We're running a few minutes late. I'll jump right in. Hello again, everyone. Last but We're running a few minutes late. I'll jump right in. Hello again, everyone. Last but We're running a few minutes late. I'll jump right in. Hello again, everyone. Last but We're running a few minutes late. I'll jump right in. Hello again, everyone. Last but not least, to cap off the symposium, we have Lithium Americas joining us virtually. Lithium Americas, based in Vancouver, BC, was formed through the separation of predecessor Lithium Americas into two public companies, Lithium Americas that we're hearing from today and Lithium Argentina. The company is committed to developing the Thacker Pass project in Humboldt County in Northern Nevada, which hosts one of the largest known lithium resources and largest lithium reserves, proven and probable, in the world. Thacker Pass is owned by a JV between Lithium Americas, which holds a 62% interest and is the manager of the project, along with GM, which holds a 38% interest. That JV was formed following GM's $625 million investment, which closed in December 2024. The company is focused on advancing this project through phase I towards production targeting a capacity of 40,000 metric tons per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate. Thacker Pass is expected to reach a total of 160,000 ton annual capacity over an additional four phases. The company has an off-take agreement with General Motors for 100% of the production volumes from phase I for 20 years, plus 38% of phase II production volumes for 20 years. GM has the right of first refusal on the remaining of phase II production volumes. Lithium Americas has around 220 million shares outstanding, trading around $3 for a $660 million market cap. Net cash as of September 30, 2023 of around $340 million for a $320 million enterprise value. Joining us remotely is CEO Jon Evans. Jon was CEO of predecessor Lithium Americas before the split from May 2019 until the split when he became CEO of new Lithium Americas. He has over 20 years of experience in operations and management, including a prior role as the Vice President and General Manager of the lithium division of FMC, which became Livent. Also joining him is new CFO Luke Colton, who joined LAC just two months ago but brings significant mining experience over two decades and most recently as CFO of Minova International. We're happy to have Jon and Luke joining us via Zoom, and I'll let them start off with an overview of LAC before getting into Q&A. Thanks, everyone. I actually am sharing my screen, so I don't know if it's up or if people have it. Yep, we can see it. Okay, great. Thanks. Actually, it was just out. Luke and I were back out at site, actually, two days ago. Even the picture that you see here has changed quite a bit as we're in active construction right now. Just to give everyone an overview of the company, and I appreciate the summary. Who are we? We are the largest known lithium deposit in the world. Actually, it's in northern Nevada, and you can see the inset there in Humboldt County, up near the border of Oregon. Our project area is the darkened area in Thacker Pass there that constitutes our operating area here, and actually, it constitutes where we would do actually additional expansions. We can do five expansions on the project scope that we have now, and the data that we published earlier this year puts it ahead in terms of reserve and resource well ahead of anything else in the world. We're funded, as you mentioned, our capital stack is made up of a Department of Energy ATVM Loan for $2.26 billion. The capital portion of that is about $1.96 billion. The rest is interest during construction. General Motors, who has invested in us via JV structure, which actually changed a little bit. Originally, it was going to be just an investment in common shares in the company. The second phase of that investment came in directly as a JV partner. In total, cash put into the company is $750 million. Then on top of that, they're providing and furnishing a $200 million zero-interest line of credit during construction, which actually satisfies one of the requirements for the loan, where we have to have extra liquidity above and beyond even contingency during the construction phase. We are low OpEx. Oh, and I almost forgot. Orion Resource Partners is the third leg of that. We recently announced an investment of up to $250 million of Orion. We've taken $220 million, and there's an ability to draw another $30 million once we get into the project with them as well. So well funded. I'll talk a little bit about those partners. They're all well known for GM, obviously, as an OEM, and Orion as an active investor in this space for critical materials, minerals in general. It's a low OpEx project. Even in today's pricing environment, which is challenged, we would be cash flow positive with OpEx of about $6,300 a ton. We have an off-take agreement with GM, where they have the rights on an annual basis for up to 20 years of the project for phase I. That is governed by a pricing agreement, which is actually built into the loan, where there is actually a floor price. There is no ceiling, but there is an effective discount depending upon what pricing is in the marketplace. They are hedged against very high prices in the past, like we saw a few years ago, when the price of lithium was about six times what it is today. A very experienced board and management team. Luke joined us, and his experience, you can see in his bio, is quite extensive with Rio Tinto and large projects like this all around the world, along with a management team that's been built to actually not only build but operate this asset. We consider ourselves as much in the chemical industry as we do in mining. The bulk of the capital for this project is actually to build conversion and purification. When the product leaves the site here, it goes directly, actually, to a battery manufacturer to be put into a cathode. It's a large project. We had the governor join us actually two days ago, and our congressman will be peaking at about 2,000 jobs. That's actually assisted by a project labor agreement with the North American Building Trades, which is part of the AFL-CIO. We have completed the bulk of the detailed engineering. We're approaching 60%+ now of final engineering. When you build projects like this, typically, when you FID a project, you're at about 30%-35%. We're well advanced and very confident now, just given the advanced nature of the engineering, which in order to do that, you have to start spending significant amounts of capital to start locking in time in fabrication shops and so forth. We've been running this basically in parallel, and we've invested actually quite a bit of money in this project, several hundred million dollars at this point. Talked about the collaboration with GM. We're also collaborating with the local communities, whether that be the nearest town, which is about 8 mi away, and even the Indian reservation to the north, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, which is about 50 mi away to the north of us. The process has been backed by years of research and development and actually by an active full-scale pilot facility. We've tested steps of this process at scale, such as beneficiation, and the rest. We've been able to operate this facility in miniature, if you will, for the entire flowsheet. It is a project that we're very proud of from a footprint standpoint. We recycle 85% of the water that we use. Our power is half of it's generated by waste heat from our reagent plant, and the other half actually is wheeled in via the grid from Bonneville Power, which is the power supplier in the Pacific Northwest. That's all hydro-based. We are actually carbon neutral. It's been a long journey here. You can see this project goes back to 2007, and it actually goes back to the early 1970s. It was discovered by Chevron looking for uranium. They didn't find uranium, but they found lithium, mercury, and other things in and around the region. The company was called Western Lithium. It merged with Lithium Americas in 2016, and a new team came in, and we basically put together a process that's very economic. Got all the information we needed to start preparing for permitting. We went through all the permitting regime where all of our federal and state permits are in place at this point, so we have no litigation issues or ability restrictions to operate. You can see here the joint venture agreement which GM announced last year, but that actually goes back to an off-take agreement that was done early in 2023. Our updated resource and reserve, which was done early this year, which really highlights the unique and world-class nature of this deposit, whereas the U.S. actually has the largest lithium deposit in the world. Finally, the final investment by Orion Resource Partners, which was announced about two weeks ago. Our partners, and really this makes up our capital stack. We were the largest loan that's been actually closed now. Our loan was closed in early October of last year and sits at the Federal Credit Bank and with Citibank at this point. We expect to draw sometime in the third quarter of this year. You'll ask me questions, "Am I worried about that?" The answer is no. We're actually playing exactly where the administration wants, where their priorities are all the above, with oil, gas, critical minerals, which you hear in the news about every day now. This project is right down the middle in terms of what the administration is focused on. We were actually permitted during the Trump administration. We were protected in court by the Biden administration and funded via a bolstered LPO office. GM came in the middle of that as well with an original investment of $650 million. Now, as you can see, up to $945 million. They've doubled down. Orion has joined here at the end with the final capital that we need to allow us to be fully funded to move forward in full construction, which we are now at this point. A lot of things we've actually put a lot of thought in this project. The first one, which might be unusual in some industries, is actually a workforce hub. We are providing actually housing for our workers during the construction phase for up to 2,000 people. That's actually assisted by the project labor agreement that we have with the AFL-CIO and the North American Building Trades. We will be housing workers, feeding them, bussing them to site, and they'll have a place to stay. Given the area that we're in is relatively rural, the city that it's located right outside of is Winnemucca, Nevada, which has about 10,000 people. The county, though, and I know you're all East Coasters, is the size of half the state of Connecticut and has 16,000 people in it. This allows folks to come from far around the country, work three weeks on, and get one week off. The facility is right off of Interstate 80, and it's about a 45-minute drive to site. It is something we wanted to put in, number one, to attract a good workforce, but two, not to put undue strain on the community, just given hotel room availability and just housing in general, which is a problem across the country now where it's in short supply and very expensive. We have completed just about all the excavation at this point. All the pads are in place to start pouring concrete for all of the process buildings, and that'll start over the next few weeks. We have a batch plant on site for concrete, all the utilities, roads. We're fully mobilized at this point. All of our long lead-time equipment has been awarded to safeguard the timeline, but also to lock in pricing, and that continues. As I mentioned before, the detailed engineering is well advanced for a project at this stage, just given it's well ahead of construction, which is in the teens at this point in terms of progress, whereas the engineering has well outstripped that, which helps really give us the project going forward too. This is some pictures here. Again, these are sort of old because even as of this week, the one on the upper left, we have all the pad sites have been put in place. You can see the batch plant in the middle. You can actually, from one part of this, from a viewing platform to the north, you can actually see the entire sort of footprint for the plant already laid out with all the building foundations already excavated. On the bottom right, you can see the workforce hub, which now we're placing housing units on top of all those piers. As I said, that workforce hub is about 45 minutes away from the production site. The process itself basically borrows from what's practiced currently. What's different upfront is the source of the material is in a specialized clay material that's left over from a major supervolcano, which erupted about 16 million years ago. It's the highest known lithium concentration on Earth. We have lithium that occurs up to 1% by weight, and it's a very easy beneficiation process that we use exactly like the phosphate industry, where we put the ore in slurry. It's friable, and you can break it apart with your hand, separate it based on particle size, and concentrate it up to 1%, thicken it in centrifuge to take out the extra water, which we recycle, leach it with a reagent that we make on site, and basically then run it through a purification process, which steps three through five look exactly like a spodumene or brine-based purification process that are running all around the world. All the equipment that we have is operating around the world today. Nothing is oversized or largest ever built or anything like that. It's all basically off the shelf and relatively easy technology because the resource is very good, and the chemistry is actually quite simple for us to convert and do the mining and conversion all in one spot. As I mentioned, OpEx, you can see we are at about $6,300 a ton, and where we are on the cost curve based on global demand and average pricing today. It is a world-class deposit, a first quartile type deposit that can survive in tough markets like we are today. It is very large. What we have depicted here is we are operating all five phases. Our first phase is only 40,000 tons, so it is a little slimmer column than that, but it rates and lines up very nicely with the best resources in the world. It would represent the U.S.'s largest lithium chemicals processing facility that it has ever had. We do produce today, but only a tenth of what phase I of this project would actually be putting out. Team here, as I mentioned, Luke is with us and joined me this morning or this afternoon. In my own background, I come out of the chemicals industry. I started my career with General Electric, spent 13 years there in specialty chemicals in their engineered plastics division. I've been in pharmaceuticals. I've been in lithium for five years before that, and even in private equity, my experience has been mainly around chemical and process industries. Richard is our owners team lead and comes from a very illustrious career at Fluor, building mega projects around the world for almost 30 years. He is backed up on the board by Phil Montgomery, who's the former Head of capital projects for BHP, which is the largest mining company in the world. Our chairman, Kelvin Dushnisky, was the former president of Barrick and also AngloGold Ashanti Ltd, which are major mining companies today. I think Barrick's the largest gold mining company in the world. This is an important investment for our country. You can see some numbers on here. I'm not going to go read them off, but from the Department of Defense standpoint, they spend several hundred million dollars a year on rechargeable batteries. Every drone, every Starlink satellite, every submarine, fighter jet, and then to go on beside this, every data center, your cell phones, our computers are all powered by rechargeable batteries. It is a strategic imperative for the U.S. There is a lot of capacity going in right now in the U.S. in terms of battery facilities, but also cathode facilities and the rest of the supply chain. While we'll be producing 40,000 tons a year, that's not going to be able to satisfy all of the U.S.'s demand by any stretch. When we get into production, it might satisfy 15%-20% of North America's demand for refined lithium chemicals. Today, over 70% of that all comes from China. It is a first step forward to reshore this critical material, but it is by no means alone. Are we going to be able to switch the how it works today? There will be more investments needed, hopefully by us as we do further phases, but hopefully other assets around the U.S. and Canada are developed as well. Our timeline here, this is sort of where we are today. You saw earlier, this goes back, it took 10 years to get to this point. At this point now, we are in full construction. It'll take us the next two and a half years to build this, get it into mechanical completion, and to start ramping up at the end of 2027, all throughout 2028, and then to be providing General Motors with the products they need to support their battery business. Also, as joint venture partners, we have the ability if they do not need all of the material on an annualized basis, we're qualifying with about seven other folks in the business right now that we'll be able to sell to. It is great that we have an offtake, but we also have options as JV partners to maximize output out of this facility on an annualized basis. I think that's it. Okay, great. Thanks for that overview. Jon, we'll start off. We have a question in the back, right to start. Hi. Can you give us the terms of the convertibility for the Orion notes? It's a five-year note. At the end of five years, of course, we have the ability actually to buy them out. I think that's after two and a half years. Otherwise, it's a five-year note; it would convert to equity. I think the pick is 9.87%. I'd have to go back and look. Actually below 10%, which is good. As you know, there's also a royalty/production payment with that as well. That added about $100 a ton to our OpEx cost. Orion is backed by pension funds and by sovereign wealth funds primarily. Their model is a little bit different than private equity. They guard against the bottom side so that they have an annuity, if you will, whereas on the upside, that production payment agreement actually reduces as price goes up. I think the structure. Is it convertible into equity at what strike price? It's a, what is it, $3 and I want to say $0.87. $3.87. Okay, thank you. To piggyback on that, with that last investment and the investment from GM, I think that was the last equity component you needed for the Department of Energy loan. How is that loan structured, and how are you able to take advantage of that going forward through the construction process? Our first draw is later this year, the third quarter. It requires us and JV, GM is our JV partner, to spend and/or commit 95% of the capital that we brought to the project. At that point, we start to draw off the government credit facility, and we do that until the end of the project. Your money goes in first, and then we meet on basically a biweekly basis with the Department of Energy. Every quarter, we do a roll-up with them as well on spend and how much capital has been spent. The process actually to draw is not a political one. Our loan is closed and sits at the Federal Credit Bank. It is a very mechanical process where you basically meet the criteria, and then you start to draw. The loan is drawn on a monthly basis based on a punch list, if you will. We have a model going forward through the whole project. Thirty days before we draw, we essentially have a somewhat itemized list of major areas. It is not line by line, but major areas, whether it be run equipment or overhead costs for the joint venture, that are submitted to the government and become the basis for the amount that is drawn on a monthly basis. All right, great. You mentioned all litigation and permits in place. The construction for phase I is underway. We appreciate, following the lithium industry for many years, how difficult that is. You are on track for construction to be completed by late 2027. What milestones should investors be looking at for now, including the FID? Can you take us through the flowsheet of getting to full production? Yeah, the FID, that is a mechanical process with GM that we are almost wrapped up with. They had to sign off on things, and that has been well underway. I wouldn't consider that a milestone as much as obviously you're all going to look at first draw to make sure that there's no issues there. We're not worried, but I know a lot of folks look at the different landscape that we have currently. That'll be one. We will have first concrete, which will be this spring. Kind of going back a little bit, that'll be another milestone for us as well. As you get into 2026 and 2027, there'll be major construction milestones. First steel on the ground, concrete pours are completed, major piping in place once the steel work gets in place, all the way to 2027 where you'll have unit commissioning complete. We'll do individual units commissioned. We've wet commissioned them with water and then hand them over until we do a final mechanical completion handoff in the fourth quarter of 2026 so we can fire the entire circuit up. Okay. You mentioned it in the presentation. We're very familiar with hard rock and brine production, but your source is clay. Can you take us how that process differs at all and how you mentioned you're going to fall low on the cost curve, but where you would fall? Yeah, we're in the first quartile. I think when I project it up, I think that's on our corporate website at around $6,300 a ton. So it's a mixture of both. It's a little bit closer to hard rock. The difference is that I don't have to use a lot of energy. Crushing, grinding, and there's no calcining required, which requires the heat and ore up to change its crystal structure. You have to heat it up to 1,500 to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. We don't have to do any of that. The lithium occurs within the ore, but it's loose. That's just because all lithium comes from volcanoes. In our case, it's a couple hundred meter thick, deep layer of sediment from a volcanic eruption that's stuck in place. It almost looks like a sandpit. It's a relatively shallow mine. It's only 1,000 acres, and it's about 400 feet deep at the deepest spot. Once you get past the beneficiation, it looks pretty much exactly like a spodumene hard rock deposit would in terms of handling after that. The leaching is the same. The purification on the last three steps is actually all the same for any type of deposit. You would have to get it to a battery-grade product. What I would say about this project, I've had a lot of folks, especially I'll say from Australia because that's hard rock country there. Firstly, if you look at deposits like this, which are large, easy to mine, and folks will look at concentrations. Concentration is high here, but it's very shallow and easy to mine. It's like laterite deposits for nickel in Indonesia today. That was a deposit that folks looked at and said, "Well, it's never been done before." It's done so well. It's killed the nickel industry in Australia that they do it via hard rock. There's nothing that we're doing here that's different or new in terms of technology. There's no black box here, no equipment that's had to be developed specialized for this deposit. It's just the geology is very easy to deal with. It's backed by work that we've done with Stanford University to understand the crystal structure here. Literally, the beneficiation upfront is really simple. That's what makes the cost low and that it's low energy, low temperature. We don't have any exotic materials to construction here. There's no titanium in this. There's no high heat, no high-pressure steam. We don't have any of that. We don't even need natural gas. We're just lucky that the geologies are very good. All right, great. We've had a very weak pricing environment in lithium for an extended period of time now. It might work out great for Lithium Americas being the timing of your end of construction. Just wanted to get your thoughts on lithium pricing. What needs to change to bring things back to normal in the market? How does that change your thinking on phase two and beyond with Thacker Pass? I think economics is going to do its thing here where you're seeing major cutbacks by current producers who even themselves are having problems with financing today. There isn't a lot of inventory in the system at this point. Pricing needs to be to a point where it's in the high teens or low twenties to get major capital off the sidelines from private sources or for the majors to come back and to be aggressive again. Whereas Albemarle, for instance, at one point was over $4 billion of capital at work. I think the challenge in this sector, and your chemicals folks, and I am too, the mining industry is used to building through cycles. The chemical industry, if you're a large chemical company, people buy chemical stocks because they're predictable. In a lot of cases, you have a higher, you might be trading at eight or nine times versus the mining industry is two or three times. Chemical companies, positive cash flow is key and dividends are key. When you get to environments like this, the companies in the lithium space are small. Nothing against Albemarle, but I had a division of GE, which was half the size of their whole company. They are fairly small. They can't put $4 billion-$5 billion at work, go negative cash flow and say, "Just wait. It'll be great. Just wait. So them, SQM, hell, even Rio Tinto got involved now. Rio Tinto could not even do a $6 million share raise. They had to go to debt to fund their purchase of Arcadium. It is all starting to hit home now. Pricing will respond. Is it going to go back to $80,000 a ton? No. I think that was a bad thing for the industry. You need to be in the high teens and low twenties for any of those companies to actually start to put that kind of capital at risk again, especially chemical companies. The companies in this space outside of Rio, who is getting in, are really small. There are no DAOs. There are no BASFs. There are no air products, things like that, that are big firms in here. Oil companies are biting around the edges, but I think that's a long ways off before they get heavily involved. Okay, that's our time. I just want to thank Jon and Luke for joining us. I know you wanted to join in person, but we're very happy to have you virtually and hopefully next time. Hopefully, I can get out to visit the mine at some point. Thank you very much, and we'll be looking forward to the progress of Lithium Americas. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you. Everyone, that concludes our 16th Annual Specialty Chemical Symposium. As our co-CIO, Chris Marangi, mentioned earlier, we host a series of these throughout the year. We hope you can join us back here in the next two weeks for our 11th Annual Waste and Environmental Services Symposium on April 3rd. On behalf of myself, Rosemarie Morbelli, and all of our team at Gabelli Funds, I just want to thank everyone for your interest and participation. Thank you, everyone.