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

[Audio Gap] are President and CEO of E3 Lithium, Chris Doornbos. He is going to give you a presentation about some of the highlights from 2024 into 2025 and some of the exciting projects E3 Lithium has in store. So Chris, over to you.

Excellent. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining. E3, obviously, had a pretty big year 2024. We haven't had an opportunity to update the market with the webinar for quite some time. So very excited to get an opportunity to spend some time and take you through everything that E3 has been working on. Where we're at today and where we see ourselves going over the next year and beyond. Obviously, today, we'll be making some forward-looking statements, and these are here, they're on the website. So you guys can review those as you need to. So E3's strategy here that we've developed over the past little while has been to create a company for significant growth by developing our lithium assets in the province of Alberta. And what that really means -- and for those who are new to this and joining a webinar for E3 for the first time, the high-level order to the company is that we have a secure asset in the province of Alberta that was a historic oil producer discovered in the 40s that we are repurposing and turning into a lithium producer. And on the back of a very sophisticated and mature oil and gas industry in the province, we're able to capitalize on that and build a lithium industry. That is yet nascent in Alberta, but we are looking to change that, obviously, by developing a new technology to extract lithium from these brines and then commercialize that technology by being able to produce our own lithium here, making lithium -- battery-grade lithium products for the growing electrification world, which is now everywhere you see, you can't turn around seeing a lithium-ion battery somewhere in some device and some car and something. So they are becoming ubiquitous and the market for them for these products that use batteries is growing exponentially right now, and we'll talk a little bit about that as well. So we are focused on our core asset, which is the Clearwater project advancing that towards commercial revenue. We have a significant ability to grow our assets with the Bashaw District. And let's talk a little bit about -- more about that today as well. Obviously, we are a battery company. If you look at it from the top down, we are going to produce products for the battery industry. And we believe in billing partnerships. And that is the foundation of this company has always been in collaboration. 2024 was a pivotal year for lithium in Alberta. E3, obviously advancing the cause here, but not the only companies working on it, some great other companies in Alberta, both in the resource space as well as in the technology space. And it is interesting how many lithium direct extraction technology companies are out of Alberta, even though we're a nascent industry today. We have a very entrepreneurial spirit here in the province because we just get things done. That's how we operate. And so for 2024, the big catalyst for us for this year was the pre-feasibility study, a culmination of a lot of work in engineering, obviously, the sum of our technology development that we've been doing to get the directly from extraction to a point where we were comfortable enough to put it out in terms of a commercial design in that because we developed that technology from scratch and have been perfecting it since 2017. We now are working with other companies on that, and we'll talk a little bit about that as well. So the prefeasibility study marked the big change in how E3 operates because we put out a project that showed a significant value of $3.7 billion NPV after tax based on a 30,000 tonne operating life. LHM with a 50-year mine life. So just think about the size of this opportunity, 30,000 tonnes a year initial production, 32,000 tonnes of initial production operating for 50 years. And the size of this area within the Bashaw District is actually quite small. The booking our first reserve 1.3 million tonne LHM reserve proven probable at a capital cost of $2.4 billion. And when you look at the cost of this project, it's a big project. It has a big capital cost as well. Some of the initiatives that we've been working on and going to talk to today is about how we're going to reduce that capital. And the next time I'm going to talk about the operating costs because there were some sacrifices, which we still believe are the right ones to keep the operating cost fairly low. We believe and our goal at E3 is to do this project as best as we can. And what that meant for us is we built in a 0 liquid discharge philosophy and that we don't source our water. And I'm going to talk about this in our process map, but this is fundamentally important to our project because direct extraction has been called out for using a lot of water, and it does. The process is a lot of water. But that doesn't mean that, that water has to be from the environment. You can source it internally and reuse it, and that's what we plan to do. We're also, in terms of land disturbance, direct lithium extraction, all projects share this. We have a very small surface footprint, very, very minimal surface footprint. And this is exemplified by this photo. This is our pilot site this type of -- this size of area will be similar in size, a little bit bigger than this for five wells of our production in terms of the drilling, and then we'll obviously shrink that and not very much bigger than this area that you see on the slide would our facility. So we're actually quite a small surface pegmatite in total. And we plan to focus on our carbon emissions in the future, probably not day 1, but in the future, next year -- year 3 or 4 into production by deploying a carbon sequestration system. And a lot of this has been done now in-house. We've built our own expertise to build this project. And we've been staffing that up based on our core group of people, who've been adding skill sets to this to get this into feasibility. And when you look at our operating cost, on the C1 cost curve basis, this is projected out to 2030 for all the projects you see on here. We are in the bottom side of this graph. And I think it's an incredibly important part of this project because our comparables and the good friends of ours over at Lithium Americas Corp, who are advancing their project and starting construction right now after their DOE loan and their recent announcement of their joint venture with General Motors has a similar operating cost to us and a similar sized resource and a similar sized capital. So it's a very good proxy project for E3 in terms of what they've been able to accomplish. They've always been ahead of us. LEC has been out in front of us for years. But we've kept pace. And so we're behind them by a couple of years. But that advancement in our path in their path has been some of the same unconventional lithium project with the technology angle. I get a lot of questions about our process flow sheet. So it's like any process flow sheet, it's somewhat complicated, but I'm going to try to step through it as best I can. And if there's any questions that we have at the end, I'm happy to come back to the slide. But fundamentally, this moves from the top left to right and then swims down to the bottom, right to left. And so the first step in our process is we pump the brine out of the arc for using a series of wells. In the pre-feas for 32,000 tonnes a year, we envisage a little under 200 wells from pads of 5 blocks of 5 wells. So 38 pads in total. And what that does is it enables us to get all the brine we need to feed the plant. We bring it through underground pipelines to a central facility, where we degas it. And that's the only thing we do to this brine, is we release the gas, and we basically depressurize it, and the gas comes off. We then pumped that gas back down into the aquifer and we put the brine through the direct lithium extraction units, which are basically just as it shows your tanks in those tanks full of beads and the beads select called lithium. So when you just flow the brine through these beads, the lithium attaches to it. So by the time the brine reaches the bottom of the tank, no more lithium minute, and then it goes right back into the aquifer. So for a closed-loop system, we handle that brine for as little as we possibly can. Every so often these beads fill up with lithium and we strip it off, we use pure water to strip it off and that is where the water comes into the process. And that creates -- you get a lithium and a chloride when you extract it out of the salty water. And so when you pull it off with the fresh water, you get that same lithium and chloride. We -- our concentrate is greater than 60% pure generally up around 70% pure. And just as a proxy, when you hard rock mine a project, your hard rock mining, spodumene and you create a concentrate, generally concentrates are between 5.5% and 6% pure. So this is an order [indiscernible] more pure than that similar proxy project. So the work that we need to do, therefore, to refine it and get it to a better product is significantly less. And that's a very important factor here. We're just treating water once it comes out of this. So we have lithium in water with a bit of calcium and magnesium. And then we separate that calcium and magnesium out while we further concentrate it. So that's the next step is that we put it through membranes and reverse osmosis to remove water to do some filtration. And then we do what we call polishing, which is the final removal where we use conventional ion exchange to remove calcium, magnesium anything else that's in there? And then we have lithium chloride that's fairly near battery grade. And then we do another concentration step, which we use a pressure evaporator to remove a bunch more water, and then we add calcium carbonate. That calcium carbonate react -- or sorry, we had sodium carbonate, the sodium carbonate reacts with lithium carbonate. And the byproduct that is sodium chloride, which is salt, and has a bit of lithium in and we put it back to our brine because the brine just salty water, and then we can extract a little bit of lithium out. And then we add, if you're going to make hydroxide, we have the calcium hydroxide and we produce lithium hydroxide that gets bagged and shipped. And the byproduct to that is calcium carbonate, which is just cement, so we can sell that to the local market. So our goal here is to minimize to near 0 any waste. We have 0 liquid discharge, so the system is fully enclosed. Water recovery, obviously, as I've talked about is a critical part of this. So the purple line represents where we pull the water off, which is from the concentration steps in the membrane and the evaporator, there's a little bit of water that come off the crystallizers as well when we make the final salt. That gets fed into a water purification system, where we remake freshwater and we add a bit of salt water from the brine as makeup water. And then we have all of the process water we need purified and ready to use in the DLE step. And the reality of this is all you're really doing after you get the lithium into lithium chloride is removing water and in impurity. So if you're just removing water, you can save that water and reuse it in the process. And that's what the water purification system does. So that's a general overview of the process. what that looks like in a schematic sort of what it will be on the ground is this. We put this out with the pre-feasibility study. So we've got the inlet over on the left, with the DLE in the center, then the hydroxide unit beside the E3 lithium logo. And that is the facility, that is the size of a 32,000-tonne DLE plant. It's about 700 meters by 700 meters. The rest of the facility is the power plant because we plan to implement natural gas cogen, we get heat off the cogen, so we can use in our process and allows us to control our carbon emissions, which means we can deploy a carbon capture unit and then we already are disposing of gases into the aquifer we can do that as well. And then there's obviously an office and a lab because we have to do our own testing, we'll have to have people operate at the site, et cetera. So we have a small office building. And then the storm water pond is really just the surface water that runs off and then that is collected. When you look at the summary of 2024, so obviously, the culmination what I just spent a bunch of time talk about was the pre-feas. But we did a lot last year. And the way that I think about 2024, and I thought about this, I think, since we really embarked on this process of doing a pre-feas is that it's really the year that E3 as a company gets built because we've been doing a lot of derisking previous to this proving out, but now we're really building it. And obviously, that is the pre-feasibility study. But there's a lot of other little things that we've done that have been part of the foundation of building this company. And a couple of them that stand out to me is the decision on the DLE. So we embarked on developing our own technology. We then started to work with a third-party vendor. We've talked about this. We still design the system in-house. So we have done the design basis for this system working with our vedor, who's going to provide the equipment so that we have control of the process. We will buy our absorbent from a third-party for the first commercial plant. We are still developing our owns absorbent that we plan to use in a potential expansion or a layer plant. But the fundamental is that we are -- we have selected that process. We have the expertise in how to design it, and that is fundamental to the success of this company. And that setting that line, setting that decision and derisking that technology is so fundamental to the success of E3. And we're very excited to make that it ended up delaying the pre-feas a little bit because we had envisaged to have in on, Q1 but with -- it was a lot more work to make the decision than we envisioned it would be, but we embarked on making the right decisions, so we didn't sacrifice the time. So we spent the time to do it, but that meant we ended up releasing the pre-feas in Q2 or the later part of Q2. We also brought on 2 new directors in 2024. First, someone has come a friend of mine, Sonya Savage, the former Energy Minister of Alberta, who brought Bill 82 to the floor that brought regulatory for brine-hosted minerals, are fundamental to the ability for us to operate. She joined our Board in March and then we had Tina Craft, formerly one of the commercial staff -- Chief Commercial Officer out of Albemarle and our subsidiaries join us as well. So bringing the backbone of the lithium industry into E3. And those are really fundamental because the maturity of the Board is really important for a company like us that has grown up from a small startup into someone that wants to become a major player in the lithium space. We've also done a lot of interesting things on vents in the understanding of the lithium sources we work with some universities. And we're also data budget guidance for CIM to change the guidelines and update them for brine hosted minerals like we have. And our team has led the way we've got -- you can see our website, a white paper we published talking about how we classify lithium resources. A lot of that work was done by my house -- my team in-house. So that's very cool to have a big mark on policy as well that we've been working on. On the other side of this, in our lab, we've been working on, obviously, all of the prove-out of all of our DLEs done in-house. We have our own DLE system. We bring in the solvents, we do all that test work in-house. We brought in the purification stage and then the carbonate reactors. Carbonate reactors, we've built a demonstration scale. So we're actually operating those now. We're taking a concentrate that we saved from our pilot and we're now running that through these reactors to make lithium carbonate from the stuff we made from our pilot. So Leduc lithium carbonate being produced in the lab and then those will eventually be deployed to the demonstration facility, and I'll talk more about that. And then obviously, Saskatchewan, putting it to resource and ERA funding. A large part of what we've been doing in the past for a while is the -- and really, this continues ongoing is working with the government. We get a lot of requests to spend time with both the U.S. and federal folks within the government to talk about critical minerals because the thematic critical minerals and national security, energy security has not gone anywhere. It's still a very hot topic across administrations. And then obviously, pure lithium, I'm going to talk more about that as well. So before we get into some of those things, I want to talk about a little bit of the shifting demand in the market. So these -- the circles on the right is the benchmark mineral side, talking about the change in chemistry from 2023 to 2024. So you saw in 2023, about 50% hydroxide, 41% -- sorry, 50% NCM and 41% LFP and in 2024 that shifted. So now LFP is the larger predictive chemistry. And what that really means is the product that's going into these batteries is shifting. And that's what the graphs on the bottom represent. So the top left is overall demand in North America, which you can see has been relatively the same year-over-year, when you look at the hydroxide and the carbonate, you can see a big shift in carbonate from the prediction of 2023 to the prediction of 2024. And these are our graphs and don't worry about anything before 2023 really. But looking forward, what you see is a big change from the dash line of 2023 to the solid line of 2024, that the prediction of more carbonate being required in the market. And that is fundamental to decisions that companies like us make in terms of what product we make, so we talk about that as well. When you look at supply, this is just the supply-demand fundamentals. This is just North America. What it's showing truly is that there is still a very strong demand coming, but internal North American supply just isn't there. And so what that means today is that most of the lithium in batteries that are being purchased in North America is not coming from North America sources. This is what the government -- this is what the industry is trying to change. We're trying to bring local supply lithium into the market. And you can see that carbonate supply is even less -- even more hampered more because when you look at where the source of these products, hard rock goes to hydroxide generally, generally speaking. And then you can convert it to carbonate, but generally, you go to hydroxide. 50% of the world's lithium molecules are coming out of the [indiscernible] Australia to the Hard Rock Mining. They've done an amazing job at ramping up spodumene production. They make the concentrate. Most of that gets refined in China. That's changing, but still the majority of that's refined in China and is refined in to hydroxide. So the majority of the ramp-up in supply has been in hydroxide, but now with the shifting market we're seeing more and more carbonate demand between LFP and mid-nickel cathode chemistries coming out. And so what does that really mean? This is a prediction of the battery industry in 2030. So this is what the prediction is going to be, it looks like effectively 5 years from now, which is the time scale that E3 plans to get our project up and running, right, obviously, sooner than 5 years. But in this block of time between now and then. And what you see is 70% -- nearly 70% of all the batteries are going to be produced in China. And that is why there's such a big push to regardless of the administration and there's been some changes in what we can talk a little bit about the impacts of that, if any. But when you look at the why here, it's this. And it's nice to see Canada on this map. So China is 70% in the east to Germany, France and Canada at the top and then obviously, the big block in the center there is the United States, huge battery capacity built, 1.2 terawatts of power capacity by 2030. Canada is now slouch 200 gigawatts of battery capacity per year in Canada. If you look at the North American supply for that right now, there is no supply in terms of battery-grade carbonate and battery-grade hydroxide that sourced from local molecules that can go into that. And I say no, very, very little, a blip on the radar relative to what we actually need. We're talking single-digit tonnes, thousands of tonnes. So this is why projects like ours. This is why the government is supporting and this is why we've got $37 million in government support, and we continue to see interest from the U.S. and from Canada in terms of supporting projects like ours the energy financing guys like Lithium Americas Corp is because the need to bring manufacturing locally from a government's perspective, is there, for sure. And then you look at the consumer, this is the challenge, I think, on the market today is that there's a missing segment in North America, which is -- I think a lot of people refer to it as the Tesla 2 or that small car. And the reality is these are the Chinese automobiles that you can buy today with decent range, all of them, 400 or around the 400-odd range for [indiscernible] range, sorry. and all of them at a price point that anyone would buy. And so when you look at what's on available in the market today, generally, they're $45,000 to $50,000 minimum price, and most of them are verging on sort of the $100,000 if you want the trucks and stuff like that. So there's just no mass market car today that you can buy in North America. And with the 100% tariffs that U.S. can have put on them, that means all of these prices are double if they were available today, which brings them to the same price as all the other cars, which is obviously on purpose. So looking at this, the perspective of the market, there are -- this segment that we're working on, I think a lot of the OEMs are talking about this Tesla is talking about the robo taxi potential Tesla 2 hitting the market at some point, once the -- it's all about units sold. So right now, the number of units sold is growing every year, but the mass units are being sold because we don't have these cars. And then you get -- once they get sold, then you have the infrastructure -- charging infrastructure coming. And so a lot of people who believe that the industry is looking for these cars. I think the majority of the industry believes that this is the missing piece, the people who analyze this. And so from our perspective, obviously fundamental to where demand is coming from in North America specifically. And so we track this. We spent a lot of time in Washington, Ottawa talking to the regulators about how to manage this. We get roped into the conversation because critical minerals. So to summarize that, I think that over the next couple of years, the demand in North America is growing 30% to 40% year-over-year. And that is very, very good news for the whole industry. And because it really drives sentiment and Rome has never built in a day. These things are going to go through ups and downs, those going go through cycles. Adoption are going to speed up and slow down. But every month over the past 12 months, while people were talking about the slowdown in EVs, we've sold more electric vehicles every month year-over-year. And so in 2024, the estimate prediction is almost 20 million units sold. And at the end of 2022, we sold 22 million units globally. So we're almost doubling the entire production prior to 2022 in this year. So the adoption is coming, but sentiment is lagging. And I think that you're seeing that across the lithium industry. So what does 2025 look like for E3? Well, with still a dominant market for lithium still not just in terms of the government pushing critical minerals, but also the rise in the sales of electric vehicles coming. These projects and the projects that we're looking at still a solid floating in terms of getting us to market. And of course, number of goal for E3 is revenue. We need to get to that as quickly as possible. So for us right now, that means we're working on the Clearwater project, and I'll take you through that, demonstration, government engagement, strategic partners, all of those things I'll talk to you about. But there's also a bunch of stuff that we're working in the background that are not developing the first project, but are creating potential short and long-term value. And I'll talk about some of those as well. So I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to talk about the path to construction for any project. So this -- a similar slide could be built on any mineral project in the world that's looking to develop towards a commercial production. And basically, you go through resource and technology development, you put out an inferred resource, then you do PEA, then you do any technology development. If you're a hard rock project, this is metallurgy, for us, it was daily testing. And then you produce a pre-feasibility study. That's a really good marker of where you sit in the industry in terms of your cost, but also your advancement in terms of your understanding of the engineering. And then what we did and what most companies do is it's a bit of a flurry to get yourself to the pre-feas out. It's a lot of work. It's a big lift. And the reason it's such a big lift is because you are eliminating all of the potential auctions, what technology, what the downstream technology is, how you're going to produce the reservoir -- all of those things and all of the potential iterations of that are narrowed down to one for each. And that is a lot of work. They call it optionality removal is another way to think of our pre-feas. So you've removed all the other options and you picked one path based on a bunch of economic assessment work, technical work and then the techno-economic work. And so then you make a decision, this is the process. And then you finished that and for us, we sat back and we said, okay, let's have a bit of a breather and let's look that and make sure that we made all the right decisions. While we are doing that, we implemented something in E3 called Agility. It was a project management framework for enabling that work very efficiently because we're going to staff up. We've already gone -- I think at the end of the pre-feas, we were just under 30. Now we're 36. We're probably going to be 40 by the end of the year or early Q1. And that the 2 teams that have been staffing up is our commercial team as well as our engineering team. And so while we're -- so we're going to have a good system to operate and so we brought in Agility to do that and you can Google Agility. It's a way to manage projects. So we took some time to do that. We also took some time to review the pre-feas. And what we found is that there are no major decisions that we made that we needed to change technology decisions, path, reservoir event, all of those things, we decided we made the right decision. But there are a couple of things that we decided that we could change to help us move this project a bit faster. And one of them is hiring [indiscernible], so you sort of have 2 choices. You can do a lot of the work yourself internally or you can hire that work out to a third party. Hiring out to a third parties is much more expensive. But companies do it because they don't have the liability of staff. But from the perspective that we have, because we're designing something new, we want to own that design. We want to own the design, we want to own the optimization of the design because you can spend a lot of money turning through engineering firms, while you're pedaling away and trying to make a decision. If the decision is done in-house by your team of experts, then you're just handing them a design package to go build. And that's effectively what we've done with the demonstration facility. So we design it with our vendors. We did the design basis in-house. We worked as a vendor to nail that down, and then it was finalized and given to them. And now they have a clear direction on what exactly they're building, and then they go away and they do the final, what we call detailed engineering, so where every little valve and pipe is going to be we approve that, and then it gets -- lithium gets ordered and assembled. And that's where we're at with the demonstration. So I'll get to that in a bit more detail, but that philosophy is very important for E3. And so that takes time to step up and get people up to speed and also reviewing the decision. So we brought those people in. We've been looking at this as well from the angle of what should we build as the first commercial plant. So the pre-feas answered what the technology is. It answered how we're going to enter the aquifer, where we're going to put the project. We even selected a plant site, which I can talk about a little bit. So we have all of those pieces together now. But then it's like how do we build this? What is the best way to go about building this. And 2 major items that we've been contemplating and that we're going to finalize here. We're just in the final stages of analyzing it is the size of the plant for the first phase of construction and the product we make. So we'll talk about the product first. As I've talked about, there's been a shift in the market for carbonate over hydroxide in terms of what we see coming at us. The other part of this is that the carbonate is a lot easier to handle. From a shipping perspective, and you could always convert it to hydroxide if you need to. And so this opens up a lot of opportunities and optionality because if we were to make carbonate on site, we could partner with a company, say, in Europe that needed hydroxide, and we can work with them to build a converter out in Europe, where we're closer to their facility and we could convert our carbonate there in a meaningful amount, 5,000 to 10,000 tonnes, whatever the offtake end up being. And then you're sort of fit for purpose, but you have less concern about the transport because transporting hydroxide, it's done. It's not all the time, but it is a challenge. And for a small company, you don't want those little challenges to hinder your bigger challenge which is operating our plan. So one of the big considerations right now is basically cutting out the hydroxide flow sheet and looking at carbonate as the first phase and then designing the hydroxide still to be there to implement for a second phase we can tailor in both markets. But what this does is it reduces the engineering burden. It also reduces the capital of the plant. So -- and the economics are roughly about the same because you make a little bit less carbonate over hydroxide, but you don't have as much capital or operating cost. It ends up being about a wash. So that's one. And then the other is building this in phases. So when we put out the pre-feasibility study, we made the decision early on that we're just going to do the full size one plant as big as it could possibly be given the logistics. And we review -- to review that decision, we always had in the back of our minds that this could be -- and I think I've talked about this publicly as well that this can be built in stages. And so now what we're looking at is where the natural breaks are to do that. Because I think that looking at this from a perfective of designing a, say, a 10 is just an example, let's say, a 10,000-tonne plant that produces carbonate dramatically reduces the capital. just those 2 decisions. And that's not to account for the fact that we're also on the hunt for other capital savings as we -- as our engineering team goes through all the process optimization, considering now we and we're going to do all of that in-house. I'm sure we'll find other capital operating cost savings. But just those 2 make a big impact in terms of the state -- the project. And then you just stage it. So if you build 10, you would build 2 other 10s or 120 after the fact once you've got the first one running. It's less risky for bank to finance, which is a big important factor to this because eventually, we do need to go to the bank and ask for the leverage to build the platform. So those are a couple of big things that we've been working on, we'll have more details out to the market because of how this would look fundamentally. But I think the update is very important because that's where we're at in terms of what we've been for the last 3 or 4 months. And the other big piece of this is the stick holder engagement. So we are looking to build a facility in the heart of Alberta. And it's farmers field have seen lots of the foods, including the ones here. So it's Alberta's wheat belt, as you might say, combined with Alberta's conventional oil belt. So the 2 go hand in hand, surface oil and gas, surface farming. And so how you -- the ecosystem of engaging with stakeholders to get a license to operate is first and foremost, hitting -- going out and talking to all the stakeholders here in the ground, talking to the stakeholders. One-on-one. And my team has been doing that almost for a year now. And that is a very exciting process because it's the first time we're talking to the public in intimate detail about what we're planning to build. So that is -- we've been spending a lot of time in India and that was part of my team, and that's going to go larger scale here because we spend a lot of time on the locals around our actual working operations, and then we start talking to the broader community as well. And then obviously, the administration facility, I'll talk about that. And then some of the other big things that we're working on strategic partner and offtake agreements the feasibility, permitting sort of post this next couple of months. And then obviously, feasibility study fits into that as well getting that accomplished this year. So looking at Plant project financing. So a lot of questions we get is how you're going to finance this plant. So one of them is building it in stages, looking at the capital very closely, not trying to not sacrificing operating costs, so still keeping your OpEx low, so you have -- you can weather the price storms, but you have reduced that capital burden. And so we're working on that. But also we need to finance this. So the way that we are looking at this right now is -- our primary objective is to find a strategic partner to come in. And we've been in lots of conversations about this for years. And I gave you a bit of an update on sort of the status of that. But we spent a lot of time engaging these types of companies. E3 needs to get itself to a stage where we've derisked it enough, just like with bank financing. So the timing of that type of agreement is dependent on a lot of different factors, the company, what they're looking for, the stage they're looking to invest in an E3 and us getting to that stage. But those conversations have been happening on a regular basis. And it comes in either 1 or 2 ways, either at a corporate level or a project level. I think we prefer project level because we've got lots of room to expand. So we'd be willing to give up a piece of our first project to get this thing built. They bring experience, they bring capital -- they potentially bring offtake to paying on the partner. So that's sort of the strategic partner. And then there's alternative sources of financing. These are things like offtake agreements that you've seen signed that bringing capital to them, government funding. This doesn't necessarily have to be granted, although there are big dollars out there. It also can be debt financing like you've seen in the United States. There's similar programs in Canada that people are developing. [indiscernible] Canada has one that we may qualify for -- so that sort of brings in some government debt financing, and we're talking to government right now about that as well. And then there's the clean technology ITC. And this is just being passed. What it basically means is that you get 30% of your capital back to you. And this is pretty big because it reduces the capital burden by effectively 30% from a project finance perspective. And if you can prequalify for it and the legislation is still being finalized, so we don't have all of the details. But we've been party to the writing of the legislation we've been putting our opinion into it at the government's request to make sure that our project qualifies and that the language is sufficient for our lithium brine project in Alberta to qualify. And we've done that and from our tax opinion, it does, which means that we can get that 30% back. And all of the logistics of that will work through and eventually, it will end up in our financial model. But it is -- it will -- if it all does pan out, it'd be bankable because it will be something you can take to the bank and they will be able to help -- it will derisk your financing. The other piece of this is the performance guarantee. So all of the technology that you bring in, whether it's an oral membrane or whatever absorbent, they all come with some certain performance guarantees in the EPC provides some sort of construction guarantee. And all of that is required for the bank. And that culminates in a project financing package -- debt financing package. And so they'll leverage a project between 50% and 70% -- 50% and 70% in debt and then the rest come from all the other pieces. And then your last thing, if you absolutely choose equity, but it's usually your last piece of the puzzle that you do. Just to give you an update on the status, we don't talk about our agreements, and we don't publicize them. A lot of companies have said we could, but we haven't because we're -- we believe that the right strategy here is to find one good partner. And when the right partner comes in that has all the pieces that is looking for the long-term supply that we haven't ruin the relationship by potentially scaring them away because we've done deals with other companies that they may be competitors with. So -- that's been our strategy, but as an update to where we're at, we have 3 nonbinding offtake agreements signed. We have 4 MOUs signed, and we have 4 more in progress. And so -- and MOUs -- non MOUs are more for on the strategic side and then the offtake more on the offtake side. All of the nonbinding obviously, because that's the stage we're in a relationship development stage. But E3 has been very active. Our commercial team and myself have been very active in Japan, in South Korea, in Europe, in North America, U.S. and Canada, talking to all the companies. we offer something that very few people do. And I talk about that the sort of what Alberta has. We have huge lithium resources. These are based on a well-known aquifer that was discovered in 1947. So this picture on the right is Leduc #1. We drilled the first well into the carbonate REITs of Alberta, which are oil bearing, and they produce these for almost 80 years. And when you produce the oil, you also produce lithium enriched brine. So we've been producing the water as much as we produce it as long as we've been producing oil. It's -- obviously that the resource wasn't important until the lithium-ion battery, truly for Alberta. And so now that we're developing this asset, we have 80 years of production history. So we are simply just repurposing it. We are geopolitically stable means we have a secure and reliable access to these critical minerals for any customer looking for them. We are proximal to the North American market and easy infrastructure to get into any port or down with the United States. Obviously, the synergies of oil and gas is the backbone of E3 because we operate a conventional oil and gas company. So we have the knowledge and the infrastructure and the workforce. And we have our proactive regulatory framework. And this is really exemplified by Bill 82 on the regulatory authority to the [ long gas ] regulator, which now we have a full framework that they're developing. And we're actually testing it right now. We're going through the process with them, and it is a very collaborative process to get these permits in under the new rigs, which has been great, and the AR has been fantastic to work with. And what that looks like from the perspective of what the Air does is every quarter in the last quarter, at least, they issued 1,200 licenses for producing wells. And what this means is that this is a very active regulator who issues licenses on a regular basis. And because of the same directives, the same application process for our wells, we fall into the same process to get wells licensed. And this is, I think, very important for us and for the security of the supply because the regulator is out there trying to promote regulation because this is our revenue. Alberta's main revenue sources is products that we produce out of these wells. So they've had to become very stream on. That's not to say they don't sacrifice stakeholder relationships. That's the first thing you have to do. You have to talk to your land owners, you have to talk to your stakeholders, you have to get permissions. That's #1. So you're talking to a community before you do any license application. Obviously, as part of this, there's [indiscernible] applications that have to be applied for, which is your environmental baseline surveys, which we've already started conducting and that sort of thing. So they don't skip steps necessarily, but what they have is a very streamlined process. And one of the big complaints you hear about permitting systems elsewhere is how long it takes to get through them. And while there's still is a process and while it still takes time, I think the quantum of time that is going to take us here our licenses is going to be significantly lower than other places in the Western world. And then a little bit about the infrastructure, and I can't exemplify this enough. Where we are located. The map on the right is the natural railway network. We can take this anywhere, and the kid extends obviously down to the states. And then the zoom in on our project. We've got grid roads. We've got power, we've got major highways, minor highways. We've got major cities. We've got major workforces. All of the things we need in Alberta to build this project are here and local people will drive from their homes to the site. And I say that, but I don't think I can say it enough, how important that is that you work for us [indiscernible]. So 100 meters from a 240k power line, 1.6% from our future highway along a secondary road. So we're just driving on existing road to get to the highway 15 kilometers through our rail, which is where we'll offload our product and 25 [ km ] to the major natural gas pipeline. And I just want to do a quick comparison to some of the Quebec projects because I think it just goes to show what the advantage to Alberta is. In the Bashaw District alone we have 16 million tonnes of M&A. If you look at the James Bay region in Northern Quebec, they've got 8.3 million tonnes on these 5 projects. And these are some of the big ones. So this is Corvette, which is Patriot. James Bay, which is Allkem, which is part of Arcadia [indiscernible], which is obviously the [ Ultamaska ], which is Arcadia and both of those now Rio Tinto or soon to be and then [ the rows ] in the model. And so these projects, what Quebec has going for it is that those lakes at the top of this diagram are reservoirs. So there's a lot of power lines run from these lakes down to some part of the product. So they have access to power, but they our fly-in, fly-out camps in the middle of nowhere. They're building -- they're digging big holes in proximal to freshwater sources. The challenge is that these projects are going to come in terms of permitting and in terms of the infrastructure and logistics are huge. And we simply don't have those challenges in Alberta. And it's one of the things that when you see us moving through the next stages, you're going to see it exemplified in our ability to get permitted, licensed and off and running. So a little bit on shifting gears on some of the other things we're going to do other than developing the project. The demonstration facility, obviously, very important. Our goal is to scale our DLE, obviously, that's a critical junction between brine and lithium carbonate. We're also going to run this process fully integrated. So we'll take the brine from the reservoir all the way through to carbonate. Mimicking the PFS flow sheet, which is really important because that gives us the ability to show that it works. We've done the design basis, as I mentioned. It's been approved by the vendor. That's all done. We've ordered the equipment. That's now expected to be delivered in Q2, and we're expecting to be running in July 25. The timing of that is really dependent on this equipment showing up. We're obviously trying to push them to move faster, but that is the time frame right now is expected to delivery sort of early-ish Q2 and then we get it set up and then we get rolling. And as we've talked about publicly, in previous announcements, we're building the carbonation reactors in-house for the demonstration facility, and we're making carbonate prior to the demonstration from our concentrate from 2023. The other side of what we're working on is that we have all this land. So what are we going to do with this massive resource. So we're going to talk about the Bashaw District. This is our primary project development area. And how we see this growing is scaling projects as we get revenue coming in. So 16 million tonnes M&I across the blue outline area in the Bashaw District. You could see Clearwater in there for scale. That's initial production of 32,000 tonnes a year, and that's 50 years of operating life, which means with a 1.3 million tonne LHM reserve. And so I've drawn what is an example, graphical representation. It's not the actual [indiscernible], but it's about what the next project size will look like and where we sort of look to do, which is sort of ease of red [indiscernible]. And while we look to develop that, we're going to work on this -- obviously, over the next couple of -- next -- in 2025. What this really means is that we can continually scale. So we're going to look at a second project, then there'll be third or fourth and potentially even a fifth. And what -- and that certainly depends on our agreement with purely thing, which I'll talk about in a bit. So it depends on the drill plan and the operating life. But effectively, over the -- from the starting point of day 1 being the first day we produce a lithium product commercially, 10 to 15 years to scale from 120 -- up to 120,000 to 150,000 tonnes a year. So if you were to look at that in the scale to, that's a global scale lithium project. And I really want to exemplify this because Alberta is going to be a lithium jurisdiction. We are one of a couple of companies that have assets at this size, and we're all looking to get these things off the ground. Which means that Alberta will -- could be one of the largest producing single jurisdictions if it's all successful. And not just the size of the opportunity here is so big that we believe that it's going to get up and running. And the government is supporting it, obviously, and we've seen that continually come in from all angles. So they want it, we want it, our shareholders want it, the industry wants it. So we've got all the momentum we need to get this built and scaling from one to the next is obviously an important piece of that. So we're going to work on that this year. We also have a couple of other projects in Saskatchewan, and we have the Rocky, which the whole district, we called the guaranteeing district, which is to the west of Bashaw. Bashaw obviously being our primary resource area. The other two, we're going to look to create value on. So I don't think at this point in time, E3 envisages operating these, but be partners in to operate them with us and take on probably a majority of ownership, if not all, depending on what the value is. And so what we see these is that the potential sources of additional capital or long-term value, so short-term value and capital or long-term value in terms of having another asset that someone else is paying to get into. And the [ Garrington ] is a very big asset. So we're dusting that off. We haven't really looked at it since 2018, but we're dusting it off. We've got a 0.9 million tonne resource. We're up sampling right now. We're going to update that resource and then we'll sort of look to see what that looks like and go from there. And then pure lithium. We get a lot of questions about pure lithium. Just some context this slide. This picture is me last week at the pure lithium facility. This is in their lab, which is behind us. We're just at the entrance of it. The lady on the right is [ Emily Bowen ], the CEO, the lady in the center is the Consulate General for the Canadian Consulate in Boston and her team, and the lady on the far right is [ Amily ] their commercial person that appeared. But the Canadian Consulate -- and the Boston Canadian consulate came to the facility to check it out to see what we're doing to talk about how this is going to come into Canada, how we're going to build batteries and can because that is the goal. So we've signed a joint development agreement the potential here, the real value that we're going to create is low-cost, high-performance batteries built in upper. That's the goal. And how we do that is we take our concentrate. This is the same image that I have from the previous slide it was our process. We take the lithium concentrate out of that process, somewhere along the way, not the fully refined stuff because we don't need to. We played it a pure lithium uses their electrodeposition technology that they've developed to take that concentrate and plate it directly on to copper as lithium metal and then make a battery. And when you do that plating, you've got about half maybe is of the battery already produced. So we're reducing a significant amount of downstream capital for E3 because we don't go into a salt. So all that refining and then conversion doesn't happen and you have a direct source of lithium to do the plating. So I'm going to buy a lithium market, you have a lithium play it. And you're creating something that has significant value add because the battery sells for several orders of [ at ] more than obviously the raw product and you're reducing the manufacturing steps. And one of the big steps you reduce is the cathode active material set, the CAM set because you don't have to make activated cathode, you don't lithate your cathode in the step, which loses that entire process. which is where our product -- when we make carbonate, it will go to cathode plant. So the development of this technology, obviously, it takes a long time to get these qualified into something like a car. So the goal right now is to get these up and running up them in devices as a starting point and then scale the business. But -- so the steps right now that we're working on with Pure is technical economic assessments. We're basically doing a scoping study, PA sort of style on the value of a battery facility operating in Alberta using concentrate and making lithium batteries -- lithium metal thanatin batteries, which is what their technology is. And then we're also looking at -- through that, we developed the flow sheet, which is the big -- the joining where our concentrate comes into their electric deposition is the engineering work we need to do because it's obviously taking 2 different flow sheets putting them together. That's what we're working right now. Is that engineering? And then that obviously develops a flow sheet and then we're going to design and build a small scale of one of those as a pilot and look to operate that pilot in Alberta and we've applied for some part of that as well. So that's the goals over the next while. Once those are all -- once those two things are accomplished, the respective boards will review that and we'll look to -- upon their approval, sign a joint venture to give a portion of our land. We're looking at sort of the south area because it's proximal to Calgary, they're for the workforce, and they would vend in on the technology. We would vend in our technology, and we would form a joint venture company that would go off and prosper as a battery company in Alberta. And that's the ultimate goal. We have a lot of work to do between now and when that will get signed and then obviously a lot of work to build that. But this is a very exciting potential value for E3 and for Pure as well. And I just want to wrap on a little bit on where we're seeing because the market hasn't been kind to lithium companies in the last little while. And so you don't really -- you ride the wave of stock price as a company. You don't have a lot of direct impact. You only have secondary impact because you don't buy and sell the shares yourselves. So what you can do is a couple of things. One is that you can continue to put your head down and do great work. That's our philosophy. We just -- we're getting the job done. We're building a company, we're building value in this company. And while the market -- the global market is depressed right now because of probably overstocking out of China and their control on the industry, we have the ability to still progress our product. And what it looks like is cash because you don't solidify your stock price unless you have to raise capital. So don't raise capital when the price is low. Obviously, it's a small company or a public company one on one. So 40% of the ones, we've raised $114 million, and I'll just take you through that. So on the left is government funding. So we started with Alberta in base. We got about $2 million. And then we got a big grant from Strategic Innovation Fund, which was a foundational support from the federal government through ISED. And then we got support through [ intercam ] for the pilot plant and then emissions reduction in Alberta for the demonstration facility. We haven't spent a single cent of the $5 million, and we have $19 million from [indiscernible] still left. And then the right summary of our fundraising. And you can see that we've wrapped up over the years. So 2017 to 2019, not very much. And thank you. There's a bunch of shareholders that hold very big positions in E3 that invested in those fundraising. So thank you for your early support $8.5 million in 2020. And then we did a big capital raise in 2021, and then we had warrants coming in, in 2022. So all of the $13 million in 2022 were warrants that were issued in 2021. And then we did a raise in 2023, as you well know, 2023 and 5 and change about $29 million plus warrants. So the total we've raised in equity is $76 million. And the total nondilutive was $37 million. So for a total of $114 million. 40% of that is still available today. $47 million we have available to us between the cash, which is about $23 million roughly at the end of Q3. It will be about $23 million and then the government funding as well on top of that. So we've got a very healthy cash balance going into 2024. We're obviously, with the work that we're doing, booting demonstration feasibility, the spend starts to increase, as you do these activities, but we're well positioned to get through the storm of lithium sentiment and the low stock price. So I think that, that's a very important piece to our story in where we're going over the next couple of years. And even with all of that and the share price and the cash, we still only 75 million shares outstanding. And so just to wrap up, and this is a repeat slide, but I just want to sort of talk about this to close out. What does 2025 look like for us? We're going to prove the demo. So we're going to build this demo we're going to demonstrate making the coverage that helps us with qualifications. So we get our offtake, and we want to start prequalifying the product. We can ship them regular batches over from Carbon they can start testing in their lab. We are also being working with the ISO committee. Michelle and our lab has been working with them just to -- so our level will be ISO certified and she's doing all the testing. We have the expertise in-house already and the equipment to do our own battery -- lithium carbon, lithium hydroxide testing to assess its quality, so battery grade. Another big effort and the commercial team has been staffed up to execute on this is finding that strategic. It's a lot of work. It takes a long time, but we have the team, we have the resource value. We have everything we need now. to get that those conversations started, and that's what we're working on. And that will be a big lift for that team for 2025. And when that happens, it's hard to say, again, it's a ven diagram of interest and what they need technically and when we're ready to give that technically in terms of our engineering. So -- but all of that is being completed. And obviously, part of that is offtake. So through those conversations, obviously, our primary objective is strategic to come in and support the project, but through those, we're also working through potential companies that would just be off-takers. And the market has shown that sometimes, a lot of times, actually, those come with some capital to support your alternative financing as I had in the project [indiscernible]. Obviously, asset divestiture, we talked about that a little bit. looking at what we might do with Garrington and Saskatchewan and how we might create some value for those. We're doing a lot of work with government. We keep them being invited back to talk to the government about all of the policies or improve minerals, both in the United States and in Canada. And I think the administration change that's going to continue from what we're seeing. And we do spend a lot of time in D.C. and have over the past several years, Lee and I are going down and talking to guys like the SAFE or the Willson Center. So -- and there's also, I think, 2025 we see a lot of regulatory movements. So we're going to start some of our big facility applications will start to be submitted in 2025. Those are huge. Those really truly set the clock for when it can operate. Because they need to submit to get them approved and you can't start building obviously until your licenses. So like I said, we'll be looking for a year with our stakeholders, and that will continue as we expand the area and we start talking to the broader communities. But we're very thankful to be working in the area that we are. We're very appreciative to all of our stakeholders that are out there. We're aiming to create jobs in this local community and build in the industry to support Alberta's long-term economic growth. I also think another big trend you're going to see '25 that's going to impact E3 as the market trends. I do think you're going to start to see the lithium market swing back. You're already seeing in the majors Rio Tinto buying Arcadium. It was a huge move, not surprising given Rio's hard rock experience and Arcadium's lack of and then also getting Rio an asset that's producing lithium. So I think it was a natural move for Rio. Obviously, the joint venture with General Motors and the Americas Corp as a good bellwether for sort of where the industry is ending up. That sort of how our model is our model, and we had set that wheel in motion about 8 months ago. So it was really interesting to see what we had -- what we're aiming to get to see an example of that directly local to us in Nevada get done, which is a joint venture on the asset level. So very excited to see that. So I think we're going to see the -- I think we're starting to see Albemarle was up quite a bit over the last couple of months, and that trickle-down effect usually happens the smaller companies lag behind that as the fundamentals get realized across the board. So I think you're going to start to see the sentiment reverse a little bit. Obviously, the timing of that and exactly how much it's hard to say, but I think that's coming at dancing Pure Lithium, a big goal for us this year, getting that agreement, getting the data and the work done so that we can work towards that agreement, obviously very important. And just looking at this from -- to close this out, looking at why invest in E3, I think one of the -- all of that aside, all of those big things that we're going to do to create value for this company, one compelling thing is our net asset value. So we have literally CAD 45 million in with a CAD 75 million market cap. So we have an incredibly compelling net asset value with a huge asset that's been well derisked and proven with our reserve book in a very secure and stable jurisdiction. So we have all of the hallmarks for company growth. And we're suffering right now from a market perspective, but I think that the big moves for the market are going to happen, I think all of the things that we're working on, and it's just -- it's such a compelling story. And I am biased because I'm full-time investor, obviously, E3, I own a huge position in this company and fundamentally here to get this thing built. So I'm very excited to be in such a compelling story, working with a great team. So the team that we have at E3 are the ones that are going to deliver for our shareholders to get this thing designed and then built -- and so I can't think of it going. Obviously, I'm already all in. So thank you very much, and it's a bit long today, but hopefully, we still have some time for some questions.

Yes. Thank you, Chris. Just a reminder for people still sticking around, you can ask your questions in the Q&A box that is on the bottom row of the Zoom call. We've got a couple of questions in just about the demo plant. Chris, can you just kind of explain how the demo plants will fit in achieving commercial production?

Yes. I think it sort of answers 2 questions. One is that it's derisking from a process and internal engineering perspective, E3 doesn't need the demonstration plant. We can do all the engineering with the data we have. Now we can do enough of the testing in the lab to validate some of the performance metrics. But the reason new demonstration is because it shows it at the scale and a derisk it for the people, who are potentially coming in as a strategic or a bank financing, it has a big impact to that derisking because they can come in, they can see actually operate -- and it's not just trust me, here's my design. It's like here, here's the design in action. And also, the other thing it does is it enables those customers who are looking for a product to take some products and continually test it. So yes, I think that -- those are the big things from the demo. It just fundamentally what it is, it's a derisking and every step to derisk the project fundamentally increases value.

Okay. And just kind of further on to that, I guess people are asking what sort of data potential partners would be interested in with the demo?

Honestly, I think it's about the product quality that you can generate, that's #1. If you can do it at a small scale, especially when you look at the this -- the demo will still going to be 100% optimized, like it won't be automated the full process through. Each component will be automated, but the joint components won't necessarily be automated. So you don't have those efficiencies. And if you can still make higher recoveries, you can still make a good quality product, it's a very good proxy for how your commercial plans can happen. It also will -- like if you look at the DOE system, the Valve array, which is what we call the controls for brine coming in and out and wash men and all the other things you have to do. That will be identical, almost identical, it's size obviously won't be, but the process operating parameters will be a identical to 12 will deploy in the commercial plan, which means you're testing it in real time what a commercial operation will look like from a process engineering perspective, which is really important. . So I think if you want data, it's -- can you do it? Can you make it at the right quality? And can you do it efficiently? And not all. And if you're looking at like a bank due diligence, they're going to dig into all of that. They're going to hire an engineering firm and they're going to dig into your programming logic for your valve it. They're going to get into that level of detail to validate it that your commercial design is going to work. So it's pretty important.

And just more on the with pure lithium and E3 is doing work with them, what are the key strategic advantages of working with pure lithium on a project like this?

Well, I think that the goal there is batteries in Alberta. And the value add, so if we make a carbonate, there's lots of value in that. The value is looking to increase by the time we get our product to market, it's going to be between the 25,000 and 30,000 ranges where the markets are sort of predicting it. There's lots of value and that makes -- we're going to make a lot of money as E3 selling carbonate, but we're holding. And so while there's a big market for that, my goal here is that because we have operational excellence in Alberta, and we can bring the processes together, my goal here is to build that battery then you have control because you're selling the final product. right? You're selling the battery. And if the battery is of good quality, has high energy density, which the pure lithium ones do, and you can make them cheap. Then the world is really your oyster, those things go in anything, right? As long as they get qualified and the hardest thing to qualify them is aerospace and space and then second is cars, right? And then third, are things like military applications or scooters or computers and phones and earbuds and like the list goes sort of down from there. And so you don't necessarily need to qualify them to go into a scooter necessary to go into some of those other applications. So there's an immediate market for that value of product. I think that that's what we see the value and we're willing to give up a piece of our resource for that joint venture because I think that there'll be more value in making those batteries than there would be if we made carbonate with that resource. But all of that is to be determined. And I just want to qualify that. There we still have a lot of work to do on the technical economic assessment to determine that, but that's the vision.

And just speaking about the market, you sort of touched on this during your presentation, but what is your view on the lithium market today and going into 2025?

The lithium marketplace?

Yes.

Yes. I think that I hate to use this because it gets overplayed, but the dominance of China in terms of the raw materials and the batteries can't be understated. And the world is trying to shift. But right now, there's not -- like the battery factories that are going to build the North American and European batteries. They haven't even really -- like they're being built right now and some of them are starting to turn on. But like the real North American demand doesn't ramp up really truly from an internal like manufacturer of product perspective until the next couple of years, which is why the big swing happens then. So you're probably going to see a bit of a stiffen in the first part, maybe the first quarter of 2025. But this -- what I'm hearing, and again, I'm not an expert, I read a lot on this, and I spent a lot of time talking to the experts and the opinions that most people have is that this can -- this sort of hindrance to the market, this oversupply or wherever is a, can't last for very long because the fundamentals are still showing that more and more cars, more and more batteries, fundamentally batteries, remember the cars. More and more batteries are being bought every single month and the market is consuming more and more lithium all the time. And you just get to this point where between the efforts to onshore and just global supply, you're just going to get to this critical tipping point. We're going to see the prices start to come back up in a hurry. I think I saw a prediction of sort of $20,000 by the end of this year and $30,000 to $40,000, potentially that high. And then into the 2028 -- 2027, '28 that '29 that range and really depends on who you talk to. But every minute that nobody saw 70,000 to 80,000 tonnes coming. So when they say we think 25,000 to 30,000, 35,000 might be the range. That's what they said before we hit 70% or 80%. A lot of people are saying, though, that whatever the price spike will be, it's going to be sustained for a longer period because the fundamentals, again, are going to be every year, the fundamentals get stronger and stronger. So this is less sense and more reality.

Okay. We have about 2 more questions here. One, and maybe this can kind of go off of what you were just talking about. What is the -- or do we have the projected cost per ton to produce lithium carbonate?

First, I can't talk about that in definitive simply because I need to do that under a National Instrument 43-101. But there you can dig through the pre-feasibility study, and you can look at the hydroxide equipment, you can start cutting that off. And roughly, it's about $300 million of capital that we removed roughly plus the operating cost associated with it. But yes, in terms of like what the economics mean for that, I can't really talk about what the NPD actually is. I can say though that it is roughly the same, like it's not material. The difference in economics between the same production of brine to make carbonate and to make hydroxide, the economics are relatively the same. I'm just going to -- there's a question I saw pop up here, about brines in Alberta, brines in Arkansas. There's a recent interesting report that came up from the USGS. And when we're talking about the resources in Quebec, the big resources there in James Bay region being about total of 8 million tonnes. Our report published by the USGS talked about somewhere between that the whole smackover, and it is a projection. It's not -- it's simply that. So it's not an actual resources projection with somewhere between 5 million and 19 million tonnes in the smackover. That's the projection. E3 has 16 and just our section of the leg get grown. So that's how they compare. That's our costumers. Now it's higher grade. So less volume of brine there in total. But the resource size is comparable. But that's a whole thing, not just what one company has. So hopefully, that gives you a perspective. A couple of other quick ones I just want to touch on. We have already started our application for -- under ASO. That was a question that came out pretty nuance, but I think that is important question because there's a lengthy time frame. So that submission was done quite a long time ago. And the ITC is the other one I want to touch on. So I can't definitively say today, which is why it's not in the economic report, we put off the pre-feas what exactly the ITCs will cover in terms of our capital cost. But we have been providing our opinion to the guidance for the regulation. And as far as we can tell, most, if not all, of it will qualify for the ITC. Now things like the building that you house everything in doesn't technical qualify for ITC, it'd be the wells, it would be the pipelines, it would be the processing facility. So when I say most, the majority of the expensive stuff, and therefore, percentage-wise, the majority of the percent of our project capital costs have been covered by ITC at 30%.

All right. Well, that brings us to time here. If you do have additional questions for us, you can e-mail us at investor e3lithium.ca. We want to thank you for taking the time to join us today. And we hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you very much. Thanks for joining.