Nevada Lithium Ties a Bow on 2025

0:03 Welcome and thank you so much for joining us for an end of year wrap up for Nevada Lithium. I'm very excited to have with me CEO and Director of Nevada Lithium Resources, Stephen Renshaw. Steve, how are you today? Doing okay. Thanks very much, Romeo. How are you? I'm well, thank you. Now, the name of the game today is End of Year Wrap-Up for 2025, but also with an eye towards 2026. So that's the topics we'll be covering today. I've got some questions just to guide as much as possible, but really we're here to hear from you and the Nevada lithium story. Now in the chat in the bottom right of your screen, please do feel free to ask questions at any point during today's event. Like to get to as many as we can. Some have already submitted over email. So I'll leave those into the discussion as much as possible, but really, really do appreciate you guys joining us today for this kind of end of the year wrap up. It will be recorded also for those of you in the room, so it'll pop in your inbox in probably about an hour and a half. I really encourage you to share that around.

0:54 It'll be on our YouTube channel as well. Please do disseminate it as far and wide as you'd like as soon as it pops out. But enough out of me, we're here to listen to Steve. So Steve, as we close out 2025,

1:04 what would you say, just if you could, are the 3 top accomplishments for Nevada Lithium this year, and how have they positioned Bonnie Claire for success in the future?

1:13 Yeah, well, as always, I'm probably gonna deviate from the questions. And first, just let me say thanks to everybody for taking the time at the end of the year. I know everybody's trying to wrap things up. You know, whether I can list 3 or 5 or 7, I think is sort of, you know, it's in the details right now. Obviously the PEA that we released back in August is something that I think puts us head and shoulders above everybody else in Nevada. And I'll tell you why I think that's really important going forward. And this is typical with sort of the way I think about things. I like to wrap the the micro and the macro together to help everybody sort of see, I think, the unfolding story, and particularly to give people hope when you've basically been in a beaten up sector, which obviously we have been. I would say what I like people to do, and just the way I'll start is just say, obviously, I think we're terribly undervalued, sitting here at 17, 18 cents, whatever it is today, market cap, 30, 40, $50 million for the asset that we have with the level of work that's been done on it and the future value that it represents.

2:18 As far as I'm concerned, I've yet to see another PEA, PFS, feasibility study in Nevada that can stand up with ours across all the different facets of the spectrum, whether it's mine life, whether it's IRR, whether it's payback, whether it's expandability, all of these things. This is a world-class project. It's something that will move the needle for the very biggest of companies. It's something that has a tremendous amount of optionality, which is something that I've spoken about a lot of times. When you think about de-risking projects going forward, the number of ways in which you can either gain additional value, ways in which you can reduce costs, all of these sorts of things are just, You just keep putting them in your hip pocket, right? It's like the bank of goodwill. You keep making deposits because you never know when you're going to have to basically make a withdrawal.

3:09 But over the lifetime of developing a project, you want to have as much of this optionality as you can embedded into the project. And that's something that we've also continued to do at Bonnie Claire. So you know we're sitting here now in a world where gold is whatever 3,400, silver is at 66, copper is at you know 5 plus, I don't know where it is, 525 and nobody cares about lithium. But if you've been watching, you'd see it lately that lithium is year to date up about 35 percent. These are Asian prices. It doesn't mean a lot, I understand, in terms of, you know, the way it's going to, I think, evolve into a Chinese, non-Chinese pricing mechanism. But nevertheless, up 35%, arguably up I think 65% off the lows mid-summer, with some very encouraging signs that we have made the bottom, least of which is one of the largest Chinese lithium suppliers, the chairman talking about the fact that he's looking at $20,000, $25,000 lithium next year, based on unprecedented demand coming from battery storage, which is a relatively new story when it comes to lithium.

4:20 And I think what's taken everybody by surprise is the acceleration in that growth. And when you talk about a market which is very tightly balanced, and again, this is a nascent industry, right? This is not the copper industry that's been around for 100 years. I would argue that lithium over the course of the past 5 years, you know, going from say 400,500,000 tons lithium carbon equivalent in terms of supply to last year, or let's just say by the end of this year 1 and a half million somewhere in there 1.6 and then now having to grow to somewhere again by 2030 you know to 2.83 to 3 million tons a year I've talked about this many times that is a tremendous hurdle to have to overcome. And that's before you even talk about the bifurcation of the market. Hey, what can have basically Chinese fingerprints or ownership on it and what can't?

5:11 So I'm sitting here looking at this, obviously waiting for people to pay attention, trying to get people to pay attention. I'll tell you more about the company specifics in a second. But you know, I want to frame the backdrop with, you know, people get very concerned about EV sales. EV sales, you know, across the world year to date have been up 20% most of that's China. North America's relatively flat, of course, in the US we've had the EV tax credits that were basically thrown away by the Trump administration. But anyway, the rest of the world combined is up, I think, was up 48%. And when you put it all together you're basically moving and have been moving at a compounded annual growth rate of 20 plus percent for the last couple of years.

5:56 I would argue that's basically spot-on to what the high, you know, the high level of projections were starting 4 years ago. I started on the metal lithium about 4 years ago now. And I remember, again, telling people this is the kind of penetration rate that we were expecting. And again, remember, folks, this is without Chinese EVs in the US markets. This is non-participation. So what happens when that technology makes it to the second largest auto market in the world? That's the US's, China's number 1 in the US. I would argue that the growth is going to come sooner or later just simply because the technology is too good. And US consumers will want it. We saw yesterday Ford said, hey, we're going back largely to gasoline engines.

6:45 They've got to get everything sorted out. I don't think that's really a great surprise to any of us who've been watching it. People didn't want to buy $120,000 UV pickups. However, they will buy, you know, luxury cars. They'll buy affordable cars. They'll buy mid-size SUVs, all this sort of stuff. And Ford's got to work itself out. I will tell you, I thought it was very interesting too, that the 2 battery plants that they had a JV with SK-ON on, one's I think Kentucky, one's Tennessee. Ford's keeping one of them. They're going to keep making batteries. They're going to do the Tesla thing. They say they're going to make power walls, right? So you take this stuff home for battery storage and use it to charge your cars until they get their act together with the actual vehicles. And SKON is going to continue with their other one. They're all using Chinese technology. This is called lithium iron phosphate, CATLs.

7:35 So my point is, even if the cars aren't there, this whole thing that's going on with the AI centers, is just tremendous. And Just to give people sort of an understanding, I think, of what's going on, you've got to divide it into different segments. We used to think about battery storage as, well, it's just uninterruptible supply, right? So it's more than that, though. It's not like what happens is the grid goes down, the solar stops or whatever, and your batteries kick in. Evidently, what's going on with these data centers is that the energy fluctuations, right, as these things start to compute, they go through their iterations of learning, queries, all of this stuff. It's just these massive fluctuations that need to be basically smoothed out. And the batteries, the battery storage systems are basically there to take care of it.

8:26 So it's everything from monitoring and basically changing voltages to providing uninterruptible supply. And they're talking about the amount of electrical generation over the course of the next 5 years in the U.S. Is going to be dedicated to these AI centers is going to basically double or go up 150 percent. And I'll just, you know, I'm sure I'm not telling anybody who's, you know, whether you're an apartment owner, you're a homeowner, you know what happens when you start to have brownouts or anything like that when you stress the electrical grid, right? Things start to fall apart. And these AI data centers are arguably the most sensitive users of electricity that's out there. They need to have the batteries there to make sure that that kind of stuff doesn't happen. So I think people are really overlooking some of the consequences, the unseen demand that's actually going to be here from these AI demand centers as long as they get built.

9:19 And of course, it's a huge fight going on in the US. And I think it is probably in other parts of the world. But it looks like it's going ahead. So if you couple that, again, with the growth in the EVs, let's just say they keep going 20% a year, I still think you're going to have manufacturing JVs with US auto manufacturers and the Chinese, minority ownership for China so that they can build them in the US. Everybody knows there's Way too many Chinese car companies right there, right now. A lot of them are not profitable. They want to get into this market. They will have access if they come in and the JV was a Ford or GM or whomever. All it takes is a little bit of extra demand to throw this entire supply demand thing totally out of whack. Arguably right now, people are saying we're either balanced, slight surplus, slight deficit. I don't know what the truth is. I think it's fairly close.

10:12 I'm very convinced that the Chinese have been manipulating prices for quite a while. They've done this before. We saw it in rare earths 15 years ago, all this sort of stuff. The point is, at what point can we continue to count on supply coming on quick enough to where it is not, you know, It's just so obvious that there's a deficit. There's no way around it. I would argue you're starting to see this with the prices that have been inching up currently. Again, Asian spot price, I think it's $13,700 is what they're quoting, up 35% year on year. That brings me to another interesting topic about the macro. And then I'll tell you again, everything we've done in Bonnie Claire. But that is that, you know, what we've been hearing since we released the PEA is, you know, why you used to a lithium price $24,000 a tonne, You know, the spot price is 12,000 or 10,000, whenever it was at the point in time.

11:09 Folks, I just want everybody to remember, there is a very, very difference, a big difference between a spot price, right, that is at any given point in time occurs for any amount of reasons, versus an incentive price that is going to bring in new supply. Sure. You have to understand, again, going back, the solars of South America that have been around forever, right, pump the brine up on the ground, let it evaporate, you know, hit it with bulldozers, take it upgraded, turn it into batteries. That's in a world before EV started really coming on. Now you have the Australians with our hard rock, right? So this is stuff that's easier to concentrate. The grade is on the order of, I don't know, call it 20 times probably higher than all of the clays that you see out in Nevada. The problem is, of course, is that they need to be concentrated even further, and it's the Chinese who've been financing it or owning the plants that do that, all of that going forward.

12:01 Again, as we get into now, I would argue the middle innings, the start of the middle innings of sort of the lithium story, you know, getting into 3 years away from 2030 where everybody's been looking at it, it becomes very, very apparent that we need to have all of the clay projects. This is where the US comes in, right? Because, you know, people can argue about DLE and the Salton Sea and the smackover formation, etc. But they're not on yet. And then, you know, we got Thacker Pass, it's coming in along with US investment to start the clay, I would argue, to start the birth of the clay era. If you look at all of the PFSs, PEAs, DFSs for the clay projects, this is ballpark, but let's just use it. There are $22,000, $24,000 lithium prices buried in these reports, that will give you IRRs that are 20% plus kind of stuff. All right? Net present value is billions of dollars, you know, with some sort of a ratio that would be acceptable to CapEx.

13:02 Of course, as I said earlier, I think we've got the best one out of everybody We've got almost a 7 billion dollar NPV You know, we've got our are 32% a payback less than 3 years But even if you just take us out of the equation you see this cluster of all these other projects, and let's call it 20-25% IRRs. And I would argue that's showing you, you know, that to me is sort of a good estimate of what the incentive pricing is needed. That's an acceptable IRR to get people involved with these projects. If you're going to risk billions of dollars, you're not doing it for 7 or 8% rate of return. So over the course of the past 3 months, since the middle of the summer, we've seen movement now. As I said, I think we've bottomed out maybe $7,500, $8,000 a ton lithium prices.

13:51 Now we're almost 14. You see how this acceleration, you could soon quickly be at $20,000. People are not going to be looking at these $24,000 prices embedded in these technical studies as any great leap, right? And that's the point. I think that that's the moment that will trigger the momentum. I think $15,000 honestly might be it, just because it's a trading number, you know, nice round number, where people will say, hey, yeah, you know what? We're through the worst of it, And things are getting settled down, particularly in the US in terms of the EVs, we know what we're up against, we start to see these AI centers come in. And hopefully, we finally get to take a little bit of the juice from the gold and the silver people who arguably deserve it, because they've also been out in wilderness for a long time. So that's the big sort of the big picture. We're sitting here, it looks like we're getting ready to launch at the macro scale.

14:42 You know, to me when I look at $100,000, pardon me, 100,000 tons a year coming in incrementally from EV demand and electronic storage. You know, every year for the next 6 years, I just don't see how supply is going to keep up with it, particularly when, again, you've got to sort out between China and non-China. Now, what have we been doing at Nevada Lithium? It's good to have, I think, these retrospectives just because as you go throughout the year and, you know, we're talking about one piece at a time, obviously I always try to put that into the context of what we're doing as a whole. But obviously the calendar year provides you another I think opportunity to say, hey look, look what we've done, look what we've accomplished. It's been a tremendous, tremendous technical year of de-risking and I think of showing the value that we have at Bonnie Clare.

15:34 Just to take you back quickly through the time, I won't go through all the details, but remembering that essentially at this time last year, we were still getting the last of our drilling results from the 2024. These were drill results where we decided to go deeper because we had noticed that the highest grade lithium that we had just seemed to be laying along the bottom of the holes where we were. Not wanting to sterilize anything, right? Which again, if you're new to it, sort of means you don't want to basically end up building something on top of your very best deposit because then you can't get to it, etc. You want to know what's there, basically. So we drilled all the way to what they call the basement, which is where we would, you know, it's the formations that haven't been altered. OK? It's like where you're not going to expect to see anything more. So we drilled to the basement.

16:23 And of course, we kept finding this very, very large, in terms of vertical depth, blanket of high-grade lithium. And this is the kind of stuff, remembering our press releases, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 ppm kind of stuff, right? And then we had the boron. All of a sudden come in and we're saying, I'll make, you know, what's going on? And immediately we thought of Rylate Ridge, right? Ioneer's project, up there an hour or so to our northwest. Okay, what did that do? Well, then what we had to do is say, hey, look, this might be new metallurgy and we certainly want to see if we can get value for the boron, you know, which turned out frankly to be something that that was a smart thing to do Because it took our cost way down that took us sort of into into February get through the metallurgy And then from then on, you know It was working on that PEA And I can't tell you how many different things go on, you know, or go into a PEA.

17:20 Everything from the mining rates to what you call capital versus what you expense, what's the proper grade to put through it, all of these sorts of things, right? This is just a huge exercise. The PEA, of course, is filed up on CDAR plus. You can read it, 300 page document, these kinds of things. But they take pretty much everything into account that you can think of. And of course, when We released it, again, looking at all our colleagues, particularly in Nevada, I didn't see anything that could equal it. Again, just to refresh everybody's memory, 60 plus year of mine life, 60,000 tons plus a year of lithium, 120,000 plus tons a year of boron, IRR 30 plus percent, NPV almost 7 billion on an initial capex of 2.2 billion kind of stuff. I mean, tremendous ratio,

18:15 tremendously effective at deployment of capital in terms of the amount of capital you need per ton of lithium production. And a lot of this is, you know, the consequence of the geology we had, which of course is this blanket of very, very high grade lithium and boron that we could capture the value of. But also, we're doing a lot of playing around with what's the proper size for this? Where does it make sense? You have certain fixed costs that you can't get around. What's the best size sulfuric acid plant that you want to build? These kinds of things. And that all went into it. And we were obviously very, very happy with it. And then it was very interesting because it was right around that time, I think, that the other critical minerals started to really come into focus. And If you've been looking at our investment deck over the past couple of years, you'll see we've had a timeline in there, the back and forth between, particularly the US and China, having to do with critical minerals, rare earths.

19:11 Not all rare earths are critical minerals, but pardon me, the other way around, not all critical minerals are rare earths, but not the other way around. But you know, it was the back and forth of China and the US, we don't want certain things used for military grade weapons or for computing, all this sort of stuff. And it was looking like China was starting to put export restrictions on some of these materials, which in fact then they did. And the US has retaliated with, you know, tariffs on certain other things. But the point in all of this is that all of a sudden the focus is back on, hey, the US has got to develop these sources to supply for a lot of different materials. 1 suite of critical minerals that we've seen in some of our assays was rubidium and cesium.

19:56 And these are used in the optical industries, are also used in armor, along with boron. Boron is a big thing as a critical mineral for hardening agent. And we noticed, you know, we had it in the essays, but we also noticed is that from our preliminary work with Comeco that the cesium and the rubidium was basically surviving in the pregnant leach solution. What that simply means is that at Bonnie Clare, as in basically almost all the other Nevada projects, you take the dirt, you put it against sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, something like that. That's what unlocks the lithium and in our case, the boron. And it'll unlock a lot of other stuff. The question is, does it end up locking other things up in ways that you later can't get them? Which might've meant that, hey, seizing and rebidding might be something what we can't get.

20:46 But the first indication is that, hey, it was in the pregnant leech solution. We think we got a really good shot at being able to grab that and then hopefully add some value for it from it. And we made that announcement. I don't know. I think it was September or whatever. The heightened interest on the critical minerals then brought us basically into a relationship with a Korean company called HydroLithium, whose business it is to upgrade, essentially

21:13 technical grade lithium into lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate. And the reason I bring hydrothium, pardon me, into the discussion is because it basically is an illustration of the technology transfer that I think is now occurring very, very quickly in our sector.

21:37 And the way I like to frame it is you sort of think of the separation of church and state at the very beginning where you have brines and you had direct lithium extraction, which became sort of like that was, you know, the cool stuff where we're gonna get the, you know, we're gonna get lithium out. We're pumping the brines out anyway. We could just put a black box on it, etc. And, you know, we can grab the lithium, etc. And this is gonna be a slam dunk. We've yet to see it. However, if you think about it sort of conceptually, we create a brine, right? We create something that's got lithium, in our case, boron floating around in it, along with other elements. And the idea is, can we do certain things to that quote-unquote brine that we have as a secondary step to extract these elements or maybe we could reduce the cost of the lithium and the boron to get it out and that's where hydro lithium came in And they've been doing a lot of work on it, a lot of very interesting work.

22:34 And at some point in time, there'll be a story I think that we'll be able to tell. I will tell you that it's very interesting when you're dealing with technology companies and you're talking about Canadian reporting standards, 43-101, all these things, what you can say, what you can't say, you really got to work at it. And so I'm just telling you, it's something that's going to probably take a little bit longer than I would like it to take. But there's some very interesting stuff going on. And we have some very interesting stuff going on with other technology providers that we don't have a basically a non-binding LOI or MOU signed with. So the point is, don't think about this whole sector as sort of being the way it was, for lack of a better word. This whole, you know, sprying in one place, clays in another, hard rock in another, there's this crisscrossing of technology.

23:22 And I think it's gonna serve to basically come and bring everybody's costs down. I really do. Now, what can we get for rubidium and cesium? I don't know. If you wanna pick like 2 of the more opaque elements out there in terms of pricing, even

23:37 more so the boron, which I found very hard to believe, caesium and rubidium would be it. However, they are definitely part of the expanded suite of critical minerals that have been designated by the US government. I think it went from 60 to 70. We also have some very big ones. Silver is now on there, obviously. But if you think about Bonnie Clare, right, you think about our project, I think we're starting to move past the point where, first of all, we were just a lithium producer. Now we're lithium boron. And it's still, using our pricing assumptions,

24:10 80% lithium, 20% boron. But now with the potential for cesium rubidium, these won't be huge tonnages, right? Because the grade of this stuff is not huge in comparison to what we have. I mean, you're talking about hundreds of ppm, right, versus thousands of ppm in terms of lithium and the boron. But the point is, at Bonnie Clare, We're going to take all the dirt out anyway, so now it just becomes a question of recoveries That brings me to another point about Bonnie Clare again if you're done terribly earlier, which has to do with the borehole mining technique now This is a technique that's been used to chemical at scar Lake for many years and essentially just involves going down to whatever depth you want to and circulating a drill rig stem with, and you're squirting high pressure water out the sides. That's essentially what you're doing. And you're creating, in our case, mud, and you're gonna pump the mud back up and put it through a plant.

25:07 The beauty of this borehole mining technique, and we think it's gonna be very applicable to Bonnie and Claire is that It allows you to get very quickly to a target depth. So as an example, if you were digging an open pit, just think about it conceptually again. If something that you want to get down deep to something where you've got a layer of, I don't know, gold that you just have to get to, you're going through those top layers first, right? That's stripping of overburden, or it's going to be at whatever year it is in the mine lathe. You just simply can't get there quickly. Borehole mining provides the opportunity, we think, to do that basically instantaneously, right? So maybe it takes a couple of days to get down to 1000 meters or 800 meters or whatever. We know from our drilling, our rate of penetrations, it ain't gonna take much longer. Once you get down there and you start essentially the excavation, remember what I've always told people before, this material is not hard. This is not granite.

26:03 This is dirt. I mean, it's essentially somewhere between dirt and rock, and it turns to mud, you can take the core, you can crush it in your hand from 1000 meters. But you make a slurry and you pump it up And you use basically airlift, which is

26:17 you're just putting air bubbles in there to increase the buoyancy of the dirt coming back up. And the folks who developed this essentially for us and recommended it to us said, stuff comes off the sea floor at much greater depths than what you're talking about. So we just don't anticipate a problem with that. But that borehole mining I think is going to be something that people, even though they think it's a technical risk right now, my gut just tells me that it's going to be something that is going to be viewed as a real opportunity.

26:47 Not only by investors, but I will just say that I've been having talks with different components of the government about the applicability of this to a borehole mining for basically the recovery of critical minerals. Now it Doesn't mean anything's going to come of it, but I'm just telling you that is a focus of interest for basically the very reason that I just told you about. And that's the ability to get somewhere quickly and mine it. So we'll see what happens with that. So we've gone through all of this. We're standing here with an excellent PEA. We have hydro lithium that's going on. We have the expanded critical minerals list What do we do next? So we have a winner program that's basically underway right now And this is a program that's basically it's going to help us determine You know what we're going to do for the next big big projects Going forward a big program going forward Because we know what we have to do right now in terms of sort of your standard stuff to get to pre-feasibility study, okay? We know we have to drill more holes, even though our resource already, right, again, I've said this before, we're second only to Thacker. And if we want to go into a nuclear arms race, I feel very confident that we could win in the end. But what is the point?

27:57 We got a 60 year mine life already, 60,000 tons of lithium coming out of it and we're open in 3 directions Honestly, if we need incrementally more my guys are not concerned at all from a geological perspective that the stuff is there But by the same token when you go from PEA to PFS, you got to move this stuff up to indicated You know status You're going to increase your geostatistical confidence. So we got to do some infill drilling. So we know about that. We know that we have to take the metallurgy up to a larger scale for bench work, things like that. The big thing that we have to do, though, where we think we could really cut cost is if we don't do a borehole mining test before the completion of pre-feasibility

28:37 study. Our PEA recommended it. However, it's really going to depend on who's going to write the PFS as to whether or not it ends up being necessary. So to that end, one of the short-term things that we've already engaged in, and we just put out a press release about it, is

28:56 we engaged an international basically, you know, mining firm, and I can't name the name because unfortunately when you deal with some of these companies, their ability to clear press releases with their names and it can take weeks and we just don't have the time for this kind of stuff. So you know, take it from me, this is a very well known global mining consulting engineering firm and they are looking at this very question about the borehole mining. Specifically, we said, hey, are you folks comfortable with the fact that we don't need to do an in-field test, do it after PFS, but we really don't wanna do it right now if at all possible because of the cost and the additional time. And these folks have got, you know, experience with Cameco, other places that have used Boral Mining that aren't as famous, etc.

29:44 So we're very confident in the level of the professionals who will be helping us make this determination. And I expect that we're going to hear about that, you know, in the relatively short, short period of time. I would assume in January, maybe towards the end of January. That's obviously going to have a very big impact on you know capital raises going forward for the PFS How we think about the timing things like that? So that's that's part 1 part 2 of this short-term winter program is we basically let come echo up in

30:17 British Columbia actually Vancouver get going on advanced metallurgy in terms of looking at the cesium and rubidium, right? So we made the announcement, we see this stuff in the pregnant leach solution. What kind of recoveries do you think that we can get at first glance, you know, at a first swipe? And so what we're going to be doing is using some mind exchange stuff, you know, looking at resins, different kinds of things to see what can be captured. Now, It's going to be proof of concept. When you think about, again, 43-101 standards,

30:51 if you want to start assigning economics to all this, what that would mean is that we would have to go back and redo the PEA yet again. We really don't want to do that. And frankly, I don't think that the impact from the rubidium and the cesium would be big enough to warrant worrying about that right now. The way I would think about these things if I were an investor is that we get positive news, you start to pencil it in yourself. It's not terribly hard to sort of, you know, use the back of an envelope, say how much might would a circuit cost, you know, to basically just throw all our material through on the way, you know, maybe after the lithium, after the boron, what would the cap X be? What's the incremental op X, et cetera, and see, you know, you can calculate yourself or at the very least get a good idea of what the incremental, right, gains would be. And that's the way I think that we should look at the cesium and the rubidium.

31:43 But I also think that from the perspective of if it is good number, and what's a good number? I don't know. I'm just swagging in here. I'd be happy probably at 60% something like that. You know, it's something that the US government wants. So again, Putting it all into the context of you know, the greater Bonnie Claire lithium project. It's more optionality

32:07 Also, and I'm just telling everybody this even though we're not working on it right now I'm not convinced that potassium is out of the is out of the mix here yet and potash fertilizer is now in the critical minerals list. So we'll see. But for right now, cesium rubidium, maybe we'll be surprised by something else. But I expect Comecco is probably going to be in a position to tell us something also in January, maybe early February, but I'm hoping January. So that's number 2. And then the third thing for right now that's going on is we're doing some work with academics over in Italy to determine sort of what is actually hosting the lithium. To most investors, I'm going to say it's not the most important question. But I will tell you that from a professional standpoint, in terms of the lithium industry, from recoveries, for projecting things forward, it is pretty important.

33:00 And it's not just Nevada lithium that sort of isn't 100% sure where the lithium is. Is it embedded in the clay matrix? Is it absorbed on top of it? All of this sort of stuff. What was the original determination of it? My guys have got different sort of theories on it, variations. I mean, they're in accordance, but there's variations on the theme. And we're engaged with a pretty heavy hitter out of University of Naples, who's written some stuff about Thacker Pass, And he's very, very interested in finding out about Bonnie Clare. He thinks that it's going to be unique, and I'm not going to steal the thunder on this. What I'm hoping is that the results are out in time for PDAC. For those of you who don't know that, PDAC is in early March. Toronto is arguably the biggest trade show out there, exploration development, everybody goes there.

33:55 And Jeff Wilson, our VP of exploration, has submitted a paper about Bonnie Clare, which was accepted. So he'll be doing a presentation on it. And these are the kinds of things that again, I'm telling you, and I've told the story many times about the conferences that we go to. I'll go off to one-on-one meetings with investors. I'll come back to the booth. There's Jeff, he's holding court, and he's got 6 or 12 people from all the big boys, right? Because there's a professional level of curiosity about Bonnie Clare that is tremendous. It's because it's high grade and it's huge. So, If they determine or if they can accurately predict where this very, very high grade is coming from, how it was formed, etc., it could arguably help us target it even more precisely when we drill to recover it or when we drill to explore for it.

34:47 I think it's fairly evident what the benefit would be like that. It would be cost savings, it would be time savings, all this sort of stuff. So I think that's going to be a pretty neat thing that's going to be, that's going to be helpful as we move forward with the de-risking of the project. And it's certainly going to be something I think is going to just give us additional attention going forward. The fourth thing I'll just throw in there, we didn't put a press release on about it because I haven't been able to sort of, I haven't been able to crack this nut yet. The one big beautiful bill in the US still has got some tremendous tax advantages.

35:21 If you could get things into production by I think it's 2031, 2032, which I would argue we're still in that ballpark and we could do it. But I have in my efforts been trying to find somebody who can help quantify or at the very least put out a news release that will give investors some idea of what the possibilities are. And the only reason I bring it up now is because I think it's a fairly big thing but it's again one of those squirrelly things where if you can't release it in a certain form according to Canadian reporting standards, it does us no good. And if on top of that, certain law firms or accounting firms are saying, hey, you don't want to be too precise about this because you could draw the ire of certain entities in the future.

36:08 It's just a weird thing and I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to crack that nut yet. I'm still trying to figure it out right now but rest assured, I think that that one big beautiful bill is somehow those tax provisions are going to make their way into deals that go on in the lithium space because the ability to expense stuff instead of capitalize is just huge when you're talking about billions of dollars of CapEx. So I'm going to wrap up sort of my remarks right there just with again where I started. Folks, this is a tremendously undervalued asset. I hate the fact that we're languishing here at 17, 18, whatever sense it is. We had that little blip up at the beginning of last year when we got up on the Toronto, we haven't been able to sustain the momentum.

36:56 This asset, the value can't be ignored forever. I just simply don't believe that it can be. If you believe in EVs, if you believe in the electrical storage going to uninterruptible power, whether it's hooked up to the grid, whether it's renewable energy, the AI data centers, whatever, you need the lithium. And this lithium is not going to be coming from Africa, not if the demand is going to be satisfied in the US, it's not going to be coming from, I'd say it's South America or Africa or these other places. And You've already seen projects falling off. Look at Rio and Yadar in Serbia. That's now off the table. And you see, in fact, it'd be interesting to see. I haven't talked about Boron much, but Rio is now basically selling their Boron assets. I would argue there's a reason for it. Obviously, Rio is rationalizing, they've got a new CEO, they're undergoing a reorganization, et cetera.

37:54 However, it probably gives us another opportunity. And I have had people who know quite a bit about Boron say, don't be surprised if a lot more value to the project comes out of the boron than what you guys are thinking. And again, we use a very conservative price. So if you're an owner, you're sitting here with a piece of arguably, you know, the second largest, certainly the highest grade lithium resource, and I get tired of some of my industry peers saying they're the highest grade But when I look at the spreadsheets unless we're looking at somebody's technical reports wrong We're the highest grade in terms of what we're throwing through the plan Through the plant and also in terms of just overall grade in our lower zone. Nobody knows about us. We're trying to work ourselves through that. There's certainly a malaise in the markets, I think about lithium, unless you happen to get US government investment, still think not many people care about what's going on, but I think that's gonna change.

38:49 I think we're looking at the precious metals. They've ignited everything along with copper. I think as inflation comes along, you're just gonna see a rotation even more so into the commodity sector. And the Technology, you know, that's going in these EVs is just too good to ignore I think you're gonna see it all here in the US and as soon as that crack in the dam appears Forget about it dams gonna burst and now let me end it there because I don't even know how long I've gone on for Sorry, Romeo. No, no, it's great. No, I appreciate it. And honestly, you answered almost every question I was going to have for you. So I think that's great. There were some questions from the audience, which I would love to tackle. So first, somebody wrote in over email. And they note, I think fairly, with the speed of innovation we see, is there any worry of yours that during a 60-year mine life, that lithium could become less important and badder manufacturing. And given that possibility, would doubling manufacturing and reducing mine life to 30 years be a potentially prudent way to reduce that risk?

39:45 Absolutely. I mean, a 60-year mine life, that's a tremendous mine life, right? And again, the economics of what we presented are on 40 years, right? And that's just because as you get past year 40, the value, the net present value of that incremental dollar is de minimis. So it's really not worth bringing in the calculations. But the way I look at it is, the natural advantage that you have with lithium is of course it's value in transferring electrons, right? It's that lightweight that you just, it's the periodic table. And we've seen other things, solid state batteries, sodium, all of this sort of stuff. But lithium is here now. And I think, the way I'm thinking about it anyway now, the real ramp up is coming, say, within the next decade. And I just don't see anything else that's going to supplant it. And you've already had additional demand coming in for electrical storage. Okay.

40:36 If you want to argue that in the EVs, it hasn't been as great as what it was thought it was going to be, which I'm frankly, I'm not sure I agree with. But nobody for saw these AI centers coming in the way they are. There's a whole another thing about the electric trucks. They aren't going to be there. All of this stuff is really slated, I think, you know, and say the next 10 years. And I don't see anything that can take the place, honestly, of lithium in that time frame. To the Bonnie Clare asset, absolutely. The beauty of what we could do, again, this comes back to that borehole mining, right? Say you want to double production from an open pit, you've got to start laying back those signs quicker to get down deeper, et cetera. Obviously if you're going to have more throughput, you got to double the size of your plan or whatever you're going to do so we would all be in the same boat.

41:30 But I think the beauty of borehole mining is what we would do is just you get another rig, right? You get another drill rig and go stick it out in another high-grade area. Remember, when I look—well, let me put it to you this way. One of the arguments that I hear about borehole mining is that, well, it's never been done at this scale. Well, my point is that one rig does not depend on the other. It's not like, again, with an open pit where you've got to do a certain bench before you can get to another bench. If we want to put 1 rig a mile to the west and 1 to a mile to the east, we can do it. You know, we want to put 6 more and we can do it because 1 rig's not affecting the other rig, right? They're basically just taking the cylinder of material out, pumping it into the surface, and we just got to connect the hoses to get them to the plant. So to me, if we want to up the mining rate, we could do that very quickly. It just becomes a question of how quickly you could upsize the back end of the plant.

42:29 And when you build these plants, you try to do it in a modular way, right? You try to do it so that your footprint for 10,000 tons is something and you want to double it, well, there you have it, and on and on and on. And that's the way that we would do it. I think lithium prices are going to have to continue to go higher over time. I don't think that 24,000, frankly, is a long-term price that's gonna stay there because I think demand's gonna outstrip it. And in that case, I would expect that we're probably going to, we would think about basically taking the production rate up higher for those very reasons that I just mentioned. That's how I would think about it. Oh, awesome. And yes, somebody in the chat echoes, so they don't worry about the next 10 to 50 years for lithium demand. The stock will be a winner, a huge winner, or a loser within 2 to 4 years.

43:14 So, yeah. Thank you. Exactly. There you go. I do want to go through a few questions that are came in just live through the chat. One is if you could discuss the level of interest in Bonaclare's boric acid, and if there's any way you could get upfront cash for offtake from that. For boric acid, I'm not sure about getting offtake for it right now. And we haven't gotten to, frankly, too deep into that right now. I've mentioned this before, boric acid, or boron, I should say, is a very, very opaque type of a thing. I'm not sure that boric acid is necessarily gonna be the final thing that we make out of Bonnie Clare. And the only reason I mention this is because of some of the technology transfer that we're talking about. Yes, we have it modeled out in the PEA for boric acid.

44:04 But there are other compounds that might be more valuable on an NPV basis. So maybe they don't necessarily have the price but maybe the cost is lower. And we're just sort of starting to get into that. As I said, we've used for boric acid pretty much the spot price when we did the PE. I think it was $950 a ton. Other folks, I think I and Eir had been using like, I don't know if they were using $1,300 or $1,400 and somebody else, I can't remember, it was 5e or whoever the other person is doing the boron. Somebody's using like 2300. Those folks may be right. We're already getting $2,000 a ton basically, I think it's 1997, off of our operating cost for a ton of lithium.

44:50 We're pretty happy with that contribution. Do we want it to be greater? Sure. But it's just like anything else, in particular, if Rio's gonna, you know, maybe something's gonna come off the market with that, you know, with those assets being sold, and more capital needs to be put into that. People don't want to do it right away. I don't know, frankly, I'm just making that that stuff up right now. But again, it's all the optionality, right? It's the same thing with the cesium and the rubidium. If we prove it at a certain level, you know, with what Comeco does, does that give us the opportunity to sell royalties on it? Maybe it does. A lot of this is also finding the right people. And I'm not kidding when I say finding the correct partners for this stuff is really, really daunting, particularly when you're in the depressed sort of price environment. And even though we're talking about boron, you know, we're looked at as a lithium project because of course we are. 80% of the revenue is coming from lithium right now. So that is one of the things that we're going to continue to explore, obviously, hopefully along with cesium or rubidium in terms of ways that we could get cash up front. Because right now, right, what are we trying to do with our stock price where it is we're making every dollar count that we can, try to get incremental good news out. We're trying to minimize dilution to the extent that we can, you know, and play this one step at a time.

46:04 We're very, very cognizant about dilution. We don't want everybody's share of the pie to get smaller just because of the timing of all of this. So it's a good question. And hopefully I'll have more to say about that and then in the future. Awesome. There's a question on macro I think we've already covered. You touched on this, but I think I might as well address it head on. Somebody writes, they've learned that it takes years, not just months, to find a meaningful MOU or LOI with a strategic partner. So he says, even though he knows it probably isn't going to happen for Nevada lithium until maybe 27 Just talk about the status of the initiative what conversations are like that kind of thing Yeah, I would say is you have absolutely no idea when something is going to manifest itself into something tangible, meaning where cash is going to exchange hands or some sort of a deal is going to be done.

46:53 I will tell you that obviously when the commodity prices are going against you, it knocks a lot of folks out. I mean, just frankly, look at look what's going on with Ford right this second. There's going to be some delays. We've been, you know, talking to, to Ford, frankly, to other car companies, I meet them at conferences, some people I have private conversations with, I won't tell you why, but that because we have NDAs. But you know, over the course of the last couple of years, I'll bet you I probably met with, I don't know, 2 thirds of all the car companies, all the big car companies, not the Chinese car companies, mind you, which is something that I sort of hope to do. But, you know, all of the major players that you would expect to see, let's just say in the Western Hemisphere. And these folks, you know, they put their heads in. Now, what do you have that I would say is sort of taking a place right now? Well, you have this whole thing with scarcity of critical minerals and wanting to secure supply lines. So now you get a lot more interest from the DOE, the Department of Defense.

47:55 What's different? Think back to the Inflation Reduction Act. I talked to a lot of people about this over time. The problem with all of these loans that you heard about, right, you had a couple that were at sort of the ending stages. You had Ioneer, you had Thacker Pass, those loans were put in place. But nothing was really trickling down to exploration development companies. Now, if you were a technology company or you were a recycling company, then that was a different ballgame, right? A lot of money was getting thrown around. Now the IRA is over, but now with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, you're starting to see specific programs or possibilities for funding that are coming out looking at minds, okay? So it's sort of a whole different ballgame. This is a very, very dynamic environment.

48:42 And all I can tell you is one thing, It always takes longer than what you think, but you just simply never know when the opportunity is gonna emerge. So you gotta stay in it. You gotta keep talking to people, you know, and just take, you know, what do you wanna hear now? What can I explain to you? Because remember too, this is new to everybody. I've said this many times over the years, you know, you talk to a car company, a purchasing agent, who's used to getting the steel, the aluminum, you know, whatever they need, it's sort of like, hey, I need this quality, I need this tonnage, whatever. I come along and I'm like, hey, you gotta help us build the mine. They're like, what the hell are you talking about, right? This is totally new stuff. Well, now with the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, you're talking to engineers, et cetera. They've never been exposed to the economics of building a mine, why it's necessary to have capital.

49:30 They're going through it from the way they understand stuff. So it's all a huge exercise in education. It has been, frankly, for 4 years for me. But to me, the audience is getting bigger, and that's a good thing. So I wish I could tell you definitively, hey, I expect this to happen in such and such a time. But I'll tell you what, I've seen too many CEOs get burned. And I couldn't tell you in good faith that I thought something was going to happen because I'd probably be proven up, you know, look like an idiot if I told you. Awesome. I appreciate that answer very much. I got 2 quick ones left. One is how does the Metalithium plan to avoid excessive equity dilution over the next couple of years? Well, the big thing is offtake, right? I mean, that's, you know, and just because it's not happening now, as I just mentioned, doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. I just can't tell you when. But that's the biggest thing. Things like our short-term work program, if we can knock out a borehole mining test until after a pre-feasibility study, that would knock out about half the overall cost of our PFS. That kind of thing obviously would have an impact on minimizing dilution.

50:40 Do we, you know, maybe we don't do raises, big raises all at once. And you say, okay, what do we need to do right now that would still keep us in the time frame of production, you know, say 2031, 2032? Remembering that, you know, you always go through the standard sort of, okay, PEA, PFS, FS, you know, all these decisions. And in an irrational world, I'd argue that you would stick to them. However, in a world of scarcity where people want stuff now, there are certain steps that can be, you know, can be done concurrently or can be skipped over. That's just the reality. And I'm not saying that we would advocate it, but I'm just saying it's all possible. And that's why I think, as we sit here at the end of 2025, it's possible we could still be getting into this 2031 timeframe if everything went right, if all the financing in the world was there, etc., etc., etc.

51:30 But dilution is, you know, it's about being opportunistic, you know. There's no trick to it when everything is, you know, is going up, etc. When the time is right, you know, we have 3 sets of shareholders, of concentrated shareholders, who've been through this, you know, been to the rodeo a number of times, very cognizant of it. I think we have some warrants, we might be able to cash in. We're just going to be judicious about when we need the money, what we're going to do with it, and probably not try to get, you know, huge hunks at a time until the markets start to behave a little bit better. You know, and hopefully that'll be relatively soon. Great. No, thank you. There's 1 just advice from the chat. I said that aggressively go after Korean and Japanese lithium ion battery makers and OEMs, not Chinese, Just because of the geopolitical questions. So there you go. Still throwing that one from the deck. Yeah. No, and that's an excellent point.

52:22 And the only thing that I think might be interesting is, to me, it doesn't make sense to get involved with a Chinese manufacturer who's producing stuff in China. However, you see all the CATL battery technology that's being licensed, being used by Tesla, by Ford, right, and those big battery plants I just mentioned, and others. Like, it's here already. Now, that's licensing technology. But what I'm just referring to in terms of when it comes to the Chinese is, again, specifically, I think the automakers sooner or later, they want to be part of the US car market. To do that, I think the way it looks like it would have to happen is they would have to JV with US manufacturers or other US companies, whoever it might be, from the position of minority ownership.

53:11 And then it would be like, here we go. Nobody's putting any thought into what kind of demand that that could, you know, basically turn into, and what would be better than to complement, you know, basically, all of these new cars that are majority owned by US manufacturers being supplied by lithium coming out of Nevada. And that's sort of the way I think about the Chinese specifically But the Japanese and Koreans for everything else. Absolutely there. They've committed to large investments, right? You've seen those announcements over the course the past 3 4 months Certainly, and we want to be part of that if possible. Great, thank you. Last question I just want to tackle. It's a quick one, but it's a curious one that I'm actually curious about as well. Somebody asked, do you have any idea why Albemarle hasn't invested in any of the other Nevada lithium projects companies, yours, LAC, Ioneer, Century, et cetera?

54:03 Why do you think that lack of interest from Alvin Marles is there? I think, you know, as a producer, I think they've, you know, they've got their stuff in their pipeline. And I don't know what the, to the extent that their brownfields, greenfields, what that all looks like, but it's like anything else. I'll just tell you, dealing with a lot of these bigger companies, these bigger mining companies, their pipelines have been in place for a while. And if you have companies that haven't really undergone, like Rio Wright is now undergoing a transformation, I would argue. So things are going to get shaken up. In this particular case, looks like they're going to rationalize away from a lot of certain lithium spots. Maybe they're going to concentrate in South America, whatever the deal is going to be Alba Marl's got the same sort of thing in place You know and he's these folks right now the producers can sit here and they can also control prices obviously by tweaking production You know making decisions about stuff that is clearly more near term in terms of their ability to bring on than, say, Greenfields or Brownfields, well, Greenfields projects, say, like Bonnie Clare.

55:12 So I don't think they feel the need to do it, I guess is really the short answer right now. The clay is something different, obviously, than what it hasn't been done commercially yet. I still think to a certain extent, there's an element of prove it, let's see it. That's why we all root for Thacker pass to come to fruition. I mean, there's just a lot of back and forth. And as I've also told this story many times, when I talk to car manufacturers and I talk to them specifically about offtake, well, we're not exactly sure what demand is going to be. It's about like, you guys are the ones who are determining demand. Well, my point is, if the car manufacturers can't determine demand, what shot does Albemarle really have? You think that they're in a better position to know what demand is? And I would argue, no, they don't, right. So they're going to play it a little closer to the vest I think that you want to see or they're gonna want to see trends established in terms of pricing Yeah, we've come off the bottom But you know, I think there's also hanging over people's heads Is that 1 Chinese mine gonna start coming back on, you know, the Chinese traders gonna do this again?

56:16 They're gonna hit the but again Remember folks the the big elephant in the room is the bifurcation of the lithium market into China versus non-China. Nobody's talking about that because of course there's No really non-Chinese involvement of lithium production. Once that discrete market pricing mechanism is put in place, and I'm making this up, China's 10,000, the US is 15,000, China's 13,000, the US is, whatever the numbers are, until that really gets established it's just going to be this sort of opaque thing. But why would it turn around? Why after all of this angst would, you know, the US say, oh yeah, you know, it's cool. You know, we're just going to start using anybody's lithium. I just don't see it. And let me do you this. Do I have a second? Yeah, I'll give you 1 second on the politics, right?

57:06 If the, if, let's just say that in the midterms bring along the Democrats take the House. If you're not familiar with US politics right now, the Republicans control the Senate and Congress, right? House of Representatives. There's a lot of talk that the Democrats might commit. Okay, fine. What does it really do just for this sector? Forget about the fact that they'll just impeach Trump and probably nothing will get done, right? The IRA, right? The Inflation Reduction Act previously under Biden tried to do one thing. Everything that's being put into place under the Trump administration is trying to do another thing. I don't for a second believe that all of a sudden if the Democrats came in, and let's just say in another year and a half there was a Democrat president who won, that they would try to take away security of supply, right, for these critical minerals. I would think you would just see another Reflation Reduction Act come in. I mean, folks, once this money gets put in government, it's very, very hard to get out of.

58:03 And you know, I was saying that before Trump and he managed to cut some of the stuff out. You know, there's no doubt he did it, but a lot of that money is still there. So my point is, I don't think there's any turning back. The technology is just too good with the lithium. People want these cars. They just don't want $120,000 Ford, you know, Evo, whatever, 150s. But they want all the other stuff. And I think as it becomes more available in the US, you're gonna see that. And this is just gonna be a question people are gonna say, I can't believe we worried about that. So anyway my last diatribe. Awesome Steve thank you so much this really I did think tied a bow in 2025. I really appreciate everybody, full audience stayed with us for the whole time. I appreciate your time very much as we get towards the holidays. I hope if you have any additional questions, you'll reach out directly to Nevada Lithium. You can feel free to reach out to 6-2.

58:50 I'll make sure that Steve gets those questions. But Steve, thank you so much. This is great. I hope you