Atlantic Lithium (LSE:ALL) — Exploration-focused Investor Webinar

0:03 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the ATLANTIC LIFIUM LIMITED Investor Presentation. Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today. We'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the investor meet company platform. And before we begin, I would just like to submit the following poll. And if you would give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the management team from ATLANTIC LIFHIUM LIMITED. Keith, good morning, sir. Good morning, and a heartfelt welcome to all our investors dialing in this morning from all across the world. Our apologies for being a couple of minutes late. Well, I'll kick off. First of all, it's great to be able to share with everyone our progress from an exploration perspective.

1:02 We've been talking a lot about project development and permitting over the last couple of months, but before it's timely that we shared with our investor base how we're tracking on an exploration stage. So I'll do the introductions, and I'll hand over to Lynn, Ewan and Abdul, and they'll take you through the slide deck. So if we kick off, for those that are joining us today that's not familiar with the project, I suspect everyone online today knows the project fairly well. But I'm gonna try and wrap it up and just give you a snapshot of where we are in two minutes or less. So first of all, our project is situated in Ghana. Ghana is a very stable mining jurisdiction. At the moment, there's 16 operating mines in Ghana, 14 gold mines. Ghana has recently overtaken South Africa as the major gold producer in Africa, so well and truly a very robust mining jurisdiction.

1:59 There's also a bauxite and manganese mine. Then what we're going to talk about today, our resource. So we currently have a 35,000,000 tonne resource, and we want to share with you how we think that's going to grow over the foreseeable future. About 80% of that resource sits in measured and indicated, which gives us a lot of confidence in terms of mine planning and knowing what's ahead of us once we start commercial production. Then from an economics perspective, I'll touch slightly on the DFS metrics a little bit later in the presentation, but really a very robust head of economics, short payback period. That was done at a very conservative price. I remember when we put the DFS out, spodumene pricing was well over 5,006 thousand dollars a tonne, and we were criticized for using a very conservative price.

2:45 And I think where we stand today, it's really a good show of progress of where we are to use those prices that we have. That's really the pricing that we're seeing in the current market conditions. Then in terms of what we are delivering next, so mining lease has been granted in October last year. We're currently busy with the final phases of permitting. And there's a couple of key milestones that you'll see come from us in this year. A lot of news flow coming from us, EPA permitting, our mine operating permit ratification, GSE listing, our offtake arrangements and the final investment from LIMIT. So that's all I wanted to do. Just a quick wrap up. Linn, if I can hand over to you, please, and if you can take us through the slides. Thanks, Linn.

3:32 Great. Thank you very much, Keith, and hello, everyone. It's great to be back here again on the InvestoMeet platform and then this time to have the geology team here in front of you. So we're pretty excited to take you through our journey and to to show you what we've been busy on and what we're planning to do in the future moving ahead. But first of all, I need to introduce you to our team. So I've got a couple of the key members here. You'll notice Ewan Williams, our exploration manager, is on the call. He's currently in Ghana. Hopefully, our Internet connection there keeps him on throughout the call. And then we've also got Abdul Razek, who's currently our country manager, but actually previously joined us as exploration geologist and principal geologist.

4:17 He was actually our second longest service serving senior employee in the company, so very familiar with the geology. So is you're in good hands today. And but I think what the main point I want to point out here is that the majority of our team, which you can see there, this is our senior leadership team and in field team, predominantly Ghanaian, and they've got a wealth of exploring and exploration experience, in particular, exploring for pegmatites in tropical terrains. And that really is a point of difference. It's hard to explore for pegmatites in areas of tropical weathering and simply because lithium washes out the rocks so easily and you're just left with very little telltale signs to follow-up. So, we're in good hands here and, many years ahead of exploration.

5:09 So this is just to set the scene of where we are. You're all familiar with this. This is our portfolio holding in Ghana. It's 509 square kilometers in total. And then, of course, we've got our two applications in Ivory Coast for a further seven hundred seventy four square kilometers. So the total of a 100 1,283 square kilometers. And and we're obviously actively exploring in Ghana. We made the Awia Lithium discovery, which currently sits at 35,300,000 tons at 1.25. And we also know of the historic Aegis Manko Hill lithium occurrence, Spodumene occurrence to the east of us. So a large portfolio right on the coast, right next door to operational infrastructure.

5:57 You really can't get a better location than that in a very supportive pro mining jurisdiction of Ghana. Now before we, commence on any exploration journey, it's critical that we have a management team that's highly supportive. And this is something that ATLANTIC LITHIUM did have in its early days and still has now. And you all know Vince Mascolo here. So hats off to the late Vince Mascolo for getting this team together, supporting us through those capital raises, through tough times, good times, but he was always there. And And that is really critical for any junior exploration company to get out through the gates and make discoveries. Without management support, you can't make discoveries.

6:42 In addition to that, it's a small, nimble team in country. You can see us stand there in that lower slide, the lower photo. And finally, in addition to that is a supportive community. So that engagement with the community, you can see us there with the traditional leaders and is absolutely critical to get things done in country. So this is how it all started back in 2016 or thereabouts. I've been following a story of the Gulamina discovery in the early days, and this is a slide from back then. I'll just let everybody know that all of the information in the slides here is all in the public domain, so it's all out there on our website. Anything else you want to find out more details on the website.

7:32 But here, we're looking at a map of the Burmians. So that's the geology map of the West African Burmian. We've been following Gulamena lithium. And from my perspective, it was clear that surely those deposits don't just occur in Mali, they do occur elsewhere. So we completed, a top down geological review, looking at metal occurrences, tin, niobium, tantalum, feldspar, looking at the right geology, looking for granites within, metasemilitary basins, schist basins. And then in my perspective, also looking at areas with good operational, and jurisdictional support. So Ghana and Ivory Coast were high on the list and where they're close to, to to a port or to roads.

8:22 And through this process, we identified Ghana and in particular the Cape Coast, BATLETH, and Ivory Coast. So with those initial areas circled, we then dug deeper. And this is when we came across the a very important discovery in those early days, and that was a thesis done by missus Amoka Mensa. And she's still very active in the mining community currently. She actually completed her thesis as a female geologist back in the seventies in the University of Leeds of all places, which and I believe she's the first, female geologist in Ghana. So she completed her master's thesis on the spodumene occurrences of Cape Coast, and that was one of the key search words I was looking for in a Google search on Ghana, lithium, spodumene, Cape Coast, and this thesis came up. So that was, I literally struck gold with that.

9:22 But then through further digging through archives and with the strong help of the Ghana geological survey, which is also an invaluable step for us, We came across some, old archive reports from work that the geological survey done throughout Ghana, throughout the 13 fifties sixties and seventies where they're really focusing on feldspar kaolinite and because there is quite well, there was quite a strong or large kaolinite industry in feldspar ceramics industry in Ghana. But through that work and the geological survey, which was strongly affiliated with the bridge geological survey at the time, identified spodumene as well. So those, both those reports, really helped us focus our efforts in Ghana and get onto the ground.

10:15 And from there, the rest is history, which is what we're going to go through now. And I mentioned earlier the communities. This is paramount anywhere you operate, and and it's no less or no different for us in Ghana. We've embraced our communities from day dot back in 2016 and continue to do so. They're integral to us achieving our results and together delivering Ghana's first lithium mine. So that's something I'm very proud of, and it's good to see that as we move into the next stages of this company's life towards building Ghana's first lithium mine, we're still very strongly integrating and working with and embracing our communities. So this is what it actually looked like.

11:02 And this is back in May 2017 when we announced our first results. And you could call this your discovery results, but there are lots of different ways to measure a discovery. For me, it was our first ore grade drill intersection, but no less, this was a a pivotal moment for us where we announced, some really significant rock chip results. And this is what the the field actually looked like, back there before any road access or drill pad access was completed. And you can see the results there of a bulk, rock chip sampling in addition to trenching, and you can see some of those outcropping penguin type boulders in the, background on that photograph. So that's what it looked like back in the early days before we've done any drilling.

11:50 And we'll now hand over to Razek who will take you through our exploration methodology. Thank you, LIMITHIUM. Our exploration methodology, ATLANTIC, our target definition methodology begins with surface travel geological mapping, followed by the utilization of airborne geophysics. The airborne geophysics normally normally carried out with radiometrics and magnetic, but the radiometric data obtained from the airborne geophysics play key role in generating targets, for further exploration.

12:39 In addition to that, we conduct soil geochemical sampling across the entire tournament area. We collect samples where we analyze the samples in house using handheld portable PXRF and let's analyze it. Based on the results obtained from the in house analysis and the target generated from the airborne geophysics, we proceed with additional investigation measures such as trenching, test pitting, auger drilling. And these methods are employed to confirm the bedrock geology of the target area. If the outcomes of the trenches, test pits, or auger drilling proves promising, we plan a low impact drilling program using an 80 meter by eight forty meter grid spacing.

13:33 Next slide. Yeah. So as I said earlier on, our socio chemical sampling, we conducted it on 100 meter by 100 meter grid spacing. And the outcome of the lithium installed are depicted on the map here in red and also our HELI radiometric with the potassium and ratio. The target the target generated out of it, we combined the two, the LITHIUM LIMITED, and the radiometric to generate targets from our interpretation. Next slide. Yeah. And to date, we have drilled over 150,000 meters of RC and diamond drilling in the resource category.

14:22 We normally start with 80 by 40 meter spacing, drill spacing, which we term as inferred resource. Out of the inferred resource, when we receive the result from the laboratory, we do 40 by 40 meters indicated category resource drilling. Then when the result comes and the results are quite encouraging, we follow-up with 20 EBITDA by 20 EBITDA measured result category. Currently, drilling is ongoing, and I believe we are going to increase our resources from the drilling campaign. Next slide. Great. You're okay to go with this, once again.

15:08 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Great. Thank you very much, Razak. That was a wonderful oversight, and it really points out the systematic exploration methodology that we've generated over the years and now we implement as routine across our portfolio. And we'll also likely utilize in any other portfolios such as Ivory Coast or new opportunities. So these slides that you'll see now are really to give you an indication of the spread of our geological understanding to date. So it gives an insight of what our geological geological understanding is now from subsurface data such as geophysics through to soils, which is surface data, through to augur, which is pretty shallow down to an average five, six meters throughout our Ghana portfolio, And then RC and diamond drilling, which is really that next step down to 50 meters, a 100 meters, or in our case, our deepest hole around 350 meters.

16:16 So it's really telling in terms of it ultimately shows you the lack of data we have once you're looking at that 100 meter depth slice and lower, which really means expiration upside. So this is our geophysical spread. You can see all our licenses there. It covers all our granted licenses by senior Bracco. So that's one potentially we'll look at to fly geophysical survey going forward depending on early results. If I then click to our next dataset, so these are our current soil soils data. So you can see it covers all of our Western portfolio on the left hand side over the WIA deposit. And we've collected soils now over the Cape Coast license, is the Western most license currently outlined there in white. So we now have soils collected over that, which we're currently processing through our in house laboratory with XRF and LIDS, which Razak mentioned earlier.

17:15 And then on the the Eastern portfolio to the right, you can see APAM East and APAM West covered. But again, Sinyabraku Bweedsy, we currently don't have any soils over that. So that's something we're we're working on now with our regional programs. Stepping to the next level of geological understanding. So this is now where we start to we're looking into the subsurface. So we're looking on average five to six meters depth. So it's still very shallow. But this is our auger drilling spread. So you can see a concentration of auger holes around the auger resource, and that's understandable. That's where you start, where your knowledge base is highest, and you're stepping out from that to the unknown. And you can start to see to the left, where we've completed a new auger drilling of the salt pond license. Currently, no order drilling over the Cape Coast license, and then some limited order drilling over the ATLANTIC LIFE ATLANTIC LIFE licenses.

18:14 And now stepping to our deepest geological understanding. So this is actually RC and diamond drilling. So this is data where you're looking at that 50 meter down to 300 meter vertical depth slice, but on average, probably around that 120 meter mark or maybe even shallower. So really not much coverage at all. And it really shows that that whole field is open for exploration and there's a lot more work to do in terms of finding further resources. Yeah. And that's basically showing all of those data sets on top of each other. So our current center of knowledge of the world is a WIA, and we're stepping that outwards. And and here it is shown in all our releases over time over the WUIA deposit footprint.

19:08 So back in May 2017, that discovery outcrop, with the trenching and rock chip sampling results. On the top left, you can see there, this is the timeline going from top left to bottom right. You can see it's very basic geological understanding, just a few lines of trenches and a few red blobs. I mean, that's how we tend to think early on as exploration geologists. It doesn't get much more complex than that. But then as we get more data in, in this case, further trenching, more trenching back in November, Again, more trenching in December, and then our first drilling program in August 2018. You can see our geological understanding in that shape of that pegmatite is improving.

19:55 And is in this in August 2018 is is my point in the sand in terms of declaring this as a discovery. It was our first drill hole from memory. It was a 111 meters at 1.3% lithium oxide or thereabouts. So that was a significant drill intercept, and that gave us the confidence to really start to hit this harder along with that management support and Vince pushing hard to then complete all these rands of drilling through January, which was 20 it's hard to see the numbers here. January main resource and then our resource upgrade going from 14 and a half to, 20,000,000 tons, and then up to my eyes aren't good anymore.

20:47 Then all the way up to 35,300,000 tons where we currently stand. So that really gives you a strong, you know, understanding of that improving geological understanding over time. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes, persistence and a very systematic approach to really get to grips with your geology and define your resource. And and ultimately, as I said, we now currently stand at our 35,300,000 ton resource at 1.25 as of our most current resource upgrade. But we're moving forward. So we've got all of our drilling completed last year, so in the order of 26,000 meters. And all of that's gonna be feeding into a resource upgrade once we've got the remaining results from our dogleg expansion drilling that we completed this year. And I'm still waiting for some final results in those holes in the diamond tail we did before we feed it all into a resource upgrade, for h two this year. So look out for that.

21:53 And it would be remiss for me not to show a picture of rocks. So this is what it's all about. This is what we're trying to explore. On the left, you can see a really coarse grained spodumene, outcrop material that's at the Ivanka Quarry. Very coarse spodumene crystals in there, that greenish color next to the hammer. And then in the center, can see one of our RC drill holes. So these are the chip trays. So this is a record of of the drilling, samples that we collect on the drill rig, and just as a library, essentially, that we can go back to over time when we're starting to, dig deeper into the geology. And there you can see some beautiful spodumene chips in that nice, beautiful green color. It's amazing stuff. And then on the right hand side, you can see in drill core. And this is the stuff that gets geologists also really excited.

22:44 There's nothing better than seeing a whole box of HQ drill core and spodumene pegmatite. That's absolutely wonderful stuff, and it's what we're trying to find more of. And I'll just hand over to Keith here now because all of those things feed into these important numbers from an economics point of view. Excellent. Thank you very much, LIMITHIUM. It's really great to see how it's progressed. So what I wanted to do is I just wanna all of the work that we've done up until the February 22 resource upgrade has amalgamated into the DFS, which we published in June last year. So these are the outcomes of that DFS that we conducted. So the processing plant will take about 2,700,000 tons of ore per annum.

23:38 And from that, we'll produce just over 360,000 tons. This means we'll be the third largest spodumene producer in Africa. When they are in production, Gulamina will be second. That's the lithium project that also referred to a little bit earlier. And when Monona comes into production one day, the DRC, that will be the largest. So really quite respectable in terms of size. Output, so as I mentioned before, the pricing that we used in our DFS was $1,400 per dry metric ton. Today, the long term pricing somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 depending on which commentators you listen to. We still believe in the short term, it's going to be higher to maybe slightly higher than the $2,000 mark.

24:28 But long term, we're preparing ourselves for that 1,500 over a prolonged period just to make sure that we're robust against those downturn and cyclic nature of the spodumene market. So the NPV of the project, 1,300,000,000 on an NPV eight basis. And very impressive, the all in sustaining cost is only $675 per tonne. That's extremely important for us. What we've seen in the last two years, spodumene has been the best performing commodity and also been the worst performing commodity. So it's very important for us to have a low unit operating cost that we can sustain those downturns and really capitalize and take full leverage and advantage of when the prices are gonna go up in the in the short term.

25:18 I think we're gonna hand over to Ewen now, Ewen, if you do have connectivity, to talk us through, what's next, what is, in the plans for us for 2024 and onwards. Yeah. I hope you can hear me there. This map shows all our current tenements and some of our applications, and it extends over quite a broad area over 90 kilometers from east to west. All the majority of our activities have been focused on defining the Ewaiya deposit. And as we progress further outwards from there, concentrically, we have less information and less knowledge. So going forward, we're going to enhance that by expanding our our working practices, which are showing good results in the Ewoya area. So we will expand with further soils followed by auger drilling and followed by drill deep drill confirmation.

26:24 Next slide. In the Ewoya mining area, mine lease area and outside, our current drilling focus has been on the within the two kilometer radius of the mine site. We will expand that in the coming year. We will extend to the north around the ASAN area and then with further evaluations there. And in the Otseer target, we have already defined with Augur a drill target, which we will assess later on this year with some RC drilling. Okay.

27:11 Currently, the resource is still open at depth in some of our prospects at Goya Northeast, at Grasscutter, and Okwesi prospects. We still need to do some further drilling in there, and that is some of that drilling is planned for this year. And then it's an iterative process. If we get success, then we will go further and deeper and and assess it further because the potential is will always remain there if if the mineralization remains open. So we will continue and assess that this year and going forward. In the Dogleg area, which we've been drilling this year, this is an interesting prospect.

27:58 We had an early hole in there, which we thought connected directly with the Moyer Main. But once we reviewed the drilling using Leapfrog and other three d software, these are powerful tools, we can see that the geometries didn't quite fit. So we added some more drilling in there, and we discovered we have a what we call a sill like form. It's a shallowly dipping pegmatite dipping to the north. And we've had a similar one in the Awia Main sill, which is a northern yellow circle in Hawaii. So it's almost a duplication of that, but at a shallower depth. So this is going to be great for adding low strip ratio tons early in the game.

28:49 Okay. The we've been successful at lifting the resource every drill program. Now, the current MRE will be updated later this year. So we're hoping for an another increase in that resource and hopefully in future years as well. The focus of our, Western portfolio in the last year has been, with Augur on the salt pond license. Now we've identified robust geochemical targets, which we followed up with Augur, and we've identified pegmatites and mapped them out. And we will follow-up these pegmatites with RC drilling in the coming year too.

29:47 And this will we'll use them to assess the continuity of mineralization with depth. And also, if if it's successful in finding the mineralization, we will define its attitude and extent. In the Cape Coast license, we're still continuing with the soil program and its evaluation, and there have been teams doing some mapping along anomalous areas. We will follow that up with further order work later this year and going forward. Okay. Our target strategy in this Western portfolio, has always been we we do the soils.

30:40 We follow-up with the auger. We we combine the soils with the geophysical anomalies, and we focus our attention on areas where we think there's going to be a high likelihood of pegmatite development. One of the criteria we've used is an old geological survey stream sediment database, which showed prevalence of beryllium in the stream seds. And some of these beryllium anomalies coincide with an area close to the Iwoa mineralization, but we've also identified further areas in the Cape Coast and the Falkland area. And we found pegmatites in these areas, so there's good prospectivity in these zones.

31:31 Next. In the Eastern portfolio, we've concentrated on Apam East, which is adjacent to the known Edisamanca Edisamanca Hills spodumene pegmatite deposit. And we've found the old trenches, and we've done some extra auger work, and we've defined a corridor where the pegmatites extend into that license. We we have an application which has recently been granted, where we are still undertaking some community sensitization before our team gets on the ground there. But the geochemistry and the geophysics indicate that the pegmatite extend into the southern end of that license area. So there's great prospectivity in that PR, and we will advance that as soon as we have the community and local authorities okay to get on the ground.

32:35 On our longer term strategy, we will continue to explore around the resource, but we have other areas in Ghana where we can advance our knowledge. We have many license areas, where we are just starting. We are just commencing our stream our soils, and we just need to get our teams on the ground. We we literally haven't got our teams on the ground in Senua Barracu and these new licenses. And the Cape Coast is still early stages. We have soil results, but we need to follow all of that out. And outside of this area, we are look actively looking for, opportunities in Ghana.

33:25 We know there are more, pegmatites in Ghana, and the and the regional geology is good. So we think there are more opportunities in Ghana for spodumene bearing pegmatites. Outside of Ghana, we have two license applications in Cote D'Ivoire, which we are waiting to be granted, and that offers similar prospectivity. It's a an area where spodumene has been recorded in the historical record by the IGM in probably pre sixties. But, yeah, these offer great opportunities for us to explore. Using the mic key milestones ahead. Okay.

34:14 As you know, we've we've received the we have, good excuse me. Yeah. We have, drilling to be completed in 2024, which will hopefully add incremental tonnes to our the wire deposit. The mine lease application has been ratified or will need to be ratified, and we need to gain the EPA permits, the mine operating permit before the mine can get going. These are key milestones that we need to achieve coming going forward. We are awaiting the final results from the Doglegg prospect that will be coming in soon this year.

35:06 All the identified well, quite a few of the identified pits in the DFS mine plan still remain open at depth, as discussed. We have new targets that have been defined by the Auger drilling in the salt pond area that need and in the Mankosyn PL that need to be drill tested. We need to commence our original exploration in Senjobaraku, which will be very soon. We have permanent licenses which adjacent to the Edges Manko Hill deposit, which are highly prospective, and we will hopefully get to explore these in the very near future. And to get altogether, we have 1,283 square kilometers of tenements that need to be explored and evaluated in both Ghana and Cote D'Ivoire, and the vast majority of that is undrilled.

36:06 So it's open for for us to discover. The okay. We are waiting for some licenses to be granted, which are under application, both in Ghana and Cote D'Ivoire, and we are working hard to move those forward. And we will be assessing for other new opportunities in Ghana and also other jurisdictions in the region. So hand back to Keith. Excellent. Thank you, Ewan. Just before I hand over to LIMITED to take us through the Q and A, if you still have any questions, please feel free to add it to the chat group now. We've got about a dozen or so that we want to work through. We want to try and answer all of those if we can.

36:52 Perhaps if I just summarize quickly, know, Oya has gotten to a stage now where we're nearing the construction phase, and we've got a good twelve year mine above ahead of us. For spodumene mining, that's quite impressive. For a small scale project where we started out, you have a decade in front of you. It's very useful. We want to maintain that. So as we are mining our ore reserves out, we want to replenish it at the same rate in which we're extinguishing it. But equally, we want to see step changes as well. So the minute we become cash flow positive or the minute we get our funding in from the Minerals Investment Fund as well as our offtake process we're running at the moment, That then allows us to spend more of that on exploration. We're very mindful that we don't explore at the cost of dilution to our shareholders.

37:44 We've got a very respectable mine life and a project. So we want to build that from cash flow out of the operation. So Lynn, maybe if you want to take us through the Q and A, if you wouldn't mind, mate. I'll hand over to you. Thank you, Lynn. Right. Thanks, Keith. And and thank you, Eun and Rezak, taking us through this story. So now we'll we'll get on to the q and a. So we started ten minutes late, so I think we're pretty much bang on time. We've got twenty five minutes or thereabouts of q and a. So keep them coming through. We'd be happy to answer all the questions that come through within reason, obviously, with a bit more of a focus on on the the geology and the exploration front, but we'll do our best. So first question, I'll take this one. When do you see another major drive on increasing the resource size? Will some of the new MIF funds and off take funds be invested into it?

38:35 So, as I said earlier, the 26,000 meters of drilling completed in last year, 2023, is all gonna be fed into a resource upgrade in addition to a further drilling completed early this year on the Dog Lake targets. And so those will both feed into a resource upgrade due later this year in the second half, early part of the second half. And and then, of course, we're gonna keep drilling. And so you would have seen on some of those maps and in our releases the proposed programs on the deep extensional drilling at Grasscutter, Akwesi Crom, Awuya Northeast. And all of that will then eventually feed into another resource upgrade probably early in 2025.

39:23 But supporting us throughout this mid funds and off take funds will help push more dollars into that that drilling going forwards. This one is one for Ewen. We're going to so in respect of your 774 square kilometer lithium portfolio in Cote D'Ivoire, are airborne geophysics planned as part of your exploration work program? Ewan? We will evaluate the property and see if it will add the information useful information we require. We will assess it. It could prove very useful in identifying more prospective areas that we should concentrate our work on because it is a very, very large portfolio of licenses there, a big area to cover. So I think it could help us. We we will assess it and answer if it's good for our program.

40:21 Yep. Yeah. For us, it's always there is a cost benefit analysis as part of that. And, obviously, we'll do our initial reconnaissance mapping, a rocket sampling, and on the basis of that, decide, yes. Here, we're gonna deploy airborne geophysics, and this is what the cost will be, and then decide the best course of action. So next question, one for Razek because he's been involved with this a fair bit through his country manager role. Is the company receiving the necessary governmental support needed to ensure the smooth takeoff of its operations in Ghana? Yes. The government has been very supportive. Sometime last year, there have been some civil society organization asking a lot of questions.

41:14 And the government embarked on sensitization throughout the country. They organized community and stakeholders engagement to support the company by explaining where the company has got into, what agreement has been signed to date, and the way forward. So I think the government has been very supportive, and we look up to them to also assist us in achieving the remaining permitting on time. So the government are very, very supportive. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Rozak. And and I'll add to that. The communities have also been a very strong voice in their support of the project, which is a huge endorsement and actually does sway a lot in terms of that governmental support.

42:06 And so they've certainly been a strong voice and advocate for this project. Okay. Next question. This one's for Keith. The market for lithium is very depressed and is expected to remain in surplus for the next three to four years, Benchmark Minerals. How does this affect you? Thanks, Linn. I'll take that one and I'll take the other one that I'll repeat just after this. Look, for us, this is our deal opportunity. What we are seeing is happening at the moment. If you go back twelve months, it was probably over 100 listed ASX, TSV, TSX and AIM companies that were playing in the lithium space. What this depressed price has done is it's really sift through those that's going to make it and those that are not going to make This has been very beneficial for us because one of the things that we've seen in our share price that remains suppressed is there's a lot of options and there's a lot of choices for investors to make when it comes to the lithium space.

43:08 What this is doing for us is it's demonstrating that our project is viable, and it's perhaps showcasing that some of those lower prospective and higher cost projects are not going to make it. So a suppressed price in the short term is not a problem for us. We'll only be in production towards the end of twenty five with the modular and early twenty six with the main processing plant. So it's prices at that time that's important for us. But again, we focused on being a low cost producer. That's the only way you're going to make it through and you're going to have a long longevity in life. There's another question that asked about the 4,700,000 tonnes of secondary product that was up on that slide when we talked about the DFS metrics.

43:53 So I'll take that one as well. So what that material is, it's the fine ore that comes naturally through the process plant. The DMS doesn't do very well with fine grain ore. So what we are looking to do with that is sell it as a low grade product. And the low grade market is still very healthy. There's millions of tons being exported out of Africa at the moment. But what we intend to do, this is about 12% of our revenue stream, so that $6,600,000,000 revenue that we'll generate over the twelve years, about 12% of that stems from this lower grade secondary product. We've completed a flotation plant study late last year that demonstrated exactly what we expected is that this material will be ideally suited as feedstock for a flotation plant.

44:44 So the question of do we sell it as a low grade material or do we sell it as a concentrate? Our preference would be to sell it as a concentrate for a couple of reasons. It derisks us against the low grade market in the first instance. And secondly, it attracts a premium. You get much better value for the lithium units in that material if you concentrate it. And then perhaps lastly, it's a much better logistical exercise to transport it in a concentrate because you get a mass yield of about 15%. So therefore, you only need to transport about 15% of the material, and the value per ton is is much more significant than selling a low grade product. Ben, over to you. Yep. So I think the next one as well, assuming we can get the resources well beyond the current twelve year mine life, is the plan to add to the production? And if so, can this be done easily on a modular basis?

45:40 I'll answer that in two parts. So the question is, if we have a significant resource growth, are we going to increase mine life? Are we going to increase throughput? We have to look at it in the context of the broader market at that stage. So if this were to happen tomorrow for argument's sake, so if we were able to declare a 50,000,000 ton resource tomorrow, then I would suggest it would be foolish to increase throughput immediately because we're not seeing that demand right away. What we wanna do is be in a position to accelerate production as required. So in terms of adding units to the processing plant, there's two ways we can increase the throughput. We can either install an additional train, and we've left the footprint to do that should it be required.

46:29 However, our focus at the moment is to deliver a 2,700,000 ton plant over twelve years. So we wanna focus on that first before we start getting carried away with increased throughput capacity in the future. Okay. Will ATLANTIC be competitive against DLE extractions in Argentina? Keith? So I think before we look at DLE, we first have to consider conventional brine deposits. So when you compare the cost of LCEs from a spodumene mine compared to a brine deposit, Brine is a cheaper LCE unit. So therefore, I would expect that a DLE would sit somewhere between the cost of brine per LCE and the cost of a spodumene converted LCE.

47:18 One of the considerations, however, is that today, there's not large scale demonstration that DLE is going to be successful. I believe it will be successful. We've seen large players in the oil and gas space that's entered the sphere of DLE in brine. So I believe it will be successful. It's going to be slightly cheaper still than spodumene conversion, but the drawback is the time to market is extended. Whereas with a spodumene mine, the experience and the time it takes you to get molecules into the market is quite quick. So I think we'll remain competitive from that perspective. But there's certainly a future for for DLE in in the mix.

48:05 Okay. Thank you. Does Piedmont have offtake rights over all future expirations in Ghana or only for the WIA project? I'll answer that one. It's for all projects in Ghana. And so done. Where is the best place to look for documents showing the keep moving. Where is the best place to look for documents showing the geo data you've shown today, particularly the spatial depth of the ore of pegmatites? I'll answer that one. So all our our drilling results releases include collar positions and from twos for intersections, drill hole azimuth, and dips in addition to a a handful of highlight cross sections. So that's probably the best, source, and then those are also included in our presentations.

48:56 I believe at some point, we're we're lurk working on a three d animation to include on our website, which will include three d view of our resource model in the boundary so you can see that clearly. Okay. When do you expect first production, Keith? So the modular DM is in 2025 and then main production out of our plant in 2026. I think it's going to be around the second quarter. Now there's a little bit tied to ratification, so we want to make sure we get ratification done. But we'll surely be fully ramped up in the second half of twenty twenty six from a commercial production perspective. Thank you. K. A geology one. Are you coming across other pegmatite mineralogy besides spodumene, tin, tantalum, lepidolite, petalite, niobium, urine?

49:54 We have the good grace that the oya pegmatite is what do you mean bearing only? No other significant lithium bearing minerals at all. We're talking trace of anything else. We have no tin, no other metallic credits. The only other byproducts will be the feldspar and maybe any quartz and hutskabite. But in the region of Ghana, we come across other minerals. If you go towards Aegis Mankle Hill, there is tin, there is tantalum. So in other parts, but AWEA, we're lucky. It's lovely and clean. Yep. Thank you. Okay. In today's economics, what do you see as economic open pit limits at AWEA from a depth perspective?

50:48 Ewan sorry. Keith? Sure. Look. I think the natural tipping point where you're switch from open cut to underground is at a stripping ratio of about one in 16. So there is one of our pits, a grass cutter that's at a stripping ratio above that. Arguably, we could make a case to mine that section of the ore body underground. It contains about 3,500,000 tonnes of ore. So the second thing you need to look at once you've established what our tipping point is, which I'm suggesting is around one in 16 from a stripping ratio perspective, is what is the critical mass that you need then to go underground. Again, from the work that I've done on other mining projects, we think it's about 5,000,000 tonnes.

51:36 So what we would want to see before we contemplate underground operation is those deeper areas that we've identified and that we have a drilling program planned for is once we can reach around the critical mass of 5,000,000 tons inclusive of that, that sits in the gross cutter deposit, then we can see it as we start thinking about a different mining methodology for those deposits. It will all be a cheaper proposition than trying to mine that open cut. So just to summarize, one in 16, it's about a mining cost of around $809,100 dollars a tonne is is where you're gonna see the transition to underground. Right. Thank you. Okay. Quick one here. Great. Gents. Love the passion.

52:24 Thank you, Duncan. Okay. Another question. Cost per meter cost per meter all in for drilling currently, I'll answer that one. So RC planning and budgeting, we're looking at roughly it was roughly in the order of 95 US per dollar all in drillers costs. That's probably going up a bit now to the $100 mark. Diamonds around the $2.50 US dollar per meter. That's for HQ, average HQ and PQ, but we drilled predominantly HQ. And that's probably also going up a bit higher to the, like, $280 per meter mark. Okay. Will the increased resource lead to a larger mine plan in the near term?

53:17 Yeah. I say any additional tons that feed into the resource above the 35,000,000 ton depending on that resource upgrade will be absorbed into that mine plan with a longer mine life or, you know, you're limited by the mine throughput on that crusher design. And but I don't know, Keith, is there any other insight you can throw to that? I I think the best way to describe it, Lain, is the organic growth. So these sort of campaigns that we've been doing in the last five years it's between 30,050 meters per year in the dry season. That will likely only lead to mine life extension. It is when we tackle those five, six drill rigs on-site and we drill 100,000,200,000 meters in a dry season where we've got a, you know, sufficient cash balance.

54:03 Those are the ones that's gonna change the economics from a throughput perspective. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Is expiration being constrained by available funds? Will expiration ramp up once the MIF funds are received? So I I think, you know, any explorer developer cash being prudent with your cash is very important. In our case, expiration will now recommence billing in the coming quarter whilst we're waiting for all the results from 2023 to feed into that resource upgrade. And then we've been carefully managing our funds across the board through this period of time once we come in with mid funding and offtake.

54:52 Okay. Do you think selling the low grade product, e g, to China only increases the chances of a continuation of low lithium prices out of China? Would some sales discipline in the low grade product be more beneficial in terms of lithium prices in the end? Keith? Yes. I'm happy to take that. Look, I think as long as we see a lepidolite market, and there is a strong lepidolite market in China, That supports the lower grade spodumene pricing. I'm personally not a fan of low grade. We've seen the market collapse in 2018 when Pilbara Minerals and of the and Minrase out of Wodgina flooded the market with low grade. So I don't think it's prudent that we are very disciplined in that.

55:47 However, we don't want to be left behind. A company of the scale we are, we can't take the high ground and restrict and limit the amount of low grade we put into the market. At our size, we do not have a monopoly. We just have to participate of what's available. So I don't think a strong discipline on our side is going to change the market dynamics. However, out of principle, I believe a low grade market will suppress pricing. But, you know, what fixes low prices is low prices. Excellent. Yep. When do you think you will be able to order the components of the plant and if you will need to pay in advance for them?

56:35 Yes. So we're yeah. Sure, LIMITED. So we're still looking to order long lead items now in this coming quarter. We already have contracts in place for some of that equipment, the likes of MCCs, power line relocation and also some of our crushers that require. We're busy selecting an EPCM contractor. We've worked the last six months with a very well known EPCM engineering house based in Africa. So those guys have been really good to set up these contracts for us. So we will execute them first in the next quarter or two. We still have time. We are not desperate to place it immediately. There's still a bit of lead time on those items.

57:27 And we will place orders prior to FID if it's required. Our initial response would be to place orders upon FID. However, if there is for any reason a slip in timeline, we will be placing orders prior to FID for those very long lead items. That's on the critical path. Yeah. Okay. And there are a couple of questions here on processing study, which I'm assuming is the conversion study in relation to the n l. So has there been any feedback on the processing study? And one of the other questions along the same vein is, does it make sense to build a downstream plant in Africa strategically, economically, and technically?

58:13 So perhaps you, Keith, firstly on the on the actual study. Sure. So as as part of the requirement out of our ML, we had to submit that study to the Minerals Commission April and we did so. It was received very well. The long and short of the downstream study is you need about double the size of the warrior and it needs to be twice as long in mine life. So you need a resource of about 70,000,000 and you need a mine life of twenty years to make it viable in Ghana from what we're seeing at the moment. There are currently prospects of building conversion capacity in Morocco.

58:58 So that could be a natural pathway for our material to go. And however, currently downstream in Ghana, you want to see a lot more resource come into play and you want to see that over a longer period for it to really be viable. Great. Thanks, Keith. Three more minutes here on questions. So I'll pick up one here. Looking back, what were your worst challenges? Yeah. I always, see challenges as a positive, but, I guess, from my perspective, the most taxing time on me personally, and I think for the company, was the passing of a former CEO and managing director, Vincent Mascoglou. It's very untimely, but the the team pulled together. We kept the company and the the ship steering through, and now we're in a a strong position, hopefully coming out at the tail end of a a lithium low and being one of the very few permitted near shovel ready lithium hard rock lithium pegmatite projects out there. So I think we're in a good position now despite those challenges we faced.

1:00:08 Okay. One for Razek. I would think the government would want to get the royalties, taxes, etcetera, ASAP. Are there delays expected, or is this a normal process? Yeah. I think currently, we are going through the permitting process. We are completed with the scoping reports that have been published in the newspaper. The first public hearing has been had within the community. Currently, the EIA has been commenced, and we have to go through the EPU. So in the permitting process, I think the government is really pushing us so hard to fast track it, but it's going through the permit permitting processing with the environmental protection agency.

1:00:57 Great. Thank you, Rosy. I think yeah. Okay. How can I buy shares of this strategic business when I'm in Ghana? So we are listed on London AIM and Australian ASX, but we're going through the process of our Ghana GSE listing, which perhaps, Keith, you can shed some light on that one. Sure. Very soon, we'll be listed on the GSE. Our expectations is that it will happen in May. I've got May basically penciled out to to return to Ghana on a moment's notice for that joyous moment. And then the end of May, I'm heading to to China to go and see a couple of our offtake partners as we are approaching the finalization of that. So within the next couple of weeks, months or two, you'd be able to buy shares in the company on the Ghana Stock Exchange.

1:01:56 There's another question on politics and upcoming election in Ghana and how that influences us. So look, the parties haven't been playing games when it comes to the permitting. Ghana is a is a nation that's had many safe transitions of power and peaceful transitions of power. We've been speaking to participants on both sides of the political aisles, and we've got broad support from all the parties. So we don't see that as a threat at all. If anything, it's likely that we want to see, you know, a a good continuous program with, with everyone involved.

1:02:45 Great. Thank you. Okay. And then the, the last question I have here, is there any feedback from Piedmont on their progress already funding their Tennessee production plans, which is the site for our off take product destination with them? Keith, have you got any updates on that one? Sure. Yeah. I'll take that. Yeah. We've been talking to Piedmont quite regularly, and and I had a conversation. And and we understand, you know, we Keith Phillips had an interview a couple of days ago. We we talked quite in detail about their plans around Tennessee. And so Tennessee is is a couple of years late, so about two to three years is is what I took from his presentation. However, that is not critical for us. Piedmont has an off take right, and they can take this material anyway. They still have test line LG Chem contracts to fulfill.

1:03:40 So they've got the 113,000 tons from North American lithium Fujianah, but then they also have to offtake from us that they can supply into to LG Chem and Tesla. So at the moment, Tennessee won't see our product for the first year or two in production. That will go to the international market and their existing customers. Great. Thank you very much, Keith. And with that, we'll close the Q and A. And I'll be handing back over to Jake. But just to say thank you everyone. Apologies for the late start, but I think we've made up for that with the late finish and in fact, the next two minutes on that. So thank you to Eun and Rizak for joining as well from Ghana. And with that, I'll join I'll hand back over to Jake.

1:04:27 Perfect. Len, Keith, you and Adul, that's great. Thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended just for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so, and we'll publish all those responses out on the platform. But, Keith, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great. Certainly. Thank you, Jake. Well, once again, thank you very much for all the investors and prospective investors joining us today on this call. It's very important for us to keep our shareholders up to date of how we're progressing. As I mentioned at the start, we know we've been a little bit slow on these flow and exploration because we've been extremely focused laser focused, if you will, on developing the project and bringing it into production.

1:05:23 This was a good opportunity just to recap on what we are doing exploration side. There's a lot of growth potential, extremely a lot of unexplored ground for us to still work. We're very mindful at how we spend our money in the short term until we receive more funds. But certainly, targets and doing smaller campaigns as we head into production is what we want to do. We'll see organic growth over the next two to three years. And once we see massive cash flows, that's where we want to really expand and be very aggressive on drilling. So thank you very much for joining us, and your feedback is much appreciated. Keith, that's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations.

1:06:16 This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ATLANTIC LIFHIUM LIMITED, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good morning to you all.