 Here we are at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, Ontario for the Clean Tech and Technology Metal Summit. Our guest is Christopher Reed. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, thanks for coming up. Neal Metals has had a fascinating year. You have your fingers into a lot of different metal pies, but right now you're focusing on lithium. Yeah, we are. We're producing lithium from the Mount Marion lithium mine. We've got a small interest in that. It's the world's second largest source of lithium feedstocks. We're now concentrating our efforts towards downstreaming our share of production in a couple of years' time. We've developed some lithium titanate anodes, which is another step down. And then we've developed some lithium battery recycling technology, essentially urban mining the lithium batteries at the end of life. Alright, so let's talk about Mount Marion. What stage of production is it at? So Mount Marion has had three shipments away. The fourth shipment leaves this month, so the ramp-up's going very well. It will produce at full capacity about 400,000 tonnes of concentrates containing about 50,000 tonnes of lithium carbon equivalent. And do you own the entire project, part of it, during that time? Yes, so we've sold down parts we've bought in two big partners. So we have Ganfang Lithium as a large equity partner and off-taker, mineral resources, who are a leading Australian project developer. So you're getting revenue from that, and then in the middle you have your own research and development team that's looking at other applications? Correct, actually a lot of it's done in Canada. We have an R&D lab in Montreal. Initially we came to Montreal as part of the Titanium project because Quebec has very large resources of hard rock titanium. But yeah, we have a small facility down in Buffalo, New Jersey where we do the lithium electrolysis. And that's a technology that we're hoping to commercialise to produce lithium hydroxide from our lithium feedstocks. You mentioned your titanium. You get some vanadium out of that as well, don't you? Correct, it's like the ones that you have at QIT. So it is predominantly iron, titanium and vanadium. So we're looking at recovering a titanium hydroxide as an intermediate product but we will recover high purity vanadium pentoxide and iron oxide. Now before we started with the cameras on you and I were discussing the recycling of lithium ion batteries. And I'd always heard it was not possible to economically recover the cobalt oxides from the cathode in a lithium ion battery. You tell me I'm wrong. Well look, you know the test work and the scoping study that we've had done by leading Australian engineers, Sedgeman, would say differently. I mean we've committed now to build a pilot plant at our facility in Montreal. We'll run 100 kilos a day of NMC format batteries through that. Certainly the metallurgy to separate the nickel and the cobalt when they're reasonably equal parts is challenging. But you know if you took a laptop battery it's about 20% by weight cobalt which is about five or six ounce gold equivalent. So there's room to be wrong. Certainly the costs were projected to be less than five dollars a pound which is pretty good in the current pricing environment. Well last time I looked cobalt was 55,000, 54,000 US dollars a ton which is about 24 dollars a pound. Correct, so there is some margin for error. Yeah, there's some margin there. And can you recover other metals as well out of the lithium ion recovery? The lithium has traditionally been tricky. The lithium is 3% of the value of the battery. The cobalt is obviously significant. As you move from the consumer of electric batteries which in laptops and phones are pretty much cobaltate you move towards the more NCMs, NCA's then you do have to recover the copper, the aluminium because those foils are in the battery, manganese. So yeah there are other valuable products and certainly one of the tricks has been to try to get it out of its native format into solution because if you get some lithium polymer there and crack that with a hammer mill, expose lithium metal things go bang. It's combustible. I've got one or two broken hammer mills as testament to that. So what can we expect this year? So this year we'll run the pilot plant for the battery recycling. And that's the one in Montreal? In Montreal. We'll have an engineering study finished by Christmas on a 10 ton a day commercial plant and then we are running a partner selection process. So the batteries, you can't move them a long way so it's more of a decentralised sort of model. You could put a small 10 ton a day next to it. Sorry, is that because the cost of shipping them makes the costs too prohibitive? Not really the cost. I think there's a safety aspect. I think we've recently seen, you know, there was lithium batteries down in Texas, I think. There was a train ignited and look. So I think you don't want to travel long distances like you wouldn't send them into Continental. So, you know, our approach with the 10 ton a day is you would put that at the plant where you made the batteries because in the process there's spoils and aspect product from the cathode, the cells, the packs of 10 or 15% of what you put in. So 10 tons a day is a good size for the larger battery plant. So that would otherwise be waste that you recover? You would have to put that through a complete different cycle. And so that's a bit of a segue for these guys to get their heads around the chemistry for a larger plant. In your life, they will need much larger... I mean, 10 tons a day is not going to cut it when you have to take all your battery packs back. Right. But right now you're in an enviable position. You have the treasury that allows you to do this kind of research. Correct. We have got about 70 million Australian dollars in cash and investments. And I'm imagining you have a budget for the year. At the end of the year, you'll have cash in the bank left. Plenty of cash. It's very, very hard to spend that amount. So we're looking at a well-funded R&D company that's in revenue. Correct. Yeah. I mean, we've got captive sources of all the commodities that we want to be in. We've got processes that can enable us to operate down the bottom end of the cash curve. And that's the only defendable position you can take in the long run. It takes the risk out of the pricing cycle. Well, thanks for educating me. I learned a lot today. I look forward to learning more from you over the next couple of days. Thanks for the interview. Bye. Cheers.