Altius Minerals Corporation (ALS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Minerals Investor Day 2023 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This call is being recorded on Tuesday, May 16, 2023. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Investor Day. We've got a live event going on with multiple speakers, and we'll try to reference slide numbers as we go to make it easier for those of you on the conference call or logged into the webcast. There will be a couple Q&A breaks, and we'll ask you to hold your questions till the first Q&A break. Then we'll take questions in the room, and then we'll prompt Michelle for the conference call. For those of you attending virtually, dial into the conference call to ask questions as the webcast is recording only. The slides for this event are posted to our website and include the Altius slides, plus guest presenters from Lithium Royalty Corporation, Adventus Mining and Orogen Royalties will speak in that order. When we finish the Altius presentation, we'll do the Q&A and we'll introduce each speaker as they start. There's a longer than usual forward-looking statement. It's on Slide 2 and applies to everything that we'll say both in the remarks and in the Q&A. Here in the room, we'll start with Brian Dalton, CEO of Altius, who will do most of the talking. But for resources and Q&A, we've got Ben Lewis, CFO. Ben, stand up so I know you're not -- oh good, good. So I know you're not at the very back. And online, we'll have John Baker, our Chair; and Lawrence Winter, VP Generative and Technical. Okay. So what could go wrong. Let's start it up, Brian.

Thank you, Flora, and thank you, everyone. Nice to see many shareholders and friends in the analyst community here. Hopefully, I don't upset too many people today. So first off, the top of this slide says celebrating 25 years. So really now, we're into our 26th year. So it's probably time to refresh that. But after 25 years, we felt we had a little bit of a license to do a look back, I suppose. And then that turned into a forward look, which is probably a great segue into this because there will be a tremendous number of forward-looking statements in this presentation today. Yes, please read this carefully. This started a little strange. Back in January, somebody came to me with an idea and said, "Hey, you should look at this M&A opportunity and the rationale for it was that you guys trade at a premium to your net asset value and the potential target asset -- I won't get more specific than that -- trades at a discount." And all I heard in that was you guys trade at a premium to your NAV. And my blood pressure went up pretty strong, pretty quick and it got me thinking, and I wanted to respond. I said, okay, I'll show you how we don't trade at a premium to our NAV, may want a rabbit hole that turned into. So we've been at this for several months now off and on, certainly point out that the team has done an amazing job. But I'll also say we've had a lot of fun. And I think in many ways, the spirit of this today should be to look at what we're going to talk about today in fun. It's about trying to get a handle on what the potential value of our accumulated royalty portfolio might look like. There's many ways obviously to do that. For us, we favor -- or obviously, we pride ourselves, I guess, on being a long-term investor with very little kind of emphasis or focus on short-term dynamics, everything we do is about the long term and what might play out. So we favor net asset value, say, over shorter term to EBITDA metrics and whatnot, everything we do when we're assessing the value of our business. Why does it matter? Like why does it matter if we understand or if we have a strong handle on what the value of the business is. And I guess it does because it informs so many of the important decisions that we have to make, everything from what looks like an attractive price to us if we're active on our buyback, these M&A type proposals, relative value, those types of things. So again, we've done all this work. It's actually been a little bit -- there's nothing revolutionary here, but it's been fairly illuminating for us internally. And so we just wanted to share that, I think, with the rest of our fellow shareholders and to see where this takes us. And I'm reiterating on the bottom of this slide in bold that we're not trying -- we're going to present some numbers and potential ranges of values around assets that are based on different scenarios. But we're not advocating particularly for any certain value. But hopefully, the thought process will be helpful to everyone in thinking about the various assets in our business as we go through. So to start with, we'll talk about prices, long-term prices and what prices might look like in the future, and then we'll get more specific into the different asset groups and try to wrap it up a little bit with some of those potential value ranges that we're talking about. So this, again, debuted at obvious trades at a premium to its net asset value or I guess our key goal here is to demonstrate that we believe we, in fact, trade at a very steep discount to net asset value. I'm the CEO, and that's my job to say that, but let me see if we can prove it to you. NPV models out the window. So there's a little bit of a debate starting to emerge. Maybe it's always been around, and I'm just listening more carefully for it right now. So just a couple of quotes from a recent commentary I picked up from Robert Friedland. So the largest mining companies in the world are throwing these NPV models out the window. They should be burned, they should be trashed, they should never appear again. I recently tweeted out of chart showing how certainly small the mining industry is in market cap compared to the technology companies, and it's simply because the mining companies are saddled with these crazy NPV models that don't pay them any value after 10 years. And then more recently, well-known royalty expert, Doug Silver spoke at a mining finance conference, and his comment was DCF is flawed, yet it remains the primary technique used for modeling investment decisions. The time value of money model levels off over time and so provide no value for most of the mines life, such as a 50-year copper mine, which is a really good segue for what we're going to talk about today. We don't necessarily agree -- I think NPV models are fine. I don't think $1 tomorrow is worth the same as $1 today. So the way we've looked at this is not the actual fundamental model itself, but we've gone in and thought, heard on a look-back basis in a lot of cases at the inputs. And I think that's what maybe needs a little bit of a refresh in our opinion. And I think that point is particularly important with respect to royalty-type interest in inflationary environments and whatnot. So again, that's kind of where we'll approach this. First -- there's only 2 real inputs that matter if you're a royalty business. It's price and volume. And so we'll start out with an overview of historical look at prices and current conventions. For current input conventions, so prices first. You look at most consensus price decks. They're modest, up or down over the next few years, generally settling at a lower level, and then that price is meant to hold at that level potentially perpetually thereafter. So that's a convention that's used as an input in most long-term net present value models. And generally speaking, volumes are assumed to be at current levels, unless there's a specific case where perhaps there's a committed finance or a committed investment amount that's been announced by the mining company that speaks to direct volume growth in the future. So these are straightforward conventions. It's been around forever, and it's how things are done. In reality, though, at least for the past 20 or so years, most mine commodity prices have been steadily increasing. They haven't run at long-term flat prices over time. And high-quality mines with long resource lives, don't run at the same volumes over time. Typically, as incentivization cycles come and go, investments occur, and these mines are continuously expanded. It's always easier and cheaper to do a brownfield expansion than to grow greenfield. So that's reality. That's what more typically happen. Again, I get the convention, but I think it is worthwhile just to think about well, what's the basis of that and what are the differences? So in terms of rationalizing those conventions, I get that, too. So price trends are ultimately a direct function of industry costs. There's really no debate in that, it's basic economics. So if you are modeling a mining interest, I think it's entirely valid to assume that prices will run at a relatively constant rate because you're modeling cash flows. So the prices they may be increasing, but so are the costs. So they offset each other. And so it's fine, the convention is fine. It works. And then in terms of future volume growth, well, yes, that's likely to happen here, but it's also going to be accompanied by a lot of capital expenditure, and so that's an offset. So again, we don't really have to account for that today if we're coming up with a model. So this is not picking on analysts here. This is every investor. This is me up until about a month ago. When I'm looking at investments in this space, this is how we've been doing it. So again, while these conventions have rational mirage, I think it's particularly true with respect to sort of average mines with average lifespan. When it comes to royalty interest, those conventions really, really break down. And there are some really big distinguishing features that are important to make here. First off is that as prices increase, if you're a top line royalty holder, you're a full beneficiary of that price increase, yet you have no offsetting share of the cost component. So there isn't that offset. It isn't valid to say that prices simply offset -- are offset by cost. We fully benefit from the increase in prices. And similarly, I don't think it's fair to assume that as future volumes grow, the offset is in capital cost because, again, we're top line royalty interest, we're immune to those capital costs. So these are big differentiating factors between, say, how you might try to model in mining interest versus a royalty interest. But that's the first key point we want to make here today. So we'll start out looking at base and battery mills. We'll go through all of our key commodities here. I'm going to take a little bit of time on copper to sort of establish some things and then we'll zip through some of the rest of it. So these are the price decks -- consensus price decks that exist today for a variety of base and battery metals. I'm highlighting copper here. And you can see that, well, actually, the spot price would be up and over $0.20 or $0.25 today. But you can see that it's going to hold relatively flat for the next few years. It gets all the way up to just over $4. And then it goes to $3.68, and that's where it's going to hold forever. That's the current input convention. So if you're building a mine -- a model for a copper mine today, and it's a 20- or 30-year mine life, potentially, you're assuming $3.68 copper for the vast majority of the year that, that line will operate and across the board, that's the way it looks. So the chart, I think, illustrates that well. If you look at this, a copper chart going back to 1973, and you can probably see where the convention may be originated. From -- you can go back further, if you want, '60s up until about 2000, copper prices did run in a pretty flat trajectory. You had a cyclicity within that. But overall, get the mid-cycle right and you're going to be more or less there. But then something started to change in the early 2000s. And at that point, you see a pretty significant inflection in the trend line for copper prices. So as best as I can figure that early period, that flat period was a time of great technological change, big scales of economy started to get brought to the copper industry. All those big mines in South America came online and basically increasing inflation of cost was met by gains on the technology and scales of economy, and ultimately, that's the result. You get a flat trajectory. But around 2000 or so, there something changes. And basically, inflation crept into the cost side of the equation, and it couldn't be overcome anymore by scales of economy and whatnot, plus you had these other features, mines were just depleting. So you can see a blowout on the bottom. This shows the average grade of a porphyry copper deposit over that period of time. The grades are going down, mining cost intensity obviously goes up, the amount of energy, the amount of water or everything. So anyway, the long and the short of it is what it is. From about 2000, copper prices have been on a trend line that have averaged 6.5% compound growth rate per year for over 20 years now, not for a couple of years. It's gone on for over 20 years. If you look at how many dollars it takes to activate a new pound of copper production. Back then, it was under $2 in 2000. Today, it's over $8, right? So it's not hard to see how these prices have escalated, and in many ways, that's what explains things. Again, this is what it is. We don't really have to get into explaining it. This is the trend line, and that's what we're talking about here today. To dig a little deeper, we try to calculate what we call the incentive price. Lots of people do this for -- and copper is a great because there's lots of data available. And all that is, as you look at what the average capital intensity to bring a new mine into production. What's the average operating cost, the run of mine today. You put those together and you try to solve for about a 15% rate of return. And that tells you roughly what the copper price needs to be to make people invest in building new copper mines. If the price is above that number, money flows, mines get built. If the price is below that, guess what, money shuts off and that's what you get. So the orange line here jumping and that's the actual calculated incentive price for all of the years that we've looked back on. The dashed orange line is just the trend line through that, and then the blue is the actual copper price. So you can see that over time, the actual copper price has revolved pretty neatly around that incentive price line as it should, right? So you get incentivization conditions, supply comes on, oversupply, prices turn over. That goes on for too long, supply goes away and the price response. So it's behaving as it should. And there's a further verification. If you look at the bottom part of this chart, what that is, is the -- it's a combination of things, but it's basically the amount of capital spent by the industry in growing out new production, and it's adjusted for that capital intensity over time. So this equates to the new pounds of copper that are incentivized in any 1 year. So money spent that year, capital intensity that year, how many pounds did you just buy. And you can see when you've got incentivization conditions, money flows. When you don't got them, you don't got them. What's also neat here is to look at the most -- the recent history. We've been almost 11 or 12 years now in disincentivization condition. So that's nearly unprecedented. That's a long time in our business for there to be no investment essentially. Now at granted, it follows a strong period of incentivization. But again, it's selling you something. So if you talked to most miners in 2000 and said 20 years from now, the copper price would be $4 a box, they'd be woo-hoo, like no way, like can't wait, what a party. Well, they're no better off now when it was $0.60 to the bottom line. It's the same price. It's the same price. So we're not in incentivization right now. And guess what, there's no investments happening. Yes, and we'll touch on this in some later slides. There's a pretty strong case to make that there's a supply-demand deficit coming in the copper industry that is downright scary, yet nobody is investing in building supply and capacity. So scary from one perspective, exciting from another perspective. So a couple of points here, and this will take us through some of the rest of the slides. One of the things that was interesting is that, that incentivization data and price that we have, we don't have that for all the commodities, but I don't even think we need it because the trend line of the incentivization price is the trend line of the copper price as it should be. So these things they're working. So I think that's all you have to do, is you look at the trend line of prices and you would then actually know where you're due with incentivization, and that's kind of a bit of a grounding point in some of the next slides. So the way it works, as I said, is there's a copper price that's picked for the next few years, and then there's that long run price over time. we did a look back and we've done this for most of the commodities. I went back and said, "Well, what was consensus copper price forecast at different points in time and how things played out instead." If you go back in 2003, and I remember it's clearly because of the year we bought our first royalty at Voisey's Bay, and I distinctly remember the long-term copper price is $0.90. And I think I was trying to sell the deal in copper was $0.75 and I had a hell of a time convincing that people to $0.90 was actually going to hold. Anyway, so you can see that. So what we do is there's a dot that shows the point when the estimate is made, the dash connects it to the point where it's meant to be effective and then that continues into the future. So '03, '08, you can see that the price didn't exactly behave as it was expected to or things have been different. So punchy statement maybe, but at the bottom here, we say long-term consensus price forecasts have proven to represent a poorly labeled trailing indicator with little to no predictive utility for future revenue modeling and valuation estimation purposes and we can prove it. So we did a very simple hypothetical case study. Imagine there is a copper mine in 2003 and if somebody owns a royalty on it. You go about trying to model and say what that royalty is worth based upon your conventions today. So simple base case, 100 million pounds a year, plug in the forecasted price. And what that would tell you is that this mine will generate royalty revenue for that royalty holder of about $36 million over the 20-year mine life. And then you discount that and we just use 5% as a arbitrary number. It's worth $22 million. So that's what the royalty would work. That's what it should transact at. In hindsight -- with the benefit of hindsight, if you go back and say, what were copper prices over those remaining 20 years, it turns out that, that royalty generated $115 million and that the discounted value at that point in time was close to $70 million. So a pretty big -- pretty big gap basically because the consensus long-term forecast is flat, and in reality, you had an inflating copper price over that period of time. This was a bit sovereign because, I mean, we make decisions on investments that if we go to the Board and say, "We want to buy this, and we think this is a deal we should do. Okay? Well, what's it worth? What's the basis? Well, consensus does it worth it? Well, imagine 20 years ago, the good investments you could have talk yourself out of. Now again, I don't know if these trends continue into the future. All I know is that that's what reading history tells us we've got going forward. That's what we've been doing. We'll zip now a little bit. So this is nickel exactly the same thing, different consensus prices. Basically, again, that '03 forecast for nickel, in reality, realized prices over that since then have been 2.5x what would have been predicted back in '03. I think it was 3.5x for copper. Lithium. Here, we didn't make the same attempt because, quite frankly, we don't -- it's too nascent. The business is just too nascent to have any kind of sense of the history and the trend lines and whatnot. So -- and I point this out because later on, we do get into trying to create some scenarios around lithium assets that we own. And my point is really just to say that we haven't done the same kind of scenario analysis of projecting forward historical trend lines here because, again, 3 or 4 years ago, this was a micro market. It's only now becoming a substantial market, and there's still a lot of price discovery to be had. So that's just established that for some of the later work that we showed. What we do know about lithium is that the prices that we had over the last few years, they were definitely higher than incentivization because pause of money went in and mines got built. And it almost stands unique amongst the different commodities out there for that reason alone. So that's all I can say about lithium is that we were above incentivization over the last few years because money went in. Potash, haven't seen really important exposure for us. Lot of markets for potash, it's hard to just throw basic numbers. So what we've done is use the Midwest U.S. proxy because of Gander's transport costs anyway. It's a noisy market to try to track. So we created a proxy that based on our Rocanville mine in Saskatchewan, which is one of the biggest mines in the world. Bottom line is the pattern will still hold up. Same kind of overall broad forecast and play general declined to a lower level that will hold forever at that lower price. And forever is a long time and it particularly is a long time if you're valuing obvious potash royalties because we have resources in some cases that will run for more than 1,000 years. So that number, that long-term number is really matters. In potash, we see a 5.8%, meaning you can take exception to where we draw these lines and I might not, but it's math. Generally speaking, it's directionally correct. Same thing forecasts typically always been below the ultimate trend line. A bit more confirmation. We do actually calculate a Saskatchewan incentive price. It's dated now because there hasn't been a period of investment in that sector for almost 10 years. So you're going back to old data and trying to bring it forward with inflation rates. But generally speaking, we would say that today, roughly incentivization for expanding an existing Saskatchewan potash mine will be about $500 a ton is where you would be. That would be the base number that would give you a positive return to build a brand new one over $1,000 a ton, which some might argue would say, why did BHP just build a new mine, price is nowhere near incentivization. And on a straight investment case, it makes no sense what they've just done there to build that new mine. But it does when you think about potash and Saskatchewan, they're not building a mine. They're building a platform for future expansions. They're just biting the bullet and they're overspending because they just want in the game and you get that first capital sunk, and then you've got brownfield economics going forward, which is, by far and away, the most advantaged -- competitively advantaged form of new potash production that the world will see probably for the next 100 years, they want and they're paying up to get this. But I don't think it disproves my point. I think it actually maybe even proves it. And again, historically, you can see how -- when that capital -- it was $11 billion, $10.5 billion in CapEx from '07 to '17 that grew out the volumes from most of the Saskatchewan mine. And you can see, again, the money went in when prices were above what was incentivization. So same point and comment as we've been making on the other slides. Iron ore, again, a little tricky because there's a lot of things happening in the iron ore world. There's a benchmark that's 62% iron ore, which is quickly not becoming the benchmark anymore. The iron ore market is shifting quickly. But it's what we've got, and I think it's still -- it's got -- it holds [indiscernible] still for us to work with here. But just for purposes of anyone who wants to see where we come to some later numbers, this breaks things down, what the assumptions are on a consensus basis for some of the varying grades of iron ore, so premiums that might get assigned for better products like a pellet or a higher grade concentrate whatnot. It's all here on this page, same pattern. The highest long-term price forecast for iron ore was actually back in 2014, 2015. Since then, it's basically been in a $70, $80, $90 range really steadily. That's the long-term price of iron ore. We've had a ball with trading against it for like 7 or 8 years in buying Labrador and receiving much higher price realizations in that long term forecast looks like. Gold, Montalto is doing -- talking about gold. It is relevant, mainly because we now have an asset that is a royalty on a significant new gold discovery in Nevada. But it was also unique because it was probably the most compelling of these charts that shows how consistently long-term forecasts have underestimated the future price gold at least over the 20 or so years we've been talking about. Gold's been escalating at about a 6% compound growth rate. And this really open up a line of thought for us. For as long as I've been in this business, we've been lamenting the fact that the gold royalty companies trade at such a big premium at a net asset value and everyone else doesn't, right? That's the -- it's fact almost. I mean, it's a fact. I don't think it is anymore. I don't think Franco trades at 2x NAV anymore, like I used to. And like -- I don't aspire to that anymore because I don't think it exists. The reality is that the NAV number was wrong, not the 2x NAV. It's not that they trade at 2x NAV, but the NAV has been calculated at half of what it would be because -- just because the price escalation factoring hasn't been built into the models. Yes, that's the point is that instead of there being a multiple gold royalty companies, it is actually underestimation of the NAV itself. So just to sum up on the price side of the equation. So this is going through all the commodities we've talked about, copper 6.5% 20-year growth rate, nickel 5.5%, potash 5.8%, benchmark iron ore 62%, iron ore 5.5%, gold 6.2%. Over that time, U.S. CPI is escalated at 2.5% and global CPI is about 3.6%. So as we get into the next part of the slides, what we're going to do is we're going to run some scenarios that look at different price forecast future. So we'll talk about what the consensus price is today and what implied value that might assign to one of our royalties, then we'll take these growth rates and project them into the future. We do it actually, we do it at half the current calculated growth rate and in the full current growth rate. You'll see that in a series of valuation matrices as we go forward. So that's kind of all we have on prices. That's probably a good point to ask a few questions or get some eggs thrown at me or whatever people want to do here. Is there any questions? Is all that thesis clear? Again, another key point here is that's particularly relevant to royalty because that price escalation factor is so lopsided. You get those price -- there is inflation in commodity prices. There is inflation in commodity prices. It's higher than general inflation. There's industry-specific factors that have been causing these costs, and hence the prices to increase. It's been going on for more than 20 years now. Maybe inflection changes, I don't know, but that's just the way it is. Yes. Go ahead, Brian.

[indiscernible]

No. In fact, I didn't know if I wanted to talk about this because this is your buyers, spectacular staff, right.

[indiscernible]

Yes. Yes. But I think that the argument actually breaks down on short life assets to because, again, like this is about trend lines over a full cyclical period. What's the good at modeling a 5-year asset on a long-term trend line when you might have a 30% decline before 50% -- like the cyclicity matters more on a short-term asset. It's only for super long-life assets, I think that this hole right, where you can sort of average out the cyclicity. It still doesn't take away the fact that there's more weight if you're going to discount on the front than the back. But again, the longer the duration, that's what we have. That's what Altius, that's why I think it's important for us to think like this. And it doesn't -- it will be part of our thinking going forward. Anyone who's out there selling anything, it might not be part of our pricing going forward or will be part of our thinking going forward. Okay. Everyone good there. We'll start to get into some of the...

[Operator Instructions] There are no question on the phone lines at this time. Please continue.

Okay. Thank you, operator. So we'll start with potash, and we'll go through each of these kind of in groups. So start up, we're going to establish some concepts around demand for the different commodity exposures that we have, and then we will get into the more specific assets. So what drives fertilizer demand, potash fertilizer demand. It's pretty basic stuff. Global population has gone from 3 to 8 billion people since 1960. The amount of arable land, the land that we grow food for that big increase in people has increased by 20%. But the only way you overcome that challenge is higher yield, you need to grow more food from each piece of land. That land is being depleted at heavy rates of the nutrients without replenishment, the land won't produce. And basically, that's where things break down. So that kind of drives -- that's the underpinning for why there's been strong demand for fertilizers over long periods of time. It's as basic as it gets. And this isn't like, oh, do I really need that air conditioner. This is without industrial scale, fertilizer use since 1960, there would be 40% less people on earth than there is today. This is a pretty basic stuff. Like if you want something to underpin your demand trends, I don't really know what could get better in this. So that takes us into what's been happening more specifically in potash. So there is a -- it's got some noise to it, but on the left-hand bottom side here, this is the global potash demand. We acquired our royalties on the potash mines in Saskatchewan, back in 2013, 2014 in that time period. Then the global potash demand was around 50 million tons. Today, it's roughly in undisturbed market, we'll say it's around 70 million tonnes. By the end of the decade, it's meant to be 90 million tons. These are compound growth rates. You're getting bigger numbers and you're compounding off of them. So there's a -- a few years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, when Jansen was first talked about, it was like, "Oh, God, like the world is over, like they're going to kill the market." This is a nonevent now. We've had enough compounding and growth in demand that like -- it's a blip, it won't even be -- it won't even be noticed. Anyway, this is what it is. It's been a 2.7% compound growth rate over time. So on a 10-year basis, the potash market has grown by about 25%. More particular to our assets, I talked earlier about that all that capital investment that went into the mines back a decade or so ago, that's been ramping up ever since. So you've got a market that's growing by 25%, and over that time, the operators of the mines that we hold royalties on have grown their global market share from about 17% to 25%. So the market share growth and a strong growth market. These are pretty powerful dynamics to think about. Thinking ahead, like can these growth rates continue and what are the impediments and limitations. I can guarantee one of them isn't resource. These are huge long-life assets, practically unrivaled in the world. And it's more than that. It's more than just the size of the resource, the quality. Geologically, these are more stable rocks, and that really matters in potash than the big competing areas in other parts of the world, namely Russia and Belarus. And then they're incredibly capital-intensive long leads from first investment to when you actually generate cash flow. So cost of capital really matters in the potash game. And hence, geopolitics also really matters. So such incredible competitive advantage. It's not hard to see why they've been earning market share, and that's in the absence of a war in the competing regions, by the way. So this would be production from our portfolio of mines over time. You can see the blue bar for when we made our acquisition. There's a little green section here. Those are investments that have been announced and that are underway and further ramping up production from here. And then the brown is what we'll call signaled growth. So this is Nutrien in their Investor Day last year, talked about relatively low-cost investments that they can make, utilizing existing major infrastructure to continue to ramp up. So they're already thinking ahead to this as well they have to. And then there's a blue section. And that's just simply us saying that let's start with an assumption that these potash mines, competitively advantaged, major growth markets will hold their share of global market. No further market share growth. They're just going to hold into a growing market. So the base case is that if we take the production levels that will be achieved based on what's already being invested and what's already been signaled, that's our base case volume assumption going forward. And then our growth case, I'll talk about it, it reflects that compounding of volumes and an assumption that these guys will hold market share over time. And we capped that in 2053, which was the earliest number we could find for anybody who says we're going to peak inflation. It's arbitrary, but you got to do something, right? So in fact, in our boat of our assets and assumptions that you see in the next slide, we cap production growth at 2053 and these compound growth rates for the price that we talked about earlier, we're capping those there as well. Again, it's arbitrary. We show this matrix for potential value for potash, not in the others, but for potash both on the basis of an undiscounted after-tax cash flow as well as a discounted 5% cash flow. And we do that just because again, it illustrates these super long lives. I've referenced Doug Silver earlier. Doug is now advocating not using NAV anymore for valuation purposes. You're talking about using [indiscernible]. We've always thought about what's the difference between your undiscounted cash flow and your discounted cash flow numbers as a measure of optionality. When you've got a big multiple -- if your undiscounted number is multiples of your discounted number, you know you've got a high option value asset. That's sort of a little internal thing we've been doing for a year. If it's very close, you're probably dealing with a short-life asset, first off. Anyway, so the bottom or the top one on an undiscounted basis, if you're compounding grow it at the peak, you've -- we've got $16 billion worth of royalty revenue ahead of us from these assets. On a consensus price deck, that's about $2 billion. But that's over a very long time, right? Again, we get, we get it. But let's look at the bottom number, $15.7 billion. Imagine you had $15.7 billion and you put it in the bank today. And it came back in 30 years and ask just what's it worth? While you'd find out that it's lost a fair chunk of its buying power, diminished in value. If you would actually put potash in the vault, we'll go back and you'll find that it's at least held its value. In fact, it's been inflating at well above. So it would have been an appreciating asset. We own these. This is royalties on freehold titles. We actually own the title to the potash to miners, the lease, the rights from us to go in and extract that potash and then they have to pay us that [indiscernible]. So we do have at today's prices, $2 billion of the potash sitting in [indiscernible]. So it gives you the range. Consensus price deck discounted comes out to about [ 360 ], which falls well within the sort of medium of consensus on our assets here, which is [ 379 ]. And then, if you use that max out the growth case of the 2.7% compounding of volume, the 5.8% historical spot price growth. If you put those sensitivities in your model, you put those escalators in your model, you would say that the value of the potash royalty that we hold today is twice the current market cap of the company. We were going to bring in bingo blotters and give these charts up and see where we put them and say if we could come with a number and have a big fun game, but we -- anyway, we didn't do that in the end. But anyway, we're not trying to hang our hats on any one number here, but it's just -- it's food for thought. If you're an investor and a broker college up and says, "Hey, that all be is trading above its NAV and trade out of that and buy something else, ask them what their input there." Okay, metals. Big picture, again, setting up to sort of demand narrative. I think the right-hand side of this, the top right chart here, it's becoming a better known story. The dark blue line shows how global copper production is set to decline and pretty precipitously and a pretty straightforward mines deplete and a bunch of them are about to. And it's been a long time since we invested in any new supply. So in the absence of investment, we are going into a period of decline of copper supply in the world. The light blue line is basically just a projection of a long-term copper demand growth trend. So if we stay on the current trajectory of no investment, the supply will go away, demand will continue and there is an enormous unprecedented gap coming in supply and demand in copper. Obviously, this can get fixed with good price. Price comes, investment will come and this will all get sorted. That's the big picture. That's the long-term picture. The narrative that's dominating today is like the headlines are "Oh, there's probably a global recession coming and China is not recovering as fast." And these things -- that's what dominates, and it changes about a week, like literally, like it's incredible. We put this chart up, this is 120 years of copper demand, compounding at 3.3%. There have been 15 recessions in this chart, like I challenge you to find them. They don't matter. It doesn't matter. It's noise. Anyway, that's the big picture setup as to why we think that there's a story or a case to be made here for long-term continuation of demand growth, similar to potash in the copper world. Okay. And then most of the analysts in this room today have done -- put this work out. And I mean we're all screaming it in the industry as investors just don't care at this point. But that's fine. That's fine. You just paid [indiscernible] much for it when the time comes. It's how easy to fix. To get more specific on the asset, Chapada is certainly our biggest exposure in the basin battery metal space. We acquired this in 2016 in the time period. Since we've acquired it, resources and reserves have been grown by over 4 billion pounds or close to 4 billion pounds. So it's been great. It's been adding resources much faster than it's been depleting. The big highlight recently was the announcement of a discovery of a brand-new deposit. Now, Chapada isn't a mine anymore. Now Chapada is a district. It's -- and we'll tune our horn and you can go back to our 2016 presentation and there's a line in there we believe Chapada is a district, not a mine. What's neat about Sauva, the new discovery is that it's much higher grade than the existing resources. So that has implications here. Obviously, Lundin has been talking for a while about future expansion at Chapada, the resource -- the amount of resource that's here is not optimized anymore at current production rates. It's a brownfield expansion opportunity, and those are few and far between, quite frankly. Again, we don't have the details of what that might look like. But we do think that this resource growth trend is going to continue and that ultimately, Chapada district is starting to look like low-hanging fruit for future supply growth whenever incentivization comes to the market, which it inevitably will. So the scenarios that we'll present in our matrix here are one that's current production rates off the current mine plan and the other is essentially a doubling of production from here whenever expansion plans are now. And whether that's from a doubling of the plant capacities or simply because there's a significant component of Sauva ore, which is higher grade at current production rates that drives that, I don't know. The only thing we can hang our hats on and again, I'm certainly not putting words in Lundin's mouth, but the slide on the right is from their recent presentation. Clearly, mark is being illustrated. But what they're graphically showing here is a doubling of production. So again, we're not trying to say that's what's going to happen. Lundin has certainly not said that's what's going to happen. But for an indicative something to build a potential scenario around, that's what we're going with. So on a consensus current base case, we come to a valuation of about $111 million. That compares to $117 million for consensus. If we double that the production is $140 million. If you start running these compound price numbers across that -- and again, I think it's very valid at Chapada just because it is long life. You get to about a tripling of the value of the royalty versus consensus. Food for thought. This would be actually a lot more except for the fact that the way our stream is structured is that after a certain number of pounds are received, there's a step down in our stream rate. So it's actually a muted response to that kind of compounding. Voisey's Bay, our original royalty near and dear to our hearts. Current mine published mine plan has this mine closing down in, I think, 2034 as when it's meant to come out of resource. So -- I don't know if I have -- that basically is a mine plan that would see operations in at about the 900-meter level of the mine today. So that's what's been drilled out, and that's what the mine plan revolves around. But recently, there's been lots of neat news, not widely publicized, but it was out there that these ore bodies continue and probably for a long way. It was a whole valley drill last year. You think about this if you're following junior mining company. 90 meter is a 2.7% copper, 1% copper, hundreds of meters beneath the current mine resource at Voisey's Bay. So again, I don't know if that's going to hold together if it will form a resource or if a lever be part of the mine. But from a scenario analysis basis, we've gone and said, hey, let's assume it's not going to close in 2034, these resources hold together. And we're just going to double the mine life at current production rates. So base case is current mine plan, upside case, grow cases, we're going to say this, this is actually going to double. It's a relatively small royalty. So the numbers here materiality-wise, again, showing a point. Base case, $19 million, growth case $33 million and the consensus deck $32 million and $74 million if you'd run the historic price grow rate. Well, there is a good example of with a direct royalty. There's no offset in stream rate or whatever, but the difference between running the scenario is basically [indiscernible]. This was a fun one for us as well as a bit of a case study, I suppose, because we've owned this royalty for 20 years. This is like go back and back test yourself. So when we acquired this royalty, we thought it was going to produce $1 million or so a year. We ran a $320 nickel price was our assumption. And what that would have said is that over the next 20 years or it's almost 20 years here, it should have generated $46 million in revenue -- or sorry, $18 million in revenue. Instead, our revenues received to date are $46 million. Again, just same point we've been making all the way through here. But this case, it's actual real numbers. If I had time, it would be a lot of fun to go back and do a lot of assets like this, others everyone would be really neat. Curipamba, I'm not going to talk too much on this because Sam is here, and he's going to talk about it. I'll just point out that the difference between our base and our upside case here is there's a feasibility study that has an open pit mine. And then there's an upside PEA-level study that talks about going underground at the end of the open pit. So A versus B here is stopping at the open pit B, is actually running the underground. And you can see the numbers, very good agreement on consensus with consensus prices with the current numbers that are out there. Sorry, Sam. But I mean, this is one where I'd actually argue against myself about using the long-term copper. It's a 10-year mine life that's currently known. So this is when we're trying to say that trend line is really can hold together and that it's a valid assumption starts to break down a little bit. On the other hand, maybe you don't want that because I actually think the next 10 years are going to be way above trend line in a cyclical fashion. So you'll probably do better in trend line, but who knows? We'll all know in 10 years, right? Lithium Royalty Corporation, Ernie is here with us. So again, I'm not going to belabor this, but this was a business that we got involved and invested in back in 2017 just before lithium prices crashed out the last time. And Ernie and the team have done an incredible job -- did an incredible job taking advantage of that and deploying capital and buying royalties on a whole bunch of projects that are now either in production or in many cases, well underway towards production. Point here, just again, from talking about where things might be worth, at least as of the end of the quarter, the shares that we hold in LRC had a market value at the end of the quarter of about $77 million. So that's basically a daylighting event that we're pretty happy with. I don't think -- I don't know what the numbers would have been, but 6 months ago, I don't think there was very much on the books for what our holding and LRC might have been worked. Also, we have 3 direct royalty holdings or quasi direct is a limited partnership structure that gave us the right to co participate. So there's 3 of these projects that we do hold direct interest in, if you will, that Sigma, Zijin and Gangfeng projects in Brazil and Argentina, very small royalty amounts because they're co-participation interest. But collectively, those mines are ones in just started production to or in late-stage construction. They're meant to produce around 115,000 tonnes of lithium between them. And there's expansion cases that have been signaled at Bose is the right word that would take that up to about 220,000 tonnes per year. Again, I'm not going to try to -- Ernie is probably the closest thing there is to a world expert in lithium right now and you've got them right here. So I'm going to shut off on this one. But that's the base and the growth cases for anyone who's interested in [indiscernible]. So we had a NAV 5 on consensus price of $24 million collectively for those 3 royalties and $47 million, if you assume the growth case. And again, we're running the consensus price deck for lithium because we just don't at this point, ourselves feel comfortable trying to project anything historic. Renewables. So we have a 58% equity interest in Altius Renewable Royalties. We basically founded the business. Soon after we founded that we formed a joint venture with Apollo. So the underlying business is the 50-50 JV with Apollo, and then ARR went public. So that's how we get to sort of a bit of a tongue twister, but we own 50% of a 50% interest in an underlying renewables royalties business. Brand new concept when we got it started. The whole idea of bringing royalty financing to the renewable space made sense to us because renewables actually stood out as a natural resource that didn't have a significant royalty component. And yes, I'm pretty happy to say that in those few years since it started, it now has more than USD 300 million that's been deployed, acquiring royalty assets. There's almost 2.5 gigawatts of operating projects now subject to royalty. Now I'll touch on that as we go. This is the portfolio. Let's read through every line in this. The bottom point is the key message is 2.4 gigawatt operating portfolio, and there's about 9.2 gigawatts of development stage assets that have been bought and paid for. These are investments that have already been made. So essentially, as these projects ramp up -- and again, these are being built by the Enbridges of the world themselves. Because I love Kenny Roger's song there's time enough for countin' when the dealing's done, let me tell you, they're dealing right now. Yes, so this is just goes to that. When we started this, it was hard. You're knocking on the doors and people are like, well, what the blank is a royalty? That's where you're starting from. Sector had no real awareness. But the counterparty list that ARR is built off is pretty incredible. I mean this would -- comparable in terms of scale, this would look like 3x, the who's who of the entire mining industry on this slide right here. For a cold start, not bad. Great tailwinds in the space overall. It's expected that investment overall in the renewable sector in the U.S. out to 2030, we'll double the $90 billion a year by the end of the decade. So a great backdrop. There's lots of activity, lots of projects getting built. And GBR is starting to win adoption. So they're taking market share basically away from competing forms of capital from equity and debt. So a similar kind of story, right, gaining market share on a growth market, but a tremendous job that the guys have been doing there. So these competing forms of capital, and this is pretty neat as well. I've gotten pretty difficult despite those positive tailwinds. I said it to the team the other day, that blasting myself for seen something like this would be mining in 2015, 2016, when it was ugly like nobody wanted to write a check. It was as ugly as you can get major mining companies. We're reaching out to the royalty companies for money, 2 -- 6 months, 12 months previous, wouldn't have thought about selling a permanent encumbrance on their core assets. And all of a sudden in a very small window like the royalty industry just deployed more capital and bought more assets in a small window, probably it was the day. It was -- if you missed that window, you missed everything. Like it might be another 20 years before we see it again. I don't know. But that was my point in the other day, I said no matter what, this is -- that's the same backdrop, and that's what you've got to hit. So this is the top left is the TSX Renewable Index, just to give you a sense of where equity capital markets are in the royalty space right now. So the peak point on this pretty much right exactly where ARR went public. But equity in the TSX Renewals Index is up 55%. So basically, the cost of equity capital effectively doubled in that period of time. And then we all know what's happened with lending rates over that period of time. So it's a really right environment right now to come in with that competing non-dilutive form of capital. And there's no surprise. I don't think that ARR has -- GBR has a very heavy pipeline. I didn't even think about asking Frank to come up here and present that, basically, he probably would have -- he wouldn't have probably responded well. But anyway, they're busy. They're busy. It's great. I touched on this already. This is -- on the left is our -- we're not going to put numbers on these, but it's what we're thinking, just some illustrative stuff. The left-hand side shows how megawatts on the royalty are going to grow solely on the basis of capital that's already been deployed. No new investments. And then on the right, we just started to play with some stocks and talk about additional deployment and investment, which we think is very realistic and how that would ramp up. And in fact, if we kept going out with the years, you would still see further ramp-up from the investments we're talking about, just lag times from investment to operations. Slide issue here, but I can talk to it. This is the other key point here. We're talking about optionality, long-term growth, volume growth, what could go -- rise, particularly at the royalty level where you don't have any exposure to capital cost. So in terms of volumes and just life extensions, all sorts of things. One of the things that really attracted us to renewables as a royalty target was probably thinking that came from the potash side of things, right? These are -- the life there are so long, we almost feel perpetual. Well, in renewables, they are. Why would one of these renewable projects that ARR had the royalty on stop in 20 years? Right now, we buy it on the basis of a 20-year life because that's when the equipment is supposed to wear out, right? So it's an engineered life more than it is a resource life. And why? The resource will still be there. We expect, at least for the preponderance of these assets that what you'll see instead is continued investment that lives -- the equipment will be refurbished. So there will be the successive life extensions that will be attached to these assets. And not only that, the equipment down the road will be better than today. So it's not just a life extension that you're likely to get, you're probably going to get a volume improvement as well. That site and that equipment will capture more power per area than it does with today's equipment. So this is a site that sits on the landscape, nimbyism issues are going to be more limited, it's connected to grids. So again, the question is why wouldn't they just keep investing in these sites? And our royalties are structured to be essentially a perpetual royalty. Frank had an interesting chat with a guy the other day, who has been a long time investor in the oil and gas space. And this is what blew him away. He said, look, I'm invested in the oil and gas royalty space, and that's the preference is. We said half of what we do or more than that is basically continuously investing to replace, right? You've got these decline curves and that's all you're doing, you're investing to replace. This is never going down. Like this is everything you buy and invest in is going to be accretive from here. I think that was -- it was funny that, that should have been more intuitive, we should have thought about it before. And probably we did without really thinking about it. But it was neat that an oil and gas guy was who brought it to our tension. Anyway, needless to say, looking for blocks, if anyone has one. Iron ore. So we're not general investors in iron ore. I think we've probably made that pretty clear to our shareholders over time. We're very specific investors in iron ore, particularly on the high purity end. We buy into the idea that steel, green steel is happening and that something very fundamental is shifting in the iron ore space overall. And really what it is, is the shift in the steel space. A lot of investments happening in new electric arc furnaces. There's 2 main ways you make steel, either as a blast furnace, you add iron ore varying quality, you mix it with coal, outcome steel or you can take scrap and very high purity iron ore electricity and you can make steel. So that's the electric arc furnace, the latter. Former was the blast furnace route. A lot of investment happening in the world today in the electric arc group very little in blast furnace. So there's a transition underway. And you can see it. I guess it's not a speculation, this is just look at follow the money. All of the money is in growth in the electric arc side, nothing on the blast furnace side. It has to be a very scary thought if you're a BHP or Rio or Vale, who produces materials that can only go into a blast furnace. Needless to say, this isn't the first slide in their deck when they talk to you the first time. Anyway, look, it's not going to happen overnight. In fact, there may be limits here just in how much site purity are in order can even be sourced to help things make this happen. Anyway, we believe overall, there is outsized demand for very high purity in the iron ore world, very few places in the world that technically that can be achieved from the Labrador Trough being one of those, in particular, other places, Ukraine, Russia or lots of huge logistical challenges like before you even get near the ore body, you've got to spend tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure. So Labrador Trough pretty unique in that regard in that it technically can produce this quality material and is relatively unconstrained from a logistics point of view. So that is really why we're so focused on our iron ore business on the trough. Just more on this high purity, DR grade or basically direct reduction pellets are [indiscernible] and electric arc furnace. Current projections, I'm not sure who this was, I think we're stealing it from Champion but you've got a near-term deficit. What's today a 200 million-tonne market, you've got 100 million-tonne deficit coming up in a couple of years or towards the end of the decade. Today's a couple of years in our world, but -- yes. So we're focused on this, and we want to be positioned to help support that. And I don't think it's a well-known story. Like everyone knows that transportation is changing, right, that we're going from the adoption curves that are underway. We're going to electric vehicles, faster in some places, slower in others, a well-known story. And then you hear about these hard-to-abate sectors, cement and steel and whatnot. There's incredible investment happening, like the transition in steelmaking is much further along than it gets credit for. In some ways, look, if you go back to the lithium story, right, you could see it coming. You could see it coming the minute, all of carmakers. Finally, somebody moved first and then the rest came all very quickly, and they said, we're going to make these big capital investments, and we're going to completely convert our industrial complex from that, which makes internal combustion engine cars. And now we're going to switch to EV. What was done at that point. You don't need to see the adoption curves, it was done then, right? When the money went to ground and the industrial complex shifted there was, the run-up in lithium prices and Sam has entirely predicted, is they built all this infrastructure with no clue as to where the inputs are going to come from to feed it and you get what you get, right? That's exactly what happened. I think it's exactly what's happening here. You can see the money going to ground. The plants are being built. Nobody has a clue where the inputs are going to come from. It's really exciting. We have 3 exposures. We have our interest in an indirect royalty interest, I guess in the IOC mine, that's for our holding in Labrador Iron Ore. We have the Kami project, which Champion hopefully, will publish a positive feasibility study on towards the end of this year. For the recording, I didn't say they will publish a positive feasibility. Hopefully, we'll publish a positive feasibility study at the end of the year. And they're looking at Kami. It's a project we originated a long time ago. They're looking at it as a potential source of DR-grade pellets that would feed this electric arc furnace market. We're about a 6% shareholder of Labrador. It owns 2 things, Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation, it owns a 7% royalty, but it also owns a 15% equity interest in IOC, got 2 types of holding which caused us a bit of a conundrum when we were getting into how we're going to form the matrix here. Just assume you're going to run these price growth rates out and whatnot, no, I don't think it works. It works for the royalty, but it doesn't work for the equity. So anyway, I wanted to make that distinction. Yes, the royalty piece, it's an interest in land royalty, but the free cash flow at the equity level everyone's focused, if you own Labrador, for the most part, you're owning it because you're looking at the dividend. Well, that's been a little bit light lately, and there's a good reason for it. We're spending a tonne of money at this site. CapEx has been heavily competing for free cash flow with the dividend. As a royalty holder, this is exactly what you want to see. This is perfect. Like you're seeing your operator get fully committed to the asset and putting Apollo money into it, comment from the CEO last year. So it will come to full capacity. I don't want to predict timing, but they're doing the right thing. So IOC close to my heart. We've probably run a little tight for a number of years, general shift. It needs a little bit of care. Anyway it's getting it now, right? So I don't know, we'll see what happens here. But when this was invested in last, it was meant to go to 21 million tonnes . And I think most people here who cover them know it really hasn't come close. We'll see. But they're certainly the right signs are here. The money is being spent. So if you're in this for a dividend, you probably should be a little concerned. We know how much more of this capital is going to come because your dividends are going to be constrained. It's the component that comes from free cash flow from the equity. The royalty part that won't be diluted at all. There will be no impact on the royalties from -- or your -- the cash flow that goes to Labrador that they distribute as dividends from the royalty component. But I think it's an important distinction and it's important time to look at that. I actually hope the dividend go to just a royalty and everyone freaks out and sells it down to half, nothing then we'll buy more. But anyway, this is -- we're a long-term holder focused on the royalty. I wish I didn't have divide a bloody equity to get us royalty quite frankly. I'm probably pretty clear on the record with that. But overall, the royalty is the core and absolutely love how much Rio Tinto spend fortune here now. That's big numbers. Like look, they look at that over the last few years. These are big capital numbers. Valuing. So we had to do it a little different. We took the royalty and we ran the long-term price assumption, compounded it. We didn't do it for the equity. We're going with that kind of convention that if there is a price growth rate to be applied here, it's going to be offset by the cost side of the equation, right? So the marginal exposure at the equity level just won't be there the way it will be for the royalties. And so it was confusing and difficult to begin with, but in the end, it was like this actually proves the point for us. This just brings it home for us. But these are different. They're distinguishing features here that are really different. So again, we've approached it that way. So what we did for the equity portion is that whatever extent -- to whatever extent we escalated the price side of the equation, we put in equal escalation. Now maybe that's a little unfair, but again, this is illustrative. We put in equal escalation for cost side of the equation. So that forms a difference. And you can see how there's much more exposure to the growth. There's a much bigger delta in the sensitivities on the royalty side of the equation than on the equity side of the equation. And that's your price ranges. Kami earlier on, I showed a slide on prices and it had like a estimates for the amount of premium, so per percentage of iron -- per extra grade point over benchmark, we assigned a premium to that. So that's all there to look at and you can look back through that when you look at the next slide. The 2 cases, one is an 8 million-tonne production scenario. And that is what the current feasibility study is we understand that is being modeled at. But we just point out that going back a little bit prior to Champions ownership and almost -- it's almost a matter of course, if you're building iron ore mines in Labrador Trough. There is -- there was a case at that point to have this mine expand over to 16 million tonnes. You build these things an 8 million tonne increments is plant sizing. So again, illustrative purposes, we've got a base case and an expansion case, base is 8 million tonnes a year, expansion case is that they double line like you do in the trough. And -- yes. So the base case on consensus price deck 8 million tonnes, $223 million, that's top left. Bottom right is expanding out and applying the historic growth rates and it becomes $1.2-ish billion. So that's the kind of sensitivity to both of those escalation factors that you see here. Now mind you, they haven't published a feasibility study yet that one made a production decision, but this is for illustration purposes. This is what this could be worth to Altius shareholders. Again, more than our market cap. We're getting close here. Project generation business. We don't call it one of our pillars, the way we do on the royalty side, but it is a pillar. This has been the pillar of the business since the day we started. Most of the royalties we've acquired were based on using the profits from different initiatives that the project generation business has come up with. So we generate our own exploration projects. We sell those on to different companies. We retain royalties, that's where the Kami royalty came from. That's exactly where it came from. Our comp base on Kami is basically, I think it's probably negative. But it's a differentiator. I think between us and the majority of the other royalty companies out there. So what Altius do is find a project, we'll sell it on to some other group, we'll take back equity and always hold on to a royalty. We manage a portfolio of equities that gets generated from this. Now we augment that. Sometimes we'll add to that with cash. We've got a portfolio today of about $50 million in junior equities. That's after monetizing about $40 million, and it's -- that was all based funded with about $22 million. That's going back to 2016. So for anyone who worries and this is where, I guess, where we raised this point, we often get asked, well, that exploration business you've got, isn't that like a weight on your royalties? Doesn't it like -- is it something I should worry about that you're going to allocate money to that going forward, and it's going to diminish really the value of royalties. And my point is that this isn't the cost, then it is a profit center. It reminds the fact that path to royalties we've got, we bought with the profits is we've had hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from almost no expenditures over time from this business. Today in our project generation business, if we look at it the routes, again, you've got the Kami project. This has been going on for 25 years. There's no mine in our current producing royalty portfolio that come from a project generation portfolio. I know that sounds kind of depressing even though it's made a lot of money. I mean, it can't be that good, right? But the truly is it takes 25 years from an early-stage exploration project. That's the kind of long-term focus is kind of business that really needs to bring to the table. So today, you've got Kami that maybe get, maybe it will be the first or maybe it will be the next slide to talk about silicon project, which is also coming through broadly to our project generation business. Another thing I'll point out here is that we're not as focused on the non-precious metals business in our project generation efforts. We don't just say, we can only go look for nickel and copper. Project generation is a very customer-focused business the way we look at it. We want to know who wants to buy projects and what type you want to buy. We're listening to our customers. And it turns out there's a big demand for precious, gold and silver. So we've always been active in the precious metal side as well. And let's say that you're a looking at busting rock, you're not just going to look for copper and say, well, I'm going to ignore that gold over here. But anyway, we have almost half of our exposure -- excuse me, funding of is in precious metals, which is probably surprising for some. I really like this slide. it probably won't mean much to most people, but this tells me everything about our long-term setup. This shows -- this tracks drilling meters. So this would be -- the blue part would be drilling meters that are happening on projects at Altius owner owns a royalty on today. The green more to do with pure equity holdings where we don't have an ancillary royalty piece. But if you just focus on the blue and on the meters, there's over 300 kilometers of drilling happening on projects at Altius on the royalty on this year. Now that kind of levels the drilling typically means that's not all pure exploration, a lot of times, that means you're getting into delineation. So resources are developing and happening. It's a fantastic leading indicator long term leading indicator of what this business holds way out into the future. It means that the assets that we hold royalties on are seeing heavy investments in seeing those resources grow out and in trying to make new discoveries. So if you've got long horizons, 10, 20 years' time, this tells you that there's some really healthy things happening across our portfolio. Does anyone care about 20 years from now anymore? We do. Silicon. Paddy is here. He'll touch on this as well. Orogen is one of our biggest equity shareholdings, but we also co-hold Royalties. They have a separate world. We both hold royalties on the silicon project. So this is a -- basically, it's a discovery of a brand-new gold district in Nevada, which is pretty exciting sentence -- pretty exciting mouthful to put out. There's probably no more coveted asset in the global mining complex than a gold royalty in Nevada. Like you put all those things together, that's about as good as it gets. So this is a project that got optioned by AngloGold Ashanti. They've made at least 2 new discoveries. One, they published an initial resource on its over 4 million ounces. Immediately adjacent to that, there's another discovery that they've talked about called Merlin. They haven't published a resource on it yet. But I couldn't resist adding just a little comment from the CEO recent comment for this other deposit is called Merlin. And he says, Merlin is the gem in the crown. We will come with more updates this year and you will be surprised, very pleasantly surprised. So little foreshadowing there, but I didn't do it he did. Anyway, this is a potentially very valuable asset for Altius and its shareholders. I think we've been very public in saying that we haven't really decided what we're going to do it is here yet. We're looking at a whole bunch of strategic options, is that the term used. And just another point you should make here. So on this slide, the blue shows all of the landholdings that AngloGold has consolidated in the district. And it actually covers other known deposits in addition to the silicon and Merlin deposits that you see in the center part of the slide with the yellow box surrounding them. The yellow box in the original agreement that describes our royalty, the yellow boxes, the area of interest. So it's the area within which any resources that are found are subject to our royalty. But there's an add-on clause in that royalty agreement that says that the lands can -- the royalty area can expand to the extent that land expand. So we take the view that the current royalty area is the full expanse of the land that has since been consolidated around these discoveries. Anglo doesn't agree. So we have a difference of opinion. And under the agreement, there is a dispute resolution mechanism that basically says you arbitrate under BC International law, but in under -- in BC. So we recently -- we agreed we talked about it, we agreed, look, I don't think there's a middle ground here like we don't agree. So we just said, well, let's find. Well, let's just get this sorted one way or the other. We both need to know. And so that's what we're doing. We're in the preliminary stages right now, selecting arbitrators and all of that. It isn't a -- there's nothing like it's one way or the other. We'll see how this -- we'll see how this plays. But anyway, this has just happened. I think we talked about it in the last quarter, but that's where it to. I don't know what timing is. I'm not trying to prejudge outcomes one way or the other. That's where it stands. For valuation purposes here, we didn't try to get 2Q or forensic. We just -- there's 4 million ounces published for silicon. There's another 4 million on the surrounding lands or so that have been talked about and published. Merlin, the gem in the Crown. Anyway, we just come up with hypotheticals that said that let's assume there's 10 million ounces of resource discovered Scenario A. Scenario B is that 15 million ounces discovered. Anglo talked about more than 300,000 ounces a year of production for more than 30 years, beginning, I think, end of 2025. To me, that feels light. Like why would you run at that production rate unless there's some constraint, we don't know about. So the scenario we wait just a, let's say, let's just follow up our 10 million ounces discovered or minable, a 330-ounce per year scenario, 0.5 million ounce a year scenario and then think about those earlier gold price escalation factors. And we just ran it on both scenarios and you go on the low case, 10 million ounces, 330 production scenario. $110 million implied NAV 5 for the royalty. And then on the more aggressive 500,000 ounces a year, you could be up to like pushing into the $500 million range in these scenarios. I don't know if there'll be 10 million ounces. I don't know if 20 million ounces, none of us do. It's just to help, I guess, to our shareholders get a sense of what we're trying to get our heads around and what we're tracking and following and why it could be a pretty material asset for our business. I don't know if we need to really belabor this. This is just for information purposes that goes to our current capital structure. Still under 50 million shares, 26 years in, proud of that, good ramp-up in royalty revenue over time, even better compound growth rates than the prices and the volumes. Maybe it's a multiplier effect, I don't know. And obviously, our commitment to return of capital continues as the business grows. Early slide, I talked about this work was meant to inform us in terms of capital allocation and those kinds of things. And I guess it does, right, I mean there's a lot that we're digesting from this. Would we want to issue shares based on the work we've done today on the current share price? That feels silly will we want to buy shares at the current share price? So that kind of feels a little smarter. Again, we're not coming out with a serious capital allocation strategy at this point in time, but you're probably getting a sense from the work we're doing here where we're being informed. And again, as we make decisions around buyback and dividend rates and all that sort of stuff. Going forward, all of this is going to help inform our thinking. Acquisition returns, we've been updating this for several years. It basically just shows the purchase price and then compared to the revenue that we received to date. It looks at whatever the consensus net asset value and then sort of not a formal metric per se, but it's indicative. And you can see that over the past year, 2 new events, both Chapada and the potash portfolio have both crossed into the point where we've returned, had more royalties received, royalty revenue received than we made on the original acquisition. So that's -- those are from investments made in 2016 and then weighted average in 2017. So when you think about the durations of both of those assets, they've got decades and decades of entries to go, that's kind of a simple payback, if you will, feels pretty good. It's certainly a lot more than would have been implied at the time of the purchase. We bought Chapada, copper was $2 a pound, and we bought the aggregate -- probably the weighted average price of the buy period on potash was $200. So maybe to point a little bit about some of the things we talked about earlier in the presentation. Sustainability alignment. We're not going to go into a full breakdown of the different ways that Altius has evolved over the years and how it sets itself off in aligns with principles and concepts that I know are important to a lot of shareholders. I will say that we recently published our sustainability report. So all that information is there linked in this presentation for anyone who wants to go there and full kudos to floor and the team. I think you will see that the ways we've been -- this has been evolving in the way -- I think we're fighting a little outside of our weight class as far as how we've been responding to that type of investor -- demand maybe is the right word. But yes, I think we're -- for our size, we're definitely leading the pack. We did -- we just achieved net zero. So what we do is we calculate our own emissions footprint. But we also look at the percentage interest that we have in different assets and the footprints of those. And collectively, we now completely offset that footprint. And I won't go through this slide, but it just talks about less about what our specific water usage or any of those types of measurements are that I think a lot of ESG investors are focused on, for the bigger picture about the types of things we're invested in and how they matter, right? So on the top left, by being involved with electrification metals and being part of that whole supply chain, if you will, at least from a financing point of view, that chart just shows how CO2 emissions are different between internal combustion versus the electric vehicle. But we're helping there. We're enabling there. We're investing there. On the right-hand top side, potash. This is what I talked about earlier, population goes up, deals need to go up. Well, that happens with potash. We're invested there. We're enabling there. Bottom right, this is a CO2 footprint for making a tonne of steel, whether you use the blast furnace or an electric arc furnace. We're working and we're doing our best. We're trying to make DR pellets happen to make this happen. And on the left, bottom left, particularly if you look at the blue line, that's CO2 emissions in the U.S. I don't know if this is a well-known back either from electricity generation. You can see that they have been really coming up. And it's 2 things. It's not just the fact that there's a lot of renewables have been coming on to the grid. It's the fact that coal has also been coming off the grid. So it's a double impact, but yes. So that's how we feel like we're making a difference. And I think that is all that I have before we switch to our guest presenters today, but also we can take any questions that anyone has before I hand over to podium. Thank you very much. Yes?

[indiscernible]

Picking an ex stuff, isn't it, right? The market is dreaming for capital and you're like deploy, deploy and then you're like, oh, we got to raise money to deploy money, right? So that -- we're doing what we need to do there, like we're not just looking at -- you look at -- one thing I'll point out is that everything we've done so far in ARR is equity loaded. Like there's no leverage whatsoever in anything in that business today. So a lot of front-end loading of equity. So I'll be honest, debts on the table now, and we're pretty active there. But we don't want to just sit back and not see this opportunity. And we feel very excited about raising new equity. Again, it's math, what's the implied return on the investment and what the implied cost of capital. So would I say no, we won't do it, but not a priority at this point. But I'm -- Ben has heard a lot before, find the right deal but we'll find the money. So that's kind of the way we're -- that's the message they've got. But yes, it's again when the window is best, we're deploying it, it's also hard to come by, but we always found a way, we'll find a way. Don't count on equity raises as the default. That would be the wrong base assumption. I won't promise it won't happen, but it's a wrong base assumption. Yes, Jim?

Thanks, Brian. You talked a lot about valuing the assets and the inflation and growth rate. I'm just curious if you have a thought about inflation and growth rates on Altius' expense base and how you think and hope that will fare?

It's a really interesting question because it actually opens up other lines of thought because it goes like, what mines would benefit from this kind of inflationary factors and which ones wouldn't. So it goes to margin, right? If you've got high margins, you're going to have outsized exposure to the revenue that comes from the price inflation and lesser to the cost inflation. I don't see us any real need in all pieces of business, for example, to expand on its head count or anything like that. I think we've got a pretty neatly running machine right now like for us to fuel growth going forward, really, you're just standing back and helping operators make decisions to put a ball of money into assets and wait to collect checks. So is that like you got to be careful when you look at our G&A, like we pick up a share of cost from ARR, for example, which is in heavy-duty growth mode and our adding people, it's noncash. Just I guess just to be a little careful there. We're 80% margin so I wouldn't -- I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but I just intuitively know, it doesn't. We should be far outsized beneficiaries of price inflation than anything at the corporate side might do to dilute those benefits going forward. Orest?

[indiscernible]

Ben might have more to add on that. I wouldn't -- he might really have more to say on this than what I'm about to say, but I wouldn't ever make the decision based on whether or not we're consolidating or not consolidating, it's going to be more intuitive. We invested in the last round and held our prorata here because it was done cheap. So that's kind of as far as the logic really went. I know in an easier accounting treatment on both sides of the equation down the road, but we'll be a little below 50%, it's not a goal, but it's also not something we'd be afraid of. Like if that dilution was accompanied by accretive growth, I mean I used to own 15% or 20% of Altius. And I own 3 or 4 or 5% now, but it's a different business. So that's what it takes, that's what it takes. I don't think there is higher numbers to focus on in that regard.

Separate question. On the silicon. When could we anticipate some kind of either development decision by Anglo? Or like what kind of time frame is that production?

We could get into a long answer because the initial production is meant to come from North Bullfrog, which is, I guess, in the disputed land area. They're saying by the end of 2025. They bought Corvus to get [ more ] Bullfrog, that was partly permitted or it was well on its way. So first production in 2025, there's a feasibility study, PFS or feasibility to come for Silicon Merlin I think next quarter or by Q3, we'll have a little bit more guidance. I'm actually surprised that the information is coming as fast as it is like you're really 90-odd thousand meters there now, you're trying to get your arms around the resource while they're also trying to make mine plan. So they're being aggressive, but I don't know what the practicalities are.

And just maybe one more, if I could. You didn't -- you mentioned copper, you didn't mention Gunnison. Is that -- should we just assume that's not working? Or do you still see value there?

It hasn't been working. We don't know that. Obviously, there's technical issues with low rates and just getting copper recoveries. But I don't -- there's certainly no sign that they quit, like you're still investing in trying to solve some of those technical problems. I guess, we just look at it as something that if it works, it will work, and we'll start talking about it, then -- until -- but until then -- and it was always that kind of a different. It wasn't like an expiration store, we look at finance or whatever. It was always a bit of technical soft that we didn't even understand ourselves. That came into us as part of the Callinan merger. So we ended up with 777. And we thought that -- when we bought 777, we kind of paid bullish price for the mine on the hope that the resource would expand there. And it really didn't. Now we got better prices. So that's what that carried today. So initially, we thought that the upside in the investment was that, a, we would -- there was a chance that resources would grow, but they didn't. There was a slug of cash in Callinan at the time of the merger. And things were getting really right, like copper was just falling, falling, falling, but we got a short-term cash flow profile and a bunch of cash completely clean up our balance sheet from having made all the potash acquisition. And without that, we never would have got Chapada. I know I sound like I'm rationalizing. But Gunnison was part of it as well. And like, okay, well, that's what we're going to get the juice while there was that solar silicon, so interesting investment overall. I'd be an interesting case study, that one for sure at some point in the future. Yes, go ahead, Carey.

Brian, historically, you've been pretty countercyclical with the investing and now you're beginning a picture of more optimism making out of prices. So how do you square those 2 things?

No, I think the assets we have will agree but ...

But like in terms of the copper price, copper has come off, is 350 a pound investable? You mentioned Chapada copper was $2. Do you really need to wait for a more depressed market to do stuff?

Like if it got ugly, ugly, ugly, we're kind of getting there, things will get exciting again. It doesn't need to be $2 because, again, the trend line is this. So we're just looking at that, like we're getting deep into this incentivization again. But I don't know if it's the same conditions, let's say, 2016 when like -- I was wanting to look at that price, that's simple incentivization point or not point. You actually got to look more at what's the mood of competing forms of capital to find it when you're really getting -- should be getting excited or not, right? I mean, there was -- I mean, the whole mining industry was on credit watch then. Like I think if you wanted to raise equity if you were a substantial player, then you can go get it. If you want a raise debt, go get it. You couldn't then like we were . We were the -- that was great. Actually, Frank's got ahead of this week, right?

Are you seeing any new opportunities on the mining side, given the market?

There's not much. I think there's really not much that we're seeing in the hopper that looks like you could make the argument here that, okay, you've got a new view on the copper price going forward. So you didn't like that one yesterday, but you were looking at $3.50 copper. Now you think copper is going to be $6. So you plug that in, and that's got to look like a screaming buy, you should buy it. Well, it doesn't matter what the copper price is if you have concerns that the volume is going to be 0, right? You can put it $1,000 a pound. So like there aren't any like either in the existing asset processes, nothing that's really gotten us super excited, which means long-term optionality and long-term resource growth, all that sort of stuff. And it's just not good enough out there for people to be trying to raise capital to do new projects, right? Royalties can't carry the whole day, you need the other -- you need the price, right? You need that equity pricing, and it's like cradle screaming about these prices and I can't do anything with that. You'll never get any copper at these prices. But [ encore is ] screaming. You'll never get any copper at these prices. So it's in that weird little limbo spot. If things got better, I think good projects would come out. But everyone's like kind of [indiscernible] bringing that forward right here. No way, you're not getting that.

We have a -- there's a question on the call from Jacques.

Yes, Jacques, please ask your question.

Brian, at the risk of sounding a bit thick here, when I look at Slide 65, the potash portfolio net asset value consensus number is $223 million. On Slide 28, the range that's given for consensus is $296 million to $403 million. So I'm just -- I wanted to know, were those net asset values on Slide 65...

[ Go with ] the bigger one. Yes, no, this is a typo on this slide. That's a great -- good pickup on your part. I'm pretty confident that the median number on the potash slide is accurate average analyst consensus.

Okay. I'm somewhere in between, so I'll take that under consideration.

Yes. Up in the top right of that slide, there is that median -- the range and the median number presented, yes. So we're not shortchanging ourselves on this slide. Good pickup. There's probably lots more errors in this, too. This is a lot of work, and a lot of it came together late and recently. So read the forward-looking statements and add that disclaimer that trust me, that won't be the only error we find in this. I'll be cringing every time I look at this again, I'm sure. It's directionally illustratively hopefully useful.

Okay. Maybe we should switch over to our guests. Oh, Ernie, you're starting us off. Ernie Ortiz is the CEO of Lithium Royalty Corp. And as I said before, he's the closest thing that exists to a global lithium expert right now. Thanks for doing this for us.

Great. Thanks, Brian, and good to see everyone. So as Brian mentioned, my name is Ernie Ortiz. I'm the President and CEO of Lithium Royalty Corp. We're now 2 months and 1 day since our closing of the initial public offering, and we raised CAD 150 million in March 15, 2023. And yes, we're off to the races. We have 3 new acquisitions in just 2 months, and we're now at 32 royalties. So just to start, and it's a good segue from what Brian was talking about, but we feel that lithium is truly an enabling technology. And we looked at a whole bunch of different commodities, and we decided on lithium because of all the different positive attributes afforded to lithium. So lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, and it's an excellent charge carrier. So it's perfectly suited to enable electrification and also storage globally. So we feel like we're at the right place at the right time to continue to invest in lithium. Going forward, it's a 33% demand CAGR for the balance of the decade. Last year, the market was 700,000 tonnes per annum. This year, the forecast is to reach just shy of 1 million tonnes, and the consensus forecast for 2030 is to reach around 3 million tonnes per year. If you look at Albemarle, which is the largest lithium producer in the world, they're guiding to 3.7 million tonnes by 2030. And on their numbers, that implies a 20% shortage in the market. So overall, we're still very bullish and a lot of room for growth. A quick anecdote that I'd like to share is that in order to meet the demand needs for the future, we need at least 10 new lithium plants per year to be up and running on an annual basis. So there's a lot of room for growth for LRC. And of course, we're very proud of our track record. We have 3 assets that entered into production -- or entering production in 2023. So 3 out of the 10 kind of needed per year is a good track record, and we have a lot more in that pipeline. So here is a good overview of where we sit today. So we're at 32 royalties globally, globally diversified. We're focused heavily on OECD jurisdictions; a lot of royalties in Australia, Canada and the U.S. We do like Australia, and one of the benefits of lithium is that it's in pretty favorable mining jurisdictions. Today, Australia produces 55% of the world's lithium production. So we do have quite a big presence there. We do have 3 producing royalties today. Two of them just entered production in the last 3 months. Core Lithium, which we have a 2.5% royalty in the northern territories of Australia, we just received our first royalty payment yesterday. And then also for Sigma Lithium, they just started production last month, which is a Brazilian spodumene project. So we're very excited about those new royalties. We also have one royalty in Argentina that's expected to ramp up at the end of the year. That's with Zijin Mining, which is a $40 billion large copper and gold producer out of China, but they have a large asset in Catamarca, Argentina. First phase is 20,000 tonnes per year, but they're guiding to potentially expanding that to 40,000 to 60,000 tonnes shortly thereafter. So a lot of optionality in our portfolio, very well diversified. So no single asset makes or breaks us. And with 32 royalties, we can continue to expand and become much larger. So as Brian said, we are kind of an enabling financier. We like to partner with strong partners, strong management teams and ESG is a strong component of our due diligence process. All of our spodumene mines are looking to have, essentially, dry stack tailings. So no tailings dam, so very light on water usage. A lot of them are using solar as opposed to diesel in their operations in the Pilbara and in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. And we think lithium investment is [ de facto ] ESG given its strong point in the electrification cycle. So that's where we are today, and that's a good geographical representation of where LRC sits. As I mentioned, big presence in Australia and in Canada. We're a big beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act. So I think all of our royalties in the spodumene side except from, [ let's say, Capital One ] would be Inflation Reduction Act compliant. So we benefit from all the big subsidies and support from -- within North America. And we're very excited about the pipeline and also just all the catalysts that are coming forward within LRC. So as I said, 3 producing assets. Zijin, which is our fourth asset there, they're expected to start production by the end of the year. And then we have 2 more starting in 2024, which is the Gangfeng project Mariana, which is in Salta, Argentina. They're, essentially, just waiting for the brine to finish evaporating in Salta, but they're guiding to production starting in 2024. And then our only non-lithium royalty, which is Sinova Global in British Columbia, they're aiming to start production next year. One thing that we're very excited about is that we think there's going to be at least 6 new mineral resource announcements in our portfolio in 2023, and we think they could be fairly material from some of the largest initial maiden resources in the spodumene market history. So the ones that were very well kind of attuned with and looking forward to is Delta Lithium, Winsome's Adina project and the like. And we have a case study on Sigma, but we do want to highlight our Moblan royalty. So that's #16 on the page. We have a 2.5% royalty on this asset in Québec. It's the second largest deposit in Québec as it stands. It's the second largest single deposit. They just quadrupled the ore body. They announced that last April. They're now at 50 million tonnes of measured and indicated, and they're doing a 60,000-meter drill campaign in 2023. So we think it has the potential to be one of the largest spodumene mine in the Americas. And they do have a prefeasibility study that's forecast to be released this month, which could have much higher production rates. So we think that could be fairly accretive to LRC. So as I mentioned, we have kind of those catalysts across the board, but we're very excited about the news flow coming for 2023 on top of the acquisitions that we are very active on. So we don't [ think too ] much given the audience here probably knows the Royalty business model very well, but just a few things I'd like to highlight. So in the lithium space given the huge CapEx cycle that's needed and a 33% demand CAGR, a lot of the lithium producers are not that cash generative. So we think we have a nice differentiating story where by investing in LRC, you can get access to the thematic with 10x GDP-type growth but also with positive free cash flow growth. So we're very fortunate with that respect. And we do like to focus on long-life assets. So we like to focus on assets that either have or we have the visibility to a 20-year mine life or more. So overall -- and then our key framework is high grade, low cost. In the past, we did have opportunities to acquire some cash flow-paying royalties. But we felt that their cost of production wasn't conducive to a potential down cycle in the lithium price, and we ended up being right. So we passed on those opportunities. So overall, we have some of the best quality assets in our portfolio with high grade, low cost across the board. And here's another way of looking at our portfolio. So as I mentioned, very well diversified. I would like to mention, we have a bias towards spodumene. So there's different forms of spodumene -- sorry, lithium production, but spodumene has lower CapEx and shorter time line to production. So as we were building out the royalty business model within lithium, we wanted to prioritize near-term cash flows. So that's why we do have a bias towards spodumene, but we aren't afraid to go after brine. We do have 2 of the longest and best quality brine resources within our portfolio. And we're very much about the here and now. So over 50% of our NAV is either in production and in construction. So -- and what I'd like to say is we have at least one new asset entering into production for the balance of the decade. So a lot of optionality that's already built in that even if we didn't do any more acquisitions, we still have a lot of growth within LRC. And here's a representation of where our NAV sits today. Our largest NAV contributor right now is Tres Quebradas, which is the asset in Argentina. So as I mentioned, Zijin Mining, one of the largest mining companies in the world, is developing that in Catamarca, Argentina, and they are guiding to start production in 2023. And I believe they're guiding to around 18,000 tonnes of production in 2024 and then ramping that up to potentially 40,000 to 60,000 tonnes over time. And here's sort of a, I guess, representation on where we think additional value could be created just from our pipeline in and of itself. So as I mentioned, we have around 6 assets today that we think could have mineral resource announced in 2023. So as those projects derisk and continue in their life cycle, we think they will naturally be accretive to LRC, not to mention the potential announcements from production expansions and mine life extensions, the Q1 that we have on our minds right now with Moblan given that announcement they're guiding to in May of this year. So we think there's a lot of good news flow that will be a good positive new story for LRC. So one thing that is emblematic of the LRC portfolio is just the optionality we have in our -- across our asset base. Sigma is probably the best example, but I could go through a whole bunch of different assets in our mix. But when we invested in Sigma Lithium back in 2018, they had a 13 million-tonne mineral resource. Today, it's around 80 million tonnes, and they're guiding to adding potentially 20 million to 40 million tonnes later this year. So it could be one of the largest in the world very shortly. And furthermore, production was 220,000 tonnes at the time of investment. Now first phase is 270,000 tonnes, and they're guiding to producing over 760,000 tonnes once they are Phase 3 up and running. So a lot of optionality [ kind of free ] carried to the LRC investor, and we think this is emblematic across the board. Like I mentioned, Moblan quadrupled their resource last month. Core Lithium, we invested when it had a 10 million-tonne resource. Now it's at 30 million tonnes. So a lot of these ore bodies just continue to extend. So we're proud of the diligence that work and all the optionality that we have within LRC. And we are still very active. As I mentioned, we've done 3 royalties since acquisition, so just in the last 2 months. We've done both primary and secondary royalties. So those are kind of 2 key growth platforms for LRC. And what we found is that a lot of issuers and companies want to partner with LRC. They know that we're a deep, kind of very dedicated lithium investor. So there is a brand value that's being associated within LRC. So there's a very positive relationship there. In many cases, they ask us to go on the Board and help advise on how to develop the mines. But obviously, we can help them advise but more from a probably secondary standpoint. We don't want to get overboarded. But that just is a good example of how important they view our relationship and [ how of a ] strategic partnership that we hold with different companies. And secondary royalties, we're still very active on that front. Once the IPO news hit, a lot of prospectors and geologists phoned us that they wanted LRC shares and they'd be happy to vend in the royalties. So obviously, we'll be very diligent on how we can continue to acquire those royalties, but there's a lot of good benefits for those prospectors as they can defer taxes if we transact in shares and the like. But overall, we're still seeing a very strong pipeline ahead. We think there's over $150 million of kind of near- to medium-term pipeline that we can go after. So we're being very selective in prioritizing what deals we want to do first. And here's just a representation of kind of what we've been doing. So for the higher risk, higher return projects [ as are ] -- probably not in construction but about to announce a maiden resource or earlier stage, there, we typically target IRRs of 15% to 30%, sometimes much more than that. And then we did acquire some of the royalties that are more moderate risk and moderate return, for example, the Allkem and Gangfeng lithium projects, which are in construction already and are pretty much going to start production fairly soon. So there's already been quite a bit of news flow to date. So as I mentioned, we've done 3 transactions since the IPO. We've closed on 5 so far, and I think we're kind of best-in-class as far as how many deals we've done per year. I think, [ frankly, it also ranks up ] there 5 per year. So we know how to transact in that market -- down market. An important characteristic is that we're not pricing our royalties based on spot. We're using the long-term average consensus price, which today for spodumene is around twelve fifty a tonne or around 30% of the prevailing market price. So we're not factoring in kind of spot economics. If we were, I think our [ IPO NAV ] value would be around 0.3x type of valuation. So we're still being very conservative. We're not pricing in spot. So there's still a lot of good optionality for the LRC investor. As I mentioned before, we've already had a lot of good news flow as well. So Moblan quadrupled their mineral resource. We had a new maiden resource over at Root from Green Technology Metals. And then events to come, the catalysts that we think will be material drivers for the LRC share price. And we do want to highlight Adina, which is a royalty that we have in Québec. There are very few projects in the world that have reported over 100-meter [ width ] on a spodumene basis, and Winsome Adina is one of them. So we're very excited about the potential mineral resource that could occur there. And they're guiding to a 2023 resource announcement to come, and they're aiming for production to start in '26 to '27. So I think a lot of good news flow, a lot of good assets. So we're excited about the potential this year. And here is, again, one of our new slide deck. It's up online. But just -- since the IPO, you can see that we're continuing to add value. We've done the James Bay, the Neves acquisition in Brazil and the Case Lake acquisition. And on top of that, we have had additional resource updates over at Core and at Moblan. So Core increased their mineral resource by 60%. So a lot of good news flow just since the IPO, and all of this is on consensus pricing. So if you were to kind of use the spot market price or prevailing market conditions, that's the chart on the right of what the implied NAV per share would be. So just to finish off here is a corporate snapshot. And maybe just while we're on here, I'll just do a quick recap on what we're seeing in the lithium market. So we are seeing lithium prices starting to bounce. We have seen prices up around 30% to 40% from the lows. The lows occurred roughly mid-April. And we are seeing, evidenced by Albemarle and Livent public commentary that cathode buyers and battery buyers are back in the market and starting to restock as far as lithium production. And we are seeing the Chinese futures exchange starting to price $40,000 per tonne lithium carbonate by the summer. Right now, spot is around $30,000 per tonne. So there is an expectation that prices could continue to be quite firm going into the second half of the year. And that's been predicated on very solid demand. Year-to-date, EV sales in China are up around 40% year-to-date, whereas the consensus expectation for 2023 is 30%. So there is potential upgrades to come on [ EV ] sales for the balance of the year, but we'll continue to monitor that. But overall, it's looking like a very robust year, and then we'll still be acquiring transactions and having a lot of good news flow for the balance of the year. And I guess I'll just go quickly on the team. So I've been looking at lithium for over 10 years. I wrote a primer back -- at Credit Suisse back in 2014. I'm also a founding member of the London Metal Exchange's Lithium Advisory Committee. Mark Wellings is on our Board and is the VP of Technical. He's on the Board of Li-Cycle, who is North America's largest recycler. And you guys know Blair Levinsky as well, well-known investor in the space. And we are proud to announce that we added Dominique Barker a few months ago, who joined us from CIBC. She's our CFO and the Head of Sustainability. So we are rounding out the team and building a best-in-class type of management team. Yes, I can stop there and take any questions.

[ Brian commented about ] the difficulty in analyst estimates. And also, given how fast both the supply and demand are growing for lithium and spodumene, do you have any guidance for how to think about incentive pricing? Like I can't even get my head around -- usually, on the supply curve, you think about the marginal mine needed to come into production. Do you have any suggestions for how to think about long-run pricing?

Yes, good question. I think there's a few ways, I think, to approach that. So first, CapEx intensity would be kind of the main one. So we've seen CapEx intensity continue to rise. If you look at Lithium Americas' Thacker Pass project, CapEx intensity there is around $55,000 per tonne, which is more or less where the Korean and Japanese prices are today. And you are seeing CapEx intensities rise across the board. Probably 5 years ago in Argentina, a brine project was $15,000 per tonne, and now it's closer to $25,000 to $30,000 per tonne. [ Basically ], integrated product in Europe is also around $30,000 to $35,000 per tonne, which just so happens to be the spot price right now in China. So you are seeing signals from the market kind of dictate current market dynamics. I would say CapEx intensity is one thing to track. The other thing would be just the marginal cost for some of the higher cost operators. And there, the key things to track are lepidolite producers in China, which their average head grade is around 0.2% lithium oxide. Just to give you a perspective, our average for our spodumene project is around 1.3%. So we're much higher than kind of that marginal cost producer and estimates there for $25,000 to $30,000 per tonne type of operating cost. So actually, a lot of them actually shut down in the last month or so because of the spot price in China that actually ticked to those levels. So I would say those are the key kind of benchmarks that we look at. And of course, just operating cost is something that we're continuing to track across the board. Spodumene operating costs have probably doubled in the last 2 or 3 years, especially if you add in the state royalties. In WA, Western Australia, there's a 5% royalty on spodumene project. So that's already adding several hundred dollars per tonne to their operating costs. So all of those, I think, are good key benchmarks to track.

Helpful. If I could just follow up. So the $55,000 a tonne sounds like a lot against what you're saying is the long-run analyst consensus. But I don't know the duration of that capital, the required -- do you have a thought about what, when you look at what those costs are for new capacity, what greenfield capacities incentive price could be?

Consensus for at least the chemicals side is around $22,000 to $23,000 per tonne. So you are right that that's -- there's a lot of backwardation in kind of the implied analyst consensus. But something that we've seen in the lithium space, and I'm sure it's probably for other sectors as well, but we do see delays and we do see kind of higher-for-longer type narratives. And that is what we're seeing now within lithium. There's a lot of expectations that lithium was going to come down much more dramatically and stay there. And it was kind of down for a few months, and now it's already rebounding. So yes, I think right now, you're still seeing some very strong signals. Livent, for example, one of the largest lithium producers in the world, mentioned that they could see prices -- they're going to see prices up in 2023, and they feel confident it's going to be up again in 2024. So I think that's where you're seeing the market signals that they do want to underwrite and build these projects because they're required, and you need kind of that high incentive price in order to bring them online.

Okay. So next up, we have Sam Leung. Sam is VP, Corporate Development for Adventus. Adventus is a company that Altius is a, I guess, one of the founders, if I could be that bold as to say. And Sam, I think the original [ hire ] other than with Christian. In fact, I think he told me, "This Leung guy -- if I'm going to do this, this Leung guy, I really need with me," and then Sam was the guy. But Sam has helped us out in other ways, too, and he's been on a smaller board. But he's here to talk about Adventus, probably more broadly with focus, I'm sure, on the Curipamba project in Ecuador. So the floor is yours, Sam.

Thanks, Brian, for the introduction. As he mentioned, I'm here to speak about Adventus mining, a company that was original spinout of Altius back in late 2016, and I joined the company in 2017. Typically, Christian, who's the CEO, you guys have probably met Christian in the past, he likes to talk a bit more, so he's usually up here. But he's actually at site right now with some government officials, which is a good sign for the project in Ecuador. I will be making some forward-looking statements, just as Altius has. And today, I'm going to give you an overview of what this project is in Ecuador and why we went there, a bit of our history. And maybe just as Brian was sharing, this is a bit of my background, is that I joined Christian and Brian back in early 2017. So my entire career initially is a metallurgist, so always on the metals supply side. So mainly in the copper space and various roles. I'm not a very good metallurgist, so I went into corporate development, was with Hatch for many years, and [indiscernible] a number of transactions. In 2017, I decided that this was a chance to kind of spread the entrepreneurial spirit a little bit and with the good backing of Brian and to pursue something in the world with Christian. So we did a search for about 150 different base metals-related assets, and it was El Domo that ranked the highest, was most actionable in 2017. And so on the back of that, that we entered Ecuador and have advanced the project in various ways. Other touch points with Altius are, as Brian mentioned, I'm on the Board of a company called AbraSilver with Flora Wood, as well a small gold explorer in Newfoundland called Canstar. So I've put some pictures up there. That was Flora and I up in Salta, Argentina in January. Lawrence and I on the road in Ecuador a few years back. And then the last photo is my last Altius fishing trip, where I'm probably the worst fisherman that Altius has ever seen. So why do we go to Ecuador for El Domo? This is it. I mean this is one of the lowest capital intensity, high-grade copper/gold projects there is globally outside of basically Central Africa. And what we saw the opportunity was an earn-in with a partner that wasn't that capital market savvy and that we could derisk and bring in Western engineering and finance. And I think that was the big key in that we wanted to spend the money in the ground and bring in the standards and experience that we have as a team. So from Christian and I working in our kitchens back in 2017, we negotiated the earn-in. And now the team is about 15 people here in Toronto, depending on what's on with drilling. And the engineering now is about 200 people, mostly laborers in Ecuador. But this is the promise of the project. It's about 5% copper equivalent for 10 million tonnes. The $236 million project finance that we've arranged is from Wheaton and Trafigura. So that's a lot of intense due diligence over the years in partnership with them. Wheaton desires a $180 million -- or will fund us $180 million for a partial gold stream, and Trafigura desires the offtake, the copper and zinc concentrates mainly. So that's another $50 million -- over $50 million stake. So this is what we're at. And I think it's going to be projected to be one of the lowest cost producers not just in Ecuador or Lat Am but globally. It's not -- [ now it begins, the ] project is not huge. But as I'll show you, it is the first deposit in what we hope to be more discoveries. And this is an important slide, we put it upfront, is that we really wanted to focus on being transparent. We have looked at what Fruta del Norte and Lundin Gold had done with integrating and really being transparent with local communities, and we did that from the get-go. So over time, we really focused and kept tabs on what are the needs and the hopes of the communities in which we work, not just kind of greenwashing. I mean this is -- there are some unique advantages in Ecuador here. When we did due diligence, there was no -- there's never been any indigenous groups on our ground, and the communities have been supportive for exploration and the hopes of future construction and operation. What I'll highlight on this slide is that Ecuador is about 80%, 90% on hydropower, which people don't really know. It's a huge advantage in some of the [ carbon ] work that we've begun doing. Not only do they have that hydropower potential, but you also have the kind of the growth rates of biology, et cetera, as well as mangroves along the coast is a tropical environment. So that's going to be quite advantageous from a long-term standpoint. And this is something that we're, of course, focused on because the last remaining piece is the ESIA approval for the project with the government. I put up the slide right upfront because it's been a tough go. Brian likes to say, don't focus on the share price. But I put this up as a demonstration of the battle scars from a junior company and as a developer. It's been a very difficult period of time despite some big wins, like an investment protection agreement with the government of Ecuador late last year. We faced kind of political headlines and social headlines nationwide, not focused on anti-mining or anti-El Domo, but those are what was on the headlines that you guys read. So despite that, we have stuck to our knitting, our entire team, which is continued to derisk the project, tightened up our belts and where we choose to spend our money [ and to advance ] the project. So despite that, we're -- despite the [ stock chart ], we're still going full speed ahead with the mind of further derisking the project and getting into a construction decision situation. On the background of the backers here, as Brian said, Altius was a founding member and brought on Greenstone. In 2018, we began discussions with Wheaton after they saw that we did the El Domo transaction. They saw it as with a high-grade project with a huge gold and silver kicker, this is ideal from a streaming standpoint without being too much on future group cash costs and production costs. So they made an initial equity investment or first equity investment in a junior company in about 10 years. And then in 2019, we brought on Nobis Group, and Nobis is quite interesting. They are one of the largest private families in Ecuador with a power base in [indiscernible]. So they are partners of DP World in the first post-Panamax port in Ecuador. They have a huge real estate holdings across hospitality and tourism, and this is their first and only investment in metals and mining. So they saw the kind of upside of El Domo as a basis of a new business line as well as the exploration potential and learning about the metals and mining space as it comes to Ecuador. And I put in there as a reminder, Altius owns a 2% NSR on El Domo. This is a slide on, for some of the analysts, the technical 2P reserves and the resource. The top table shows the open pit, which is the full feasibility study, was completed late 2021. As you can see, it's about 2% copper plus 2.5 grams gold. And then the underground, which Brian spoke to, it's currently in PA phase based on kind of reporting obligations. But what we've done from a design standpoint is that all the CapEx includes the tailings, et cetera, and waste dumps of the underground. So for our purposes, it's built into not only the design, but also the ESIA approval process with the government. This is a snapshot of the life of mine NSR value. And to Brian's point earlier, here, we're using long-term pricing at the time, which was $3.50 copper and $1,700 gold. So you can see the huge kind of cash flows expected. This is what the government is informed of. This is what we kept track of. We obviously take a very conservative view through technical reporting and due diligence, but this is the value. And for those curious about the Wheaton stream, the $180 million upfront for contribution to the CapEx will take about 50% of the gold and then ratchet down over time. From a time line standpoint, we are in mid-2023. As mentioned, the big milestone that we had was the investment protection agreement with the government of Ecuador late 2022. We are the third group to sign that agreement, following Lundin Gold and the Chinese conglomerate that own Mirador. So this is a big step. We've surpassed a number of other higher-profile Ecuadorian projects due to the nature of El Domo, the location and the consultations that we've done transparently. I think that's a big win for the team. In terms of the detailed engineering, that's continued from the funding from last year. We're about 50% done that. The most recent news is the power line contract, which we will give more news on. So that locks in a life of mine value of about $0.09 a kilowatt hour in Ecuador for renewable power, which is fantastic. [ Road upgrade ] we've announced earlier in Q2, and the key number -- or key action item here is the permits -- the ESIA approval. So that's the main approval and milestone that we're actively -- we're not waiting for. We're actively pursuing in Q3 of this year. The control budget is also on the back of the detailed engineering. So the original feasibility study CapEx was about $230 million. There have been some concerns about escalation, et cetera, as natural course for development projects. But again, it's -- the magnitude is $230 million. We're not a $1 billion project. We're not a $2 billion project. So there will be some escalation, but Ecuador has been insulated because it's been on U.S. dollar for 20 years. And so we hope to give market guidance on that number -- the active number going forward. And in terms of timing, the production is expected in the first half of 2025. So El Domo, as I mentioned, is about that 9 million, 10 million tonnes of 5% copper equivalent, and that's that little, little [ pod ] -- that little orange [ pod ] there, within 215 square kilometers. And this is what, I think, drew Lawrence Winter and the Altius team into Ecuador along with us is that, okay, this is a first VMS lens. It's extremely high grade, 5 to 6x higher in gold content than average VMS deposits. There's likely going to be more. So what -- I guess a part of the story the last 5 years has been, well, how do we allocate capital to project development and advancement on something that's getting a high probability of being mined versus greenfield exploration beyond that. So we've taken some kind of cheap shots at it, I think, over the years and [ did a vast ] amount of geophysics, a lot of geochemistry. We've hit some targets like in 2021 on additional VMS lenses and other kind of sniffs of it. But I think with our strategic investors and our partners in Ecuador and government officials, I think they -- we went down to tangible route, which is to advance and derisk El Domo. And so this means that there will be exploration here for 10-plus years. I should also mention that people concern about mining in Ecuador is that there's a quarry mine south of our deposits, so just connecting there, and then additional gold sniffs there from historic drilling before us. When we entered Ecuador in 2017, we also were impressed by just the lack of people operating other than big Australians throwing money in because of kind of the larger scale projects. And we saw an angle to work with our partners, the Salazars, to start a portfolio. While we were there, if we had contacts with prospectors and private explorers, a lot of families that are in the exploration business especially in the south of the country, we started to meet them, and we started to be able to connect them with an idea of additional finance or bring them in a public company. And that's the concept of the exploration alliance. And so to date, we have looked at many things, dozens of projects across the country, but 2 that we are in full control of are Pijili and Santiago. This is part of our kind of long-term optionality strategy. Again, we've done geophysics here, spent a good amount of money but not [indiscernible] for drilling. And with Pijili, we made some discoveries more academic, but enough for -- as a project generation for future funding partners on some interesting copper hits. We're at the side of Southern Copper's big copper project. And Santiago, which I'll get to next, is probably the most enticing project, an interesting target, but we've actually had a quite tough time looking to get to work here. But this is Santiago. To give you a bit of background, this is in the south of the country. It was a former Newmont project in the '90s. They, at the time, were looking for shallow gold -- shallow hybrid gold out of Yanacocha, coming from Peru and into Ecuador. They had a limit of drilling, about 300 meters. So 1,000 feet at the bottom of an open pit. And they hit mineralization. They hit copper, 0.2%, 0.3%, 0.6% to 0.9% equivalent, but they stopped because copper was less than $1, and they were looking for hybrid gold. So fast forward, 20, 30 years, we come along. We say, "Look, let's do more sampling. Let's do more geophysics. Let's see what vision -- or what visibility we can get below the historical drilling." We know SolGold has drilled down to 2,200 meters in Ecuador. And lo and behold, we see some interesting anomalies and targets for future drilling. So the concept here is for us to win the old Newmont holds and go beyond and see what's really there. I mentioned the struggle with this is that there are areas in Ecuador where it's harder to do work than others, and this is an area where we've been very aware from the beginning of some of the community and social concerns. And so this has taken us years at this point, not months, to really engage with local community members and leadership to get to work. And we're part of a dynamic where a lot of local smaller communities really want to get to work and get us drilling and doing more work. But there are other regional forces that are politically battling the government. So stay tuned. This is just a summary slide on what I've talked about is that El Domo, keep your eye on the news to come with our work with the government and the ESIA approval. You'll see updated detailed engineering and the capital costs. Everything is on track based on that number. You'll see -- continue to see lots of negative headlines from Ecuador. But I would suggest that you take them with a grain of salt and you just have to look at Lundin Gold's share price every so often because the mining projects are now -- those 2 mining projects are mining operations and they're contributing and changing the economic outlook of Ecuador behind the scenes beyond the headlines. On Pijili and Santiago, we continue to have a lot of interest in what those projects can be. So that gives us a bit of longer-term optionality. And then from a corporate standpoint, we are actually partnered with South32 in Ireland. I think Brian had a South32 logo on the screen. They are continuing to work in Ireland with us. These were original spinout assets before we pivoted to Ecuador, and they'll be spending a few million euros in exploration -- greenfield exploration with us in Ireland as well this year. Yes, so this is a bit of an update of an interesting investment for Altius.

[indiscernible] Okay. Next up, before we have -- we switch over to cocktails, it's a little segue to -- [indiscernible] and keep going. So we have Paddy Nicol. Paddy is the CEO of Orogen Royalties. We have a long history with Paddy. Orogen is actually a combination of 2 companies, Evrim and Renaissance. And we were large shareholders of both companies before it all came together. There's connections around the royalty that each hold on the silicon project. And even today, we work together in strategic alliance, developing new projects that we feel have silicon-like characteristics that we're making available for new royalty creation in Nevada. I think we're your largest shareholder. I knew we were your largest shareholder, but anyway. All over to you, Paddy, Orogen Royalties.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, Brian, and thanks to the Altius team for sharing part of their Investor Day with us. As Brian mentioned, I'm Paddy Nicol, President and CEO of Orogen. Today, we're going to spend a bit of time talking about the business model. It's a bit of a unique one, I think, within the royalty space. We'll talk about some of our key royalties, and then we'll also cover off the prospect generation business. Here's our forward-looking information. There's no graphic. That's okay. When we talk about Orogen to new investors, new shareholders, we like to talk about the history of the company, the predecessor companies that actually formed Orogen. Orogen's been around since 2020. So just about 2.5 years under its belt now. And the predecessor companies that formed Orogen were built upon prospect generation, and those companies covered the Western Cordillera of North America. And through their efforts as prospect generators, they both had discoveries. In the case of Mexico, the Ermitaño deposit was discovered in 2016, 2017. It is now on production. And then in Nevada, the Silicon asset, which is under development, was discovered in 2017. And the companies used those assets as the basis for forming Orogen in 2020. We continue to run our prospect generation business today. It is a profitable business unit within Orogen. We received cash payments, received share issuance as much, very similar to how Brian described it. In every case, we always retain the royalty on the back end of every deal we do. And so that is our primary tool for developing royalties today. We also do royalty acquisition. It's not the primary way that we acquire royalties, but it is a way. And so last year was the first year that we had picked up 3 royalties. Our focus on royalty acquisition is a fair bit different. We will not be involved in the bidding processes. Our size is simply too small. Our cost of capital is too high to be playing in that sort of game. So instead, we use our prospect generation, technical skills, business development expertise to look at assets and areas and opportunities that others may not be looking at. So it allows us to pick up some interesting royalties, but obviously focusing on strong risk-adjusted returns. Exposure to growth is very important, both from the development of our royalty portfolio. Our royalties are brand new. They're always at the forefront of their mine life or their potential lives and even our mine life with respect to Ermitaño and Silicon. But we also have the leverage in the discovery of any project that we have under option. We have 14 different exploration partnerships today along with 2 alliances. So that exposure to that early stage exploration provides a tremendous amount of leverage going forward. As mentioned, we've talked about quality. And for assets like Silicon and Ermitaño, these are brand-new royalties. Again, at the forefront of the mine life. You're going to see the full spectrum of value created from these. In addition to that, these are in jurisdictions, I think, that are probably some of the best in Nevada. It doesn't get much better than that and along with the top-tier operator in AngloGold Ashanti. In Mexico, mining is well known, and we've got a very good operator in First Majestic Silver. We're profitable. Last year was our first year of royalty revenue, and it's provided us to be generated about $800,000 in profit in year 1. And that stability is massive for a company like Orogen. It allows us to focus on our business of prospect generation and royalty acquisition. Some financial highlights for you. 2022, as I mentioned, first year of revenue, and we generated $4.6 million. Of that, $3.7 million came from the Ermitaño royalty. The balance came from our prospect generation business. $800 was approximate profit that we generated. Working cap at the end of March is $15 million. Over the course of the past year and to date, the development of our flagship royalties has been significant. The Ermitaño production profile will grow by about 20%, which will have obviously a knock-on effect for our royalty revenue. We expect that to be $4.5 million coming in over 2023. The announcement of the 4.2 million ounce resource at Silicon is significant. AngloGold has provided a fair bit more information on what that resource looks like. And this is -- again, this is on an oxide resource and a heap leach operation only. This does not talk about the sulfides or the transitional material that exists below, and we'll talk about that as we go along. As I mentioned, our prospect generation portfolio is very busy, 14 active partnerships. We expect upwards of 8 drilling programs by our partners this year. We have 2 alliances, one, as I mentioned, is with Altius. We generated or created 8 new royalties over the course of 2022, and we expect that -- well, to date, we've already brought in 3 for 2023. The partner-funded drill programs are expected to be approximately $10 million. Actually, I think it's going to be closer to $15 million. So there's going to be a lot of money spent in our projects over the course of this year. Corporate snapshot. I'll draw your attention to the graphic on the right. As Brian mentioned, Altius is the largest shareholder in Orogen. That has come through private placements, the investments that they made into the prospect generators that formed Orogen in the first place. In addition to that, they have been buyers in the open market. And so that's been a fantastic support for Orogen. Adrian Day Global Strategic Management holds a significant amount as does the Sprott Asset Management Group. And this is the group out of San Diego, [ brick rules old shop ], the global resource guys who are really champions of the prospect generator model. They hold 11%. The balance is sort of a combination of small fund, high net worth individuals, along with a fairly significant component of retail investors. That is starting to transition a bit as Orogen's growing. We're seeing more and more of the institutional ownership come into play. Market cap is just around $100 million. Our share price is hovering around the 40 -- sorry, $0.55 mark. We're close to a year high of $0.60. There is a number of warrants that have been coming due over the past 6 months. Altius actually holds over 7 million of those warrants which are due next year. The balance actually is expiring today. So we're happy to have that lid brought off the company, and we'll continue on without those warrants. That's good. But anyways, it's -- that's where we sit from a corporate snapshot perspective. Zeroing in on the royalty assets. Ermitaño, this is in Sonora, Mexico. If you know where the Laramide porphyry belt, there's a smaller area called the Río Sonora Valley. Within that valley, you've got the Santa Elena Mine, Mercedes Mine, Las Chispas. It's quite a prolific little area. Royalty revenue for us, as mentioned, was $3.7 million. The initial mine life for Ermitaño is 7 years, and that's based on a resource reserves which is now sitting at 274,000 ounces gold, 4.6 million ounces silver. There is a significant inferred resource behind that, that we believe will extend the mine well on into 10 to 12 years. The -- as mentioned, the guidance for production is up by 20%. Over the medium term, this is the Silicon Project, we're moving into Nevada now within the Walker Lane. This is a 1% NSR that we hold, AngloGold as the operator, and we talked about the resource already. But the future growth beyond just the Central Silicon zone, which is where the resource exists, is really in Merlin. And there's also a significant sulfide mineralization that sits probably below both areas. And again, it's a difficult one to figure out. AngloGold has not released one drill hole on this project yet, so it -- we live a little bit vicariously through their public disclosure. But what they are saying is very positive. Pre-feasibility is underway, and that's expected to come Q3 2023. And they announced that last Friday, actually, so that's encouraging. This is Ermitaño. We're just going to zero in a little bit. The graphic on the left gives you an idea of our royalty influence. It's 167 square kilometers, so there's lots of room to find more resources. Production here started in Q4 of 2021, and it's been going very well ever since. But the big story right now on Ermitaño is the new discovery called Luna. That was discovered last year, and it provides additional years mine life, we believe, to the operation. AngloGold -- sorry, First Majestic Silver is planning for the long term for this area. They have put a new LNG plant. They have put in a high-intensity grinding mill. They've put in a dual circuit. And so these aren't insignificant investments, so they're clearly planning for the long haul. There is also 20,000 meters of drilling is planned for this year, which is an infill and expansion program. This next graphic, it's a bit busy, but this was published last week by First Majestic. It gives you an idea of the mine complex. Ermitaño, we're looking north here. The mine area is split up into 3 areas. You've got Splay Ermitaño, where the current operations are, you can see the sort of the black line, that's the underground; Central Ermitaño; and then out towards the East, which was, again, discovered last year, called Ermitaño-Luna. The drilling that's ongoing right now is an effort to bring in some of that inferred resource into an M&I category. The yellow call-outs that you see, this is a graphic taken right out of their presentation, that's some of the new intercepts that they've encountered over the past -- well, first few months of this year. So very encouraging to see, and it's providing a nice level of stability for the company. We lost all of our text, but that's okay because I've said this a lot, so I can go off the cuff. I'll draw your attention to the graphic on the right. This is the Silicon Project located about 2 hours North of Las Vegas in the Beatty gold district. The historic mine here was the Bullfrog mine. And these claims that you see here, the dark gold claim is where our royalty influence is. That's approximately 79 square kilometers. The lands that surround us were once held by Corvus and Coeur Mining. AngloGold has invested over $600 million into acquiring those lands that surround it. So it gives you the sense of the intent and scale of what's going on here at Silicon. The initial resource of -- that was announced, 4.2 million ounces of gold, is focused solely on the Central Silicon deposit. And you can see to the South, those little black dots are all drill pads on 200-meter spacing. Merlin was discovered in midway through 2020, and they have been actively drilling that ever since. And so we -- obviously, you've heard Brian talk about some of the captions that the leadership from Anglo is talking about, about Merlin being the gem of the district. So we presume that it's going to be at least big -- as big, if not bigger than the Central Silicon deposit. And it's a primary importance, I think, to the company. If you look at sort of the grade differentiation between something like the Central Silicon deposit versus North Bullfrog is 3x the grade. The average grade at Central Silicon is about, I believe, 0.83 grams per tonne. It's about 0.33 grams per tonne at North Bullfrog. So this is clearly going to be the most important piece of this district as time goes on. There is an integrated study coming -- as mentioned, coming in Q3 of this year and a pre-feasibility. So we're excited to see the outcome of what's going to happen at the Merlin and Central Silicon areas. We suspect that also zones like C-Horst/Lynnda Strip will also be included into that integrated look. And beyond that, there is tons of opportunity at areas like Maverick and Frying Pan. A lot of people ask how big this can be, and we don't know except for the fact that AngloGold's already gone on to say it sort of got a 10-million-ounce look to the area within where our royalty area of influence sits. And we'll just have to see how the numbers come along later this year. We're going to zero in on the Central Silicon zone. This is the resource as they've showed it in their mineral resource and reserve statement. And it's a fairly rigorous resource. It's a pit-constrained resource. They've applied cost. They've applied metallurgy. And so what you see is, I think, a very solid number. And it's based again on oxide-only resources. You can see in the graphic, there's a bit of a yellow hatch pattern, a yellow blanket that sits over top of the upper part of the resource. That is where the oxide sits, and that's based on the heap leach operation. And that's all the mineralization they're talking about. They are not talking about the mineralization that sits at depth, which is transitional or sulfide. Through the charts that AngloGold has published, there's actually 6.4 million ounces in that pit. They've also gone on to disclose that they are going through a number of studies right now to see how they can bring those ounces back in, and it might be through a third -- or sorry, a secondary or tertiary mining and milling operation. Beyond that, there is a significant amount of mineralization that is outside the pit. And we think that in future years, that gives rise to the opportunity for an underground operation. AngloGold has published photos of drill core that's about 625 meters below surface, looks very similar to what you see at Ermitaño from an epithermal standpoint. They've also disclosed they have not found the bottom of the mineralized zone yet, and so they're still chasing that at depth. So we see that there's a significant opportunity to grow the resources just at Central Silicon alone. Production, as Brian mentioned, starts on North Bullfrog 2025 with silicon coming in sometime around 2028. I'm glad the graphics made it. I can at least not worry too much about the text. So this is a graphic of Nevada. I think I just want to talk about the prospect generation business a little bit. We have a fairly deep reach into Nevada. The groups that found silicon in the first place are still with us, and they continue to provide silicon-type opportunities. In fact, the alliance that we're in with Altius is doing just that. The projects that we have in Nevada, anything that's labeled in blue is under option today. Anything that's labeled in gold are already created royalties. Anything that's in red is an on-option project, and you can see we don't have many left. So what we're trying to do now is bring in more projects. We brought in 2 late last year. We're bringing in 2 more currently. So we're trying to rebuild the pipeline to deliver our exploration opportunities. This is where most of our drilling is going to take place over the course of 2023, groups like Nevada Gold Mines, Barrick, Pan American Silver. If you follow the Headwater Gold story, who's got an option now or the option has been farmed out to Newcrest, who are drilling the Spring Peak project, which we believe could be sort of the next leg in our stool of royalty assets, K2 is already drilling. So there's lots of opportunities that are -- lots of news, lots of catalysts, lots of exposure to the upside that will come as a result of these relationships that we have. So it's a very important exploration base for us. And obviously, we've got a tremendous amount of partnerships in there. And yes, we're excited for the news that might come out on this over the next year. This is our final slide, and this is, again, speaking to our prospect generation business. It is -- I mean, it's one thing to come up with a really nice target. It's another thing to try to convince someone else it's a really nice target and get them to take hold of the dream that you have and carry it even further. And so I think the team has done a fantastic job in putting this portfolio of active option deals together. And I'm not going to go through each one, but I think the important column that we should look at in here is the term. Every deal that we have has a cash payment component or has a share payment component. Those cash and share payments make our prospect generation business profitable. We don't put any money into it. It is a self-sustaining entity within Orogen now. But because of that and the efforts that they've made, we're allowed to create royalties on the back end of every deal that we do. And you can see that in the term. It's effectively like we're creating royalties for free in that sense. And I think that's a really unique take on what we've done within the royalty space. And that is our presentation. I apologize for the messed-up slides. I'm happy to take any questions you might have. Yes?

[indiscernible] privately owned [indiscernible]?

So withing our area where our royalty influence sits, that land was once held in the -- I know it sounds a bit ominous, but it was the Nevada Test Site. And so those lands were released by the government, and so it was public lands. And so the way that AngloGold would go about permitting that is through the BLM. It's not a Forest Service thing, which is good. And so -- and one of the reasons why AngloGold purchased Corvus, and Brian alluded to this, was the fact that they were already several years down the road in their permitting process. And the other aspect which I think a lot of people don't know is that Corvus had private water rights in the area as well. So that provided a tremendous fast track for AngloGold to get a leg up on that. And that's the reason why they're going to go to produce at north Bullfrog first. But in terms of private lands, there's just -- there's not a lot going on down there. I mean this is all kind of right near the Nevada Test Site. It's an area that you just don't see a lot of people. Beatty is certainly there, but that's pretty well the only, I would say, small town within the region.

[ More than happy to know the legal process ].

I'm not sure on that. I'd have to find out for you. Yes?

Is there royalty for a district being distributed [indiscernible]?

No, we understand our royalty rights right now, and it's 79 square kilometers, and that's where -- our royalty agreements are different. And the, I guess, genesis of the royalties that were created when -- Callinan Royalties, a predecessor, did a deal with the Renaissance team. They had a very robust royalty agreement that had some language around expansion and expanding into an AOI. Our royalty agreement that we have with AngloGold is different. It's quite a definitive type of where we know we have land and where we know we don't have land. The ground -- since the land has been acquired by AngloGold to the North of where you see the Central Silicon deposit, because they're staking ground, they're not acquiring ground, they can actually still go and stake land, that is included in our AOI. So this graphic is reflected by that. They acknowledge that our royalty influence has grown. Where we won't get royalties or we won't get an expanding royalty for Orogen is when it's a third-party acquired ground, where our AOI won't expand. So anything at stake, we will get it. Anything that's -- or anything that they stake, we will get. Anything that's third party, we will not get.

Okay. And just a follow-up. So your 1% NSR is on top of the 1.5% that Altius has on the Central Silicon, if they have silicon?

That 2.5%. No, there's 2.5% total. Yes, and both are nonviable. There's no cap on them or anything like that. Any other questions? No? Great. Thanks, everyone.

So we're going to ask Jenny to see if there's any questions on the call. We'll just pause a moment for that.

[Operator Instructions]

We've actually talked through a webcast operator shift change. I've never seen that before. So I'm assuming Jenny will interrupt us if there's any other questions. But I really want to thank Ernie from LRC, Sam from Adventus and Paddy and Marco, his colleague who's in the audience, from Orogen for being here. And stick around, we'll close the conference call and webcast, and we've got coffee being replaced by alcohol in a few minutes.