Electra Battery Materials Corporation

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the ELECTRA fourth quarter and year-end 2022 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star then 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Racanelli, Vice President, Investor Relations with Electra. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ariel, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As you know, we filed our Q4 year-end results last night, and we have all our materials available both on our website as well as CDAR. There were a couple of developments beyond our control that took place, and and that resulted in a couple of days' delay, but we're moving forward. With me today is Trent Nail, our CEO, our CFO, Greg Cunningham, as well as Mark Trevisio, who's at the refinery site this morning and will provide an update with the status of our construction project and our black mass. We will be following a presentation this morning that is available from our website. I encourage you to follow along. At the end of our management discussion, we will have a Q&A, and we will open up those questions to the research analysts who do cover us. For investors who do have specific questions, please reach out, and we'll be able to answer them going forward. So thank you, and I'll hand it over to Trent for his opening remarks.

Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Before we go to analysts and open it up for calls, we're going to give you just a quick overview of development in the Q4. and close off by sharing some of our near-term priorities and what our focus is going to be into Q1 and 2023 and beyond. Fourth quarter for Electra was particularly busy for us. And I guess the highlight for me, capping off the year, was the commencement of our black mass trial just before Christmas, kind of step one of our proof partner and build strategy. And I think it's paying off. And when I talk about the black mass trial for us, what that means is using our hydrometallurgical refinery, And the process we've developed over the last two years to take shredded battery black mass, as we call it, and refine it into its constituent elements. And Mark will give you an update on that. Equally important for us this year as well was just the progress we were making towards the commissioning of our cobalt sulfate refinery on its same location north of Toronto. And we'll talk about that. Q4, you can see other developments there. We raised some money in November. Difficult markets, to be sure, over the last six, eight months. But we got that done. And then over in our Idaho, with our Idaho team, we acquired the CAS project. So that's a target, a copper cobalt target that's adjacent to our Iron Creek resource and to the Ruby target that was prominent this year with drilling. And I should highlight as well, we filed a new resource estimate with a very large increase in the copper endowment for our Idaho projects. So I think Q4 overall, very considerable progress for a company of our size. I think it's reflective of the commitment of all our employees, and I want to thank everybody for the hard work that we did throughout the year, and it continues into this year. It reinforces our first mover advantage and really positions us well for the future. So I'm going to pause there. I'm going to turn it over to Craig, and I'll come back at the end of the call.