Piedmont Lithium Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Ellie and I will be your conference call operator for today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the PID month lithium fourth quarter and full year earnings call. Please note that this call is being recorded. If you'd like to ask any questions later at the Q&A, please press star and number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to If you'd like to lower your hand, you can also press star and number one again. I will now turn the call over to Erin Sanders, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. You may now go ahead, please.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Piedmont Lithium's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. Joining us today from Piedmont Lithium are Keith Phillips, President and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide the introductory and closing remarks. Michael White, Chief Financial Officer, will then review our financial results, followed by Patrick Brindle, Chief Operating Officer, who will offer an update on our project. Keith will provide the closing commentary before we transition to a live Q&A session. As a reminder, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations that are subject to various assumptions and caveats. Factors that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation, earnings release, and in our SEC filing. In addition, we have included non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's earnings release and the appendix to today's slide presentation. Any reference in our discussion today to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA. Further, references to shipments are lithium concentrate and metric tons are dry metric tons. Please note that copies of our earnings release and presentation, as well as a replay of this call, will be available on our website PiedmontLithium.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Keith Phillips. Keith?

Thanks, Erin, and thank you all for joining us today for what is now Piedmont Lithium's second earnings call. We're reporting fourth quarter and full year 2023 results today. For those of you who are new to Piedmont Lithium, I will quickly reiterate our mission and strategy. As one of only three U.S.-based lithium companies in production today, Piedmont's mission is to be a leading supplier of lithium resources for the North American EV supply chain. Our goal is to support US efforts to reduce our reliance on foreign nations for critical materials and strengthen our national energy security. Underpinning this mission is our strategy focused on hard rock production, and that is producing and further processing spodumene concentrate from assets that we own. The big story for us in 2023 was the restart of our Quebec joint venture, North American Lithium. NAL successfully commenced operations last March. leading to our first revenue in Q3 via shipments made under our North American lithium offtake agreement. NAL has been successfully ramping up production over the past 10 months and hit record production levels in December. NAL now has the distinction of being the largest lithium operation in North America, the only large spodumene mine in North America, and one of a couple of handfuls of spodumene mines controlled by Western companies anywhere in the world. We are completing a few remaining capital projects in the first half of 2024 that we expect will result in further improvements in production and unit operating costs as NAL looks to achieve full run rate production levels later this year. Patrick will talk about these in more detail during his update. NAL is a key focus for us given its status as a producing asset, but we have a strong development pipeline with our projects in Ghana and the United States. We believe Piedmont is well positioned for the long term with growth opportunities across our project portfolio. I'll speak to that more fully on the next slide. We have been very disciplined in our approach to growth, prioritizing a prudent funding strategy while minimizing dilution of Piedmont shareholders. Part of the strategy includes managing our cash balance, obviously. We ended 2023 with $71.7 million in cash and cash equivalents. And in the first quarter, we have sold our holdings in Cyanomining and a portion of our holdings in Atlantic Lithium. for approximately $49 million in net proceeds. We have an additional number of non-dilutive project funding options that we're exploring, all in an effort to help ensure that we're leveraged to the lithium price recovery that we believe is not a matter of if, but when. You'll hear more from Michael about our finances shortly. So let's take a look at our integrated development pipeline. Over the past several years, we've created a robust pipeline with large strategic projects positioned for development on a sequential basis. At NAL, production is ramping toward target. Production volumes and unit costs are expected to improve in 2024 after the completion of key capital projects. The future at NAL appears especially encouraging given the exceptional drill results announced by CYANA in late 2023. Notably, some of the drill intercepts from the 2023 program are thicker and higher grade than any previously encountered, increasing confidence in NAL's mine life. With infill and exploration drilling continuing, We expect a resource update to come during 2024, which may offer the potential for further mine life extensions. My point is that NAL is very much a core asset, and with our life of mine offtake agreement for qualified Inflation Reduction Act material, and is critical important to our customers, I believe NAL will be a great asset for Piedmont shareholders for the long term. Now, while this is an earnings call, and NAL is our only producing asset, I do want to highlight the exciting growth projects in our portfolio. including our AWOIA project in Ghana and our strategic projects in the United States. The AWOIA project continues to advance through the permitting and approvals process in Ghana. AWOIA is planned to be a large spodumene producer with a high return on invested capital driven by relatively low capital and operating costs. It's going to be a great project for us and our partners, Atlantic Lithium. Our Carolina and Tennessee projects are both strategically located in the growing battery belt and are critical to the goal of achieving some level of lithium self-sufficiency in America. Carolina Lithium is our integrated project that we're designing to include mining, spodumene concentrate production, and 30,000 tons per year of lithium hydroxide production all on one site. We expect to complete the material permitting process in 2024. Our Tennessee project, which is permitted and also designed for 30,000 tons of lithium hydroxide production, provides an additional opportunity to expand downstream capacity when we and the market are ready. So our plan with each of these three projects is to invest in their development at the right time, in the right way, and always with the goal of minimizing shareholder delusion. With that, let me turn it over to Michael.