5E Advanced Materials, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the 5E Advanced Materials Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, David Snyder, Investor Relations. Thank you, Davis. You may begin.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for the 5E Advanced Materials Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2023 Earnings Conference Call. During this call, management will be referencing our earnings press release and a webcast presentation that can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website. If anyone needs a copy of the press release or the supplemental presentation, you may contact Alpha IR Group at feam at alpha-ir.com. Please turn to slide two of the presentation, where we presented our legal disclaimers. I want to remind everyone that remarks made on today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements, including our expectation of future results, costs, production, capacity, market dynamics, liquidity, cash spending, and other items. Our actual results may differ materially and adversely from those projected or discussed in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause the results to differ materially and adversely from these forward-looking statements are contained in our press release that went out earlier today, as well as the disclosures in our public filings with the SEC. The company is under no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Today's call may also include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, as that term is defined in Regulation G. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information presented in compliance with GAAP. This afternoon's conference call is hosted by 5E's Chief Executive Officer, Susan Brennan, Chief Financial Officer, Paul Weibel, Chief Marketing Officer JT Starzecki, and VP of Operations Chris Knight. Management will first lead off the call by making some prepared comments, after which we'll open up the call to your questions. Now, please turn to slide three of the PowerPoint, and I'll turn the call over to Susan Brennan. Susan?

Thank you, Davis, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We recently closed the books on our 2023 fiscal year. We made significant progress against our goals last year and remain intently focused on advancing the corporate and commercial operations of our 5E Moron Americas project. As we look to fiscal year 2024, we felt it was important to create a regular cadence of communication for our investors around the globe. And thus, this is our inaugural quarterly earnings call. Today, we are going to discuss where we are along our project development timeline. We'll update you on our guideposts and reintroduce the long-term opportunity for those of you that are new to 5E and or considering an investment in the company. First, while I have had the opportunity to speak to some of you, there are many I haven't met. I took over as CEO in late April of this year. I've spent the majority of my 30 year career working within leadership positions of global organizations in the materials, clean tech and automotive industries. This includes most recent CEO positions in battery and EV technology at Romeo Power, which we sold to Nikola Motors last year. And previously, I was the CEO of Bloom Energy for eight years, a leader in fuel cell technology. Prior to that, I held multiple operational roles at Ford and Nissan and was a research assistant doing chemical process development at Herc Celanese early in my career. As you can see, I understand our end markets. I am proficient at running an early stage company and I know how to build a global organization. Over my first few months, I've had the opportunity to meet with key personnel, our skilled operators and staff, and align our team together under common goals. I can say with confidence that we are on a well-planned path to success, and we are doing the work to position our company to create meaningful value for our shareholders and stakeholders, both over the next year and into the future. A common question I have received in the first months of my tenure has been, what brought me here to lead the company? 5E is an inherently unique project representing a pure play opportunity in boric acid as well as lithium carbonate in an environmentally responsible way. Aggregate demand for boric acid carries meaningful tailwinds over both the near and long term, given that it sits at the nexus of a number of developing industries that will play a meaningful role in the global energy transition. Many of you have been following us for some time now, and I'd like to update you on our immediate focus areas. As you know, our plans have been temporarily delayed by two near-term issues. Number one, release of the final conditions under our EPA permit, and number two, a contract dispute with the company that was leading the construction efforts of the company's small-scale boron facility, SSBF, in Newberry Springs, California. First, the process with the EPA is ongoing and we will continue to work with them to get to the finish line. For the EPA permit conditions, we have installed four up gradient and five down gradient water monitoring wells for the initial mining block and four injection recovery wells. Additionally, we were required to plug and abandon all unused existing open historic wells located within the permit area of review boundary. This was completed and all required reports, including the well completion reports, were submitted to the EPA in October of 2022. We received a response for those reports in May 2023. The May 2023 EPA response letter included a few questions regarding temperature logging of the injection recovery wells, plugging and abandoning of the historic wells, and the legacy Duval boreholes and their potential impact to underlying groundwater. In June 2023, we submitted our response letter to the EPA's letter. and we believe it has addressed all of their comments. Analytical information was used to develop the permit required alert level report, which establishes alert levels for each water monitoring well. This report was submitted to EPA in October 2022 as supporting documentation for the authorization to inject process. Upon completion and review, of the reference submittals, we expect to receive authorization to inject water which is our step rate testing. We believe the step rate testing is the last remaining condition of the permit required to complete the injection approval process. This testing will verify the porosity of the ore body and the formation fraction pressure. After completing step rate testing, we expect to receive authorization to inject acid, which allows us to commence mining. So today we remain focused on business fundamentals and we are executing against work streams that are within our control. For example, we've taken on some of the final plant commissioning activities ourselves that the third party contractor did not complete. We've also insourced our optimization work and controlled our hiring and overall spend, which is helping us to judiciously control our costs and preserve our cash. Paul will talk more about this in a few minutes, but I am very proud of how this team has come together to prioritize capital and reduce expenses. Lastly, we are preparing for our future through numerous commercial, capital, and other strategic activities. We're going to walk you through all of those work streams today and better outline our go-forward milestones. To do that, I'd like to recognize that we have both legacy investors on the call, new investors, and prospective ones as well. So let's take a step back and review our overall investment thesis and the exciting opportunity that we have in front of us. I think the best place to start is with the updated pictures of our integrated small-scale boron facility, which we've shown you on slide four. As you can see, this is a real facility that is nearing completion and an asset that's produced in the past. Throughout the 1980s, three different pilot test programs demonstrated that the deposit can be leached. During these programs, a few hundred tons of boric acid was produced. Bench tests conducted in 2017 have demonstrated lithium chloride can be extracted. The 5E Boron Americas project represents the single most significant near-term growth project in the U.S. for the production of boric acid and lithium carbonate. The results of our recent SK1300 technical report summary completed earlier this year prove that we are possession of a rare resource of boron and lithium, and we have the ability to produce, develop, and monetize the resource through a large commercial scale operation. Furthermore, we have proven the merit and ability to deploy cutting edge technology to support our operation, most notably in situ mining or leaching, which does not lead to surface disturbance like open pit mining. Slide 5 reinforces our first mover advantage in the U.S. While we await clearance from the EPA that will effectively allow us to launch operations, we already have all the necessary permitting in place. As many of you know, obtaining these permits is no small task, and possession of which is not to be overlooked or underestimated. On top of having the necessary permitting in hand, the 5-Eat-Born Americas project is also unique relative to competitor projects in that we actually have already constructed our plant with a mineral deposit that has been historically operated. We are extremely well positioned to bring our vision to fruition in the near term. We have a foundation of a great business in place and a huge opportunity in front of us. We also have a phased execution strategy over three modules that will help us deliver up to 450,000 short tons of boric acid and 5,500 short tons of lithium carbonate when complete. Paul's going to talk you through that plan now and provide a few other updates. Paul?