 Hi, I'm Chris Thompson for Investor Intel and today we're talking with Peter Cashin who is the president and CEO of Imperial Mining Group. Hi. How are you today, Peter? Good Chris. How about yourself? I'm great. A happy new year. And today we're talking about your PEA stage scandium project in Quebec, which has a 25-year, I guess minimum stage life depending on the existing resource and scandium is one of those critical minerals in Canada, in the US and in the EU, which are important. Today, what is scandium actually used for? Well, the main purpose of scandium is it's a very effective alloy agent aluminum and by adding very, very small quantities of the oxide in your aluminum metal production, you can increase the strength of the alloys up to eight times or 800%. So recently you've had a lot of good exploration results. Can you give us a quick summary? Yeah, sure, Chris. The reason of the program was to take the results we had from our 2001 resource report and convert the inferred resource part of the total resource into indicated, which is a requirement when you move to feasibility study. So we did that work. A lot of the holes were actually at the lower part, lower extension of the zone, basically right at the limit of the pitch shell that we established in our PEA, and it's showing not only wider thicknesses, larger thicknesses, but increased in grades. Now, that being said, we recognize that as we go to the south, that higher grade, thicker higher grade section seems to be plunging up closer towards surface. So I think future work that we're looking at is to do a bit of near surface exploration to define some of that higher grade mineralization in the early years of the mining life. Otherwise, the material that we've defined at the lower section, we won't even look at till year 2025, something in that area. And by finding that higher grade material closer to surface, how does that affect the economics of the project? That's the improved because really you want that higher grade plumb closer to surface in the early years of your mining operation to accelerate capital payback and lower your operating costs. You'll be mining a lot less material to get your inferred production rate. And in the PEA, what was the economics at that time? That actually, that's a good point. It was a 25 year mining life, producing about 88 tons of scandium oxide per year, which is not really all that much, but it's really used for making the aluminum alloy I was telling you about. That is the net present value after tax at a 10% discount rate is $1.72 billion Canadian. And the internal rate of return right now is about 35% after tax. But that was before we had, we're working on, continue to work on our process flow sheet, and we improved the recoveries that were used in the PEA by about 10%. So that'll positively affect the economics that were portrayed in the PEA. We haven't worked on that now. Obviously, that increase in the recoveries will be used in the feasibility study report itself. So that's what you want to see. You want to see an improvement rate in the recoveries in your process because you're going to be mining a lot less material to get your notional production rate. So it's pretty exciting. And when are you aiming to have the feasibility done? Well, we're starting that up. So there's multiple things that we're looking at in 2023. We're just about to finish our process flow sheet. It was protected by a provisional US patent. Now we submitted our final patent, and we should have that within the next four to six months. So that information will be now used in the engineering for the pilot plant. So that's one of the first steps that we intend to do in 2023. We've already started our data collection for the environmental baseline study, which is a requirement to move to feasibility. And then we're hoping that we can get the feasibility study started up at least in the second half of 2023. Excellent. I saw also that you did recent financing. Can you just go over who came on board? It looked like a pretty exciting time. Yeah, it wasn't a large financing. It was about a rate 700,000 in flow, but we've got about 300,000 in hard dollars as well. The intent there really is to do a small provisional financing. I mean, our capital needs are much higher than that. But I mean, all mining companies are negatively affected by the market collapse. So I was trying to be responsible and bringing enough money to at least have the seed capital necessary to start all of our various steps moving forward. And hopefully with an improvement in the market conditions, an improvement in our share price market cap, then probably go after a much larger financing down the road. But you also had involvement from the Septial Economic Development Corp. So that's a good sign. Yeah, they've been really good partners so far. The intent there is the Economic Development Corp set up meetings with business, indigenous and municipal leaders. Generally, SETIL has traditionally been an iron mining and production center. Unfortunately, most of the government R&D capital and incentives are for critical metals. And they felt kind of left out because they wouldn't qualify for that. They view that our project will allow them to get into that transition, the energy transition and get involvement with the critical mineral space and gain the profile as being a center for critical minerals as well. So very exciting. I mean, we met leaders from, there's a large aluminum plant there. They're very enthused. Apparently, as one of the provisos by the Quebec government to finance an expansion of the plant from about 350,000 tons of aluminum to 600,000 was to get involved with the downstream and get an aspect of your business plan involved with value added metals such as scanning aluminum alloy. Well, Quebec is widely known for its aluminum plants there. So it's a natural fit. And Quebec is leading in the critical minerals and battery metals, you know, space for investing. So are you finding that you're getting good support from other parts of the Quebec government? Yeah, absolutely. The optimization work we did with our metallurgical flow sheet was partially sponsored by the Quebec government, about a quarter of a million dollar grant. We just submitted a subsequent grant to help us to now to move through the pilot plant work, and that's for about $500,000. Basically, they've been very prudent in their approach in supporting critical minerals. They're not going to support the exploration and development of all 16 rare earths and all of the other, you know, I think there's about 50 critical minerals on the US and Canadian list. What they want to do is they said, well, we'll support those critical minerals that have natural synergies with our existing aspects of our economy. And obviously, scandium being an additive to aluminum and aluminum being an extremely important sector for the Quebec government. It was natural. It was a natural fit there, like you said. And where will the pilot plant go? That's in discussions there. I think for the pilot plant, for the metallurgical front and at least the mineral processing and getting the scandium out of the rock and as an oxide will likely be done in Southern Quebec somewhere at a commercial lab. But in our discussions with the alloyed aluminum, which is the aluminum plant there, they've actually got about 18 test circuits for aluminum metal production that potentially we could partner with them and do the various R&D that we need to produce, you know, ensure that we've got, we maximize our ability to create an alloy. And then the secondary benefit there is that if we could align ourselves with them on a toll basis for them to produce the alloys, we could probably knock off about 100 to $150 million off the capex that we reported in our PEA. So, I mean, there'll be some economic benefits there, mutual benefits, I would say, to produce the specialty alloys. That's quite exciting. Now, you mentioned a couple of things already about what was in store for 2023, but why don't you give a little bit of a recap You seem to have a lot going on from exploration to, you know, the feasibility work. So what are sort of the top five things that investors will be seeing this year as part of your news release flow? Well, a startup of our pilot plant, exploration drilling, and that to try to define the higher grade surface resource to the south of our existing resource. We want to really get actively involved with our environmental baseline, both at the mining site, as well as the process site that will be in Sattel, and that's for the process plant. And then second half of the year, move towards the startup, the feasibility study. So, exciting times for imperial mining. Looking forward to it. It's going to be a big year. That's great. Well, thanks for the update. I was talking with Peter Cashin, who is the president and CEO of Imperial Mining Group on the TSXD with ticker IPG. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Chris.