Boron: From Consumer Products to Defense

0:08 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the sixth panel about boron and 2 unique companies looking to exploit this strategic resource. I'm pleased to introduce the speakers for today, Stephen Renschler, CEO of Nevada Lithium, and JT Starczyk, CSO of 5E Advanced Materials. We'll be discussing the various strategic and commercial uses of boron, its properties, and what both companies are doing to make sure that USA has a secure domestic supply. So afterwards, if we have some time remaining, we'll be accepting questions. And as a reminder, you can submit your questions in the chat at any point during the presentation. As always, this event is being recorded and will be available to watch shortly afterwards. So to kick things off, the boron market has been historically quite niche and opaque, with various info sources reporting on it differently from each other, whether that be about the supply, demand, or even the use cases and the geographical sourcing of the element. So before we start discussing the importance of the strategic resource

1:05 for North America, and in particular, the USA, it might be helpful to provide an overview of the boron market and some of its uses for those who are new to this element. Let's begin with you, JT. Please lay the foundation of the supply side of the Boron market, who the main producers of Boron are, and can you also touch on the supply situation in the US specifically? Absolutely, Maxim. Once again, thanks for having us on the platform. We always enjoy being able to talk about our story and to talk about what we're doing in the Central Mojave Desert. Steve, great to join you again on another panel. Looking forward to the next hour. So let's maybe start from a market perspective. The boron market is essentially an oligopoly, meaning that there are really 2 main players that control about 85% of the market.

1:57 The market leader and the one that sort of moves the market both from a tonnage and a pricing perspective is essentially the Turkish government through an entity called Etimadin. This entity itself is responsible for about 65% of the global boric acid production. The company itself also sits on about 72% of the world's global reserves. You've then got here in the United States about 20%. So player number 2 is U.S. Borax, which is owned by Rio Tinto. Rio has been in operation for over 100 years. So it's a well-defined, well-established mining operation. Where they're starting to look to have their challenges will be in the future, as they have a very well-known, self-described depleting ore body.

2:52 If you go and you take a look at their financials, operating costs are up. They're into some other parts of the ore body itself that play into sort of the processing

3:04 of the actual ore body itself. Both companies that are in this particular space have a set of derivative products too as well. So boric acid, And when we talk about the boron market, we talk about it in terms of boric acid equivalent tons. So that market being 3 and a half to 3.6 billion tons on a global basis, depending on what publication you read, Is sort of what the size is it looks at today. There are some South American producers Within the family of borates. There are 3 or 4 different types For us at 5e we are mining an ore body called Kolnite, which is the most commercially process ready ore body, if you will. It's very similar to what Turkey mines itself. And when it comes sort of into play of how much processing, how much effort goes into that processing, obviously feeds into your operating costs.

4:07 And so look, the market itself is dominated by 2 main players with a handful of South American players. Those South American players tend to feed into the agricultural industry. From an end-use perspective, your boron is one of those things that impacts everyday life that nobody seems to know about. So when you look at it from a commercial use perspective, there's well over 300 different applications. On the low end, it can be things like cleaners, degreasers, and then as you sort of move up the value chain, it's used in the construct of fiberglass, insulation, it goes into permanent magnets, It goes into the fiberglass that construct wind turbine blades. It has applications in all electric type transportation.

4:54 It has pharma applications, not only in the administration of pharma technology, but also in the drug itself. So anything from screens to you know insulation, acoustic insulation in an electric vehicle. So that the breadth and the depth is there. The price points are a little bit more opaque. You would expect that when you've got 2 main producers essentially controlling 85% of the market. But Boron is very simply one of those things that you don't know it's in your everyday life, but you certainly would miss it if it wasn't there. Okay, perfect. And Steve, if you can just have anything further to add there about the supply side, if you're through to do so, and could you also discuss the demand side and any additional use cases you can think of?

5:47 Sure, sure. I'd love to put a little bit more color from my perspective on it. First thing I'd like to tell everybody is go to JT's website to get a lot of great information about the boron market. It's extremely well laid out and be very, very helpful to you. Nevada Lithium, we're relatively new to sort of looking at this boron. We frankly just discovered it in our mineralization

6:12 no more than say 6 months ago. So This has been a learning experiment for me in terms of say lithium, which is of course our main product But I'm very very excited about what I see for the potential applications for boron going forward The The opacity of the market is very interesting. I think the fact that it is an oligopoly clearly is part of it. And to the extent that we call boron sort of a commodity like we call lithium a commodity, the reality is that there's just a wide spectrum of various products, differences that are really make it more like different. It's a chemical. It's the way I think about it. Very small differences will have very great impacts in the value and the use of the boron.

6:59 One of the interesting things that I found out was the integration of boron into the photovoltaic cells, right? So the solar panel industry, which is something that is definitely starting to ramp up around the world, but is still nowhere near experiencing the growth rates that most people think are going to occur with global electrification.

7:20 So boron in terms of being on the glass, the borosilicate glass that increases the transmission of the light to the cell itself, and then it's used as a doping, essentially chemical with a silicon to increase the conductivity. All of those kinds of things are going to continue to increase the use of boron going forward. I mean, if we even just look at the way that solar cells have increased their efficiencies over the course of the past 10 years, it's remarkable going from, or the impact going from, say, 7 or 8 percent up to 15, 17 percent. And I know that some of the national labs are up to 40 percent efficiency.

8:01 Boron, in terms of replacement for gallium, looks like there is something that could be potentially pretty big going forward. So that's an area that I look to with global electrification that's going to increase the demand side. One of the other interesting things is sort of the interaction with boron in the whole US critical mineral sourcing. And I'm gonna let JT speak to this in a little bit because 5E has done a lot of heavy lifting in this area. But in a broad brushed way, what I see is the integration of boron with steel as an additive. And in many applications, again, think of boron as a low percentage additive that gets added to a high percentage product. I know it works that way in agriculture, where boron is one of those very small amounts of elements that you need for proper plant growth, but it's been depleted over the years just through excessive fertilization and other ways. Well, with steelmaking, it's the same way, and it increases the strength of steel in tremendous ways, also increases the ability to weld it.

9:05 I have a feeling going forward that with regards to remaking the US defense

9:12 industry, as a consequence of using Chinese steel for so many years and with questions as to the quality of that steel, that boron is going to become a substantial part of the U.S. Defense industry as we start remaking tanks and ships and all these sorts of things going forward. So I think JD put it perfectly. It's one of these things where you see boron is one of these things that you see in so many products that you would never think about whether or not it's your soap or in the strength of the steel that's used in your car or US tank or anything like that. But when I think about all of the potential supply demand gaps evolving, and I do read different publications and I've got to tell you I'm not exactly sure what the boron market was last year and a boric acid equivalent or not because I see numbers going from 3.5 to 4.5 it's at all this kind of thing.

10:06 But one of the things that I think is telling me that there is indeed a growth potential there. Is because it's already started when I look at I. In years definitive feasibility study that was done in 2020, they were using about $700

10:22 a metric ton for boric acid. That's what they figured that they would get. And today it's around $770 a ton. So it tells me there's no gross imbalance in terms of supply demand. It looks to me like it's nice, steady growth. At least it has been over the past couple of years. And I anticipate as these other high-tech products start to be used, the integration becomes even greater, that there will in fact be a supply-demand gap opening up in favor of boron prices. So that's sort of my view from 30,000 feet. Yeah, maybe I could just augment that a little bit. The product that Steve talks about is Ferroboron and it has so many applications, right? So that's the part of the FEB that goes into the ND-FEB permanent magnets, so the neodymium permanent magnets. It also goes into the chassis of just about every electric vehicle that

11:23 is coming off of a manufacturing line that's being implemented in petrol vehicles or gasoline-powered vehicles because of the ability to have higher resistance to impact. It makes it much more fuel efficient, right, because it's lighter. And so those applications are pretty good. We've been doing a lot of work. There's a third-party publication that'll be coming out here in the very near future, we're being told, to lend itself a little bit more transparency into the price points of boric acid.

12:04 So people should just kind of keep their eye out for, and I don't want to do any advertising, but for the publication that'll start tracking boric acid prices. And actually the prices are significantly higher, I think than the price point that was quoted here previously. We've, in the conversations with our customers, we're talking about price points that are significantly higher than what Steve mentioned. And it is very simply the supply and demand imbalance is very here and very now. So we started to see it about 18 months ago where just about every ton that was produced was spoken for. And now we've got customers, potential customers crawling out of the woodwork.

12:52 We've recently launched our customer qualification program. So

12:55 this is the self-promotion piece of 5E where we've got samples in front of some pretty significant consumers of boric acid. And every week we have more and more coming to us saying, hey, we'd like to test, hey, we'd like to talk about a commercial relationship. Hey, what is it gonna look like when you guys scale your production? Because we are producing now at our 5E Boron Americas Complex, you know, is this something that we could start to then get into our supply chain? You know, when you talk about risks of supply chain, I spend a fair amount of time on Capitol Hill, And one of the things that 5E and our advisors were very successful in last year was getting boron entered into the verbiage around single points of failure in the US military supply chain. Boron being listed as one of those. So as we move forward, right, when you talk about things like tank armor and munitions and flare technology and chip technology and satellite technology, where we source as a government, where we source boron from becomes a major component into appropriations funding.

14:06 And so being able to sort of take that step and then parlay it into, you know, getting more and more on the radar, trying to open up opportunities. You know, Steve and I have very similar battles in how we're gonna build our companies, regardless of what the end product is going to be. And that support from the US government becomes so vital to everything that we're gonna do from a build to scale perspective.

14:32 And so we took that as a pretty big victory that I kind of think flew under the radar, even though we did make an announcement about it and put it out through our socials. You can get the US government, You can get the government to agree on that being a point of potential failure in the supply chain. That's pretty important stuff. And we've been able to build off that. So we're excited about where the market's going to go, both from a price perspective and a supply demand dynamic perspective. And I just, Max, before the next question, I just want to echo the importance of what JT just said about getting that recognition from the US government. I just sort of give you a similar story of the complexity of dealing with the U.S. Government and perhaps it'll give the audience a better idea of just how much of a coup actually that is for JT to pull that off.

15:26 You know I was just recently to digress for a second out of the FastMarkets Lithium Conference in Vegas. You know for Nevada lithium lithium will be the be the core product coming out. We hope to have the boron associated with it, but no doubt lithium will be at the core of what we're doing. The point behind my saying that is that essentially Department of Energy people were there speaking and they do understand the critical nature of many of these materials. What they've yet to do is sort of make the transition from the public way of looking at it, when I say public, meaning the governmental way of looking at things, developing things to the private sector. The first step is to get them to even acknowledge, to get them to understand what some of these materials mean, how they're critical, what their uses are, et cetera. Definitely step number 1. Hard enough by itself in many cases.

16:21 The second step will be for all of us, meaning all of us essentially trying to develop these assets in the U.S., to continue with our emphasis on getting the government to understand

16:33 the difference between essentially giving a loan to a late-stage project and actually helping to develop things at an earlier stage on, right? So from the government's perception, the risk goes up the earlier you are in the whole process, but from the perspective of developing a critical materials supply chain, it's actually more important to take that risk at the beginning as opposed to trying to necessarily play winners and losers with U.S. Government taxpayer dollars. And that's something that we're involved in as well as. But to JT's point, step 1, get them to understand about the material itself. Step 2, which we're all working on, and I think that we will make progress here as we go forward, is to get the government involved at the appropriate stages to keep the entire process moving along in a way that frankly won't take decades to finally get to the point where you can access some of this money that's always advertised as being there. So that's all I just want to add about that, Max.

17:34 And I think a follow on point to that, Steve, is the fact that through all of this early stage development, late stage development, government financing, at least from a Boron perspective, a lot of the derivative products, right, that are used in military applications are processed in places like Russia and China.

17:56 And so when you talk about adding more to the risk equation of what we're doing, right, being dependent upon other nations, nations that maybe we're not as friendly with for critical components to our national defense. You know, as we move later and later into this decade, the uncertainty, the global uncertainty that certainly exists today. I mean, that's a scary proposition, knowing that, you know, pretty much all of our boron carbide, which is tank and body armor, that's that's processed in China. It's created in China. So we add that to our national stockpile. And that's just a list of one of many things that we are dependent on other, what we'll call less favorable nations to us as a country.

18:45 So, you know, as the government should be looking to fund early stage projects It should also have an eye on the fact that look we're talking about domestic resources, right? So my project Steve's project it's it's domestic we can we can mine it here. We can refine it here We can keep it here. We can help unlock global markets, which creates jobs here and I know we spend I I spend a lot of time talking to members of congress talking You know trying to get them to understand that we're creating local jobs to serve as a domestic market but the ability to be upside in the global market. And that shouldn't check a lot of boxes. And so that's a message we're trying to get to reverberate as much as we possibly can. Yeah, and I tell you, the similarities to the lithium market are clearly there, right, in terms of you want to have the whole domestic market from basically beginning to end be incorporated into the US as much as possible.

19:42 Where I think it gets interesting with the boron, and then going back to your previous point about the pricing capacity and probably the fact like the numbers that I'm simply looking at and seeing on the internet or basically bank research are low comes down to again to this sort of bifurcation in the market that we know is being caused by China. You know, with regards to lithium, it's there because the Inflation Reduction Act, right? And all those EV tax credits, which ostensibly give you that $7,500

20:13 fully loaded if that material is sourced from the US or from a friendly country. You don't necessarily have that in the defense applications, but you have exactly what you described. It's sort of like you don't need to have that tax incentive there. Common sense and national security tells you that you should be sourcing this material, boron in this particular case, from a US source. And to me, if that's the case, we're going to have one of these types of situations again where somebody asks you, well, what's the spot price of boric acid? And you can either say, well, it's A here, you know, let's just say measured somewhere in China where so many of these spot indices are, or you could flippantly say, it really doesn't matter because, you know, General Dynamics needs it for this, or Raytheon needs it for that, or whatever, and you've got a long-term contract that's sewed up because of the domestic security aspects of it. So I find it very interesting, and I agree with you wholeheartedly with regards to getting to Congress to make people understand about the actual local impact of Developing projects like this because frankly, I don't think that they really understand it I guess it's not a surprise but it's one of these things and I often talk to people about the iterative nature of sort of being a CEO in an environment like this, where it's just constantly saying the same thing over and over to different people to finally get that momentum in place to make real progress. So I echo your sentiments completely.

21:45 Actually something, an interesting use for Voron that I thought of, just kind of tying into what JT said about defense and also Steve about the steel aspect is, I think it's actually quite useful in radiation shielding. So with SpaceX's new initiative to do stainless steel, you know, rockets, it'll be interesting if that's kind of the the modus operandi for for space exploration going forward as well. So just in terms of new technologies and new things that it's going to

22:16 be very helpful for. I think it's quite interesting and exciting. And JT, can you just briefly touch on the aspect of the criticality of it in terms of regulation? So I think it's not listed in the USGS critical minerals list, but what's the update on that? Why is that? And what's going to happen going forward?

22:40 Yeah, no, I'd love to comment on that. So let me level set when we talk about critical minerals and materials here in the United States. So when people talk about the critical minerals list, they're talking about the US Geological Survey's critical minerals list that sits underneath the Department of the Interior.

23:00 Okay, so that's the predominant list when you hear about being a critical mineral, you know, so lithium is on that list, you're seeing a lot of push to try and get copper on that list. When you then break it down into both the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, they also have their own critical minerals lists. We're not on the Department of Energy's. We missed it literally by a mathematical value of 1. We are listed as a critical material on the Department of Defense's list. Now, in here in 20 24, they are redoing that list. We have been spending a lot of time briefing the steering committee on the uses and the practicality of why Boron is so important.

23:47 We saw some Capitol Hill communication where some representatives that represent our district have written and penned letters to the USGS to consider Boron being added to that main list. There's also some communication happening that before the USGS finalizes that list this year, which will go into effect January 1st of next year, to take a look at what is on both the DOD and the DOE's list. There's going to be some similarities, but ultimately, if you've got something that is critical to defense, the thought of it then being on the overarching critical minerals list as held by the USGS makes a lot of sense. So we have spent a significant amount of time working with not only the USGS Steering Committee, but we've also briefed the Department of the Interior at the upper levels as well to talk about the importance of this, to talk about the lack of domestic deposits, frankly, the lack of global deposits that can be commercialized, and how important it's gonna be in all of our defense-related technology.

25:00 I think we're doing, it's safe to say we're doing a lot of the right blocking and tackling. And ultimately, we're trying to put ourselves in a position where boron can be added to the predominant list, which is the USGS critical minerals list. But it gives us a leg up because we're already listed on the critical list under the Department of Defense. Yeah, perfect. Thanks. And since we're on the topic of kind of regulation and things like that, maybe, Steve, you could start with this one, but can you just share some insights into the regulatory landscape for boron mining and production in the US? How supportive is the government in that?

25:37 And generally, how it's different from maybe lithium even? Well, I'm not sure that I could answer with regards to if you were mining for boron alone or say borax like Rio's doing over in California. I do know that from our perspective and this is early stage again for Nevada lithium, I don't anticipate that there really going to be any differences with regards to the way that the regulations would be applied to us. You know, from what we can see right now, the flow sheets are going to be fairly similar, meaning the recovery flow sheets for what we're doing, the mining method shouldn't change, things like that.

26:15 So I don't anticipate that, again, there are going to be any real differences from a regulatory perspective. I certainly haven't heard of anything. I think though again, and this goes back to something that JT was just mentioning, as the local governments become more aware of the value of the products, so now in our case we have, we think, boron to go along with lithium, we would expect that the impact on the local communities will start to be more recognized and that will in fact filter its way up as we continue to the state level and then sooner or later up to the federal level where of course all the money is. So I believe it's from my perspective it's all a plus kind of thing. Since we're not doing certain types of mining that I think where you would see differences perhaps evolve, or I should say perhaps where if we had found boron in a very different setting than what we were looking at previously, I would expect differences.

27:20 I think that the presence of boron is entirely benign to us from a regulatory environment. So from my perspective, all lights are green.

27:30 Yeah, JT, any other comments on that? Just I'll offer things from a 5E perspective and it's going to be pretty similar to what Steve just mentioned. When we did all of our permit applications, we led with boron. We too also have a co-product of lithium in there that is covered in all of our permits. We are fully permitted. In fact, we're fully permitted all the way up into our first level of expansion as well. And so even though it was a different project, when it was scoped out back in 2018, 2019, potentially looking at creating SOP as a crop nutrient,

28:11 we had the borates, we had lithium all covered in that permit. So going in, I don't know if it would be different under a different political spectrum, but at least from our perspective, we've got clear sailing when it comes to regulatory and having everything covered in all of our permits right now. Okay, excellent. Thanks. And I see there's a lot of questions going in in the chat, so I'll try my best to tie your questions in to what we have here. And so make sure to vote on your favorite questions and I'll tie those in. And then any questions we can't get to through this conversation, we'll again make sure to answer afterwards. So in terms of technology and boron's uses in the future with technological advancements, There's a couple of good comments here. For example, boron arsenide was recently described as the best semiconductor material on planet earth by MIT researchers.

29:10 And there are also some questions here about its uses in energy generation, you know, nuclear reactors, things like that. So do you have any insights on the technological advancements that are coming up or potential uses such as those that you've seen?

29:27 I mean, I would offer that, At least for us, we've been looking at what we used to call future-facing technologies, whether that be use in some space technology or satellite technology, or specifically pharma technology. At some point, we almost had to cut it off and say, look, there's so many different applications. You can even go into, you can find some studies, some academic studies around, is there a potential to replace part of the battery technologies of what we see today, using it as a boron, as a coating for the anodes and cathodes. There's a lot of different opportunities, but I caution that the difference between everything that's done, either at a theoretical or a university level, the challenge then becomes for any company like ours or Steve's is how do you commercialize that? Right. And then what is the market opportunity?

30:30 Right. Is the market opportunity vast or in the sort of have to strike a balance when you're building a commercial business, right? So, opportunity, one thing, price points are another thing, but also the market size. Is it something that you can move 1 ton of product into at a great price? Okay, that's fine. That's a nice to have, but you can't build a business off of that. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure we as a business, we didn't get so far down the road where you become an R&D organization. There is a group out there that we've had some commercial discussions with where they have particular expertise in for on research and the applications for future facing technologies.

31:16 Right. We're a boric acid business. We're a business that will create some advanced materials, but first and foremost, we're gonna look at what those market size and opportunity is, model the economics from there, right? Cause ultimately then, if we're gonna create advanced materials, maybe it's a boron carbide or it's a boron nitride, you know, what are the capital and investments that we need to make to do that? What are the price models look like? What's the return to our shareholders? So I love the fact that they're that the the reach of boron is branching into some really, really cool stuff. We are trying to stay focused on our business right now, which is becoming a domestic producer of boric acid, scaling that up, right? And then also what does it look like from additional creative co-products?

32:11 We also have the opportunity to do some things like a green gypsum, calcium chloride, potentially magnesium chloride, just with the way that our operating facility works, we're gonna focus on that as our core business, building that, making sure we're returning value to shareholders, scaling that, and then down the road, there's probably a lot of different opportunities for us to consider once we're producing and returning value to shareholders. Yeah, the question is some of the more exotic materials that comes up in terms of the benefit ultimately to our shareholders would be a capital allocation decision, but that would be far down the road. Step 1, and as an example, JT is more advanced in terms of his project than what ours is, But step 1 is to get the mine up and running, produce your basic, I don't want to say elements, but basic products, like in the case of Nevada, lithium.

33:09 And it looks like probably be boric acid. Step 2, or step 3 or 4, actually, down farther down the road, would be then to see whether or not you know the basic building blocks could be taken as let's just call the more exotic materials. I think from from the way that global demand for just boric acid again using that as the generic equivalent in terms of measuring total tons of use and supply. I think that global electrification as it is, is going to be enough of basically a demand boost to keep prices rising, certainly over the near term. To me, it's sort of another way, if you think about copper, the same way going into EVs, you know, it's gonna be drug along, copper demand with increased penetration rates of EVs.

33:59 In the case of lithium, It's not all just about EVs. You've got stationary storage that's starting to increase dramatically. And so the use of lithium there, all of these different components go in, they're here and they're now. I think a very interesting one in the case of boron is going to be sort of the whole use of boron with hydrogen storage. Whether or not you believe ultimately the world's going to end up in some sort of a hydrogen-dominated type of a situation rather than battery vehicles, etc., it's really quite a good alternative from my perspective. And I guess that, frankly, the qualities of boron lend themselves, I guess, density, frankly, to being able to contain hydrogen. So that's 1 that I would keep my eye on.

34:44 To JD's points again, some of these are going to be very small, specialized, high-cost areas of application. But the way I think about boron, the way I've seen it play out so far, is I think more of it's an additive. It's incremental uses of boron to more existing bulk tonnages of other materials to get these qualities to come out that you want. And the final thing I guess that I would say about this is when you have more supply coming on, you take a very, you know, so you start and say boron, you know, on a relative basis is very small, 3 and 1 half, 4 million tons, however you want to define it in terms of global supply. As those supplies increase, and of course, they're mismatched with demand, prices could come down a bit. But just in general, if supply comes up, people will find new uses for this. And you think of like rare, you know, the rare earths, and then all of a sudden the magnets that came along, etc. Things like where if you just had too small a market, you simply couldn't make any of these applications.

35:45 And I think Boron is going to be another one of those types of markets. So that would be my comments on that. Boron is really interesting. A few weeks ago, I spoke at an offshore wind caucus in DC, where it was talking about the potential pain points in the supply chain. You know, and there is a big differential. We haven't spent, Steve mentioned in his opening remarks about solar, and we firmly concur that that is a market that boron and boric acid is gonna play into, Because it's not only the new demand coming online, it's also the old technology that has to be replaced. And the same goes for wind turbines. Onshore wind and offshore wind are very different. The size of a turbine itself offshore is about 2 and a half times that onshore, right? They just have to, they can capture that much more space. But when you start to break it down, right?

36:43 5% of every single one of those large wind turbine blades is boric acid. And when you start looking at the gigawatts that we as a country want to add both onshore and offshore, it really quickly starts to add up to a pretty significant amount of consumption of boric acid that is needed just to capture the new demand. That's not even to replace, that's not even to go into other items. There's gonna be that much more product that is needed and there just aren't enough resources. There's just not enough deposits that are through the permitting process and through the construction process. And Steve and I fight a lot of the same battles when it comes to trying to bring essentially a Greenfield project online.

37:35 And when the government wants to add 30 gigawatts of wind by 2030, just an offshore, where's that product gonna come from? That's a big question mark. And it's going to provide an opportunity for guys like myself and for Steve. So we're excited about that. You know, that's a great statistic. You brought up the replacement of all this, because we all forget. I mean, solar has been around for a while. So all of those, you know, and of course there's performance degradation every year. So as all those old panels have got to be, you know, reinstalled and remanufactured, you're right. Where's it going to be? And as, you know, if I think about something that we talked about or you talked about at the very beginning with regards to Rio, and its million ton operation over in California and starting to get a little bit long in the tooth.

38:23 I think about what they're planning on now over in Serbia, in Jadar, which is a lithium boron department's deposit. It's actually weird. I think it's the only known instance of the mineralization that they now call jadeite or whatever. Right. But what's wild is, you know, People who are not familiar with the natural resources industry do not understand the length of time it takes to get something going. And I think in terms of 2031, 2032, something like that for our project, which seems like a tremendous amount of time to investors. But in the grand scheme of things, because we're not starting at 0, it's not. But the average, I think, copper project takes 16 years from discovery to production.

39:11 I mean, that's crazy. Take something now where, like Jadar, And so say Rio wants to replace a million tons of refined borates or you know, whatever the equivalent is I think maybe they're gonna get 160 170 thousand tons out of something that's politically active right over in Serbia It's not gonna be a cakewalk to get that done and I'm not saying anywhere It's gonna be a cakewalk developing an asset, but I'm just saying, it's not like that's going to happen in 3 years, right? It's already been delayed for 3 or 4 years and they just got sort of the go ahead to go again. So people can start to understand all the implications for supply disruptions, for bringing new projects on, for underestimating demand, and all of that has got a very, very pronounced impact on strengthening prices over time. And obviously that's the kind of thing that JT and I hopefully would like to see over time for our projects.

40:05 So I'd love to augment a little bit more on the Yator project, because it's interesting, right? It's always been, and back when I was in the potash sector, there was always the Janssen mine by BHP that was always held out there as sort of, okay, but if that comes in, that's gonna have a massive impact to the market. The thing about the Jader Project is it's being, it's actually a different form of borates called yatorite. And yatorite, there's never been a commercially viable solution to take yatorite and turn it into boric acid. Most of what are the boric acid that we see today that is used in refined products comes from culminate.

40:52 Culminate is what we mine, it's what the Turks mine, it's what U.S. Borax used to mine, but they're getting into a little bit less pure. The South American companies, they mine a boret called Ulicite, and that really, there's a little bit heavier, a little higher heavy metal content. It does go into crop nutrition because it's cheap, and it gives you a cheaper source of those micronutrients. So, you know, when we look at the Yator project and the applicability, if it ever comes, I mean, it sits in a massive tourist destination. It sits right next to one of the largest sources of drinking water in that entire region. Just because they've had a new government coming in saying, okay, we're gonna re-grant you the mining permits still means that they're decades and decades away.

41:45 They've got a massive PR fight. They've got to solve a technical challenge Which a lot of experts in this space will tell you is not solvable And so while it's nice to have it out there to call Call into question upstart companies like, you know Nevada lithium and 5e when you dig in and you scratch below 1 level of the surface, you'll start to realize that even if they were to be successful through all of that, right, 160,000 tons of boric acid is a fraction. In fact, Rio's US Borax operation is dropping about 100,000 tons a year, right? So they started at a million and they're working backwards. That would barely even replace what is coming out of the market. And the demand, You see in one of our investor presentations, we have a demand number of about 5.4% CAGR.

42:37 So look, we need more projects to come online just to meet growing demand. That's gonna be pretty significant. I was actually just asking all of you about that. And you both touched on this a little bit, but can you just talk a little bit about how you see the boron market evolving over the next 5 to 10 years? Obviously, it's hard to predict where it goes entirely, but based on what you've seen thus far, both globally and in particular, the US. You want to take a breath, JT? I'll start off. Because you've been doing the yeoman's work. I think that if we assume the global electrification is gonna continue, then I think you're gonna see an acceleration just predicated upon EVs being part of it, increased penetration of solar, that whole deal.

43:36 I think that you're gonna see a bifurcation in the market between global demand and US demand because the ramifications for defense industry use are gonna become clarified and acknowledged. In the U. S. And therefore I think you're going to see- bifurcation as well with the pricing so essentially what's the price of. You know boron that you can use in certain applications that are you know going to go into U. S. Defense. Versus what you could do in the rest of the world, right? And people forget, again, with the complexity of these materials and thinking that, you know, you're going to just say, maybe you take boric acid as a precursor, I'll call it a precursor and I'm probably doing it incorrectly, but this is the way I think about it. You know, and you have to refine it into something different. Well, typically all this refining capacity, whether or not it's in boron or in the case of lithium, again, it's overseas. And specifically a lot of this stuff occurs in China.

44:31 And therefore, it's going to be excluded from a lot of the Western hemisphere demand, specifically the US demand. So the point is you're going to have volatility. I think you're going to have pricing volatility, frankly, probably, before you see a lot of the demand start to accelerate because, again, I look at the analog of the lithium industry, where if people's expectations with regards to EV production are not met, et cetera, and because the industry, the lithium industry itself, is so nascent, you get mismatches in supply and demand that are clearly going to be you know I think taken care of by time and increased demand. And that's assuming of course that the end goal stays the same. So which in our case would be again global electrification, the green economy.

45:19 So going forward for boron, I think it's one of these things that's a little bit a little bit earlier, frankly, even though it is in many ways a mature market for its existing applications, again, fertilizers, fiberglass, ceramics, all this sort of stuff. But the new applications they're being developed and a lot of them are high tech. And I think that it may take a couple of years longer to get sorted out. But I expect that there's going to be an acceleration in the demand curve you know above say the mid single digits. And you know I'm telling you it takes a lot to get commodity, entire industries to grow much quicker than that because they cannot handle the stresses, the overall stresses on the system, let alone at the project level. So that's sort of the way I think about it. I like one of the statements that Steve used earlier in some of his comments, that you know along the lines of copper, copper is being pulled along as the electrification of transportation continues to expand.

46:18 And that goes beyond just EVs, right? That's, it's anything. It can be marine vehicles, it can be long haul trucking vehicles. Copper is going along for that. From a Boron perspective, As we evolve from a defense technology perspective, drone technology, and as an ugly subject, but as military and defense becomes more and more mechanized, the need for more of these specialty materials just continues to grow. And I can't say it enough, and I've said it a lot in my 2 years, we are so dependent for those type of materials from Russia and China. If the average, you know, if the average American knew how dependent we were, it would absolutely frighten them to death. And so we need more domestic resources, we need more deposits that can be fully permitted and actually get through to production.

47:15 The scarcity of boron deposits is pretty prevalent. But so you have that kind of that push pull or pull effect in electrification. You have the same push pull or pull effect when it comes to national defense. All of it leads to 1 thing, which is we need more. We need more boron. I use an analogy quite often when I'm talking to, you know, various groups of stakeholders. Think about rare earths 5 years ago, right? Or 6 years ago. Before NP really solved that issue, rare earths were relatively unknown. The misnomer is that boron is actually more rare than all rare earth deposits. And so when you need to use it in all of the types of technologies we've talked about permanent magnets being a big, big one for boron.

48:08 Boy, that's a problem. That's a problem we're gonna face domestically. It's a big problem for us globally. And We've sat here and we've talked about the length of time it takes to go from concept to production, right through the permitting, and then the cost of all of that. You know, there's very few companies that can actually get through that labyrinth. But We are with boron where lithium was 8, 9 years ago, and where rare earths were 4 or 5 years ago. And it's coming and that supply demand gap is real. It's here and it's now. Awesome. Now just to get into a couple company specific questions to just change the flow here. So, Steve, as your company name suggests, you're exploring for lithium primarily in Nevada.

48:56 However, you're on this panel, as most folks probably know, because you've discovered some significant boron at your project. So can you just discuss the potential of this discovery? And maybe, you know, there's some questions about how that will affect perhaps PFS, PEA, things like that. Right. Yeah, so the so boron is a relatively new thing for Nevada lithium. You know, I firmly believe that the JT is going to get to enjoy the benefits of a growing boron market before we will. But it's been, I think, a very eye opening and potentially very valuable addition to what we already have at Bonnie Clare which is our lithium resource and by the way we're situated about 2 and a half hours northwest of Vegas down in Nevada.

49:45 So you know this is the way that we're looking at boron. And just to give a very, very short history, leave time for JT here at the end. You know, we recently discovered through some drilling that occurred at the end of last year and then we got the assays earlier this year, that we had some tremendously high boron assays coming back with extremely high lithium assays over very very wide intercepts down at basically the deepest part of the holes that we were drilling. And to us the similars- the similarities are to what Ionear has at Rhyolite Ridge where the boron the high levels of boron are associated with the high levels of lithium. Now we don't know at this point in time, and we're working to find out right now, whether or not they're hosted by the same minerals, things like that, et cetera.

50:35 But what is happening is, as we were working our way to PFS, which would encompass drilling, potentially doing a field experiment with our method of mining, which is called borehole mining, we were starting to examine the metallurgy on these very very high lithium and boron value materials. We found that basically that the mineralization is called 0 site and it's changed from what we were originally testing before. So we have a lot of options at Nevada Lithium. Again, we're earlier stage than what JT's firm is doing. But the way I look at it with regards to the boron is it's almost all additive to me. As long as the cost to get the boron out don't exceed essentially the revenue that we'll produce from me, to me it's a win because the way I look at it is the we are accessing materials at Bonnie Clare that are material 2, 3 times higher than what we currently have in our PEA.

51:38 So in other words what I'm saying is from my perspective. As long as we can get the boron removed. It allows us to access a much higher grade of lithium, which is in basically our economic models, much more important than anything that boron would provide. This, the boron is just gonna be basically icing on top of the cake for us. So we're early stage, but we find it very, very exciting. And we'll be talking to the markets over the course of the next couple of months, as we decide the best way to essentially put the value proposition out in front of everybody. Max, I'm on mute. Max. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, the classic. Okay, so yeah, just quickly, Steve, to touch on, there's an audience question about how the Boron discovery was received in your discussions at FastMarket.

52:33 Oh, it was received very well. Some folks have been associated with IonEar and Rhyolite Ridge end users of lithium. Obviously, there would, I think, be a natural attraction because their level of understanding is higher than a lot of other peoples. You know, the one thing that I would just, you know, when I talk about investors who aren't, who haven't been necessarily around natural resource development as much, is to just sort of talk to them about what they perceive as delays are. You know, in our case, we're going from PEA. I wanted to have a PFS done essentially at the end of this year. I don't think it's going to be done. And one of the reasons now, frankly, the main reason is because our mineralization has changed and we have to take into account not only the type of lithium that we have, meaning very, very high grade, but also the additive value of boron. And you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself.

53:29 You know, We all want to get to the next stage. PFS, I've always talked about, that's sort of the inflection point where end users want to talk to you, you know, and, you know, you do things like with offtake agreements, et cetera, things like that. The problem is you don't want to commit to a PFS until you're sure of what you have, because you can leave a tremendous amount of value behind. Investors recognize this. So when I talk about we have a PEA and then we're doing an updated PEA or what the sequence is going to be, it's all, believe me, we understand the ramifications of not getting things done as quickly as we once wanted to. But the way I think about it from Nevada Lithium's perspective, we essentially have a whole new, frankly, better deposit on our hands than what we thought we had 3 years ago. So yeah, it was very warmly received at the Vegas conference.

54:18 Thanks. And JT, so 5E is currently at an interesting point as you're shipping boric acid samples while undergoing a customer qualification program. And we understand that there are limits to what you can disclose, but JT, what types of potential customers are showing interest in your products? So, you know, the kind of in, I'll just talk from maybe an industry perspective. It runs the gamut and it's really interesting. So, you know, when I look at how our commercial plan and how our commercial strategy looks like today, when I look at sort of the markets that we're in, right? So it can be anything from consumer electronics to, and I'm using actual examples, to fiber optic technology, even into sort of the advanced derivative space and into things like the pharma space, right? So, who would have known that outside of drugs, you know, pharma glass, syringes, vials, tubes, injectable type solutions, all of that will have a boric acid input into it.

55:29 We have, you know, We're not obviously the whole, we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into serving any particular interest or industry, but we do have sort of this growing amount of industries that even coming sort of full circle, I never would have thought that X industry had boric acid as an input, large scale producers, small scale producers, specialty producers. So it kind of runs the gamut. I mean, anything from, like I said, consumer electronics to specialty pharma are groups that we've got. And that program continues to grow almost on a weekly basis. So we're excited about where our commercial strategy is starting to evolve into, where we're starting to send product.

56:21 You know when you get through that labyrinth you can get into bigger and bigger testing. Our customers want to ultimately start using our product in their actual output So producing their end product with our boric acid, that's gonna lead to a lot of different positive things commercially for us, right? You can parlay that into customer support, you parlay that into offtake agreements, all really, really, really good things. And we have the benefit of being able to use our product because our operation is, you know, we started producing, we produced our first part, first tonnages of boric acid late April of this year. We've been refining it. We've actually have a very iterative approach with our growing customer portfolio where we can start to tweak our operations to meet these very fine specifications.

57:11 So it's in a great position and we think that we're going to be able to knock a whole bunch of things out here by the end of the year. And we hope to be able to continue to provide positive news to the market as it relates to our commercial program and our customer program. Perfect, and JT, if you could maybe just briefly elaborate on what these products actually are. There are, you know, from any other call today, there's, you know, probably very limited boron exposure for any. So I wanted to know, you know, perhaps a bit about that, if you could elaborate. Yeah, so let me give you some examples. Every iPad and iPhone on the planet have a specialty product called Gorilla Glass. That is a glass that is specifically designed for Apple products. There's a very similar product, a type of proprietary product that'll go into Samsung devices.

58:04 The screens and the cameras that we're all tuned in on, that'll have boric acid as an input. Just about anything that's made of fiberglass or has some sort of fiberglass, I mean carpet fibers have boric acid that go into it. The fiberglass in wind turbines, the fiberglass on cars, all of that has boric acid into it. Steve mentioned earlier borosilica glass, which essentially sits on the outside of every solar panel. I mean, the reach is very vast. It probably is, as people are sitting in their offices, there's probably 15 or 20 uses of some type of boron derivative, including boric acid, that are sitting in front of people and they don't even know it.

58:49 Perfect. And just in terms of boric acid, there was a question here about the pricing of it. Is it clear what the pricing is? Does it fluctuate a lot? You know, you can get you can get There is some some very active and accurate Chinese spot pricing pricing data that is out there on the internet. There is a well-known publication that has a vast following that is going to start to publish a boric acid price, spot price. There are now some groups that are covering a ferroboron price too, so you can back solve into boric acid by looking at the steel industry and you sort of back that out.

59:35 It's, it has been relatively opaque, but frankly we've been doing a lot of blocking and tackling to get more transparency into it. You know, historically it's been sub a thousand dollars a ton. It hasn't been that way in a long time, multiple, you know, multiple years. And it continues to grow as the demand starts to, continues to dry out. So, you know, I don't ever like to lock myself into a price point because here's the thing a commercial contract We'll have a price point a spot market will have a price point and a specialty product will have a price point Right and depending on where you end up locking in it kind of it kind of sort of It'll all depend upon that What I can tell you is there is a lot of desire for people to get some transparency into the to what the price points for boric acid are, very similar to other products that we've talked about here, and that is coming in the very, very near future, which we believe is going to not only help, but bolster our case because when you look at RSK 1300 technical document, there's price assumptions built into that that's publicly available.

1:00:50 And when the spot pricing and publications come out, you're gonna see a lot of similarities. So we're excited. All right, thanks. And just before we get into our last question here, can you just briefly talk, we spoke kind of global scale and US, but can you just talk about the local economies and local communities where you operate? What kind of measures are you taking to ensure that there's a positive impact on those as well? Well, in our case, again, we're very, very early stage, essentially doing exploratory drilling, even though we have a very, very large project. But the impact on the local community, I would say the first impact is just for basic information about what we're doing.

1:01:38 So I've been out to the town of Beatty to speak in front of the town's folks there, the administration, et cetera, to let them know exactly what our plans are going forward. And then we always have things like, you know, dust mitigation, trying to keep lights from shining, you know, into people's living rooms, even though there are no living rooms around from our drilling rigs at night, things like that. I mean obviously you need to be a good steward to develop a natural resource anywhere in the world, but we're again in Nevada which is arguably the number 1 mining jurisdiction in the world and Nevadans, they want to have the right type of minds. They want long-lived minds because they understand the JAMA impact, the impact it's going to have on their children, etc., going forward. So I would say it's just common sense being a good steward of your community relationships.

1:02:32 That's what we're doing right now and I know things will evolve and get more complex as we move forward and our participation in the local economy will continue to grow as we advance the project. And essentially it's like we won't do anything to the local community that we wouldn't, you know, want to unto ourselves. So that's the way I look at it. So from a 5E perspective, because we are operating a plant, we have about 97% of our employees come from the local area. And when I say local area, I say essentially a 60 minute, 60 mile radius for drive-in. So we do run a 24 by 7 operation. So we've brought in higher paying jobs.

1:03:18 So when you look at sort of the average wage in the particular area, so we're about 17 miles outside of Barstow, California, high unemployment rates, very few skilled jobs out there. We're paying significantly higher. So we're bringing an economic stimulus into that particular area. We've partnered with local universities, trade schools, we've even partnered with a group that will take veterans and certify them on large machinery operation. And so we do a lot of hiring out of that. So we have a very positive community impact when it comes from an economics and an employment perspective. We're also mining in a very different way. So we're in situ leaching. So we don't have multi-level buildings that will add to any sort of site pollution, light pollution.

1:04:11 Everything is done essentially underground. So we have a well field. In fact, if you were driving on the main interstate, you wouldn't actually be able to tell anything is there. We sit behind a mountain range in the central Mojave Desert. And so we've done a lot to mitigate the environmental footprint or impact when it comes to any sort of an extractive industry. Because of where our ore body is, it lends itself to solution mining. And so we have all the benefits of no large open pit. We're not putting, you know, we're not utilizing large diesel polluting vehicles. We're not sending that stuff underground. So from a safety perspective, right, we don't have personnel going subsurface.

1:04:57 It's all mechanized. It's all mitigated. And so, you know, from from an environmental and a visual impact perspective, we're pretty nil as well. So very fortunate across the board. Perfect, thanks. And as we as kind of like a wrap on this, the last question here for you is, with Boron being very critical for various industries, how do you ensure a stable supply chain and mitigate potential disruptions? At least for us, you know, I mean, how do you mitigate secure and steady supply chains? You look where the single points of failure can be. You know, when I outlined in my opening remarks, the fact that Turkey really dictates 65% of the global production.

1:05:44 We don't have many deposits here domestically. So you make sure that the ones that you do have domestically get up and running. If our project gets to scale and Steve's project comes online and even Rhyolite Ridge, I mean, you could make a case that all of that tonnage combined will not replace what eventually will go offline when real shuts its doors. And they have talked about sun setting dates, right? Reclamation dates. So you talk about points of failure, you talk about ensuring that domestic resources get permitted, get financed, get up and running. And then you also talk about, have to talk about the processing of that, right? Making sure that us producers have the ability to process the material so we don't have to rely on Russia and we don't have to rely on China.

1:06:36 Those are really, you know, the whole, you know, invest in America, made in America, are as about as true words as 1 can ever speak. If you wanna take away that single point or that point of failure in the supply chain, you've got to invest in domestic resources and ensure that we get to production. Yeah. Just to quickly echo that, you need to have multiple sources of production domestically as well, Even just to mitigate transportation risk, all these sorts of things, if they're all in geologically in 1 area, you're prone to disruption, et cetera. Now, the geology may not lend itself towards being able to diversify across the continental US, But preferably that's what you would want to do. It'd be interesting to see the way that it turns out, but you definitely want to develop multiple projects to try to mitigate the risk of disruption.

1:07:26 Excellent. So thank you both for, that's all the time we have for today. So thank you both for taking us through this panel session. I also wanna thank everyone who submitted questions or comments. We'll be sure to send those forward to the relevant panelists after the event. Today's recording will be available to watch on demand in the coming hours, So look out for that. I'll pass it to Steve first here for closing remarks and then to you, JT. Thanks, Max, for putting this together. JT, as always, I always enjoy being on a panel with you. I learn a hell of a lot. And this is the area that's definitely newer to me than it is to you, but I'm very, very excited about what I see for Boron is, in our particular case, Nevada Lithium, a secondary product, but it certainly looks like it's going to have an impact, nonetheless, so I look forward to it, and thanks again for your time.

1:08:20 I'll echo those sentiments, Steve. It's been great. I know this is our second panel that we've sat on together. I look forward to future panels. We've had a lot of mutually beneficial agenda items that I think that we can help each other, you know, raise the profile on, which is good for everybody. It's good for all the junior projects, especially in the West Coast of the United States. Maxim, for you and the 6 Platform, you guys are fantastic partners. Just put on great events and Thank you most importantly to those that decided to take an hour and 9 minutes out of your day to listen to Steve and I, talk about the merits of our projects and Boron as a market. As always, I think we're both available for questions after the fact. So thank you to everybody joining in.

1:09:08 Thank you everyone once again, and I hope you