Searching for Stocks To Ride the Battery Metal Bull Market With Gwen Preston

0:08 Well, hello everyone and thank you for joining us for the second edition of our Searching for Stocks to Ride the battery metal bull market. In our first session, we covered some metals with some presenters, and now we have a sort of a second suite of metals, mined commodities, to take a look at, with another suite of excellent, experienced, informative presenters here who can take us through some of the big questions around nickel, lithium, and copper, obviously 3 biggies in the battery metal space. So what I'll do to start is just run through these gentlemen, give them a chance to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about their company just in brief and then we'll jump into questions about these medals and see what light these fellows can shine on these opportunities for us. So I'm just going to go in the order that I see people's faces on my screen.

1:05 Ali Haji, could you go first and tell us a little bit about Ion Energy? Sure. Thank you, Gwen, and thank you to my fellow panelists. I'm Ali Haji, Chief Executive Officer of Ion Energy Limited. We are trading on the TSX Venture and are a brine development company out in Mongolia. We hold 110,000 hectares of highly prospective lithium licenses and we're on our path to an inferred resource on one of our assets shortly this year.

1:33 Fantastic. Okay. Oh, whenever people introduce, I always want to like jump straight into asking them questions, but that's not what I'm supposed to do right now. So Mark, instead we will move on to Mark Jarvis, who is with Giga Metals. Could you give us a little introduction to you and your company?

1:49 Sure. Thanks Gwen. I'm Mark Jarvis. I'm CEO of Giga Metals. We've got a giant deposit of low-grade Sulphide Nickel and Cobalt in North Central British Columbia. We recently had a resource update. We've now got 1.5 billion tonnes measured, of course, indicated. I think our strip ratio life of mine is about 0.1.

2:16 And it's a low-grade deposit, but we're developing it in a similar model to a copper porphyry type of operation.

2:27 We are currently working on a pre-feasibility study and we're doing it in conjunction with Mitsubishi Corp. We recently signed a joint venture arrangement with Mitsubishi and they wrote a check.

2:43 So that's who we are. Fantastic. That tags into a question that I want to, a topic that I want to get into later, which is about financing opportunities or how projects in the base or the battery metal space are perhaps having different financing opportunities given this scale of growth and the downstream players that are in action. But we will get back to that after I've given other people a chance to say hello. So William Willoughby, could you give us a hello from Cypress Development?

3:14 Right. Yeah. Hi, I'm Bill Willoughby. I'm the CEO and President of Cypress Development Corp. We're a developer of a lithium deposit in Nevada in the U.S. Our project is at the advanced stage. We're working on a feasibility study. We have a pilot plan in operation in Nevada, and we're working to develop a process to extract lithium from clay. We do have a DLE component as part of our process, and we've taken that process all the way to making battery-grade lithium carbonate.

3:47 Fantastic. All right. We've got some Lithium players on the panel, which is good because there's always questions about the one mined commodity that's doing sustainably well, or has been doing well for the last while. There's always questions to ask those in the know about that opportunity. Moving on, Barry O'Shea, could you tell us about Highland Copper? You're the only copper player on the panel today. Yeah, of course. And thank you for hosting, Gwen. Yeah, so Highland Copper, it's a little overlooked. We actually have about 8 billion pounds of copper defined across 2 assets in the upper peninsula of Michigan. So a historic mining district and operating in the US where there is a significant,

4:27 I would say, focus on resource independence, a place where geopolitics are certainly going to play into decisions for mines that will or will not get built. And we think it puts us in a good position to move our 2 great assets forward in the coming years.

4:41 Interesting. I am going to ask you more about that. It's an interesting comment that you talk about geopolitics around Copper. I feel like Copper gets a little overlooked in the geopolitics question, but perhaps unfairly so. We will get back to that last, but certainly not least.

4:55 Sean Sampson, could you bring us up to speed as best you can in a minute or 2 on EV Nickel. Thanks, Gwen. Hello, everyone. So I run EV Nickel. We are an Ontario based company. We have assets just outside Timmins, a half hour drive outside Timmins. We have 30,000 hectares and 100 kilometers of trend that we're exploring. And we have 2 tracks. We have an historical resource on a high-grade business that we've been drilling and we've found an extension of that. We think we're going to double that resource or so that comes out beginning of next year. And then our second track is a bunch of drilling we've done on a near surface, low grade, we're down around 0.25% Nickel. We think we have an enormous deposit. We've drilled 1.5K of a 10 kilometer trend with that mineralization.

5:45 And that will also be a new resource next year. So it's just outside Timmins. And the other neat thing is that there are 2 permitted concentrators right on the area we have. 1 operates as a toll mill and they're investors in our company. So they're a very nice synergy play for us to get our high-grade business up and running. And we've begun permitting on the mine as well. So we think we're going to be up in production in 3 to 4 years from that high grade. And then we have this enormous low-grade option as well. All right. With the stage set, let's just to choose one of them, let's start with nickel

6:24 and talk a little bit about just supply and demand. Each of these, we're talking about lithium, copper and nickel, Nickel and copper, obviously major markets have been for a very long time, yet the green transition is changing these markets in dramatic ways. It's actually sort of hard to wrap your head around the scale of growth in the nickel market. Nickel was always just a stainless steel thing. And now the scale of growth in this market is quite difficult to wrap your head around from battery demand. So Sean, do you want to just talk about nickel supply and demand and whether

7:03 current operations or operations that are sort of on their path to producing. Do they have the ability to meet these sort of forecast demand increases? In short, no, they do not. So it's a great place to be for either me or Mark sitting on a bunch of nickel in the ground, because something has to change. And you nailed it. It's the supply demand balance for nickel has been set up for stainless steel. And that's been the sheer volume, you know, the volume numbers matching the sort of 3 to 5% annual growth rate of nickel demand for stainless steel. But then if you bolt on top of that, the enormous planned demand for nickel, specifically for the EVs, it just doesn't add up. So something has to change.

7:50 And I think it's going to be a combination of elements. Like if you stack up all of the plans for giga factories on the EV side, the requirement for each of those to have, and obviously a mine is not always the same, but if each Gigafactory requires a nickel mine and a lithium mine to supply it, they're just on different timelines. It takes a few years and I spent a lot of time in Europe and I headed back over to Germany tonight, dealing with these car companies. And we're just on different pages in terms of how we talk about our future business. So in short, with the new demand coming from the EVs, it's not there right now on the books. It's not even in the plans. And there's a real disconnect. So something clearly will need to change, whether it's

8:38 the price, obviously, of Nickel to incent more demand to come on or more supply to come on. But it just doesn't happen quickly, as we all know in this panel and most investors know, you just don't flip a light switch. And it's radically different than the way you think about expanding out your gigafactories, adding demand. The supply is just not there. So I think price is likely something that's going to have to help correct the situation. In addition, obviously, it's always about battery chemistry and what the composition is of these batteries. Right now, nickel's

9:13 a big winner in the setup of those batteries, But something's going to have to change. And I think also in the supply side, typical cutoff grades. So I mentioned I have a high grade plus a low grade, a large scale operation. I think we're going to have to change how we think about what typical cutoff grade is for economic nickel mines, because the supply is just not there from traditional sources. And then the other thing overriding all of this, of course, is ESG,

9:43 carbon costs, and then the geopolitical, where you've got amongst the biggest nickel supply in countries in the world, their future supply, whether it's Russia right now, or whether it's Indonesia and Philippines with what's heating up in Taiwan, all of that's in question. So to answer your question, Gwen, the nickel is not there on the supply side for that forecast demand. And it's super complicated. And it it knocks on a bunch of other things that are happening in our market as well. Absolutely. OK, that encompassed a lot of stuff, Mark. I'm going to take it over to you to talk about, excuse me, some of those things that Sean brought up at the end. Geopolitics, sure, but also the carbon count. I mean, the irony of nickel being a green metal for EVs.

10:29 But there's this dark side of Nickel, which is that a huge amount of Nickel supply in recent years has come from laterite deposits where the carbon costs are just dramatic. Do you want to talk about that and how that impacts investors,

10:46 investors, all of that? It's not just carbon costs. It's other things that are arguably even more important. So to start with, on our project, in our PEA, we modeled the carbon intensity at 2.4 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel, which is very much at the low end of the scale. We're also doing research in conjunction with the University of British Columbia, a guy named Greg Dippel, Professor Dippel, about CO2 sequestration and silicate tailings, which is something common to nickel deposits and diamond deposits, actually. And we think we've got a clear shot to get to 0 carbon. This is in contrast to HPL projects, which are around 25 to 30 tons of CO2 per ton of nickel produced.

11:45 And then if you produce NPI and convert it to matte, you're looking at about 60 tons. But to me, what's really

11:54 dark about nickel produced in Indonesia and similar jurisdictions is these are strip mines. They're not open pit mines, they're not underground mines, they're strip mines. They're like 10 metres thick and they go for a mile after mile after mile. And in many cases, you are mowing down tropical rainforests with incredible biodiversity. You're then, if it's HPL, you're processing the clay and dirt very aggressively with sulfuric acid and you're dumping your tailings in the ocean out of sight, out of mind. So, and then beyond that, you know, so you stick down the forest, you wipe out all those species.

12:41 And then it rains or an earthquake happens. And this is a very seismically active area. It's very, very wet area. And you get mudslides wiping out villages. I mean,

12:56 this is a story that I think is gonna get out there more and more as time goes along. And according to the Indonesians, it's not mowing down the tropical rainforest that caused the mudslide. It was the rain that caused the mudslide. It's an act of God. What's to be done? So yeah, there is a dark side.

13:21 And to put some numbers on sort of the demand supply thing, we've got a study by Roskill, and it's not a note liar, but this is what they felt is that just for the battery market alone, by the year 2040, you're going to require 1.5 to 2.5 million tons a year of additional nickel production just for the battery market. And that's the equivalent of 40 to 70 large new projects. And when I say large, I mean on the order of 35,000 tons a year of nickel. That's a tall order. North America alone, just looking at the giga factories announced in North America, you're going to need an incremental 250 to 450,000 tons a year of nickel.

14:11 And that difference is, it depends on what ratio is nickel-based chemistries and what are LFP batteries. And I tend to think that in North America, you're gonna have more nickel-based because people really like range in North America.

14:31 Interesting, Okay. There's so, I mean, there's obviously more to unpack in that conversation than we can do today if we plan on talking about anything other than nickel. But there is certainly a dark side there. I think I'll ask you to 1 last question, and maybe you can both chime in. Related to all of this, I mean, obviously, as the leaders of nickel companies at different stages, you're always out there looking for money, right? So you're out there searching for who wants to invest in what form they might want to invest. How has that conversation changed over the last few years? Are there different players involved? And do these factors come into the conversation with regularity or not? By these factors, I mean carbon emission, like the carbon weight of each project, the environmental impact, like do these factors come into the conversation? This is something that I think I'm curious about because I'm curious if big money cares about these things.

15:32 I can tell you that Mitsubishi certainly does. And the low carbon intensity was extremely helpful to the discussion. They looked at, they told me they looked at 26 different projects worldwide. They like Canada as a jurisdiction. It's a competitive disadvantage that we have with Indonesia in that we have to go through an environmental assessment with a large project, which is a minimum of 2 to maybe 4 years. In our case, it could be 10 to $15 million. Whereas in Indonesia, you can just snap your finger and start building.

16:11 However, the flip side is that you can be happy If you're a consumer of electric vehicles or if you're a consumer of batteries as an EV manufacturer, you can be happy with the ethical aspects of your raw material sourcing if it's coming from Canada.

16:30 So it's a double edged sword. Sean, what do you have to add to this?

16:35 Yeah, so I would say the downstream demand, the buyers, whether it's the battery companies or their customers, the car companies, have been out in front of the miners on things like carbon costs, because especially the Europeans, the European legislation around what they have to be labeling EVs with just in 2024, all electric vehicles have to have full emissions stamped on them, which means that they are very quickly going to have to start explaining why you have a greater footprint on the Volkswagen EV versus the internal combustion Volkswagen in the dealership when people are coming to buy. So they are focused on the inputs, all of the carbon costs.

17:21 The biggest one, of course, difference between those 2 vehicles is the big lump of metal in the EV. So

17:28 in my time speaking with the European car companies, they've been out in front of new supply. They're also in a panic about just getting their hands on supply. Since conversations at the beginning of this year versus conversations they've had in the fall, and I'm following up next week or this week with them as well.

17:48 By bringing Russia off the board because of Ukraine, radically changes the way they see the world. And they see the guardrails tightening even more when they look at Indonesia and the Philippines having Chinese money behind it, and potentially Taiwan being the next Ukraine. So they see the world becoming much smaller. As Mark says, they have a focus on ESG beyond just carbon costs, but carbon you can quantify. And because of this, just access to supply, access to the right supply, they're coming further up the chain. You see it with Mark's deal with Mitsubishi. You also see just they're very aggressive on trying to get their hands on metal supply. I mentioned that we're talking 3 to 4 years out for potential production from our high-grade track.

18:36 That's what the car companies want to be talking about now. So I think that's a big difference. You mentioned sort of big money. That's 1, the demand. The other big money would be the large capital pools flowing around. They're focused now in on the battery metals thing. And just like the subject of this talk, they're looking for opportunities to play battery metals. And within Nickel, there's this big disconnect where we've got this due to demand category and it's just the supply is not there. So I see big money coming into Nickel.

19:10 You know, I see it every month getting better and better, more incoming calls to talk about projects because the numbers just don't add up when we forecast them out. Interesting. Okay, those are some really interesting comments for those of us on the investing side. That's cool. All right, let's

19:27 move into lithium just because we got to choose 1 to do next. Lithium, the mined commodity that has had an exciting price profile for the last little while. There's usually 1 and lithium has been the darling of the ball. And of course the question for anybody who's interested in Lithium is the sustainability of that in the near and medium term. I think longer term. I guess in all of the terms. Ali, I'm just choosing one of you at random. Who wants to start talking about Lithium pricing? I'll start if you don't mind. So yes, you know, we've seen levels that are now at record levels Especially in China where you have 75,000 per ton a pre-pandemic you were looking at about 4,000 per ton So we've had this acceleration in pricing that is just unheard of with respect to any commodity out there.

20:18 This is a result of various things, of course, the demand, much like for nickel, lithium needs to come online in order for us to have this clean green energy revolution. We're seeing more and more sort of

20:31 unorthodox projects come to fruition or see funding. And you know William you'd probably agree with me but if we had a clay project 10 years ago. Well good luck having that fund. Right. So the world is now moving towards a path of determining where we can extract lithium, where the chemistry profiles are correct, where we have the least environmental impact, and how do we ultimately

20:53 align the right technology partners to extract the necessary lithium for this revolution. Now, Lithium today doesn't sit on the LME. It's not traded much like any other commodity. There are a lot of contracts out there for various producers or refiners or battery manufacturers. And as a result, the price is rather subjective to those agreements that are in place with the necessary supply chain. So until it is regulated much like any other commodity on an exchange like the LME, it will continue to have really crazy spikes in pricing. I think pricing will start to come down at 75,000 per ton.

21:29 The cost passed on to a consumer eventually will become far too much for them to afford an electric vehicle whether or not the government will help subsidize that. So we believe it's coming down as a board we think you know it's got to come down at least somewhere along the 16 to 20,000 mark for things to continue to be feasible.

21:49 75,000 is just outrageous. So I'll pause there and hand it over to William. Yeah, William, what do you have to add to the lithium pricing situation that we're in? Well, certainly, I go some of the comments Sean made about being in a sector where you've got just tremendous growth and demand. What are we looking at? Something like 2 million tons a year of LCEs forecast for year 2030, and another 2 million beyond that, benchmark is forecasting up to 2035. So that's like a factor right now of 4 to 8 times growth. So you can see how the price level is insane and say, that's really high. But then at the same time, you look at the forecast and you say, well, it's a great place to be. You've got a lot of demand coming on. If the EV penetration happens the way it's forecast, and even a portion of that, you're going to see long sustained prices.

22:50 Now back to the other side that Ali was alluding to, costs. Being in any mining commodity where you have an operating margin that's many times your operating cost, it has to come back down. It'll be reeled back down. And there's, you look at even costs of a hard rock or probably an 8 to $10,000 a ton LCE range, maybe a bit more now today with some inflation factors. Brine is

23:21 less. Our project, we're trying to hit the midpoint between the hard rock and costing. That is where I focus my attention. What is that operating cost going to be? Maybe we are in that $16,000, $20,000 range when things come back down. Well, we want to be in the right place in terms of operating costs to be able to sustain that type of price spike and move. Absolutely. Okay. I just could add to that very quickly, Gwen, sorry. 1 parallel that is, you know, it's odd to draw on, which is the oil sands, right? The oil sands only come to production when the price of oil is above a certain sort of threshold. And for lithium, many of these projects that we see out there that have, or will have a price of production that is significantly higher premium than call it 10,000 or $20,000.

24:08 Those projects, as the price starts to correct, will see the same effect as we've seen in the oil sands where they will sort of fall off as potential producers for this revolution. Gotcha. Yeah, that's an interesting analogy, an ironic but appropriate analogy. Okay, you've both referenced, I mean, new technologies in the space and you can't talk about lithium without talking about new technologies. You both also referenced the incredible scale of growth in lithium. And I think lithium, it stands out for that because 20 years ago, what did we use lithium for? Like making ceramics or something? Like we didn't use it for very much at all. And now it's this cornerstone piece of this massive paradigm shift in how we move people around the earth. So it's a really insane growth trajectory.

24:56 And whenever you get a market that grows that quickly there's opportunities and then there's challenges. So let's talk a little bit, I think we'll get to the technologies as maybe opportunities in a moment. One thing I was wondering is about some of the challenges when you have a sector that's growing this quickly. I mean education, finding geologists who know anything about what's going on, governments,

25:17 social awareness. Do you want to talk a little bit about the challenges of a growth rate that's that insane?

25:27 Someone go ahead. Go ahead, William. I'll jump in on one of the bigger challenges. Mark was alluding to that over in Indonesia's permitting. In the U.S. And North America, we have standards, we have a whole permitting process you have to go through. And it's almost a project by project basis. You have to look at what that source is. What's the permitting challenge that a particular project deposits going to have in terms of flora, fauna, some archaeological sites, groundwater, water is a big consideration anytime you look at a project. So when we're developing new sources, we always want to look and see is that going to match the society's awareness and perception of that project? Is it gonna be something that's fits in the new regime of ESG or is it something that's an outlier?

26:29 So That's always a challenge. Our particular project, I think we've got some good fundamentals on the permitting side of it. We haven't really done a carbon balance to that. We can talk more about that. I think we're in a good place that way. Thanks for that. I think from my perspective, obviously having operating mines or operating exploration sites in Mongolia today, you know, the pandemic was was a dual ed sword. It was one that that precipitated the need for us to look for lithium in perhaps locations that you wouldn't have found lithium historically. But then again, we didn't have the skill set and the necessary know-how in country that say Argentina, Chile or Bolivia may have. And so with the lockdown in place, we found lithium and we used industry-wide experts to validate that. But we weren't able to advance our projects, much like everybody else in the lithium space was operating in a jurisdiction with the necessary skill set. So I think, depending on your location, that skill set may be a major factor.

27:31 Of course, there are more and more folks going into lithium exploration or getting a better sense of understanding it because it is the darling of the ball, as you said. But I think as we start to look at unconventional

27:41 locations and sources of lithium, we're going to have to fill that educational gap in those specific regions? I think we need to fill that geological education gap or labor gap across the entire space, but yes, perhaps there is a special need. Well, especially, you know, Gwen, if I can just weep in on that one little factoid, There's even more competition now for professionals in the mining space. And I'm just starting to see it with the car companies. About 3 weeks ago, I mean, I've had many conversations with car companies over the years and they've moved from not willing to invest in upstream projects to now they're looking for upstream projects to invest in. I talked to the 1st mining engineer I've talked to. Oh, at a car company?

28:33 Yes. And so starting to hire mining engineers, because they're realizing, well, if I'm going to invest upstream, I better figure out how to tell the difference between a good project. So we don't have any engineers to spare. I mean, it would be a lovely time to be kind of a 50-year-old mining engineer. I think you could name your price. Fair enough. Interesting, yeah. OK, I'm categorizing it as the opportunity side of this growth. There's obviously in lithium so many new technologies. As with most mind things, lithium exists in a variety of geologies, and therefore there are a variety of extraction requirements or opportunities there.

29:20 DLE, direct lithium extraction, is this elephant in the room that keeps transforming. It comes in many different colors and shapes, And it's hard to understand for those of us who are not deep into the lithium space. Ali, do you want to take a stab at explaining sort of the current state of DLE and your thoughts on how much it's going to contribute to lithium supply needs in the medium term? Absolutely. I think DLE is used as a term that describes as you said the extraction of lithium and it just simply means direct lithium extraction. Your chemicals or your scientific makeup may be different from 1 project to the next and thus your DLE process will also be different from 1 project to the next. Now we've seen a number of organizations in the lithium space talk about producing battery grade lithium carbonate on site using their proprietary DLE technology say a pilot.

30:15 And that is something that tells you that companies are investing heavily in the technology necessary to do so. But pilot projects are sometimes not commercially viable or scalable. Specifically if you have access to reagent issues power issues or ultimately you know just you're not able to scale up as quickly as perhaps a traditional mining operation. So one has to be cautious about DLE in pilot versus it being put in commercial form. There are various organizations around the world that have created resin-type technologies for you to extract the lithium ions and ultimately put the rest of the brine back into the ground. I'm a big believer and proponent of DLE and its impact in the future. I think it's going to replace traditional evaporation ponds and a lot of the processes that are rather environmentally taxing that are currently in use.

31:08 I do know of a group out of Europe, a French mining company that's a French conglomerate. They've done a fair bit of work in various other metals, including manganese, but they've had an R&D facility just outside of Paris where they've spent a good 13 years trying to figure out this DLE problem. And they are now building a plant in Centenario in Argentina. In 2025, it will be in commercial production. It will be a carbon neutral, carbon net 0 project, putting out 20,000 tons LCE at a cash cost of 3500 US per ton. And so that's the advancement that we're seeing in the space. That's where we've come. We've come a long way. So DLE, while it was and continues to be rather misunderstood, we're seeing its commercial viability put into place. Absolutely. That's a great example there, a commercial scale plant of that scale in the near term.

32:06 Bill, what do you have to add? I'm sure you get asked technology type questions all the time because you have a claystone deposit which, again, is one of those kinds of lithium deposits that people don't necessarily understand or wonder about viability. So what can you add to the conversation about lithium extraction options? Yeah, well, let's just go back and say what is DLE? And you're really talking about a purification step where you're taking the lithium ions that you have in solution, you're concentrating those, or selectively pulling them into one stream, and you're rejecting your other cations. Mainly for us, it's going to be calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium that we want to move one side and get the lithium into the other side. Now, how do you do that?

32:52 Our system is basically an ion exchange system, which is, you know, think of ion exchange in terms of water purification, it's pretty common. There's other ways to do that through, say, membrane technology. You can do it with solvent extraction. But it seems like the industry is more focused now on finding that right resin, that right compound that's going to be selective and moving in that direction. So you see a lot of work by different companies in that sector. And I got all these right. There's going to be a magic bullet here that comes through and you're going to be able to apply it. Where are you going to apply it? You're going to apply it in the places that you have Lithium in solution. So how do you do that? Well, brines are easy. It's already in the solution. So that has its own unique chemistry, your own set of problems.

33:39 For us, we're pulling lithium out of clay, so we have to do almost the same sort of steps that you do in, say, spodumene concentrate, where you're roasting it, but we don't roast, we just do a direct leach. So we leach the clay, we put the lithium solution, we also bring along some iron, aluminum, and the cations. We do a couple purification steps the same way you would in say a conventional conversion plant. And then we take it into an ion exchange step. Now for everybody else, other projects, you're going to look at what's the add on, what's the thing you can take away from it that makes it work. So it's not A11 size fits all. Definitely. You have to look at each individual product, but there's definitely a pathway forward for it.

34:27 Gotcha. And, you know, Even in our simple sort of hard rock mining and then trying to process and get the nickel out, we're rethinking each of those steps and there needs to be a rethink to try to get lower grade assets into the money, for example. And back to your question about personnel and attracting people to the industry. You know, it's one thing just a headcount of how many sort of man hours you need, and also the expansion of who needs that headcount, whether it's on the demand side, they're going to start hiring people who are experts on what we do. But also, we need to attract different people to bring us different ideas. So my company spends a lot of money in the lab, working on processing technologies, working on bio leaching, And those are not always the typical metallurgists we're working on it, who are the ones who spent the majority of their career trying to crack the nickel nut to date. So we need new people, new ideas, because frankly, we're being called upon to rethink every step, whether it's on the mining side and electrification or on the processing side, just thinking about ways to do things better so we can draw from the lower grade deposits and find more of the metal that is required for this transformation.

35:47 Yeah, interesting point. Ali and Bill, I'll finish the nickel, or the nickel, lithium conversation with a similar question to what I asked Mark and Sean about money. So what kinds of money are you finding is interested in lithium projects? What does that money look for? Is it users? Is it investment dollars? Yeah, what do they want out of it? Bill, do you want to take a stab at that first? Sure. I think for our project being in Nevada, we are fortunate in that there's a lot of U.S. Feeling right now towards strategic metals and having a sustainable supply.

36:33 So one of our first discussions is with the US government. There's loan programs and grants that are currently available. So that's part of our thinking and how we move the project forward. Our market, our capex that we forecast in our pre-feasibility study was about 500 million dollars. So likely that number is going to grow as we go through the feasibility. Inflation's up, So we see a lot of components of our project costing more. How do you finance something that's going upwards towards 1 billion dollars? For a junior company with only a $200 million market cap, that's quite a stretch. So federal government obviously is 1 step towards that.

37:19 And then people that funds that are looking for projects that have that green energy and good ESG profile are another. That's all something that we've seen a lot of interest in. Yeah, I'd echo those statements. You know, thankfully, the U.S. Has a bigger purse than, let's say, the government of Mongolia in order to help fund some of these projects in the U.S., whereas Mongolia today does see lithium as a critical metal. It is one that is seeing a lot of interest both locally and internationally in terms of it being a jurisdiction. You know, I was there 4 weeks ago and met with the Vice Minister of Mining and he was unequivocally supportive of bringing these assets to production or helping to achieve that path for them. I think our proximity to the Chinese market, of course, means that a lot of our funding would very likely come from the Asian part of the world. Today, China imports the vast majority of its lithium from Latam or Australia.

38:16 Well, if you find it on your doorstep, you know, your carbon footprint is significantly smaller, your path to bring it to the ultimate facility to build that battery is a lot shorter. And so we are seeing a lot of inbounds, much like Sean said, you know, we're seeing a lot of calls come in from various groups. They're not US auto manufacturers, and we're not in the US, and so that makes sense. But they are a number of different strategic organizations, either Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Chinese, 1 German. And so we're seeing a number of inbound. And I think that the funding will, because of the scale and the numbers we're talking about, be very much from organizations with 12 to 15 billion market caps that are worried about ESG and supply chain, but also those impact investors that want to ensure that they are part of that ESG mandate as we start to electrify our world. Gotcha.

39:09 Interesting. I think the money side of this and who's interested and who's playing is an area of huge interest for me when I talk about, when I think about battery metals and green metals. Barry, we haven't talked about copper yet. Poor Barry hasn't had a chance to really say anything, so let's move into copper for a little bit here. We'll start with the big question, which is sort of the set the stage, the supply demand. I mean, the copper market, like the nickel market, is going through a period of incredible growth, even though it started from very big, which makes it sort of more incredible. Do you think that the market can meet that forecast demand over the next decade? Or maybe the other way to phrase that question is, what do you think needs to happen for the copper market to be able to meet forecast demand over the coming decade?

39:58 Yeah, so it's probably similar to the other metals. No, at this point, I think demand is going to outstrip supply and there's a lot of things that need to be done. And of course, that gap is widening. You mentioned copper, of course, has considerable traditional uses in urbanization and industrialization. But when you think of electric vehicles, solar and wind, you know, copper is used probably 4 or 5 times more so than in traditional counterparts and traditional vehicles. So the gap is only going to widen. And, You know, I guess to put some perspective on it, I'll refer to an S&P report that came out recently, which indicated that, you know, as we progress towards ongoing electrification globally, demand is expected to outstrip supply by about 2 times.

40:47 And I'll bring it back to the US where we operate, that gap is even more significant where demand is expected to outstrip supply by a factor of 3 times. And when you bear that in mind that the US is highly focused on resource independence as other countries are and should be. It kind of helps you understand that a lot of things need to be done. So to your second question again, when what needs to be done, first of all, the federal and state governments really need to act quickly, particularly from a permitting perspective. And in the US, and this is probably more so at a federal level, permits have been slow in coming. I will say that corporates are making lobbying efforts around this one because the US needs to be competitive and the permitting timelines are considerably greater, for instance, than in Canada.

41:37 So that is critical for that to happen. But the private sector naturally needs to step up as well. I think everybody understands that there's this growing and impending imbalance and money needs to come in from the private sector to support the federal level. I will plug one thing from our company perspective. A nice thing about Michigan is that the land that we operate on, and predominantly most of the land in Michigan is private state land. So we have the fortune of not having to run ourselves through the federal NEPA process and actually are largely permitted from a state level. And then maybe the one other thing that I would mention is the base metal majors, they need to start putting money into their larger projects to support the ongoing imbalance. And that might also come in the form of buying, acquiring, and supporting smaller companies that need to develop.

42:38 Without the mega projects coming online, that long-term imbalance will only grow. Absolutely. It's been very interesting, The 3 things that you brought up, the permitting, ever longer permitting, and then lack of investor capital interest in the space, and then management teams at major miners not being aggressive, being decidedly conservative since the last bear market, those things have really choked off supply for major metals. So yes, that's sort of where my question came from for sure and you answered exactly in the ways that I thought you might. What kinds of money are interested in copper right now? I mean, there's lots of talk out there, certainly before this particular moment where the focus is recession and tightening in the moment. Before this moment started, there was lots of talk about green investing and the money that was flowing into that.

43:37 I'm curious what money right now is still interested in Copper, is as we would think of it, forward looking. What are you seeing on that side? Yeah, so it has been interesting. Money has certainly been tighter. Copper as you know, is actually in a bit of a down dip from a price perspective, perhaps different to both lithium and nickel. But the overall discussion and conversation around it is extremely positive from a long-term fundamental standpoint. So what we are seeing is that, I guess, investors with somewhat of a longer term outlook, or moreover, investors that have the capacity to take a little more risk. And by that, I mean, they're willing to invest on a slightly down cycle with the understanding that the fundamentals will play a role and copper price will come back in the future. So to that end, you know, naturally we are seeing, you know, things like, you know, family offices, sovereign wealth funds and private investors who have meaningful amounts of money, have the internal capacity to do their own research and really understand and warrant and understand the long-term fundamentals of copper and are happy to come in at low valuations because, again, what might distinguish some of the copper developers and producers at the moment is that because copper price has come off the highs over the last year or 2, we all say that's a very attractive valuations.

45:08 And I guess thinking to your audience, when retail investors who don't always have the capacity to do the research that the family offices and larger investors might do. I think there needs to be some degree of faith that the work done, the studies done around copper supply and demand will precipitate. It will move Copper in the appropriate direction. And they actually have some very good investment opportunities on the Copper side at this point. And then maybe the last thing I'd state, and it's similar to what some of the others said, is that money is definitely coming from the US federal and state governments. Obviously, the US has federal programs. Interestingly, copper, as of this point, is not considered a critical metal from a US perspective. That's a separate point of discussion.

46:02 But the state of Michigan where we operate really has started to focus on companies that are going to support electrification. They put about $1.8 billion into a fund called Soar that they're deploying quite rapidly for companies that are going to support electrification. Certainly they've put money into GM and Ford amongst other developers and producers. So we have our application ready and moving in with Michigan state at this point. Interesting. Okay, yeah, it's interesting to hear Michigan's more proactive approach on copper as a green metal, because it does feel like copper, despite being massive, gets a little bit overlooked in the green metal discussion. And some of the comments that we had before, you know, if lithium prices go through the roof, if even if nickel prices go through the roof, there's options in battery chemistry that you could potentially take advantage of should certain commodities end up very, very expensive. But that doesn't exist for copper. Copper is the thing that you can't replace.

47:07 So I think it's interesting that it gets a little overlooked in that conversation. I mean, Barry, I think you sort of talked about that already. I don't know if you have anything else to add. Well, maybe just one thing, Gwen, because as I mentioned, you know, the concept of the strategic metals being defined by the federal government. But when they looked at that, my understanding is that a factor they looked at was whether or not a supply, domestic supply in-country would meet 50% of the expected demand. And arguably a number of years ago, that would have been the case for copper changing dynamics that is due to change quite quickly. And, you know, again, the manufacturers in Michigan and across the US are lobbying the government to reconsider copper as a strategic metal and we certainly believe they will.

47:53 Gotcha. All right, well we've only got a few minutes left. I've got several questions that have come in that are specific to individuals on the panel. So what I'll do is I'm gonna go through and give each of you an opportunity to talk more about your project. And when I give you that opportunity, I will slide in some of these specific questions that have come through about particular projects. So Mark, because the first question on the list happens to be for you. Why don't we start with Giga Metals? I think the phrasing that I want to use is if investors could leave this remembering one thing about your project, because you know, it's Monday, it's hard to get our brains going. So let's focus on 1 key thing. In the context of this conversation that we've just had, what would that thing be? At the same time, there's also been a question about, does the increased resource size improve the economics of your project or does it primarily help to extend my life? So I'm just adding that question into my other one.

48:48 Well, to answer the second question first, I don't know yet because that resource is feeding into our pre-feasibility study. And so I'll only know the economics once we've ground through all of that. The one thing to take away in the context of what we've been discussing, there's many things I could focus on, but the one question that you've had is, you know, really to restate the question, how does a tiny company develop a monstrously huge deposit? In our case, our PEA phase 1 is 1.4 billion US capex and then plus another 500 million US to double the production throughput, you know, and that gets you to, you know, plus or minus 35,000 tons a year of net capital. So, you know, and when William talks about a 200 million dollar market cap, I, you know, I would dream about a market cap like that. Our market cap's 30 million.

49:53 And yet we're looking at a 1.4 billion cap. So how do you square that circle? Well, we've been very focused on the strategic market. The retail market's soft, the institutional market's soft, and it comes and goes, but it's the strategics that we're focused on because, and we're focused on raising money at the project level. Our market cap's so low. If we start trying to develop this project by endlessly diluting our equity, there's gonna be nothing left. I am the largest individual shareholder of our stock and I don't want to get diluted to nothing.

50:40 So we've been kind of holding out and trying to get investment at the project level. And that's I think a key takeaway. We've been successful in getting Mitsubishi on board. Mitsubishi is a very sophisticated mining project investor. And now we're looking at trying to sell, perhaps another 20% minority interest in the project to a car company or a battery company because they are actively looking. And so we're hoping to do that at a project valuation that we like. And hopefully sooner or later, the market will figure out how to value this properly. You know, my theory is that sooner or later, markets are efficient.

51:28 Sometimes it's a lot later. Oh, that darn patience thing. But yes, if you can get someone to come in, someone, an end user who understands the dynamics of the market and can then pay what you think of as a reasonably appropriate valuation, that puts a peg in things. And especially if several such deals happen in a market, then that absolutely has the potential to shift valuations, to bring investor interest, to change the dynamic of the market. Sure. And, and, you know, and especially, you know, as, as, as others have talked about here, the major mining companies are being very cautious. And we've all seen that we're in a cyclical business and CEO activity at the major mining companies goes through cycles too.

52:20 So they're still scared to invest because so many CEOs got fired for investing too high in the last cycle. And so now you've got the CEOs that were hired to be steady hands and careful. Well, once things start going, and I think things are going to start going, I predict that things will start going crazy once the 0 COVID policy ends in China. I think that's a big weight on everything right now. And it's underappreciated. Once things start going, well pretty soon the major mining companies will go crazy again. So and then you know that's the problem, everything falling apart again as you know. Well with that optimistic ending, Bill do you want to talk about something to take away about your project company? And then just so you know the specific questions that have come in for you, there were some questions about the timing of various permits and about water levels, receding water levels in Lake Mead and how that might impact your access to water.

53:23 Okay. Well, for Cypress, we're definitely one of the advanced lithium projects in the United States. There's a handful of those. We are unique in our path to production. We're going from clay to a lithium carbonate product on site. So unlike say hard rock deposits, we're not looking to make a concentrate and then find a conversion plan to deal with the concentrate, somewhat like a smelter. We're trying to go fill that niche all the way from mine to product at the site. So for where we're at, I think we're in a great position and we could tackle some of those permitting questions now that you have? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, one of them was literally just, what are these stages of various permits? Which I'm sure could be a long conversation in itself, but perhaps you're an expert now at answering such questions, and then the water levels and what that might do to your project.

54:21 Well, our permitting path is, of course, going through a federal permitting process because we are on federal land. So that entails doing a plan of operations, kicking off the National Environmental Protection Act need process. That's probably a 18 month period to do the baseline work and EIS that goes with that. And That's our major permit. We have a water protection control permit that we have to fulfill, clean air permit, and then a litany of other minor permits. The federal permit's our main one that we have to work with. As far as waters of Lake Mead, we're in a closed basin. We're structured our projects so we can deal with water of all types.

55:07 Right in our basin, we have a lot of brine resources. So our process being a chloroalkylene process is tailored to use a saltwater solution in the process as our process makeup water. So that gives us our reagents, hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide that we need in the process. So that Lake Mead water issue is not a concern to us. We have enough water. We're very efficient with our water use as well. We use about 0.1 of the water that a Brian operation would use to make maybe 4 or 5 times the amount of lead. Gotcha. All right. Ali, let's go over to you. What's the takeaway? There was no specific questions for you, but I'm sure you can more than easily come up with things for people to remember.

55:58 Sure. Sorry, my baby just walked in. I have a kid in the room beside me as well. Yeah, so just quickly for our listeners, our investors, hopefully Yara is not drowning out my voice here, but ION Energy has 2 projects. One is Babayul, 1 is Gurghat Naran. I talked earlier about the delay or rather the inability for us to have the necessary skill sets in country to extend or expand our projects. Well, that changed this year when we had access to Mongolia and we were able to get out there to actually get our work done. So, Dr. Mark King, who's on our board, as well as Don Haynes, were able to go off the site with me twice this year. We were able to get a fair bit of work done in terms of arriving at our inferred resource.

56:45 And Don Haynes is currently on site and he will be coming there to, or he will be working on our inferred resource before the end of the year. So the fact that we have had access to country, the fact that we've been able to advance our asset and we are on the cusp of announcing an inferred resource in the jurisdiction that is extremely close to the largest consumers on the planet, I think is what investors should be paying attention to with respect to the upcoming catalyst for ion energy this year. Awesome. Sounds good. Beautiful daughter, by the way. Barry, let's move over to you. What do you think is the takeaway just to be part of the scene? What do you think is the takeaway that investors should remember about Highland Copper? Yeah, I think there's great value in Highland Copper that's not being recognized on the markets at the moment.

57:34 As a quick overview, we have 8Bnlbs of Copper in the ground across 2 assets in Michigan. Those 2 assets are respectively at Feasibility and PEA level. We have 7 of the 8 permits that we need on the first project and 4 of the 8 on the second. Market doesn't quite see maybe or understand the advanced nature of our projects and our pathway to development to production over the next 2 to 3 years. And to give you 1 number that an investor might remember thinking about value. From a market cap perspective, we're valued at 1 cent per pound of copper defined at the moment. So, you know, it's a nice entry point for retail investors. There's some great entry points out there. We just need to, as I characterized it before, get through this moment in the market so that people can look ahead and invest based on a concept of growth instead of fear and recession and all of those things. But there's no argument that valuations are low relative to all these supply demand fundamentals that we've been discussing here today.

58:39 Sean, what's the takeaway? What's the takeaway for you? Yeah, so I have an enormous land package just south of Timmins. I don't think there's any place better on the planet to be coming up with a new mine, whether from a permitting or staffing or even geographic location of proximity to Detroit perspective. So we've got a huge land package with these 2 tracks. We're permitting on our high grade. It's very straightforward, but a concentrator just 7 kilometers away. That's my high grade business. And then I have this enormous low grade or large scale target that the market hasn't acknowledged at all. We've drilled off a kilometer and a half. We're coming out with assays over the next few months. That thing looks a lot like competitors in the same camp that are valued over a couple hundred million.

59:30 And that's 1.5K of 10 kilometers of the same stuff. So we've got that as an option back pocket. And meanwhile, we're pushing ahead and hope to be in production in 3 to 4 years on my high grade. And meanwhile, I've got 1 million and a half bucks of cash in the bank that pays for all the work I plan to be doing over the near future. And we trade at 6 billion equity value. Like I say, there's some great entry points out there as long as you are on board with everything that we've just discussed about supply demand and the crazy transformations these markets are undergoing and the lack of new projects that are really ready to step into that gap. Well, thanks everyone for your time and attention today. Happy Halloween. I am going to ask the panel 1 last very important question Which is does anybody know what it's like to be kissed by a vampire?

1:00:27 It's a pain in the neck there's actually been a whole series of jokes in a group chat That's been going on on one side that I've been ignoring But I glanced over and I was like I should probably finish with that as it is Halloween This is part of my my daughter's mermaid costume. Thank you to all of our attendees for coming and paying attention. Back to my day. All of these guys I'm sure would be happy to have longer conversations about any of the topics that we've brought up today, because they all deserve much more conversation than we had time to give them. And I know there were other questions that came in. I had to sort of make it all fit. So thank you for your time and attention. Feel free to reach out to these guys. I'm sure they would be more than happy to have further conversations.

1:01:14 And thank you, of course, to Ali, Mark, Bill, Sean, and Barry for taking the time to participate today and help our audience understand a bit more about these opportunities. And with that, hopefully we'll see you all again soon on another conversation or conference or something of the sort. Happy Halloween everyone and take care!