 Hello everyone, this is Byron King with Investor Intel and I have Dan Blondel here today from a company called Nano One which is located in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dan has a fascinating background in engineering and material science and Nano One, if you are not familiar with the company, is in the battery business and in particular the lithium side or the cathode side of batteries. Dan, thank you for being with us today. Tell the viewers and listeners out there, just give us a quick summary of what is Nano One? What do you guys do? Nano One is an industrial technology company and we're developing a chemical process for the production of cathode materials. The cathode material is one side of the battery, it's one side of the electrode and it is the most complex and expensive component within the cell. It could be 40 to 50 percent of the cost of a lithium-ion battery cell and that's because it's made of things like lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron, phosphorus. There are a bunch of different flavors of lithium-ion batteries. They all have lithium in them but they use different metals and those make the battery do different things. Some of them are better at charging, they charge faster, some of them are safer, some of them are cheaper, some of them have better energy density and they serve kind of different purposes in the market. Our technology is a platform that allows us to make all of them and what we've developed is a chemical process to assemble the key raw materials into a composite powder, which is the cathode material. That would then go up to a battery cell manufacturer who would mix it into a paste and spread it onto a piece of foil and roll it into a cell or fold it into a flat cell that would go into a battery application of some kind. Our technology allows us to use alternative sources of raw materials like the lithium, the nickel, and the manganese but we can use materials that have a much smaller footprint, environmental footprint, so reduces the by-prox and the amount of waste. It reduces complexity and as a result it reduces cost, improves yield, all of that ultimately for the improvement of the cathode material. But the technology also simplifies the process. There's a chemical component, there's a thermal component where you cook it in a furnace and we're trying to drive down the cost and the capital, both the capital and the operating cost of those parts of the process as well, all for the purpose of having a lower cost material. So that's kind of made in a nutshell. One of the things that I noticed about your process is that you have eliminated the element sulfur from the process and traditionally that's been in there and sulfur is a problem, it's a problematic chemical when you start to use it and so you've taken all the sulfur out, is that fair? Yes, so sulfur actually, you don't want sulfur in a battery but what it is, it's an intermediate chemical that the industry uses right now. So it's easy to make, what happens is they convert nickel into nickel sulfate and they convert cobalt into cobalt sulfate and then that goes off to a cathode producer, then that's a bunch of chemical work to it and all the sulfate comes out with sodium actually is a sodium sulfate waste stream and it's two to three times larger than the cathode stream. In fact, it's more like a sodium sulfate manufacturing plant with cathode as a byproduct and all of that's been fine while we're in the thousands and tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of tons but as we hit the terawatt hour world and the EV revolution, we're going to be in the millions and tens of millions of tons and that sodium sulfate waste stream becomes untenable so we designed our process to completely eliminate it. We can go direct from nickel metals and sidestep that, we can go direct from lithium carbonate to lithium hydroxide, we can go direct from the manganese and cobalt metals and the same thing on the LFP side with other metals. So all of this is aimed at driving down the footprint, which of course has a cost but it also has a big CO2 component as well. Sure, well and then just in terms of just handling, I mean if you produce a ton of good product and you've got two tons of something to get rid of, you've got a problem over there. So you use lithium, nickel, cobalt, a whole lot of it. People are focused on lithium in many respects. I mean there's lithium from Brian's, lithium from spodium mining, things like that. Does it matter where your lithium comes from in terms of what you can do with it? Ultimately not, probably just cost and purity and so what are the impurities that come with it are probably the only things but that's no different than anyone else in the space actually. We tend to prefer lithium carbonate for a couple reasons. So lithium hydroxide is not very stable, it's very moisture sensitive, it doesn't have a long shelf life and it's quite corrosive. Lithium carbonate is everything but those things and so just much easier to handle and typically carbonate is the first product that comes out of a brine type of operation and traditionally will be somewhere between 1000, let's call it 1000 to 1500 dollars a ton cheaper than hydroxide. Now that doesn't of course in a lumpy market like we're in right now that doesn't always happen but in the long run we believe that carbonate will still play out as the really the lower cost components so there are some significant advantages to staying with it but we're also quite flexible, we can go with the hydroxide as well. So now where do you stand, where does the company stand right now in terms of what are you doing in terms of lab work, bench work, pilot work, anticipating a productive facility that will actually have the loading dock on it and you can put it on the truck. Well we have projects at virtually every level of development you can imagine, some of it is really, there's sketches on paper and some of it is all the way at what we would call sort of a pre-commercial demonstration point of view so we're at the point where we can build a production pilot plant that would allow us to then sample out significant volumes of material to a large sort of automotive scale. And so some of the chemistries are at different levels, LFP, lithium iron phosphate is probably the most developed of our technologies and we believe is closer to sort of commercial readiness than let's say the nickel rich materials where we're really pushing the innovative envelope on the nickel rich materials by going after the sulfate, the elimination of sulfates and that puts us back a little bit in terms of the development but it gives us a great advantage so we feel it's kind of worth that. And then there's work we're doing on thermal processing and sort of chemical reactors and things like that that are very early stage development and we're not relying on them but if they prove to be good they will come in and replace the thermal processing that we have designed right now. So as we de-risk those we spiral them in as modules that will further reduce the cost of the entire process. Okay so nano one trades in the US and Canadian exchanges and you have a website and it's a very good website and you have presentation and links to videos and such which are very educational but let's give the viewers a real brief rundown. What's the structure of the company in terms of share structure and how much money in the bank going to burn rate things like that? There's roughly 100 million shares out right now and we're sitting on somewhere just somewhere south of 50 million dollars in the bank somewhere between 40 and 50. 50 cents a share is just money in the bank so to speak but yeah. Yeah and in terms of runway we're ramping things up we have these spending you know in the last year probably somewhere in the sort of 10 million dollar burn rate we've got a bunch of capital expenses and we're hiring new people right now we expect this year to be a little bit pricier we're looking at a whole range of different opportunities right now to accelerate our business. So it's a multi-year runway but we do anticipate we're not going to drag it out for five years we're going to be you know pushing it as fast as we can and taking advantage of some of the the commercial opportunities out there that'll be really to drive the acceleration of our business. Dan this has been a pleasure I you know I really appreciate that you would share your time with us this afternoon and again you know nano one trade cles canada a great website full of information and there's a there's people to contact there your IR side and everything that people have questions and you're going to be a North American focused production company eventually not importing everything from all over the world. So again we thank you and we'll call it quits at this point. Great fantastic to meet you and I appreciate you taking the time as well and to learn more about us and great to have your audience listening too thank you.