Cypress Development: 2021 in Review & Looking Forward to Upcoming Catalysts

0:07 Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Cypress Development's live summit today, hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce Dr. Bill Willoughby, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bram Yonker, Chief Financial Officer, and Spiros Kakos, Vice President, Investor Relations. Dr. Bill is going to walk us through a company presentation. And after, we will open the floor to a live Q&A. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions at any time on the Q&A panel on the right-hand side of the screen And we'll get to them after the presentation and as always the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on six.com But without any further ado, I'm gonna hand it over to you. Dr. Bill to get things started Our project is the Clayton Valley Lithium Project in Nevada. On this opening slide we'll talk about our deposit location and our project orientation.

0:58 What we're doing is we're extracting lithium from clay. That is a unique process in itself in the world in the world of lithium About 60% of the lithium comes out of brine saline brines mostly out of Chile There's a lot of resources in Argentina and Bolivia and The second leading source of lithium is out of hard rock more or less Granite pegmatites that would be the primary producer out of Australia. There are yet no lithium clay deposits in production. Nevada has an abundance of those, as we'll see, of resources. We'll take a look at the resource picture among those deposits.

1:44 There are some things to take in off of this opening slide. We're standing on our clay deposit in this photo. There's about 400 feet of clay beneath us and this would be where our pit is located. You can see some of the clay outcropping in the opening slide. That ridge in the foreground is called Angel Island. It's older rock which is surrounded by the clay on both sides. That is where we plan to put our full plant site or mill in our mine plant. If you go over that ridge you drop into Clayton Valley proper. There's a brine operation there, Silver Peak, which has been in operation producing lithium for over 50 years. That's now operated by Albemarle Corp. And further off on the skyline, off to the left, is a project called Rhyolite Ridge, which is operated by a company, Ioneer.

2:35 Some features in the opening slide, there's a thin veneer of gravel over top of the clay as you can see, so we have a very low strip ratio. Another feature is that you can see the sparse vegetation. It's mostly scrub sagebrush. We've done a lot of work on the environmental side and feel that we're in a good position as far as moving our project forward. There's only surface water to speak of. This is on the edge of an alluvial fan, so we have water which comes in with storms, but of course is over the deposit. There's no groundwater, seeps or springs to speak of. So we're in a good position that way in terms of groundwater as well. Some cautionary statements.

3:23 Like just address why Cypress as an investment choice. Our position is based on 4 real pillars right now. We've got resources, technology, we have facilities, not faculty, facilities and water. We have a large land package, multi-million ton LCE resource. Our land package is big enough to support all of the facilities in terms of the operation, our mill site, our tailings. That's very important to have enough room to put your project. Our technology is unique. We're using a chloralkaline process to leach our clay. We have a license agreement with the company Chemionix, which is important. It gives us a direct lithium extraction DLE process, which by which we're able to concentrate the lithium from solution, our leach solutions, into a product.

4:19 That's a key. Under facilities we've got a pilot plant site which I'm talking to you from down in Amargosa Valley. This is a permitted facility. It's one of the largest testing facilities for leaching clay. And we're very proud of what we've done this year in bringing this pilot plant along. And then underwater, we just concluded a water rights agreement, which gives us all the water we need for our project as far as we can see in our mine plan for moving forward. And water is absolutely essential in developing our project. 2021 has been a very busy year for us, mostly centered around our pilot plant.

5:06 As you can see, once we had concluded a bot deal financing in March, we raised about $20 million in that financing. Spiros, in a moment, will tell us about how that financing was arranged. We then proceeded to lease our pilot plant site here in Amargosa, assemble our equipment, and then move on a license for some of the technology that's involved in the plant. Just assembling all of this together and bringing us to this point in time has been a real experience and I'm very proud of the team here that we've moved forward on that. Spiros, would you like to? Sure, Yeah, we've got, as everybody can see here, we've got 130 million shares, as you know, standing and 150 million fully diluted, brings our market cap close to around 250 million, sorry, 300, close to 300 million, I mean.

6:03 The company is institutionally held, is about roughly around 8%. Management currently owns, we used to be around 8% in management, which includes directors, but we've had some 2 directors stepped off, we brought in 2 other directors to replace them. And so now we're roughly around, I think around around 6%, but that'll probably change in time because the directors haven't had enough chance to pick up the share prices. Although days like today are a good time to be picking up stock. The company is, as Bill said, we've had 1 initial financing, institutionally held financing that is, which was PI back in early 2021 from PI.

6:50 Other than that, everybody else has been in here has been, you know, it's been those 1 million, 2 million financial raises that we've done. So it's pretty much a retail stock at this point. And that's something we're trying to kind of trying to change and evolve and become much more increased for institutional holdings to be around 15 to 20%. Great. Yeah, As Spiro said, we have made changes on our management and board. We brought Cassandra Joseph in as our chair. That was an excellent move. She's a formerly an attorney, deputy attorney general of the state of Nevada, Division of Natural Resources. So great experience there. She's a Reno attorney We also brought Brian Disher who was formerly PricewaterhouseCooper Ken Owen who was ex Anglo and De Beers so we've added a lot of management on that side, which is really moving us towards being an independent board focused on bringing the company more to a mid-major level and definitely focused on bringing our project towards the feasibility level and beyond.

8:03 On the management side everyone on this page has had either some or extensive experience in Nevada with projects. Bram Yonker is an ex-Nevada copper, And he'll help answer some financial questions in the Q&A. Dan Kallback, Adam Knight, both I've worked with for years on different projects in Nevada. And Spiros and I worked with the company in Exco, which had a copper project up in the northeast part of the state. So one question we get a lot is how do we stack up with our peers and what are our peers? Well if you're talking about valuations really clay and clay stones are their own class.

8:51 And what we see on this slide really should be our peer group if you wanna look at valuation side. Why peers? Because it's really not fair to look at say a brine deposit in Argentina as being the same as a clay stone. They're not. In fact, a brine in Argentina would have attract a different investment group than say a claystone in Nevada. Probably Chinese money would be more interested in the Argentinian brine and not able to participate as well in a US project for 1. Same token, a hard rock deposit has entirely different cost profile than what a lithium clay deposit would have.

9:37 So comparing a hard rock project, say like a Piedmont in North Carolina is different from what lithium America's or one of these deposits on this list wouldn't have. Really on the list, you have 5 deposits. There's a couple of companies which share the same deposit as Cyprus. Who on that list are the peers that are valued more? Well, Ioneers, I think is around $1.6 billion valuation. Lithium America is around 4 or 5 billion. And the rest of the group we're working to catch up. And we'll conduct later in the Q&A how Cypress plans to catch up in valuation and fill that gap. But We feel like we're in a very good position. We with our pilot plant, we're one of the advanced projects and we're, the work that we've done, bring us through the PFS and work into the feasibility, definitely puts us in a lead in terms of trying to get there to fill that gap at this point.

10:41 And this is our project location. We're halfway between Reno and Las Vegas with our lithium resource. Our project sits in Clayton Valley. We have 6,500 acres there adjoining as you see in the slide to the right, Albemarle's lithium brine operation. We also have a square mile of geothermal lease up to the Northeast, which might come into play as we look at renewable resources to power our project. We also operate 2 other sites, a sample prep admin facility up by Tonopah Airport and 100 miles southeast of our project in Amargosa Valley we have our pilot plant. We're very excited to have the pilot plant location that we have. It's fully permitted for the leach test work that we're doing and that's a real critical thing when you're trying to advance a project at the pilot plant stage.

11:39 Here we have some results from the pre-feasibility study, a synopsis of the cashflow analysis that we completed earlier this year. This was based upon sulfuric acid as our leaching reagent. We used a base case of $9,500

11:56 a ton for lithium carbonate equivalent. And that generated very robust economics, 26% IRR, $1 billion NPV at 8% on an after-tax cashflow basis. CapEx was under 500 million dollars, OpEx under $3,400 a ton. We looked at this project initially with the idea of sulfuric acid as our focus. That would be the same as the other clay deposits in Nevada. A year ago we started rethinking that, given that we have these brine resources around us in the groundwater. We wanted to make a system that was going to be compatible with that approach. So we started looking at chloride leaching, hydrochloric acid combined with a sodium chloride brine as the basis for our project.

12:45 We found that we had better performance, say, on some of the materials handling and leaching characteristics. We also saw the potential here of having a better environmental footprint to the project and being able to eliminate that dependence on sulfur as a supply source. So with that in mind, we began test work, had really positive results. And earlier this year, we just shifted the entire project over to this hydrochloric acid approach. We'll go through the flow sheet for it here in a few moments.

13:18 And we saw that there were definite benefits in terms of the economics. There probably a wash, maybe a little bit more on the capex for the chlor-alkaline approach, and maybe a bit more, bit less on the operating side. An often asked question is how can we operate a project at 1,100 parts per million lithium when some others are a bit higher grade? Well a lot of that lies in the deposit features itself. We have an extensive flat line deposit, thin gravel overburden to it, negligible strip ratio. But a key to the deposit is that it's very uniform, virtually constant grade along strike and at depth.

14:06 So we have very few if any disruptions in the stratigraphy, no inner beds of waste or low grade material. Once we get into it, it's pretty much

14:18 uniform grade with depth and it's a soft clay so we don't need to drone blast it and we're able to reach it with relatively low acid consumption. And This is a picture on this slide of our resources and reserves. You would see a comparable sort of a resource reserve picture if you looked at, say, Lithium Americas, where you have a large amount of resources and a relatively smaller amount of reserves. We've got 1.3 billion tons in our resource category measured and indicated. We have only 200 million tons in our reserves and that's what we need to formulate a mine plan. The reason for that is that we're constrained on the production side. In this case, it was looking at the sulfur supply as our critical element.

15:11 We hope by working with hydrochloric acid and chloroalkaline approach that we might be able to break that constraint and up our production. But even with that we generated a healthy 40-year mine plan, 5.5 million tons per year

15:27 of clay feed to our plant and with that we were producing around 30,000 tons a year of lithium hydroxide product targeted in our pre-feasibility study. This is the general arrangement from our pre-feasibility study. As I mentioned earlier, you need a land area, 6,500 acres in our case here, to be able to put all your facilities. That includes our pit, our plant site, stockpiles and our tailings facility. We're fortunate in that respect that we have adequate land and also that ridge of Angel Island to locate our plant site. Our pit is well configured for mining. It's shallow, elongate, lends itself well to conveyor haulage.

16:14 And the strip ratio is quite low. As we go forward into the feasibility study quite likely we're going to be looking at that tailings location, see if we can come up with an alternative because quite likely that covers up some of our potential resources which are not carried in our resource or mine plan. Now we'll talk about the flow sheet a little bit. Basically we have a same sort of flow sheet for sulfuric acid leaching as hydrochloric acid. The difference is with the hydrochloric acid approach, we don't need sulfur to use a sulfur burner in an acid plant. We generate our acid onsite by using electric power. We apply that to a sodium chloride brine, and in that we make hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide.

17:07 Those are 2 important ingredients in our formula. Hydrochloric acid leaches the lithium from the clay. The sodium hydroxide then neutralizes that spent leach solution and brings the pH up and we're able to remove the impurities with it and then move it on to a lithium recovery area. Our lithium recovery area is unique in that we worked with a company, Chemionix, out of Ontario to develop or apply a direct lithium extraction DLE process to our

17:39 leach solution. And that concentrates our lithium in solution, upgrades it while rejecting the cation impurities, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. So with that, we're producing a concentrated leach solution, which then we will ship to Canada. Noram Engineering will then work on processing that until a final product for us. Benefits that we had with the hydrochloric acid approach, we were able to get easier filtration. That was a huge step forward for us. It was a limiting factor. Took us about 2 years to get to a feasibility study because we kept looking back and how do you actually separate your solids from liquids in a leach process and also allows us to work with a higher slurry density that was key for us in working with our water supply balance and then actually applying that in reality and going out and buying a water right, which we concluded.

18:43 And here in this slide we have our pilot plant configuration. It really is quite simple. We take our sample feed material, solids go one way in this flow chart, liquids go another way. The solids come in, introduced into a heated leach tank where we apply the acid solution. We then leach that for a specified period of time, roughly about 4 hours. That material moves into a thickener, that slurry. We then do our solids liquid separation through a bank of thickeners, washing that tail with fresher water, and then ultimately putting it on a belt filter and bagging those tails to be removed off-site. The solutions meanwhile are pregnant leach solution, which is separated in the thickening process, then moves on to a primary and secondary impurity removal. That's where we add the sodium hydroxide, drop out the iron and silica and some other metals.

19:41 We then deliver a clean solution to our LyonX lithium recovery unit. That's our DLE process where we reject the cations and concentrate the lithium into a higher purity solution, which we will then ship for final product from our pilot plant. We also do a tertiary removal step where we precipitate out the calcium using sodium hydroxide, and then that solution then returns around and goes back into leach. It is a very unique thing now when we're looking at our pilot plant, very exciting to watch the process work. That solution, when it comes out of the PLS stage, moves through our primary and secondary impurity removal. It starts out as a kind of lime green, you'll see in a moment, solution.

20:29 When we add the sodium hydroxide, changes from that color into red, and then all the iron and other co-products drop out. And then we are taking a virtually clean water with peering solution, clear solution over into our Lion X area. Of course, on our plant objectives, getting our extraction of lithium out is a main focus. We wanna see what that percentage is when we actually leach the clay. We also wanna see what the quality of that end product, that solution is coming off of Lion X or DLE process. In the slide, You can see on the center of the photo, there's a green tank, that's our leach tank. To the left of that is our sample feed and a tritter which breaks the clay down into a slurry.

21:27 And to the right, we have a couple of thickeners arranged. And in the foreground, there's our vacuum belt filter. We're occupying now virtually all of the building down there in Amargosa. That building's right behind me where I'm sitting today. Plant is very compact. It's fun to walk in there and watch it operating. Relatively quiet, only this a tritter and the hydro cyclone or cyclone that's in the foreground. This black unit are actually making noise. So very quiet plant and guys are working around in the plant.

22:12 We have 3 operators. As far as dust and fumes, it's quite clean. So quite happy with the way it's been arranged. What you see in the tank in the photo is our leach tank in the center. The several thickeners working to the back wall And then in the lower left-hand corner are parts of our LION-X lithium recovery area.

22:44 We've been operating the plant using test solutions, synthetic solutions for about a month and a half. We started running clay through it about 3 weeks ago. Now we are in the process right now we're in day 4 of a second continuous leach test where we're running 24 hours a day. So it's going quite well. We're quite pleased with the results. This slide you see we're producing clean tailing coming off the vacuum belt. There's a leach solution that's being pulled off of a primary leach tank. It's running easily 300,400 PPM average right now. We don't have final assays on this. Our final assays get sent to ALS in Vancouver.

23:32 There's about a 4 week backlog on that. We do have an onsite ICP, so we can are able to generate our own values on site and see how the system's performing. And from those, we are happy with the way the plant's performing. We're pulling off about 10 ppm off of the DLE area, which indicates to us that we're probably getting a high level of extraction going through with a plant and being recovered. We'll only know that when we get the final assays back, but things are looking very positive right now for us.

24:15 Here's another photo of the pilot plant. In the middle, you see the leach tanks, the vacuum belt filter, and on the left is our sample feed area going to the primary leach tank. We run about a bulk bag, 1 ton a day through it on our design. We've been running a little bit less so far just to get things tuned up. Our plans are to work up until Christmas break in the next couple of days. Then for the rest of the year we will be making some adjustments in the plant and resume our testing on a continuous basis in January. We're taking samples every 6 hours. That's a sample array on the table from 4 different test runs, 4 different sampling runs, that'd be 24 hours.

25:09 And the photo on the left, you see the thickener bank. Those are 1 to 2 cubic meter thickeners, so fairly large. On the right hand side is our PIR SIR area where we do the impurity removal. We paid a lot of attention to design and social and environmental governance issues. We wanted to make our project as environmentally conscious as possible. And that's a key driver in moving to this chloralcalene process. We're also going to be thinking of ways to use renewable energy and give us a lower carbon footprint overall. So we've done a year's worth of baseline work.

25:58 The baseline work indicates that we've got no real issues ahead of us. It's actually one of the more favorable projects I've ever seen for being able to move it forward environmentally. Gonna address some other issues on the ESG side when we have our Q&A, but I think we're in great shape as far as moving the project forward. And the main catalyst for driving the stock price up is gonna be our pilot plant. It's always been my assumption with this is that we've got to demonstrate that we do have a viable process, that the process works and that it's economic. The way we get there is by showing that, yes, we can scale this up. That's what the pilot plant is for, that we can look at all the different parts of the project and the process and see if there's any issues.

26:56 All that will come together. We've already been looking and talking to a bunch of people for a feasibility consultant, and that's upcoming in the next year. So working on the feasibility and permitting. And summary, Our treasury is strong. We've got more than enough money to carry us through the feasibility stage. And our pilot plant testing is nominal burn rate on that. So we're in great financial position there. The project is very strong in its location. Rates favorably in terms of its being in a positive mining jurisdiction and the pilot plan is a key driver for us.

27:50 And we will now open up for questions. Yeah, we've got a lot of questions and Bill, I'm just going to start reading them and Bram, if you can pitch in a little bit here as the questions come over. I'll give this one to Bram here. Has CIP or Cypress had any takeover offers of interest? Yes. So takeover offers by their very nature are highly regulated transactions. So we are not at liberty to comment on anything like that outside of the regulatory framework. So that's all I can say about that. No, it's good to have clarity on those questions like that. There's nothing wrong with asking any kind of a question, right? No, absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely.

28:40 Where are we with uplistings and rebranding? This is very urgent. There's a few questions about that. Bram, why don't you talk about uplisting, and I'll talk about the rebranding. Yes, so look, I appreciate that the market is very volatile. Sometimes that can be a little bit discouraging to investors. But the reality is that if we look back at 2021, we only completed the very first real fundraise for the company that was done in March before I joined. I joined the company in May. During that time, you know, water rights have been secured, technology has been secured for the pilot plant.

29:30 The pilot plant has been built despite numerous sort of challenges that we currently have around logistics in the U.S. We've brought in a majority independent board of directors. We've changed and we brought in the necessary structures inside the company. So there was really a lot of work that's been done here over the last 8 months. We brought in Spiros on the communication side. So one of the next targets, of course, for us is to close the valuation gap that we see in the market between us and some of our closer competitors.

30:19 When we look at 2022, I think we can summarize it like this. We have a great project. We have a pilot plant up and running that's operating to expectation. We have a treasury that's very strong. We have a management team now in place that's very strong. We have a board of directors that's very strong. So we've spent essentially 2021 to put all of these building blocks in place. And we are really ready now. And part of the drive in 2022 will be to focus on the investor communication, to really get the story out there. This is a very exciting story in the lithium place. You know, we only have 8% institutional shareholder base, which means the institutional shareholders and really need to become aware of who we are and why it is that us as management is so exciting about this. All the building blocks have been put in place. A lot of work has gone into 2021 to get all of that ready.

31:28 So 2022 should be a very exciting year for us. You know, the pilot plan results will start to come out. We're going to do the feasibility study. You know, the other aspects on the strategic front, which all forms part of natural evolution of a company like us. We will obviously also start looking at migrating to more senior boards. So there's a lot of exciting things for 2022. 2021 was a very exciting year for us and we really now need to just focus on getting that story out there so that people can appreciate the quality of the investment opportunity that we bring into the table. Yeah, and that will come along with rebranding as well, you know, new website, et cetera. That's all happening. It doesn't happen overnight.

32:17 There's a lot behind the scenes that we're getting done, but we hope sometime really early in 2022, we'll have a brand new website and the company will look very different than it is right now. Let's continue on. Yeah, step by step. And I wish I could make it go faster, but I'm not, I can't control how the web designers, how they work. So I'm just going to keep reading here. I'm trying to find questions that are a little bit different. Some of them, Brahm, you've answered here. Here's 1 from Chris. It says, with Cypress stating numerous times they are taking this into production themselves, with the cost of building the production plant costing 2 to 3 times the current market cap, why should institutional investors invest now considering that there will be a huge amount of money raised in the near future?

33:08 Why should current retail investors stay invested considering that dilution is coming? Brom, start off or Bill? I'll start off. Yeah, you want to start off, Bill? Sure, sure. I don't think it's appropriate. You really can't look at a project at this stage and just say, oh, you're not going to get the money for it, or you're going to take massive dilution because that's not necessarily the case. And for a company to not think positively about taking something into production, especially on a new commodity and something that you have to develop and prove that it works, that won't get you very far down the road. You have to stay positive, think that you're gonna take it all the way through feasibility into production.

33:58 And then you look around and see what sort of deals are being had. Certainly, Lithium Americas was a case where they were probably in our situation a couple of years ago, and they assembled the team, assembled the people. They're bringing in pretty good chunks of capital just in financings. As the time goes on, they'll have the wherewithal to bring that in with minimal dilution. Same thing if you look over at Ioneer, Ioneer did the $490 million deal with Sabanier. That gave up a bit of the project equity, but they got a premium on the capital that comes in for it. So there's a variety of ways that we can approach financing. It's definitely the stronger the project you have, the easier it's gonna be to finance.

34:49 You have thoughts there, Bram? Yeah, so maybe just a few other points. And, Bill, you've touched on some of it. So I think first I would like to say that equity is not the only way in which a project gets financed. So people shouldn't just look at this project and say, oh, well, you're going to need $600 million. So you're going to try and issue shares in order to raise $600 million. So you're just going to be diluted. There are far better ways, and certainly equity will form part of it, but when you look at financing a project like this, there will be various components of the financing. And equity is usually the only one that's actually diluting to the shareholders.

35:37 The rest, you know, they should be extremely value-added. That's the first thing. The second thing that I would like to point out is, even with the pre-feasibility study that was done and updated earlier this year, you had an NPV of around 1 billion dollars. So our current market cap is such a... And by the way, that project, that NPV was calculated considering the $600 million that had to go in in order to build it, right? So you have a project that is trading at a massive discount to its NPV and that NPV is not even been updated for the latest developments.

36:23 So you really have a very unique opportunity here where, and I don't want to repeat myself, but where you have a project where management has focused to put all the building blocks in place and we're gonna have a really exciting year ahead of us, any financing that we're gonna do will be value accretive to our shareholders. So you've got that aspect to it, plus you've got the further aspect that we still have this massive disconnect between the value of the project and our current market price. So All in all, I think when I look at this, I see huge upsides for investors at this point in time. I agree.

37:09 I agree. Great. Thanks, guys. A lot of questions here. So I'm going to try to run through it and try to get as many as I can. This is a good one, actually, from Paul. I'm going to send this over to you, Bill. What's the difference between Cypress and Standard Lithium's DLE technology? And there's a second part to it as well. And what were your goals for the lithium solution grades, Cypress's yielding solution grades of 350 to 700 parts per million lithium? Say the last part again. And it says, what were your original goals for the lithium solution grades? Well, let's start with that. In bench scale tests, lithium in solution, we've seen values up to 300,350 typically when we've leached either with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid and that's at the right solids mix. Keep in mind you're feeding ore which is 1,100 parts per million lithium but you're diluting that when you're leaching it with 2 to 4 times that volume of water for leach solution.

38:21 So it's not a one-to-one correlation. I got 1000 here, I got 1000 there. It's gonna be 1000 with some lower number. We've Rarely seen a number above 400. This was nice to see those initial spikes going up into the 700s It varies about How long your retention time is? What your acid concentration is going to be but definitely a positive hit for us on that initial target. So I'd like to see the LEACH solutions in that plus 300 range. Now, what was the second part? Yeah, it was, What's the difference between Cypress and standard lithium? Right, right. So 2 different scenarios.

39:07 I can't speak to what standard lithium is using in their DLE. I understand it's a technology, some sort of a ceramic bead provided by Laxness. And they've got their own way of recovering it in a stirred reactor. Ours is more conventional ion exchange, probably maybe similar materials, maybe not. We're proprietary processes. There's working on a bromine bromine field Brian. So different chemical composition. Ours is working on a high iron high magnesium bleach solution which comes off of clay. So we are adapting ours in the way we do a PIR-SIR step where we're neutralizing the solution, dropping out the impurities.

39:57 So we have less impurities to worry about when we get to that ion exchange step. Great. I'll send this one off to Bram first. Coming, this is a question from Salmon. Says, why do you think you're so far undervalued compared to our peers? Well, I think this touches on some of the comments I made earlier in the Q&A session. So I think people should look at Cyprus as to what has happened here over the last 8 months. And, you know, we could have probably focused more on the marketing side, but it was very important for us to get those necessary building blocks in place.

40:47 So I think from a marketing perspective and a rebranding, that's become very important to us now. And I think that partly accounts for that deep discount. Also, the fact that our shareholder structure is a lot different with 8% institutional shareholders and more than 90% retail, which is fairly uncommon, I have to say. But Again, it comes back to the fact that the company has only done one major fundraise. It wasn't even that major. It was $20 million that was raised. In the bigger scheme of things, it was a very small fundraise. That's the first time that the company really went out there and got exposure to institutional investors.

41:36 I think that explains why we are where we are and no excuses. What we're going to see next year, one of the targets is to address the shareholder base, to get the institutional shareholders in there in order to try and close that gap. Yeah, I agree. That's good. Thank you. Keep in mind that where we brought our company in the last 4 years, we've probably spent a total of maybe $12 million getting us to this point in time. And some of those peers have spent upwards of $100 million on their projects already. So, we'll try it. We'll try it hard. Yeah, exciting, 222.

42:23 Here's 1 from our good friend, Austin Craig. It says, what is the intent of the 480 acres that were acquired a few months ago. Bill? I'd tell you Austin, but I'd have to shoot you. That's a strategic thing. So, you know, a little hip pocket. We all look down the road for doing some horse trading with people. Okay, next question here. How are the impurities for end product looking so far? Will you produce high-grade quality required for EV batteries or is this info that will come to life via NORAM? It is the info that will come to life as we get our solution product which is now sitting in a couple tanks behind me out the door and shipped off to NORAM.

43:15 So not quite there yet as far as being able to answer that question. Okay. Okay. Wes, shareholder here, calls in once in a while. Are there any plans to do some additional drilling in 2022 to move some of the inferred towns into indicated. Now, this question gets asked a lot, can we do more drilling? Why haven't we done more drilling, Bill? We've got adequate drill spacing through our deposit to define indicated and measured tons, which in moving towards a feasibility study equals probable and proven reserves. So drilling additionally doesn't really do us much good. Adding resources doesn't do us any good. If we could optimize our mine plan by, say, targeting a higher grade area and filling in more of that early years in the production schedule, that'd be something to look at.

44:14 But As far as expenditure, if the way to generate news is to go out and drill holes, that's not going to help us. So we've got plenty. Okay. This is from Merv. You've kind of answered this one, but let's bring a little bit more clarity. I'll bring this one over to Bram. What are the plans to list on exchanges in the United States? The big thing is NYSE, right? The New York Stock Exchange, right? So there's TSX, which is CQX, and of course, the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, so look, when you look at a company like us, you know, it's fairly, I think it's fairly easy to map out our path going forward, right? So we're currently on the TSX-B.

45:01 I think it's fairly clear that we have outgrown it by now. So, you know, of course, that is something that we're looking at migrating to the TSX itself. I don't think that would be a surprise to anybody. When it comes to the New York Stock Exchange, you know, when you move to the New York Stock Exchange, you really need to time it well, right? So our market cap is sitting at around $200 million, and That's quite small from a New York Stock Exchange perspective. You really want to be quite a bit bigger than that. But we're an American-based asset. And obviously, when we put our funding package in place, I can really see that when you make that step to start raising your funds for the development of the project, that that would have to include a move to the New York Stock Exchange.

46:00 Now, whether we do that a little bit beforehand, that is stuff that still needs to be decided upon. I think we're putting the cart a little bit in front of the horses here. But of course, that would be part of the evolution of the company, is that we need to get to an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. We will be at the right size and it will be at the right time. Thank you, Bram. Bill, Another question here from Austin. Can you expand upon the comments about tailings and how we might move it to less valuable, less valuable land given the lithium under the current tailings area? First, we have to have that additional land to move it to. And right now it's sitting on a few drill holes where we know we have resources under that tailings facility.

46:58 So there would have to be some sort of move to acquire some more land. I would like it to be flatter out, lower elevation, but that's not something we're looking at just immediately. Okay. Okay, Martin, do you have any plans of announcing offtakers prior to the DFS? Question from Martin. Yeah, No, not prior to the DFS. That's definitely a post DFS question. First, we have to know what product we're gonna make. That will only appear as we get to pass the couple of steps here in the pilot plant.

47:47 Okay. It's just not something that's an immediate concern to us. Now, it's nice to get an offtake agreement. Some other companies do that early on, and they're not able to deliver. Why? Because it's just too premature. And an offtake agreement, depending on how it's structured, could look like a futures agreement, futures contract. And that's definitely something that can be potentially toxic for an up-and-coming company, depending which way the prices swing going forward. If the prices go up and you have a cheap offtake and you can't produce, you're in trouble. If it goes the other way, yeah, maybe you're okay with it. But I think we'll do just fine with our approach and where we're at.

48:40 Okay, thanks. Bill, here's another question for you. Because based on the new data from the pilot plan, you can certainly answer the following question. Is our water supply sufficient for the entire planned production rate? At our target of 15,000 tons a day, so far it's looking good. Good, perfect, thank you. Here's another one from, here's 1 from Dave. Are you sending concentrate samples to potential outsourcing clients? Not yet, as soon as we get some concentrate samples, we'll start looking at that. That's a little bit down the road. Yeah. That may be a January sort of thing. Another question that kind of ties them together. Have you sent any concentrate to British Columbia for lithium extraction?

49:29 Not yet. It's all sitting behind me. Any issues, this is 1 from John, any issues at all with environmental or rare species act? We've done a year of baseline work on that to try to identify any issues. And the results from that study were, I guess you could say positive for us in that we didn't identify any threatened or endangered species out of it. We know that there's some state sensitive species in the vicinity, but those don't appear to impact our project just yet. I'll knock on wood as that goes. You know, things can always come up and bite you. We've seen that with other companies, but I think we're in pretty good shape from where we're at today in terms of our studies. Good. Here's 1 that kind of is again from John, but it ties in together.

50:25 It says, recently there were some concerns with indigenous peoples in mining areas of Nevada. Any concerns with mining with Indigenous people at Clayton Valley? None that we've identified so far. We're virtually a brownfield sort of location, but we're going to be sensitive to those issues, obviously. Adrian asks, what is the lithium content parts per million that is being fed into the pilot plant? It was mentioned 350 to 700 in a recent press release, But what is the input? Can you explain the variation between 350 and 700? That goes back to something I said a few moments ago. The feed grade of the clay coming in is between 1,000 and 1,400 parts per million lithium.

51:17 The solution grade coming off the tank we sampled somewhere between 350 and 700 plus parts per million. What's the difference? Well, it's not one-to-one We're leaching at roughly around 35 percent solids. So that means we have 65% solution in that. So we're diluting down the grade of the lithium that we're pulling off. It's not a one-to-one. Even if we got 100 percent of the lithium out of the clay, your grade is going to be lower in the fluid coming off just by dilution of the additional solution. Okay, here's 1 Bill for you. Don, as from Don Lee, do you have any approximate date for the beginning or the completion of the feasibility study?

52:06 As soon as we're ready for it, but I would expect it's the first part of the year since we get a contract signed up. We already have a consultant lined up for resource and reserve calculations. Let's see here, I'm trying to get different kinds of questions. So here's 1 from Piero, Given the plans by the Biden administration to invest in green energy, including EVs and securing the US supply chain, are you getting any indication of an accelerated permitting process? No. No acceleration.

52:53 Hopefully, it just stays the same as it has been. Under the Trump administration, there were guidelines put in for completing an environmental impact statement. It was a target of a year on EIS, document had a specified length. Those criteria stay in place, I'll be happy. Quite likely it's going to drag out a little bit longer. Just all depends on what the project itself looks like in terms of its environmental impacts. As we've seen with other companies, things can come up to bite you. You can have those indigenous peoples concerns. You can have certain plants that hang up your permitting.

53:42 Okay, Bram, here's a question from you. Any intent to go after government grants for lithium? To the extent they're available, of course. Government grants are sometimes very beneficial. So let me qualify that by saying to the extent that they're beneficial to the project, we'll absolutely go for them. And they mostly are beneficial. So that would absolutely be on our radar screen, to the extent they're available to us. Yes. Okay. Thanks, Bram. Bill, here's 1 from Gene. Any comments on the rare earth, on rare earth elements? Yeah. We had arranged our impurity removal steps, our primary and secondary impurity removal, to be able to look at the rare earth concentrations as it moved through neutralization.

54:41 We have some initial data from the first probably week of when we were running the plant that we will go back and look at. However, what we found is that that PIR step was difficult for what we were trying to do in the pilot plant. That we were sliming on the plates of the filters So we combined the PIR and the SIR together into one mixer and 1 neutralization step that improved the quality coming off the P of the SIR filter So we're now making a nice cake there and quite happy to just be doing that for the initial start. We really have to focus on is the lithium. We can go back and look at rare earths and other products later. But if we, project has to cut it on the lithium recovery, the lithium concentration, we can't make that it's it weakens the project. So great.

55:42 We're getting close to the hour now. There's a lot of questions, but I can try to get 1 or 2 more in there. Here's 1. Let's see. From Ludwig, how much lithium will be sent out to NORAM to get tested? And once you get results, will you be sending out samples to companies or could you possibly sign offtake agreements? Not on the offtake agreements, yes, to potentially sending it out to companies and trying to get some interest there. And then, sorry, interruption. As far as the quantity, we're going to probably be shipping somewhere around, I'd say 100 liters of sample concentrated lithium solution up to NORAM.

56:37 Brahm, there's a question here. It says, we mentioned 2 new board members. Who are the 2 new board members? And while we're talking about board members, we want to touch up a little bit on 2 that stepped off. We had 2 that came on and then 2 stepped off. Make some comments on that. Yeah. So during the year, we've actually added 3 board members. We added Cassandra Joseph, our new chair, and Bill has given us some of her background there. She's an absolute excellent addition to the board. We've added Brian Disher. Brian was actually on the board of directors of PWC. He's an extremely senior and well-respected individual in the finance community.

57:27 And then also, of course, Ken Owen. Ken has been around for a very long time with Anglo American. He's been with SRK. Ken has overseen projects in total of billions of dollars. And then the 2 members that have stepped off the board is Don Houston. Don was of course the one that started the company. So Don has done an excellent job for the shareholders here over the years. So Don has stepped down And so has Amanda Chow. So those were the changes to the board that we've seen. Great. Yeah, thanks. And I think this will be the last question because we're 11.58 now here in Vancouver.

58:13 We'll have more of these 2 guys. This is a great way to communicate our story to our shareholders and it's really important for the shareholders to be able to have an opportunity to kind of reach out to us and ask us directly. So Bill, here's 1 for you. It says here, Based upon your current data, do you expect the hydrochloric process to be a success? Heck yeah. It looks good. Yeah. One of the exciting things for me is to watch that conveyor coming off the vacuum belt filter and watching those tailings plop off. Because as I said earlier, we spent about 2 years on our pre-feasibility study.

58:59 That was the most difficult thing, was doing that solid liquid separation for us. We experimented a lot with different flocculants, different settling rates, different filtration systems. But that one step, just being able to wash the tails, get that tailings to actually move through the system and be able to concentrate the tailings, get the moisture content down. That's that was a very positive step. So that alone makes me very happy. All right, well, thank you all so much. Before we close out, I just want to thank you, Dr. Bill, Spiros, and Bram for taking us to the presentation and the Q&A. I also want to thank everyone who joined us today and asked all these great questions. Of course, we weren't able to get to all of them, but I'll make sure that the Cypress Development team will follow up with you directly. Of course, there will also be more upcoming events. So stay tuned to that for that. And the recording of this summit will be posted to 6 dot com within 48 hours. So you'll all be getting an email to remind you. So you can watch it again to check in on anything that you