Okay. Thanks for joining us. It's the deadly post-lunch slot, Paul, so here we are. Get your caffeine, and everybody's hyped up after the power and AI keynote at lunchtime. So anyway, we are pleased to welcome Paul Graves to join us. He's the CEO of Arcadium Lithium. Arcadium is the result of a merger that closed earlier this year, late last year, between Livent and Allkem. Itself was the merger and the result of a number of previous legacy lithium producers, notably in Argentina and Australia. So Paul, you know, I consider Paul one of the straight shooters in the lithium market, or at least somebody that doesn't shy away from questions and provides opinion. And so we always appreciate that. So always found those discussions insightful. So welcome, Paul, and thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Let's step back and maybe talk about the drivers of the merger. Let's start on the company instead of talking about the industry a little bit. But maybe you could talk about some of the drivers of the merger and some, like, your underlying thesis. Clearly, you know, the transaction provided a lot of scale and diversification. Maybe just give us some perspectives on that, as a starting point. Sure. You know, look, I think it really starts with is this idea in the lithium business that given the growth of demand and therefore ultimately of supply that we need, you can't be a small single asset company. And so you have to start thinking about how do you, and the reason for that is you're just not big enough to be relevant with your customers. You end up being just tiny. You know, you just don't have any relevance. And if we are producing 40,000 tons a year of lithium and one customer needs that much, then you're just gonna struggle to really have relevance in this industry. So we definitely believe that it was important to get bigger. And it's pretty difficult to ramp up a single resource, even the big Argentinian brine resources, which are just massive, right? But the ability to actually bring more production on a rate that's in line with the growth in demand, it's just not there for a whole bunch of reasons. So we decided and we realized that we wanted diversification of resources to give us more optionality and expansion. We needed more, more, more molecules to be more relevant with the customers. And then we looked around and we said, look, we in Livent, I was running Livent before, we have a lot of expertise in DLE and brine-based extraction and lithium hydroxide, but we're maybe less experienced in hard rock mining, and we need to be in that space as well. And so Allkem, we identified pretty quickly, great overlap of assets. We have two right next door to each other in Argentina, two next door to each other in Quebec, very different and complementary skills. And so it just, frankly, very similar valuations as well. So we thought it just was one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to put together a merger of equals, and, you know, create an organization that is positioned not only for growth today, but actually growth over the next decade or so. And I think it would've been much more difficult for each one of us individually to do that. Certainly. Well, notwithstanding the trajectory of price as well, right? And so now that you're, you know, well, you know, five good months into integration, you know, any positive surprises of note or things that have, you know, maybe give us a perspective on how it's played out relative to what your expectations were, you know, five, six months ago? Yeah, look, I think there was a lot of fit, a lot of similarities between Allkem and Livent and Allkem. But there are a few differences. And I think the single biggest difference is how we ran the organization. Livent always ran itself back through its FMC Lithium days as a fully integrated business. So this philosophy was always maximize the value of every LCE that you produced, which is why not only we're in carbonate, but we're also in chloride, we're in hydroxide, we're in butyllithium, we're in lithium metal. And to run a business that way and to really integrate it, you have to run a very centralized operating model, whereas Allkem was much more asset-based and ran each asset individually and almost as an island. One of the opportunities of the merger that we saw on both sides was to move to a truly integrated model across both businesses and integrate all these assets together so that we can maximize value. One classic example of that is a lot of the Allkem carbonate is designed to not be battery-grade. The process cannot make battery-grade product. Whereas the Livent process not only can, but sort of can only make battery-grade product. Today we have this inefficiency where we're using the higher value battery-grade material to process into lithium hydroxide and selling lower value technical grade. The opportunity to take that network and integrate it was a big piece of the value proposition that we think that the merger brings. It's been good to see that, you know, that largely is playing out. We're now running this technical grade lithium carbonate through our hydroxide plants to test it, make sure it works. We expect to start qualifying that material into the customer supply chains later this year. It's been good to sort of see that generally speaking, customers are very supportive of what we've been doing and are very keen to spend more time with us. We certainly now have much better capabilities on project delivery. I think just having more scale allows you to build stronger capabilities. We've hired some good people even since the close with deep experience in delivering projects in the oil and gas and the mining industry around the world. I think we've really strengthened the business since we closed. Could you? I'm happy to hear about the technical grade integration and qualification process, 'cause I feel like I ask you about that every conference call. But so for those that maybe aren't as close to the numbers and what that actually means is you've got a higher grade technical molecule that you're upgrading to hydroxide and a battery grade. And is that opportunity set? Is it a, you know, again, I guess it's very dependent on where market prices are, but is that a 10% margin uplift? Is it a 20% margin uplift? Like, what does it mean for your business? Well, there's a couple of benefits. You know, one of the advantages in the Allkem Olaroz process is that if you're not trying to make battery grade and you are a bit more relaxed about the impurities, you get pretty big productivity benefits. I mean, we can probably improve output from Olaroz by between 20% and 30% by not trying to make battery grade. So straight away you're just getting more, you're getting better productivity. The second is, and it varies upon market conditions, and I think this will become more the case over time. Technical grade at some point runs out of technical grade markets. And so people buying it are upgrading it themselves into battery grade. And so they want a discount for that, right? If they're gonna do it. And so you can, today we probably see anywhere between—look, it varies—but between $2-$5 a kilo discount for technical grade relative to good quality battery grade. And if you apply that over the full 40,000 tons of carbonate that Olaroz can produce, it's a pretty meaningful profit uplift to be able to do that. Now that'll take time, but it's you just have more degrees of freedom, the better the quality of lithium that you're actually producing and selling. Right. Okay. Can we talk maybe just considering some of the investors in the room are probably interested in just your perspective on the lithium market overall. I mean, obviously we've come what looks like a second kind of classic boom bust within the decade in terms of the price chart. I think it's perhaps not helpful that you've got, you know, one of your bigger competitors based in North Carolina that starts with an A saying, oops, we didn't think prices would correct this far. We thought more supply would come off, right? I mean, they kind of are throwing up their hands a little bit. Investors hear about a de-stocking process that they have zero visibility on, right? They've got consultant reports telling them it's unclear to people, is it the de-stocking at the cell level? Was it in the, was it in the pack level? Was it in the, you know, where was it in the chain? So maybe your perspective on kind of what's going, like, you know, prices have kind of come off the floor, feels like expectations have kind of come completely down in terms of some sort of whipsaw improvement. Yeah. Maybe your perspective on kind of where we are in that cycle. Sure. So let me start with a bit of, as you said, perspective. When Livent IPO'd in 2018, that year was the highest average realized price we'd ever achieved. And, and up until 2023, still was the highest average realized price we'd ever achieved. And that was about $15 a kilo. And we averaged over $20 in Q1. So let's get this market in perspective, right? I think people are a little bit blinded by the kind of crazy run-up to $60-$70 prices on some of the indices and just think, oh my God, it's just awful. But it's just a lack of historical perspective. I think the second thing that's perhaps even more important is the price appears to have kind of bottomed out in the sort of $12-$13 a kilo, give or take, something like that in China. It's higher outside China, but in China it's in that kind of price range. The last time we had a down cycle, it went as low as $6. It really tells you how the supply side has changed in the last three years and what supply has actually come on market changing these high prices. It isn't low cost production, it's high cost production that's come on. So the challenge that I think most people wrestle with today as well, and maybe that's where some of my friends down in North Carolina are trying to point to is, well, why isn't that high cost supply coming out of the market? This is where lithium becomes a really complicated industry. The supply chain is incredibly opaque for everybody, even for us, right? It's long. The signals being sent down the supply chain are often the far distance, you know, they're happening in Detroit or they're happening in Germany or even, you know, in parts of China. They're not clear signals. So what we have is a supply chain trying to figure out; we know that year-over-year growth in EV sales is about 20%-25%. It still was in Q1 year-over-year 25% higher year-over-year. So we know the growth is there, but there's a lot of confusion around technology roadmaps. There's a lot of confusion over IRA incentives, where Western automotives are trying to build supply chains. So I think you've got the whole supply chain that's kind of a little bit frozen at the moment, and it's kind of sitting back waiting for clear signals about which way to go. I don't believe there was a massive de-stocking in lithium 'cause I don't think there was ever a real big, you know, increase in inventory in the lithium space. I don't think we ever really saw in our supply chain customers with more than a couple of months of usable materials out on the shelf. So there wasn't really much they could do to de-stock. But what we're not seeing today is people producing cells, producing batteries, producing through the chain for next year's demand, which is what they typically would do. So it's kind of a little bit frozen. Now, I think another interesting wrinkle, and this is why it's such an interesting but difficult industry sometimes to predict is there's some pretty big geopolitical factors at work in my view. I think the U.S. and Europe, and we saw it today with the tariffs in Europe and we've seen it all through the IRA. If you flip it around and sit in China, the message you're receiving is the Western world is trying to remove China's advantage in electrification, which is huge, right? It is a massive advantage in the entire supply chain. And the biggest weakness that China has, its Achilles heel, if you will, is it doesn't actually have any lithium resources of its own. And so the simplest place, and maybe you could argue the same in, in other commodities, the simplest way to choke off China's leadership is to choke off the supply of raw materials. So not a surprise that they take what, what may appear to be economically irrational decisions, but are actually quite rational decisions to build their own captive supply chain to start processing very expensive lepidolite, to start putting a lot of capital into a very inefficient supply chain in, in African spodumene. This is really expensive stuff. But what the battery chain is saying in China, what the Chinese industry is saying is we don't care that that is costing me $20 a kilo just to even make it myself, 'cause I'm getting security of supply and I'm defending myself against some of these broader actions that the West is taking. So I try and encourage people to not look at lepidolite and not look at African spodumene as supply that came into the market. Think about it more as demand that was taken out of the market by, by captively producing. China is basically saying, I don't need to buy as much lithium. And that's where the oversupply comes from. And that's, look, it will correct. It always does. The growth rates are so high. I mean, total lithium demand in 2023 was where we thought it would be in 2025 when we did our IPO in 2018. So in the space of five years, you know, we hit a seven-year target in five years and it continues to grow at that rate. And it will get harder and harder for low-cost supply to come into the market. We just think there's a natural tendency, there's a natural path upwards for the marginal producer's cost. And we think the price of lithium is, will only creep up even from, especially from where it is today. I don't think it'll go over $40. I don't think it'll stay below $20. I think it's just, you look at the economics, it's difficult to see how that happens. Right. Really helpful. It's a good, it's a nice counterpoint in terms of that competition of additional supply that came to the market that was perhaps less economic. What's your perspective? I mean, the other thing is you think about, contemplate some of your growth perspectives. I mean, the interesting thing about putting these two companies together is you were both, both companies were on a growth trajectory. So you have built-in growth over the next couple of years almost without having to make, you've got decisions to make, but not really hard decisions like a greenfield. As you contemplate kind of greenfield, it does feel to us in the industry that there's like this two-tier decision making. There's: will my customer support this with a price that gives me a return? And then there's, you know, does the IRA have teeth enough that I need compliant material and will that come at a premium? You know, how do you, and again, you've got a conversion plan in China and you play on both sides of the fence as everybody else does. Yeah. What's your perspective on that kind of, you know, that dual path of that decision making? You know, it's interesting, you know, when you put it like that, Arcadium is very much almost like a little microcosm of the industry as a whole, to your point, because we have history in low-cost brine in Argentina and, you know, South American politics. So we can understand the challenges down there. We are developing hard rock-based resources, some of which will be converted into hydroxide, in Nemaska's case, some of which will probably in the first short term be sold as spodumene concentrate in the case of the Galaxy mine up there. And that is all IRA qualified. We have processing capabilities in the U.S. and in China. And we're in all the different products. And by the way, we also have a hard rock mine in Australia that's reaching end of life. So these are all the issues that the industry is gonna face as a whole. You can, you have to worry about the rest of the industry just, just by us and you get the whole industry in, in, in one go. Look, I think, I think it's a difficult question, but it's not that difficult. I think you have to have confidence in where you think marginal pricing is and look at the cost, position of your asset for a greenfield, especially. And that's not that difficult to do. The second thing, when you talk about, will customers support it? You know, customers aren't gonna pay you a premium for a commodity. So the only place a customer is really gonna give you pricing certainty is if you're selling them a product that is not commoditized, that has real specific value to them. That is not all lithium products. It is largely lithium hydroxide into high-nickel batteries. Certainly will be in lithium metal as that becomes more important. It's almost certainly not in spodumene concentrate and probably not in most grades of lithium carbonate. And so you've gotta be really thoughtful about, about where you make those decisions, when you rely on customers and contracts, and when you just have to have confidence about where, where the industry is going. I think the bigger challenge, more than pricing, actually is the capital cost. I think what people really misunderstand is how much capital it takes to bring on a lithium resource. And it's especially the case once you get it, you know, in more remote locations. It's just more difficult and more expensive in Canada than Australia. It's more difficult, you know, in Argentina. Building conversion plants outside China is incredibly expensive relative to the China option. And so I think the bigger challenge is this: will you get a return on that capital based upon what you think long-term pricing will be? And you've seen how it bounces around. That's a hard, that's hard math. Right. You, and in terms of the longer term, and again, don't put words in your mouth, but I, I guess our, if I think about, some of the longer-term pricing, those longer-term pricing dynamics and, and exactly what you just mentioned about the, the current cost of some of this, of some of this that people assume will come at the established cost structure, right? And so to the extent that the global cost curve is rising, demand is still growing, isn't this just a question of we need to bring on all this capacity that was funded in a different price environment and then it'll just become clear? Like, aren't we just headed for another crossover of that supply-demand curve? Yeah. Well, I think you gotta be a little bit careful with that analysis because there isn't really a single supply-demand curve, right? Because if everybody says, "I'm taking the easy, low, low-risk, low-capital path, I'm just gonna mine spod concentrate," then that's no, that's no use if you're building a battery. It's gotta be converted into a chemical. Other chemical plants that convert spod concentrate on a merchant basis today in China, right? So how does that, so you've got, so that's gonna be a market that's gonna be, if it truly becomes a separate market and, and Western supply chains won't touch material that goes through China, and that's a big if. But if they do go down that path, the China market will be massively oversupplied and the rest of the markets will be massively undersupplied. Yeah. And you then get into the question of, well, most of that, that capability is to turn spodumene into the hydroxide. But if the technology roadmap takes us more down a, a carbonate-based path, then either those plants need to be changed or they need to build new plants. And so even, even doing the supply analysis is not so simple as turning it into, you know, lithium carbonate equivalents into LCEs, running a cost curve and, and in it with a single supply and demand curve, you will get the, you'll get the answer wrong if you take that approach. And I think that's why, I think it's actually why people keep getting caught out. I think people are overambitious or overconfident around supply additions and not quite thoughtful or sophisticated enough in the demand patterns that they forecast where those demands are and what the actual product is. It's just not easy when even you get some of the OEMs signing long-term contracts with us for lithium hydroxide, and then they'll turn around and say, we're good with you, but now we're shifting a lot of our technology over to carbonate. You know, it's really difficult for us to invest in the supply chain when the customers themselves still don't know what they want three or four years from now. Right. We talk all day to people that are highly convicted based on the Chinese app that they're looking at that's telling them what the right price of this product is. So. Well, if the app says so. There's no lack of conviction. Can we talk a little bit about DLE? So, talk about something that's misunderstood. Yeah. You know, so an existing very bespoke process at Fenix. You've, you know, over the last number of years, you've made investments and partnerships with other companies on other aspects. And I know you made this, you know, you've got this partnership on ILiAD that you did late last year. What, what are you getting after here? Is this, is this expanding the resource base and the resource opportunity in your mind in brines, or is it lowering the cost of your existing asset base? Like what, what, what you, you seem to be working on a, on, on something here. And I was curious your, your perspective on it. Yeah. You know, you make it sound really Machiavellian and this stuff. You know, the truth is every process of producing lithium carbonate from brine has constraints. And people forget that land is a constraint. You know, other than the Atacama Desert, most places aren't really that well suited for evaporation-based processes, pond-based processes. Ponds are very expensive to maintain. They're very expensive to build. They are difficult to control, and they have very low yields. You know, you probably only yielding about 30% of the lithium you're actually extracting in the end. You compare that to a DLE process, and we've been running a DLE process since, you know, since the early 2000s, over 20 years now. We have a yield of about 90% of the lithium. We use very little land. In fact, we're slowly but surely eliminating our pond structures. They're only small ponds anyway, but we're largely eliminating them, for a whole bunch of environmental reasons. And we produce, because of the nature of it, a very pure product at the end of it all. Now, there are disadvantages. It uses a lot of fresh water and it needs energy. You have to heat the brine, and not everywhere you go can do that. So the ILiAD technology for us has some pretty big advantages over our existing technology. It's essentially a derivation of our existing technology. It's our technology sort of 2.0, if you will. But because of some changes that have been made, it uses less energy. So it allows us to deploy it in scale in places where maybe we would otherwise be energy constrained up there in the Salar del Hombre Muerto in Argentina as an example. We also see opportunities for future expansions at all of those not to be pond-based, but to have a DLE aspect to the flow sheet. It's certainly not just to your point about being misunderstood. DLE is just part of a flow sheet, right? There's a lot of stuff that we do in a pond-based system that you also do exactly the same with a DLE process. And, you know, you'll hear some people say, but, you know, DLE's a game changer because you pump the brine, you put it straight through the DLE process, and within hours you've got lithium. What you do with a pond, once the pond's up and running, you pump brine in at one end and you take, you know, concentrate brine out the other end. It's instant as well. So I don't, I don't think sometimes people focus on the right benefits or challenges of DLE. You want, you wanna develop non-conventional brine resources, you're gonna have to have a DLE process. In most places, you won't be able to use ponds. So it's really about having the right technology roadmap to allow us to take advantage of multiple types of resources in the future. Okay. And it's, I mean, it takes it, to say it otherwise, I guess the way we think about it is it takes it away from a, you know, a mining and extraction type process into an industrial process a little bit, right? Your footprint is smaller. It's in the kit, right? I try to remind people that if you actually look around who the real lithium producers and the integrated lithium producers in the world have been the leaders forever, it's SQM, it's Albemarle, it's ourselves, Ganfeng, Tianqi, they're all chemical companies. Yes. They're all industrial companies. None of them are miners. There are, of course, some big miners, you know, Pilbara Minerals, all these kind of guys, Sigma Lithium, but they're miners and they're mining an intermediate product. The analogy I use is they're the iron ore to the steel industry. Right. Right? They're not making steel, they're making iron ore or the equivalent of. And so there's an important place for that, but essentially lithium is a chemical business. It's an industrial process. Right. And so just in wrapping on that last thing, you mentioned another thing. Do you envision a time at which Arcadium could be in a place for you to be in the brine extraction business in, you know, either the Lower 48 or in North America? Yeah. We've looked multiple times at some of the brine resources in North America. Brine's complicated at the best of times. If you end up with a difficult brine, it just becomes really expensive. We've looked at petro brines, you know, we've looked at geothermal brines, we look at the Salton Sea. You know, just generally speaking, the capital requirement in the U.S. is high. Permitting is challenging. The brines themselves are chemically very challenging as well. And so it's not, we don't have an aversion to operating anywhere. We just don't see the economics in North America for the resources today, at least being that attractive. Okay. Could you talk a little bit about your customers in, in terms of what you're seeing from their behavior and their desires? I mean, obviously they are all, maybe they're, some of their growth aspirations are maybe a little bit lower than they were, a little while back, maybe. But at the same time, like you've got material that's coming from growth. Can you talk about how your commercial strategy on your growth material is and as of any different than the way in which you've operated historically? And then to, you know, are, are your customers coming to you and wanting more longer-term supply at a different price structure or, or how, how is that evolving? Yeah. I think that the overarching theme for most customers is their focus is much more on security of supply, of having partners that can actually grow supply, have credibility and grow supply than it is on price. I mean, the comment I make, no, no customers come to me and say, look, we think we're gonna win the EV race by buying lithium cheaper than anybody else. They will say we could absolutely fundamentally lose the EV race by not having access to lithium. So they're really very much focused on that. I think they are very nervous about how immature the lithium supply market is. A lot of junior miners, a lot of people selling intermediate product, very few people capable of producing high-quality material, particularly in hydroxide, maybe more so in lithium carbonate. They're also, you know, I don't think their growth aspirations are lower than they were a year ago. I think many of them had kind of built themselves up into a frenzy of constantly raising their estimates for EV sales. But if you go back and look at what they're forecasting today for EV sales and go back to say 2022 or early 2023, the numbers aren't that different. They just got a little, in my view, carried away as they went through 2023 with increasing their forecasts. And they're learning too. They're learning what consumers want. They're learning whether the consumers want a premium vehicle or do they want with super long range, or do they want a cheap vehicle that's more of a city runabout? And they're busy adapting and amending their portfolio of vehicles accordingly. They're also learning to move more quickly. You know, seven-year product cycles are just too slow today. You know, China just goes much quicker than that in the automotive space. And so they're also having to go through all of those changes. In that context, customers are really wanting long-term partnerships and truly partnerships with their suppliers, and they want flexibility. They want the ability to say, "Hey, look, I need more carbonate than hydroxide. I need somebody who can help me think about metal for the next generation of batteries. I want some China material. I want some non-China material." And so back to the, you know, opening question about why we did this merger, we can offer these customers a heck of a lot more now we've merged in terms of flexibility than we could beforehand. Ultimately that's what brings them to the table. I have just as many customers coming today wanting to enter into long-term supply agreements as I did before. They are not trying to get lower prices. They are completely committed to providing us sufficient economics so that we can invest and therefore grow and meet our commitments to them. It's really. I don't see it being fundamentally different if I'm honest. Yeah. But you must be in a situation where you are looking, that you're looking at those potential customers and you're trying to evaluate who I wanna, you know, who I wanna hitch my, my horse to, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's laughable to think that you can grow at the CAGR of the industry. Right. And create shareholder value, right? And I think we all wanted to grow at a big rate because I don't know, we wanted you, you know, Elon to take us seriously or whatever it was. But at the end of the day, you'd be hopeful that you could be at a lower growth rate and maximize value, over that cycle. Yeah. Look, I think, you know, growth for the sake of growth is just, as you said, you don't create a lot of value that way. You can grow your assets at rates that depend largely on the asset and they depend, whether you create value depends on how efficiently you do that. The danger of trying to grow too quickly, as you said, is you waste a lot of capital. And we've seen this. We've seen some plants being built that don't work. And you have to go back and say, if you'd maybe gone a little more slowly and been willing to miss out a year or two of growth and actually build it properly, you'd be in a better place today. I think a lot of what we've been focused on is on an asset-by-asset basis, growing them in a way that is appropriate and credible for that asset. There's no point turning around and saying, I mean, take Salar del Hombre Muerto that we're in in Argentina. That thing's huge. It's absolutely huge. The resource itself is so large that it's not even relevant to your decisions as to whether to expand. So if you took a simple path and said, well, I'm just gonna double every single year, there's no way you can do that. You don't have the infrastructure up there to do that. And you don't have the talent, you don't have the capabilities. You are fundamentally constrained. That doesn't mean you shouldn't expand, but you've gotta do it in a rational and sensible manner. It's also why having multiple resources that you can then have a portfolio of projects is a better way to go than trying to just take one giant asset and expand it as much as you possibly can. Right. You know, again, we've never said we have a target market. You'll never hear me say my target market share for this industry is X or Y. It just doesn't really mean anything. Right. We do though, to your point, have target customers and target, target market shares at those customers. And you know, the mantra that we try and say in the organization is we gotta move from mentality of selling what we make to a mentality of making what we've sold. So the starting conversation is find out what the customer needs, sign the contracts, now go and build the capacity to meet those customer needs. Gotta do it that way around. That's, that's a good insight. Nemaska. Yep. So, you mentioned before an inflationary environment. This is a project that you stepped into that had a, you know, long and checkered history and some capital that was spent and destroyed. You've got, you're in an interesting situation. I don't think people realize it, but we, I think we had this conversation a year ago about how you've got a partner on this project who also is conveniently kind of setting industrial policy in the province. Yep. To some extent, or has, certainly has a pretty good call into doing that. So maybe give us a sense of progress there, you know, gating factors. Yep. Is the government kind of conforming to what you thought in terms of coming through with incentives and everything else and how it's coming along? Yeah. Nemaska's got two assets, as you know. There's the mine called Whabouchi, and then there's the downstream, hydroxide plant called Bécancour. Bécancour's the big capital commitments, over $1 billion of capital to build that. When you talk about customer commitments, we've sold a very large proportion of the volume out of Bécancour to Ford. Ford made a long-term commitment to us. And so it kind of shows that they, the customers are there to support projects that they like. That project's completely on track. It's due to be completed in 2026. It'll take six months or more maybe to ramp it up and get it producing, but we should have volumes out of there by the end of 2026. Whabouchi, the mine that serves it, that was where much of the capital, as you said, wasted capital from previous incarnations of the company went, but it wasn't all wasted. So that's a mine that will be up and running, producing about 250,000 tons of spodumene concentrate a year, starting in early 2026 as well. All on track, all doing very well. But it's expensive. I mean, there's no doubt about it. That amount of capital would be a lot less if we didn't have to build in Quebec, if we could build a hydroxide plant in China instead. The government of Quebec though is, as you said, very keen to have domestic capability in lithium chemicals. They're certainly a supportive shareholder. They own their investment through Investissement Québec, their investment arm. They do not provide direct subsidies. They don't provide direct capital or have not yet to date done that. There were some restrictions about providing government money into mining, but certainly they've been very supportive to help us with things like permitting processes, very supportive in helping make sure we have enough access to what is increasingly scarce hydroelectric power for Bécancour. So yeah, no, look, I think they've been a good partner. I think they are very. I don't think they're very keen to be a 50% investor, but they're keen to be a long-term investor in Nemaska, and we're keen to keep them there. We've been very clear that we would like them to own less than 50%, and they've been pretty open that so do they. When the time is right, they'll be happy to step back. So with the Ford offtake or where you're at today, and where your costs are coming in, you're confident on, you know, don't put words in your mouth, but you're confident on generating your return hurdle, from what you see today? You know, all of our contracts, as you know, have floor prices to them, and we won't sign them. So we know what the worst-case economics are from a pricing perspective out of Nemaska. And we have a pretty good handle on what the cost structure is gonna be. So yeah, we're, we're very confident that it will cover, it'll clear its return hurdles. Okay. Maybe an industry question on that while we're talking about Quebec. Does Quebec not need some consolidation? We've got some undercapitalized operators. We've got some diverse asset group. We've got a government that wants more development. Do we not need bigger, stronger companies in there in the lithium industry? And is there a place for you in that? Or I know you've got a lot on your plate, so I'm not pushing on that, but it seems like there needs to be some consolidation. Yeah. You know, the assets in the resources in Canada are mines, right? There's not a lot of synergies between consolidating mines. So yeah, it'd be good to have bigger, larger companies there, but the mines are mines. The project's gotta stand on its own. If somebody can, you know, if a large mining company come in and can bring a mine online cheaper, more quickly, or with more certainty, I'm sure that's a marginal benefit. Would it be enough to justify paying acquisition premiums? Probably not. I think the biggest challenge in Quebec for the resources they have is really remoteness and lack of infrastructure. Quebec hydropower doesn't have unlimited power, and there's a lot of the industrial policy you talked about is attracting battery makers and cathode producers. They are very energy-intensive businesses. And so it isn't entirely clear that the province actually has, you know, what we would need to be a larger lithium industry in a short timeframe. That doesn't mean Canada couldn't. I think there's obviously more than just the province of Quebec. So I do think there are other parts of Canada that do have those capabilities. So I don't know about consolidation, but I do think Canada does have an opportunity to be a major player in lithium chemicals in the future. Okay. I know we're running up against time on just one tack on Quebec. Are you, James Bay, your thoughts on, you know, you've got another mine that came to you in the acquisition. It was relatively well advanced from a development, from a planning perspective. You're confident on kind of moving that one forward at the same time you're doing Whabouchi or concurrently or waiting to see what you learn or, you know, where does that fit in the queue? Yeah. Look, very confident. I you know give a lot of credit to what the Allkem management team did up there in James Bay with the Galaxy mine. It's incredibly well engineered. It's ready to go. It was really been sat waiting for permits, so they struggled a little with the permitting process. But we're now through that and it's a very good project. And we have a dedicated team. So there's no conflict between a Nemaska team and a James Bay team 'cause they're separate teams and separate structures and separate partners. So I'm super confident that we'll be able to bring James Bay on time, on budget. It's a larger mine than Whabouchi. We've had as much as 400,000 tons a year of spod concentrate. And it's a relatively straightforward operation. Of the four major projects we have going on, I think James Bay's probably the highest certainty in terms of execution risk and probably the simplest and quickest to bring online as well. Okay. Great. Thank you. I think we're, it's been a, it's been a great kind of overview. Any last words or anything else you'd wanna suggest? I know you've got an analyst day coming up September. I, I hope, I trust you'll make Dan do a, you know, slide-by-slide review over Labor Day weekend or something like that. So. Absolutely. I will. Absolutely. As long as it doesn't involve me in it. No, look, I just wanna say, look, you know, the lithium industry, it's like an interesting industry and it's very complicated and it's, it takes a lot of time and effort to get into and understand, but it's, it's really at the heart of this energy transition. I mean, I think we, there's gonna be very difficult to have the transition to electrification if we don't have a lithium industry that's both successful and generating acceptable returns on capital. That's what gives me the confidence that over time, as it matures, not only does I have a growth profile that I don't think we've seen in a resource business for decades, I think it also has the opportunity, given the value add that you need to add in the chemical space to earn returns on capital that are probably better than most of the resource industries as well. So it's a long cycle investment, but it's gonna be a good one in my view. Great. Great. Thank you, Paul. Thank you very much.