Electra Battery Materials Corporation

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Electra first quarter 2023 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Racanelli, Vice President, Investor Relations with Electra Battery Materials Corporation. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gillian, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. We released our results for the first quarter last night. The material is available both on CDAR and our website. Today with me are Trent Mill, company CEO, as well as Craig Cunningham, our CFO, and joining us for the first time is Renata Cardoza, our VP of Sustainability. We will be using a presentation this morning, and I encourage you to follow along from our website. At the end of our management discussion, we will be opening up the call to questions from analysts who do cover us. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Trent for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everybody. Lots to discuss today, and so I thank you for joining us. We will, as always, open the call up to analysts for questions, but before doing that, I'd like to review some of the developments we've had in in what remains a busy time for us in an active Q1. So first quarter, yeah, like I said, remained busy as we were in 2022. Probably the most notable milestone for us was our battery recycling, our black mass refining demonstration plant. Huge accomplishments there that we will talk about later in the call. But first of its kind, plant scale recycling demo in North America. To our knowledge, first MHP production We've produced a very high-quality lithium carbonate. We've produced a graphite product. And the demo plan has allowed us to continue to develop our IP and improve our process in a live-scale environment. I do have Mark Trevisial online who can take some questions on that later on. We also closed a convertible debt, retiring our old debt, generating proceeds of $14 million U.S. off of that. Other developments in the quarter included the sale of some non-core assets in the Canadian cobalt belt. Takuya Silver. We also released a new resource estimate for our Iron Creek copper and cobalt asset, an asset that continues to show big prospectivity with validation of what we believe to be a sister to our Iron Creek, an area known as Ruby. And then really pleased to have Renata, our VP of Sustainability and Low Carbon, on the call with us. She is truly a global leader in sustainability and a great fit for us because one of our key differentiators is our low-carbon footprint. I don't think anybody on the planet can have as good or better of a footprint as ours, and it's something that we brag about with good reason. So Renata is going to talk to you not just about that, but some of the developments we've made in our own sustainability journey, which, as she likes to remind me, is a journey that has no end. And at the end of the call, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the more recent developments The board tech committee recently approved a rebaseline review of our top capital cost estimates for the refinery project. We'll talk a little bit more about the desktop study on Black Mass, and I'll touch upon the strategic review, which we also announced in today's press release. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Renata.