Aqua Metals, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the AquaMetal's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 investor 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 on the webcast by typing them in the ask a question field on the left side of your screen. To queue up for a question on the phone, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Bob Myers of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for joining. Earlier today, Aqua Metals issued a press release providing an operational update and discussing financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2022. This release is available on the investor relations section on the company's website at www.aquametals.com. Hosting the call today are Steve Cotton, President and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Merrill, the company's Chief Financial Officer, Ben Tacker, Chief Engineering and Operating Officer, and Dave McMurtry, Chief Business Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind participants that during the call, management will be making forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's report on Form 10-K filed today, March 9th, 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 the formal remarks, we will be taking questions. Questions will be accepted over the phone from analysts, and all other investors can submit a question using the online webcast 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 AquaMetals.

Steve, the call is yours. Thank you, Bob, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. The fourth quarter of 2022 capped a watershed year for AquaMetals, with several new milestones surpassed and continued progress scaling our innovative battery recycling technology, which we call AquaRefining. While we finished approving our lithium aqua refining technology at both lab and bench scales earlier in the year, in the fourth quarter we completed as guided the installation of our pilot scale facility and commenced operations. As a result, we are now recovering high purity metals through a first of its kind regenerative electrohydrometallurgy process. The input to our process is from black mass, which is made by our supply partners from spent lithium ion batteries. Our progress enables us to continue advancing our discussions with prospective partners as we share samples of key products, such as our directly recycled lithium hydroxide, for high-performance batteries at representative industrial scale. Our continued progress during Q4 affirms our confidence that this will be a transformative year for aqua metals as we move from concept to production, and from a vision of clean metals recycling to operations and revenues. I couldn't be more proud of the work our entire team is performing and have never been more confident in our company and our prospects for the future. The era of lithium-ion batteries is upon us. From electric passenger and delivery vehicles to energy storage systems and portable devices, lithium-ion batteries are everywhere. We are now at the precipice of the transition from an economy primarily powered by fossil fuels to one built upon clean energy sources. and the required critical minerals to repeatedly store and then release that energy. But even as the extraction of resources like lithium, nickel, and cobalt ramps up globally, many of these metals are in very short supply as battery manufacturing capacity continues to grow, and forecasts show these supply shortages continuing for years to come. While new recycling manufacturing capacity takes only a couple of years to build, new mines and refining capacity can take a decade or more to come online. Recycling at scale will be essential to satisfying the meteoric growth in demand for lithium batteries, but we believe the current and many proposed recycling solutions are not viable long term. Current pyro and hydrometallurgy recycling systems are just too costly and inefficient and produce untenable amounts of pollution and landfill waste. Recycling one ton of black mass simply can't require the use of multiple tons of chemicals or result in multiple tons of waste and pollution and still be effective or sustainable. Our lithium aqua refining plant is demonstrating that a closed loop sustainable recycling solution that eliminates the need for polluting furnaces and intensive chemical processes is not only possible, but it can be more adaptable and cost-effective. By using electricity as the primary reagent to our patently unique and innovative combination of low-temperature hydrometallurgy and electroplating, we can dramatically reduce our energy consumptions and eliminate as much as 95% of the waste associated with pyro and hydro recycling and truly close the supply chain loop in a sustainable way. We also believe that aqua refining is now the only proven battery recycling technology that can produce lithium hydroxide at scale instead of making lithium carbonate or other lithium salts. Hydroxide is also consistently more valuable than carbonate in metals markets. This unique ability to generate lithium hydroxide natively with our aqua refining process significantly increases the value of each ton of black mass that we process today, and it enhances our ability to economically process nickel and cobalt-free chemistries like lithium iron phosphate or LFP batteries in the future. Our pilot plant operates in the heart of the domestic supply battery chain in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center near many key players in Nevada's lithium leap. As we continue to advance operations at our pilot and develop our recently announced commercial campus, we are also building a partnership ecosystem. We have secured Black Mass to scale our operations through agreements with leading feedstock suppliers and are turning that material into saleable products and samples for ongoing partnership and advanced off-taker discussions. All this progress shows that Aquamentals is well-positioned to lead as we begin to generate our first revenues from materials recovered from lithium-ion batteries. We have broadened participation from the senior team on today's call, and I'm going to ask Judd to walk through the financials next. Then I'll turn the call over to Ben Tacker, our Chief Engineering and Operations Officer, to talk in more detail about the pilot plant and our engineering efforts. Lastly, I've asked David Mertry... our Chief Business Officer, to join the call to discuss relationships and partnerships in our commercial initiatives and provide an update on activity to pursue grants within the Department of Energy. So I'll now turn the call over to Judd.