 Today I have the privilege of speaking with Peter Cashin from Imperial Mining Group. How are you today? Good, Tracy. Peter, the reason why I said privilege in speaking to you is I am a Scandium buff. Ever since I was a member of the U.S. Russian Council for a number of years and the Russians loved Scandium okay and with all the news about the Russians can you tell us and for those of you out there that may not understand why the Russians love Scandium so much, why they were so ahead of us with their appreciation of Scandium? Well, they started experimenting with Scandium in the 70s and they've started alloying it with aluminum and they recognized that just small quantities of Scandium could significantly improve the mechanical strength of the alloy. In the instance of pure aluminum you can increase the strength by 800%. So it was a great product, particularly when they were in the process of upgrading their fighter jet program development. So Meg 29 and then the SC-235 that De Byron presented a couple of weeks back here last week with Jack. So they said, well, we've got this stuff, let's try it and their planes far outmaneuver the U.S. F-18s because it imports strength and not just that. When you get up to Mach 5 and some of those fighter jets, although you need a strong alloy, it has to have a degree of flex to it and that's what Scandium imparts. The hotter it gets, the more stress that's on the alloy. It becomes super plastic. In other words, there's a degree of flexibility. Whereas titanium, which the U.S. uses, is very strong, a bit very brittle and you've got always to have to worry about structural cracks when you get into high speed. So that's why I think there's a general understanding and transition that the U.S. fully understands the benefits. A lot of science has been undertaken, but let's get this stuff, but right now we can't get it. So all of a sudden we're putting our flag up and saying we've got a North American source of the highest grade bedrock Scandium opportunity that's out there. Well, we've got the news coverage, Russian control of uranium and of course we cover all the critical materials. We cover everything from tin to rare earth, the Chinese control of rare earth. So talk to me a little bit though about who controls Scandium supply in the world right now and how we can get it in North America. Control is a pretty strong word I think for Scandium. I think more is where are the available sources and what is their production capacity? And you mentioned China. China produces about 20 tons of the world's 35 ton availability of Scandium and that's from byproduct processing of the tails from biennobles, the rare earth tails that they get all the rare earths from. The Russians produce about 10 tons of themselves that we know of and most of that stuff goes into the strategic stockpile for the reason that I told you I mean they're using it for their defense program and now they've evolved that into applying Scandium aluminum into their marine program so ships, battleships and the rest. And then there's small amounts of supply in the Philippines that Sumitomo has derives from nickel cobalt laterates and most of that stuff is about five to eight tons of Scandium goes to bloom energy first in California for solid oxide fuel cells and that's it really. But help us understand I mean the people I've had the pleasure of being around a number of Scandium bugs in my life but it seems like the people who get interested in Scandium can't let it go. There seems like there's an extraordinary passion that evolves for Scandium. Can you talk to us a little bit about why those of you that are so interested in Scandium believe it can be used for such a much larger industry? With the drive to reduce carbon footprint of all transportation platforms is really going to be the driver here and Scandium aluminum and put it into manufacturer platforms be it automotive or defense or aerospace or even fuel cells will significantly lighten up the weights of the platforms and you talk about EVs and you know a good example is that you can't go more than 400 kilometers on a charge in an EV and if I go to Montreal I have to stop halfway and charge my vehicle for an hour before I go on for my trip. So a lot of work's been done in battery chemistry but if you think that if you lighten up the platform you can probably have a better effect or an equal effect in extending the battery range or the range of the electric vehicle by lightening it up. You just recently put out a corporate update for Imperial mining and you were really talking about the research and development and I think you know would you not be the kind of company that ESG funds would be looking at you know because of all the work you're doing in R&D perhaps you can give us an update? Well yeah because I mean the issue is the mechanical properties of adding small quantities of scan into luminar are well known have been known since the 70s but now the way that you grow the market is you start developing new alloys and new applications and for the use of those alloys in all of the manufacturing streams so you have to almost create market pull by introducing new materials and new product opportunities. So what are some of the competitive advantages of Imperial mining? I mean for those people out there who are continue to be interested in Scandium why is Imperial mining the company to go to for Scandi? Well because it's you know it's a large bedrock high-grade opportunity and we've we defined about 40 years of resources in our 43-101 last September and we've got four additional areas that have yet to be fully evaluated so the resource potential and the grades are exceptional. The fact that it comes to surface it's open pitable so it'll have a very low cost production profile and because we're in Canada's center of green aluminum in Quebec there's lots of aluminum production capacity there's a strong workforce and there's an understanding of the the significant benefits that aluminum the aluminum industry has on the Quebec economy. So and then right next door to what view is what view we view as probably the most important consumer potential consumer of Scandium aluminum and and that's the U.S. Your most recent news release to me I would have used this as the headline I thought your metallurgical process development update was significant. Can you tell investors out there what you announced and why it is so significant? As you know Tracy you've been in this critical metals game long enough and companies that don't truly understand the nature of the business think that reporting great grades and huge resources is really the the key path to success in the sector. It's not that at all because it's your ability to be able to economically get the materials of value out of the rock and and these these kinds of orders tend to be quite complex metallurgically complex and you need a process to you know an efficient and cost effective process to get the Scandium out so we've been working away now since 2018 on a process and we've we came up with a solution we filed for a patent this past December so it's patent pending we've got 12 months with which to finalize all the parameters of the patent so that leads me into the grant that we received about a month ago from the Quebec government that's going to invest in our ability to optimize the process we've got a process now we're going to optimize it we're going to refine the nature of the process we're going to do things like improve the recoveries try to reduce the cost inputs to on that recovery and then ultimately I think the big driver because this is a product really slated to reduce carbon footprint we want to make sure that we reduce the carbon footprint of the process itself so that's where we're going right now we're hoping that that work should be completed by the fall and then with that information we'll now file the final patent with U.S. Patent Office probably in December we have to do it by the end of November and those parameters are going to be used for a pilot mill study to start to scale up the process for it to be done so far you mentioned that some of the research that's being done with imperial mining there's been an emphasis on applications towards EV and hybrid automobile batteries can you talk to us a little bit about that yeah that's that's our work that we're doing with tech industries in in wisconsin they're they're a small alloys group but they're tied into the aerospace automotive and defense sectors and we were we started out with them by looking at different alloys different compositions once they did the experimental work and created these alloys actually indicated to us that in actual fact that the parameters the mechanical properties were really dictated to them by a major global automotive partner in manufacturing and so now and we found out that those the alloys actually met or exceeded the minimum characteristics of what they were looking for for the battery box so you need something that's strong because that battery box really forms the chassis of an EV it needs to be thermally resistant because the battery the heat that the batteries will you know generate are quite hot so you need and generally some alloys actually weaken as you heat them up scandium actually maintains its properties and then lightweight of course that's a big big driver here so now we're into the prototyping steps and if the prototype ultimately gets gets accepted it'll usually it'll probably lead to a significant off-take agreement for our scandium well peter as always it's such a pleasure to speak with you and get an update and a little secret between us is a friend of mine asked me to help them sell the the scandium based golf club that had been taken to the moon many years ago so that's what I was introduced to scandium as always it's a pleasure to get an update from imperial mine group thank you peter great thanks tracy thanks for that