Okay. Battery Metals, the company's CEO, Joe Mills, will be with us this morning. We're going to give him about 20 minutes to go through the presentation. If there is any time at the end, we are going to have a Q&A section. If you do have any questions, please type those into the Q&A box and we will get to as many as we can, time permitting. With that, Joe, thank you so much for being here, and we'll turn it over to you.
All right. Good. Thank you, Daniel. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us this morning and to hear our story. If you go to the next slide, Daniel, please. Our required disclosures or disclaimers. Next slide. All right, good, thank you. All right. IBAT. We go by IBAT. Our stock symbol is IBAT. Most people in the industry know us as IBAT, but the official name of our company is International Battery Metals Ltd. We are a Canadian domicile company. We trade on the TSXV in Canada. We also trade on the OTC here in the U.S. We're hoping that we'll be able to uplist to one of the major exchanges sometime in the next, hopefully 12 months as we work to deploy our technology and make it commercial. With that as an intro, we are a DLE company.
What does that stand for? Direct lithium extraction. You will see that term used throughout the presentation, DLE. That's what it stands for. DLE is an emerging technology. It's actually been around for probably 20 years, but at a lab scale. Only now is it really reaching commerciality. We're excited to be one of the pioneers in that space. Our founder, Dr. John Burba, is considered one of the early pioneers in the lithium industry. He's been working with lithium and absorbents and different technologies really since the 1980s. He's got an extensive resume and reputation in the business. He's our founder, also our chairman of the board. He founded IBAT with a vision of deploying DLE commercially around the world. What makes our technology unique is we have a patented process.
Specifically, we have a media that is proprietary that we manufacture right here in the U.S.A. We also have columns that are proprietary. The way we actually run those columns and the way we extract lithium is fairly unique. We're excited about the growth of lithium. Obviously, it's a critical mineral. It's not a rare mineral, and I'll talk a little bit about that, but it's all about commerciality. It's all about the economics, I'll highlight why we believe our technology is poised for commercial scale. We're excited about the opportunity set. As I mentioned, we are DLE. What makes us unique, or at least one of our calling cards is the modularity. I'll talk quite a bit about where lithium is found, how it's found. What is really important about what we do is that our plants are built modularly.
What does that mean? Well, it means that we don't build them on location, which you can only imagine is a lot more expensive. A lot of the locations where lithium is found around the world is in very remote locations. Either up in really high locations in the mountains or in deserts. You do not want to be building a plant on location. You got to hire engineers and welders and electricians and house them for months, if not years. What we do is we build our plants in fabrication yards, and then we haul them out there on trucks, and we put it together. The CapEx intensity is much lower. It's much more efficient, and very importantly, allows us to scale our process with our customer's resource. I'll talk a lot about that. We have a very unique extraction process.
We are an extraction company. We think the value is really driven by this modularity as well as our technology, and our ability to capture the lithium efficiently. You can see there, we have a market cap around $35 million. We have a strong balance sheet. It's over $9 million, the company is in sound condition and really poised for success. All right, next slide. Why talk to us? Why even look at IBAT? I'm going to touch on each of these through my presentation. One is the structural lithium demand growth globally, and it's real. Obviously everybody reads about it every day, whether it's the growth of battery energy storage systems. The data centers are driving a big chunk of this. The AI is driving a big chunk of this, as well as electric vehicles.
EVs continue to be a robust growth avenue for lithium. Again, I'll talk quite a bit about that here in a minute. Nearshoring. We'll highlight that China owns this business. They dominate it. They have for really decades. The world has woken up to that fact, and so there's a real strong push to nearshore supply chains, whether it's here in the U.S. or it's Europe or it's Australia, Japan, Middle East, you name it. There is a awakened surge in redesigning the supply chain so that we're not as dependent on China. Three is we have proprietary U.S. sourced technology, and very importantly, our media is sourced right here in the United States. We manufacture it right here in the United States, so we don't have to go off to faraway places, unsavory locations, in order to source our media and manufacture it.
Four is the modularity, and I touched on that. Modularity is really important. We believe it is the key to our success and execution. A lot of our customers, and I'll highlight why that is. Again, a lot of these locations are very remote. Again, building in fabrication yards and then deploying it on location is far more efficient from a capital standpoint, and quite frankly, our ability to scale with the project. Last but not least is the management team we've assembled here. I'll touch quite a bit about that. I'm proud of the team we've assembled, decades of experience in both the lithium business as well as in the oil and gas energy space. We think all those are the confluence of events that's going to drive the success of our company. Next slide. Okay, let's talk about lithium and demand.
Look, for those of you that are new to the space, welcome. It's an exciting space. At times I do describe it as the Wild West. Lithium demand has grown exponentially over the past really decade, but now it's poised for really expansion. Today the world consumes about 1.6 million metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, and we'll touch on that, but LCE, and you'll hear that term used a lot. That's what goes into a battery is lithium carbonate equivalent. 1.6 million metric tons consumed today, and whether you look at Benchmarks, Data, Fastmarkets, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, the International Energy, it doesn't matter. You can look at any one of their projections and you will see that everybody's projecting anywhere between 3x-5x growth over the next 10 years. What's driving that?
Clearly EVs have been a big driver, but what's really driving it now is of course the battery energy storage systems growth, whether it's the data centers or AI or people wanting big batteries in their garages, right, for reliability. Batteries are here to stay and quite frankly they're only going to grow. Lithium is a major driver in that. Are there competing technologies? Sure. Sodium ion is certainly making headways. One of the advantages lithium has though is, really over almost any other material, is the energy density, and what I mean by that, it's its ability to hold energy, but it's also its weight. Lithium is one of the lightest elements in the elemental table. Sodium is not. Sodium is very heavy. If you think about your phone, you don't want a sodium ion in your phone because that phone would probably weigh 3 pounds.
Lithium, when it comes to transportation, EV, drones, anything that needs lightness and energy, lithium is probably the best alternative or certainly the best technology available today. We feel really good. Lithium demand is going to continue up and to the right, that's a big tailwind for us as we look at how we deploy our technology. Next slide. Okay. I touched on a little bit of this, the macro conditions are finally aligning for this project advancement. Again, IBAT been in a public company for eight years, since 2018. The lithium prices, and I'll start with that, lithium prices hit all-time highs in 2021 when lithium carbonate, LCE, which again is what goes into a battery, reached a staggering $80,000 a metric ton. I always like to tell people I'm an oil and gas guy.
I came 45 years of being in the oil and gas, running lots of oil and gas businesses, upstream, midstream, mineral businesses. I've done all of it. That's like oil hitting $300 a barrel. It's a moment in time. Obviously lithium prices have come down. Unfortunately, they came crashing down. In June of last year, lithium hit, it was a dark winter, lithium hit multi-decade lows at $7,800 a metric ton. Again, $80,000 a metric ton in 2021, hits rock bottom at $7,800 a metric ton last June. The good news is it's rebounded very nicely. It's around $23,000 a metric ton right now. That highlights a little bit of the volatility, hence the need to be cost efficient, right? You have to be the low cost efficient operator in this business in order to generate acceptable returns. Lithium, there's no way to hedge it.
There's not a hedging market out there. We think that will develop over time. We know Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Trafigura and some of the other big trading houses are trying to develop it, but today it doesn't exist. There's no way to create a financial derivative to underpin your price risk. We tend to ride that wave, right? When it goes up, we make a lot of money. When it goes down, well, you better be the low cost efficient operator to weather the storm. DLE is, I think, now poised for greatness. The projects have now matured. The DLE process itself has matured.
A lot of the largest players in the world, whether that be Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Chevron, very large, Albemarle, some of the largest players in the energy space now have entered the lithium space and most of them are doing it or looking at it through the lens of DLE. Again, I'll highlight why that is. The improved cost structures, the DLE has come down in a cost standpoint to be economic now as we compete against the hard rock mining like the spodumene mines of Australia or the salars, solar evaporation ponds of the Lithium Triangle of South America. Again, I'll highlight that some more. The economics are improving. Clearly prices have rebounded to the point where a lot of players are now looking at FIDs. Last year was a low point for FIDs around the world.
I think there was only four FIDs in the world around lithium projects. At $7,800 a metric ton, very challenging to make any money. At today's prices, we're seeing FIDs move forward very quickly. We're encouraged by that. The supply chains are being rebalanced. I'm going to touch on that quite a bit more here in a minute. That's providing a strong tailwind for DLE. Demand visibility. Clearly I touched on that around lithium prices. Next slide. Critical minerals, lithium is a critical mineral. I always like to start off with it's not a rare mineral. Lithium is found in lots of places. Lithium tends to be associated with sodium. A lot of times when you see salt flats, salt lakes, the Great Salt Lake of Utah, a lot of lithium in it. It's hard to capture it, though.
It's a challenge to capture lithium, and so obviously we all focus on places that have high concentrations of lithium. I mean, seawater has lithium in it, but it's at such low concentrations that you can't capture it efficiently or economically. We tend to look for places that have higher concentrations to make it more economic. What is staggering, though, is China's dominance of this space. To their credit, they have mastered it over the past 40 years. I mean, this isn't something that happened yesterday or overnight. This is something that the Chinese have deliberately focused on and have built, quite frankly, an incredible position. As we highlight, their chemical processing global capacity, 60%-70% resides in China. When you look at the global lithium ion cell capacity, 70%-75% is all done in China.
Even more impressively is the global cathode, is 80% of it is in China. For that reason, you can see why the nearshoring has become such a focus around the world. Obviously, President Biden focused on it through the Inflation Reduction Act policies. Now President Trump has accelerated that through a lot of focus through the critical mineral supply chains. Obviously, the Department of Energy, the Department of War, are all heavily focused on this, and I know you've read the headlines. Lithium is a critical mineral. It's been identified as one, we're starting to see the government lean into it, we're excited about that. We think that will help accelerate the adoption rate here in our country. Europe is also leaning into it.
They have enacted a Critical Raw Materials Act that their goal is to process 40% of the domestic supply by 2030. That's three years from now, four years from now. There's a lot of governments leaning into this, that's only a good thing, and we think that's a structural demand that will continue to provide us a tailwind. Next slide. Okay. DLE, though. The adoption rate has been slow. As I mentioned, some of it has been a cost structure, just the adoption rate. That's now changing. It's accelerating as we look at ExxonMobil, right? They've acquired hundreds of thousands of acres, this is public, in the Smackover Formation of South Arkansas and East Texas. Chevron jumped in last year with a large-scale acquisition where they picked up a couple hundred thousand acres.
When you have the majors diversifying and looking at lithium now as a potential source of revenue, and of course, these are energy companies, they're focused on the energy value chain, and lithium is part of that. We're excited to see a lot of these large energy companies now moving into this space because, quite frankly, we need their expertise, we need their balance sheets in order to help move this forward. These are not small projects. These all runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which is still far cheaper than the hard rock mining or the salars. Hard rock mining and salars can run in the billions of dollars and take a decade. DLE, it runs in the hundreds of millions and can take 24 months or less in order to deploy.
Again, from an efficiency standpoint, our ability to move these projects forward, from a CapEx standpoint, is much lower, and a time standpoint is a lot lower. DLE, though, we think is going to, over the next 10 years, capture 10%-20% of the lithium market. Are we going to replace hard rock or salars? No. I don't want anybody to think that this technology is going to simply replace all the hard rock mining or the salars across the world. That's not going to happen. Will we capture our fair share? Sure. I think 10%-20%. If we think back on the earlier slide, 5 million-6 million tons a year to be consumed by 2030, if we capture 10%-20%, you can do the math. I mean, it approaches 1 million tons a year that DLE has the opportunity to capture.
It's a big market, and we're excited to be a part of that, and we intend to be a player, a major player in that market. Next slide. Okay. We have demonstrated our technology at a commercial scale. We have a demonstration plant that we built back in 2022 and deployed it in Utah in a challenging operation back in late 2024. This was a magnesium tailing site just south of Salt Lake City. Very challenging. Not a naturally occurring brine, right? We like brines, we like water. They had to create a synthetic brine at a great expense. Even through that challenging resource, we were able to prove that our technology runs at a commercial scale. We've manufactured our proprietary columns. Think of a pool filter, very large columns. They're 3 ft by 6 ft.
That's as large as anybody's ever done, and we have 12 of them that we ran through this operation. We had 83 days of operation. I know that doesn't sound like much. Part of the issue was we were there for months. The issue was our customer had a lot of issues manufacturing the supply. There was a lot of up and down, which was through no fault of our own. Even with those challenges, we ran over 8,000 cycles through our columns. We generated over 25 tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate right here in the U.S. We're proud of that. It's a demonstration of our capabilities. Unfortunately for us, during this time, lithium prices were collapsing. As I mentioned, they hit multi-decade lows by last June. Our customer got into financial trouble, ultimately succumbed to bankruptcy.
Not through our fault, but candidly, the cost structure was too high. They ended up in bankruptcy. We ended up moving our plant out and we wish them nothing but the best. Hopefully, when they come out of bankruptcy, there's another opportunity for us there. Next slide. DLE, though, I touched on this. There are three ways to extract lithium around the world. There's the hard rock mining, which think of coal strip mining, where you truly deface the land. There is solar evaporation, where you pump billions of gallons of water or brine water on the surface into these large evaporation ponds. You just let the sun evaporate the water, and what's left is the residue, which has lithium in it. Both of those are, you can only imagine, environmentally not very friendly.
They're also very expensive. Billions of dollars in order to get these mines up and running, and it takes sometimes up to a decade for the permitting. Our technology is very efficient, meaning we can, with a resource owner, this is akin to drilling oil and gas wells, which we do. We know how to do that very well around the world. A well is drilled, brine water is produced, enters into our columns, into our technology. We extract the lithium, we give the water back to the resource owner, and then they inject it back into the ground. The beauty is it's circular, right? It's a closed-loop system. The footprint is very small, right? Again, if you think about hard rock mining or even the salars, the solar evaporation, those things can cover hundreds of acres, if not thousands of acres.
Our footprint is less than 10 acres. Five to six acres is all we need between us and the resource owner in order to develop. The footprint is really small. It's very efficient. I touched on, we don't use chemical reagents in our process. That is unique to our process. I can't say that about a lot of our competitors that have to use chemical reagents. That's not a good thing, because obviously, if you have to inject chemicals into your process, there's a cost for that. Wait, you're not going to be able to inject that water, the spent brine, back into the ground without removing those chemicals. The EPA or other government agencies are not going to let you do that. There's a cost to inject the chemicals, there's a cost to extract the chemicals before you can deliver the lithium.
Ours does not do that. We do not use chemical reagents, that's a big advantage. We recycle up to 98% of the water in our process. Also very environmentally conscious, and we think that's really important. Then there's the waste heat recovery. We're very energy efficient in that regard. Our plant, one of the things that's really unique to our technology is that we like the brine water hot. The good news is Mother Nature usually gives us the water very hot. Some of our competitors need to cool the water. We do not. We like the water 170, 190 degrees Fahrenheit. We like the water hot, which is very comparable to what you get out of the ground when it comes out of the subsurface. All right, next slide. There we go.
A couple things, and I'm going to touch on this very quickly, but our media is really unique, and we're excited about it. It's aluminate-based. We manufacture it ourselves right here in the USA. It has very high selectivity. What does that mean? It captures the lithium and chloride ions, and that's it. It likes to let all the other dirt, as we refer to magnesium and zinc and other things that we don't want, because that makes the carbonation process more expensive. It's very efficient, meaning we can capture up to 98% of the lithium ions per cycle, which reduces the amount of cycles. You don't have to let it soak. That also goes to the kinetics. Some technologies, the water needs to sit and soak into the media. Ours does not. We can move it fairly quickly, which helps your extraction rates, right?
It's all about cycle times. It's very resilient, meaning that we just concluded, for a very large customer, a resiliency test where we ran thousands of cycles on our media to see how it degrades. The good news is it has minimal degradation, which reduces your OpEx and increases your uptime, meaning your ability to keep running cycles over long periods of time is really good. Next slide. We're the missing link. I'm sorry for that. I'm not sure what's going on there with that slide. My apologies. Our arrows are all blurred together. What happens is, and I touched on this, we have the brine resource, which, of course, is usually a third party, right? It could be a large energy company, a national oil company, and they own the resource. They will drill the wells. We don't drill the wells.
We don't bear that on our balance sheet. That's on them. They give us the water. We are the missing link. What happens is we will extract the lithium out of the water, and we will then give them the spent brine, the spent water back to the operator. They will reinject it back into the ground. What comes out of the tailgate of our plant is called lithium chloride. It's a bag of water full of lithium ions and chloride ions. That goes into a carbonation facility, or sometimes you'll hear too, as refineries or polishing units. They're all the same. That's a carbonation facility, and that's behind us. That's not part of our technology. That's a separate. That technology's been around 100+ years. Again, the Chinese own it. They have done a great job.
That's where we manufacture it into lithium carbonate, which then goes to the offtakes. That's what goes to the battery companies, to the Teslas and the Fords and the General Motors and the LVs and whoever the offtake is. That's how the value chain works, what we call the flow sheet. Next slide. I'm going to just touch on this one very quickly. Again, I touched on the left-hand side, the process. We do have critical patents. We have six major patents. We have eight patent families. We are protected across seven key jurisdictions, including Latin America, the Middle East, the United States, and we have protection in our patents to 2038. We also have a number of trade secrets, which are important in order to protect our technology. Next slide. Very importantly, we are working on projects all around the world.
In the United States, there is a strong drive right now to find lithium. The Smackover Formation of Arkansas and East Texas is really the big epicenter, but that doesn't mean that there isn't Utah, Nevada, California, Pennsylvania. There's a lot of interest in extracting lithium from brine. Smackover Formation is, and we're working with a number of large players there as we look at helping them figure out the resource and then ultimately deploy the technology. The Lithium Triangle, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, obviously 50% of the lithium supply in the world comes from those three countries. We're working with a number of parties down there. In particular, we have a relationship with a company called Ensorcia Metals that has a long track record there, so we're working with them to see about deploying our technology on the salar. Last but not least is the Middle East.
The Middle East has become a strong epicenter. Whether it's Saudi Arabia, Oman, or the UAE, there's been a strong drive to build a battery ecosystem. They're very rich in brine resources with high lithium concentrations. We are working very closely there with a partner to deploy our technology into the Middle East. Next slide. I'm about to run out of time, sorry. Very quickly, three ways we make money. We license our technology. We can do a service model where we actually build a plant, deploy it for a fixed margin, a dollar per barrel. We also look at project participation, that we could actually participate in the resource itself. Next slide. We have an experienced management team. As I mentioned, I've got 45 years in the oil and gas business. I've run five other large companies. I'm excited about what we're doing here.
We've really assembled a strong management team, both in the business development as well as at the lab. Obviously, Dr. Burba remains our Chairman as well as our Chief Technology Officer. We continue to push the technology, but we're obviously focused on execution. This is all about deploying our technology, and we're hopeful that that will happen soon. We're working very closely with a number of parties in the Smackover, obviously the Middle East, as well as Argentina. My hope is we will be able to announce something soon, and that obviously will be a catalyst toward our growth.
Next slide. That really is it. I think that gets us to the end. Again, summarizing. Let me stop there, and I know I've ran a little long and I apologize. Obviously, I hope you can tell I'm excited about what we're doing. I think we have one minute, so probably not enough time for questions.
Yeah. No, Joe.
We are absolutely available for Q&A.
I actually wanted to let you finish with something. Obviously, you've had a 45-year career doing a variety of things, it sounds like primarily on oil and gas. Can you maybe just close and give us an idea of what gets you most excited about what you're doing now and where you see it different from your previous experience?
No, that's a great question. Thank you. This is my sixth company to run. I've been CEO of five very large oil and gas businesses, upstream, deep water Gulf of Mexico. I've done international. I've run a big midstream business, so pipelines, gas gathering, processing. You know what attracted me to IBAT and what gets me excited is our technology. I really believe what we have is unique. It is low-cost and efficient, and I can't say that enough. Having spent 45 years of my career in the commodity business, oil and gas, the one thing I learned about the oil and gas business, that to be successful, to be a successful oil and gas company, you have to be the low-cost efficient operator, period, end of discussion.
If you only make money when prices are high, you are not a successful oil and gas company. You have to be able to weather the storms. I see IBAT in that category. I think our technology is low cost and efficient. That is imperative to our customers as we look at trying to deploy our technology around the world. That's one. Two was lithium itself. The more I looked at the value chain. Look, China owns it, but it's clear to me that there is a strong incentive around the world to near-shore, and I think there's a real opportunity. I believe in my heart that in the next three to five years, we're going to see a large battery ecosystem get developed, whether it's here in the U.S. or it's in Europe or out in the Middle East.
It will happen, and I want IBAT to be at the forefront of that great expansion. Those are the reasons I'm here, and I get excited every day. I get up every day excited to come to work and push this forward.
It's a very good answer. Joe, thank you so much for being here and your willingness to share the presentation on IBAT. For those of you in the audience, I'm sorry that we ran a little bit long today, but as you can tell, Joe is excited about this opportunity. Overall, we just appreciate everybody's interest in Sidoti's conference. Joe, thanks again for being here.
Thank you very much. We look forward to follow-up calls.
Bye, everyone.