 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Greg Bowes of Northern Graphite. How are you today? I'm doing well. I'm doing well considering all the receptions at the PDAC. I'm surviving. Greg, I'd like to start by asking you about your timing for this private placement. I noticed you just announced it on Friday. Yes. We've kind of been in a bit of a holding pattern for the last year or two because we have a feasibility study done. We have our major environmental permit. And we didn't want to just issue press releases for the sake of issuing press releases. We wanted to minimize expenses. We wanted to minimize dilution. And we wanted to wait until we felt the timing was right to move the company forward again. And so now we feel the time is right and there's a couple reasons for that. One is just before Christmas the Chinese government announced that they're building a stockpile equal to 80% of their annual production. They're telling the rest of the world they have a graphite supply problem and they produce 80% of the world's graphite, 100% of the anode material for lithium-ion batteries. And the lithium price has already responded to that battery demand. Finally, we've seen cobalt respond and graphite should be next. So that pretty much drove the timing. It's time to move the company forward. Well, I have to commend you on a very well-written news release. You did something I rarely see and I think investors at Investor Intel will appreciate this. In your news release you clearly identify what you plan on doing with this race. Can you explain this to our audience? Yes, thank you for the compliment. We are raising $2.5 million non-brokered private placement. And a lot of it is retail brokers and high net worth people that did very well in Northern back in 2010 to 2012. They know the asset, they know the company and they came to me and said, Greg, it's time to get back in. So what we're going to do is basically three main things. We are going to update the feasibility study, exchange rates, oil prices, things like that have changed since we did our study. We are going to finish the operational permitting for the project, which has been ongoing for a while. We just haven't pushed it. We have our major permit, but there's a number of smaller ones that follow along after that. And we're going to build a pilot plant to demonstrate our purification technology for making spherical graphite. It is critical that the West comes up with an alternative to the Chinese wet chemical approach. And we feel we have a cost-competitive alternative to that approach. So we're going to do a pilot plant on that. Well, I'd like to talk, just to have you talk a little bit more about the pilot plant. You have a page in your PowerPoint. It says Spherical Graphite, a technology story. Yes. Explain that. Yes, everybody in the graphite business that has done a PEA or a feasibility study or whatever, it's all based on producing a run-of-mine concentrate that you sell to various customers. However, anode material for batteries is a manufactured product. So you take the mine concentrate and you have to go through a number of upgrading steps to actually have the material that you can use in a battery. And one of the key steps is purification. So the mine produces a concentrate, let's say 96% carbon. It needs to be 99.95%. So that purification is one of the key steps. And as I said, we have developed a proprietary technology for doing that. And we've done a lot of lab work, a lot of bench scale testing. And now we're going to do a pilot plant test. Okay. And further to that, can you tell us what we should expect with your timeline for the next couple of quarters, Greg? Yeah, you will see the results of all of that work. Right now, for example, we're currently preparing samples from three major producing areas of the world. These are existing mines, plus a couple of juniors that we're working with. And we're going to test our purification process on it to see how universal it is. We know it works on ours, so we will be issuing that press release in the not too distant future. There's a couple tweaks we want to make to the flow sheet. This is part of the feasibility study update, so that will be coming along, plus the results of the pilot plant and the permitting. So it should be a pretty busy summer for us. One of my favorite questions to ask you, because I deem you to be a top graphite expert, can you tell us where you think pricing will go for us in 2017 in graphite? Well, I would like to add the caveat at the start that I've been wrong for a year and a half. I thought graphite prices would have reacted to the growth in lithium ion batteries a year ago. They have to be getting close, because battery demand has gone from almost nothing to a third of the graphite market in five or six years, and it's growing at 20%. That growth was offset to a large extent by declines in the steel industry. The steel industry has bottomed and is coming back a little bit, and the batteries have continued to grow. So as I said earlier, Cobalt has already responded, lithium did a while ago. I think it's graphite's turn, and I think we'll see much higher prices before year-end. Well, you've heard it here first about what we anticipate for graphite in 2017. Greg, as always, thank you for joining us. It was my pleasure, Tracy.