Good day, and welcome to today's webcast with NioCorp Developments. This is Barrett Boone with Red Chip Companies. Today's webcast will cover NioCorp's recently published 2026 technical report for its Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in Nebraska. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the webcast to your questions. You may submit a question at any time by clicking the Q&A button on the bottom of your Zoom window and typing it in. I will now hand the webcast over to Jim Sims, NioCorp's Chief Communications Officer. Jim, please go ahead. Thank you, Barrett, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. It is a big day for the company. The team today, we are going to walk through a supplemental presentation during today's webcast to accompany our overall discussion in the Q&A session. NioCorp's news releases, presentations, SEC filings, including the technical report supporting the updated feasibility study, are all available now on our website at niocorp.com and on SEDAR. On the webcast today, we have Mark Smith, Executive Chairman, President, and CEO of NioCorp, and Scott Honan, Chief Operating Officer of NioCorp and President of Elk Creek Resources Company. Before we begin today, please note that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding NioCorp's future financial and operating results, expectations, plans, and prospects. Any statement that is not a historical fact should be considered a forward-looking statement. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed. For a description of these risks, please refer to the cautionary notes in today's presentation and to the risk factors in NioCorp's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and on SEDAR+. Today's discussion may also reference market and industry data drawn from third-party sources, which the company has not independently verified and which are subject to uncertainty. Lastly, all dollar figures today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. Following today's prepared remarks, we will open the webcast to your questions. Let me now turn the webcast over to Mark Smith. Mark, please go ahead. Thank you, Jim, and much like Jim just alluded to, this is a very important time in the company's history. This is quite the effort that the company has undertaken here. Along those lines, I would like to start out by thanking Scott Honan, our COO, the entire NioCorp team, including our board of directors, who have all been just phenomenally supportive in this effort. I want to thank the literally hundreds of consultants that we have used to put this entire independent study together, and in particular, the 15 qualified professionals who have signed their name and certified the technical competency and accuracy of this report. Very important and it is just a huge responsibility that those QPs undertake when they do that. Then certainly last but not least, I want to thank our shareholders for their patience as we worked our way through this process. As Jim noted, we did file this report on SEDAR yesterday. If the report is not on our website yet, it will be up there today. I encourage you to take a look at that 500-plus page document. One of the things that is very important to me personally in every one of these efforts I have ever undertaken is that, my entire NioCorp team can attest to the fact that I am always pushing to get things done. Let us get things done. But when it comes to a feasibility study, a technical report like this, quality needs to be paramount. We will always choose quality over speed when it comes to doing a feasibility study. So again, thank you all for your patience while we undertook this effort. It did take a little more time than what any of us had anticipated. But I know after all of the years I have been working in project financing and fundraising that that short amount of extra time, in this case, is going to pay very good dividends for us as we move into the full project financing, including EXIM and additional equity fundraising. So thank you for that. I think it will pay dividends now with this high-quality study. We basically undertook the feasibility study update for two reasons to start with, and that was to do some additional drilling out on site. We wanted to have tighter hole spacing so that we had better definition of what the ore body contained in between all the other drill hole samples that we had. We undertook that effort. The results were outstanding. Once again, every time we put a drill bit in the ground, we find out something even better about this ore body, and that just continues to be the case. This is an outstanding ore body. Second, we had a new process flow diagram for our metallurgy. We needed to have the process flow diagram converted into an actual feasibility study level engineering design. So after 12 years now of working on this metallurgy and really optimizing it, I think to almost the highest extent possible, where we are getting high 80s, low 90% recoveries of all of the elements that we are going to be pulling out of this ore body and selling. We are now in good shape because not only do we have a demonstrated metallurgical process, we now have the engineering design to support that effort as well. Then just because, again, quality is paramount, we undertook during the feasibility study engineering effort and the drilling effort, we undertook some other additional studies just to make our technical program that much more robust. So we did some extra geotechnical studies, some geohydrologic studies. We did a lot of work on paste tailings and a lot of work on grouting, which will make for a better mine plan, a safer mine for our employees, and a longer-lasting mine over the long run. S o again, really a solid effort here. I want to make sure we send out that thank you to everybody. Alex, let us go to slide 4. We will start out with one of the main drivers here in terms of improvements to the feasibility study for 2026 versus 2022. We will now have eight different products that we will be selling as a result of underground mining and surface processing activities. You can see we will be producing niobium, scandium, and titanium, which of course was in the 2022 feasibility study. We will also now be producing the neodymium, praseodymium high-purity oxide, dysprosium high-purity oxide, terbium high-purity oxide, and then as a result of how one goes about processing rare earths and what comes out first in solvent extraction, we will also be producing two d ifferent concentrate products. One is called an SEG, or samarium europium gadolinium carbonate concentrate, and the other one is all the other heavy rare earth elements in a carbonate form, again, concentrate style. What you can see on the right here is the life of mine gross rev enue. The circle on the left shows the 2022 feasibility study, where we had niobium, scandium, and titanium as part of the overall revenue. Just a little under $22 billion for that life of mine gross revenue. The figure to the right, which by the way is to scale so that you can actually visually see what the additional revenue means in terms of a to scale picture here. We will have life of mine gross revenue as a result of the 2026 feasibility study of a little over $37 billion with multiple products here, niobium, scandium, the rare earths, and the titanium. That $37.4 billion is about 1.7 times greater than the $21.9 billion. So a huge impact on the revenue side of the equation, given the additional products that we will be able to produce from this ore body. Next slide, Alex. If we start heading into the overall economic highlights and some of the numbers associated with our economic model. I will start out over on the left here, and this is a life of mine margin of $560 per ton. That is one of the highest that I have certainly seen in my career in the mining industry. We get that by simply taking the $815 gross revenue per ton figure and subtracting the $255 OPEX per ton. Keep in mind that that $560 per ton margin is 41% greater than the margin we showed in the 2022 feasibility study. So again, really getting those extra products in, getting the extra revenue in really bolsters the economics here quite significantly. Then we can focus on some of the numbers to the right. I know I like to focus on the $4.1 billion pre-tax N PV utilizing it at 8% discount rate. We have $519 million per year average annual cash flow over the life of the mine. If we head over to the right, you can see the $608 million EBITDA annually over the life of the mine. We have a 40-year mine life, and we have a total upfront CapEx estimated at $1.85 billion. Clearly the CapEx number has gone up, as has the NPV, as has the margin, as has the revenue, as has the EBITDA, as has the cash flow. But that CapEx number, I think we were all concerned about what inflation would do, and this is largely driven by inflation more than anything else. But we do need to remember that we have added some additional processing to what we had before as well. We have the solvent extraction for the rare earths. We have the chlorination for the niobium and the titanium. And again, can't forget about that horrible thing called inflation. But a $1.85 billion CapEx number, and we still end up with a less than three year after-tax payback with these numbers as a whole. Very strong economics, very robust economics, I would say. Next slide. One of the things that is really starting to catch people's attention in the market right now is an absolute bifurcation of pricing between things that are coming out of China and things that are not being produced outside of China. This is a quite compelling number, and it appears to have very good traction, and we think it's going to last for quite some period of time. If we take a look at scandium as an example, scandium being produced and sold within China is actually upwards of $800 to $850 per kilogram right now. NioCorp is actually out purchasing scandium on the open market today because we are demonstrating the ability to produce scandium metal, and we of course own a business that can make the master alloy, scandium aluminum master alloy, and we're actually out on the market purchasing scandium to feed those businesses. We're seeing prices for scandium range anywhere from $3,000 to as high as $6,500 per kilogram right now, and it's a very good example of this bifurcation of what is b eing made and sold in China versus what is being made and sold outside of China. Terbium is another very good example. Terbium inside China goes for about $1,000 a kilogram. Outside of China, it goes for about $4,500 to $5,000 per kilogram. And dysprosium goes for about $250 a kilogram inside China, and it goes for about $1,250 to $1,500 outside of China. There's an absolute bifurcation, very clear and evident. And we do, as I mentioned, feel like this bifurcation could last for quite a while because it takes a while to get these projects that everybody is supporting built up and operating. We think that in combination with the Section 232 duties, which are available to the president right now, tariffs which are available to the president right now. Project Vault, as well as the G7 support pricing discussions that are occurring and gaini ng a lot of traction are all going to help support this bifurcated pricing structure that we're seeing between China and the rest of the world. Next slide. What do we have going forward here now that we've got the feasibility study done? That feasibility study was a huge piece of what EXIM was looking for as part of the loan program that we're undertaking with them. We met with EXIM for about two hours yesterday, going over as much of the feasibility study that you can in a two-hour period. They will be looking at that document now for the next week or two. We'll set up another probably all-day workshop with EXIM and all of their consultants to go over the feasibility study in detail and answer any questions that they have. But a huge step forward in the right direction here. As everyone knows, we continue to work on our offtake agreement with Traxys. That is all continuing to move forward, albeit a lot slower than what I think anybody anticipated, especially me. I had a couple of very good phone calls with Traxys just this last weekend, and we hope to have that agreement finalized. There are just two or three points that are still in discussion between the two companies, and I do not see any reason why those cannot be cleared up and finalized in short order here. The next item, though, is quite an undertaking, and this is where we have to continue with our engineering effort. We have to go from feasibility study to detailed engineering, and we have to put the company and our EPC contractor in a position that we can actually write an EP C contract and have something that both parties are willing to sign and something that EXIM is willing to agree to as part of their loan undertaking for this project. This will be quite an effort. We have draft contracts that are already written. We are sharing those with the EPC contractors. We hope to have a lot of that effort behind us by the end of August or so. Then we plan to sit down with EXIM, the EPC contractor, as well as NioCorp, with EXIM and make sure that EXIM is as comfortable as we are with those agre ements. So you can see we are on a very fast track moving forward now that that feasibility study is there, and we can use that information to support a lot of the efforts, including offtake agreements and EPC agreements. Then finally, the EXIM Bank loan and any remaining equity that is required. Let us talk about that for a minute. We all are aware of the fact that we have written documents from EXIM saying that they would loan up to about $800 million, and they specifically said 65% debt-to-equity ratio in that correspondence. So we are with the new feasibility study, the new economics associated with that study, and the new CapEx estimate. EXIM will be making another evaluation to determine what level of debt to equity they are willing to support for this project. I do not have any reason to believe that that amount of loan figure will not increas e accordingly. Again, final evaluations have to be made by EXIM, but the robust economics here clearly will support greater than $800 million in loans from EXIM. So we are anxious for that process to get going. Again, we met with EXIM for about two hours yesterday, talked to them about their next steps and timing for those next steps. They are very energized about all of this. They are as excited as all of us are about this feasibility study being done because now they can really start to move on several fronts. We are going to have more meetings with them in the next couple of weeks. The comment that was made by the highest-ranking EXIM employee there at the meeting yesterday was that NioCorp remains the highest priority for EXIM right now in terms of critical strategic mineral projects. So we have their attention. They have the data that they need. We'll go through this additional due diligence process with them, and they will make a final determination in short order on how much that loan can be and what percent debt to equity that we'll end up with at the end of the day. Once those decisions are made, then we'll know what additional fundraising, if any, we need to do on the equity side. That's kind of a short description as to where we are now that the feasibility study is done. With that, I'll hand it over to Scott to get into some of the more technical parts of the feasibility study changes and whatnot. Scott, floor is yours. Thank you, Mark. I'd like to start just by echoing something that you said at the top of the webinar. I'd just like to thank our NioCorp Nebraska team, the local community around Elk Creek and Tecumseh, Nebraska, the good folks at Kruger Farms, and the 15 QPs that certified our feasibility study report. I'm really grateful to have a strong te am like this that has worked so hard to make today possible. When we look at our project as it stands today, we have definitely built on the nine previous technical reports we've done on the Elk Creek project and all of the engineering and testing and mine design that have gone along with that. We've continued through this design process to de-risk the project, both from a technical perspective as well as from an economic perspective. I wanted to highlight a few areas where we've made some changes to the better for the project. The first area is just in terms of mine access. In our previous study, we had presumed that we would access the mine with a twin shaft arrangement. We've now replaced that with a twin ramp from surface. The twin shaft idea was certainly technically viable, economically reasonable approach. It did require us to use a freezing approach to freeze the ground so that we could sink the shafts through the ground safely. However, putting in shafts is an exacting science. A vertical shaft in a mine has to be perfectly vertical. There can't be any deviation. Shaft access does require some specialized equipment, both in the shaft and on surface, that's only made by a few manufacturers around the world. We're now moving from that to a ramp access from surface. We started that work here in February, establishing the mine portal where our twin ramps will originate from. Putting in the ramps is definitely an improvement in that the ramps can tolerate some up and down and back and forth as you advance, and they are a quicker way to get to the ore body than the shaft approach. Building on that in terms of project schedule, I'd like to thank the folks at Amplify Mine Planning and Dumas, who put together the new mine design and mine plan. Again, just building on the access question, we now have a design that gets us down to the ore body and into full production in 35 months. That's definitely an improvement over our previous study. I think we've always recognized that in looking at this project, the critical scheduling path runs through the mine. You have to get that mine established up and running to get the entire project producing and making products. So it's been really gratifying to see that taking this approach gets us there faster. When we get there faster, we start generating revenue and getting a return for our shareholders. Inside the mine, we've changed our approach to material movement. Previously, everything would've been moved around underground using diesel equipment and then hoisted to surface through the vertical shafts in a thing called a skip. With the ramp approach, we've also changed our design, our philosophy around material movement, and we've embraced the idea of the Railveyor for moving material from the mine to the surface plant. The Railveyor, it's a very nice piece of technology. I had the opportunity to visit a Railveyor installation down in Missouri, and I was struck by how simple it is, both mechanically and operationally, how easy it is to operate and maintain. One of the questions I ask myself when evaluating a new technology is, if this thing breaks, can I go to Elk Creek Welding and have it repaired? The answer with the Railveyor is certainly yes. So I think we have here certainly a lower cost, more efficient way to move material out of the mine that'll serve us well as we put the mine into production. Energy supply has been a difficult proposition, particularly in Nebraska. Like a lot of places, we've seen a situation where a lot of big data centers have gone in, power supplies are stretched a bit. The situation with the local utilities is a little bit tougher than it was a few years back. We were in a situation where getting connected to the local power grid was going to be an expensive proposition, both in terms of the capital cost to bring in a power line, as well as the capital cost to put in a large substation at the site. We really did evaluate a number of options here, and I think where we have landed now is that our best proposition is an on-site microgrid. So what that means is we'll have a series of small natural gas-fired generators that will power the site both during the construction period and during operations. A third-party company will own, operate, install, and maintain this equipment. We just get power through the fence to power our activities. The third party can do this at a cost that's really right at the same benchmark as we would get from the utility. So we have a good solution there. We will certainly still need a natural gas connection from a local pipeline to the site. That's underway. That part of it has been certainly a design change, but I think certainly one for the better. When I say that, I'm very focused on the reliability of our power supply. Certainly, when you have people in an underground mine, you need to have power, and it has to be there all the time. I was fortunate enough to visit a very similar type of microgrid system that powers the Pittsburgh Airport and has been doing so for five years. I felt that if you can have one of these systems to power a big airport like that, we can certainly use it to our advantage at the Elk Creek project. The other big change is on the processing side. Certainly we have added equipment to the production process to produce rare earth products, but we have also changed our approach to the front end of processing the ore. In the prior project design, we had a couple of upfront steps. The first was leaching with hydrochloric acid. The second was leaching with sulfuric acid. The acid demand in that approach was quite high. It required us to have an on-site acid plant, which again, was both technically and economically feasible. Although acid plants are a very particular technology and do come with some considerable maintenance considerations. Stepping back, we ran a demonstration plant and evaluated different ways to get at the pay metal in the ore. What we came up with is a much better front end of the project. What we have now is a calcining step and a step to remove calcium and magnesium. This reduces the mass of the ore that the rest of the plant sees by about half, and it takes out all of the acid consumers in the ore, or at least most of them. After those first two steps, we then return to the idea of hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid leaching to get at our pay metals. But we can do that at a much lower acid consumption than we had previously. As a result, we no longer need an acid plant on-site. We will recycle our hydrochloric acid and simply neutralize our sulfuric acid. It is definitely a change to the better on the process side of things, reducing our acid consumption and simplifying our production process. Finally, as I mentioned, we have added or expanded our product suite to include the rare earth products that Mark mentioned at the top of the webinar. We are really leveraging our expertise around rare earths as a company. We are taking advantage of all the good work that we did at our demonstration plant, where we built a small scale version of our production process. We ran it continuously, and we are able to take all of the data generated from that plant and incorporate it into the current design. What distinguishes us on the rare earth side of things, as separate from a lot of other development stage companies, is that we are actually going to produce fully separated, high purity rare earth products that can go directly into the supply chain for making rare earth permanent magnets. In addition to that, because we have all the rare earths present in our ore body, like any rare earth ore body, we have the upside ability to take samarium, europium, gadolinium, perhaps yttrium, and separate those out and make those products as well. That could be a future capital project at the site, again, to deliver some more revenue and value to our shareholders. At the end of the day, folks, we have a better project here. It's a better revenue distribution across a broader product portfolio, and we have a project that's not reliant on a single element or product to sustain our economics. We've made improvements to the mine and the surface plant, and those have resulted in higher efficiencies in the operation and higher yields to the product. Now we also have a shorter time to commercial production. Next slide. One thing I like to talk about is what's happened to our resource and reserve as a result of all the good work that we did last year at the site with an extensive drilling program. So now we have 45.9 million tons of proven and probable reserves and 40-year operational life. In the process of doing the drilling last year, we have established a proven reserve, which is the highest category of reserve that you can have on a mining project. This is a very important step for us, and it was important because not only does it increase confidence in that underground mineral reserve, but it's something that the EXIM Bank was looking for us to do. I think it's important for folks to understand that the drilling we did last year was what's known as an infill drilling program. So we certainly knew where the ore body was, and we had a certain level of confidence in it. Really, that program was intended to put holes in between holes that we already knew a lot about. When you tighten up hole spacing that way, you increase your confidence and you get to these higher level of resource and reserve categories. A nice side benefit of the drilling that we did is we did get a substantial increase in our inferred resources category. That wasn't part of the initial plan, but it's always good when it happens. It just points to the fact that we have a tremendous ore body at Elk Creek that remains open in a number of directions and certainly has the potential to become bigger with more technical work. In terms of the resource now, we have 21.7 million tons of measured resources, 187.4 million tons of indicated, and 169.2 million tons of inferred. I think what you can read into those numbers is we've talked about a 40-year mine life. But again, with some additional work, we could certainly convert more of those resources into reserves and certainly extend the mine life beyond the 40 years that we're talking about here. Our product portfolio remains the same, and I'll just highlight to everyone that we're now reporting everything in imperial units. We did that because at the end of the day, we're building a project in the United States, and the people that are going to be using the tools are going to be used to doing everything in imperial. So we've made that unit conversion to make it easier for the eventual construction of the project. We'll make a little over 8,000 tons a year of ferroniobium. That's our backbone product. That's what our entire production process is built and based around. We'll make 118 tons a year of scandium. Just a lot of exciting things happening in the scandium world these days. I'm sure everyone has seen our recent announcement with Lockheed Martin. We now have NioCorp Advanced Metals and Alloys with the capability of producing scandium aluminum master alloy. We have got some great things happening over in the U.K. with Project PIVOT, looking at incorporating scandium into aluminum that is used in automotive platforms. We have our three magnetic rare earth products that certainly are in high demand here in the United States right now. We are making a samarium europium gadolinium carbonate or SEG carbonate. That will have a market for it, certainly. That again goes back to what I said about some upside here, and that with some additional capital and testing work, we could separate those rare earth products into individual oxides as well and get some more economic benefit from our ore body. We will make a heavy rare earth carbonate, which is all of the rare earth elements heavier than holmium on the periodic table, including yttrium. Interesting things happening in the yttrium market these days. Again, an element that certainly the federal government here in the U.S. has some interest in, and again, something we could do in the future as an expansion or improvement project to target that element and recover it as a separated product. Rounding out our product portfolio is just a little over 59,000 tons a year of titanium tetrachloride, a higher value version of the titanium product that we made previously and a feedstock that is used to make titanium pigments and titanium metal. Bottom line here is we have a strong project with a long life and the potential for an even longer life with more technical work. Lots of upside here, and certainly I cannot wait to get underground and see how big it really is. With that, I will turn it back over to Barrett. Thank you very much, Scott. We are now going to open the webcast to your questions. To submit a question, click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window. Our first question comes from Neal Dingmann of William Blair. Neal, I have enabled you to speak. If you just hit unmute, you should be able to ask your question. There we go. Can you hear me now? Yep. Certainly can. We can hear you. All right, good. Thanks for the time, guys. Mark, could you talk a little bit about, you mentioned the timing, again, I think, and Jim and I talked about this a little bit. Key data now is the timing between now and the financing, of course. Again, is it just the EXIM? Seems like now having the definitive feasibility study you'd have most, but is it just now crossing the Ts, dotting the Is? How much more details will EXIM be looking for between now and then? It's a good question, Neal, and we continue to learn more in every discussion we have with EXIM. They're no different than a commercial bank in many ways. They kind of have an idea as to what they'd like to see, and then we talk about that, and we provide it to them, and then they have another idea. We'll continue to go through that process, but we know what the main pieces are that are remaining. We've got to finish the Traxys offtake agreement. We need to get an almost final, if not final, EPC contract in front of them, and we're going to be ready to go. I just don't see any reason why we can't get a lot of that work done in the very near future and get this in front of the board of directors for EXIM in short order. Very good. Then, love to see and was hoping to see now as Scott walked through having the eight distinct critical minerals that are in there. I guess my question is, once Elk Creek starts producing, how flexible, I guess, is the best way to ask it, will you all be? If again, scandium prices take off or dysprosium, you name it, there's going to be a lot of obviously upside potential for the mine. How much flexibility will you have to sort of lean into one or the other? I guess my question maybe for Scott, just on operational flexibility, how he sees it once Elk Creek is producing commercially. Yeah. I think, Neal, that we have a production process that's built around a mine plan that is intended to deliver a fairly steady head grade to the operating plant. That's not to say, though, that that can't be optimized. We have some very good and clever mining engineers, and while you're a little bit constrained in an underground environment as to how you approach the mining, there's a certain sequence you have to have. We certainly have enough information about the ore body that we could target, say, higher grade zones of niobium if the niobium market got really hot. I think the other thing that we've certainly talked about internally is the fact that our production process is pretty versatile as far as what kind of feedstocks it could incorporate and process successfully. There's probably a number of flavors of rare earth concentrates, for instance, that might be available in the market that we could buy and supplement to the feed coming from our own mine to prospectively increase our production of rare earths. That might require some capital investment on the back end of the process to ensure we have adequate separations capability to make additional rare earth products, but it certainly could be done. If I could sneak one more in, Mark, just on further off, should we expect those in the coming months, coming quarters? You broke up a little bit there, Neal. Just on further offtake agreements. Should we expect, you guys have done a tremendous job already, obviously locking some things in. Should we expect more in the coming months, coming quarters? Let me discuss that just a little bit, Neal. At a very high level, we are going to have two commercial agreements for 100% of the offtake for this mine. 50% of our ferroniobium will go to ThyssenKrupp, and then everything else will go to Traxys once that commercial agreement is finalized. Within that Traxys agreement, and a lot of this is built around the long-term relationship and trust that we have between Traxys and NioCorp, is our ability as NioCorp to continue to go out and market those products on our own. We may find customers or uses, applications, different strategies that we want to employ because of a growing market or strategic implications for the country that we want to really focus our sales on certain customers versus others. We will have the right in the Traxys agreement to undertake those sales efforts and then sit down with Traxys and discuss which party would be better overall for NioCorp and its shareholders. Traxys will be fine one way or the other because they will get the economics regardless of whether they make the sale or whether we make the sale. So we can really kind of lean in on a lot of different areas that we think may have a better future, a better margin, maybe working with a customer that is a better credit risk. So lots of things that we can use there to optimize our commercial situation. The other thing that we are doing, and this is based on, after a while, you do learn how not to do things in the business, and so we try to keep those in top of mind as well. One of the things we are doing with our commercial agreements is we are turning them into volumetric take or pay agreements rather than price-based take or pay agreements with floor prices. One of the big reasons behind that is our confidence, extreme confidence, I might add, in where all of these markets are headed for the products that we are going to be selling. The supply and demand fundamentals are all in our favor. What I do not want to do is to end up with a commercial arrangement where we may get a floor price, which really helps our debt provider get comfort, but then we also end up having a ceiling price as well. We are going to avoid ceiling prices wherever possible and make sure that the company can take full advantage of the confidence that we have in where these markets are going. We are trying to apply some deeper thinking to how we are conducting our business, and I think we will end up being very protective of very good markets going forward and be able to, like you say, lean in where that possibility opens up. Fantastic. Congrats on the great announcement. Thanks, Neal. Our next question will come from Tate Sullivan of Maxim Group. Great. Thank you for presenting the study and all the details. Can you talk about the planned construction timeline? I think in the study it indicates 35 months. Back in 2022, it's 45 months, I believe. Is that due to the ramp access, and also is it due to the portal starting construction in February? Scott, you want to do that? Yeah, certainly, Tate. As I mentioned, we've always recognized the critical path for this project goes through the development of the mine and getting the mine into production. So it's a combination of two things. One is getting that mine portal started and established. If we can get that behi nd us, then the remaining work to get down to the ore body and get the ore body producing goes quicker. I think the other thing here is that when we had put together various mine plans, including the one in the last study looking at shaft access, the shaft access and the development from the shaft to the ore body introduced some constraints on our ability to get to the ore body quickly and to ramp up that production. If you look at our last study, there was a fairly long period, about eight months or so, where the mine started producing at an initial rate, and then it ramped up fairly slowly to full production. I think the design we have now gets us there just a lot more quicker, so we get down to the ore body quicker. With the ramp access and the advantages it provides, it allows us to get the stopes that we need into production quicker and get to that full production threshold just as quick as you could hope. Yeah. Thank you, Scott. One more for me. Mark, can you talk about, from looking at potential timelines, do you think there's more variability in the mine construction aspect of the work or in the processing plant construction? Yeah, Tate, that's a great question. I don't have a perfect answer, but I'll provide you with some thinking along those lines. The engineering associated with the above ground project will be a little more straightforward and a little more black and white from an engineering standpoint. But it is a big project, and it's a complicated project to build multiple floors in the buildings and whatnot, so it has its challenges. Having said that, though, as confident as we are in our underground mine plan, those of us that have been in the mining industry for a couple of years know that you never know what Mother Nature's going to hand you until you open up the ground. There's always those concerns, but I will say that the extra work that Scott and his team have done on the geotechnical, the geohydrologic, the paste tailings designs where we're going to backfill the underground mine, all of that extra work has made us even more confident that surprises in an underground mine are really not going to happen in our case. But we've all been in the business a long time. We know it can happen, but I think we've taken every effort possible to minimize any surprises at the end of the day. That may require us to put a little more grout down there or to add a little bit more cement to the paste tailings, but that's what we'll do. Safety will be job number one for our employees. So not a precise answer, Tate, but hopefully you understand the complexities of both. Yeah, and thank you, and thank you for including the report, the ex-China pricing and the other sources, current sources of supply, and thank you for taking my questions. You bet, Tate. Good to hear from you. Our next question will come from Soundarya Iyer from B. Riley Securities. Soundarya, if you hit unmute, we should be able to hear your question. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. Yes. It's mostly around investor skepticism around the scandium demand. Just given the size of the market today, I wanted to ask if you're able to share anything on the commercial process with prospective off-takers, specifically that would help investors get better sense of how much Western demand could inflect once a reliable non Chinese source like Elk Creek actually starts producing. Yeah. Soundarya, great question, and one that I love to answer because we're really studying this scandium market as deeply as we can. I will be the first to say that this is a product line that has my excitement level just exceptionally high. Let me start out with just a couple of foundational data points. First one being, up until very recently, we all understood the scandium market to be about a 30-35 ton per year market. Maybe 3 tons a year being produced out of Canada, 7 tons being produced out of the Philippines, and basically the remainder being produced out of China. For some reason now, the United States Geological Survey has published a report that suggests that the market may be upwards of 60-65 tons per year. We're still trying to do the math to figure that out, because we don't know where the extra production may be coming from. But it is interesting to note that the United States Geological Survey has identified sources that they think exist, which has almost doubled what the market was in terms of supply prior to this year. The reason why I spent just a little bit of time on that is that that's all kind of interesting and fun to think about. But when we think about just one application of scandium in the world today, and it's a real application that's being used today, and it's in the solid oxide fuel cell business. In order to support the growth that the solid oxide fuel cell business is suggesting is going to occur in power generation. They certainly have good reason to believe that with all the AI and data center power generation requirements. Just one application there, those solid oxide fuel cells will then need about 400 tons of scandium per year to meet their production requirements for those solid oxide fuel cells. So that alone is going to create just a tremendous amount of demand for this new product that we're all pretty excited about. Now we've kind of got that baseline figure, which far exceeds anything that's produced today. Then you start talking about things like defense applications. We just had announced the MOU with Lockheed Martin for 15 tons per year. We know that there's going to be more demand from Lockheed and other prime defense contractors as they continue with their light weighting. As they continue to figure out that scandium aluminum alloys are cheaper, they're easier to work with, and perform many additional duties over what they're using in the fighter jets today, which would be composites. So we know that that demand is going to grow. We're looking at various automotive uses. We've got Project PIVOT that Scott mentioned over in the U.K. We're actually working with Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover. We've actually made the first scandium aluminum part for the front suspension of their DBX model, and they're doing destructive testing on that now, and then the next part that we make will actually go into one of the Aston Martin DBXs. The automobile industry, just based on the market reports that we have, could consume upwards of 3,000 tons of scandium per year. When I take a look at the demand side of this scandium business, then I think about literally the win that the automobile manufacturers get by utilizing scandium aluminum alloys. Th ey get lighter weight. They get better corrosion resistance. You can weld it. It is cheaper when you use it with recycled aluminum than just using aluminum by itself. You got all of these things, including a CO2 emission reduction that they get on that part, so they get to lower their overall CO2 emissions for their corporate reporting purposes. Every single one of those things is a very positive outcome, and we think the automobile industry is likely going to become a huge user of scandium. We are really excited about the scandium business. We want to make sure that we show everyone that we can be a reliable producer. I think we differentiate ourselves in that method or that way as well, because by virtue of the fact that we are underground mining a single ore body, bringing everything up to the surface and running it through a metallurgical plant. We are there primarily for niobium, which is a fabulous market all to itself. By virtue of the fact that we are producing niobium, by definition, we will be producing scandium. I think a lot of the end-use applications look at that as a reliability improvement over a primary scandium production facility, because we have these multiple products, and by virtue of producing niobium, all the other products come out. I threw a lot out there, Soundarya, and I hope I did not confuse the situation too much, but hopefully you can hear just a little bit of excitement in my voice about this scandium market and where it is going to go. It is really an exciting place to be right now. I will finish it by saying that the United States Department of War understands the importance of scandium, and it is high, very high on their radar right now in terms of importance to the security of our country. No, thank you, Mark, for that comprehensive answer. It makes a lot of things very clear for me. Just one more on the sequencing between EXIM facility and the potential equity component. Will EXIM require any evidence of committed equity before the loan closes? I think it's going to be an interesting situation. We have talked with EXIM significantly over the last three years and one month now, and they have come around in a big way to this idea of loan authorization with conditions precedent. One of the areas that they certainly seem to be very open to is the idea of loan authorization with a condition precedent to raise any remaining equity after the announcement of the EXIM loan authorization. We'll continue to work with EXIM along those lines. That is not something that they have historically done, but under the leadership of John Jovanovic and Brian Greeley, they are very commercially astute. They understand how these markets work and when it's a good time to raise equity and when it's not. I think we have a much better sound box to bounce things off of with the new administration than what we have seen historically. I think that possibility is certainly there. Having said that, I also know that capital pools form when they're ready to form, not when I want them to form. If the capital is available, the company will always take a hard look and try to make the best decision possible on behalf of our shareholders when it's the right time to raise any equity. Lots of optionality there. That is very helpful. Congratulations on getting this through. I will pass it over. Thank you, Soundarya. Good to hear from you again. It has been a while. Our next question will come from Heiko Ihle from H.C. Wainwright. I assume you can hear me okay? Yep, we can hear you, Heiko. Hi, Mark, Jim, Scott, team. Thanks for taking my questions. You bet. Is there a way to expand into more products and diversify just a little bit more? Obviously you've gone from three to eight. Is there a way to go further downstream? Just conceptually, how much more can Elk Creek even grow? You're looking at a 40-year mine life here. How much more can Elk Creek grow before you oversaturate your own production, or at least start moving down your own pricing? Yeah. Good consideration, good thinking, Heiko. Scott, I will have you go over some of those extra rare earth products, which we know are there. They will be in the concentrates that we are going to be making anyway, and we just need to separate them. Do you want to cover those first, and then I can start talking about some of the downstream activities that we are engaging in. Certainly, Mark. I think when you look at what we have presented here in this webinar, the product mix when it comes to rare earths represents a bit of a trade-off. We have targeted specifically the magnetic rare earths, which is where about 80% of the value lies. And we have to separate those from the balance of the rare earths, and we make specific decisions about that to make the best use of capital on the project. For instance, we have lanthanum and cerium. We do not do anything to try and recover those. They are very low-value products. They will cost more to recover than what their value would be. The samarium, europium, gadolinium sit in between neodym ium, praseodymium, and terbium, dysprosium on the periodic table, so we have to separate them out. We recover them together because we did not want to put the additional capital into the project to have two more solvent extraction circuits to make those three as individual products. But it would certainly be not a difficult exercise to do that engineering to have that solvent extraction capacity and make those products if we were able to get the right pricing for those products. For the heavy rare earths and yttrium, the holmium and everything heavier than holmium, it is really quite small quantities. It would be a challenge for us to try and make any kind of business out of those heavy rare earths, but the yttrium is certainly interesting. There is a couple of hundred tons of yttrium perspectively. We will make all those together right now as part of the project and send them to someone else to separate. But again, at the right price, we would probably need one additional solvent extraction circuit to separate out the yttrium and turn it into a product. But just aside from those rare earth products, I think once we get the plant up and running, we have a mineral resource and a reserve here that could certainly support a higher production rate than what we have in this current study. Now that would require, again, some capital to expand mine production and some capital to expand production in the surface plant. But it is fairly easy to see how that could be done to say go 2x from the current plant and double the production output. Last thing I will mention is that, and this goes to almost more of an environmental matter than a production matter, but some of the products that come out of the plant, calcium carbonate, for instance, iron oxide, are actually fairly high purity products in their own right. Now, we use those to make the paste backfill material that goes underground and fills the voids that we create by mining and supports the structure of the underground mine. But we certainly are in discussions with some folks that could potentially take those products off our hands. The advantage would be then that we would need to keep enough on site to sustain the paste backfill activity. But it would be a situation where it might generate some extra revenue. It certainly could defer or delay the cost of surface tailings impoundment facilities. Well, then I would just add to that, Heiko, that we really were looking at the SEG con and the heavy rare earth con as leaving them there, and that was largely driven by the prices of the samarium, the europium, and the gadolinium at the time. On the heavy rare earth concentrate, leaving that as is and not separating it because things like yttrium, which were in there as well, just did not have prices that would support any CapEx for that. That has changed just like all the other rare earth elements right now, and we are seeing a very strong bifurcation of pricing for things like samarium and yttrium, which as you know, our Department of War needs in a big way. Yttrium is becoming a lot more important right up there in terms of importance along with scandium right now. With the right situation and the right price supports, we can easily take the samarium out of that SEG con. We can easily take the yttrium out of that heavy rare earth con, and we can have two more products. But we are not going to do those at a losing proposition. We will only do that as a profitable proposition. But that would add more products to our list. The other way that we can expand the product horizon a little bit is to just take the existing products, like niobium is a very good example to start with here. We plan to make ferroniobium, which 90%-92% of all the niobium sold in the world today is sold in that form. It is basically sold to the steel industry. It is an alloying agent, and it strengthens regular steel into high-strength, low-alloy steel. But there are many other markets out there for niobium that we are aware of and we are pretty excited about. You can make niobium pentoxide, Nb2O5, and that can be in different purity levels, so it has different applications. The margins on the high purity Nb2O5 are significantly greater than ferroniobium. You can also get into niobium metal, where your margins are probably the highest in the niobium industry. But what we wanted to start out with was a simple product that has pretty broad ranges for the specifications. That is the ferroniobium, and we want to make sure that we get good at that to start with and generate revenue as fast as possible. We will start out with ferroniobium, but we have every intention once we get good at that, at looking at some of these Nb2O5 and niobium metal downstream applications. And in scandium, we are already into the downstream markets there. We are doing some testing of scandium metal production right now. Scott and I just witnessed that last week at the contractor's facility where they are doing that. That looks very promising because there are customers for scandium metal right now. They will place a contract with us right now for scandium metal because you cannot find scandium metal outside of China. China is being very selective on who gets any of their scandium metal on an export basis. Then, of course, the scandium aluminum master alloy, we bought that business and intellectual property last year. We have relocated the business to a more suitable manufacturing facility, and now we are purchasing scandium feedstock so we can start making scandium aluminum master alloy, and we have customers waiting for that product to be produced. So, yeah, there are many ways yet that we as a company can continue to take the foundational elements that we have and pursue these downstream activities where margins generally increase, and we fin d that to be quite exciting. In 23 years in this industry, this might be the longest, in a good way, answer to a single question on a conference call I have ever gotten. You know me how I am. By longest, what I really mean most comprehensive, so thank you for that. Thank you. One thing, I would be lying to you if I told you I have read through the whole study, but I did sort of skim through a couple of pages. One thing that popped out was the gas line. It was 18.4 in the study, I think it was page 379. You said you expect to connect this to a distribution pipeline 30 miles away. Are all arrangements to actually get this done related to terms, pricing, how much you can get already done? Can you give maybe a bit more color on power generations and the factors that may sway you into a certain direction of how to do it? Sure. Scott, you want to start that one? Yeah. Certainly, Heiko. We are in a unique position where our project is located in that we are close to actually three natural gas transportation pipelines. There is one to the east that is only about 5 miles away. There is not a lot of capacity on that line, but we will access it to provide power during the construction period. The two larger lines are one that is about 28 miles to the south in Kansas, the Rockies Express Pipeline, and then there is a Northern Natural Gas/Black Hills alternative for us about 30 miles to the west. We went through a competitive process with those two larger pipelines to see, really to get the best deal we could on gas delivered to the site, understanding that in today's environment. We are going to be responsible for the capital cost of those pipelines. As part of the competitive process, we established terms around the cost of the pipelines as well as the subsequent transportation fee we would pay to have the gas transported from a main pipeline to our site. Going through that process has resulted in what you see in the study, where we are focusing on this opportunity to the west, bringing in a 12-inch diameter pipeline to our site to provide gas for both the process and for power generation. Just to put a point on the power generation, that is about 15% of our natural gas need is going to be dedicated to generating power for the site. I do not think we are at the point, Heiko, where we have definitive contracts in place. That takes a little bit of time, but we are pretty far down the process with a particular provider and supplier of gas. There is a contract to finish there, but we do not expect that that will take much long, and certainly, we would expect that to be in place here later this year. Awesome. I think I've taken up my slice of the time of the questions here. I'll get back at you. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Heiko. Thank you to our many participants today. If there are any further questions, please direct them to NioCorp at jim.sims@niocorp.com or aguthrie@niocorp.com. Once again, that's jim.sims@niocorp.com or aguthrie@niocorp.com. Once again, thank you for attending, and thank you, Mark, Scott, Jim, and Alex for presenting. Thank you, Barrett. Thanks.