E3 Lithium Limited (ETL.V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I see things happening. It should be coming soon. Please come in, feel free to grab a chair coming at the exact right time. Okay. This is a really important video that we want you all to see. So I think I'm going to give them a moment to figure out the audio, and we'll play it when they give me the thumbs up that they're ready. We'll just go back to the PowerPoint, the age old technology that we know works. Welcome everyone to E3 Lithium's inaugural Investor Day. We are so happy to have you join us today. For everybody who made the trip to be here in person, thank you. We are happy to share this day with you and for all of you joining us online, so glad to have you. I'm Robin Boschman. I'm E3's Director of External Relations and I have the privilege to be your MC today. Before we get started, I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of Treaty 7 lands in Southern Alberta. The city of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation #3. I'm going to get started and run you through some housekeeping items so that we're ready to go. And then really quickly here, we're going to start our great lineup of speakers. All right. So to get you oriented to emergency evacuation procedures. In case of emergency, we will hear the fire alarm, ring the bell slowly every 2 seconds, and it will increase in frequency and volume. That is your cue that there is emergency procedures happening at the venue, and we ask you to calmly walk towards the staircases that are located on either side of this room, avoid the elevator. Then you head outside and the muster point is just on the corner of 8th Avenue [ N4 Street ]. In terms of the agenda today, we have opening remarks from the Chairman of the Board, John Pantazopoulos. We will hear from Chris Doornbos, our President and CEO, we have 2 great panels set up for you today. We first will go through our project development panel, where you're going to hear directly from the people who are responsible for the commercialization plans for our company. And then you will hear from the strategy and sustainability panel. We'll have a quick break. This is a stretching and bio-break only. We'll get you back here pretty quickly, and then we will have a financial update with Raymond Chow, our Chief Financial Officer. Finally, we'll hear again from Chris Doornbos before we move into a Q&A. While we are unable to take questions as we go, we won't be able to stop and say do you have any questions. We have a lot of time left over at the end to answer as many questions as we possibly can. And we have set up for you a question app. So all you need to do is take your phone out, use your camera app. And if you click on this QR code, this will take you to a place where you can simply input your first name and last name and you can input all of your questions that you have as they come to you. If you are joining us online, of course, you don't need to do this. All you need to do is put your questions into the Zoom, and we will log them that way. If this QR code doesn't work for you simply go to slido.com and enter the code Investor Day. Can I get a thumbs up from the audience that this has worked for someone? Good. Perfect. Okay. I think I heard that our video is working before I cue that, I want to encourage you to share. Any comments, any photos you have from today, you're welcome to take photos as we go. Please don't use your flash to avoid blinding the speakers. But feel free to use #E3InvestorDay'23. So any time you want to post anything that you found insightful or interesting, please feel free to do so. That is encouraged today. Okay. I will let the video player for ready. [Presentation]

Thank you. So happy that worked and we got you guys to see that. That just shares some of the excitement that we at E3 have for the big bright future ahead of us. Now that as we speak, we are producing lithium concentrate at Western Canada's first Direct Lithium Extraction pilot plant. You are going to hear so much more about that today from our great lineup of speakers. So without further ado, I would like to welcome to the stage, John Pantazopoulos, the Chairman of our Board. Please join me.

Thank you, Robin. As Robin mentioned, I'm John Pantazopoulos and I have the distinct honor, privilege and pleasure to serve as the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of E3 Lithium. And on behalf of your Board of Directors, I welcome all of you, those who are able to attend today in person as well as those joining us virtually to the E3 first annual inaugural Investor Day. I joined the Board of Directors of E3 just about 3 years ago. And what an absolutely amazing journey it has been for these past 3 years. Back when we joined and when the company started, the company had a vision. Quite simply to take subsurface brine and extract the lithium. Through countless challenges, through dreaming and struggling and fighting, those dreams have now become a reality. And as previously mentioned, but 1 hour north, head down Highway 2 [ hanging ] a right and you're right there. We are the first company in Alberta to have an operating pilot with [indiscernible] technology producing lithium in Alberta, which is amazing. And as a result, we are becoming the industry leader for renewables as well as the industry and the energy transition. Our team is about approximately 30 people, and let me assure you they are the best in class. I've had a chance to meet many of them and work alongside with them. Every day, they are solving problems getting solutions, working a world-class asset. I reassure you and assure you that the best is yet to come from E3 lithium. As Robin mentioned, you're going to see many of these individuals coming up here and presenting on the stage, and they're going to talk to you about their plans, the growth and where the company is ultimately going and the success. But before I get to do that, I get the privilege as a chairperson to introduce our President and CEO, Mr. Chris Doornbos. I think everybody in this room would agree, myself included, that there is no better champion of E3 than Chris. Right from the beginning, he believed in the vision, the opportunity and the potential of lithium right here in Alberta. There are countless challenges, as I said before, and many individuals would have said no, they were to back down and stopped, but Chris had a resiliency. And because of that resiliency, E3 Lithium is experiencing the success that we've had. I can think of no better leader with inspiration and vision for the future of E3 Lithium, and I can't wait for him to come up on stage and introduce and show our plans for the future and how great the company is going to be in the years ahead. So please join me in welcoming to the stage our President and CEO Mr. Chris Doornbos.

Thank you very much. Very kind words, John, I appreciate it. It has been a good long 7 years to get to where we are today. And it is a sign of the success that we've had that we are actually operating in this pilot today. So -- and obviously, the team is fully responsible for that development. Quickly, I just want to thank everybody for coming. We've got a pretty good shot here live. We also have a pretty well-attended virtual live stream of this event happening as well. So be cognizant of that, and I will as well, as I talk through what we had to talk to you today. This will also be recorded and then available online. So if you miss anything or -- for those who can't join, obviously, we'll have that available. So I just want to take you through a little bit of the foundation of E3 and just sort of kick off today's event. The real meat of what we want to talk about today is not hearing from me, but hearing from the people that are actually doing all the work to build this project and this company. So in 2016, the company was founded on the basis of 9 metallic industrial mineral permits in South Central Alberta between Airdrie and Innisfail. And the premise at the time was to develop a project on the backbone of an industry in Alberta that was well understood. And when we looked around the world for projects, we started looking in 2014 for lithium and for projects that had lithium Alberta had a lot of the advantages that a lot of the other projects didn't. Similarly jurisdictional advantages, a mature and sophisticated industry that was already here and established and really building on Leduc No. 1, which was -- started the oil industry in 1947 and us developing out of the Leduc aquifer and transitioning it from an oil producer into a lithium asset. So we knew the resource is real when we started it. And from that perspective, we started to really develop the technology and build upon that. And one of the things that sets E3 apart is that we've always had a clear goal to commercialization. So just taking you through some of the key points and the development. We knew from the very beginning that the resource is here. We knew that we could produce lithium from the resource, we could produce the brine. And so developing that asset from the maturity of it was at the time of the oil and gas industry and converting it to Lithium was not actually that big of a job from the aspect of we understood it. But moving it towards something that you could move into a lithium producing asset still needed a lot of work. And so we continue to develop it over the past 7 years. And the real catalyst was last year drilling 3 wells, we're drilling 2 and acquiring 1 from an oil and gas company and putting out our updated resources and Peter and his team are going to talk to you today about how that will happen and what the outcome was, for us was 16 million tons M&I. And for the perspective, of the audience, that's 5x more resources than the rest of Canada has combined. So this is a significantly large resource base in a very productive zone within Alberta's geological history in the Leduc Aquifer. But from the very beginning, we sort of had an understanding of how big this could be. And so we started to work on the technology. And that technology development was absolutely critical because at the time, there was not a real process that we believe was commercially viable to get the lithium out of the brine. And so we had to start looking at our own technology while we are tracking other people and their development of their technologies, obviously, it's critical. And so from that perspective, obviously, the company has come a long way. We've developed a lot of this asset and a lot of the resource and our technology to the point where we are today. And I think what you're going to hear throughout the conversation from the folks that are going to be up here on the stage is that all of that leads to the commercialization. And I think what sets E3 apart from some of our peers and what we're aiming for is that there's a real progression towards commercialization in a simplified manner that is building on the backbone of this oil and gas industry. So the staff that we have, with the lithium experience that we have gained over the past 7 years are brought in, sets us apart. If you think around the world on the size of the resources and the number of companies, there are not that many people who have the direct lithium extraction expertise that E3 holds. And from that perspective also, it enables us to do a lot of other things. We're going to talk about some of those advantages that we have. We've reviewed most every technology out there from a direct lithium extraction perspective, and I think that really has gained us a lot of experience in understanding what this asset needs to be delivered to be a commercial producing lithium hydroxide production plant. And when we look at the vision -- and if you've ever seen some of the investor presentations that we do, we have this slide up. And we usually -- I usually say something like, I'm going to -- by the end of the presentation, you're going to understand what this means. And I think what I'm really talking about here is exemplified by our resource base. It's exemplified by the technology and the success you're seeing. And I think the benefits you have today is that now you're not going to hear me talk about this, you're going to hear the people at E3 who are actually developing this and turning what we have in E3 into a producing asset that is globally significant. And all of that will become clear as we talk through today. So just on the broad perspective of the market. I want to give a couple of terminologies just to clear them out. We -- the resource base, we talk about is LCE, Lithium Carbonate Equivalent. So that's just a general terminology to understand what our resource is relative to other people. So it is lithium in the ground times about 5 to get lithium carbonate equivalent. But E3 is going to produce lithium hydroxide, often to abbreviate LHM, which is 6x the lithium in the ground. And then there's also the lithium molecules in the ground. Which the people like the U.S. geological survey, the USGS outlined just as lithium in the ground. So it can be confusing to compare sometimes what the different numbers are. I think the most important thing to see, this is LCEs, this is generally how we talk about resources. When we produce hydroxide, we produce about 18% more hydroxide than we do lithium carbonate. And it just -- that understanding, I think, is fundamental to when we -- how we discuss our resource base. So we discussed it in Lithium Carbon Equivalents, but we actually will produce lithium hydroxide. And so from this point forward, we're going to talk in lithium hydroxide is what E3 is going to produce. But market-wise, we talk Lithium Carbonate Equivalent. And so from that perspective, this undersupply that you see here, starting in around 2026, is fundamental to the development of this resource base and where this going. You have to put this into perspective. And that of all of the metals that are going into these batteries, lithium is the one chemical that has to be brought on from new. So if you look at nickel and you look at cobalt and you look at even manganese, these industries have been producing for a long time at quantities that just need to be scaled up. But you look at what is needed to bring lithium into the picture. All of this lithium has to be brought on from new, say from small increases of supply from the current producing assets. There are only 5 really truly global leaders in lithium production today, 5 big major companies. Relative to like the nickel market, which has maybe 50 to 100 companies globally producing nickel. So it does really set it apart from what is needed and what's needed is new supply. We have to find that new supply, we have to bring it on to the market. And that's where E3 comes. And the reason that this graph looks like this is because of the announcements you're seeing globally, and you're seeing them here in Canada, the announcements of battery factories or gigafactories being developed. We've seen recent announcements, the federal government in Canada has been pushing a lot to get the industry here locally. I was just in Europe talking to a lot of the companies. There's a lot more start-ups. Northvolt is a Swedish start-up that is now building a factory -- started to build a factory in Quebec. And then all of the South Korean and Japanese companies that have been here for a long time, Panasonic has been supplying battery cells to Tesla since the very beginning, are also expanding production. And it takes a couple of years, 2, 3 years to design and build a gigafactory and all of those have started to be underway. So this is what leads us to this supply/demand gap because all of those factories turn on. And when they turn on, they need lithium to put into their batteries. And -- so this metric done by Benchmark Minerals is really just outlining how many cells are being manufactured, what is the lithium content of those cells and what do we need to grow? And looking at the supply side, and how many companies are developing projects and what the supply looks like. And so the deficit is huge for lithium and what it means for us is higher prices in the initial onset of this, it means definitive customers looking for this material. And we're going to talk a lot about that today in terms of where the market is going. So a little bit of history on E3. This is only the last 3 years of the company. There are people in the audience here who have been involved in this story since the very inception as a private company, some people. We had a big group of investors that are here that started working with us in 2018. So all before this graph started. And what you -- if you're involved in that story between, say, when we went public in 2017 and where this starts at the end of 2020, we traded roughly between $0.40 and $0.60 and we stayed there because we needed to demonstrate to the market that we had a project that had the chance to be viably economic. And that really was outlined for the first time in the preliminary economic assessment we put out at the end of November. And you see the value of E3 increase dramatically from $0.40, and this is a 100 % return. We went from $0.40 to about $1.80. And then in 2021 -- early 2021 went up to $5. If you look at every lithium stock in the beginning of 2021, they did the exact same thing. So there's a big rush in our lithium at that time. During that -- from this sort of the start of this graph through to that point, the company raised about $14 million, and Ray is going to take you through that. And then we just started to get to work. We had the capital, to go out and we opened up a lab, we started to develop our technology at a pace that got us to commercial. We started to do things like drill wells. We drilled the first lithium well in Alberta last year. Fundamental to us being able to go out and get our resources upgraded, measures indicated. We are working with Imperial Oil for -- since 2019, that got announced in 2022. We've been very successful at achieving government grants. The reason for that is fundamentally because we are leading the -- leading edge on Direct Lithium Extraction in the province in Western Canada. And our success means everybody else's success. So you bring in that funding to us. We get -- we prove out the technology, we prove out the viability and then everybody else gets to ride on that. And I think that's really important, and we've been very appreciative of all of that support. And then obviously, leading up to today where we've commissioned Alberta's first lithium pilot. So just I wanted to take you through a little bit of the years that I've been here. The picture on the far left is one of the earliest I have of a tour we did with the Board of Directors showing them people who had never seen Alberta infrastructure, some investors showing them prior to us going public, what Alberta infrastructure looks like. That's not our infrastructure, but just on our project site. And then obviously, leading the next one right into the pilot plant. And so this is just going around the circle. We've done a lot of work internationally because this is an international challenge. Getting critical minerals into these batteries is an international challenge. And I'm going to talk to you through that at the end and some of my more recent experiences in how the world is viewing critical minerals. That's the [indiscernible] bit from the first well into the Leduc for lithium. And then this is our team from 2018. The team has changed a lot. This was the entire team in 2018. You're going to see the whole team here today, 30 people, and we're still expanding. That's the drill rig from 2018 -- or from the first lithium well, and this is our first lab that we opened up at the University campus. And then just some other various pictures of us through the years. Bottom right is me in 2017, learning how other companies do this. This is an assault and see, looking at how they're taking [indiscernible] brines and turning them into lithium producers. The one in the plane, that's the first -- Canada's first electric plane that was hardware are converted one of their -- [indiscernible] beavers into electric. So just a lot of work through the years to gain an understanding of this industry to promote lithium in Alberta to grow the team to get to where we are today. And looking sort of zooming in to 2023. And you probably can go back to our 2022 and you can actually fact check this. You can go find presentations from 2022. Where I would have said that 2023 is going to be our biggest year. And the reason for that is that we knew we had some foresight to what was happening. And it really represents, and this theme you're going to hear again all throughout today. It represents a pretty significant paradigm shift in what the company is going to focus on from here on into the future. And so it started with the upgrade of our resources. These are fundamental to book reserves under 43-101, which is how we report such things. We have to book a measured indicated to move it to a reserve. So we needed to do that to that. We had to drill wells last year. So all of that was moving towards this announcement. That was pretty significant. We kicked off our pre-feasibility study. You're going to hear from Jody, who is going to talk about that today. Obviously, the pilot plant is fundamental. And I think that there's a couple of levels where the pilot plant really is significant. One is that, obviously, it's a critical linchpin to us proving out that this is a viable chance of being a real producing asset. But it is also something that we've been talking about for a very long time that we needed to pilot because this is still new technology regardless of who and what you're doing, it's new technology. And it needs to be demonstrated each project before you can really move that project into the normal standard course of project development. And so -- and you've seen that also in the response to our share price and the interest even the volume and the share price. This one activity, we always have -- we've known for a very long time and I believe that it is fundamental to our movement for the maturation of the company. That's been supported by the federal government. We've also completed about $28 million in fundraising over the past little while to fund us into 2024. We're producing the final product using commercially -- commercial technology. Josh is going to talk about that today. And then obviously, announcements today and the last couple -- in the last month on the preliminary results. So a lot of stuff happening. We'll talk about Saskatchewan as well later on today. So a lot of stuff happened this year, and we still have the biggest milestones yet to come. Which I think is the most exciting part. So we're going to try something here to move into the next section, and that is a live stream. And whenever you do something like this, you're always told, never do anything live. But we're going to try it. On site, before we kick that off, what we want to do is we want to take you on a tour of the pilot. So we're going to roll a video, taking you on a fulsome tour. We have Caroline, Director of lithium extraction who was out on site, in the last couple of days, and we're going to have a tour and then we're going to kick off the live stream. So first, if we can queue the pilot tour, please.

Welcome to the E3 lithium pilot. I'm Caroline. I'm the Director of lithium extraction here at E3. Today, I'm excited to take you on a tour of our pilot and share with you all the great work we're doing here near old Alberta. Our first stop on our E3 lithium tour is our E3 lithium brine tank. This is the tank where we're storing the lithium-rich brine from the Leduc reservoir. From this tank, we are pumping this brine downstream for treatment in our direct lithium extraction pilot unit. In this pipe that you see behind me, the brine is going to travel through flow meters, so we're accurately measuring the flow of brine as well as PH measurements. The other tanks that you can see behind me is the tank that we're storing our lithium-dubbed plated brine in. This is where we store the brine after we've extracted all the lithium. Now we're inside the E3 lithium tank because this right here, is where the magic is happening. That Leduc lithium-rich Brine is flowing in through these pipelines you see behind me. Now very, very little pretreatment is needed for Direct Lithium Extraction. So the only vessels you see behind me are a couple of filters. Through these pipelines, we're piping that lithium-rich brine down to our Direct Lithium Extraction pilot test unit, where we're extracting all that beautiful lithium and moving it into a lithium concentrate street. This right here is my favorite part of the tour. This is the E3 Lithium Direct Extraction pilot's kit. And in this kit behind me is where we're recovering the lithium ion. You see 3 columns behind me on my lab. These 3 columns are also [indiscernible] that was specially engineered to be highly selective for those lithium ions. After brine [indiscernible], the lithium ions are exchanged on [indiscernible] material. Later in the process, all the lithium ion are concentrated into a lithium-rich product stream. Now all these cycles happen in a fully automated way. We use control valves to move between all this cycles seamlessly allowing ions to move forward as efficiently as possible capturing as much operational data as we can to further optimize our process and prepare for commercial design. Thanks so much for joining us here for our pilot tour. I hope you have a great day.

Awesome. Thanks, Caroline. So we have StarNet -- StarLink, sorry, running on site. So we're going to test its ability here to run a live stream. We've got Pritam at the pilot. He's one of our research scientists that is up there right now operating for us. We take -- the team takes turns running the system. And so we'll load this up, and we'll get -- and I'll take you through what he's up to right now. All right. So this is live, and I'm actually somewhat surprised it's working. So yes, thank you. So as Caroline pointed out, this is the E3 DLE skid. We do have another skid up there running as well. It operates in a similar function. So on the right-hand side, we've got the lithium stickers all over the columns. These 3 columns are full of lithium absorption material. And this runs continuous flow. So we have brine coming in from those tanks that Caroline showed you behind all of this flowing through these columns and the lithium molecules as the brine flows through the column sticks to the materials. Just a small -- looks like a little bead. But when the timing of the flow rate is absolutely critical. And we're going to talk about this in an upcoming announcement but what the flow rate really means and how it's -- how we manipulate that and how it fundamentally comes down to our project economics is how fast we can move the brine through the material. So we're flowing the brine through the material. We're extracting lithium onto the beads and then the brine comes out with very little lithium left, and then it goes into disposal and back into the reservoir. I think what Pritam is doing here is taking a sample for our lithium analyzer. We have a specific lithium analyzer out there that we keep track of the performance. So this skid is fully automated. So it's just turning on. There's a computer control system that's telling when the valves to turn on and off to time the brine. When the brine is done flowing, we wash it off with the slightly acidic fluid that strips the lithium off and then we collect that into the concentrate. And that's what we turn into lithium hydroxide. And so one of the key pieces of the story is understanding how their performance is moving through time. Because this is a -- this is designed to do testing. This is not meant to produce lithium. This is meant to understand how we produce lithium. It collects data for us, and that data we use to design a commercial facility. So the result of the pilot is purely just that data. It is the performance criteria that we need to design a commercial plant. And so all of the data that we collect and what he's doing here is a lot of the samples get shipped on to [indiscernible] to our main lab but he can check the performance on an ongoing basis with our little lithium analyzer that we have on site. And so the work out there is going to continue, I think, until pretty much the winter starts and then we'll probably pause for the winter, we're going to turn on a third skid, a second third-party company that's going to be operating as well. And then that will run through the rest of the year and into the new year. And then we'll come back next year and the plan right now is to continue operating. And that will be a much more fulsome mainly for the prove out of like a long-term run for project financing for our partners to see it demonstrated over a long period of time. The data we need to do the actual design will all be collected this year to get through feasibility. So I think we're wrapping up on the live stream. So -- can he hear us? Okay, he can't hear us. But maybe give him a round of applause, he's been a great [indiscernible]. Awesome. Okay. Yes, Internet, Starlink, there you go, there's a plug for Starlink there, we'll get it. Okay. So we're wrapped up with me talking. So I want to bring out the smart people on to the stage who are doing all of the work for you guys. So we're going to start with the project development panel. If you can get you guys up, we're going to have Kevin Carroll, our Chief Development Officer. Can I get the slide, please. We've got Peter Ratzlaff, VP Resource Development. Caroline Mussbacher, our Director of Lithium Extraction; Josh Rubenstein, Process -- Director of Process Engineering and Jody Calvert, Engineering Manager. And they're going to take us through between 2 firms conversation, I won't try to be exact on this one. What we're up to from the project development side. So we hand it over to them to introduce themselves to give you a bit of their background.

I am Kevin Carroll. I am the Chief Development Officer here at E3. The development is probably the most important piece, especially working with the development team. That's a reflection of the stage again that we are at with respect to the company and driving towards commercial development. And -- so I joined the team earlier this year just to do that. I am an engineer by background, primarily oil and gas, which coincidentally, there may be some relevant skills for the development of this lithium resource. I've worked at integrated super majors down to cofounding junior oil and gas right here in Alberta, coincidentally, over the same project area. And so I've got to meet Chris long before I heard on 3 years ago through that work. I'm excited to be here.

Hi. My name is Peter Ratzlaff. I'm the VP of Resource Development. I'll just tell you a bit about myself, too. I graduated from the University of Calgary with a chemical engineering degree far too long ago. I spent my whole career in oil and gas to start out in the drilling rigs all throughout Western Canada. Did some engineering work building pipelines and oil and gas facility. At the bulk of my career, I've done in -- I worked with oil and gas exploration companies in the production operations.

I'm Caroline Mussbacher, I'm your Director of lithium extraction. I'm a proud graduate of the University of Alberta in chemistry and chemical engineering, and I'm a lifelong Alberta resident. I've specialized my career in water treatment process engineering, supporting our oil sands industry, our nonconventional oil industry and now our lithium industry.

Good afternoon. My name is Josh Rubenstein. I'm E3's Director of Process Engineering. As a way of an interaction to myself, I have over 20 years experience in process and metallurgical engineering with project development, operation support, technology development and implementation. Over that time, I've worked both in Canada and internationally, including Australia, South Africa, South America and the U.S. We've also been involved in a variety of different commodities, including base metals, precious metals, light metals, oil sands. I can honestly say that my favorite is lithium. And I'm not just because I'm sitting here, it truly is the best.

Hi. My name is Jody Calvert, and I am E3's Engineering Manager. I started my career in Ontario in manufacturing and loved my job there. I actually became quite fascinated about watching raw materials come in the front end of the plant. And watching a finished sales product go out the back end of the plant. So I'm excited to be here at E3 again to do something similar. I worked in [indiscernible], and I brought my skills to work at a major oil and gas company here in Calgary. And I had quite a diverse experience there. I worked in research and all the way through to operations, I worked in conventional oil and gas and thermal operations as well as mining. So I'm bringing all those skills here to E3 as your engineering manager, and I'm excited to be up here today to talk to you about our pre-feasibility study.

Excellent. So -- this is the team under Kevin that is here to design and build the project for you guys. I thought maybe, Kevin, you can start off just taking us through the overall big picture of what the process is and what we're up to.

This is the flow sheet that the team is most comfortable with me explaining. It really is simple. And so we drill wells to the Brine and the Leduc formation. As everybody knows, we've been drilling wells in this province for over 100 years. The technology is not new. We're a lot smarter and more efficient and better at it today than we were 100 years ago. But fundamentally, this is no different than any other wells that we're drilling. Once we pump that brine to surface, it's aggregated at a central processing facility. And as Caroline said, that's where the magic happens. So the Direct Lithium Extraction is the breakthrough, if you would, that is enabling the development of brine-hosted minerals throughout the world. We think we're better at it, obviously. But that's -- it's not -- the fundamentals of it is Ion Exchange Technology, which Caroline will talk about. It's been around for decades. And it's just a novel application of all technology to target and extract lithium. The concentrate from there then goes through a refining process. And guess what? That's not new technology either. There's a number of lithium refining operations throughout the world that exists today. And so that is where we deliver our lithium hydroxide product. The brine that is now lithium depleted, all we do is put it back into the exact same formation through some more wells that we've drilled. And effectively, we're displacing that lithium depleted brine to the producing wells. And so we're sweeping that to the producers. And so it's a closed loop. It's elegant, it's simple.

Yes. And I think given what we're doing, and we've talked about this a lot, the smashing together of some very commonplace pieces to combine into what's going to become a lithium-producing asset, build largely on what Alberta does. I mean we do water treatment in Alberta, we do drilling in Alberta. The only thing we really don't do is that final last step of conversion. And potentially, the most Albertan crew that we have in the E3 office is Peter's group. And so we'll hand it over to Peter. Your group does a lot of the work from the subsurface to the surface. Can you maybe just tell us about -- a bit about your team, what you guys do?

Yes, sure. So I work with some excellent people. I'm in a multi-disciplined team, which includes drilling engineers, completions and production, and they're responsible for the 2 wells that we drilled and the planning of the future wells. We also have the geologist group who I know are the best and most important people in our company because they tell me that every day.

Well, I'm one as well.

And our boss is a geologist, so we have to honor that. They spend hundreds of hours going through rock, including our own core that we got from our wells and collecting the seismic data and well log data. And all this data is collected by our reservoir engineering group who then builds out the model and develops a resource development plan, the well network and how we're going to produce all this. And so, yes, obviously, this is very important. So -- and as you can see, the resource is huge. It's about 200 kilometers by 50 kilometers wide. It's about the size of PEI, if you want to put it in perspective.

It's bigger.

It's bigger than PEI, and it's about 200 meters thick. It's got great perm and porosity. That's just a fancy way of saying it holds a lot of fluid, and that fluid can move to the rock easily. Earlier this year, as we talked about, we booked the 60 million tonnes, and our group was responsible with working with QPs to -- we're instrumental in booking that. And now we're working hard on converting, though, that resource into reserves, and that will be published with our upcoming PFS.

Awesome Yes. And everyone is working hard, including some of the extracurricular academic work that we have going on. Maybe you can sort of talk about some of the bigger-picture stuff that your team has got going on as well.

Yes. So we're working with 3 universities, actually, on the origins of lithium and within deep saline aquifers. We're about to publish a white paper on brine-hosted minerals and how that resource is booked here in Alberta. And then we've just been accepted in the ESP, which is a global energy conference, to present there. So it's pretty exciting in the academic world as well.

Yes, we're -- in terms of these deep confined aquifers, I think we're one of the companies leading the charge in understanding how lithium comes out of them and where the lithium came from in the first place. So it's pretty fascinating stuff and stuff that we hope to get published one day as well. Maybe we'll move to Caroline. You've got a team of research scientists that we've grown over the past 3 years that have expertise in delivering the DLE solution that we have going on as well as the pilot, obviously, which is pretty important. Can you talk a little bit about your team, who you have on your team as well and just give us an introduction to what you guys do at the company?

I'm happy to, Chris. Within the direct lithium extraction team, we have the top research scientists. They have a strong background in geochemistry, chemical engineering, analytical chemistry and mechanical engineering. The importance of having this diverse background is to allow for collaboration and fast problem-solving because that's really what the lithium extraction team is. We are problem-solvers and we are learning at the fastest rate we possibly can. Within the lithium extraction team, we're working on solving the puzzle of quick lithium extraction. And how we're doing that is the innovative application of a very old technology: we're using ion exchange. Now everyone here is familiar with ion exchange. Everyone here probably has a water softener in their home. And what we're doing is no different than that water softener that's removing calcium from the water as it enters your house, except we're using resins that are engineered specifically to be highly selective for lithium ions. It's really just chemistry. And you know what they say about chemistry, right? It's like magic, but real. And that is what we are doing. So my team has worked with the support of our E3 Lithium colleagues to take this from the bench scale through to a prototype that you'll be able to see if you visit our table later all the way up to our pilot unit itself. And as we build, as we expand, we learn. And as we learn, we evaluate and we deliver better value for E3 itself.

Yes. And I think that, obviously, one of the critical pieces of E3 is the direct extraction, is the pilot that we've got operating. And we put out a couple of recent news announcements talking about that very preliminary information to the market. We're going to have the full details out in due course in aligning all of the data. But maybe just, Caroline, if you can put the news out since the 2 of them into perspective, focusing on today's -- what they really mean, these preliminary results.

We were really excited to get out those news announcements and share our pilot successes with everyone here. We're really proud of what we've accomplished with the pilots. We've shared 3 different metrics. The first is our lithium recovery. We've shared that we've achieved indication of 94% lithium recovery. The reason this is so critical is we don't want to waste any of that lithium that Peter's team has worked so hard to bring to surface for us. So the maximum recovery possible is what we are striving for. And 94%, that exceeded my expectations. So I'm really proud of that, and I hope you are too. The other metric that we released today is our purity. We were excited to share that our lithium product stream has a purity of 80%. Now that's reflective of all the [ cut-downs ] that are in that product stream. The 80% purity, that's really important because it speaks to the ease at which our concentrate can be refined in the downstream equipment. The third metric we were excited to share is the concentration of lithium within our product stream. We're excited to share a concentration of 916 milligrams per liter lithium. Why is that significant? Is it the decrease in volume? So what we're really doing there is we're taking brine with a concentration of 75 milligrams per liter lithium and we're concentrating it up to 916. What that means is it's a much smaller volume that now has to go for downstream processing. Smaller volume means smaller equipment, means lower capital cost, which means more money for us. And that's really what we're trying to make today other than lithium.

Awesome. Thanks, Caroline. I think the combination of the direct extraction obviously is in lockstep with the downstream processing. Moving down the process stream and down the bench here, Josh, picking up on that, your team works on a lot of different aspects of process design, the most critical of which is obviously the conversion. So maybe just a little bit about who you have on the team and what you guys are up to.

Yes, for sure. Thank you, Chris. I have the real privilege of leading the process engineering team, which consists of a senior process engineer, a lithium production specialist and myself. I think this sort of characterizes everyone at E3, and the process engineering team is no different. But members are passionate, smart and really capable. So it's a really fun group to work with. I think just overall, it's really fun. Process engineering. So what is the process engineering group? We essentially assemble the pots and pans to take the resource from the E3 Clearwater resource and turn it in a battery-grade lithium hydroxide. We focus on developing a flow sheet that is safe, efficient and maximizes value. So to borrow some of Caroline's words, it makes money. The -- let's applause on that one. We focus very much on the lithium refining circuit, as Chris mentioned. So to do that, we work very closely with major equipment suppliers who design, test, supply and guarantee the full lithium refining circuit. These are vendors that have extensive experience with lithium refining, including the treatment of DLE concentrates. So a lot of these technologies exist. A lot of these technologies have been used. And a lot of these technologies, you can go and you can touch out in the field today. We also work very closely with Caroline and her team who have been able to achieve like excellent concentrate quality. And by excellent, I mean that there's very high lithium, very low impurities. And so in the refining process, what that means is we can produce the battery-grade lithium hydroxide with far fewer losses along the way. Thank you, Caroline and team.

Yes. And similar to Caroline, we put out some news about making some lithium carbonate. Just today, talking about the fact that the hydroxide has now also been produced. We have some of it here. So for those in the audience, you can go find Josh's team, and you can see some of the samples that are lithium molecules from Leduc Reservoir. They are now in final product. But maybe just a little bit about that final step to take carbonate to hydroxide and why we're doing that.

Yes. So along the lithium refining process, we first make a carbonate, which was the subject of an announcement a couple of weeks ago. Then as part of the refining process, we take that carbonate and we produce a hydroxide. And it's really exciting because this is a hydroxide that has been produced from the resource. So all of that -- those lithium molecules are now in that hydroxide form.

Yes. And hydroxide, obviously, going into high-nickel cathode batteries, which are more dominant today in the North American market, which is why E3 is aiming towards a hydroxide product. Thanks, Josh. Jody, your team, as you mentioned before, basically assembles all of the pieces from all of the work that these other folks are doing and turns it in something that makes sense into a cohesive plan. In project management speak, you manage Stage 1 and 2, if you're looking at Alberta standard. Who do you have on your team? And sort of what are you guys focused on right now? What are your big goals?

I think I have the best job in the company because I get to work with everyone at E3. Really, everyone here, up here in the panel, a lot of the other E3 employees that you'll have the opportunity to meet today, we all are indirectly or directly working on our pre-feasibility study. So my job is to wrap the commercial plant into one concept and present that in the pre-feasibility study, but I'm certainly not doing that alone. The commercial plant is -- can be divided up into many different puzzle pieces, if you like to think of a commercial plant as a complete puzzle. And each practitioner, each engineer is really responsible for a piece of that puzzle. And they will spend time doing trade-off studies and looking at different options to try to find the optimum piece for that puzzle. And my job is to really wrap all those pieces into one commercial plant that will be presented in our pre-feasibility study. So you will see the work that my team is doing in the form of studies and in the form of a pre-feasibility study report. And it's been a fabulous experience to work with all these individuals to pull this together. Right now, we are in the first -- just finishing the first stage of developing the pre-feasibility study report. You can divide the work really into 3 different stages, finishing the first stage, and we're moving into the second stage of integrating some concepts together. And we are working together to put together the pre-feasibility study report that focuses on a commercial plant that is safe, technically feasible and, above all, economic.

Yes. And the pre-feas is just really one step in the process design perspective. Maybe you can take us through sort of what happens after pre-feas, more not so much from the public perspective, but what we're doing internally to get through the next stage as we're ready to build the plant, just high level.

So the pre-feasibility study is really the first is the development stage of the project. After that, we move into more of the execution stage and the feasibility stage. I think a nice way to think about this is if you were developing a house, you would start out with some very high-level ideas on what that house might look like. And as you move forward to constructing your house, you define each piece of that a little bit more clearly. And so we will have a good idea of what that commercial plant will look like at pre-feasibility, but there will be more technical work to do as we move forward into 2024. And we will continue to define the commercial plant. We'll continue to develop those engineering deliverables that we need to get cost estimates and to work with vendors. And this is just a very normal process that we're using to move through specific gates as we work towards the final stage, which would be start-up.

Excellent. Thanks, Jody. Just to wrap the panel, we've got about 5 minutes left. I just want to bring back to Kevin. We've heard from the members of your team and the team that they manage who are building this project. Can you maybe just talk to the audience about what excites you about this project? And you've only been here 5 months, but you've come in at a very critical point. What excites you about E3 and what we're up to?

I want to emphasize that this is the easiest question Chris has asked me in 5 months. There's 2 things that excite me about E3. One is the magnitude of the project and the scope of the project. As an engineer, and I'm going to say as geologists and scientists and even accountants in the room, this project is super cool. To assemble the LEGO blocks and the technologies that we are in a novel and innovative fashion is awesome. But then you apply the scale of this, it's an engineer's dream job. The other thing that excites me about this is this -- it's a strategic world-class asset satisfying what you saw was a massive demand for a very critical material. And to be a part of something like that, especially at little old E3 here, is incredibly exciting. I get to go for walks over lunches with colleagues, with family dinners. My kids are excited about the contribution that we can make here at E3. And so I think I can very comfortably speak on behalf of the entire team with respect to that enthusiasm and excitement for what we're doing here at E3.

Yes. And I think that's important. I mean the team is everything. The people that are delivering the project in the company are really what is driving everything that you see publicly. Everything we announce publicly is driven by the people who are doing all the work behind the scenes. And the public sees a small snippet of that through our news announcement, but there's a lot of work that goes on the background for each news announcement that goes out. And I think one important thing to sort of wrap on this is that we -- E3 being a leader in this space is cutting -- the cutting edge here. We are cutting the new cloud. We're building the first one. And from there, we get to be examples for our future projects. So as we expand and we grow to Project 2 and 3 and 4, that we have the expertise and the mold created that we can then copy and paste to understand how to build bigger projects. And so we unlocked the first one, and it's the hardest one that we do. And after that, everything gets much easier. We continue to progress and create that real value. And it's these people here and the rest of the team at E3 that are doing that. So maybe give them all a round of applause. All right. So I'm going to invite the next panel to come up. And this panel is the strategy and sustainability panel. So we're going to shift gears a little bit from project development mode, from the technical work that we do at E3 to some of the more bigger-picture, higher-level corporate development aspects that are as equally important. And so we wanted to share some of that today. So on the panel today, we've got Leigh Clarke, VP, Corporate Development; Raymond Chow, our Chief Financial Officer; Robin Boschman, Director of External Relations; and Brian Ceelen, Director of Commercial Development. I think we'll start off with each of them introducing themselves as well for this panel, and then we'll kick it off. So maybe, Leigh, with you.

Thanks, Chris. As Chris mentioned, my name is Leigh Clarke. I'm the VP of Corporate Development. In my responsibility basket, I have our environmental and regulatory practices, our sustainability practices, our external relations, although Robin is really the one that does that work. And our -- the business side of commercializing our projects and bringing our product to market, but really that's Brian that takes care of most of that. I am also, as you know, Chris, the youngest and the smartest person at E3.

So move it along.

I think I had that backwards, didn't I?

How do I follow up on that? My name is Ray Chow, I'm the Chief Financial Officer here at E3. My job is not only to ensure the company's financial health and governance, but also for the planning and execution of our strategic goals. I articled right here in Calgary, spent a lot of my time in high-growth, successful energy companies, growing them from small organizations to large, complex, publicly traded ones. I spent a little bit of time as well in the project finance world, evaluating renewable and energy projects as well. So...

And I'm Robin Boschman, E3's Director of External Relations. You all have met me briefly before. In my role at E3, I'm responsible for everything from Investor Relations to media relations. And for the purposes of this panel, I'm wearing the hat of stakeholder relations, consultation and engagement. I have more than 15 years of experience working in Alberta's energy industry. And through that time, that experience has really spanned broad roles, but all for the purpose of developing and maintaining the relationships that a company requires to ensure that it can operate sustainably. So I'm very happy to be part of the panel today to talk more about that and the work that I do with this great team.

And lastly, I'm Brian Ceelen, Director of Commercial Development. As Leigh led in with, I am responsible for the commercial strategy, negotiating with offtake and product sales and business development for the company. I started as an operation engineer for an upstream company here in Alberta, transitioned into commercial with them for transitioning to business development with a midstream company and then was lured here by Chris this year.

Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Maybe we'll just kick off with something that's of critical importance to any company that's developing a business, a project or what have you, and that is ESG. It's a term that often gets thrown around, and I think we just wanted to talk a little bit about what it actually means and what it means to E3, most importantly. So Leigh and Ray, maybe just over to you guys to talk about the different letters of ESG and what it means for E3.

Sure. I probably should have admitted that I'm a lawyer as well. And I have more than 30 years of experience in working with major project companies, both as counsel and then as an executive helping to get big projects built here in Alberta. When I think about ESG and the sustainability, Chris, as Kevin said, I think we have such a great hand here. The cards in our hand from this closed-loop, well-known system and its environmental -- relatively small environmental footprint just provides such a great basis for us. But when we think about sustainability at E3, we think about doing whatever is the most responsible thing to do in the circumstances and, wherever possible, minimizing our impact on our stakeholders and the environment. When I think about the E part of ESG and that minimization of the impact, we're in a great starting point. We've obviously -- we understand how to extract brine. We know how to move it. We know how to extract the lithium from it. We know how to put the brine back. And the standards for doing that are amongst the highest in the world anywhere. We know what the target is to meet. And I know that this team, and I'm working with Jody and her team, were all striving to exceed wherever possible those standards. So I like our hand as it relates to the environmental side of things. We take it very seriously. And we are in a good starting position with a footprint that is quite small, particularly when compared to other sources like a hard-rock mine or evaporative solar in South America. On the social side, I'll say the same thing, the regulatory compact, the relationships with our stakeholders, the AER and the government have for years and their predecessor has been setting high standards for that type of engagement and relationship and ensuring that our impacts on our communities are minimized and mitigated wherever possible. The rules are well known, which is terrific. Other jurisdictions are still developing these types of frameworks, but it's all built in for us. So I really feel very, very bullish about our -- the S side of ESG for us. And Ray, did you want to say something about governance?

Thanks, Leigh. Our approach to governance has always been proactive in nature in the sense of the tone at the top is where it sets our base corporate policies all the way down to our code of conduct. It's something that a lot of smaller companies will struggle with as they scale up, but it's something with strong core foundational values that we stay ahead of these types of growing pains. We've been proactive in our systems and our processes. And we pride ourselves in the transparency and accountability to our shareholders. Like let's be clear, we're building a company for the long term here. So...

Excellent. Thanks, Ray. And I think all of these things when you're building a project, if you start with them at the foundation, they're easily -- they're integrated and easily to implement as you go. It's a lot harder to look backwards as you go. Perhaps we should have done some of these things to start off with. So having a good foot forward is incredibly important. Maybe over to Robin. As Leigh mentioned...

But I've not finished.

Okay. As Leigh mentioned, we're -- stakeholder engagement is incredibly important for all projects, community development and building those relationships with your local community. And there's a lot of people in the audience here that are local Albertans that are shareholders and probably also part of that group that we would say local stakeholders. So maybe, Robin, just talk to us a little bit about how you think about these things and what our plans are in that respect.

I would love to. But Leigh, first, do you have something that you want to say?

No. No, that's fine, Robin. You go ahead.

Okay. So in terms of stakeholder engagement and consulting with and collaborating with local communities and local landowners in our operating area, the approach that E3 is already taking is to get out there early, to get out there often and to have real meaningful conversations. And based on my experience building large linear infrastructure projects in the province, that is really what it takes to do this well. Now to be clear, we will not be out with a formal regulatory stakeholder consultation process until our pre-feasibility study is complete. That will provide us with the data that we need and really that the community and the landowners need to understand what it is we're proposing to do. So once we have that, we will get out there more rigorously to have these conversations with the stakeholders who are interested in what we plan to do in the area. In my experience working on these projects in Alberta, I've seen what works and I've seen what doesn't firsthand. And the things that work are really quite simple. And it is what I said, it's getting out early, it's getting out often, it's sharing information transparently and it's really bringing this value to it of a desire to co-create what you're doing together with the community. There are so many benefits of what we are planning to do at E3. You saw in the video, we're aiming to create 150 jobs with every commercial facility, right? There's a lot to that. There's tax base. There's a lot of economic benefits to that. So there's a lot of positivity about it. And our job at E3 is to make sure that we maintain that positivity. And why shareholders should care about this is just exactly for the reason of sustainability. If we do this right, we will be able to build it and operate it for the long term, our first commercial facility. And everything after that, right, those relationships are so important to pave the way to sustainable operations, to sustainable revenue. So I've been out in the community for the better part of this year, meeting with local chambers of commerce, meeting with local municipal governments, including meeting with local polytechnic postsecondary institutions. And people are really excited about how they can support building this industry in Western Canada with E3 Lithium. There's so much benefit that people see to doing that. But that doesn't just give us a pass. We have to communicate well, we have to consult well. And those are the philosophies and values that we are going to bring to the regulatory stakeholder consultation and engagement process.

Awesome. Thanks, Robin. I'm going to bring back to Leigh. Leigh and I spent the last week together in Europe. So we're probably a bit punchy.

Punchy? Punchy.

So back to Leigh, just to wrap up on sort of closing the loop on ESG.

Yes. I just wanted to make the point that from our perspective, and this, I think, current runs throughout the company, we see ESG and being sustainable and being responsible not as a chore or an obligation, but as a strategic advantage. I think it's a differentiator for us. We have this tremendous, tremendous base that we're moving -- that we're operating on top of. The rules are clear. We know what we have to do. And we have a small footprint, thanks to the resource. And I think that can play into and become a differentiator for us in the market for capital and certainly for offtake. And I suspect Brian can speak to the increasing focus on ESG standards throughout the supply chain in the electric vehicle world. And so I really am excited about that and like the work we're doing. And I think it's up to us to leverage it.

Yes, 100%. And I could lead in to Brian. So we've seen the landscape change significantly over the past few years given the global push towards electrified transport. I'm going to talk a little bit this -- about this as I wrap up as well as some of the experiences from the last couple of weeks. But this includes things from the OEMs that move into the supply chain, which we really haven't seen since the Henry Ford days. So that's fundamentally changing everything about what's going on for critical minerals. Maybe you can just talk a bit more specifically about what we're seeing and what you're seeing in the industry and how that's all playing out.

Yes. It's a really exciting time right now in the lithium industry. As we've seen in the charts on the supply and demand, this imbalance that happens in the future here as well as what we're seeing here in terms of the amount of investment that's necessary to get this lithium into the market. And so on the base case side, this is, I think, provided by benchmark materials. On the high case, that's like what you need to meet all of the government and other regulatory goals that are out there in the world right now. And so you see a significant investment. And this has, as Chris said, fundamentally made a shift in how the market is moving about getting this lithium supply. And part of that is with some of the OEMs, you're starting to see these car manufacturers make deals with upstream companies. Like for instance, you could use General Motors and their deal with Lithium Americas and Thacker Pass, that's $650 million. Ford has provided a $300 million loan to Liontown. Liontown has now been acquired. And Stellantis in -- has a $75 million investment in Vulcan in Europe. So we're -- if going with the next slide, Chris, like there's -- you've seen this shift of these companies moving into the supply chain and trying to supply themselves because to meet the demand goals that they have to make this transition to EVs, they need to make sure they have the supply to develop that. And that means feeding their cathode makers into their supply makers and to the actual EVs themselves. And this is a representation of it, but you're really seeing these companies move down the supply chain.

Yes. And I think it is interesting to see because it's not just the OEMs that need lithium. It's the cabin factors are the ones that actually consume the lithium. And they're the ones that actually need to purchase it, yet the OEMs are buying that lithium on their behalf. And that dynamic, I think, is an interesting one. It's also something that is new to everybody in the space and potentially in some ways unexpected. But maybe we can look at the relationship side of things because everything is about relationships. And the ones that we are building with our offtake customers are obviously pretty important. Can you talk about that environment and some of the relationships that are being developed and sort of how we see that as well, how E3 sees it?

Yes. And maybe to echo some of the things that had been said by the people on this panel and others is relationships are a big thing for E3. We really believe that, that is how it's going to support our needs to get this first commercial plant, but maybe more important for us than others is building a long-term relationship because there'll be other phases of the projects afterwards as well. And so what that means is like this is an international market, and we need to be out there, and we have been going on the road meeting these companies in person. But having the field pilot has been a really fundamental shift for us as well as inviting them here, have them come to Calgary, have them come to see the pilot, see and touch it and have these conversations, meet our team, and I think that's been a really fundamental shift for us and something that has really been beneficial for E3. And so building these relationships, Chris as being kind of forefront and myself and Leigh and the rest of the team here is a really big important thing. And to make ties together, what we're hearing from these conversations is ESG will become a bigger and bigger thing in terms of the lithium supply. And we think E3 kind of has that advantage in terms of this DLE and everything we've talked about here in this panel. And it's been really well received by the companies we talk to, and we look forward to continuing those discussions and relationships.

Yes. And I think you look globally at the desire to move to electric vehicles, the ESG component, the carbon footprint is one of the key metrics that these companies look at. And different governments are approaching it in different ways. The United States, with IRA and DPA, sort of more carrot approach, providing funding, providing opportunities to grow, bringing the supply. They also have a stick because if you have a project in the United States, that lithium can't leave the United States. In Europe, the approach is slightly different. It's more about a stick approach. They're pushing certain amounts of materials with certain qualifications. So either a certain carbon footprint or a certain amount of recycled material, those sorts of things have time frames to ensure that those batteries that are going to the cars meet certain hurdles like an ESG component or like a certain amount of recycled material, those aspects. And so that shift as well, fundamentally -- that policy fundamentally drives what companies like us end up doing. And for example, it is unlikely that our first plant will be carbon neutral day 1, but it's probably something that we will aim to do as revenue starts coming in. As we pay off the plant and as we have capital to do that, we'll probably end up going in that direction, partly because that's what our customers are asking for and partly because they will pay a premium for that. And there are opportunities in Alberta to do that type of activity to reduce our carbon footprint. And there's new technologies as well that you can implement that are more electrical-based that allow you to control your carbon and, therefore, control your footprint overall. So any final thoughts before we wrap? Excellent. We'll let this panel go. Thank you very much for coming up. So this is you.

Can I do this?

You can.

Thank you so much. I've been trying to get this all day. Okay. We're going to have a brief break, just a 20-minute break. This is just a stretching and bio break. If you need to use the washrooms, there are 2 on either sides of us here as well as some downstairs, and you're free to go outside and come back. Do you have the time?

Yes, 3:40, please be back.

3:40, please be back. Thank you. [Break]

I welcome you up for this part. You want this? Advanced pack.

Yes. All right. I'm super excited to be here today with you guys. I'm going to touch on some of our financial highlights and performance to date. I have Chris to my left here. I'm going to go through the black and whites, the dry stuff and let Chris provide some color as we go through our material here today. Our philosophy from the very beginning has always been to minimize dilution and keep that tight capital structure for our shareholders. Second, being very cost-conscious about our capital spending, where it's being spent, how it's being spent and maintaining a reasonable overhead. Since announcing some of our major milestones this year, a lot of eyes have been on us. We've been seeing a lot of interest in the story. And with increased interest, increased volumes and naturally some volatility, some shorts, this is normal. This is natural as a company becomes more mature and more established. You see this with a lot of our peers in the space as they've been growing. The outcome of this and the increased volumes just means that we've been able to grow our share price and our market cap by over 60% year-to-date. As planned, we were able to go out this fall and raised the largest oversubscribed bought-deal financing in our company's history. We've also been able to demonstrate the ability to tap the capital markets at higher and higher share prices and providing shareholders the comfort that we're well funded into the future. Not only has our market cap and share price increased over 60% year-to-date, we've also organically been able to grow our volumes from trading probably just under 100,000 shares per day at the beginning of the year to over 700,000 shares per day in the last 3 months. This provides additional liquidity to the stock, providing shareholders that upside and liquidity to buy and sell.

I think one of the key things that I think is important for us as well is that as a pre-revenue company, your currencies or capital market and your ability to continue to do what development you need to do is fund it through raising capital through that currency that you've developed. And I think that if you looked around -- and there are some bankers here in the crowd, and so definitely try to find some of them if you want some more detail. But I think the markets right now are pretty tough. There's not a lot of stories that are gaining traction, not a lot of funds. And there's still some macro market fear of recession. And certainly, the postponement in reducing rates or the thought that, that might happen can cause market volatility and make things more challenging for companies like us to raise capital. So I think the sign, the encouragement that we got from being able to raise capital as easily as we're able to and the quantum that we're able to raise is a sign of sort of the interest in what E3 has been up to. And it's certainly not shared by our peers. Some of our peers are struggling right now to find that same access to capital. So I think it really does sort of shine a light on E3 and what we've been up to.

Yes. So we're going to be heading into 2024 with a very enviable balance sheet, sitting on probably just over $40 million based on our Q2 working capital number and our recent raise. So the ability to access capital markets to grant funding, as Chris had alluded to, has been quite tough, but also successful for us. First, we've been incredibly appreciative of the support provided both by the provincial and federal governments who have been there for us as early as 2019, where we first secured the Alberta Innovates grant. On the back of our preliminary economic assessment published at late 2020, we were able to fund ourselves a $13 million equity raise with a full warrant attached, which helped quietly fund ourselves over the next 2.5 years. You didn't see any bought-deal financings during that time as we've been very cost-conscious of how we've accessed the capital and spent our capital, with spending always been in line with our ability to access it. We've also been very appreciative in the investment funding from our friends over at Imperial. And with the support of the Strategic Innovation Fund, Natural Resources Canada and our recent raise, we're well funded going into 2024.

I think that there's -- resounding around the Board table when I talk to the directors is looking for access of capital that's non-dilutive. And I think it's important to the shareholders as well because any dollar that comes in from one of these grants means we don't have to raise in the capital markets. And there was a rationale, I talked about this earlier, why we're getting this quantum of capital from the provincial and federal governments, and it is that if we prove this out, it opens the door. It opens the door to an industry in Alberta that doesn't exist today. And it's risky. It's not really high risk. That's why we're publicly traded is because finding private capital for this type of story is very difficult. And I think the government recognizes that risk and is supportive of us to be able to develop this industry and develop the project. So obviously, we've spent a lot of time over the past couple of years working with the provincial government and specifically on regulatory, and that has borne some pretty significant fruit in terms of Bill 82 and the AR rewriting certain directives to include brine-hosted mineral language. We've moved very closely with the federal government on their critical minerals action plan to see the development of these critical mineral assets. And in Canada, obviously, they've got a broader picture of more of a global -- sorry, a Canadian ecosystem of batteries, so they want to see all the way from raw material to the final battery being produced in Canada. And it's -- they're putting their money where their mouth is on that one. And I think that E3 being a recipient of that is an incredibly important part of the growth story for the industry in Alberta.

Awesome. Thanks, Chris. So over the past year, we've also been very successful in the sense that we've been added to 3 additional venture indices on the TSX. We've also been able to outperform all 3 of those indices, including the Horizons Lithium Index here. We've outperformed them by over 50% year-to-date. So a quick peer comparison of our direct lithium extraction brine peers. Many of these projects and companies have shown significant progress towards commercialization. As the leader in Canada, we've demonstrated significant progression through our milestones. And there's a well-worn pathway laid out by our peers that have increased their valuations such as field pilot plants, PFSs, strategic partnerships, offtake and feasibilities that we continue to work towards. Chris?

Yes, I think looking at the broad market, and I was actually talking to a couple of shareholders at the break about that broad market and what's happening, milestone -- if you can just do a quick simple analysis, you can plot E3 against our peers, peers in the space that are here on the slide and other ones as well, and you look at where their sort of aggregate value was created, and it was things like pilot plants. It was things like corporate development partnerships, advancing their projects through some of these stages that are important to get to the end goal of being able to go commercial. And I think that, that is in part where E3 is performing really strongly right now. But I think that there's another component here that we don't really talk about too much because it's hard to quantify, and that is that DLE stories haven't really yet had their day in the sun yet from a market perspective. And what that really means is that we had a slide where we talked about the preliminary economic assessment validated E3, it validated that a 75-milligram per meter resource had the potential to be economic. We've put that out at the end of 2020, and it fundamentally changed the game for E3. And it unlocked the door to financing, unlocked the door to us to opening our own facility to actually demonstrate that DLE technology. And that is -- the fruit of all of that is being proven out today with the pilot. But moving forward, DLE still outside of China does not have a commercial example, but that is changing very quickly. There's a company that next year will turn on the first outside China DLE plant that will produce somewhere around 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year. And when you look at that validation from a macro sense, that has a huge piece to play in all direct extraction because it's a validation. It shows that this has the ability to become commercial at the size that E3 is talking about that is not there today, and it's one of the big reasons why these stories often get looked at and I think why the values aren't there relative to some of the peer companies like hard-rock companies that are looking at lithium where you look at the fundamentals of what DLE offers in terms of ESG, cost, development perspective, time frame to commercial. There's a lot of advantages there. So I think that DLE is going to have its stay in the sun in the next little while, and I think that's going to have a big impact as well to valuations across the board.

Awesome. All right. Well, I'm going to hand it back to you for some closing remarks.

Excellent. Thanks, Ray. Thank you for your time. Let me just find my place here. So I think one of the big things that I want to close on, and so we've talked a lot today. We've talked a lot about where E3 came from. We've talked a lot about where E3 is going. And I just want to try to bring this all together into more of the vision of E3 and where the big picture is that we want to take this company. First and foremost, the team, everybody here -- almost everybody, there's a couple who's on vacation, but almost everybody from the team is here today to support this event. They're going to be around at various different stations during the socials part of this where you can talk to them about what they do with the company more specifically. And honestly, it is this group of people that are building this project for you guys, for the shareholders and for Alberta. And it was a big lift to get this day together. So a big thank you to the team for coming out, and a big thank you to Robin who you've seen. This was her bench. She spent a lot of time and energy building what we have today. So a big round of applause, everybody. So I'm just going to sort of summarize what you've heard today and attempt to anyway because there's a lot of smart people who've been working -- are working on this project. So we've heard a summary of our project development. So we talked about what it's going to take to build this project. We talked about the brine production, the similarities to Alberta. We've talked about the direct extraction, the pilot, how important that is, how that process unlocks the ability to make -- or take the lithium out of the brine and the success that that's having, at least preliminary results that we have out. We've talked about how we're making lithium hydroxide, which is the final battery product, and the process that it takes to get to that. We've even talked a little bit about regulatory and stakeholder. And I think that looking at Alberta and looking at why we came here, why out of -- I was looking around the world for lithium project, why it landed in Alberta. And I have a background here, and I spent a lot of time in oil and gas industry myself in Alberta. But what drove me really to come to Alberta is the fact that the part that E3 is about to enter, the project development cycle that we're about to enter, we fundamentally understood there was advantage to being here locally in Alberta to develop this project. And that really focuses around the regulatory environment. Leigh talked about that a little bit. I mentioned Bill 82 that our previous energy minister got ratified and into law, and the outcome of that was the rewriting of the directives that the Alberta Energy Regulator here, who we now are regulated under, that include language to license the facilities and the wells and the pipelines that we need to build this project. And so we're -- we've been able to proactively get the government to engage with us to change -- make some of these changes so that we could be ready to license and permit this project. And so there's obviously a big thank you to the government of Alberta for working with us to be proactive. But when we looked at this from a 7-years-ago lens looking forward, there's -- the company is really -- especially for the first 4 or 5 years, it was passion that kept the company going or the passion of the people involved in this that built the early days of E3 when there wasn't a lot of money to be had on the market, where we were doing things on a shoestring budget to advance the project, mainly focusing on the technology. And I think that everything that we've done today from that past is really built on that passion and that conviction. And that's why I'm here, that's what I do this. I think that building a new industry in Alberta is a very big thing to accomplish. And it's something that drives me every day to get up and do days like today, which started very early and will probably end very late. So I think that it's really important that, that passion is felt. I think everybody in the team definitely feels that. So when you look at the sort of where we are today, we're hosting this inaugural Investor Day. We could have done this in the past, but we're doing it today because it is a point in time where if everything is successful over the next 4 or 5 months in terms of the DLE tech, which we've seen, preliminary results showed success, we're working through the pre-feasibility study that's going to outline the value of this project. And all of that really means that we're moving through a bit of a paradigm shift and a critical transition of E3 from what was like a research and development company to something that's more of a commercialization company. And it's happening right now, and we had vision of this last year, and we did talk about it last year of the need to do this and the need to get to where we are today. We have one of the largest lithium resources globally. It is well documented. We have a direct extraction process that has been demonstrated to work and will continue to provide the fulsome results to the market in due course. So you'll be able to see what we're seeing now behind the scenes, we'll get that to the market, see how actually well it's working. The success of the pilot and demonstrating the pre-feasibility study opens up our ability to grow our project and to move forward into other projects as well, but also opens up the door, as I've talked about before, into the Alberta landscape. And so it's really the culmination of 7 years of hard work by everybody that you've seen here and previous employees who have -- who were around to really get this sort of foundation set. And it's transitioning into that commercialization company that I think is really what's going to grow E3, is going to grow an industry in Alberta. And that's really truly what it is that we're doing here. And I had an opportunity to go -- and I was in Europe in the past couple of weeks at some industry conferences, and I was invited by the Natural Resources Minister of Canada to join a trade mission. And we did a couple of stops in London and Paris. And we -- the third day was an invitation to participate in the International Energy Agency's inaugural critical minerals event that was hosted last Thursday. And it was attended by over 50 delegates from over 50 countries, either the Prime Minister or the natural resources or the Energy Minister or the Labor Minister to talk about, including the Secretary of State from the United States, to talk about critical minerals and the importance of this. And so what we're seeing globally -- and this was a global conference. This was attended by not just the members of the IEA, but also the invitees and then there was another 50-or-so companies that were -- that attended, including some of the biggest mining companies and oil and gas companies in the world. And what we're seeing is that there's a global concern that there is not enough critical minerals in place to transition this industry towards. We need money. We need to -- we need permitting reform. We need all of these things to get this industry. This is a global -- these are global concerns. And we have that advantage in Alberta to advance this without a lot of the concerns that you see globally around permitting, around social license. And it's going to be one of the big advantages for us into the future. So this is not really about the movement towards electric vehicles and the mobile electricity. This is, from my perspective, really a global mini-industrial revolution, what we're trying to do here globally. We're trying to transition to electrified mobility. And to do that, we have to change what we -- how we operate. We have to build a critical minerals industry that doesn't exist today to feed the batteries that are going to enable this transition to electrification. And so it's a global effort. And every single country, including China, which are the leaders today in electrification and electrified transport, but everyone is on board. The European Union, North America, South America, the entire world and the countries within it are working towards this goal, and it's a unified front. Everybody is working on this. Companies all over the world are developing batteries, companies all of the world are building electric vehicles. The uptake in Europe is over 20% now of new sales. Canada and the United States are not far behind. China is well into the high percentages as well. So everyone is pushing for this. And the benefit that a company like us has is that lithium powers it all. Lithium is the one element in all of these batteries that is consistent and is used around 10%. So all batteries use about 10% lithium. So how is E3 going to participate in this? Well, we talked earlier about how important ESG is to these companies and how E3 offers that we are in a reliable jurisdiction. We're based on democratic principles. So we'll develop this project responsibly, but we have the advantage. I think we'll be able to develop it also very quickly because of the regulatory environment that we have in Alberta without having to skip steps. Obviously, we have a very strong process that we can -- that is -- for the -- what's the most important part is transparent. So we know exactly what we need to do to get licenses to have that ability to commercially operate. And so we can go find -- we can go acquire those licenses with a clear and transparent process that's well laid out by the Alberta government and Alberta Energy Regulator. And then we have the land base and the potential to expand and really become a global player. The largest lithium producers on the planet are somewhere around 150,000 tonnes a year today. Now they're growing. They're going to be larger to that in the future, but that's our ability as well. We can move this project in the Bashaw District to about 150,000 tonnes a year. And so that enables us to really become a global player, just E3, a global player in terms of the size of the resource base that we are developing here. And that doesn't include the Rocky property and our Saskatchewan property. And I think that we have plans to develop both of those. And looking at Saskatchewan, this is fairly new to the market. We announced this only a month ago, but we've held the land since 2021. And I think what it demonstrates is that E3's eyes are around what else is going on and trying to find opportunity to do strategic M&A to grow the value from this company for shareholders. And that work will continue and probably more increased activity into the future because we have a deep understanding of what it takes to make a good project because of the skill set we have in E3. We have the foremost experts in direct extraction, in producing brines, in large-volume production as we develop our own project, and we can apply that to others. And while we plan a 100% focus from our technical development on Clearwater Project 1, so you saw the project team, and that is 100% of their focus. And the majority of our staff and our money that we have will go towards building that project. There's other opportunities that we can create. For example, we have the Rocky property that we have a plan to develop in parallel. And that plan involves us finding partners to develop it with so that we can get that project also up and running while we focus on the Bashaw side of things in the eastern side of Central Alberta. And I think there's also -- the way that batteries are produced is also changing. And there's an opportunity as well for E3 to look at that value chain and bring some of that local. And there are some advantages to producing cathode materials and synergies with reducing costs from both sides of the battery manufacturing process and the lithium manufacturing process if you're proximal. And so there's opportunities there. And I think that the way that batteries -- you have to remember that the cathode chemistries that are going into batteries today are 25 to 30 years old. And they're finally being commercialized. It takes a long time to get these technologies to the point where you feel comfortable enough to put them in a car underneath your feet. And so the same is new for new technologies. As they get developed, it takes a long time. They'll go in small applications like phones, then they'll go in bigger applications like computers, then things like scooters and then eventually, they'll end up in a car. And so new technologies that you see around today involve things like lithium metal anode or solid state. And we're working with a great company, Pure Lithium, that has a lithium metal anode and they're developing battery technologies around that. And I think that, that represents the future. They claim that they can reduce the cost of the battery by 6x. And when you talk about that type of cost reduction, and it doesn't -- it's not switching off lithium. It's just simply the manufacturing process is cheaper because you're integrating with your lithium producer, which is why we like it, but it also has higher energy density. And so the combination of the 2 enables you to make batteries cheaper, which means the cars get cheaper. Now you're talking about electric vehicles that are cheaper than ICEs, and the whole industry changes. You're talking about installed -- sorry, stationary storage applications that enable wind and solar to be much more efficient if you deploy them. And so the whole world is shifting in this. And the batteries and how they're being manufactured is shifting because the industry today is well and truly very immature. The leading producers of lithium today are hard-rock mining in Australia being processed in China or lithium production in the lithium triangle in South America being processed in China. 80% of the processed lithium chemicals, so lithium hydroxide and carbonate battery quality are coming out of China today. But that landscape is shifting and there's a big push, especially in North America and led by the United States, to get us off of that. And I think that we offer a very amenable solution to that problem as well. So specific vision for E3, obviously, is that we are going to refine our brines that we have here in Alberta into battery-grade hydroxide at a commercial facility creating domestic economic value. We then plan to grow that to 150,000 tonnes in the Bashaw District alone, which is enough, as we've mentioned, to produce about 2.2 million EVs annually. So all of this enables us to unlock shareholder value. It's why a lot of shareholders here today is to look at where E3 is going to grow. And I think that we're able to, by doing all these project development activities, by looking at some strategic M&A across our assets and across what other projects are out there, to unlock the value creating batteries for future generations. And doing that right here, focused on our resources, focused on Alberta, creating jobs and really bringing the value to E3 and to the province. So I told you earlier that our vision is to be a global leader in responsibly-sourced lithium. And so if I can bring that home now to wrap this up, obviously, the belief that the Bashaw District can produce a globally significant quantity of lithium on an annual basis, being about 150,000 tonnes a year, that makes us one of the largest lithium producers on the planet. And that's just E3, that's just what we have, that's just the Bashaw District. And the benefit that we have is that we can do it better, we do it more sustainably and we can build a world-class industry in the province. So on that note, I want to thank everyone for coming, and we're going to open it up to a live Q&A session.

So I -- as modern as I can be, I have live questions coming at me on the iPad here. So I'm just going to go through them in order. We have about 15 minutes or so left, and so we'll get through as many of these questions as we can. If the question warrants, I'll bring up some of the staff to do it. Maybe I'll just grab a seat, and we'll bring some people up as we go. All right. So I think the first question is pretty interesting, and it's not surprising that it's one of the first that we've received. They're looking to explain the criteria of how we choose the DLE technologies that we'll test at the pilot. And we talked about our KPIs in June. Maybe Caroline, if you want to come up and give a bit of an explanation as well with me on this one because there's a couple of questions about the direct extraction. Maybe we can just spend a couple of minutes going through a couple of them. So the critical criteria, and I'll get Caroline to explain the specifics, but it's really about fundamentally the economics of the project. So we've talked about the fact that we have 2 third-party in our technology, all buying for the spot of the first commercial DLE project that will be implemented for E3. It may not be the second, and that's fine, but we need to pick one for the first project. And so it really fundamentally does come down to the economics. But we understand some of the fundamental criteria that are required that we know will make a project more economic -- more ideally more economic than us. Maybe you can talk about the flow rate and how that comes into play.

All right. So there are 4 key criteria I look for when evaluating DLE technologies. One of the ones that's most important is your flow rate ratio. And what we're looking at there is we want to understand how fast can we recover the lithium from the brine. The speed of recovery speaks to the size of the capital equipment and it speaks to our operating costs. So the goal there is to have as high a possible flow rate ratio indicating that we're recovering lithium as quickly as possible. That's one of the 4 key criteria because that speaks to the size and the efficiency of our system and speaks to our capital cost that feeds into our PFS.

Yes, exactly. And I think when you see -- there will be an announcement that will outline a full suite of what the results were for the last 6 weeks of testing, and Caroline's team is just going through all of the analysis of that data now so that we can be confident in it before we publish it. And one of the things we'll talk about in the announcement is the flow rate. So one of the KPIs we put out in June was a flow rate ratio. And what's that really telling the investor, but what -- and what's based on is that you want to move the brine through the columns you saw on the live stream as fast as you possibly can by still maintaining a high recovery, low impurity and high lithium content. And so a lot of the testing we've been doing is pushing the rate up to see how fast we can go before we start losing some of the fundamental criteria and then finding that optimal path and the optimal set of operating criteria that gets us the maximum recovery and the maximum full rate so that we have the smallest amount of capital outlay, which is the small size of the plant that we can do to get the same lithium out. Is it a fair summary?

Well done, Chris.

All right. Thanks. I only learned by osmosis from the smart people in the room. Thanks, Caroline. Another question about Imperial Oil. So now the question is asking that an employee -- at a recent employee forum, an Imperial Oil Senior VP talk passionately about E3, how does having the support of a large oil and gas company such as Imperial enhance the pilot and production? I mean we've been very fortunate to have Imperial Oil's support. I'd say where they've been most beneficial is on the reservoir development. Obviously, that's their expertise. They used to own this asset for production oil in the '90s. So they have the expertise. They have data. They have all of the things that an operator would have. But they also, the team, are very smart people, and those people are -- can be dedicated scientists to things like reservoir engineering that a company like E3, our team, is focused on our projects. And they have a team of people that just focus really on the science, and they're not project specific. And having -- a lot of people here have worked with large oil and gas companies, you know what I'm talking about. They have a support team for all of the projects that are usually PhDs that help the project development. And so they've been working with our team and supporting us as we've gone through the development of the reservoir that has led to the M&I upgrade. But just having also a group like that in the background, they have systems and processes that are in place that can assist a small company developer. I mean, there are a couple of critical staff members on our team that are from Imperial Oil and from that sort of education system that they provide their employees as oil companies -- oil and gas companies do. So I think it's been pretty fundamental to what we've been doing, and they continue to be supportive to this date. So this is a good question. I might bring Peter up, if you want to join me really quick. So there's a -- we had a resource out for E3 that converted downward from an inferred resource to a measured indicated. So maybe just we -- the question is, why that happened? So maybe just a little bit on the information that went into M&R.

Yes. So when you have an inferred resource, you have a certain confidence. And so when you shift from inferred or to indicated measured, it's an increasing confidence. And so you take a big picture around the inferred. And as you are more confident and more sure of what you're doing, your reservoir -- sometimes your resource shrinks. So this happens all the time when you're booking reserves, when you go from improved to probable. And so people have an understanding of how resources and reserves work. This is not uncommon.

Yes. Really, what's happened is -- and this is one of my expertise as well is you have a much more defined understanding of the processing, probably the control factors of a resource. So in inferred, it's really just a block with an average values across it. And as you get into the more detail using all of the -- and the team spent a year evaluating all the core, all the wire line logs that give us the digital data. We did a production test that informed us on some of the pros from doing production values. And all of that information is more granular, and that granularity enables you to have a much more high confidence, which is why we call our confidence increase. So measuring [ cadence ] increased confidence in the resource. But it can generally mean that you have, as Peter was saying, that, that volume of available brine reduces with that work. And the question continues on here about proven and probable. And while we can't contemplate what our proven and probable is, it's actually not legal. What I can say is that for booking a reserve and for moving from measured indicated to proven and probable, that generally happens in a smaller area. So you take a subset of your area that's M&I, and you focus on that. And you have to -- like there's all sorts of other parameters like it has to be producible through the plant for a certain amount of year, and you can only go for 50 years of production. So we have way more than that in resource. So the reserve will be smaller than the resource, similar by the fact that it's only what we're going to produce from that pre-feasibility plant that we're designing for a total of 50 years. And that's how we book what you call book of reserve. And so that number will be outlined in the preface.

Yes. And the PFS is going to come out, and so we'll have a much higher confidence as you look forward.

Yes. And reserves are fundamentally important. There's very few lithium reserves for direct expression on the planet. Yes. I know you're trying to get out here. So...

No.

Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it. So a question about -- I think this probably came from a comment that Caroline made, and I've made a similar analogy from an ion exchange system, such as water softener. So -- and ask me about how the imperious get reduced. And so it's not -- when you look at how these ion exchange systems work, it's not so much that you're reducing impurities. It's that you're only selecting lithium. So the water software analogy is an appropriate one because the ion exchange principles are what you're using to extract sodium out of your water if it's hard -- sorry, calcium water if it's hard and replacing with sodium. So you have a hard water high in calcium to ion exchange medium. It swaps out calcium for sodium. So you've absorbed the calcium on to your water softener material and replaces it with sodium. And sodium softens the water. You don't really notice it because it's not much, but it softened. A lot of people do it to eliminate scale in their pipes and that sort of thing to have a cleaner system running. So the lithium works on almost identical principles, where you're swapping lithium for hydrogen. So as the lithium and the brine flows past this material, it swaps off for hydrogen. So you're now absorbing lithium on to the material, and the hydrogen goes into the brine. Now 75 milligrams per liter, so hydrogen has negative -- negligible impact to the brine. But similar to a water softener, when that material gets full of calcium, you backwash that and you actually flush it down your drain. For us, we do the same thing. We backwash that lithium, but we keep that because that's all of the lithium now. And the only reason that we get a little bit of impurity is to take 80%-plus impurity -- or 80%-plus purity. That other 20 or less percent of other stuff is really coming through the fact that you have a little bit of brine left in the system, and you can't get 100% of that brine out because you have to rinse that between. So you extract lithium, you rents and then you extract the lithium off the material. And that rinse step cleans out all the brine that was sitting in the system, so that you can get the purity. And that rinse step is never 100% efficient. And you can get a little bit of calcium scaling on the sides of the walls of the columns and stuff like that. So the impurities aren't extracting from the brine onto the material. They just happen to be in the system. And so your rinse becomes a very important step in the process of how you get purity, and one of the big pieces of optimization that Caroline's team has been working on. This is an interesting one. Could the pilot plant generate revenue? No. No. It probably costs us more to make the lithium than it does we could sell it for. But again, that's not the point. It is not meant to be commercial. It is meant to collect data, and that data will allow us to design a plan. And it is just also the DLE portion. There are plans in the work to look at an opportunity to bring the same hydroxide production on the back of that in the future to demonstrate the full process locally. Again, that will produce the better quality stuff, but even that won't be a sellable product. We'll be using that to find customers and generate interest in the project. And more importantly, as Brian and his team be a big part of 2024 is qualification. So you have to put your lithium through into batteries for a certain amount of time before the company will believe that it's -- have that sort of qualification process and the belief enough to put it into a battery that goes into a car. And that qualification process is critical, and all companies go through it. And the way that we believe that it's moving and what we've seen is the GM Thacker Pass is a good example of being able to work with your partners directly and being able to provide the quality product from the mine gate rather than when they receive it at the battery plant, and therefore, working with them the qualification. But a big piece of this is also -- and it's the same thing that Lithium Americas Corp. did is they built a demonstration plant to produce lithium hydroxide to enable that process to start. So it is a fundamental important process, and it's something that we're looking at very closely. Let's see if we can find one here. Maybe just a clarification. You say that you're planning on having 5 plants up and running by 2026, each producing 20,000 tonnes to 30,000 tonnes. I think that's just a misunderstanding, so we plan to have 1 plant running in 2026, hopefully. And then we believe we can scale from there to 150,000 tonnes, so 5 more over time. There's no -- I don't think there's any hope that we're getting 150,000 tonnes up and running, and I think that would probably cause a lot of aneurysms in our staff if we try to ask them to do that. A good question about flow rate, but I think, Caroline, we've already answered that. A market question, this is interesting. Can you talk about how the lithium metal recycling will affect supply/demand in the future? There's actually a graph that Brian was going to put in that we didn't, and it was a good one that represents this where the supply comes in the future. And so with lithium recycling, specifically of recycling, they're the set all metal recycling, there's about a 10-year lag because that lithium has to be produced. You put it in a battery, that battery is in a car for 10 years, which is the average warranty. And then you take it out a car and you may even put it into any second use. So Tesla takes a lot of the batteries and puts them into their power walls. So they have second use, and that delays that into recycling. So it could be 15 to 20 years before that battery is ready to go into a recycling plant. So when you look at when recycling starts to have a major impact, it's really not until the mid-2030s that you start to see recycling come on as a big process that's going to add to supply. But you always see that primary molecule first. Recycling is not 100%. It might be 78% recovery. Where recycling companies are being -- are implementing their technologies, and life cycle is a good example and actually, Northvolt, who's looking to build in Quebec is another example, recycling companies are generating revenue today on scrap. When a battery plant first starts, the average is 30% of the batteries are scrapped because the cells are faulty. And it takes a couple of years for that efficiency of the manufacturing process to get to the point where that percentage is in the low single digits. And so a lot of the recycling right now are taking those cells that are scrapped that are defective and recycling them for the companies. And that's why Northvolt, and Northvolt is a really good example of a company that's looking more how the future batteries will be produced and not so much how they are today, is that they have the whole integrated battery chain. So they do the cathode, they do the cell manufacturing and then they also do the recycling. So the reason that they did that is because they know that they will be scrapping a big percentage of their batteries in the beginning, and they needed a way to not waste that product and bring it back in to make the project more efficient. And so that is very -- becoming more and more common, companies are making money. But that real -- an impact to supply doesn't really happen until mid-2030s. So unfortunately, we're actually over time on the Q&A. So I just want to thank everybody who logged in to the live stream today for joining us. And this recording will be posted shortly on the website, so you'll be able to review it. Thank you, everybody, for coming in.