal way. What we're doing right now as a starting point is taking a look below the ground. Again, if you're not familiar with seismic, this is something that you often see used in oil and gas exploration. And you're looking for structures. And structures, geologist's way of saying, I think about it in terms of, oh, changes, differences, upheavals, things that are thrust down. This is all, of course, subsurface.

2:43 But these distortions or stresses that you see are often places where you will have ingress routes for basically liquids that come in and if they're the proper chemistry or pH, the way our technical team thinks about it is they would dissolve those sediments, which we know we have a lot of, and turn them into basically a brine solution. And that's the sort of the conventional brine that you hear about. What we're going to be doing over the course of the next couple weeks is going methodically across a portion of the property that we think that we basically had previously identified as prospective for these types of structures and that's based on a Magneto-Tlerc survey that was done a number of years ago that identified sort of pools of brines.

3:36 And we're going to do the seismic in an area that we think looks promising. We're going to have to interpret that again looking for the structures. But I think by Christmas time what we're going to have is a pretty good idea and interpretation of where we want to put a dedicated well to look for brine. One of the main differences between the brines and the sedimentary type of exploration or development that we're doing is the depth at which we would think that we would find the brines. So, so far, all of our infill drilling has going down to a depth of 600 meters or 2,000 feet. The brines we would expect to find at deeper depths, at what they call the basement. To give you an update on our latest drilling, our first core hole, which is used for the infill drilling, has gone below the 2,000 foot depth that we had prescribed for that program.

4:33 And as we had announced earlier to the markets a number of weeks ago when we talked about the BORUP program, the intent was to go all the way to basement and see if we could find some additional information that would be useful for the Brine Exploration Program. Well, we are down basically at the basement now. Now, what I want you to think about, sort of philosophically or conceptually, is, you know, how things slow down the deeper you go. So, the progress that you make when you're at 100 meters of depth can be considerably different than when you're down, obviously, at 600 or 700 or 800 meters depth. If you just think about the mechanics of drilling a hole, and if something were to happen, For example, something got stuck or you had to clean out the hole.

5:19 It takes a tremendous amount of time to go all the way down, trip all the way back out when you're down at the 700 or 800 meters versus when you're at say 100 or 200 meters. And that's just the way these types of programs happen. So you can't say, well, you know, it took me, you know, it took me 5 days to get down to 500 feet and it's therefore it's going to take me 10 days to get down to 1000 feet. It doesn't work that way. So we're down now, basically at the bottom of the first hole. We're going to be doing a bunch of testing, probably take a couple weeks to get through that. The assays have started to go out a long time ago, but the proper way to release assay results to the market is really when you have the whole column. And in this case, frankly, it's gonna be more than 2,000 feet. It's probably gonna go down to 2,500, 2,800 feet. So the point in my telling you this is, just because we don't have a constant news flow about assays doesn't mean that there isn't work going on.

6:18 On top of that, I just want to make it clear that while we have all of this PFS related work going on, we have the brine work that's going on, but the brine work is not to replace the existing PFS work. The brine work is something that I would consider and I would hope you would consider to be additive. I'm going to share my screen here for a second just to see if I can't make this a little bit more clear. This is from our investor presentation and I hope that you can see it now. So Bonnie Claire's the little battery down here, again, in the circle, and we, 2 hours northwest of Vegas. And you'll see as you continue the northwest, about another hour is where Albemarle is. That's the Silver Peak Mine. That's the only producing lithium mine in America right now. It's only about, as I said, about an hour away. You go right up Route 95, nice paved highway, easy drive.

7:11 There's a plethora of projects that are developing along that strike, basically. And then they're looking for brine up there. This is in the Clayton Valley area and what they have up there is very similar to what we have. They have essentially these north south types of structures and it's along those structures that they're looking for again pockets of essentially brine that may have the proper chemistry to have dissolved the lithium in them. Now one of the interesting things about it is that the the drainage basin so basically everything that comes into Bonnie Clare is Magnitudes of order bigger than what's going on at Clayton Valley. So we have a lot more sediments to work with Essentially, but the question is always going to come down to if we identify those structures, we're going to have to then drill them to find out whether or not the brine is there basically in solution. In other words, the science can only help us so far and then we'll have to drill them and as I just described that we would expect them to find those ingress areas for brine at deeper depths than what we're looking for with the sedimentary packages.

8:25 So we're very, very excited because, again, the controlling structures that they have where we know that there's brine that's been found up again in the Clayton Valley area is what we have down at Bonnie Clare. So we're going through the mechanics. It's going to take some time to finish up the science and figure out where we want to put that first dedicated well. But what I think is going to happen is it's going to contribute to some exciting news flow as we go into the new year. I just want to go back again in my investor presentation a couple of pages and again you can get this right off of our website at nevadalithium.com to try to put all this into perspective for you and sort of the way I think about this. Here's the footprint of Bonnie Clare and you can see in the oval the area of focus where we are. This is essentially the infill drilling, you know, and it's boundaried by the drilling that we did last year where we were finding all the higher grades, the grades that were coming closer to the surface than the original holes that were done in our preliminary economic assumption.

9:32 Again, this footprint is bigger than the island of Manhattan for those of you who've been out to New York. And the way I think about this in particular with the brine is there is no reason to potentially divide this up into multiple projects if the opportunity exists at the correct time and maximize shareholder value in that way. We basically have, I think, the potential for lithium in many different strata here, if you just sort of, again, think about it philosophically, we're concentrating on the PFS with a borehole mining, which at this point in time, we're talking about going down to 600 meters or 2000 feet. Obviously, open pits would not go down that far, but we've been finding shallower material at higher grades than originally found, which would also work with open pits.

10:25 And then we have essentially the opportunity for brine, which would be then deeper than the borehole mining and obviously deeper than the open pits. You know, I like to think out of the box here. It's not something that would happen overnight. But what I'm trying to convey here is that we're going to maximize value for this overall project in however best we can. And it's during times of sort of market weakness upheaval, things like that, that I like to think about the possibilities. And I think it helps everybody rest better at night. The lithium story is not something that's going to go away in 12 or 24 months. I mean, the demand is clearly baked in from the car companies, the world's governments, all this sort of thing. What again I point out to people particularly those who are newer to sort of commodities and Connie related investments.

11:15 Is that growing supply of anything is extraordinarily hard to do. And typically it occurs at the rate of GDP plus or minus a couple percent. So when you need to increase global supply of anything by 20 or 25 percent. It is something essentially that's never been done. Or if you start from a very small base and do that you may get away with it for a little bit. But obviously you know the law of large numbers means that as you start getting into talking about 1 million or 1 million and a half tons you know a year of lithium the ability to increase that by 20 to 25% is a heck of a lot harder to do than when you start out at 400,000 tons a year as we were arguably 12 months ago. So what I want people to think about is the extraordinary value that we see here at Bonnie and Claire. It's going to take time to unlock. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible to fill in sort of news flow gaps with everybody. I understand what it's like to be on the other side of the table. You know, you obviously can't be privy to everything that we're doing internally at the company for various reasons, you know, and much of it would be given away competitive, you know, information we don't want to occur.

12:27 I continue to talk to strategics. I can't really talk about that much. I hope I'll be able to announce something obviously this year. The PFS work that's going on is multifaceted. The metallurgical work continues to go very well. We already produced a battery-grade lithium carbonate. We're working on hydroxide. We'll have more to say about that. The Brine program is clearly, I think, exciting and we're just getting going with that. And we'll start to get sort of conventional assays coming back in the not too distant future. Then the engineers will start writing the reports. We'll be putting this all together. We're going to continue to drill. You know over time what's going on in China will abate. The Mideast is a fire. All of these sorts of headwinds rising interest rates are the kinds of things I think that separate investors from traders.

13:14 It's very hard to do. But when you can concentrate on the tailwinds at your back, it makes it easier to rest at night. So when you look at our overall value proposition, I hope you take heart in it. I'd be happy to take some questions now specifically about the, you know, the brine program, what we're doing here, or the rest of Bonnie Clare. And I'll hand it back over here to, to Max. Thanks a lot for that. Perfect. So we'll get right into the questions here. Please feel free to submit them in the chat as we're going along. So first of all, are there any plans to conduct a mineral identification by x-ray diffraction analysis?

13:57 I'm not sure what the question, I don't, I'm not sure what the question is driving that, honestly, Max. Mineral identification by X-ray? XRD analysis. Well, OK. I think, and I'm not a metallurgist or a geologist, I know that x-ray diffraction has been done on it. I think this was probably driving towards what's the hosting environment of the lithium. And first of all, we're doing additional work on that right now. One of the things that's often talked about with, I call it the third generations of these projects and it's almost all of them that are out in Nevada the sedimentary deposits is that people hear the word clays and they think that everything is the lithium is essentially encapsulated by the clays. At Bonnie Clare, we have clay-sized material. This is a sedimentary package. So over time, the winds eroded things, the volcanoes blew up, it all got, you know, blown into to to a lacustrine environment or lakes, you know, inner seas, this kind of thing, over time all these sediments build up. And remember that the lithium in Bonnie Clare is in the fine grained sediments. So there's not enough clay here to host all of the lithium that we have.

15:18 So I'll be able to characterize exactly, I think, the mineralization better in the not too distant future because we do want to do that. It's described in our PEA, I think, pretty adequately. However, we do get additional questions about that. But what I could tell you at this point in time is that it's not in the clays. It's just that we have clay-sized material in these sediments. So hopefully, at least that helps. OK, thanks for that. And AT, just let us know if that answers your question or if you'd like to clarify. How much of the inferred resources do you anticipate may become M&I by the start of the PFS? That's a good question. Obviously it's up to the engineers and we're independent from them. I think the thing to remember is we are already at, this is at a 32,000 ton a year lithium carbon equivalent production rate for 40 years. We're only using a very, very small percentage of those of the overall resource. I would think that we're going to get certainly a significant amount of this into indicated.

16:25 The overall plan is for I believe it's 10 to 12 holes again. This is going down 600 m for each hole. So I believe that we're gonna have a pretty good hunk of that going in indicated and into measured as well. But what the overall percentage is gonna be, I honestly couldn't tell you at this point in time. Okay, thank you. And how long will this survey take and when will we get the results? The survey is almost half done actually, moving very, very well. And these are people who've also done the surveys up in Clayton Valleys, my understanding. So, I mean, they know what they're doing. By the time everything gets sent off to the labs for interpretation, and again, computer interpretation, my understanding is by Christmas time, we're going to have the results back. So maybe we get lucky, we get a little bit earlier. Obviously, things are going to slow down around the holidays, but I think December would be a very good target.

17:21 Okay, excellent. Then how optimistic are you with the bride exploration you're undergoing compared to when you were at the same place with Clay? I missed the first part of that Max. How optimistic are you with the BRINE exploration you're undergoing compared to when you were at the same place with clay? How often or thick? I still don't, I'm sorry. How optimistic. Oh how optimistic. Okay, yeah. Sorry about that. We're very optimistic. I mean we have a couple of the the prerequisites that are there and that's you know The structure that we're certain goes underneath us. We had the Magneto to lyric survey that indicated Again that there are there's brines of fluids down there.

18:08 The issue is you've got to find, again, a certain pH, something that was acidic enough to dissolve the sediments and put them into solution. Now my understanding is there's only one way to do that and that's to drill. And the thing is is when you do that you know you're taking. Well it's not a gamble but essentially you know you're committing a lot of resources time and money to 1 particular particular target. So you want to try to get the odds in your favor as best you can. So I'm sure what the folks are going to do is take a look at that seismic, look for the biggest targets that they can find, and at that point in time, then we're just going to poke a hole and see how it goes So I'm very optimistic, you know, the comparison would be that we didn't have the structure. We didn't have the M&T survey, etc So, you know to me I just don't want people to think that this is supplanting our ongoing PFS work. You know, time and money to me are almost equivalent right now. The lithium end users want that lithium as soon as possible. Hopefully, as you all know from talks I've had previously, we're trying to do everything possible to basically minimize mitigate the risk here. If we'd go from 1 1 mining technique to another whatever the whole idea is to minimize the amount of time that we lose in going from 1 to the other.

19:34 With what we're doing here with the seismic, this is dedicated money. It was agreed to with our new shareholder group that came in. It doesn't interfere with what's going on. It's all additive. Obviously, we all hope we find brine and be tremendous. And we'll put our heads around how we could best, as I said, unlock the value not only of the brines, but also the sediments that we have. So, you know, for what it's worth, I don't think we'd be in this business if we weren't optimistic, but I'm pretty optimistic. Okay, thank you for that. We have a couple more questions streaming in here. So David Barron says, I always thought that the Bonny Clair project was a clay and hard rock deposit. Will the company be using evaporation ponds or an advanced direct lithium extraction process for its brine like 1 World Lithium's carbon dioxide injection method, which is ESG friendly and consumes CO2, thereby giving the company carbon credits?

20:33 Right. OK. So the first thing is that this is not a hard rock deposit. So the way to think about these types of deposits is that they're sedimentary deposits. And again, these are not the most well-known types of deposits because frankly, the world's never needed to develop them. Right. So you had the brine. Essentially, we're all familiar with those in the salars and send South America center. Now we the hard rock coming or the pegmentites. You see those in the Quebec and Australia all these types of things And this is I call the third generation. But these are just very expansive, lower grade types of sedimentary deposits. The way that you address them is through well, it looks like they're going to be a couple of different ways to do it. And remember, none of these is in commercial production yet. So this is all being done in the, in the labs right now.

21:23 If they're hosted in clays, okay. And some of them are, you hear about Thacker and you hear about Clayton Valley of, you know, other ones like that, it looks like they're gonna be using an acid to burn through the clay to get to the lithium. One of the reasons I always try to differentiate what we have at Bonnie Clare is because our lithium is not in the clay. So we don't have to use an acid, whether it's sulfuric or hydrochloric, whatever it is, to burn through it to get to our lithium. If you imagine a jar of ping pong balls, that's also got a bunch of marbles in it. The lithium is the marbles, the ping pong balls are stuff we don't want. We screen it out based on size and then we address the lithium balls using what's called a calcination process, which means it warms it up. We add sodium sulfate to it and then we up wash it out with warm water. Now is that done anywhere else? No, it's not. There are no commercialized, again, productions going on of sedimentary deposits.

22:21 However, bacchanora was an analog. They had the same sort of material that we have. And so this is all just predicated on geology. If we were to find brine, then my guess would be, the thing to do is we would try to hook it up to a DLE, a direct lithium extraction type of a black box, basically. Now, all of those are what I consider to be bespoke, right? Again, they're individualized to whatever is going on with your geology. Chemistries are different, the mineralization's different. There's, you know, all sorts of stuff is gonna be different. But the idea is that, and I think that this would sort of be analogous to any conventional recovery sheet, you start trying to basically knock out the stuff that you don't want to have. And you can do that using ion exchange, membranes, or heat, or all sorts of different things, but you would have to figure it out.

23:17 So, you know, the ESG profile that you mentioned with DLE, well, we're pretty proud of ours as well. The calcination process uses a lot of heat, and you got to generate that heat somehow. Now, in our PEA, they're talking about natural gas to heat the kiln. I'm sure we would use alternative energy. So that's great for the ESG. But these rotary kilns are essentially like big cement kilns. And if you look over in Europe, you'll see plenty of them where they also sequester the CO2. So that's something that we would use to our advantage. So, you know, the way that I think that you need to look at all of these types of deposits is on an individualistic basis. You can't go and lump them all in and say, hey, okay, these are all clays, these are sediments, you know, but one thing I can tell you is that we're not hard rocks out here. So hopefully that helps. A long-winded way of saying, you know, we're something different, but I think you're going to find it pretty much throughout Nevada.

24:11 Yeah, perfect. Thank you for that answer. What will be the cost of the survey? And I guess Benjamin here is asking for the duration as well, but you mentioned that it'll be until December, correct?

24:23 Yeah, I think what you know, you've got to see, you got to go out, they got to go on the fields, they got to lay down these lines, basically a microphones. If you look in the news release that we had yesterday, you see the tracked vehicle essentially puts a, I don't know, I think they call it a thumper down and then they send the sound waves, right? So they got to do that. And we're talking about a good couple of kilometers. I forget all told what it is along 3 lines. So there's a lot of work to put all that down, then get the data. And I think the data's actually getting sent off to Australia. I have to double check on that, but I'm pretty sure that's correct for interpretation. Then I go through all the heavy duty computer work, et cetera, and then it comes back and then the teams take a look at it and say, hey, there's a structure, we think it's filled with water, it's reflective, all that kind of stuff, and then make the decision as to where to set up, you know, to set up, again, the well that we want to have dedicated to the brine.

25:18 So, you know, again, I think that, you know, talking in December, that's a pretty honest assessment of when we're going to be getting that kind of information back, you know, and in terms of, you know, the cost of whatever, I'll ballpark it for you, You know, probably on the order of multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars US, but I'm not going to get any more precise than that. But yeah, it's not an insignificant amount of money. However, it's set you up for much better chance of success further down the line. Excellent answer, thank you. And with other projects with higher grades in Nevada identified, do you still see a lot of interest from end users? Are they looking for a higher grade or a closer timeframe to FS?

26:04 Well, it's an interesting question. I guess this is the way I would answer it. I always whenever I talk to investors about you know high grade I've heard it as an investor oh yes you look for high grade well the thing to remember is that that's everything else being equal. So if you have, you know, a deposit and again, everything else being equal and you have a higher grade, then it makes sense that you would have better revenues, you would have lower costs, etc. However, all of our, All of our grades, all of our costs, etc. Are already represented in our first pass at everything, which is preliminary economic assumption, which came back with very healthy returns at a very low lithium price. Again, this is on the order of 1.5 billion dollars NPV, 8% after tax, predicated on a $13,400 lithium price.

26:54 Now, our all in sustaining costs from the order 6,000 tons, pardon me, $6,000 a ton. This is what I would sort of suggest to people when you talk about industry supply curves and all this kind of stuff. There is really no existing industry of the size that we're going to need to basically supply all of the lithium out in 28 29 30 all that kind of thing for around 500,000 tons a year. I would argue that supply curve looks totally different than what it's gonna look like when you're talking about 3 million tons a year. So it's not a question of, to me anyway, of are just the highest grade, you know, resources going to be developed? Or if I'm a car company, am I saying, well, you know, I don't wanna talk to you unless you have 2000 PPMs and you only have 1000 PPMs. It's not like that at all.

27:45 They want the lithium and they're starting to really recognize that they are going to need all the lithium that all of these projects and projects that we aren't even talking about yet. They're all going to be needed to be developed in order to hit that supply profile that's going to take care of all the car batteries. So I'm not getting specific questions about, oh, how come your, you know, your resources has got a higher or lower, you know, grade than others. Again, they're all going to be individualistic. But my point would be, if it weren't economic, the PEA would have suggested that, hey, it's not going to work. Well, we already know it'll work. So is it going to work? We could certainly, frankly, high-grade the thing. We could make the cutoff higher. We don't need to have all this material in terms of an inferred resource going forward because we're only using a small percentage in our PEA anyway. The way I look at it though is I'm sure we would probably look at upsizing this. If we're talking about 30,000 tons a year, Could this resource support 45,000 tons a year to start?

28:50 There may be a phase 2. I'd say it sure looks like it could. So I wouldn't get too frankly, I don't want to say hung up on on what the 1 grade versus another. I think you need to continue to look at the technical reports as they shed more information on the overall picture. It's one thing to look at the grades when you're just looking at a you know a mineral resource estimate when you're first starting out. But you start to really get an idea of what the potential is when you start to get at the PEA level and then you get to the PFS level, which of course we're working on now. Excellent. Thank you. And last comment here or question rather. Do you have any thoughts or comments on Rob Friedland? And I guess this actually ties into your answer from from the past question, but do you have any thoughts or comments on Rob, Robert Friedland's recent announcement that his new lithium metal technology will put lithium carbonate producing mines out of business?

29:47 I don't. Robert Friedland has said a lot of things right and wrong over time and he look he's he's certainly somebody who's you should listen to. However there's been a lot of announcements of technologies over the past couple of decades. Some have materialized, some haven't. I don't think anything's gonna put anything out of business, quite honestly. The way I look at it, we're gonna need all the carbonate mines, we're gonna need all the hydroxide, we're gonna, because everything's in a state of flux, except for the fact that the demand looks to be baked in. I mean what was it a year and a half ago Elon Musk was talking about he could you know he could produce the lithium with table salt or something like that and then it became with don't worry about the lithium you know we should just be interested in the refining part of it because that's really the choke point, etc.

30:36 I don't care really what the technology is, frankly. When it comes to natural resource development, you've got to go through the hoops and the hoops take time and the time that it takes to go through the hoops continues to increase. So what it does is put us in upward pressure on lithium prices, which is going to make people who have projects that are already profitable even more profitable. And that's what we have with Bonnie Clare. So I'm honestly not gonna, I'm not gonna worry too much about Robert Friedland. I hope he's successful with what he does. But I think here we got a tiger by the tail, maybe more frankly at Bonnie Clare. And I'm more than content to continue to figure out how we're gonna extract and maximize the shareholder value that we have. You have a fantastic answer.

31:23 And Reddy asks, you referred to volcano sedimentary lithium resource is Bonny Claire a light bearing sediments like Thakrapas?

31:37 I missed the word again. The sediment, something before the sediment like that. So you referred to, oh yeah, it's called, spelled it illite. Illite, I believe that's a type of clay, and again, not a geologist, but I'll put it this way, and we can follow up with you. We really don't have the clays here. We don't have enough clay to essentially host the lithium like Thacker does, etc. The distinction is that we have clay-sized particles here, the sediments. And I think I'll leave it like that. But I know that the other words that come to mind, like hectorite and stuff like that, we hear types of clays don't have that. So, you know, that differentiates us from something like that.

32:25 OK, perfect. And ready, if that's not good enough clarification, we can reach out to you afterwards. Yeah, that. Yeah. Here, I guess I'm saying, Steven, great work so far communicating with the markets. No, I don't like him. Is the cheapest peer in Nevada by a wide margin. What's your plan to narrow the value? Yeah. Well, first of all, the first thing we're doing on top of. Well, the first thing we're doing is trying to make ourselves known. Obviously, the way I look at it, Bonnie Clare has just been an unknown orphan for many reasons over the course of the past number of years, and we're trying to address that now. We're just getting in front of the markets, getting in front of the banks, all of the people who we're going to need basically to get on board to help us, you know, recognize the value.

33:12 Simultaneously, we're going to continue to do the work in as many different areas as possible. And a good along a broad front get to PFS. As quickly as possible. The way I look at it is PFX PFS is a sort of a normal inflection point where. Let's just say strategics and in this case also strategics are mining houses. And the car companies battery companies. Etcetera will tend to take things more seriously now those of you who have followed our story know. That I have been pushing for over the course of years now yeah I think almost 2 years, to try to get basically something, an offtake agreement with an end user at a very, very early stage of PEA as a way to minimize dilution.

33:59 When you Talk to the end users, essentially the consultants that they have in-house. And I've told this story many times as well. When you think about the purchasing agents at say car companies, this is not their normal role, which is that, you know, we're talking about natural resource development here as opposed to, hey, I need to go out and buy aluminum or steel for my car frames or doors and I go to the same suppliers and I know what my prerequisites are and I'm looking for the best cost and all that kind of stuff. This is a totally different ballgame for them. Who do they bring in to help? Well, they bring in consultants who've got mining backgrounds, things like this, and you'll see consultants and you look at their resumes and they come from the big mining houses. So the DNA that has been incorporated into these car companies to talk with companies like ours brings with it sort of this, hey, we'll talk to you at PFS type of a thing.

34:50 So my point is, you know, I want to drive the PFS process as quickly as possible because I know at that point in time that natural inflection point is gonna be there. And then the serious, the real seriousness, this I don't want to say it's easy, but the much easier point in time to talk to these end users will occur. If I can accelerate that by 6 or 9 months, it's the best thing that could happen for basically Navada lithium shareholders, because to me that would be the most creative way to get additional money into the company. But the point in time that we're at now with the PFS is doing the scientific work. And a lot of people will look at it and say, well, it's a Lausanne curve. If you think about it coming back down the backside it's not terribly sexy. The drilling results that are coming in you know it's not going to be like looking for high grade gold. Well I would say hey you know what it is all very exciting because all of this is baked into a lithium demand supply profile that we know is very, very beneficial for projects like ours. So, we're going to continue to release basically drill hole assays 2,000 feet or more at a time that I anticipate are going to show much higher grade results than what we originally had and then basically be comparable to what we were showing. You know last year where you had orders of magnitude greater than our average- you know- resource- great.

36:12 And we're going to it's all infill drilling now and it's going to take time to do that. And then the engineer is going to have to write the reports and all this kind of stuff. But I'm going to continue to talk as much as possible. You know what it makes sense to the markets to try to give the comfort level to make sure people understand that the work is being done behind the scenes. And even though I can't tell everybody day to day what I'm doing, things are getting done. And it's all basically driving us to the point where we can again extract that maximum amount of value given the background of this tremendous lithium industry, which even though we're having some hiccups now, people are concerned about what I consider to be short term types of things have a way of bala is a very, very opport my in my opinion to b a company that is a treme value that that will be d forward.

37:08 And you know to take heart as we go forward with this. There's a lot of work that's being done and all of it is adding value. Excellent answer, Steve. A couple more questions here and then that should be all the time for today. So with the recent interview with the Nevada governor and stating they are open for business, Do you see them being able to help speed up the process and get this project in operations any sooner? I think so. There are 2 ways in which I think that the state is really going to help. Now obviously, well I shouldn't say obviously, Maybe you're not, people or viewers aren't familiar with, you know, the way it works in the US, but a lot of the legislation gets shoved down from on high, right from the federal government. And of course, when you're talking about the state of Nevada where over three quarters of the land is owned by the federal government. There's you know there's a lot of impact coming from that. But traditionally what happens in so many times is when you have legislation being forced from above it misses the mark. It misses what was intended and that's where the state can really help to basically redress that. You know they can go back to Washington obviously but you know the state of Nevada's got senators and congressmen there who are there to represent the interest in Nevada and say hey you know what mining is tremendously important to us. I had found some statistics from the Nevada Mining Association.

38:37 The mining jobs in Nevada are twice as valuable as any other jobs in Nevada. And obviously Las Vegas is in Nevada, so you know that they've got some decent paying jobs there. But you know the governor of Nevada does not want to lose those high paying jobs. Copper, gold and silver production has essentially been stagnant or falling for the past 10 years. It's very clear to me that the governor understands that the lithium industry is a big part of Nevada's future. So they're going to be able to help when we need to talk to the federal government, make them understand why certain pieces of legislation either need to be modified or basically could be interpreted in different ways. Remember when the Inflation Reduction Act was put into place, there was essentially 6 or 9 months where the government was asking for people to say, hey, how do you think we should interpret this type of thing? I wrote to them, told them, said, hey, I think some of the money that you guys are dedicated to for EV tax credits should be available to companies that are trying to actually develop these assets because you're not going to have an EV tax credit if you don't have the lithium to put in the battery that goes in the car that gets the tax credit. So those sorts of things. But then at the local level, you have the tremendous influence that the state can have in terms of creating economic zones.

39:59 You know, so basically changing the tax burdens, the tax structures in certain ways to attract lithium miners to help with water. I mean, water out in the West is a very big deal, and there's no way to basically shortcut that. But you have all sorts of different variations on the theme where you have. Water recharge rates you have- water rights have been allocated over the years but then you people who are using the water because- perhaps it's too it's too alkaline you can't put it on a field about falcon because it'll kill the out. So can you use that water to for lithium mining all these sorts of questions that the state level at the state level that would be ideal for them to help us. So you know it's one of these sort of sort of things where the interaction going back and forth It's sort of it's an iterative type of thing. And you know responsibly mining obviously is the is the key to everything in the mining industry over the course of decades has gone in my opinion to great lengths to developing natural resources in ways that minimize the impact around them. Is there going to be change if you develop a mind somewhere. Well certainly there will be. But the point is is you want the positive aspects of that change to outweigh the negative. And when you're looking at a lot of these towns as an example that are near us where they don't have you know they don't have basically supermarkets in America you know with big grocery stores there's supermarkets.

41:22 They don't have nearby towns where there's enough basically residential housing to take care of, you know, thousands of workers who are going to basically come along for the lithium mines as well as the existing gold mines in the area. You know, and the schools aren't up to the, let's put it this way, even though they might not have say drug problems, you know, or anything like that, which is great. The kids really don't have all of the benefits they need, all of the resources they need, not just talking about, you know, internet access. I'm talking about other sorts of resources that could be put into play there to get them to get the education that will enable them to take on these jobs going forward. I mean, there's going to be a plethora of jobs, obviously, across the spectrum, right, of the different types of skills that you're going to need. You're going to need engineers, you're going to need truck drivers, you're going to need all of this stuff. Well, kids are going to need to be taught.

42:17 I mean, in the end, it's all about the future and the future is all about the kids. But it's another area, again, where the state government can really help to basically pave the way, make it easier. I'm not saying, you know, basically short circuit anything, but help companies like Nevada Lithium find a way forward in the most expeditious way possible. And that's what I'm looking forward to. You know particularly as again I've asked people go find that video. I think we have it up up on our Web site. It is so uplifting particularly during times of market turbulence when you see what the governor of Nevada is talking about you're going to understand why I'm so optimistic and given the tailwinds in the industry. Yeah great point about the kids being the future and the future being about the kids.

43:04 So yeah, you have a set of entry projects and are looking for brine, anything else? And also does brine mean that you can pump it out? Does brine mean that we can, I'm sorry? That you can pump it out. Well, that's look, that's what the testing is all about. I mean, to me, we don't know if we have a Brian project. I'm just merely trying to to bring attention to people that we have the opportunity and we're dedicating money and time to it, but that we're not dedicating that money and time to the exclusion of what we're already in the process of doing, which is advancing our PFS for a sedimentary project. The way I think about it, We have the potential for 2 different types of things here. If I'm still sharing the screen, I think, again, the way you want to think about this footprint on top of everything else, the deeper stuff is down to the southeast area of Bonny Clare. The lithium tends to be coming up along with the basement as you progress to the northwest.

44:07 Is it possible that we have a brine project? Maybe. If so, I would think it would be in a different area than we would be talking about borehole mining and or open pits. And that's why I just say, hey, we think, we think outside the box here. I'm not saying we have all these additional things. However, I think there's optionality to it. And I think there's value to that optionality. So we'll know more, we'll be doing pumping tests on different strata in these wells to see, you know, essentially how much brine is coming in. Of course, first you got to see if it is in fact lithium-bearing, that's step number 1. But then the next thing would be, okay, hey, you know, we're getting 10 gallons a minute or we're getting 1000 gallons a minute, whatever the deal is. That's part of the ongoing science that's taking place at Bonnie Clare, and I will keep you apprised of it. Excellent. We've got one last question here.

44:57 So Chad here says, thanks for all the hard work. Excited for this to come through. Joe Lowry aka Mr. Lithium suggests it takes 10 years to get a project running. What timeline is realistic and why not just hire him for his huge experience? Well 10 years, well first of all we talk about different people we would love to hire for different things and I would certainly not rule out Joe in the future. You know, 10 years, it depends on what your starting point is. The governor of Nevada, I thought he hit the nail on the head really well when he talked about from the time You get going to where you could put a shovel in the ground is 7 years. Well, you put a shovel in the ground, you still have a couple of years to go to construct something. So, yeah, I think that 10 years from the very beginning, you stake your ground to where you're producing something, 10 years is certainly a reasonable estimate.

45:50 The one overall thing that I would say is, and we've seen this in other industries, and I love to use copper as an analog, is that the amount of time from beginning to end continues to increase, right? You've got everything from permitting to NGO, financing gets more difficult, finding the people who could do the science is getting difficult. Collectively, we're getting older. That's another reason we need the kids involved, basically future generations who understand this kinds of stuff. So it's, you know, rarely you're gonna find something that actually shortens that timeframe. That's yet another reason why that video from the governor in Nevada was so uplifting. I mean, I think his choice of words was a little bit optimistic, but he said, hey, we want to take that 7 years and we want to cut that down exponentially.

46:36 Hey, give it to me if you could do that. I'd be happy if you could give me 18 months, that kind of thing. Because again, every time I talk to a lithium end user, the first thing out of their mouth is, is how quickly can you get me lithium. So you see it all ties together. You know it's a world of realities when you're developing natural resources. We don't generate revenue until we get to production. So we constantly have to go back to the markets. The markets have to be the correct timing for us to raise financing in a reasonable way. On top of that, we have weather constraints. All of these kinds of things go together in a multifaceted way to bring some very complex process together and actually make something. That's why I think the value is there. That's why I think, you know, collectively, we all don't invest in natural resources for market rates of returns. I mean, this is where you can really generate value.

47:26 But, you know, it's not getting any easier. For somebody who's just staking ground now, I'd say 10 years is certainly a reasonable estimate today. I would say going if you come and talk to me in another 18 months, it wouldn't surprise me if we say, hey, 11 years is an even better estimate. That's just the nature of the beast. That's one of the reasons I'm so optimistic about Bonnie Clare. Bonnie Clare essentially you know 07/20/1520 16 was was when it was first state. So the work that's been done hasn't been able to be done in an accelerated fashion until relatively recently. But it gives us a great head start, even though we're not well known, the work is there, the PEA is already there, the PFS, we get all our ducks in a row, we keep going with the work, all the sorts of things that have to come together, we'll get that done quickly. And then you can bet we will be ready to get right into feasibility and get involved. So we're not far behind. As I told the car companies from the very beginning, as they told me, hey, we want to address our near term needs first. I said, yeah, but the problem is going to be is if you don't address your farther out needs as well, you're going to get those farther out needs getting farther into the future. So it's not going to be 2030, which is where I think our first production reasonably is going to come in. And if everything were to go well, I would hope maybe 2029.

48:44 But the problem is, And it's not just with Nevada Lithium. If you get started with capital, if other things happen in terms of permanent or legislation, then it's going to start to go farther out into the future. And then again, that supply demand gap is going to continue to widen, which is going to just make us more valuable as we go forward, because lithium prices are going to support us. So that's a long way of saying, yeah, I think 10 years is a pretty good estimate. Fantastic. So that looks like all the questions and time we have for today. So thank you, Steve, for taking us through the updates and the Q&A session. I also want to thank everyone who submitted questions. Today's reporting will be available to watch on demand in the coming days, so feel free to look out for that. You can find more information on Nevada Lithium by going to their website. So just before we wrap up, I'd like to pass things back over to you, Steve, for any closing remarks.

49:35 All right. Super, Max. Thanks for putting this together. Appreciate everybody taking the time sort of in the middle of the day. I know the markets stink. I've been accustomed to going through these types of cycles, and it's hard. I understand it. Hopefully I'm putting out sort of a blueprint for you of how we're looking at this Bonnie Clare project and how we can maximize value. If you believe in the electric vehicle sort of revolution and what they're talking about going forward, you know the demand is there and you know that supply is not going to nearly be enough and you know that Nevada is clearly open for business and you would be hard-pressed to find a better mining jurisdiction. We have a lot of different pieces going on here at Bonnie Clare. I think they're all additive. I will do my best to continue to explain them to you as we go forward and basically document our progress. I'll tell you about the things that I can as we go forward, but I appreciate your support. If you're not a shareholder yet, please take a look at us. I think you're going to find that our value proposition is unparalleled.