Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Electra Battery Materials Corporation Q3 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Racanelli, Vice President, Investor Relations with Electra Battery Materials Corporation. Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before I turn the call over to management for our discussion review of Q3 developments, want to do a couple of housekeeping items. First off, we released our results, our financial statements in MD&A last night, in the form of a press release, and all those materials are available on our website as well as on regulatory sites like SEDAR and EDGAR in particular. We will be making use of a presentation. That presentation for those on the webcast is visible. For those on the call, you can view that from our website. We will be making forward-looking statements, and those are itemized on page two of our presentation. With me are Trent Mell, Electra's CEO here in Toronto, as well as Craig Cunningham, our Chief Financial Officer, and at the refinery, joining us today is Mark Trevisiol, the VP of Project Development. We will have a Q&A session for analysts following us at the end of our discussion. For anybody who wants to follow us, please reach out to me. I do wanna make note that we do have our AGM later on this morning. For those who are able to join us, we welcome to meet you live and in person. With that, I'll turn it over to Trent, and please go ahead, Trent. Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Before we jump to questions with the analysts, I wanna review starting on slide four of the presentation some of the key developments we've had over Q3, and then we'll jump to some of our near-term priorities and areas of focus. As we you know march ever closer to production, the first production from the cobalt sulfate plant, Q3 was probably our busiest yet at site. Mark will get into a little bit of that with the growing team, equipment deliveries arriving on site and progress overall. However, I think probably the biggest highlight for us and for our investors is the three-year supply agreement with LG Energy Solution. I'll get into that a little bit later. That's an important cornerstone relationship for us. Other highlights in the quarter, we're continuing to progress the commissioning of the refinery, which Mark will go into more detail on, and that ranks right up there with LG in terms of significant catalysts. You know, kind of in the background, but it'll soon be in the foreground, is our battery recycling initiative. The recycling, the refining of black mass through a demonstration plant is imminent, and that'll be starting during this quarter. Last couple of points or three points here, we confirmed a new cobalt mineralization zone in the Idaho Cobalt Belt. We released results of a nickel sulfate scoping study, so this would be a plant adjacent to our cobalt plant and our recycling initiatives up here in just north of Toronto. Then lastly, we signed a benefit agreement with one of our community members, the Métis Nation of Ontario. If I break that down a little bit further, let's go to slide five and just talk about LG Energy Solution. LG is the... Well, you know, on the one hand, they're the second-largest EV battery maker in the world. They're also, this is important for North America, they're the largest outside of China. They've been very aggressive at rolling out their supply chain. They've been fabulous partners to date, frequent touch points, both in Korea and here in Canada. What we signed, I said it at the time, I think this is the beginning of a deeper relationship, but at this point, it's a three-year supply agreement for cobalt sulfate, and I think there's more we can do with them. If I stick to that agreement that we have in hand, it's a binding term sheet. We're still working out details of the pricing mechanisms, but there's a general meeting of the minds there. 7,000 tons of battery-grade cobalt being shipped to their battery maker, to their PCAM producer, if I can get a little technical, starting in 2023, and the contract will run through 2025. What that means for Electra is, you know, by default, they're our largest customer, representing about 60% of our production. I'd say just as a parallel comment to that, you know, we believe that we've basically got 100% of our material accounted for in terms of downstream customer interest through contracts or MOUs and whatnot. Selling our product is not gonna be hard, particularly with LG as our cornerstone client. The contract itself for them, if on a market basis, is worth about $400 million, and for us, a top-line revenue, about $70 million. A big de-risking event. We've got 100%, well, 90% of our feed has been accounted for under contract. We have the option to bring that to a hundred, but we're gonna be cautious or we'll time that. Then on the back end, you'll see more agreements firm up on the back end in terms of who we're gonna be selling to. All right. If we flip over to slide six, just in terms of, I guess, the focus now on the refinery itself, I did mention the Black Mass Recycling, and Mark, I'll ask you to get into that a little bit. It's an important pillar of our strategy because, you know, the cobalt sulfate plant is the beginning and not the end, right? We've articulated a four-phased vision here for Ontario, where we would start with cobalt, move to recycling, and then move to nickel, and then invite a precursor manufacturing partner to come in with us and help us develop that last step of an integrated plant. Of course, we talked also about expansions into other markets, and I'll come back to that. Before I do that, I wanna turn the call over to Mark Trevisiol, VP Project Development, who's been leading the charge of that site, and he'll provide you with an update of the initiatives that he and his team are working on. Mark, over to you. Okay. Thanks, Trent, and good morning, everyone. Slide seven highlights some of the progress that we've made at the refinery. We've got about 90% of the brownfield equipment commissioned. Similarly on the procurement side, about 90% of the procurement is complete. The detailed engineering, similar number, about 90% of the detailed engineering is complete. Our solvent extraction plant, you know, we've got the majority of the plant erected. There's still, you know, some internal equipment that has to be put in place, but we're very happy with the progress there. Our owners team now sits at about 27 personnel, and that consists of tradesmen like electricians and millwrights, engineers and technicians. We have a complement of office support staff as well. We have three training and development personnel which are helping to prepare us for our operational and commercial readiness. Throughout all of the program that you know we've been constructing at the site over the last 15 months, we've had zero lost time accidents. That's paramount to our site is that we do things and we execute, but we execute in a very safe manner. We're developing a very we'd like to believe a very excellent culture of health and safety and environment at our site. The next slide eight shows the inside of our existing refinery. This is part of the asset that we had going back a few years ago. There's a number of tanks and pumps and pipelines which we'll be reusing. That, as I mentioned, about 90% of that equipment has been commissioned. Just in front of you there is three separate leaching vessels. We'll be reusing one of those leaching vessels in our process. There's a number of other, you know, pieces of equipment that we're reusing in the plant, like thickeners and filter presses, a number of tanks that we'll be using from one step of the leaching process to the next. Progress on the solvent extraction facility is on slide nine. That kind of shows a picture of the steel frame going up in the summertime. If you go to slide 10, that's what it looked like about a month ago. You can see the claddings got on, and the roof structure is there. If you went to the site today, going to slide 11, we've got the SX, the solvent extraction cell is actually being installed. You know, the building is pretty much complete. We've got all the siding and the roofing completed, and now we're accepting, you know, the heavier pieces of equipment into the site. That'll continue over the next three to four months. Slide 12, some of our guidance for next year with regards to production. You know, we're still on target for starting commissioning in the spring of 2023, and with production starting up during that time, and targeting a contained cobalt production of 1,800-2,100 tons for 2023. A quick update on Black Mass, if I go to slide 14. We plan to process in our demonstration plant up to 75 tons of black mass. It'll all be done under the existing footprint of that refinery that I showed earlier, the picture of it showing the leaching tanks. Most of all the equipment that we're using for black mass is a hydrometallurgical process, and that equipment is in situ. It's basically there. We've had to put in a few new pumps and some extra pipelines, but we're really leveraging the existing asset to make this work for us. Of course, we're targeting the recovery of, you know, the main battery materials, nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, and graphite. We'll be watching closely the efficiencies of the process and the recovery rates. We've been very pleased with our bench-scale testing that we've done at SGS Labs. We're very confident that we're gonna be able to achieve fairly good recovery rates of these metals. Slide 15 shows a breakdown of our process. Pretty simple view though of the process. Again, the products are nickel, cobalt, graphite, lithium, and some copper. We'll be taking black mass in as a solid and then releaching it through our process and separating out the impurities to create these four to five products. The next few slides are just a couple of pictures of some of our recommissioning. On slide 16, again, we're using an existing repulping system that we have and was used before when the refinery operated. That's been recommissioned and is ready to go. Similarly, in slide 17 is the part of the material handling system that, again, was at the plant and operated when it was operating as a cobalt and a milling facility early on in its history. That's about it. Turn it over now to Craig. Thanks, Mark. We're moving to slide 19. As we're a pre-production and pre-revenue entity, as expected, we've incurred a net loss of CAD 7.6 million or CAD 0.24 per share. On a year-to-date basis, we have a gain of CAD 2.3 million, which is driven primarily by the fair value gain on our derivative liability. As an overview of our cash position, which is cash and cash equivalents, we held about CAD 19.7 million in cash equivalents and marketable securities at September 30th. This is down from the CAD 41.8 million that we held at June 30th. The primary drivers to the use of cash are the continued investment in the refinery recommissioning efforts. That was approximately CAD 19 million in the quarter, as well as about CAD 1.3 million in related expenses for exploration and development work at Iron Creek, as well as our biannual interest payment of CAD 1.6 million that is on our convertible debentures. I should also point out that our cash balance at Q3 did not include our expected remaining balance for government investments through government grants, which amounts to CAD 6.7 million, which we expect to receive in the year, as well as approximately CAD 17 million that we will be able to bring in under the ATM program. As we can see, capital management is gonna be a key priority for us as we near commissioning of the refinery. As you've heard, it's expected in spring of 2023. Moving on to our recent financing initiative. As you know, we launched a marketed offering for units this Tuesday that will help to raise up to $5.5 million. The highlights are here on slide 20. The unit offering consists of one share and one share purchase warrant. The warrants will last for up to 36 months from completion or closing date. The offering is anticipated to close on the 15th of November. The proceeds from this raise will continue to be used to fund the recommissioning and construction of the cobalt sulfate refinery. Given our previous disclosures around funding and funding requirements to complete that commissioning, we do have other financing options that we're looking at, which include the ATM, as mentioned earlier, as well as potential strategic investments, upsizing of debentures, and additional potential available funding from our government partners. As we move closer toward refining and getting to operations, maintaining our balance sheet strength is a key priority, and we will continue to provide regular updates on our progress with both of those. That concludes finance. Mark, I turn back to Trent. Thanks for that, Craig. Okay, now let's move on to exploration, actually. Normally, I would have Dan Pace, our Principal Geologist, give this part of the presentation. He actually is in the DRC right now, visiting, inspecting some of the mines that we're looking to buy from with our VP Sustainability, Renata Cardoso, and that's part of our Responsible Minerals Initiative, sort of transparency process. Glencore is taking us on a tour of their operations. Some of the best run mines in the country, I would say. They'll be back next week. However, I guess the point here on slide 21 is that, you know, and I say this to investors frequently, we got a great asset in the State of Idaho, and it often gets overlooked because, you know, when you're allocating capital, you've got to make tough decisions, and the refinery being the one that's closest to cash flow, it has to get the priority. Having said that, it doesn't negate the excitement we have around this asset as a very, very rare source of primary cobalt in North America. Slide 22, I'm gonna walk you through this map a little bit. I would highlight, as we move to onshore the supply chain into North America, finding cobalt is really hard, and the DRC is gonna remain for years to come, a huge source of cobalt. We do have a new mine that's onstream in the Idaho Cobalt Belt, and our Iron Creek, I think, could be next in queue. What I would highlight from this summer's exploration is some drilling we did of a nearby target called Ruby. We've known about it for some time. There's some surface expressions of mineralization. It looks the mineral type and the setting very similar to Iron Creek, in size to our Iron Creek deposit, which is sitting at just under 5 million tons of high-grade cobalt with some copper byproducts. I would say, we only did three holes 'cause this was kind of a test program. The biggest highlight, you got some grades there. These are high grade, good intercepts, for a cobalt target. What was interesting to me is that all three holes hit two zones of mineralization precisely where the model predicted it would. Geophysics is not an easy, not an exact science, but it tells me that our team has got the right technique. It gives me confidence that this target you see there is worth additional exploration activities into the new year. We do need to follow up. I've got to be mindful of allocation of capital, of course. I would say maybe anecdotally that we do have some downstream interests. Again, this is part of the IRA and the onshoring, supply chain participants looking to try to onshore cobalt primary feed. This is an asset that will take a little longer to bring on stream than, say, the refinery. But I do expect and predict that it'll become higher profile in the years to come. Just contextually now onto slide 23, where is the asset situated? It's in an area known by the U.S. Geological Survey and the industry of the Idaho Cobalt Belt. You can see it there near Salmon, Idaho. You've got a legacy asset, Blackbird, Ram ICP, just went into operation, and you can see our Iron Creek asset down to the south there. It is recognized as America's, you know, best cobalt endowment, hands down. Nothing comes close. I would argue even across North America, this is our best opportunity to be able to onshore the cobalt supply chain or at least parts of it, here on our continent. Historically, Blackbird did produce quite a lot of copper and cobalt, the 14 million pounds of cobalt, 53 million pounds of copper. There is a healthy history of mining high grade and high tonnage. All right, let's flip over to page 24 and basically transition here to outlook and some of our near-term milestones, which are outlined on slide 25. For me, hard to understate the importance and the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act. There's $400 billion of money earmarked towards climate and energy programs and initiatives. The one that hits home most for us and for our investors has to be the $7,500 vehicle credit. There's two parts to that. One is the requirement that the supply chain be within sort of free trade countries. That would be obviously in the U.S. and in Canada and any other country that has a free trade agreement with the U.S. The other part that's even more important for the part of the supply chain that we sit in is the requirement that no critical minerals be produced in China. China today, if I were to sort of aggregate cathode refining, that's about 80% of the global market. If you're an automaker looking to get access to that $7,500 vehicle credit, you can't have a single pound of material being processed in China. Otherwise, that drops to zero. That's huge, because it is going to propel, I think, a significant investment cycle into this part of the supply chain. Namely, that we're at that first step, right? That chemical conversion of minerals into a usable form for the battery sector use, and then the precursors and the cathode active material. You know, let's not lose sight of that. We're waiting for the rules and regs to see how it's going to be impacted or how it's gonna be implemented, I guess. I do see that as a huge tailwind for all of our initiatives that we're chasing. You know, commodity side, yeah, cobalt and nickel were down this quarter. Look, we're a margin operation, that we're buying at market and selling at market. So that doesn't impact us, frankly, too much. But the outlook is positive for the sector, and it aligns with what we see in annual EV sales growth expectations. Bernstein projecting 27 million vehicles by 2023 on a compound annual growth basis. You know, you're looking at 23%-27%, depending who you look at, look to for a forecast over the next several years, and that's huge growth. I would say with the adoption of the IRA and really the uptick of vehicle sales in North America, the inbound interest from downstream partners, potential clients, continues to strengthen and intensify. I guess lastly, you know, customer demand, I talked about this, the downstream. I do think that by the end of the year, if we can finalize some agreements, we'll be 100% sold. That basically would support in terms of future sales, either an expansion of the refinery in Ontario, which we are envisioning, or our expansion into Quebec at the Baie-Comeau facility in the Province of Quebec, where we're seeing tremendous support from the federal and provincial government. All right, now slide 26, just to kind of wrap up. This is the last slide outlining some of our near-term milestones. As busy as Q3 was, you know, Q4 is and will remain just as active. Recycling, put that up there first because that, to me, is the most exciting one. Stay tuned. You'll see a series of, you know, I guess, news releases and information on that as we get going in earnest. Importantly, Mark and the team have commissioned most of the equipment you see here before you. This is the legacy refinery plant that we are building around and expanding. Most of the equipment there that you see has been, you know, restarted, tested, and some of this is gonna be redeployed for the black mass. You can, you know, by that, on that basis, you can take it that, you know, we're already in the commissioning process for the black mass. We're waiting for material to show up, I think, next week, and then we'll have some news in the coming weeks as we start to put it through our plant. Sustainability report. You know, for the industry we're in, this is huge, and that's part of the DRC trip that Renata and Dan are on. We'll have our very first sustainability report. I'm expecting that just before Christmas, so it's a year-end deliverable, so you can stay tuned for that. Very proud of our carbon footprint. We believe we'll have the lowest carbon footprint in the world of any cobalt producer, and it's a trait that we can extend to all of our operations by virtue of having hydroelectric power in Ontario and in Quebec. Then as we look forward to the spring, of course, the big milestone we're all working towards is the commissioning of the refinery. Then thereafter, obviously, the cash flow finally coming in the door and, you know, changing the stature of our company. Exploration at Ruby, you know, let's wait and see. Wait and see how the markets are and how the treasury is. We do have to keep that going. You know, how aggressive or light we go will be a function probably of partner interest, and we're looking for other people to help us fund that. Just again, given our focus on the refining operation. Lastly, the Bécancour pre-feasibility study. This would be a second cobalt plant in that battery park, some call it Battery Valley in the Province of Quebec, where you've already got POSCO working with GM. You've got BASF, Vale, all looking at building out installations in an integrated park. We have been asked by the government to be the cobalt producer for that park. More to come. That's a few years out, but being the only cobalt refinery that are built ex-China in about 30 years, it just puts us in a really good position to execute on that and become a part of that bigger club. I think that's probably a good summary of where we are. Operator, at this point, maybe we'll just put it open to questions if there are any. All right. We will now begin the question-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question comes from Jake Sekelsky of Alliance Global Partners. Please go ahead. Hey, Trent and team. Thanks for taking my questions. Good morning, Jake. Just looking at the Black Mass Recycling program, are you able to touch on some of the recoveries or results that you've seen during early test work and what we might expect to see as far as results go once the demo plant gets up and running over the next little bit? Yeah. Mark, I'll let you talk to that high level. I would say we're not giving exact numbers. You know, hydrometallurgy refining, you know, we've been doing it for over a century, I guess. Black Mass is still a bit of a new industry, and you can see the numbers out there, right? Some of our peers publish recovery, some don't. You would expect kind of high to mid-90s is kind of what the industry might expect and is what we're targeting. Mark has done this before. He's done some recycling when he was with Falconbridge, now Glencore, back in the day, pyro, mind you. He's got sort of good oversight on where the market is going. Mark, do you wanna say anything more about that in terms of our, maybe your level of confidence or how we may stack up against the industry? Well, I guess I could add that, you know, we're pleased with what we saw, you know, during the bench testing. It didn't start all that pleasing in the beginning, but we modified our circuits and modified our process to get us where we think is, you know, probably an industry standard for a hydromet facility on recoveries and efficiencies. Are there improvements we can make? Probably so. Overall, we're fairly pleased with the results that we've achieved. Now, the exact numbers, I mean, you know, you start to get into the, you know, the commercial side of the business, which, you know, we'd like to keep that fairly close to our chest, because it basically affects contracts down the line. But overall, I think this is gonna be a real win for the company and, you know, an industry that is only going in one direction, in terms of, you know, being able to recycle these metals. There's lots of companies knocking on our door to obtain them. Mark, maybe I'll just add, just for added color, that based on the test work we've done to date, we're, you know, we like what we've seen on the graphite side, which for some has been a bit of a challenge in their flow sheet. Given the price performance of lithium of late, of the last year, that's gonna be an interesting focus as well. You know, we went into this looking at the cobalt and nickel, but lithium becomes an important source of revenue on the Black Mass Recycling as well. I guess two things to watch as we move forward. Okay. That's fair. I guess staying in that vein, I mean, Trent, you touched on some of the team being in the DRC, looking to source cobalt feed. But I'm curious with the recycling plant, you know, coming online here, how have discussions with the potential black mass suppliers been going? Do you think that you're close to executing on any agreements there? Yeah, this is where Mark's background, I guess, comes in handy, right? He's, you know, we know who the competition is, I guess, and we know what they're paying. Our focus, given that we've got a cobalt sulfate plant, is on the LCO, so the high cobalt material. We're able to, I think, attract that. It does ebb and flow, right? I think, Jake, the way I would look at our recycling right now is we're trying to perfect the process, so we're not necessarily going, we're not swinging for the fences in tons. We wanna get it right, and we can scale up. I think on a per ton basis, the margin looks quite attractive. It's important you get that right. For a CAD 3 million demo plant, we're gonna learn a lot and sort of take it from there. For now, we are sourcing from, I don't know, Michael, our VP Commercial's probably got 20 or so potential providers of black mass. These providers, of course, as you know, Jake, these are the battery shredders, right? They collect, they shred them, and then they send it. 90% of material today goes to Glencore in Sudbury, a pyro process that doesn't get the lithium and graphite. There is a ready market. I would say, you know, the future of the recycling business is gonna have to be linked to cell plants. That gets you into higher nickel cathodes, and there'll be an evolution of our flow sheet. Ultimately, we envision our role in the supply chain, at least for now, with sourcing black mass from the shredders. Then eventually there's probably a tie-up with one or two cell plants, so you've got sort of consistent feed day in, day out. That would be a few years out. Okay. And then just lastly on the supply chain initiatives we've seen lately, you know, whether it's the IRA or the $2.8 billion in DOE funding for the supply chain, are there any programs out there that you're seeing that you think Iron Creek would qualify for? Or does the project need to be advanced a bit more? I'm just curious on your thoughts there. Yeah. No, that's actually a great question. There are programs on both sides of the border that we're, I guess, actively engaged with. When it comes to Iron Creek, if I look at the initiatives that have been announced, there's a lot there that we can do once the minerals have been extracted. I think from a policy proposition, the administration wants more domestic production, but we haven't yet seen any real tools rolled out to help with, you know, exploration, feasibility, and even extraction. However, once that's done, you wanna build a mill or some infrastructure or refinery in America, lots of funding available there. There is a bit of a gating item we've got to get through. But that's an active discussion we have with, you know, whether it be DOE or DOD. I think they recognize that domestic production is gonna require funding opportunities for the extraction, but not quite there yet. We're looking at that through the lens of kind of a second step, right? Once you've got your resource and your feed, they could help on the surface CapEx. Got it. Okay, that's all for me. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you, Jake. That is all the time that we have for questions today, and this concludes the question-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Joe Racanelli for any closing remarks. Thank you all again for joining us. As noted, if you do have any other follow-up questions, please reach out to us either by phone or email. As mentioned, we will have our AGM starting in about an hour and a half time for those in the Toronto area, and I look forward to meeting some of you in person. Thank you again, and we will be providing regular updates going forward, particularly on the Black Mass, so please stay tuned for news flow on that front. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.