Aqua Metals, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the AquaMetal's second quarter financial results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You can submit your questions via the webcast at any time by typing them in the ask a question field. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Glenn Axelrod, spokesperson with Bristol Capital. Thank you. You may begin.

All right. Thank you, Diego. And thank you, everybody, for joining Aqua Metals' second quarter 2022 results conference call. Earlier today, Aqua Metals released financial results for the quarter end of June 30th, 2022. This release is available on the investor section on the company's website at www.aquametals.com. Joining us for today's call for management is Steve Cotton, President and CEO, Judd Merrill, the company's Chief Financial Officer, and Ben Taker, Chief Engineering and Operating Officer. During today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's report on Form 10Q filed today, July 21st, for a summary of the forward-looking statements and the risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. AquaMetals cautions investors not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake and specifically disclaims any obligation to update or revise such statements to reflect new circumstances or unanticipated events as they occur, except as required by law. As a reminder, after management's formal remarks, we'll be taking questions. Questions will be accepted over the telephone from analysts, and all other investors can submit a question using the online webinar portal provided in today's and last week's press release. We will take as many questions as we can in our available time slot. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve Cotton, CEO of AquaMetal. Steve, please go ahead.

Thanks, Glenn. Okay, thanks, Glenn, for taking everybody through the safe harbor. So I'll move on to the next slide, which is our mission, which will be the first slide that I present today. And this is a presentation that's geared towards updates of what we are doing, but also some reminders and new information for those that are new to the aqua metal story. Our mission is to provide sustainable metal recycling for materials that are strategic to energy storage applications. And our technology, which we call Aqua Refining, returns raw materials directly back to the manufacturing supply chain in both a clean way and an economical way, thus reducing reliance on mining to meet the growing demand for energy storage systems that are battery-based. On the next slide, we are the only recycling technologies that are aligned with the U.S. Department of Energy vision, which is to use air and water to recycle and electricity to recycle critical battery minerals. We have PV aqua refining, which stands for lead aqua refining, which is commercialized, and we'll talk about our process and where we are with the first deployment with our first licensee. And we have lithium aqua refining, both of which are room temperature closed loop and fundamentally non-polluted processes. The lead aquifining is commercially proven, and we are deploying that with our first licensee in Taiwan later this month, and we'll get into some more details on that in a future slide. And we've been expanding rapidly into the critical minerals associated with recycling lithium ion batteries, And those periodic table of the elements symbols stand for cobalt, nickel, manganese, copper, and lithium, for which you'll see examples in this presentation of what we've been able to accomplish with our lithium aqua refining efforts and the results of extracting those critical elements. Our process is also cleaner and more cost-efficient recovery in a very efficient recycling process as compared to incumbent smelting processes and what we've see out of the marketplace is what we characterize as traditional hydrometallurgical processes as compared to our aqua refining process. We also produce a very high-quality product, and we'll explain that and show you some pictures of the products that we've created already with the lithium aqua refining process. And our entire set of technologies is really well patent-protected, and we'll talk about that in a future slide as well. Moving on to slide five, I want to summarize for everybody our very active Q2 2022 highlights that we've accomplished just this past quarter. First off, all the aqua refining equipment for the lead aqua refining licensee at Acme Metal Enterprises arrived in Taiwan, and installation and commissioning is set to commence this month in July. To date, we have also successfully recovered all the high-value metals and minerals from used lithium ion batteries, including high-purity lithium hydroxide, copper, nickel, cobalt, and manganese dioxide. We made an announcement today that we'll talk about lithium hydroxide, and I'll ask Ben to kind of take everybody through what these minerals look like as we extract them. Third, we approved the bench scale, our clean and economical metals recycling process. Fourth, we initiated deployment of our first lithium-ion recycling pilot operation, which is located at our Innovation Center in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, and that is slated to begin operations later this year, only in a matter of several weeks. Next, we signed a letter of intent, which was announced today with Dragonfly Energy Corporations. Dragonfly Energy is a lithium ion battery producer, and they would purchase commercial quantities of lithium hydroxide from AquaMetals, sourced sustainably from recycling, to support the ongoing development of their solid-state lithium ion battery technologies in future manufacturing activities. Dragonfly Energy, by the way, is located right here in the Tahoe-Reno area as well. And Aquamentals will also be providing recycling services from scrap materials from Dragonfly Energy as feedstock into our process. Lastly, and certainly not least, is our technology allows us, and we believe only us, to make 100% of our operations using the electron as the reagent instead of fire or chemicals, including our offices and the Innovation Center, 100% powered by renewable energy. So we are already 100% RE today as a company, and we will be operating the pilot plant that we'll be turning on very soon with that covered and to prove that you can truly and sustainably recycle lithium ion batteries with renewable energy sources. Next slide, number six, a little bit more about our deployments in Taiwan. This is slated to have the installation, commissioning, and early ramp of the first phase of deployment happen in a very near-term time period, whereas the installation site is prepped. The team is traveling to ACME beginning in just a matter of days this month. And all major equipment and electrolytes pictured, as you can see, is on site. And the phase one estimated completion is going to be by October of this year, so very quick path to success with our phase one is what we anticipate, and that is commencing again in a matter of days, really. This next slide is a little bit more about Dragonfly Energy. This is a picture of one of their locations here in the Tahoe-Reno area. Lithium-Ock refining uniquely recovers the high-value lithium that's currently lost in the smelting process. Today, of the 5% of batteries that are recycled, that are lithium batteries while the other 95% is in the landfill, there's a total of zero lithium recovery with smelting incumbent processes. Lithium off-refining allows us to recover all, nearly all, of the lithium. Dragonfly would purchase commercial quantities of the lithium hydroxide beginning with our pilot plant for ongoing development of solid state lithium ion battery technologies in future manufacturing activities. AquaMetals will also provide the recycling services associated with the scrap materials as well as spent lithium ion cells that come back from Dragonfly Energy. Dragonfly expects to begin production of its solid state pilot line as early as 2023, which is quite exciting to see such a large facility being planned for 2023 production of lithium being sourced not only as through traditional resources, but through a sustainable method such as aqua metals. So we in Dragonfly are very excited to embark upon this partnership. I'm going to now ask Ben Tacker, our Chief Engineering and Operations Officer, to take us through some of our recent achievements this quarter with the Innovation Center. And I'll turn it over to Ben. Ben, go ahead.