Ramaco Resources, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Ramico Resources second quarter 2025 results conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeremy Sussman, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead. Thank you.

On behalf of Ramico Resources, I'd like to welcome all of you to our second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. With me this morning is Randy Atkins, our Chairman and CEO, Chris Blanchard, our EVP for Mine Planning and Development, Jason Fanning, our Chief Commercial Officer, and the newest member of our Executive Committee, Mike Wolacek, our EVP of Critical Mineral Operations. Before we start, I'd like to share our normal cautionary statement. Certain items discussed on today's call constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent Ramico's expectations concerning future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors many of which are outside of Ramico's control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and except as required by law, Ramico does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I'd like to remind you that you can find a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures that we plan to discuss today in our press release which can be viewed on our website, www.ramicoresources.com. Lastly, I'd encourage everyone on this call to go onto our website and download today's investor presentation. With that said, let me introduce our Chairman and CEO, Randy Atkins.

Thank you, Jeremy. I want to first thank everyone for being with us this morning. We had an exceptionally busy quarter. I'll begin with the very recent, very positive events surrounding our Brook Mine Critical Mineral and rare earth business in Wyoming. The release of the summary of Flora's preliminary economic analysis and an historic ribbon cutting at the Brook Mine in July have both garnered a great deal of attention. These two events reinforce the concept that Ramico has now embarked on transitioning to become a dual platform company unlike any in the United States. Our operations now embrace production of not only met coal, but also rare earth and critical minerals and their refinement ultimately to oxides. This transition has also resulted in a fundamental reset in our share price as the market has begun to view us in this new light. The Brook Mine is unique, both as a geologic mineral proposition, but also unique in our country's larger strategic quest to claim back, frankly, its own security. We hope and believe that this mine will produce a large and vital domestic supply of rare earth and critical minerals in the face of dominance by a maligned foreign nation state. Specifically, the Brooks Distinctive Geology facilitates not only a lower cost REE production, but also a lower cost ultimate processing and refinement. The rare earth mine also combines with our met coal profile to create a unique growth story combining two vital forms of now critical minerals. We will soon explore expanding our rare earth mine production profile to enlarge the annual production rate to a multiple of its currently permitted two and a half million tons per atom. We will similarly look to expand the oxide processing capacity to a larger level as well. At the same time, we will be exploring and developing the remaining roughly 11,000 acres, or two-thirds of our reserve base, to determine both the size and geological character of this massive deposit. WEAR has now defined the TREO base at 1.7 million tons on the roughly 4,500 permitted acres. We expect this new exploration will substantially expand the known size of our reserve. As to the mine groundbreaking ceremony two weeks ago, I want to thank again all of the dignitaries for taking part in the opening of the country's first new rare earth mine in more than 70 years. The group was led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, the entire Wyoming U.S. Congressional delegation, as well as Wyoming's governor, Mark Gordon. As I said at the ceremony, with both a deposit size of over 1.7 million tons of rare earth oxide, and importantly, with the only domestic slate of five of the seven recently banned rare earths from China, this mine has the potential to become an important bulwark to the supply chain challenge posed by China. This will be America's mine. Its production, refinement, and sales will be on American soil. I will not dwell on the background of our critical mineral business other than to say we have been working on developing the Brook Mine since 2012, and with a particular focus on rare earths now for almost six years. The mine is fully permitted. We began full-scale mine operations this June. We expect to begin pilot plant operations to take our ore to oxide this fall. And we will use our pilot operations to optimize the processing techniques for roughly about nine months, which will then assist in the design engineering for our full commercial oxide facility. We hope to transition to construction of the full commercial facility by late next year. And dependent upon some potential acceleration on timing, we would expect to be in commercial oxide production and sales by 2028 or hopefully sooner. Over the past six years plus, we have continued work on this unique opportunity with a combination of assistance from NETL as well as other third parties such as Weir and Fluhr. In early June, I had the honor to personally meet with Secretary Wright in Washington to brief him on the project. Given the critical importance of the mine to national security, he encouraged us to explore how the government, and in particular the Department of Energy, could assist in accelerating and expanding both the timing as well as the production rate of the mine. Since the Brook Mine is the first and largest new mine and processing facility in the U.S., the federal government is now engaging with several agencies to assist Ramico in moving this project forward. To this end, for three days this week at the regional NETL headquarters in Oregon, we held an all-hands meeting of Ramico's entire Rare Earth team with more than 20 Department of Energy personnel. These scientists and technicians were from NETL as well as the Lawrence Livermore Lab and Idaho National Lab. Mike Wolachek, who was there with me for the entire time, will be speaking on that in a moment. The DOE's objective for the Brook Mine is to provide the full capacity of the National Lab's comprehensive testing and research capabilities to accelerate our entire mining and process development process. This is somewhat unprecedented. The DOE will provide their wide-ranging resources to essentially become Ramico's partner in all testing and critical path development of the exploration, processing, refinement, and ultimate production of materials and metals at the Brook Mine. There will be more to discuss on that collaboration as we proceed further in the months ahead. We are also now involved with the administration's National Energy Dominance Council on a variety of fronts. This council acts as the White House's coordinating arm to advance critical mineral development across multiple federal cabinet offices and agencies. We're now engaged with the Council to advance discussions between Ramico and several federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, of course, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, and the National Security Agency. Again, as those engagements proceed, we will disclose specifics in due course. We are also now beginning to receive inquiries and meet with potential rare earth and critical mineral customers. We expect samples of various elements and oxides to be available for customer trials as we advance the pilot process. Jason Fannin will be speaking a bit later on the marketing and sales process that we are beginning to conduct. We are also broadening our bench of rare earth personnel and are actively hiring individuals with experience in both rare earth geology and processing. These operations will be conducted under the direction of Mike Wolchak, our EVP of Critical Minerals, who, as many of you know, recently joined us after serving as the global head of Fluor's Critical Mineral Operations. In sum, we are rapidly taking steps to develop our REEs into a commercial business. We are also being provided strong encouragement and support from the Trump administration in this regard. During the pilot phase, we expect to better define the size of the capital investment as we optimize the processing flow sheet and advance further. Fluor has, of course, provided a preliminary CapEx estimate subject to a broad contingency. That figure will be refined as we proceed through the design, engineering, and procurement phase. As I said earlier, we will be studying how we can enlarge both the scope of the mining production level as well as processing capacity to achieve a much larger scale to the project to meet an obvious U.S. demand. We ultimately expect that investment capital for the new business will come from a variety of sources. This will include, of course, the internal use of Ramico's own financial and balance sheet capabilities, but it may also include potential governmental and private customer assistance in various forms including possible direct investment, long-term procurement, advance payments, and other contractual arrangements. As with any project of this size and scope, we will proceed with funding that is backed by conventional third-party purchase and throughput commitments. We will not disclose any discussions involving potential investments or financings at this time. Turning to our met coal business, the past quarter again underscored how quickly the landscape can shift. Met coal benchmark prices dropped roughly 25% year on year this past quarter. After bottoming in early June, the Chinese domestic coking coal prices staged somewhat of a textbook V-shaped recovery, driven less by headline production bans and more by a combination of deliberate softening in demand, pardon me, in supply, as well as targeted safety and environmental checks that slowed output. Even with the sharp pullback we saw this week, prices are still materially above the June-July lows. Beijing's clear signal seems to be that it intends to rein in chronic domestic oversupply, which we hope lends some durability to the recent gains. The other moving parts of the met coal pricing equation are lining up in similar fashion. Indian steel makers remain solidly profitable, underpinning steady raw material demand. Australian exports out of Queensland have yet to fully normalize after weather and operational setbacks earlier in the year. U.S. met coal producers have reduced production as pricing realizations are in many cases now below mine costs. Taken together, we see a healthier balance developing in the second half, albeit not yet a straight line. Against that backdrop, we continue to focus on what we can control, and that is driving down mine costs and lifting productivity. Chris and Jeremy will speak to those points in a moment. This quarter also marks our second consecutive production record. Our mine costs dropped again this quarter by $5, to 103 from 108 in the second quarter of 24, and we expect to drive them further down in the back half of the year. Nevertheless, the weak spot export pricing still outpaces our efficiency and mine cost gains. As a result, we are trimming full year sales guidance slightly, simply to be prudent. To be clear, the adjustment is purely price driven. we will not place tonnage into an oversupplied spot market at negative margins. In short, in the MET space, even while price volatility remains, we are cautiously optimistic that pricing will improve as we move through the back half of the year. This is going to be through a combination of firmer Chinese fundamentals, a resilient Indian demand, and constrained or even declining Australian and U.S. supply. So to wrap up on a highly positive note, the bottom line is that we are rapidly moving forward with the multi-year process of transitioning Ramico into becoming the only U.S. dual platform in both rare earths as well as the meteorological space. We have a very unique business model and a unique and highly promising growth trajectory in both business lines. I feel strongly we will serve both our shareholders and our nation well as the years evolve. So with that, I'd like to turn the floor back over to the rest of our team to discuss finances, operations, and markets. But first, I would like Mike Wolachek, who leads our critical mineral business, to share some further thoughts on rare earths. So Mike, if you would continue.