TMC the metals company Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Metals Company fourth quarter 2024 corporate update conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Craig Sheskey, Chief Financial Officer of the Metals Company. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Liz. Please note that during this call, certain statements made by the company will be forward-looking and based on management's beliefs and assumptions from information available at this time. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which may be beyond our control. Additionally, please note that the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated, and except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Our remarks today may also include non-GAAP financial measures, including with respect to free cash flows. Additional details regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found in our slide deck being used with this call. And you're welcome to follow along with our slide deck, or if joining by phone, you can access it at any time at investors.metals.co. And I will now turn the call over to our chairman and CEO, Jared Barron. Jared, please go ahead.

Thank you, Craig. Well, before we announce a material and very exciting change in our way forward, I want to revisit the premise behind our company. So in the next 30 years, we expect to need to mine more base metals than have been mined in all of our human history. So where can we get these critical metals with the least cost to humans and nature? 70% of our planet is covered by the oceans, but They are home to only 3% of living biomass. And the abyssal zone accounts for more than half of the ocean area. And according to Grok, the abyssal zone hosts sparse but resilient life that thrives on sinking organic matter in a vast otherworldly expanse. Limited leftover food means limited life. So limited life to begin with means less life to impact and vast Self-similar abyssal zone means ample opportunities for smart conservation. And that's just the beginning of why nodules could be a great source of critical metals. And once you get this far offshore and this deep, there are no human communities to impact. Metal grades are high. And there are four metals in one resource here, while it would take three separate mines on land. And crucially, We can process this resource onshore with near zero solid waste, and this means we will not need to manage lakes of toxic sludge. And what's the alternative? Well, keep cutting down biodiverse rainforests, displace people, poison air and water, and generate massive, often toxic, waste streams, much of which ends up in the ocean, sometimes in smothering, beautiful reefs. And as a company, we reasoned from first principles and believed that we have a better shot at responsible extraction where we have fewer impacts and fewer impact receptors. So these first principles are backed by decades of research. Since the 1970s, the Clarion Clifton Zone has received billions of dollars of investment and hundreds of research campaigns. In fact, after three commercial mining tests in the 1970s, The initial Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, or PEIS, was prepared by NOAA already in 1981 based on several research campaigns conducted by the agency and the CCZ. And by 1995, NOAA reported to Congress that their studies basically eliminated pending verification of plume behavior during monitoring of further at-sea mining system tests. virtually all other environmental concerns which were raised around deep sea mining. Starting in 2011, the metals company has repeated a lot of this work, and then some, in our contract area in the CCZ. We are finishing our own EIS now, and we have orders of magnitude more environmental data, our mining system is much better designed, and our impact modeling is much more sophisticated than in the 1970s. But our conclusions are not materially different from what Noah concluded already 30 years ago. And furthermore, thanks to last year's expedition that revisited the site of a 1970s mining test, we now have a 45-year perspective on how the deep-sea ecosystem recovers from a machine that looks quite irresponsible by today's standards, cutting 20 to 80 centimeters into the sediment compared to the top three to five centimeters that our seafloor collector impacts today. So we too have a sense of the recovery from our collector immediately after and then 12 months after the test. So the notion that we do not know enough to evaluate the impacts of collecting these metals rich rocks is wrong. So looking back at least 14 years of our company's existence, We and our partners have achieved numerous milestones worth writing home about. Firstly, technical statements showing a resource of 1.6 billion tons of nodules representing the world's two largest undeveloped nickel projects. Then there's the first integrated collection system test since the 1970s, lifting more than 3,000 tons of nodules to the surface. There was the successful industrial-scale nodule processing into high-grade nickel, copper, cobalt alloy and manganese silicate, which we announced earlier this year alongside our partner PAMCO, and successful bench-scale refining of our intermediate product into nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate. Twenty-three offshore research campaigns in some years delivering five campaigns per year, while most contractors manage one every other year. and the adoption of a capital-light approach utilizing the existing assets of our partners. So we've shown that we can pick up nodules from the seafloor, we can lift them to the surface and process them onshore all the way to the refined products with minimal environmental impacts and limited capital expenditure. And though we may have achieved much in 40 years, many investors are focused on a different 14 years, and that is how long the ISA has been working on the mining regulations for this industry. After repeated failures to deliver the mining code in 2020 and then 2023, based on what we've seen during the current ISA session, there remains a possibility of continued delay on the ISA's target for the mining code adoption in 2025. The ISA's timeline drift and failure to deliver its legal obligation of adopting a mining code does not change one key fact, and that is that we are ready. We have amassed an unprecedented wealth of environmental impact data, have gone above and beyond to design a system that minimizes environmental impacts, and feel confident that we now know enough to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks. What we need is a fair hearing and a regulator willing to engage. Thankfully, we have another path forward The United States has had the legal framework and regulations for issuing exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits for deep seabed minerals in international waters in place since the 1980s. And now there is political will to put existing authorities to use. So today I'm pleased to announce that our U.S. subsidiary, the metals company USA, LLC, will submit applications in the second quarter of this year to move into commercial production through the existing U.S. regulatory regime. And we did not make this decision lightly. It took careful consideration and many months of legal due diligence and government conversations. We've engaged multiple law firms and have conducted thorough legal diligence on the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980, or DSMRA, as well as implementing regulations from NOAA. Congress passed DSMRA as an interim regime to allow US citizens to pursue deep seabed mineral projects in international waters in anticipation of the United States one day ratifying UNCLOS. 45 years later, the United States has not ratified UNCLOS, while DSMRA and NOAA's implementing regulations remain on the books and have stood the test of time. The total of four exploration licenses have been issued under this regime, with two still active. So we've begun a dialogue with NOAA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce authorized as the lead agency for permitting under DSMRA, and have in fact initiated a formal process of pre-application consultation with NOAA. We've also met with numerous officials in the White House as well as U.S. Congress regarding their support for this industry. And in fact, today, it was great to see Secretary Rubio talking to leaders in the Caribbean and highlighting that developing seafloor resources responsibly was an important opportunity for everyone. It is our strong belief that this path offers the greatest probability of receiving a commercial permit to begin operations in a timely manner. So I'm sure you will all have many questions, and I promise that we will spend the vast majority of this call talking about the details of the strategy, including the many months of meetings in DCs and legal analysis. But first, we'd like to take you through some of the rationale that led us and our board to pursue this new path forward. And for that, I want to hand it back to Craig Shefsky, our CFO.