Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Electra Q1 2023 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, Gillian, and thank you everyone for joining us this morning. We released our results for the Q1 last night. The material is available both on SEDAR and our website. Today with me are Trent Mell, Company CEO, as well as Craig Cunningham, our CFO. And joining us for the first time is Renata Cardoso, our VP of Sustainability. We will be using a presentation this morning, and I encourage you to follow along from our website. At the end of management discussion, we will be opening up the call to questions from analysts who do cover us. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Trent for his opening remarks. Thank you, Joe, good morning, everybody. Lots to discuss today, I thank you for joining us. We will, as always, open the call up to analysts for questions, but before doing that, I'd like to review some of the developments we've had in what remains a busy time for us in an active Q1. Q1, yeah, like I said, remained busy as we were in 2022. Probably the most notable milestone for us was our battery recycling or Black Mass refining demonstration plant. Huge accomplishments there that we will talk about later in the call. First of its kind, plant scale recycling demo in North America to our knowledge, first MHP production. We've produced a very high quality lithium carbonate. We've produced a graphite product, the demo plant has allowed us to continue to develop our IP and improve our process in a live scale environment. I do have Mark Trevisiol online who can take some questions on that later on. We also closed a convertible debt, retiring our old debt, generating proceeds of $14 million off of that. Other developments in the quarter included the sale of some non-core assets in the Canadian Cobalt Belt to Kuya Silver. We also released a new resource estimate for our Iron Creek copper and cobalt asset. An asset that continues to show big prospectivity with validation of what we believe to be a sister to our Iron Creek, an area known as Ruby. Really pleased to have Renata, our VP of Sustainability and Low Carbon on the call with us. She is truly a global leader in sustainability and a great fit for us because one of our key differentiators is our low carbon footprint. I don't think anybody on the planet can have as good or better of a footprint as ours, and it's something that we brag about with good reason. Renata's gonna talk to you not just about that, but some of the developments we've made in our own sustainability journey, which she likes to remind me is a journey that has no end. At the end of the call, we're gonna talk a little bit about, you know, some of the more recent developments. The board tech committee recently approved a rebaseline review of our top capital cost estimates for the refinery project. We'll talk a little bit more about the desktop study on Black Mass, and I'll touch upon the strategic review, which we also announced in today's press release. With that, I will turn it over to you, Renata. Thank you, Trent. Good morning, everyone. Moving on to slide six. As we said before, Electra has a deep commitment to sustainability and contributing to the global energy transition. This commitment is reflected in our core values and our mission, as you can see on screen. Our mission, which is focused on providing low-carbon, ethical, and traceable materials to the global battery supply chain, is at the heart of everything we do and highlights some of the priority topics that we covered in our sustainability report. Moving on to slide seven, we present our approach to sustainability, our framework that was developed in partnership with our stakeholders and encompasses a number of critical aspects such as climate change, human rights, health and safety, and respect to indigenous peoples. This framework helped us to underpin our ESG activities in 2022 when we developed our ESG policies, implemented our whistleblower channel, and became members of the Responsible Minerals Initiative, RMI, which allows us to assess our suppliers' compliance to OECD guidelines. Moving on to slide eight, we can see a summary of our ESG scorecard that you can find in our sustainability report. All results you see here reflect our construction phase, so numbers will change to reflect the future developments of our plant. It's very important to highlight our safety record of 0 high consequence work-related injuries, informing how well our sites are managing this major priority for us now and always. For those unaware, our sustainability report was released in January and is available from our website. That concludes my remarks. I will now turn it over to Craig, who will review our financial highlights. Thank you, Renata. Thanks everyone for joining us this morning. Our, as Joe mentioned, we filed our Q1 as stated at the end of yesterday and wanted to take everyone through some of our highlights To begin, we'll start with liquidity. Liquidity position is done on slide 10. At the end of Q1, we had approximately $12.9 million of cash and marketable securities. This was up from $8.4 million held at the end of the prior quarter. The increase was primarily driven by the $51 million U.S. convertible debt offering that we closed on in February. That offering provided us $50 million in net, $50 million in gross cash proceeds. The increase was partially offset by refinery commissioning costs, expenses related to the black mass trial, and higher general and administrative costs for the period. I'd also like to point out that at the end of Q1, that cash balance did not include any amount of the $5.1 million that we are still yet to receive from government investments that should be received in the coming quarters. At the start of Q2, our cash marketable securities position has declined, while we have continued to settle a number of our advancements on the refinery. Cash management is maintained. Cash management is a key priority of the company. We'll be continuing to undertake measures to protect cash and reduce some of our expenses. As mentioned, we completed our $51 million convertible debt financing. If we move to slide 11, we will be able to see a summary as I just turn there. Although we did go over these in Q4, I will provide a quick update and some additional information there. Again, when we completed the $51 million in financing in February, we retired the original $36 million U.S. of outstanding 2026 notes at par value, plus the accrued interest. The conversion price ratio used in the new 2028 notes is $2.48 US. In addition to the notes, investors were entitled to $10.8 million of warrants. Those warrants are available for 5 years with the same strike price of $2.48 US. Additionally, these notes allowed us to have a lower minimum cash balance of $2 million US. You will notice in our Q1 results that the impact of settling the 2026 notes and creation of the 2028 notes resulted in a $19.9 million one-time loss on recognition. This relates to the settlement and then initial recognition of the 2028 notes. That is a non-cash loss, primarily driven from the fair valuation methods used in the package of financing. I would, now turning over the updates to Trent, who will take you through the refinery project economics. Thanks, Craig. All right, back to the refinery. I do have David Marshall on the line for questions as well later on. Dave, our VP Engineering, led the rebaseline review with our EPCM contractor, EXP. You know, just by way of reminder, on slide 13, we did withdraw our guidance on February 14. Became apparent that just with the ongoing supply chain issues that we're all well aware of, compounded by the receipt of some damaged equipment, inflation, the likes that I haven't seen since the, I guess, since the 1980s. All the pressures that put against us that we needed to pull that and review our capital cost estimate. We'll go through that a little bit now. leted, as I say, Dave, with EXP. We then had a third-party estimator, complete an independent review as well of that, and following which it's gone through our tech committee. We had a pretty good scrubbing of the numbers. With the amount of detailed engineering and procurement done, and much of the long lead stuff now on site or in transit, we're feeling pretty good about where we are in terms of our estimation. As I say, it was completed with a new estimate now of $110 million-$121 million. We spent just under $50 million of that. We do have some additional funds, as Craig outlined, that are coming in, but you know, it is apparent that we are gonna need more money in order to complete that process. If you look to slide 14, you can see how the variances stack up as against different components of the project. Take freight as an example. You know, we could never have predicted 5x increase in the cost of freight, but these are the kind of things that replicated higher labor costs, higher steel, concrete and so on. So it's been some challenges, but we're making our way through it, and I think we've got a pretty good idea of what the way forward looks like. Another perspective, looking at it again through slide 15, gives you the workup to both the, you know, the low end of the range and the higher end of the range. What we've done here is we went right back to the original estimate, just for transparency to show where we were with our study documents. Our control budget, by way of reminder, wasn't 62, but $80 million when we started construction. This just shows you the workup of the study. Doesn't quite show the control, but where we think we're coming in right now. Again, Dave is here if you wanted to work through that. There's more details in the press release. As I said, we're gonna need more capital. If you look on slide 16, in terms of our next step, it does now focus our attention with some of our partners on funding the gap. We've got commercial partners that we've been talking to for some time, government agencies, federal, provincial, U.S. as well, that are in the mix, and then some strategic partners as well. Until that time, things are gonna be a little bit slower in terms of how we execute. We've got a small team on site that can continue working that through. It is really a question now of just managing the capital, managing our expenditures, and getting ready to resume construction once we've lined up the remaining portions of the capital. We can come back to that in the questions. Let's maybe turn it back to Craig now, if I may, on the black mass study, starting on slide 17 and 18. Thank you, Trent. In addition to the update on the refinery, which we released yesterday, and Trent just walked you through, we'd like to provide a overview of our black mass scoping study. As a reminder, we started the scoping study based off of the very positive results we had seen from our demonstration plant, which we commissioned in December and have been running throughout the quarter. We have received a lot of interest related to that capability from various stakeholders within the supply chain for EVs. The recovery and production of lithium carbonate product, as shown on slide 18, was also something that has generated considerable interest. The success of our black mass trial project is a significant underpinning to us joining an MOU with the Three Fires Group, which we also recently announced. If we move to slide 19, there's a summary of the highlights of the scoping study and what some of the indications could be for a potential black mass recycling plant located in our Temiskaming facility. As you can see on slide 19, the scoping study is based on processing 2,500 tons of recycled material per year, indicating some compelling economics. Most notably, we'll be building a permanent black mass operation using our existing footprint at our refinery. It would cost in the range of approximately $6 million to complete and construct, and would deliver a attractive rate of return and a payback period of less than 2 years. Some of the economic highlights of that potential opportunity, we would be predicting an EBITDA in year one approximately $12.6 million, and in year two of $9.9 million, carrying forward in a similar fashion that way. Some of the key assumptions that are built into the model are using analyst consensus for estimates on commodity prices over the coming years, as well as consensus prices on reagents for the same period. Moving to slide 20, the next steps with our black mass trial. The results we've achieved to date in our black mass trial have been rather encouraging and supported by the market outlook. Looking ahead, we anticipate the first commercial deliveries of products produced through the demonstration plant to happen in Q2. We also set to continue to refine our hydrometallurgical process through our batch analysis and improvement processes. Pending completion of our trial, we will evaluate the results and demonstrate a path towards commercialization of this technology and potential opportunity. This concludes my comments, and I would like to turn the call back to Trent for his closing remarks. Thank you, Craig. We're onto slide 22 now. Before I do the concluding remarks, I just wanna say a word or two about black mass as well. The benefit of this picture shows you the significant advantage we have and why we were first to produce or to refine black mass on a plant scale, because we've got this legacy refinery that you see before you that has been commissioned by Mark and our skilled team at site. It really is a huge accomplishment. There's a lot of black mass, a lot of battery shredding happening in the industry, but thus far, nobody is doing this. Nobody has taken that black mass and refining the 6 critical materials, minerals in there into their constituent elements. Our approach has been fairly straightforward, but also different. It really is about proving out our IP, that's what we've been doing. Once you prove your IP, you can then partner, we've had lots of visitors coming to see our site, receiving our product, looking at what we're doing. It's once you've done your proof and your partnerships that then you can start building out the plant. We look to build this out on a modular basis, growing with the market incrementally so that we don't get too far ahead of ourselves or where the market is. A big congratulations to the team, our metallurgical team, our operating team, and the leadership for pulling off what is a huge accomplishment that I would say is probably not getting enough recognition. With that, I'll move on to just some closing remarks. The first bullet there, as we, as we said in our announcement today, we have disclosed that we've launched a strategic review to evaluate potential alternatives that could help us address our funding shortfall to complete our refinery project. The black mass does give us an alternative, but there is a bigger capital lift required on the refinery and capital requirements on the black mass as well. I won't talk today about the process, and we will report back when we do have something to say. You know, at this point it would just be speculation and rumor, we're gonna leave it as disclosed in the press release. Though maybe some shareholders may be surprised by the development, I think it's good to take into account the context in which we sit today. When we started this project in late 2019 and into 2020, coming out of COVID, real interest rates were negative, access to capital was much different than it is today, equity markets were favorable, and we were moving into a period where chemical refineries like ours were receiving pretty generous multiples. Over the past to the year and a half, it's been a different tone. Equity markets for small caps are getting tougher. Liquidity is harder. Interest rates are harder, or higher, I'm sorry. As a result, access to capital has become considerably more challenging. As I look to 2023, you know, looming recession seems to be the growing consensus of what this company needs, and the only thing we need is a stronger balance sheet. However we wanna achieve that. Everything else I think is in our favor. The macro tailwinds, we've got a process, we've got a location with permits, we've got people, and we've proven out a lot of what we have set out to do. And we're well into construction with long lead equipment on site. Of course, you need that balance sheet and that partnership to help you get that across the line. You know, we have anticipated for some time, 2023 was gonna be challenging, and that's why we did start taking steps, you know, frankly, some time ago to make sure we would complete our vision and succeed with what we have laid out over the last couple years. As you know, the outlook for the EV battery market is extremely bullish. We keep seeing announcements here on the continent. I think it's taken the industry by surprise with the speed at which things have picked up, no doubt bolstered by the US Inflation Reduction Act and other incentives that are there across the, across the sector in North America. Against this more favorable outlook, we're very committed to completing the refinery project, capitalizing on our first mover advantage, moving forward with our black mass and our Bécancour plans. With that, I'll thank you and open it up to questions. Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. The first question is from Matthew O'Keefe with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. A lot in there. Just a couple of questions on... Let's start with the refinery. It sounds like you're kind of stalled construction here. When you do just sort of figure out your cash issue, and you reengage in construction, how long would it take to complete the build and get it commissioned? Yeah. In fact, we. Thank you, Matt. Good morning. We haven't disclosed that in part because it really is capital dependent. We continue to receive equipment. I think comfortably, you know, a conservative number or a realistic number once we've got funding in place ready to go might be 14 months. You could do it faster, you could do it slower. Where we are right now with detailed engineering is at 98%-99%. Procurement, largely the big stuff is done. We've got some piping, and cables and whatnot that we need, but a lot of that's at a custom fab. SX tanks and all that have been received or are coming. Really it's execution now. we're talking about, you know, a couple hundred people on site doing piping and electrical work. what that schedule looks like is gonna be a function of how your funding aligns and how quickly you can crew up. Okay. On the financing side, you spoke a lot about partnerships and I mean, aren't gonna mention too much about who or what, but I mean, are we looking at across the gamut here from traditional lenders to automakers, to other strategic, like other mining companies or processors, or is it more narrow than that? It's pretty broad. you know, I mean, we talked about, in the presentation, the CAD 5.1 that we expect to receive from government. There are a couple of other streams, two or three other streams, including an application with the US Department of Defense. Mm-hmm. That are out there. Hard to predict what those look like, certainly a lot higher than CAD 5 million each of the other streams I'm looking at. The downstream partners, yeah, I think that's going well. The reality is, with a rebaseline underway, we needed to get this out in order to complete those conversations. I can think of one downstream partner in particular that's not in the public domain that, you know, wants to have the conversation now that we've got this back out so they can understand how they are part of a bigger solution. Then of course, the strategic process and what that may yield. Okay. If I can ask one more question, just on the black mass. For you said $6 million CapEx. Actually two things there. One, maybe explain how... That doesn't sound like a lot, to generate $10 million of EBITDA. Maybe you could explain what goes into that. Does that require the completion of the refinery in order for the, for you to engage in the black mass processes? Yeah, I'll let Mark talk to that. High, high level, Because the refinery, and I know you've been, you've been through there, the refinery is running today, right? We're running, we can run up to, you know, a ton of material per day through that plant. It's basically taking what we've got for the demo plant, adding some tanks, building out a bigger lithium circuit, and sealing that up using what we have. Unlike a new build, you know, the feed handling system is there, the warehouse, the lab, the maintenance crews. Mark, maybe I'll let you add some narrative to that. Yeah, sure. Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Matthew, for your question. I mean, if you've toured the plant, the plant has about 64 vessels that, you know, over the lifetime of it has, you know, evolved to, you know, a hydrometallurgical facility that has several streams or had several streams in its history. Right now, under this current footprint, we're using about a dozen or so of those vessels. When we go to You know, a 2,500 ton per annum plant. We'll be using a lot more of the dormant vessels that are just laying there right now and, not really doing any work for us. That's the leverage that we have here. You know, it's a lucky thing to have, because it really allows you to limit the capital spend and get into production quicker. That's kind of, you know, the asset, you know, leveraging the asset that we have to maximize the rate at which we can run. You can see the profitability on these numbers is quite significant. Okay. That's kind of a bird's eye view of that. Just so I'm clear, you could run this... Like, spend the $6 million, like, now and have some cash flow before you complete the refinery for the cobalt? Well, what this plan does, what this scoping study did was, the spend that would need to be done would occur over 12 months of, you know, from getting the financing on that spend. Some of these vessels would be dual purpose, and some would have to be replaced if the hydroxide project gets full financing. In the near term, this gets you operating and generating cash much quicker. I mean, if we have full funding on the project, our cobalt hydroxide, the cobalt sulfate project, then some of these vessels would have to be replaced. Got it. That would be part of additional capital for keeping the rates going, so to speak, for Black Mass. All right. Matt, if I may, just to be totally clear, CAD 6 million becomes CAD 6 million+. If you wanna run these two concurrently, that is to say the cobalt plant and the 2,500 ton, then yeah, I mean, the idea of the CAD six million, this is a very quick and profitable way for us to get the cash flow with a quick return. You are borrowing some of the equipment that otherwise go to the cobalt plant, so there would be a higher number associated with a 2,500 ton standalone. Oh, okay. Do we have a number for a standalone? Truthfully, no. No, I mean, I think we'd be- Okay. We'd be guessing. We're working on a, you know, kind of a, what would a 5,000 ton look like? That will come in time. That would be, you know, an order of magnitude larger because now you're building out structures and whatnot. Okay. You know, I mean, compared to a greenfield, right? You're not, you know, we've got our. Obviously, we've got our permits, which is massive, but you've got your infrastructure and power and water, and like, there's so much already there that when I say orders of magnitude, you know, we're not talking $100 million. Maybe you're talking half of that to get a 5,000 ton plant. Again, this is just orders of magnitude. We need to do the work. Because of everything that's there now, we're building onto existing structures and facilities and equipment. The next question is from Jake Sekelsky with Alliance Global Partners. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, Jake. Just following up a bit on the Black Mass operation, do you expect to announce a full economic study before moving to commercialization there? Are you comfortable moving forward with the work that's been done so far on the 2,500 ton a day scenario? Yeah, back to my point I made about, you know, proving out your process, your IP, and then partnering. We're kind of at the partnering stage now. You know, leveraging somebody else's balance sheet, whether it be through a commercial relationship or otherwise. Yeah, there'd be more work required. This is a desktop. Look, Mark's team got this up and running for, you know, like $3 million, recommission the plant and get the plant going on a demonstration basis. It's that same crew of operators and metallurgists that came up with this work. We're still doing our METSIM modeling, among other things. There will be more work required. I think we'll be able to share some of this, publicly as well as the results of the study. Slightly redacted, but we'll have a report available on our website to give you a sense of the amount of work that was done. Got it. Okay. Just switching gears to the Three Fires agreement that you guys announced about a week ago. Can you provide any color on the pricing mechanisms that you guys are considering under that agreement? Or is it still too early stage to kinda talk about that? Okay. Yeah, maybe just Three Fires, just by way of background, that's, I guess the best way to describe it's an economic development group that represents a number of indigenous First Nations communities around the Great Lakes area. And of course, we've got two very large cell plants that are coming into their territory. You know, I think from their perspective, circularity and recycling aligns with their values. They've got, you know, they've got access, I suppose, to capital and access to government officials eager to help build capacity. The... Where we are right now on the MOU, we haven't outlined the economic split, but you know, the high level concept with Three Fires, and this was them reaching out to us with the idea, is that, look, you've got the refinery, you don't need four of those. What you do need is shredding capability and a dedicated feed. Why don't we work together to build out the shredding capability in Ontario and have a good sized collection and shredding facility. You know, for whatever the sources might be. The broad parameters would be that they would help with the siting, so the location of the property, and the initial capital. We would bring our expertise, both in refining and also on the shredding side to help make that, make that a reality. Operatorship, the profit shares we would see. What that really does, Jake, it provides us now with a captive feed source, which I think is really the future. I think this idea of buying black mass in the open market, is gonna come and go 'cause as battery plants start to pop up, you know, nobody's gonna sell you their feed only to buy it back again. This kind of sets us up for what I would say kind of the second generation of the black mass market as we see it evolving. Makes sense. Okay. That's all for me. Thanks again. Thank you. The next question is from Gordon Lawson with Paradigm Capital. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning, everyone, and congratulations on getting to this stage. My question is, in line with what's already been asked, but the forecasted decrease in EBITDA, is that largely based on consensus commodity price forecasts, or are there other factors at play? Before I hand it over to Craig. The EBITDA that we presented there, Gordon, relates just to the black mass, right? Other EBITDA that we had previously presented was for the cobalt sulfate production activities. As we indicated, we withdrew those guidance numbers earlier this year. Numbers today we're presenting is for the scoping study on black mass. Correct. The, the products coming out of that, the black mass recycling, I mean, you're generating EBITDA based on commodity prices, correct? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. Okay. As for the mill, is there an opportunity for debottlenecking or additional fine-tuning? I mean, the mill is now being used for a different product than originally designed, so I'd assume there's room for improvement there unless it's you prefer to keep it as is for the future cobalt production, correct? You wanna take that, Mark? I mean, as far as black mass processing, yeah, we've been, you know, since we started this back in December, we have been tweaking the process as we go. In fact, that's one of the things that is nice about this whole demonstration is that it gives us that ability to, you know, increase recoveries, increase throughput, by, you know, getting feedback on what's working well and what isn't working so well, and then moving forward. As far as the hydroxide project, I mean, we've done a pilot plant, a complete pilot plant, on that right through to processing and manufacturing cobalt sulfate. We're pretty confident in our flow sheet. You know, the people that we've... The vendors that we had involved with, supplying equipment have supplied equipment to other cobalt sulfate plants around the world. There's a level of confidence that we have in that process. Overall, I mean, the opportunity that we have right now for the black mass circuit is really adding value to our steps moving forward and expanding out to 2,500 tons. There is ongoing tweaking that we're doing almost every week here, and finding little ways to improve recoveries and as I mentioned, improve production rates. Gord, I'd say, as Mark said, this plant's had a couple of iterations, right? It's produced nickel and cobalt, copper products in the past, silver even. What it hasn't produced is lithium. If I were to think of a bottleneck today, it's building out that circuit, right? This is a circuit that we introduced as part of a demo plant. Yeah. To go continuous, we'd wanna continue adding that capacity. To the, yeah, to the bigger cobalt hydroxide plant, you know, we looked at that early. Decision to buy a larger crystallizer, which is now having some knock-on effects on our CapEx, but to go from a 5,000 ton crystallizer to a 6,500 tons cobalt-containing crystallizer, that would've been the bottleneck. You know, you gotta size that right out of the gate. Right. Tankage is certainly not an issue. It may be when we go from 5,000 to 6,500, but I think we successfully addressed that potential bottleneck 2 years ago. When I looked at the cobalt projections of any one of the big three or any one of the big automakers, this plant's total capacity for cobalt is gonna exceed any one auto manufacturer's requirements by about 2027. I think it was the right decision there. Okay. Great. Thanks very much for the color. Thanks, Gord. That is all the time we have for questions today. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Joe Racanelli for any closing comments. Thank you everyone for joining us. We will be available for any follow-up questions. Please do reach out to us. We're happy to answer any of your questions. Again, thank you for participating today. That concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.