 Want to learn about stocks, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the metaverse? Join RichTV.io. Hi, how's everybody doing today? I'm your host from RichTV Live, Rich. And I'm here with our very special guest, the director from Atco Mining, Dawson Briscoe. How are you doing today, Dawson? I'm doing very well. Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure to be on your program today. Hey, very excited to have you on the show, Dawson. And we're really looking forward to learning more about Atco Mining. And can you tell us a little bit about Atco Mining and how you got involved? I'd be happy to. Personally, I've been in the mining and exploration industry for going on a couple of decades. I spent about a third of my time as a geologist in the Gobi Desert of Central Asia. Another third was in the business development side of the mining industry. And the last portion has been with Maury and Resources, where I've been CEO since 2018. And Maury is a, dare I say, rather unique cash flowing, dividend paying, TSX-V listed mining royalty company focused on North American bulk commodities. But for most of my career, I've been focused on energy. I've been involved in uranium and thermal coal, steel coal. I've spent an inordinate amount of my professional and free time looking at fossil fuels and renewable based energy systems. And one area that's had most of my attention for the past short while has been hydrogen. So when I was approached by Atco to join the board, it was quite fortuitous, frankly, given that hydrogen is Atco's focus as well. Fantastic. And hydrogen is getting a lot of media attention lately. Can you tell us what drew Atco's attention to this niche market? Great question. The short answer is that hydrogen is the next major wave of energy development. It's a big statements like that sometimes aren't convincing. So I'll tell you why I think it's true. I'm certainly not trying to be negative toward renewable energy. The degree to which solar array technology and onshore wind costs have been reduced has been incredible. And they have a massive role to play in the world's future energy grid. But after 20 years of development, wind and solar now provide just 3% of the world's total energy. I'm personally getting solar panels installed on my house shortly. They work great on a small scale. In some instances, they work great on a large scale as well. But there's a reason why renewables aren't ramping up fast enough. And one of the core issues, the core issue, in my opinion, lies in the fact that we just don't have long duration battery storage technology yet to store the energy for any great length of time. So on a large scale, they're just not quite able to reliably act as base load, base power supply. And for that reason, our grids generally they're carbon based. They're not renewable based. And so that brings us and segues into hydrogen. The attractiveness of hydrogen is that it is the energy source and it is the storage solution. In super basic terms, the flow sheet or the pathway, if you will, would look like this. Wind turbines produce green electricity. Green electricity produces or powers rather, the electrolysis process, which splits hydrogen from the oxygen. That forms hydrogen gas. And then a company like Atco stores the hydrogen gas and salt domes or caverns where it sits undisturbed for a great length of time or as long as the local utility needs until the hydrogen is needed, at which point the hydrogen is just recombined with oxygen from the air and that creates energy. I don't wanna oversimplify this, but it's a pretty simple exothermic reaction. The reason why this is getting such broad media and government attention is because hydrogen leapfrogs, the whole battery storage problem, like nowhere in that pathway that I need to insert a battery to make it work. So that the hydrogen is stored and when energy is needed, you simply introduce it to air and then that creates energy. Now, gonna make my answer a little bit longer and just give you two quick catches or caveats. The first one is that you need green electricity to fuel the electrolysis process. The largest contributor to green energy these days is offshore wind. Eight years ago, a two megawatt turbine was impressive. Now, if you look off the coast of Taiwan and off the coast of Europe, they're building 18 megawatt turbine fields. And so it just so happens that western Newfoundland has very attractive offshore wind sites, as well as, and this is probably just as important, they have a government that's willing to permit the sites super quickly. And so, we're very likely gonna see, I'm told the first wave of offshore wind sites permitted in western Newfoundland just in the next month. And then the second catch is that you need to find a way to store the hydrogen once it's produced. The solution, as I mentioned, is salt caverns or salt domes. And then it just so happens that western Newfoundland's St. George Basin where Atco has a very large land position has great potential for these domes. Now you mentioned salt domes. Can you tell us, is salt dome storage new for hydrogen and is it a proven concept? Hydrogen caverns are proven. They're inexpensive and they're a reliable technology. For example, the US Strategic Oil Reserve, they've been storing America's emergency backup oil and underground salt caverns for decades in the Gulf. You know, when it comes to hydrogen specifically, as far as I know, there are about a dozen sites in operation today. But with the energy crisis that we all know is well underway and also governments increasingly looking for green alternatives to Putin's oil and gas, we're witnessing a lot of new hydrogen based salt dome projects come online. Uniper, for example, the big German utility announced last year, it was starting construction of its own salt cavern storage project. A similar one is underway in the Netherlands. There's a big one in Utah, you know, the US, Europe and Canada, they all three of them have really bold hydrogen strategies that are gonna require a lot of these salt dome projects. Atco has had a lot of development since its IPO. Can you go through those for us? Sure, you know, as you know, and as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, most exploration companies, they IPO on the heels of a big acquisition or either of a company or a project or they IPO on the heels of a major land grab in a perspective area, which is sometimes what happens in the exploration and mining space. Atco falls into the latter category. You know, when I joined the board of Atco, just to put this in perspective, they had about 3,000 hectares of attractive ground. Three months and about a dozen press releases later, including one this morning, Atco's land position in this super perspective basin is now about 20,000 hectares, making it one of the largest landholders in the region, an area that's now regarded as the East Coast Hydrogen Hub. You know, Atco's projects, to put it in a perspective and context, there are about 50 kilometers southwest of the town of Stephenville. And last summer, Stephenville was the spot where Prime Minister Trudeau and German Chancellor Schultz met, shook hands, and officially launched the Canada-Germany Hydrogen Alliance Pact. It's an agreement that's very ambitious. It targets hydrogen exports to Germany by 2025. And the reason these two leaders met in Stephenville with a population of about 7,000 people on the far west coast of Newfoundland is that this is gonna be one of the primary sites of Canada's growing hydrogen export industry. The reason is that it's rare to have such high potential for salt dome storage immediately next to a deep water port that's also adjacent to some of the highest wind speeds on the East Coast. And that all combined, as I said earlier, with a province that's being fairly quick to permit these wind sites. So Atco plays an instrumental and big role in this mega project coming to fruition. That's really, really exciting. And what are your top three milestones for 2023 that shareholders can look forward to? I think number one will be continued land acquisitions and staking, like what we saw Atco press release this morning. The second step will be geophysical surveys to delineate the salt domes. We're flying a large geophysical survey right now, in fact. So Atco should have those results out soon. And then last, the Atco will look to drill those targets. So to sum it up, 2023 will be about setting the stage for this hydrogen energy push. I can't wait. And how much does the company currently have in the bank? And do you feel like you will need to raise any money this year in order to accomplish your goals for 2023? You know, Atco has about 600 to 700,000 in Treasury, Canadian. We're not planning a financing. In 2023, the company is run in an extremely lean fashion. Obviously the geophysical surveys cost money, but we're fortunate enough that there's a lot of players in the basin. So we can piggyback off of some of the MOB and DMOB costs. However, when you're in a new, when you're a new entrant into a new sector that's moving this quickly, things can obviously change, particularly as you advance toward the drilling stage. So I would never say never, but at this point, we're not planning on financing this year. Okay, that's music to our ears. And is there anything else you want? Investors that are watching today to take away from this interview? That's a good question. I would suggest that your viewers, they just, they try to get exposure to hydrogen, however way possible, frankly, because the momentum behind it is real. It's happening. And by the end of this decade, I believe the hydrogen fuel source will be well on its way to competing with gas, thermal coal and renewables. You know, if you bought a solar stock or a renewable ETF back in 2018, you did extremely well. And I have this feeling that hydrogen, this wave that we're in right now is going to follow a similar trajectory in the capital markets. And so what Atco offers, if I could make a plug on Atco's behalf, is it's a relatively low cost entry point for people to get exposure to this new sector. Now, what is the best way for anyone, including investors that have any questions to get in touch with the company? The website, you know, AtcoMining.com, ATCOMining.com, it's well maintained, it's updated regularly. So I would suggest people start there. Fantastic. Thank you for joining us today. The director of AtcoMining, Dawson Briscoe, love to invite you back on the show. And I'd be happy to be back on the show soon. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Richard. Always a pleasure. And I must remind everyone that Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you invest in anything we talk about or discuss. Today we're talking about AtcoMining, put on your radar, put on your watch list. And thank you for joining us today, director Dawson Briscoe. And for those of you that are watching, if you're not winning, you're probably not watching, we're bringing the winners, and we're bringing them to you first. Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Rich from Rich TV Live, saying have a nice day. We'll see you soon.