 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Mark Saxon from Tasman Metals. How are you today, Mark? All right, Tracy, very well. Thank you. Mark, you just recently put out some news about the completion of a magnetic separation plant for the Noracar Heavy Wear Earth Element project. Can you tell us a little bit about this news? Yes, thanks, Tracy. We've just finished a magnetic separation pilot plant, and that was to do a scaled-up test of our beneficiation process, which for Noracar is magnetic separation. So that was a test run in Finland. It was paid for by the European Commission under our Eurair project, and it performed very well. We're very pleased with the results. All right, so in addition to that, there was something that I thought was very interesting in your news release. It said you've managed to take what was previously deemed waste product, a nephaline byproduct, and you found a way to commercialize this. Could you start by explaining to us at Investor Intel and maybe the rest of our audience knows what nephaline is, but give us an understanding of what you have here. This sounds exciting. Yeah, most certainly. It's a little bit different to what most companies are dealing with. And in fact, the Noracar project was first worked by a Swedish mining company, Bulleiden, for nephaline, rather than for air earths. And so it's had quite a long history there. So nephaline is a mineral. It's not a metal. And nephaline will go into the ceramics industry, the glass industry. It can go into cosmetics. It can go into building fillers. It can go into many, many end uses. Europe is a very large market for nephaline. And when you think of roof tiles and bricks, and when you think of Italian ceramics or Spanish ceramics, all of that is using nephaline. And so it's a very large market. For the rocket Noracar, about 65% of the material in the ground is in fact nephaline. And under our PFS, we had to deal with that as a waste product, because we didn't have our products worked out. The work we're doing now is to get the nephaline into some end markets. And so we can understand the value of that in particular, but also understand the environmental benefit it can have as well, because it is using our waste material. And we've got the aim there to have a very low waste mine or even a zero waste mine, if possible. So if we could just go back to the results, though, it seemed to be based on your comments in the news release that you were very pleased with the results. I think you said that it mirrors the bench scale test work. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this actually means? When we've done our bench scale test work, we have used a whole range of machines in order to see what performs the best. The pilot plant that was available to us under the EU Rare program that we could use for free was not the best equipment that is available and is not the equipment that has performed best for us, however it still works very well. The thing that was very pleasing was that our bench scale work matched our pilot plant work, and really that shows that the processes can be scaled up. When we do our final test work, it will be done with the optimized machinery and we'll see higher recoveries. But we achieved almost 80% recovery with a non-optimized machinery and we're very pleased with that. And of course, I think I just want to draw attention to this research partner. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you facilitated this because it seems like a real win-win for both sides? Yeah, sure. The EU Rare project in Europe is an ongoing project and it's been running for three years. I believe it's got one year to go. It's been funded with 10 million euros and its aim is to reduce the risk of rare earth metals inside of Europe. So certainly quite a bit of our work is done under that program. We've done quite a bit of large-scale drilling. We've done this beneficiation plant. And we're now moving on to some hydro metallurgy work under the EU Rare project that will be funded again by the European Commission. Okay, well, I find that very fascinating. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've all been... I've been talking to everybody in the industry about Dudley King's North's recent presentation and the impact of illegal rare earths from China on the overall market and pricing. I'd love to know your comments on this because, Mark, you are one of our leaders in the industry. Yeah, certainly. I follow Dudley's work very closely and he obviously has a very good understanding of the balance of what's consumed versus what's produced. And I certainly believe that there is some missing metal, I suppose, that has to be coming from illegal mining. Certainly, I would have liked to have seen the illegal production be reduced from the market a lot more quickly than it has. I think we're going to have to stay with it for many more years. It's very hard to reduce that amount of material. But I guess it's now up to the customers to say, are they prepared to be part of that supply chain or are they looking for alternative sources and things that are more sustainable both on the business case and also on the environmental case. And that's really up to the customers now. Okay, well, I believe that that was Dudley's recommendation as well is that the customers need to apply more pressures without an understanding of the large impact they're having on rare earths for the entire global market. Now, I noticed that you elected to withdraw your application for a mining lease for your ulcerum. Ulcerum, did I pronounce that properly? Rare earth project? Pleasant access. Can you talk to us a little bit about this? And it sounds to me like it's a reflection of the overall sector presently. Yeah, certainly. I think it was 2013 we put in a mining lease application for our ulcerum project based on having completed a small internal scoping study and showing that it was an interesting project having completed a resource and some drilling. And we decided to go through with a mining lease. However, we had done all the work we had to do for that stage. However, at this stage we need to be submitting more information and more information obviously comes with more cost. And so we have decided rather than incur that cost now, we shall move back to working on our exploration licenses and continue on exploration licenses rather than the mining lease. And obviously it does reflect the market and how difficult it is to raise finance and I guess the long-term view we need to be taking with rare earth metal. It's a very good project. It's got a very simple mineralogy. It benefits you as well. And the flow sheet is very well known for Zeniton monazite that occurs at the site there. But it's not a project we need to rush ahead with, I suppose. Of course, Mark, you have a lot of die-hard fans and shareholders in the industry. I mean, you've been a leader for many years now. Can you tell us what we should anticipate for the new year? Yeah, certainly. All I can say is I hope the new year is not as difficult as the past year. And really, rare earth is not alone. And it's been challenging for every part of the mining sector. And it certainly looks like the Toronto Venture Exchange will be finishing at an all-time low at the end of this year, unfortunately. And so it's been a very difficult time. I think in the rare earth sector now it's a much smaller market. All of the projects that are now being funded do have a chance of success. They won't all be successful, but they're all reasonable projects. So they all do deserve funding now. And hopefully the funding can be attracted for all those projects. And we all need to slow down and we need to be very cautious of our expenditure. And I think in the way that Tasman has done, we have increased the products we can produce on site there. And so we need to get a broader base of revenue, I suppose, in order to support rare earth metals while the price is alone. And then when the industry turns, I think, yeah, there will be three, four or five companies that are very well positioned to take advantage of that. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to get an update. No problem, Tracy. Thanks very much.