Time zones represented today. Thanks for joining us from all across the world. I'm lucky enough today to be joined by Paul Weibel, CEO of 5E Advanced Materials, to discuss the recent developments with the company, but also give a view into the future for investors and prospective investors who are both here in the room and watching the replay. Paul, how are you today? I'm good. Glad to be here. Awesome. Let me do some quick housekeeping. This is how it's going to work today, just for the folks in the crowd. I've got some questions for Paul, just based on both recent news, but also what's coming up. It is an interactive event. I know some people have already submitted questions in advance over email. Appreciate that very much. There is also a chat function at the bottom of the screen. Please do ask questions during the event, or you can also email them in. I'll keep an eye on those, too. If we don't get to your question for whatever reason, either we've run out of time or it's a little off-topic or doesn't quite fit, I'm still going to make sure that the team gets those questions afterwards. They'll be sure to get back to you either on email or by phone, depending on what you put in during your registration. The only other two things I'll say is that this is being recorded and will be available for replay in the late afternoon, Eastern time, probably before end of day for folks on the East Coast. There's a request meeting button at the bottom of the screen. Please feel free to press that if you'd like the opportunity to meet with Paul or anyone from the 5E team. I'll make sure we connect those following this event. Paul, let me get into the meat and potatoes here. The headline this quarter, to me, the first offtake heads agreement, long-term deal with domestic industrial customer, 7,500 tons of boric acid a year, with optionality all the way up to 10,000. After years, I know you've gone through of qualification work, what does it mean to finally have a signed commercial commitment in hand? And why was this the right first customer to take your book? Yeah. Great to be here. Good to get the monkey off the back. I bet, yeah. For sure. Yeah, I think it's a major catalyst. The market likes offtake agreements. I think it's confirmation we're real. We've qualified multiple industry segments across various industries. I'd also say, it was important, one, because this is a large buyer of boric acid. There's more opportunity there. I think this is the first, what they felt comfortable. It also made logistical sense, just where we're based, cost to serve, relatively reasonable. Those factors went in. Obviously, there's a relationship aspect, too, for our commercial team to get them comfortable. I think it kind of sets the stage for more to come. Are you mute? I think you're still muted. I got to embarrass myself once a day. It's a long webinar. Once a day, you got to do it. The structure I found notable of the deal, the fixed pricing with annual escalation. You got that five-year initial term and automatic renewal out to 10 years. Walk us through why you went for that shape rather than spot- index- linked pricing, all these other options, and what locked-in revenue does for conversations with project lenders at this point. Yeah. We have offtake proposals of various shapes and sizes. The structure, though, at its core, the principle is about bankability. The reality is, as you talk to lenders, they're going to say, "How are you going to mitigate price and quantity in your offtake agreements? How can we model revenue?" The simplest way is actually fixed pricing. I think bankability comes in various shapes and sizes from, at its simplest form, a fixed agreement, cost plus, or you can index to a certain benchmark with a floor or potentially collared, and that has a ceiling. For this customer, this industry, this made sense. It obviously has the annual escalation, which is good because obviously what you do see in reagents, especially hydrofluoric acid and traditionally sulfuric, though that's been an interesting conversation in the market today, they tend to go up in inflation. You can lock in and really model and underpin a debt financing. One of the other proposals we have out there today is actually, the boron market's very opaque. Sure. When we first started approaching customers, they would ask for market-based contracts. I'm like, "What's the market?" "It's the proposal that the other two players in the oligopoly who have already spent their capital are offering." I'm like. Yikes That's not going to work. Sure. What China is to rare earth, Eti Maden can be to boron. We need to mitigate price and quantity. What we've actually done too is we use, Fastmarkets does provide a West Coast FOB benchmark price. We've walked customers through that. We've vetted their price. It's pretty close. It's not going to be perfect, but I think what they're going to do a very good job of is capturing a trend. Sometimes, maybe a customer's procurement team could do better or worse than that benchmark, but I think over time, it's going to be relatively reasonable. The proposition we've made to other customers, and this was a big theme of the roadshow, is walking them through 5E and also what we would envision a contract structure looking like, has been, listen, I think we would propose a Fastmarkets benchmark. We talk about the trend, it'll capture that. What we would propose is to establish bankability as a floor price. If the price would go below that floor, they would have to pay that floor. In exchange for that, we would offer a ceiling price, if boric acid prices go to $1,500, $1,400 a ton, $1,600, which supply and demand definitely is a big driver of pricing and utilization. You have a great contract because you're capped at a ceiling price, and relative to your competitors, you're going to make a lot of money. At the same time, you're going to introduce a third supplier into the market by giving us a bankable structure. Given what we're seeing in the market today from just actually a supply and demand, the deficit's here. Sure. At least in the U.S. People say that's fairly reasonable. It's only really been until back of last year, this year that we've been able to really soften ground and make that progress where people are amenable to these structures. Sure. Hey, it's been so long people talk about the incoming deficits, but they've arrived. Yeah. That's most of the conversation. Yeah. I do want to talk about the roadshow that you were on in March. I'm going to have to use some crystal ball gazing here, so bear with me. I know you met with 12 or more industrial boron customers and distributors. Where does the broader pipeline stand right now? How many, again, ballpark, crystal ball gazing, how many of those conversations do you realistically see converting to binding offtake over the next year or so? Yeah, I call my commercial team daily. I'm like, "What's the status?" Apparently. I think the first thing to note is there's general consensus. Customers want a third reliable U.S. domestic supplier. Americans tend to be very reliable. Sure. It's a very secure jurisdiction here. That's a common theme and a trend we saw with all the customers. I think sometimes always price does matter, and we've been very good with thinking outside the box creatively on ways to bring value to each specific customer that all of a sudden says, "That's a really good idea. That's something you should pursue." I think, listen, there was 12 customers, kind of various shapes and sizes. We probably have six active proposals in the pipeline. Yes, it is six. I'd say three are very close. They're through legal review. I'm waiting on nominated volume. Wow. We kind of are close to or I've had their proposal back where I'm like, "Well, I would really like this in there." We have approved templates. We're kind of leading with that. Then, listen, everyone has really marked it up for what's comfortable to them. Okay, we go back and forth, and it's a negotiation. Sure. We kind of get some meeting of the minds, but there's three that are very close that I continue to talk to Mark Zamek and the commercial team, and it's like, "All right, what do we need to do?" I think they're coming. This is going to be a big theme for 2026. We knocked down the first, and there's more to come. Mark was in Asia last week. Out of the Asia trip, now we have a much more diverse portfolio of borate products than just the boric acid. We can talk about that in a little bit. I think six customers, here's what they ordered on the menu from a sample size. Here's the contact. Here's their phone number. Here's the address, and let's get this out. That'll kind of Listen, Asia is going to be a little slower. I think the commercial team went over there. Similar conversations to what they saw on the U.S. trip, where again, want another supplier. There's concerns, I think the plan will be another visit towards the back end of the summer after they've digested, done their analysis on those samples. You can kind of hopefully expect a similar progression where, okay, March, mid-March, we were on the road, mid-May, two months or so, you start knocking down some of the Asian customers. We also did engage one of Mark's former colleagues at Rio. It's more domestic based, and we're calling North America, but it's a segment we actually have not targeted. I wish I could be more transparent from the customers in the industry, but we're trying to break into an oligopoly here. Yeah. You got to just kind of hold your cards to the vest. Progress is being made. I think that's a big industry segment because Mark's an industrial guy. At Rio Tinto and Eti Maden, when he was there, that was his kind of bread and butter. Now one of his former colleagues has a whole different sector of the borate market that there's very large bankable customers as well as ultimately size. I think we're just looking for a piece out of the gate. We don't need all supply. It's 130,000 tons in the model. It's 90,000 in year one. You can kind of see. It doesn't take that many customers to start to build a substantial portfolio. Okay. No, appreciate that. I want to zoom out for a second and talk about boron generally, because I know we've even discussed today, but I know you've spoken generally about the domestic boric acid market slipping into a pretty serious supply deficit. I'd love if you could just help investors in the room understand what's driving that first, and then how much of a tailwind a kind of tightening U.S. market is for a domestic producer that isn't even in production yet. Yeah. Really interesting time in the borate market. Obviously, boron was added to the List of Critical Minerals in November last year. We foreshadowed that occurring. Once it was added, you really had a couple interesting fundamental shifts. I can say, I do applaud the U.S. government because relative to some of the other minerals, where they're adding things as critical and acting on the back foot, at least on the boron side, I would've loved to see it added three years ago, and that would've gotten an A+ rating. I think you still get the B rating. It's still really good that it's added now. The deficit's here. You got a 5E project that is a near-term solution. I think we're a bit more on the front foot than the back foot. I think that was a big positive. I think, all right, you've always had. We talked about this oligopoly. The second-largest global producer is for sale right now. That should conclude here, I don't know, in two months or so. From what I hear, the process is moving along. That customer, they're not expanding. It's a depleting asset. They kind of are who we thought they were. They're a very Great Lakes producer. They are 25% of global supply. They definitely produce their half a million tons of oxide, but there's no expansion coming, right? That's one. There's always been another much smaller producer in California on borates. There's a soda ash primary producer. Listen, it's a shame that there was an earthquake damage and then ultimately COVID. Sure Just a tale of unfortunate events, and really compounded by the soda ash market's long and China's supplying some very cheap soda ash, and that has caused them, just they can't compete on the cost curve. They're restructuring the business in the sense that they've exited soda ash and then also boric acid. There's a couple of different refined borates. sodium borate is one of them. It's more of the commodity of the borates, but they'll produce that, but not boric acid. That was about 65,000 tons-60,000 tons, and they were predominantly supplying in North America. Okay. This is all public, and they exited. We saw on our supply and demand analysis, 2025 was the year of parity. Because it's just such an opaque market, 2024, 2025, we were teetering on is there excess supply, excess demand, deficits. Once they took their 60,000 tons out of the market, the full deficit was here. Sure. What we saw was customers scrambling for challenging South America product or begging Eti Maden to supply them. Listen, I think it's like people scrambled, and at that point, it's like, well, what's the price? Yeah Like, where's the bid and the offer? When you're in a deficit, price discovery is really interesting. What we've seen now is it's a little tight in Asia, but any of the large Asian customers are contracted. They really weren't buying from this domestic producer. What the anticipation is, and this was really strategic on why we sent Mark over to Asia now, was that boric acid and borate contract negotiating season for 2027's starting. Sure. Massive ripples and waves are hitting U.S. markets while customers are scrambling. Asia was relatively insulated. As you go and renegotiate and contracts are up, what's going to happen is those ripples are now going to hit the Asian markets. Sure listen, those existing producers, they're 60,000 tighter on utilization. Their utilization went up, and so that drives higher pricing. That drives a tighter supply and demand. Sure. I think that bodes well for what we have going on in Asia. That was the big driver that really pushed it to a deficit. Also, now you see boron getting more coverage. Project Blue, which is actually spun out of the Wood Mackenzie Roskill Group. Okay. Sure. They reinitiated their boron coverage. They had a fantastic 2015 report, 350-page report, detailed it. We had a call with them recently, and these are some of the best market research teams, and like, the deficit's here on their radar. I think it's definitely the year of boron. There you go. I want to zoom in on one thing, because the metaboric acid product for you guys seems to, I don't know, to me, come out of basically nowhere this year. Roughly, about 80% boric oxide equivalent with a provisional patent already filed. What's the customer pull on that material specifically? How should we think about where it sits on the margin curve versus standard granular boric acid? Yeah, we're excited about that. I think similar to the meta, there'll be some more products that come out of that technology package that we've been working on. Listen, a lot of customers, it's not all, but they seek higher B2O3. Okay. Just from a basic molecular level, boric acid is actually three hydrogens, a boron molecule, and three oxygens. Boron oxide is just B2O3. When you look at a specification, boric acid is actually quoted as 56.3% B2O3. At the molecular level, there's additional water molecules with hydrogens and oxygens. The boron oxide is an anhydrous product, i.e., less water molecules. Customers pay a premium for boron oxide, typically about 3x to maybe 4x the price of boric acid. They're compensated for additional capital spent to drive off the water. What certain industries do want, specifically LCD, textile fiberglass, Pyrex, they want higher B2O3. Again, they may be price sensitive in that they would like a higher B2O3, but they don't want to pay for it. Ultimately, what we've seen is that this is a product that we created. There's some literature on it, but ultimately, we questioned, why isn't this in the market? The reality is actually the two large producers, they produce the bookends. They make boron oxide, which is pretty capital intensive, and they also make boric acid. There's no reason to have an intermediary. They can charge a higher price for customers that want the 97%-98% B2O3 boron oxide. We've been able to get there at a meta product, free-flowing, meets specs, and samples are out to customers. Listen, at a very minimal basis, there's a stoichiometric value. If a customer really wants the B2O3 content, if they've procured a 80%, they can use less product. In theory, there's a parity point on a B2O3 basis where they'll just pay a higher price because it's the same price as boric acid, relatively speaking, on a 80% basis. They're just buying less tons. That provides a higher price point. Additionally, you're shipping more valuable boron, so your unit economics can get better on a shipping basis. You have actually two opportunities to convert customers. You have your traditional people that are buying boric acid, but they would like a higher B2O3 product. Fine. You can come up with that stoichiometric price point, on the low end coming up from boric acid. Let's assume boric acid sells for $1,000 a ton. Boron oxide, we'll use a simple analysis where it sells for 3x the price of boric acid, so $3,000 a ton. Someone who's buying boron oxide, maybe they would like an intermediary product, right? They found out that their manufacturing process does better with higher B2O3, but there hasn't been this intermediary in the market. Maybe they're really sick of paying 3x the price. Sure. You can take 3,000 x 0.8, right? I don't have my calculator, but that is maybe $2,400. Sure. Right. All of a sudden, you have a ceiling price for boron oxide customers. Now what you've done is you've taken boric acid at $1,000, boron oxide at $3,000, you maybe have a spread of $1,400-$2,400 where there's value potentially to these customers. You have higher price points you can start to contract at. Really novel and innovative. It was really important to file the patents too, because we don't want anyone else to do this. Of course. Yeah, I think that can give you some indication on what the margin is because you have somewhat price points, how I'm thinking about it. Yeah, there's going to be some incremental OpEx on the energy side. Listen, look at the PFS and in the economic analysis, what is the biggest driver to the model is actually commodity price. You creatively, through this technology, get to a better product that gets us a higher price point, and it's going to be accretive to economics. There you go. Other direction I'll throw you for a second. I know a recent announcement highlighted a Lithium PEA. Your PFS included a LCE lithium resource, but no reserve, because it was not included in the economics. Jeff Hunt explained what drove the update for the Lithium PEA, just for folks to remember. Sure. Listen, we've always had a lithium chloride in our solution, and it kind of ranges from 40 PPMs up to 100 PPMs in solution. When you extrapolate that on a mass and energy balance, it's about 500 tons a year at 130,000 tons of production. Okay? Obviously, if you can hit some higher areas of lithium, maybe you get to 150 PPMs, but that's the driver of your output in quantity. When we were starting the pre-FEED engineering phase that led to the PFS, we actually had a very good, robust discussion and intentional about do we include lithium in the scope at the PFS. The reality is, you've got to produce about 130,000 tons of boric acid, 130,000 tons of gypsum, like serious logistic aspects. The 500 tons of lithium, man, this is interesting, and it can be accretive economic. That's not our core business out of the gate. Given we're dealing with aqueous chemistries, you can always add a valve or a slipstream and bolt that on the back end. Also at the time, the lithium market got beat up. Prices were $9 a kg, and it just was like, this isn't high priority, so fine. Now we're at a point where the business is simple and a lot of emphasis on the offtakes and the commercials. Sure. Our technical team had some capacity. One of the other things we did was we included some solar evaporation ponds in our design. We do have sodium, which is salt that is not very. Listen, you can sell it, but it's just not Yeah, sure. the economic driver. There was about $45 million in our initial CapEx for specifically evaporation or evaporator equipment and total installed cost for the sodium. I'm like, "Guys, this just. Yeah. We can't be spending this. We got to find another way." Listen, we're blessed that we're in High Desert in California, which is very similar to the Atacama, that solar evaporation ponds are a very viable technology path. We included additional five ponds. Listen, there's nothing contentious about this. It's actually the back end of our process. Sure. You're really just removing salt water and just letting the sun take out the sodium, and where sun take out the water. You get a remaining sodium, and then that gave us some optionality to make a liquid calcium chloride. We put that into the design, and so we came back now to Fluor. We said, "Hey. Okay, DLE technology has actually made some strides from just a technical readiness perspective. We have this lithium chloride. Let's do a trade-off of potentially two or three options." It was DLE adding a sixth pond, pretty small too. Sure. We also looked at potentially would we sell a liquid stream if we had a counterparty, but that was a little bit more difficult to price. The focus really came into the DLE versus the solar evaporation ponds. Sure. We've used the $18 a kg we're seeing today in the market as our base case. We have real prices on what we could procure commodities. We know the CapEx, and that's afforded, and it's one additional pond plus some equipment to make a lithium carbonate. We think we have actually all the equipment predominantly today, so that while the CapEx is in there, it's already sunk because we can repurpose small-scale facility, and it's a sixth pond. Really inexpensive and very proven technologies. Listen, it's definitely not fast. You won't get it right away. Sure You've got to build flow in the ponds and let it build up, and so you can evaporate. It's how they do it in the Atacama, and you ultimately are a very low-cost producer on that byproduct then. It at $18 a kg, equates to a $50 per credit toward boric acid at 130,000 tons. That's nice. Sure. It's really pretty nominal capital we're going to have to deploy. We did it. It was pretty inexpensive before and was a bolt-on. Similar to while we're progressing commercials, really focusing on with the meta and potentially ferroboron. Yeah. I wanted to get into ferroboron actually because I know that does have the market's attention to some degree. For people in the audience who know you as a boric acid story, can you explain what magnet-grade ferroboron is and how it fits into the neodymium iron boron magnet supply chain? Just because I think most investors probably don't know that backstory. Sure. 5E stands for the, it's the fifth element, and Advanced Materials is ultimately from a boric acid product. You can make various boron derivatives. Sure. It's always been a medium-term, longer-term vision of the business. We are at a point where the network's grown, and we can start to do a little bit of R&D that is actually not very expensive. Let's talk the basics. A neodymium iron boron permanent magnet, i.e., what everyone in the government's talking about. Sure. The rarest permanent magnets. Those magnets chemistries are Nd for the neodymium, Fe for the iron, and B for the boron. The rare earths are, in the manufacturing process, combined with the ferroboron. They don't take iron, they don't just take a boron. There's actually an intermediary step, which we're doing the R&D on, and it's actually not that novel of a technology, Sure well- known to get the ferroboron. It's aluminum or carbon thermic reduction in an electric arc furnace. That's how it's made. Now, we don't know the exact process, the baking time. Sure The temperatures, that's what we're flushing out. The reality is, no one in the U.S. makes ferroboron, and that creates a supply vulnerability. In fact, most of it does come out of China. Yeah. There is Japanese production, but this really came on our radar as the commercial team received an inbound from a Chinese ferroboron manufacturer, and they were looking to scale up to 4,000 tons a month of boric acid. I'm like, "Wow, that's a sizable contract." Ambitious. Yeah. That's 48,000 tons a year of boric acid. I'm like, "Okay, we need to learn more here." So we did, and then we were talking to a couple industry folks in the rare earth and magnet space, and they said, "Listen, we can buy Japanese ferroboron, or we can get Chinese ferroboron. That's obviously frowned upon. Yeah. Sure Secure magnets, we have a need." It was like, "Okay, we know it's growing. I can't go onto LinkedIn without seeing something about magnet CAGRs and supply concerns." We went down that path. As we started to also do additional homework and research, well, the barrier to entry is actually, it's the B. That's our core competency. All right. If you think about it, what I expect is ultimately, if you can vertically integrate, I think we need to do the R&D, and then there's prospect to then start from the bench in the lab and then go up to some level of pilot or make larger quantities. We have multiple specs for the magnet grade. The major difference is it's a lower carbon ferroboron to go into the magnet because also ferroboron goes to steel, and that's the much bigger market, but the magnets are very much growing. I think that long-term, our cash cost is our input cost into that work stream, and so you can have a competitive advantage there. I don't know if we will compete. I need to do some, obviously, as we work through mass and energy balance and get those details, we can start to model it out, and we'll do the market analysis to understand where people are on the cost curve, i.e., China. I think the value proposition is what 5E can provide is a domestic, reliable, fully mine-to-magnet on the ferroboron piece. Irons are readily available in the United States. Round out the domestic supply chain, and we can be a much more reliable supplier relative to the Chinese. I think still very competitive because it's our cash costs coming in on the input side. I think that's exciting. I also think there's whispers where, I saw it from another CEO. I was on his distribution list. There's whispers China may just cut off rare earths. I've heard whispers that that could also be the ferroboron side, too. Yeah. Sure. Sure. There's a reason they got it right and they added boron as a critical mineral. It just wasn't about boric acid. It was about some of the, definitely the derivatives that are in there as well and what China dominates. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting and exciting work stream we have going on. No, I'm going to stick to ferroboron because I think the strategic case is, it's obvious. Like you outlined, the U.S. doesn't produce it domestically. The supply chain all runs through China, which is tightening export controls. It seems like every month they're stopping the export of something new that America unfortunately has relied on. I guess my question, just as an add-on to what you just went through, how quickly could 5E become a meaningful domestic source of ferroboron? Sure. I have my government affairs team pestering me to go take this to Department of Defense now. Sure. We've done the testing in the sense that we've dialed in parameters. This month, the lab space is rented. We're going to take those parameters and work on the reduction. I think if we can provide successful samples, then you would look to in the fall make a larger quantity that we could say, "You can trial this in a magnet production. Make a magnet with it." That's the goal. I would rather have the conversation with the Department of Defense. Here's my samples. Yeah. Take a look. Here's the spec we've met. That's a much more powerful, we've done the R&D because then I would expect it's like, "Okay. Wow, great. How can we help? Yeah. No, yeah. That's good framing to come in with. Sorry. I appreciate you going on my flight of fancy with ferroboron. I just found that element so interesting. I want to talk about the balance sheet for a second, because obviously you closed $36 million in February. It was more than 4x oversubscribed. Added Jonathan Siegler to your team, to the board. With his project finance background and I know your ongoing interactions with EXIM, what is his arrival or what should it signal to investors about how you intend to fund that kind of heavier capital phase at Fort Cady? What do you expect to be debt? What role could federal financing play? Just any information you can give on that. Listen, the offering was 4x oversubscribed. It was an S-1, those are hard deals to get off when you're public. SEC has actually changed the rules that would no longer be the case if we did that now, which probably would've been better pricing. I think, listen, it definitely shored up our balance sheet, put us in a really good position. I think the goal is not to have to come back to the public markets. It's to really focus on the debt piece and building the relationship with EXIM. Additionally, if there's non-dilutive aspects, other grants we've applied for, we can touch on that in a little bit if it makes sense. I think, listen, this is why the offtakes are so important because the stronger they are and the more they mitigate price and quantity, the more we can actually take on debt. Ultimately, listen, I think usually when you talk to the lenders, it's kind of a 1.2 interest coverage ratio they're going to target to look at. To the perspective you have a fixed price offtake or you have a floor price, you can really get a good sense of what the revenue's going to be like behind those contracts that ultimately can validate and get a lender comfortable on the coverage ratio. Listen, EXIM can loan up to 80% of a project, but the interest coverage ratio needs to make sense. Sure. That's why, especially as we look at some of these higher priced products on the meta side, that's really important. Ultimately a potential lithium carbonate credit helps us get more competitive on the cash costs. I think we would target as much debt as makes reasonable sense. Sure. -on we can maintain those coverage ratios and that's driven by the commercials. Listen, I think what we're seeing today is the U.S. governments are investing in companies. We submitted a grant application and there was really a question that was like, "Would you be open to including the government on the capital stack?" Listen, we've had proposals for royalties. I think what I'm very sensitive about is your royalty if you're going to do something, and especially having a lithium stream, you could potentially royalty off of that as well. You don't want to mess up your project finance because royalty tends to be. That'll get recorded in the county and it'll sit on your deeds or your BLM claims, and sometimes the language of a royalty agreement can cause lenders to have pause. I think we want to really progress on the debt side and in any kind of optionality as a last and top-up on a potential royalty as well. There's an option for that. I think if there's any equity deficit, we plan to have meetings with the OSC. I think we're waiting on a DOE grant, that would open if we win that. We would target in the grant agreement, have that conversation because it was in their NOFO. I think the goal was to do a bigger raise so we can mitigate the possibility of coming back to public markets. I think the goal would be the agency debt. It is a really cheap form of capital and we're building that relationship with EXIM and that's important. It's ultimately cornerstoned on the offtakes. Yeah. There you go. I want to next just kind of pull a lot of these threads together, if you don't mind. Between the offtakes, the metaboric acid, the ferroboron program, the financing pieces, what to you are the specific boxes that still need to be checked before 5E can take that final decision on Fort Cady? The business is pretty simple. The focus is commercials and a little de-risking on the well- field side. We're going to test a jet pump here. We've done it on the bench and it looks good, and we'll put it down the well. It's really building the commercial pipeline to go into FEED because if you're going to go into FEED, you're going to build something. Additionally, you need confidence that there's customers on the other side of FEED. Of course. If you raise the debt and you put steel in the ground, when that steel is constructed, you have a product that customers will buy. Candidly, Mark's fantastic, has great relationships, but a lot of the focus of the business previously was on a bit of the de-risking and capital raising at times. That raise ultimately did open up the door that I can go arm- in- arm with Mark and really focus on the commercial aspects of the business. If you think about, I started really focusing on this three months ago, and here we go. Right. This is what needs to happen, is the commercials. I think they're massive validation, and it's definitely great catalyst as well. Listen, the other thing is what's interesting on the meta as well as potentially ferroboron, but we've got to progress that. It's not quite along as far as meta. Even toll, we have various samples out to customers now, or they're being shipped after the Asia Roadshow. Listen, you need a contract, or you need supply, which is. Of course. There's traders out there. There's actually potential. We're looking at more nearer- term cash flow opportunities on the meta side. That's something we're lifting many stones. Great. Last one from me, then we'll jump to some of the stuff that's coming from the audience. A lot of which we've already covered, it should be pretty speedy. I just want to zoom out and take a look at looking forward a little bit. For an investor looking at 5E today, and I know there's some folks in the room, this is their first time looking at the 5E story. Today versus a year ago, what's the single biggest thing, in your opinion, that's changed about the risk profile of the story? What catalysts can you point to that folks in the room should keep an eye on in the next 12 months? 2026 would be the year of offtakes. That's the big catalyst on the horizon. Listen, we did apply for a DOE grant as part of Mine of the Future. It's going to be competitive, but it was a sizable grant. We thought we'd know by the end of February. It's going a little slower, but I think we've heard whispers it's under review. Don't know the exact status, but that would be a major catalyst. It's a decent amount of non-dilutive funding. It was like a 60-page grant. We spent our Christmas writing. Sure. Yeah. I think, listen, it's just a simpler business now. It's de-risked predominantly, and it's been done at a decent size. The market has turned, so there's a need for that reliable supplier, and it's taken us a little bit of time to get there, but it's here. I think the next 12 months is a big focus on the commercials. Great. No, appreciate that. Getting into some stuff that's been asked by the audience. One, they asked what other federal or state grant applications or non-dilutive funding efforts. You've already touched on it, but if you got any other additional comments on status of those or whether any awards are likely to materially reduce the need for equity financing, I'll let you give it another go, but I know we've already covered it. That DOE award would potentially materially reduce any need. That, super, it's a home run. Yeah. We are monitoring other grant opportunities. There was actually one that got dropped yesterday. It is interesting. A white paper would be due in 15 days. We can actually take our existing application and repurpose that into that. That's helpful. Yeah. You would find out on your white paper pretty soon, and then you would have to submit a formal application. If you get moved on from there, you get invited to pitch at a conference later this summer. Okay. Like Shark Tank. It's an interesting way. It's a bit unorthodox. Sure. Interesting. We'll see. I think we'll apply, and we'll go through that. We're consistently working, and I know Curt Hébert, Jr.'s been in D.C., and will be in D.C. this week meeting with another agency that we're talking non-dilutive. It's always on the radar. Okay. No, appreciate that. That's definitely asked, good to reiterate. One person asked just a quick question, I know they can look up your disclosures, I'm sure that's the number you're about to quote. Somebody's just asking current treasury of the company as far as last reporting. Yeah, I think $25.3 million. Listen, I think we target, having burn, we're still operating in pilot, but we target $1 million a month. The benefit, there was a point where the small scale facility was operating 24/7, and we're a much smaller team now. We have adjusted, it's a much more reasonable burn rate today. I think our maximum analyst, we surprised them with this last quarter, we'll continue to really be stewards of capital on the burn. I know I do see one question on the permits, we got a Record of Decision in 1994 that basically gives us the ability to operate on the federal land that surrounds our real property. We have, State of California and San Bernardino County approved a mining and reclamation plan and use permit also in 1994. That's how we operate today, actually, and that's our license is to operate, so the permits are very real. Obviously, you'll have some ancillary. Those are two of the big permits. The other major permit is our Underground Injection Control permit with EPA. We've received authorization to operate. The demonstration plant we operate today is really licensed under this permit. There's other ancillary permits, not major mining permits, air permits. We have all that. Again, we'll pull some additional permits. You don't do that till FEED when you actually understand Sure every piece of kit that's going to go in there, those specification spec sheets on the kit has actually the NOx and the SOx emissions, then in turn you go apply for the permits. There's no reason you won't get them. Obviously we included in the scope solar evaporation ponds. We've had conversations with them, with the water board. There's nothing contentious about this. Even the water we produce, it's actually a closed basin. It's brackish, like soggy water. It's not going in any groundwater. Water is adjudicated in California, like we've been demonstrating use, it's for us, we'll put those solar evaporation ponds, not going to be a gating item. Well actually now that we've included a sixth pond, the application will get updated, and it's pretty much ready to go, and it's a couple of months process. California gets a little bit of a bad rap, but I think when you're in San Bernardino County, it's a good county to be in. Fair enough. Seems like a pretty clear ride. Just before we get into the last two questions from the audience, just want to remind everybody, because I know there's a lot of you in the room. There's a request meeting button at the bottom. If you would like to meet with Paul or the 5E team, please do hit that button. I'll try to get you guys connected following today's event. Robert from the chat asks one of those questions that's tough to answer, but I'll throw it to you anyway. What's the anticipated average contract size, if you had to throw a number on it? Yeah, I think we target price points that are in our PFS, but that's obviously, we've had to think outside the box and be creative with some of that stuff, but that's look at the PFS, and you can see where we need to be. All the commercials are all underpinned by what's going to get us that FID. Listen, I think, we're not going to be where we have two or three or four customers. We're going to have a portfolio of customers. I could very realistically see a scenario where probably target's 25, maybe it's closer to 20, or it could be as up as 30. Some of the distributors are smaller, lower tonnage, but they're good, reliable customers. I think you would have this diverse portfolio across various industries, definitely needing export nexus. In turn, you're going to have a diversification of a combination of various contracts, that some are fixed, some are collared. Then you would obviously have some portfolio in there for just spot market where you can take advantage of we think it's going to be a higher price environment because that's driven off of supply and demand. Great. No, appreciate that. Last question, we've already touched on it. This is people's last opportunity to ask a final question, if you'd like, while Paul answers this one. Todd just wants reiteration what's the status of the financing of the EXIM loan? Yeah, the big loan, for me, a large project finance, we'll have a check-in at about 25,000 tons under contract with counsel for project finance. For me, my gut says it's 50,000 tons, that's when you should apply for a loan. That's a KPI for us. Perpetua Resources just got their loan. We've been talking to EXIM to start to get them familiar with the project through a smaller EMP loan, because I think there's a relationship aspect that's really important here. It gives people and EXIM the ability to familiarize themselves with the team as well as the project and some of the technicals. For me, that's the target. Obviously, there's 7,500 tons under, more is going to come. I think that because those are what I have in my mind, but again, it could change. I think as you think about it, maybe it's less because in first year of production, you're really probably only going to produce 90,000 tons of the 130 because you got to scale up and work into that. I think you have some of, there's still obviously very large customers specifically out of Asia that have multiple plants. The way I'm thinking about it is that you could potentially, obviously you want to get closer to 130,000 tons. As you're sequencing that, what we're talking to about for some of those customers is, okay, in year one, this plant. In year two, I need that plant. You start to be very strategic on what's that kind of revenue lead sheet look like? Awesome. Paul, thank you so much for letting me grill you on recent history of the company and going through some of the recent news. Everybody in the audience, I know there are a lot of you, thanks so much for joining. If you do have additional questions, you think of the perfect one to ask right after the event ends, somewhat often happens to me. Please do send it in. I'll make sure that the 5E team gets it and gets back to you. Paul, thank you very much. I think this was very informative, and thanks everybody for joining. Thanks. Have a great day. See ya. Have a great day, everyone. Cheers.