 Let's start out with strengthening our world and that seems to be particularly fitting for the elements that we'll be producing at NIO Corp. It consists of niobium as our foundational product but we also have scandium trioxide and niobium as you'll hear in just a minute basically strengthens and lightens steel and scandium interestingly enough does for aluminum what niobium does for steel. So it's a very interesting combination of elements out at the site and one that we're awful excited about. Now I will give you our disclaimer. The other thing that was very interesting to me this morning was listening to Natasha and so I'm going to try my best not to bore you with this presentation and hopefully create some excitement about this project but this is kind of a standard presentation that we do give publicly right now and I'll try to make it as fun as I can. So NIO Corp is traded on the TSX under the symbol NB and we really like that since that's the elemental symbol for niobium. We had a lot of very good fortune in 2014 the lower left-hand side of that slide you'll see a couple of different areas that we excelled in and the very fascinating part to me is all the accolades that you get for stuff like that but it all originated from our main course of business which is doing technical work programs to increase the value of the company and that's what all of those share performance attributes were a result of was hard work by a very good group of people. I'm very blessed to have a group of people with me that I know and I trust these are very experienced people they know how to take a resource and put it into production and that's our goal in life is we want this project put into production. We also have the good fortune of having some board members on our team as well Joe Caraba who many of you may know from Cliff's Natural Resources he only has about 40 or 44 years of experience something like that another gentleman by the name of Dave Bealing who thinks that I'm still a kid so I really like him and he's got over 50 years of experience including underground mining so the team that we've put together and the resources that we can tap into are really quite amazing. On top of that we have excellent people like Eric and Elaine from Roche Engineering and that's just meant to let you know we're partnering with the right people as well. We're partnering with Roche Engineering they're doing most of the detailed feasibility study level engineering right now we have partnerships with SRK Engineering we have partnerships with SGS with Corum with Hazen we have partnerships with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse and Mackie Research so those are just some of the names that we've decided to do business with and a lot of it has to do with their core values as companies they're good honest people that work hard. So what is niobium? Niobium is an element that when added to steel makes it lighter and makes it stronger the other thing that it does is it has very good corrosion resistance and very good temperature resistance so there are certain applications where it actually there are no substitutes there are other applications where there are the largest use of the materials actually in the construction industry and that is largely because of the lightweight and strength that it provides. The picture there on the right is one of those amazing things that you look at and you say there's just no way that that could be but first of all it came from CBMM which is the authority on niobium in the world and second of all I had it checked by two different engineers as well and it came back just fine. But I was quite amazed at this and if you think about 60% weight reductions in steel and concrete for a structure like that over in France just think of the fuel savings alone transporting your materials of construction out to the site. So there are a lot of pluses that we can look at for niobium. The automobile industry is the one that I like to talk about the most because when you look at every automobile and you know wherever you fly in the world there are cars everywhere and wherever there is a steel automobile body or chassis that is more likely than not made with a niobium based steel. I like to point that out because people can really relate to how prominent niobium is in our economies today. Some additional uses and the top one is the one I'll focus on is oil and gas pipelines and this is where in the deep sea drilling and in the oil fracking business in particular the strength of the steel, the corrosion resistance and the temperature resistance actually mandate that niobium be used for those pipelines and those drill bits. So that is an area where no other substance will do the trick. There are a couple of other minor uses. You do get into some more specialty applications at that point in time. It's a very good market growing at about four to six percent per year and we'll get into this in a little bit more in just a minute but you very rarely hear or see much about niobium and there's a good reason for that. There is currently three producers in the world of niobium and the largest one is CBMM and CBMM is a privately held company out of Brazil so they do not have to publish anything that they do and they don't. So a lot of people don't understand when 85% of that material comes out of one source how prominent it is. However, there is one other small mine in Brazil that produces about six percent of the world's supply and then there is a facility here in Canada as well, Nilebeck, that produces about eight percent of the world's supply. So about 92% of the world's production of niobium comes out of one country, Brazil, and the remainder comes out of Nilebeck here in Canada. It's a very good average growth for the mineral and the pricing for this is just extremely stable. You can take a look here, we've got two graphs here on the slide. The larger graph really shows from 2009 through 2014 very flat compared to most minerals that are sold in the world today and then the insert really is meant to show you that there's really only been two pricing points for this product in the history of niobium. CBMM used to charge $10 to $15 a kilogram for it and in 2007 they basically doubled almost tripled the price and now it sells for $35 to $45 a kilogram. Very steady and when you show these types of charts to banks you're financing possibilities drastically improve. So we have another element, scandium out at this site as well and scandium is one of those amazing elements that has latent demand but we just don't have supply of this material right now. There's currently only 5 to 12 tons of this material produced in the world today. That comes out of China and Russia and Niocorp once it comes online will become the largest producer of this material in the world at 97 tons a year. Here is one of the uses for scandium. It's in the solid oxide fuel cells and what you'll note is that there are really two basic technologies for the fuel oxide cells and that involves yttrium or scandium. The yttrium although it's been the primary focus for the fuel cell industry for some time, it has its limitations. First of all it only has about a one to two year life associated with that fuel cell and it has something in the neighborhood of about 55% reliability. So it really hasn't served the purpose for which people are buying it for whereas if you do a scandium doped Zirconia fuel cell you change the fuel cell industry overnight. Now you have something that lasts for a decade or more and you have four nines reliability. So this actually can be considered base load generation of your electricity and there is a company here actually not here in the United States called Bloom Energy that is producing these fuel cells right now and there are buildings in the Silicon Valley in California running off of these fuel cells. So this is a way to generate power in the future. You eliminate the grid lines that are associated with it and I think we're going to see particularly with more scandium coming on to the market we'll see this market increase quite a bit. Scandium as I mentioned earlier can be alloyed with aluminum and the scandium does for the aluminum what niobium does for steel it makes it lighter and it makes it stronger. And this picture is worth a thousand words because the picture on the left is just regular aluminum metal and you can see there's kind of a chunky appearance to the structure of that whereas if you alloy it with scandium you get what you show on the right and that's a very fine grained material it can be welded it is much lighter it is much stronger and this is an area that the aerospace industry has been aware of for quite some time but again they haven't had a reliable supply of the material so they haven't been able to convert a lot of the aerospace construction over to the scandium aluminum alloys. All the intellectual property has existed for this for some time matter of fact the Russians were pretty smart in this regard and in the late 60s and early 70s they were building their migs out of the scandium aluminum alloys. You can see in the blue ribbon at the bottom what the economics look like for a scandium aluminum alloy used in the aerospace industry about one to one and a half million dollars of scandium will provide a 10 to 15 million dollar savings in terms of fuel costs over the life of that plane and those are both on present value numbers. Another application that we think is going to be extremely interesting as well there's a lot of desalination plants that are being considered. If you take a look at the state of California down in the United States right now they probably don't have a lot of choices other than to continue to build these plants to create the water that the population there needs. Well historically those plants are built with a titanium based piping material and that's because if you take a look at the top picture on the right there that's what would happen to aluminum just straight aluminum tubing in that type of environment but when you put the scandium and alloy it with the aluminum you get performance that you see in the lower right hand side and it's really not impacted at all by the salt environment and can handle that corrosive atmosphere. This will save a tremendous amount of money on the cost of building one of these plants. We had a third party study done on what the pricing would be for this material and we do just simply use the pricing the third party expert came up with as part of our PEA which I'll go through in a little while here but there are two cases that they propose one is kind of the base case where the aerospace industry gives credit for the reliable supplier and that would be the blue line and if the aerospace industry takes a little bit longer to bring their platforms up to the use of these alloys then there would be a second pricing case and then what we do from everything 2023 on is just keep it at those prices that are shown for 2023. A quick note on the strategic and critical importance of these materials simply put for niobium if you don't live in Brazil or Canada it by definition is a critical and strategic element in the country you live in and for scandium if you don't live in China or in Russia by definition it is a critically and strategically important element because those are the only places where it is produced so needless to say we do have a lot of interest right now out of the Department of Defense in the United States and they're watching our project very carefully and very closely let's talk a little bit now about the project itself there will be a picture that comes up here shortly shows you the aerial extent of this carbonite structure which is located in the southeast corner of the state of Nebraska it's about 10,000 acres in size it is just absolutely gigantic we've only drilled a very small piece of it so far but we have done a lot of drilling out there over 18,000 meters total of drilling and we have published a 43-101 compliant report we've got a couple of different categories here we've indicated an inferred and then we have PTA-1 and PTA-2 and the only thing I'll make a point of here is that the drilling that we did starting in April of 2014 and finishing up with that in December of last year that was very targeted drilling what we wanted to do was to do enough infill drilling to create enough measured and indicated resource for a 30-year mine life and lo and behold we hit that pretty good we didn't waste any additional money on extension drilling or anything else we'll show how big it is later when we need to but we ended up with a 31-year mine life using measured and indicated material so we tried to use shareholders money very judiciously in that regard we've got all the 3D views of the resource itself this will be an underground mine it's about 200 meters the ore body is about 200 meters below the surface we've drilled down to 900 meters and the grade is increasing we stopped the drilling after 900 meters because it does get quite expensive at that point and once we put the underground mine in then we'll drill deeper when we can start halfway or more down there's been a lot of resource work we've also done a lot of metallurgy work and you can see here that we've used 6 different labs for the metallurgy work we've done over a thousand different bench tests and we've run 8 different pilot plants we have one more pilot plant tests that we're going to be running and that's just for optimization purposes on the Scandium trioxide solvent extraction circuit we were happy to report I believe it was in September a lower left hand picture there that we had actually produced our first ferroniobium and the great news about that was it met the specs for the customer that we have lined up Teeson Krupp who has a contract with us for 50% of our ferroniobium production but after all that testing here's what you end up with a very simplified process flow sheet and this is what the plant is being designed around right now and again the excellent job that Roche Engineering is doing for us is really putting this together and getting our CAPEX numbers where they need to be here's what our numbers look like when we run them through preliminary economic analysis pre-tax NPV of a little over 3 billion dollars after tax NPV of 2.3 billion dollars average pre-tax cash flow of 438 million dollars per year total upfront capital of about 979 million dollars we do include in the upper right hand corner there an analysis for the base case for Scandium and the lower or slower uptake by the aerospace industry on the right hand side we also provide a breakdown of the CAPEX costs in the lower right hand side and you'll see that we do plan to produce about 7500 tons a year of ferroniobium about 97 tons of Scandium trioxide and roughly 24,000 tons of titanium dioxide the titanium dioxide is actually very prevalent in this ore body and so we're producing it just to generate extra revenue and it just goes almost to the bottom line because the CAPEX to do that and the OPEX to do that is very small so we're moving our project along this is an area in the state of Nebraska that has excellent infrastructure I know that everybody hears all these things but there actually is a state highway right next to the resource electricity grid lines are already in the area we just have to build the substation to provide the actual power it all comes from a nuclear power station that has more than enough capacity for our needs plenty of water in the area if anything maybe a little more water than what we would like but plenty of water and the community support out here is something that I have to talk about because I've never seen this level of positive community support ever in my 34 years of being in this business we have town halls out in Elk Creek, Nebraska on a regular basis so we can keep the community informed the sign at the entrance of the little town is actually a chalkboard so that in case somebody is born or on the other hand they can adjust the handwritten number on the sign and there are 114 inhabitants in Elk Creek, Nebraska we have yet to have a town hall in that area where we don't have more than 114 people present every time this is an engaged community almost every member of the community is a shareholder they believe in the project they want the diversity of business in their area and we're excited to be where we are