Nevada Lithium Announces Robust Preliminary Economic Assessment

0:08 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this live Nevada Lithium event. Today we're joined by Stephen Rentschler, CEO, and Jeff Wilson, VP Exploration, to further discuss the robust PEA of the Bonnie Clare project. Just a couple of housekeeping items before we begin. This event is being recorded and the replay will be available shortly after we conclude. Also, as this is a live event,

0:30 And so I would encourage you to submit any questions you may have in the chat box, which can be found in the bottom right corner of your screen. With that said, gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. Stephen, perhaps let's start with what are your initial thoughts on these PEA results, and what does this milestone mean for Nevada Lithium as we move forward? We've been getting a lot of new eyes on the story, so maybe a quick look back at the rationale behind this PEA would also be helpful. Yeah, that's super, Kyle. I think it's a great place to start. First of all, thanks very much to everybody for taking the time. Not quite in the dog days of August, but I know that things are still busy for everybody. You know, obviously we released, I think, an excellent piece of news with the technical report, a preliminary economic assessment yesterday morning. You know, actually the very first thing I wanna do is just compliment and congratulate our technical team who put this together.

1:22 I think this has been a superb report. I think the output of it has just been eye popping for a lot of people. Notwithstanding market reaction right now, I think it's the kind of thing that is going to continue to help us gain traction as we tell this story about really the value of the asset that we have here at Bonny Clare. This is a world class lithium boron asset. And I think you know the numbers are very very hard to argue against that. And I'll give you a perspective, first of all, as sort of an investor from the past, that was my prior life. When you see things like IRRs in the 30% range, when you see NPVs to CapEx ratios of over 3, all those kind of things. These are very, very strong metrics. That's just on the investment side and I'm not going to read through the entire table for you. But again, for us, a $6.8 billion NPV, that's after tax, an 8% discount rate.

2:21 We've got a 32.3% after tax IRR. We're going to have an initial cap ex of a little over 2 billion dollars. What's also very important here, I think very strong metrics are on the risk side. And that's the capital intensity of what this project is. So what that means is if you're sort of new to the area, it's, you know, how many dollars do you have to put in for pounds or tons of production coming out. So the way you think about it here with Bonnie Clare is we'll be pushing out over 62, 63 thousand tons of a lithium carbonate per year for over 60 years. We'll be throwing out basically a hundred and 29,000 almost a hundred and 30,000 tons of boric acid per year for over 60 years.

3:12 And to do that, the upfront capital is again a little over $2 billion. The capital intensity to do that is, I think we're the best in Nevada. I think our other investment metrics are the best in Nevada as well, but when you couple that from the risk profile of saying how many dollars do you need to invest to get this kind of production, it takes on to me a whole different aspect to this project. You marry that with the fact that the payback for this project, the way it's modeled out now is under 3 years. All of a sudden, you've got really the complete package, right? You don't have just stupendous investment metrics but you've got a reduced risk profile. Again this is at the PEA level so this is sort of the first shot at the economics.

3:58 But it's an excellent starting point. And when you marry that with the fact that our mining jurisdiction is second to none, Nevada, USA, you see that the risk profile just, I think, becomes superlative. So when I sum up sort of everything about this PEA, I really can't think of a metric on which we don't excel. Now, these Nevada clay-based or sediment-hosted projects, these are not salars in South America. I often hear this, well, you don't have a $3,000 a ton operating costs or things like that. This is the reality of the situation with these projects. We wouldn't even be looking in Nevada for lithium unless it was needed by the world going forward. And so here I'm going to just divert a little bit into sort of what I see coming up and how I think Bonnie Clare fits in.

4:50 Despite sort of the antics of let's just call it for what it is, I think Chinese traders, stockpilers and things like that, that have been depressing the lithium price, The demand for actual lithium has been skyrocketing. You see that in everything sales. You hear me talk many times about EVs. We see that globally they continue at a torrid pace. The overall rate 25, 28 percent. In Europe and China, those rates stay up there. The U.S. Has tailed off a little bit in the first half of this year. But the point is that the technology continues to advance. The quality of the cars continues to advance. You have certain, you know, basically geopolitical aspects that have been put into this whole thing so that you have a distorted pricing mechanism for lithium, right? We all know this about the tariffs.

5:38 We've seen now all about the potential benefits for building in the US, accelerated depreciation schedules, all of this sort of stuff. And frankly, from my perspective, it all works to the benefit of Nevada lithium shareholders. I mean, just let me try to put some context to what's going on in, say, the battery space. You've seen battery densities go up on orders of magnitude, right? This is how much power you can get out of a given pound of a battery. That all equates into making EVs cheaper and making the ranges extend. There have been extraordinary leaps in electric motors themselves. This is 1 that I saw sort of the other day, but Mercedes has got in their hands basically electric motors that are capable of 600 horsepower each that weigh about 30 pounds.

6:30 To put that in perspective, the power density of that is on the order of over 40 times. If you only go back to the end of World War II, where the sort of the pinnacle of piston powered engines, right, hydrocarbon engines, Rolls Royce, Merlins, Pratt & Whitney, you know, double wasp, all this sort of thing, cranking out 2,000 horsepower. You're talking about power to weight ratios of 1, 1.2. Now you're at 40. This is the kind of technology, right, that's occurring in the EV space, and it's all coming together. The EVs I think are on the way to basically through Mexico first into the US from China. There's no way that we're going to see this stop over time. The Chinese want to sell their cars in the US.

7:15 This is where they can get essentially their margins. The US understands that. And what's going to happen, in my opinion, is you're going to see joint production facilities put up or licensing technology, something like that. If you've been following, you see that very recently Tesla started building batteries up in Sparks, Nevada. Right, they're using CATL, Chinese technology, and they're paying a licensing fee. I think this is the way of the future going forward, to develop these industries, including the critical minerals. And in my opinion, we're going to see that basically buttressed by the development of a sovereign wealth fund in the U.S. And I've seen various bits and pieces in the press about this being developed in other bills that are currently in the house.

8:02 I say this because, again, even though I think we put out a tremendous PEA that not only shows areas where we can build on it, the optimization that we can do, we outlined them a little bit to the extent that we could in a technical news release. But it's things like ore beneficiation or ore sorting, right? Getting rid of the material that we don't necessarily think has lithium in it. So we're not processing as much. You know, extra work on reagent pricing. Can we use slightly different reagents? Maybe not lime, but maybe limestone that's cheaper. And then there are possibly the effects of this, you know, basically legislation that has just come through the US and isn't fully defined yet, but I think it's getting there, which would allow for basically, you know, the expensing of the capital to build things like Bonnie Clare. I mean you can think of Bonnie Clare as a mine but frankly I think it's a manufacturing plant. Yeah we're going to have borehole drilling. Looks like bringing stuff up but that immediately gets piped into a plant, and that's where the separation takes place. And remember, we're not going to be shipping this material anywhere around the world, right? The idea is we upgrade it there, and it goes right to the battery places that are springing up all over the US, whether it's the Midwest, the Southeast, whatever, perhaps up into the Northwest of the country.

9:23 So I think at this point in time, what I would say to people is, yeah, I understand that the market isn't really looking at it. I think obviously we've been through and are continuing to go through some very turbulent times. But I'm sensing that there's an inflection point. In particular, I don't know, is over the last couple of weeks, you've seen that the Chinese has started to take some additional production offline. Again, we've seen this before with regards to Rare Earths back 2010 to 2012 where the Chinese were trying to protect their domestic industries. But they come basically to their senses. And I think they understand that at this point in time, these Chinese cars have got to come to the US and they're going to have to have batteries that are made with US components and critical minerals in them. And if they continue with what they're doing, then none of these projects are going to get done. Right. Because everybody looks at basically what the spot price is and then says, well, you know, we can never build it. And I'll sort of end my opening remarks with this thought about the pricing that we use. So we use $24,000 a ton of lithium in our PEA. Current spot price is, I don't know, $9,500, $10,000 a ton, something like that, in China or somewhere in Asia. Right. So that's what everybody calls spot.

10:42 Bork acid pricing, we use $950. That's about currently what it is from the analysis that we've seen. The way to think, in my opinion, about sort of what the pricing that's appropriate to use for projects in the future in an industry like lithium is not what the trailing 3 years is or the last 6 months or whatever, you get nonsensical numbers with that when you're in an industry that's just starting to be built out and is accelerating at this at the speed that it is on the demand side. We're also being distorted again by the fact that China dominates 80% of the resources, 90% of the resources, and more importantly, the refining capacity, right, to bring this up to battery grade. You need to look at the incentive pricing that's necessary to get projects like Bonnie Clare basically over the finish line. And if you look at our industry colleagues slash peers, you'll see that 20, 22, $24,000

11:40 is the kind of pricing that generates IRRs that frankly aren't as good as ours. However, they are the kind of IRRs that are going to be necessary to get somebody to invest the capital right. The time and the capital to put those projects into into place in terms of again the boric acid price we used. It's the current price to the best that we know. It's more of an opaque industry that is for sure than lithium. However that price is a lot less aggressive than than some of our other industry colleagues have used going forward. So the reason I bring this up is is that as it stands I don't think that we're saying oh Bonnie Clare could only be built in this future world where maybe we'll get these prices. We need these prices. If these prices do not come to fruition, you won't get basically lithium being developed in the US. And again, you know, I'm saying I'm not quite sure what's going on with the DLE guys. That's a story that I've been hearing for a number of years. You know, again, non-commercialized

12:40 technology. But I doubt it's going to be as cheap as what everybody thinks. And there's a whole sets of hurdles. We all have them, but there's different sets of hurdles that need to be overcome with DLE. If you think that the EVs are going to play out, and again, that we're going to end up somewhere needing 2 and a half to 3 million dollars of lithium carbon equivalent, and say now the next 5 years or whatever, as far as I'm concerned, all of that is gonna need to be built out. And it gives you an indication of what the prices are going to be if that's going to happen. So as I always try to wrap up when I talk to shareholders, talk to people, If you believe in EVs, if in fact now you believe in all these data centers, these AI stuff that's coming in and the need for uninterruptible power, right? I mean, the reality is the US grid, they're talking about the power that's going for these AI centers from 4% last year up to 12% in only 4 years.

13:36 I don't understand how the US grid can either a generate or distribute that kind of power. From my perspective

13:43 you're gonna see Google, you're gonna see Meta or whatever, Apple, all of these guys, they're going to be building their own energy, basically, generation. And then they're going to need batteries to hold it. Because I don't know about you, but every time I trip over a power cord, or we have a brownout, or we have a storm, and the PC goes out, all sorts of crap happens. And I can't even imagine what would happen in an AI data center. So

14:08 my thoughts are, this is an excellent outcome. This is an excellent starting point. I hope that you're all excited. I'm very sorry. It took a little bit longer than what we had hoped, but the world's been changing to an extraordinary extent. We wanted to take a little extra time and just make sure we understood going forward where we wanted to concentrate. But I think that the wait was worth it, and I hope You do too. Steven, thank you so much for that introduction. It's a great way to kick it off. I do want to bring Jeff into the conversation though. Jeff, thank you for joining us. The decision to focus exclusively on the lower zone for this PEA is interesting. How are the zones different? Could the upper zone also have economic value in the future? Sure, I mean,

14:52 the upper zone, so what we have is 2 deposits, we've got the upper zone and the lower zone. The upper zone consists of about 1000 ppm material,

15:05 and maybe a couple of thousand ppm boron. And it's got the title material, it's got a lot of quartz and feldspar, And it could be exploited through an open pit method, we might come back to that. The lithium and boron, you know, they might be existing as free salts within the pore space, something like that.

15:29 But you can get a lot of this type of mineralization in Nevada. With the lower zone, which sits under the upper zone at, you know,

15:43 1500 to 2500, 3000 feet, It's a much higher grade material. Rather than a thousand ppm you've got 3 4 or 5000 ppm lithium and rather than a couple of thousand ppm boron you have 10,000 ppm boron. So you have 5 million tons lithium carbonate indicated 25

16:12 inferred and then 100 million tons boric acid equivalent between the inferred and indicated. And we really felt that the market has responded to the lower zone, which is, as far as I can tell, a unique kind of deposit of this type.

16:33 And I'd like to add on here because I wanted Jeff to talk about the differences between sort of the upper and the lower zone and put it into a context too of why we did this PEA because I've also been asked many times by people, well, why are you doing another PEA? So, especially for people who are sort of new to our story, let me just do this quick recap.

16:56 You know, 4 years ago, approximately, a PEA was done on Bonnie Clare. And this was Nevada Lithium at the time was 20% owner and we weren't the operator. But we also didn't obviously have access to the knowledge about the deep zone at the time.

17:11 What happened is, and I'm a layman, so here are the layman terms, the mineralization changed. Okay. So that means that we wanted to bake, you know, previously with the other PEA, we were going to basically, you know, bake a loaf of pumpernickel bread. And now we do the deep drilling and basically we say, okay, we want to go and bake some pumpernickel bread, but the flour has changed, right? The composition has changed. We can't. We can only make wheat bread, right, because of what's happened. When that kind of stuff happens, it's not like you just say, oh, okay, we're going to advance. We're just going to go forward now into PFS. You don't do that. There was no way that we were not going to be able to do this PEA. We had to do it. We have a whole different deposit on our hands than what we had previously. Now, we think it's better, right? Previously, we didn't know about the boron, didn't have that in there. That certainly helped.

18:04 The grades are much higher. Probably going to speak about this a little bit. But the thing is, is that we're not done finding stuff. And the potential for making that sort of that new flower that

18:15 we have that's in the lower zone, that could get even better. So I just wanted to throw that in there, sort of little context about that's why a PEA was necessary to do this, you know, not just because we wanted to do it. This is a whole different ball game. In the previous PEA, we were basically using a calcination, a thermal mechanism to extract the lithium metal. In the lower zone, we have a lot more cerlozite, which is a boron mineral, which gives us our high boron grades. And that's required a change in our methodological method from calcining to a bulk acid leach. And we had to go back this time last year and engage floor to

19:04 redo our flow sheet. And that's all detailed in our, in the PEA. Yeah. So with an updated PEA with resources remaining open in 3 directions, I believe, and grades potentially increasing. Does this correlate with finding the bottom of the basin that Bonnie Claire is sitting in? Well, we have hit the basin a couple of times in our drilling, about 2,900, 3,000 feet. And we imagine that that's going to be consistent throughout the resource area. We have a relatively good handle on it through our geophysics, both seismic and IP. And we expect that to continue north and south for a considerable distance. Other parts of the basin are a lot deeper, but we haven't explored those. But we expect the depth of mineralization to be relatively similar along the axis of this elongate fault-bounded basin.

20:10 Jeff, do me a favor, will you tell everybody again about sort of we're in this big drainage basin and just how you're thinking about like how the lithium got there. So this kind of deposit you would call a volcano sedimentary, volcano sedimentary deposit. OK, what you do is you have During continental extension, you get melting at the base of the crust, you get a lot of melt coming up, forms a volcano at the surface, it blows its top, you get a lot of volcanic ash flow and it fills in either the caldera itself or the or a basin immediately next to it. So in our case, we have a very deep, elongate, trans-tensional fault basin, Sarcobitus Flats, and it's filled up with this ash flow tuff.

21:06 And then we've had a hydrothermal event go through that. And it's given us this, it's pulled the lithium out, the meteoric fluid, The meteoric water has pulled the lithium out, it's circulated in this basin, and then you get a recrystallization, a kind of a hydrothermal recrystallization, to give you, you know, probably illite, maybe some muscovite, with cerulzite, within this basin. And so what you have are large volumes, very continuous, laterally continuous, vertically continuous, increasing in grade towards the main controlling structure, which we think is an elongation of the state line fault zone, which extends

21:56 along to the northwest and southeast. And if I'm not mistaken, correct, part of the reason that we have these massive intercepts, like hundreds of metres of these types of sediments, is based on literally the size of this bathtub. I mean, I think of Bonneclair as a bathtub with everything draining in towards us. You know, I mean, this formed a few million years ago, but basically you have a very large,

22:22 very rapidly evolving sedimentary basin next to a volcano that's dumping a lot of lithium-rich ash flows, ash flow tufts into the basin. And then you get a hydrothermal overprint on top of that, which may have come along the fault, it may have come out of the volcano. We're still trying to work that out. But it's a large volume of material from a very large volcano next door with a very large hydrothermal event, we're thinking.

22:58 This is one of a number of deposits of this type around restricted to Nevada, but it's a very large deposit, very continuous high grades, and it's not unique, but it's pretty unusual to see these kinds of grades over these kinds of distances. And I think it's because of this unique geology of the proximity to the very large volcano in the Walker Lane fault zone. And one of the reasons I wanted Jeff to sort of bring this out now is because, again, you've heard me speak in the past as we've continued to sort of talk about Bonnie Clare, go to conferences and all. It's this level of professional curiosity from academia, from the big strategics, et cetera. I've often talked about I'll come back, I'll go to one-on-one meetings, Jeff will be at the booth. I come back and he's holding court and he's got a dozen people talking and they're talking geology.

23:56 This is a very, very special deposit. And you're gonna be hearing more about this in the future. I don't think it's gonna be in the too distant future. But for those of you who are, might be watching sort of for the first time or just starting to get a handle on what we have here, it's important, I think that Jeff puts it out there because again, I mean, I think again, the PEA demonstrates the value, but the magnitude of this thing, and from my perspective, the additional value is just tremendous. And it's all derived from basically the geology. Yeah, and if you have a curiosity around this deposit type I would certainly recommend you read Francesco Puzzolo's survey paper in the most recent most recent issue of Economic Geology and he talks about the deposit type in great depth.

24:47 Up until now, the understanding of the deposit has been dominated by Thakar Pass, which is kind of sitting in the caldera. We are adjacent to the caldera in a fault basement. I think we may prove to be either the largest, one of the largest fault examples of this deposit. That's super. Sorry, Kyle, go ahead. No, I like these tangents. I'm going to bring it back here and remind people to submit questions. I see quite a few questions submitted, but I just see an individual wrote a question that I had prepared as well. In layman terms, what is the likely method of extracting the lithium, which seems to be quite deep? So what I was going to ask you, Jeff, was hydraulic borehole mining is not a tremendously well-known mining technique. From a geological perspective, what gives you the confidence that this technique could work at Bonny Clare?

25:40 Well, we have material which is solid but it's still friable, even at depth. So Terri Lane, our external QP, has suggested that conventional underground methods would be a challenge. So she suggested this hydraulic borehole mining method. And so in that case, we do a series of wells, 30 meter diameter, within a 280 foot circle. We case it down to about 450 meters and then we start to scour out the material. And then we airlift that through a production well which is offset from that 280 foot cell back up to the surface. So by the time it hits the surface we're thinking you know you have a slurry which is maybe 25 percent solids.

26:34 It feeds directly from

26:38 the rig right into the production plant. And we're confident that it works. Certainly, we've engaged Kinley Exploration, who build these rigs, to have a look at that. And at some point soon we'll certainly do a lot more hands-on experimentation and pilot testing of that method to determine primarily how the material at depth behaves. At the moment, we've modeled it numerically.

27:10 And certainly, Colin Kinley has looked at that. He's certainly very confident that it's going to work. But until we do a pilot test of the material in real time, that will be the real proof of the method. Right, and I would add this as well. One of the questions that we had is we continue to find this very high-grade material at ever deeper depths. So the way the progression went from 2,500 feet, then to 2,700, then to 3,000, that kind of stuff. The question was, well, would borehole mining still be able to basically get to it? They were very, very confident that certainly from the drilling perspective.

27:58 And again, all we're doing is injecting water, high pressure water that erodes the material. To Jeff's point, it's very friable. The way I like to say it is you could take the core from 3,000 feet down and you can basically crumble it in your hand, right? So soft material. You erode that away, now you're pumping mud back to the surface. So now the question becomes is, hey, can you continue to get it up to the surface as you go deeper?

28:23 And they have techniques. These are very tried and true techniques. You know, hydraulic airlifts, putting bubbles into that stream that's coming up to increase the buoyancy, right? To bring that material up. That's being done off the seabed floor at much deeper depths. So there really does not seem to be an issue. The question always becomes the economic value of doing it, right? Is the value of what you're bringing up in the grand scheme of things, not just the excavation, but in the whole, from beginning to end, is it worth going after the material? Because that's, the cost is gonna be associated with the horsepower that you have to put in there to get everything back up. So, the borehole mining has been used in other types of things. You'll often hear me talk about, again, Cameco and Cigar Lake, Orvano's starting up, but they have a Sabre.

29:11 It's a very similar kind of a thing. We may be the deepest. I'm not actually sure if it's true, but it doesn't look like depth is really going to be the constraint.

29:22 Unless you have anything else to add to that, Jeff? No, I said that pretty much covers it. As I say, Colin Kinley, who builds these rigs, seems entirely confident that it can work in this environment at these debts. Thank you. I want to go back to you, Steve. I know you've mentioned in the past the 1 Big Beautiful Bill Act could enhance project metrics. Can you quantify the potential impact of these new tax provisions on the IRR and payback period? Are there other areas for optimization? Yeah, and you know I'll start with the with the other areas I think first. You know, and these are all areas where you know I'm just telling you my thoughts here and sort of my own internal calculations on some of them in a bit. So these are not things that, you know, that have been approved by the engineers, the regulators or anything like that, but it gives you an idea of sort of the way, you know, I think about things.

30:17 The first thing is, is again, you think about the deposit that we have, right? The very high grades of lithium and

30:24 boron, which frankly, they work together to get our recoveries to where they are. The boron is used in the counter cycle leaching circuit with the sulfuric acid. You basically you're hitting stuff twice with sulfuric acid. But the first time around it may not be virgin sulfuric acid. It may have already been used. Again, I'm not a metallurgist. I don't want to screw this up too badly. But the reality is that you're using that sulfuric gas to get 2 things out, right? To get the boron out and to get the lithium out. If you throw higher grade Lithium in there, you need more boron. It seems like we've got enough boron to go with it. But the point is, again, in rough terms, the higher the grade you throw through it, everything else staying equal, the lower your cost will go.

31:14 We have not necessarily found the highest grade material at Bonnie and Claire. We're open in 3 directions. You know, would we necessarily double the grades?

31:23 I doubt it for what it is, but you don't know. Increments make a big difference up here. Do we get another 5%? I don't know, 2% or whatever, but it's there. So that's one area for us to basically expand upon going forward. We talked about sort of the ore beneficiation, which is, again, do we get rid of the larger size material that we have? Because we've known that the lithium is in the fines, right? The very, very small, small size material. You know, the big material also has got a lot of acid absorbing basically characteristics. But again, the chemistry, it's a balancing agent. So, Flore, and again, Flore has done this kind of stuff, you know, not just for us.

32:10 Their QPs have been on all the big projects, including the other big one in Nevada that's got boron, right? So they know what they're talking about. You know, they felt that the countercycle was a better way to go because it would reduce acid more than if we did beneficiation. But the point is that there might actually be some sort of marriage of the 2. So that's another area, You know, and there are many of them, you know, one of the things we've seen in another industry peers come out talking about the critical materials that are also in their ore. We have them too. That doesn't mean that we necessarily explored other than the fact that we know we have them, but in terms of how to get them out of our ore, that's not

32:53 something that we've done. But clearly, there's a reason to look at it. You start looking at these rare earths that are generating all the interest right now that could be additive to what we have. We've always known we had a high levels of potassium. That was particularly in the material from the other PEAs who are at higher levels, but we talked about the potential for fertilizer. I'm not sure that we're done with that. So it's all these kinds of things that we have that are inherent to the deposit itself.

33:22 And then we have the time that we live in now, which is the U.S. Is doing what it's doing to onshore everything. You try to bring manufacturing capability back to the U.S. As well as securing critical mineral supply. Hence the big, one big beautiful bill. And it's all about the expensing of basically capital equipment. And now it looks like construction, Construction of the factories themselves, which, and this is where it can get tricky, right? Have got to be done by a certain deadline. Looks to me like it's the end of 2031. That would be right on the cusp of what we could do in an environment where we have all the money that we need so that we could double up on rigs, start throwing everything in environmental permitting, all of this kind of stuff.

34:09 So I'm not trying to kid anybody. It would be tough. However, the impact could be huge. So I'm just going to tell you, when I worked it out and basically saying, hey, what happens if we can expense out, you know, the you know, all the mining equipment, the plan equipment, all that kind of stuff. It adds almost another 5 percent to the IRR and about another 900 million dollars of NPV. Right. That's the kind of money you're talking about for an accelerated development schedule. And I will tell you already, you know, because we just released the numbers yesterday morning, that that kind of thing is not lost on, let's just say, some very big companies around the world, right, who want to get into the US,

34:51 who understand that they're being impacted by terrorists, and now on top of it we had the big beautiful bill. Now, I just want to caution everybody again, when the Inflation Reduction Act was put into place It took, I think it was almost 9 months before everything was fully fleshed out. I don't think it would take that long here, quite honestly. But you know, we're just at the very beginning of this. However, the impact is there. And you know, again, there's numbers that I just gave to everybody, that's Steve messing around with the economic model. So please don't take that as gospel. You can try it yourself and see what you get, but I think you're going to come in the ballpark with what I'm seeing. So those are the areas. So just to sum up before we go to Q&A, again, all my thanks and kudos to the technical guys who did this. This is a monumental task. And I'll tell you quite honestly, Jeff, really, really, he shouldered the burden on this.

35:43 I think it's a stupendous outcome. I think the market is going to recognize it. I think Bonnie Clare is maybe a one of a kind deposit, but in a good way. And I still continue to think that this

35:55 is going to be a project that is going to be the centerpiece of the US lithium industry going forward. So At that point in time, I think, go ahead, Kyle, let's see if anybody's got any questions. There's a lot of questions. I'm just trying to figure out which thread to pull on. You just did mention rare earths, so maybe I'll ask Peter Epstein's question here. Might there be any other exploitable materials, in brackets, credits, besides boron, REEs, anything like that. Yeah. And I'm not trying to say either that we're the only ones who have them. You know, it's again, it's just the geology. And I don't want to go too far with this, but we see them in our assays. And I mean, Jeff, you're obviously the geologist, and I know you always caution me to sort of not go too far with this, but I would like people to know that, you know, the possibility exists. Do you want to have a comment on that?

36:43 Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, the rare earth, we have a good 200-300 ppm of a wide range of the rare earths. And that's a function of this caldera volcanic history. And all of these deposits will have 1 version or another of that. One thing which we're certainly in discussion with the engineering firms as to whether it's a possibility, and I suspect that will be part of our projected work program in the next 6 months to a year. But of course, when you're predicating everything on your lithium, your primary lithium grade and maximizing that extraction, everything else takes a hit.

37:35 And if you go for rare earths, then chances are boron and lithium would take a hit if you are focusing more on them. So there's always a bit of a give and take, you know. But certainly they are in there. And the folks in engineering firms are working on this kind of thing with other clients. So it's something we certainly would be interested in investigating going forward. Right. So and again, it's with all these kinds of things, it becomes trade off in capital. And I look at it again, and this is sort of the way I thought about Boron. It's you know, If it's additive, if it helps me get my primary product out, so in that case, obviously, it's still the lithium and we're doing it at 85%, just right in the ballpark of what everybody else is doing. Maybe we could tweak that higher.

38:30 But we're still going to be running a couple million tons of material through the plant every year. So even at low PPMs, if the recoveries are anywhere reasonable, you never know. And it's not like these types of materials, the cesium, whatever, other REEs, that kind of stuff. You're not talking about, you know, tens of millions of tons, the kind of thing, like it's not copper or anything like that. You can get significant value for relatively low tonnages of these materials. So, yeah, we're looking at it. But I just, you know, certainly when we were in the most recent fast markets in Las Vegas, there seemed to be a lot of boutique DLE companies who are not just looking at lithium, they're looking at a wide range of different potential elements that they can extract.

39:23 So that might be something that will change dramatically over the next 5 years or so. Yeah, yeah. There's about 15 questions lined up here and I just want to preface that before I ask this question just so to make sure we keep it brief. But how does the U.S. Tariff affect your business? I think they're going to be very important. And the reason I say this is because we've always talked about price distortion. And the inability to find really what the market clearing price of lithium is going to be. And I think that's basically it's we saw it again with under the Inflation Reduction Act with the EV tax credits. In my mind, it's just taken a different form.

40:08 Right. And this is with the tariffs in China, whether you agree with it or not. You know, clearly, the Trump administration has got a certain way of approaching China. And I think the way it's going to manifest itself is essentially protection of US industries. You know, we're going to, in my opinion, we're going to have multiple, you know, sources of pricing. You're going to have an Asian price, a Chinese price for lithium. You're going to have a price in North America that can be used and be applicable to avoid the tariffs. I think it works to our favor. This is just a consequence of the U.S. Being the dominant consumer marketplace in the world. So the US administration can sort of throw its weight around with that.

40:54 There are many, many Chinese cars companies out there. I think there's over 75 of them. They're in like a cost cutting war right now. They're surviving. There's way too many of them. There's all sorts of information that's coming out about it. But look, they know that they want to get to the U.S. Right. U.S. Is the second biggest car market after China domestically. It's where they can make really make their margins. They're not going to be able to do it on the terms that they wanted to previously. This is one of the reasons I sort of brought up about that whole CATL battery technology plant that Tesla just put in. I think that's sort of a view of what the future is going to look like. You know, hey, you know, maybe you can't make 100% of the money, you know, Mr. BYD or, you know, NIO or whomever it's going to be, but 50% of something is better than nothing.

41:42 And the tariffs are the tariffs are what's making that important you know for the U.S. And that's just the trickle down effect to us. I'm very very intrigued again by all this stuff coming and don't know about the way it's going to play out in terms of US energy generation. Is it going to be everybody's going to have their own solar farm, all these AI centers? Are they going to be hooked up directly to natural gas fields like in the, you know, I don't know, the Fayetteville Shale or down in Odessa or whatever the deal is going to be. But again, the battery component, the storage ability is really, to me, what's key. That's a whole another avenue. It's a very small kind of a piece of the pie right now, but it's growing very quickly. And I think it's growing quicker than most people realize. The batteries, iron phosphate batteries, again, it's hard to believe that was an American invention. The Chinese took and ran with it.

42:34 But all of the Chinese batteries are going to be suffering from the tariffs again. And you know that the technology is going to be developed here. I mean I'm not talking about the solid state stuff and all that kind of stuff. I mean when I say here I don't necessarily mean in the US, but I just mean it's coming. And anything that is developed here is gonna have that natural tariff barrier with it. So to me, it's all good. And I don't see it going away anytime soon. Thank you. Moving on to some PEA related questions here. This was from an individual that submitted them upon registration. Why do you use different prices for lithium and why are they so disconnected to the actual price? And a follow-up question, Why is the cap X so high?

43:21 Well, this goes back to some of the comments that I made earlier about the pricing, but I'll turn around and I'll start with the end, which is I don't think this cap X is very high at all. I know people might say billions of dollars, you know, oh, well, that's a lot. Sure, in absolute terms, it still is. But when you're talking about developing world class assets, $2 billion is not a lot of money. I'll just tell you, you know, 25 years ago, maybe it was a lot of money when I was looking at different projects, things like that. You know, you want to see mega projects. There are big oil and gas projects. There are, you know, potash, Janssen, you know, 10, 15 billion dollars. Then I agree with you. 2 billion dollars with a potential payback of under 3 years. I mean, if you know what that really indicates is you know let's just say if everything were to go belly up and you're you're there Mr. Strategic you know mining house that got involved with Bonnie Clare you know you cut your losses and you run. This is not something that you're putting capital into for 10 years. And, you know, it's, you know, 7 billion dollars later, you realize you made an error.

44:23 This is this is not the opportunity that Bonnie Clare, you know, offers you by having the 2 billion dollar capex and a low payback. You know, along the I was going to say along the same lines. Yeah, go ahead. With regard to the $2 billion, $1.3 billion of that is the acid plant. You know, so when we went from calcining to acid, acid plants are not cheap, you know, and every project in Nevada, which is going down this road, requires that, you know, and that's just the reality of the situation. Yes, and that's, in my opinion, that's a relative argument. As I said, to me the project is not the same project that Bonnie Clare was 4 years ago. And in a relative sense to again other to other projects in Nevada, our capital Again, our capital intensity, that low, that $32,000 number, $30,000 number, whatever it is, is showing you that.

45:22 This is frankly, this is a cheap project, in my opinion, in absolute terms and in relative terms. Again, just to reiterate the pricing for those who may not have been there at the beginning, looking at historical pricing, in my opinion, in the lithium industry gets you nowhere. Right. Because you've got a demand profile that is just it's just hysterically large. This is not the way in which industries are normally developed, where, you know, 3 years ago you had 500,000 tons a year of lithium carbonate. And you're looking at projections in another 5 years of going up to 2 and a half 3 million tons a year. What's going to be needed. That kind of compounded annual growth rate is not something that is going to be linear. It's not something that's going to basically produce rational pricing. You look at what's occurred in lithium, the spike that we had, what was it, 14, 16 months ago.

46:13 Where would you take the average? Would you make it straight across the middle of that bell curve? Would you take a 45 degree? It just, it doesn't matter. When you look at all the prices that are being used in Nevada, okay, again on the projects, again, basically, I think almost all $24,000 for the lithium. And that is giving you IRRs based on PEAs, preliminary feasibility studies, definitive feasibility studies that are somewhere around 20 percent, maybe a little higher, sometimes a little lower. It's given us 32 percent. But the point is, Those are the kinds of numbers that you need to see basically big partners come in who are going to help shoulder the burden on getting these things built. And to me, that's the economic incentive pricing that you should be talking about because again, if you're going to believe that all these EVs are built, that all these data centers are going to be built and they're going to be built in the US and the cars are going to be sold and built in the US, then you need this lithium coming from Nevada and those are the kind of prices that you need. And that's why you do it that way. And you just say, hey, you know, the spot may be what the spot is, but frankly, you know, 2 weeks ago was another 10% lower and another another week, it may be 10% higher.

47:21 That's not what this is about. This is about what's long term viability of those prices and yeah, I want to describe it. And the long term, the long term projections are towards this. And, you know, in terms of comparables, 24,000 is the standard number used by the various engineering, the big engineering houses for projects of this type. Yeah, I think the individual asked the question because when you look at the market cap in Nevada, lithium sub 40 million, it's a big expense, right? And a few people in the chat have this question, and you touched on partners here, Steve, but I'm just going to read you the first question that was submitted actually, and I'll let you answer that. Assuming you're moving forward with a PFS, how much money will you budget for this and will you need to raise money? If so, how will you do this? Well, yeah, we'll eventually going to need to raise money for the PFS. And that's what we're going through right now with the work program.

48:19 So I'm not going to talk about how much we need. But you mentioned a second, our market capitalization. Look, the idea is, well, here's the setting, first of all. When you're an explorer and then advancing into the development stage all this stuff, you're not producing revenue. So this is all diluted. There's no doubt about it. But what you want to try to do is show the inherent value in the project. Well that's what the PEA did. Your market cap at any point in time reflects what the market thinks about, you know, not only your stock, but maybe the industry, anything, you know, that's going on. That's a snapshot in time. You know, when it back in the old days in our prior life, many times we would sort of think about it, well, small market cap, you've got, you know, do you really have a potential to develop this? Well, the idea is that, are you necessarily gonna raise all the money on your own? The odds are pretty good that we're gonna end up with somebody along with us, somebody with more experience, somebody who wants to buy off, take somebody, all of this kind of stuff. And when you sell you know you raise money in that environment to do it you're not doing it you know and saying what do you want 30 percent of the company at the current price. Right. You want to do this as creatively as you can. This is why if you look at our marketing materials you'll see that you know do you sell it for a percentage of you know the NPV at your PFS level or your FS or whatever the deal is going to be. And the idea is until you get to that that point in time you want to raise as much money as you need to. You accept the fact that you're going to have

49:49 dilution. There's no way around it. But you don't necessarily raise the money all at once. Right. The market has ebbs and flows. You try to take advantage of that the best that you can. Remember, we've got some very, very strong shareholders, 3 sets of very strong shareholders who've been involved with lithium in the past. We're very grateful to have them help you get you get you through the valleys, that kind of a thing. So, you know, we're just going to be judicious about how we raise the money. You know, the understanding that everybody has to have is that we're not the only ones who are suffering through sort of the down cycle in lithium. But what we do in the same way as everybody else is you can get delayed. And if you get delayed that means supply is going to be farther in the future, which means it's not going to keep up with demand, which means you're going to have an even sharper price spike next time around.

50:37 And the key is really making the end users, in my opinion, the end users understand that even though lithium spot prices are X, the incentive pricing might be 3x and they have to accept that and they have to get involved. Now that's part of what we're doing. So, you know, that's how you end up raising money in markets like this. And specific to the viewer's question, The third party recommendations will be detailed in the technical report that we will be filing on CDAR. And it's a chunk of change, but we'll chip away at it as best we can. Yeah, and we don't know exactly what it is right at the second, but it'll be apparent when we file. And we'll probably be talking about it earlier than that, too. Justin had a question upon registration. I see he resubmitted here, so I'm going to address that one. What will be the estimated sulfuric acid requirements? I calculate around 2 million tons per year acid-based assumptions from the latest technical releases?

51:36 In terms of per annum, I'd have to get back to you. I don't have that off the top of my head. But we can get back to you. We could do that, I think, when we release, you know, it'll come out in the PEA, obviously, when we file it. And I'll be sharing the questions with your team because there are a few and we have about 9 minutes left, so we're trying to address as much as we can here. Sure. Let's see here. Every single clay-hosted and or DLE lithium project in the world needs at least 24,000 tons to get funded and built. There's no way around it. Oh, apologies. This is rather just a statement. Okay. Sounds good so far. Let's see here. Peter Epstein, how many potential viable clay-hosted lithium projects do you think there are in the western US?

52:26 Projects that could reasonably reach production in the next 10 years? I think there's going to be at least 3 or 4. I think there's a lot more that we don't know about, but there's no doubt that the permitting timeline, the financing timeline, all of this sort of stuff, the constraints that are there are very, very rough. But again, to my mind, you're going to need all of them coming out of Nevada if you're going to make global lithium demand and supply meet. That's just going to be the way it is. But I don't know what the absolute number is. The potential is huge. I mean, wherever you have a caldera in Nevada, you have the potential for a lithium deposit. The older the rocks, the less chance there is.

53:13 But I mean, the potential is there. So far, there's about a half dozen, which are moving forward towards production. Only 2 or 3 of them have the kind of grades that we have. And so, grade being king, that gives you some idea of which are the most likely to get the funding, I would say. So there's still potential, a lot of potential at Bonnie Clare. This individual is wondering, will you need additional fill-in drilling at all? Yes, go ahead, Jeff, why don't you take that? Depends on your definition of filling, right? I mean, we have drilled 20 holes so far, 4 of them punched through the low-grade zone.

54:00 Our external QP has told us that we should start stepping out. I mean, I'd call it a step out, they call it an infill. But, you know, spacing of 350 to 400 meters, stepping out from the 4 that we have. And, you know, to encompass the entire grade shell, the 3000 ppm grade shell, we're talking about 15 holes, but the 4 that we're predicating this on give us a 40, like a 60 year mine life. So we're stepping out to improve the geostats so we can move from inferred to indicated. I mean, as it is now, we have a lot of volume and that's going to increase.

54:51 Now you touched on drilling now, I'm just going to keep it a little broader here with Rock's question. What are your exploration plans for the rest of the year and into next? So if you just want to continue on with that, Jeff. Well, let me continue on first because that's predicated on capital and it's all tied up with what it is. But we're in the middle literally of determining that right now. And I think it's probably better just to leave it at that. Gotcha. No problem. We probably have time for one more question here and then we can do some closing remarks. I would say one thing, Kyle, actually, quick, just about the resource, because I know I've seen this comment before, too. Remember that what we're putting through with 60-year mine life, that's not the entire resource that we have. I think some people erroneously think that our massive 30 million tons or whatever has sort of disappeared. That's just constrained by this PEA, this production profile, per se.

55:49 What's naturally endowed at Bonnie Clare is massive. And this is why I always talk about the optimality here. You've heard me talk about, OK, this is deep. The borehole mining, you're talking about 3,000 feet or somewhere, high enough lithium prices. You've got tons of material, much lower grade is Jeff described potentially open pit, you never know. We have seismic, you know, we have magneto-telluric stuff that indicates, I don't know, maybe there's brine on there. This is what happens when you have basically a property that's larger than the size of Manhattan Island. You've got a lot of stuff going on. Now, that's we're not looking to deviate, but I'm just saying is that's the optionality of what's there when you think about this. This is a massive, high grade property, and this is really what gets people's eyes open.

56:39 Now we have the economics that go with it. I'd certainly encourage your viewers to read the bottom part of our press release. Our, the mining, the mine plan is based on a high grade subset of our overall resource. Our overall resource is about 3000 ppm. The economics that were stated as headlines are based on a high-grade subset of that, greater than 4,500 ppm material and 1% boron. And at that, that's, so that 60-year mine life is based on 20 to 25% of our overall resource. And as we drill that out, you know, you just choose a number for your mind life. Yeah. Yeah.

57:25 Gentlemen, that's all the time we have for today. I do want to leave Steve you a moment for closing remarks, if you have any, But thank you everyone that submitted questions. We will be sharing them with the team after as well. If you came in a little late, my team would be sure to have the recording up as soon as possible. But over to you, Steve, for any closing remarks. Super. Thanks. Well, again, thanks for taking the time. Look, you know, hopefully the market starts to respond here, not only just for us, but just with lithium in general. But I hope that you, you know, that as shareholders, that you're enthusiastic about the results of this PEA. You know, I would just tell you that as an investor I know I would have been. I think this is a very high quality report that's gone into it. We've had world class outfits working with us.

58:11 It's been it's been a long haul. But I think that basically the conclusions that have been drawn are compelling. They're not over with yet. We have the opportunity to do even better as we flesh out exactly what the next steps are. We'll be sure to tell everybody about it. And we're going to do the best to continue to add shareholder value. And I think at this point in time, I'll just say we should probably end it there. Steve, Jeff, thank you