Metals Market Outlook

0:04 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. We're excited to have you here for this live discussion on the commodity market outlook. I'm pleased to be joined by Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Cascade Copper, Stephen Renschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium, and Lee Barker, President and CEO of Sparkton Resources. Before we dive in, a quick note, this event is being recorded and will be available for your viewing shortly after we conclude. So we'll get started here with perhaps I'll start with you, Jeff. I'd like to begin with you because recent disruptions at major Chilean Copper mines like El Teniente have tightened supply forecasts for 2025. How do you see this impact on global Copper markets and what does it mean for Cascade Copper's exploration strategy for its 5 Canadian projects?

0:49 Yeah, for sure. There's recently there's been some news out of Chile, but also out of Indonesia with Freeport McMorrin's Grasberg deposit, which is a huge deposit. And any kind of disruptions in these major producers creates immediate sort of concern in the market. And I think what happens is, and I've seen this over the last 68 months, is the warehouse stocks at LME and in Shanghai have been sort of lower than normal. So when you see any kind of disruption like this, it sends a note to the market that maybe it is a bit volatile for sure, but maybe we're not producing quite as much as what the world demand is. So yes, it's all about supply and demand and how people have knee-jerk reactions to any kind of news like that. So what it does is it shows that there's some very volatile things happening and the price, usually when you hear this supply issue, It creates a bit more higher price in the market. So global Copper prices go high. So what does that mean for us as an explorer on our projects? Well, I think it doesn't affect us directly because obviously we're just explorers. But what it does is it, 2 things, I think it creates more

2:21 interest in the copper market. You know, mostly we're overwhelmed by, you know, gold prices and gold, you know, the extraordinary gold prices and how they're climbing. But when you get news like that, and

2:34 then people start to think, oh, maybe we should think more about copper and our everyday use of copper and what's coming up with the potential uses in EVs and AI and infrastructure and all that kind of thing. So at the end of the day, what it does is it creates more interest in copper. It creates more interest in copper developers and producers and indirectly copper explorers. So I think it's what it's gonna translate to is people that are gonna say, look at we need to pay more attention. The retail investor will think about going and buying some copper stocks. But I think maybe what's even more important for us is that the institutional guys will start looking further down the food chain into the exploration companies like ourselves.

3:29 And the majors and mid-tier producers are going to say, well, look, we've got to secure a supply for copper maybe 5, 10 years down the road, so we better start looking now. So we've seen evidence of that where the guys are, like the big guys are coming and knocking on our door and saying, we'd like to look at your project. So, and we've had some good interest in that. So that's kind of what it translates into for us as explorers. Thank you for that, Jeff. And thank you, Steve, for joining us today. I'll bring you into the discussion with lithium demand projected to rise 26% in 2025 due to EV sales and accelerating stationary storage. What macroeconomic factors will establish Nevada as a lead in lithium hub? Is demand playing out the way you thought a few years ago?

4:20 Yeah, it's interesting, but I think everything is playing out sort of how we envisioned a number of years ago when you look at the long term demand growth profile for lithium. And I'll say, let's talk about 2030, hard to believe, you know, 4 and a half years away, in which you had a starting point that was, you know, arguably say 3 years ago, 400,500,000 tons.

4:44 And all of the expectations were that you were going to need anywhere from 2 and a half to 3 million tons a year of lithium carbonate equivalent. And that's everything that I still see essentially is in place. I think we're somewhere around, you know, 1 and a half million tons a year. The point is this, and I always love to speak about copper as sort of the analog to what we should expect in the lithium industry. Of course, copper is a mature industry, and you look at what's going on now, and copper prices at $5, whether you're talking on the LME or you're talking about the NYMEX etc. And you've got I don't know somewhere between 3 and 6 percent of global supply is offline or being hindered because of El Teniente and what was going on in Grasberg and I think you know Peru's still having their problems, the DRC, all this kind of stuff.

5:36 It's the kind of thing that people have to expect in the mining industry.

5:41 Those kinds of distortions, when I used to model copper, it's the kind of thing we would always put in 4 or 5% sort of supply disruptions to get things to sort of balance. And you see how much copper prices are benefiting from, I would say, relatively small imbalances. And then you take that into what's going on with lithium, where you have a nascent industry Where everything's being sorted out sort of on the fly. You've had all of these sort of forced demand profiles inserted over the course of the last couple of years and there I'm specifically talking about the U. S. Inflation. Reduction act in the adoption of E. V. Ease and then basically the same sorts of things in Europe. Some of those have been taken aback, but in the meantime, basically the technology has been accelerating in a tremendous pace. So you've got batteries, have got very long lives, quick rechargeability, power density is going up, cost is coming down, the cars, basically half the world still hasn't seen the Chinese EVs and I would argue that the only person you really have seen who's coming into the market with low price quality EVs is Elon Musk.

6:49 And when you look at what he's about to unveil with that sort of Tesla 2 over the course of the next couple of months, you see how the demand, even though it may not be exactly as people predicted, going forward still looks plenty, plenty strong. And on top of that, we have a bifurcated market coming out. Where you have the separation of the world into China and and on China which is tremendously distortive for prices. So when I When I look at what's going to help us and sort of what I think is going to make Nevada the centerpiece of the US lithium industry going forward, there's a couple of factors. And the first one I think we're seeing play out right now, and that's the US government taking direct interest in helping these projects going forward. Of course the loan guarantees were there previously.

7:35 Of course recently we've just seen some sort of a rejiggering of what's going on with lithium Americas I'm not entirely sure. What was going on there however. You know if we were to have an establishment of a price floor which I think frankly is going to be coming at some point in time for. And I'm making this up right now but if. If we said that you know the government understood that Hey the equity apartment the lithium incentive prices is not anywhere near what's going on in.

8:03 It's spot prices but say it's 20 or 25,000 dollars and started taking interest. You know in companies and saying I will buy 35 percent of your off take or it's there you know maybe 35 with 15 percent. You know option that kind of thing. That would make it very very clear just how important. This is basically to the U. S. Government. And I think you would see a rapid acceleration of the projects. I think what's also important and I do think is coming is there's going to be a rapprochement between the Chinese and the U.S.

8:34 Governments. And I think that those automobiles that we currently see in China will make their way to the U.S. To be manufactured here, probably under 51, 49% JV kinds of things. With this time, the U.S. Can control. I know the Chinese are clearly very scared of having their technology stolen, but I don't believe that the US automobile makers, with the exception of Tesla, can make up for the lost ground. But I think that that is gonna be coming despite what's going on with the turmoil in the rare earths right now. And the third thing I would just say is that continuing interest by the U.S. Government in not only, say, lithium, but in all of these critical minerals and rare earths. And the reason I say that is because The geology in Nevada is incredible. There are so many different things that you can essentially take out of the ground, and the reality is that if you have a project that has demonstrated economics on say taking 1 or 2 things out, in our case we already have that. Then all these other things that you might have in relatively

9:35 low percentages in the ground, it becomes a different exercise in seeing, well, geez, is this vanilla? Is this chocolate icing that I can put on top of it? And that's how we're looking at it sort of in Nevada right now. There's a multitude of things that in our particular case we have in the geology. And I think that the more interest that there is from various sources, though I would say right now it's really the U.S. Government, The more that we can extract from them, the better. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this all turns out. Do you see just a question, Steve, for you about the possibility of the US government adding a number of these things into the stockpile? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's where I see a complete massive support for all these things.

10:23 Yeah, I see it, Lee, as the we're watching the birth of a US sovereign wealth fund, in my opinion, right now. It's it hasn't been called that yet. But you know, to me, it's sort of like it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, all of this sort of thing. And there have been a lot of variations on the theme, right?

10:39 I mean, you see Lithium Americas, you've seen Mountain Pass, you've seen it with U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel. I think that they're going to establish though, you know, the stockpiles say, hey, we want 100,000 tons of copper We want this whatever the deal is. It's just an evolution and there is precedent in the US for this, right? So back in the global financial crisis though when we you know, the US government took equity positions it was in financial companies that needed to be bailed out. So slightly different, but there is a precedent. But yeah, I think you're going to see that, perhaps not too long. Yeah. Lee, I'd like to bring you into the discussion here. With central banks purchasing 700 tons of gold per quarter while copper and lithium face growing green energy demand, how might divergent policies like Fed rate cuts versus China's stimulus affect these metal price trends?

11:33 Well, at the moment, because we have basically a trade war going on, in fact, around the world, there's a lot of volatility in all of these prices. And just to be blunt, a lot of this volatility often depends on President Trump's tweets or his posts on X on a daily basis. But let's look at the fundamentals of supply and demand for these commodities. And the fact that the world is not

12:04 going to go to hell in a handbag. There's going to be continued growth. We have a population growing and a demand growth for all of these commodities and specialty metals. And that's going to support reasonable basic prices with commercial operations that can make a profit because we are not only government owned and operated like some of the older situations and commodities in places like Russia and China, where they produce things internally just because they needed them and there was no profit motive. But private enterprise needs a profit motive. And I think

12:41 that's going to be a key thing in going forward in the production of these commodities. And you know, you've got an issue with the US economy that we know has got some weakness, and the price of Gold in particular follows very closely the value of the US dollar. But the US is still the strongest economy in the world. It's still the biggest demand for these things in the world. And hopefully that'll be able to sustain itself so there won't be a major collapse in the US financial system like we had in 2008 that will support an even higher gold price. And the other thing is, in dealing with China as a major financial and economic power in the world,

13:30 I think ultimately various countries like the US and Europe, the EU, and everything, are going to come to grips with the fact that in the long run we have to be able to do business together. We can't continually try and out-think or out-win the other one on various economic issues and issues of production, supply and demand and sales. And I think over the next 3 to 5 years, there's going to be a rationalization of a lot of this around the world. And we're going to see more of a stability in these markets. And the volatility hopefully will go away at that time. One of the words that I'd like to see develop, but it never seems to happen anywhere, is the word equilibrium.

14:17 We'd like to see some equilibrium in the world economy and the world demand and production for various commodities. And I have no doubt that because of the green revolution, the fact that the world is going to a carbon-free scenario for many of industries and things like that. Things like Lithium and Copper, which Copper is a main necessity for electricity transmission, because if you were around when copper prices went very, very high in the early 1970s, we were going to do aluminum wiring in our houses. And I in fact had a house with aluminum wires. And I don't think we're going to return to that. But you know, you need copper for all of these things.

15:03 And lithium is still the best Metal for use in EV systems and small high energy density Applications like our cell phones and our computers that we're on now and that's not going to change. You know, it takes there's all kinds of new battery technology being developed

15:22 for these smaller high-density systems, but Lithium is still the best and there'll be improvements in the lithium technology which Stephen talked about And in the larger scale for battery development, the grid scale batteries, we're involved in a company with the joint venture with Robert Friedland that builds vanadium flow batteries. And these have been proven as the safest and best opportunity for large-scale, grid-scale battery energy supply support. And in many countries, there's actually mandatory use of some of these Canadian full battery systems for new energy projects, for renewables and for wind, solar and things like that. So I think the positioning of the commodity price trend is going to stabilize over the next 2 to 3 years as all this volatility starts to peter out.

16:21 And we're going to see a much better system where people can actually develop things and have a predictable price trend to make sure that they can become commercial. And that's where investors have to look at what's going on with the various companies that are involved in these projects because you know ultimately the project has to be successful commercially and doing your due diligence and all the underlying information available is very important.

16:51 Jeff or Steve, do you have any comments for what Lee just touched on? Yeah, I'm happy to just chime in quick. I can't see any government policies, whether it's in the US or the EU or China, obviously, that could be construed to put a constraint on the development of all of these metals. To me, I think the cat's out of the bag. I think the price of gold is clearly telling you that we're in an inflationary environment. I agree with Lee. I think the U.S. Economy is weak. Hopefully, it's bottoming. I hear various things about what's going on in China, and I don't profess to be a China expert nor know what's true, But I just can't see anything restrictive coming out I think that if there's weakness obviously there has to be stimulation whether it's lower interest rates.

17:40 Subsidies out we whatever it's going to be and in in in that environment I think all frankly all the commodities will will do well I mean. If you look back over time and you look at the correlations between inflation and metals, obviously gold's always had a huge one. Pardon me. I've seen things that are relatively recent in the last couple of years was show that copper may be even more correlated to inflation as you know and would work better as an inflation hedge. Now, I'm not sure given the past 6 months that that would necessarily be true. But the point is, is that hard assets always do well in an inflationary environment. And I'm very comfortable saying I would expect more of an inflationary environment going forward than something that's being restrictive.

18:28 Yeah, maybe I'll just make one comment, Kyle, is that I think copper perhaps is a little bit different than some of the other critical metals. The fact that, you know, it's so widespread, different countries around the world have copper resources and reserves, including China, but also Canada, US, Central and South America and so on. So it doesn't really it's not a protected commodity, like maybe lithium has been some of the rare earth elements in China and so on. So I think it does have a little different status worldwide and I think it's benefiting from that. I mean, the demand is high around the world and even in China, China is I think probably in a deficit and looking for more copper supply. So it's kind of a reverse thing where instead of China holding on to their resources and keeping them from other countries and creating a disparity, they're actually looking for copper. So the demand is maybe a bit different for copper.

19:37 I'm going to have this question open to the group, but perhaps, Lee, you can kick it off. I don't think I've heard anyone mention about the tariffs. How could U.S. Trade policies, specifically tariffs, influence the share? Well, the tariffs, of course, have generated a tremendous amount of volatility in the entire commodities trade market around the world. And when you look at some of the details of the tariffs, sometimes these tariffs at face value where there's a massive tariff on this and a massive tariff, there are things underneath that that are somewhat exempted that are not necessarily actually affecting the business world as strongly as the media might show just by throwing out raw numbers. But the tariff situation right now with the US and their ability to, because they're the major importer and consumer of a lot of these things, to shoot tariffs on all these commodities. And I mean, steel and aluminum in Canada are major ones.

20:41 Ultimately, I think what's going to happen is we're going to see that the tariff policy or the use of tariffs by President Trump is going to show a negative benefit to the U.S. Itself. And probably the new negotiations for these tariffs are going to go back to something far more reasonable. I mean, the nationalistic sort of retrenchment of the U.S. Back into itself has to be recognized that the commodities that the U.S. Uses, many of them, there's not enough of them in the U.S. To support the current demand. And ultimately, they're going to have to, if they're going to penalize their trading partners by putting huge tariffs on these things that are needed, they're shooting themselves in the foot to some extent. And ultimately that has to play out over time.

21:34 And so I think probably the tariff situation is going to remain volatile. The negotiations to generate more rational tariff structures between suppliers and producers and the US in particular. But the US and China, of course, are facing off with reciprocal tariffs against each other, and so is Canada and China, which I find somewhat ridiculous. It's just the way politics sometimes supersedes pragmatism. And what I'm hoping is that over the next couple of years, during the remainder of the Trump administration, that there's a much more pragmatic outlook towards tariffs and the ultimate solution of the negotiations between these various trading partners.

22:20 I'd love to hear your thoughts, Steve, given you operate in the States. Yeah, I may be the only American on the call, too. It's interesting. I think clearly the tariffs are being used to reshape the American economy in many ways. And obviously, I'm not a tariff expert by any stretch of the imagination. I do believe that the brunt of the tariffs though however the impact is actually not born by the consumer it is by the producer. I know at times that may be that I'm the minority of that, but I still believe that in the end, supply and demand cross. And if a consumer deems that that particular product is too high cost, they simply won't, they won't buy it and they'll go to an alternative. But if we take it face value what the Trump administration is doing and that the on shoring of industries.

23:10 At frankly I would say entire industries is to take place. Then I think I understand you know what's going on it's not always about the lowest. Cost per se. Of a given- of a given commodity or- you know or a widget or or whatever the deal is if there are other- social economic goals in mind and I think that that's what's going on the U. S. Now these are early days. I mean there's all sorts of weird things are going on as an example U. S. You know oil prices you know WTI is very low I would argue it's way too low to sustain. You know even the shale plays that we have here et cetera. However in the U. S. You know gasoline prices despite what you'll see in some of the news, not just low in widespread areas. Diesel fuel's still tremendously high, I would argue, from a historical standpoint.

23:59 But This is because the refining capacity is in here. There's another big California refiner that's going to go down. And we don't build that kind of stuff in the U.S. Anymore. I'd argue that that is the kind of thing that you are going to see start again if this all plays out. The analog in the lithium industry, or I would argue in copper, or almost pick any metal, is you may have a source and a deposit, but you may not have the infrastructure to basically turn it into a usable process. Look at all the Chinese smelters out there and I think the RCTC's rate this year may be 0. I mean they want to get that material so badly it's in such you know such in such need around the world. So you know the point is all of this just adds to distortion.

24:45 You know you can't get real price discovery. And it can go 2 ways in our particular case in lithium it's going lower the prices. Been low since a high of whatever 90,000 dollars a ton down to 10,000 and bumping along that kind of thing. But if China wants to basically distort supply for a while, and it's been done again, they did it with rare earths about 15 years ago, they can do it. But it also can work once it is like a rubber band, man. Once it gets going the other way, you don't know how far it's going to overshoot. So all of this to say is I hope the volatility might settle down but I don't expect it to. And I mean and I think that that's it can be caused either by changes to supply and or changes in demand. I mean again just look at gold and silver and everything that's going on there. So to me, I'm sort of bracing myself for volatility over time and just trying to put myself in a position to explain to investors why I think, particularly for nascent industry like lithium, it's gonna benefit us all through higher valuations for the projects that we bring to market.

25:49 Yeah, as investors and speculators, volatility is not a bad thing. Jeff, I'll bring you into the conversation and with this volatility, how should investors gain exposure to these commodities and why might your company be a viable option? So I'll let you all discuss why your company is a good investment vehicle for this volatility in the commodity prices right now. Yeah, thanks, Kyle. Yeah, as far as just one comment, maybe on the tariff side of things, just before I go into that about, you know, why we're, we could be an option for an investor. But we saw the tariffs in the US before it was sort of figured out what the tariffs were gonna be on with regards to copper.

26:36 It ended up not being raw or copper ingots or copper concentrate, but ended up becoming the tariffs on copper products like piping and wire. So at the end of the day, it actually was another sort of flag that says, wow, copper is important for the US. And as a spinoff, it's good for Canadian companies too, because then if we're producing copper in Canada, either now or in 5 to 10 years from now, that copper is gonna be in high demand in the US as they develop their own internal, sort of value added products. So that leads into why, you know, our projects in Canada can be very important for not only a Canadian investor, but also US investor.

27:30 You know, traditionally Canada, US has had a fantastic trading relationship. It's funny, a few years ago, the US figured that Canadian oil was domestic oil for them, because it was just right next door and at a really good deal and a really good rate. So I can see that being the same for Copper. You know, your Copper is our Copper. You've got the factories that need it. So, yeah, and our projects are, you know, Certainly at the earlier stage, we're not even at a resource estimate at this point, but we've got 5 projects that have the potential for very, very good sized deposits, porphyry systems.

28:16 They're similar to what you're finding in Arizona in the US and Nevada. So they're good sized deposits. Good infrastructure, easy to access, easy to mine, mining friendly jurisdictions. So you've got to start somewhere with investing in Copper deposits. So, for us at the earlier stage, but with good looking, high tonnage, high content projects, I think we're in a very good position. And Steve, yours does have a resource on it. Why don't you talk about Nevada Lithium and why it would be a good, potentially good investment vehicle for someone that wants to be exposed to lithium?

29:02 Yeah, the reason to me that you become involved as an investor in the junior resource market is because of the leverage that you have, in particular to increasing commodity prices. You're just starting out and you go through sort of the progression of risk assessment, and, you know, then diminution of the risk as you go forward, you know, and trying to basically pull up through your bootstraps a project that's got economics that work and that hopefully are all out of proportion to what your market cap is. I always tell people you don't get involved in this area of the markets because you want S&P 500 returns. And I mean, I would argue too, is that if you even looked at some of the large commodity producers, you see the kind of risk that is inherent just because of the industry. And again, look at El Tainte with Codelco, look at Freeport, et cetera, with Grassberg, all those sorts of things.

30:01 But here, in my opinion, when you're starting out with something like lithium and you're watching the birth of an industry, and if you believe in the demand side of this, then all you can really do is make an investment and hold on to the armchair rungs that you have because you're going to have a wild ride and the hope is that over time you go from the bottom left to the top right you're going to have peaks and valleys of this kind of thing. And I'm not you know to me the word volatility I'm not a trader I mean obviously that's where traders can really make their money, but you know hedge funds, Glencore, this kind of thing, I'm talking about investors. And investors when they see this, if they believe basically the fundamentals are in place And they have management that they can believe in. They have management that has proven that they are able to basically advance these projects farther along.

30:53 Now with Canadian reporting standards as an example. You know go through getting a resource and then you know a scoping study or a PEA then a PFS and you know definitive feasibility study all these sorts of things. You're advancing that project, and it is a long road. But again, you're not playing for S&P 500 returns. You're playing for multiples of your money. Not promising anything here, but this is why we do it. And if you catch this with an ascending commodity price, what happens is that the torque that accrues to your net present value on that project just gets all out of proportion, as I said, to your market cap. So you're buying a very, very cheap asset that whose probability of success, not lying to anybody, it is a tough road to hoe to get all the way from the beginning to the end. However, there's lots of different ways to make money along the way. And that's why you get involved in these kinds of markets and something like in the model lithium resources.

31:52 And Lee, Spartan Resources is an interesting play because you have exposure to a technology too, right? Could you share with the audience? Yeah, we're a little bit of a hybrid in a way because we do have this 10%, nearly 10% interest in the Vanadium flow battery industry through our ownership of 9.975% of VRB energy, which is linked to Ivanhoe Electric, one of Robert Friedland's companies, who are in fact developing a large Copper deposit in Arizona. And under that, of course, we have our mineral exploration projects, which are at early to middle stage. We're not, if you know, Greenfields, Brownfields, and then blah, blah, blah with resources. We're getting close to the Brownfields stage on one of the projects.

32:43 And The business of critical metals, of course, being acceptable and high priority for various jurisdictions around the world, including Canada, allows us to raise funding for those things. Our passive interest in the Vanadium flow battery industry is very undervalued right now in our balance sheet because the valuation we're showing on our books is from the original transaction with Mr. Friedland in 2016. And we're going to be in the process of updating that now because Ivan Hoeletic is a public company has made a lot of disclosures about the valuation of VRV Energy in their recent financial filings. So we're going to piggyback onto that in our financial filings in the very near future and show a much higher value on our books.

33:37 And timing is everything in this business. We suffer from the ups and downs of volatility. And You made some key words, Stephen, and so did Jeff. Investors and traders and the volatility of current markets has been very, very positive for traders. But in the longer term, people that are actually investors and believe in what we're doing and what our potential is, they're not going to worry so much about the short-term volatility. They're going to look at the future. And if they believe that we have something substantial that's going to create much more value in our company for the investors in the share price in the future, then they're going to look at us and they're not going to worry about 3-months or 5-months or 3-days or 3-weeks.

34:30 They're going to look at the development of the assets that we have and how those are going to reflect in the company's value. And we have, of course, the critical metals projects that are active. And we have a new project that we've been working on for about 2 and a half years now. It's an analog to some very significant world-class critical metals deposits in Finland called Orokumpu, which are still in production, but not really recognized geologically in Canada. And our initial work on these projects, and the property that we have, has shown that the analog is becoming much more reasonable to accept as the viable exploration methodology.

35:18 And we're looking at a number of untested, large number of untested targets in an environment which we don't believe has been explored. You know, the last drilling was done on these things nearly 30 years ago. And we have found some new things that were never identified before. And those are the things that, of course, are the wild cards in the exploration portfolio. But we plan on testing those. And because critical metals or specialty metals is a bit of a difference between them, but they're acceptable now as investment venues in both the government support system for subsidies and of course in the financing system for various types of share investments by investors, by the merchant bankers. So we're quite positive and continuing to go forward with this critical metals type of thing. And we also do have a Gold asset that is underexplored that we will pursue in the early future as well.

36:22 Because while Gold prices may be subject to volatility, we've focused on projects that are in areas where the expenses are not overly high because they're close to existing mining infrastructure. And so we get a very good bang for our buck for our exploration costs. And on that basis, and Jeff and Stephen are in the same boat in some ways, we don't have to worry about seasonal exploration in the far north, lack of infrastructure, no power, no people. You know, we're within 50 or 100 kilometers of major mining camps in all of our projects. And I've stuck with that because, you know, the romance of going off in the boondocks to find something is wonderful, but the reality of having to spend the money in them sometimes is frustrating. I've been there and done that.

37:11 I've worked in the Arctic. I've worked all over the world in these places. I know that when you try and raise money for them, unless you've got a lot of romantic interest and investment interest in the market, a lot of your money goes into logistic, a lot of your money goes into travel, a lot of it goes into not getting technical answers to what your opportunity is. So We've stuck with that as a small company and we're looking forward to continuing with some success. Gentlemen, thank you for your time. I wanted to keep this one short and concise and to the point, but as I asked you guys for the investment thesis for your company, you all took the approach from a long-term investor, which is great. But I would like to end this off with more immediate catalysts for each of your companies.

38:01 So perhaps I'll start with you, Steve. And what can people expect for the next 6 to 12 months for Nevada Lithium? Sure. First, I didn't realize that we'd hit the elevator pitch part of our presentation to end. So I'm going to have to bear with me folks for 2 minutes. But essentially our flagship asset is Bonnie Clare Project, which is located 3 hours northwest of Las Vegas. So we have the second largest lithium boron resource in America after Thacker Pass. And arguably, we're open in 3 directions for at least a thousand meters. Very high grade, obviously already very high tonnage and we just recently completed our PEA, which took into account all of that high grade mineralization. And we have a 60 year mine life.

38:49 There's a tremendous almost $7 million dollar, pardon me, billion dollar NPV on, you know, a $2.1 billion cap ex. So we look very, very attractive in terms of the 30 plus percent IRR, very low capital intensity ratio. And this is because of the grade of what we have, the dirt that we're putting through and the fact that we have a boron credit there worth almost $2,000 a ton. Additionally we have Cesium Ruvidium that we disclosed to the market. And this I alluded to earlier in terms of just the geological endowment basically in Nevada. We also just announced a relationship with a Korean lithium producer who's basically the developer of proprietary technology, I think is very similar to DLE.

39:39 That's basically the brainchild of the man who put together POSCO's lithium production. So I'm hoping that he is going to help us unlock value in many different ways, additional value at Bonnie Clare. In the short term, you know, there are a number of things that we're looking at that came out of our recent PEA in terms of the ability to bring additional byproducts besides boron into play to show additional value that's easy morbidity and possibly potassium. Maybe manganese things like this- we have an evaluation now we're looking at the best way to see what the consequences or the implications of the one big beautiful bill are. And the US this could be a very, very big thing where instead of capitalizing expenses for certain parts of your infrastructure, like factories, you may be able to immediately expense it or get additional depreciation.

40:32 That's the kind of thing that Bonnie Clare, this is Steve's back of the envelope kind of stuff, but it could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars of additional NPV. So we will be looking at that. And then we're also going to be looking at the best way to basically advance with pre-feasibility study looking at mining due diligence as studies. We have a borehole mining which is our it's basically the- the production technique the chemical uses Scar Lake. Our Rano uses up at their Red Denison J. V. And we're looking at a variation on that said to get down to our high grade material. At Bonnie Clare so we have a lot of stuff that is coming up not only short term obviously should go through these progressions PEAPFSBFS. We're gonna be looking a lot of different things including talking to the U. S. Government in different ways and seeing if they can.

41:20 Help move us along here obviously- all of us I think is non revenue producing. Companies are very very cognizant of trying that to minimize dilution for our shareholders going forward. And make sure that you know at least in the case of our company, the very, very big pie that we have is demonstrated by the net present value is split up in as few ways as possible. So that's sort of my the end of my spiel there, Kyle. All good. Thank you, Steve. And Jeff, how about you in Cascade Copper, what can people expect for the next 6 to 12 months? So unlike Stephen's company, we're a pure exploration company. We don't really have the mandate to take things into production. What our job is as a junior explorer is to basically go and look at either overlooked or under non understood deposits.

42:16 Typically what we like to do is look at something that has a little bit of history, in other words a bit of historic work that's been done, maybe it's been sort of left on the shelf and forgotten about for a while. So we've been able to do a little bit of sleuthing and found really a good portfolio of projects that have good legs to them. In other words, there's good tonnage, there's good grades, and typically what has happened is they've just been under-explored over the last couple of years for whatever reason, whether it's a lack of funds or the commodity prices were low, but we see that the portfolio that we have of 5 projects, 4 of them are in British Columbia, 1 in Ontario, They all have the ability to be company makers.

43:06 So what would we expect to see in the next 6 to 8 months or a year? I mean, basically we're looking at expiration now, budgets and so on for 2026. What would we expect to see is some drilling. A lot of these, 4 of these projects need to be drilled. 2 of them have not been drilled in the past and they still have some fantastic targets. The 3 projects in BC that are porphyry systems have great potential for 250 to 500 ton deposits, maybe even up to a billion tons on one of them at Rogers Creek. But again, it's just a matter of getting in there and doing some work on them.

43:52 And what we're doing is promoting them to our investors, but also to bigger companies as well. And I think, you know, perhaps one of our projects, maybe even 2 of them could be candidates for joint ventures with medium-sized to large producers or larger exploration companies. So, we've got, you know, like I said, we've got 5 projects we can afford to allow another company to come in and spend their money and develop those projects. And we basically have it carried into us to a certain point in the joint venture earnings. So we'd have news coming from a joint venture partner, potential joint venture partner, plus news from our own development and exploration.

44:40 So I think, you know, going forward over the next year, I think we should have lots of news coming out from drilling, from potential joint venture partnerships and just general information coming out of all of our projects, corporate-wise and project-wise. Thank you, Jeff. And Lee, what can people expect from Spartan Resources in the short term? Well, we're in a similar situation to Jeff's company at Cascade Copper. In the next few weeks actually, we're going to start a drilling program on our Pence Critical metals project, where we are on the Quebec side. We're going to test before it frees up basically, as you understand in Canada, we have 2 drilling seasons, the frozen season and the thawed season.

45:30 And we want to get some work done in there while we still have access before things freeze up on a couple of targets that are brand new, never been tested before. And we're in the same environment as the earlier work that we did on the Ontario side of the Pence project. Over the next 12 months, there's something interesting also. That drilling news will be announced, of course, as soon as we start to mobilize and we'll provide results. We do have results coming from some surface sampling on a new zone that we discovered in that project on the Ontario side of the border, where there was previous significant Copper assays found in the 1960s. And we're going to look forward to a winter drilling program as well once freeze-up takes place, because some of these targets, these numerous targets that we've developed through geophysics and the work that we did over the last few years, are better accessible during the wintertime.

46:30 On the low battery business, the VRB energy interest, there's going to be some sort of a transaction taking place sometime in the next 7 or 8 months, because in 2021, VRB Energy borrowed through a convertible loan about 24 million dollars from a Thailand renewable energy company that has well over a billion dollar market cap and builds solar systems and wind systems in Asia. And that was a convertible to venture into equity in VRB Energy, which expires in June of 2026. And Ivanhoe Electric, of course, who are the 90% owner of VRB Energy, VRB Energy is going to have to either repay that $24M to the Thailand company or the Thailand company can convert into equity in VRB Energy.

47:30 And I don't believe that Ivanhoe Electric and VRB Energy will pay $24 million back to the Thailand company. I believe there'll be some sort of a financing transaction that will allow liquidity to take place in the VRB Energy shares. And the Thailand company may ultimately convert into a 14% roughly interest in VRB Energy. Our interest is maintained because we have a non-dilution provision in our agreement and that should show when ultimately if there's a liquidity event we will be able to participate in that liquidity event and get a large, large block of cash into our company. And that will put us in a different position than we are now, as a company with a big portfolio of exploration projects, but a big cash position in the company that'll allow us to do things that we can't do at the moment.

48:25 And the trigger date for that is sometime in early June of next year. So there's going to be something happening early next year, even late next year too, something about that transaction. And so we're very optimistic that that's going to allow us to cash in if we or carry forward with whatever happens. But the news that's going to be coming out will be the critical metals exploration news from the drilling that we're starting. And I just point out that we actually have our own captive drilling company in Spartan Resources. It's called Edcore Drilling Services. We've been operating this company for well over 20 years. We put it into operation because it was impossible to find drills back in the early 2000s.

49:16 I used to be a driller in my younger days and I've had a close experience with a lot of different drilling operations. I bought some equipment from a colleague who had it all stored in his barn and we set up our drilling company. We've operated and drilled over 60,000m in the last 20-20 years for different clients, including Osisko and people like that. We've been the highest productivity contractor in the whole world because nobody can touch us. I've got men that have had over 30, 40 years experience drilling. And we operate based on productivity, not the 9 to 5 and Saturday on, Saturday off. So I have a good rapport. We have a good crew. We will do the drilling with our own people because we don't want to take the risk of getting somebody that we don't know, although there are a lot of good drilling companies out there. They have good people available now, but we'll do it ourselves.

50:12 That's a benefit to us because we can go very quickly and do exactly what we want. I'm looking forward to new news for our investor group coming out of the drilling program. Recent assays from the mineralization that we've been sampling on surface. There's some photographs of this on the website and of course the developments in the VRB energy valuation, which is much, much more substantial than we're showing in our book later on. Thank you for sharing. And thank you for the participation, everyone, and great discussion today. We look forward to the next one with you all. Thank you for your time. I wish everybody good luck in all their stuff that's happening too. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks, Colin. If you need a director for your Ontario work, let me know.

51:01 Well thought. I'd Be happy to fit your job. Bye now.