American Resources Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to American Resources Corporation's second quarter 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Mark LaVarghetta, Vice President, Corporate Finance and Communications. Mark, you may begin.

Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of the American Resources Corporation, I'd like to welcome everyone to our second quarter of 2021 Conference Call and Business Update. We welcome this opportunity to not only discuss our accomplishments over the past quarter and first half of the year, but also on where we have our sights set as we continue to embark on this exciting time. Also on the call with me today is Mark Jensen, American Resources Corporation's Chairman and CEO, Kirk Taylor, our Chief Financial Officer, and Tom Salve, our president. Before we kick it off, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and over normal cautionary statements. Certain statements discussed on today's call constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. When considering forward-looking statements, You should keep in mind the risk factors, uncertainties, and other cautionary statements which are laid out in our press releases and SEC filings. We also do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Also, we will be holding a Q&A session today following our prepared remarks. And for anyone wanting to ask a question, you'll need to dial in by phone to get into the queue. With that said, I'd like to turn it over to Mark Jensen. Thank you.

Thanks, Mark. And thank you all for joining today's call. I'm excited to tell you and give you some updates on our business, a business that is not only disrupting a legacy industry, but also transforming new industries in the domestic market, especially focusing on the rare earth element component of the business. The second quarter of 2021, in the first half of this year, we continue to show material execution in terms of the positioning of American resources at low cost supplier of raw materials to the infrastructure and electrification marketplace. We've showcased our ability to innovate our industry and asset base and position and be positioned really well to supply the high growth markets and highly aligned to the US priorities that we've talked about, that we'll talk about here in the near future as well. Now that we'd be able to further define our technology chain, specific to capturing, processing, and purifying rare earth elements in the most environmentally safe, and in certain cases, environmentally positive ways ever developed, while also pushing aggressively to bring these innovative applications to the commercial marketplace. Furthermore, we have the opportunity to strengthen our balance sheet by adding over $30 million of equity capital and pull forward initiatives, which is also better positioning us to collaborate and execute with real commercial partners. And having the strength of a balance sheet will enable us to bring in these partners and showcase that we're a strong company and able to execute upon our business model. Before we dive into where we're at today as a business, I think it's important to discuss where we came from. Since 2015, we've acquired over eight companies. We went in and acquired these businesses at a substantial discount, and we're focusing on acquiring the legacy assets that we can repurpose and reposition for the future market. By doing so, we're able to eliminate high legacy costs and also reposition them for the future, not only looking out for the next couple of years, but looking out for the next 10, 20, 30 years. As we see the United States and the domestic market transition away from coal-fired power plants, we also see the demand for the metallurgical carbon. And as our business, when we went in and transformed to acquire these assets, we wanted to not only position ourselves to be the lowest cost producer of met coal for the next 10, 20 years, but we also wanted to be able to reutilize these existing assets and repositioning this existing asset base to provide significant value through our other divisions, more specifically our American Rare Earth Division, which we'll talk about here shortly. We're going to leverage that entire asset base in a streamlined focus, utilizing our existing team and building out our existing team to be able to execute across all of our business lines and be able to do so efficiently and effectively and timely. The American Carbon Division, I'll discuss here first. As you see throughout the news, there's strong strength within the steel and carbon markets. With the steel markets ramping up with an infrastructure plan in place, we're starting to see significant strength within the marketplace and significant demand that's going to start kicking in here shortly. That gives us the ability to pull forward some of our operations over the next couple years and really start taking advantage of the current strength within the marketplace. I don't think you can see a company within our sector that doesn't see strength within the metallurgical carbon division over the next three years. That being said, we also see that there's a number of our competitors that are still struggling because they're focused on the thermal coal markets, which we see a significant continued decline in, while at the same point, we're able to bring our metallurgical carbon operations back online and start utilizing the labor force that is coming back into the marketplace as we see. Our Perry County division, as we ramp up and focus on the delivery of our off-takes, we were able to also build up inventory over the last several months and position ourselves to be able to start supplying our customer bases in a very strong fashion. In this quarter, we were able to start shipping to our stoker customers and also supplying excess carbon that we had on the ground while we started to prepare for our PCI shipments that are taking place this quarter. As we see, in the second quarter, we began shipping our metallurgical carbon business to our main off-take customers in August. And we expect those shipments to continue to ramp up and continue to ramp up over the next year as well to the existing customers. Additionally, our main baseload customer exercised their right to expand their carbon purchases off of us and add an additional 20% to their annual contract. We are currently in conversations with a number of customers and having very good conversations and very good developments to not only expand our shipments out of the Perry County complex, but also our McCoy Elkhorn complex. We anticipate bringing this complex on later this quarter or early fourth quarter and continuing to expand this operation and our production from this operation over the course of the next 12 to 18 months. During the second quarter, it's not surprising that there was challenges in the labor markets. You can go to any restaurant, to any commercial and industry group out there, and everybody's struggling with the labor side. There's extended unemployment. and there was additional benefits to being on employment. This was a needed thing. We're not arguing against people needing the unemployment benefits, and they're there for a reason. That being said, as they start to unwind those benefits, we're starting to see a strong demand for the labor coming back into the workforce. And that's benefiting us greatly in this time of growth and expansion that we're getting ready to exercise over the next 12 months. And we're starting to see a really good labor force come back to us and enabling us to not only expand our production, but also expand it in the next 12 to 18 months as we continue to ramp up. Given the staffing issues, we're effectively a quarter behind. And that's because when we went to ramp up, we were hiring people back in, and it was a little bit of a slow start. That being said, we're sticking to guidance of 35 to 60 million for this year, which given that quarter behind and given the staffing issues that we had in the past, we're overcoming those. And we're starting to be well positioned to generate cash flow from our American Carbon Division. and continue to grow that cash flow over the future months and future quarters and future years and have a good access to a really, really good workforce, a really strong workforce. Our American Metals Division, we've been aggregating metal. It's really our focus in the last six months is to continue to build out our American Rare Earth Division and continue to build out our American Carbon Division and build inventory on the American metal side. We anticipate continuing to build out these supply channels. We're currently interviewing and working with strategic partners to bring in-house to expand this division with the goal of ramping it up to about $5 to $10 million of revenue year over year and then over the next two years. It's a strong market. We see strong demand for metal. The electric arc furnaces aren't slowing down at all. They're actually expanding. And the ability to capitalize on this from our existing logistical footprint that we have that we own outright is substantial. Our American Rare Earths division is extremely exciting on the developments that we've been able to build out here. As a reminder, as of this time of last year, we hadn't even announced this division. Now, that being said, we've been building it out over the last four to five years. And if you look past our three-quarters of announcements, you can see that we continue to define our technology base, our processes, and also our partnerships. We've been able to develop, acquire, and invest in some of the strongest technologies within the space, which we define as our capture, process, and purify technology process chain. The goal of our technology process chain is not just to be able to produce or mine for rare earth elements. It's about taking them the entire way through the supply chain to produce a purified and isolated rare earth element in an environmentally sustainable way that can actually be done in the United States cost effectively without subsidies. That being said, with subsidies, It's rocket fuel behind our division, and there's many tax discussions taking place within the existing infrastructure bill that will enable that. Our rare earth division represents a strategic opportunity for us as a low-cost, sustainable supplier to the domestic supply chain to be able to be one of the only companies in the United States that can produce and purify rare earth elements. Again, with the passing of the infrastructure bill, there's significant funding on the supply chains for clean energy technologies. And we're in a great position and aligned with the national priorities. You read about it on a daily basis of the need for rare earth elements, but very seldom do you actually hear about the feedstocks or the technologies that are able to process and purify them. We have those. We've been developing these with Purdue University, on the capture side with Penn State University, and on the process side with Texas Tech with technologies we acquired from Ohio University. We believe this technology process chain packaged together will be able to showcase in the next 12 months a plan that can be viable for the United States to be able to actually secure and have a domestic supply chain and do it in a cost-effective way. The U.S. needs to lead the innovation in this space. We can't rely on solvent-based extraction or liquid-to-liquid extraction. We need to focus on new technologies and new investment that can develop this supply chain in a low-cost format. So at the end of the day, when China drops their prices, and China's going to do that because they want to try to control the market, we will succeed. And our business model and our feedstocks and our supply chain will enable us to do that. And we're going to showcase that. We're going to showcase that very shortly. The market demand for these materials is ever-growing. The demand for electric vehicles, for windmills, for electric motors in general, for the batteries for the electric motors, to be able to produce and purify an isolated rare earth element or a critical element, on the domestic supply chain in a cost-effective way will be a game changer. And we're confident in the success of our technologies. And you'll hear us talk about that over the next two to three months on the proof is in the pudding. We will showcase that we can execute and will execute to be able to produce these elements in a cost-effective manner on the domestic soil. Our process and purification methods eliminate the need to rely on China. These are the final steps in the processing and purifying of the rare earth elements. It's not done in the United States at all today. And there's no other technology that we believe can compete against ours. Our electrolysis technology, our process technology, we've already provided the update that we are in the build phase of our two kilowatt mobile electrolysis facility where we've actually built a one meter cell that we have designed and built utilizing our partners down at Texas Tech to be able to process fly ash. process fly ash utilizing byproduct economics. When people talk about rare earth elements, the ability to produce them in a cost-effective way is a huge deal. Rare earth elements aren't rare, but can you monetize the process? And our electrolysis technology does that. It enables us to purify fly ash that we can sell off to the concrete market, which is in a huge demand because of the the need for infrastructure today, where we can actually make money in the process. When we're building something, very seldom can you make money in that process. We can make money in the building of our feedstocks by selling the fly ash, producing hydrogen, selling it back to the utilities, and pulling out in the anode our rarest elements, and then bringing those to our chromatography facility where we can process and purify them. Our purify technology, our chromatography facility, that we are in the final stages of site selection and moving forward into the build phase, already in the design phase of our facility. Our goal is to finish this facility, build this small scale facility, be operational in early 2022, and have the ability to continue to scale that facility on a commercial basis, being the only and first commercial scale processing facility where we can purify and isolate rare earth elements. Our team that we built out on the chromatography side, is extremely impressive. The experience that they have in the space and the leadership that we have on this division is second to none. The development of our distribution channels and aggregation points for end-of-life products to be recycled is continually built. Having $30 million of cash on the books and having the growth of our American Carbon Division and a cash flow positive basis of balance this year will give us the ability to continue to expand and focus on bringing in these these distribution partners on the upstream and downstream components where we're sourcing the waste products, sourcing the lithium ion batteries to be recycled, sourcing the permanent magnets, which we already announced a distribution arrangement with one of the large windmills in Indiana. Between Indianapolis and Chicago, if you're ever in the area, drive up there and see these wind farms. These generators, we have the access to pick up these generators, strip out the magnets, recycle them, and produce purified, isolated rare earth elements with a 36% concentrate. There is nobody else that is looking at feedstocks with that level of concentrate that is able to acquire them, dissolve them, and purchase and purify them in a very cost-effective way. We can do that today. We can do that utilizing our electrolysis concept on the upstream and then our chromatography facility to purify and isolate them. The market for end-of-life products on a recycled basis continues to grow exponentially. There's over $3 billion of permanent magnets that are going to landfills in the United States alone year over year. That represents a huge market to utilize our chromatography facility to be able to start keeping these out of the landfill, recycling them, breaking them down, and producing purified isolated rare earth elements to be turned back into new permanent magnets. The growth of permanent magnets is not slowing down. It's growing at well over double digits a year. And there's no other place to source them other than China today. Over 90% of the rare earth elements come from there. As we start to recycle these magnets, we're going to be able to grow this business substantially as we work with our distribution partners on the upstream side of it to source these magnets to be able to recycle them very cost-effectively. We believe our innovative processes will have a very meaningful component on the domestic rare earth supply chain. We believe that because the proof is in the science. Our technology partners have been building this out for years. And our capital behind it and the processes that we're putting in place to run this as a business and be able to scale this year over year is significant. And we're going to start showcasing that as we continue to announce our execution over the coming months of how we're building out our process chain. As we dive into this, let's go through our upcoming catalysts. And we're excited about where we're positioned. I don't think we've ever been better positioned as a company than we are today. We're going to continue to show execution of milestones on the American rare earth division on the processing and purification development and commercialization, our chromatography and electrolysis technology. We're going to continue to announce the execution on both of those fronts, securing additional collaboration agreements on sourcing partners for the rare earth element, end of life materials and feedstocks. At the end of the day, if we're able to source these products cost effectively, which we're confident we can, because we've already started doing so, We're going to be able to recycle these and get these back to market very quickly and very cost-effectively. We're going to continue to announce some key appointments on the American Carbon Division as we continue to build our production teams and enhance our production teams to further mitigate future labor challenges. At the end of the day, forecasting the labor shortage, forecasting that we're going to compete against the government was something we didn't foresee. That being said, the strength of the company, we're able to overcome that, and we've already started to overcome that in a meaningful way, a very meaningful way, to continue to ramp up our production over the coming quarters. We're confident in our ability to announce additional metallurgical carbon offtake agreements based on customers that we're already in very in-depth conversations with at very attractive prices. On the monetization side of our business, on the equity value side, is formalizing a SPAC target. We announced our SPAC. We closed our SPAC. We have over $106 million in trust, and we're very pleased with the level of targets we're seeing and the conversations that we're having on that front to continue to drive that forward process to create equity value for our shareholders, and then post the SPAC merger, dividend out shares over to our investors. The value creation initiatives, including, as I mentioned, the American Acquisition Opportunity, the SPAC that we announced, we believe is significant to our shareholders. But at the end of the day, it's about executing and about proving out the concept, and we're confident we're going to be able to do so. As I mentioned, we have over $106 million in trust and the level of targets we're seeing because of the focus of what we're looking for. We're looking at that old world industry transitioning to new world opportunity. And that positions us in that ability to capitalize on cash flowing opportunities to continue to drive equity value for all of our shareholders. We're currently working through that despacking process and we're looking at a number of very high quality targets that we believe will have great opportunity for additional asset appreciation for our shareholders. Ultimately, we believe that ARAC, that our shareholders of ARAC, will get the benefit and the value creation that is not currently being reflected in our market value today. Our Novastera license agreement. We announced we had the great opportunity to sub-license two of our graphene and carbon nanotube patents to Novastera. We ended up, as part of that, we received 50% of the company and also an operating cash flow sweep of about 50%. Novastar is currently working through the capital raising process and the public market process. We're very pleased with their progress and very pleased with the team and opportunities and the way they're looking at opportunities to continue to expand that component of the business. Graphene is an extremely exciting business and giving it to a company and partnering with a company that can take that to monetization as we focus on our carbon and rare earth divisions is a big deal for us to continue to drive value for all of our shareholders. Ultimately, we believe both the SPAC and the sub-license agreement are examples of how our management team and how our board is looking at benefiting our shareholder value and focusing on shareholder value, utilizing our skill sets and our capabilities to drive value, drive equity value for our shareholders in a way that's accretive and efficient. I'd now like to turn our call over to Kirk Taylor, our CFO, for some additional comments on our financials.