Nevada Lithium Corporate Update

0:08 Good morning or good afternoon, depending where in the world you're signing in from today. I'm fortunate today to be joined by Stephen Rentschler, Nevada Lithium's CEO and Director, as well as Jeff Wilson, the company's VP Exploration. How are you both doing today? Okay, how you doing, Bianca?

0:25 Can never complain, looking forward to today's event. And speaking of, today, this is the format that we're gonna be having for today's event. We'll start with a quick presentation from Steve and Jeff, and then we'll jump into audience questions starting with the questions sent in advance via email and then the questions from the live chat. If for whatever reason we don't get to your question today, I'll pass that along to the Nevada Lithium team and they'll get back to you as soon as possible. Today's event is being recorded and the replay will be available shortly. But without further ado, I will pass it over to Steve.

0:56 Super. Thanks so much. Thanks to everybody for taking the time to listen. Normally we try to do a video on the day on which we do a news release. However, this news release came out last week and I was at the Benchmark Critical Minerals Conference in Los Angeles. So we couldn't quite pull that off. However, the timing was pretty good. We had hoped it would be so that while I was there, we would have the ability to showcase this report, this updated resource report, which is quite honestly, it's remarkable. It's eye opening. And I'll just take you back, even though Bianca says it'll be short presentation, as always, at least I tend to get long winded, but it's worthwhile sort of going back, telling the story again quickly, because I know we have a lot of new people who are taking interest in the story.

1:45 And to take a minute and just sort of show the path, the way forward that we've come and where we're planning to go, I think makes a lot of sense. The highlights of the report that we released on Tuesday put us, I think, in a league of our own. In particular, this was a resource report that drastically increased an already very, very big tonnage of lithium that we had at Bonny Clare. It drastically increased the grade of what we were calling our resources, which now include indicated as well as inferred, and it gave us our first boron resource. And to put this all in context, this is the culmination of essentially marrying the last 2 drilling campaigns that we had with our initial resource report.

2:32 And this is, it was a world-class deposit in my mind, certainly from the beginning, but now we've just, we've catapulted ourselves into a whole nother realm. And you can argue about whether or not this is the biggest in Nevada, the US, the highest grade, the biggest Nevada, the US, all these sorts of things, it doesn't matter. We have so much material. We have such high-grade material. I'll try to sort of parse out why I think that's important as I come to the end of my comments. But suffice to say, if you think back to what we had at Bonnie Clare, and remember again, just to set the stage, right, we're about 2.5 hours northwest of Vegas, we're on State Route 95, we're all by ourselves, the town of Beatty is about 30 miles to the southeast, We have Area 51 on our right flank by about 20 miles. We've got the Death Valley that's on our left flank by about 20 miles. Nobody around us, right? Literally the gate to the property is on Route 95. We've got power lines going on top of us. We've got no endangered species, flora, fauna. We have no indigenous cultural problems that we have to worry about. We have this entire massive land package all to ourselves, not flanked by anybody.

3:45 And over the course of the past few years, obviously, we've been drilling on this and trying to advance the PEA and then get to a PFS. But what occurred as we started to drill deeper is we hit a different type of mineralization, which essentially started to provide these assays that were remarkable with regards to their lithium grade. And whereas before maybe we were hitting 2000 plus ppm type of lithium, and again these are sediments, this is not a brine, it's not a hard rock, this is a very soft clay type of a deposit like Thacker Pass or Rhyolite Ridge. But as we were, you know, 2000 PPM starting to get a little higher as we went deeper, we started hitting these massive intercepts of 3000 PPM, 4005 thousand PPM as we went deeper and deeper.

4:32 And essentially, we didn't want to sterilize or mean we end up building something on top of our best mineralization. So we kept going deeper as we kept stepping out, trying to find what the extents of this mineralization was. But we'd never been able to quantify what the effect was on our resource. Again, going back, we had slightly under half of what we have now. I mean, it is tremendous, the increase. I should say, another way to say it is I think we have almost 90% more than we had before, and the grade has tripled, right? It's that kind of stuff, that kind of high grade that's going on. And rather than just going through all the numbers, so many hundreds of meters of this or so many, you know, millions of tons or whatever, it's all in the news release. You would need to read it closely anyway to frankly to sort it out. I just conceptually want you to think about it like this.

5:24 Originally we had a club sandwich here at Bonnie Clare and let's just call it for just to make it even more simple it's a tuna club okay so we got 3 pieces of bread we've got tuna on the top layer, we've got tuna on the bottom layer. The top layer would be where you would open pit something, if you wanted to, but that's never what we were really going to do here at Bonnie Clare because of our proposed mining method, which is borehole mining, which lets us get down to the bottom layer of tuna. However, at a given lithium price, that top layer of tuna probably could be economic in a different part of Bonny Clare because of the way that the geology sort of lays in a shallower part. We've been exploring what's going on in the bottom layer of lithium and the way I want you to think about it, that original club sandwich was you know piece 3 pieces of rye bread whatever.

6:13 All of a sudden as we kept drilling now we if you went to Subway right it's a it's a called a hoagie shop in the US you got a 6 incher on your hand right so it's starting to elongate and what else is happening is the bottom part of the of the sandwich where the tuna which is the lithium is it's starting to get thicker so it's starting to get a little bit floppy there on the bottom part getting thicker the symmetry of the sandwich isn't there. And we kept drilling and now we got a foot long okay at Subway and the tuna is now we could basically hold it in our hands because of what's happening in the bottom layer. And now there's a bunch of cheese in there, which is boron. All of this has come to fruition basically after 2 years. And this is the first time we've ever seen the extent of it. We also have the opportunity to keep going in 3 directions. And if you're looking at me, basically it would be look to your left, it's still open, which means that we could drill there, pretty sure that we would find more of the high grade mineralization.

7:09 You could look behind me, we drill there, we should still be able to find more mineralization. And if you look to my other direction to the right, you would say, well, we could find more there. We will never have a problem with having enough resource of Bonnie Clare. This is a monster that we have. And we have more than enough to do what we want to do, which is basically work towards an updated PEA. And that, I believe that we are on track to finish that at the end of Q1, so end of March 2025.

7:39 Currently, what we're doing with that is having Floor work on the metallurgical work. We announced not too long ago that we engaged them. These are the folks that did the recovery flow sheet at Riley Ridge. They've worked on other massive projects, internationally known. These are the people that you want to have involved going forward with the project. They're going to give us essentially something different than when we had in the old PEA, which was a calcination approach to recovering the lithium, which meant you heated it up, you put sodium sulfate on, you wash it out with water, do some other things. Remember, we proved that we could do battery-grade lithium carbonate. Because of that very very thick tuna intercept along with the cheese in the bottom, we've got to change our recovery process. And Floral already said, okay, on a preliminary basis, we know that we can get 98% of the boron and 97% of the lithium out of it. Those will not be the final numbers. I don't want people to think that, even I know at this stage of the game that that's too good. That just means that for using a weak acid right now, we know we can separate the lithium and the boron out of the mineralization.

8:47 And I have very, very high confidence in Fluor that they will be able to give us essentially a conventional sulfur recovery type of a system. I truly believe it's going to be something that is very similar to Ioneer's Rhyolite Ridge because of course Rhyolite Ridge has got lithium and boron. Though I frankly would think about

9:08 Rhyolite Ridge as being a boron mine with lithium whereas we are absolutely the other way around. Our lithium values are multiples higher of say Rhyolite Ridges and our boron tonnages are up there even though our grades aren't as high. From my perspective if we can just get the boron out without increasing our costs that gives us the accessibility to the high grade lithium then we're ahead of the game. If we can get something for the boron, and all I will tell you right now is that the boron markets are very opaque, but if we can get anything at all above that, that's just absolutely icing on the cake for our costs. Now, before I turn it over, Jeff, I just wanted to mention that with regards to sort of the updated resource report, in my mind, what's the most important is the grades. And if you look at the tables, look at the cutoffs, and look at the average grades, et cetera, what you'll quickly see, I think, is that you'll get the flavor of the fact that if we high grade this mine, which means if we can get right down to where the very highest grades are, that will absolutely maximize the economic impact in the updated PEA.

10:20 It's like in any other mining, if you think about it, if you've got a ton of material, but you've got 3 times the stuff in it that you had before, you process the same amount. You still put the ton through, but your output is 3 times higher. Your unit costs are going to go down all sorts of things. This is going to give us tremendous flexibility in terms of how we look at this updated PEA. And I will tell everybody that what we're going to do is look at everything from a smaller throughput option to a bigger throughput option. And the reason I say that is we've seen a number of projects over the course, let's call it the past year, they're coming in with multi-billion dollar capital expenditures that are necessary up front. And the markets don't really like them. I will tell you that, you know, 25 years in the past, there was certainly a time when strategic investors wanted to have those big types of projects. In fact, they preferred them because they could continue to put their money into them, reinvest them at a very high internal rate of return. Right now, we're not going through that in the markets. So we want to have some flexibility.

11:24 We're talking very frequently to both floor and to GRE who will be doing the updated PEA for us to make sure that we've examined all the options, right? And then we'll make a decision with the board of directors, etc. Which ones we want to present to the market, etc. Because the key ultimately after the updated PEA is then to launch right into PFS. And of course, then you're really going to start to look for project financing. So we have to take into account what's going on, you know, which essentially market sentiment about how these, these projects are going to be financed. Because even though we all see the news of the of the loans that are coming in from the Department of Energy, for Ioneer, for Thacker Pass, those are at the end. We have to get there. We still have a couple of steps to get there.

12:11 The next step is, of course, the updated PEA at the end of March. I'm going to let Jeff talk more about the deposit right now just to maintain some continuity and then I'll finish up after Jeff is done. Give you some more thoughts about the next steps that we have as well as you know what I learned, gleaned, whatever you want to say at that Benchmark Minerals Conference in Los Angeles, because I think there are some interesting things going on. So Jeff, let me hand this over to you right now, if you could show people what we think is going on at Bonnie and Claire. Sure. So rather than bombard everybody with more facts and figures, I'll maybe just show everybody what it looks like on the screen. Okay. Okay.

13:02 Everybody see the corner field? Yeah, yeah. Okay, let me just hide that.

13:09 Okay, so in what we have here, I'm looking at an oblique view of our property boundary. The green blob you can see there is the outline of the 900

13:23 PPM grade shell. This thing is about 5 kilometers north-south and about 3 kilometers east-west. What we have are 2 deposits. We have one at the surface that Stephen has talked about, you know, around about 1000 ppm and then the lower deposit around 3000 ppm. The drill holes you can see are in the blue there and I'll just switch to a cross section. So this is kind of an east-west cross section. You have the upper zone which is dominantly within the upper claystone around about 1000 ppm And this is the 900 ppm grade shell.

14:08 Then you have a lower, slightly, easterly dipping deposit, the lower zone we're calling that. This is a 900 and then the 1800 ppm. 900 we chose because it's comparable to open pit competitors, 1800 we chose because

14:32 the underground, the borehole mining parameters would indicate that that's a realistic number. And as you can see, we have the lithium along the drills up to 6000 ppm, dominantly in the lower part of our of our deposit and you can see that the boron in the graphs along the side kind of exists sort of concurrently with the lithium in this lower zone

15:05 and as you can see it does come up towards the surface on the west side. In the east it's still open in this direction. Again, we don't have a lot of drilling to the north, but it should be open. It is certainly open to the north and into the south. We currently have no drilling and it's open to the south. Okay, so that just gives you an idea as to where we are with regard to that. Beautiful, so spatially you can see, all right, what we were talking about with the shallower material, again, top layer tuna, open pit.

15:52 By putting it into the resource, we wanted to make sure that people didn't forget that we had it. It was not of an inconsequential size. However, it doesn't mean that we need to develop that or would be in a mine plan in our updated PEA. We develop it in an open pit and then get to the higher grade material. That's not at all. It's in there to show the optionality and the way that basically that shallow material is going. To me, in my mind, and I think I've said this for a couple of years now, if it were ever to come to an open pit, it would be to the west. It'd be towards the western boundary of the property as everything tilts up towards the surface. And of course, we're going to the east, to the south, potentially to the north, as basically the technical team is looking to find sort of the bottom, I guess the low in here, where again, this blanket of lithium might've had its thickest accumulation.

16:46 So I don't want people to think that all of a sudden an open pit is part of what we're advocating for here in the development. This is still the hydraulic borehole mining. We had Kinley Exploration do an advanced study on this again over the summer. They say getting down to these depths is no problem at all. You know, in terms of, again, just drilling a vertical hole, this is in a very simplistic explanation, but essentially drill a vertical hole and rotate the drill string with high pressure water on. And again, because that material is so soft, you can crush this with your hands from you know stuff that comes up from 3,000 feet in depth that water will erode that material and cause a slurry and we will pump it all back up to the surface and again remember we're not talking about shipping stuff off to to be upgraded you know that's the analog to the hard rock that you hear about in Australia and Quebec where you know you make a concentrate and then you send it to a refiner or whatever they're gonna do and and get your carbonate or your hydroxide or whatever.

17:48 This project again would be a beginning to end

17:52 finished battery material whether it's carbonate or hydroxide or interestingly enough maybe something different. And here's where I'll just jump into some of the things that I learned at the Benchmark Minerals Conference. So, you know, this is Benchmark Minerals is arguably one of the 2, if not the premier, let's call it research houses, in critical minerals and lithium. They invest markets, I have no problem naming either one of them. Very, very smart people.

18:21 And they have a flagship conference every year in Los Angeles and about 450 people, 500 people came. You know, everybody from the banks to companies like ours, to investors, et cetera. But you hear a lot of the talk from the scientific experts, a lot of battery talk, quite honestly. And one of the things that I noticed and was talked to about by people coming up to me is sort of the advance of the solid-state batteries coming in. This is a couple of years away. But one of the materials that will go into that will be lithium chloride, as opposed to necessarily the hydroxides or the carbonates. And the reason I bring it up is this potentially a third thing that we could look at as we do the updated PEA.

19:07 Remembering flexibility is just of massive importance in this industry. And the reason is because you're basically building an industry from essentially nothing. You've heard me say this many times before, but starting a couple years ago, 500,000 tons a year lithium carbon equivalent out to what they were projecting in 2030 at you know 2.5 to 3 to 3.5 million tons. It doesn't matter. It's all way too much. Compounded annual growth rates of 20, 20, you can't build industries that quick, which means in my opinion, you'll have persistent

19:43 upward pressure on prices, which obviously is good for our project. But the point is, all of this is going to continue. Nothing has changed. People were asking, obviously, about what would happen because of the US presidential elections. And I will tell you, I listened as much as anybody to other people's opinions. I've been pretty adamant, I think, about mine, and consistent. I didn't think there would really be any changes. If, in fact, the EV mandate is lifted,

20:12 I don't see a big change, because I don't think it could ever have gotten to the point where the lithium supply could have basically satisfied the demand even if it was imposed. I frankly don't even think the cars would have been there. So given that, I think that the focus has gone on the U.S. Wanting to secure mineral supplies, just want secure domestic supply lines that cannot be interrupted. And you'll see that the US government just added copper to its list of critical materials. Again, recognizing the importance not only just for, you know, EVs and global electrification, you know, all these AI data centers that are coming in tremendous power draws there that are being projected and of course like Nevada is busy trying to build out their infrastructure to handle that as well as the mines that are coming on.

21:04 So the point is, even though again, lithium market prices are still call it $10,000, $11,000 in spot in China, I would argue who cares because that's not the price that's ever going to be used in the non-China world for the IRA tax credits. And again, I will say again, as a US citizen just sort of watching politics, I don't see how those tax credits could be reversed. There were political careers that were essentially thrown away to get that legislation over the line. So if things slow down a little bit, I don't think that's a tremendous problem, frankly, for the industry, and I don't think anything in the long term has changed. In fact, we have other sources, whether it's stationary storage with alternative energy, you know, you can pick a number of things, but the technology is advancing very, very quickly and the efficiencies are getting better, which is better for the economics, et cetera. And all of this leads to a better outlook for lithium going forward. So I would not be worried about that.

22:05 Now as we go forward, you know, this is what I think that you should look for. Again, next step for Nevada lithium is going to be the updated preliminary economic assumption. Now the way it works under the Canadian reporting rules is as soon as we came out with that research report, pardon me, the 43-101 technical report that showed the updated resource, right? Now we can't talk about the old PEA, right? Subsequently, we will update that PEA and then we'll back, we'll be back to talking about economics. However, I do know, and you can still prove this to yourself, by looking at the old one, which the old PEA, which is still up on CDAR. I mean, that's gonna remain there. You'll see that we have a number of levers to throw to increase basically, you know, the results, let's just say it that way.

22:58 You know, the results that we wanna see coming out of the updated PEA. And I've talked about this before, we'll be using a higher lithium price, so that's certainly going to help. Capital expenditures, I know that they're going to go up because of the level of detail and we've had inflation that's going in over the course of the last 3 years, et cetera. So that's not gonna be a surprise. But I want people to focus on what that high grade material allows us to do. Again, just simply going back to, you know, if you think about it, you got a ton of dirt that you're throwing through it, and it's got a multiple of whatever material you want in there. If it's got 2 times the lithium, 2 and A0I don't know what the answer's gonna be right now, but I'm fairly confident that it's gonna be significantly higher than what we had going through previously.

23:45 That is going to have a tremendous impact on economics. And again, just to sort of tie it all together, understanding that the market's circle gonna wanna see sort of the spectrum from something that doesn't blow our socks off in terms of a high annual throughput, but looking at something that we could bootstrap ourselves up that we know would be financeable. We're going to go all the way through from one end of the spectrum to the other, as you know, over the course of the next couple of months to get that updated PEA out. From there, the next step would be preliminary feasibility study. If all of the chips fall into place, and that includes financing, we will be having to drill more holes to continue to raise the level of statistical confidence in our resources, right, from inferred to indicated, that will require, I don't know, 8, 10 drill holes, something in that order. And that's using the assumptions from the last PEA, but it gives me a good sort of planning, you know, place to start.

24:45 And then the other question will be a test of the borehole mining, which we still think will be necessary, pretty sure, to accomplish the PFS. There's a possibility it might not, but if it is necessary, that will take some long-range planning that we're starting to look at right now, permitting to be specific. And that's an expensive test. So the way in which we finance that is going to be obviously something that is going to depend upon how much dilution we want to take on. But that, if everything went right, I would say conservatively, we would be ready in 2 years time somewhere around the spring I would say of 2026 with PFS it's finished and then at that point in time we could be marketing I would say with a step change let's just put it that way people's confidence and something with the PFS versus a PEA is markedly different.

25:39 But I think that would be the next stepping stone, big stepping stone for Nevada Lithium. And from there, of course, with PFS finished, you launch into feasibility study, you're permitting the BLM, all of that kind of stuff. And the groundwork for all of that is already being laid out in terms of environmental studies, community relations, all these sorts of things that you want to show years of sort of continuity to the best that you can to basically ease into that final stage. And of course, that's the stage where you would, you know, you would be looking to get those government loans that we've all seen, you know, again, with Ioneer and with SacrPass. So that's the overall game plan. I hope everybody sees the significance of this latest resource report.

26:25 I will just tell you if you peruse the other lithium companies today, somebody released a preliminary feasibility study, one of the allegedly biggest ones out there, and they claimed that they were the biggest in North America, and a very, very simple read of their introduction or introductory page will show you that they're nowhere close to what we have at Bonnie Clare. So given all that, as I promised, I would not be short-winded. Bianca, why don't you take it from here and if we have any questions we'd be happy to answer them as best we can. Amazing, well I'm happy to say we have tons of questions. So I will dive right into them. Some of them might be a bit of a rehash of your presentation but good for folks who maybe are coming in a little late. A question we have a few times here is, will we need to raise any additional capital to complete the PEA or the PFS?

27:18 The PEA we're gonna be okay on. So that was taken care of a while ago. Again, if you look over the course of the past year and a half, you'll see that we have 2 new substantial shareholders who along with prior shareholders been very, very strong proponents of the company, and we raised that money to get us through the PEA. So we're gonna be fine with that. PFS is definitely gonna require more money. The question is gonna be in what form. You've heard me talking about trying to get off take from OEMs. Obviously, I continue to talk with them. I will tell you, all you have to do is look at car sales around the world to know that they are in a world of hurt right now. Frankly, in my opinion, some of their own doing because of COVID but be that as it may.

28:07 You know it's not conducive right now for that. So even though I continue to talk and hope we'll have to see what happens. We have a little bit of time But there are different ways to finance these things. But for PFS, we're going to definitely require more money. Diving into the PEA again, there's a question here that asks, what lithium oxide equivalent and boron price will be utilized in the PEA? We don't know yet. We know in the resource report we went up to $20,000 a ton for lithium carbonate. And I'm trying to remember what the price was for boron. And I don't think it was boron oxide either. However, those are 2 questions precisely that we're gonna continue to go over with GRE because again, the PFS today that came out, I saw had a lithium carbon at a price of $24,000 a ton.

29:03 So I will tell you that in Nevada, we've seen all sorts of preliminary feasibility studies, PEAs, et cetera, somewhere in 20 to 24,000 for lithium. But boron, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. On the PFS side of things, there's a question here that asks, do our resources need to be measured for PFS or is indicated resources sufficient? Go ahead. I'm sorry, Jeff. It's yours. Indicated, measured and indicated either is fine to support mine planning. Beautiful. Another question here about water rights. The question asks, do we expect to obtain water rights next year? I don't know when we're going to actually obtain water rights. I will tell you that we're having discussions with various entities.

29:51 And look, water is going to be an issue throughout Nevada. And we're starting from a position where in our hydrographic basin, There's no other use for the water, right? It's not potable, it's already brine. And I don't mean lithium-barren brine, I just mean it's salty water, it's brine. So it can't be used for agricultural purposes, et cetera. And the details of the water laws and the kinds of things that we're doing, I would just tell you right now we take up a whole another seminar. So we're talking to people. I'm not going to talk about exactly what we're going to do because I know certain people are on these calls, they have been traditionally, who are not necessarily looking to make things easy for us with regards to water rights. So I think I'm just going to leave it at that and say we're well aware of what needs to be done with water rights.

30:40 Talk to private individuals, talking to state entities, et cetera. And we'll do our best to do what we can going forward as quickly as we can. A question here about the hydraulic borehole mining method. They're asking when the first one will be performed. I think you've already done a little bit this past spring, so maybe just diving into that method a little bit more. Well yeah it can be a little confusing right so the hydraulic borehole mining is will be the mining method and we haven't done it yet. This will be a full blown test as we think about it now for preliminary feasibility study. What I'm hoping if we could do it by would be essentially by the end of this year, pardon me, the end of 2025.

31:26 We're not in 2025 yet. And there's weather involved, et cetera. The first hurdle is to get over the permitting, which I know it's not the same as permitting a drill hole. Now it might get done very quickly, but I'm just gonna be conservative about this because it's something that's out of the ordinary. Remember borehole mining has been done in other parts of the world or very very similar some people have said well it's not exactly borehole mining. Okay everything has got a little bit of a variation on it so you want to say Cameco you know they they might get their their material out of their you know the underground- structure a little bit different in terms of bringing up they don't pump it up but they're accessing exactly the same way. Denison looks like it's gonna be exactly the same way etc.

32:13 So you know again it's going to be a pretty big test. Again, this is not going to be drill a hole, you know, that's say 12 inches in diameter, and that goes all the way down to the bottom and we're taking assays, right? This would be to literally excavate the material. And I don't know if it's going to be a 30-foot wide radius or 10-foot wide radius, you know, but it's going to remove material. By the way, that material will be able to use stockpile, potentially put it through a pilot plant in terms of helping with regards to working on the feasibility of the recovery flow sheet that Flora's been putting together. But almost think of it as test mining because really that's what it's going to be. And that's why the permitting is going to be you know so important and so different than what we're doing right now. And of course the cost is no secret. I've said this to people. You know the latest estimate we have is 10 to 12 million US dollars. I'm sure that's not going to get cheaper in terms of the absolute cost, if we can defer certain costs, sharing it with people, or by going to the government. And here's something that is a little bit new that I forgot to talk about in my prepared remarks.

33:19 I was approached by consultants again and I understand they're consultants. However, in Washington, it seems as if there has been a bit of a change in the legislation regarding the IRA and how you can access funds, again, predominantly for technology with regards to, you know, securing mineralization and battery companies, all this sort of stuff, but this time to make it accessible to those who are trying to develop the mining side of this. And so I'm already basically following up with discussions, you know, with those folks to see if in fact, that looks like that has become a viable option. I do know from preliminary discussions, it would take at least a year from when the new tranche of financing becomes available. So it's not like, you know, you know, and you really wouldn't know too, 6 months into it, whether or not you were going to be successful.

34:08 But I have to gather a little bit more information, talk to the board about it, whether or not we want to pursue this, because that would be all of a sudden a possibility to get some funds in, you know, anything at all to try to defray the cause of that borehole mining test. So, yeah, we have to stay tuned, but unfortunately we haven't done any of it yet. We have to rely on the experience of others, and we do know that that's been a positive experience for others. All right, this next question, I'm going to do my best. I apologize if I butcher any of these technical terms but the question is as far as we know boron is fixed in a borosilicate material a mineral and lithium is found in the form of another silicate mineral. There does not exist any similarity with Serbian jarredite. Is it possible that your deposit has lithium in the form of diatridal leupedialite?

35:00 I guess I'll answer that. We are currently doing, you know, a fair amount of metallurgy and petrography with Fluor Enterprises, who we've hired to do the metallurgy. At the moment, our best guess for the lithium is that it's bound in illite, which is a non-swelling clay. And then the boron is likely bound up in cerlizite, which is a borosilicate mineral, which is common to the Ionia Rhyolite Ridge property as well. So it doesn't really have much to do with jadeite and the Serpian deposit. Awesome. Thank you.

35:48 Another question here, dollar for dollar, how does boron value compare to the lithium value? Right now, I think boron is a little bit lower than lithium, but this goes back to sort of the opacity of what I was talking about with boron markets. You know Rio's Rio Tinto is a big player in boron not only in California but in Serbia. Yadar was going to be you know a big a big source of boron obviously because of the ytterite. And in terms of, it's also going to be a much smaller market, we think, as you look out a couple of years, you know, to when the EBs are really here and then you're talking about 3 million tons of, you know, lithium, whatever, something like that. I think it's going to be less. And it looks like they're also just starting to come up with some of the uses. I mean, I've seen it in an armor.

36:40 Boron obviously is an essential element in fertilizers, even though it's sort of a trace element. If you put too much boron, you'll kill your crops. But it's just a very, very cloudy thing to look forward into. And that's why I'm saying it's very important to remember we're not going to be looking to that boron to make the economics of Bonnie Clare. It's why I was saying too, if we can just get it out, you know, without too much of a cost or any cost, we're way ahead of it because our high-grade lithium, that real high 5,000, 6,000 ppm stuff, seems to co-exist, you know, at least in terms of a stratigraphical, you know, levels with the boron. So we want to be able to separate it, get it out, but we're not going to count on that revenue.

37:26 Anything would be gravy. And I wish I could say more about it, but I tell you, I just don't feel comfortable. I have to talk to more banks about that. The ones that I have talked to have basically told me what I just told you. So in the coming months, as I learn more, I'll be sure to share it with everybody. Yeah. And I'd just like to echo that, you know, when we're talking to the external consultants, their impression is that the boron is nice to have, but it's the lithium, which is the real, real moneymaker.

38:00 Yeah. If I heard correctly, there's a question here about, is more test drilling before PFS needed, before the PFS is completed? Yeah, I mean at the moment the bulk of our resource, the 25 million tons of LCE are in inferred category. So we need to tighten up the drilling to do that. At the moment, The drill holes are, let's say, 4 to 500 metres apart, and we need to tighten that up to 170 to 200 metres to go from inferred to indicated. And with an indicated resource, that's sufficient to give you a metal reserve and support mine planting.

38:47 And the other thing I would just follow up on that, again, is remember, I mean, we're talking 5 million tons already indicated, and I think it was just the 2 holes, right, that gave us the indicated, but the 25 million, if we were to bring, you know, a large percentage of that up to indicated with the infill drilling, which I assume we would, remember, this is a quantity of lithium that is so large, it's not that we would necessarily build the mega project, right? I mean, this kind of a resource would support tremendous throughput, right? Everything is... Think of the biggest lithium project you can out there and we could easily be that big with a 40 plus year mine life remembering again that you stop counting after 40 years because the economics are so de minimis in the net present value.

39:34 But what it does is it gives us the flexibility. It's these massive columns of this very very high-grade mineralization which, right, That is tailored to a borehole mining technique, where again, you think about it, you get down as quickly as possible into those high grade areas. And that's where you start bringing up the material. So you could theoretically change your, your mind plan around, right? Find your areas with the very thickest intercepts and we'll find them of course, through more of the infill drilling. And that's where you start. And again, you might start, maybe only start with 1 borehole because the grade is so high, as opposed to 2. That's the ultimate flexibility. I mean, the way I'm looking at it, just so everybody is clear, is, you know, we'll be talking to floor. What's the minimum sort of size that you can put on the back end of something for what we want to do? Previously, right, we were talking about 32,000 tons, the old PEA I'm not supposed to be able to talk about. But that's- it is what it is. Here it might be more modular, right?

40:35 If the markets are saying, hey, we want to finance stuff that's more of a bootstrap approach, we want to set this up so that we can present that, basically, that investment proposition to them. The resource here is not, it's not going to be an issue. This stuff just goes on and on and on. And I'm secure in saying that, and I'm not a geologist. So, sorry, Bianca, I'm gonna get off my soap box. No, you're good. There was a mention earlier around a weak acid. What type of acid will you be using? Sulfuric, looks it, right, Jeff? Yeah. Beautiful. Another question, do you anticipate occurrence of subsidence? You want to talk about that Jeff? Sure, I mean we'll have a better idea of that once we do the pilot plant.

41:21 But the external consultants are saying that it's so deep that you might see a certain amount of subsidence, but it wouldn't be large. You know, we'll have a better idea once we've done the pilot plant. And when you say pilot plant, Jeff, you mean the borehole mining test? Yes. Okay. Yeah, the pilot borehole mining test. Sorry. No, no, that's okay. Yeah, we've heard, Remember too, we've got this very, very large, that sandstone, Jeff, what is that? 500,700 feet that's stuck in the middle? It's- Yeah, 500 feet. Yeah, a lot more competent than the material that we're talking about, you know, using the borehole mining in. So it remains to be seen, but you know, will that act as a support so that you don't get the subsidence at the top or again as Jeff said is it so minimal that. You barely notice it I've had you know Richard Kern ever heard him talk about that you know. The wind's gonna blow in over the desert you know Steve the stuff is all gonna go back to flatten yeah I get it. So you know in the grand scheme of things though we're not expecting to see anything. Much happen at surface.

42:24 But we have to we have to continue to test. Another technical question. So again, bear with me, I will do my best. Is there any zeolite such as clinophytolite and or mordonite associated with the lithium and boron minerals in order to assume the existence of an old saline alkaline lake environment of deposition? The main zeolite that we see from the quantitative XRD is analsime and that might be hydrothermal. That's our best guess at the moment. Bear in mind that the rock which hosts the mineralisation is predominantly sub 10 micron, so the conventional sort of mineralogy visualisation tools are of limited use. I think as time goes on we'll have a better handle on that, but at the moment Cerlozite and Analsime appear to be at least partially hydrothermal.

43:25 So we were assuming it's a dry lake bed of some kind. I mean, these are unconsolidated sediments, partially consolidated sediments within an active basin. So. Excellent. We've had a few different versions of this question. So I'll try to consolidate. Are we looking to sell lithium as a commodity or Nevada Lithium as a company? And what would be the timeline for any of those sort of catalysts? I think I think what what's being asked is sort of do we need to build it or is there an exit off ramp here a little earlier? And I'll go, because nothing's changed. I'll go over it again with regards to sort of the way we look about this.

44:10 You know, whenever you develop a natural resource asset, you're always asked, well, do you have to build it? You'd say, well, you know, or could you build it? Well, sure, you could assemble the team, you could do it. You know, you have the timeframe, you go through all the steps, BEA, PFS, feasibility study permitting, you know, raise everything, et cetera. You have a net present value of that project, and you would assume over time, right, that the value of the company accretes towards that net present value. Or it could go to a multiple of that. I've seen that many times before particularly in the gold industry. And then as you go forward into production you know then you the company becomes rated on a multiple of earnings as any other conventional company would. Is that a possibility? Absolutely. But we're not close to that part yet.

44:55 There are other ways to get shareholder value out. They trade off one thing for another. If you take sort of the same net present value or close to it that you would get, let's just say, in pre-feasibility study, and somebody, say a strategic, maybe it's a mining house, maybe it's an energy company, could be anybody, wants to come along and wants to buy this from you as an asset, traditionally you get some percentage of an agreed upon net present value. And I'm making this up, but maybe it's .3 or .4, it depends on where we are, it depends upon how attractive the asset is, how much upside there is, And believe me, Bonnie Clare ticks the boxes on all of this. But you're not getting the full value, but by the same token, you're getting that value, if you get 0.3 or 0.4 of net present value, years ahead of where you would be getting it if you build it, without a lot of dilution. Remember, when you get to the, let's call it the end of these processes where you're really getting down to the loans and all this stuff, you gotta raise a lot of equity as well. You know, if it's traditionally two thirds debt and a third equity, you'd be talking about a lot of, you know, a lot of extra shares. So there's different ways to look at it. What I would say is I don't think that the board would really be interested in right now is looking at this and selling it as an in situ resource. You see this at very early stages with companies, just sort of as simply, hey, we've got 50 pounds of lithium in the ground and I want a buck you know a buck a pound and it's worth 50.

46:21 We're so far beyond that. This is a world-class asset. I mean to have the tonnages matching up with the grades that we're seeing you know and again I can't find anything else in Nevada that's frankly even close, and remembering that this thing continues in 3 different directions, and we're nowhere near our claim boundaries, right? So, you know, again, do we have to prove that we're even bigger and better? No, don't really think that that's necessarily the best use of the dollars. Now we want to sort of integrate this all into a holistic type of a thing, which is gonna culminate in this updated PEA. Then I think, you know, everybody would have a better point to make a decision as to what the value is and then ultimately, you know, which of a different couple of an exit points maybe do you want to do you necessarily want to use.

47:11 But there's there are many different ways and I'm not even giving you, you know, there's probably 3 4 different variations to take a carried interest. You know, do you know, boron we haven't talked about, maybe somebody does want to buy, you know, or take a royalty on boron or sell off take on boron. Of course, we want to sell off take on lithium. But all of these types of things would be in advance of our, you know, in advance of the final culmination of shareholder value for current Nevada Lithium shareholders is the way I would put it. They would be stepping stones before the decision to whether or not, hey, this is the proper time, you know, to basically do a deal or to build it. We have a while to go. So I'm sorry, and long winded. I guess as a 20 year veteran of the Vancouver junior mining scene, When you say to me, are you going to build a mine or do a deal? The answer is definitely yes.

48:07 Yes, and that's exactly what I've heard over 30 years in New York. So everybody's talking the same language. Anything is possible, and That's the way you want to keep it. I see a few questions here associated with analyst coverage. So I suppose to consolidate them again here, what do you think the catalyst would be that would trigger an increase in analyst coverage? In my opinion, it's really, it depends of course if it's Canadian or if it's US. I think there would be different characteristics because I think that the Canadian investors have always been a little bit earlier into what's going on than the US investors. We all know everybody's been involved with biotech and cannabis and everything else for God knows how many years.

48:54 But I think, first of all, the updated PEA is certainly going to be helpful, because it's going to be a refreshed look at something that has completely changed form, right? I mean, this has been, I sort of look at this as a 1 year, you know, not a detour, but a 1 year we had to go back and in a circle and start again because we had to see what we had here. And I think it's been a worthwhile trade off time. I think that's one thing. I think certainly lithium sentiment right now is something that all the banks are waiting for. I mean you know obviously we're when we talk to them we want to get into research coverage lists. We have a small market capitalization. We're working on accessibility for European investors because I think they're a little bit farther ahead frankly than even the Canadian investors But you know until we see I think Lithium prices get off the floor and you know get out of their own way. It's it's gonna be a little bit rough. However, in my opinion, I think that's gonna start to happen sooner rather than later. And I think it's gonna be a culmination of, you see what the car companies are doing right now. Look at the Ford, the big article about them, Stellantis, other car companies have said, they're buying these Chinese cars, right?

50:07 And they're, they're reverse engineering, right to see how to build these electric cars in a way that can be profitable. I mean, frankly, they already know that all they do is look at Tesla. But it's going to be a big change for those car companies. But I think they understand it, even if the mandates get rolled back a bit. Clearly, the capabilities of the EVs are getting better. Everything in range, reliability. If you want to have something, I think it's very interesting anyway, You want to keep track of sort of what's going on in China and their cars? Go on YouTube, look at a guy called the Electric Viking. I don't know him at all. He's just a guy who puts out a couple of videos every day, 5, 6 minutes, really in tune with what's going on about all the cars that are coming out. You won't hear about it in the US press. My only point in saying that is that the technology of all of this stuff is advancing very, very rapidly, not only with the consumer products, meaning the EVs, but also again, the battery technology going into the stationary storage devices.

51:03 I will tell you that on the processing side, the direct lithium extraction folks, right, they started of course with brine. They're working right now on the hard rock, the spodumene stuff. And again, in Australia and Quebec, they're coming to me and talking about saying, hey, we think we could do this for the clays. Again, this is again, analogous to what I've been talking about to people over the last 3 years or so. 3 years ago, nobody thought these clays were going to be necessary to supply global demand. They're going to be necessary. So you're seeing all of these changes and it's a complicated subject. And the long-winded way of saying this, I know that the analysts have a hard time trying to keep up. And remember, for the banks and everything like that, they're gonna start where they can do business, right? What's their investment banking arm going to say we need to do a deal?

51:50 It's not like in the old days where you had, you know, you basically had coverage. People stopped paying for basically research coverage a long time ago. That's why investors are out in the woods about this. Why I sort of try to put my spin on it from, you know, from my prior life. But you know, I think again, I think the PEA, people won't be able to ignore that. I think certainly lithium prices. One other thing I'll just say about lithium prices, what happens if the Chinese just arbitrarily say, hey, you know what, lithium is a strategic mineral, just like they did with antimony not long ago, right? 80% of the world, all of the lithium, 1 form or another, either upgrading capacity or the, you know, the primary source is controlled by China. Total game changer. That could be something that brings everybody into it. And again, I think the US markets are going to need to be a little bit mature. We're talking to a lot of different people. I met a lot more different people out in Los Angeles from the US side of things. They're aware of us, but there's a difference between people being aware of us and being in a coverage list. And that's an arcane subject I could go into at a later point in time. But those are the types of things I think that we really need to see.

52:59 Yeah, I would echo what Stephen's saying. The lithium price is going to underpin any kind of change in sentiment. The PEA, maybe once we do the borehole drilling test, that will be a big catalyst for change. But you know, in the spring, once we get through Roundup and PDC, we'll have a feeling of the sentiment at that point. And I think Canada has traditionally, the analysts in Canada don't have a huge depth on lithium, especially for sedimentary lithium at the moment. But I think that is changing and hopefully we'll be the beneficiary of that going forward. Yeah, those are excellent points. And to again, remember, if you go back at the way we were talking about this 3 years ago, 2.5 years ago, the world, in particular, the OEMs, right? The car companies thought that the direct lithium extraction, that was a panacea. That was gonna solve everybody's problems.

53:57 So hey, you know, hard rock, well, what's that? Yeah, we sort of understand that. Clays, no, we don't even know what that's about. Things are changing very, very quickly. So I think in research coverage, you know, we have the potential to, you know, look, people can't ignore the size of what we have now, they just can't. And I think that's gonna play in our favor. Amazing. Folks, we have time for one last question. Thank you so much for everyone who participated in the chat or submitted questions early. As I mentioned at the very beginning, if we didn't get to your question, we promise to pass them along to the team and hopefully they can address it at a later date. But last question here before I pass it back to you, Steve, for final words. Can you expand on Bonnie Clare and how it compares to other deposits in the U.S. And the world and the qualities that differentiate this asset for potential strategic investment by other corporates across the lithium supply chain?

54:46 Yeah, I mean, complicated question, obviously. And remembering, everybody has to remember this, right? We've got different types of lithium being produced, right? You've got the brines, all the salars, but you've got 1 set of economic constraints, advantages, disadvantages, obviously, water, all sorts of things going on with them. And you have the hard rock, you know, coming out in Australia. And again, the ability who's going to convert that stuff from, you know, concentrate, you know, into a usable battery material. You know, those refineries cost billions of dollars, et cetera, A lot of Chinese ownership in these types of things. And then we finally come to the clays. You know at first blush we really have yet to find anything in the US that can compare to Bonnie Clare. I mean again in tonnage we haven't seen it. Our folks have you know we we diligently try to go through all of the projects and you know in their characteristics, tonnage, grades, etc. Hey some people are going to have more you know measured and indicated. Some people are going to have proven all these sorts of stuff. But if you just look at the resource side and you look at the continuity of what we have, I don't see what else compares, you know, and if you wanted to go up to the very north of this state, you know, And I would just say within the state of Nevada, I think we're going to be the largest because I think some of the stuff up north probably goes up past the state lines.

56:07 But it's sort of a, it's just a, it's a bit of a parlor game to play who's the biggest and who's the best. I haven't seen the grades that we've been putting out. Certainly haven't seen them with the intercept, you know, distances that we're talking about with hundreds of meters, you know, hundreds and hundreds of feet of this 3,000, 4,000 ppm type of material. So we think it's among the world's best. I mean, there are all sorts of constraints in the other places of the world with regards to state-owned entities, owning them, again, Chinese ownership, and these all come into play when you have the IRA-compliant and IRA-noncompliant world, right? So you've got to take these into account. Nevada is perennially one of the best mining jurisdictions in the world. You know, in a little bit of a round trip here, let's just say over the past 10 years, we have catapulted this project from something that was already arguably one of the best to something that I don't even think you can argue is one of the best. Really, the only constraint is we've had is lithium price sentiment. We've just been on the wrong side of it. Okay, that's fine.

57:09 That's going to change. We talked about that a lot of times in past videos. But when you look at the overall picture, everything again from where it is, no risk of expropriation, the state of Nevada and the governor saying we want all of this to occur here, to where we are, you know, to putting a finished product again, right? For now we're talking about a finished product going into a battery. Maybe there will be other ways that we can address that too and work with some sort of a DLE if technology comes along. We're not going to put anything out there and say that it's not possible. The optionality on this project is off the charts. Not only in those ways I just mentioned, but everything from, hey, again, we're over the size of Manhattan Island, we're basically exploring, right, where? And I said this before, Midtown Manhattan, the resource covers that, but really if you look at our drilling footprint, it's like the theater district. It's just so small and we have so much more that we could do. That kind of optionality investors will pay for over time. Do we have brine? We don't know for sure that we don't. We have a structure that seems to run, you know, all the way up to Albemarle's silver peak. Give us an analog.

58:21 We don't know. So in terms of Bonnie Clare versus everything else, I just, you know, when you tick all those boxes, I don't know if it's the best, but I'm pretty damn sure that it's got to be one of the best, and I know that we're undervalued in terms of market capitalization. And again, we're just starting to tell the story in a world where nobody cares about lithium, right? So we're going to continue to do the work. We're going to get there. We'll get up the other side of the Lassonde curve, you know, this thing is a beast and we have not seen the last of what she has to offer. So you know, we have a game plan set out in the near term. We have a long term, a longer term game plan we have to execute, got to finance. But I think we have very, very good chances to basically accrete a hell of a lot of shareholder value for everybody, certainly from where we are now.

59:09 And I'll just say that we have 25.6 million tonnes of lithium carbonate inferred, 5 million tonnes of indicated. And we're opening in 3 directions. And I'll leave it to others to for their thoughts about where how we compare to others. Yeah, amazing. Thank you both Steve, Jeff, appreciate your time and for all these insights. A big thank you to everyone who attended both live and for those of you watching the replay. I will pass it back to you, Steve, for the final word. I've said enough. I'm sure everybody's certainly had enough. Thanks, Bianca. Obviously, everybody knows, reach out to us with further questions or to 6, excellent hosts for these webinars, and we'll make sure that we get them answered for you. Very much appreciate your time.

59:56 Take care of yourselves. ♪ you