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Battery Metals Panel, Part 2

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Fri, March 26, 2021 at 12:00 PMendedReplay
Battery Metals Panel, Part 2
Company
Giga Metals Corporation (TSXV:GIGA), Electric Royalties Ltd. (TSXV:ELEC), Nickel 28 Capital Corp (TSXV:NKL)
Date
Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 12:00 PM ET
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On 6ix: 6ix.com/event/battery-metals-panel-part-2

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Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.

0:12 All right, well, hello everyone and welcome to Battery metals panel hosted by 6. We are joined today with the leaders of 3 leading mining exploration companies within the battery metal space. I'm pleased to introduce you to Lyle Triton, manager of development of Giga Metals, Brendan Uric, CEO and director of Electric Royalties, and Justin Cochran, President and CEO of Nickel 28.

0:36 In this panel, we're going to hear insights into the impact the global acceleration away from fossil fuels has on each of the leaders' companies, as well as the commodities they focus on. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions on the Q&A panel on the right-hand side of the screen at any time during the presentation, and we'll open the floor to live Q&A afterwards. Well, welcome, everyone.

0:59 To kick off this panel, if you could just introduce yourself and your companies and go into a bit of detail on what battery metals you focus on and how are they used in batteries. So Lyle, if you could start us off. Thanks, Dasha. It's a pleasure to be here. Let me start with the company. Giga Metals is a Canadian junior mining company. We own 100% of the massive Turnagain nickel deposit in northern British Columbia, Canada, which could produce over 1 million tons of ethical low-carbon nickel over a mine life exceeding 30 years. And that nickel concentrate comes with a cobalt kicker as well, about 5% of the nickel content. And those are both used as the energy source materials within EV batteries. So they're in the cathode and they hold the energy. So there's in the premium EV batteries in use today and in the near future.

1:47 As for me, I've been a nickel guy for a long time. I've been in the business for more than 25 years at Sherratt's Nickel Operations in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, as well as with their technology development and commercialization arm. So I've worked in project development and operations and sustainability. I've seen the full life cycle there. And I've got experience with Sherratt's former operations and licensees, including designing and starting up refineries at 3 locations internationally.

2:18 Great. Thank you so much. Brendan. Yeah, sure. So I'm Brendan. I'm the CEO, founder and CEO of Electric Royalties. We're a royalty company focused on the entire suite of metals really required for the drive to clean energy and decarbonizing the global economy.

2:38 So our metals are used in all types of batteries, the entire battery, not only batteries, but energy storage, electric vehicles, renewable energy. And so we're targeting tin, lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, vanadium, manganese, graphite, and zinc. So quite a few metals. The interesting thing is that You have never really seen this before, where you have such a big new source of demand that's gonna hit all these metals all at once. And so, we're pretty excited about the forecast for all these metals, where you got exponential growth, looking out at 2 decades. I don't think there's too many circumstances where you see that kind of an opportunity in life. You know, and so we're a royalty company. That's how we're playing this opportunity.

3:24 You know, we're primarily focused on safe jurisdictions. You know, mining is a pretty risky business as is. So, you know, why add jurisdictional risk if you don't need to? We've already got a portfolio of 12 royalties,

3:36 including several advanced stage, you know, feasibility stage assets. And we just actually announced our first cash flow and royalty acquisition about 2 weeks ago. So, we're pretty excited about that. And yeah, I guess that's, I'll just kind of leave it at that. Great, thank you. Welcome. And Justin. Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Dasha. And thanks to 6 for hosting us on the panel today. And welcome to my 2 compatriots here. So I run a company called Nickel 28. Nickel 28 is

4:08 a nickel cobalt producer today through our roughly a 10% interest in the Ramu nickel cobalt mine in Papua New Guinea. Ramu is one of the world's largest and most profitable nickel-cobalt mines, producing about 33,000 tons of nickel and 3,000 tons of cobalt on an annual basis. And that's produced in an intermediate product called MHP, or mixed hydroxide product, that goes straight into the battery precursor industry to go into lithium-ion batteries. In addition to our interest in Ramu, we have a portfolio of 13 different royalties in Canada, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, including a 2% NSR on Lyle's Turnigan project there in British Columbia, which I'm sure Lyle will talk a bit more about, but also 1.75% interest on the Dumont, sorry, 1.75% NSR on the Dumont Nickel Cobalt Mine in Quebec, which is probably one of the most advanced development projects around the globe.

5:21 And so similar to the other 2 guys on the call, we're focused on battery metals. We believe there's a massive opportunity specifically in nickel and cobalt, but also in many of the other metals that Brendan has referred to. And when we think about EV adoption and battery storage and other applications for lithium ion batteries, which I think is commonly missed. And us, the company, we believe we're significantly undervalued. We'd love the chance to chat offline with any investors that want to reach out. So that's why we're here. And again, thanks, Stasia, for having us. Looking forward to the discussion today. Great. And thank you all for joining. And you brought up a good point. We'll be we will be sending out a short survey to all the investors here today, and you'll be able to leave your contact details for all the companies and get in contact with them to follow up after this panel.

6:15 So I want to take a deeper dive into each of your respective companies. If you could just go into explaining what your company's strong points are, starting with you, Lyle. Sorry, second to get unmuted there. So thanks, Asha. Our strong points are really related to our 100% ownership of a very significant nickel deposit in a great jurisdiction.

6:39 That ownership structure, we don't have partners on it that really simplifies decision-making, including any potential deals we might make in the future. And the deposit is very large with over 1 million tons of nickel in the mine plan today, which gives great option value to rising nickel prices. So, you know, we've got a great location for ESG sensitive investors and customers. British Columbia is a mining friendly province in Canada. So we've got, you know, not only are there many large mines there today producing copper, molybdenum, precious metals, it's also a great jurisdiction for bringing mines forward. They understand the mining business there. It's a great jurisdiction for sustainable production because we've got some of the world's leading regulatory systems in terms of environmental and social permitting, making sure that the local communities and First Nations are brought along with us and that

7:33 we help to uplift them in the process of bringing the project forward. We have access to low carbon power through the BC hydroelectric grid, which we need to run a line to to bring it up to our site, but that's definitely the plan for commercial production. And that will give us one of the lowest carbon footprints in the marketplace for nickel and concentrate.

7:56 Great, thank you so much. And Brendan, what about for electric royalties? Yeah, probably have to start out with the royalty business model. Kind of in love with it, honestly. You know, it means we have no operating costs. It's basically, you know, definitely the lowest cost in the industry in terms of production. You know, we trade at higher multiples typically. You know, I kind of joke that I could spend 30 years building on the next Rio Tinto, you might get 5 or 7 times cash flow. Royalty companies typically trade at 15 to 25 times cash flow. It lets us be diversified across all of our assets. We're not on the hook for capital costs, cost overruns, etc. Then I look at our portfolio and I say, we're the first movers in the space. We've already got royalties on two thirds of the only manganese district in North America basically being developed to supply manganese for the EV battery space. You know, we've got significant,

8:54 significant, shoot, I'm just, it's on the, the words on the top of my tongue. Significant exposure to Eastern Hard Rock Lithium. We've got royalties on the Ocea Lithium Project operated by Sona Mining. They're actually in the process of buying the Canada Lithium Mine right next door. So we're about 12 to 18 months out in production on that. We've got feasibility stage graphite royalty, 10 hours away from the largest up-and-coming gigafactory coming up in the US,

9:24 and some other very advanced assets. So we've got adverse spot exposure, all safe jurisdictions covering most of these commodities we're targeting already. And we've got no debt, 2 million cash and tight share structure. I would also echo Justin's point that we're extremely undervalued. I think we've got probably about 100 million NPV on our royalties right now. If you look at what base metal companies are trading at, it's about 1.3 times and our market cap is 20 million. So you can do the math on that. Great. Thank you so much. And Justin for Nickel 28. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Sasha. I commented on a few of these earlier, but our interest in Ramu today, as Ramu is one of the lowest cost nickel-cobalt mines in the world, as I mentioned, our interest in that mine today generates 30 to 35 million US in cash flow.

10:19 The bulk of that cash flow today is going to repay construction debt associated with building the mine. But starting 6 months from now or approximately 6 months from now, We'll start getting 35% of our cash flow as we pay down the first tranche of that debt, which will be about 10 million US in cash flow. And we'll repay organically the balance of that project debt over the next couple of years, which will increase our interest, both increase our interest in the mine. And again, at today's commodity price, generate approximately 40 to $45 million in free cashflow to the company. Ramu's got a mine life of 15 years today based on reserves and 35 years based on resources.

11:10 And that resource base is on 15% of our ground at Ramu. So We believe Ramu is going to be a mine for 100 years. And similar to Brendan's point on multiples, there's no reason this company shouldn't or couldn't trade at a 15 to 20 times multiple once the debt is repaid.

11:31 And again, not hard math on what the potential valuation there is today. And we're trading with a 40 million US market cap, so basically 1 times our current cash flow. And again, so see significant upside. On top of that, we are the only carbon neutral nickel-cobalt, probably mining producer in the world that we're aware of. So we did offset our entire GHG footprint earlier this year. And Wham-oo is fortunate because it's one of the lowest GHG emitters in the nickel-cobalt space. And so it does allow us to very cheaply offset our footprint.

12:16 On top of that, we have our royalty package that I talked about on both Dumont and Turnagain, among 11 other royalties. And Dumont and Turnagain are 2 projects that we truly believe should be built in this next nickel cycle, North American sources of supply,

12:38 basically carbon neutral, or can be very much carbon neutral sources of nickel and cobalt to the North American and European and even Asian OEMs and battery producers. And so there's essentially free upside through our royalty portfolio that we believe includes some of the best nickel cobalt lines in the world. Great, Thank you so much. So I want to talk a bit more about the battery metals market. What emerging trends do you see in the battery metals market that you think investors and stakeholders should be monitoring? Lyle, if you're okay to start. Sure. And we've actually had some of this come up in the Q&A as well. There's been a bunch of things happening lately in the market. The Sing Shan announcement of plans to make nickel matte to refine into battery chemicals or class 1 was pretty negative for nickel prices in the short term, as we saw a couple of weeks ago.

13:35 There's no secret sauce there. It's really redoing a process that's been proved for a long time. Aramet used to do this in New Caledonia at the SLN facilities, And they quit doing it because they found it more economic to sell the ferronickel that they make there and import that within Europe. So economics are perhaps a little challenging, but it is certainly doable. Is it the answer for nickel in EV batteries?

14:04 I have my doubts that it will be really palatable to EV customers in the Western world because it's got a very high carbon footprint. Published reports say it suggests it's around 50 tons of carbon per ton of nickel. Just to get through to make the mat without the further transformation, most sulfide producers are going to be in the range of 10 tons per ton of nickel or less. So it's a very big difference there. So operating cost-wise, it's no better than operating from a typical sulfide mine. But we have to admit that the nickel pig iron industry has demonstrated a speed of deployment, which is something that is the envy of those of us who want to develop projects in the West.

14:52 There's a question on manganese, and I'm sure Brendan can speak a lot more about that from the Volkswagen Power Day. That shook some people up a little bit too. But frankly, I think that's a very positive announcement for the entire EV industry, because we were going to be extremely challenged to bring on enough nickel to supply the forecast demand. That was the Rosskill put out a forecast of 2 and 1 500,000 tons of nickel production needed by 2040

15:19 additional to today just for batteries. And there's no way to bring on that much production. So that would be a hindrance to our decarbonization efforts. So we don't see that as really a negative, but it is something that people are monitoring and I think they have to understand the full impact of that. Great, absolutely. Brendan, what trends do you think we should be monitoring? Yeah, sure. So maybe I'll start with the manganese one just since Lila was talking about it. Like I'm a finance guy and I know mining. I'm not a technology specialist. The only bet I really make on the metals, how bad battery chemistry is gonna go in the future is that we're always gonna try use cheaper metals than we can. And that's where technology is gonna go as well because there'll actually be a gap that you can capture. There'll be an incentive for people to come up with technologies to use cheaper metals. So increasing manganese makes sense.

16:16 I think zinc also, if you look at what the technology breakthroughs have been in the last 6 months, you're seeing a lot of manganese, a lot in zinc, partially why we're so excited to be acquiring a large gasoline royalty in the US, only primary zinc producer in the US. But that's really how I make my bet on battery chemistry. And why we don't necessarily dive into it much further than that is because we stay diversified across all these commodities. So I'm not a technology specialist, but That's the bet that I do make, I feel comfortable making. In terms of what trends people should be aware of, I mean, at this point, look, the electric revolution is coming, okay? This is basically mandated by governments and has been kind of for the last 6, 9 months, with Biden kind of being the last guy to jump on the bandwagon.

17:04 Not only that, now it's funded by governments as they try to spend their way and print their way out of COVID recession. And so that's interesting because that's a real powerful driver. The other, the obvious one has got to be ESG, obviously taking much more importance. Investors care now what companies they invest in are doing and how they're doing it. And I see that trend just continually rising. I think there's some great stuff that's coming out of that that we probably should have done a long time ago. It might've been a factor, maybe solar power wasn't there, but there's a lot of mining operations in Africa that have access to sun all day long. And So incorporating stuff like renewable energy to fuel mines, things like that are very smart.

17:52 And like I said, probably should have started a little while ago, but I definitely see more of a push internally from companies. And I think the mining sector generally is waking up to that fact. And they also care and are working towards it. So it's good to see. Great, yeah, thank you so much. Justin, anything to add? The only thing I would add is I think investors should pay attention to the EV war that's going on between different automakers. Just today there was an announcement from Mercedes talking about their, I think, 6 models that they're releasing next year and trying to chase down Tesla and now offering a the range on their EQS that's going to exceed the current range of the Tesla Model S.

18:38 Volkswagen, I think it was either earlier this week or last week talking about the fact that it wants to be the leader in EV sales by 2025. There is a massive war, auto war, taking shape over the future of the EV industry, and the entire industry is moving that way. So I think for the most part, people are following and understanding those trends. On top of EVs though, people should be paying attention to the fact that these lithium ion batteries are going into many other devices on top of EVs, right? They're going into your smartphones, your tablets, they're going into lawn mowers, they're now into boats and being tested on airplanes. I mean, these lithium-ion batteries are being used well beyond what we normally just talk about, which is the electric vehicle space. So I think that's an important trend to follow. And as I've been in this space for 5 years, in fact earlier today, I went back and looked at some of the estimates that some of our research companies have put out on expected demand in the nickel space from batteries.

19:45 And what I can tell you is if you go back even a year and a half, they drastically underestimated the amount of nickel that was going to be going into battery metals, even in 2020. And they were off by 30, 40% for the most part, and off by several years in terms of how much nickel they thought was going into batteries. And I believe that they're still vastly underestimating the same thing because again, it's well beyond just the EV space that we should be thinking about in terms of lithium ion batteries, talk about battery storage applications, for example, on top of it. So it's an exciting place to be. It's going to have, there's been some great points already on ESD and battery chemistry.

20:30 These are all going to be things to watch out for. And the key is the battery capacity that's being built worldwide is predicated on the nickel, cobalt, manganese battery. There may be different chemistries between those 3 metals. And Tesla is using an NCA, so nickel, cobalt, aluminum battery. But it's going to be those chemistries and those metals that went out on the cathode side of the equation. Of course, lithium and graphite and many others are going to be relevant and copper, of course, if you think about building out the grid. Great. Yeah. And Justin, I'm going to mix up the order and throw this next question to you. Brendan, you brought up ESG. And so I just wanted to dive in a little deeper on ESG. How do you think ESG will influence the industry moving forward?

21:19 I'll start with you, Justin. So as I said, we took this step a couple of weeks ago to be the 1st nickel, cobalt, and probably mining company in the world to offset our greenhouse gas footprint. We're doing that because that is the way the investor base is moving. Regardless of the company that you're now listening to and present, almost everybody has an ESG slide in their presentation. Go back a year and that just wasn't the case. I think Brendan made the great point that COVID's been almost the kickstarter for this focus on ESG and it's coming across not only mining but really every other company in the world. When you look at ESG, there's now 18 or over 1,800 companies around the globe that have committed to being carbon neutral.

22:11 And carbon neutral looks at the entire value chain of the products that you're consuming and delivering. So your ESG footprint or your greenhouse gas footprint for your metals matters now, and it will matter. And Lyle made the great point on the carbon footprint of nickel matte, which is going to be a big issue for this industry going forward. We're fortunate in that we have a producer that's relatively low on the GHG footprint side. But there's a huge, huge focus. There's something like $3 trillion in ESG funds just in the US alone, with not a whole heck of a lot of options and companies to invest in these days.

22:59 And I think the mining sector as a whole can be a leader in this move towards lower footprint metals and be a leader from an ESG footprint. Of course, ESG is beyond just the environmental side. It also looks at social and governance and other aspects that are critically important. And I think mining should be a leader in that space. And I think in general, mining to date has done a very poor job addressing these issues. It's becoming a key part of what we're all talking about. We're for everyone on this call is quite fortunate by the fact that, you know, we have, it's a focus of ours and it should be for investors as they think about what the next couple of years or next decade is gonna look like.

23:45 Great, thank you. Very good points. Brendan. Yeah, sure. Sorry, what was the question again? How do you think ESG will influence the industry moving forward? Yeah, so I think I kind of touched on a couple of points already on that. And, you know, I'll maybe just kind of open it up. I mean, it'd be interesting to see how the market reacts. I mean, the fact is, you know, we do have such a thin supply pipelines out there. You know, you have geopolitical concentrations of production across these commodities where you've got, you know, say 60 percent of cobalt out of the DRC, 60% of tin graphite out of China, 99% of MSM, manganese sulfate, and electrolytic manganese metal out of China as of last year, 60% of nickel out of Indonesia. So you have this high risk level in terms of geopolitical risk disrupting the supply chain. And so it'll be interesting to see how those 2 forces kind of play out in terms of ESG and really actually needing some of these metals to fuel the drive to clean energy.

24:47 Like I said, I think a lot of these are practical, very smart things, like using renewable energy when you can, to power mining operations, really simple 1. I think technology is quite frankly, the mining sector, you think about the fact that we're replacing the oil and gas sector, right? And how much money goes into the oil and gas sector. It's probably for every dollar that goes into oil and gas, you get 0.5 a penny, you know, the stream of the battery metal space. You know, never had guys like Bill Gates, you know, the MIT Energy Fund, you know, working on technologies for the mining sector. And so I think you're going to see a lot of technological change come to our sector, which is something that has been probably very anemic for the mining sector generally. And longer term, I think things like bioleaching of copper sulfide ores is something that sounds fantastic from an ESG perspective, especially considering you can use salt water and basically organisms doing the work of harmful chemicals.

25:45 So I do think there's going to be a lot of technological change that comes, but I'm looking forward to that. And it'll be exciting to have that kind of capital coming to our sector to fuel that. Great, absolutely. And Lyle, what are your thoughts? Yeah, so the ESG story is here to stay. There's no question. It's been an evolving thing for at least 20 years, starting with the Nike sweatshop campaigns in the 90s, blood diamonds, the conflict minerals of 5 to 10 years ago. And it's only growing. And that's really important for all of us to understand. Today, we're talking about it for EV batteries. But we have to remember that right now, 70% of the nickel in the world goes into stainless steel. And nobody is yet campaigning for clean stainless steel. But that's going to come too, because we're talking about the responsible steel campaigns and other commodities are going this route.

26:40 I'd like to draw people's attention to the new EU battery regulations, which are being debated right now, where they're not only looking at carbon footprinting of batteries and eventually ratcheting down the carbon footprint of batteries, that's one major aspect of it, but they're also talking about social impact assessments of the raw materials that go into the batteries. It's not yet clear how that's going to be done, but the intention is clearly there that they're going to force the industry to pay attention to those social metrics that Justin discussed, whether it's your treatment of indigenous peoples, local communities, those kinds of things, those matter. And I think we don't see, you won't ever see, I think, 2 London metals prices for nickel, 1 for good nickel and 1 for bad nickel. But we've seen it in cobalt, and we'll see it in nickel where stuff actually does trade at different prices depending on its ESG provenance.

27:39 Yeah, very interesting. Lots of really good points. So moving on, how will the development of new battery technology, such as the solid state batteries, impact the future demand for battery metals? Justin? Yeah, so when in sort of the metals that I focus on, the solid state battery doesn't impact the cathode. So you still have nickel, you still have cobalt. It probably does change your ability to maneuver the chemistry of that cathode a little bit in terms of hopefully achieving a safer battery, which allows you to put more nickel in it. People shouldn't forget the reason why cobalt is in the battery and why there's been lots of talk about Tesla over the years entirely removing cobalt from the battery but they've never been able to do it is because cobalt adds stability to the battery.

28:34 And that's likely to remain true, but within the solid state battery, maybe you can increase your nickel content and reduce cobalt. Those are relevant, but within the actual metals themselves that we focus on again, the solid state battery shouldn't have a drastic impact on demand. What's interesting is as you think about a solid state battery, if it does come to fruition, And 1 thing to consider just in the EV space in general is, is as we get safer batteries, and as these EV rates become focused on range, I just talked about Mercedes making a big splash about the fact that their model can go 7 miles further than the Tesla Model S, range will become an issue.

29:24 And how do you get more range? A bigger battery, right? And so, in all likelihood, we are going to see battery sizes increase, which itself would have sort of a greater impact on resulting demand for those key metals. So I think the solid-state battery could be very positive certainly for nickel and to some extent cobalt and for battery safety in general. Again, if you can solve the charging equation with solid state batteries, and this is true of all new chemistries, people forget There are a few questions here on different chemistries. One of the questions was the move, the comment by Elon Musk about going to an iron phosphate battery chemistry in China, where for their standard range models, those are all going to be very relevant because for those longer range models, you don't need nickel and you don't need cobalt.

30:30 And there is going to be a market for standard range vehicles that have iron phosphate. I don't think that takes away from the resulting demand for nickel and cobalt in your longer age vehicles. And certainly when you think about North America, we're all going to be focused on range. And of course, that's by far the largest auto market in the world alongside Europe, which has got the same considerations. Great, thank you. Brendan, what are your thoughts? Yeah, look, I don't think it's gonna be negative necessarily on metal demand. You know, I think in the end of the day, the reason why, you know, Musk is going with that is partially because of the lack of good supply options. And, you know, I think the supply side is going to be challenged continuously, you know, as we move forward here.

31:17 You know, there's just too much demand coming, quite frankly. And the one thing that must be missed is the fact that it's a 15 year development timeline, right? So if you tell me today that you need some more copper, I only have a supply pipeline that's available and then I gotta go poke a hole, and okay, I find copper. It's 15 years until I can actually give it to you, right? So, you know, that's a really long, you know, timeline for development. And when you look at how thin the supply, you know, side is for all these different metals, which is obviously gonna mean higher metal prices, you know, I think ultimately, we're gonna be maxed out as we are, using all the metals that we can and all the various technologies that we can, just to meet our goals of a decarbonized global economy. So I don't think it's going to have necessarily an impact. It might change up a little bit on a metal per metal basis. But generally, overall, I think it's going to be only positive for the sector.

32:12 Right. Lyle, anything to add? On solid state, I don't think it changes the chemistry force at all. The ongoing battery discussions will continue. And realistically, the discussion in North America at least has been about, we want to decarbonize without changing anything that we do. That's a little silly. I think we're going to see that people will end up being forced into making some decisions. And, you know, maybe you end up, you know, you got 2 SUVs today, maybe you end up with a small commuter car that runs on an LFP battery, and an SUV that runs on a nickel cobalt battery so that you can take the family on a trip. So in the battery chemistry, revolutionary change is hard in that space because the factories lock in their approach.

33:09 So, you know, those tweaks in battery chemistry, sure, they're coming, but it's not necessarily a negative for any one metal. Got it. All right, so I do want to get to the questions from the attendees. So just to finish up here before we jump right into the live Q&A, I want to ask, what should potential investors lead with today? And how should they look at battery metals in the future? Justin, sorry, I keep making you go ahead. Yeah, so I think that the takeaway for investors is, as they look at this space, I think it's gonna be important to follow this EV race and the trend of OEMs and the announcements they make in terms of the different models and their commitments to electric vehicles.

34:02 Because again, I've been following this space for 5 years and what we see today is well, well beyond what people were assuming 5 years ago when I got into this space. So we continue to see much faster adoption and this move accelerate far quicker than most people are expecting. And again, I think it's worth following trends beyond just electric vehicles. We have to think about battery storage. We have to think about our other consumer devices that are also moving towards an EV in a decarbonized future. And the metals that are going into this sector is going to span the base metal sector Quite broadly which Brendan's got a great great model, right? Like let's not focus necessarily just on nickel and cobalt I think nickel and cobalt are gonna be massive winners in this move There's gonna be a whole bunch of other massive winners as well the base The base metal space is going to be really, really interesting over the next decade.

35:08 And this is a generational move, right? This isn't something that's coming and going over a couple of years. This is going to be a long-term trend. The massive supply deficits generally don't hit us for a couple of years. And so I think it's going to be important to keep your eye on those deficits and on these EV races as they play out over the next couple of years. Absolutely. Brendan? Yeah, I mean, you have to think about it that oil and fossil fuels have basically powered the world for the last 100 plus years, right? And it's weird to think about it because nobody's really looked at it that way from you know until the last couple of years. But these metals are basically the oil of the future you know.

35:55 And you know cleaner I shouldn't say oil of the future might sound bad from an ESG perspective but you know that's the case right. You know and so like I said I mean this is kind of day 1. We're looking at having to quadruple, sometimes even more production, just over the next 10 years across each of these commodities. And so the mining sector has never been maybe foremost in people's minds. And you look how much money has been in the oil and gas sector over the past 50, 60 years and how important that's been. And so it's definitely an exciting time to be in the mining space. We feel like a small community, honestly, at this point, that's been whittled down over, you know, kind of 10 tough years, but we're gonna need a lot more people, you know, we're gonna need a lot more capital, and I think it's gonna start getting a lot more attention as we move forward. So, yeah, no, I'm excited about the future, and, you know, I think it's exciting to be, you know, helping be part of that solution to drive the world to carbon neutral.

36:56 Absolutely. And Lyle. Great comments from Justin and Brendan there. I've got 2 things I'd like to leave investors with. Decarbonization through electrification is real. It's happening. It's going to keep happening. And it's going to need a lot of nickel and cobalt and copper and other stuff. There's a lot of announcements coming out on the EV supply chain that's kind of distracting, frankly, to those of us who are just trying to bring projects along. We need these metals, and we need a lot, lot more of them. For those who think that the answer is maybe green hydrogen, it's not. That race has been run. Hydrogen has been said to be the answer for 20 years. And look at what's happened. Nothing for hydrogen. EVs have won the race. There's a great place for green hydrogen, but it's not transportation electrification.

37:45 And as we see this evolution of batteries to have sort of tiered levels of battery performance from low range vehicles to premium vehicles, people investing in premium electric vehicles that are going to want those premium high nickel batteries are going to want a premium ESG story too. I don't think you're going to find a lot of investors in the West who want to spend $100,000 on a vehicle to then be accused of supporting slave labor or something else. Who knows what the issues might be in the future? So that great ESG story doesn't come from converting NPI or ferronickel into mat and into chemicals. And whether it comes from sulfides or better ways of treating those dominant latter-eight resources we have out there, you know, that's going to be the future.

38:38 Once that social and environmental train starts moving along, it doesn't get stopped. Great, Thank you so much. A lot of good points. So I want to jump into the live Q&A now because there's lots of great questions here from our attendees. Harry is asking, can you discuss the supply chain and how you see this in the future? Who are the off takers for MHP? What is their position in the chain? Will the supply chain be more vertically integrated? And what will the role be of battery makers, OEMs, trading houses? And lastly, what would you expect 5 years out? So let me take this one because it was a point that I was wanting to make at the same time, which is when you look at the global OEM space, the automakers, they've been supplying cars for 100 years and never worried about the fuel source going into their cars, right? That was taken care of by the oil industry.

39:34 Now you have a situation where these OEMs are starting to have to care about the energy source going into their vehicles, which is the batteries, right? So We haven't seen a whole lot of vertical integration. To some extent, we've seen it in China, who's taking a more active approach. But we haven't seen it really in Europe and North America yet. It's somewhat troubling, to be honest, because at some point in time, these OEMs are going to have to care about where they're going to source the material from. And you had Elon talking about the fact that if you build nickel capacity, we'll enter into a long-term agreement. And that's because he's starting to recognize the fact that you're going to need to have some control over your supply of these critical metals. And if you don't, you're going to be left in the dust. I will say the battery space has been spending a lot more time thinking about this. And you have seen some integration, vertical integration from battery makers, who again are recognizing that, you know, if their focus in the past was key technologies and catalysts and other technologies going into the combustion engine car, they recognize that their competitive advantage going forward might actually be the agreements they have on the supply side with these physical metals. So it's going to be an issue that I think needs more attention than it has.

41:08 In terms of the MHP that we produce in Ramu, it goes to 20 or 25 different battery precursor plants all in China. So 100% of our product goes into China. In the future, I could see some of that going into other parts of Asia and even into North America. We ourselves will start to have offtake rates on our products starting a couple of years from now. And that'll be 11.3% of the product we produce. So I mean, entering into a long term offtake with one of these OEMs is a is an option. But today, we haven't seen a lot of it 5 years from now, you know, the last part of Harry's question there, I hope we have seen a bit more vertical integration between OEMs, between battery makers, between the suppliers of these metals, because the only way, to Brendan's point, the only way we're gonna get this stuff built is if more capital comes into the space and we have the support from some of these suppliers.

42:12 All right, thank you, Justin. Lyle, Brendan, feel free to add anything. If not, I'll... Like Justin covered it all. Yeah. Yeah. You know, from my point of view, I've been saying for a while that the automakers and the battery makers need to be focused a lot more on supply than price. The reality is that a $3 premium on nickel for a 60 kilowatt hour high nickel battery is $300 to the price of the car. It's not 0, but it's not that big either. And if they don't secure their supply, they're going to be facing a lot more than that. When the nickel is simply not available, they're going to have a problem meeting the strategic goals. And that goes to governments as well. Governments with strategic decarbonization goals really need to be thinking through how they're actually going to get there if their manufacturers can't deliver.

43:07 Great, thank you. Jason is asking, are there any new emerging technologies expected to improve or expedite smelting? Why don't I take that one? I've actually got an operations background, but let's be clear, I'm a hydrometallurgist. I'm not a pyromet smelting guy. I don't see anything really significant on the horizon that's going to improve either smelting of laterite ores to produce nickel like they're doing for nickel pig iron and ferronickel. That's fairly standard technology and new smelting technologies are very risky. Kony Ambo tried to adopt a new smelting technology in New Caledonia for their big new 60,000 ton a year nickel plant several years ago now, and it hasn't worked out very well for them. They're still not operating at rate.

43:59 Various furnaces that tried new things in Brazil and other places have faced massive year-long shutdowns because they've destroyed their furnaces. On the sulfide side of things, which applies to to nickel and cobalt from sulfide producers, but also to, you know, very significantly in the copper and zinc space. I don't see a lot of new technology being developed there. It's going to be hard to develop new smelters at all and I don't see that people are really going to want to take on the risk. What they will focus on is improving the performance of existing smelting technologies, especially in the environmental sense. Smelters have a bad name for air pollution. Some smelters in the world run without sulfur dioxide capture, and that's a lot of acid gas into the atmosphere.

44:51 Most smelters, certainly in the Western world, do capture most of their sulfur dioxide, but there's always more you can do. And so those modernization projects are ongoing and have been for quite some time. Great, thank you. How will metal recycling impact long-term demand on metals? Yeah, sure, I can maybe take that one. We've actually taken a look at a few metal recyclers actually, and looked at funding them. I mean, ultimately, where could we branch out from what we do today is trying to support the supply chain in other ways. I think ultimately, if you look at, and I'll maybe start with another answer first, why I feel comfortable that we have kind of 2 decades runway here at least. You know, I never say beyond 2 decades, although I think it'll go further, but 2 decades is a long runway. You know, and you look how much money, you know, these EV makers, you know, battery makers are putting into the sector and these giga factories, you know, it's like 300,400,500 billion dollars, right? And you know, the groups don't do that and then decide I'm going to change to something else, you know, until they get their capital paid back and they can't until they pay that capital back. So, you know, you have so much money going into the space and that's why, you know, when you have a technology, you know, as prevalent as this is and how much money is going in, you know, that's going to give impetus to keep it around for 15, 20 years.

46:11 You know, even past, you know, potentially it's useful life, like you've seen an oil and gas, you know, where it kind of stuck around maybe a little bit longer than it should have. You know, metals recycling, ultimately at the end of the day the goal is closed loop system, right? Where you're recycling 100 percent of your metal and you don't need to produce anymore. Now, I hope that we get there 1 day, but we're a long ways away from that. Recycling is always going to play a bit of a role, but I think, quite frankly, we need it to play a bit of a role, just given how constrained we are on the supply side already. We're all supportive of meeting that goal of clean energy and decarbonizing the global economy. And I think recycling is gonna be a necessary part of that. Obviously it's gonna play an increasing role over time, but when you look at the demand increases over time, I think it's actually not gonna play as big of a role until we get much farther down in the future.

47:06 So will it impact the opportunity that we have in front of us today? No, I think we've got at least 2 decades runway would be my kind of answer to that. Yeah, and the only thing I would add is, again, I remember talking to one of the very first owners of the Tesla Model S. This is going back a few years ago, but he'd had his Model S for 5 years. And in that five-year timeframe, and he'd driven it a lot, it was 75,000 miles or something to that extent. He had logged 3 miles of range over that five-year time frame and the 75,000 miles. So one thing that I think has surprised people is actually the longevity of these lithium ion batteries. They're lasting a lot longer than people originally estimated. And of course, there's always been talk about these batteries having a second life in a renewable energy application before they go to the recycling plant.

48:03 So recycling will be relevant. I think in China's 5 year plan that was just announced a few days ago was the first time they ever talked about recycling battery metals. So I think that's significant. But it is it's probably a decade or 2 away. And even when you think about those numbers, you're talking about taking nickel as an example, maybe 100 to 200,000 tons of incremental nickel supply that could come from battery recycling over that time frame. That's just in the context of meeting 1.5 to 2.5 million extra tons of nickel, it's still a relatively small number, but it will become And hopefully it does play an important role if we think about the future of this 10, 20, 30 years out.

48:54 All right, thank you. Lyle, we have a question for you regarding GigaMetals. When will GigaMetals bring hydro to the site? Yeah, so that would be part of our initial project development when we go to build the project after we've, you know, cleared the EA and stuff that will all be part of the scope of that. So, you know, it's part of our project plans, but given the cost of it, it wouldn't happen until we were commercializing the project. All right, thank you so much. So James is saying there's been a lot of talk about alternatives for battery use in both nickel and cobalt. Can you guys just discuss what they are and why they may or may not have an impact on each of your respective companies. Sure. Yeah, go ahead. Okay.

49:41 You know, there are lots of alternatives. I think you're going to see a variety. We've talked about LFP already. Manganese is being talked about. Manganese can be used in 2 different ways. There's LMO batteries, lithium manganese oxide, which are typically used in small devices. And then manganese use in electric vehicle batteries is really only being talked about as changing the recipe of the nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries. So, you know, it adjusts the ratio around, but there's still a big demand for the metals we produce. Some of the other battery chemistries that get talked about, I think they have to be clear that things like redox batteries, like vanadium redox batteries and those kinds of things, are really for electric grid storage applications and not about mobile applications.

50:27 So, you know, in the mobile space, there, You know, there isn't a lot that's going to change out of the NCA, NMC, LFP kind of framework in the foreseeable future. Great, Justin, do you have something to add? Yeah, I mean, Lyle's exactly right. When you think about these chemistries and the different chemistries and the LFP versus the NMC versus the NCA, which Tesla uses, they all have trade-offs, right? You can go to the LFP battery, the lithium iron phosphate battery, which is a cheaper chemistry than the nickel manganese cobalt battery. But it also doesn't have the charging time and the range that an NMC battery does have. So there's going to be trade-offs with all these chemistries, and the trade-offs generally are charging time, range, and cost, and safety, if you wanted to add 0.25 1.

51:29 And so within each of these chemistries, there's just trade-offs that each of the battery makers and OEMs has to evaluate depending on their market. And my point on the lithium-ion phosphate battery, and I see another question here on that, was for your lower range and lower cost vehicles, that those are going to be the vehicles that would utilize a lithium iron phosphate battery. The longer range, higher end cars, most of the North American and European cars, we suspect, will use the nickel manganese cobalt battery because of those factors. Great, thank you. And thank you for answering that other question. I was going to follow up with that one. But to leave off here, Jason is asking, what can companies do to help investors understand and value the carbon neutral approach to mining nickel versus other less responsible mining?

52:29 Lyle, You're the guy. Sure. How do we make customers and investors and stakeholders care? That's a difficult question. I care. Lots of stakeholders care. How do we make Everybody care? I honestly don't have answers to that. I just have to continue to tell the story and point out that there are differences in the impacts of what we choose every day. And you might think about it when you choose to buy your coffee at McDonald's or Starbucks, you make a value choice. And when you choose to buy your coffee at McDonald's or Starbucks, you make a value choice. And when you choose to buy your vehicle, you make a value choice. And it's a reflection of what you value. And I think we have to continue to make that point to people that the raw materials that we need to supply as an industry all come with impacts. Nothing is free of impacts.

53:23 And you should demand to be informed by the people making products that you consume as to that level of impacts. And that's where things like the EU battery regulation are really being driven home. But that has to start at the regulator level, at the government level to make those things mandatory. Just like we have energy efficiency ratings on refrigerators today. You wouldn't have that if it wasn't mandated by the government. And so that's really where it starts. There is a big push towards, you know, there's a task force in existence today called the Task Force for Climate Related Financial Disclosure. For climate-related financial disclosure. And this is going to start to require companies to start reporting their emissions, their scope 1, scope 2, scope 3 emissions, which is looking at the entire value chain of your product from the time it comes out of the ground to its end use and what the greenhouse gas impact of that of the product that you sell and your company is.

54:26 And so the way that companies can help investors understand it is just by continuing to talk about it and I don't think as Lyle talked about before this is not an issue that's going away anytime soon. Every company that I'm aware of now is starting to talk about it. As you think about us having to start to disclose this information on our financial statements, I mean the natural response is so you have to start disclosing your impact, your impact. The result of that, of course, is going to be, well, what are you going to do to improve those numbers? And that's the point of, as Lyle said, the energy waiting on your refrigerator, right? As you start to disclose the information, people now have the information to decide on what company they're going to invest in and what products they're going to invest in.

55:15 And there's a big move industry-wide to enhancing this disclosure. And I think we're just in the early innings of that change. Right. Absolutely. And that's why we do panels like this to continue the discussion and keep investors informed. So I want to thank you all so much for joining us today and for all your great insights and great conversation. I also want to thank everyone who attended and submitted questions. If we didn't get a chance to get your question answered, as I mentioned, we'll be sending out a short survey and you'll be able to leave your contact details and we'll put you in touch with any of these companies. And thank you

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Speaker profile Lyle Trytten

Lyle Trytten

Manager of Development at Giga Metals

Mr. Trytten has more than 25 years experience in the nickel industry, and was previously General Manager, Sustainability with Sherritt International Corporation at their Alberta nickel refinery. His experience at Sherritt also includes research and development, engineering for brownfield and greenfield projects, and major project feasibility studies. Lyle has been personally involved with metallurgical operations on five continents, including a 1-year secondment to the Murrin Murrin nickel refinery in Australia (now owned by Glencore), the feasibility study for the Ambatovy mine and process plant in Madagascar, and design and commissioning of metallurgical processing facilities in the US and Indonesia.

Speaker profile Brendan Yurik

Brendan Yurik

CEO & Director at Electric Royalties

Founder and CEO of Evenor Investments Ltd, a financial advisory group to junior mining companies for alternative financing, debt, equity and M&A with experience on over $2 billion in mining financing transactions throughout his career. Prior global experience as a research analyst as well as in business development and mining financial advisory roles with Endeavour Financial, Cambrian Mining Finance Ltd, Northern Vertex Mining Corp. and King & Bay West Management Corp.

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