5E Advanced Materials, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the 5E Advanced Materials Fiscal 2024 Shareholder Update Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation and prepared remarks, 5E's executive management team will conduct a question and answer session with the company's sell-side research analyst, and will also respond to questions submitted by investors. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. I will now pass the call over to Nathan Scone in Investor Relations. Nathan?

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for 5e Advanced Materials fiscal year 2024 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. For a copy of our press release, or the supplemental presentation, you may contact Alpha IR Group at FVAM at alpha-ir.com or go to our investor relations page on our website. We've presented our legal disclaimers. Today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements, including our expectation of future production capacity, market dynamics, liquidity, cash spending, and other items. differ materially and adversely from those projected or discussed in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning these factors and other 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 and our public filings with the SEC. The company is under no obligation to update forward-looking statements. Today's call may also include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures as that term is defined in Regulation G. 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, Paul Weibel, and Chief Strategy Officer, JT Starzacki. Management will first lead off the call by making some prepared comments, after which we will open up the call to your

Thank you, Nathan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We recently closed the books on our 2024 fiscal year. Despite fiscal year 2024 being a challenging one for 5E, there has been significant progress made, which now positions the business for a much stronger, better future in 2025. 2024, we made significant strides, having obtained our final approval from the EPA, started the small-scale facility, achieved first production, and recently finished the month of June by shipping first customer samples. As we enter fiscal year 2025, our goals include completing the first phase of engineering for our 90,000-ton boric acid commercial facility, securing offtake agreements, exploring partnerships for our various byproducts that we'll produce, and commencing the diligence phase for project finance. On today's call, we'll discuss the recent capital raise, current state of the small-scale facility, report progress on our cost optimization, and outline the outlook for fiscal year 2025. Please turn to slide four. Last week, we announced the capital raise of $10 million. The new capital consists of $4 million direct common equity offering from a new U.S.-based shareholder, as well as a commitment from our two lenders to issue via private placement $6 million of additional convertible notes. We believe that this capital raise provides the runway to complete the first phase of commercial engineering and allows our management team to focus exclusively on this effort. We have a strategy and a deliberate plan in place for the use of these recently raised funds. The use of proceeds from this capital includes the following. advancing the first phase of the commercial plant engineering program, which we target to complete in December or January of 2025. Upon completing this phase of engineering, we expect to then quickly update our technical report summary. Second, to fund the operation of the small-scale facility, where we will continue our efforts to optimize capital and operating costs and advance production of our product for customer qualification. Thirdly, the new capital will aid in our ongoing pursuit of off-take agreements and commercial negotiations. And finally, advancing various government initiatives already in the works. Please turn to slide five, where we will report on the progress of the small-scale facility. I'm pleased to report that we had zero safety incidents during the quarter. I'm proud of our team and the behavior-based safety program we have implemented continues to drive accountability, awareness, and a culture of safety. Additionally, we continue to achieve head grades of 5.5 to 6% boric acid in solution, which equates to approximately 10,000 ppm of boron when we sample. This result continues to demonstrate that 5E is in possession of a world-class resource. Despite the good results, we have not gone without headwinds that have resulted in some plant downtime. Recent maintenance issues included downtime to repair a leak in our heat exchanger, as well as revising the design of our screw conveyor that feeds boric acid from the belt filter to the dryer. Additionally, we paused operations for about two weeks in the month of August to install a sifter and enclose the bagging section of the plant to prevent final product from being exposed to the elements. Our team was judicious, swift, and diligent in executing the necessary solutions to have us back up and running. With the modifications made, our current production rate is one short ton per day of on-spec product. When we initially started producing, the goal was to first produce boric acid. The second goal was to achieve a product that meets prospective customer specifications. And the third goal was to begin increasing rates. While we continue to assess increasing production rates, we are currently comfortable operating at a rate of one short ton per day as it provides us with a liquidity profile whereby we can complete the first phase of engineering, continue to optimize costs, and progress customer qualifications while we work towards offtake agreements. As we build towards and assess higher production rates, we continue to obtain critical information that is integrated into our commercial engineering design. On slide six, we have outlined our optimization plans. Two meaningful changes we have incorporated into our commercial design include a change to the method of crystallization and the temperature of our mine water injection solution. Since commencing mining operations in January 2024, we now have a higher degree of confidence in the resource and our achievable head grade. Further, we believe we can increase our head grade to higher levels by increasing the temperature of our mining solution. This increase in our solution temperatures will also decrease residence time leading to a more efficient process. Essentially, our data has determined that it is less expensive and more efficient to heat the solution compared to boiling off and evaporating water. This has provided us the opportunity to modify our crystallization method from evaporative to chilled crystallization. Chilled crystallization has multiple benefits that are worth highlighting. First, the amount of energy required will be much less. An initial energy balance estimates a 60% reduction in natural gas consumption relative to evaporative crystallization, which will drive a lower structural opex. Further, this provides us with the opportunity to use less hastelloy steel in our crystallizer design, which will in turn reduce the overall capital cost by utilizing less expensive materials of construction. Another area of optimization is our mine plan, where we believe we can reduce the overall levels of sustaining capex up to a factor of 10 by implementing horizontal wells and sidetracks. Our horizontal well program has been externally vetted, and to increase confidence levels, we plan to test horizontal wells in the upcoming fiscal year. Additionally, we continue to critically examine our potential byproduct credits. We have confirmed lithium chloride exists in our solution today, and we are monitoring the increases in concentrations of lithium and calcium to determine the optimal recovery technology. Finally, We continue to investigate calcium chloride and assess this as a byproduct relative to gypsum. We are actively looking to explore partnerships with existing producers and technology providers. At this point, I'll turn the presentation over to our Chief Strategy Officer, JT Starzecki, to talk about our commercial and government programs. JT.