Nevada Lithium: A Korea Connection and Birth of a US Sovereign Wealth Fund

0:04 Hello everyone and welcome again to another live Nevada Lithium event. Today I'm joined with Steve Rentschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium, to hear further context on the recent announcement of a new relationship with Korean lithium producer Hydro Lithium. As always, feel free to submit your questions in the chat box, which can be found in the bottom right corner of your screen. Also note that this is being recorded and the replay will be made available shortly after we conclude here today. Steve, thank you for joining us today. You've got 2 major developments happening almost simultaneously, the hydro lithium relationship and the US government's

0:35 potential equity stake in Thacker Pass. Walk us through how you see these pieces fitting together and what this moment means for Nevada lithium and the broader critical minerals landscape. Yeah, super. Thanks, Kyle. Thanks everyone for taking the time to join me this afternoon. There's been a lot of things that have been going on over the course of the past 7, 8 weeks, I'd say, in the lithium industry and also with Nevada Lithium. And I wanted to take the opportunity to basically get some comments in while the news is relatively fresh. I wish I could have gotten this done last week, but we just had a lot of other things going on as well. But I'm going to take the opportunity to just sort of recap where we are. I noticed that we continue to get new faces to the story and as I said over the course the past 2 months there has been a lot been going on and I think you'll see how if I go sort of step by step over again the last 3 announcements we've had you'll see how these things all dovetail together and sort of, you know, I think it'll become apparent, you know, the kinds of things that we're thinking about at Nevada Lithium and what it means for shareholders.

1:42 So to recap, You know, 2 months ago we came out with our updated PEA, again, which I would ask that you go back and look at the investment metrics of that, and I think it stacked up very, very well against anything else in Nevada and in other parts of the world, some of the other projects. You know, we have a very, very large lithium carbonate project scheduled for over 62,000 tons of production a year, a mine life of over 60 years, along with on the order of 130,000,140,000 tons of boric acid as a byproduct credit. All of this gave us a plus 30% IRR, a net present value that was $6 billion in initial CapEx, around $2 billion. So a very nice NPV to CapEx ratio, a payback under 4 years in the threes, very, very healthy. All the types of things that you would want to see to get attention on your project and to increase its odds of, you know, not only the project come to fruition, but getting additional partners, getting people who are interested in what you're doing, size, grade, economics, all these things sort of married together, I think have put us in a very, very good spot.

3:00 Now, we noticed, obviously, there's been a lot of talk about strategic minerals in the U.S. It's not just rare earths, right? So I'm talking specifically about things that are different than rare earths here. But By the same token, these are the kinds of materials which the US government is vulnerable to, supply lines. It could be either in the processing of it, it could be in just the original deposits. A lot of different things go into it. We had seen basically some other companies start talking about the availability in their deposits of some of these strategic minerals. You'll sort of remember maybe from years ago, one of the things that we were thinking about as another byproduct was potassium, potash fertilizer, which is in fact on the critical materials list of strategic minerals for the US.

3:56 But there are also a bunch of other ones and 2 of them are cesium and rubidium. And these are, I will call them specialty, let's call them specialty products, minerals. Things that are not measured in millions and millions of tons of production, but they, in use in small quantities, have some very, very significant properties that are desirable. And it seems to be technology is really one of the areas where these materials shine. I had given a video about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, and where I sort of in very broad brush strokes sort of outlined the value that potentially is there. The numbers get very big very quickly. And so I didn't want to show you my spreadsheets, but sort of I laid out to everybody that you could do the math yourself. It's not hard.

4:44 Even when you talk about very low percentages, like parts per million, we're talking 100,300 parts per million kind of things, when you basically expand that by the tonnages that we have at Bonny Clare, so say 30 million tons of resource, you see how the potential basically grows. We're not, again, talking about becoming a critical minerals company. We're lithium and we're boron. And all the rest of this though is just, it's additional icing on the cake. It's optionality and I'll talk more about that in a minute. So, you know, if we can basically find a way to get these, you know, metals out for not much more money, this is again, it's just all gravy. And we'll look at this as sort of separate projects within the project.

5:37 So I found it very, very exciting because A, we had the minerals there. So the guys looked through the assays again. We found that the critical minerals are basically with our high grade lithium and boron. So that's the material that we will be going after. First, if you looked at basically the news release that we had done 2 news releases ago, You'll see some scatter plots that Jeff had put in there that show, you know, how the, how these all correlate. So it's not like we're going to be going out of our way or would have to go out of our way to grab this stuff. Basically, the way I look at it is, is we're going to be throwing 8,000 tons of dirt through the plant a day, and this material is going to be coming with it. One of the neat things that we found out was that, you know, through some testing, that Comeco had done for us up in British Columbia, you know, think about the way this recovery system works. We put the slurry into the plant, we hit it with acid a couple of times, try to liberate the boron, then the lithium, get rid of some nasty stuff. And then when you have what's left is a pregnant leach solution, okay?

6:45 Well, we found that the cesium and rubidium are still present there. So they're not being destroyed, they're not being locked up or whatever. So that to me puts us even farther ahead in the process. I think that there's going to be value in these materials in 1 of 2 ways. Either in pure economics, we put some sort of a circuit in, and we extract the metals out. And by the way, I use metals and minerals interchangeably. I probably shouldn't, but just so everybody knows what I'm talking about. You know, and potentially upgrade them and send them off for sale. Now, the cost of that, we don't know. But I would say, when you look again at the selling prices of these specialty metals, very, very high, measured in hundreds of dollars a gram, things like that. Again, you could do the math, and you see that there's a lot of wiggle room to bring additional economics to the existing project.

7:38 But the other way in which they add value is because they are a point of such interest, particularly now. And it's the way in which they bring attention from different entities, whether or not it's the US government, or whether or not it's strategic, potential strategic partners, or a new relationships that are being developed, people who are able to try to extract this for us economically, or to set up basically supply lines in concert with the US government in a way to strengthen relationships. And of course that's sort of what is leading into the announcement of last week, which is our new relationship with Hydro Lithium out of Korea, specifically our CEO Dr. Won Chang, who I've found to be a real pleasure to work with and someone who I think is going to be very, very helpful to Nevada Lithium, potentially in a number of ways.

8:32 So by way of background, I just tell you a little bit about HydroLithium. They're listed on the Korean Stock Exchange and they already produce lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide. They have a plant set up in Korea for about 35, 3600 tons of I think it's lithium carbonate a year. They're constructing a second plant, 10,000 tons going to 50,000 tons a year. And the way that you should think about this company, at least right now, is that they have DLE technology. Okay, so you may say, oh, well, hold on a second, where, you know, Bonnie Clare's is not looking at direct lithium extraction because we don't have brines. Well, this is sort of the dynamic nature of basically the lithium industry and how I would argue that technology is starting to blur the lines between the differences of say, SELARS or Brine Operations, and operations potentially like ours, right? So clay-based, let's just call them like that. And that's because as the technology continues to evolve, and let's just call it DLE technology, it becomes a question of where do you apply it potentially in our recovery stream, right? So although we may not be taking a brine directly out of the ground and just processing it through DLE, the sort of analog I think about is that at some point in time, we do have a solution that is full of lithium and other things such as cesium and rubinium.

10:05 And perhaps the DLE technology is another way to extract more value. And this doesn't mean at this point in time that we're thinking about taking the floor-developed spreadsheet or pardon me, flow sheet that you know is in our PEA and not using it, but this is optionality. If in fact different things can be brought to bear through new technology that perhaps reduces the reagent use, that reduces the residence time while the desired minerals are unlocked, has lower capital costs, all of these types of things. Well, these are the things that we wanna know because as we go from PEA to PFS, we're going to evaluate all of them. And now, as I said, at this point in time, right, we're not becoming, we're not looking to become a primary cesium or rubidium producer.

10:57 So I would say the way to think about this kind of thing is, you know, we have an inflow of material coming in. We already know how to basically unlock the lithium boron, bring down a lot of the impurities that we want, but there may be a way to basically just stick in circuits, right? This is basically, let's turn the pipe 90 degrees, put the flow of solids or semi-solids, whatever it's gonna be, into another recovery type of a thing, bring it back into the main circuit, on and on and on. And at this point in time, as I said, cesium and rubinium look like they're pretty much no brainers to try to capture. I still think that we have a good chance with getting the potassium out.

11:42 Again, potash fertilizer is on the critical minerals list. And these are the kinds of things that will just continue to build into the optionality at Bonnie Clare. Now, I want to make sure again, particularly for people who are relatively new to the story that when I talk about optionality, I have a, I have a certain take on that word, it comes from my investing background on the buy side, which is you want to have as much optionality as possible because these projects, it's all about de-risking things really in every facet of the project development. Whether it's the geology, whether or not it's the metallurgical recovery, whether it's the financing, all of this kind of stuff, right? You're basically 1 foot in front of the other in as methodical a way as you possibly can, trying to bring down basically what are unknowns to quasi-knowns to relative levels of certainty, et cetera, the more avenues of sort of more pivot points that you have, the better. Because if something were to go wrong, you can pivot, and you're not completely out of the game. And that's what I think of when I talk about optionality.

12:48 Optionality at Bonnie Clare also, frankly, is something I've talked about since the very beginning, which is that at a high enough lithium price, we've got lithium mineralization that comes to surface. And it could very well be economic in a different area of the project. Remember again, Monteclair is the size of Manhattan Island. There's plenty of room to move around. We also have a structure where we think it looks like the potential for brine might exist. Don't know what the possibility is, but it's optionality again. It's better than not having it. And that's the way I think about these recent announcements with the critical minerals. So I just want to make sure people understood that. We're not talking about rolling the dice here or anything like that or playing the options market. It's just these are added potential avenues for additional value that we're going to be looking at. Now, if I go back to hydro lithium for a minute, I just wanted to say a little bit about the CEO, because one of the areas that really interested me was Dr. Chan, who is the CEO, his background.

13:53 Dr. Chan was with POSCO, right? Huge Korean steelmaker. I think it's been called the most competitive steelmaker in the world for 12 years in a row, $6 billion in sale. Basically I would say it's a Korean, not a gemstone, but it's the apple of their eye. It's a very, very well thought of company. Well, it also produces lithium, which a lot of people I don't think really understand. But POSCO has got mining rights, and they've got upgrading rights. And they're producing, I think, 30,000, 40,000 tons of lithium a year. They're a pretty big lithium producer. Dr. Chan was the one who developed basically the technology that they rely upon. He also built a lot of their demonstration plants and their larger plants.

14:49 He basically operated them. So this man has got many, many talents and an understanding of how the technology potentially starts. And the reason I say the reason it starts is because in 2016, Dr. Chan retired and he's an entrepreneurial kind of guy, started a hydro lithium and he continued to develop basically the technology that POSCO uses, but specifically to go after basically brines that have got higher levels of impurity in them.

15:21 And most of the time what those are is calcium and magnesium. And you'll see in the US a lot of the brines, a lot of the materials, we have a lot of it, you know, It's the kind of thing that his evolving technology could potentially take on. So I take a lot of comfort in the expertise, not only in what hydrolithium has done in the past through Dr. Chan, But how I would say the technology is revolutionary, but it's certainly evolutionary. So it's a CULX technology that he's talking about right now and not to go into total details because of course, you all know I'm not a metallurgist, but you know, think about not using adsorbents, not using membranes, etc, but using some very environmentally benign materials, some air, some electricity, different types of things like that, that I think would definitely be viewed positively when it came to the development of Bonnie Clare, if all of this should pan out.

16:25 So I just wanted to bring that up because I think when you have the technology that's there, it's obviously not lost on me that Dr. Chun has a long relationship with POSCO. It's not lost on me that POSCO clearly has a relationship with the Korean government. And it's not lost on me that given what's going on in the US, Korea very recently came to the White House with Donald Trump and committed to massive amounts of infrastructure, co-development, all these kinds of things that we're seeing from different parts of the world in an effort to get around basically US imposed tariffs. So there are obviously, this is again at the very beginning, I have a lot of hope here. I don't want to dissuade anybody from that hope, but I want people to be realistic.

17:19 These types of things tend to take time. However, we're already at a point where, again, we know that we have the critical minerals in our pregnant leach solution, and the starting point, therefore, is a much easier place to start from than if we were just trying to apply this against the dirt that came out of the ground in Bonny Clare. So again, very excited for this relationship. I will keep everybody updated, obviously, as we're able to. And this could take in a lot of different forms. And we'll see, you know, we will see. Certainly can't commit to anything at this point in time, but I think there's a very, very great opportunity for, for extra value. So I may as well just keep rambling on here for the last, you know, for the last couple of minutes of my monologue here, and that's what I think we're seeing now with the U.S. Government. And this is the kind of thing that I've been talking about I thought would start to happen as soon as Donald Trump got elected, and it has to do with the establishment of a US sovereign wealth fund. And I think this is one of these types of areas where you know if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, and blah blah blah, it's a duck. Right?

18:30 We've seen a number of different things happen, of course, over the last few months that some have been relatively, I'd say, I don't want to say vanilla cake type of a thing, but standard kinds of things. Maybe taking 10%, the US government taking 9.9% or 10%, say, Intel. I think that was in August. You know, then we had the whole NVIDIA and AMD kind of thing where in exchange for export licenses, you know, the US government gets 10, 15%, I think of, you know, the, is essentially the revenue from sales to China, those chips. And the US steel and Nippon Steel agreement that came to be in the US got a golden share in there, right, essentially gave the US government a right to basically not allow a certain number of things moving to headquarters, renaming the, you know, renaming the company, not be, you know, has basically got the ability to stop a reduction in workforce or CapEx, all that kind of thing. So that's sort of a different flavor.

19:37 And of course, we had MP materials, not Long Coast, so Mountain Pass, which I think is $400 million, something like that, whatever. The point is, right, 2 things. Again, all different things. Can you call them sovereign wealth funds? Is it not? Does it really matter? I'm not sure. You know, the way it's looking like now with the stake that the government is saying it wants in Thacker PASS, you know, with relationship to, I think, basically redoing those loan commitments that were there. My understanding, and I don't have any friends in the company or in the government to tell me precisely what's going on, but my understanding is that, you know, the equity, the warrants, the equity, however this is going to manifest itself is basically because of wanting to basically redo those loans because there is some concern with low lithium prices.

20:32 What would be the ability of you know of of lithium America's to be able to pay it. And I don't want to comment on that because I don't know. I'm not deep into their financials but that's sort of the scuttlebutt. And the reason I really want to bring that up is because if that's so it's telling me that the U.S. Government definitely understands the necessity for some sort of a viable lithium price for these projects and therefore the industry in the U.S. To move forward. Right. We've talked about this many times yet I'm still asked about it. You know of course lately it came out as when we did our P.A. We used 24,000 dollars a ton for lithium carbonate prices which is consistent with essentially everybody else in Nevada. But it's not consistent with spot prices right which are now still I think above 10,000 dollars a ton. But the reason as I always say that it really doesn't matter is because at $10,000 a ton, none of these projects is going to work.

21:28 And if you believe in the lithium industry and you believe that EVs are the key to the demand going forward, the economics do not work on these projects at $10,000 a ton. You need to get up to $20,000, $25,000, where it becomes, on a risk-adjusted basis, something that a risk that people are going to want to take. And therefore I'm very comfortable with the investment metrics coming out of the PEA. To me, if the US government is recognizing this in one way or another and saying, hey, maybe we should be talking about redoing these loans. It's a good thing. We don't know how this is all going to manifest itself. However, I would say, when you see the approach, I think that's being

22:10 taken by the US government, you know, in all of these different areas, right, so semiconductor, steel, you know, mountain pass with, you know, some of the rare earths, you know, if it's going to be lithium Americas with the lithium, you see that it's a very wide, and I would say very, you know, encompassing approach, which is different, in my opinion, than what we had seen earlier, under the Biden administration, where so much of this had to be something that was relatively near-term commercialization, something that had something that you could sell to consumers to get their money back. It was all predicated, or I shouldn't say all, but very much predicated on recycling, etc. Now you're starting to see the understanding, in my opinion, about the need to basically get all the way to ground level. Now, obviously the projects, the companies that are getting attention from the US government are the bigger ones.

23:05 Thacker Pass has been around for a long time. It's been developed for a long time. The billion dollar companies, you would assume, are going to be the ones who are gonna get the most attention first. But I don't think it's done. And we're doing our best to make sure we get in front of the proper people who can help us get to the decision makers. I will tell you I have been speaking with US government about different types of things there's nothing definitive here I don't want anybody to think that there is. However, once again, it's better than not talking to people. It's just been a very, very dynamic, I want to say, whatever, last 6 months. And I think so much of it is predicated upon this push for secure supply lines in the US and the tentacles are essentially expanding.

23:55 And what I'm hoping is that we're going to be able to take advantage of that with the model lithium and Bonnie Clare. So again, lithium prices, I think, are going to have to come back. I think the world's going to realize you can't have a bifurcated pricing system. If you don't want to have Chinese, essentially Chinese related lithium in US EVs, you're going to have to come up with alternative sources. I think that's sort of, again, what you're seeing with Lithium Americas and Thacker Pass and GM. I don't think it's over yet. Again, demand for lithium still looks to be 2 and a half, 3 million tons a year, out only a couple of years away. If we're 1, 1 and a half million tons now, and you're basically going to take out, I don't know how much of it because of China relationships, all of the projects, as far as I consider, are going to need to be developed in Nevada. So we're going to have the ups and downs with the prices. We understand that, but the key is we want to keep the risking as much as possible. Wait for the price to come through, wait for offtake agreements, wait for the US and actually the global EVs to sort of sort themselves out. The Chinese continue to sell them at a tremendous pace. The, you know, the, penetration rate in, in everywhere, except basically the US has been tremendous.

25:15 However, the cars continue to get better and you're starting to see US cars being released. You've heard me speak before about the fact that I'm certain that US car companies bought the Chinese technology a couple of years ago and reversed engineered it. And I'm sure you're going to continue to see all of this come to be developed and brought to the US markets. So a lot going on. I think I've covered essentially what I wanted to mention about the Nevada lithium side of it, as well as the thoughts on the US government side and what we're seeing there. And at this point in time, Kyle, if there's anything that people would like to talk about, I'd be happy to try to elaborate to the best of my ability. Sure, thank you for laying the foundation and your insights. We do have a lot of questions in the chat, so we'll kick off from the first one submitted.

26:01 Peter Epstein is asking, do other Western US lithium projects, clay hosted or brine with or without DLE tied to them have cesium or rubidium in addition to lithium? Yeah, I know Surge does. Surge Battery Metals does. They had actually made the announcement that predated ours. So there's 1. Now, anything that's close to production like Thacker or whatever, I don't know. And I don't know about Clayton Valley, etc. I haven't heard of any other announcements. And frankly, I would think that that would be something that people would be bringing out, you know, if they could. But that's just me thinking out loud. So that, but that's what I know. I know Surge does, yeah.

26:49 When will Bonnie Clare start production? Well, you know, look, let's always, here's always my caveat, you know, without, with, if financing is not an issue, I think we get Bonnie Clare into production in 2031. And the reason, and here's just my rough timeline going out forward, as we go through to pre-feasibility, right, and where we are specifically right now, is looking at some studies we want to do, looking at some basically firms as well, as to who do we want to author the pre-feasibility study. Coming out of the PEA, there was a recommended scope of work that the authors of the PEA, and that would have been GRE, thought would be necessary to basically get us to a pre-feasibility stage.

27:37 A lot of that is drilling, quite honestly, and drilling is the kind of thing that we know we could double up with the number of drills and cut the timeline down, right? We don't just have to drill 1 hole at a time. We know rig availability would be there. We have a pretty good handle on how quickly, you know, the rigs can get down to the depth we need, et cetera. Metallurgy, we would need advanced metallurgy. It's the kind of thing we could put a bigger team on. I would assume it would still be floor at this point in time using you know their technology that kind of thing. The big thing is really going to be what what is it what eventually is decided on with regards to a test of our mining method which is borehole mining. Again this is the methodology that is essentially used by Cameco at Scar Lake and Orano is just starting it up with their Denison JV.

28:24 And that's just rotating that drill string, essentially a big oil and gas rig, rotating the drill string with high pressure water coming out. It erodes the sides of the well and basically drops a bunch of mud down the bottom, the mud gets pumped up into the plant, and then we start the whole recovery process. Do we need to do a test of that for the PFS? We're getting mixed answers on that, and that's one of the things that we want to determine, because if we don't, then obviously that gets us to P feasibility relatively quicker. When you think about Bonnie Clare sort of holistically, right, We don't have an open pit. We're not talking about having to lay back, you know, and dig through overburden to get down to the ore. That's sort of one of the beauties of the borehole mining. You get there very, very quickly to your targeted depths.

29:12 So really the construction is a plant, right? Plant's a big shell. Outside, inside, you know, it's just basically recovery units. You know, basically loops of systems that go in a very methodical way that can be built in a modular way, et cetera, to which you hook up to, you know, your, your basically your infrastructure, the rest of your utilities, et cetera. And of course, as you've heard me speak many times, Bonnie Clare is 20 yards off the state route 95.

29:45 We have high tension lines going over top of us, another set coming through, et cetera. Water is still something that needs to be resolved as basically almost all these other projects, et cetera. But the point of my telling you all of this is that you could go from pre-feas into feasibility very, very quickly. And in my opinion, you could easily start construction as you're going through feasibility. I know there have been projects, many projects in the past that have gone directly from pre-fees into feasibility. This will be a risk and reward kind of a trade-off. The reason I bring up the risk reward is because of the one big beautiful bill that's part of the US legislation. Essentially it was just passed a few months ago, maybe 6 weeks ago, something like that.

30:32 But the potential for having the manufacturing side of Bonnie Clare, so let's just call it the plant. And now this is just Steve's opinion, right? This is nobody else's opinion yet. If that's, in fact, a manufacturing plant, we have bonus depreciation, we've advanced depreciation, we have expensing instead of capitalization, a lot of things that could potentially impact, okay, the taxes at Bonnie Clare. And of course we measure our NPVs on an after-tax, a percent after-tax

31:07 evaluation metric, so it would have a direct impact. And I'll just tell you that in my very, very rough calculations, it could be worth hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, one of the things that we're going to do is look into trying to get basically somebody other than Steve to give not an opinion, but basically guidance on that. We're doing that right now and see if we can't get a little more of our of a handle around that But obviously that would be important to a strategic partner or anybody else So that's why as I say to you, I want to try to get this, you know, 20 It looks like I think 2031 inside their constructions got to start before Maybe 2030 Or you got to be going into production before 2031. We'll get all of this figured out. But then that's what we're going to shoot for, because I think that could be potentially a pretty big prize.

32:01 So we're looking again, and any way we can to basically, if we get delayed because of financing or anything else, look at ways to basically double up. We'll certainly be looking up with potential partners who have the ability to build things that makes perfect sense. And again, that doesn't mean that we have these partners in our hip pockets. I'm just saying is that this is logically how you see a lot of these big kinds of projects get built. All of these kinds of things to advance that timeline and keep it in that timeframe.

32:30 So hopefully that is- I'm thinking of a partner, could the relationship with HydroLithium eventually become a partnership where they help develop a pilot planned for a feasibility study That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping that that the partner that the relationship and I'm just try it again be very careful I don't want I don't want to call anything a partnership. We have a relationship with hydro lithium that I'm hoping could manifest itself into a partnership in many, many different ways. Perhaps not just with them, but with hydro lithium's ability to bring other you know players to the to the table If you read the news release You know that I put out last week to see I was I worded it very carefully the kinds of things that I wanted to say about You know hydro lithium in its CEO I can't tell you how much this man has impressed me and I think the depth of his relationships go. Now, you know, that that doesn't mean anything. However, I think that if we can prove that the relationship, pardon me, if the technology works, you know, with Bonnie Claire's material, I mean, I have no idea perhaps it could work on the on the clay itself on the on the initial slurry But I will tell you we're not we're looking more at the back end but It's the kind of thing that if it's proven and we see the magnitude of this project and look Bonnie Claire in my opinion It's a strategic asset of the u.s. I mean again, we're still open in 3 direction folks from an exploration standpoint You know if push comes to shove and

34:00 this thing wants to be upsized, I don't think resource is going to be a deterring factor. And now I know Jeff will probably get on me for saying, you know, we, but we're open in 3 directions, right? For thousands meters, et cetera, kind of thing. And our guys still don't think that they found the highest grade material, you know, basically at the bottom of the, let's call it the basin. So we're in a great position right now, but that kind of thing, that kind of gravitas that the project has, big, great economics, the potential for more, applying technology to it in a great, you know, in a great place, best mind jurisdiction. I don't even think it's arguable anymore, but in the world, parentally, that's the kind of thing that gets attention. And things can happen in many ways, right. So, you know, I am hoping that we do have some sort of a partnership come out of this with hydro lithium. And I know that they're very, very keen to apply their technology to a lot of the basically high impurity brines or pregnant leach solutions that may exist in other places.

35:04 So there's a lot here that we could do with them. You mentioned that technology might not work and an individual in the chat is wondering if the new technology underperforms or costs escalate, What is the fallback options? Well, I'm talking about the new technology here, right? So I don't even want to talk about it in terms of a fallback position, right? And that's one of the things, again, I want to be very, very clear. This technology is not supplanting the floor developed flow sheet that we have for the lithium and the boron. Okay, this is additive. So specifically, we're looking at the cesium, the rubidium, okay, go after that. Can we get that out of the pregnant leach solution in a way that's economical? That would be the first thing that I would say. I do think that we're going to find out very quickly what the parameters of lithium and boron extraction are though as well.

36:02 If for some reason, and I mentioned some of these things before, like you know residence time in terms and that's sort of like how long does your solution have to be exposed to a reagent, okay? The shorter that sort of circuit is, the better. You think about it, because your throughput increases. Perhaps the ability to change the reagents, perhaps, you know, I don't know, all sorts of different things. But that's all gravy right now. So there is no fallback position because we haven't changed our position. And that's one thing I just want to make clear again to people. If hydro lithium can grab the cesium and rubinium, I'm not saying that we wouldn't have floor look at it, too. But then we've got 2 options, right? 2 potential ways to go. And again, that goes down to the whole thing about optionality and de-risking. This is precisely what I'm talking about.

36:53 Right, right. Thank you. Any updates on the potential for obtaining water rights? No, the answer is there is no update right now. This is what I would say to people with regards to the water rights. You know, the state of Nevada has to figure out a way to get all these overallocations taken care of. You know, all of these projects are going to require tremendous amounts of water. There's just no way around it. And obviously, you need to be cognizant of using neighbor's water, you know, the overall impact over time to the aquifers, things like that. So I always tell people, remember, one of the nice starting points about where we are is first of all, we don't have nearby neighbors. And second of all, all the water we have is brackish.

37:42 Okay, so we're not talking about using potable water. It's, there's no agriculture in the water. You couldn't use the water coming out of Bonnie Clare nearby etc. And as an example use pivot irrigation on alfalfa or something like that if you wanted there's just too much salt on it so there's really not a lot of uses for it but water rights you know it's one of those things You got X amount of dollars to do things and water rights can be very expensive. I do know that the state, you know, is gonna have to look at things where, you know, basically water rights holders who don't have any use for it and can't find a buyer for it, can't is essentially extorts the wrong word but hold up all of these all of these projects coming forward by sort of being the last person standing. And I don't know how this is going to evolve.

38:31 It's look, it's a very tricky political kind of thing. But in general, when you talk about the fact that all of these areas where the projects are, basically, on what's called an over allocated basin, right? So they say, hell, you know, these, the aquifers recharge at a rate of whatever, 10 feet a year, and there's already 12 feet, you know, being used a year, you're over allocated. Obviously I'm making this, oversimplifying this, right?

38:58 But then the state, right, and again, remember what Nevada is. It's you know, the fourth largest gold and silver producing country in the world. They know what they have to do to basically make short-term impacts such as mining, which may be 60 or 100 years, consider a short-term impact on the rechargeability of the aquifers, they know how to do that. So I have great faith that all of this is going to be worked out because, you know, again, the government, the governors again just made it very clear they want this lithium industry to not just survive but to thrive in Nevada. You heard me speak about this before. They're busy trying to swipe all the high-tech manufacturing that they can from California. I don't know if you've seen sort of what's coming out of Las Vegas but Las Vegas is not doing well and half the state's workforce is in the you know in the hospitality industry.

39:53 So you know the governor he definitely wants to basically you know get into as many different things as he possibly can. There is, you know, there's a bit of an impasse, I wanna say, at the state legislature level. You've got mixed, you got Republicans and you got Democrats. But, you know, just in terms of way forward for the state, it seems pretty clear to me that mining is not going away. So again, long winded way of saying no, we don't have water rights. It's not the highest thing on my list right now. You take dollars away that we think are probably put to better use. And I again, We've often talked about the different ways that we can get value out of Bonnie Clare. Do we do it alone? Okay, sure. We can try to build it alone, go through all of the dilution, et cetera, over time build the team, et cetera. Is it more probabilistic that we end up with a partner in some way? We sell offtake.

40:48 I'd say all of those avenues are more probable than our building alone. And I would say that all of those avenues probably come in with more funding, people perhaps have got more weight, political gravitas, etc, that kind of thing than the model Lithium has at this time. And I think that's where you would see probably a natural move towards going after things like water rights. And just think it's a little bit farther in the future than where we are now. Gotcha. Another question here. Why hasn't Albemarle, who has an operating lithium mine in Nevada, invest in Lithium Americas or other promising lithium juniors nearby their Silver peak complex? Well, I can't talk obviously for Albemarle, but I mean, I would just say there's some obvious differences in that, you know, silver peaks, it's a 5,000 ton, you know, lithium brine operation, you know, pretty sure too that the stuff still comes to surface. These evaporation ponds, they're not going to be around much longer.

41:51 You can't even get away, really, with that in South America anymore because of how much water you're basically just throwing away. But I mean, again, that's a brine operation. And so you're talking about, you know, lithium Americus is an open pit, you're talking about us, we're, you know, a borehole mining thing. And again, we're not talking about a brine, we're talking about, you know, a sediment, a clay. So I don't know the extent to which Albemarle sees it as a natural fit, nor do we know what they have looking at overseas. You know, I just think that the number of places like you hear about the smack over right in the brine, and I know that the the energy companies have a lot of that, right, Because they're all depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs. And that looks like that's the next sort of big thing. This looks like where the DLE is finally going to emerge.

42:40 I would think years ago, you thought it was going to be like the Salton Sea, right over there, controlled thermal, etc. And we're still waiting for that to come on. But I would say is that if Albemarle is gonna take a look at something, they should take a look at something like us. I mean, when I look at the standard lithiums, I think it was the feasibility study just came out, was updated on the smack over, Pretty sure it was feasibility study. I'm looking at the investment metrics. I'll take Bonnie Clare's all day long. And I would hope Ava Marl would too. So, you know, you just don't know where potential partnerships are going to emerge from. And it's, you know, the unfortunate thing is that again, I can't tell people everything that you know, we're up to as a company. And by the same token, I don't want to try to, you know, imply that that means there's something imminent, because means there's something imminent because frankly there isn't.

43:33 It doesn't mean that there isn't stuff that's going on but it's going to happen when it does. These things just evolve and again when you see an announcement that's made on a Tuesday it doesn't mean that everything just got figured out on Monday. These kinds of relationships take a long time And I will tell you that we've had some relationships going on for a long time with people. So I think that we're going to see things in this very dynamic industry going forward. Speaking of dynamic industry, if the US DOE or DOD were to put a floor price in for lithium carbonate for lithium Americas or any other companies what price might the floor be? I Think it's gonna have to be 20 25,000 dollars a ton for carbonate I just again if you if you take a look in particular at everything that's going on in Nevada right so.

44:23 You know again everybody says oh the DLE. You know what DLE. I'm sorry it's not commercialized and as I said if you just take a look at what was going on in the smack over, which I would argue is supposed to, you know, that's the poster child for, you know, for DLE in the U S you know, the metrics are, you know, whatever. But again, people also, when they hear about a thousand, you know, hundreds of thousands of tons to production a year, you know, like, well, that's going to destroy the market. Well, again, getting back to global demand for EVs and now of course for the stationary batteries and what's coming all out with AI and all this sort of stuff, You know, you need to have these big projects that could do hundreds of thousands of tons a year. And but there aren't going to be that many of them. So the point is, I think Nevada is going to continue to be the epicenter of the lithium industry in the US. You know, you're, you're not going to have the amounts of the hard rock you know the spodumene pegmatites that you've seen in Quebec or in Australia that kind of stuff. The geology in the US is predicated on these volcanics. You know a bunch of volcanoes are just blowing their tops off. You know we think there's 1 was right next to us And that's how we got all of ours essentially into the basin.

45:35 And if that's the case, you'll see all of these, let's call them the clay deposits to make it simpler. You'll see all of them gravitating towards that $20,000, $24,000 ton pricing in their PEAs, et cetera, going forward to get investment metrics of 20% or more. I think we had the highest at like 32, 33%. But you need that kind of return, I would argue, to get people to make the leap of faith, to get involved with these. These are not small projects. I don't consider these to be mega projects, certainly not ours. I've had that discussion with many people over time. Mega projects to me are $10 billion offshore oil and gas wells, or Janssen's Potash Mine, that kind of stuff. I mean, these are manageable projects, but they're still billions of dollars worth of projects.

46:27 And you need to have decent metrics, long lives, high RRs, quick paybacks, all that kind of thing. And I would say that that plus $20,000 lithium kind of a floor, it does it for you. The other thing is that, you know, if the government were to set some sort of a floor or whatever, it might unlock the ability to get off-take agreements, I don't know, perhaps with the government, you know, as an example, as opposed to necessarily, you know, other entities that, you know, are trying obviously to minimize the price that they pay. And I have often told the car companies, you've heard me tell this story before in the past. You know, you got to watch what you wish for. You know, everybody wants to try to, you know, sell me your material for the cheapest price possible. Well, it's not going to do you any good if everybody's bankrupt, right? Nobody's getting in and out of the ground. So it's a, you know, it's a weird kind of a potential relationship with off takers, but you know, the US government coming in and it's rather overtly or even indirectly establishing some sort of a lithium price floor, I think would be a good thing. I think it would make things a lot easier to come up with unique solutions to basically the financing. That is, it's a problem for all junior developers. I mean, and we're not alone with this, obviously.

47:41 This is just, you know, financing is always gonna be a tough thing in the mining industry. That's just the reality. Thank you for that, Steve. Still quite a bit more questions here. We'll try and get to as many as possible. We do only have 12 minutes left. If this is a clay-based deposit, how will the processing deal with all the other metals, some deleterious, that will be released. Well, you would be, you would, so I think we're talking probably about the tailings. So, I mean, we're, you know, we're going to have a tailings impoundment area. It's going to be dry stack tailings. So there, you know, we're not looking at, we're not looking at re-injecting them. That was something sort of the first iteration with the hydraulic borehole mining as a way to, you know, basically put some of them, but if I recall correctly, there was some issue we thought about perhaps that they would be swelled, Because even though we took the water out of them to dry stack them, and remember, we want to recirculate as much water as possible, you still wouldn't be able to get the volume that you thought down there. So you would have, as you would with almost all other mining operations, a large impoundment area that you construct, obviously, to prevent any kind of a runoff, etc.

48:54 You know, it's going to be very interesting to see, as we go forward with more emphasis on the establishment of US sources of supply for all different things. If things that are perhaps considered to be deleterious for lithium and boron as an example for the purity of them, if they can't somehow be utilized in a way of themselves, I think like manganese, you know, maybe calcium. I don't know. And again, this is Steve who is not the metallurgist, but I'm just saying is that the technology continues to evolve. So you never know what might happen And all the tailings could be reprocessed yet again. I mean, you see it in Copper and Gold. But yeah, we'll have a tailings impoundment area. Some company, excuse me, sorry. Some company management teams with Lithium projects in Nevada have post-tax IRRs well below that in your PEA.

49:48 Given Nevada Lithium is using the same lithium price assumption, how does Bonnie get such strong IRR? I think it's the grade. I think it always, you start with the grade. Because what that allows you to do is to pump out more product on the back end for every pound of dirt that you're putting through. Look, would I love it if we had the same grades at surface with no stripping on an open pit? In some ways I would because our mining costs would probably be lower. But by the same token, the mining method that we're looking at right now allows you to get to the highest grade material immediately so you don't have to work your way through. Like ideally with regards to an open pit, If you had the highest grade material you had right at the surface, then you wouldn't you would only work your way down necessarily until you hit your cutoff grade, you know, but you'd be through your good stuff first. Okay, that's great from an MPV perspective, but I would argue might actually shorten your mind life. Here, we gotta go down to get it. We don't think there's a problem going down to get it, but we can get it first. So it's the best there is for the MPV.

50:56 And we're just, the grades are so high. I mean, in some cases, you know, when you start seeing 567, 8,000 ppm material, remember 10,000 ppm material is 1%, you're starting to talk about seeing some stuff that you see with the hard rock, right? Spodumene that they make concentrates out of things like that. I think that that's the key. I think that the flow sheet that Flora developed also is good. I think that, you know, would we love to be able to knock down the sulfur cost? I'm not sure that we're not done with it. But the reality is because the geology works with the boron coming in with the lithium, we're getting a substantial byproduct credit. I think that we got a very nice credit for what I don't consider to be an excessive price. I think we used $950 for boric acid in our PEA, which is a lot lower than some of our peers.

51:48 So, you know, I would say it starts with, you know, it's all geology. It's great, and it's the fact that the boron's coming in. That's what I think it is. Plus the fact too, that you're just sitting in the best mining jurisdiction in the world with infrastructure right there. So that's the way I would attribute it to why the IRR is higher. Thank you, Steve. I think we have time for one more question and then closing remarks. So I'm gonna ask this question, feel free. It's a good way to wrap it up and then you can do any final closing remarks and we'll call it a session here. Where do the top 2 or 3 things that prospective investors push back against regarding the prospects for Nevada lithium? Well to me, it clearly people always have questions about borehole mining, the mining methodology.

52:36 I think the reality is that our material is at depth. I don't think that the metallurgy is as much of a question mark, perhaps, as it once was. That's why we brought in Floor to work on it, because Floor has got QPs who worked on essentially all of these projects. And I think that, you know, that that mark of approval that they put there, answer a lot of questions for people. You know, as I go back to, you know, well and water, look, and water is always a question. That's why even though, you know, I wish I could tell you that we had all the water rights, I just don't see that as this is going to be the bullet that kills Bonnie Clare. I mean, this is something that is essentially all people face when they're trying to develop things in the desert.

53:22 And water is something that is going to be, you know, is going to not be argued over, but it's something that is, it's a value and we know that people are going to extract value to get it. But the point is that the better the investment metrics of your project, the better the chances are of you getting that, basically getting all the components that you need. The borehole mining, I've had enough people talk to me who've been involved with it in various different ways is something that I do not think is going to be an issue. In fact, I look at it perhaps I'm the optimist. I think that the gains in efficiency are actually going to be higher than what have been modeled. And I'll tell you a very recent occurrence occurred in a totally different part of the world, in a different industry that makes me think that way again. And it has to do with Freeport's grass bird mine in Indonesia, which I was there. Jeez, I can't remember if it was 15 years ago or whatever.

54:19 It was basically one of the largest open pits in the world, copper and gold, up the top of a mountain. But when I was there, you know, they were starting to design the large block cave underneath. And they recently, unfortunately, just had a huge basically mud inflow down there that we don't know the extent of damage, but basically Grouseberg's offline and people lost their lives, et cetera. But the point of that is, is that we talk about fluidity. We talk about plasticity in Bonnie Clare, right? This is not granite we're talking about. This is very soft material that at 3,000 feet or 1,000 meters, whatever you want to say, you can crumble in your hands. OK, you hit it with water. It turns the mud to slurry. When we modeled, essentially, the borehole mine, if you look at it from above, it would look like a honeycomb, right, with a bunch of circles essentially that you saw that were touching each other on tangents. And if you think about that, the material in between there, it was not accounted for in the recovery.

55:19 We don't think that's going to be the case. Now we can't prove it, but the reality is we think because of the water, because of the nature of the soil, etc., that that material is going to flow, which means maybe you don't have to drill as many of these boreholes to get the material that you can suck up to the top. If that does, the economics get even better. And we have no reason to believe that it won't happen. Will we eventually want to do and have to do a borehole mining test? Yes. It's just we don't want to do it right now because the cost because it would be a pretty big ticket item for someone our size. However, we're exploring the potential to do it with you know, other people who may want to be involved. And there's nothing definitive about that. I'm just telling you that I'm, you know, exploring other ways to try to find a way around that big ticket.

56:05 But it's probably borehole mining is probably going to be something that is not going to be put to rest in investors minds until they actually see it happen. Even though Cameco does it all the time at it you know I get it it's at a nearer to surface than what we're doing it at but this is the way I always think about investments and this is how I'll run it you know run it out. Everybody every investment I should say climbs a wall of worry and And I'm not promising that everything is going to happen perfectly here that we're necessarily going to build Bonnie Clare, etc. But there's a lot of different ways to basically make value here and your investment. If you're going to worry about something and you're going to have something like Borehole Binding, that's going to be it, you want to have as many other things going in your favor as possible.

56:52 So I always like try to take the opportunity to list off all those other things that we have which mitigate the potential for the borehole mining technology, which incidentally, I will tell you, is we're not convinced that it's the only possible way to get the material. We've been hearing from and going to be talking to more and more people about alternatives. And one of them I just mentioned might be a block cave, which I would argue would then be a different kind of a project. But the reality is that would not mean that the material is sterilized, that you could still get at it. And that's just 1 potential thing. But when you look at it, you've got the high lithium crates, you've got the boron coming in to reduce cost, you've got the infrastructure, you're right off a highway, You're in the best place in the world in Nevada to do this. You've got power lines going overhead. You've got no neighbors. You've got a huge drainage basin, and you've got hundreds of meters of other high-grade lithium material and boron that people kill to have. That's just the reality.

57:49 We're open in 3 directions. Do we have the possibility to turn this into multiple projects or to upscale the projects? And the answer is yes to all of that. Now we got people who are coming in with technology that I would argue is not only revolutionary, but it's evolutionary, who have experience in dealing with things in different ways and looking at things out of the box, as is example, applying DLE against leachate, right? So pregnant leach solution instead of directly against the brine. You have all of that. Now you've got critical materials that are coming in that the US government is terribly interested in. You've got the US government bringing in basically investment commitments from people who want to be strategic partners with the US. All of this happening at a time when we're just making ourselves known, at a time when lithium prices are still in the doghouse, but we know that they can't remain that way or we're never going to have EVs or anything else manifest themselves in a meaningful way in the US. And I don't for a second believe that's what's going to happen.

58:48 So if you take the borehole mining as your wall of worry, stack that up against all your other stuff. Remember what I always say too, we don't invest in companies like this, investments like this for S&P 500 returns. These are the kinds of things that, you know, you're here to basically take a risk on because you know you're going to have outsized returns. And when you stack up all the probabilities, I think Bonnie Clare looks great, certainly compared to anybody else, but I think in absolute terms as well. And that's how I would think about that particular topic. So hopefully that answered it. Steve, great update as always. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone that attended, especially the ones that asked the questions. It's always great when we get so many questions like this. So Well, interactive event. If you did come in a little late, our team will have up the recording within the next couple of hours here, so keep up for that. But Steve, thank you