Electra Battery Materials Corporation

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the ELECTRA year-end 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 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 Heather Smiles, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development with Electra Battery Materials Corporation. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Firstly, a few housekeeping matters. This presentation includes forward-looking information and forward-looking statements. Please see slide two for clarification on what that entails. All of our fourth quarter disclosure materials are available on our website and CDAR+. And today's presentation is also available on our website. For those who don't know me, my name is Heather Smiles and I oversee the investor relations and corporate development programs for Electra. I rejoined the Electra team in January of this year, and I previously worked for Electra from 2017 to 2019 and spent the last several years with Baffinland Iron Mines here in Canada, leading their stakeholder relations program. Our presenters today are two familiar faces, our CEO, Trent Mao, and our Vice President, Project Development, Mark Trevisio, as well as another new member of the team, our CFO, David Allen. Dave joined the lecture at the New Year as well and has more than 30 years of finance experience spanning manufacturing, natural resources, shipping, real estate, and financial services industries. He's held CFO and senior finance roles with companies such as Algoma and Canada Goose. Now, I'll turn it over to Trent.

thank you heather and good morning everybody and i should say i guess heather welcome back to the team and dave welcome to the team it's nice it's been it's been really enjoyable working with the two of you uh over the last few months so um i'll start with some highlights uh on what we've been doing through 2024 before handing the baton over to dave and then and then mark um summary just some of our activities um 2023 towards the beginning of the year, you'll recall we focused on the rebaseline exercise. So that was basically to do a reassessment to post-inflation of what the completion schedule and capital costs would look like to complete the refinery. Brownfields expansion plus construction. So depending on the metric, we're quite advanced with permits in place, civil works done, buildings, equipment there. Did that exercise, and then in tandem with that, we started what we believe is the continents first, plant scale demonstration plant for the refining of Black Mass. Mark will talk a lot about that. And that took up a good part of the year and allowed us to take advantage of the gap in construction by recommissioning the front end of the Brownfield site that we've got. In tandem with that, I spent a lot of time, especially myself, working on the funding gap. I'll come back to that a little bit later. I'm making great progress there, as I indicated in Q3. And then strengthening the balance sheet. Myself, Dave, and others, we extended the maturity of our debt. We, in Q1, I guess, announced a $5 million grant from the federal government as kind of a bridge to a bigger solution. Made amendments to our debt facility to minimize potential dilutive impact of the notes. And, you know, all said and done, I think we're getting closer and closer to our goal here, which is, of course, to complete construction and make our way into production and Spent a lot of 2023 just laying the groundwork for that environment to occur and then come out of the gates stronger when we do get back to work. So as you can see in slide four, a number of commercial pieces as well were announced through the year. Quite recently, we announced a feedstock agreement with Eurasian Resources Group. Incidentally, that's where our VP commercial worked prior to joining Electra. And that's one of the biggest cobalt miners in the world. and delighted to have them as a supplier for our refinery. Also earlier in the year, strengthen the relationship with ERG, sorry, with LG rather, LG Energy Solution on the offtake by extending the term and the quantum of the material they're going to be buying for us upon production. And then we've advanced and continue to advance the strategy with the Three Fires Group. I'll come back to that as well, but basically it's an indigenous economic development group in Southern Ontario with some shared values around closing the loop on the battery supply chain through recycling. Plant scale, I'm going to defer to Mark on that, but bottom line, our journey here to produce IRA-compliant onshore North American battery materials continues unabated. Some good progress, more to come. But before we get into that any further, let's go to Dave first, and he'll review the financial highlights for Q4. Dave?