Earning Date, Transcript Summary & Report

Conditional Grant Validation: Receiving a $225 million conditional grant from the DOE validated the world-class potential of the South West Arkansas project.

High Lithium Recovery Efficiency: Lithium recoveries have consistently exceeded 95%, demonstrating the efficiency of our extraction process.

Government Funding Secured: We have secured government funding for our project, which is a significant milestone for our operations.

Key Derisking Agreement: Our landmark agreement with Koch Technology Solutions was a key derisking event for our project.

Strong Operational Performance: Recent commercial-scale results exceeded expectations, indicating strong operational performance.

Net Loss Comparison: For our first quarter ended September 30, 2024, we reported a net loss of $4.8 million, or $0.03 per basic share. This compares to a net loss in the first quarter of 2023 of $7.3 million, or $0.04 per basic share.

Net Loss Reduction Strategies: The reduction in our net loss was primarily driven by meaningful reductions in expenses from our demonstration plant as a result of the great work our operations team has done to reduce reliance on reagents, improve efficiencies through changes in our flowsheet, bringing our personnel in-house versus outsourcing, and reduce testing applications as we honed in on the use of LSS technology for DLE.

G&A Cost Reduction: G&A was reduced by approximately $0.2 million, despite increasing back-office activities and a larger executive team to support moving forward towards FID on South West Arkansas, as well as expanding and further defining our resources in East Texas.

Healthy Working Capital Balance: We ended the quarter with a very healthy working capital balance of approximately $24.7 million and $28.9 million in cash. Cash outflows during the quarter were primarily driven by the aforementioned cash-based expense items on our income statement, in addition to approximately $2.4 million in payments made on previously accrued expenses, deriving primarily from legal and advisory fees associated with our joint venture transaction with Equinor, in addition to fees paid associated with the co-development of our DLE technology that we plan to use at Stage 1 of our South West Arkansas project.

Structured Off-Taker Engagement: We have been engaged in a long informal dialogue with a number of potential off-takers for the project. However, we are about to be kicking off a more formal process to have a more structured dialogue with multiple off-takers at the same time.