Nevada Lithium Announces Rare Earth Elements Within Bonnie Claire

0:03 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for this live market update in the new year. I'm pleased to be joined by Stephen Rentschler, CEO of Novato Lithium, to discuss this week's significant announcement. Steve will share his thoughts on the release in just a moment, But first, if you have any questions during the conversation, please submit them in the chat located in the bottom right corner of your screen. As always, this event is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after we conclude. Steve, thanks for joining us again. You just announced Rare Earth elements at Bonnie Clare. What drove the decision to analyze the Rare Earths

0:34 in your existing drill core? And why is this the right time to be bringing this to the market? Hi, Kyle, and thanks to everybody for taking the time in the new year to listen to this story. Yeah, it's an interesting set of circumstances that drove us to look at the potential for rare earths. But let me just cut to sort of the summary, the chase of the whole thing here is that, in my opinion, the news that we just released yesterday is some of the most exciting, perhaps second only to the release of the updated PEA, the second most important piece of news that we've released at the Model Lithium, and I'll

1:10 take you through why. The rare earths, first of all, for those people who aren't as familiar, I just want people to understand exactly what the rare earths are. And this is sort of the suite of, I call them the high-tech metals, and they're not new to the world. If you've been around as long as I have, you go back to 2010 to 2015, you'll have seen a huge run up in things like prasadium and dysprosium and all these things. And think of them as the magnet metals, a lot of other uses that get developed with them. But they're currently, right, they're the topic of basically these huge export constraints, curbs between the Chinese and the US governments. The defense, the high-tech applications of these minerals can't be overstated.

2:00 So the reason that this is important for us at Bonnie Clare is because it's one more layer of value, of optionality, as you often hear me talk about, to our lithium boron project. And it's something that we'll be looking to quantify going forward. But the reality is where we sit right now is when we look at what we have at Bonnie Claire we have this layer cake again to refresh everybody's memory and From surface down to I don't know 600 700 feet 250 meters, whatever somewhere in there We've got essentially, you know grades of lithium that could be found in many parts of Nevada, right? So up to 1000 ppm, give or take, stuff like that. Then we have another 500 feet of sandstone in there. Sandstone is more competent than the clay stone, right?

2:47 So think of it as hard rock. And in that we really don't have any of the lithium and the boron. And then below that is the lower zone of Bonny Clare. And this is where all the excitement has been and this is why we restated the PEA back in August of last year. Because as we go lower in that lower zone, down to basically 27, 2800, 3000 feet, so close to 1000 meters, we see higher and higher grades of lithium and boron. And associated with that, we now see rare earths. Now, these are not the same grades as what we see in the lithium and the boron. I don't want anybody to think about that, but they don't have to be. What we're seeing is measurements of, you'll see it in our press release, the total rare earth oxides of, you know, basically 150 parts per million up to 320 parts per million, something like that. But it's averaging out around 240 ppm, 0.24%, something like that, which is comparable to what some of our peers have talked about.

3:50 What's really interesting, though, here with us again, is that all of this mineralization is in exactly the same place as the high-grade lithium and boron, which we would want to take out anyway in our mine plan. So this is the kind of stuff that we essentially will get from a mining perspective for very, very little cost. Now, if we back up a month or 2, we talked about finding cesium and rubidium at Bonny and Clare. Now they are not rare earth metals, however, they are critical minerals. They're part of the newly updated critical mineral list that the U.S. Government has. They're again very specialized in terms of the types of attributes they have. A lot of, again, defense applications, medical applications, nuclear applications, all these sorts of things.

4:40 Very opaque markets in terms of pricing, actual supply and demand, et cetera. But one of these things that almost all of the critical minerals have, frankly, in common is that they're controlled essentially by the Chinese government in 1 form or another, either the refining or the actual sourcing of them. So these are all very, very desirable. Now, one of the differences that we have between the cesium and rubidium that we announced is that we know from preliminary analysis of our pregnant leach solution, okay, so this is where after we put the lithium and the boron mineralization into a bunch of acid. We then release lithium in the boron and we have a bunch of other stuff still in the pregnant leaf solution. And the cesium and the rubidium is there as well.

5:27 Well, that means it survived the initial acid baths. We're gonna obviously be looking to see about what happens to the rare earth elements in the next set of analysis that we're doing at Bonny Clare. But for now, we're very happy to find that in fact we do have the rare earths at Bonny Clare in exactly the target zone that we would be looking for the high-grade lithium and boron. Now, with it being the focus, the rare earths being clearly the focus of governments and industries around the world, this is just going to increase the appeal of Bonnie Clare for potential suitors, potential partners, all these kinds of things. I think we'll have another inflection point just in terms of technical knowledge when we see what basically the ion exchange, because that's what I think is going to be taking these minerals out of solution, when we see what the recoveries actually are.

6:18 The way I want everybody to think about it is we're not gonna be able to sit here and tell you, you know what, if we recovered the, what, presidium or whatever it is, just pick one of the rare earths, it's gonna add $10 to the value of the project or 1 million dollars or whatever the deal is. We're not going to be able to do that until we are basically, well, completing our preliminary feasibility study. And that's just because you can't have multiple technical reports on the Canadian reporting standards at one point in time. So what I'm going to ask people to do, however, is very simply just take a look at the percentages, take a look at the volume that we're going to be throwing through Bonnie Clare, which is almost 3 million tons of dirt a year, and pick whatever recovery factor you want. And what you're going to see is that there's substantial tonnages coming out from almost all of these materials. Now, they're not going to be, again, of the significance in terms of actual tonnages that say the boron or the lithium is, right? Over 62,000 tons of lithium, 120,000 tons of boric acid. They're not going to be anywhere near that, but they don't have to be, right? These are the kinds of materials that industry and government are going to want to add incrementally, whatever they can get, 100 tons, 150 tons, because they're going to have to assemble these from stockpiles around the world.

7:40 So think of this as very high value. Basically, When I talk about these kinds of materials, I use an analog of what I've done earlier with the car industry and lithium. What's the opportunity cost for an industry that's, I don't know, building missiles, as an example, or building high-power magnets or whatever, to not have these materials? The opportunity cost, I would argue, is basically infinite. You don't have a company if you don't have them. And I think that that's going to give us additional leverage as we talk with people about getting involved with Bonnie Clare. So what do we have essentially right now at Bonnie Clare? Why am I so excited? Obviously we have the lithium and boron, but now we have the potential to produce an entire suite of critical minerals.

8:29 You know, I don't know if there's 10 or 15 of the rare earths. When you look at them from one end to the other, they're all, of course, in the news release. But if you just want to count them as sort of 1, right now the way I'm looking at it is we can produce lithium, that's 1, boron, 2, cesium, 3, rubidium, 4, rare earths, 5. This is the kind of thing that you want to have for optionality. It's going to help in terms of, I think, getting government interest, just because of scarcity of supply and security of those supply lines. And I won't be surprised at all if they actually add value when it's all said and done after we get the calculations for what it costs to put essentially ion exchange columns in. So all of that will come out later, but please think of this as good news. I think that people are going to take notice of the fact that we now have rare earths. And we do have additional assays that we could do. What we did was just to demonstrate in this one hole, I think it was 2401C, that the rare earths were present. And I will tell you that the guys originally thought that if anywhere, they were gonna be in the sandstone, which would have been a bit more of an issue because we've never been basically planning to take that sandstone and put it through, you know, basically the planet, Iboni Clare, because that's not where the high-grade lithium and boron is. This stuff is exactly where we want it. It's right in the sweet spot.

9:53 So that's Rare Earths. I'll come back to that, and we can talk about that with Q&A. But I just wanted to move on now just to, in terms of an update, in terms of what's going on now with I think the lithium markets because I think it's important and I think people are just starting to notice. And obviously people's attention I think has been captured by what's going on with copper, with gold and with silver. But I would consider what's going on with lithium to be nothing short of spectacular in terms of the, let's just say the turnaround that we've had over the course of the past 6 months. And we started talking about this with everybody basically back in the summer, as to whether or not we were seeing an inflection point because of mine shutdowns and permits being revoked and things like that. But clearly it looks to me when I see where lithium prices are now, and these are Asian prices, spot prices look like they're above $19,000 a ton right now.

10:48 6 months ago, they were 10, $12,000 a ton. If you look at my shareholder's letter, I talked a little bit more about this. I mean, we're up basically over 50% over 2025, and we just started out with an absolute roar in 2026. It strikes me as that this is all sort of the same kind of thing that's going on with the Chinese in terms of them starting to flex their muscles over more than basically just the rare earths. And the way I look at it, the rare earths, the whole thing started back, I think it was October 23, something like that, with the gallium and the germanium export controls, that kind of stuff. I think we found the inflection point where, and again I'll point to this, there was a US congressional report that came out that clearly identified the Chinese have been tampering with lithium prices for a while now to protect their domestic industry, but essentially they overdid it.

11:44 And to the point that their mines were now, their primary sources of supply were not profitable enough to basically continue. So a little bit of the pressure has come off with that. But what I would say is that when we think about where the price is going, I've talked about the difference about spot pricing and its relevance compared to sort of what the incentive pricing is. Because the incentive price that's needed to bring on new projects, specifically new projects in the US, which I would argue is going to be the safest jurisdiction for Western Hemispheric Lithium, right, that price has been much higher than what the spot price was only a few months ago. However, at $19,000, you'll see that it's clearly, I have no reason to think it's going to stop right now. It's going to be in this $20,000, $25,000 area, which I would argue is the minimum incentive price needed to bring things definitively, like Thacker Pass or some of the other projects even if it's IME or whatever but specifically us to bring us you know into the point where We look more and more like a viable project now if you if you remember the investment metrics on our PEA were tremendous, right? $8.8 billion net present value at $24,000 a ton lithium.

13:11 Of course, we've got the boric acid byproduct credits, almost $2,000 a ton. That's a $950 a ton. Boron prices, IRR plus 32%, payback of around 3 years, you know, all of this kind of stuff. Well, I would argue that if you say, well, the incentive pricing, How much leverage do we have that? Because this is how I would like people to think about what you actually have when you have an investment in Bonnie Clare. It's already tremendous. It's just sort of what I think that incentive price that's necessary for all the North American projects is. And again, if you take a look at say 22, $24,000 a tonnes where the preliminary feasibility studies, the definitive feasibility studies were all done, you'll see a cluster of IRRs right around 22, 25%.

14:00 I would argue that as an investor, that's the kind of thing that you would want to see if you're going to get involved with financing a project like that, remembering that at that price we're already at 32% IRR. If you just take it a little bit further, and perhaps it's premature, however, look how quickly lithium prices have rebounded. If you say the Asian, let's just say Asian prices were to stabilize around, say, $25,000 a ton. Do you think that's the Asian price? Do you think that the equity incentive pricing needed for North American lithium projects would be higher and lower than that? And I would argue that they would have to be higher because there's no, essentially, there's no North American lithium production that's on stream other than Silver Peak, which is 5,000 tons a year, which is nowhere near what's going to be needed.

14:54 If you look at our investor presentation, just take a simple look and say, hey, maybe the Western Hemispheric price, right, should be 25% higher. It's not that much. On a $24,000 a ton base, that's $30,000 a ton. Our NPV then jumps from $8.8 billion to $10 billion. This, my friends, is why we're involved in investing in the junior resource space. Our market cap is arguably right now whatever 30, 40, 50 million dollars Canadian. If you look at a 10 billion US market net present value right That's 14 billion Canadian. That's in the order of 280 320 times where we stand right now with our value again This is why we get involved with junior resource stocks and we talked about exit strategies over time, whether you build it, do you get the full NPV, do you bring somebody in, do you take, shave off part of the NPV? I would argue that I'm not sure it really matters because that far number, that ultimate NPV is so great And believe me, over the course of my career, I've seen things trade well over NPV. I've seen discount rates at 0. I can't pretend to understand why some of these things are done, but particularly in the gold space, I have seen it done.

16:15 So the point is, I'm not even sure that's the upper, upper limit of what the value is at Bonnie Clare. And here's a couple of other things that I'll throw in. The lithium price is the one thing, but right now we're sitting, according to the PEA, with an 80-20 revenue split using $950 boron prices. Well, boron has been actually moving pretty quickly over the course of the past 3, 4 months as well. And boron prices have doubled. And all I can tell you is from the PEA, If we were to just take all else being equal and we doubled the boron price, you can see that the absolute revenue shift wouldn't quite be, it wouldn't go to 40% because obviously you would have to dilute it over the entire lithium plus boron price, but it goes up substantially is what I'm saying. Again, for no additional input cost, correct? You just have to take out the tax.

17:09 Well, we have that. Then we have the fact that we have no incremental value assigned to any of these critical minerals, cesium, rubidium, any of the rare earths. So this is just all additional optionality. This is the kind of stuff that as we figure it out and we put it in, I expect is only going to be incrementally positive. So you have this massive, massive base project that's worth, I don't know, again arguably anywhere from 8 to 10 billion US dollars, right? So 15, you know, you're getting in the order of 15 billion Canadian and a market cap that's somewhere around 50 million. That to me is the kind of risk reward scenario that you want. And I think it's a beautiful time to be getting involved with Nevada Lithium.

17:55 Now, I'll just end up sort of my prepared remarks on which this, what are we doing right now? So obviously we got off to a very hot start here and, you know, the team did a great job of getting us basically working on this over the holidays so we could get it out to when we thought people would, you know, just be coming back from their holidays, the investment community. We already have a couple of other projects that are ongoing right now. And I'm hoping that we're going to have the results in what I'll call the short term. So hopefully late January, early February kind of a time frame. Obviously, we're asking people to run as quickly as possible on those. The first of them is to go back to the cesium and the rubidium. And there we've asked Cometco, and this is the laboratory up in British Columbia, that worked on basically our metallurgy in concert with floor for the PEA right so this is world-class folks there at the labs and they have basically the the analysis ongoing with what the recoverability is going to be with the cesium and the rubidium.

19:03 Again, if you just sort of think simplistic terms, but this is the way I need to think about it. We take the dirt out of Bonnie Clare, you hit it with acid, and then we basically have what's called a pregnant leach solution, which means the lithium and the boron is in the dissolved acid, we take out the lithium and the boron, we have a bunch of other stuff that's left, including cesium and rubidium. How do we get that out? Well, that's what Comeco is working on right now. And we'll be able to assign recoverability factors for those 2 critical minerals. Then of course, it's still going to have to remain back of the napkin kind of analysis. But that's fine for now. But that's going to give us a very, very good idea of what's realistic to assume as we move forward. We're also going to ask them to look for the rest of the REEs, the rare earths, and see if we can't apply the same sort of analysis to them. Now, what happens is you have different ion exchange, different membranes, all these sorts of things, right? So it's not going to be 1 size fits all.

20:05 I really don't think it's going to be that. But we're going to see about getting them started on that, try and come up with a recoverability factor on that as quickly as we can. So that's one thing. The other thing that we have going on is a study on our borehole mining technique. Again, for those who are not familiar, borehole mining is something that Cameco uses to recover uranium and it's simply the application of high pressure water rotating on a drill stem. So it's just a circular thing. You look at it from above, it's rotating around and it dissolves the dirt right in your target area. Okay. Turns it all to mud. You pump the mud back up and then you put it into a plant to recover the lithium and the boron. Again, we're not trying to recover anything from a chemical standpoint at depth. We're just looking to remove the dirt.

20:54 Now, the borehole mining has not been done at the depth that we proposed to do it. So again, somewhere down from, you know, whatever, 1,500 to 1,000 meters it's called to make it easy. Kinley Exploration who did the initial analysis on this said no problem. They had experience with what basically the experience with Cameco other other companies that have been using the technique, Cameco is just the most well-known. But we essentially brought in, independent again to us, globally recognized engineers. And the only reason that we didn't put it in the news release, who they were, was because we couldn't get basically approval

21:38 from their legal side in time for when we wanted to put the news release out. The next news release we have, I'll be sure that we have enough time that we can identify them. But the point is this world class outfit, okay, whose engineers again have experience with Cameco, Denison, other things and other projects, other types of projects with borehole mining. And basically what we're looking at is for them to put an independent stamp of approval on the borehole mining technique. Why is that important? Well, the biggest thing that we're trying to do is see if we can knock down the cost of a preliminary feasibility study. Now, the preliminary feasibility study that's been essentially framed out by our PEA, Preliminary Economic Assessment authors, that was GRE out of Colorado, looked for an infield test of the borehole mining system. This is the kind of thing that would be, you know, at least a 10 million dollar US test.

22:35 If we can get around that for the completion of pre-feasibility study, obviously, it's going to be very important. It'll be important from timing. It'll be important from the point of view of less dilution. Then we can essentially spend more of the money the way it would work out on basically just framing out the resource, right? Basically increasing the geostatistical confidence in the resource, which we're already very confident about because this stuff is basically a big, you know, it's just a big, relatively flat lane, you know, thick carpet of high-grade lithium and boron. That's what we got going on at Pont de Clerc. So we're looking forward to the results of that study. Again, late January, maybe we get lucky a little earlier going into February. That's another thing.

23:22 We also have a study that's going on that we're working with the University of Naples with an accommodation who is very, very well versed with the types of deposits that say Thacrapass is and and Bonny Clare is. Now there are differences. This is one of the reasons why this is so interesting and what we're hoping that we're going to have is the results of this back in time for a talk that Jeff Wilson, our VB of Exploration, is going to be giving at PDAC at the beginning of March. For those of you who aren't familiar, that's Prospector and Developers Association of Canada, and It's arguably the biggest trade slash exploration slash, hey, come show me your project show in the world that occurs every year. And this is a big thing.

24:09 And the reason I talk about this is because I've mentioned many times over the past couple of years, when I go to these conferences and I'm off basically talking with investors and 1 ones, these kinds of things. I come back to the booth and there's Jeff sitting in the chair and he's got basically a bunch of folks around him on he's holding court because they are very, very interested in Bonnie Clare. They were very interested at first because of the size, then they get even more interesting because the combination of the size and grade, then they get even more interested because the size and grade and the other things that we have going on such as the boron, and now of course We have all these other critical minerals that look like they're exactly in the sweet spot that we want them to be. The reason that we think it's going to be even more important than just sort of getting all of the spotlight on to Bonnie Clare going forward from the academic side of things, because obviously we're hoping will be written up in literature, all of these things and all of this kind of attention is very good.

25:08 But if we target if we can really target the actual mineralization and Jeff has sort of described it to me is, you know, like the real high grade mineralization, the kind of stuff like a, there's your streaks of real high grade lithium and boron. Right. So even though all of this extends, when you think about our high-grade lithium and boron over hundreds and hundreds of meters, again, that's what really defines us versus everybody else. As far as I'm concerned, and we can't find anybody who can disprove it, we have the highest grade lithium as a resource in all of Nevada, as well as the highest grade lithium and boron that we're throwing through our mine plan. But if you could arguably find a way to target and sort of predict where even the highest mineralization would be, well then obviously you could get even more selective in terms of where you want to mine.

25:57 And going forward, the beauty of that hydraulic borehole mining thing is that you're not digging down from again the surface and having to go through remove overburden potentially going through lower you know lower lithium and boron strata to get to where you want. We go directly to the high grade stuff And if we can get even more precise in that targeting, it might have pretty significant implications for our ability to high-grade the mine even more, and to increase the resource, and the grade of the resource even more. So that's going to be very, very interesting, and we have until the beginning of March to basically get preliminary results, but I know that the guys are already working on that. So we're looking forward to those results and they will be of interest and obviously we'll let everybody know when we have them. And the last thing that I would say is that over the holidays, and when I say holidays I'm talking even going back to pre-US Thanksgiving, right? So somewhere in November, I will tell you that I have been talking with US government entities, specifically the Department of Energy, about their interest in certain aspects of Bonnie Clare.

27:07 Now, I cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, pretend to promise anybody that we will have a government partner or that we will get government funding. However, I will tell you that we've taken our guys, our team, and we are now actively looking at certain funding opportunities,

27:26 which are relatively new. They're very, very different than what they were under the Biden administration. And that in concert with what I've been talking with the Department of Energy about, and frankly it's about the borehole mining and about critical minerals, and really shouldn't, I don't think it should be a surprise, but the what really the desire is is to know, hey, you know what, could that borehole mining be used to go after all critical minerals? And one of the things that I try to impress upon everybody as I talk to you and we talk about that is that at Bonny Clair, All of the minerals that we're talking about are in the same, you know, basically horizon of dirt that we want. And there's no reason to think that if we dig all the dirt up that somehow we're going to magically lose the rare earth elements. We already know that cesium, right, and the rubidium are making it to the surface. The idea again is that we just create mud out of the basically the mineralization of Bonny Clare. It's very, very soft. And you pump the mud to the surface. There's no reason to believe it's all going to come back up.

28:29 So We're not, you know, I'm not saying anything out of school. I'm not, you know, telling you that we're going to get it. I'm just telling you we're actively involved with trying to get it. And I hope that we'll have good news about it. Have no idea what the timing is. I will tell you that things with the government tend to take a lot longer. They tend to have stop and go effects. Teams change. Basically, the deadlines change over time, et cetera. But I will say that I feel very, very good about the potential for getting involved with some sort of a grant or participation or something like that. I feel much, much better about it than I ever have in the past and therefore I'm willing to talk about it. So we'll see how that plays out. But I just don't want people to think that we're not addressing it because we're doing everything that we can to basically Grab money from wherever we can in as non dilutive a term as we possibly can This is all about the optionality of Bonnie Claire This is what I've tried to impress upon people from the very beginning when I talked about, okay, we've got this stuff at depth.

29:36 If lithium prices go high enough, can we talk about an open pit? Sure. If we happen to find brine, can we talk about brine? Yes. Well, now the optionality is extended into other areas. Obviously, specifically, we're talking about the boron, which is relatively new, and now we're talking about all of these other critical minerals. So, at this point in time, I'll turn it over to Q&A. We have a lot going on. We have a lot that's gonna happen over a relatively short amount of time. We're gonna be taking basically what we find out from all of those studies and everything to basically solidify the work plan for the rest of the year. We obviously wanna have the input of the analysis of what we're doing now to make sure that we don't go off in

30:21 a way that doesn't make any sense. So once we get the results back then we'll start talking about the work plan and you know in the midst of all of this I would tell everybody just say look what's going on with those lithium prices. Perhaps the Chinese don't necessarily want to knock out the US in terms of cars. Maybe we've actually gone into something different and I talked about this in the shareholder letter, But what if it turns out that rising lithium prices or basically the curbing of exports of lithium to the US are a way for the Chinese to basically combat US deployment of artificial intelligence?

31:01 It sounds entirely plausible to me because frankly, folks, they're gonna need all the lithium for not only the backup, but basically to handle the power surges. They're going to need the power smoothing. As these AI centers, they turn them on, they learn. The power goes all over the place. This is evidently something that wasn't terribly well-known When the when the need for or the descriptions what's going on with AI? Started coming in but I will tell you in the US power rates are starting to go up people are starting to notice Just normal consumers. They're not happy about it I I continue to believe that these AI companies are gonna have to build their own power generation facilities, whether it's solar, who knows over time whether or not it could be nukes, but batteries are all part of this. So It's very, very exciting.

31:46 The value proposition we have, I can't think of anything else that's there.

31:51 We're going to start to be seen more. I just know it is. We're doing everything that we can to make our presence known. And so I hope that if you're not a shareholder, you become a shareholder. If you're a shareholder, I thank you. Stay the course. Think about the value proposition that we have. This is why we all get involved with junior resource stocks. And Kyle, I think at that point in time, let's see if anybody has anything they'd like to ask. Great. Great insight, Steve. Thank you so much. There is quite a few questions and quite a few of them have been addressed during your overview. So, but there are a few that have not. So I'm just gonna start from the top and work my way down. Clifford's asking, with the news and excitement of these rare earths, will that cause any delays in starting and completing the PFS?

32:35 No, I don't think so. The time between PEA and PFS is, this is the time when you want to, you basically want to sort everything out. So this is the kind of stuff. It would be optimization that goes on. And I would consider essentially all these rare earths to be part of that optimization process. And I'll tell you why. And I think this is one of the things that sort of the cesium and the rubidium tipped us off to, at the very least. So I'm just talking about those 2 for now. You know, we've already seen the cesium and rubidium make it, let's just call it, to the back end of the flow sheet. So again, right, you take the dirt, you hit the dirt with acid, you take the boron out, and you take the lithium out. Now you're left with other stuff.

33:22 The other stuff, the way I look at it, is not going to require a rework of the beginning parts of the recovery flow sheet. It's the kind of thing where the way I envision this is that you take the liquids and then you would send them through Basically, they call them, you know ion exchange kinds of things their membranes that either you know, you let certain things pass because they're either too big or they're too small, or you use other properties, perhaps electrical attraction, all these sorts of things, or chemical attractions to bind up the kind of stuff that you want. So you do that with ion exchange, and then the remainder of that kind of stuff, you know, whatever you're not picking up, can then go through another ion exchange kind of a thing. All of this is the kind of thing that we would do before eventually then we cleaned up the water that we're using, the processed water, and recycle it and go back and it would go back into either the plant or I don't know, perhaps down into the borehole

34:21 mining kind of thing. Remember, it'll be a big circular recirculation kind of thing. It's not like we can really get rid of the water. We would never want to. And so the way I'm looking at it is that there would just be multiple ion exchange columns now. The key seems to be as if in the process of getting one of these minerals out, do you somehow lock up other minerals at the same time? And then you get to the point where somehow you can't separate them. And that's what remains to be seen. That's what Comeco is looking at. So as an example, I don't think that cesium and rubidium are going to be locked up together. But perhaps they're going to be parts of the rare earths that are. But we already have as part of the PEA going to PFS that whole process, taking our basically recovery flow sheet, which has been done at the bench scale, and taking it up to a pilot plant level, right? So if you think about it, that's probably going to be the biggest thing on the metallurgical side, right? You got to build that. You know, you got to go through this using bulk samples and all this kind of stuff, which of course means you need to drill.

35:31 We're going to need more material to put the tonnages through that are necessary to basically prove the metallurgy at a larger scale. So all of this to say, this is just all additive. I do not see this delaying us, frankly, in any way, these critical minerals. I will tell you one thing I forgot to talk about sort of in the update is that we continue to talk with our partners in Korea at HydroLithium who've had some very interesting results. The question is how do we necessarily take the process that they're using, put it into a form that can be used under Canadian reporting standards

36:11 that can be basically shown in a way that again would not be able to necessarily show economics right now because we really can't do that unless we're going to recast the PEA. We don't want to do that. But basically look at certain things that basically they've been able to do with regards to looking at more than just lithium and boron, Certain things that they've been able to do with acid requirements. It's all very interesting and I can't talk about it now, but I will say that, you know, that work is ongoing and the technology transfer that's occurring in the lithium space right now, specifically in the lithium clay space is tremendous. And that's another reason I'm just, you know, I'm very, very enthusiastic about everything that we have going on now. So sorry for the length of the response, Kyle. No, It's okay.

37:01 We probably have just so you have reference probably 8 questions and about 20 minutes. So okay do that as you will Another question here with add-on rare-earth processing could this trigger more rigorous environmental impact studies potentially delaying the project?

37:18 I don't think so, because of course, we're not really doing anything different. The big environmental impact, in my opinion, always comes from your mining method, air quality, water quality, tailings, all that kind of stuff. This is just the same dirt right that we've taken out again from the very beginning just going down to the mineralization that we want for the lithium and the boron you know we know what we're going to have to do to basically we will have to undergo the NEPA process because this is again federal land as is most of Arizona, Nevada, etc. And because the size of the project. Folks, this is a world-scale project. But I cannot think at this point in time, you know, what else of any real magnitude grabbing the rare earths would take out. You know if you know I'm sure we're going to have like discarding ion exchange you know membranes that can't be reused over time things like this. But to my understanding it's just not they're not very big factors in the overall scheme of things.

38:18 There's quite a few questions. With the uptick in lithium prices from $9,000 to $10,000 to $19,000 per tonne in just a matter of months, have you been getting more calls from potential strategic investors? It's also a similar question regarding the doubling of the boron price and the rare earth. So all of this, are you getting more interest? Yes, yes, we are. You know, and again, this is the kind of thing where, and I've always just cautioned people about this, When you see some sort of a deal that's done in the news, understand that if they announce it on a Thursday, it's not like everybody sat down on a Wednesday. So again, I just try very, very hard to under-promise and over-achieve on the things that we can control. But people are starting to take notice, yes, at the strategic level of what's going on with lithium and boron.

39:09 And of course, what's going on with critical minerals, the rare earths, this just happened yesterday but I fully expect that the interest is going to be heightened. Have you had talks with Jonathan Evans or other suitable buyers about partnerships or acquisitions of the Bonnie Clare project? Well, I would never tell you specifically who we were having talks with, but when we talk about other lithium producers at this point in time when you look at the statements that many of them made about where their interests are whether or not it's you know wanting to have center of gravity say in South American brines or you know say hard rocks etc obviously you know all the Australian stuff the hard rocks of Quebec they're looking to you know obviously develop certain things like that. There are pipelines. These companies have a number of their own pipelines filled, including what I think they would consider to be some brownfields.

40:03 So I'm not going to give away who I'm talking to, who I'm not talking to. All I can say at this point in time is that with the valuation that we have, I'm not certain that this is necessarily the time that we would want to be selling anything to a strategic. That's my opinion, right, obviously, and I'm 1 board member, but the point is we're really just getting going here, and we're coming in here as there's an upswing in lithium and boron prices and all the other heightened interests that we see in the critical minerals. So I wouldn't take that as a bad thing, as we're not quite ready to sell yet. But again, to go back to the previous question, we're getting increased interest. Peter Epstein is wondering If oil and gas service companies could be helpful in the emerging borehole mining methods, besides 1 or a few Uranium companies in Canada, is there anyone else who's in borehole mining?

40:57 A lot of development in BMH should happen over the next 5 years. Yeah. And obviously, as everybody knows, Pete, you know, Peter does work for us. And I think he does very good work. He's frankly, one of the few, I would say, independent analysts out there who I think understands what's going on in the lithium market going forward so I would encourage you to follow him. But the thing is yes the mineral sands is another project that we're looking at that borehole mining we expect to be coming on relatively soon this is what our consultants have told us. But the idea to me all along has been that, you know, what you would want to do was get essentially a US land rig company involved to do this because from the drilling, right, this is not gonna be terribly difficult drilling, right? The only trick, if you want to call it a trick to it, is that you have, you know, essentially something on the end of the drill string rather than the bit that is just basically it's garden hose on the end of it that's putting high pressure water into the system and creating mud that you're pumping back up right so you don't you're not going to need like a drop a diamond diamond studded drill bit to get through something tremendously hard you're not talking about going out laterally for an extended horizontal reach for a couple of kilometers, this kind of stuff. It's not that.

42:21 I mean, you're going basically vertical. You're going right down to say 1000 meters. You start rotating the string, you start hitting it with water, you pump it, you start raising the drill string. And in my, you know, to me, part of the allure, if you want to call it that, or the whole Bonnie Clare kind of a thing with the US government is that, hey, what better way to basically create economic, you know, value for everybody if we can basically take it and extend it beyond just, you know, the actual recovery of the minerals, but in the actual production of the minerals, which would be, I think, the US land rigs, who could probably do this much more effectively. It'll take a significant rig, I mean, it won't take something that's only going to go down to 1000 feet. But the reality is a lot of these rigs, I would argue, are going to be basically stacked unless there's something for them to do with what we have. And when you think about it, If you go back and look at our PEA and look at what is actually happening, you put a rig on one of these areas that's basically a 300-foot radius, it's going to be there for a couple of years. That's how long it's going to take to mine out just 1 segment of Bonnie Clare. Remember something, folks.

43:32 Bonnie Clare is the size of Manhattan Island, just as a point of reference. It's bigger than Manhattan Island. And we're basically looking at, I don't know, the footprint of our minable resources, 25%. There's a lot more to find. So yeah, we are looking at the US land rig to basically participate. That's always been part of the game plan for me. Peter has a follow up question here. And during your update or overview, you're just talking about the value proposition of Nevada lithium and I think this has a lot to do with it. A lot of investors fear the borehole mining risk. Is this a deal breaker risk or is it a risk where you have to throw more money than expected at it for it to work? I don't think it's a deal breaker, but I don't know about whether or not more money would be necessary if it weren't borehole mine. And I would just tell you that as we've asked the independent engineers, let's call them that, engineering firm to look at this, part of it was also to talk about what alternatives might be and there are a number of them. There's block caving, there's underground, there's all different things.

44:41 But the PEA basically proposed the borehole mining because it just felt like it was playing to the strengths of that. And I do think I've often talked with people about this, with this being the technical risk and certainly the perceived technical risk to to the project, however, and I've been look over the course of my long career, I've been one of the lucky ones who's actually gone to Cameco, down to Cigar Lake, you know, McLean, and seen where they're actually doing this. And what they're doing there is a hell of a lot more complicated than we're talking about. There, you're talking about freezing the ground. You're talking about much harder kind of stuff. And they're going after very, very precise pods, you know, very small, small areas. So the precision of what you're targeting is tremendous. Now arguably that's some of the highest valued ore on earth when you're talking to 80% uranium that kind of stuff but we've got stuff we're talking about a big target area we're talking about again something that if you look at the proposed mine plan you know 1 rig is sitting there essentially excavating for the course of I don't know a year, year and a half whatever it is over something that's a 300 foot radius. That's a big area. So sure, do I understand people's concerns about it? Yes. However, is there always a wall of worry to climb?

46:00 Absolutely. I would argue when we got through, you know, what we had found at surface at Bonnyclare originally, remember folks, that was an entirely different metallurgical process that was going to be used. That was calcination. It didn't work as well down in the high-grade lithium and boron. So to me that was really the big technical hurdle, in my opinion, to overcome. And there will always be something, but I just don't think the borehole mining is going to be the problem or the concern that many people think it is. So for what it's worth, That's my answer to that. Thank you. Jacques is asking, do you have an idea about the amount or percentage of REE, Rare Earths, Contain and Dirt that will be extracted? I know you covered this during your overview, but there's been a couple of questions like that. Sure. You know, it's so in the table Jeff had put it in under, you know, total rare earth oxides, which is the way I guess when you look at the entire suite of things. And if you look at those intercepts, right, so they're in percentages, you know, I would assume that essentially you're going to see this across the other basically deep holes that we have, and we will do the assays.

47:15 If I ballpark that and look at the averages, it sort of looks to me like maybe it's 200 ppm, 0.02% kind of stuff. As I said, now you've got to say, all right, that's what's in the dirt. If that works out over time, and we're not gonna try to demonstrate a resource on this, like independent of what's going on, because if we did that, we would have to restate the PEA and all the expense and all the time. We're not gonna do this. We would expect to see this in pre-feasibility study. But essentially, take a look at what, say call it 200 PPM if you like that, apply a recovery factor, I don't know, call it 50%. Now you're at 100 PPM and we're looking at moving, what is it, 2.9 million tons, 3 million tons a year. I think that's what it is in the PEA, right?

48:02 And you can sort of get an idea. And again, these aren't gonna be high, high tonnages, certainly nothing like what you're seeing with the boron and lithium. But remember, the optionality, or I would say even the value from this is that they're there, okay? And people want them. And if, you know, it's not like you're going to be able to go and find many places where you can get 50,000 tons of, you know, neodymium. I don't think that they exist anyway. But the point is, this is all additive. So if we're going after the other stuff and this stuff exists, and essentially the cost is de minimis, or even if there's a cost, what do you think the odds are that for somebody who this stuff is strategic, maybe it's government entity, maybe it isn't, maybe they'd foot the cost for the incremental costs for doing this at the very least.

48:50 So, you know, that's the way I look at it. The tonnages may not be big, but the thing is is that it is additional tonnage and that's what's important. That's the way I would look at it. Excellent answer. I think we have one more question here and then we can wrap up. What are the next 2 concrete milestones investors should watch to validate the BORON opportunity? What does success look like for shareholders over the next 12 months? And how does this boron change the trajectory? And I'm just going to leave that as the closing remarks. So feel free to answer. And we'll close things off after this question. OK. So the way I'm interpreting it, so it's the boron, if they're asking specifically just about the boron, as opposed to the lithium boron, I would say that the next thing that we're going to be looking at with regards to the boron would come out over the course of the pre-feasibility study, and it would have to do with the recovery.

49:45 And the reason is because in the PEA, we were looking at recovering, I think it was 48% of the boron. And that decision was made because at that point in time, whether or not the incremental cost to go after more of the boron would essentially be worth it, okay? You know, whether additional asset consumption, the facilities that you would need, all of this kind of stuff. Now, given that, you know, boron prices have, well, they've doubled since then. And, you know, I remember telling people too, when we came out with the PEA, that we were very conservative at that point in time because some of our competitors slash colleagues who had boron had used much, much higher, higher prices than even what we're seeing right now. Would I be comfortable taking up the boron price if things continue, absolutely, as we go into PFS.

50:35 But this is still a lithium first project. In the midst of all this good news, in the midst of all this additional optionality that I'm presenting to you, please understand that still we're lithium first. If boron has doubled, that's great. Like I said, I don't think we're going to 20% of the revenue or pardon me, 20% to 40% of the revenue, maybe it goes to 30%. But again, if you think about it, if 950 boron takes out $2,000 of cost on the lithium, I'd assume that essentially another 950, say we go to 1,900, takes another $2,000 off it. Now we're first quartile, right? And I would say that the lithium the lithium projects in Nevada you're again you're in my opinion you're never going to see them directly compete with say the salars you know in terms of costs say in South America. Now there's all other things that you need to consider in terms of mining jurisdiction, security of your investment, all these sorts of things, threats of nationalism, et cetera. But, you know, obviously the boron is a big thing.

51:45 And I think that if we can increase again the recovery on top of the increase in rising prices, you're going to see that all manifest itself in the PFS. If we hit stuff at the pilot level and it looks like we have a significant increase in the recovery, would that be worthy of a news release? Yes. But again, to quantify it, you would basically have to go and you'd have to do your own calculations. We'd be doing more back of the envelope stuff. That's the way I would look at the boron. So if that's the last question, and I've basically used up my time, just let me wrap it up with you know saying it Kyle is at it or do you have one? No, that's it for questions. So feel free to wrap up. Thank you. Okay, so I'll just wrap up saying look. Thanks again to everybody I know that this kind of stuff gets really convoluted, but what the picture I'm trying to paint for you is that we're basically just layering on one piece of value over top of another, over top of another. We're doing this as quickly as we can. We're doing this as rationally as we can. I think the results, if you look back over the course of the past year, have been tremendous.

52:54 And I think that obviously the centerpiece of everything that we have at Bonnie Clare is that preliminary economic assessment, which was done at lithium prices, which frankly are not too far away all of a sudden from where we are now And that when I think you look Logically at what it's going to take to bring global supply up to make global demand particularly in a world again a bifurcated Supply which means China non China in a world where clearly we have scarcity of supply that's worth something, what are basically long-term lithium prices going to look like? And all of a sudden, folks, you're not back where you had $9,000, $10,000, $12,000 spot, and people were saying, well, it's never going to work at that. Well, of course it was never going to work at that. The point was those spot prices were never real. They're not indicative of what's needed. So if you believe in the EVs, if you believe that Chinese EVs are essentially going to get to the US in 1 form or another, or at least the technology from these EVs is going to get to the US in 1 form or another, which EVs of US auto manufacturers.

53:56 And that global demand is going to be somewhere around 3 million tons, and that the global shortage is going to be considerable starting very, very quickly. And if you believe that the Chinese have stopped screwing around with depressing lithium prices, and if you believe that critical minerals really are critical to the US, and that the interest from the government and other quasi-industrial or slash government entities, that interest is real. And you believe that the people who are in charge in Washington have a different view than what has been there previously. And if you believe in basically what that PEA is telling you is a first very broad brushstroke of what the value is in the ground, but not counting any of the critical minerals and not counting what the real long-term price of boron is. And you look at what that net present value is and know that we could take pieces of it through various exits, or we could build it, or perhaps the NPV is actually a multiple of what there is now through a lower discount rate.

54:52 If you believe in any of that, you see what the outsized reward is for the risk that you're taking. And I hope that you would take a look. And I thank you all for your support and I know it's stunk to be a lithium investor for the past year and a half, but I think it's getting better. I think the lightning at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train. And I thank you for your time again and they're all ended. And we thank you for yours. It was a great update and thank you everyone for submitting questions. If you came in a little late, the replay will be ready within the next couple of hours or so. So stay tuned for that. Steve, thank you