 Greg Bose is the CEO and Director of Northern Graphite. Greg, welcome to the Investor Intel studio. Pleasure to be here again, Frank. I understand you've just been in China and Japan and you have learned more about the local graphite market there. Perhaps you'd tell us what you learned. One of the big takeaways from China is that the high end of the market, which is what we call the XL or double XL flake, which would be plus 50 or plus 32 mesh material, is fact underserved. The market would be sure if there was a reliable, consistent source of supply and therefore manufacturers are forced to substitute lower quality rates. That's very good news for Northern Graphite because we have the only true large flake deposit, 90% of our production is large flake by far the highest in the industry and 60% of our total production is the plus 32 and plus 50 mesh flake. A big part of our strategy, therefore, is an offtake agreement on traditional underserved markets that are here in our real now. Greg, I had a cell phone battery die on me which was very upsetting, was only three years old and I'm certainly looking down the road at perhaps buying an electric vehicle someday. I'm certainly not planning on having a car that's only three years old with the battery die on it. What's happening in the technology with regard to batteries that is affected by graphite? Yes, that's a very nice segue into a big part of the trip because again, I think a lot of junior companies and a lot of investors don't realize that when we talk about the anode material in the lithium ion battery, there are a lot of different grades and a lot of different qualities. If you start with the basic product, it's called uncoated spherical graphite and it's pretty all produced in China because they use hydrofluoric acid for purification, which is one of the nastiest substances known to man, would be very difficult to do in the West. So if you're a junior that wants to produce in the West, you have to have an alternative solution for purification, which Northern does. I'm not aware of any other junior that has announced one and done the extensive testing and engineering and design work and scoping work that we've done to come up with a real solution. So you have to do that first and then we have what's called coated spherical graphite, which is the final product that goes into the battery and this is where we come to your question. Producing batteries for common devices, let's say cell phones, cameras, laptops, there are a lot of different grades and qualities depending on what the nature is of the anode material that you use. It's not a, I would say overly difficult process to make those batteries and again, you might have cheap batteries from a cheap manufacturer in your cell phone, you might have higher end batteries in your cell phone. There's a wide range of performances there and a wide range of prices, which are probably quite a bit lower than most juniors are forecasting in their models. And one of the reasons that there's lower quality batteries in those devices is because the product life is short. You had your cell phone for three years, you're probably at the higher end of the spectrum. Many people change those devices much more often. So battery life is not as critical in those devices again because they have relatively short life. However, if you're dealing with a Tesla, for example, the battery has to be 80% of capacity after eight years because the value of the battery is the value of the car or vice versa. So when we're talking about EV batteries, that is a very high end high technology battery. It's an engineered product. It's got high temperature heat treatment. It's got synthetic graphite blended in it. It's got special coating treatments. There were only four companies in the world that have figured out how to use natural graphite in an EV battery and get the required battery life. So there's in fact an oligopoly on EV battery and other material just like there is with lithium. So again, if we go back to the junior companies who are saying they're going to make spherical graphite for electric vehicles, there is a huge technological challenge there to catch up to those four. And is Northern one of the four great? No, we are not. We are one of the. Those four would be big companies like Hitachi and Samsung and so forth. So Hitachi, for example, produces the anode material that goes into Panasonic batteries, which go into Tesla cars. So if you're a junior company that wants to produce anode material and get it into any car, whether it's a Tesla or anybody else, you've got a serious amount of qualification work to prove that you have the technology that your battery will still be 80% capacity after eight years and will not do what your cell phone did and die after three. Otherwise, the car is essentially worthless. There's synthetic graphite as well as the flake graphite. My understanding is that that's being used in EV batteries currently. What are the positives and negatives about synthetic graphite? Yes, synthetic graphite is a manufactured product. So historically, it's had more of a consistent quality than natural graphite, which has to be processed to get it up to that quality. Generally, the synthetic graphite charges faster and it has a longer life. It's a simple way of putting it, but it's much more expensive. So natural graphite is much less expensive and it has a much higher capacity in the batteries. So the electric car batteries are generally made out of synthetic except for those four that I mentioned because they have figured out how to blend natural in with synthetic to combine the best qualities of both material. And the big one is controlling expansion, which causes the battery to break down and reduces cycle life. So only four companies have the secret recipe of how to do that, which leads to a lower cost, higher capacity, long life battery. So the trend is definitely towards more natural because it is cheaper because it has higher capacities. They do not say what the secret recipe is in terms of blending natural and synthetic. Most people believe that it's 60% natural, 40% synthetic, and that the natural proportion is increasing. Many pundits are predicting strong growth in the EV market. How is that going to affect graphite pricing generally? Well, it's a very, very positive development because the graphite market is relatively small. 370,000 tons a year of fleet graphite production. Not all of that is suitable for being converted or upgraded into anode material for electric batteries. I don't think anybody really knows what that number is. Maybe it's 200,000 or 300,000 tons. But those kinds of numbers, the amount of natural graphite that you would need for, let's say, a million electric vehicles a year, which is a little over 1% of the new car market, you'd probably have to double the annual supply of raw graphite production. So that's obviously not going to happen overnight. We also have grid storage, continued growth in the smaller prices. So the supply-demand outlook for graphite is extremely bullish. It has not led to higher prices yet, but we've seen the first couple upticks in the last few months, the first since we've seen since 2012. So hopefully graphite does what lithium has already done, and that is that the price has spiked because of battery demand. And we think that's coming for graphite as well. Well, you've positioned northern graphite then as North America ounces of graphite. You've got a technology for purifying it, which is not sensitive environmentally. What else have you got up your sleeve, Greg, for the rest of this year? Well, I kind of turned it around and say, look at it the other way, the problem with most graphite deposits is that production is too large for the size of the market. And the reason companies are modeling high production rates is because capital costs are high, and that's the only way to kind of make the economics work, forgetting about the fact that those high price or high production rates are going to cause prices to go down. There's a high percentage of fines and non-battery grade with those projects, and they don't have the technology for operating it to spherical graphite. And Northern does not. We have an advanced stage project in Ontario, full feasibility, major environmental permit. We're starting at 20,000 tons per year, which is a more realistic number. We have a high percentage of large flake and a very low percentage of fines, and we have a purification technology for upgrading it. So we like to think we have the whole package already. Great story, Greg. Thank you very much. Well, it's been six or seven years in the making, and hopefully the best is yet to come.